As inauguration day approaches, I find myself contemplating life as a cloistered nun. Someone could notify me when Trump’s impeached.

Syrian Girl just put out a new video attacking little Omran which is making the rounds among Assad supporters, many of whom don’t have all their marbles. You have to ask, why does that little boy rankle them so much? What kind of mentality fixates on a 5-year-old child to vilify him?

One reason only. He bears testimony to the world that Assad is bombing civilians without mercy & that children are suffering the unimaginable.

Historical documentation is overwhelming: only war mongers & racists exploit children for purposes of propaganda.

To my mind, Glenn Greenwald went off the deep end when he campaigned for Chuck Hagel as a lesser evil candidate for Secretary of Defense. Since when do progressives give a damn who administrates US wars?

He’s a wreck on Russia & those damn emails & he was dreadful on Dilma Rousseff’s removal in Brazil. He just doesn’t get how capitalism works & you don’t have to be anti-capitalist to get that.

When it comes to Syria, he’s gone over to the dark side. If you’re a serious investigative journalist, you can’t talk like Syrian Girl–especially when her level of political discourse is as debased as it gets. Or unless you share her idiocies & repugnant prejudices.

This is the 7th anniversary of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The looting of that country headed up by Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton, both acting as representatives of the US, & the scale of US criminality committed against the Haitian people is beyond barbarism.

There are now thousands of Haitian refugees traveling to Brazil & with African & Asian refugees attempting to make their way through Latin America, Central America, Mexico to the US border to apply for asylum–an odyssey of nearly 9,000 miles (14,485 km).

These are Haitians last October lining up to interview with an immigration agent in Tijuana, Mexico near the California border. US immigration can only handle about 75 people a day. Until September 2016, Haitians were eligible for Temporary Protection Status against deportation for periods from 6 to 18 months, subject to renewal. But since then US Homeland Security sticks them in detention facilities & processes them for deportation back to Haiti. Most of the thousands waiting to be processed at Tijuana don’t realize that they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of receiving asylum.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

Our fullest solidarity with the Haitian people in bouncing the US military & looting apparatus out of Haiti. Haiti for the Haitians.

(Photo/Gregory Bull/AP)

According to local news, just across the US border in Reynosa, Mexico, immigrant shelters are increasingly serving African & Asian undocumented immigrants. That is true along the entire southern US border from California to Texas & has been since 2011.

Africans from several countries & Asians (mostly Bangladeshis & Indians) have chosen to travel to Brazil because their destination is the US. They each pay thousands of dollars to an organized network of human smugglers for false papers to cross them through 10 countries on foot, boat, & bus to the border of Mexico. That involves traveling in overcrowded fishing boats, trekking through mosquito-infested jungles, dodging armed bandits & immigration authorities, temporary encampments.

Because Mexico has no deportation agreements with some of the African countries of origin, Mexican authorities will issue Africans transit permits to get to the US border. Most, probably those with false papers, do not register for permits & must navigate the treacheries of the 1,450-mile trek on their own.

Mexico is hardly a model of enlightened immigration policy. It functions as the southern flank of US immigration & in 2015 deported more than 165,000 Central Americans. It also has one of the highest immigration detention rates in the world, including of children, & in 2015, detained 190,000 from around the world.

African refugees want to get to the US border because individuals from Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan are given US Temporary Protection Status against deportation for periods from 6 to 18 months, subject to renewal. It doesn’t mean US Homeland Security always honors that amnesty because it is also supposed to be provided to refugees from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, & Yemen & as of September 2016, it began detaining & then deporting Haitians.

There are now thousands of Africans encamped along the US-Mexico border because the US grants asylum to only 50 Africans a day. That’s why the US Border Patrol reported that it apprehended 6,126 African & Asian refugees trying to cross illegally in 2015. In the first seven months of 2016, nearly 8,000 Africans & Asians had registered with Mexican immigration in Chiapas. Just to process the registered would take US officials over six months when the International Organization for Migration estimated that 20,000 more African refugees were already en route from Brazil to the US.

The US is trying to involve Latin American countries in policing & containing refugee transit to the US & has deployed immigration agents to Mexican immigration facilities on the southern border to impede the traffic from Africa, Asia, & the Middle East.

This photo is African, Asian, Haitian & refugees from other countries waiting to register with Mexican immigration in Tapachula, Chiapas on the southern Mexican border.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

(Photo by Encarni Pindado for the Guardian)

Local news reported that a team of forensic anthropologists & their students from Texas State University (TSU) exhumed unmarked mass graves of undocumented immigrants near Falfurrias, in Brooks County, Texas & found 30 bodies just in the last week.

Falfurrias is on the main highway 70 miles (115 km) north of the US-Mexican border. There is a three-lane border patrol checkpoint with canine units to sniff out immigrants being smuggled. To circumvent the checkpoint, “coyotes” (human smugglers) drop off vans of undocumented immigrants a few miles south of the checkpoint & drive north past the checkpoint to wait while the immigrants trek around border patrol through private ranch land. The detour of about 25 miles (40 km) takes a few days on foot in extreme subtropical heat & humidity (100℉ / 38 ℃) & arid terrain.

Since 2010, the border patrol in Brooks County have found the remains of over 461 immigrants who died, mostly from heat exhaustion. That is why Brooks County is called the “real Death Valley” & “one of the deadliest killing fields” for undocumented immigrants in the US.

The bodies were routinely handed over to a funeral corporation paid $1,000 per body. Rather than comply with state & national laws regarding the proper handling of bodies, the funeral corporation dumped them together without identification in trash bags, shopping bags, milk cartons, or no containers at all, often in shallow graves only 6 inches from the surface where animals could get at them. Sometimes only the skull is found. The burial grounds were like a landfill site.

When investigative reporters exposed the mass graves, the elite Texas Rangers “investigated” & found no wrongdoing on the part of authorities or the funeral corporation which had close association with then Texas governor Rick Perry. The investigative reporters have cited several state & national laws violated.

The university forensics teams are part of Operation Identification (OpID) started in 2013 as a collaboration between forensics investigators from TSU, Baylor University, & the University of Indianapolis (UI). They exhume unmarked graves, transport the bodies to TSU, & analyze the remains to identify & return them to their families in Mexico or Central America. Since 2013, 192 bodies have been exhumed–the youngest 14 years old & the oldest 60. So far 20 have been identified.

One of the investigative reporters asked two of the forensics professors why they launched OpID. Professor Krista Latham from UI said they were doing it for the families & because “everyone deserves to be mourned properly.” Professor Lori Baker from Baylor said “Would you want to see your son buried that way? Or your mom, or your sister, or your brother? This is not how you want someone you love to be buried.”

Photo is of exhumations in Falfurrias killing field January 2017.
Immigration is a human right. No human being is an alien. Open the borders.

(Photo from University of Indianapolis/Guy Housewright)

Trump’s inauguration planner said the event will have a “soft sensuality” & won’t be a “circus-like celebration” with celebrities. Kind of like a cross between a funeral wake & the Vampire’s Ball.

If you listen to the vituperations of politicians & emboldened nationalists & fascists against allowing refugees to enter Europe or the US, the highest traditions of human civilization are imperiled by the hordes of mostly Muslim war refugees. There are almost certainly terrorists hiding among them, maybe even the head-chopping kind. But even if there aren’t any terrorists camouflaged as war-traumatized refugees, allowing so many Muslims to enter with their hijabs & their conservative ways would threaten cultural monotony & create social havoc. Hasn’t multiculturalism made enough of a mess without the Muslims?

It would be useful if they would elaborate those highest traditions of human civilization. Do they mean the US-NATO wars & massive bombing creating all the refugees? The multinational looting that dispossesses & makes millions desperate enough to flee to another continent? The civilized politics that lets thousands drown or live outside in the freezing cold?

This group of refugees eating al fresco in a snow storm at sub-zero temperatures (-20 C / -4 F) are part of 7,000 Afghan, Iraqi, & Syrian refugees in Belgrade, Serbia, hoping to be allowed entrance to Hungary which is 2-1/2 hours away by car; they’re all on foot. Hungary doesn’t want them & long ago made that quite clear by building a razor wire fence with heat-sensitive cameras, surveillance helicopters, patrolled by thousands of soldiers.

There are some refugee tent camps near Belgrade & the UN refugee agency is there handing out blankets & counting. Counting seems to be its highest mission in life & it can’t even get that right since there aren’t enough tents. The camps are so overcrowded that only women & children can get in & men are forced to live & sleep al fresco or in abandoned warehouses that are likely filthy rat-infested fire traps.

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders personnel are there to provide medical care–those are the very doctors Assadists are now campaigning against as stooges for US-NATO. The doctors say a lot of what they’re treating are respiratory infections like sinusitis & bronchitis: runny noses, phlegm, sore throat, upper chest pain, burning sinuses. It must be a living hell.

The highest traditions of human civilization include asylum for refugees, not this kind of barbarism.

Immigration is a human right. Asylum is an obligation. Open the damn borders.

(Marko Djurica/Reuters)

Someone asked me to do a post about Meryl Streep because there are so many posts about her speech, some admiring, some ridiculing her.

Well if today were not the 20th anniversary of my beloved brother Paul’s suicide & if I hadn’t recently seen the video of a young man with learning disabilities being tortured or read of two other instances of young people with learning disabilities being ridiculed, I might not honor the request to write a post about her speech. But I did want to write a tribute to my brother whose loss was one of the most wrenching of my life so I shall combine the two.

Meryl Streep is what she is & she ain’t what she ain’t. She & I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of questions. That’s how it goes. But the 30 seconds in her speech about the humiliation of a disabled reporter by Trump & her succinct condemnation of the power relationship involved in abuse was moving & powerful so why would anyone ridicule her for saying it? Humiliation is the way of the world for the oppressed so there can never be enough condemnations.

My brother took his own life by stabbing himself in the stomach after 40 years of being ridiculed & tormented as a person with disability. He was taunted all his life as a “retard” & made to feel small & worthless. He was intelligent, insightful, witty, generous, & so sweet & kind, but being humiliated for being disabled made him hate himself so much he overcame the elemental human instinct for survival. He lived with more psychic pain than most can imagine–or that only the oppressed can imagine–because he didn’t have the sense of self & social power to defend himself. He knew he was worth something as a human being but he knew he would never get others to understand that.

With great indignation, he would tell me how companions would ply him with alcohol, shave off his mustache which was his pride, & then drop him off on the side of the highway far out of town in the middle of night & the middle of winter. That was his life. That’s the life of those with disability & of the oppressed if they don’t have the power to defend themselves.

So I put aside all the criticisms of Meryl Streep & tip my hat to her because despite all her privilege she understands how shameful & vile it is to humiliate & ridicule someone without the social or psychic power to defend themselves & she spoke out against it. Maybe she doesn’t get a lot of things but she gets that. Paul would have been so heartened if he had heard her words. May his sweet soul RIP.

People who don’t understand the disputes over Syria speak of balance & false binaries & insist that in the end we all want the same thing. No we don’t. Nothing will put this movement back together again. It’s a rude awakening but you cannot play both sides of the street when the polarization is revolution versus counter-revolution.

Do you stand with the Syrian revolution of working people against Assad’s gulag, forced disappearances, torture, repression, death squads & summary executions?

Or do you stand with Assad’s military counter-revolution taunting the revolution as a lie & opposition to him all head-choppers? There is no proxy regime change war against Assad. It is a proxy war against the revolution where Russia, the US, & the most repressive forces in the Middle East play their part because counter-revolution is the one thing they agree on.

A revolutionary victory against dictatorship in Syria would resonate & change the relationship of forces throughout the world to the advantage of the oppressed. The Syrian revolution is the last one standing of the Arab Spring, so mercilessly were the others reversed by the same counter-revolutionary forces. A defeat would be catastrophic throughout the Middle East & leave Palestinians more isolated than ever.

Those who blither on about vilifying Russia, who claim Israel’s schemes for expansion are behind the war in Syria, who rattle on about Wahhabism, Salafism & other things they know nothing about, who rail against US death squads but cheer on Russian bombers, have become the Greek chorus for Assad’s counter-revolution. They turn principled politics into parody & make a mockery of revolution against dictatorship.

Those who take politics seriously face the harsh reality that when it comes to the uncompromising opposition between revolution & counter-revolution there is no middle way.