[-empyre-] WH vs sanctuary cities

[Brian Holmes]

While I am far from minimizing the harm that this administration can do (a
form of harm which has many parallels around the world and whose interest
is maybe not limited to the US), nonetheless the very CNN article being
quoted in this thread shows how rhetorical these particular threats are:

"On Monday, Sessions reiterated that cities and states hoping to receive
federal funds or grants must comply with federal law requiring local
authorities to share citizenship or immigrant status of individuals to the
Immigration and Naturalization Service if requested. The attorney general
did not specify which cities or which funds the department may claw back as
it has threatened.... The government would likely be limited to pulling
funds that it can prove are related to the policy it is targeting, namely
immigration enforcement."

The nitty-gritty as I understand it is that they can pull funding related
to... Homeland Security. Apparently that's the main destination of federal
funding to cities these days! So to fight against the sanctuary cities, the
Trump administration can only weaken what so far seems to be its strongest
constituency, namely law enforcement.

That said, Frédéric's idea of focusing on war is timely. As the putative
rhetorical powers of the administration are exhausted, it is obvious that
they will attempt to use brute force. They won't do it - or at least they
won't do it first - inside the borders of the US, because they do sort of
have to obey the laws inside the country: meaning they can deport even more
immigrants than the Obama administration's record deportations, yes, but
they can't use unprecedented emergency powers unless they can manufacture
an emergency. This points toward the impending invention of new definitions
and practices of war, legitimating new states of emergency. I think a new
definition and practice of war is a logical development of Trumpism. And I
also think that rather than making up outlandish ideas of what those new
definitions and practices will be, one might do better to look coolly at
the record of the two previous administrations to see what they already
are, and thereby, to identify where the qualitative thresholds can be
crossed. Trumpism will stand or fall on the capacity of all levels of
society - not just the top, the bottom, or the middle - to resist the
escalation of foreign war and the generalization of its laws to the
domestic sphere.

Here's the sad, but crucially important truth about the capitalist
democracies: they call it fascism when the "just" laws of foreign wars are
"unjustly" applied to the domestic sphere.

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:02 PM, Frederic Neyrat <fneyrat at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Concerning the occupation - "many of us feel that this is no longer "our"
> country or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or
> doubling/doppelgange"r - let's think about *The Man in the High Castle *(the
> TV show at least, for I did not read PKD's book).
>
> So, on the one side, the High Castle = the WH; on the other side,
> Sanctuary Cities that the WH tries to turn into Obituary Cities.
>
> I don't know what will be the result of this war. But it's a kind of war,
> right? Maybe Empyre forum could devote a month to that topic: Wars.
>
> My best,
>
> Frédéric
>
> 2017-03-27 20:48 GMT-05:00 Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> Sanctuary Cities (apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious)
>>
>> This may be of interest only to US residents, for which apologies.
>> It does give some indication of the brutality of a regime which
>> pays little attention to protest. The result for refugee and
>> immigrant communities - even for families legally in the country -
>> has been devastating.
>>
>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/27/politics/jeff-sessions-trump-s
>> anctuary-cities/
>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/sanctuary-cities-explained/
>>
>> (Sending it out because we're in a sanctuary city and state; both are
>> poor, and, being pessimistic, I'm waiting for the resulting havoc. What's
>> so strange, uncanny, for so many of us, is the speed with which the tenor
>> of the US has changed; we've gone from more traditional protests (against
>> police brutality, military engagement, women's rights, BLM) to protests
>> based on a different atmosphere - that of overt racist acts, and potential
>> or real federal attacks on the poor, Blacks, Latinos, the environment etc.
>> - attacks from the very institutions that are "supposed" to protect us. So
>> in a very real sense, many of us feel that this is no longer "our" country
>> or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or doubling/doppelganger, and
>> that's hard to come to grips with. I'm speaking of course from two
>> positions - that of being white, middle-class, and "educated," and that of
>> being Jewish and "senior," and witnessing, for the first time in years,
>> acts of anti-semitism on the increase, even in Rhode Island (I won't even
>> describe the destructive ageism I'm dealing with). So I'm privileged on the
>> whole, not having to deal with what a friend here calls micro- aggressions
>> against minorities - micro-aggressions that occur constantly, that have
>> only increased as well. On a plane of sociality/communality, the US is a
>> foreign country for many of us, located nowhere, going nowhere but towards
>> a brutal and militarist future, at least for the time-being.)
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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>>
>
>
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