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Local Citizens Describe Crowd-Funded Border Wall As A Failure

Local Citizens Describe Crowd-Funded Border Wall As A Failure

A new half-mile wall built with private funds along the U.S.-Mexico border has not stopped the flow of immigrants coming from Mexico, BuzzFeed News reported Wednesday.

“It’s a bunch of bullshit,” Fernando Ontiveroz, a resident of Sunland Park, New Mexico, told BuzzFeed. Even though he supported the idea of a wall along the border, Ontiveroz admitted, “I don’t think it’s working.”

The section of wall in Sunland Park, a New Mexico border town near El Paso, Texas, was built on private property and spearheaded by the group We Build the Wall. The group built the half-mile-long, 20-foot-high wall even though they did not have proper permits to do so. They claimed the structure would help stem the flow of illegal immigration and stop criminal activities like drug smuggling and human trafficking.

But the $20 million effort appears to be an abject failure, according to local residents.

BuzzFeed reporters saw dozens of migrants come into the town after the wall was built and were approached by several adults with children looking for a border patrol agent so they could turn themselves in. Another night, border patrol agents detained 54 people “a stone’s throw away from the base of the crowdfunded wall.”

“Regardless of what they build, they’re still coming in,” Jorge Alaniz, an El Paso resident, told BuzzFeed.  “This is just political crap.”

The mayor of Sunland Park worries that the wall will be ineffective and just funnel migrants to enter the country in other areas.

“It is always the case, where you have outsiders coming in thinking they have a solution,” Javier Perea, mayor of Sunland Park, told BuzzFeed. “Building the wall won’t change the source of the problem.”

“It’s clear to us that construction of a portion of the wall in private property is nothing but a political stunt by white supremacists and xenophobic groups,” Fernando Garcia, executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights, told KTSM at the end of May.

The effort to build a privately funded wall was backed by Trump allies such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and We Build the Wall’s general counsel Kris Kobach has ties to white supremacists.

Asylum-seekers are still coming across the border, fleeing desperate situations.

“They traveled thousands of miles by foot, so they’ll do whatever it takes,” Alaniz told Buzzfeed, adding, “These people are desperate. They’re hungry and they’re trying to survive.”

Rather than do anything to help, We Build the Wall constructed one final, half-mile-long barrier.

By all appearances, it is a multimillion dollar failure.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: Screenshot of the wall on private land in Sunland, New Mexico.

 

Report: Trump Ordered Cohen To Commit Perjury On Moscow Project

Report: Trump Ordered Cohen To Commit Perjury On Moscow Project

Michael Cohen has told the special counsel that President Trump ordered him to lie to Congress about the aborted 2016 deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow. Buzzfeed News reported late Thursday that, according to law enforcement sources, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Cohen’s accusations, which could implicate the president in subornation of perjury, conspiracy and other crimes that might trigger impeachment.

Buzzfeed reported that Trump “personally instructed [Cohen] to lie”  about the negotiations over the Moscow tower — by claiming that those talks with Russian government officials ended months before they actually did. The point was to conceal Trump’s own role in the deal during his presidential campaign.

Trump’s former attorney Cohen pled guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow deal last November, both in his testimony and in a written statement. The purpose of those lies, according to Mueller’s sentencing memorandum, was to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — the prosecutorial moniker for Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Guilt Feelings: Why Trump (Like Clinton) Will Require A Subpoena

Guilt Feelings: Why Trump (Like Clinton) Will Require A Subpoena

“Donald Trump insists he is willing — eager, even — to sit down for a tough interview with Robert Mueller. His lawyers have other ideas, and hope to strictly limit any questioning of the president under oath or prevent it from happening altogether. Whether they can pull this off is a legal and constitutional question for which the precedents do not look good.

“As they consider the options, they and and their boss would do well to learn from Bill Clinton, who was asked to testify on four separate occasions while under investigation during his presidency.

“On three of those occasions, Clinton and his lawyers readily agreed to the requests, without the issuance of a subpoena. It was only when independent counsel Kenneth Starr sought Clinton’s testimony again, more than three years later, that his defense attorneys strenuously objected. They managed to stall for almost six months before Starr finally sent over a subpoena, and the battle over that demand ended up before a federal judge in Washington in July 1998.

Why was Clinton initially so willing to testify, and then so hesitant?…”

My new post on Buzzfeed News looks back at the last presidential probe that led to impeachment — and what Clinton’s prosecution by the Office of Independent Counsel may mean for Trump. It includes excerpts from a previously sealed court hearing on the subpoena that the OIC issued to Clinton after his lawyers stalled his grand jury appearance in the Lewinsky case for six months.

Trump’s New Press Tactics Follow The Old-School Authoritarian Model

Trump’s New Press Tactics Follow The Old-School Authoritarian Model

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Donald Trump is fulfilling the role of an authoritarian demagogue so thoroughly that if this whole disaster were a movie, it would be criticized for being formulaic and cliched. His frequently expressed hostility toward the media comes right out of a well-worn copy of the Dictator’s Playbook, and he has repeatedly revealed himself to be an enemy of a free press.

The latest example comes as Trump and his team attempt to alienate the media by shutting down the White House press room, which has been in operation since the Nixon years. Trump’s war on the press is also attracting candidates to his administration who are helping PEOTUS devise ways to make journalists’ jobs harder, including by mandating that those who cover the White House undergo biannual drug tests.

Esquire was the first to report that Trump, on the heels of his first press conference in six months—which he used to denigrate the media for occasionally doing their jobs—is mulling over the prospect of evicting the press corps from the West Wing. According to the outlet, the move would relocate the press corps to digs in the nearby White House Conference Center or the Old Executive Office Building.

Trump’s press secretary Scott Spicer suggested the move is being considered because the last media briefing showed a uniquely high interest in covering Trump. “When we had that press conference the other day, we had thousands of requests, and we capped it at four hundred,” said Spicer, who is definitely pretending not to know that PEOTUS’s refusal to answer press questions for an unprecedented amount of time had exactly the effect the team intended, in terms of demand for access. “A question is: Is a room that has forty-nine seats adequate?…Is there an opportunity to potentially allow more members of the media to be part of this? That’s something we’re discussing.”

Trump’s chief-of-staff Reince Preibus repeated this talking point during a tour of Sunday morning news shows. But another senior official didn’t bother pretending that the relocation is anything other than what it appears: a transparent attempt to block press access so Trump can avoid explaining, defining, defending, or detailing the what, when, where and how of his administration’s plans.

“They are the opposition party,” a senior official reportedly told Esquire. “I want ’em out of the building. We are taking back the press room.”

Effectively shutting out and shutting down the news media would allow Trump’s voice, in concert with propagandistic platforms such as Breitbart, the Enquirer, Fox News and other right-wing echo chambers, to ring out the loudest.

Attempts to appeal to Trump’s anti-free speech stance inspired at least one potential hire to propose a tactic intended to turn journalism into an endurance test.Buzzfeed News reports that David Martosko, the U.S. political editor of U.K.’s Mail Online, applied for a job as press secretary for Trump’s incoming administration.

“Journalists who are at the White House more than one day per week should be subject to drug screenings,” Martosko wrote, according to New York PostPage Six columnist Richard Johnson, who broke the story. “Refusal to comply should exclude them from credentialing entirely.”

Martosko wasn’t hired, and the job went to Spicer instead. Both Martosko and the Daily Mail declined to comment to Buzzfeed when contacted.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

IMAGE: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives an address at an event organised by the Greater Charleston Business Alliance and the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce in North Charleston, South Carolina, September 23, 2015. REUTERS/Randall Hill