Tag Archives: Concentration Camps

Homeless Issues

Reverend Andy Bales Of Skid Row’s Union Rescue Mission Is Consulting With Donald Trump’s Homeless Hit Squad — Approves Of Their Disdain For Harm Reduction — Wants To Call Out The National Guard — Says That Trump Can’t Possibly Be Planning To Carry Out Sweeps To Relocate Homeless People — How Is He So Sure, You’re Wondering — Because — There’s No Place To Put Them If They Were Relocated — How Can Trump Be Planning To Relocate The Homeless If There Is No Place To Relocate Them To — That’s It — That’s His Argument — Feel Better Now That You Know Trump Isn’t Planning To Relocate Homeless Human Beings Into Concentration Camps Because There Aren’t Any? — Me Neither

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Reverend Andy Bales, CEO of Skid Row’s Union Rescue Mission, has recently been dragged pretty thoroughly on social media for his unconscionable collaboration with hired killers sent by Donald Trump to implement what is sure to be an appalling and probably genocidal plan for some kind of final solution to this City’s inability to house its residents as well as his tone-deaf support of the very worst local psychopathic housedwelling politicians.

His responses as far as I have seen have been mostly of two types. First of all he denies that Trump wants to put homeless human residents of Los Angeles into concentration camps even though there actually aren’t that many people that Trump doesn’t want to put into concentration camps and the list, along with the capacity of the camps, grows larger each day. Second he accuses everyone who criticizes him of being gang-affiliated drug/sex traffickers who oppose the Trump/Bales plan because it’s likely to cut into their gangs’ drug/sex profits.

And I don’t have much to say about the second trope other than the really obvious “EEW GROSS pls shut up pls!” But it turns out that there is something important to say about the first. Yesterday, Friday, November 22, 2019, Bales appeared on KNX Radio and was interviewed by Charles Feldman and Mike Simpson about his collaboration with Trump. You can listen to the whole segment here, and there is a complete transcription below. But Feldman and Simpson asked him about the concentration camp thing.

Simpson asked in particular about concerns that “the police could be used, that there would be like a roundup. What do you say when you hear people say those things?” And Bales has a reason to doubt that Trump is going to round people up and put them in camps. It’s a stupid reason, but it is a reason. And it’s not at all reassuring. The reason, says Bales, that Trump is not going to round up homeless people and put them in camps is that there are no camps. That, he says, is our problem, that we don’t presently have camps:

… where would we take anybody? If there’s a sweep, where in the world would anybody be taken? We have to create places to take people and that’s the problem right now in Los Angeles. We do not have anywhere to take people who want to seek shelter. You have to create the shelter first and then you’ll have a place to take people.

Which of course speaks reassuringly to neither the abject depths of Trump’s evil nor the sanity of Bales himself. Possibly Bales is confusing concentration camps with houses, but we can be sure that Donald Trump and his minions aren’t. And obviously there actually are concentration camps. And even if there weren’t, building them isn’t ever the problem. They can be built fast.

Turning one part of the human race into raw material for jobs programs for another part is a core component of precisely the kind of populist fascism that Trump exemplifies. The best possible interpretation of Bales’s collaboration with Trump is that he’s blind to the fascism and the worst is that he’s complicit with it for his own purposes. Neither is good.
Continue reading Reverend Andy Bales Of Skid Row’s Union Rescue Mission Is Consulting With Donald Trump’s Homeless Hit Squad — Approves Of Their Disdain For Harm Reduction — Wants To Call Out The National Guard — Says That Trump Can’t Possibly Be Planning To Carry Out Sweeps To Relocate Homeless People — How Is He So Sure, You’re Wondering — Because — There’s No Place To Put Them If They Were Relocated — How Can Trump Be Planning To Relocate The Homeless If There Is No Place To Relocate Them To — That’s It — That’s His Argument — Feel Better Now That You Know Trump Isn’t Planning To Relocate Homeless Human Beings Into Concentration Camps Because There Aren’t Any? — Me Neither →

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Los Angeles City Council

The Resurgence Of The Unhinged Grudge Informer — Anonymous CD5 Resident Threatens To Call ICE On Construction Workers Because They Don’t Speak English And The Constant Beeping Of Trucks Drives Her Crazy — And CD5 Staffer Debbie Dyner Harris Doesn’t Say A Critical Word About It — It’s All Normal In Quality-Of-Life-Land — If Our Society Creates And Weaponizes An Institution Like ICE It’s Certainly Not Unexpected That People Would Use It As A Weapon — But Can’t We Rely On Our Public Officials Not To Encourage It — If Only Through Their Invidious Silence?

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Tomorrow, July 12, 2019, under the banner of Lights for Liberty, thousands of people across the country and across the world will be participating in vigils at American concentration camps run by ICE, protesting the murderous treatment of the prisoners held there. You can find an event near you here. There are any number of serious reasons to abolish ICE, you can even ask ICE agents about it.

And one of these reasons is that the very existence of this organization, which is empowered to lock people up and torture them on the barest suspicion that they’re somehow violating immigration laws, incites people to use that power to further their personal goals. Under the original Nazis concentration camps were not only a tool of state terror but were used regularly by ordinary people to settle entirely non-political grudges with their neighbors.

The very existence of the capability creates the irresistible urge to use it. The blade itself incites to violence.1 This behavior was so commonplace and so problematic for various reasons that there’s a term for those who engage in it, they’re grudge informers. As Colleen Murphy puts it in her fine book The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice:

The term “grudge informers” refers to individuals who, during periods of conflict or repression, report personal enemies to authorities in order to get rid of them.2
Now, I’m not interested in rehashing the endlessly stupid discussions about the appropriacy of comparisons of ICE concentration camps to Nazi concentration camps nor, obviously, the appropriacy of the term “concentration camp” to refer to them. If it strikes you that there are two legitimate sides to that debate, you can go here and talk about it to your heart’s content.

I am, however, interested in talking about public records. In this case, a set of emails I obtained from the office of Paul Koretz, putatively esteemed CD5 repster, containing the phrase “quality of life.” I’m really interested in the kind of crazy shit that housedwellers gripe about to their council offices, and especially interested in the kind of terrorism that gets conjured up and poured down upon the tender heads of the helpless like so much molten lead from the ramparts as a result of such complaints.

Searches on this phrase seemed like a good way to find more of it, and oh boy, did that ever work out! Just for instance, if you have the heart, or the stomach, really, take a look at this endless series of constituent complaints from folks on Sweetzer Avenue in May of this year, really worked up about some construction noise created by an assuredly villainous outfit known as ETCO Homes.
Continue reading The Resurgence Of The Unhinged Grudge Informer — Anonymous CD5 Resident Threatens To Call ICE On Construction Workers Because They Don’t Speak English And The Constant Beeping Of Trucks Drives Her Crazy — And CD5 Staffer Debbie Dyner Harris Doesn’t Say A Critical Word About It — It’s All Normal In Quality-Of-Life-Land — If Our Society Creates And Weaponizes An Institution Like ICE It’s Certainly Not Unexpected That People Would Use It As A Weapon — But Can’t We Rely On Our Public Officials Not To Encourage It — If Only Through Their Invidious Silence? →

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