Apartheid Returns to America: SB 1070, the "Papers Please" Law

There’s only one way an American can repay the debt for our Constitution and Bill of Rights—among the world’s greatest guarantees of dignity, liberty, and equality—and that’s to pay it forward. When we fail to do that, when we deliberately jettison somebody else’s rights and dignity, we spit in the face of God.

SB 1070, the harsh new “Papers Please” law that Arizona’s GOP government just enacted, requires Arizona police to demand the papers of anyone they “reasonably suspect” is in the country illegally. It also says that any person can sue the authorities if they don’t do just that.

Ironically, SB 1070 does nothing to stop illegal border crossing. Nor is it actually aimed at “illegal immigration” generically. It isn’t aimed at Canadians or Europeans or Icelanders or Polynesians. In Arizona, illegal immigration is a south of the border thing, meaning that this law’s effective impact is exclusively directed at Latinos, Mestizos, and Hispanics.

Unlike a border control station, SB 1070 just doesn’t treat all people equally. Blue eyed, fair skinned “illegals” have no worries. The chances they’ll be carded are zero. That makes this law unconstitutional.

Effective impact means how this law will operate in real life, so let’s get honest. There’s no way to tell by looking who’s here illegally. Given this new mandate and our proximity to Mexico, that’s going to pose a big problem for our police, because here in Arizona, 10% of the population is Native American, and 30% of the population is Latino, Mestizo, or Hispanic.

Of that combined 40%, hundreds of thousands of Arizona residents belong to families who have inhabited this land long before any Anglo ever did, which should make the prospect of carding any one of them cause repeated reflexive vomiting. And then there’s our indigenous American population. Thousands and thousands of them are in fact physically indistinguishable from a Mestizo or an indigenous Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, or Ecuadorian, and all of them are in fact citizens of the 21 other sovereign nations in Arizona that we call tribes.

Because this law requires our police to detain anyone they merely suspect might be here illegally; and because it targets Latinos, Mestizos, Hispanics, and Native Americans exclusively, it combines everyone in these groups—US citizens, tribe members, legal residents, illegal residents alike—into one giant suspect class based on nothing but racial characteristics such as skin and eye color, facial structure, and body type.

In other words, unless our governor in her vast wisdom produces other criteria for identifying a suspected illegal immigrant, it seems inescapable that SB 1070 will force Arizona's jurisdictions to engage in illegal racial profiling—there being no alternative—or be sued. That’s called legitimized race discrimination.

So, thanks to SB 1070, now all Arizona residents whose skin or eye color, facial structure, or body type may provide “reasonable suspicion” of illegal residency must now carry papers in case they are stopped--on mere suspicion and without warrant. My citizen friend Antonio, who looks like a Mayan prince, could be detained when he walks his dog. My citizen friend Roberto, a former Senate chief of staff, could also be detained, as could any Hispanic, Latino, Mestizo, or indigenous US soldier. As could their families. As could physicians, and educators, and hard-working roofers, construction guys, gardeners, nannies, chefs, inventors, investors, citrus pickers, miners, architects, waiters, and artists, all because the police can’t tell by looking and our GOP government doesn’t really give a good goddamn about the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This makes me almost indescribably angry. But it gets worse.

Added to the powers to arrest, detain, and deport without warrant, giving police the power to demand proof of citizenship on the basis of mere suspicion and without warrant is as fundamental to the police state as a network of secret prisons. In fact, it is the ground-level, on-the-street hypodermic syringe that every single one of them must have in order to inject into their people the pervasive terror that keeps them in power. Get it?

What you get when you add race discrimination to police state powers is called Apartheid. It is no less Apartheid in Phoenix than it was in Johannesburg. It is no less ugly, no less an affront to human decency, and no less a threat to the entire citizenry here in the US of A than it was in South Africa, because once this kind of thing is permitted to take root, it will only grow.

For this (I would think obvious) reason, our brilliant Constitution limits police powers, reserves border control to the federal government, protects us from unreasonable search and seizure, and prohibits indefinite detention without specific cause and due process. We undermine and debase those protections at everyone’s peril, because the generation that will sells its country’s freedoms at any price is also least equipped to buy them back again.

The bottom line here is that, as history repeatedly affirms, if given enough popular fear and outrage, lawmakers everywhere can and will justify anything, no matter how heinous or obscene. In my view, that simple truth puts the participation of Tom Tanton’s Immigration Reform Law Institute in writing SB 1070 into what I hope is horrifying focus. Please: Follow that link.

A lawyer for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI)--the group that helped write Arizona's law--boasted about being "approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing. IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Immigration Reform (FAIR), an extreme anti-immigrant group that has recently been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 'In a nutshell, the IRLI has been behind most, if not every, local legislative immigration crackdown over the past few years. . . .'

[The Progress Report, April 29, 2010] Please: Follow that link, too.

In other words, entities that the very estimable Southern Poverty Law Center calls “hate groups,” entities that, with the help of Fox News and Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh other loud-mouthed Far Right propagandists, have been spewing virulent lies for years about the extent and consequences of illegal Hispanic, Latino, Mestizo, and indigenous immigration are now drafting Arizona state law.

If that doesn't frighten you and make you hopping mad, either you’re not breathing or you’re stupider than a can of sand, and you sure as hell aren’t an American patriot.

I'm scared and I'm furious. I’m also frightened and sickened by the enormous erosion in the last 30 years of Americans’ common understanding of ourselves as a people and of what we stand for as a nation. More and more of us—mostly good people, many well educated—are entirely ready to jettison somebody else’s constitutional protections in less time than it takes to strike a match, and then have a party to brag about it.

We’ve already seen Americans lie down and take it as GOP lawmakers happily cut out some of our constitutional right of privacy and some of our habeas corpus protection in the wake of 9-11. We’ve also mostly kept our mouths shut as state after state has made a lower caste of gays and lesbians. And now the Arizona GOP, unwilling to name, much less target, the real causes of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, has made itself a racist police state the likes of which the USA hasn’t seen since Jim Crow.

Horribly, mystifyingly, no body of fact, no argument however elegant, no appeal to reason or Christ or common decency--no force in the known universe can make these people see that it actually isn’t white skin, flag waving, Bible thumping, and prayer in public schools that makes a person an American.

What makes us real Americans is standing up to fascism whenever, wherever, and however it arrives. It doesn’t make a bit of difference whether fascism gets here on the tip of a missile, carrying a cross and draped in the flag, or on the pen of a fundamentalist, white supremacist lawmaker, because once we let it in the door, it’s hell to get it out again. As we know.

From its predictable and profound negative economic, tourist, and international repercussions, to the human fodder this law throws to Arizona’s obscene for-profit prisons, to the hoped-for decimation of Hispanic votes in November, to the legislature’s usurpation of exclusively federal powers to regulate immigration, this law is a travesty.

But note well: This isn’t Arizona’s first modern venture into Apartheid.

In recent years, anyway, the first was Arizona’s segregation of GLBT people into a second class for which marriage and its enormous social and economic benefits are simply not accessible.

So it’s natural, now that we have yet another instance when an Arizona Republican government has intentionally created a lower-caste citizenry, that sentient beings might wonder what the third, fourth, and fifth instances will be. I’m deadly serious. These Christianist, Far Right extremists have a rather developed taste for limiting other people’s freedoms. As they’ve got Tom Tanton and Fox News to give them political cover, and an unusually high number of really whipped-up bone-stupid voters, and don’t hold themselves even the teensiest bit accountable to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, what’s to stop them?

People will always find reasons, but both the truth of history and the founding of our own country surely shout that nothing ever justifies spitting on the principles that make us uniquely American and for which many generations of our families and neighbors—yes, even “anchor babies,” “coloreds,” “Indians,” and “queers”—have died.

As pundit Michael Gerson put it in yesterday's Washington Post, the only truly American answer to “May I see your papers, please?” is “Go to hell! I’ll see you in court.”

Soon as that's past our lips we'd best deal quickly with the REAL causes of illegal immigration, starting with multinationals' pillaging of the nations south of the border, the American agribusiness, meatpacking, construction, and entertainment business demand for cheap (and even slave) labor, and shoe-shined Wall Street coke dealers.

I Know What's Wrong with America

This week's 9-11 lie from George W.'s former speech writer Marc Thiessen is just the latest case. For close to eight full decades, the Right has steadily poured a deathly poison into Americans' eyes and ears. The result is that today we're sickened almost to the killing point.

There's a word for this. It's treachery. That's what a lie is, and take note: Treachery stems from the same root as treason. It means--please take these synonyms slowly, mull them over one by one--betrayal of trust, faith, or allegiance; perfidy, disloyalty, and treason.

Propaganda--let's be frank--lying in politics--is nothing new. What is new is today's lethality, systemization, ubiquity, and respectability. They aren't playing for partisan gain. They're playing for keeps.

And what is new is the credulity, ignorance, and apathy of the American public. Face it. We're a lot less educated and a lot more easily stampeded now than we once were. One such malady would be bad enough, but afflicted with all three? Baby, we just don't stand a chance.

For malicious lethality, I give you "baby killers," "the homosexual agenda," the hyped-up hoardes of "criminal, leprous immigrants," the "death panels." In fact, I give you the far Right's vicious Balkanization of all the American people into just so many expendable parts.

Journalist and blogger David Neiwert has aptly named this phenom "eliminationism." Unarguably, its inevitable consequences are the murders of Dr. Tiller, Matthew Shepard, Stephen T. Johns and thousands of nameless GLBT people, African Americans, immigrants, and desperate poor whose assassinations didn't make the national headlines. Not to mention the chance for millions of uninsured Americans to see a doctor, get a prescription, or have a life-saving surgery. Or prosecution of the Robber Barons of Wall Street. Or indictment of the last Administration for war crimes and theft on a galactic scale.

For systemization and ubiquity, I give you hidden corporate funding and uber-wealthy patrons. I give you Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and the rest of talk radio, all full- or part-time propaganda arms of the Republican Party, all heirs of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and HUAC.

Add to far Right media the thousands of ultra-conservative nonprofits deputized (and given tax breaks) to incite us to lethal rage by telling lie after lie after lie. Citizens United, for instance. Focus on the Family. Eagle Forum. The 700 Club, and the numerous (tax-exempt) national curriculum coordinators for far Right, Christianist, activist home schooling. Front groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.

It's not just the far Right media impact or its voter recruitment, registration, and "education" consequences. It's also taxpayer subsidized direct mail avalanches of lies, distortions, and invective unleashed deliberatly for decades to whip up the base (and steal its money).

To these, add the astroturf websites and organizations, the tweets, and even the bumper stickers. Then from the total, subtract competing organizations as media consolidation, deregulation, and the Second Great Depression purge the airwaves and the presses of counterpoint, of fact.

Critical to understanding all this is grasping that there are thousands of heavily funded far Right organizations. If the far Right was once a "fringe," today it is pretty much the center of our culture. Its devotees occupy every sector of government, church, and culture, and just recently occupied even the White House.

Most of these organizations have innocuous or even positive names designed to confer credibility and respectability on ideas that nauseate and repel people of integrity. Americans for Truth, for instance, all about the "homosexual agenda." And FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago unmasked as one of at least ten manufactured virulent propaganda tools created by veteran racist Tom Tanton.

Such groups exist specifically to flood the media, to bury the gullible millions in "talking points" intended to whip up moral outrage, pit the well-off against the desperate, spur voter backlash and ultra-right lawmaking, and meanwhile to distract us all from the orchestrated Republican hosing of the American middle class.

This isn't made up. It's real. You know it to be true if you drew breath at all in the last 10 years.

Daily Media Matters e-alerts attempt to correct the rain of lies, but its circulation pales by contract to Rupert Murdock's reach.

For respectability, I give you United States senators, judges, sherrifs, Members of Congress, state legislators and governors, bishops, clergymen, physicians, heads and staffs of federal departments and agencies, professors, teachers, high school principals, librarians, and pharmacists.

It gets worse. The states are bristling with armed militias and so-called "patriot groups" poised to slaughter anyone they perceive as "not us." It will take only a spark. To provide it, talk show hosts incite murder every day. Murder, rebellion, whatever it takes.

Even so, and fully aware of what's at stake, "respectable" pundits and news anchors let the lies pass. Those who don't actually amplify the treasonous far Right Jihad on America (e.g., Lou Dobbs) either don't bother to get the facts themselves or are silent, baldly complict (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell). Their jobs depend on their playing ball. After all, their corporate masters are heavily invested in a fascist America, because corporatism is a main tenet of fascism.

For eighty years or more, the American people have been systematically goaded by ever more concentrated poisoned prods into a brimming rage--over largely invented actions, omissions, and words attributed to this pro-Constitution, egalitarian Democratic President or that Democratic Justice or just to Lib'ruls in general.

But somehow, nobody's talking about how the heat is mostly over made-up, imaginary affronts to imaginary values (family values), imaginary traditions (the, um, unconstitutional "Judeo-Christian" nation), imaginary heroes (Ronald Reagan,fiscal conservative. George W. Bush, fighter pilot).

The War on Christmas? The "illegal takeover"? "Welfare Cadillacs"? The "Myth" of Global Warming? Liberals Appease the Enemy? See Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and before them, see Paul Harvey, Joe McCarthy, and that high-toned FDR assassination cabal.

If you want to know what's wrong with America, or why the two parties can't cooperate, start right there.

The Left may not be spotless, but there's NO comparison, either quantitatively or qualitatively, between the Left and Right when it comes to corrupting the American cerebellum. In fact, one of the magic carpets under which this all hides is the lie of equivalence: "They all do it." Well, no. Doubt it? Go on: Name one Left counterpart action, organization, or person for every indictment in this rant. You can't. There is no counterpart to Fox. No counterpart to Limbaugh, or Lou Dobbs, or Pat Robertson.. Sen. Coburn. Sen. Santorum. Alan Keyes. None. Nada.

Again, there's a word for this.

This poison--certainly known in advance to be toxic waste--is both source and foundation of the unprecedented paralysis in Washington, DC that already threatens our capacity as a nation to respond to huge and growing national security, fiscal, environmental, and infrastructural threats.

The same polluted swill is also both source and foundation of the "Birthers," the Tea Partiers, the milititant Christianists, the Sarah Palin groupies, the wanna-be Joe the Plumbers (another hoax). This is the amniotic cesspool in which the whole dim-witted, fact-phobic, fear-drunk, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-pigment, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-humanist, anti-Constitution American Right has been steeped for 80 years.

Why's nobody talking about how all this is mostly over made-up stuff?

It would be funny except that America held such sacred promise.

It would be funny except that my dad lost his eye defending that promise.

It would be funny except that millions of people have already died, and millions more will follow, because those who perpetrate these hoaxes are who profit most. profits of perpetual war and the swindles of Wall Street. I give you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Neo-Cons all, and Paulson and Greenspan and Rice and pharma lobbyists and Dobbs-Limbaugh lapdogs.

For sure, the redneck hard-hats and the truck drivers who make up their conservative base won't profit. They're every bit as expendable as you or me: Remember W's repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act for Gulf Coast states right after Katrina? Remember what you learned from The Shock Doctrine? Remember for-profit, paid-per-capita prisons stuffed to the rafters through hard-Right propaganda and the not-coincidental suddenly intense war on Mexican immigrants? Remember "privatization," the plan that replaces public control of our infrastructure, water, utilities, hospitals, highways, and energy, and replaces them with with private ownership of water, utilities, the military, energy, hospitals, etc. Can you say ENRON? HCA? Blackwater/Xe? Hello?

So it turns out that the garbage we've been forcefed all these years isn't just false. It's also a boondoggle. Turns out that all this Rightwing raving isn't about (the bogus) "homosexual agenda" or the (made-up) illegal takeover, or the "emasculation" of the 'Merkun male at all.

It's about corporatism and privatization. It's about perpetual war for perpetual profit, and a "free market" stripped of regulation and stripped down for plunder. I give you Halliburton, KBR, Xe, Pepsico, Monsanto, the Carlyle Group, and the Wall Street con men. Even our far Right state legislatures, like Arizona's, and avowed racist lawmakers like Russell Pearce are penny-ante demagogues, pawns in a way bigger chess match and too stupid to know it.

There's a word for this. It's called treason. Yet the Legislative and Executive branches are either immobilized or co-conspirators, and our highest Court--that tool of the Right responsible for empowering W and Dick and legitimizing their Reign of Plunder--just took it over the top. When the US Supreme Court ruled recently that restricting corporate funding of political candidates is unconstitutional, they unleashed a corporatist muck tsunami that very well may choke us all to death.

For 30 pieces of silver, a platform, and a megaphone, men and women like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Karl Rove, and a host of lesser infidels have sold their mortal souls.

They've sold ours, too, and any hope our children ever had for the American Dream.

There's a word for this. It's treason.

A Perfect Storm, Part 3: The Killings Begin, or, Hamlet Redux

Buried in the back pages of The Washington Post, this bit of trivia:

Census Worker Found Hanged

A part-time Census Bureau field worker was found hanged in Kentucky Sept. 12 with the word "fed" scrawled across his chest, according to a law enforcement source. Bill Sparkman, 51, who was white, was found at the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky, the Associated Press first reported Wednesday night.

. . . The FBI is assisting state and local police with their investigation, the law enforcement source told The Post's Spencer S. Hsu. The source was unsure of the cause of death.

It is a federal crime to attack a federal worker during or because of his federal job.

"It’s a tragedy. Our hearts and our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of this worker," Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said Thursday morning. He has spoken frequently about the denigration of federal employees.

"I’m going to be closely following this law enforcement action. If this is an attack on a federal employee, I can assure you that no resources will be spared to find the perpetrators," Berry said. "We cannot tolerate essentially domestic terrorism, if that is what this is. But until we understand the law enforcement investigation, we don’t know."

Threats are more common than actual attacks on federal employees, Berry said. He noted that people regularly threaten federal judges and their families, IRS agents and federal law enforcement officers. . . . more

So Hsu can't figure out the cause of death and Berry isn't sure if it really is domestic terrorism.

Well, I'm guessing he died of strangulation from hanging, and that the word "fed" scrawled on his chest wasn't written by a fan.

Hanging is a message with a deep history in the US. It isn't just the mode of choice of frontier "justice." It's also the weapon of racist vigilantes. I wouldn't discard these contexts if I were investigating this murder. After all, there's no shortage of guns in rural Kentucky. Or knives. Or fists and boots.

Even though Sparkman is white, the choice of hanging is a potent message that we ignore at our peril. Translated, it says "Domestic terrorists are watching you, too." No antiseptic can sanitize rural, backwoods hanging of the stink of the Ku Klux Klan. No vehicle that can transplant hanging from its solidly Right-wing garden of horrors to something Left or Center.

I said in the title of this post, "the killings begin." Actually, they began a ta few months ago with the racist slaughter of Stephen T. Johns at the Holocaust Museum and the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita.

And they are deliberately being inspired by the likes of Glenn Beck, Michele Malkin, The Freepers, Michael Savage, and their cleaned-up, prettied-up counterparts on the Right side of the US House and Senate.

All this is of a piece with the 1998 slaying of Matt Shepard and the radically underpublicized double slaying of lesbians Lollie Winans and Julianne Williams while camping on the Appalachian Trail in 1996.

What do I mean, "all of a piece"? This kind of savagery always begins in thoroughgoing, relentless dehumanization of the victim. He or she is reduced to a hated function or a thing as it is imagined by the killer.

I think the victim in these cases is actually more than mere symbol. The victim becomes the thing itself, a walking-around synecdoche: The part stands for the whole. Here, the Census worker IS the federal government. the Holocaust Museum attendant IS the Jew (and as it happens, the "Nigger" too). The doctor IS abortion. And Matt, Julianne, and Lollie ARE homosexuality, just as the World Trade Center IS the deviant, corrupt America in the minds of Al Qaeda.

How much of this is spawned by the kind of demented Christianity that Frank Schaeffer so correctly denounces? Setting aside the Al Qaeda version, probably all of it if you dig far enough. The connections are obvious in the Tiller, Shepard, Winans, and Williams cases. Maybe they're a little more remote for the current generation in the Holocaust case. Hint: "Christ killers." As for the Sparkman case, it's too early to know, but I speculate that three or four guys steeped in the toxic tea of paranoia, poverty, and Bible-thumping states-rights "patriotism" had a lot to do with it.

If you haven't seen it, be certain to watch Schaeffer's recent appearance on "The Rachel Maddow Show." He is riveting. In case you don't know, Schaeffer is the son of the late fundamentalist minister of the same name, but a renegade. His full-time career nowadays is to explain his upbringing and its implications for the country when multiplied by hundreds of thousands, or millions, of men and women brought up to hate facts and despise common sanity. Hence, his must-read Crazy for God.

Has there ever been anything comparable in scope and reach to the US Right's death-dealing assault on America? I'm not being rhetorical.

Taken collectively --from "You lie!" to Fox to Trinity Broadcasting Network to the thousands of Far Right websites, media stations, nonprofit organizations, funding agents, corporations, politicians, home schoolers, private schools, colleges, phone banks, rock bands, "entertainers," lawmakers, judges, and moles in medicine, academia, psychology and psychiatry, women's health care, and the Executive Branch, our nation, like a noble King Hamlet, is literally (not figuratively)--being mortally poisoned through the ear.

The killings aren't the cause of our demise. They're but the symptom.

A Perfect Storm, Part 2: "The Last Time Right-Wing Hatred Ran Wild Like This a President Was Killed"

That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course.

I've been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I've watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-calling passed for health care 'debate' this summer.

The radical right, aided by a GOP Noise Machine that positively dwarfs what existed in 1963, has turned demonizing Obama--making him into a vile object of disgust--into a crusade. It's a demented national jihad, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times.

But I've been thinking about Dallas in 1963 because I've been recalling the history and how that city stood as an outpost for the radical right, which never tried to hide its contempt for the New England Democrat.



Now, in this this month's Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner offers up in rich detail the hatred that ran wild in Dallas in 1963. To me, the similarity between Dallas in 1963 and today's unhinged Obama hate is downright chilling.

Kashner's fascinating cover story actually chronicles the professional struggles of writer William Manchester who was tapped by the Kennedy family, after the president's assassination, to write the definitive book about the shooting. The Vanity Fair articles details the power struggles, and epic lawsuits, that ensued prior to Manchester's publication.

But this unnerving passage from VF caught my eye. In it, Kashner retraces Manchester's step as he researched his book. It's unsettling because if you insert "Obama" for every "Kennedy" reference, it reads like 2009:

Manchester also discovered that Dallas “had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists … the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of [ultra-conservative oil billionaire] H. L. Hunt and his activities.”

“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.”

A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices.

And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause.

Today, conservatives are expressing outrage that Rep. Nancy Pelosi had the nerve to raise concerns about the onrush of violent political rhetoric. The Noise Machine claims it has no idea what Pelosi's talking about. But the truth is, America's most famous bouts of political violence (i.e. JFK, Oklahoma City, etc.) have always been accompanied by waves of radical, right-wing rhetoric. Given that history, the GOP's insistence that the hate now filling the streets couldn't possibly inspire violence seems woefully naive.

It is time for Americans of every stripe to insist that the Secret Service and FBI operate at the highest levels of effectiveness. Sign your name to this petition so that Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, hears the message loud and clear. And please pass this message on to your friends and colleagues. It is a difficult time in America, and we have to stand up and make sure our president is safe.


[This piece, by Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, appeared September 18, 2009,on AlterNet. I think it is worth including here, in full.]

It's Yours to Save or Yours to Lose

I'm sitting here watching the country nose-dive into the latter-day equivalent of the Dark Ages, wondering how in the hell we got here.

For anyone with any historical depth vis a vis the US of A--that would be anyone who is at least 40, has an interest in this country, and values a fact-based universe--where we are is all but unimaginable.

Did you ever think, in your wildest imagination, that a vocal part of the country would actually object to a sitting President's extolling our kids to study hard, learn more, and excel? I confess: I sit nigh paralized in wonder.

I'm even more stupefied that the whole entire rest of the country hasn't just risen up as one and slain these agents provocateur.

Can we immediately stop calling these people fools and morons? Can we step back a moment and observe that they are successfully de-railing the agenda of a Democratically controlled government? That's many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them.

I've followed the Far Right for quite a while: since the early 80s, in fact. All that time, I've tried to warn any who would listen that we're in for a whirlwind of the Daniel Webster (see Scopes monkey trial) sort. Can you see it now?

AND WHY IS THAT? When Pat Robertson lost his bid for the White House, the Christianist Far Right devised a brilliant long-term strategy to remake this country in the image of a fascist, patriarchalist, capitalist, racist, fundamentalist society.

what does that mean? Look up each word. Fascist. Capitalist. Patriarchal. Racist. Fundamentalist. Now THINK. Is what you see consistent with what I say is going down?

We have a choice. Either we say NOT NO, HELL NO, and say it NOW, or we will be ruled by the most violent, illiterate, uneducated, male-supremacist, racist, homophobic, and Darwinian 20 percent of Americans ever created.

Young Americans: Wake up. You are about to lose the Dream.

And that, my friends, is why this President is right: A good education is worth more than gold. With it, you can navigate the dangerous rapids of endless propaganda and mass manipulation. Without it, you're helpless.

The Marriage War: Strategy Considerations

My wife and I got married in San Francisco, CA, in February, 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newsome first gave gays and lesbians the option. So I've got a more than a little interest in this matter. I'm not now nor have I ever been writing about it from a neutral perspective.

Of course I think GLBT people should be able to marry. I've written fairly extensively about why. In my way, I penned a somewhat contrarian analysis of why the issue matters so much to Republicans and what else it brings into their gunsights, and took a sarcastic swing at Cathi Herrod, doyenne of the Arizona Gay Haters' resurrected anti-gay proposition, Prop 102. Recently, I took up strategy, too.

We will succeed. So long as we have a Constitution, states such as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are reliable bellwethers. But our strategies will determine how long we have to fight, and what additional costs we'll pay. Some thoughts:

(1) It's trendy now to blame African Americans for passing Prop 8. That's really not smart. In the first place, it may well be because of young, new, first-time African American voters that the margin wasn't greater than it was. Olberman made that point last night, showing the numbers.

In the second, didn't we learn anything from the Obama/Hillary dust-up in the South Carolina primary? The LAST thing we need, as progressives, is a split in the ranks. No matter how bitter the irony of Black opposition may be to a community over-represented in the Civil Rights movement, we need to be clear about defining the real enemy. Instead of singling out African Americans when Hispanics and others are equally complicit, and instead of denigrating the African Americans who voted for Prop 8 and its ugly cousins in states like AZ and AR, we must target the racist, sexist, and heterosexist fundamentalists and evangelicals who, after all, are the real foe. Remember: African Americans who voted for Prop 8 or Prop 102, or any other anti-gay measure, didn't do so because they're African Americans. They did so only because of hateful, lying anti-gay propaganda from Far Right Christianists like Howard Ahmandson, Jr. THAT's the source of the problem. Let's keep our eyes fixed on the correct target.

(3) The energy we save by not attacking African Americans can and should be used for outreach and education in all conservative communities, including African American, Hispanic, Native, Asian American, and Anglo. Follow Obama's example: Never cede territory to the foe.

(4) I think it's stupid to picket churches. Think about it: A picture speaks a thousand words, right? The negative PR image is louder than anything we can shout. It doesn't help us to hand message validation to Christianists on a silver platter! They're saying that we're un-churched, godless, and opposed to everything holy and good. And sure enough, there we are, lined up screaming outside a church. Duh.

(5) Instead, I support targeted boycotts. Mormon leaders made the LDS church an aggressively public party to this struggle. Let's let them know, in no uncertain terms, that while we support their right to vote, the LDS decision to intervene militantly, across state lines has consequences. They are free to use the power of their institution and their money to pursue their objectives. So are we.

But I don't get limiting the boycott to Utah and Mormons. After all, Baptists and Catholics and others have been there long before the Mormons decided to put their feet on our necks.

Any group, corporation, organization, municipality, or state that waves an anti-gay flag doesn't deserve and should not receive gay dollars. In this recession, that message can have a major effect.

And this is critical: Not only the churches that actively urge hate, but also those that choose safe silence in the face of clear injustice are complicit in our oppression. Let them all feel what it means when GLBT people, our families, and our friends withdraw our support.

This can be tricky when denominations take a pro-gay stand but local member congregations choose silence or opposition. Know who's who and what's what.

(6) Similarly, anyone who supports us, we should support strongly. We must make it our business to know that PepsiCo gave PFLAG a half-million dollar grant, and buy Pepsi. As long as Coors funds the Far Right, drink Pepsi.

(7) Words matter. Use them wisely and well. Instead of using terms that affirm the lie that Christianists mean us no harm and hope only to oppose "gay marriage," we should begin now to talk simply about marriage. Not gay marriage, not straight marriage. Just marriage. From our point of view, the goal is not "gay" marriage, whatever that might mean. Our goal is equality in marriage.

And let's not talk anymore about "anti-gay marriage." From the Far Right point of view, the "marriage" angle is just a cover. This is not anti-gay marriage. It's ANTI-GAY. Period. Make no mistake about that. Let's strip the facade and take away the sophistry. This movement is only and always about oppressing gay and lesbian people, never merely about who has access to marriage rites. Let's not contribute to the confusion, OK? Call it what it is: Anti-Gay.

(8) Instead of re-inventing the wheel, it seems to me that activists across the nation would be wise to study the tactics and strategies of Evan Wolfson, often called the father of the marriage movement. When there's an expert hanging around, why not utilize his experience and knowledge? And there are strongly successful state law models out there. Washington State's is one of them. Let's go with what works, stay focused, and stay on message.

Rush, Rush the Toilet Brush

From Media Matters today:

On the May 21 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh asserted that "one of the objectives of the feminazis over the last 20, 25 years has been to dominate the public education system so as to remove the competitive nature of boys. You know, there's a crisis of young man-boy education in the schools. And they did this on purpose, to eliminate male competition in the work force. This is part of feminazi grand plan."

OK, see, wouldn't we have had to do more than merely advocate for equal education opportunities for girls and women to "remove the competitive nature of boys"?

Like, maybe, capture them all and drain their testosterone one little gonad at a time? Or round up all the daddies and mommies and take the competition gene right out of their DNA?

Rush again broadcasts his weakness as a person and as a man. He's telling us that just the search for female equality so threatens him that he feels justified in surrendering his honor and integrity. In public, yet.

He's fine with lying right out loud, with demonizing people who disagree with him, and with distorting the public record. He's fine with misleading people who are less informed and weaker than he is. That makes him sociopathic and generally unfit for the company of decent people.

Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Bush, Lott, Tancredo, Bill Donohue, Hagee, Robertson, McCain--guys like that may as well brand giant "Is" in their foreheads, for Insecure. For, what they say is really very telling. Over and over they light up in neon the core flaw in men of the Bush Davidian Right. To feel secure, capable, and competent, they have to stand on top of somebody else. If it's not Iraq, women, or Latinos, well, there're always Black people. To wit:

Limbaugh then said, "They forgot affirmative action for black guys. And because of that, every bit of their plan has gone up in smoke now, because they -- if -- they had to come out in favor of affirmative action for black guys, and that's -- see, this is one of the things that really irritates the women. And there are women all over this country fit to be tied -- trust me on this. ... [L]iberals eventually are going to be devoured by their own policies. And it has happened here. Because [Sen.] Barack Obama is an affirmative action candidate." He concluded, "So, it's just -- they just forgot that one thing: affirmative action for black guys. And if they had remembered to oppose that, then they wouldn't face the situation they face today."

Mmmmmm, cute and coherent, too!

If these guys don't get clear of that gaping inferiority complex very soon, or we don't clear them out of the halls of power, they'll take us all down.

AZ's Pearce: Give Me a Child for It's First Seven Years. . .

Arizona's Republican legislators, led by the notorious Russell Pearce and Karen Johnson, never cease to amaze us. They propose allowing guns in public schools, and slashing our education budget. Arizona is already somewhere around 49th in state per capita education spending, but I think I see the genius here. If we can just kill off the kids fast enough, we won't need much education funding. Heck, if we get the timing right, we could even rank 48th next year.

Sheer brilliance.

This might be amusing, except that it's anything but.

For some 20 years, attacks on public schools have been at the center of conservative Republican ideology. There's a reason.

Underfunding public schools sets them up to fail, which creates a climate in which "No Child Left Behind," vouchers, and home schooling seem reasonable. I wrote recently about "political climates." This strategy is a case study in how to manipulate public policy to make the unthinkable--such as Rightwing control of the curriculum through home schooling and through "faith-based" private schools--seem eminently sane.

But. The fact is that the old standard liberal arts curriculum was the terra firma on which Americans achieved technological and economic greatness, between the invention of the automobile and the airplane, and the moonwalk. However, it also gave us critical thinking skills, a fairly decent knowledge of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, a common approach to good citizenship and ethics, and the wherewithal to perform well in a changing global economy. All these are anathema to fascism, propaganda, spin, and distortion.

Rightwing, fundamentalist, fascist prosperity depends very centrally on controlling the curriculum for future generations. This is far easier to do outside the public sphere and beyond public accountability. Ergo, failing, unfunded public schools, attacks on teachers' unions, cuts in education funding, deteriorated physical plants, challenges to "liberal" teachers and course content, lawsuits, and all the rest pave the way for a New World Order, if you will. Enter standardized Far Right curricula marketed innocuously through privately controlled home schooling associations, "faith-based" private schools, and fundy factories pretending to be colleges and universities. By these means, a whole new crop of hardcore conservative automatons is cultivated for civil service, the military, the legislatures, the courts, and the White House.

If you doubt it, take a look around. All these things have come to pass in approximately the last 20 years, thanks to master strategies, organizing, and funding from the Far Right.

The consequences for America have been written for seven years in day-glo orange for the whole world to see. The caliber of Bush appointees to Justice, HHS, FEMA, FCC, the appellate courts, the US Supreme Court. The Iraq invasion. The demise of a vigorous middle class. The complete meltdown of any sense of common purpose and any awareness of common interests. Our deteriorated infrastructure. The recession. The chilling rage of one half the country at the other. All these markers of catastrophe can be traced, directly or indirectly, to priorities nurtured in the Far Right's gradual and surreptitious dismantling of our great Jeffersonian, liberal arts, free public education system.

If Arizonans want this future, they're well on the way to having it. As for me, I have a better opinion of our state, our country, and our kids. They deserve our very best, not--as Pearce and Johnson embody--our very worst.

Ron Paul

I wouldn't call Ron Paul a libertarian any more than I'd call a cat a buffalo. I'd call Ron Paul a Far Right, control-freak, hyper-conservative, paranoid-delusional wing nut, and that's when he's having a good day.

In case you've been engaged by his unpolished approach to political campaigning or tempted by his stance on the occupation of Iraq, please see Orcinus' roundup of Ron Paul's legislation. It speaks loudly and clearly for itself.

Paul is everything we don't want in a public servant. If the fact that he's too far Right for this Republican party doesn't tell you something, seek a brain transplant.

And did I read that Kucinich is considering Ron Paul for his VP? Fetch the smelling salts and shoot me now. That's a waltz I never want to see.

De-Spinning the Immigration "Debate"

Globalization is a major 21st C phenomenon. As Mario Soares, former President and former Prime Minister of Portugal just pointed out, it is also nothing new. Modern globalization dates from the late 15th C maritime trade explorations from Europe to Africa and the Americas. Now as then, technological development, economic and monetary policy, religious and military conflict, exploration, trade dynamics, natural disasters, plagues, and other mega-forces stimulate massive changes in population demographics, the distribution of wealth, agricultural and other resource production and value, and territorial habitability.

These, in turn, prompt waves of migration comprising many, many thousands of political and/or economic refugees, and the stream of effects continues. Life goes on, its national histories etched with assimilations, diasporas, campaigns of repression, border realignments, and new forms of culture and social organization.

To understand immigration issues in the USA, it’s wise to begin thinking about them in this kind of historical perspective. Then it's obvious that migration is as universal and timeless as the wind, that it is frequently global, or at least regional and multi-national rather than bi-national, that it has causes and complexities that aren’t well communicated in sound bites, and that racist, punitive, and exclusionary strategies don't solve anything because they never, ever address underlying causes. Instead, what they do seem to accomplish, repeatedly, are festering social, psychological, and economic sores. What's astounding is that, unlike rats, we haven't mastered this part of Advanced Cheese Theory. There's just no cheese there.

In other words, knowing the context can be a good head start for detecting when the public debate is up to the challenge and when it's up to no good.

Soares outlines the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the USA as the world’s sole major power, and the ascendency of Reagan-Bush economic neo-liberalism (not to be confused with classical liberal social theory).

Americans rightly tend to link economic neo-liberalism to neo-conservatism because of pronounced connections among University of Chicago economists, principally Milton Friedman, University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss, and neo-con defense/foreign policy architects including Wolfowitz, Perle, and Rumsfeld, among others.

Keep in mind that major elements of neo-liberalism are imperialism, "free" trade, deregulation, anti-environmentalism, anti-unionism, anti-government intervention(except subsidies for favored multinational enterprises and tax policy tilts), and privatization of certain government functions and most commonwealth resources (water, airwaves, forests, etc.).

Soares writes:

Under the command of George W. Bush, the US revived its imperial ambitions, began its dangerous but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to marginalise the United Nations, and guaranteed the triumph of neo-liberalism as the dominant economic-political ideology.

In truth, the influence of neo-liberalism was felt most strongly in the last years of the last century and was responsible for giving capitalism an essentially speculative and virtual financial face. One of its characteristics was the expansion of stock trading and the generation of multi-million dollar profits without having a significant impact in the real, productive economy.[Emphasis added.]

Globalisation increased social inequality and the gap between poor and rich nations and people. It brought about a growing concentration in business and the banking sector in particular, the outsourcing of production to areas with low wages if not slave labour, financial scandals, and high-level corruption, all of which are current practices of neo-liberal globalisation, which as a result has been thoroughly discredited.

This is familiar terrain to readers of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and this—continuing now from Soares—is becoming frighteningly familiar to anyone watching cable TV today:

It is no accident that the neo-liberal ideology loses more ground every day or that the world now finds itself on the verge of a grave financial crisis that is manifesting itself in the rapid seesawing of the stock market and is beginning to affect US society: a deepening of the real estate crisis, rising unemployment, fears of inflation, unprecedented increases in the price of oil, not to mention the colossal trade deficit which no one seems able to relieve.

It is a commonplace today to say that the policies of President Bush have resulted in total disaster both domestically and abroad.

A country’s economic prosperity is usually measured by GDP—the total dollar value of all the goods and services it produces in a given time—say, a year. But of course, as Hazel Henderson points out, GDP does not measure the health of our natural resources, our people, our schools, or our quality of life. Policies such as privatization of commonwealth natural resources, unchecked development, unregulated business, subsidized oil exploration, subsidized agribusiness, hostility to conservation, and refusal to mediate the effects of global warming, as well as an expanding draught, continue to degrade our air, water, and land and our living standard.

The consequences are more than economic. In physical terms, they are measured in our medical viability. What with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, ADD, sleeplessness, depression, and obesity, ours isn’t all that spectacular despite the outrageous cost of healthcare. And we know it.

To all this, add rising crime rates, lousy schools, drug abuse, out-of-reach higher education, escalating costs of living, wage stagnation, outsourcing and downsizing, plummeting house values, rising foreclosures, individual indebtedness, a wobbly stock market, a weakening dollar, threats of terrorism, the horrors and expense of the (optional) Iraq occupation, the threat of war with Iran, a president and veep contemptuous of Congress and the Constitution, bizarre weather patterns, and a marked increase in racist, fascist, fundamentalist, and nationalist organizations.

What you get is the “felt” if not necessarily rationally understood framework within which North Americans are trying to come to terms with immigration.

OK. That said, I think it’s fair to say that the US debate on immigration so far has been shaped by a mere handful of thought—nuggets linking immigration to crime, property values, stolen social services, deteriorated public schools, lost jobs, and so on. Singly and together, these memes are helpfully presented as if they alone explain the impact of (primarily) Mexican and Latino immigration.

I hope it’s clear now that they don’t, and that some of what they leave out is clearer. It remains to be seen why they fail so miserably to reflect and to grapple with reality.

But if you look at the source of these memes, the talking megaphones that shout them, and the "data" disseminated to support them, you’ll find that, just like neo-liberalism and the neo-cons, they come from the Far Right. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?

More later.

"Jakarta is Coming!" For a preview, watch Burma!

I tell you right now, myself: This post will sound lunatic unless you've read the most important history book since Hannah Arendt: Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. If you read nothing else in your life, read this, and the sooner the better.

I’m now 75 pages into The Shock Doctrine and I’m ready to scrawl on the walls, “Jakarta is coming!”

Building on other strategies that got us here, discussed elsewhere on this blog, I've started to ruminate about things going on around us as I write. For instance, just suppose that the increasingly violent anti-liberal rhetoric of the last 30 years has been a strategy to make the minds of conservative Americans not just amenable to cheating at the polls, but amenable actually to our removal.

In that scenario, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, the whole Faux apparatus in fact, and Clear Channel, and those who trashed the Dixie Chix and others are psychological storm troopers, a secular advance guard paralleling Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye on the religious side. The tactic is not new. Goebbels perfected it on the Jews.

I’m now 75 pages into The Shock Doctrine and I’m ready to scrawl on the walls, “Jakarta is coming!”

The master that Bush and Cheney serve is Milton Friedman. The model that they follow is Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile. The local trial balloon was New Orleans.

The enemy is the peaceful and prosperous New Deal society. Its crime was Keynesian/Galbraithian economics, ensuring that wealth produced by many is returned in some measure to many. That is called “redistribution,” or worse, “transfer,” as if the profit of a corporation were realized entirely by the men in the executive suite, without the labor of the employees, and as if the raw materials of which the wealth was created had always belonged to them and not to the commonwealth itself.

The objective is to make of the world—soon to be starring the great prize itself, the former constitutionally democratic USA—a completely unregulated economy—-without product safety or quality regulations, or workplace health and safety regulations, or humane labor requirements, or minimum wage requirements, or environmental protections, or tariffs, or any other form of restraint on “free trade.”

The infrastructure is in place. The jobs are being outsourced, the unions dismantled, and the trade agreements written apace. The plans have been written, tested, and perfected. The engineers are at their posts. The media has been harnessed, the military propagandized, the people divided, the domestic intelligence and torture apparatus made fully legal and acceptable, and erected, the detention centers have been built, the CIA has been brought to heel, the equation of protest with treason firmly established, the voting machines and voting laws in key states have been fixed, the Justice department is blocking investigations into fraud, corruption, and patently impeachable crimes, the high Court is pretty much rigged, and Congress has been neutralized. The presidency is unitary. Read, the president is a dictator. But he doesn't want us to know that, so he is denouncing what's happening now in Burma. Denouncing, but not actually doing anything to stop that, or Darfur, or Iraq. No, he's got bigger fish to fry.

The missing piece, according to the pattern previously tested successfully in Jakara, Santiago, and New Orleans, is the next big shock, analogous in effect to Katrina or to 9-11, if not much worse. Something big enough to stun the population long enough so that life as we know it can come to an end overnight.

As our Dictator President knows, the way to get that next shock is by bombing Iran. Either in the event itself or in the aftermath of retaliation, anyone who stands in the way of a declaration of martial law will be forcibly detained and tortured until everyone understands that there’s a new game in the USA, and it is called “disaster capitalism.” What’s yours is theirs, what’s ours is theirs, and what’s theirs is theirs--constitution rights, homes, bank accounts, savings, the land and our liberty itself. The end.

What’s going on now in Myanmar (Burma) is a miniature version of what will soon be coming to a theatre near you—that’s if any American has the grit to protest, I mean.

None other than Daniel Ellsberg just warned in a speech at American University that if we go to war with Iran, we will be a police state. Read all about it on the Consortium website.

Again: If you read nothing else in your life, read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The veil will fall from your eyes.