Wow!

Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project: Great cause, great graphic.

An Open Letter to Partur

Partur sent this comment yesterday to a post I wrote some time ago, called "Belatedly, AZ Republic Blasts Immigrant Suffering":

"Wow. I hardly know where to begin.

"First, I want to make it clear that I don't wish death upon any of the people crossing the desert in search of a better life. I admire that kind of determination- we all want that for our families, and death should never be a result of our efforts to do so.

"However, breaking the law should never be a part of that mission, either.

"With that in mind, I pray tell, what is the answer here? Whose responsibility is it to prevent this sort of thing from happening? Is lack of compassion really the issue, or is it the fact that the people who died crossing into Arizona made that choice and took that risk on their own? Why is it up to American citizens to open wide our borders and our pocketbooks for those who made the foolish choice to evade our laws in the first place? No one who upholds the sovereignty of our borders thinks these people deserve to die- believe it or not, we are capable of compassion- but we do see it as a natural consequence of MAKING THE PERSONAL CHOICE TO ILLEGALLY CROSS THE ARIZONA BORDER VIA THE SONORAN DESERT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SUMMER. It's like anything else in life- when poor choices are made, the consequences can be very, very painful.

"On another note, as much as I disagreed with your 6/17 post "Should This Man be Our President," it was good reading. Interpretation is tricky business. I try very hard to understand the liberal viewpoint and criticisms of the conservative movement, and it definitely helped me see how those opinions are formed. We may not see eye-to-eye on most things, but I appreciate your blog nonetheless!"

I'm answering Partur here because this dialog is too detailed to bury in comments to a months-old post.

Dear Partur,

First, thank you for writing and for your kind comments. Second, please excuse my typo in my brief "redirecting" comment at my original post. I know your alias is Partur, not Parfur!

(1) Tragically, there's a huge "data divide" separating conservatives and progressives on this and many other issues. Conservative commentators such as Lou Dobbs, conservative legislators such as AZ's Russell Pearce and CO's Tom Tancredo, and conservative websites such as Free Republic rely for immigration information primarily on ten organizations. All of them were founded by one man, John Tanton.

You can test this for yourself by noting the names of the organizations that Dobbs and the others cite or invite. Then you can research John Tanton and decide for yourself what to make of his enterprise. For instance, see what the highly regarded Southern Poverty Law Center has to say, for starters. Check its sources.

Check the righthand column on my blog, under "Heads Up." You'll find a number of immigration-related links. These are the data sources progressives rely on.
The chief differences are that the latter are not generated by organizations founded by one person, are regarded as nonpartisan and academically reliable, and report findings that are widely replicated by researchers in a large variety of institutions, including the President's own Council of Economic Advisors--hardly a bastion of liberal thought.

I encourage you to take the time to compare the findings of the two groups. It's not that Americans are "interpreting" the same data differently. It's that we're operating on two entirely different sets of data. (I don't know your background. If you've got a degree in any research-based field, you will know the basic rules for evaluating whether a given study by anybody is credible or not. If you don't know these guidelines, email me privately and I'll dig them up for you.)

(2)To say that immigrants "choose" to come here is like saying the people at the World Trade Center "chose" to go to work that day. It's technically correct, but only in the most restricted, grossly misleading, and self-serving sense. Please bear with me. I don't want to insult you, but you asked my take and I'm laying it out. I invite you to do your own wide and deep research to test whether I'm telling the truth or not.

On the one hand, Mexican and Central American low-wage workers are being forced out of their own countries by impossibly harsh economic conditions. On the other, US agribusiness, construction, meat packing, landscaping, roofing, hotel, restaurant, and other industries are still actively advertising jobs in the US, luring them here to provide a cheap and docile workforce. And so they come. These are facts, not opinions. We can dispute opinions, but you'll agree that it's insane to dispute facts.

Economic realities are what's driving Latino/a low-wage workers out of their own countries. If you haven't already, please consider reading informed critiques of NAFTA and other global "free" trade policies. I'd strongly recommend Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine for a general overview. It's well researched, carefully documented so that readers can evaluate her sources for themselves, and very readable. It's not "opinion." It's fact. (For instance, there's no rational question that the Chicago School of Economics exists, or that it masterminded Pinochet's 9-11 coup in Chile or that Milton Friedman is conservatives' all-time favorite economist, or that Friedman espoused what Klein says he espoused, or that what happened in Chile and the other laboratory countries she deals with actually happened.)

After The Shock Doctrine, it would be worthwhile to read critical exposes of Monsanto's genetically engineered seed enterprise and its effects on indigenous farmers in Latin America, the US, and Canada, just for starters. Also look into water privatization initiatives in 3rd World countries globally-- e.g., Bolivia. (There's a new book about about Monsanto that conveniently packs a lot of information in one source.) All this can be dismissed, of course, but pretending it isn't actually happening won't mean it isn't actually happening.

The point is that fair-minded people who live in a reality-based world dig into the causes behind illegal immigration, and consider who benefits from the status quo.

(3) For decades, US administrations of both parties have collaborated with US industries in several sectors to ensure a steady supply of cheap, docile labor. You know that's a fact. Why this goes on and who benefits is pretty obvious. I recommend a book called Nobodies, just for one tiny case study.

Yet at the same time, US immigration policy sharply restricts the number of slots open to low-wage workers from Mexico and Central America. Immigration policy is available online. See for yourself. Despite steady appeals from US business to increase the quotas, it doesn't happen. Therefore, the fact is that vast majority Latino/a peasants driven from their own countries and lured north by promises of green cards and good jobs can't come in legally. However, having gotten as far north as the border, they've then got two practical alternatives: go back to starvation, which they can't do and can't afford to do, or cross illegally. I know that if you were in their shoes, you'd do exactly what they're doing, which is why conservatives' moral indignation about this is so galling.

(4) Who's responsibility? Not the peasants', IMHO. They're caught between the corruption in their own countries and the corruption in ours and in multinational businesses. They can't control US immigration policy or stop global "free" trade. But to say that they "choose" implies that they have some alternative, when the reality appears to be that they don't.

To me, it doesn't take a vast empathic capacity to understand that nobody sane "chooses" to walk across the Sonoran Desert any time of year, let alone in the summer. This is obviously driven by sheer desperation. If you doubt it, talk with the Humane Borders people, and talk with some immigrants themselves. You'll then be in a better position to judge them. And you do have the option to talk with these experienced sources. You don't have to take my word for it.

(5) If conservatives and Rightwingers were as vocal, organized, outraged, and militant about, oh, say, drunk driving, the $billions fraudulently disappeared in Iraq, Medicare fraud, tax evasion, contruction companies that repeatedly ignore safe crane regulations, Wall Street thieves, crappy levee construction, Pentagon purchasing scams, wife beating, unsafe FDA practices, ignored mine regulations, and so on, I'd be a lot more persuaded by their concern over the lawbreaking aspect. I'm sorry, but I don't buy the crocodile tears of outrage, and even if I did, nothing justifies Postville, IA and what's going on here in AZ. Nothing. We're supposed to be civilized, democratic people who believe in much higher values.

(6) This belated fixation on illegal immigration: It's been going on for decades, even longer. Our cities and towns and we ourselves have benefitted from it and still do, or you can be sure that it would have been ended. So why the sudden frenzy?

My conservative paratrooper WWII fighter father taught me to follow the money, never trust government, not to believe everythng I'm told, and do my own homework. My progressive mother agreed. So I ask myself whether there's any possible correlation between the explosion of for-profit privatized prisons that are reimbursed on a per capita basis and the sudden frenzy of immigrant roundups. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me. I ask myself whether there's any possibility that focusing America's attention on a pretty-much made-up crisis might have anything to do with diverting its attention from the systematic destruction of the US middle class. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me, and it sure isn't unprecedented. So, more suggested reading: Top Heavy, The Great Risk Shift, The Global Class War. We report, you decide.

(7)Last but not least, and with all due respect, the piety of US conservatives is profoundly disturbing to me. Not that you expressed piety yourself. To your credit, you didn't. But you will grant the heavy emphasis conservatives give to their reverence for Christianity, I'm sure. For that reason, even though you won't like it, I'm calling your side of the aisle on your own widely trumpeted "Christian" values.

See, to me, immigration directly calls up "do unto others," the Good Samaritan parable, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' repeated cautions to the pharisees about narrow fixation on legal technicalities, "if you do it to the least of these," and many other explicit Christian values I learned in church and at home from parents who were each the child of a minister.

The thing is, I was taught that these are meant to apply to real life. But from conservatives' and Rightwingers' behavior and writings about immigration, I gather that Leviticus and Deuteronomy have been far more influential in your lives than Jesus.

It's not that I think my side of the aisle is perfect. Not hardly. It's just that I NEVER see conservatives founding or staffing or supporting groups like Humane Borders. Instead, I see them slashing the tires of Humane Borders' water trucks (I can provide documentation) and threatening to kill "illegals." You know I'm not making that up.

I'm saying, among other things, that this is a hugely complex issue that takes a lot of time to research. It's not a question of rhetoric and pumped-up outrage. There aren't easy answers and the bad guys are everywhere, including us.

If it were up to me, I'd rengotiate NAFTA and all the rest of these disastrous trade pacts. Then I'd employ our vast economic, trade, and diplomatic power to force source countries' corrupt elites to create stable, fair working conditions for their people. Then I would ensure that US businesses adopt living wages and decent working conditions for ALL workers, both to attract native born labor to jobs they (sanely) won't take now AND to keep greedy corporations from playing off cheap foreign labor against US workers. I would go after what I consider to be predatory capitalism a la Monsanto and Coca Cola. Then I would enact fair, enforceable, and comprehensive guest worker programs, not the Braceros kind or the kind being proposed by Napolitano and other US governors now. (This is too complex to go into here. Do your own homework.)

Your mileage may vary, Partur, but one thing's for sure: You'd do exactly the same thing in the shoes of these immigrants and you know it. I wonder what that simple moral truth suggests to you about your own next steps.

Thanks for writing,
Pico

Would You Buy a Brain from This Man?

He's not using his. (Photo courtesy of AlterNet)

There's a Box

Findings of the federal mine “regulators” (I use the word loosely) are that those Utah miners weren’t killed by an earthquake after all. They were killed by their bosses. The mine operator chose to remove the columns of coal supporting the roof of mountain over their heads. Everybody knew this was coming. The bosses brought it on.

From the foremen on the line to the gentlefolk in the board room to the inspectors and the regulators to the administration that sets mine safety policy, the tacit consensus is, “It’s about our profits. Their lives are of no consequence.”

White-collar Americans are pleased to imagine that such murderous exploitation stops at the mine shaft and the factory door.

Not really. Linking the Utah mine murders to a tide of desperate immigrants to citrus-picking heat strokes to unaffordable health care to a tsunami of home foreclosures to the lies about global warming to Enron’s happy run of piracy to soldiers sans armor to Wall Street “bubbles” to vanished pensions to privatized water to outsourced jobs is the consensus that our lives are of no consequence. It’s all about their profits.

But this is the world we’re choosing. Translate slogans like “war on terror,” “over-regulation,” “let the market decide,” “big-government liberals,” “class warfare” or “socialized medicine” and find, “It’s about our profits. Their lives are of no consequence.”

Old women in Africa saw off their daughters’ clitorises with the lids of sardine cans. Old women in Afghanistan stone younger ones for adultery, real or imagined. It’s not only about the men whose status is thus secured. It’s also about the women who comply with them.

They accept that their welfare depends on their complicity.

It’s not that they can’t see outside the box.

They’ve forgotten that there is a box.

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?

The Sorrow and The Pity

For the last several weeks, I have been rendered pretty much mute by the sheer scale of injustice, corruption, cynicism, and, yes, treason, represented by the US establishment's response to illegal immigration.

There've been days when I've gone totally silent, days when I've wondered what possible good it can do to write one more post pointing out one more stupendous act of cruelty or one more boggling transgression of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. It has sometimes seemed useless, a flailing in gale force hurricane winds. There are times when I still feel that way, and there will be times like this again.

I don't ask for forgiveness and certainly not for consolation. It's not about that. If there's any point in writing about this, it's to chronicle the everyday collateral effects of evil.

I've been thinking about this subject a lot in my flight into silence. Not thinking well, perhaps, but processing nonetheless, sometimes consciously, sometimes in the dark recesses of my brain.

A documentary called "The Sorrow and the Pity" has helped me to focus somewhat. I've been told that it's the most famous documentary in film history, and that General Charles de Gaulle himself, leader of the Free French movement and later French President, banned it from France.

It doesn't shame me to admit that I hadn't heard of it. For one thing, I was a twenty-something with other things on my mind when it came out, and I was exploring them in Europe without aid of a television. For another, there must be a google of things I've never heard of. Who's counting?

"The Sorrow and the Pity" is about the German occupation of France in WWII, filmed from the perspective of men and women who were there, then.

Certainly it doesn't parallel our contemporary response to immigration in any way. However, in its encyclopedic portrayal of the human response to evil, it serves, perhaps, as a warning that no one and no country is immunized from complicity. When evil on the scale of the Holocaust occurs, when evil on the scale of global trade and the rape of low-wage Latino immigrants takes place, it's because most of the people there at the time comply. Comply: Complicity.

What "The Sorrow and the Pity" reveals is the timeless, free-radical nature of evil, and something very like a genetic template for governing human response.

There are the mundane dime-a-dozen clueless, absorbed by two-year-olds or taverns or soccer or Gaulois and boules, or what you will. There are the picayune petit bourgeois who are fine with it if they can but sell another round of cheese. There are the clergy, ranked by degree of complicity or resistance. There are the enraged ineffectual; the enablers; the sexual hangers-on; the Leftwing militant; the go-to-ground who hope just to be let alone; the closet sympathizers; the social, mental, intellectual, and emotional defectives; the genuine heroes; the consolers; the mockers; the ones who flee. There are the political elites, the intellectual elites, the churchmen, and the healers. There are the animals, helpless equally in the slaughter or the flight.

They are we. Surely by now that is clear?

What remains to be driven into the resistant, distracted, denying, or oblivious skulls of Americans today is that what is going on in the official US response to illegal immigration is the prelude to a police state. In future posts, I will try to explain what I see, but for now, "immigration" is a laboratory in which all the instruments of fascist, police state repression are being tested, honed, refined, polished, and piloted.

What is going on in "immigration" is but a preview of things to come unless we decide otherwise, now. Unless we are willing to see and then to act, we'll soon see organized labor, homosexuals, feminists, Leftists, and constitutionalists "addressed" in equivalent ways. I'm not the first to say so. Wiser persons than I have been warning us for fifteen years or more.

As I've said, this subject can be overwhelming at times to those of us brought up softly. But it can also be energizing, empowering, reminding us through others' suffering that freedom wasn't forever guaranteed us by our fathers and mothers.

It can also tap into our strongest and best instincts. May it be so.

We can't let Latinos' suffering be in vain.

WaPo: Arpaio Sweeps "Blatantly Unconstitutional"

Yeah. Like we've all been saying for about a hundred years.

John Dickerson, in his New Times Valley Fever blog, pretty much nailed my feelings about this Washington Post editorial when he wrote,

"The Post editorial succinctly unpacked the pattern of Maricopa deputies’ racial profiling — and the price it costs documented citizens who get arrested and harassed in the process. The Post's editorial board was able to identify and nail this issue from 2,300 miles away. What a shame more local reporters and editors can’t see it as clearly from so close."

The editorial itself concludes thus:

"The sheriff loves describing himself as a tough guy and delights in humiliating prisoners by, among other things, making them wear pink underwear and swelter in open-air camps. He has gotten away with it -- even won reelection -- thanks to his colorful public persona and an electorate rattled by the demographic changes caused by immigration, legal and illegal. He denies allegations of racial profiling even as his deputies practice something that looks awfully like it. It's high time for federal authorities, or courts, to step in to halt what has become a travesty of justice in Arizona."

Our Phoenix mayor and our Arizona governor have called repeatedly for a halt to Arpaio's festival of abuses directed at our Latino residents, citizens and visitors alike. Unfortunately, nothing much has happened, I suspect because so far, the tide of public sentiment has rolled in the direction that white supremacist propagandists intend. This is not so surprising. After all, as we and others have often noted, the constellation of organizations assembled by John Tanton for this purpose has all but monopolized the attention of big mouths like Lou Dobbs. Mouths like his have a farther reach than mouths like ours.

But surely there's more to it? Of course. A certain cohort of US employers profits on the backs of undocumented workers, in the process cheating their competitors--employers who obey the law (and understand the concept of common morality)--and inserting yet another stick in the wheel of the so-called "free market." Here's the source of US immigration policy. It's pertty much that simple, if you ask me.

Those employers are here, just as they are elsewhere. They are among that sublimely influential stratum of citizens whose views find their way into the councils of local newspaper editors, state legislators, and the like. This is the lobbying class. When it is bolstered, as now, with the voices of many citizens poisoned with far-Right propaganda because it takes their attention away from complexities like NAFTA, CAFTA, and "free trade," it slows certain things down a lot.

This can and will change when the tide shifts and works in the favor of the rest of Arizonans, we who stand for justice, understanding that "law" isn't necessarily the same thing. When the critical mass of regular citizens wakes up to the hideous brutality being dished out to Latino residents and gets that it's just a matter of time until that same brutality is dished out in other directions, things will change.

When the critical mass of regular citizens understands that "worker abuse" is abuse of ALL workers, including those who live in your home, and that only pro-organized labor policies can hope to address widespread workplace injustices affecting ALL workers, then these things can and will change.

When the great mass of Arizonans understands the connection between global "free trade," the loss of Arizona jobs, the degradation of Arizonans' wages, AND the presence and abuse of undocumented workers, then things will change.

This is all of a piece. It means we ALL need a new deal. It won't happen for us, for immigrants, or for all Arizona workers until and unless Arizonans wake up and demand it. That day will come when we realize that our first allegiance is to each other, not to the lobbyist class.

AZ Anti-Immigrant Ballot Update

In a possible sign that Arizonans have begun to sober up a bit from the Right's virulent anti-immigrant binge, this from the AZ Republic:

"Two voter initiatives designed to toughen Arizona illegal-immigration laws will not appear on the fall ballot, the chairman of the campaigns told supporters this week.

"Don Goldwater, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate, wrote in an e-mail that initiative campaigns working to strengthen the state's employer-sanctions law and to require police officers to enforce immigration law each failed to collect the 153,365 petition signatures required to put the proposed measures before voters on Nov. 4.

"Both Goldwater and state Rep. Russell Peace, the Republican sponsor of last year's employer-sanctions legislation, launched the initiative drives in March 2007.

"But they lacked the financial backing needed to hire paid signature gatherers."

The failure of these two measures to make it to the November ballot signals a widening fissure between far-Right Republicans and their often more moderate pro-business colleagues. Goldwater's measure would have stripped licenses from businesses for the first incident of knowingly hiring undocumented workers. Now, a more moderate pro-business measure is expected to appear on the fall ballot.

"The Stop Illegal Hiring initiative, which would provide more protections for businesses while targeting the pay-in-cash labor market and identity theft, submitted signatures to the Secretary of State's Office on Tuesday.

Who's Sorry Now? Oh, Puhleeze!

Anti-immigration "Minutemen" founder Jim Gilchrist laments the possibility of violence in the movement he helped to create.

"Today, Gilchrist is worried that a few self-proclaimed patriots might be carrying a gun.

"After seeing online videos that encouraged border violence amid calls to crack down on illegal immigration, the 59-year-old Aliso Viejo resident said he feels responsible for what started out as a publicity campaign and has since fallen prey to internal divisions and to influence by people he believed had 'Saddam Hussein mentalities.'

"'In retrospect, had I seen this, had I had a crystal ball to see what is going to happen… Am I happy? No,' Gilchrist said in a phone conversation late last week. Am I happy at the outcome of this whole movement? I am very, very sad, very disappointed.'"

Oh well duh. Sorry, but there's no way on earth I believe he didn't see the possibility of violence. I mean, words like "invasion" don't exactly conjure rose petals--oh. Er. Unless you're name is Rumsfeld. Maybe Gilchrist was just following his Fuhrer? Consider:

'"It's an 'invasion'," Gilchrist said of illegal immigration across the border between the United States and Mexico, "but it's not a war. It is a covert 'Trojan Horse invasion'."

"That's a marked difference from the Gilchrist who led supporters on a caravan across the country two years ago to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX, shouting at critics before leaving from Los Angeles: 'Minutemen, stand your ground!. . . If it's a war he wants, then let it begin here.'"

"The year before, just back from the border trip, he told a group of 150 supporters at an anti-illegal immigration group meeting: 'I'm damned proud to be a vigilante.'

"Last year, a coalition of human rights and labor groups labeled Gilchrist a 'voice of intolerance' in the debate over immigration reform. In 2005, the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center reported that neo-Nazis had joined the border-watching event led by Gilchrist."

He can't go around carelessly spewing words like "war" and "vigilante" and "invasion" about brown-skin Mexican immigrants without expecting, if not inviting, militant neo-Nazi types to join his little tea party.

Gilchrist is he who waged an internal war with our own Chris Simcox over control of the Minuteman Project. Sorry, but he can't now divorce himself from the consequences of his deliberate racist organizing. He built it, he owns it.

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.)

More on Eating With Accountability

Brownfemipower (BFP) pushed me to think past the given frames on choosing what I eat.

First, let it be said that I still eat fast foods occasionally because I'm too lazy to plan ahead. I still eat meat. I also weigh way more than I ought to, which, in my case, is not for a lack of decent grocery stores in my neighborhood, or because I can't afford to fill my belly with nutritious foods and so opt for carbs. I am beginning to excavate this enormously complex issue. I'm not hypocritically "talking the talk." I'm thinking out loud. There's a difference. I'm taking next steps on a journey.

BFP made my week by acknowledging my response to her posts and EllePhD’s on this vegan/vegetarianism subject. I’m happy to have connected partly because I couldn't reach BFP directly to tell her how much I admire her work. For that matter, I still can’t. She’s turned off the "Comments" option on La Chola. But now that I've dug around in the tombs of the Internet, I think understand why, and I now consider that act a wonderful example of owning her own power. BFP could have just gone away, driven into silence by that particular pack of hyenas. (You know who you are.) Instead, thank God, she turned her mike back on and drew some insurmountable boundaries for people who plainly are not acquainted with the concept.

BFP’s response makes me really happy, too, not just because I am a huge fan of her crystalline thinking and writing, but also because I so much want to link across the chasms that the birth lottery carved between our paths. It's not easy, it's perilous, and it doesn't come with promises of perfection on either side, I know. But linking across race, class, sex, gender, nationality, immigration status , religion (and all the rest) is mortally essential. Mortally, morally, vitally essential.

Because you know we're supposed to fail at it. We're not supposed to talk with each other, and if we try, we're supposed to blow it. Everything about the status quo depends on our not connecting across the chasms. When the buttons they’ve planted blow up, we’re really just doing their dirty work. Lateral hostility. All that. It’s true. Look how much time we’ve lost already.

Which isn’t to say we can’t get angry or disagree with each other. It’s just that there’s a way to do so without gutting each other like catfish. To me, BFP illustrates how in her post in reply to EllePhD about vegetarian/veganism. She isn’t attacking anybody. This is one of the several reasons I admire her work.

Second, let it be said that this is a skill too few possess, including me. There's a difference between knowing what I ought to do and being talented at it. Again, I’m just beginning to excavate this next enormously complex issue. These are next steps on the journey.

More thoughts on eating with social consciousness.

It’s also about the vendors.

On the vast list of things I just do not get is why progressives are not all over the whole constellation of worker justice issues: a living wage, worksite conditions, wage theft/fraud practices, health and safety factors, union busting, and all the rest.

Oh, right. “Benefits.” Let’s stop calling health insurance, retirement income, and profit-sharing, and personal leave “benefits,” OK? “Benefits"? As if they’re ours solely at the discretion of the patriarch who owns our labor? Uh, no. This archaic term intrinsically undermines the truth, which is that these are non-negotiable, earned universal worker rights.

As a dear friend puts it, it doesn’t matter whether someone else writes your paycheck or hands you cash in exchange for your work: If somebody else pays you, you’re a worker.

So it’s obvious, isn’t it, that the way the grocery store or chain treats its personnel is directly related to the way your own boss treats you, right? Over time, unfair labor practice in one sector becomes unfair labor practice in all sectors. We get accustomed, and if we have it a bit better than some, well, unlke us, they're just "workers." That's just a "labor" problem. Not.

If that isn’t sufficient reason to get your head out of your sphincter and get active in worker justice, then what about this?

If eating with consciousness is about how the food gets to our mouths and where it comes from, then it’s also about all the other links in the chain, including the warehouse stockers and the cashiers and the gourmet deli workers. It’s about all the labor practices of their employers.

And if that isn’t sufficient reason to pull it out and get busy, then consider this:

Any employer who is willing to cheat his workers of a living wage, clean and safe working conditions, and universal worker earnings (healthcare, leave, retirement income, profit-sharing) is willing to cheat his customers of fair quality for a fair price. It's about one chain of stores for poor Latinos and another for wealthly Scottsdale. It's about expired product on the shelves, and half-rotted produce, and dirty butcher shops, because if the prime motive is money, don't think for a moment that you as consumer aren't fair game, too.

So let’s stop calling it "eating with a social consciousness." Consciousness is essential, but it isn’t a substitute for doing something to benefit the rest of the production line. Consciousness strikes me as the minimum factor necessary to benefit myself in this matter. If I eat with a social consciousness, I eat very well and support relatively fewer adverse repercussions for others, but I don’t actually change anything materially.

That takes eating with accountability.

I don’t get out much anymore, but I really believe that the last time I saw the (largely) white radical-to-progressive contingent get out en force around any of this was when Ronald Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers. There was a huge protest at the Mall in DC, and I'll never forget it because it began to seem, there for a while, that we might expand our peace and justice movements to include (gasp) all workers-- as if all workers are intrinsically linked in power, strategy, and, well, the fate of humanity. That would include poor white male workers. It seems to me that we could have changed the country if we had had the wit to include them in our demands, because then their anger and resentment would have been redirected. We would have made them allies instead of the reactionary tsunami that swept Reagan, Bush, and Bush into office.

The point is that it isn’t about menus. It's about all of us, and it’s about opening our eyes to every implication of the fact that we actually are all in this together, regardless of the fact that some of us are fuckers. We certainly can prioritize, but I don't think we can leave anybody out of the peace/justice equation.

I don’t aim to perfection. I just aim to do a little bit better with this horrible reality every day.

Belatedly, The AZ Republic Blasts Immigrant Suffering

Finally the Arizona Republic speaks:

The season of dying has started along Arizona's southern deserts.

Those who die are illegal immigrants, so some people say they get what they deserve.

After all, some people say, "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"

They've said it so loudly and for so long that they nearly drowned out some of Arizona's other voices.

In hard fact, what happens along the Arizona-Mexico border every summer is an enduring humanitarian crisis that takes the lives of real people.

Husbands.

Wives.

Sons and daughters.

Fences haven't stopped the deaths. Increases in Border Patrol agents haven't stopped it. The National Guard didn't stop it.

According to Border Patrol reckoning, 61 migrants died in the Tucson Sector from Oct. 1 through April 30. This tally is seven fewer than for the same period last year, which echoes a drop in the number of illegal immigrants caught entering the country.

Even at a reduced number, this represents a tragedy that Arizonans should not be willing to accept or ignore. What's more, those 61 souls perished before the summer heat begins taking a toll.

Migrants have long died trying to cross the border, but the numbers more than doubled from 1995 to 2005, according to the Government Accountability Office. More than three-quarters of that increase happened in Arizona. It was the result of enhanced enforcement in urban areas, which forced migrants deeper into harsh desert country.

The Rev. Robin Hoover has been keeping track of where deaths occur. He says that, eight years ago, bodies were generally found within three-quarters of a mile of a road. Now, they are found nearly 5 miles from the nearest road. The reason? Increased enforcement has driven migrants to even more remote and dangerous areas.

Hoover founded Humane Borders to try to save lives by placing water tanks along routes used by migrants. Despite the decreased numbers of border crossers this year, Hoover says the water stations disperse in excess of 1,500 gallons a week.

Years ago, The Republic editorial page began writing about summer death counts in the hope of shaming Congress into reforming immigration policies that contribute to those deaths. Washington wasn't paying much attention.

In recent years, the issue of illegal immigration reached hot-button status. Attention jumped right over those dead bodies. It leaped past the human dimension. Instead of being seen as people who are caught in a broken system, migrants are now portrayed as villains who are unworthy of sympathy.

That's where Arizona is today. Anger has the upper hand. Rage is louder than reason.

But Arizona risks its humanity if it can't refocus on what immigration policies are doing to real people.

Husbands.

Wives.

Sons and daughters.

The humanitarian crisis along our southern border needs to recognized for the tragedy it is. Policies that contribute to deaths by driving migrants deeper into the desert need to be assessed for the impact they have on people.

These things need to happen for the sake of the migrants' humanity.

And Arizona's.

The comments about the original editorial, on the Republic's website, make clear that much of Arizona has already lost its humanity. That was left by the roadside the minute these people elected to treat legality as if it were justice.

Is there anything more dangerous to our common humanity, or more disgusting, than a person who's lost the capacity for self-scrutiny and the saving grace of compassion?

Sheriff Joe: John Wayne's Mini-Me

That John-Wayne-Wannabe Arpaio wrote a piece in Latino Perspectives Magazine called "Illegal Immigration is Just That--Illegal." In this manifesto, mini-John turned the entire issue into About Joe, Bad Mayor, and the proverbial Group of Vocal Activists, of course.

His main claim is that he don't never selectively enforce the laws. Uh, BWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAAA!

Someone near and dear to Pico read that and wrote this:

Sheriffs and DAs have selectively enforced laws since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Who does he think he's kidding?

Here's the deal: We Anglos invited, lured, advertised for, and sometimes bus in poor laborers to do mean, dirty work for cheap. EVERYBODY was just fine with that until the GOP suddenly started making "illegal" immigrants the new Willie Horton--Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, Faux News, Lou Dobbs, Russell Pearce, and all the rest.

So I figure it has to do with the "Ownership Society"--something like, oh, I dunno, privatized prisons that are built by our tax dollars to give to wealthy cronies (like ball stadiums) and reimbursed by federal and state tax dollars on a per-prisoner basis. Duh. Like the fence, this sudden belated interest in "illegal" immigrants strikes me as just another Keep the GOP in Beemers for Life scheme paid for by you and me and the dumb shmucks who actually put these vultures in office.

It's amazing to watch sworn, self-touting heroes of capitalism throwing thousands of home-renting, house-buying, grocery-eating, goods-producing, clothes-wearing, tax-paying, Social Security contributing CONSUMERS AND THEIR FAMILIES right out of town voluntarily.

Almost as amazing as watching the home loan swindle-driven foreclosures rise, businesses slow down and close, and the school and infrastructure budgets plummet. Thanks. Great job, Brownie!

Hey, I'm one of the "We the people." Here's what *I* want: Raid Anglo neighborhoods and round up cocaine users, drug dealers, predatory swindling lenders, gas-guzzing air polluters, Mormon polygamists, corrupt legislators, office-abusing officials, high-rolling Johns, scofflaw drivers, and tax cheats with the same zest you apply to running after little, unarmed, powerless, poor brown people.

Yeah, THAT's going to happen.

Meanwhile, thank God we have a few decent people in office who can distinguish between racist re-election campaigns and the righteous prosecution of serious crime.

More on Agriprocessor and the Cowards' War on Immigrants

A comment a close friend of Pico's just posted on Daily Kos:

Unless we believe that terrorizing people is a good strategy for (a) misdemeanor offenders and (b) enhancing the world's political support for the USA, then we'd be well advised to drop this war on immigrants.

It's not the people we need to smack down. It's the deliberate use of immigration policy to provide greedy employers like Agriprocessor with a steady stream of undocumented workers who can be intimidated, cheated, and abused and who have NO recourse. For you anti-immigrants out there: If that's not the reason why our INS/ICE policies haven't changed in 50 years, pray do tell me what is. Follow the money.

Today it's the Guatemalans in meat packing companies. Before, it was Lithuanians, Poles, Vietnamese, and Mexicans. This is an age-old ladder that the industry has depended on since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, about exploited people in Chicago's meat packing houses. That was like 1909. The most desperate and vulnerable take the worst, nastiest, and most dangerous jobs. Then they progress up the ladder to citizenship and are assimilated. See Leys' article in yesterday's Des Moines Register for more about that history.

Nativists offer us two choices: Either grow your own meat and produce, or ignore undocumented immigrants. That's because if you drive them away, either your chicken price will go through the roof or your chicken factory will move to Mexico, and won't that be great for Postville!

The rest of us offer a better solution: A new New Deal, no more exploited workers from anywhere, including home-grown, and an end to so-called "free trade" and globalization.

Either we all hang together for global worker rights and decent pay, benefits, and conditions, or we'll all hang together. It's not rocket science.

Mean loves stupid and stupid loves mean. It's axiomatic. When we stoop to this, we demean ourselves, our flag, our country, and our global honor.

This isn't what my WWII Paratrooper Captain dad lost his eye for. He'd be sickened by what we've let ourselves buy in the co-opted names of "patriotism" and "Christian," because only cowards resort to torture and terror.

Rick Galeener's Chicken

Today on NOVA, I heard the usual outrage. Asked if an American would work a 12-hour day in a [dangerous, highly exploitative, blood-slick, bone-chilling, puke-inducing] meat packing plant for $6.25 an hour, the caller yelled, irate: “No! Americans won’t work for that! ‘Illegals’ are holding down the wages at these places!”

Whoever he was, he doesn’t know whether to wind his watch or run.

He could be any Anglo camped outside the Macehualli worker’s center at 25th St. and Bell Road. We may even have seen him pounding his flagpole, screaming curses through his bullhorn at the (obviously legal) immigrants waiting inside the chain link fence for somebody like us to give them a day job. He might have been Rick Galeener himself, that wrinkled, publicly urinating racist old rattlesnake who, probably, was the guy videotaping my license plate and my face as I got out to make arrangements with Sal Reza, beloved de facto leader of pro-migrant Phoenicians.

I wanted to say to him, “So Rick. You’re saying you “Christian patriots” do want to pay $15 a pound for raw, uncut chicken, right?”

Guys like Galeener can’t have it both ways. No undocumented, exploited immigrants, no $1.99/lb roasters. No $4.95 Church’s fried, either.

This is the bottom line that American racist-nativists happy to have cheap chicken as long as they don’t have to see who makes it aren’t willing to talk about. The self-limited choice, the sublimely short-sighted and settle-for-nothing choice they offer is this: Grow your own or tolerate “illegals.” Which will it be?

For those of us with considerably higher self esteem and a much more wholesome vision for tomorrow, there’s a way better way. We don’t advocate exploiting anybody. Read on.

American haven’t really thought through what it means to us to kick out undocumented workers, although here in Phoenix, watching the tax base erode and the For Sale signs sprout like stink weeds, we’re beginning to get a glimmer. We’re gradually catching on that no real “Christian patriot” capitalist worth his salt would run large numbers of hard-working good consumers out of town just pretty much for the hell of it.

I’m saying that Nativist America needs to rub one of its two brain cells against the other in hopes of igniting a spark of recognition.

Immigrant workers sustain this country’s economy. Its lowest-wage earners, they are the floor on which the rest of us stand. If they aren’t able to report for work, either we must or the businesses and the economy that depends on them will fall. Alternatively, the fact is, if the floor rises, so will everybody on it. That’s what Roosevelt understood, and so must we. Fast.

This is a window on the life of one meat packer in Sholom Rubashkin’s Agriprocessors, Inc., the meat processing plant in Postville, IA much in the news. This is about a 21-year -old Guatemalan woman named Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, why she came here, how she got here, and what she does at Agriprocesors, Inc. It is provided by Tony Leys at the Des Moines Register:

Guatemala is still recovering from a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Average income there is only 12 percent of income in the United States, and 43 percent of the average income in neighboring Mexico. Income inequality is starker in Guatemala, with the richest 10 percent of people controlling 43 percent of the wealth, compared with 37 percent in Mexico and 30 percent in the United States.
That is why so many poor Guatemalans risk robbery, arrest and heat exhaustion to make the trek to the United States.

Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, a Guatemalan immigrant who worked at the Postville plant, made the journey last winter.

Monzon is the daughter of a farmhand in rural Guatemala. She is a soft-spoken woman who wears braces and looks younger than her 21 years. She sat at a picnic table outside the Postville church on Friday and described her homeland and her life.
She said her hometown is a place of tiny wooden houses with metal roofs and dirt floors. Food costs are rising, she said, and jobs are scarce. Violence, which is tied to the drug trade, keeps getting worse.

Monzon's family borrowed money so she could try to make it to the United States. She took a bus for nearly a thousand miles from her hometown in southern Guatemala to the U.S. border. Most of the trip was through Mexico, where she saw people with nicer clothes and better houses than most Guatemalans she knew. The roads were in much better condition, she said, and more people had cars.

Despite being better off than Guatemala, Mexico is a poor place with few opportunities. So after reaching northern Mexico, Monzon walked across a desert border area with four other people and made it into the United States. Then she took buses for more than 1,300 miles to Postville, where she joined her brother. The total journey took 27 days.

12-hour shift, 30-minute break

Monzon said she had no trouble landing a job at Agriprocessors, where she worked from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., with a half hour break for lunch. She spent her nights in a cold, refrigerated room, always rushing to cut feathers off chickens and slap labels on them. She said the work was more grueling than she expected, but it was the only job available.

Yo, that fried chicken there. Want some fries with that?

According to Leys, Agriprocessor workers like Monzon make $6.25 to $7.50 an hour at jobs many of them borrowed thousands of dollars just to reach. When they are deported, they will lose their homes and farms in Guatemala that served as collateral, and the money they sent back home to stave off starvation for their families will be no more. What then?

The notion that these same workers will just turn around come back to Agriprocessors is a fantasy. They can’t afford to in any sense, and as word spreads across Central America about our terrorizing chicken-shit raids on the least of the least, nobody else will come, either. It may be desperate at home, but at least it’s not desperate and grotesque.

When they’re run out of Postville and Agriprocessor is forced to hire the locals, the price of chicken will hit the stars.

What Tancredo and Dobbs and Galeener and the rest don’t want to get into is that this and every other capitalist country has made a devil’s bargain to exploit anybody who’s vulnerable and has no leverage, in exchange for a decent, affordable standard of living for everyone else. Slaves, immigrants, refugees, poor people, women (what is it now? $.79 on the $1.00?) and old people, but especially poor immigrants: It’s a deal pretty much bred in the bone of capitalism itself, because capitalism is about profits, not about people.

So long as the people and the profits can peacefully co-exist—as they did during the country’s New Deal glory days—guys like Galeener can pretend that they're on the winning end. But when, as now, profit lust has slimed the country, gas is $4 a gallon and food prices are getting scary high, they can either question their priorities or blame the “illegals.”

Their choice is foolish. It’s like voting for a Republican if you're not Dick. It’s circling the wagons and firing.

No, Virginia. It’s not the “illegals” who are holding meat-processing and re-bar workers’ wages down. It’s Ronald Reagan and the rest of the GOP, then and since, who collaborated both to block sane immigration policies and to impose “free trade” and globalization on the rest of us. With the help of the Clintons and a whole bunch of craven, complicit, sell-out congressional Democrats.

Here's a clue. “Free trade” and NAFTA and its spawn amount to a wholesale declaration of war on American labor, domestic and imported. It started when the Idol of the Right broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1980 and shot labor unions in the chest.

That wound has festered and grown these 28 years. Now the economy created by Roosevelt’s high-wage/pro-union policies—you know, the one that gave your parents cheap university degrees, two cars, fine houses for 6% fixed 30-year mortgages, and employer-paid health insurance and pensions, weekends, and overtime pay--has gone, gone away.

Because tell me: What, if not unions and government enforced workplace regulation, stands between exploitative bosses like heavy GOP contributor Sholom Rubashkin and Monzon and, well, Linda Green, Bobby Ray Lee, and Tyrone Washington? It isn’t corporate ethics and it isn't Bush's "free trade."

Galeener either doesn’t know this or he doesn’t see what it has to do with him. He also doesn’t know that “free trade” means no unions and no workers’ comp or minimum wage enforcement and no benefits and all the investment safeguards of Enron, just as it means no regulation of predatory mortgage lenders and a flood of people like Monzon across our borders, fleeing from the wreckage of carnivorous multinationals.

He doesn’t even get that the same low-wage/no regulation conditions that drove Monzon to the United States are being replicated here by George Bush’s low-wage, anti-union, pro-corporate, anti-middle-class, tax-only-wage-earners policies.

But he’s about to get a clue.

So, either he can recognize that his half of the boat rises with Monzon’s and stand with her for higher wages, good benefits, a path to citizenship, and decent working conditions, or he and she and all the rest of us can all fall together. That’s the deal, locally and globally.

The choice is not between continuing to exploit immigrants and other vulnerable people or being wrung out and hung out. It’s not between an unacceptable status quo + an unacceptable (exploitative) guest worker program.

It’s between global workplace fairness and decency, and profits redirected into research, innovation, clean production, and real value, or global decline for 99% of us and immeasurably obscene profits for the rest.

Yes, propers for Monzon will mean higher food prices for you and me, but with a global New Deal and priorities re-centered on people and the planet that sustains us, we can afford it. If you don’t believe me, quit drinking the Kool Aid.

It’s just a question of will.

Can't Evacuate Unless You've Got Your Papers

If the nation hasn't already bottomed out on vicious stupidity, surely we're getting close.

This from the Rio Grande Guardian via Latina Lista over on Sanctuary:

McALLEN, May 14 - If a hurricane hits the Rio Grande Valley this season, residents evacuated via school buses will be prescreened for citizenship by Customs and Border Patrol.

Hurricane season starts June 1. In the event of a hurricane in the region, emergency officials predict more than 130,000 evacuees will leave the Valley by school bus. They will be checked for identification and citizenship before they can board.

Anyone who is not a citizen or is not a legal resident will be held in specially designed areas in the Valley that are “made to withstand hurricanes,” said Dan Doty, a Border Patrol spokesperson for the Valley sector.

Those specially designed areas include the Border Patrol facilities in Edinburg and Harlingen, Doty said.

Officials are so proud of this policy that news photographers were banned from shooting a drill:

Border Patrol agents could be seen checking the identification and citizenship of the mock evacuees, many of whom were senior citizens from the Las Palmas Community Center. After Guardian reporter started taking pictures of this part of the exercise, he was asked to stop and leave the area.

Some random thoughts occur.

Now that everybody knows that ICE will detain anybody (brown and black) who lacks proof of citizenship or required immigration papers, we also know that (brown and black) men, women, children, and babies lured across the border by corrupt agribusinesses (etc.) will try to ride out the storms in their brand-new hurricane-proof residences. Or maybe down at the Piggly Wiggly.

We saw what happened when residents in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast tried. (CNN is casing Edinburg for potential good angles even as we speak.)

We know humans and CEOs delay evacuation as long as possible, in denial and to preserve as much capital of the $$$ kind as possible. So we know that these school buses won't be loading three days ahead of squall lines. They'll wait til the last second.

We know from our local hyenas here in Arizona that wingnuts aren't actually satisfied with drivers' licenses or Mexican consul documents. They prefer verified, validated proof of citizenship and immigration status, whatever that may mean. Then. To that particular ICE agent. There. If they've decided.

And since it's not easy for people with low incomes to get passports and birth certificates and notary stamps and whatnot, we know a lot of folks who live in the Rio Grande Valley legally will also be denied access to evacuation.

Mini-Tutorial for the Middle+ Classes: People on way low incomes don't have any money to spend on family photos. They also don't have Internet access so they aren't always right up to speed on regulatory changes, and most crash, exhausted, before they can read the paper they don't subscribe to or turn on the TV they can't afford.

Many don't even have cars and if they do, gas costs what, an hour's wages a gallon? What's a round-trip to the nearest approved vendor of verified ID going to cost? Passports aren't available in just every little bug-tussle town, you know. And only God knows where to get verified, validated ID.

Immigrant agriculture workers -- or OK, 99.5% of them -- just weren't born in Middleclassville where conventional wisdom is breathed in with the baby powder for generations, and where people just come up knowing how to get official stuff taken care of. It's not like that for poor people. It's especially not like that for the people doing the hard work at the Del Monte subcontractor's Pik and Pak Paradise.

The bureaucracy is even confusing and intimidating for Tom Tancredo and Russell Pearce, so we know it's not a matter of native wit.

Now get this:

Officials are shooting for a tentative 30-minute window from arrival at an emergency holding post, through processing, and to final evacuation by bus. Each bus would carry about 50 to 60 people, according to Health Department officials.

“The initial questions are to determine whether the people can handle a five to 12 hour bus ride or vehicle ride of some type, and if they can handle that then the military will evacuate them on school buses to make sure they follow through with that,” said Hidalgo County Health Director Eddie Olivarez.

“If a person is not able to handle a five to 12 hour vehicle ride, then the military personnel will asses them medically, and then will assign ambulance or specially designed buses.” [Emphasis added throughout]

Yeah. Right.

I don't have the second sight, but I'm not stupid.

Just stop a sec and think how this will pan out. Thirty minutes from arrival to departure? That doesn't happen at your local high school on a sunny day.

I'm seeing logjams and screaming families in all colors, rain slashing on paperwork and wind snatching green cards, and folks in wheelchairs and folks not quite up to speed in English, and everybody one semi-second from all-out panic. And that's not even counting the angry and frustrated Border guards.

And now remember the cluster-duck that was mandatory evacuation from Houston and Galveston, where everybody sat on the INTERSTATE until their cars overheated or ran out of gas. But:

Highway 281 is the designated hurricane evacuation route and the Border Patrol checkpoint for the highway is at Falfurrias, in Brooks County.

Just how many school buses and "vehicles" does it take to haul 130,000 people? At 60 per, I get 2,166. These aren't interstates and there's a border patrol checkpoint up the road?

A 5 to 12-hour ride? On whose Bat Mobile?

Surely this is a leak intended to drive (brown and black) people out of the Rio Grande Valley from sheer revulsion well ahead of any hurricanes. Surely it isn't serious public policy.

Surely we haven't sunk to this level of depravity. For this is a racist, class war recipe for extermination-by-nature. And where oh where have we seen that before.

Just think of all the real estate that will be ready for GOP developers! There's a link beside the story on the Rio Grande Guardian touting the growth in McAllen, TX. If you don't think this could happen, read The Shock Doctrine.

Mississippi Mud

Truthout reports today on two predictable but still appalling immigration developments in Mississippi. In one case, "more than 100 workers in Pascagoula, Mississippi walked off the job at a Mississippi shipyard last week to protest conditions similar to slavery," involving bait-and-switch offers from a Northrop-Grumman subsidiary in Bombay. The Indians were promised residency, green cards, and jobs in return for payments of up to $20K. What they got is disgusting.

But in its infinite wisdom, Mississippi will be charging immigrant workers with felony offences for working in the US illegally, but giving exploitative employers a free pass, apparently.

If you note the terms of this law, you will see that everything in it is designed to increase the number of persons in detention and to maximize their days in prison. Mark my words: This will turn out to be just one more RepubliCon scheme designed to provide fodder to privatized prisons on the per diem Federal compensation dole. Betcha good money.

You heard it here first: Prison privatization, including immigrant detention centers, is just the newest version of human trafficking.

Another AZ Immigration Myth-Buster

This from the Tucson Citizen, "Immigration Reform: When There's No One to Harvest the Crops":

In Yuma, Muthart manages the 60-year-old, 8,000-acre Pasquinelli Produce Co. in a part of the state that produces up to 90 percent of the lettuce, broccoli, celery, cauliflower and other vegetables eaten by Americans during some winter months.

Because there is not a guest worker program allowing people from Mexico to come into the United States for the harvest, then return home, workers must cross the border - legally - daily if they want to work.

So Pasquinelli has stopped planting on land it owns more than an hour's travel from the border because workers don't have time to travel that far. Muthart said he is 20 percent to 25 percent short of the workers he needs for full produce production.

He has twice been to Washington, D.C., to argue for immigration reform or at least a guest worker program, but to no avail.

He and other farmers in the area now are deciding how much land they'll have to leave vacant next winter. "It's on everybody's mind," he said.

Robbs and Muthart both stressed one point: The farmworkers from Mexico don't want to live in the United States. They want a legal and easy way to go back and forth.

"These people like living in Mexico and to go home every night," Muthart said.
"They have their families down in Mexico," Robbs said. "They like it down there."

Duh.

What part of this escapes the RepubliCons in our state and national legislatures?

Mexicans who work further north in AZ perhaps can't go home every night, but they still want to go home as often as they can. The able and dignified man who does landscaping so well in our neighborhood goes home every weekend to continue building his house in Mexico. Where he plans to retire. NB: Well out of reach of our healthcare (as if) and Social Security systems. He doesn't want to live in the USA.

A lot of Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other Central Americans feel that way. They'd like to work here and pay into our tax base and Social Security system, but then, provided they can survive there, of course, they wish return to live in the land where they were born.

Family values, I guess. Or patriotism.

Mean Loves Stupid and Stupid Loves Mean

Following disclosures that we inject deportees with mind-altering drugs, sweep up immigrants in Gestapo-style midnight raids, and unaccountably throw poor brown people willy-nilly into bottomless pits called "for-profit detention centers," editors at the New York Times today reveal another charming piece of Republican genius for us to ponder.

Apparently we're banning people who marry foreigners from getting earned tax rebate checks:

Hard-liners were so intent on keeping the cash out of the hands of undocumented workers that they restricted the rebate to people with Social Security numbers. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, issued by the Internal Revenue Service to people who pay taxes but do not qualify for Social Security numbers, will not do. If a married couple files jointly, and one spouse is not eligible for the rebate, neither gets the money.

This hurts all manner of people who are working and paying taxes: American soldiers stationed abroad who happen to have married foreigners; high-tech immigrants in Silicon Valley and other places whose spouses are not authorized to work or have not yet had their paperwork processed. These are people who are perfectly legal, economically vital and politically inconvenient .[Emphases added.]

Does it get any dumber? Do we need clearer proof that mean loves stupid and stupid loves mean?

AZ Governor Janet Yanks Arpaio's Anti-Immigrant Funds

>>>>>AZ RESIDENTS: PLEASE CALL NAPOLITANO'S OFFICE NOW TO THANK HER FOR THIS MAJOR STEP TOWARD HUMANE AZ IMMIGRATION POLICY: 602-542-4331. WE MUST SPEAK OUT IN SUPPORT OF REASONABLE, COURAGEOUS STANDS! PLEASE ALSO CALL YOUR STATE LEGISLATORS AND ASK THEM TO SUPPORT THE GOVERNOR!<<<<<

In a deft strike at the Maricopa County Sheriff's highly controversial anti-immigrant round-up/deportation neighborhood sweeps, AZ Governor Janet Napolitano (D) has issued an executive order directing the state's Department of Public Safety (DPS) to give priority to targeting the tens of thousands of felons in the state:

The executive order directs the DPS to immediately deploy a squad to address the backlog of nearly 60,000 open felony warrants statewide, with priority on gang-related felonies and fugitives who are undocumented immigrants.

The action takes place in a statewide budget crunch partly brought on, ironically, by misguided rightwing Republican-driven anti-immigration policies such as the recent "employer sanctions" law. These measures are triggering an exodus from Arizona of Hispanics (immigrant and other) fearful and angry at being targeted. When they leave, they take millions from the consumer/tax streams that fund state operations.

The open felony warrants Napolitano seeks to address appear largely to have been tabled by the Sheriff in order to to target Hispanic immigrants who have entered the country without authorization. For the rest of this story, please see my post at Citizen Orange.