Anti-Trump, history-twistery VOX.com slants MS-13 as wrongly targeted by Trump and ICE policies

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America, Ana Arana, anarchy, animals, anti-Trump, asylum seekers, border, border crisis (2014), Border Patrol, Brenda Paz, Brothers Circle (Russia-based), bullying, butchery, Camorra (Italian), Carla Provost, Carlos Martinez, cartels, cartoon villains, Central America, Chief of Customs and Border Protection, child migrant surge, citizens, communities, community policing, Congressional Research Service Report (2016), crime, criminal enterprise, criminal justice police, criminal records, Customs and Border Protection, Daily Signal, Damaras Reyes, Dara Linddara, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, drug dealing, economic sanctions, education, El Salvador, empathy, English speakers, ethnic groups, extortion, extravagant brutality, fantasy armageddon, firm hand policy, Foreign Affairs, franchises, Gallup polls, gang attire, gang intimidation, gang recruitment, global syndicates, guardians, Guatemala, hardened criminals, Hector Silva Avalos, history, Honduras, How The Street Gangs Took Central America, human traffickers, ICE, illegal aliens, Illegal Immigration Reform And Immigrant Responsibility Act, illegal revenue streams, immigrant crime rate, immigrants, immigration, immigration enforcement, indifference, infiltration, inner cities, institutions, internationally franchised street gangs, Ioan Grille, Jeff Sessions, Jonathan Blitzer, Jorga Leap, Jose Luis Sanz, journalism, Judas Priest, Justin Livicura, Latino gangs, law enforcement, legal assistance, legal status, Liz Robbins, local governments, local policing strategies, machete, major criminal presence, mano dura, Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, Maria Reyes, mass incarceration, media, mental health care, mercy, Mexico, minor delinquents, moshing, MS-13, National Drug Threat Assessment (2017), native born, New York Times, nihilistic ethos, North Triangle, organizations, Paul Liquorie, police officers, politicians, politics, propaganda, prosecutors, public protection, public school authorities, public schools, rage, reason, Salvadoran Americans, Salvadoran Civil War, Salvadoran immigrants, Salvadoran National Civilian Police, sanctuary cities, security crisis, semi-Satanic imagery, Senate Judiciary Committee, sensationalism, sh#thole countries, social assistance, social intervention, social workers, stoner gang, street gangs, suburbs, Surenos, tattoos, The Atlantic, The Collapse Of American Criminal Justice, The New Yorker, The Stoners, thug life, tolerance, tough on crime, transnational criminal organization (TCO), Trump administration, Trump policies, ultraviolence, unaccompanied children, US Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR), US Department of Justice (DOJ), US Department Of Treasury (DOT), US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), victimization, VOX.com, Washington Post, What You Need To Know About The Animals Of MS-13, white voters, William Stuntz, Yakuza (Japanese), Zetas cartel (Mexican)

Christina Animashaun/Vox

“What a steaming pile of VOX.com, B.S. propaganda! All any reasonable person has to do is question the [mal]intent of VOX vs. the intent of ICE.

Which organization has in mind the blind TOLERANCE of case-after-case of anarchic butchery (Note the MS-13 motto “kill, rape, control” attributed to and merrily carried out by most of them) and which organization has only the protection of citizens–as well as NON-citizens–in mind? Really, VOX? Your slanted journalism is supposed to be helpful in any way, shape or form?”  — S.A. Bort / 10 August 2018

VOX

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/26/16955936/ms-13-trump-immigrants-crime

MS-13, explained

President Trump has turned the Salvadoran-American street gang into public enemy No. 1.

By Dara Linddara@vox.com  Updated May 21, 2018, 10:52am EDT

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President Donald Trump and his White House call them “animals.”Attorney General Jeff Sessions says “they must be and will be stopped.”

The administration talks about the Salvadoran-American gang MS-13 with the hatred and intensity once reserved for apex predators, lingering on the gory details of murders they’ve committed. A fact sheet the White House sent out in May — titled “What You Need To Know About The Animals of MS-13” — highlighted five brutal cases and included details like this: “In Maryland, MS-13’s animals are accused of stabbing a man more than 100 times and then decapitating him, dismembering him, and ripping his heart out of his body.”

MS-13 has become the face of the Trump administration’s favorite trope: the idea that people from other countries are sneaking into America and importing violence and crime. Talking about the gang has allowed Trump to associate crime with immigration without having to deal with the inconvenient truth that immigrant crime rates are, if anything, lower than those of the native-born.

But Democrats (and some local law enforcement officials) argue that the Trump administration is nonetheless using MS-13 to demonize all immigrants — that immigrants themselves are the biggest victims of MS-13, and that harsher immigration enforcement impedes the kind of community policing that allows police officers to distinguish innocent immigrants from gang members.

“We’re going to destroy the vile criminal cartels MS-13 and many other gangs,” said President Trump during his speech on July 28, 2017, in Brentwood, New York. 

Getty Images

It’s easy to see why MS-13 has become Trump’s perfect antagonist. The group, born on the streets of Los Angeles, has established a foothold in the suburbs of New York City, Boston, and Washington and has announced its presence with brutal and horrific murders. MS-13’s “foreignness,” its official status as a transnational criminal organization, and its penchant for ultraviolence — the machete is a frequent weapon of choice — certainly make for sensationalistic copy.

But the attention that MS-13 has received is disproportionate to its impact. MS-13 hasn’t reversed nationwide trends of declining violent crime, even in the areas where they’re most powerful. And for all the horror it inspires, the gang has never numbered more than 10,000 members in the US. MS-13 has been responsible for gruesome crimes, but the fact is that it is not a major criminal presence at the national level. The reason it has suddenly become part of the national discourse on immigration policy is that President Trump has put it there, front and center.

In a way, Trump got lucky that the current wave of MS-13 violence coincided with his rise to the presidency, providing him with a convenient foil. And if he gets his way, the policies he wants to implement to clamp down on the gang will only make things worse and do further harm to the immigrant communities around the country who are already most victimized by the gang.

Mass incarceration turned MS-13 from a stoner gang into a hardened criminal enterprise

MS-13 was born in the USA.

It started as a youth gang of Salvadoran teens in Los Angeles: “more of a social than criminal group that gathered around a shared taste for rock music and marijuana,” according to the journalist Hector Silva Avalos. The LAPD’s first reference to the “Mara Salvatrucha Stoners” dates to 1975, but most analysts peg the group’s growth into something significant to the early 1980s, when Salvadorans began to flee a brutal civil war in their home country and come to the US as unauthorized immigrants.

They faced hostility from other ethnic groups for being new, and from other young people for being long-haired mosher types, so they banded together and called themselves the Stoners — later Mara Salvatrucha, and eventually, once the gang had metastasized under the network of Southern California Latino gangs known as Sureños, MS-13.

When and why the “Stoners” became a hardened violent gang is up for debate. Avalos attributes it to repeated confrontations with other LA gangs, while journalist Ioan Grillo thinks it has more to do with the arrival of newer Salvadoran immigrants who were “hardened by the horrors” of civil war. Salvadoran journalists Carlos Martinez and Jose Luis Sanz, meanwhile, say that the gang’s story paralleled that of a lot of young men during the “tough on crime” era: They were minor delinquents stuffed into jails and prisons, where they had the time, opportunity, and incentive to become hardened criminals.

No matter where MS-13 first adopted its current nihilistic ethos — which marries semi-Satanic imagery (the original Stoners were Judas Priest fans) with extravagant brutality and violence — mass incarceration and deportation were what took the gang international.

El Salvador’s National Civilian Police reviewing Mara Salvatrucha gang leaders in 2004.

 Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images

In the early 1990s, California passed laws mandating life sentences for a third felony and allowing minors to be charged as adults if they were determined to be gang members. “Hundreds of young Latin criminals were sent to jail for felonies and other serious crimes,” wrote journalist Ana Arana in a 2005 Foreign Affairs article called “How the Street Gangs Took Central America.”

At the same time, with the civil war finally over, the US made a renewed effort to deport unauthorized immigrants back to El Salvador. And in 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act led the government to start deporting large numbers of immigrants who’d been convicted of crimes (including legal immigrants stripped of their legal status due to their criminal records).

By the turn of the 21st century, gang members were an American export. According to one estimate, 20,000 criminals were sent to El Salvador from 2000 to 2004 — a considerable number for a Salvadoran government that didn’t have the capacity to deal with criminal organizations and that wasn’t being notified which of the deportees being returned to them were criminals, thanks to US law at the time.

To be sure, most MS-13 gang members in El Salvador were not deportees — according to one 1996 survey, only 16 percent of Salvadoran gang members had been to the US, and 88 percent of them had joined the gang in El Salvador — but between the deportation of gang leaders and the cultural appeal of “thug life,” the gang itself was absolutely an import from the US.

As the US’s gang problem became El Salvador’s, the Salvadoran government responded in the same way the US had — with mass incarceration of young men — only worse. El Salvador imported a zero-tolerance “mano dura” (firm hand) policy from Honduras, leading to the imprisonment of 31,000 young people from 2003 to 2005 simply on the suspicion that they were members of gangs. Eighty-four percent of them would ultimately be released because the government didn’t have evidence to charge them with anything.

In the meantime, incarcerated members of the same gang were kept together in dedicated prisons — which reduced violent confrontations in prison but also made it a lot easier for gang leaders to consolidate and plan criminal activity.

National Civil Police officers completing a raid of suspected MS-13 members in San Rafael, Santa Tecla, El Salvador, in 2008.

AFP/Getty Images

The US may have exported MS-13 to El Salvador, but, according to most experts, it was Salvadoran MS-13 members who eventually founded cliques on the East Coast of the US (though some think MS-13 spread to the East Coast from California). Those cliques, in the suburbs of DC and Boston and on Long Island, started garnering attention for themselves in the mid-2000s with their gruesome executions.

But the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and local governments struck back, with aggressive investigation and prosecution of MS-13 clique leaders and multi-pronged local policing strategies to starve gangs of new members.

The response may or may not have reduced the total number of MS-13 members in the US — official estimates have ping-ponged between 6,000 and 10,000 for years (with current estimates at the high end of that range) — but it appeared to put an end to the grisly violence that had drawn public attention. Law enforcement “effectively decimated” the DC-area MS-13, as the Washington Post wrote in 2017, and rendered the Boston-area cliques dormant for years.

It worked — until it didn’t.

MS-13 is officially a “transnational criminal organization.” But really, it’s short on the “organization” part.

The US Department of the Treasury officially designated MS-13 as a “transnational criminal organization” for the purpose of economic sanctions in 2012. It was the fifth organization to be designated that way, joining some heavy hitters: the Russia-based Brothers’ Circle, the Italian Camorra, the Mexican cartel the Zetas, and the Yakuza in Japan.

But most analysts agree that MS-13 doesn’t really belong in that company. Those other organizations are sophisticated global syndicates with several different illegal revenue streams crossing borders; MS-13 is more of an internationally franchised street gang. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report argued that “the term transnational criminal organization, or TCO, might be misleading when used to describe” Central America’s maras; the 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) categorized MS-13 as a “national gang” rather than a TCO.

There are two substantive differences between MS-13 and more sophisticated criminal organizations. The first is organizational: MS-13 cliques in different areas are less like branches of the same organization than like franchises. The West Coast and East Coast MS-13 don’t have a ton of common ground or mutual trust. Efforts to unify cliques into a “national program” have fallen apart before. Different cliques are definitely in communication, and members sometimes flee to another clique in another city after committing a crime to evade law enforcement, but that’s just street-gang-level stuff on a bigger geographic scale.

The second is economic: MS-13 makes its money through relatively small-time drug dealing and old-fashioned extortion. That extortion can be brutal, and sometimes wide-scale: In 2015, they extorted the bus drivers of San Salvador into going on strike for higher wages, so that more of those wages could be turned over to the gang. But it’s not as sophisticated as the multitude of revenue streams that other transnational criminal organizations have.

Nonetheless, MS-13 occupies a lot of real estate in the imagination of many Americans — and politicians. What really distinguishes MS-13 is the spectacle of its executions. As anthropologist Jorja Leap told the Atlantic, “They don’t just kill people, they cut off body parts.” In 2003, MS-13 members in Northern Virginia retaliated against 17-year-old Brenda Paz for informing on the gang to the FBI by stabbing the pregnant Paz so violently in the neck that “her head was almost completely severed” when her body was dredged out of the Shenandoah River. In spring 2017, as many as 10 gang members in Wheaton, Maryland, stabbed a victim 100 times and cut out his heart and buried it separately.

ICE and gang task force officers arrest alleged MS-13 member in Manassas, Virginia, on August 10, 2017.

 The Washington Post/Getty Images

In the communities where MS-13 has been highlighted — Suffolk and Nassau counties on Long Island; Montgomery County, Maryland; Fairfax County, Virginia — the gang’s activity makes up a large percentage of murders and violent crime. Suffolk County had only 22 homicides in 2017 but attributed 14 of them to MS-13.

That said, murder is declining even in the counties most bedeviled by MS-13. So why has the gang become so notorious? That list of communities above offers a clue: MS-13 has established itself in major metro areas — New York and DC — whose local media outlets have national reach. (MS-13 is also active in North Carolina, and some of the most gruesome murders of this wave happened in Houston, but those aren’t the cases that have drawn national attention.) And the gang is strongest in the suburbs of those metros.

“This sort of thing is about a feeling,” the chief executive of Suffolk County told the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer. “You don’t feel that crime is down. Acts like these murders aren’t supposed to happen in the suburbs.”

The “you” in this case isn’t actually the community that’s being targeted — which is, overwhelmingly, fellow Salvadoran immigrants. It’s white voters who feel just close enough to violence to feel abstractly threatened.

It’s an updated, hyper-localized version of the political dynamic of crime in the 1970s and ’80s, when criminal justice policy was designed to appeal to white voters in the suburbs, but its effects were largely felt by nonwhite Americans in inner cities.

“Anger and empathy alike are weaker forces when they come from voters who see crime on the morning news than when they flow from voters’ lived experience,” William Stuntz wrote in his 2012 opus The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. “The system oscillates not between moderate levels of mercy and retribution, but between wholesale indifference and unmitigated rage.”

In the early 2010s, the pendulum swung to indifference. Intensive anti-gang programs in the Virginia suburbs were cut 85 percent, a casualty of Congress’s elimination of earmarks.

In the middle of the decade, it swung to rage.

The child migrant “surge” of the mid-2010s set the stage for the current MS-13 panic

In spring and summer 2014, America was transfixed by a “crisis” at the border: Border Patrol officials were being overwhelmed by people coming from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, often children unaccompanied by a parent. Increasing numbers of unaccompanied children had been coming to the US from the “Northern Triangle” since 2011 — and after the gang truce in El Salvador fell apart in 2013, giving way to a wave of violence that made the country the most violent in the world for a few years, the pace of children fleeing to the US accelerated. While the influx slowed in August 2014, tens of thousands of unaccompanied children continued to enter the country through 2016.

In all, about 260,000 unaccompanied children migrated to the US from 2012 to June 2017. Many of them claimed to be fleeing from imminent danger posed by local gangs, among them MS-13. While their ultimate immigration cases — often for asylum or a special immigrant status for juveniles — were pending, they were able to enter the United States.

The surge received wide coverage in the media — and activated latent anxieties among Americans. In June 2014, only 3 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration was the most important issue facing America; in July 2014, it spiked to 17 percent, the highest level in a decade.

The idea that so many migrants were being received at the border and then released into the US seemed to many Americans like a security crisis — even a slow-motion invasion. The fact that the asylum seekers were fleeing gangs didn’t seem like a point in their favor, particularly among Americans who believe America is weakened when people from “shithole countries” are allowed to resettle here.

But there was no large-scale infiltration of the US by MS-13 members. In June 2017, interim Chief of Customs and Border Protection Carla Provost told the Senate Judiciary Committee that 159 unaccompanied minors who had been processed by Border Patrol between September 2011 and June 2017 were “confirmed or suspected” to have gang ties — a “very low” number, as she said, given that about 260,000 unaccompanied children were processed during that time. Of those 159, 56 were “confirmed or suspected” to be affiliated with MS-13.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

By CBP’s estimates, 0.02 percent of the unaccompanied minors who came to the US — one in every 5,000 migrants — had some MS-13 affiliation. That might be an undercount — or, conversely, it could count migrants who were wrongly suspected of being MS-13-affiliated because a Border Patrol agent misunderstood their tattoos, or because they had relatives who were in MS-13 but weren’t themselves, or who had been coerced into joining the gang and had fled to the US to escape its clutches.

But with MS-13, perception has been more powerful than reality. More than anything President Obama did, the 2014 border crisis activated the immigration anxiety Donald Trump would ride to the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

As a candidate, Trump didn’t talk much about MS-13 in particular. He was usually happy to talk generally about how dangerous immigrants — or, at his most specific, unauthorized immigrants — were. After the election, however, he appears to have been alerted to the MS-13 threat — and since then, both he and Attorney General Sessions have turned the gang into their rhetorical public enemy No. 1.

MS-13 is a perfect foil for Trump. It allows him to connect the reality that gangs have taken over much of El Salvador with the fear that parts of America have become similarly lawless and unfamiliar — abetted by foolish local “sanctuary city” governments.

Furthermore, it allows him to do that without saying anything that sounds like an obvious racist dog whistle. When Trump said Mexico was “sending” rapists and murderers over the border, people across the political spectrum recognized that he was playing on racist fears. But the same criticism doesn’t resonate as much when Trump talks about an actual criminal gang.

The fine line between MS-13 “predators” and their prey

The real tragedy of the unaccompanied migrant wave was that for all the concern about whether the US was doing enough to deter and screen child migrants, not many in Washington paid much attention to what happened to them once they entered the US. And under the fog of indifference, some of the teens who had left gang-ravaged El Salvador for the US ended up caught in the life they were trying to escape.

In 2017, the Washington Post told the story of Maria Reyes, who had paid $11,000 to bring her daughter Damaris to Maryland from El Salvador in 2014, only to lose her at 15 when she was killed by a group of teenagers in MS-13 (two of whom had also come to the US as unaccompanied minors).

“I didn’t know people like that existed in the United States,” Reyes told the Post. “I thought it was super safe to have my daughter here with me.”

Other parents of migrant teenagers who were killed in gang violence voice the same disbelief and disillusionment: that gang members weren’t supposed to be in America. But the history of MS-13 shows that where gang members are matters less than the strength of the institutions that are supposed to protect the public from them.

Reward posters hang near a Brentwood, New York, high school asking for information on the homicides of two teenagers on September 13, 2016. 

AFP/Getty Images

Those institutions were weak or nonexistent in El Salvador. They were supposed to be strong in America. But this is the problem Stuntz identified: Both indifference and rage toward marginalized communities weaken the institutions that are supposed to protect them from crime.

Many teenage migrants settled with relatives in communities that already had large numbers of Guatemalan, Honduran, or Salvadoran immigrants. Those communities, where public schools and services are often underfunded already, now got tens of thousands of newteenagers — many of them with traumatic pasts, few of them with close relationships with the relatives (even parents) with whom they were living, nearly none of them English speakers.

The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t have the ability to work with schools or local governments to make sure migrants were getting the legal and social assistance they needed once they were in their new communities. They didn’t even have the ability to screen would-be guardians rigorously — at least a few unaccompanied minors were released to people who weren’t related to them at all and turned out to be human traffickers.

Even in a best-case scenario, when children who came to the US were reunited with parents who already lived here, it was difficult to rebuild close family relationships — as the Post’s story of the Reyes family showed. “Why did you leave me?” Damaris once asked, her mom said. “Why didn’t you bring me sooner?”

“The resulting isolation that many of them feel or experience makes them more susceptible to victimization, gang recruitment, and participation in criminal activity,” a Montgomery County internal report from 2016 read.

The problem was that not only were they isolated, but they were segregated as well, placed alongside other new arrivals, fellow immigrants, and Salvadoran Americans. Those who had fled MS-13, as Jonathan Blitzer has documented for the New Yorker, often found themselves side by side with people just like the ones they’d fled:

After a few months in school, two Salvadoran boys wearing oversized shirts, sagging pants, and light-blue bandannas sat down next to Juliana in her math class. They peppered her with questions in Spanish. Where was she from? Whom did she hang out with back home? Juliana had promised her mother that she wouldn’t tell other students her full name, so that word of her escape wouldn’t reach El Salvador, and, as the boys grilled her, she became panicked. “When someone talks like that in El Salvador, it means they’re in a gang,” she said. “They weren’t supposed to be here.”

School authorities weren’t always willing or able to help. Some misidentified gang intimidation as bullying; some were simply scared of the gangs. And when law enforcement came through and did gang sweeps, they weren’t able to distinguish gang members from people who were trying to live their lives gang-free.

Blitzer’s New Yorker report says that one Long Island teen was arrested in a gang sweep for having a Salvadoran flag as his profile picture (whose dominant color, bright blue, is also used by MS-13). One ex-girlfriend of a gang member told Blitzer that when they needed to lie low, “Carlos and his friends from MS-13 would change their style of dress” — like swapping out their shoes — and then “mocked the police for being slow to catch on” to the fact that they weren’t wearing their “characteristic” gang attire. “Immigrant teens without ties to the gang,” meanwhile, were at risk: They “didn’t necessarily know which clothes were off limits.”

Trump’s policies won’t destroy MS-13. They will, if anything, only make things worse.

Local officials don’t always agree on the extent of the MS-13 threat. Prosecutors tend to talk up the threat; police officers downplay it. This makes sense — police officers have no interest in making it seem like they’re failing to do their jobs, while prosecutors want to emphasize how important it is to lock people up — but it also demonstrates just how much the discussion of MS-13 is shaped by political incentives.

A deputy county executive in Suffolk County admitted as much to Liz Robbins of the New York Times:

When something dramatic happens, politically, we speak of it in the most larger-than-life terms because that’s going to get the governor’s attention; it got the president’s attention and the attorney general’s attention […] It got us resources, and we’re using that money. Part of the negative side of that is things like this might get overblown.

Local police and social workers emphasize that no anti-gang approach can be solely carceral; that education, mental health care and social intervention are just as important to present teenagers with appealing alternatives to gang membership. And in the one place in the US where MS-13 was once strong but hasn’t been engaging in spectacular violence in the current wave — Los Angeles — that’s what they’ve done.

But that’s not what East Coast communities have money for right now — or what they’re getting. The “resources” the Suffolk County executive mentioned to the Times took the form of a $500,000 grant from the Department of Justice, most of which was to be used for enforcement — with “a small amount,” the Times wrote, for education.

The more pressing policy question for local authorities dealing with MS-13 is the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — and what that means for law enforcement efforts in the immigrant communities where MS-13 is entrenched.

When law enforcement’s biggest problem is proactively identifying who gang members are, and distinguishing them from their victims, the solution has to involve talking to community members more. And between the Trump administration’s use of federal immigration agents to sow fear in immigrant communities and its attempts to pressure local law enforcement to help federal agents take immigrants into custody, immigrants have every reason, right now, not to speak to a police officer.

“The community’s silence is the gang’s strength,” Montgomery County Capt. Paul Liquorie, head of the county’s anti-gang unit, told the Daily Signal. “It’s hard enough for the community to come forward to tell us activities that are going on with the gang. If that same community also fears they will be deported if they come forward, that is just one other factor that prevents us from getting an understanding of what is going on.”

Liquorie and his fellow law enforcement officials are careful not to directly criticize President Trump or his agenda. But it’s apparent that the demands Trump is making on behalf of communities threatened by MS-13 are exactly the things that community leaders worry about.

Trump has cast MS-13 as cartoon villains in a fantasy armageddon. But the gang is not a metaphor. And the immigrant communities that MS-13 preys on are very much real — and they’re the ones in harm’s way. Trump’s actions to date show that he doesn’t see it that way — that is, if he sees those communities at all.

Family and friends at the burial service of Justin Llivicura, a 16-year-old high school student in Long Island, New York on April 19, 2017. He was murdered in a local park in what many suspect to be an attack from MS-13 members. 

Andrew Lichtenstein via Getty Images

Cries on deaf ears at the turnaround of a dead-end street

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belief-systems, Bill Clinton, conditioning, crime, criminals, deaf ears, Democrats, dilemma, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, indictment, lies, mentors, not-crime, partisanship, relativism, Republicans, Truth, voting age

There should be a test called “What represents a crime, and what represents a not-crime, and which is worse?”  It should be against the rules to lie on the test or write off the test answers as “relative” and therefore unnecessary to waste time on.

An obvious problem with the test is one of generationally-ingrained blind partisanship.  There are now too many people of voting age who have been conditioned by parents and/or mentors to believe that if you can get away with it, then it’s a not-crime, and if it’s contrary to your partisan belief-system, then it’s a crime–even when it’s truthfully not.

Somewhere along the line, truth was kicked in the ass down a dead-end street.  Most people now thrive, at least politically, at the intersection of partisanship and relativism.

Hillary and Bill are criminals relative to whether or not they got caught, and if caught, whether or not they got indicted.  They each have broken numerous laws over the decades, but with the exception of Bill, they weren’t convicted of any.  Crimes?

Trump is a criminal relative to whether you’re partisan to the Democrats or to the Republicans.  Trump has broken no laws, at least, it has yet to be proven.  Not-crimes?

A dilemma, these cries on deaf ears at the turnaround of a dead-end street.

by S.A. Bort  10 October 2016

photo from:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_end_(street)

Three Essays Advocating the Abolishing of Money: III. “Imagining Earth (Without Money)”

02 May 1990, DENVER, CO:  Imagine earth without money.  Begin with the occupations that would cease to be.  The IRS workers would be the first to go; who needs taxes on a planet without paychecks?  Running a close second would be the lawyers; no one would have money to give them, and they wouldn’t work for free.

Who would miss the televangelists that peddle the good word?  Robert Schuller would have to simplify his Crystal Cathedral “gospel of prosperity” down to “the Gospel.”  And how would Jim and Tammy Faye raise cash for Christ in a world where a “donation” is the giving of oneself?  They wouldn’t.

Then, there would be the product distributors from Amway, Herbalife and Kirby; the peddlers of water purification systems, encyclopedias and aluminum siding; the entrepreneurs of ways to keep our lives tidy.  They would pass from this world without a eulogy.

Finally, on the slightly darker side of life, drug peddlers and prostitutes would also be left without soil from which to grow.  What bounty would there be, after all, from the selling of bodies and dependencies without the fertilizer of money?  Imagining earth without money is like imagining a garden without weeds.

There is something wrong with money and its cancerous effects on humanity:  money forces into a secondary position all other thoughts than those of acquiring earnings, just as a life-threatening disease forces into a secondary position all other thoughts than those of survival.  Only after the tumor of money has been wrenched free of its grip on humanity will this oppressive focus on survival be cast aside, like a broken cocoon.

The vocations that remain will be those that matter:  the teachers, the medical workers, the farmers, the pilots, the researchers, the scientists, the religious, the writers, the artists, the architects, the builders, the clothing designers, the engineers and the chefs.  Minds and hearts, without bonds, will be free to pursue the higher concerns of civilization.

What would motivate people to fill these vocations when money no longer exists as reward?  Ask yourself what you would do with your life if you didn’t have to earn money in order to purchase survival.

Would you build a sailboat and sail around the world with your companion while drinking 100-year-old bottles of Chateau d’Yquem white wine from the Bordeaux district of France; eating all the grilled, freshly-caught seafood that the world’s seas have to offer; making wild, passionate love five or six times a day on the foredeck, under the flying jib sail?

Would you build a log cabin in a secluded mountain valley next to a gushing stream that glistens like light through a crystal and read the entire fifty-four volumes of the Brittanica Great Books from Homer to Freud?  Or, would you commit yourself to eternal sluggishness as a couch potato by watching the entire series of videos of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone and The Lucy Show?

Suddenly being without the need to earn money would be similar to skipping grade school:  the idea sounds great until you’re at home for awhile, bored and wondering what to do next.  There is a natural motivation in people to be useful.  In fact, people are born uniquely useful.  In most cases, this usefulness is stifled as people move towards concentrating on the practicality of earning a living.  The impression that people would veer towards laziness when confronted with freedom is only because people today yearn for laziness as a drastic alternative to the imposed drudgery of their function in society.  Function is a substitute for usefulness.  In a world without money, people would be free to realize the full potential of their usefulness.

Why would a person purposely choose to be lazy (an act of rebellious escape) when their natural role in life has become unbound, recognized and appreciated?  Instead of laziness, there would be play and festivity:  the rejoicing of the body, mind and spirit in the celebration of being fully human and fully alive.  What wonders of human creativity could be revived?

In a world without money, education would be different.  Teachers would be teachers because they are truly gifted at teaching and their desire is to teach.  They would be free to wholly concentrate on the activity of teaching, instead of teaching while also having to earn a living.  Students would be in school according to their educational needs and not according to the level of their parents’ income (or lack of income).

School would serve to guide in the discovery of a student’s unique usefulness as well as to emphasize and strengthen the student’s awareness of that usefulness.  In the process of strengthening awareness, the student would come to an understanding of why certain jobs (with their underlying skills) will always be more effortless, and why other occupations will always require more effort (like swimming against the flow as opposed to swimming with the flow).

When students reach the end of high school, they would have both the ability for university level work (those who desire such) and a defined sense of direction from high school to a vocation (both virtually unknown today), based on the recognition and understanding of their natural, underlying skills.  Students today are so concerned about “priorities” like job images, jobs that are in demand for the decade of the nineties and amounts of income, that they are blind to how their unique talents translate into useful vocations.  In a world without money, education would be a process in which everyone gains and not a game in which some win and most lose.

Without the concept of money, work would settle into that which is necessary for the advancement of civilization.  People would practice their vocations throughout the world.  With the benefits of language study in school, carpenters would offer their skills in the building of housing throughout the world.  Doctors and medical aides would also be in demand worldwide.

The concept of ownership would disappear with money; people would be free to live wherever their vocation would be needed at the time.  Transportation would not be a concern since fares would be nonexistent.  Think of the entire globe as an extended metropolitan area.  As people now travel modestly among Northglenn, Boulder, Littleton, Aurora, Castle Rock and Colorado Springs, they could travel freely among Denver, Paris, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Prague, Beijing, New Delhi, Tokyo or Homer, Alaska.

Housing would exist for those workers living in each “suburb.”  Restaurants of all cuisines would serve meals cooked by those who love their occupations.  In a world without money, people would simply love doing the things that they do the best.  As a result, there would no longer be room for greed, crime, or empire building.  Purpose in life would be to fulfill creative potential daily instead of to “fill full” savings accounts for retirement.

Play and festivity would be hard to distinguish from work in a world without money.  In work that one truly loves, there is a sense of already being at play and of having to force oneself to break away for quiet time or simple frolicking.  One thing play would not be is an escape from work.  Instead, it would be a celebration of life; and that is exactly that imagining earth (without money) is all about.

~

by S. A. Bort / 6 August 2013 (2 May 1990)

Three Essays Advocating The Abolishing Of Money:  II.  “The Travail of Wage Labor“

Three Essays Advocating The Abolishing Of Money:  I.  “The Lower Depths of Capitalism”

PHOTO CREDITS:

1).  http://photobucket.com/images/cornucopia/#/images/cornucopia/?page=1&_suid=137586034581408885752393535319  2).  http://www.netspedizioni.com/f/86d43ca40a  3).  http://brokenlightcollective.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/cocoon/  4).  http://www.wine-searcher.com/find/yquem/1990  5).  http://www.broadwaymusicalhome.com/shows/musicman.htm  6).  http://www.paperbackswap.com/1990-What-Color-Richard-N-Bolles/book/0898153174/  7).  http://www.123rf.com/photo_15913053_illustration-of-a-jobs-and-professions.html  8).  http://www.igourmet.com/shoppe/Maryland-Crabcakes—Classic—FREE-SHIPPING.asp?cat=&subcat=&cf=usp_ListSeafood_MultiCategory_Sel&cprod=&source=pepperjamppc&gclid=CMWmxJCm6rgCFctcMgodawoAzQ

NOTE:

I originally wrote this May 2, 1990.  After twenty-three years, I thought I would tune it up a bit and publish it here on the blog, along with the two accompanying essays.

I sent these three essays to Burlington, Vermont’s Brautigan Library, named for Richard Brautigan and  initiated by his daughter, Ianthe.  The essays were among the first (in 1990) accepted, bound and placed on the shelves under the “Mayonnaise System Catalog Number” of:  “Social/Political/Cultural:  SOC 1990.007.”  My accompanying certificate states:  “LET NO MAN block the light of wisdom and inspiration found therein.”

See: http://dtc-wsuv.org/brautiganlibrary/?s=Stephen+Bort , http://www.cchmuseum.org/research/the-brautigan-library/ , http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/Blank.html , http://www.brautigan.net/responses-library.html , http://brautigan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.php?page=The+Brautigan+Library and https://www.facebook.com/BrautiganLibrary for current information on the library.

Shortly after I was added to the shelves, I was contacted by Lawrence Ingrassia of the Wall Street Journal, who was writing an article on the opening of the library.  He had seen the above foreward to this essay and was curious about the concept of “abolishing money.”  He asked if I was a socialist.  I answered no.  He asked other questions, but in the end, his article of May 28, 1991 did not mention me.  His article can be found here: http://brautigan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.php?page=Ingrassia+1991+Fictional+Library+Becomes+a+Real+Place

For Shawn, Three Years On

Son Light - Winter 2005-SB

Today is the third anniversary of the brutal and unnecessary killing of a nephew, Shawn, who was shot to death by police.

He had encountered the law previously for misdemeanors but nothing more serious.  On this day, three years ago, he placed himself in the company of someone who had previously committed at least one fatal crime.  They planned the armed robbery of a man with a car load of cellphones so they could sell the stash of technology that would most likely later be sold again for use in other crimes.

The theft went terribly wrong.  It appears to this day that the police had staked out the affair.  How else could they have been in pursuit in so little time?  Shawn and his shithead companion ran over something that caused a flat tire, then ran from the car.

The police gunners could have targeted him in the legs and then stopped when he fell.  Instead, they shot him multiple times in the back and legs.  When a Flight-For-Life helicopter was called for, the police said no and asked for an ambulance, which had to make it there in afternoon traffic.  Shawn bled to death.  His shithead companion was wounded and captured and is now serving time.  I wasn’t there, but that’s the story as I understand it to this day.

Even within the space of seconds, there’s time for reason.  There’s a clear need for law enforcement, but there was no reason for the multiple kill shots.  Sure, he was involved in a crime that involved a gun, someone else’s gun.  I won’t justify the crime.  What he did was wrong, and I believe in the absolutes of right and wrong.  Excess force leading to the overkill of a twenty-three-year-old is also wrong. 

Maybe it’s just that he was family.  Maybe I’m hopelessly naïve to still believe in the virtue of reason, even within the space of seconds, especially among those who are trained to react in seconds. 

At Columbine High School in April, 1999, it was just the opposite.  SWAT team members were afraid to enter the school.  I lived a handful of blocks from Columbine High at the time, and I walked to that memorial service, the sorrow of which will never leave me — the doves being released for each of the victims and hair-raising fighter jets thundering in and out of low-hanging rain clouds, almost close enough to touch.  Those elite were trained to go in under those circumstances — and they stalled.  In Shawn’s case, the police rushed to a quick and messy kill.  Things are just so wrong so often.

Icy Sunrise - Spring 2010-SB

All of us have stories, good and bad.  I have plenty of stories.  Stories are important. They have to be told, sometimes over and over.  Sometimes they stick, sometimes not.  Sometimes they proliferate, most times not.  There are storytellers of their own stories,  and there are storytellers on behalf of those who have passed.

I’ve used up at least a handful of my “nine lives.”  Once, I was with friends on a road trip to Austin, Texas.  We were in a “beater” of a car on our way back north to Amarillo with cases of Budweiser in the trunk.  We would down the beers and then relieve ourselves into the empty cans, throwing the full cans out of the windows.  Even pigs showed more brains.  I was about twenty years old then, sometime in 1975.

The driver began to swerve, at something like 70 MPH.  He swerved to the left, then the right, overcompensating each time until landing in a side ditch and sliding forward with the car sideways.  I was in the passenger-side back seat with a steel culvert coming at me on the other side of my window.  We hit the culvert, which I was sure would flip our car over it.  Instead, somehow, we bounced over and slid to rest on the other side.

Once upon another time, when I was eighteen, just two months out of High School, I was driving my brother’s early-1970s, BMW Bavaria that he had purchased while in the U.S. Army in Germany.  He had it imported back to the U.S. and let me drive it on occasion.  He trusted me. 

I had been in the habit at that time of driving to Liberal, Kansas, where beer could be purchased at age eighteen.  In Texas, you had to be twenty-one.  I had two younger friends with me, and we were on our return trip to Texas from Liberal with a case of Budweiser “Tallboys.” 

It was common to drink and drive back then in Texas, not near as enforced as today.  My brother’s BMW would easily do 120 MPH on the straight, seemingly forever highways on the Texas plains.  Fortunately, I was just accelerating as I left a small town for the open road.  An older couple, in their seventies or eighties, pulled up to a side farm-road and braked at a stop sign.  I saw them and continued forward.  They looked at me, it seemed, but then they pulled forward. 

I smacked them dead-center into the rear axle of their Cadillac at about 30-40 MPH.  There were cuts and bruises to go around, but luckily that was all.  I spent my one and only night in jail, and my brother’s BMW was totaled, its front end like a metal accordian.  I’ve made lots of mistakes in life, none quite as eyeopening for me as those two.  We’ve all made mistakes, and will continue to do so.

Here, There and Everywhere - Summer 2011-SB

Here are my three “morals” to this story, which I’ve told to younger members of my family, and which I consider at the pinnacle of the list of “wisdom” I’ve somehow managed to pick up in life.

1. There are three kinds of accidents:  Those that go away almost immediately; those that go away after some time has passed; and those that never go away. 

If you trip over something, then right yourself and quickly look around, seeing that nobody observed what happened, then you brush yourself off, walk away and no one but you knows. 

The two accidents that I described above, I consider somewhere between the second and third kinds of accidents.  Most of those involved are either dead now or have forgotten the whole thing, but both incidents left an indelible mark on my psyche that stays with me always when I’m either driving or placing myself into a car with another driver.  I could easily have died in either accident, along with one or more of all the others.

My nephew Shawn, as good as his heart was, made the third kind of mistake, which will forever affect him, his family, his friends and anyone whose eyes happened to be on the horrible scene that day, three years ago, when he was “overkilled” by the police, lying there, no doubt wishing that he had chosen instead not to run, not to have placed himself in the car with his shithead friend, not to have wanted money so bad as to break the law for it until his short life was over and he could wish no more. 

His two children will no doubt forever wish the same things that can never ever be.  “Why didn’t you just stop and put your hands up, Shawn?”  How many times have I asked myself that question?

2.  Always think BEFORE you find yourself in the company of people you don’t know. 

I remember once, back in the “hazy daze” of the 1970s, when a very good friend of mine drove me to a little house way out along dirt roads in the farmlands of Texas in order for him to acquire some exotic Mexican weed from someone that he knew but I didn’t.  We arrived there, and I found myself in this “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”-style dump with pounds of pungent grass on a table, various well-used tools for weighing it, cutting it and bagging it, along with a visible variety of firearms.  I remember being in a serious conversation with myself, basically asking “WTF was I thinking?”

The journey began with me climbing into a familiar car with a familiar good friend and ended with me in a dump of a lonely farmhouse somewhere out in the sprawling shadows of Texas.  Luckily, my friend and I walked out of it, but not without wisdom that I’ve somehow carried with me to this day.

A co-worker of mine told me a story once about her and some girlfriends who had traveled down to Mexico for a vacation.  They were on the beach in bikinis and saw some hot guys in swimsuits motioning to them from a small yacht just offshore.  The guys wanted them to swim out and join them to party.  They did.  After arriving there, it didn’t take long for my friend to realize that even though things went well, and they lived to tell about it, it was an incredibly pig-stupid thing for them to have done, to have placed themselves into the confines of that boat with total strangers.

Shawn, to my understanding, had just met his shithead friend days before their attempted theft.  The guy was a friend of Shawn’s girlfriend, and he placed himself in the guy’s company with blind trust.  “I know about climbing into cars out of blind trust, Shawn, but with the intent of armed robbery?  Why?”

Think of this in a political way, as well.  When you pull the ballot crank in a voting booth, you’re essentially placing yourself in the backseat of a very big car with someone driving that you really don’t know much about at all.  Pulling the crank is blind trust, even when you think you know who you’re placing in the driver’s seat.  You can’t go through a whole life without placing yourself in some kind of backseat at some point.  I’ve done it.  We’ve all done it.  In this political sense, you have to pull the crank for some driver.  Blind trust, though, is never one’s friend.  Reason is the only equalizer.

3.  When working at a coal mine in Wyoming back in 1979-80, I had to take an OSHA safety class since I would be working around trucks the size of small houses with tires twice as high as a Chevy van, as well as other hazards.  I learned something in that class that I still keep in mind thirty-two years later. 

If you place a roller skate on a living room floor and leave it there, it’s an accident even though it hasn’t happened yet.  If you pick it up when you first notice it, you’ve eliminated the accident from happening.  It works the same way with a car tire that’s becoming bald.  If you leave it, it’s bound to go flat when you least expect it – like when you’re on the highway doing 70, or 120 in a BMW.  But if you fix it asap, then you’ve prevented it from happening. 

The Nature of Accidents:  An accident is not something that has already happened, but something that has potential for happening.  If you nail it in its potential stage, then you’ve nailed it from happening.

Aspen Gold at Dusk - Autumn 2011-SB

The last time I saw Shawn was Christmas of 2008, three months before his killing.  He was twenty-three, having been born three days before Thanksgiving of 2008.  Shawn was someone to be thankful for, 100%.  We have all made mistakes, and all of us have known terrible accidents. 

I can’t say why I’ve come close to death in the past but lived, and Shawn didn’t.  I don’t have that answer and never will.  I was so shocked after the phone call came early the next morning, before sunrise.  His death was so uncharacteristic of the young man that I knew. 

He worked in a health food store at one time as a manager.  I remember him telling me all about the benefits of certain vitamins and supplements.  “I know what would be great for you, Uncle Steve,” he would say, concerned for my health, writing down some names.  “Why don’t you try some of these for awhile?”  There are lots of answers I just don’t have and never will.

Father's Day - June 2010-SB