Life in Arizona for Latinos and Queers

Oh, please join me and other gays and lesbians as we grovel in appreciation. We've been granted the "right" to pay the city of Phoenix $50.00 so that we have the right to visit each other in hospitals, nursing facilities, etc.

It's the Domestic Partnership Registry. Yay.

We're thrilled. Not.

Do you get the part about how WE have to PAY to be accorded a simple fact of civilized society that hets take for granted--because, for hets, it is granted, free?

This is "equal protection under the law"?

Well djes, here in Arizona, where our sheriff marches Latino deportees through the streets to humiliate and demean them, this is what passes for civilization.

And we pay taxes, too?

Family Values

Nicholas Kristoff writes in the NYT today about sex slavery and the vicious torture of girl slaves in the trade in Cambodia. Read it, if you dare. This grisly, filthy business actually isn't a world away. To the extent that it caters to them, it begins in the consciousness of Western men. It exists because they like it and because Cambodian men and women slave-traders and brothel owners can profit from it.

Kristoff concludes:

"Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s. . . .

"I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists."

Everything Kristoff says is true and urgent. And yet. . .

Is Kristoff really unaware of the slavery that underpins much of US business? Florida's and Texas' citrus and vegetable industries are equally brutal, routinely practicing beatings, starvations, and murders--not to mention gross wage theft. Growers know it, local residents and authorities know it, state officials know it, ICE knows it, and so does Congress. Everyone winks.

Is it somehow easier to focus on Cambodia's sex trafficking than on the domestic variety? Ask any big city US mayor whether there's a thriving underground economy in trafficking and torturing girls (and boys)--whether Cambodian, Vietnamese, Russian, Texan, or New Yorker. Ask the Attorneys General in Utah, Texas, and Arizona whether sex slavery exists in remote fundamentalist Mormon enclaves, protected by whole townships. Ask them whether torture is involved. If they don't mention re-assigning wives, dumping boys too young to fend for themselves and without any means of support, and handing over pre-teen girls for the sexual pleasure of men old enough to be their grandfathers, point out that these things, too, constitute torture.

I don't knock Kristoff's service in publicizing the horror of the Cambodian sex slave trade. Good for him. But it's breathlessly naive to assert that sex slavery (abroad) "is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery." (It's this kind of thing that makes me think of Kristoff as such a lightweight.)

"Truly the 21st century's version of slavery"? Well, no.

Sex slavery is merely ONE of 21st century America's versions of slavery. We have several.

Wherever wage theft occurs, there is some degree of forced labor, one criterion for defining slavery. This includes the legions of mostly foreign domestics brought here and then imprisoned in the blight of a million McMansions.

There are legions of undocumented workers lured and brought here and sold off by "coyotes" to complicit managers in construction, agriculture, meat processing, landscaping, and entertainment.

There are legions of girls and boys bought and sold as sex slaves for guys we see in suits every day. There are legions of children who are being circulated among pedophiles, and raped by their fathers and uncles and brothers and cousins. These, too, are forms of sex slavery.

So you might wish that Kristoff would place the Cambodian sex slave trade in its larger global context, and that he would also illuminate the myriad forms of slavery happening right here, right now. The home-grown variety.

And you might think that, in addition to challenging Obama and Clinton, Kristoff would challenge, oh, say, the "religious" Right.

You might think that it's a far, far worthier cause to target slavery in any of its loathesome manifestations than it is to target the right of GLBT persons to marry, adopt, and serve openly in the US military.

Wage Theft: A National Disgrace

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and the subject is poverty.

Along with conservatives' anti-labor, anti-minimum wage, job outsourcing, and economic policies, wage theft--an all-American pass-time--is a major systemic cause of poverty among American workers. It's so widespread that just by itself, wage theft undermines the national claim that we are a country driven by universal religious values. Nuh-uh: All religions require justice.

If you labor in construction, domestic work, home healthcare, assisted living, landscaping, agriculture, hotel and restaurant food services, certain retail industries, roofing, meat and poultry packing, house painting, and similar industries, it doesn't matter whether the employing firm is large or small. The odds that you'll be cheated of significant earned wages are more than 90 to 1.

At least that's the experience of those of us who volunteer for Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). IWJ is a national organization devoted to improving the lives of America's workers--especially our low-income workers. Reports from IWJ's 19 Worker Rights Centers across the country indicate that over 90% of workers who contact IWJ for help report at least one experience of wage theft.

What is wage theft? The short answer: Wage theft is when you aren't paid the correct sum for each and every hour that you're worked.

How does it happen? Here are some of the more common ways. You work as directed but:

You aren't paid at all;
You are paid less than the amount you were promised;
You are forced to work "off the clock";
Work-related travel time is not recorded or compensated when it should be;
You are misclassified as an "independent contractor," thus cheated of benefits, overtime pay, and the employer's share of payroll taxes to which you are lawfully entitled;
You are paid less than the applicable state or federal minimum wage;
Though eligible, you are not paid time-and-a-half for each overtime hour you work;
Your time sheet is altered to record fewer hours than those you've actually worked;
Illegal deductions are withheld from your paycheck (e.g., illegal fees for required safety equipment);
Fraudulent deductions are withheld from your paycheck (e.g., fees for a promise to get a green card for you)
You are misclassified as exempt from overtime requirements; and so on.

Wage theft isn't merely cheating. It's stealing.

It happens to everyone, but most of all to the most vulnerable among us--immigrants who are unaware of their rights, unable to speak English fluently, and easily exploited.

But while wage theft is epidemic among low-wage workers, both native-born and immigrant, anyone who gets paid for labor is subject potentially to wage theft. "

Wage theft hurts middle-income as well as low-wage workers. It robs money from he public treasury, create a strain on he nation's limited social service delivery networks, and takes money out of workers' pockets that would have been spent at local businesses. And it is a grave sin." [Faith Works, Summer 2008)

Wage theft rates have skyrocketed under the Bush administration. Today, there are only 750 Department of Labor (DOL) inspectors for some 135 million workers who are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act--and that doesn't even count domestic and agricultural workers, who aren't protected. In 1938, when the law was first enacted, there were 14 million workers protected by 1500 DOL inspectors.

Until now, wage theft has been virtually ignored. That's beginning to change, thanks to IWJ. IWJ Executive Director Kim Bobo testified in July before the House Education and Labor Committee on wage theft, which catapulted the issue onto the national screen. Shortly thereafter, an editorial appeared in the New York Times, and other newspapers gradually began to cover it. This November, Bobo's new book on wage the will be published.

So at last the issue is beginning to surface. Our job is to keep it front and center.

What can you do to help?

Fill the White House, the Senate, and the House with Democrats
Support Interfaith Worker Justice with a generous contribution
Take advantage of IWJ's extensive online educational resources
Watch Kim Bobo's July 2008 testimony before the House Labor and Commerce Committee, or read the full text of her remarks at the IWJ website
Host a study group on the issue at your faith community; use Bobo's book as your study guide.
Set up a Worker Rights Center, or volunteer for one in your area
Support all pro-union initiatives, including the Employee Free Choice Act now pending. A well-represented workforce is the key to a strong middle class.
Support initiatives to extend wage and hour protections to workers who are not presently covered
Support initiatives to extend paid sick days, healthcare, paid vacations, and retirement benefits to all workers
Support living wage and minimum wage initiatives
Contact the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to voice your support for vigorous enforcement of wage and hour laws. This is especially effective if your own representative or senator sits on one of these committees.
If you are an employer, do the right thing.

Wage theft doesn't hurt only the workers and their families. Ultimately, wage theft hurts us all. It removes dollars from our local economies, undermines our tax base, forces workers who could otherwise be self-supporting to become dependent on taxpayers; gives an unfair, anti-competitive advantage to unscrupulous employers, and strengthens the same climate of greed and fraud that is responsible for a global market crisis. It's different, sure; but the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

AZ Tribe Calls Halt to Water for Immigrant Desert Crossers

From the Santa Fe New Mexican:

TUCSON, Ariz. — A member of a Southern Arizona Indian tribe who has been putting out water for illegal immigrants crossing the desert for about seven years said Thursday that he has again been told to stop.

Mike Wilson has ignored an admonition to stop the practice since 2002 and has been operating four water stations on one part of the Tohono O'odham Nation for several years and two others just south of the Mexican border, all in cooperation with the humanitarian organization Humane Borders.

The water is set out in 55-gallon drums along routes heavily used by illegal immigrants to try to cut the number of heat-related desert deaths.

"The (Tohono O'odham) nation has been adamant in not cooperating with any person or groups in the social justice community in trying to mitigate the deaths on tribal lands," said Wilson, 59, a resource manager for a charter high school in Tucson.

Calls to Tohono O'odham tribal Chairman Ned Norris Jr., Baboquivari District Chairwoman Veronica Harvey and tribal spokesmen were not returned immediately Thursday.

Some of the busiest smuggling routes in Arizona cut through the Tohono O'odham Reservation, which shares 75 miles of border with Mexico and which has registered a disproportionate number of illegal immigrant deaths in the state, mostly heat-related. Arizona has been the focal point for illegal immigrant trafficking from Mexico for most of the past decade.

The Border Patrol says the agency doesn't break out migrant deaths on the reservation, but has documented 154 fatalities since Oct. 1 across the agency's Tucson sector, which includes most of the Arizona-Mexico border. That's a 21 percent decrease from the same period a year earlier.

The Arizona Daily Star, which has tracked border deaths for years, said the bodies of 70 illegal immigrants were recovered on the reservation in 2007. Eighty-three were recovered between Jan. 1 and mid-June this year, according to the newspaper.

In June 2002, the reservation's Baboquivari District Council passed a resolution prohibiting Wilson from putting out water in the district. The council resolution said illegal immigrants and smugglers were breaking immigration laws, threatening tribal members for food and rides, breaking into homes, littering, cutting fences and trading drugs to tribal members for information.

Wilson said he's been threatened with banishment by the tribe's public safety director and Attorney General's Office if he doesn't stop putting water out for migrants. However, tribal officials have largely left a water placement ban to each of the tribe's 11 districts.

On Saturday, a police officer told him to take down a water station he has nicknamed St. Matthew, Wilson said. "I told her I would respectfully decline the instructions to take down the water station," he said.

Wilson said he felt a responsibility as a human being, a Tohono O'odham member and a pastor to do something.

This grim story illustrates the very real and very tragic complexities created by our criminally complicit federal immigration policies for those who live on the border--all merely to further the lowballing wage interests of corrupt and influential operators in meatpacking, construction, landscaping, agriculture, and other industries heavily reliant on exploitable immigrant labor.

Films and Morals

I saw the film "The Visitor" today. I hadn't heard of it before. Please see it if you can. I'm not sure how long it's been out, but here in Phoenix it's showing at the Camelview 5, one of our smaller art film theatres, and it won't be around much longer.

It's about two Syrians, a Senegalese, and an American--about an odd and inspiring entanglement of lives and a rude interruption brought courtesy of the fed. If anything that side of reality illustrates the meaning of "bare lives," it's this film.

Possibly the greatest moral challenge I face personally these days is to learn how not to hate this Republican administration and all who support or appease them.

"Bare Life"

"Behind every death there was a dream, and then a tragedy. More than 9,000 illegal immigrants have died since 1993 in the attempt to seek a better life in Europe, according to the European organization United.

“They drown in Gibraltar are blown up in mine fields on the Turkish-Greek border, die in asylum custody, commit suicide and get killed when they are sent out of Europe. We don't think about it much. It is unwanted and dispensable life.

“The European Parliament* has backed a much criticised new return directive which, when implemented by 2010, will allow governments to keep illegal immigrants, and those who have overstayed their visa period, in detention for up to 12 months, ban re-entry into Europe for five years, and make it easier to deport vulnerable people.

“Maybe it seems like a simple and rational piece of legislation, but it is more than that. The Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben talks about "bare life"; life which has been reduced to biology whilst the person's political existence has been withdrawn by those who have the power to define who is included and who is excluded as worthy, sovereign human beings. Power through, for example, law can legitimately be exercised over them whilst their own voice is negated.

“The thousands of nameless, faceless and unwanted people who risk their lives trying to cross our borders, desperate to make a better life for themselves, constitute such 'bare life'. Their aspirations and legitimacy can be effectively negated by the power of a bureaucratic vote in Brussels. Meanwhile, goods, capital, and western citizens are flowing freely around the globe in the name of globalization. The irony, tragedy and hypocrisy is obvious for those who want to see it.

“. . . for every harsh immigration law passed, for every statement made about the need to keep 'them' out, for every immigrant imprisoned, we make 'the others' a little less human and a little more 'bare life'.” Iselin Asedotter Stronen, “The Bare Life of Immigrants,” The New Statesman

But it's even worse than that, isn't it?

We also make ourselves a little less human and a little more "bare life." In our own eyes. In others' eyes. And hideously, dangerously, ironically enough, in the eyes of the overlords, too.

How to Assist the Iowa Immigrant Detainees

If you, too, think that attacking poor people who work hard at the nation's dirtiest job is not the right way to deal with the decades-old corrupt immigration/employer dance of immigrant exploitation, please take a moment to visit this site.

Standing FIRM, part of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, provides information here for how you can provide desperately needed help to the 400 people whose lives were reversed this week in Postville, IA.

Pico thanks you.

Republicans Driving Immigrants out of AZ's Economy

As we predicted, the employer sanction law is pushing both documented and undocumented immigrants out of Arizona. Together with the Republican-engineered tanking economy, the Republican-engineered "employer sanction" law, which punishes employers for hiring undocumented workers, is driving down school enrollment, apartment occupancy, home buying, and retail sales in what undoubtedly will be a continuing spiral of decline for as long as the Republican-engineered home mortgage fraud crisis and the resulting Republican-created credit crisis persist.

How marvelous for us all.

If there's anyone in this state who has the unmitigated gall to vote for any Republican anywhere at any time in the future, it will prove beyond any remaining doubt that a sack of cement is smarter than a Republican.

Ask me if I'm angry.

Republican Russell Pearce and his merrie band of Republican racists has declared war. Unfortunately, like his White House mentors, Cheney and George, he's shot the wrong target. As Republican Sherrif Joe Arpaio and his thugs round up brown people, they are creating a climate of fear--called "panic" in this NYTimes article--that is enveloping not just undocumented workers but documented residents of 24 years and more. This is because they can't find jobs when the economy is depressed, and they have relatives here who are not documented, and they feel the flood of hostility being intentionally whipped up at Mexican immigrants. They don't feel welcome anymore, because they aren't.

The hysterical reaction of Republicans to the influx of (invited and lured) citrus harvesters, cotton pickers, farmworkers, construction workers, restaurant workers, hotel and motel service personnel, food service and grocery workers, landscapers, miners, and domestics--terrifying bunch, huh?-is rapidly worsening an economy that is already bringing record foreclosures and other disasters.

As these families leave, they withdraw their children from our public schools and school revenue, based on headcounts, tanks, too. They leave, and when they do, they leave groceries, gasoline, household goods, school supplies, sundries, prescription medications, clothing, shoes, and all other consumer goods on the shelves. Then businesses close and homes go into foreclosure, and when businesses close and homes are abandoned, city, county, and state revenues plummet and neighborhoods deteriorate. When these things happen, everybody--brown, black, yellow, red, and white, turns blue.

This is predictable in a state that historically has always depended on Mexican laborers for its prosperity. It doesn't take a genius to connect these dots. Apparently, however, it takes a bunch of Republicans.

The Neo-Nazification of the USA: Part I: Bush, and the Demonization of Hispanic Immigrants

Any doubt that the USA is being neo-Nazified can be erased just by making a careful, point-by-point comparison between what the Nazis did in the 1930s and what Bush and the fascist Republican Right are doing now.

At some point, a stream of coincidences becomes something else. It becomes evidence of deliberate replication. We’re there.

This is the first in a series of posts that I hope will help to make that clear.

I'm not writing this because I enjoy slogging through this mire. I'm writing this because I can't can't can't understand why Americans aren't in the streets as one, in protest. I'm writing this because maybe, by making ourselves, one by one, see our denial for what it is, we might find the strength to stop the madness.

I'm writing, now, specifically, because I am appalled by what I'm seeing in Arizona and across the USA, and what I'm hearing across the mainstream media about immigrant Hispanics.

I can't can't can't understand why Americans of my generation and older, at the very least, aren't seeing that America is behaving just like Germany on Krystalnacht. And condemning it!

I just don't see the difference. I. Do. Not. See. A. Difference. Sure, I hear the justifications. They're "illegals." I also hear the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and fraud in that formulation, as well. For decades, we've been happy to use undocumented workers, happy to exploit them, happy to extort them, happy to sneer and denigrate them, too, but nonetheless happy to ignore why they came and how. (Not to mention that there are far worse crimes that we routinely ignore when powerful white people commit them.) There's a parallel here, too. Germans were quite comfortable to use Jews for centuries in a similar quid pro quo, wrapped similarly in racist rhetoric.

Meanwhile, what I see is human beings being dehumanized, demonized, rounded up like cattle, separated from their infant children, dragged from their workplaces, detained, and deported. I hear them being vilified and cursed, and I hear credible reports from eye-witnesses that they are also being beaten, and that some have been killed in detention. And I hear with my own ears exhortations on American airways to kill more of them!

I can't believe this is happening in my country, except that I know we have been carefully prepared for just this kind of pogrom--let's call it what it is--by a barrage of divisive, brutal, hateful rhetoric over many years directed at several targerts. More later about that. Well, guess what? The Reich also didn't spring whole overnight from barren soil. It grew up over a decade or longer, depending on what you count, and it fed on exactly the same excrement: Fear, division, resentment, economic concerns, hate, and a language carefully crafted to dehumanize.

What I'm not hearing, however, is a loud and irresistable demand from the clergy and the governor and the people--much less the president and the Congress==to stop this right now. In fact, I'm hearing the opposite! Poll after poll tells us that Arizonans want Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his thugs to do exactly what they're doing as he and others like him rush to profit from the crudest, cruelest kinds of demagoguery.

Poor working human beings ought not be the target of anything, and are only the target of cowards and thugs. We have other means for addressing legitimate problems in border security and legitimate problems in workforce provision.

The real target ought to be a corrupt, duplicitous, and disintegrated immigration policy, a greedy corporatist economy, and a complicit public that wants its lettuce and landscaping cheap.

OK. End of rant. At least today.

About the neo-Nazification of the USA: I want to begin with a couple of observations about Hitler taken from the USA Office of Strategic Services' 1943 report by Walter C. Langer, “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler, His Life and Legend”:

At the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler made use of an extraordinary figure of speech in describing his own conduct. He said,
"I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker." (p. 4)

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or a wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it. (p. 219)

I’m a little unnerved. I just found these an hour or so ago, and from what I’ve observed, they apply just as aptly to George W. Bush. That proves nothing, of course. But, lacking any contradicting patterns in his behavior, I will add this bit of information to a growing pile of similarities between the Nazification of Germany and what I believe to be the Nazification of the USA.

Again, at a certain point, a stream of coincidences becomes something else. It becomes evidence of deliberate replication. As I see it, if there’s a credibility problem, it doesn’t lie in pointing them out. It lies in refusing to see them.