Don't It Make Ya Proud?

Tip o' the hat to Michael for this reassuring example of Bush's Homeland Security goons at work:

"Jason Haist's arrival in the U.S. was a complete accident. After nearly drowning in rapids on the Niagara River, he [and a friend] washed ashore on American soil, where he was promptly informed he faced charges for entering the country illegally and could be detained for up to three weeks while officials try to determine his intentions."

The jet ski accident happened after Jason had contacted the US Coast Guard to determine whether it was legal to make his proposed trip. I'm sure all terrorists do that.

"Jason Haist, who was put on an IV drip after having fluid pumped from his lungs, said he could hear a border official using a walkie-talkie outside his hospital room.

"'He was on machines all night,' Kerr said. Haist was discharged from the hospital around 3 a.m. and arrested shortly after.

"'He told them, 'I almost died. I didn't plan on washing up on your land,' Kerr said.

"The men will remain in custody at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility until they can appear before an immigration judge.

"'They're here illegally,' Ciliberti said, because they turned up at an unauthorized point of entry, a U.S. customs violation. It doesn't help Haist's case that he didn't have any identification in his wetsuit. All he had was his boater's card, Kerr said.

"Ciliberti said the pair received notices to appear before a judge and explain their circumstances. If they choose to cancel the notice to appear and return to Canada voluntarily, Ciliberti said, 'you're admitting you're in the States illegally.' And if they don't appear, they will be deported and denied entry to the U.S. for at least five years.'"

Hit 'em where they live. I'm sure they're dying to come back.

As far as I know, they're still in detention. The moral of the story? Just don't have a near-drowning experience near our shore, buddy.

Other than that, I really don't know what to say.

Of Comic Books, Immigrants, and Eternal Fascism

When it comes to describing the US as “an incipient police state,” there’s a frustrating, perplexing fastidiousness on the Left and in the mainstream.

“Incipient” means “beginning to exist or appear.” For some time in this country, the defining characteristics of fascism (a term that, in this context, I use interchangeably with “police state”) have decidedly begun to appear. Notable guardians of democracy such as Lewis Lapham have been warning us about this for nearly 15 years, their warnings amplified in the last seven especially.

If an exponential increase (a) in unaccountable police powers concentrated within the Executive Branch; (b) in the infrastructure, funding, and structure of these police powers; and (c) in their routine abuse by our highest authorities are any indication, we’re well and truly somewhere between “incipient” and “fully fledged.” To me, it just isn’t debatable.

All this is well known. For seven-plus years, national news media have reported on White House and telecommunications conspiracy to conduct widespread illegal domestic spying; on chilling (and still emerging) provisions of the cynically named “Patriot Acts”; on the “Endgame” plan to remove all “illegal aliens” by 2012; on the explosion of domestic concentration camps, euphemistically called “detention centers”; on the systematic political corruption of the US Department of Justice; on an Executive Branch that is contemptuously defiant of the Constitution’s requirement for balanced legislative, judicial, and executive powers; on massive, illegal government databases; on surveillance of perfectly legal, constitutionally guaranteed protest assemblies; on the suspension of our habeas corpus rights; and, yes, on the repeated human rights abuses inflicted by agents of our government on Latinos, citizen and noncitizen, under the guise of dealing with “illegal immigration.”

One has to ask: What more evidence can possibly be required?

Yet even now, while we still have a chance to root out these evils, the loud, irrepressible chorus of condemnations you’d expect from the Center and the Left is nonexistent. Where there should be calls for mass strikes and street protests, only a few brave souls are speaking out. With a few notable exceptions, even our most influential bloggers are pulling their punches.

For instance, after documenting numerous detention and deportation horrors, Joshua Holland of the widely respected AlterNet sees only the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration operation as an emerging police state. Apparently he’s overlooked the cold, hard truth that the mammoth DHS, which, like the CIA and the FBI, is under the Executive’s unilateral control, is just one of many troubling manifestations of fascism in US government operations.

Some I just noted. Others include Guantanamo, “legalized” torture in contravention of the Geneva Accords, citizen detentions by airport ICE agents without access to attorneys, Blackwater, privatized (and therefore virtually unaccountable) prisons, Abu Ghraib, the so-far uninvestigated and un-punished disappearance of trillions ostensibly for “rebuilding” Iraq, a country we occupied illegally and without provocation in the first place. And of course there’s the covering mist of endless media lies and distortions regularly documented and exposed by Media Matters and other vigilants.

All these things are happening, undeniably. Moreover, none of them is happening in a vacuum, and all of them are products of the most ideologically driven, rabidly Rightwing administration in US history.

Yet still there is this peculiar reticence to call an incipient police state just that. Where Holland sees only departmental fascism, Dave Neiwert, whom I respect enormously, won’t even go that far. He writes: “It's perhaps worth remembering that incipient police states always target the most vulnerable members of society when they start out. And in today's America, there are no people more vulnerable than those millions of workers here, for a human universe of reasons, illegally. That's not to say we are in an incipient police state, but the warnings are unmistakable--especially in tandem with the Bush administration's massive acquisition of previously unimagined executive-branch powers--and should not be dismissed blithely.” [Emphasis added.]

Warnings existed when Eisenhower nailed the military-industrial complex. Surely now we’re some distance past warnings?

Certainly Rightwing control of the media—both outright, as in Fox, and less forthright, as in CNN and CBS—is a dampening force for dissenters, as it is meant to be. Corporate owner interests ensure that our media not only shape public opinion but also lampoon the views of, and if necessary, destroy the reputations of those who dare to contradict their mantras. Clarke, Plame, Wilson, and now Ron Suskind (who reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a letter linking Iraq to Al Qaeda) are case studies in what happens to resisters these days.

So I suppose it makes sense that some prominent progressive opinion shapers--political candidates, TV and radio commentators, print editorialists, and bloggers alike—would be afraid to step off the designated path. It just makes sense that they’d fear running afoul of the White House and its media familiars and, consequently, losing even the modest persuasive power they possess in this concepts marketplace dominated by flags, fear, and money.

There’s a plague of holding back, as if we're all waiting for some unspecified second shoe to drop. But if it’s some sign of a strong, supportive, broad-based anti-fascist political consensus we're all hoping for, surely history shows that such a thing never emerges in time. How can it, when everyone of any moment is waiting for somebody else to speak first?

For what it’s worth, I have a theory. This reticence to name US fascism for what it is, and the impossibility of broad public consensus, happen because we dwell in a comic book. “Reality” consists of a given set of symbols punched out in stark lines colored in bold crayon hues. Nothing beside remains. In our comic book world, things that can’t easily be represented by a simple line drawing cease to be. What can’t be expressed in light-bulb commentary—the graphic equivalent of a 5-second sound bite—can’t be addressed.

The one arena in which we might all plainly see our new-minted US police state at work is immigration, but among the sound-bites written by White House flaks for flunkies like Wolf Blitzer, among the pandemic spores cooked up by professional racists and rained nightly on us by Lou Dobbs and Kitty Pilgrim, and given the banning of journalists from cattle drives like Postville, we only know what they want us to know.

We live in the immigration comics. This phenomenally complex issue has been colonized by a set of images which, in turn, establish the boundaries of our national debate. In the immigration comics, the villain is an imbecilic “illegal” here to finance his human trafficking sprees by drug-dealing and living off (our) “welfare.” If he happens to work in a packing house, well. Never mind. He’s a closet terrorist who taints what he touches anyhow. Besides, on his off time, he spawns anchor babies and rapes white women. America, land of pristine (white) purity, is being dragged into the sewer by (brown) Pedro. Hoards more like him are just waiting to crawl across (our) border as we speak. The only (sane) recourse is violence. This is war, and with war come prisons and police. This ain’t no time to play (stupid) all constitutional-like. Ergo, enter our heroes: the fascist Republican Right. Here it’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There it’s Tom Tancredo. Don’t worry: There are plenty enough to go around.

Synecdoche reigns. That comic book “illegal” and his law ‘n order opposite sum up the whole discussion, implying both all immigrants and the sole (rational) response. It’s a thought stopper. It’s meant to be. We can no longer see the immigrant’s humanity or our own. It’s all caricature, all two-dimensional, all binary, bipolar: Right or wrong, black or white, 010101010.

But the world doesn’t work like that, does it? Law isn’t always justice. Order is too often authoritarian abuse of human rights. More often than we’d like to admit, their crime was necessitated by ours first. Global “free” trade comes to mind. And earlier expropriations of other people's things.

While we are trapped in immigration comic book world like flies in amber, real-world immigration policy, in fact, has emerged concretely as the laboratory in which reigning US fascists are developing, funding, propagandizing, and refining the apparatus of a fully fledged police state. If you doubt it, read this. Read it all. You might not see it, but it's there just the same.

Here, eyewitnessed and in print, in cattle pens, in neighborhood midnight raids, in babies torn from mothers’ arms, in the nightmares of American children left behind to wonder what has become of their playmates, is the unveiling of a new American constitution. Here is the hellish stable in which the Antichrist is born. Its first targets, as always, are “the least of these,” but tomorrow, sure as sundown, its skinny arm will snatch up anybody it views as “undesirable.” You know who you are. No, the centre cannot hold.

Do you still doubt? Some have already observed the toll this fascist US immigration policy has taken on organized labor. If you’re not among them, go back and read the Des Moines press about the Agriprocessor ICE raids in Postville. Notice who wins and who loses. Notice the timing. Notice the effect of it all on nascent union organizing, the one thing that (as FDR showed us) can ever counter the conspiracy of business and the GOP. The losers? The five-foot-tall, dirt poor, two-bit workers. The winners? The profiteering extortionists, slave masters, and cheats who exploit those workers. They’re left entirely alone, free to continue to enrich themselves in flagrante delicto.

To the extent that we cannot see that this is essential fascism, we are both evidence and symptom of that engineered myopia I talked about a minute ago. Synechdoche reigns here, too.

Since the close of the Second World War, stark news reels, fiction, film, and political art have reduced multivariate fascism to two images only: the SS and the death camp. If we don’t see brownshirts or concentration camps, then, ipso facto, there is no fascism. If we dare to say there is, we’re tinfoil hatters, conspiracy theorists, playing politics with facts.

In 1995, Umberto Eco wrote of just this, in an essay published in The New York Review of Books called “Ur-Fascism.” Lapham says this about that:

Eco wrote to suggest that it's a mistake to translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:
• The truth is revealed once and only once.
• Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
• Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
• Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
• The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.
• Argument is tantamount to treason.
• Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear.• Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in the grand opera that is the state.

Obviously, the strategy is working well. Why wouldn’t it? Circumstance after circumstance points to the probability that Karl Rove learned his craft from Goebbels. It’s not an original observation on my part. The parallels in method are shatteringly similar. Even a dimwit can see them.

It’s working even when we can see behind the curtain. The truth of Iraq was revealed but war ensued. The Executive—our Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding—says he owes nothing to the Legislative, and appoints the Judiciary. There is no global warming, we're told, but oh, there is. And, right, menstrual cramps can be healed by prayer. Women are free here, but women may not contracept and certainly may not abort. We are anti-terrorists and we do not torture, and you are either with us or against us. You get the drill.

The handmaidens’ choir sings on. You know them well. Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Savage, even (in a different register) Blitzer, Cafferty, Mitchell, and the late Tim Russert. After all, truth can be beaten to death or it can be obscured in a haze of none-too-penetrating questions. It can be copyedited. It can be driven out of town on the pen of a hack ad writer, the way it always is in political seasons. While the game plan is unfolding as intended, we’re listening to compelling 24/7 coverage of the latest little disappeared white girl, and Cialis commercials.

Their master's talking points disseminated, an obedient corporatist media blathers them one by one in the identical order and syntax, arrogantly contemptuous of our powers of reason and our capacity to see and hear the world as it is even when we'd really rather not.

War on terrorism? Nonsensical, but an effective rubric capable of keeping us on some front or other forever. Once again, because it evidently bears repeating: Illegal domestic spying. Blackwater. Guantanamo. Homosexuals want special rights. A plague of privatized for-profit detention centers sprouting all across the country, their obscene profitability ensured by an endless stream of “illegals” in fulfillment of an ominous “Endgame” that somehow never ends. Do you get it yet? No?Stage-managed presidential press conferences where tax-paying dissenters can’t come in. Where once a whole nation felt free to speak, now there are tiny fenced-in “free-speech zones,” thank you very much. A Justice Department populated with Rightwing monkey boys and monkey girls. Our national treasure re-routed to fascist cronies. A city drowned in cynical, engineered ineptitude to prepare a new, white, domestic tabula rasa, Shock Doctrine style. Now do you get it?

They even warned us. They even said, “We make our own reality.” “They won’t see us coming until they’re in the body bags.”

It’s all true. We know it’s true. Yet still we won’t say so, and if we don’t say so, how can we rally the truly brave, the genuinely patriotic, the ones who really do love their children and want the best for them, to resist?

What happened to our founders’ sons and daughters? Where did America go?

Degrees of Separation

What if you knew that genocide doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it does?

What if you knew that it can begin to happen without our even noticing?

Well, now you do.

In 1996, the International Campaign to End Genocide identified for the US Department of State the eight stages of genocide.

Take a look.

While you’re looking, think about how undocumented immigrants are being discussed on US talk radio, in the press, on Lou Dobbs, in Congress. Notice the swell of violence against immigrants all over the world. Ask yourself whether that doesn’t somehow seem to legitimize it here. Consider the for-profit detention centers—here, on US soil. Focus on the deaths in detention, on the number of parents separated from children by our ICE agents, on demands to deny citizenship to "anchor babies."

Think of the effect of that term on how Americans perceive Latino migrant children. Consider that bills are being written all over the country to deny healthcare to "illegals." Think of that word as a weapon of mass dehumanization. Reflect on the working conditions the immigrants face at Agriprocessors and Smithfield and other US meat packing facilities. Think about racist militias gathering at the border and surrounding (legal) day worker centers here in the land of the free. Consider how many US sheriffs' departments and local police forces are being militarized in the hyped-up war on immigrants. Think how you'd feel if you were the target of dawn and midnight raids and cattle pen roundups.

If even CNN can flagrantly rely on Tanton's white supremacist propaganda machine instead of using respectable, comprehensive immigration data, what makes you so sure that someday you won't be?

I'm daring you--YOU--to read through these online resources on genocide and tell ushow many of the stages of genocide we've let loose on US residents of Hispanic origin--citizens and noncitizens. Or, if you still don’t think that the stages of genocide apply, tell us what differences you see, because I don’t see them.

What I see are my friends and colleagues frightened that they, too, can be caught up and ICE'd even though they are US citizens or are here with proper documents. What I see, all over the world, is that with enough propaganda, in the right conditions--usually economic hardship such as we are experiencing here, now--genocide can occur readily enough. We can all be its enablers if not its agents--witting or unwitting--given sufficient hate speech and rage--or given sufficient apathy and cowardice.

There's certainly a difference between what’s going on all across America right now and full-scale genocide. But it's a difference of actualization, not of potential. All the elements are in place, including the street thugs and way too many complicit police.

What I see going on in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County, AZ, and in Sheriff Chuck Jenkins' Frederick, MD (more here), in and dozens of other small and large towns across America undoubtedly threatens our constitutional democracy to exactly the same degree that it threatens Latinos.

Genocide begins with the unswerving conviction that Das Volk--the people--are under threat from a specific group, and that breaking our own laws, defying our own moral and ethical conventions, and ignoring our own Constitution are justified in their defense.

What does it mean that the United Nations has issued several condemnations of America's human rights record under the Bush Regime?

What does it mean that the same Regime embraces torture, and how many degrees of moral principle separate those who are willing to torture from those who are willing to commit genocide? Who can tell me?

If we do nothing to stop this, what are we? And how long do we wait to decide?

Denial is the fertile ground necessary for genocide to take root. Seen from that point of view, the eight stages represent at least half a dozen opportunities to prevent it. Starting now.

(Since 1948, the crime of genocide has been clearly defined in the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Maybe if it were required reading along with the eight stages of genocide, it wouldn’t be a 21st Century epidemic.)

NC Reversal on Admitting Undocumented Immigrants to Colleges

See my short post over at Citizen Orange updating earlier reports of the North Carolina Attorney General's recent decision to bar children of undocumented immigrants from NC colleges.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Fathe, er, Homeland Security doesn't actually require such schools to track students' immigration status.

Therefore, now, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, such students are not necessarily barred.

As I note over at CO, I'll be really surprised if this ICE opinion doesn't attract unwanted attention from the always-wrong Right. After all, they just can't resist even a tiny, symbolic opportunity to convert hardworking, promising new US residents into lifelong bitter enemies.

I’m Sure We Would be Horrified

I just took a look at 32 of some 44 anti-migrant bills introduced by far-Right Republicans in the AZ legislature.

The merry band responsible for these measures shows thoroughgoing contempt for the Constitution and Bill of Rights, no comprehension of the actual operations and costs of state government, and all the demonic zeal of the long-term, unmedicated insane. And when you stop to consider that the "crisis" being addressed here is 80% hype, the extent of their madness and the scope of our slack-jawed gullibility begin to be revealed.

Collectively, these 32 measures would deputize every public servant and a good many private citizens as untrained, uncompensated immigration officers; fine or imprison those who let a peasant into a public school; prohibit Arizonans from marrying non-US citizens; create a new class of indentured slaves without rights or recourse and a bunch of babies without countries; construct a 360-degree continuous harassment zone around every non-white in the state, and plunge AZ even further into fiscal catastrophe. Go. See for yourself.

And for what?

Hype. What's real is that immigrants are coming in growing numbers. Otherwise, ALL the indictments recited by Lou Dobbs, Tom Tancredo, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and the rest against undocumented workers have been concocted and orchestrated by one guy. These claims have been disproved time and again by every reputable immigrant study conducted in the US in the last ten years.

This goes for healthcare utilization, public education impact, and "welfare" utilization, crime rates, general economic impact, resistance to assimilation, infectious disease, and all the rest. Except for the fact that growing numbers of economic refugees are coming across the border, everything you think you know about immigration is pretty much wrong.

So then WTF is going on? My name ain't Alan Greenspan or George W. Bush so I can only speculate.

One, the banking/finance, multinational, domestic corporate, and government pirates who've delivered us huge, life-threatening problems at home and abroad need to find a place to hide. Immigration hype, like terrorism hype, contains a kernel of truth and a saving facade of plausibility, which make it a very effective diversion.

Two, so-called "fair trade" agreements and the pandemic of shock-doctrine capitalism being visited on Central, South, and North America are indeed causing a growing tide of economic refugees, native and foreign. How an already teetering domestic economy, which is outsourcing its jobs as fast as possible at the same time that it is reeling from the costs of the Iraq occupation, the housing/mortgage/lending meltdown, and the astronomical rise in gas and food prices can absorb all the native unemployed and a growing wave of desperate immigrants, and employ eligible workers at all levels and provide retirement for the Boomer generation is not clear to anybody.

Detention centers—many and huge—must be built to stave those incoming migrants off, but first, Americans have to be fed plausible reasons, prepped for a brutal, primitive anti-immigrant backlash. These have been scripted and we are being fed. All the better if prison privatization lays on blessings of riches to salve the consciences of the corporate pirates, state and federal lawmakers, and media tools who are either causing the economic implosion or making the hype and the cover-up come together. When CCA and Wackenhutt are reimbursed on a per capita basis, what incentive do you suppose is created for detaining and incarcerating as many "capitas" as possible?

That's my take. Of course clucks like Arizona GOP state Rep. Russell Pearce aren't intelligent or powerful enough to devise such things. But they are clever enough, and as Republicons, positioned well enough to know how to capitalize on recession and terrorism fears, and unscrupulous enough to do so. I use the word "capitalize" for a reason.

All that's at stake for a Pearce or a Sheriff Joe Arpaio is merely re-election. They don't give a rat's fanny whether what they say is true, or fair, or right, or decent, so long as it appeals to enough voters and works to undermine the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. When these guys get to beat up on demonized people of color, they're playing to type. It's an easy gig if you ask me, fit for a bunch of puking cowards.

Pandering to worried, angry average Joes who see the border crossings at the same time as rising bills dwarf their paychecks or SS benefits are sitting ducks. They're easy prey, particularly in this high-tech era where testosterone and bull strength aren't much called for anymore. Plenty of core masculine self-esteem issues here, and plenty of pent-up rage at pert' nigh everybody—women, people of color, and all those high-talkin' libruls who abandoned blue collar whites in the Reagan union-busting years, whatever. Their world view is delivered ready made by Fox, and they figure somebody up there must know something they don't. But hey, call me "elitist."

In some other contexts, many of these guys are decent people, and most of them aren't idiots—they do see who's been driving the bus lately. Nevertheless, they've got themselves in a dark, small hole of their own devising: If it's "treason" to criticize 'Murka or the Presnit, their anger has to find another outlet, somewhere where there'll be negligible consequences. This is easily arranged. Happily too, gilded by the luminous back story of the Old West, all this high-decibel racist, xenophobic "law 'n order" rhetoric and the promise of gunfire on the border makes for a new hyper-masculine heroic epic. That is, if you don't look too closely at the rationale or at the soldiers.

The "enemy" isn't Santa Ana's army, after all, and the white guys aren't Davy Crockett. The "enemy" this time is just a scraggly bunch of desperate peasant furriners clinging to the peculiar convictions that hard work is a virtue and that people have a right under the common law of human dignity to go where they need to go to survive. Hell, even caribou do that.

Plus, they aren't armed and they have no high-powered Washington lobbyist to defend them. What could be better for a pony-tailed, fanny-packed RV militia? At some level for them, this is just a theme park, a new kind of "psychodrama," if you'll forgive the pun; just another variation on Paintball. After all, they don't risk a thing and they don't get hurt.

For us and the migrants dying in the desert answering the summons of a gigantic multinational bait and switch, it's not theatre at all. Mindlessly cruel and brutal things are happening here in Arizona, on the border, on our city streets, in our jails, and in our for-profit detention centers. If only we weren't so busy playing our assigned role as audience for the Great Republicon-Job, I'm sure we would be horrified enough to do something.