Choosing Democracy: NEA. Republicans Make Massive Cuts to Education Fu...

Choosing Democracy: NEA. Republicans Make Massive Cuts to Education Fu...:   I—and our students across the country—urgently need your help to stop extreme cuts to public schools.  Just as parents and educators prepa...

The Crimes of Elliot Abrams

 

 

The Crimes and Dangers of Elliott Abrams: Why Biden Should not Appoint Him

 

By Ariel Gold and Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler/Waging Nonviolence/July 18, 2023

 

It was a bright sunny March morning in 1980. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart. He stumbled and fell to the ground, dead.

 

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses G-d’s preference for the poor and oppressed. His visibility as archbishop elevated his voice and the credibility of his critique of the conditions faced by peasants in El Salvador.

 

A month before his assassination, Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter requesting a halt to U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government.

 

Over 250,000 people attended Romero’s funeral demonstrating the love of the Salvadoran people and echoing his demands for justice. Tragically, however, they were swimming against a historical current of meddling and manipulation which included murder, often orchestrated or at the very least condoned from the U.S.

 

Intentionally ignoring two U.S. embassy cables naming the general who ordered his personal bodyguard to carry out the assassination of Romero, in 1982, Elliot Abrams, the newly appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, said, “anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool.” Thanks to Abrams and his ilk’s support, U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran regime was dramatically increased that year. The following year, the U.S. gifted the Salvadoran military and government with U.S. advisors.

 

Last week, President Biden nominated Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s pick to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Elliot Abrams. If you’re not already outraged and infuriated, keep reading.

 

Under Abrams’ watch, over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, 75,000 Salvadorians were killed. In the village of El Mozote, the army’s Atlácatl Battalion herded women and children into a church convent and opened fire with U.S.-supplied M-16 automatic rifles before burning the building down. One hundred and forty children, average age six, were killed. In 1994, with blood still dripping from his hands, Abrams referred to the U.S.’s record on El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement.” 

 

In addition to supporting the Salvadorian junta, Abrams was a defender of the Guatemalan Montt regime which oversaw the mass murder, rape and torture of scores of Indigenous Ixil Mayan people in the 1980s. The Montt regime was so brutal that it was later classified by the United Nations as genocidal. From his conviction for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair, to his roles supporting the Iraq war, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, and attempting to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela as recently as 2019, one thing is clear: Abrams doesn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body. 

 

Abrams epitomizes an extreme form of American biblical nationalism, dressed in the distortions of Christianity and Judaism that ironically echo the papal bulls of 1452. These papal decrees, known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” codify the rights of white nations to acquire and dominate any lands they “discovered.” Similarly, Abrams speaks the language of the Global North proclaiming that their hegemony is the natural order of the world, as G-d wills it to be.

 

The Doctrine of Discovery inspired the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the “right” to exploit and plunder Latin America to be exclusive to the U.S. “We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety,” President James Monroe said. This served as a philosophical justification for the ideological boots Abram’s wore to stomp all over Latin America, the Middle East and other places. Abrams has left bloody footprints across the globe.

 

Steps have been taken over the past couple of decades to repair the damage done by Abrams and Co. in Latin America and other parts of the world. In December 2011, the El Salvadoran government apologized for the El Mozote massacre. In 2018, Oscar Romero was elevated to the status of saint. Pope Francis said Romero “left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the gospel.” And just a few months ago, on March 30, the Vatican, formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” and called it antithetical to the Catholic faith.

 

Justice is long overdue for Romero, the other Salvadorian faith leaders who were murdered in the 1980s, the children murdered in El Mozote, and the Ixil Mayan women raped by death squads in Guatemala. To honor those who died and continue to suffer from the fires Elliott Abrams lit and fanned in their countries, we must reclaim the name of G-d from the political and religious ideologies that twist it for hatred and violence. The first step we must take is to ensure that Abrams does not receive another appointment to another U.S. administration. The blood of his victims call out from the ground, and hearing their cries we are called to act and respond.

 

This story was produced by Fellowship Magazine

 

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From: David Richardson <drdaver@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2023 8:11 PM
To: David Richardson <drdaver@hotmail.com>
Subject: The Crimes and Dangers of Elliott Abrams: Why Biden Should not Appoint Him

 

https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/dangers-elliott-appoint.html

The Crimes and Dangers of Elliott Abrams: Why Biden Should not Appoint Him Ariel Gold and Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler      ( Waging Nonviolence ) - It was a bright sunny March morning in 1980. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart. He stumbled and fell to the ground, dead. Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of www.juancole.com

Where Discrimination Flourished Like Mushrooms

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The Reality Check: WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO WIN POWER FOR WORKERS?

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Demand for Accountability for Migrants

 Together, we are too powerful to ignore. 

Last Friday, June 30th, we took to the streets from Tapachula, Mexico to New York City, USA and online to make our demands heard - demands to bring accountability, justice, and transparency to the U.S./Mexico policies that impact our communities and lives on both sides of our shared border. 

In concert with civil society organizations across the United States and Mexico, the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice organized actions in Tallahassee, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; and across Mexico in Mexico City, Tapachula, Chiapas, Puebla, and Tlaxcala calling for justice for the victims of the devastating fire in Ciudad Juárez, which left forty dead and ALL victims of the current cruel and ineffective U.S./Mexico immigration policies.

Our voices have made a difference!

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has made a recommendation in favor of our demand for justice for the migrant victims of the devastating fire in Ciudad Juárez. (Available here in Spanish.)

We also received the commitment from the Federal Government in Mexico to establish a working group with the Ministry of Interior to follow up on the agreements of the Peace Summit from earlier this year. 

These commitments and recommendations represent a significant step forward in the ongoing movement towards finding justice and building a lasting peace throughout the region. We could not be more pleased with the outcome of this day of action - and we’re excited to keep putting pressure on the governments of both the United States and Mexico to demand the policy changes that will make these goals possible.  

We recognize that there is yet more work to be done - and we will not rest until the full demands of the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice are not just heard, but realized. 

We are calling for more just and humane immigration policies in both the United States and Mexico, an expansion of asylum, justice for the disappeared and commonsense policies to reduce gun violence. 

Thank you for making this (first) victory possible.

We will not stop until the work is done. 

In Solidarity,

Life as a Mexican Poet

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You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.

– Philip Levine, What Work Is

In recent years, the media has turned its attention to the stories of ordinary working people. Farmworkers and grocery clerks who risked their lives to care for us and keep us fed during the height of the pandemic were briefly celebrated and deemed “essential.” Tales of their bravery were followed by headlines about the great resignation, as many quit their jobs or retired early. Of course, work has always been with us. It’s older than poetry, even, and central to who we are as a people and a country.

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When I was 9, my mother declared it was time for me to work. At that age she had picked cotton in south Texas as an undocumented child. Child labor was common among Mexican migrants during most of the 20th century — and sadly persists today in factories and slaughterhouses. I ended up dragging a rusty lawn mower around the neighborhood to cut lawns for 25 cents. We lived in a poor Mexican community in the San Gabriel Valley with dirt roads, no sidewalks, chickens and goats in backyards. There weren’t “lawns” — there were dirt yards with patches of grass and weeds.

My parents were highly educated in Mexico — my father was a school principal and my mother his secretary. But they were never recognized for their credentials in the United States. Instead, my dad worked in factories, construction, selling Bibles and pots and pans, eventually retiring as a janitor. My mother served the super-exploitative garment industry, including doing piecework at home. I resented the industrial sewing machine that devoured so much of her time. In a poem I would write years later, in the eyes of a child narrator, the sewing machine became “The Monster.”:

As a teenager I worked in a car wash, a discount store, a warehouse; as a busboy in a Mexican restaurant or driving a school bus and a bobtail truck for a lamp factory. I married at age 20 when my girlfriend was two months out of high school. That same year, I got a job at the Bethlehem Steel Mill in southeast Los Angeles — rotating shifts, stretches of “graveyard,” and even 16-hour days called “double shifts.” I started there as an “oiler-greaser” on massive machines, forges and furnaces. The doors had finally opened for Blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans and women to enter the skilled trades, jobs previously held mostly by white men. I became a millwright doing heavy mechanical repairs and rigging. 

I thought I had it made, sweating the big drops for the best pay and a union job.

Capital a & Maine

The real Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action

 They will not replace us: The real Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action

Dear Hornet Community,

In 2011, a white nationalist French author, Renaud Camus disseminated through his book, "Le Grand Replacement", the conspiracy theory that European populations were systematically being replaced by people of color or non-white people. You might ask, what does this have to do with the landmark ruling against Affirmative Action? Everything.

Yesterday’s decision deserved at least 24 hours to process. If I would have responded immediately after the ruling was announced, I would have fallen prey to my visceral emotional reaction, rather than remaining a seeker of truth and strategic responsibility. I chose the latter.

The lawsuit brought to the Supreme Court by members of Students for Fair Admissions, which features Chinese-Canadian student, Calvin Yang, as the poster minority student against Affirmative Action is a classic play from the exploit people of color playbook. The same playbook was used in 1996, with California Proposition 209. This misguided law was championed by Ward Connerly, an African-American man and benefactor of Affirmative Action (then a UC Regent), who became the face of the law that prohibits race and gender as a consideration in state hiring, contracting, and California state university admissions.

The truth is that the Supreme Court’s decision solidified the role of race in college admissions for persons of European descent, and legalized ignoring the historical and government sanctioned exclusion to college access and admissions of Black, Latiné/Hispanic, Native, and Asian groups, such as Pacific Islanders, Hmong, Laotians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, etc.

The truth is that the United States of America was, and is, founded on a history of race-conscious decisions and laws that legalized the: enslavement of Africans/African-Americans (1619-1863), Indian Removal Act (1830), Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Immigration Act (1924), and the Undesirable Alien Act (1929), to name a few. These aforementioned unjust laws and acts were the reasons for the 14th Amendment’s inclusion of equal protections from discrimination. It does not take a law degree to recognize the critical importance of historical context and the role systemic injustices have played in the racialized historic and predictable disparate outcomes we see today in education, employment, economics, healthcare, homeownership, and the list goes on.

The truth is, race-conscious and preference-based admissions exist, but not because of Affirmative Action. It exists because of legacy admissions. This is a process that is still used today in the United States of America and results in preferential admissions to “legacy students”. What is legacy admission? Legacy admission is preference given by an institution or organization to certain applicants on the basis of their familiar relationship to alumni of that institution. Students who benefit from legacy admission make up 75% of research universities and nearly all of liberal arts colleges. When we think, historically, of foundations of higher education institutions within the U.S., which demographic group was allowed to apply to and attend college? White men of affluence.

The truth is, a 2005 analysis of 180,000 student records obtained from nineteen selective colleges and universities revealed that being a legacy student gave an almost 20% advantage over those who were not a legacy student (aka 1st generation college students). The study further found that "legacy students were deemed to be less qualified and less racially diverse, yet more economically beneficial to universities and more likely to donate to the university."

The truth is, six of the nine supreme court justices decided to maintain the status quo and legacy admissions: John G. Roberts, Jr. (Irish/Czech male and Harvard Grad), Clarence Thomas (Black male and Yale Grad), Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (Italian Immigrant male and Princeton Grad), Amy Coney Barrett (European female and Notre Dame Grad), Neil M. Gorsuch (European male and Harvard Grad), Brett M. Kavanaugh (Irish male and Yale Grad).

Three supreme court justices, all women, dissented the ruling and challenged this unjust decision: Elena Kagan (Russian/Jewish female and Princeton Grad), Sonia Sotomayor (Latina female and Princeton Grad), and Ketanji Brown Jackson (Black female and Harvard Grad). Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson, makes her dissent clear in one bold sentence, stating, “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

The truth is, European Americans/White individuals remain the majority in college admissions, in graduation, in leadership and decision-making positions. The truth is, Chinese individuals are adequately represented in colleges, when compared to the total population of Chinese individuals in the United States.

The goal of this Supreme Court ruling is to breed fear, maintain a white majority, and to handcuff practitioners for justice into doing the dirty work of making higher education elite again, exclusionary again, patriarchal again, sexist again, ableist again, homophobic again, and racist again. We cannot fall for it. We must strategize, mobilize, and galvanize those that are committed to equity and find ways to continue to provide equal access and close opportunity gaps.

So, in the face of continued injustice, what is our strategic responsibility?

As we continue our pursuits to become an antiracism and inclusive campus, it will be up to each of us to critically assess and make sense of events, ideas, patterns and trends, past and present, that interrupt our progress.

It will be up to us to build the esteem of our thirty-four percent 1st generation college students, our students of color, our immigrant students, and our students who are poor and basic needs insecure. It will be up to us to ensure that every student whose inherited life circumstances that created a barrier for them has that barrier removed. It will be up to us to partner with our TK-12 system to provide equal access and resources for satisfying "a-g" requirements.

It will be up to us, especially as an Anchor University, to provide historically marginalized students opportunities to build their leadership and community service portfolios. It will be up to us to take our time to write stellar letters of recommendations to colleges and universities, sharing how despite experiencing racial injustice, despite life circumstance which correlates to race, despite disadvantages like poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, non-legacy status, and immigration discrimination these students are qualified to access higher education and will transcend these life circumstances.

It will be up to us to read between the lines and color outside of the lines to ensure justice in our educational and admissions decisions. It will be up to us to act equitably as practitioners even when the law does not. Yes, the Supreme Court decided to do away with the ideals found in Affirmative Action laws. Yes, we will mourn the loss of the term Affirmative Action. Yet, we will give birth to equity-based practices, strategic, and intentional action that opens wide the doors of access. Our commitment to our students will not waver. We will stare directly in the face of adversity and say together, you will not replace (us) champions for justice.

In partnership,

Dr. Mia Settles-Tidwell

Vice President for Inclusive Excellence and University Diversity Office