Anti-Racism
Bangladesh is blocking hundreds of thousands of Rohingya children from accessing meaningful education, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday, urging authorities to lift restrictions on schooling in refugee camps.
In a report called ‘Are we not human?’, Human Rights Watch accused Bangladesh of violating the rights of 400,000 school age children who have fled Myanmar and are currently living in the Cox’s Bazaar refugee camps.
“Depriving an entire generation of children of education is in no one’s interest,” Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch told Reuters. “The international community needs to act and demand that Bangladesh and Myanmar change course.”
More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh since a 2017 crackdown by Myanmar’s military, which followed attacks by Rohingya insurgents.
The Human Rights Watch report said Bangladesh had banned Rohingya refugees from enrolling in schools outside the camps or taking national exams and also barred U.N. agencies and foreign aid groups from giving formal accredited education.
It accused Myanmar of not agreeing to recognize the use of its school curriculum in the camps.
Bangladesh’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission Chief Mahbub Alam Talukder said it was untrue that children in the camps were not being educated and that there were 4,000 learning centers in the camps.
Trump will reimpose steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina, opening new trade war fronts
President Trump announced tariffs, effective immediately, on all steel and aluminum shipped into the United States from Brazil and Argentina.
“Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies. which is not good for our farmers,” Trump said in Monday morning tweet. He then directed his attention to the Federal Reserve, saying the central bank should “act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies. This makes it very hard for our [manufacturers] & farmers to fairly export their goods. Lower Rates & Loosen — Fed!”
The surprise announcement came after it appeared as though the White House was preparing to dial back its adversarial trade approach in the lead up to next year’s election. The administration appeared close to a deal with House Democrats to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement, and tensions with China had eased in recent weeks. Read more…
Donald Trump’s Republican congressional allies are throwing up different defenses against impeachment and hoping that something may sell. They say that he didn’t seek a corrupt political bargain with Ukraine, but that if he did, he failed, and the mere attempt is not impeachable. Or that it is not clear that he did it, because the evidence against him is unreliable “hearsay.”
It’s all been very confusing. But the larger story — the crucial constitutional story — is not the incoherence of the president’s defense. It is more that he and his party are exposing limits of impeachment as a response to the presidency of a demagogue.
The founders feared the demagogue, who figures prominently in the Federalist Papers as the politician who, possessing “perverted ambition,” pursues relentless self-aggrandizement “by the confusions of their country.” The last of the papers, Federalist No. 85, linked demagogy to its threat to the constitutional order — to the “despotism” that may be expected from the “victorious demagogue.” This “despotism” is achieved through systematic lying to the public, vilification of the opposition and, as James Fenimore Cooper wrote in an essay on demagogues, a claimed right to disregard “the Constitution and the laws” in pursuing what the demagogue judges to be the “interests of the people.”
Should the demagogue succeed in winning the presidency, impeachment in theory provides the fail-safe protection. And yet the demagogue’s political tool kit, it turns out, may be his most effective defense. It is a constitutional paradox: The very behaviors that necessitate impeachment supply the means for the demagogue to escape it. Read more…
In Trump’s corruption and racism, white supremacy finds a home
The United States’ inaction on gun regulation and white supremacy creates conditions for domestic terrorism to persist in this country
The rise of President Donald Trump has caused a re-emergence of white supremacist violence in the past three years, including mass shootings and attacks on minority communities, and a 15% uptick in assaults against minorities in 2018. Trump has not only neglected to enact tougher gun regulations—even after several promises—he has ceaselessly been racist toward Mexicans. At one point, he said Mexicans were not “people, they’re animals.” Furthermore, the lack of regulation allows a gun culture with close ties to white supremacy and nationalism to go unchecked as they commit ideologically driven mass shootings.
More recently, it seems the extremists committing these crimes have been recognized as domestic terrorists, but this is only through media coverage—not at the legal level. These men have continued to get away with acts of domestic terrorism and legally suffered smaller charges for the crimes they’ve committed.
The rise of President Donald Trump has caused a re-emergence of white supremacist violence in the past three years, including mass shootings and attacks on minority communities, and a 15% uptick in assaults against minorities in 2018. Trump has not only neglected to enact tougher gun regulations—even after several promises—he has ceaselessly been racist toward Mexicans. At one point, he said Mexicans were not “people, they’re animals.” Furthermore, the lack of regulation allows a gun culture with close ties to white supremacy and nationalism to go unchecked as they commit ideologically driven mass shootings. More recently, it seems the extremists committing these crimes have been recognized as domestic terrorists, but this is only through media coverage—not at the legal level. These men have continued to get away with acts of domestic terrorism and legally suffered smaller charges for the crimes they’ve committed.