Is the US at War with Venezuela?

Margaret Brennan asked Mike Waltz, Trump's National Security Adviser, this very important question in yesterday's "Face the Nation," and then allowed him to escape into Ukraine without giving her a straight answer. She shouldn't have done that. 

The Trump Administration is trying to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to claim the power of arrest and rendition, in the middle of the night, of any non-citizen to a black hole in a foreign country, without the right to so much as a phone call, let alone a day in court, even to prove that the person being detained really is a US citizen. 

Trump's first test case for these new powers is his renditioning of 238 Venezuelan men, (One of which turned out to be a woman, and another that wasn't Venezuelan. Both had to be sent back to the US.) to a notorious super max prison in El Salvador. Included in the ICE round up, aren't just criminal gang members, but also those that entered the United States legally, and have been living in the US legally before Trump revoked their legal status. 

Among those sent to the CECOT labor camp in El Salvador in the first three plane loads were 137 Venezuelan men that Trump claims are members of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua, [TDA] and  he is using the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798 to justify their otherwise completely illegal treatment. 

The Alien Enemies Act is the sole surviving child of a group of four acts passed by congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798. The Alien Friends Act and the Sedition Act expired in 1800, and the Naturalization Act was repealed in 1802. The Alien Enemies Act, as amended, is still in effect as 50 U.S.C. ch. 3.

2019 April 17: Girl Scout Troop 5325 clean up!

Personally, I think the Alien Enemies Act should have joined its siblings a couple of centuries ago. I thought it was horribly wrong when FDR used it to throw Japanese Americans into concentration camps during WWII. From the memorial apologizing for those terrible days on the corner of Lincoln & Venice, I thought we had grown past that. I guess not. And at least FDR had a very real and declared war with Japan to base his actions on. 

The framers of the act wanted to make it crystal clear that these extreme measures could only be taken when the United States was in a real war with another nation state, and not some rhetorical war like the "war on drugs" or the "war on terror." And these crafty old founding fathers knew their way around the English language.

So now, I think they've got Trump pretty well boxed in here. Probably, Trump's ppls should have really read the law before citing it.  My best claim to legal scholarship is that I recently binge watched 3 seasons of Lincoln Lawyer, and even I can see that Trump doesn't have a leg to stand on, legally speaking. When you read the law, it really is a thing of word craft beauty. It begins by specifying just when this act applies:

50 U.S. Code § 21 - Restraint, regulation, and removal

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.

From this it's easy to see that it takes no great feat in reading comprehension to find that this act only applies when there is a "declared war," meaning declared by Congress, or an "invasion or predatory incursion" by a "foreign nation or government," meaning a nation-state like Japan or Venezuela. Since this is the test of whenever the act applies, if the it fails this test, there's no need to read the act further. 

But before moving forward with my main argument, I wish to take notice of something that speaks to the sheer meanness of the Trump regime: This 1798 law shields those younger than 14 from its effects, and that's just fine with the Trump regime. They've been sending so-called TDA members as young as 14 to a life of hard labor in El Salvador. 

A lot of things have changed in over two hundred years, including our collective understanding of when the protections of childhood should end. In 1800, the average US life expectancy was 34.5 years, less than half of what it is now. In the Middle Ages a young noble might become a squire to a knight, and begin his military training at 14. In the 1800's apprenticeships begin at 14, as did university educations for those more privileged. In many ways, 18 is the new 14. But not for the Trump regime! If the 200 year old law says its terrible effects can fall on people as young as 14 in 1800, the Trump regime will use it to sell children into slavery in 2025. But I digress.   

The Trump Administration has been trying to turn Fox News fear mongering built around a couple of videos without sound, run on a loop, of a dozen or so gangster looking guys with guns doing suspicious looking things in the hallways of a few Aurora, CO apartment buildings and said to be TDA gang members, into a reason to deport people with absolutely no due process. Trump thought that he could just brand TDA "bad hombres," and on that basis, claim the extraordinary powers vested in the Alien Enemies Act. Then a lawyer read the act. This lead to the most absurd claim made by NS advisor Waltz yesterday in this exchange with Margret Brenner. Starting about 5:14: 

Mike Waltz: President Trump has determined that this group is acting as a terrorist organization. It is terrorizing our communities through attacks, torture, rape, and in the most awful of situations for those communities, number one. And number two, the Alien Sedition Act fully applies because we have also determined that this group is acting as a proxy of the Maduro regime. So, you have..

Margret Brennan interrupts: I'm sorry, just to clarify on that: this is suppose to apply if the US is at war with a country. You're saying that you have evidence that the government of Venezuela is directing these gangs?..

Mike Waltz interrupts: We're saying that TDA is acting as a proxy of the Maduro regime. This is how the Alien Sedation Act applies. 

The charge that they never even read the law before applying it is bolstered by the fact that Donald Trump's National Security Advisor can't even get the name right! He twice refers to "the Alien Sedation Act," which is not a thing. It does not exist, and has never existed. 

In 1798, the US enacted a set of four laws: The Naturalization Act. the Alien Friends Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and the Sedition Act. The set was named the Alien and Sedition Acts. Three of those, including the Sedition Act, had died a timely death by 1802. Trump is now trying to wreck people's lives by using the single remaining survivor, the Alien Enemies Act.

But why should he be expected to know that? He's only the White House National Security Advisor. He's only using the law to tear up the Bill of Rights, terrorist whole communities, and proclaim to the whole world their uncontestable right to snatch up anyone and sell him into slavery in a foreign land.

What he now does know, now that somebody who can read law at least as well as me, has explained to them, is that this law absolutely, positively, requires a war with another nation-state that is either declared, or pending declaration, before it can be implemented, and the founding fathers left very little wiggle room on that point. Hence Waltz's tell at the end of the above statement, "This is how the Alien Sedation Act applies."

So, to cover this "slight" problem that comes from using the law before reading it, we are expect to swallow the fiction that "TDA is acting as a proxy of the Maduro regime," meaning the Venezuelan government. This is crazy talk. This is how they are digging the hole they are in deeper.

According to the AP, the Maduro government claimed "it had dismantled the gang in 2023 after retaking control of the prison where the group was born."

But even assuming the Trump administration's logic that TDA is at war with the US, and TDA is a proxy of the Venezuelan government, doesn't that mean we are at war with Venezuela? After all, when elements of the Japanese First Air Fleet struck the United States at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the US didn't declare war against the Japanese Navy, it declare war against the Empire of Japan. So, the question has to be asked: Is the US now at war with Venezuela? Because, otherwise, Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act on Venezuelan nationals in the United States is completely illegal on its face.

Just my legal opinion,

Clay Claiborne

24 March 2025

PS. Mike, if you want to add me to a group chat, just message me for a phone number. Small journalist need leaks too.

Congratulations Elon Musk

On Donald Trump's 2nd Inauguration, I want to congratulate Elon Musk, the capitalist behind the throne. And I want to make a point of why this man has no business running anything that people have to depend on.

Everyone knows of his failed Cybertruck demo where the balls shattered the glass. Twice! How embarrassing! I guess Elon is human after all.

What was he thinking? How did this happen? Had they not tested this before he demoed it to the world? This wasn't like one demo before one customer to sell one truck—and yeah, you screwed it up. This was a major demo before the world in which millions of dollars were on the table, and not just his fortune, but that of all that sail within him—or work for him. It's obvious that he never tested this scenario, or tested it enough. If he was managing my money. I would call that reckless in the extreme. You always test, and test, and test again, before you bet the house. I never even got my engineering degree, and I know that. If more of his rocket ships don't blow up, it's because he has some very good people working under him.

You get my point: He man who was so honest about the quality of his Cybertruck when he meant to lie shouldn't be running any 'Department Of Government Efficiency' or anything like it. Arrogance, and faith in one's own genius, can only get you so far, and we need a lot more.

just hanging around to see what happens next...

Clay Claiborne
21 January 2025

How support for genocide gave the election to Trump

Let me start up by saying that I don't see this as it is often discussed. I don't think that the US voters were sufficiently concerned about the genocide taking place in Gaza to swing the election against Harris/Biden. I don't think this was like 2016, when Trump was elected to his apprenticeship term. Then the white Left, as represented by the Green Party did actually have the power to swing the election towards Trump. In that election, the votes for Jill Stein in three critical states, PA, WI & MI, were enough to swing the election to Clinton had they chose to vote for her rather than use it as a "feel good" vote. In 2024, the white Left had no such clout. Even if the uncommitted movement gave MI to Trump, he would have done perfectly fine without their help. Nevertheless, those who used Israel's genocide in Gaza in a bid to defeat Harris will still own what Trump helps Israel do to Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon going forward.

In my telling of this tale, it is the corporate media, most notably MSNBC, that is most responsible for a white supremacist and fascist being elected president of the United States. While MSNBC was the most vocal of all the corporate media in voicing opposition the MAGA movements bid for power, it has also been the most silent about Israel's crimes in Gaza, and its massacres in the West Bank and Lebanon. CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS have similarly been engaged in a cover-up of Israel's war crimes. While Fox News did give more time to these stories, they did so from a racist  Christian-Zionist perspective, which is arguable worst than silence.

Those that know better what has been going on in Gaza from the daily news reports from Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, and other more truthful news source, have a much clearer idea of what is going on in Gaza. Those daily reports on the Israeli attacks and Palestinian deaths make it obvious why so many international organizations have branded it a genocide. But those well informed Americans are still a minority of US voters.

Most US voters live in an alternate reality carefully cultivated by the US corporate media, and its masters, with regards to what has been happening in Gaza in the last 13 months, or even the last 13 year times three. 

The problem for anyone running for president with the intention of actually winning state power and being able to affect US policy from that position, as opposed to someone running a performative campaign designed to seize the moral high ground and garner like minded votes, is that they have to win a majority of voters who see the conflict through the lens of this alternate reality. 

By representing this limited, and warped, view of what has been happening in Lebanon. Israel, the West Bank, and particularly Gaza, this supposedly liberal media undermined the fight against the Trump takeover in two fundamental ways:

1.) By forcing the whole discussion around Gaza to operate within their alternate reality, they also undermined the ability for a politician to take a position based of justice and still win a majority of US voters. This made the alienation of many voters that demanded justice from the Harris campaign inevitable.

2.) By revealing to those in the know that they were willing to countenance genocide, they undermined their own calls to defend democracy, as many saw it as a call to defend a social order where genocide is okay. And who would want to vote for that?

Based on this thinking, I have conclude that was most necessary from the pro-Palestinian community in the past year, and still most necessary going forward, is a sustained campaign that simply demands that the US corporate media tell US voters and tax payers the truth about what our government is supporting in Palestine.

Clay Claiborne

18 November 2024

The other side of the Trump Campaign's racist Puerto Rico comment

There has been a lot of very righteous criticism of the Trump comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's racist crack that:

"there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

While this obviously racist attack on Puerto Rico has been called out by everyone that's not a shameless Trump supporter, this comment has two edges, and it cuts both ways. Whereas the insult to Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people has received a lot of attention, the insult to the Earth has received none that I've seen. 

That's why I'm writing this blog post. In all this discussion about the racist nature of the Trump comedian's comment, somebody needs to point out that there really is a floating island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is already twice the size of Texas—and that's no joke!

This other side of this racist attack, treating this massive attack on the Earth's oceans as a joke, is also a component part of white supremacy, as I noted in a blog post more than six years ago:

Why white supremacy is a danger to the Earth

While the skin color differences between the European colonizers, and the people of the southern hemisphere may have provided the original impetus for the white and black categorization, the adoption of the symbolism of white by Europeans at the beginning of the imperialist period has been used not only as a sign of their righteousness in dominating and raping the thereby newly created "non-white" people, it has been used as a sign of their righteousness in dominating and raping the entire planet. Therefore, we can conclude that the problems inherent in a group of people being called white is not merely a race problem. It would be a problem even if there were no other people. This attitude of whiteness has been invoked not just against the "black people of the Earth" but against the Earth itself.

The array of political forces around the climate change debate is but one example of how white supremacy isn't just an attack on the better part of humanity, but on nature itself. At first glance, the global warming question has nothing to do with race, and one would think that even the most extreme racist, that envisions an earthly future free of people of color, would still be fighting to see that the Earth did have a future, if only for white people, and yet there they all are, firmly on the denial side of climate change.

White chauvinism therefore is the practice of white supremacy, not just towards the excluded peoples, but towards the entire excluded natural world. It underlines and legitimizes the operations of capitalism not just in exploiting "people of color," but in ruthlessly exploiting the resources of the Earth as well.

Anyway, the Trump comedian's so-call joke so clearly illustrates this dual nature of white supremacy that I just thought someone should point this out is all.

Clay Claiborne

Halloween, 2024

Occupy LA, October 2011

 

  

The genius of "The Wire" shown again by the 2024 US Presidential election.

The Wire, is cop/criminal TV series located in Baltimore that played on HBO between 2002 and 2006. Some consider it the best series ever produced for TV, and I proudly count myself among them. This is the scene that opens the series. It runs before the title and song, and involves a conversation between Baltimore Det, Jimmy McNulty and an eyewitness to the the murder of Omar "Snot Boogie" Betts, a street hustler:

-So, your boy's name is what?
-Snot.

-You called the guy Snot?
-Snotboogie, yeah.

-"Snotboogie."
-He like the name?

-What?
-Snotboogie.

-This kid whose mama went to the trouble of christening him Omar lsaiah Betts? You know, he forgets his jacket...so his nose starts running, and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him "Snot." So, he's "Snot" forever. Doesn't seem fair.

-Life just be that way, I guess.
-So who shot Snot?

-I ain't going to no court. m*therf*cker ain't have to put no cap in him though.
-Definitely not.

-He could've just whipped his ass, like we always whip his ass.
-I agree with you. 

-He gonna kill Snot. Snot been doing the same shit since I don't know how long. Kill a man over some bullshit. I'm saying, every Friday night...in the alley behind the cut-rate, we rolling bones, you know? All the boys from around the way, we roll till late.

-Alley crap game, right?
-And like every time, Snot, he'd fade a few shoots. Play it out till the pot's deep. Then he'd snatch and run.

-Every time?
-Couldn't help himself.

-Let me understand you. Every Friday night, you and your boys would shoot crap, right? And every Friday night, your pal Snotboogie, he'd wait till there was cash on the ground, then grab the money and run away? You let him do that?
-We catch him and beat his ass. But ain't nobody ever go past that.

-I gotta ask you. If every time Snotboogie would grab the money and run away, why'd you even let him in the game?

-What?

-If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play?

-Got to. This is America, man.

Crazy, right? When you hear it from a corner boy in Baltimore, it sounds crazy that they would continue to let Snotboogie play when they knew he would try to steal the pot. One of the most fundamental rules of any game is that all the participants agree to abide by the rules of the game, i.e. you can't just steal the money if you lose. One of the most fundamental rules of elections is that those participating in the election agree to abide by the outcome of the vote. Otherwise, what's the point?

Yet, here we are, about to hold a national  election with a Snotboogie as one of the major candidates. He lost the last election, tried to overthrow it, and still won't admit he lost it.. He has also announced loudly, and often, that he won't abide by this election if he loses. So, why is he even allowed in the game?

Got to, This is America, man.

Clay Claiborne

28 October 2024