Not All Members Of Congress Are On Junkets When They Travel Overseas

Last month, in endorsing Andy Levin's reelection bid, we showed how he has the best voting record in Congress. And he's pretty good when he's not voting too. Congress has been on another one of their long recesses. Many members scurry off to do "research" in Paris and Rome and Tahiti. Andy, vice chair of the Education and Labor Committee and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, wasn't dining at Guy Savoy or in L’Arpège Paris or at La Pergola or Il Pagliaccio in Rome with the Republicans. Instead he hooked up with CARE for a grueling fact-finding trip to Bangladesh. He wrote about his trip on his Facebook page

I came to Congress to raise the standard of living for families, including abroad. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I wanted to see first-hand how U.S. foreign assistance is providing support for the most vulnerable, including women, children and refugees; so I joined CARE for a #LearningTour to Bangladesh this recess.

We visited a ready-to-wear garment factory in Dhaka to gain a deeper understanding of the working conditions and how CARE equips workers to know their rights in the garment industry. Most of these women travel from distant villages⁠-- often leaving family behind⁠-- to provide a better life for their children.

In the afternoon, we met with union activists and leaders at the office of the Solidarity Center, the AFL-CIO’s global arm. I’m really proud that our government through USAID funds the Solidarity Center to help workers organize and bargain collectively in several sectors here. However, it’s rough going. The garment factory owners resist the workers’ efforts, and the government fails to recognize their unions as it is supposed to most of the time. When I asked how many of the activists present had lost their job or even went to jail because they tried to form a union, most raised their hands! I was deeply moved and impressed by these brave workers and the work they are doing to win a decent life in Bangladesh.

Our #LearningTour ventured south to the 34 Rohingya refugee camps, a stone’s throw from the Burmese border where hundreds of thousands crossed after a campaign of terror and violence against the Rohingya was waged⁠-- and where they still cannot safely return. My first impression is of quiet horror, of a vast sea of suffering endured and now internalized, with little outlet for expression and pretty much none at all for accountability.

Virtually every person we spoke with came through a horrifying experience, often witnessing the torture, murder, and/or rape of close family members and friends; knowing that their villages were burned down, bulldozed or destroyed as they fled; losing their home and land and fleeing with virtually nothing; now living in a refugee camp for up to two years and counting, not being allowed formal education beyond the earliest years, not being allowed to work outside the camp.

The cost to Bangladesh in hosting and administering all of these people, the infrastructure, the management-- it is huge. And what of the cost to the world community? With so many needs around the globe, Burma’s actions have caused a mass investment to stabilize this population.

While admitting all of the tensions and limitations, let us admit our shame as Americans that this already super-densely populated country struggling to escape the shackles of mass poverty is hosting a million refugees even as our country turns its back on refugees at our own southern border. And how much harder is it for us to fight for the human dignity of Rohingya refugees when this President has utterly destroyed any credibility we had? How can we press for greater freedoms for them when, had they come to our shores, their children might have been ripped from their arms and caged?

Finally, let us not forget the degradation of our one and only planet caused by massive, emergency migrations like this. Deforestation has been overwhelming. The camps were only recently broadly forested, with elephants roaming about. The strain on the earth is obvious and undeniable, and is happening in a country already hugely vulnerable to and affected by climate change.

Perhaps the greatest triumph, though, is that of the human spirit. Throughout the camps, children played and laughed with us. Mothers shared that they wished they could make some food for us during our visit, a moving gesture of hospitality. When we asked what brought them joy, parents said seeing their children happy. Our lives may be very, very different, but we share a common humanity.

Now, it is our responsibility to channel these connections to foster greater respect for human rights and encourage peaceful resolution of conflicts. We must remember the resilience of these brave men and women who have faced horror no person should. They have persevered to build better lives for their children, and so we must persevere to build a better world.

White Evangelicals Are Embracing Concentration Camps As Revenge For Their Petty Grievances And Resentments And Because They Feel Mocked And Scorned

Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian

Death camps are different from concentration camps; they're worse. But concentration camps are bad enough. If Trump was setting up concentration camps what would you do about it? What are you doing about the concentration camps? Silence, beloved brothers and sisters, is not golden... it's complicity. Our country is complicit in his crimes against humanity, his crimes against these women and children.

What about Trump's evangelical supporters? They may bear more responsibility than other Americans. Do the concentration camps make them uncomfortable? From what I'm reading... not at all, not at all. Yesterday The Atlantic published The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity-- Support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness by Peter Wehner. Their leaders are reveling in Trumpism. Wehner began with a quote from noted evangelical huckster Ralph Reed: "There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump. No one!" And evangelicals are fighting for him too. They believe the concentration camp regime "is spiritually driven" and that "God’s hand is on Trump, this moment and at the election... Donald Trump is God’s man." He's kidnapping children and putting them up for adoption. "God has chosen him and is protecting him." These people want an authoritarian asshole. They welcome fascism and the end to democracy. "Jerry Falwell Jr.: "Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys.’ They might make great Christian leaders but the United States needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!"


Late last night, writing for the NY Times, Thomas Edsall pointed out how the "give-us-our-orders" evangelicals fit into Trump's plans for reelection. "Alex Gage, head of TargetPoint Consulting, a Republican firm specializing in voter mobilization, found that 'anger is a much stronger motivation' than recounting the beneficial things a politician has done. Trump has aligned himself with two overlapping, declining constituencies that are clearly motivated by a combination of anger, resentment and anxiety-- white evangelical Christians and whites without college degrees. If Trump is to win re-election next year, he must raise the stakes for these two sets of voters so that they turn out in unprecedented numbers. Demonizing immigrants and other minorities is crucial to this strategy."

Between 65 and 70% of white evangelicals approve of him-- 25 points higher than the national average. "The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump," wrote Wehner, "by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades-- and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency-- insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of “family values” so eager to give a man with a sordid personal and sexual history a mulligan?"

Part of the answer is their belief that they are engaged in an existential struggle against a wicked enemy-- not Russia, not North Korea, not Iran, but rather American liberals and the left. If you listen to Trump supporters who are evangelical (and non-evangelicals, like the radio talk-show host Mark Levin), you will hear adjectives applied to those on the left that could easily be used to describe a Stalinist regime. (Ask yourself how many evangelicals have publicly criticized Trump for his lavish praise of Kim Jong Un, the leader of perhaps the most savage regime in the world and the worst persecutor of Christians in the world.)

Many white evangelical Christians, then, are deeply fearful of what a Trump loss would mean for America, American culture, and American Christianity. If a Democrat is elected president, they believe, it might all come crashing down around us. During the 2016 election, for example, the influential evangelical author and radio talk-show host Eric Metaxas said, “In all of our years, we faced all kinds of struggles. The only time we faced an existential struggle like this was in the Civil War and in the Revolution when the nation began … We are on the verge of losing it as we could have lost it in the Civil War.” A friend of mine described that outlook to me this way: “It’s the Flight 93 election. FOREVER.”

Many evangelical Christians are also filled with grievances and resentments because they feel they have been mocked, scorned, and dishonored by the elite culture over the years. (Some of those feelings are understandable and warranted.) For them, Trump is a man who will not only push their agenda on issues such as the courts and abortion; he will be ruthless against those they view as threats to all they know and love. For a growing number of evangelicals, Trump’s dehumanizing tactics and cruelty aren’t a bug; they are a feature. Trump “owns the libs,” and they love it. He’ll bring a Glock to a cultural knife fight, and they relish that.

... There's a very high cost to our politics for celebrating the Trump style, but what is most personally painful to me as a person of the Christian faith is the cost to the Christian witness. Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche-- might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective-- is troubling enough.

But there is also the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.

While on the Pacific Coast last week, I had lunch with Karel Coppock, whom I have known for many years and who has played an important role in my Christian pilgrimage. In speaking about the widespread, reflexive evangelical support for the president, Coppock-- who is theologically orthodox and generally sympathetic to conservatism-- lamented the effect this moral freak show is having, especially on the younger generation. With unusual passion, he told me, “We’re losing an entire generation. They’re just gone. It’s one of the worst things to happen to the Church.”

Coppock mentioned to me the powerful example of St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, who was willing to rebuke the Roman Emperor Theodosius for the latter’s role in massacring civilians as punishment for the murder of one of his generals. Ambrose refused to allow the Church to become a political prop, despite concerns that doing so might endanger him. Ambrose spoke truth to power. (Theodosius ended up seeking penance, and Ambrose went on to teach, convert, and baptize St. Augustine.) Proximity to power is fine for Christians, Coppock told me, but only so long as it does not corrupt their moral sense, only so long as they don’t allow their faith to become politically weaponized. Yet that is precisely what’s happening today.

Evangelical Christians need another model for cultural and political engagement, and one of the best I am aware of has been articulated by the artist Makoto Fujimura, who speaks about “culture care” instead of “culture war.

According to Fujimura, “Culture care is an act of generosity to our neighbors and culture. Culture care is to see our world not as a battle zone in which we’re all vying for limited resources, but to see the world of abundant possibilities and promise.” What Fujimura is talking about is a set of sensibilities and dispositions that are fundamentally different from what we see embodied in many white evangelical leaders who frequently speak out on culture and politics. The sensibilities and dispositions Fujimura is describing are characterized by a commitment to grace, beauty, and creativity, not antipathy, disdain, and pulsating anger. It’s the difference between an open hand and a mailed fist.

Building on this theme, Mark Labberton, a colleague of Fujimura’s and the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, the largest multidenominational seminary in the world, has spoken about a distinct way for Christians to conceive of their calling, from seeing themselves as living in a Promised Land and “demanding it back” to living a “faithful, exilic life.”

Right-wing former GOP congressman assesses Trump

Labberton speaks about what it means to live as people in exile, trying to find the capacity to love in unexpected ways; to see the enemy, the foreigner, the stranger, and the alien, and to go toward rather than away from them. He asks what a life of faithfulness looks like while one lives in a world of fear.

He adds, “The Church is in one of its deepest moments of crisis-- not because of some election result or not, but because of what has been exposed to be the poverty of the American Church in its capacity to be able to see and love and serve and engage in ways in which we simply fail to do. And that vocation is the vocation that must be recovered and must be made real in tangible action.”

There are countless examples of how such tangible action can be manifest. But as a starting point, evangelical Christians should acknowledge the profound damage that’s being done to their movement by its braided political relationship-- its love affair, to bring us back to the words of Ralph Reed-- with a president who is an ethical and moral wreck. Until that is undone-- until followers of Jesus are once again willing to speak truth to power rather than act like court pastors-- the crisis in American Christianity will only deepen, its public testimony only dim, its effort to be a healing agent in a broken world only weaken.

At this point, I can’t help but wonder whether that really matters to many of Donald Trump’s besotted evangelical supporters.

Ralph Reed, a follower of Jesus? Give me a break. Falwell, Jr.? You're joking right? What makes Wehner imply they are? Must be something I don't understand.





Also on Friday, writing for The Economist, Erasmus noted "the widening ideological and personal schism within the very group of citizens who should be a conservative president’s most natural supporters... white evangelical Christians, of whom 80% are thought to have voted for Mr Trump. Leading evangelicals are not just sparring over metaphysics, they are also trading insults. Think of the war of words that erupted after June 25th when Russell Moore, a distinguished theologian who heads the Ethics and Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, protested over the fate of migrant children on the Mexican border." Moore wrote that the plight of the kidnapped children at the southern border stuffed into Trump's concentration camps "should 'shock all our consciences' given that all 'those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion.'" Vicious Trumpist Falwell went on the attack against the man who runs the public-policy arm of America’s largest Protestant denomination immediately: "Who are you Dr Moore? Have you ever built an organisation of any sort from scratch? You’re nothing but an employee-- a bureaucrat." [An inheritor of great wealth, it is notable that Falwell never built anything except an alliance with Satan.] The neo-Nazi evangelicals on the far right fringe joined Falwell by claiming protesting the immigration crisis amounted to an unpatriotic slur on the U.S. Border Patrol.

Rohingya Crisis

-by Reese Erlich

I sneaked into Myanmar on a tourist visa because the military junta running the country made it almost impossible to travel as a journalist. So I thought I was the only foreign reporter in the capital of Yangon in July of 1995.

I was relaxing one morning when BBC TV ran a bulletin that famous opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi had just been released from house arrest. I scrambled into a taxi and went straight to her house in a wealthy neighborhood of Yangon. I envisioned being the first reporter to interview her. I had the scoop of the century!

When I arrived, however, her front yard was filled with dozens of diplomats and reporters. Most had flown in from Bangkok that morning when the government relaxed visa requirements.

I joined the scrum of reporters asking her questions. Suu Kyi had genuine poplar support as a democracy advocate in this country once called Burma. She stood against the country's brutal military rulers. She was also a darling of the United States and Britain because of her advocacy of free markets, anti-communism and other pro-western policies.

Most significantly neither Suu Kyi nor her supporters that I interviewed understood the complexities of Myanmar's 135 officially recognized ethnic groups. Her father had been a leftist and nationalist leader in the fight against British colonialism. That revolutionary nationalism helped free the country. But nationalism of the Buddhist majority applied against ethnic and religious minorities was to take the country in a repressive direction.

Suu Kyi was jailed and released several times until her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), was allowed to field parliamentary candidates in 2015. The NLD won the election and Suu Kyi became Myanmar’s de facto leader. But she hardly mentioned minority rights.

The generals exercise real power in Myanmar. They claim the Rohingya, who live in the western state of Rakhine, are really Bangladeshis, despite the fact they have lived in Myanmar for centuries. The government denies Rohingyas the right to vote or hold elected office, and restricts their access to healthcare, education, and jobs.

Brutal attacks

In 2016 and then again on August 25, 2017 an armed Rohingya militia attacked police and army posts, killing dozens of security personnel. In the following days the military viciously attacked Rohingya civilians, eventually driving hundreds of thousands out of the country. In numerous documented cases, the military beat, raped and murdered civilians.

Right-wing nationalist Buddhist monks, with government cooperation, incited their followers to attack Rohingya villages, killing some civilians and driving out the rest. So much for the concept that Buddhism is somehow immune from the extremism affecting other major religions.

In August this year a UN report described the military actions as "genocide" and called for an international tribunal to put the generals on trial.

Despite these atrocities, Suu Kyi defends the military's actions. She also justifies the jailing of two Reuters reporters who exposed the massacres but were convicted on trumped up charges of violating the British colonial era Official Secrets Act. Last month they were sentenced to seven years in prison.

Alice Baillat, research fellow at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs now living in Bangladesh, told me Suu Kyi's political options are constrained by the powerful military. However, "she has not used her moral authority, popularity and power position, however limited, to stem or prevent the unfolding crisis and protect the civilian population."

Armed attacks

Rohingya politics are complicated as well. For two years an armed group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) has been attacking police and military targets in Rakhine state. ARSA's leader Ata Ullah was born in Pakistan and lived in Saudi Arabia.

The International Crisis Group wrote, "The insurgent group, which refers to itself as Harakah al-Yaqin (Faith Movement), is led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia and is commanded on the ground by Rohingya with international training and experience in modern guerrilla war tactics."

James M. Dorsey, senior fellow S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told me that as a Sunni Muslim group, ARSA has received political support and some relief supplies from militant groups such as Laksha Taiba in Pakistan.

He noted, however, that ARSA is not a terrorist group such as Al Qaeda or ISIS, nor does it seek to create an Islamic caliphate. But, he warned, continued government repression could push some Rohingya in that direction.

"If you're Rohingya, gravitating to militancy is 1 + 1 = 2," he said.

Other ethnic groups in Myanmar have their own armed militias, noted Simon Billenness, executive director of the International Campaign for the Rohingya based in Boston.  ARSA, he told me, attacks primarily military targets and doesn't intentionally kill civilians.

"ARSA has more in common with the ethnic armed forces than it has to any international terrorist group," he said.

U.S. Policy

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have wrestled unsuccessfully with Myanmar policy. The country has valuable gemstones and sits in a volatile area bordering China, Bangladesh and Thailand. The last few presidents have tried to break Myanmar's close economic and political ties with China, and bring it into the US sphere of influence.

The Obama administration lifted economic sanctions after the military gave up some power, even as attacks on Rohingya began. The Trump administration re-imposed sanctions on individual generals and threatened more stringent, unilateral sanctions.

In my opinion, unilateral US sanctions are wrong in principle and unhelpful in practice. Who is Trump to denounce human rights violations against Muslims while denying them entry to the United States and keeping them jailed indefinitely in Guantanamo? US unilateral sanctions, while ostensibly defending human rights, in practice aim at replacing hostile regimes with ones friendly to the U.S.

"If Donald trump comes out swinging with sanctions, he won't get a lot of Chinese and Russian support," said analyst Dorsey." If there was a multilateral effort to improve immediate living conditions with  ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) at the core, it could create a tolerable situation."

The Trump administration should immediately help fund the UN's requested $951 million to help the Rohingya living in refugee camps. I don't expect much positive from the dotard Donald, but at least he can help fund refugee relief.