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Authored by Danny Sjursen via TomDispatch.com,

Could Donald Trump end the Afghan war someday? I don’t know if such a possibility has been on your mind, but it’s certainly been on the mind of this retired U.S. Army major who fought in that land so long ago. And here’s the context in which I’ve been thinking about that very possibility.

Back in the previous century, it used to be said that “only Nixon could go to China.” In other words, only a longtime cold warrior and red-baiter like President Richard Nixon had the necessary tough-guy credentials to break with a tradition more than two decades old in February 1972. It was then that he and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger traveled to Beijing and met with Communist leader Mao Zedong. In that way, they began a process of reestablishing relations with China (now again being impaired by Donald Trump) broken when the Communists won a civil war against the American-backed nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek and came to power in 1949.

By the same token, perhaps no one but Nixon could have eventually — after hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Americans died — extracted the United States from what was then (but is no longer) America’s longest war, the one in Vietnam. After all, in 1973, it was hard to imagine just about any Democrat agreeing to the sort of unseemly concessions at the negotiating table in Paris that resulted in an actual peace accord with a crew of Communists. But Nixon did so.

After those “peace” talks and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that land, the corrupt, battered U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government barely held on for another two gruesome years before a massive Communist offensive finally took Saigon, the capital of the American-backed half of that country in April 1975. Images of U.S. military helicopters hastily evacuating American diplomats and others from Saigon would prove embarrassing indeed. Yet, in the end, little could have altered the ultimate outcome of that war.

Nixon, a cynic’s cynic, evidently sensed just that. Yes, he would prolong the war to the tune of more than 20,000 additional U.S. troop deaths and seek to create a politically palatable pause between the withdrawal of American troops and the unavoidable Communist victory to come (at the cost of god knows how many more dead Vietnamese). It was what he called “breathing space.”  In the end, in other words, in the bloodiest way imaginable, he finally accepted both his presidential, and Washington’s, limitations in what was, after all, a Vietnamese civil war. 

Fellow TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich has referred to such realities as “the limits of power.” As a longtime military man who once carried water for the American empire in both Afghanistan and Iraq, let me assure you that, almost two decades into the twenty-first century, those limits still couldn’t be more real.

Recently, I got to thinking about Vietnam and Bacevich — himself a veteran of that war — while following the strange pace of the Trump administration’s peace talks with the Taliban. It struck me that the president, his negotiators, and his loyally “deplorable” backers might (gulp!) just be America’s best hope for striking a deal, 18 years late, to conclude the U.S. military’s role in Afghanistan. If so, he would end the war that replaced Vietnam as this country’s longest — and that’s without even counting the first Afghan War Washington fought there against the Red Army of the now-defunct Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989.

An Unwinnable War

For someone like me who long ago turned his back on America’s never-ending wars on terror, it’s discomfiting to imagine the process that might finally lead to a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially one negotiated by The Donald and his strange team of hawks. Of one thing, rest assured: bad things will happen afterward. Afghans whom Americans are sympathetic to, especially women, will suffer under the heel of the kind of extreme Islamism that will be in command in significant parts of the country. And getting there could be no less grim. After all, President Trump, that self-proclaimed “deal-maker,” has so far shown himself to be anything but impressive in striking deals. Nevertheless, he has, at least, regularly criticized the ill-advised Afghan War for years and his instincts, when it comes to that conflict, though unsophisticated and ill-informed, seem sound.

In a sense, the situation isn’t complicated: the U.S. war in Afghanistan cannot be won. The Kabul-based government’s gross domestic product can’t even support its own military budget, leaving it endlessly reliant on aid from Washington and its allies. Its security forces have been taking what, last December, the American general about to become the head of U.S. Central Command termed “unsustainable” casualties — 45,000 battle deaths since 2014. Those security forces simply can’t recruit enough new members to replace such massive losses. 

Today, the U.S.-backed regime controls less of Afghanistan than at any point in the nearly two-decade-long war, despite all the American bombs dropped and troops deployed these past 18 years. Rather than grapple with that inconvenient fact, the U.S. military simply stopped counting how much of the country the Taliban now contests or controls. For these and a plethora of other reasons, that military and its Afghan proxies won’t be able to change the ultimate outcome of the Taliban’s war in Afghanistan. Forgive me, then, for placing some hope in President Trump and his negotiators.

The disconcerting truth is that the brutal, venal, medieval Taliban movement is popular in the ethnic-Pashtun-dominated south and the mountainous east of Afghanistan. In 2011-2012, as a lowly company commander in a sub-district of Kandahar, the province that birthed the Taliban, I saw firsthand just how much sympathy villagers seemed to have for that Islamist cause. Sure, many — so, at least, they said — were opposed to that movement’s violent campaign to control the province and the country, but culturally and religiously in some fashion many of them seemed to agree with the group’s basic agenda and worldview. 

Most of the Taliban foot soldiers I faced were little more than impoverished farm boys with guns drawn to the movement as much by patriotic opposition to the American military occupation of their country as by any desire for the application of sharia law. In addition, many in the region were making at least modest sums off Afghanistan’s record-breaking opium trade, something the U.S. was never truly capable of controlling or suppressing. The bottom line: the American war in Afghanistan was essentially over then. It’s over now, a defeat that neither politicians in Washington nor Pentagon officials have been able to accept to date.

A Brief Litany of Messy Wars and Their Endings Since 1945

The certainty of imperial failure in anticolonial and counterinsurgency conflicts has defined the era of war making since at least 1945. So it shall be in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering some of those oft-forgotten conflicts.

In the favored American version of war, endings involve unconditional surrender by a defeated enemy, whether Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 or imperial Japanese officials on the deck of the USSMissouri in 1945. But such moments, historically speaking, couldn’t be more rare in “the American century.” After World War II, as the last colonial wars of the European powers ended in defeat or the withdrawal of imperial forces, the U.S. military went to war globally with Third World “Communism” — and victory became a thoroughly outmoded word. In the Korean War (1950-1953), which never officially ended, the U.S. finally settled for a status quo truce with its North Korean and Chinese opponents. Tens of thousands of American troops and millions of Koreans died in what essentially amounted to a negotiated draw. Vietnam, as noted, ended in the negotiated version of an outright defeat.

Meanwhile, the French, already booted out of Vietnam in the First Indochina War (1954-1962), tried to torture and kill their way to victory in colonial Algeria before accepting defeat there, too. (A coup attempt by disgruntled right-wing military officers during that counterinsurgency almost cost France its democracy.) Nor could a declining Great Britain kill its way out of the last of its colonial wars, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (1969-1998). That 30-year war with the quasi-socialist, nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) only ended when London demonstrated a willingness to negotiate with that group and draw it into electoral politics. Not only was there no military victory to be had, but Britons had to swallow the embarrassing spectacle of former IRA bombers being released from prison and onetime IRA commanders entering parliament at Westminster.

In smaller conflicts and interventions, the American military withdrew from Lebanon in 1983 after some 220 Marines (and 20 other service personnel) were killed in a suicide bombing and the until-then hawkish President Ronald Reagan realized he’d stepped into an unwinnable morass. In 1994, President Bill Clinton did the same in Somalia after 18 U.S. troops were killed in a chaotic shootout the previous year with a warlord militia in a local civil war. (Twenty-five years later, however, U.S. drones and special operators are still battling it out in that chronically war-ravaged society.)

One lesson to draw from such an abbreviated version of American and allied morasses and military defeats at the hands of nationalist militants, left and right, is that suppressing people’s movements has historically proven difficult indeed. Most of the insurgencies of the long Cold War era were led by vaguely Marxist or, at least, leftist groups. In this century, however, similar insurgencies are led by right-wing Islamist groups. Either way the results have generally been the same. The insurgents, not the governments the U.S. imposed and/or backed, are almost invariably seen by local populations as the more popular, legitimate fighting forces. 

Marxism (and its Soviet communist variant) ran its course in local societies as the Cold War wound to its conclusion, but such movements were never truly defeated by the U.S. military and its brutal right-wing proxies, even in the Americas (as in Nicaragua in the 1980s). Islamist theocracy is undoubtedly abhorrent, but it, too, must run its course and (hopefully) sooner or later be defeated by forces within the societies where it’s now conducting its terror wars. Just as in Vietnam, the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan in this century has only served as an accelerant for what might be thought of as political and military arson.

A Messy End

Predictions are tricky when it comes to war, but here’s a safe enough bet: in the wake of any Trump administration “peace” deal with the Taliban, like the South Vietnamese government of the Nixon era, a corrupt, scarcely legitimate U.S.-backed Afghan government and its badly battered security forces will, sooner or later, find themselves back at war. And they will be fighting an ever more confident Taliban. The Kabul-based regime could perhaps hold onto the biggest cities (except possibly Kandahar) and significant parts of the country’s north and west where there are Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara minority enclaves long opposed to the Islamist insurgents. The Taliban would then dominate much of the south and east, leaving Afghanistan divided and still violent indeed until, perhaps, like the South Vietnamese government, the one in Kabul collapsed.

Still, it’s unlikely the Taliban will ever again risk harboring large numbers of transnational terrorists or stand by as a bin Laden-style attack is planned in Afghanistan’s mountains or valleys. After all, its goals have always been Afghan-centric, not global. What’s more, it appears that its negotiators have tacitly promised not to protect or ally with al-Qaeda or its newer offshoot, the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan (which, in any case, is anything but a prospective ally of theirs).

Of course, transnational terrorists have never needed Afghanistan to hatch attacks on the West. Much of the planning and logistics for the actual 9/11 attacks occurred in Germany and even in the United States itself. In addition, partially thanks to America’s never-ending war on terror, there are increasing numbers of ungoverned spaces and tumultuous regions in dozens of countries in a band stretching from West Africa to Central Asia. Should the U.S. military really station tens of thousands of troops in all those locales? Of course not. Among other things, leaving aside the expense of it to the American taxpayer, U.S. soldiers would only inflame local passions and empower local terror outfits.

So here we are knowing there is little the U.S. can do to change the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan. The only question of consequence is: Could Donald Trump be the twenty-first century’s Richard Nixon? Could he do what no one in his position over the last 18 years has had the political courage to do and end — his phrase — a “stupid” war that has come to seem eternal? If “only Nixon could go to China,” is it possible that only Trump can extract the U.S. military from Afghanistan? God help us, but that seems conceivable.

Now, some in the foreign policy establishment will balk at any eventual Trumpian peace agreement. Army General Mark Milley, the president’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for instance, recently bucked his boss during confirmation hearings. He told senators that withdrawing from Afghanistan “too soon,” according to the New York Times, would be a “strategic mistake.” Likewise, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a typical Washington foreign policy pundit, has already complained that the current U.S. peace talks with the Taliban in Doha will only lead to a Vietnam-style denouement where U.S. negotiators use a negotiated agreement as a fig leaf to save face, declaring “victory,” while essentially accepting future defeat. And, in this case, O’Hanlon is probably right on the mark, even if wrong to reject such an approach.

Count on this: the end of the American military mission in Afghanistan will be unfulfilling and likely tragic. Still — and here’s where O’Hanlon and his ilk couldn’t be more off the mark — like Vietnam before it, the Afghan war should never have been fought for these last almost 18 years, never could have been won, never will be won, and should be ended in some fashion, even a Trumpian one, as soon as possible.

*  *  *

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KjtYwb Tyler Durden

New findings from the Imperial College London estimate that air pollution causes heart attacks, strokes, and lung disease that kill over 30,000 Americans each year, which is about the same number of deaths from car accidents each year.

The study, published last week in the journal PLOS Medicine, found a connection between cardio-respiratory and excess particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5, is about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair — comes from automotive, power generation, and industrial engines.

Millions of Americans are inhaling PM2.5 daily, which build up in small blood vessels in the lungs, and over an extended period, can cause lung disease. These dangerous particles also are absorbed into the bloodstream that can increase the risk of heart disease, the researchers suggested.

Researchers noted that PM2.5 levels have dropped in the last two decades, but in some areas around the country – the levels remain seriously high.

Los Angeles remained one of the worst cities for PM2.5 along with several regions in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. 

Inner cities deemed low-income areas across the US also had dangerous levels of PM2.5.

Researchers said this “inequality in mortality burden” occurred because of the low-income population was already prone to higher rates of preexisting medical conditions.

“I think the big conclusion is that lowering the limits of air pollution could delay in the US, all together, tens of thousands of deaths each year,” Majid Ezzati, the study’s lead author and a professor of global environmental health told CNN.

Air quality data between 1999 and 2015 at over 750 monitoring stations across the US were cross-referenced with death records for cardiovascular-related diseases to determine the dangers of PM2.5, the researchers noted.

The governments acceptable PM2.5 level is 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air (ug/m3).

In 1999, Fresno County, California, recorded 22.1 ug/m3; by 2015, the level was at 13.2 ug/m3 for Tulare County, a region 20 miles from Fresno.

In the last several years, the Trump administration has rolled back a wide variety of regulations that protect the air we breathe.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zncgy3 Tyler Durden

Authored by Danielle Lacalle,

If there is something that is evident is that the United States does not need a rate cut.

With the economy growing at 2.1%, unemployment at 3.6%, creating 170,000 jobs per month, and estimated underlying core inflation of 2%, no objective data justifies cutting rates that are already artificially low. Wages are rising by 3% and credit growth for companies and families is solid.

There is also no public sector financing problem. The 10-year US bond trades at a 2.05% yield, consistent with the country’s growth and inflation. In real terms, the United States borrows at almost no cost and without Federal Reserve support, as all bond demand comes from the secondary market.

If the Federal Reserve cuts rates it can be for two reasons:

• One, because it expects a drastic and abrupt worsening of the economy, but that is apparently not the case, as the Fed itself talks of a “solid” economy.

• The second reason would be more concerning. The Federal Reserve would cut rates as a reactive measure against the monetary assault of the ECB (eurozone), the PBOC (China) and the BOJ (Japan).  That is because it is recognizing in a veiled way that we are in a dangerous bubble inflated by central banks, and that we are heading for a currency war. It is no surprise that the dollar index (the DXY) has risen despite expectations of lower rates and even repurchase of bonds via reinvestment of interests in the United States. When all major economies “copy” the Fed without having the financial balance, economic dynamism and global reserve currency of the United States, they are basically implicitly saying “buy dollars”.

Constant easing has created major imbalances, from asset bubbles to rising zombie companies (“Asset Bubbles to Zombie Companies: The Dark Side of Rate Cuts”).

In the eurozone, there is a similar case. There is no need to cut rates and launch another stimulus, which by the way has never been abandoned, by the way, since all expirations are repurchased). The excess liquidity in the ECB exceeds 1.79 billion euros, rates are already negative and the eurozone governments issue debt at negative and artificially low yields. The credit market shows the risk of dangerous bubbles when the spread between junk and high-quality bonds has fallen to historic lows.

The problem of stagnation of the eurozone and other economies has nothing to do with rates. Businesses and consumers are not going to take more credit or invest more due to a 0.5% change in already artificially depressed rates. The problem of stagnation in many economies is not due to lack of monetary stimulus but its excess. Zombie debt is perpetuated, overcapacity is maintained and malinvestment in high risk and low productivity sectors is encouraged.

The risk to markets is that investors fall again into the trap of betting on “the worse, the better”, that is, taking more risk despite the fact that the earnings’ season and macro data are disappointing, with traders betting it all on new liquidity injections.

The Fed and the ECB face the devil’s alternative. If they normalize monetary policy, they risk an abrupt and widespread correction in risky asset prices, and if they do not normalize, they lose tools to face a true cycle change. The Federal Reserve still has some tools, but the ECB is already in diminishing return territory in monetary policy.

The United States does not need a rate cut, but it probably will. Reducing exposure to the most cyclical part of portfolios may be a good idea because the race towards negative rates of the global economy has only one result: secular stagnation. Central banks will keep risky asset prices high, but we cannot forget collateral damages. When high productivity is fiscally penalized and monetary policy is rewarding the most inefficient and indebted parts of the economy, growth suffers and bubbles reach systemic size.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZgHiYp Tyler Durden

Millennials will tell anyone – the “greatest economy ever” is a hoax. That is because many young adults aren’t just priced out of the housing market; they have never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigated several trends that have transformed millennials into a generation of renters. The Journal’s latest report is an eye-opener into the shaky finances of the next generation that will take over the entire U.S. workforce by 2024.

Alex Ruiz, 29, and his wife, Stephanie Johnson, spoke to WSJ about insurmountable student debt, little savings, rising rents, the affordable housing crisis, and the bleak outlook on life.

The couple is located in Asheville, N.C., where residential real estate markets have jumped 70% post the financial crisis, making it unaffordable for the pair to buy a home. Rising rents and student loans have drained every last penny out of the two, who are unable to save for a downpayment.

“Day to day we’re OK generally,” said Mr. Ruiz, a case manager at a government-funded agency.

“But the depressing part is when we take a hard look at the possibility of our future.”

For many generations, homeownership was a pillar of the American dream. Since the dream died shortly after the 2008 crisis, many are rethinking what that new dream could be.

Millennial homeownership rates have crashed over the last decade. The median age of a home buyer is 46, the oldest since the National Association of Realtors began keeping records in 1981. The trend is expected to accelerate into 2020.

Millennials who became young adults in the stock market and real estate crash a decade ago, came out in the aftermath with “no bargaining power when they entered the job market, crimping their earnings ever since,” said The Journal. They watched their families get obliterated with financial hardships, determined that owning a house wasn’t in their interest.

Now that millennials are generally at an age where it’s accustomed to settling down: buy a home, get married, and have children — many are rethinking the American dream because they cannot afford it.

From 2012 to 2018, the average price of lower-priced homes jumped 64%, according to mortgage-data tracker CoreLogic, while the price of higher-end homes increased just 40%. During the same period, wage growth for average workers remained depressed.

A study earlier this year showed that six out of ten millennials don’t have $500 to cover their rent or food expenses; in the event, they lose their jobs in the next downturn.

The effects of poor financial health have forced many millennials to live in their parents’ basements, according to census data. This means many can’t even afford rising rents in many of the Case-Shiller 20-Cities.

“Lower homeownership for young adults means lower economic growth,” said Sam Khater, chief economist of mortgage-finance giant Freddie Mac. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

The millennial homeownership rate is at the lowest levels in three decades. About 40% of young adults, ages 25 to 34, were homeowners in 2018, according to Freddie Mac. That is down from 48% in 2001 when Gen X-ers were young adults.

Stagnate wage growth is the crux of the problem. Home prices have dangerously outpaced wage gains over the last decade. From about the end of 2000 to the end of 2017, median home prices increased 21% after adjusting for inflation, while median household income grew 2%.

The median net worth for millennial households crashed by a third from 2001 to 2016 after adjusting for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve.

Even if millennials start purchasing homes this year through earlier 2020 – they’re likely buying the top of the market.

The effects of not buying, or buying late, should become more evident through the early 2020s as millennials settle down. The median family net worth of homeowners is $230,000 compared with just $5,000 for renters.

Without home equity, millennials are screwed in the next economic downturn.

And several decades from now, around 2040, millennials will keep working through their retirement years.

Which leaves us to today, as the 2020 U.S. presidential election is around the corner, many Democratic presidential candidates are offering student loan debt forgiveness and universal income to struggling millennials.

A snapshot of the student loan crisis: Only 26 people were granted debt forgiveness out of 34K applicants in the U.S. this year, says @CNBC.

A recent economic study suggested that canceling student loan debt could actually be a huge boost to the economy: pic.twitter.com/FMAjfsXhvK

— AJ+ (@ajplus) November 29, 2018

Could millennials, who are over 75 million strong, have a much more significant impact on the election than previously thought?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YyyHTJ Tyler Durden

Authored by Jake Johnson via CommonDreams.org,

Sen. Ron Wyden issued a scathing statement late Monday warning that President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as director of national intelligence is so unqualified that he could put lives at risk.

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), an ardent Trump loyalist, “is the most partisan and least qualified individual ever nominated to serve as director of national intelligence,” said Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The sum total of his qualifications appears to be his record of promoting Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the investigation into Russian interference and calling for prosecution of Trump’s political enemies,” Wyden said.

“Furthermore, he has endorsed widespread government surveillance and shown little concern for Americans’ rights, except for those of Donald Trump and his close associates,” Wyden continued.

“Confirming this individual would amount to an endorsement of this administration’s drive to politicize our intelligence agencies,” the Oregon senator concluded. “This is a dangerous time, and America needs the most qualified and objective individuals possible to lead our intelligence agencies. Anything less risks American lives.”

.@RepRatcliffe is the most partisan & least qualified individual ever nominated to serve as DNI. His only qualifications seem to be promoting Trump’s conspiracy theories about the investigation into Russian interference & calling for prosecution of Trump’s political enemies.

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) July 29, 2019

Wyden’s statement comes days after Trump nominated Ratcliffe — who has no background in intelligence — to replace current Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who is stepping down next month.

The president reportedly liked the way Ratcliffe questioned former Special Counsel Robert Mueller during his testimony before Congress last week.

In an interview with Politico on Monday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) described Ratcliffe as “a television character that the president has watched on TV.”

Trump, said Murphy, “wants to put somebody in this position who’s going to agree with his political take on intelligence.”

“I’ll certainly do my own evaluation,” Murphy added, “but it strikes me as a very inappropriate choice for the job in a moment when we are trying to lift intelligence out of the political soup.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GDQkY4 Tyler Durden

The secret is out for a Chinese blogger who called herself “Your Highness Qiao Biluo”, according to the BBC.

The blogger, who had presented herself as a “young” and “glamorous” girl in videos online, is actually just an average middle aged woman. A technical glitch during one of her livestreams revealed the truth. 

It stunned her fans, who were apparently unaware that everyone on the internet may not actually be who they present themselves to be.

Biluo had a follow count of over 100,000 on Douyu and is now believed to have used a filter to alter her face. She had been renowned for her “sweet and healing voice”. China’s Global Times noted that Biluo had been “worshipped” as a “cute goddess” by some members of her audience. Some followers even sent her as much as $14,000.

But during a joint live stream with another user, the filter she was using stopped working and her real face became visible to her viewers. She only noticed the glitch when “people who had signed up to her VIP access room started exiting en masse,” according to the article. 

Many of her followers (who, surprise, were primarily men) stopped following her immediately and withdrew some of their transactions after her identity was revealed. Most commentators didn’t sympathize with the men and said they deserved to be tricked for not verifying her identity in the first place. 

Since the incident, Biluo has suspended her platform. Some users claimed she was conning people out of their money, while others asked people not to judge her because of her looks. The other live-streamer, Qingzi, showed no reaction to Biluo’s face being revealed.

The story has gone viral in China, with more than 600 million people reading posts about it. China has 425 million live streamers and the use of face filters is “common” across many social media platforms. 

Users on YouTube captured the footage: 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Yh9IFh Tyler Durden

Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times,

Children are being rented, bought, recycled, and kidnapped so that single adults, mostly men from Central America, can gain quick release into the United States after crossing the border illegally.

The cost of renting a child varies.

“We’ve had indications … that it could cost anywhere from a few hundred—or even in some cases, less than $100—up to $1,000 or more,” said Kevin McAleenan, acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), during a congressional hearing on July 18.

McAleenan said in one case, a 51-year-old illegal alien had purchased a 6-month-old baby for $80 in Guatemala so that he could easily get into the United States. The man, a Honduran national, confessed to border agents when he was faced with a DNA test.

“We’ve seen all manner of smuggling organizations communicating to potential customers and to those crossing the border how to bring a child with them to be allowed to stay in the United States,” McAleenan said. “They’ve been active in advertising, literally on Facebook and on the radio in Central America.”

Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, sent 400 agents to El Paso and Rio Grande Valley, Texas, in mid-April to interview families that Border Patrol suspected were fake. In the last eight weeks, HSI special agents have identified 5,500 fraudulent families—about 15 percent of all cases referred.

McAleenan said agents have uncovered 921 fake documents and 615 individuals have been prosecuted for trafficking or smuggling a child.

“That tells me that we might be scratching the surface of this problem and the number of children being put at risk might be even higher,” he said.

“Everybody knows that if they bring a child, they’ll be allowed to stay in the United States—they call it a ‘passport for migration.’ I heard that directly from a gentleman from Huehuetenango, the western-most province of Guatemala.”

He said almost every summary of the cases he has seen mentions the same thing:

“The subject stated that he made the attempt because he heard in his hometown that anyone traveling to the United States with a child will be released.”

The southern border has become so overwhelmed that most illegal aliens don’t even claim credible fear for asylum anymore, knowing they’ll still be released expeditiously into the United States—especially if they have a child.

In Yuma, Arizona, less than 10 percent of illegal aliens make an asylum claim, sector Chief Anthony Porvaznik said on April 17.

300,000 Children

Since Oct. 1, 2018, more than 300,000 children have crossed the southern border, according to McAleenan. Most of them entered as part of a family unit, but 67,000 also entered as unaccompanied minors. Family units increased by 469 percent from the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year to the same period in the 2019 fiscal year.

The legal loophole that is fueling the sharp increase in family units was opened in 2015 by a California judge, who amended the Flores Settlement Agreement to prohibit the detention of families for more than 20 days. Previously, the 20-day rule was applied to unaccompanied minors only.

An immigration case cannot be adjudicated within 20 days, so families who cross the border illegally are now released by Border Patrol within days, with a future court date that most fail to honor.

One of the most telling statistics is that of men crossing the border with a child. In 2014, fewer than 1 percent of all men apprehended by Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley Sector had a child with them. That number now sits at 50 percent, according to Rodolfo Karisch, chief Border Patrol agent for that sector.

McAleenan said smugglers pair up adults and children. “If they have an individual who wants to go to the United States and someone else has a child that they might want to make some additional money renting [out], or they want the child delivered to a relative in the United States,” they’ll buy fake documents and then get smuggled to the border.

“There’s a whole fake document operation in all three countries,” McAleenan said, referring to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

“The vulnerabilities in our legal framework [are] incentivizing smugglers and families to put children at risk. The recycling problem is maybe the worst manifestation of that,” he said. Recycling refers to when a child is used by an adult to get across the border easily as a “family unit,” then the child is sent back to be used again.

“ICE now has three significant cases, multiple cities around the country, where they’ve identified a small group of children—say five to eight children—who are being used by dozens of adults to cross our border seeking release into the United States.”

The adults involved in fraudulent family claims are prosecuted by the Department of Justice for federal crimes including: immigration crime, identity and benefit fraud, alien smuggling, human trafficking, and child exploitation.

Changing Flores

McAleenan said Congress could make the biggest impact—“not only on the flow, but on protecting children”—by making a change to the Flores agreement.

He said that prior to the 2015 change to Flores, the Obama administration started detaining families together for the duration of their immigration case, which takes around 45 days. The flow of illegal immigrants reduced in response, as those with meritless asylum claims were deported.

“If people are not successful in coming with a child being released, they’re actually getting a decision from an immigration judge resulting in repatriation for the vast majority, that would mean others would not try to come,” McAleenan said.

Although almost 90 percent of those who claim credible fear when presenting themselves at the border pass the initial screening, less than 20 percent are granted asylum relief by an immigration judge. For Central Americans, that number is less than 10 percent.

Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) told McAleenan at the hearing that a Democrat-controlled House will not amend the Flores agreement, nor will it provide funding for more detention beds.

McAleenan pushed back, saying he’s not ready to accept that a system that worked under the Obama administration five years ago would not be accepted by Congress today. He said back then families were kept together for 40 to 50 days in a campus-like setting with education, recreation, medical care, and courtrooms on site.

“We’re not seeing successful results in immigration cases when anyone is released from being detained in custody, but especially for families—they’re more likely to cut off their [tracking] bracelets; they’re less likely to show up for hearings; they’re less likely to respond to a final order of removal,” McAleenan said. “So being able to address that at the border in an expedited and fair way with due process is a much better solution than what we’re doing now.”

He said he’s already discussing bipartisan options with the Senate Judiciary Committee, but he’d like to start a discussion in the House.

67,000 Unaccompanied Minors

McAleenan is also concerned about the increased number of unaccompanied minors coming across the border and the legal loopholes that prevent them from being sent back home.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) has been established for years to help victims of trafficking; however, a loophole prevents the United States from returning children back to their home countries unless they are from Canada or Mexico (contiguous countries).

McAleenan said even if Central American countries want their children back, U.S. law prohibits it.

“We’ve had all three ambassadors from the Northern Triangle countries assert that those governments should have some say in what happens to that unaccompanied child,” he said.

Instead, an unaccompanied child gets moved from Border Patrol to Health and Human Services (HHS), which then finds a sponsor in the United States to place the child with.

Currently, around 11,000 unaccompanied minors are in the care of HHS, creating a proxy foster care system. The vast majority (88 percent) hail from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Most are aged between 15 and 17.

“The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States during this fiscal year has risen to levels we have never before seen,” said Jonathan Hayes, before the House Judiciary Committee on July 25. Hayes is responsible for the unaccompanied minor program within the HHS’s Office and Refugee Resettlement department.

Hayes said that as of June, the average length of time that a child stays in HHS custody is approximately 42 days—a “dramatic decrease” from late November 2018, where the average length of care was 90 days.

McAleenan said it’s often a parent, who is already in the United States illegally, who pays a smuggler to deliver their child up to the border.

“I don’t think most people realize that most of these unaccompanied children are being released to parents or relatives in the United States who are also here unlawfully, who may not have permission to work in the United States,” McAleenan said.

New restrictions, placed by Congress in the latest round of appropriations, include a provision that illegal aliens in a household with an unaccompanied minor are now exempt from deportation.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GC6uS2 Tyler Durden

Despite record credit injections and endless easing, China’s economic survey data goes from bad to worse.

• While China Manufacturing PMI managed a de minimus gain from 49.4 to 49.7, it remains in contractionary territory for the 7th month in the last 9.

• China Services PMI continued to slide, back to its lowest since 2018.

Confirming global weakness seen in Japanese and European PMIs.

In a seemingly desperate reach, Bloomberg notes that the stronger result (49.4 to 49.7) signaled some optimism is emerging in the Chinese economy in spite of lingering uncertainty over trade talks and domestic demand.

PMI data improves as “the government’s tax cuts have helped improve growth slightly,” Yao Shaohua, economist at ABCI Securities Co. in Hong Kong

Under the hood things are less rosy with Manufacturing New Orders and Employment both contracting…

And Non-Manufacturing Employment is contracting…

We are less enthusiastic as July has more working days than June, which could also have helped lift production.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZjAE3L Tyler Durden