WE BEGIN, but do not end, with the sensational incident where the Obama White House, under Trumpian pressure, produced for public inspection the President’s “long form” birth certificate.

I do not know how successful I will be in my attempts to navigate the journey, but I think it’s important to move from an immediate feeling of hurt or anger to a broader view of the very thing that moves behind this event and is so upsetting about it. This is what I will try to do.

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Why can’t we roam this open country?
Oh, why can’t we be what we wanna be?
We want to be free.

–Bob Marley, 3 o’Clock Roadblock

ROADBLOCK

What a frenzy.

What a storm of feelings, thoughts, tweets, and emotions were exploded into view with that one event, where the President of the United States of America—a man of color—answered the insincere jeering of a single white citizen by producing his identity papers for inspection. As if our duly elected President was but a teen at a police checkpoint, wearing baggy pants and with his hands up against the hood. As if he were a young man standing on a corner looking Mexicano, immediately suspect and thus beholden to the law man to prove he was not up to criminal acts. What a shaking of the timbers of racial history were felt up and down the blogosphere in this one simple happening.

And rightly so. What a harsh reality we trade in; that it will take far more time than our grandparents’, parents’, or our own lifetimes to evolve past the sickly, sadistic, inhuman history we Americans share on matters of race. In matters of history—look to Mexico, or China, or Egypt—this country is in an infantile stage. And the things that were done to African Americans, and Indians (indigenous peoples from el Norte as well as from south of the “border”); to Chinese and Japanese and Chileans and so on…. these ghosts will not fade fast.

Donald Trump is one of those ghosts, his ailing caricature of a human form cavorting to and fro, swaying recklessly but cleverly. Almost as if animated by an actual soul, he bellows nearly-intelligible sounds, and the media flocks to absorb the spittle. His expression remains forever puckered like a lemon-shocked anus-mouth, his mind alight with tired stereotypes and bursts of fart-static. A clown who doesn’t have the decency to laugh at himself.

And Donald is so easy to hate, isn’t he? Because he is a hateful man. And because he enlists the powers of hate, hate long rooted in American soil. Hate that long ago drew blood and tossed ropes and smiled for the picture as the body cooled to a dusk-like temperature. Hate that raided Native American villages to murder sleeping children. Hate that buffed its boots before demanding that black men duck their eyes, and go drink from some other fountain. Hate that considers women, and Blacks and Cubans and Haitians and Iraqis and Afghanis and Mexican and Chinese and Vietnamese and Puerto Rican as less than human. Hate today that spends Joe Arpaio’s paycheck, props up his decaying frame, and parades his prisoners in pink. Hate yesterday that reneged on treaties, and swallowed up gold, and burned codices.

Donald Trump is animated by the very same hate that is used to divide so many people today, and strives to obscure the roots of our liberation as it obscures the hands that lock the cuffs on us. It is a disease of the mind and soul called White Supremacy. And in the land wherein this virus thrives, certain kinds of men, with their ballooned minds and feverish egos, get to demand certain concessions from other people: that you surrender your papers; that you not harbor anger in your eye or your tone lest it be beaten out of you; that law shall endorse such beatings; that you prone out on the ground with a gun in your back at a moment’s notice; that you swallow a bullet if the bully feels sexy while perched up there and straddled around your spine. It is a land where you apologize for a role you never asked for but is ascribed to you by thieves and liars; where They will always have the right to tell you to pull over and prove yourself, and where You will always comply and perhaps be allowed to live with just humiliation if you are lucky enough to walk away with your life.

And so the target of so much history, for a day, becomes Donald “I am the Patriarchy” Trump. And many hearts seethe for his being so cruel as to remind us of our history, and to imply that even when you gain The Most Powerful Office In The World, it means nothing next to the anger of a White Man. It was the same reminder Republican Senator Joe “YOU LIE” Wilson gave us when he shouted down the President of the United States in the middle of an address that was adorned with all the pomp and decorum as we see fit to afford our nation’s executive leader. That shout, that demand to show papers, that insistence that you duck your eyes, it hisses You can even become President, but you still are not White. Which means you are not really the President. Don’t go dreaming that somehow you are now more powerful than me, darkie.

And as an immediate and visceral (and predictable) reaction, what did so many of us people of color need to see the President do? We needed him to scoff at the implication that such assertions could be true. We needed him to refute that reality. To deny it exists. To stand up and stand proud. To destroy that reality with a new action.

Was coughing up the papers but then roasting Trump at a gala dinner in front of the Press enough? Was ordering the home invasion and murder of a wanted man of color in Pakistan enough to erase that reality? Perhaps for our empathy with Obama being humiliated, it was. Perhaps now the unpleasant memory of watching the national daddy figure bow to a carnival barker has been mitigated for most. Maybe now that feeling, as if we watched the POTUS hand over his lunch money to bullies, has been nullified, gunsmoke wafting about our heads like purifying incense smoke.

And I suppose it is best to take the man at his word: he saw the Birtherism (also known as “Racism”) wasn’t going to go away and wanted to squash it and force the GOP ravers into a corner by removing what he saw as their last leg in what was left of the Birther argument.

But I do not think it does the larger issue any service to forget it when the feelings fade, or to imagine it resolved because the President has shown his papers, is in the clear, and we are feeling tough again because, damn son—he’s got that killer instinct. Just as Rosa Parks’ challenge was not to one bus driver, but to an entire system of inequality, this matter is much broader and deeper than the pageantry that recently unfolded between two rich men on TV.

Yes, the dynamic where we identify culturally or ethnically in some way with President Obama (and as a man of color, I do) leads us to watch the disgusting Trump claim victory for making the President skip on command, and we fume with empathy. We gnash our teeth and swear our allegiance all over again to Barack, this poor besieged man who has to endure the barbs and slings of Age Old Racism. This intelligent, thoughtful scholar, statesman, gentleman, father and husband. This President who bears up nobly in conditions potentially humiliating, conditions asked of no other President has been before him. We spit on the ground and growl Trump’s name. We swear to show up in the voting booth for the Democrats…as if that in any measurable way addresses the larger issue of Them Who Shall Be Asked For Papers.

CONQUER AND DIVIDE

I should probably clearly state the obvious in case it is not as obvious as I’d hope: the American Black experience is deep, unique, and I highly respect it. I would never claim to see it in all its parts or stand within it. I am not pretending to have any stake or voice therein. At the same time, I have my own experiences as a Xicano, and there is some degree of overlap between the experiences of all people of color in this nation. This I know from years of activism and friendships and conversations with people of different ethnicities.

Also—quite important to suss out and account for—there are (exploitable) gaps between our experiences. It is in those gaps that divide and conquer wedges are introduced by the ruling class.

Strategically, it is in marginalized peoples’ great interest to discover these gaps ourselves so they cannot be exploited casually. It is in our great interest to find them, examine them, and prepare for the attacks that will be launched; attacks that would seek to exploit the latent weaknesses that could threaten our unity as people marginalized and exploited by the oppressive, racist hand of law. Black and Brown alike suffer behind the racist criminal justice system, for starters. Statistics for both Latinos as well as Blacks are disproportionately high for the actual number of crimes that run rampant through all communities, when compared. This is so because the law continues old power differentials and is implemented by human beings who have been conditioned by the same society .

And because law begins as idea, and only becomes strapped with force when enough people agree on that idea.

One of the ways that unfortunate ideas become commonly accepted is by the use of emotional triggers to mislead thought and obscure the true machinations of state or corporate power.

It is necessary to deny the apparent binaries here.

This is not just a black/white issue. Take it from Chuck D. And for all of us who care, there is a way to channel the need to see justice done in the wake of this ugly moment. There are other peoples and communities who would greatly benefit from our consideration in the current context. People who would suffer in continued indignities and abuse were we to avoid using that lens in a broader sense. Other communities that are having their own dignity denied, with not just social pressure demanding they suborn themselves and produce papers for how they look (not white), but laws. Laws and actions, I’m sorry to say, that are supported very much by President Obama. Laws being snuck under the radar that increase the reach of the surveillance state. as well as that feed into the growing prison and detention industry in the U.S. Like the actions of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

I will be more specific on these both in a moment. But I wanted to prepare the soil of your imagination for this turn of thought. I invite you to explore these ideas:

• The President, seemingly the unwilling subject of this degrading and dehumanizing shape of act before our eyes—being forced to show papers in the course of his day, with no reason but for the fact that he is not a pale man called Smith—supports that very idea being implemented for others who Appear Foreign, and is directly involved with making this a reality across America.

• If it bothers me that he, as one person (and a very powerful one on the continuum considered) is subject to this, how can I engage the larger fight where millions are subjected to this? Millions of very vulnerable people. Not graduates of Ivy League schools; not powerful politicians with millions of dollars at their disposal, and millions of people clamoring to back them up.

2. This is not a struggle between Barack H. Obama and Donald Whatever Trump. Nor one between their persons or personalities. Sure, let us consider their power and from where their power derives, and what they use it for. Let us give context to the scene and the players. But we really don’t need to make either of them a demon or a hero for us to successfully engage this important fight. In fact, doing so will dilute our powers of observation and thought.

3. The battle is not between the Evil, Rich, Racist Ole GOP and the Beleaguered, Liberal, Bullied, Righteous Democrats. If I may presume to know and say so, the battle at the heart of this outrage and hurt here, is for principles. For human dignity, and human rights. The battle is for integrity. The battle is against racist hate shaped into popular opinion and finally, given the force of the masses’ will—be it in the shape of social pressure, law, violence, or all three.

Going forward, we must recognize the possible faultline that divides certain viewpoints rooted in the Black American experience from certain viewpoints in the Mexican American community, as well as in the Pro-Migrant community. Especially when exploited by the powers that be. We must dwell in our connectedness. It’s not hard. I know I don’t just care for Mexicanos. I care for all people who suffer behind the racist machinations afoot in the nation today.

4. It’s not citizens vs. immigrants. Human rights, dignity, fairness: these are not things we should let legal terms determine. These are things we want human beings to have. Don’t let the squirming exploiters and vampires at the top whisper to us the nightmarish myth of scarcity. Things only seem scarce when a small group of people need to capitalize on many people’s energies and resources, and this profit-making pyramid shape enforces an artificial scarcity.

When we feel we cannot even take care of “our own,” it’s easy to let a feeling of solidarity slip away. It makes me sad when I see people of color who should understand and join in the struggle that Mexicanos and other immigrants face today, but who veer away from that struggle imagining that immigrants represent a threat to their own community. This is the voice of White Supremacy, and it’s a bullhorn turned on all day and night in this land, so I understand. But when in all important ways our struggle is the same, “our own” can be an expansive thing—and these larger numbers will render us more powerful to fight those exploiters at the top, already unfairly given advantage.

Many of today’s most important issues deal with power differentials between the very rich, and the rest of us. Immigration is one of the most important area for us to mind. Many issues come together here. Drug war. Commerce, and the Economy. Lines of ownership; lines that signify an US and THEM, borders that we end up believing need small army units and millions of dollars of technology in guns, drones, and surveillance equipment to maintain their reality; their solidity.

In the issue of immigration and corporate abuse of borders and employees is revealed the secret of how towns and communities become economically destroyed by corporate powers being above the law, and exploiting the worker. In the selling of the idea that the only people affected are Criminal Illegal Alien Invader Types, the elite continue to exploit our vulnerable brothers and sisters.

In Immigration politics, we see the manipulative hand of Economics, and the fallout of Capitalism and Neoliberalism. Domestically as well as Internationally. Within this struggle are handholds to engage the struggle for working class rights, women’s rights, family rights, culture, reproduction, human rights, our national ethics.

As more and more strife becomes about resources and mobility, more conquer and divide tactics will be put to work in this area of Immigration.

We must remember first and foremost (and again at the end), that the forces that benefit from our being divided will seek to exploit all these key areas. A simple lens adjustment would make that impossible. We must come to realize how many of us share this same struggle; fighting that power that reared it’s ugly naked head recently under the glow of sunlight bouncing off skyscraper windows, and hissed at the President with breath as old and rancid as years of gallows sweat.

TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY

There are so many discussions about the Arc of Obama in the eye of popular opinion as of yet. We’ve all had an intense experience of some sort from election day until now, though our specific experiences may vary, and our current feelings vary just as much. Some have offered arguable reasons for becoming disenchanted with his administration. I will avoid the political laundry list, some or all of with which you may or may not agree with. That’s not the conversation(s) I am here for. I don’t want to get sidetracked. I don’t want to exploit or even risk the potential differences and faultlines in our unity just for a moment. And when I say “our unity,” I mean working class people. I mean the 99% of income earners in the nation. I mean many many Black, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Guatemalan, Dominican, Chinese, Korean or otherwise golden brown beautiful red black people. I mean white people. Here, I talk to all those people marginalized in some way by the powers and status quo that men like Donald Trump act in the service of.

I propose that what we have in common here is the idea of how wrong it is to deny the full dignity and rights to the Other in the name of safety and legal procedure. I suggest that this fight and furious sense of injustice cannot and should not end with the humiliating press conference, nor with the empowering roast of Trump at a dinner you and I had no means nor invitation to attend.

PROMISES, PROMISES

Candidate and President Barack Obama made some very specific promises to crowds of Latinos, in speeches to NCLR and to the immigrant community. He decried the ICE raids that tore parents away from their children, he called the system broken. In passioned speech, he told desperate immigrant families that he had their back. That he understood their pain. That he was determined to make a difference for them. He said he was an ally to Latinos and to Immigrants and that we could count on him.

He then turns around and continues the raids, but in other shapes. He deports more people than George W. Bush does, insuring that many, many children are torn from their parents, after all. He does this in the name of Papers, not in the name of human rights or dignity.

President Obama and Janet Napolitano brag to the Republicans that they are deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants. He turns his back on his own disabled aunt when the cold eye of ICE falls upon her. He sends troops to the US’ Southern border, when the economic refugees flee conditions in Mexico that have been greatly caused by NAFTA policies (A Democratic accomplishment under Bill Clinton). Those people risking rape, murder, starvation, and poverty to cross the border to find a chance at life don’t need bullets in their heads, they need help accessing resources so they don’t need to flee their homes and families.

Obama’s Department of Homeland Security offers a program called “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) that ties in the FBI and ICE to local police so that anyone apprehended by local police has all their info shared with these other agencies, even if a person is not convicted of anything. We’ve seen how successful Arizona’s SB 1070 has been in disrupting society, and at driving a wedge between local police and many communities where people fear either being detained or simply being hassled based on ethnic signifiers. Many police have protested the implementation of S-Comm, understanding right away how it would harm their relationship with the immediate community and lend a hand to the proliferation of many crimes that would exploit this wedge. A few cities attempted to opt out of S-Comm, but voila! The cloak came off and Obama’s DHS suddenly informed these cities that the program was not, after all, voluntary. Whoops.

Immigrant communities understand that they are being targeted when they are just trying to feed their kids and make a living, often exploited by workplaces that know they live without protection from law or society. But to console the rest who don’t know this, Obama’s White House claims it is only deporting serious criminals. The most cursory examination of reality shows this to be a complete falsehood.

One easy example of this is shown quite blatantly by how the White House is going after activist, friend, and law school student Prerna Lal. Prerna is a positive role model, an engaged, passionate person and organizer. Hardly a serious criminal. (Please sign the petition to help Prerna fight deportation. Her crime? The creation and success of DreamActivist.org. Prerna was simply too successful in organizing students behind the DREAM Act, which—unlike these sly and disingenuous actions by the Department of Homeland Security—does exist in the service of human rights. We don’t need to be frozen in the sixties to aid those fighting for communities before it becomes common sense to do so. We can look Prerna’s way.

The stats tell the same story. The Obama administration is not deporting scores of dangerous criminals but people who have an old offense, or minor offenses, or who get caught up in the widening and growing web of “immigration enforcement,” or who are simply students and children of immigrants and dared to make a valedictorian speech at their school, or reach out to help other people in the same plight. Sometimes they are simply driving home from work, and get pulled over by an old, white, sheriff who might as well be Donald Trump. They get asked for their birth certificate because their name sounds…un-American.

COME TOGETHER

It’s so easy for us to stay firm in our personal experience and all the ways it feeds our own heart. One of the major premises in this article (or ramble depending on how you look at it) is that we proceed deeper and deeper into times when it will be important to not let ourselves be divided in the wrong ways. The Earth, mother of all, is increasingly poisoned and robbed…and those plunderers conspire to keep us misinformed about her condition. As she sickens in different ways; as our reckless, imbalanced, capitalist society veers drunkenly to and fro; as the divides grow starker and the ultra rich more intoxicated by desperation, the powers that be will work harder and harder to keep us at each other’s throats; to offer us others who we can throw to the curb in order to keep our own apparently threatened freedom.

We can feel empathy, kinship, or even an affection for the person named Barack Obama; for the challenges he faces navigating a system so strongly interwoven with racist currents, yet simultaneously see how today’s policies enacted by the creepily-named Department of Homeland Security exist to grow the racist prison syste<[/a>, and aid racist behaviors and values through the normalization of certain laws.

Final notes: Thanks to friend (and immigration lawyer) Dave Bennion for help with resources.

Crossposted at Shakesville

This episode of News With Nezua is brought to you by Center for New Community. YouTube version here. Past episodes are archived here.

YESTERDAY’S SICK WARMONGERING SCION OF AMERICA, George W. Bush, once appeared on television and sternly scolded the People for taking television too seriously.

That is, this pampered rich boy who had every thing stolen for him in his life, swaggered up on his pulpit and berated the entire nation, warning us not to have too many emotions and thoughts due to all the televised news about death in Iraq; about suicide bombings in Iraq; about the Empire spasms that lashed out taking lives, maiming babies, weeping spent uranium. “The explosions on your TV.”

And I think that little irony there says it all about today’s media, about today’s “News” channels. We are supposed to take them seriously, even as they tell us not to do so. An inverted knot of suppressed and sublimated emotion and mangled thought process is how they’d have us. A busted open container they can pour poison into. But before that, like a vampire, suck up the energies and spirit of so many, and from all sides of the political spectrum. Inside this beast’s festering jaws are clenched a fabricated world brightly and wretchedly illuminated as if by 100,000 limbs set alight by white phosphorus.

Inside that box, the Iraq disaster is done with. Inside that box, it makes sense to keep bleeding billions into the Afghanistan sands. Inside that box, no important questions matter. Inside that box, your own heart and mind can’t fit. What would (does) our world look like outside of that box?

Today’s Right wing is not worth listening to any more than it makes sense to stick your arm into a spinning garbage disposal. What of those those who watch these hell-hearted plasticmen and seethe? Or mock them on a blog? Or debunk TV arguments every day of the year? A massive amount of energy and time is spent doing this. It’s sort of weird. Who do they watch for? Not for me. Some will claim it is a service. Do they do it for you? They deplete their own energies, and accomplish what? What is accomplished each day by doing this?

In truth, I’m sure it is a service for a few. Is it the most valuable service? Perhaps not. What of pooling all that time, pooling any monies, and creating a new station. Or perhaps a new network via radios. Yes, radio. This tool that many more people can use, and even carry mobile. A tool that many of lesser means can broadcast with, no less.

And to do what? Simply reporting the state of the world as it truly is. Sowing the airwaves with hope, with positivity, with history lessons. With plans, with campaigns, with community. Completely tuning out the false narrative as you would tune out  a sick individual on a corner, ranting about death, devils, and disaster. Would you follow that person around, reinterpreting all their madness for the crowd? Would you shout side by side and call it a service?

This motion is not so much popular, though. The shape of thought that would completely swerve away and build something new in the place of something unsightly, unsafe, or unsound. Is that a revolutionary act? It is, by definition. Reform seeks to take something broken and reshape it. Redundancy says do it over and over even when it does nothing much. Revolution says that Thing is not worth reshaping, nor is it worth your energies and time. Revolutionary thought says you have the power and means and ability to make something new, in place of the old. But today’s Left is not revolutionary, of course.

Lately I hear a lot about how while so many are misguidedly blaming ALL muslims for 9/11, it was only a small cadre of radical extremist muslims who attacked us on 9/11.

Is that true?

Do you even know–as a person–who attacked us on 9/11? I don’t. How am I to know? How are we to know? I still have the newspaper where some foggy screen caps of a Fake Osama Bin Laden were shown supposedly crowing about the WTC attacks. For a tape that would be the hardest evidence in USA possession of who made the biggest hit on our country in its entire history, it faded out of existence very fast, eh? But then, I already said it’s fake.

Do you know it was the Taliban? Really? Why? Because your TV told you? Because the lying, corrupt government told you? That same government that was making deals with the Taliban in August of 2001? The same government that has been trying to sink its derricks into Central Asian oil fields for years? Why? Because they claimed 19 passports floated out of the completely exploded plane down onto the street and somehow stuck out in all that clutter, debris, ash, and litter?

What evidence do we have that the WTC were taken down by the people our government claims? What evidence personally? What trials brought to light the guilty? What process made this clear? What oracle pronounced this truth? The very same TV that our own government’s head of state told us not to take seriously? What forces forbade you to question this? The Right, and yes, the Left, too. From Bill Maher to DailyKos—earnest questions about this catastrophe that changed everything in our nation, from law to war to monies spent in congress, to school lessons—were verboten. Despite the shabbiest case ever built against any major crime. And those who insisted we examine it were demonized by those same Liberal forces, as we are today. Just as it has been the Liberals overwhelmingly leading the charge to sneer at those of us who still believe in protest, rallies, and boycotts.

That is your (Professional) Left.

Obviously, in 2010, what is ancient is again new. The empire is well into its recycling phase. We see conquer and divide. Hucksters and snake oil salesmen. Blatant class war. PSYOPS and a host of control mechanisms to provide a manufactured reality that keeps the People scattered, confused, scared, angry, and mostly, full of fake information. We were attacked and traumatized a decade ago, lied to about it by those who are supposed to protect us and be of us, and this rending of the truth helped destroy us as a confident and sane people.

We tried again to hope and believe in truth when Obama was elected, but as much as some “progressives” still cling to their ideology and party, it’s clear on a gut level that we were had and that the strongest forces in our nation today are those of war, greed, and deception.

And now, nobody believes in much of anything anymore as a result. And we are fast unraveling. Truth means nothing and TV pays it not even the tribute of a gesture. Racism is part of everyday speech, political campaigns, and dialogue. Hate groups are hand in hand with government. White supremacists roam the border and carry badges and guns, too. Laws that let police be even more racist in their operations than before are being launched left and right.

Even those who fight every day to maintain belief know, in their belly, that the game is rotten to the core. This is driving us mad, it is wrecking national sanity. Or causing people to simply turn away.

It’s not just because Obama is black that the nation is flipping out. It’s also because all the illusions of national identity and ideology that we were given as children have fallen apart. Now naked power rules, and shows itself in gross class war and cooked up news shows, court rulings, and police actions that make clear who will be okay tomorrow, and who will not. Those of us with little money or position understand we will soon be living in mildewed tents on the outskirts, while those with money or power will continue to enjoy tax breaks, ballrooms, and well-buttered toast smothered with imported jams.

Dreams of justice and fairness have been toppled.

Once that sinks in fully, things will become very ugly indeed. But many of us are in denial, in shock, or yet to see the final foundation buckling. Still listening to the siren song of TV.

Were there someone or some ones capable of organizing even a fraction of us—they’d need lots of money, and yet not to be beholden to the ideology of the Right—we might have a chance against our enemies. Our enemies are greed and disinformation. And a state out of control. It is those same illusions given us as children. It is the inertia that shoves us cliffward. It is the voice of the Television. It is today’s Liberal brain, brain like a slave, stooped over with the load of delusion, but weary and with no place to go to get away from it. The Left is a zombie holding a flag, with all its sly use of the Right’s most drastic weapons, with its reinforcing at key moments, what harms the People, with no real plan or courage to enact something better, something revolutionary. At every juncture where the Left might make a real stand and make a difference, it suddenly caves in. Just when the People might again hope or benefit. But it must. Because, you see, even the “left” politicians on the national stage know the deal. They hold no hope for justice or truth, either. But LIBERAL is their brand and they are stuck with it.

The GOP? The GOP is but the blood-flecked ID expanding like a rogue universe of wicked cells, the diseased and disintegrating lobe of the human condition. The freaked out, frantic, midnight acid-head mind that whips and coils like a half-smashed snake in the sand.

I’m not better than anyone else in all of this. I soothe myself with TV, too. I dive deeply into illusion. I simply happen to turn to it for storytelling, for movies. Otherwise, I’ll be out in nature. Give me the sun, the wind, the water, and the touch of someone close to me. And give me stories. Stories of clear-eyed humans, of paths lined with golden wheat that sways in the sun, trod by brave souls undertaking important journeys. Give me stories of unpolluted hearts, and simple, wise, and humble humans. Give me stories of the past, of over there, of a day faraway. A day when this looming tower of babbling bullshit has finally collapsed and lain itself upon the ground to bake and bleach under an aging sun, before long to be but a skeleton for tomorrow’s mountains.

THERE WILL BE NO MEANINGFUL IMMIGRATION REFORM. Not this year, and not next year. If it lurches up to the starting gate in any form, it will be in a cruel, misshapen, bruised, and weeping condition.

The Much-Vaunted LATINO VOTE

No, the question is how will those of us who took hope in hearing Obama’s campaign-trail passion on the issue react to this news, once it manifests? The immigration-talk theater being put on now between Democrats and Republicans boils down, as I see it, to a theatrical piece where the players joust to show their base who defeated/championed a legislative effort at all. Because they translate that piece of fantasy into votes for or against them when nothing passes.

The purpose of the charade is, too (and equally important), to let us down very gently in order to dull a wave of reaction that might hurt them at the voting booth. As was done with the Public Option popping in and out and in and out of play during the Health Care talks, until our nerves were greatly numbed to the idea of either outcome. These politicians are nearly sociopathic in their ability to read and manipulate large masses of people. That’s their job, they do it well, and they learn all the wrong lessons. But one they stick close to is blunt the edge of any potential progressive populist anger. That anger, after all, is not pro-corporation.

They tell us that our power lies in our votes. But does it?

The Democratic party assumes that Liberals and Latinos alike won’t defect, in the end. Even if they punt on the immigration issue. “After all,” they imagine us saying, as they play puppet games in the library whilst drinking outlandishly expensive cognac, “Democrats fought for health care! And what is the GOP today anyway, except a festering, miserable, fearful, warlike, racist contingent of the rich and the wanna-be rich? Surely no place for us there!”

Or…we stay home and do not vote. Or…we vote third party just to say fuck you, you cynical, cowardly, well-funded, well-fed, well-powdered power brokers. All of you.

The People

I attended the march and rally for immigration reform on Sunday, March 21, in Washington DC. I shot a video of it for my weekly news/commentary video series, News With Nezua. This week’s piece—“200,000 Strong”—is featured at La Frontera Times.

Here’s an article at the American Prospect covering the same event:

Last Sunday, 200,000 immigrant-rights protesters shared the National Mall with a Tea Party crowd that shouted racial epithets and spat at members of Congress. Unsurprisingly, the media focused on the histrionics of the Tea Partiers, but Sunday’s immigration demonstration was an important manifestation of the movement’s building impatience. In its enthusiasm and optics — legal and undocumented immigrants chanting “Sí se puede,” singing folk songs, and waving both American and Mexican flags — the demonstration was reminiscent of the immigration protests in 2006.

Yes, you are right that it is “unsurprising” that “the media” focused on the histrionics of the relatively miniscule opposition. It is unsurprising in a context where an article writer like yourself poses the two as comparative entities in the first line of your essay! Ay.

Let me tell you something. The Teabaggers, and the NumbersUSA crowd were SO SMALL in the overall reality of that day that I never once bumped into them. I actually set out to find them, and could not. So that article (while not a bad one at all) begins disingenuously. Not malevolently, I just think the writer desired a certain entrance.

Further compounding the sense of unreliability in the text is the line equivocating the waving of “both American and Mexican flags.” Writer is stretching hard, here, to justify the mirroring that they propose between 2006 and now.

I shot photos all day. I took audio. I shot video–on both my camcorder as well as my iPhone. I interviewed the young and the old. I traversed the grounds from riser and Press tent to the street and the dirty dusty danced-up soil of the National Mall until my entire body hurt and I could barely walk anymore. I squatted, ran, walked, and even hung from one arm on a tree to get a good shot. There were maybe…three Mexican flags that I saw amidst the thousands I laid eyes on. And one was tiny and hanging from my own back pocket. You go ahead and peruse the images and video you find online. And if you discover any kind of ratio that would justify that article’s imagining of an equivalency between flag-waving, come back and tell me! (Incidentally, though a bit irrelevant perhaps nonetheless, I did see a handful of El Salvadorean flags, but RIFA went to a lot of trouble to avoid a replay of the 2006 march, where the sight of Mexican flags in the street caused many, many palpitations on the Right side of the aisle.)

What IS IT with reporters today? There is so much drama and passion and honesty and fight and meaning out there. You don’t need to make things up!

No, the message transmitted by the rally and march was strongly contained and crafted and directed. That much is clear. It was a good show. RIFA did a great job. White clothes (Mexican tradition as far as I know regarding marches and protest) for a positive, clean feeling; chants of “USA! USA!” to sooth the fragile trembling tissues of the Buchananites, who toss and turn nightly over visions of Indians leaping fences to plant flags bright with writhing cobras and hungry eagles in pure pristine AMERICAN soil; big showing of proudly self-identifying Christians for immigration reform….and so on. I don’t mind, I don’t think it’s anything but smart. You would have to take control of this message in particular if you were hosting an event that large, sure.

Anyway, human rights advocates understand (one hopes!) that being involved in a pro-migrant cause requires one to push back against many nation-deep memes that feed on Indian blood, a nation that overall prefers its darkies in cells and chains or at least busing tables.

And this is a show, after all! Politics is not about truth, and even when it is, Politics has two arms. One is draped in diamonds and silks and shows up on TV, and one holds a gun and leans its elbow into the dry sand of foreign nations as it clambers ever closer to the dizzying scents of petroleum and blood. The fine line between entertainment and war, says Rage Against the Machine.

So put on the show.

My video was not celebrating the chances of reform passing. I appreciate that La Frontera Times tweeted today that I “captured a celebration of hope.” That’s just what I felt was my imperative to do on the scene, once I was there and had walked around a bit.

As a…Journalartist or…an Artivist… (or someword that combines Journalism, activism, politics, and art), my job at these events is to capture and translate the mood and feel of the happening. To tell the truth as a journalist would—by showing you who was there and what was happening—and to send it flying with the power embedded in the poetic passport only an artist may employ to launch a truth into your heartspace. The “activism” part (if it must be called something, this will do) is simply in the fact that we all know, and it is not hidden in the video, that I do not pretend to be showing some middle-of the road, “neutral” piece, but am certainly there vibing with the people I am presenting. Nonetheless, I was not there to push any political entities’ agenda, nor to lie about what I see—and finally, not to claim that what I see is all there is, either. (Though I deny an equivalent number of Mexican and US Flags!)

Fact is, if it felt different in DC on that day, the video would have come out different. I soaked it all up, and I give it back. The day felt utterly positive, true, real, and beautiful. And that was not due to the speeches (which is why my video has hardly more than one line of those in it), but to the heart and soul and bodies and voices and needs of the people.

The very people who are being lied to and used by more powerful forces in a bid for continued power.

O, the People. Who is left to fight for the People? Many who won’t show up on TV. And if they weren’t out there doing their thing, we’d all suffer a lot more than we do. But as far as politicians and well-paid pundits? For the most part they are welded to the beast, to the iron tumbling beast that will soon find the bottom of the ocean. They shout into microphones, extolling the beautiful landscape along the way.

Indian Killers Vs. The Safe and Sanitized Left

The GOP grapples with a number of problems. But at the core, their main problem is their philosophy. It is not real. It relies on a reshaping of the Real which requires endless violence and delusion, rather than meeting the Real to see how we can learn from and nourish the human race’s organic arc. By their ideological nature, they cannot progress (“Conservativism” embraces stasis, tradition, a reductive approach, an exclusivity that stunts, withdraws, retracts, rejects; this philosophy cannot sustain itself) and so we see them tearing at themselves now. It’s ugly. It’s painful. There is no cure. The ideology has a fatal flaw that only grows more egregious and destructive as the rest of the world changes.

At heart, you can trace so many Right-Wing objections to the naturally-shifting ethnic demographics of the USA back to German philosophers like Johann Gottleib Fichte, with their notions of Romantic Nationalism. Undiscussed by the paid-for propaganda stations on your TV are how the very same notions of a cultural and national supremacy beset by invaders from within resulted in movements like Nazi Germany.

Surely nothing (aside from rounding up people and shuffling them en masse into concentration camps) is more Hitleresque than enacting laws and social norms and mainstreaming violent language that targets the spoilers of the Pure. (I make these comparisons very carefully, but know that half my family came here fleeing Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe about 3 generations ago and I for one do see a disturbing overlap in this revulsed, persecutory, culturally superior aggression against Mexican immigrants today.)

And that is what the US Right Wing response is to today’s immigration issue, health care reform (which they imagine is a handout to people of color), and Obama’s presidency boils down to. From the laws creeping forth like chokeweed in Arizona, to guns and sleazy assassination talk as rejoinders to Democratic (centric and corporatist!) legislation.

SOSHALIST! FOREIGN AGENT! FASCIST PRESIDENT! ILLEGAL INVADERS! MEXICAN FLAGS! WELFARE QUEENS! AFFIRMATIVE ACTION! I WANT MY COUNTRY BAAAAAAAAAACK

The deepening fracture in the GOP echoes that which took down the 19th century Whigs—centering, as it does, around racism. The GOP cannot move into the future. It is, at heart, built to comfort and sustain the lives and ideas of elite whites, and mostly elite white property-owning men. And that is not today’s real world. As it was, the notion has always had to be brought to bear behind the barrel of a gun in the first place. That is another reason the GOP is dying. You cannot sustain a culture without respecting and revering women. And you cannot sustain a political party on a room full of old white men…and a living pinup. That’s for other types of partying…I suppose.

When the Right embraces a woman, it has to be a person who is racist herself, devoid of intellectual integrity, and crammed full of hypocrisy, condescension, and power lust [Palin]. When it embraces (and I use the word embrace purely functionally, not emotionally!) a black man (Michael “Bling is My Thing” Steele) it is a cynical and insincere motion used only to counter a larger political or cultural force (the election of Barack Obama). When the Right elevates a Latino/Hispanic like Alberto Gonzales, he by needs must abdicate his own family roots (lie about how they got here, disowning story and allegiance and pride and truth in the process) and aid the US war machine in killing hundreds of thousands of brown humans in Iraq. When the Right  has an Asian American hero, such as in the case with John Yoo, he would of course have to be a cold-blooded advocate of testicle-crushing, torture-wheeling, bomb-dropping aggressions in the Middle East.

These Indian-killers in the GOP (and when I use that term I reference the illegal Irish immigrant Phillip Sheridan who wreaked holy historical hell on the American Indigenous during his tenure in the US military) cannot change their stripes. They can only fracture within as some members attempt even the tiniest departure from a reflexive racist stance, or die out, sputtering, hissing, contorting, and shrieking all the way.

I say “indian killers” because there is nothing more rational at the root of so much of their ideology—be it opposing non-white immigration, denigrating the civil rights era, or fearing a black president’s every move—than what was behind General Sheridan’s imperative to genocide-by proxy the American Indian by slaughtering every bison on the land, when not directly killing indians. It’s built into their DNA by now; To these sorts (despite what they say out loud, and they say plenty out loud!) people of color stand for all the evils in the world, and these types have a guilt that has perverted itself over the many sins leveled against the Other and projected itself skewedwise upon us, just as the notorious Gang of Perverts (GOP) is well-known for introducing punitive anti-gay legislation all while secretly engaging in meth-fueled, scuba-geared, rest stop stall-centric homosexual hijinks on the down low. To these spoilers and stealers, it is people of color who stand for crime, for corrosion of culture, for the faltering of White Empire.

The Right simply cannot abdicate that position, because to renegotiate these ideas would be to admit their stores of wealth and (relative) sanity are but founded upon falsity and evil.

The latest shape in which the GOP offers up its ubiquitous racial animosity and white supremacy is one choice vehicle to truly draw forth their ire and bile: the immigration issue. The white liberal faction of activism and punditry claims the GOP attacks the idea of immigration due for the most part to their fear of instilling a mass of future Democrat voters. Not really. Not unless the Dems are employing their own code language here.

It’s just what it sounds like. It’s not far from the thirst for racial purity that we associate with some very creepy chapters of world history. And it’s just as dangerous an impulse. And it’s dangerous, too, not to name it. Because how will we face and defeat this ugly, ancient impulse if we pretend it’s about voting booths? Anyway, voting booths are just about power, and the power the GOP wants to maintain and propagate is one that—again—would erase the Civil Rights gains, suppress your wage, declare your teeth and health a luxury that you cannot afford, and while you sweat in the sun mowing their grass so pretty, invade your ancestors’ land to steal more fuel to power your mower.

How is the GOP and the “conservative” mind attempting to enforce racial purity in today’s world? In so many ways. From the loop that the Criminal Justice system sets up to pack the prisons with black and brown, to the banks’ targeting customers of color and immigrants to exploit with higher rates and scams, to the erasure or minimizing in Texas’ textbooks of the achievements of people of color, to the ENTIRE IDEA of IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT which by now seems to be discussed as an item of faith, as if it is not a trumped up WAR ON TERROR part two. Yes, other things come into it, such as the State making money for policing and incarcerating this new population. Our war economy is failing us. And our nation knows no better way to make cash than go to war on yet another population. At this point states are blatantly justifying 287g programs and such because new prisons and detention centers are springing up in their towns.

And many Democrats are championing those same programs, and the same “heavy enforcement” talk, telling me that they need to do all this to convince the American people that these word games indicate the right approach to “our broken immigration system.” But you know what? Social justice is not a word game. It is a bloody fight and if your hands are clean, you may be on the dodgeball court, but you ain’t in the struggle.

A Progressive Lens

This war on people of color and on the indigenous of this continent (because oh yes, the CIA has its hands deep in Latin America, too, and has for yearrrrrs) rolls on. This must be seen and championed by “Progressives” or they’ve got nothing. There is no Progressive movement without that lens. Nothing at all at the heart. And nothing for the future of the movement but running around the exhaust pipes of the GOP for the rest of their own doomed existence. True justice lies in employing a fearless lens upon the birth and the current fractures of this nation and how this plays out in our international policies and wars and thus, our current state. And it has to do with Imperialism and white supremacy and exploitation of the Other. Way more than most liberals are comfortable examining, aside from a snarky line or two in a blog post. These truths of our imbalances maintained must become part of our national dialogue. We must accept nothing less from the Democratic politicians. You cannot blame the US for being a “soundbyte nation” if you are validating and employing and not fighting that tendency! Run from the GOP and their accusations of “Blame America First”? Retreat behind flag pins? Join them in talk about locking up and deriding immigrants? This is the way down. This validates the very party and ideology the Left ought lock horns with and do fierce battle.

In my opinion, confronting that comfort is the path forward. And maintaining that comfort simply makes you a meek aide to the Republican machine; less than they. For at least they know their cause and they stand behind it unapologetically.

Not that there is any shortage of opportunities to engage. And the immigration issue certainly presents a giant opportunity. And by all means, join in. It’s not for Mexicans that anyone ought do it, really. It’s because unless the People take up the cause of all the People, then the People will fail, divided by the professional manipulators who have everything at stake in keeping us apart.

One of President Obama’s great hopes for Republican bipartisanship on the immigration issue is Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer is most recently known in immigration advocacy circles for his turn to the right when it comes to talking about immigrants. He wanted harsher talk. He pooh-poohed the idea that we ought refer to them as anything but “illegal” immigrants or aliens. He laughed at the idea that “undocumented” was sufficient. This is a strangely hostile position for a “liberal” to take, considering the connections between how we are talking about these populations (and I include MY population, being of Mexican descent and Hispanic name) and the violence that finds us. Schumer is not a champion of progressive thought, nor my friend, nor my ally. For what that is worth. But I won’t take it personally.

Another of Obama’s hopes is Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. Recently, Graham was the one to come forth and say that immigration is dead this year. And because Obama had to go and push the Health Care thing. That’s Graham’s story and he’s sticking with it. You don’t need me to tell you he’s full of shit. The GOP must try to destroy Obama and all he does. And anything he does. This, too, is tied to their belief system. This is why they went crazy when Obama spoke in schools. For children to see a black man as President destroys a space in the mind that Republicans would use to plant their ideologies about racial superiority. Just that sight—of an articulate, handsome, well-spoken, kind and powerful black man—could alter the lives of those children in a fractal sense. One new image that provides a foundation for a series of other thoughts and beliefs, that very possibly do not lead to a worldview supported by Conservatism. So the GOP cannot rescind Obama’s electoral tidal wave, but their next best hope is that the nation feels the first black President was a failure. That—now that—could be worked into their ideologies. “Sure,” they’d say to their deluded children, “it was White Guilt and Black Racism that elected Obama. And maybe a bit his pretty speechifyin’. But mostly the first two, just like I tell you all the time about Affirmative Action. So he caught a boost into the Oval Office. He got to play dress-up for a while. But of course he failed in the end, Ruthy! He’s….well. He tried hard, you gotta give him that. And he sure could play some mean b-ball, eh kids?”

So let’s just get that straight and know that Lindsay Graham would never have helped Obama secure anything he believes could be successful for Obama, Democrats, or people of color. I mean, didn’t we just learn from watching the GOP tantrumize the entire Health Care debate how willing they are to work with the Dems? Lindsay, pleeeeease.

Nevermind that this immigration issue affects Irish immigrants, as well. Don’t even bother with that. This issue is about Mexicans. Period. That’s all we are talking about with fences and “invaders” and “culture changing.” Shit. Nobody is concerned about one more Irish fella at the pub on March 17! Pat Buchanan is not terrified that O’Malley’s will run out of bar seats under another wave of Irish immigration. This is about Mexicans. You know, cockroaches. Etc.

Lindsay Graham did say a bit more to the Spanish Speaking press in an interview with La Opinión. [Google-translated page]

WASHINGTON, D.C.— El senador Lindsey Graham (R-SC) la figura clave del Partido Republicano en las negociaciones sobre reforma migratoria en la Cámara Alta, aseguró a La Opinión que los indocumentados tendrían que “declararse culpables de un delito menor para obtener su legalización”. A su vez, el legislador enfatizó que la reforma migratoria no tiene posibilidades este año en la Cámara Alta.

La semana pasada, el presidente del Subcomité de Inmigración, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) y Graham presentaron juntos una columna de opinión en The Washington Post, donde aseguraron que los indocumentados tendrían que admitir que violaron la ley.

“Para los 11 millones de inmigrantes que ya están ilegalmente en este país, teníamos que ofrecer un camino duro pero justo. Se les exigiría admitir que violaron la ley y el pago de su deuda a la sociedad mediante la realización de servicio comunitario y el pago de multas e impuestos atrasados. Estas personas estarían obligadas a pasar controles de antecedentes y ser competentes en inglés antes de ir a la parte de atrás de la fila y ganar la oportunidad de trabajar hacia la residencia legal permanente”, dice la columna.

Consultado por La Opinión respecto a “¿qué significa admitir que se violó la ley”, Graham aseguró “la parte que se refiere a la solución de la inmigración ilegal, es que van a tener que admitir que cometieron un crimen, declararte culpable de un misdemeanor o delito menor, pagar una multa y realizar servicio comunitario”.

Un delito menor es una ofensa criminal que resulta en un récord. Tiene un grado menor de severidad que las felonías, pero mayor que las infracciones civiles. En general, se le considera un crimen que se paga a través de prisión, libertad bajo palabra y multas.

It goes on. He is essentially saying that a) Immigration Reform is dead this year and b) his terms for signing a bill in any case involve the usual terms offered by the GOP such as learning English, but the novel and disturbing proposition that the undocumented community, before becoming proud and naturalized US citizens, admit to criminality and carry a misdemeanor crime on their record evermore. In addition, the newly-shamed and minted criminal class will do community service and pay a fine.

The Eternal Servant-Criminal Class

I am not surprised at these types of ideas coming from a Republican. From an old white Conservative man. Never mind that currently being undocumented is not even a criminal offense but a civil one! (ICE has got around this by charging people with document fraud, thus shuttling the cases into criminal court where immigrants often don’t have adequate representation and sign whatever they are told to, ending up in—yup, you guessed it—a detention center where the taxpayers support their imprisonment, rather than benefit from their working and adding to the local economy and workforce.)

Do you know that law officers already generally assume you are a criminal or have an arrest record if you are a person of color? Or at least that you were up to something recently! Or perhaps that your shirt smells like Marijuana. It’s true! That is why people of color get stopped for driving for no reason, get tailed in stores (hate this one, it’s very distracting) get harassed by cops in the first place. It is part of the Prison loop. See you as criminal, create you as criminal. Target you more, prosecute you further, assume guilt, search ’til they find some. Punish. Repeat.

Republicans like Graham and Sessions and so on are essentially incapable of viewing an abstract Mexican or group of Mexicans as ANYthing but something deviant, shameful, criminal, and destructive. Of course he wants ten million brown people to have a police record! In his mind it’s already one and the same, he aches to flesh his bias into life. As Joe Arpaio does by criminalizing those he feels are already criminal by nature.

And a police record will lead to further trouble with the law. It’s bad enough getting harassed more because of a name or physical traits, but to be harassed and then found to have a record already? As I said, these things compound each other, and sometimes, very fast. Punishments increase in severity, less lenience is given, you feel more uptight about further trouble, which might make you act funny around cops who are already looking at you funny…see? It’s a loop. And that’s the point of it.

So Lindsay Graham (R) is basically saying “Okay. I will agree to let millions more Mexicans into this culture, but they must play the roles in which I see them. This preserves my white supremacist culture, after all. I don’t want you here, but if you have to be here and you are already, then you are criminals. That fits the script.”

And Arizona is all over this, too. As I covered in the latter part of News With Nezua | Whoa Canada! (the specific Arizona segment is here on YouTube), a mesh of laws are being enacted in that state that turn the presence of any undocumented person into a violator of criminal laws, as well as anyone who transports them to work, or to look for work, or home from work. These laws (primarily enshrined in SB 1070) empower police and government workers anywhere in the state to stop anyone they think may be undocumented for any reason and require proof of citizenship…or be swept into ICEville. Yup. Bad, bad news. Bad, bad move. (Did you know the massive marches of 2006 were mostly in reaction to the Sensenbrenner bill which proposed the very same thing?)

That is essentially the ground that Graham is preparing for the entire nation.

You think cops harassing people of color is bad now? Just imagine. Watch that segment on the new Arizona laws, and imagine how that could play out on an entire nation where people of color or who have accents are already under fire or derision; already being scapegoated for the economic destruction wrought by greedy blue-eyed bankers. These laws that empower local police to increasingly view and treat the undocumented—and by extension, Latinos—as criminal suspects who owe obeisance at any moment (Your papers??!) serve as a very, very poor response to the shifting cultural face of the nation. In fact, it’s safe to say that this creeping violence and force is the last gasp of Whiteness, meaning to do by gun and prison what it cannot maintain by propaganda and illusion.

In today’s civilized and progressive era, everything will be by law and decree and politically viable and sound and acceptable. And yet, the jails continue to grow. And grow too small. And be it in Haiti or Iraq or Mexico, it is still a certain kind of dweller on this planet doing the plundering. The Marines and police are still sent in to secure the Imperialist hustle in every market on the planet.

And the Democrats are often the ones tearily waving them goodbye as they embark on their patriotic journeys.

And Ye Shall Reap What Ye Sow

Bill Clinton recently admitted to what many have been saying for many years: that creating conditions that flood a foreign nation/entity with imports from the US while disabling that locations ability to farm and produce food for themselves wreaks destruction on an area. This is actually a pretty important statement for him to make. (Must be why after the first day, the article is buried and took me a while to track down!) Because the US does this…as a pattern. And when you stop and think about it, there is no more confusion about my level of emotion on how my own birth-nation treats humans around the world, known here as “immigrants” or as “illegals” or “illegal immigrants” by all the GOP and some members of the Democratic party. Because it’s a very nasty and disgusting and immoral and deceptive way to act. And I expect better from this world, in this time.

You cripple a nation’s agricultural market so that THE USA MAY BENEFIT from this NATION OF BROWN PEOPLE. This destroys the market in Haiti, as it did in Chile, as it did in Mexico. It’s not an accident. It’s not that Clinton is just realizing it. This is how the US stays strong and economically viable. China makes a lot of things we use! I would be lost without all my gear imported from China. China has a leg up exporting because they make SO. MUCH. STUFF. The US exports by creating famine conditions and then conveniently being around when people are hungry. In essence. I’m being a bit dramatic, but good, because it all ends up the same. It’s like locusts. We strip them down so that we can fly. It’s vile. But that’s not the end of it.

When these people flee, and come here—the much-trumpted LAND OF OPPORTUNITY and LAND OF PLENTY—from those lands that are economically stunted or crippled, we consider them criminals. We say they have to admit what wrong they did. Even Democrats insist that they be punished, this low person on the ladder! Dems and GOP insist they be shamed! It sickens my gut. Where is the discussion of what the US has done wrong in this? Better yet, a way forward where we can do right by what went wrong? An intelligent cause and effect talk? This is tyranny of the strong, to punish these tiny humans scattering about in the wake of imperial boots that tear through towns collecting our bounty.

Bill Clinton has made it clear that he understands this. And if this tiny piece of truth could make its way into our national dialogue on economy, foreign policy, and immigration? It would upset and rearrange the entire trajectory. Or it would have the potential, at least. We know it wouldn’t have a chance in the murky, corrosive depths of US political discourse.

And then people even on the “left” want to talk about a “soundbyte culture.”

The Democrats are now talking about sending in guns, or having some special type of arrangement with Mexico so our Marines can go in and join his drug war that has spiraled out of control and is eating human beings every day. It’s not like they can run through the desert to escape the war. I suppose soon our troops will be waiting for them there, and our bullets firing upon them from Mexican rifles.

Bill Clinton’s tears mean about as much to me as Glenn Becks’.

Siphon

The Democrats are doing their job. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, and recently wrote about journalists: it’s not that they aren’t doing what they were elected to do, it’s that people are confused about their purpose. And the Democrats’ purpose is to siphon off genuine populist outrage on the Left side of the spectrum. To give us the Good Cop to the GOP’s Bad Cop. That results in our being “trapped” into a Two Party mindset. The dynamic is a powerful one, because it taps into a couple things personally (nevermind the practical chances/difficulty in electing a third party candidate). One, most people who are scared of outcomes or of being in a scary situation (or perhaps I should call it “uncertainty”) will choose the easiest way out. For another thing, The Good Cop/Bad Cop routine presupposes you don’t have enough personal strength to offer yourself a third option in what currently presents as a binary, and a pressing one. These are generally sound assumptions to make with most people, at most times. And of course, there are other reasons that are systemic.

But however you shake it out, the current Democratic party is a pretty inadequate choice for people truly interested in social justice; in a sound, healthy, vibrant society that respects human rights and has the confidence and joy at heart that a thriving culture would. No, the American voting public is, sometimes, like beaten children ready to take what we are given because our imaginations and hope has been kicked in until it cannot expand any further.

Given: The way the GOP is veering downward and righty-right-righto-right as of late draws the distinction between them and the Democrats a valuable one, admittedly. Also, while the insurance reform bill that was just passed does enshrine the worst parts of the capitalist system, as I think Taibbi said, and is a giveaway to the corporate moguls, the current GOP was really rubbing its Class War Club quite unabashedly and certainly is off on an irrational trajectory that ends in abject class war. Beck telling us our teeth are not a Constitutional right. Oh, I’ve got a few things to tell Mr. Beck and people like him about teeth! But that’s for another time.

That said, even with the historic healthcare legislation achievement, the Dems will continue to fund the utter destruction of our neighbors in the world. Be it in Afghanistan, where the CIA now operates as if another branch of the military; in Pakistan where drones drop down death on the daily; in Iraq or wherever the US Pentagon decides we go next without needing to call it “war” and thus launch it legally. And people will continue to flee these nations (if they live through it) and many will make their way here. The US—both Left and Right—will continue to speak of these migrations as violations of our law and border, a law and border that are like one-way doors for bullets, bombs, and people and through their precise functioning undermine any and all we say about opportunity, fairness, and liberty. The US will continue to lock people up in the already overburdened and ridiculously blooming prison system. Movies like Blindside will continue to win Oscars and make white America feel it’s a good place, at heart. And once in a while, the Democrats will make a big show of passing a center-left piece of legislation.

Meanwhile, no branch of our government is doing much to help heal the world at large, or at least slow the destruction and degradation of our global community and its future.

It can be a scary thought if you dwell on it. Dancing helps.

Fear Felt Up High

And so the Democratic Party is now feeling a bit of anxiety over the immigration issue. I know because I am contacted sometimes by Democratic aides in DC. The Washington-Blogger relationship is new, and I’m sure they are not quite sure what to do with it, but I credit them for approaching and making contact with me and making an effort to…well. I guess that is the question. What are they after? How do they see a blogger? We know the protocol for the Press and the White House…but I am not quite that. All these areas are new. I am open to how they flesh out. But I am certainly not here to simply pass on messaging. I am not a tri-corder, or whatever Colbert called the MSM. No, Jim, I’m a blogger. And that means I’ll not just pass on what was said, but how I perceive that statement, or various statements. I’ll report on it, but I’ll report on it, and I’ll report on me, too! REPORTING ON IT! It’s like frakken Gonzo Ummagumma up in here.

After my multiple talks, I began to feel such a desire on their part to have me carry out certain actions and spread specific messages that I replied that they should find a way to pay me! This of course sent them off running for the moment. Not to mention it would ultimately be a unethical. That remark was my way of hinting that I don’t do specific jobs that other entities benefit solely from unless I’m paid or want to.

But I’ll pass on their words in case you do want to, or in case they are valuable. In that sense, sure. I’m happy to help. And they said to pressure Graham. Activists should be “outraged” about Graham’s proposal to criminalize immigrants. We should pressure the GOP so that they come on board to Obama’s side (bill?) and feel the heat.

But what bill? What leadership? Are they really asking bloggers, now, to fulfill Obama’s promise to the community?

Oye, if the nation can see or hear or yawn at what’s been going on so far with the immigrant community, well. As I said, we are pushing back against some deeply entrenched imaginations of what brown people are and so on. It’s a tough economy (I know, it’s hitting me hard) and it’s easy to begin hoarding and fearing. Especially when the government feeds that impulse! As I said to to both of them in so many words, how do you expect the grassroots to get excited and work for you? You are out there saying all these things about immigrants! Helping to spread fear and a punitive outlook! I laid out my thoughts as I’ve done here to them, to one of them. I brought up the larger global picture of what is going on in immigration. He said, true, “but this is a soundbyte nation.” And I said that I don’t want to treat my country like it is stupid. Why are the Democrats not educating people on this? Why do they bow to the Right with the talk of criminality and punishment? I talked about blaming the weakest link in the chain and about the Tyranny of the strong. And I said I had to take serious disagreement with the idea that making the People comfortable involves playing into the criminalization of Mexicans and immigrants. Nope. Not buying it.

I didn’t really know what they could do with everything I said. Maybe they passed it on, maybe they just wondered why they called The Angry Mexican in the first place and left it at that.

But I had to speak on why I had no passion really to run errands for the Democrats’ capitulatory, cowardly asses. “You need 60 votes for anything” one said, over and over. Which is fine. But who is leading the charge? Not Obama. Not the tiniest bit. And who made beautiful speeches to la comunidad via NCLR events and so on? Wait for it…yup. That was Obama.

After speaking to both an aide to a major Democratic player in  Congress and their Hispanic Outreach person, I can tell that they are sweating our reaction. New Media, activists, advocacy groups, the People. Why? Probably because they don’t plan on moving anything. President Obama tells the GOP that they have to offer up a bill, or that he said he was open, but he needs more of them on board. Reid’s office states it will introduce something by the end of the year if nothing happens. Schumer and Graham are out having beers and swatting at piñatas or something as they talk about how to extract the most shame from one square mile of tomato skins.

President Obama won’t be leading this charge. I love the man, no doubt. But look, son. He wouldn’t even come out swinging for his old disabled aunt. You think he’s gonna risk his ass over ten million Mexicans? No, I know stall talk when I hear it, and he won’t be championing the issue. He’d already be out there.

Today and Tomorrow

Which is why I began this piece with the question how do we react to this? Now? Let’s think and plan and know now, so that by the time it’s made inarguably clear through the ole up/down/up/down Public Option style desensitization method, we already know our plan. Do away with the doubt and hope so we can get practical. In what way? I don’t know. I guess that depends. It might be a purely personal plan, having to do with voting, or lifestyle or living area, brand of pop-tarts you buy…I can’t imagine. But despite our own personal reactions, we have to understand that this is not a tiny let down or broken promise, nor should it be. I can’t call it for you. But I think it’s safe to say despite the excuse-making, we were had.

That the Democrats will continue deporting Latin Americans at an astonishing rate (1,000 a day now?), enacting laws that devastate communities and punish individuals for what is really a larger issue (next we can punish the seals for drowning as our industries melt their icebergs) and our charming, sweet, and eloquent President will most certainly not use that enlivening tenor to educate the US masses on what they really need: to understand exactly what is going on that ties the health care issue together with the economy, our international policy, and immigration. The GOP will continue to react as if despoilers of the Pure need to be fought within her borders and across oceans, and never will the entire picture or truthful dialogue be presented to the People so that something—some real thing—might change in this whole setup.

Finally, as expected, the Democrats will stall on immigration and offer feints and tuff-guy soundbytes, but they will not come through, nor will they break it all down and get real with the People.

They can’t. The Good Cop, no matter how comforting, still needs you to fear the cell for his shtick to work.

DESPITE my many misgivings on how What-May-Become-CIR is shaping up, the energy at the rally on Sunday in DC was undeniably strong, fresh, vibrant, positive, and loud. More like a loving block party, concert and picnic than a “march,” the National Mall hosted hundreds of thousands of people supporting our fixing the broken immigration system. I’ll have a video for you (the next News With Nezua video) that I am going to use to convey some of that energy to you.

Because there are separate aspects of any “cause” or political issue. Which is what makes the whole thing so frustrating sometimes. We all forget, we all remember, are reminded, when we talk it over. We begin pushing for the very best we can, as we should. Ideals lead the way. Then some others get angry and say that the first group is being too purist, or non-pragmatic. Compromises must be made. Then your undocumented friend says those compromises are cruel and unneeded and unnecessary. And then another undocumented friend says, hey—I’m willing to make those concessions. Then another citizen friend says but I am not willing to have a biometric Social Security card, and we shouldn’t let that be ushered in using this issue. Then someone else passes a link about a protest or march action and then someone else says isnt there more to making change than protests, than making noise? And then you attend a massive gathering like this in the absence of any movement from the white house after all the beautiful speeches made to la comunidad and you remember that every gathering is not about making an immediate change. Or rather, more comes out of something like this event than just definitive legislative action.

Sometimes you need to be around people who feel as you do, who look a bit like you, or have a name like you—especially when those things are under attack by various groups and voices in our nation. Especially when you are out there working that activismagic-whatever you do, making your heart visible and evident in the world, trying to chip away at wrongness because that gives you a lust for life, that makes you feel you have done more than take from the world. And that good things can happen, and that you are not alone, and that you stand with hundreds of thousands of other people. And that even though the people who would stab the very balloons out of the hands of mimes may be given too loud a voice at times, on the other hand, the people who know that justice is a right all humans have can gift each other with a very powerful weapon to place in the arsenal. And the event had a lot of that energy. It was very comforting to know that with so many Latinos around, even if we were dissimilar in many ways, we were standing together at the moment for things that go so often unchampioned or unmentioned by the most powerful voices in media, if not altogether slurred and derided. We were, for a handful of hours, a city of solidarity and flava and positivity.

And at the same time, all those aforementioned currents that can sometimes complement and sometimes contradict, were in play.

I saw a number of people who work this scene, the regulars, the activists (undocumented and citizens), some org people, some new media people…you get to know each other after a while! We always see each other at these events. Our feelings on what is right and what is possible overlap in places. And not in others. And always varying at different times, perhaps, depending on how the issue is playing out in Congress or on TV or in the White House. And to see that weave of multiplicity on the issue just in that group of people gives you a peek into how tough it has to be to move legislation with so many people in government, many whom are not just sometimes at variance with, but directly opposed to each other’s value systems and desires and ideologies, and many who don’t even deal in good faith, who are simply making decisions on cynical and power-based motives. It’s a wonder anything gets done. And it explains why so many of us on the Left are beaming sunshine out of our blogholes because the White House just passed insurance reform that still leaves us with a health care system that should hide in shame compared to that of many “less powerful” nations—not to make light of the very big deal that is this bill being passed, nonetheless….

One of these activist type friends I know—he is involved with one of the current orgs that speaks for/stands for/benefits from the Latino&Immigration type issues—was a bit bitter about the event. It was “cynical,” he said. “Why aren’t they telling people” that this is a big hoo-rah event when in reality, Schumer and others are lining up a nasty little deal before they even consider trying to sell it; a deal that involves National biometric ID cards/SS cards, and passing an English test (who says you have to speak English in the USA, we still don’t have any “official language,” after all!), admitting shame and criminality in being here at all (I’m still waiting to hear the US govt explain the reneging on NAFTA as well as many other actions that contribute to global inequality and spur immigration in the first place!) and blowing more money on a militarized and harmful border mentality and weaponry/wall, as well as funding (in part) Felipe Calderón’s drug war that has claimed over 17,000 lives by now. And I understand what he is saying. These things are not acceptable, in reality. At least not to me as a citizen. And I do live here, and have to live here for now. And so I feel I have a right—while not speaking for anyone else—to take part in pushing, shoving, nudging the world closer to where I feel it should be. Beginning here.

At the same time I could have said “Okay. Fair enough. But if that is cynical…then why don’t you tell that truth through the org you are attached to?” Because he does not, either. Nor do they. They stand for good things, too. But not the whole truth. Does anyone? Does anyone think the whole truth stands a chance in this nation? And yet you can’t really aim any lower and have too much self-respect. Because you know invariably that ideal will fall short, being channeled through an imperfect vessel—be it your own humanity, or Congress.

So it’s never cut and dry. We all have our interests, we all have to make a living, we all have to make compromise, we all have our hands stained from rowing in the Empire Ship, and even in those moments we truly want to do only good, only the right thing, that still doesn’t mean we’ll agree on what exact shape that Thing will be. We come from different places. We stand in different places. We’ve had different beginnings. I’m still personally trying to learn how to be true to my own vision, and at the same time make room for yours. In a way, I guess at heart, that is what the USA is supposed to be about. (At least judging by the mantras children are pressured to speak to the flag in school.) Lately I feel we are not being too successful at making that vision happen. But maybe as a nation born squalling and bloody and steeped in lust and reverence for property, as well as violence and exploitation of the Other, we just take smaller steps than those that satisfy me right away.

What is there to do but to keep putting energy toward such an idea, and toward fighting the good fight?

Which is why I thank Reform Immigration for America very much for making my trip possible. I appreciate the help in getting there, and the no-strings freedom to report the way I report. Speaking of which, I have to get back to editing the video. Meanwhile, here’s a slideshow of the fotos I took. Maybe they will give you an idea, for now, of what I’m talking about….

BELOW ARE SOME NOTES that I took on a conference call Monday, hosted by SEIU. It was a presentation for the media, discussing Rep Gutierrez’s CIR ASAP immigration reform bill. I was liveblogging it, so I sum up sometimes, skip some sentences, paraphrase. You know how it goes.

After the liveblog notes is the full text a summary of the bill. (Note: The liveblog notes are not complete, but the best I could do coming on a little late, and then asking a question myself which distracted my notetaking.)

Finally, there will be a link posted so you can add your voice to help support this bill. We need every voice, truly.

—

SEIU: Remarks introducing bill. Opens up to questions.

Josh Gerstein of Politico: What is the motivation behind DHS efforts? Look tough in anticipation of debate? A “must” effort? Re: Broader Debate: What are you looking for Pres Obama to do in upcoming months?

SEIU: In terms of motivation, you’d have to ask DHS why. But this is not about looking tough, this is about solving problems. If they were able to really focus on some of these bad actor employers they would get full support from many corners and actually do something good. Put an end to some of these exploitive problems we see coming from bad actor employers.

Bottom line is that CIR is supported by “poll after poll after poll.” Churches, people, employers, businesses. We look fwd to POTUS leadership on this.

JG, Politico: A lot of talk from congress and White House saying they will be creating jobs. Do you have any concern that intense focus on the employment rate would be something to scare some legislative leaders away from CIR?

SEIU: I think that what we need to focus on is economic recovery. Making sure we create good jobs for American workers. I see CIR as part and parcel of coming up with an economic recovery program. So I hope Congress begins to understand this strategy is a good one…

Derek Cain: What makes you think Congress is at all interested in taking on such a volatile issue on an election year?

SEIU: If there is an issue with widespread support, this is it. Lot of polling shows that well over 2/3 of US people want to see CIR passed. Secondly, business is fully in support of this. SEIU and Chamber of congress dont get along on many issues. But on this one we are of one mind. I’ve met with many employers around the country who feel the same and are communicating this to Congress. Community groups, too…The only ones who dont want to see this happen are nativist orgs who will never be for anything that means making sure we have an immigration system that works and they are a small minority of the US people.

DC followup: Core of problem is legalization…I don’t think legislators wanna approach this. Do you just leave this part out?

SEIU: No, without legalization, you have no reform. The USA is disrupting workplaces, arresting gardeners, nannies, fieldworkers. Causing pain.

DC again: You are being critical of DHS in the size of their audit. I think we have a dramatic departure from the raids we used to have. Are you happy with change? With the audits?

SEIU: THey are just another side of the coin of raids. We are glad the raids have stopped, but these are resulting in the same thing. Look at American Apparel. Huge impact on the employer and workes. True, they are not arrested and placed in detention, but the workers have lost their job and if they cant find a job now, maybe they find one in the underground economy….

Wash Times, Steven Deenan: Just wanted to follow up on jobs question earlier. The unemployment rate is certainly different than it was, do you think it will have no effect ont he debate?

SEIU: Fixing this system will be good for American workers.

Susan Gamboa, AP: re audits: Seems the Obama admin is building a case so that when CIR comes up they can say “we have taken steps to make borders secure and interior enforcement” so it seems the aduts are part of this body of evidence. By criticizing it, do you hurt your own cause of passing CIR?

SEIU: No, they can accomplish the same thing. We are not saying they should not enforce the law. With limited resources you should focus on what is most important. What they are targeting are workers paying their taxes, holding jobs, thats how their names are in th system. On the other hand if you have an employer not paying overtime or min wage or taxes, they do not get punished. They are not targeting them. Enforce the laws, but enforce all of the laws!

Nezua of The Media Consortium/TheUnapologeticMexican.Org: Thank you for taking this stance. In my experience also, most people want reform passed, to see human rights given to all people in our nation. But there is a small faction of anti-immigrant voices, orgs centered around John Tanton with white supremacist and very questionable affiliations that get the media’s ear too often, using questionable stats and facts all molded by their agenda. The independent media seems to get this, and yet the MSM does not for the most part. Do  you have any plans to counter this? Thank you.

SEIU: [I was too busy listening to his response to type while he was talking to me...ironically, I don't remember what he said, but perhaps there was not much he could say to this. The groups like NumbersUSA, CIS, FAIR and other anti-immigration groups move too often under cover and perhaps they hadn't thought of what to do yet. Part of my reason for bringing it up was to remind the rest of the media members on the call what we are dealing with, and introduce the facts in case some weren't aware of John Tanton and the origins of many of these groups].

SEIU closed by reminding everyone they are not saying DHS should not enforce the law. Just that only focusing on Enforcement was not helping and was not the answer, and that they were focusing in large part on worker’s rights.

Below is the text of the CIR ASAP bill.

—–

Comprehensive Immigration Reform for
America’s Security and Prosperity
(CIR ASAP) Act of 2009

TITLE I – BORDER SECURITY, DETENTION, AND ENFORCEMENT

Subtitle A – Border Security:

Subtitle A of Title I assembles a vision of effective and accountable enforcement for the 21^st century through maximizing border security by requiring the Secretary of Homeland Security to form a national strategy that is consistent with the progress already made. In order to achieve these goals, oversight and accountability for the Department of Homeland Security is emphasized, especially as they pertain to fiscal appropriations and cost-benefit analyses of operations and programs.

Protecting Our Borders: This subtitle protects United States border cities and communities from violence and crime along the U.S.-Mexico border by:

• Creating a Southern Border Security Task Force that is composed of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers
• Requiring a security plan for land ports of entry at the borders involved in international trade
• Expanding the programs under the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism that is in accordance to the SAFE Port Act
• Improving the exchange of information between federal agencies on North American Security by a conducting a targeted study of security clearance standards, document integrity, immigration and visa management and coordination, terrorist watch lists and smuggling operations

Effective Enforcement: Subtitle A achieves effective enforcement by improving personnel, assets and technology. This section:

• Supports additional training, oversight and evaluation for agents who are the first face of America at the borders
• Ensures that Customs and Border Protection have sufficient personal equipment like body armor, weapons, and uniforms, and that Customs and Border Protection have sufficient assets such as helicopters, power boats, motor vehicles and other electronic equipment
• Promotes standards for searches of electronic devices and appropriate training for agents in conducting such searches
• Minimizes wasteful spending by developing and studying comprehensive uses of advanced technologies, such as aerial and automated surveillance
• Requires an inventory prior to any increase of personnel assets and technology

Securing Ports of Entry: Our nation’s ports of entry are modernized for our economic benefit and security by conducting a study of the infrastructure and operations to identify necessary improvements and projects to enhance border security and the flow of legitimate commerce and travel. This section:

• Improves infrastructure and recalibrates resources and training to allow for more effective screening of commercial goods and individuals so as to minimize threats to national security at ports of entry
• Increases the number of full-time port of entry inspectors, agricultural specialists, and support staff to improve the timely and safe flow of commercial goods and individuals
• Establishes a demonstration project to test and evaluate new port of entry technologies and also refines existing technologies and operational concepts

Combating Criminal Activity: This subtitle recognizes the role of state law enforcement at the border in combating criminal activity by creating border relief grant programs for Northern and Southern border state, local and tribal law enforcement entities. This section:

• Enables better training and technical assistance for state and local partners that deals with narcotics-related kidnapping, drug trafficking and the interdiction of weapons and currency
• Facilitates information-sharing and collaboration between federal and state partners
• Suspends the Operation Streamline program pending review of the goals, impacts and cost-benefit analyses
• Reimburses Northern and Southern border state and local prosecutors for prosecuting federally initiated drug cases
• Provides expanded resources for Operation Armas Cruzadas and Project Gunrunner to identify, investigate, and prosecute individuals involved in the trafficking and smuggling of firearms between Mexico and the United States.

Improving Partnerships: The importance of border communities as partners and allies are recognized as key in achieving effective enforcement by prioritizing community consultation in developing enforcement policies, border protection strategies and training. This subtitle:

• Establishes the U.S.-Mexico Border Enforcement Commission and a Border Communities Liaison Office to foster and institutionalize community consultation
• Prohibits military involvement in non-emergency border enforcement
• Prioritizes mitigating adverse impacts to federal, tribal, state, local and private lands, waters, wildlife and habitats by promoting cross-agency development of comprehensive monitoring and mitigation of ecological and environmental impacts of border security infrastructure and activity

Combating Human Trafficking: Subtitle A requires the development and implementation of a plan to improve coordination amongst federal and state partners to address human smuggling and migrant deaths. This section calls for additional ICE agents dedicated to combating human smuggling are stationed at ports of entry, requires reporting on migrant deaths, and establishes a study of strategies used at the Southern border to address this problem.

Subtitle B – Detention:

Improving Conditions of Detention: The bill requires DHS to meet minimum requirements to ensure the humane treatment of detainees. Minimum requirements include:

• Adequate medical and mental health screenings, evaluations, medically necessary treatment, and continuing care
• A review process for medical treatment requests and complete and confidential medical records
• Reasonable access to telephones, affordable rates, and privacy protections for calls
• Protections from sexual abuse, care for victims, and reports and investigations of abuse
• Protection from transfers that fail to consider health and access to counsel

To ensure compliance with minimum detention conditions, the bill requires rulemaking and enforcement. An independent immigration detention commission is established to investigate and report on compliance. DHS must report the death of a detainee within 48 hours, and report annually to Congress on the circumstances of all deaths in detention.

Protecting U.S. Citizens, Lawfully Present Immigrants, Vulnerable Populations, and Communities: This section increases screening and protections during immigration-related enforcement activities for U.S. citizens, Legal Permanent Residents, others lawfully present in the U.S., and vulnerable populations. Social service agencies, translators, and legal services must be available during enforcement activities. DHS will be required to:

• Issue regulations prohibiting apprehensions at enumerated community, educational, and religious locations
• Provide access to legal orientation programs and access to counsel during enforcement activities and for disabled individuals unable to fully participate in removal proceedings
• Give timely notice and service of immigration charges, as well as timely bond hearings if detained more than 48 hours

This section increases protections for individuals subject to immigration detainers, limits the use of detainers to confirmed removable aliens, and requires DHS to collect data and report on detainer use. The unnecessary detention of refugees is prohibited. DHS is required to report to Congress on the impact of immigration-related enforcement activities.

Improving Secure Alternative to Detention Programs: Criteria are established to guide detention and release decisions and require release for vulnerable populations. Detention decisions must be in writing, served upon detainees, and are subject to redetermination by an immigration judge.

Protecting Family Unity: Families with children may not be separated except in exceptional circumstances where alternatives to detention are not available. Residential, non-penal facilities are developed for any necessary family detention with appropriate protections for children and parental rights. The bill includes safeguards for families and children during immigration-related enforcement actions by:

• Improving child welfare services for children separated from parents and guardians who are in immigration detention or have been removed
• Requiring training for federal and state personnel who interact with separated children and for staff at immigration detention facilities on parental rights, humanitarian, and due process protections
• Ensuring protections for detained parents, guardians, and caregivers in immigration detention to promote access to children, family courts, child welfare services, and consular officials

Protecting Unaccompanied Alien Children: Training is required for DHS employees who encounter unaccompanied alien children. Upon apprehension of an unaccompanied alien child, immediate notice is required by DHS or ORR and transfer to ORR custody within 24 hours.

Subtitle C – Enforcement:

Protecting workers: Provides temporary visas and work authorization for detained workers when they have been retaliated against by their employer for asserting their labor rights and they agree to pursue labor claims against their employer. Also expands U visas to provide for whistleblower protections with regard to worker exploitation, civil rights violations and retaliation for exercising labor rights.

Address Reporting: Clarifies address reporting requirements

Ending Discrimination: Preempts any state or local law that discriminates against an individual based on immigration status or imposes sanctions on any individual or entity based on the immigration status of its clients, employees or tenants

Repeals the 287(g) program: Repeals the 287(g) program and clarifies that the authority to enforce federal immigration law lies solely with the federal government

ICE Ombudsman: Establishes an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Ombudsman

Asylum: Eliminates the arbitrary 1-year bar to applying for asylum

Restores federal jurisdiction: Restores the federal courts of their jurisdiction to review decisions and practices of DHS thereby also restoring the historic role that the courts play in reviewing agency actions

TITLE II – EMPLOYMENT VERIFICATION

This section sets up an employment verification system for employers to verify each new hire’s authorization to work. The new system will eventually apply to all workers and all new hires, and will be rolled out in phases, beginning with critical infrastructure employers and large employers. The employment verification system:

• Creates significant civil penalties for employers who do not comply with the requirements under the new system
• Establishes serious criminal penalties for knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens
• Debars employers who repeatedly violate these provisions from government contracts, grants, and agreements
• Includes privacy safeguards by limiting the data that can be collected and stored in the database and requiring the agencies to develop the system with maximum security and privacy protections
• Requires the agencies to evaluate impact of system from a privacy perspective and complete privacy impact statements
• Prohibits creation of a national identification card
• Includes anti-discrimination provisions. Forbids employers from using the new system to discriminate against applicants or employees on the basis of nationality. Prohibits employers from terminating employment due to a tentative non-confirmation, using the system to screen employees prior to offering employment, or using the system selectively
• Allows an individual to register with the Social Security Administration and acquire a PIN that would allow them electronic access to their file in the system, update their information, and lock their file for purposes of employment

TITLE III – VISA REFORMS

Backlog Reduction and Numerical Limit Reforms:

Reduction of existing backlogs: Permits the “recapture” of unused employment-based visas and family-sponsored visas from fiscal years 1992-2008 and allows future unused visa numbers to roll over to next fiscal year. Immediate relatives are exempted from the annual cap on the number of immigrant visas. This section increases the percentage limit of visas which may be issued yearly to a single country.

Promotion of Family Unity: To recognize family unity principles and facilitate backlog reduction, reclassifies spouses and children of lawful permanent residents as immediate relatives. The government is given greater discretionary authority to waive unlawful presence bars to reunite families upon a demonstration of hardship for applicant’s U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident family members.

Sons and daughters of Filipino World War II veterans: Exempts the sons and daughters of Filipino WWII veterans from the annual numerical limitations.

Immigrants with Advanced Skills Exempt from Visa Cap: Exempts several categories of highly skilled workers from the employment-based immigrant visa cap.

Retaining Workers Subject to the Green Card Backlog: Current nonimmigrant skilled workers whose employer has petitioned for an employment-based green card on their behalf and their dependents will be permitted to file an application for adjustment of status, regardless of whether a visa is immediately available. An applicant under this section must pay a supplemental $500 fee, to be used by DHS for backlog reduction and clearing security background check delays. The Secretary shall provide employment and travel authorization in 3-year increments while the application is pending.

Protection of Children and Families:

Relief for Orphans and Widows: Ensures that surviving spouses and children applying for adjustment of status or naturalization, including spouses and children of asylees and refugees, retain eligibility for waivers and other considerations that would have been available to them at the time of the petitioner’s death.

Reform of Cancellation of Removal: Permits immigration judges greater discretion in determining eligibility requirements for long-term lawful permanent residents seeking cancellation of removal. Eliminates prohibitions on including time spent in the United States after becoming inadmissible or being placed in removal proceedings as counting towards continuous presence requirements for cancellation of removal.

Protection for Refugees, Parolees or Asylees: Prohibits the removal of any individual who fled his or her homeland for fear of persecution before the age of twelve and was subsequently admitted into the United States as a parolee or refugee or was granted asylum in the U.S.

Enhanced Protections for Children: Revises current law to ensure that the children of fiancés of United States citizens will be protected from aging out of eligibility to adjust to conditional resident status by requiring that eligibility determinations are based on the child’s age at the time the U.S. citizen files a petition for classifying the child’s parent as a fiancé or spouse. Eliminates he requirement that stepchildren must have been under the age of 18 at the time the qualifying marriage took place in order to be classified as a child for purposes of immigration eligibility.

Limits on Removal for Parents of U.S. Citizen Children: Permits an immigration judge to decline to order the removal of the parent of U.S. citizen child if the judge determines that removal would not be in the child’s best interests and the parent is not subject to removal based on national security, terrorism or trafficking grounds.

Determinations under the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998: This section amends the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998 (HRIFA) to preserve eligibility for children of applicants based on their age on the date of enactment of HRIFA and permits new applications and motions to reopen on that basis.

Affidavit of Support: Revises the eligibility requirements for sponsorship of immigrants by reducing the level of support required from 125% of poverty level to 100% of poverty level.

Return of Talent Program: Permits lawful permanent residents to temporarily return to their home country to assist in post-conflict or natural disaster reconstruction activities, for up to two years without losing credit towards time as a continuous resident of the U.S. for purposes of applying for naturalization.

Humanitarian Visa Program to Prevent Unauthorized Migration (PUM Visa):

Prevent Unauthorized Migration Visa (PUM Visa) Creates a stop-gap new visa program that will provide for safe, humanitarian migration during the three-year transition period before the implementation of recommendations made by the new Labor Commission.

• One hundred thousand PUM visas will be made available annually, for three years, to persons from sending countries of unauthorized migration to the United States to be distributed on a percentage basis through a lottery system.
• Individuals may apply to the lottery if they are not present in the United States at the time of filing, do not have other family or employment-based means to immigration, submit to criminal background checks, and have completed less than a 4-year college degree program.
• Individuals awarded visas will be admitted to the United States as conditional residents and may petition to remove the condition after three years upon showing they have good moral character, pass all required background and security checks, comply with all tax requirements and other factors, including payment of a $500 fee that will be used to fund security and employment programs.

TITLE IV – EARNED LEGALIZATION PROGRAM FOR THE UNDOCUMENTED

Visa Program for Qualified Undocumented Workers: Creates a program providing conditional nonimmigrant status for undocumented immigrants (and their spouses and children) in the U.S., which is valid for six years.

Features of the Conditional Nonimmigrant Program:

• Provides conditional nonimmigrant visa applicants with work and travel authorization and protection from removal
• Bars related to undocumented status will be waived (security and criminal bars cannot be waived)
• Contains provisions for administrative and judicial review of denied applications

Requirements for Conditional Nonimmigrant Status: The alien must:

• Establish presence in the U.S. on the day of introduction, and continuously thereafter
• At time of registration, attests to contributions to the U.S. through employment, education, military service, or other volunteer/community service (with exemptions for minors, persons with disabilities, the elderly, or other unusual circumstances)
• Complete criminal and security background checks
• Pay a $500 fine plus necessary application fees (fine exemption for children and certain immigrants who initially entered the U.S. before the age of 16)
• The individual shall be ineligible to receive a visa as a result of a serious criminal conviction, persecution of another person or reasonable grounds for believing that the alien committed a particularly serious crime abroad
• There is a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment for anyone who willfully falsifies information in an application for conditional nonimmigrant status

Adjustment of Status to LPR: Provides qualified conditional non-immigrants and their spouses and children with an opportunity to apply for lawful permanent resident status (green card) and eventual citizenship.

Features of the Earned Adjustment of Status Program:

• No green cards may be issued under this program earlier than six years after the date of enactment unless existing immigrant backlogs have been cleared before that time
• The Department of State and DHS are required to provide any requesting law enforcement entity with information furnished on an application in connection with a criminal or national security investigation or prosecution
• New penalties for making false statements in an application for earned citizenship are created
• Immigrants who adjust from a conditional nonimmigrant visa (including dependents) to lawful permanent resident status shall not be counted against the worldwide numerical visa caps
• Those appealing decisions associated with the application for adjustment to permanent status have access to a defined administrative and judicial process

Special Rule for Persons Brought to the United States Before the Age of 16: In order to simplify processing of applicants under CIR ASAP, those persons ordinarily covered under the DREAM Act will apply for status through the same program outlined above, with the following special features:

• No fines for persons who were brought to the United States before the age of 16, have resided in the U.S. for at least five years, and were 35 years of age or less
• Such persons will be eligible for accelerated LPR status upon graduation from high school, and completion of two years of college, military service, or employment. Persons granted LPR status under this provision will be eligible for naturalization three years after the date LPR status is granted
• Graduation from a U.S. high school or receipt of an equivalency degree will meet the English proficiency requirement
• Individual states permitted to determine residency requirements for in-state tuition purposes

Requirements for Earned Adjustment: The applicant must:

• Demonstrate contribution to the United States through employment, education, military service, or voluntary or community service, where applicable
• Complete criminal and security background checks
• Establish registration under the Selective Service (if applicable)
• Meet English and civics requirements
• Undergo a medical examination
• Pay all taxes
• Show admissibility to the U.S

Other Provisions in Title IV:

• AgJOBS Act of 2009

TITLE V – STRENGTHENING AMERICA’S WORKFORCE

Title V of CIR ASAP strengthens America’s workforce by reforming the badly-flawed H-1B, H-2B and L-1 visa programs and establishes a Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets to provide researched, unbiased, accurate recommendations for future flows of workers. It also permanently reauthorizes the EB-5 visa program and establishes stricter requirements for employers and recruiters of foreign workers. Title V additionally establishes the American Worker Recruit and Match System which will match qualified individuals with job opportunities in fields that traditionally have relied on unauthorized labor. Furthermore, this title establishes the Security and Prosperity Account which directs funds raised from fines in the earned legalization program to fortify America’s workforce, integrate new Americans and safeguard our borders.

Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets: Title V establishes a new independent federal agency known as the Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets. The Commission will:

• Establish employment based-immigration policies that promote economic growth and competitiveness while minimizing job displacement, wage depression and unauthorized employment
• Create and implement a policy-focused research agenda on the economic impact of immigration on multiple levels
• Collect and analyze information on employment-based immigration and publish the data and analysis
• Recommend to Congress and the President appropriate methods for determining the levels of employment-based immigration and assessing the effects of such immigration as well as the numerical levels and characteristics of procedures for future flows of workers to be admitted into the United States

Security and Prosperity Account: The Security and Prosperity Account is established in Title V to fund efforts to strengthen our workforce, including:

• Grants to states for adult and dislocated worker employment and training activities
• Funding for the Electronic Employment Verification System to ensure that all individuals working in the U.S. are authorized to do so
• Funding for the Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets to provide sound, researched and objective employment based immigration policy
• Dislocated workers assistance national reserve funding
• Establishment of AWRMS programs and funds educational purposes
• Funding to reduce the USCIS visa backlog to ensure a timely and reliable process for all individuals applying for visas and further the integration of new Americas with programs that, for example, facilitate citizenship for legal permanent resident students and create citizenship promotion services
• Funding for border security, detention and enforcement activities

American Worker Recruit and Match System: Title V establishes the American Worker Recruit and Match System (AWRMS), which is an internet-based program that is set up by each State Workforce Agency (SWA) to be incorporated into current Web-based job search engines. AWRMS is a searchable database that allows employers to post job opportunities in fields that have traditionally relied on unauthorized labor. In addition, individuals can post their employment profiles and AWRMS will match employers with qualified individuals.

Protecting Workers: Title V protects foreign workers from exploitation and abuse by ensuring that each prospective employee is provided a written description of the terms of their employment which may not knowingly include any misleading or false information. In addition, each employer must provide to the Secretary of Labor the identity of all recruiters working on their behalf and any possible violations committed by a recruiter. An employer will be held responsible for the actions of a recruiter and may be subject to civil penalties.

H-1B visa program: The current H-1B visa program does not adequately protect American or H-1B workers. Title V reforms the H-1B visa program to:

• Ensure that before an employer can hire an H-1B worker, the employer must meet strict requirements for the recruitment of American workers
• Authorize the Department of Labor (DOL) to initiate investigations into possible fraud and abuse in the absence of a formal complaint and/or the Secretary’s approval.
• Increase penalties for violations
• Authorize the DOL to conduct annual audits of employers that rely heavily on the H-1B program

L-1 visa program: The L-1 visa program is currently vulnerable to fraud and abuse. CIR ASAP authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to audit L-1 visa participants. Penalties will be assessed for violations of the provisions of the L-1 visa program.

H-2B visa program: The H-2B visa program is reformed to prevent the exploitation of H-2B non-immigrants and the depression of wages and other workplace abuses by exploitative employers. Reforms to the program:

• Include stricter requirements for recruitment of American workers
• Prevent employers from participating in the program if they have conducted a mass lay-off in the past year and includes strengthened worker protections

EB-5 Visa program: The EB-5 Visa program is permanently reauthorized within Title V with an increase in available visas to 10,000. It also allows for an expedited processing of petitions for a fee of $2,500. The definition of Targeted Employment Area (TEA) is expanded to include:

• Rural areas,
• High-unemployment areas
• Counties with a 20 percent or more population decrease since 1970
• Areas within the boundaries of state or federal economic development incentive programs
• Areas designated as TEAs by a state agency authorized by the Governor
• Areas designated as TEAs during the two year period before visa application

In addition, Title V requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to study and report on the current job creation counting methodology and how to promote the employment creation program to overseas investors. Lastly it creates a new category of job-producing foreigners eligible for visas: venture capitalist seeking a Founder’s visa.

TITLE VI – INTEGRATION OF NEW AMERICANS

Immigration Fees: Immigration fees have risen steeply in the past decade. Title VI will ensure that future fee increase requests receive closer scrutiny than provided by the largely perfunctory regulatory public comment process. Title VI incorporates and expands on provisions of the Citizenship Promotion Act of 2007 to make citizenship more accessible and affordable. This title:

• Provides for greater transparency for immigration application fees and encourages a uniform process to submit fee waiver applications
• Provides for uniform administration of the naturalization exam
• Promotes citizenship of the elderly by adjusting the age requirements for English language exemption

Improving the Naturalization Process: The process for naturalization is lengthy and difficult to navigate. Title VI creates reforms that encourage citizenship among immigrant communities. This section requires timely response on background checks and evaluates their efficiency. In addition, this title includes a grant program for community based organizations to promote and help immigrants prepare for citizenship. These grants in support of naturalization efforts will assist legal permanent residents with:

• English language and citizenship classes
• Legal assistance
• Community outreach activities
• Assisting aliens with applications for citizenship

Integration Grant Programs:

Title VI includes a grant program for education, training and support efforts relating to the provisions of the CIR ASAP Act, including protections from immigration fraud and the availability of benefits provided by the act. Provisions ensure that to the extent possible, the nonprofit community organizations receiving grants serve geographically diverse and ethnically diverse locations.

USCIS Grant Program: Title VI establishes a grant program within USCIS that provides funding to community-based organizations, including community-based legal service organizations, as appropriate, to develop and implement programs to assist eligible applicants for naturalization. Grants provided for in Title VI will be funded through fees and fines deposited in the Security and Prosperity Account.

Initial Entry, Adjustment, and Citizenship Assistant Grant Program: Title VI establishes the Initial Entry, Adjustment and Citizenship Assistance Grant Program. IEACA grants will be awarded to community-based organizations for the design and implementation of programs to provide the following services:

• Assistance and instruction, including legal assistance, to aliens making initial application for conditional nonimmigrant or conditional nonimmigrant dependent classification
• Assistance and instruction, including legal assistance, to aliens seeking to adjust their status
• Assistance and instruction to applicants on the rights and responsibilities of US citizenship and English language proficiency

Improving Naturalization for Legal Permanent Residents: Facilitates citizenship among Legal Permanent Resident students that want to naturalize. Legal Permanent Resident students will be deemed to have satisfied the language and civics requirements for naturalization if they are able to demonstrate they graduated high school after completing grades 6 through 12 in the United States and the curriculum reflects knowledge of U.S. history, Government, and civics.

Strengthening Communities: Title VI strengthens and unites communities by creating incentives for English language acquisition programs. Creates tax credits for teachers in limited English proficient schools. Provides employers with a tax credit for qualified English language education programs. Authorizes states to form State New American Councils comprised of 15-19 individuals from state and local government, business and community organizations.

Celebrating Citizenship: Title VI celebrates the citizenship of new Americans and encourages these individuals to integrate into their communities. It provides for the availability of funds to the Director of USCIS or to approved public or private nonprofit entities to support public ceremonies for administering oaths of allegiance to naturalizing legal immigrants. Independence Day naturalization ceremonies include appropriate outreach, ceremonial, and celebratory activities. This program shall be funded through fees and fines deposited in the Security and Prosperity Account.

—
Please take action and add your voice to let Congress and the White House know there is support for this bill!

Twitter Notes from Immigration Reform Media Call, September 17, 2009 | Click to Enlarge

ONE REFRESHING EXCEPTION to the sort of dynamic I posted on in Proud and Selfish vs. Idealist and Hypocritical , where all moves from “Liberals” and Democrats present as reactionary and timid  is a move made by Rep. Gutierrez (D-IL) on the immigration front yesterday (Citizenship Day). While I can’t put myself 100% behind the proposed bill or comment on all angles until I know the specifics, I heartily applaud his action of getting the ball moving on this issue in which the dialogue is only degrading in its chaotic momentum and inattention except by voices from the Right.

PRESS ADVISORY
From Make the Road New York

For Immediate Release:
Thursday, September 17, 2009

Contact: Javier H. Valdes, 917-679-2971

Make the Road Applauds Rep. Gutierrez for Taking the Lead on Immigration Reform Legislation

WASHINGTON — Today, Dora Chalarca, a leader of Make the Road New York spoke at the Citizenship Day celebration in Washington, DC in front of hundreds of immigrant leaders and representatives from Congress urging them to push for comprehensive immigration reform this year. Shortly thereafter, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) announced that he would introduce comprehensive immigration reform this fall.

Rep. Gutierrez played a pivotal role in the Familias Unidas interfaith tour earlier this year that introduced families separated from loved ones by our broken immigration system to his colleagues in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and House Democratic Leadership, and helped build compassion and support for immigration reform.

Make the Road New York and its 7500 members are eager to support a bill that fixes our broken immigration and work with Rep. Gutierrez and Rep. Nydia Velazquez in taking bold action to break through the years-long stalemate on Capitol Hill.

We expect the Gutierrez to a introduce progressive immigration bill which will create:

• A pathway to citizenship that keeps families together;
•Elimination of the family immigration backlogs that keep people waiting years and decades for legal entry;
•A system to modernize the process by which visas are allocated so that they reflect actual economic needs;
• Protection of worker rights for immigrants and native-born workers;
• Restoration of basic due process rights and protection of basic rights and liberties;
• Enforcement that respects these rights and restores confidence in the immigration system; and Effective and innovative immigrant integration programs.

While a great deal of attention has been focused on health care reform, the urgent need for immigration reform has not diminished. If anything, the acrimony, deception and scapegoating of immigrants in the health care debate has underscored the need for a comprehensive solution to fix our broken immigration system. Immigrants, faith leaders, businesses, labor unions, progressive groups, and a broad coalition across the political spectrum support solutions to our current immigration mess.

We will have to see what these bullet points boil down to (and I’m pretty sure in this current age and system, unfortunate compromises to humane reform will undoubtedly take place—as Mala pointed out yesterday, the Hispanic Congressional Caucus made compromises even before the process began) but at least in the present moment, someone is stepping up and unwilling to simply watch the Joe Wilsons of the world dominate the conversation on immigration. And it’s about time. I am, of course, especially interested to see what is to be done with the horrific mess that DHS is leveling on the Latino/a community in the form of it’s “Enforcement Agenda.”

Saying immigration is a priority for this Administration or this Congress is not the same as seeing tangible action, and the longer we wait, the more every single piece of legislation we debate will be obstructed by our failure to pass comprehensive reform.

—Rep. Gutierrez, September 17, 2009

Perhaps Congressman Gutierrez feels a bit stung by the White House’s inaction. On the media call yesterday (the notes of which informed some of this post and the screenshot of some you can see above) Gutierrez sounded a bit…put out. That’s good. We need more of this. Disappointed in what his vote was turning into, given current White House inaction (and action of the unhelpful kind). We do nobody any favors except the corrupt entrenched political inertias that harm gente when we make excuses for “representation” that does not represent.

For now, I say let’s get behind at least this one bold move (that has the backing of many other voices behind him). We can always (and will always) push for the most humane and modern (meaning “enlightened” not “with 40% more sugar in the can”) immigration policy possible, even so. But where there is a spark, the flame needs wind to grow. So let’s go!

WHEN IT COMES TO THE IMMIGRATION ISSUE, or even the ways in which the GOP versus the Dems operate, I have long been frustrated. As you know. I’ve been frustrated by a couple things. One, the way the Dems primary shape of political engagement seems to be reaction. Or a sort of bowed-head, hand-wringing shame that weakens the legs of any idea they trot out. Any idea they DO trot out, when predictably smacked hard by the GOP, never seems to have much conviction in itself. Or perhaps it is those who present it who do not.

Not enough proactive action, not enough strength, and certainly not enough moral conviction. Mostly my thoughts on this involve the compromises the Dems have made.

The GOP’s philosophies allow for greed and for taking bucketloads of cash from lobbyists or corporations; their philosophies of Bootstrap and Bootneck seek to justify destroying the environment, hurting the poor, punishing people of color for reacting and suffering under punishments already systemically leveled at them. So even when the GOP engages in their selfish and amoral actions, they do not appear to be hypocritical. When they do act hypocritically it is in supporting what their radical base does, after condemning the same actions when undertaken by the Left. But that hypocrisy, of course, does not demoralize their base. Or not most of it. Because it is another smack at the Left, which their base is happy to support as long as the planks of the overall GOP platform is adhered to, and all the poor and people of color are targeted, while their own taxes are guarded.

On the other hand, the Democrats OSTENSIBLY are for the People. For the poor, for the whole, for the health of the land, etc. Their philosophies do NOT allow for raking in cash from corrupt sources or in making capitulations to corporate greed and so on. So when they take the cash they inevitably do from these sources; when they capitulate to entrenched forces that harm the people, they not only look as if their entire platform is a lie, they themselves cannot defend it. So they appear mushy, unconvinced, and they do not sway anyone. The answer is, of course, to move closer toward what they profess to be. The Democrats simply need to be more radical—meaning be more of what they pretend to be. If so, they could stand in truth and summon all the power that comes from doing so. As long as they sniff over to the Right, they lose. They can never excuse doing this to the people they seek to represent. Further, rather than using their own radical faction for fuel as the GOP does, the Dems marginalize their own “radical” elements which not only demoralizes us, but pushes that oft-touted “Overton Window” to the Right and again, positions the Democratic party as primping and posing to gain a seat at a table of politicians and pundits who despise them anyway.

TED KENNEDY has died, at 77. I’m no big fan of politicians in general, too often they do more harm than they do good, beginning with the theft of our trust and a boatload of fake promises that give way to a career of bolstering their own riches and the riches of their elitist pals. Ted Kennedy was not perfect, but to my mind, an uncommon politician. In this age of Democrats bowing and scraping before the much-feared Neocon phantasm of awaiting judgment, Kennedy was an unapologetic liberal and  there was no mistaking it in his life and career. He fought, time and time again, for progressive issues that helped the common person and he has left behind an unmistakeable legacy. Of special note here at UMX due to my family origins, Senator Kennedy was a great friend to migrant fieldworkers.

Salúd, Mister Kennedy. May you have peace.

Que Viva Ted Kennedy!

UNITED FARM WORKERS
18th Constitutional Convention
August 22-24, 2008
Fresno, California

Whereas, Senator Edward M. Kennedy has championed the cause of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement after picking up the mantle from Senator Robert F. Kennedy following his assassination in 1968, and since then no national political leader has more effectively and selflessly supported the farm workers’ cause; and

Whereas, from helping convince Congress to end the infamous Bracero Program in 1964 to becoming the driving force behind the United Farm Workers’ historic AgJobs immigration reform bill in the U.S. Senate today, Senator Ted Kennedy has never failed to respond to the farm workers’ call for help; and

Whereas, in 1967 Senator Ted Kennedy oversaw the first official hearing of a committee of the United States Senate to ever take place in Starr County, Texas during a UFW-led strike in Rio Grande City, Texas; and

Whereas, Senator Ted Kennedy has embraced farm worker boycotts, beginning his address before the 1972 National Democratic Convention by exclaiming, “Greetings fellow lettuce boycotters”; and

Whereas, year after year and time after time, Senator Ted Kennedy has spent much of his public career standing shoulder to shoulder with the farm workers during marches and rallies, political campaigns and legislative battles from the halls of the United States Senate to the dusty fields of California; and

Whereas, Senator Ted Kennedy has always joined the farm workers in speaking out for justice as well as against violence, causing Cesar Chavez to once describe him as “always available” and as “the favorite among Latinos all over the country”; and

Whereas, as UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta once said, Robert and Ted Kennedy “didn’t come to us and tell us what was good for us. All they said was, ‘What do you want? And how can I help?’ That’s why we love them”; and

Whereas, in 1973 Senator Ted Kennedy traveled to Fresno, California to address the delegates to the United Farm Workers’ First Constitutional Convention at the height of a bitter statewide grape strike; and

Whereas, Senator Ted Kennedy has helped lead the fights for all workers, including passage of the most recent federal increase in the minimum wage in 2007, as well as efforts to increase student financial aid, improve educational standards for working people and lead the fight to make it easier for workers to organize, and

Whereas, during Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign the UFW proudly endorsed his candidacy and dispatched top organizers, including Cesar Chavez and Arturo Rodriguez, to work on his behalf; and

Whereas, in 1985 and 1986 Senator Ted Kennedy worked with Dolores Huerta when she was leading UFW efforts to help pass an historic immigration reform law that allowed more than a million farm workers to win legal status, including many attending this UFW convention; and

Whereas, most recently, Senator Kennedy has been a leading author of the landmark AgJobs bill, negotiated by the UFW and the nation’s agricultural industry to allow undocumented farm workers in this country to earn the permanent legal right to stay by continuing to work in agriculture; now therefore

Be It Resolved that the United Farm Workers of America, sitting in convention in Fresno, California, expresses genuine thanks and gratitude to Senator Ted Kennedy for all he has done for farm workers and other people in our country who still suffer; and

Be It Further Resolved that the farm workers pray for Senator Ted Kennedy and ask God to permit his voice to continue to be heard on behalf of America’s poor and dispossessed.

©NYTimes Photo

YESTERDAY, President Obama met with Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and México’s FeCal to make a show of talking about issues that affect the continent. It was a damn informal evening chillout and half a day of actual schedule the next day. Please. If we are to believe the press releases and quotes?

Then:

a) The torrent of human rights abuses that the Mexican military and army are perpetrating on citizens in the free-for-all atmosphere that descends when you set a massive gang against its own populace, some of which are very happy to live well on the backs of a criminalized drug war approach—is not occurring and

b) Even though the US backs the violence to this day—almost 900 dead last month and over 13,000 overall since 2006!!—and refuses anyone from México seeking asylum as they flee that violence, we are to believe that the rising number of sanctuary seekers being turned now from Canada’s border due to increased requirements just enacted are “fraudulent” cases and thus….

Who bears the brunt? Who owns up to this? I mean…México is waging WAR on itself. Or, actually, Felipe Calderón is waging the war. Midterm elections in México made clear that there was no visible support for the continuation of his outdated Drug War model.

Why would there be? Troops occupy the entire nation! Reported cases of human rights violations unleashed by the Army include “killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions.” [pdf report]. Terror.

Foto © Harvard U

In another example from August 2007, five soldiers detained a man, held him incommunicado in military installations for over 24 hours, beat and kicked him, placed a cloth bag on his head, tied his arms and feet, poured water on his face while they hit his abdomen, and applied electric shocks to his stomach. A federal prosecutor requested that a military prosecutor investigate the case. Despite the existence of medical exams documenting the torture, the military closed its investigation, determining it did not find evidence that the soldiers had committed a crime.

—Mexico: Hold Military to Account on Rights Abuses

And while we are talking about the corrupt forces whom the US GOVT (and our hard earned taxes!) are funding, I wonder who shot dead an attorney who was proving pretty good at defending drug traffickers?

People in México are running away from the poverty and violence unleashed in their beautiful country! They cannot escape it. The US believes in a wall to keep them there! Canada puts a host of paper walls up! This too, after the treaties created by these three nations have helped destroy the livelihoods of so many Mexicanos; a livelihood as ancient as many of the stone artifacts in her museums.

Foto ©Xinhuanet

Where do the people go? And who looks at this morally?

Forget morals. It’s like a dirty word to people in politics, I’ve found. They start calling you “pious” and negating your words or trying. But you cannot negate the plain truth. Or you negate humanity. And thus you negate your own soul. If that’s “pious,” deal with it.

Let’s look at this practically, then. Unless I am mistaken, organized crime was given foothold and opportunity by Prohibition, no? Forget a link, this is common sense! If you make a product illegal that most people using are not going to give up, then YOU have created a HUGE market for that product. Period. A market for commerce and a market for violence.

Watch smart people do it right in Portugal: rather than press on like a nutso boar on a wild rampage and deaf and blind to all evidence, Portugal has decriminalized drugs, and there is simply no denying the success of that move.

Just as there is no denying the abject failure of the current model. The deaths and the loss of the Mexican people’s support should be enough to make that clear. The drug trade goes on, even in prisons, if one needs another sign. But of course it does. Jail sales of drugs and contraband are a sub-economy for a subculture. There is no way to eliminate drugs and the selling of drugs in a house of convicted criminals who are made every day to feel dangerous and shamed and deprived of mobility or self empowerment but in a few narrow ways! These remain, after all, human beings.

We know the Drug War model doesn’t work. We know that. We know 13,000 bodies are not worth the “successes” traded. For there are none that we see. Support even in the US mainstream has been faltering—it’s very hard to ignore over ten thousand corpses stacking up at such a rate. Yet, the President uses his charisma and pulpit to assure us all that everything’s goin’ just fine.

So what is the goal? Either the government is run by absolute idiots who don’t know how to interpret studies and history, or there is a different goal than what they claim out loud. (I’d choose this one.)

Senator Leahy puts on his own show, acknowledging the human rights abuses by putting a hold on $100 mil of the aid that the US gives to MX for the Mérida initiative for México’s onslaught of weaponry, surveillance, and terror. More theater. Mexican state officials claim they need listen to nobody about human rights, certainly not the US.

While American shops are arming the cartels, the lawmakers said, they have no right to judge the Mexican army for fighting back. “We can never agree with a foreign government unilaterally judging us in return for economic help to deal with a shared problem,” said Rep. Tomas Torres.

Obama admits in that article, too, that he cannot stem the tide of guns going South. Nope. Gun lobby is just too strong.

Foto ©Google/AP

Our “solution” is more money for more violence, for “US trained death squads.” More prisons. Making the backward analogy that this massacre blooming every day in Mexico is akin to the fight against the mafia in the US. Backward because if the US hadn’t tried to outlaw people’s right to alter their consciousness (via alcohol in that instance), the mafia as such would not have existed! In the false analogy lies the very solution to the problem, and the suit fumbling with the analogy—Alan Bersin, the Homeland Security Department’s “border czar”—can’t even grasp that?

Lack of intelligence set loose up on the world. Lack of morality tossing money bags across borders. Lack of conscience the rule of the day. But we still get smiley photo ops and the assurance that next year immigration reform will be a priority. Meanwhile, the corrections and detention industry grows larger and is offered as a solution, and the entire transnational squeeze on the People while the prison corporations and the governments profit on our suffering is enabled by many a pundit today who won’t step back enough to peep the entire scene, or is unwilling to connect the dots.

What the hell happened to the human race up in here? What on Earth gave us the idea that life was so difficult and beyond our means the only answer was to wage war on our own people for each and every social fluctuation or challenge? And damn, just who are these ghouls who smile and tell us everything is going fine as they eat up our tax money and roll it into bullets and barbed wire?

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