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.

WITH THE COUP taking place in Honduras right now, and this being September 11, my thoughts turn to Latin America of course. On this day, 36 years ago. Chile suffered a terrible blow, one that rocked and bled it for years and years. The horror was far beyond anything we have experienced here in the US, at least in my lifetime. And unsurprisingly, the United States Republican party allies itself time and time again with these kinds of acts. Acts of terror and coup and tyranny.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration remembered Augusto Pinochet’s rule in Chile as a difficult period on Sunday and expressed concern for the victims of his government and their families. [...]

“Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families. We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law, and respect for human rights,” he said.

Pinochet seized power from the elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende in a 1973 coup supported by the U.S. government.

—Bush ‘Remembers’ Something or Other, The Unapologetic Mexican

Bush ‘Remembers’ Something or Other

The Tyrant Who Wouldn’t Shut Up

A Cruel Dimension of Reality

What to do in a world seemingly with an endless procession of greed-driven rulers who usurp the peoples’ will to enact their own fantasies of death and control and endless treasure? Share information. Share love. Share stories. Share truth. Even with all their guns and lies and supersaturated flags flapping, they can never overcome these things.

THE DAY DEFINITELY SERVED AS A DIVIDING LINE IN MANY WAYS. I had no idea how much or in what ways. But the politicians were right and truthful about at least one thing: Nothing would be the same.

I was living in NYC and had been for about three years, having moved from 1.5 hours north in upstate New York, to Manhattan to attend NYU. It was one of the greatest times of my life.

The attack on the WTC exploded the dream into a million fragments. My entire life seemed to come apart at that moment. The day not only took thousands of lives, but crashed a hole in my storehouse of ideas…

…and brought the vapors of crushed bones, cement, and fuel down like a cloud upon the streets of the city. Ash drifted down from the sky like snowflakes from hell…for days.

The streets were occupied by US Marines. The policing and suspicion were to be a sign of an increasingly scared and violent country.

Our entire view on so many things changed that day. Airplanes, nations, the US…our view on immigrants changed very much, as did our policies. The day, and the fear exploited from it brought us to the disgusting and backward place we are at right now in terms of looking at those from “outside our borders” or even many of those inside our borders.

And the flag that so many of us hung on that day and on the days following it was to be snatched from our collective grasp and wrapped around a murderous philosophy that rolls on to this day. If there is any greater violation I feel, I’m not sure what it is. But in those few days, the flag meant something else entirely to those of us in the city, and I imagine those all around the nation and the world.

Of course one must add that the murderous philosophy and actions had long been going on and many, like myself, just hadn’t really thought enough about it. Hadn’t really counted on the bomb-clawed chickens coming back home.

I carry the hard, dark, weight of that day with me still. But it does not poison me, as the air of NYC did, sending me retching down the street not much longer after I took this shot. Nor does it rest, or will it settle into muck, or septic spiritual sediment. It has, instead, lit me on fire and blooms within like a tree of lightning. The energy has empowered me and agitated me and sent me reading and thinking and for 8 years now has transformed my purpose and commitment to not only enjoy every moment of my life, but to resist all and any forms of oppression and state-motivated destruction while I have breath in my body.

For the record, I do support an investigation into 9/11. A REAL investigation. I don’t care what person thinks they have the right to label my desire for true understanding of what happened. But whatever it was, the People were not told the truth. Nor do I expect Empire to be forthcoming. Empire has its purpose. And I have mine.

Peace. But not before Justice.

What the US is now doing to México by way of NAFTA and the overwhelming of México’s  market by US-subsidized Agribusiness (gutting their farming-based/corn-based market and glutting it with our own products, while employing many of their citizens at substandard rates and in substandard health conditions in order to help our own economy and prepare/manufacture/sell our food) it does directly in other nations through coups and forced legislation, Nations that are further from our border, and thus beyond the radar of the average US citizen. For example, Haiti, where the US’s Wilsonian fantasies and greed and neoliberalism led long ago to the destruction of the rice farmer’s ability to sustain him/herself and are a direct prerequisite to the food crisis they are experiencing now. USGOV has long been sucking the lifeblood of much of Latin America, and in the case of Haiti, refuse to let go the neck.

We can go further and talk about the undeniable thirst for the Strategic Crescent, the oil-rich Middle East, the wars to gain footholds (bases and massive “city within a city” embassies being built in Iraq as well as Af-Pak + lest we forget the “reservoirs of oil” that Iraq is “floating” atop). The US economy is collapsing, the nation is heavily armed, but hollowed out at the heart, waving numb fingers, and with a belly soon to feel real hunger pangs. It is supporting itself by draining the lifeblood of other nations and peoples. This is happening on many levels.

The Empire, in yet another shape, sprawls and burps and bleeds and chews up humans as it moves into its final phases—the phases where it self-destructs as all Empires do, as all man-made power-suction gold-glory death machine-staircases to the halls of the Gods must always do when they forget their place in the overall family of creatures and balances. It isn’t pretty, it will get uglier, but we must be ready. Because the danger we are used to reading in books and seeing in movies, or hearing about happening in a faraway lands is crawling closer and closer to our front doors, and in more cases than many of us care to think about, has already woven its caustic threads into the tapestry of our small, ambitious lives.

Borders are illusions, and they are perhaps necessary to some degree in a world where spirit is somewhat bound by containers. But in many cases they are a deadly illusion behind which humanity chokes. The illusion is disconnection. The illusion is that our worth is greater on one side than en el otro lado. The illusion is Us and Them. The illusion is that we are in control of nature’s deepest rhythms.

How to wake ourselves up from these dreams that suffocate so many?

THIS IS A MOMENT THAT OCCURS over and over on TV day after day in one shape or another. Granted, it’s FOX TV (the channel that is known for showing “Baby Snatcher” type chyrons “accidentally” next to a photo of Barack Obama as well as naming anyone arrested for impropriety in government a “Democrat”, etc etc), but FOX is a massive voice in US culture, funded by billions and pushed out to millions.

So what’s going on in this moment?

Well, here you have three white dudes talking about how wrong and how it is an “abuse of power” that a hate crimes bill was added to a defense spending bill.

The three rich white men also discuss how the Defense spending bill omits cashola for their new lusty F22 plane which McCain laments has never seen action in either Iraq or Afghanistan. (Isn’t that a dear smile on the old chap’s face?)

So. They want more money to kill brown people oversees and they call the protection of brown people here in the US an “abuse of power” by US government. And they end by saying (as you can see by the lil subtitle at the bottom of the image) that this combo leaves ‘us’ with inadequate defense.

Which ought to make you wonder…Whatchoo mean “us”?!

I GUESS THE IRONIC factoid that still stares at me from the corner is that as SOON as the World Trade Center had fallen (maybe a little after I haven’t checked my tapes but you get me) we began hearing about how we would never give up on our freedoms and rights and our way of life. Dammit, attack us as they may, the terrorists would not “win!” That was the litmus. And yet, as the reports continue to roll in, it is clear that we gave up immediately. We gave up our justice system, all the nobility hinted at or stated directly in our dearest writs, and our morality. In a heartbeat. We traded it for sheer might, terror, and force. We did not act like some wise elder intellectual/statesman with puffy sleeves and elegant quill pen, such as one would imagine signing his “John Hancock” to a momentous sheaf of papyrus. We acted like a freaked out extremist with some really bizarre ideas.

If you download and read the leaked Red Cross report report [pdf] (and I’ve only got a page or two in, don’t have the time now but it’s working on my mind let me tell you) it’s just amazing. The process we put humans through and kept secret is revolting. And clearly was implemented so damn methodically that the presentation of events feels cold to the point of habituation. The voice/tone and some words of the medical report make quite clear the Red Cross Medical faction’s concerns, and yet, the way in which the medical establishment is implicated in the ongoing catalogue of horrors is chilling. I am immediately reminded of every story I’ve heard that sought to inculcate one with the depth of horror belonging to the Nazi death camps. Nothing is “like” the Nazi death camps, of course. But one doesn’t have to reach too far to find that same alien chill, this cold, measured scientific eye cast over horrors that should immediately shock and repulse any person who has not destroyed their sensitivities; any person with a a functional conscience. I already know that fear can erase many lines within the mind. But there is no light you could shine on this that would convince me it is “American” or anything like that. Or, hey. Maybe it is. What do I know. Maybe I’m the naive one. Maybe the real Apple Pie is not taken from the oven by some beneficent smiling woman, but instead, scooped and scraped out of a diaper that you force a detainee to soil repeatedly and wear prolongedly as part of their induction into a torture factory.

Did we ever really believe in all those grand ideals that we thought we’d not “give up” no matter who hit us? I guess some of us did. And some of us never did. Some of us only really believe in a big enough gun or tall enough wall and to hell with the fancy notions like morality or humanity when it’s US vs. THEM. Is that too simplistic a conclusion for me to come to? Here’s some more stone-cold conviction, then: those who do believe in the more beautiful ideals of the USA are the ones who will chase the perpetrators who violated so much and so many, those who have shocked the national conscience with an array of sick crimes—until justice is done. And the people, pundits, and politicians who simply do lip service to a structure that can make them rich and powerful are the ones who will do all they can to avoid the truth of everything getting out. Because they don’t believe the system can handle the truth, that the People deserve to know it, or that—and here’s where the bass drum drops—it matters.

President Obama spoke in many ways of how he would bring change to our nation. He has made some bold moves and even bolder statements in this direction. Yet, the fronts on which he makes no substantial shift from Bush policy accumulate disappointingly. As much as I loathe the Right Wing maniacs like Hannity and Beck and that weird Limbo guy who do their best every day to stir up the ugliest types of opposition to Obama (and at everyone’s peril), I cannot be strong armed into defending Obama’s policies just to offer a buffer against their hate. I cannot possibly align myself, after all, with the President’s policies if he insists on aligning them with those of George W. Bush. And we can no longer ignore the war crimes that trail us like a raging family of ghosts. Either we refute and condemn them through action, or we are become them.

A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS is underway.

AMERICAN drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people.

The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

As many as 1m people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army. In Bajaur agency entire villages have been flattened by Pakistani troops under growing American pressure to act against Al-Qaeda militants, who have made the area their base.

Kacha Garhi is one of 11 tented camps across Pakistan’s frontier province once used by Afghan refugees and now inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis made homeless in their own land.

—Thousands flee bomb attacks by US drones

I don’t know. What one hopes to accomplish by posting about something I’m not quite sure anymore…although by all means post, because once in a while a post changes everything, or more importantly, each one probably touches many people and a net of energy and wisdom is made possible. More accurately, I don’t know what I hope to do with it. I think I just need to get it out or think aloud a lot of times. Because if I’m going to be paying attention, it’s almost overwhelming. And you can’t just be absorbing energy. You have to kick it around, kick it out, give it back in some shape and form. Sometimes, too, I need to write just to say “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

When you did income taxes…honestly. Did you think of these unmanned drone planes? And our astronomical defense budget? And those “militants?” I end up wondering what that means. Those words. What does it take for the AP to call you a “foreign militant” whose life (obviously) is worth, perhaps, a speck of a real person’s life? What merits that precipitous demotion in worth? Does it mean you were killed with a blueprint to a bunker in your hand? That you are connected to people who knew the Saudi network who bombed us eight years ago? Does it mean you are caught with weapons and propaganda? Does it mean you are related by family to conspirators to people hostile to the US? Does it mean you met weekly with community members to stay cohesive and plan how to get through the time? Does it mean you lived in the wrong place? Is there a definition the AP is bound by? Or does the military just write “foreign militants” in their log book and the AP copies it in? Because a whole lot of mess is being dumped on a whole lot of people behind this word. You’d think someone would be policing the definition.

It feels weird to me that I can be so sensitized to a system…it is business as usual when millions of people die or are displaced by the direct and otherwise intended actions of our own “land” or governing body. Our people. Our military. And I can’t, I’m not. That’s why my psyche has emotional hiccups over and over, rejecting it. This chaos, violence, and displacement seems huge. It doesn’t seem at all a part of me. And…I must own a piece of it. I live and benefit from living in the sunny backyard of the empire.

But forget about the dead, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are displacing massive amounts of people. I know I could google right now and find out how many displaced. I’m sort of afraid to see the number.

For what? What is going on here? Who poses such a threat to us? That we are raining down death all over the place, uprooting entire social networks and generations of families and inflicting such terror across such huge regions? Is that what it’s really all about? Terrifying the entire part of the world that we think stung us…or wants to sting us, or that it could sting us? Ugh. If so, I guess it would make a certain kind of grim sense…if all you are concerned with is a vast, dark, battlefield. But to be part of that mission would feel dreadful in the true sense of the word. A pyrrhic victory, a million pyrrhic victories paid for in full and in absentia.

When I think about all our warring in the “Middle East” in context with the creeping of the security/detention/policing industries into everyday life and mores and the economy here in the US, as well as the violence that has sprung up in the last week or so across the nation as people feel wound too tight or stretched too thin, I think to myself there’s got to be a better way. And I mean that literally. Most of us sense, think, or feel that…which is why we elected the president who felt more like change. But that symbol obviously is not the end of it.

I think about the forces coming to bear and I think that there’s got to be a good number of us willing to be part of that better way. And to know what it is and how that way might manifest. And how we can reinforce it outside of our self as well as within. I may not be able to stop drones from firing on homes in a distant part of the world, but I can think about what actions and ways of thinking in my own life and day is like an empire’s drones firing into fragile homes. And…if that makes sense to you, maybe you can be part of that way in your own way. Let the right wing fanatics and white supremacists give in to terror and violence, twice as many of us need to begin healing our culture. In little ways, in tiny ways, in nearly invisible ways, and in the biggest ways we can manage.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT The DREAM Act, I want to introduce you to the legislation, fight, and arguments. There’s really no need for me to try and explain it because some compas have poured hours and hours of work into making cases, offering links, and organizing already. I’m just going to write at the moment to say I do support it (despite the fact that I don’t support creating new ways for our war machine to suck up more mexicano—or other—lives) and I’m going to paste some links and writing from Dream Activist as well as Blogmigo Kyle from Citizen Orange.

First, what is “The DREAM Act”?

The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (also called “The DREAM Act”) [is] a piece of proposed federal legislation in the United States that would provide certain immigrant students who graduate from a [U.S. high school], are of good moral character, arrived in the US as children, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency.

—Wikipedia ((23 March 2009)

Furthermore, as Kyle notes, The National Immigration Law Center has a basic information sheet (pdf).

Dreamactivist.org introduces it this way:

The federal DREAM Act (S.729 / H.R. 1751) will provide undocumented immigrant youth in the United States with conditional residency and a pathway to citizenship provided they came here before the age of 16 and maintained continuous residence for 5 years, graduate from high school or obtain a GED, attend 2 years of college or join the military and have no criminal records.

If Congress fails to act this year, another entire class of outstanding, law-abiding high school students will graduate without being able to plan for the future, and some will be removed from their homes to countries they barely know. This tragedy will cause America to lose a vital asset: an educated class of promising immigrant students who have demonstrated a commitment to hard work and a strong desire to be contributing members of our society.

Here’s a short video on the DREAM Act. And what bothers me about it is the blurred faces. It’s too perfect a metaphor for what we ask of the undocumented, of how we ask them to live. Without a face, without a self, without an identity.

A post I really recommend if you want to get a full understanding, complete with many links:

65,000 unauthorized migrant youth graduate from U.S. high schools every year. Many were brought to the U.S. before they could remember much else, and most know no other home except for the U.S. The cruel irony of their situation is made all the more apparent by contrasting it with my story. I was born in Guatemala and spent most of my life there. I was given the privilege of U.S. citizenship simply because I was born of U.S. parents. Meanwhile, DREAMers have lived most of their lives in the U.S., but are denied the privilege of U.S. citizenship because they had the misfortune of being born somewhere else.

If I had to sum up the DREAMer struggle in one sentence it would be this: DREAMers don’t even have a right to exist in the only country they know as their home. DREAMers haven’t even gotten to a point where they’re fighting against be considered equal humans, they’re fighting just to be recognized as humans. That’s a huge part of what inspires me about DREAMers. If any nation told me I didn’t have the right to exist, I would hate it, much less want to live in it. I’ve long joked that if I was a DREAMer, I would have started my own version of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement. The U.S. should be begging for talented youth like this, especially during this time of economic crisis. Astonishingly, DREAMers don’t hate the U.S., they work to better it. Where I probably would have been tearing the U.S. down, DREAMers instead fight to make the U.S. a better and more just place. They embody the essence of what it means to do good in this world.

—Citizen Orange

Actions one can take to help get this legislation passed:

1. CALL – The National Council of La Raza has a page to help you call your congressional representatives in support of the DREAM Act.

http://capwiz.com/nclr/callalert/index.tt?alertid=12988601

2. FAX – America’s Voice has a page to help you fax your congressional representatives in support of the DREAM Act.

http://americasvoiceonline.org/page/speakout/DaretoDream

3. EMAIL – Change.org has a page to help you email your congressional representatives in support of the DREAM Act.

http://www.change.org/ideas/932/view_action/ask_your_congressperson_to_support_the_dream_act

4. PETITION – Dreamactivist.org has the official petition in support of the DREAM Act.

http://dreamact2009.com/

5. TEXT – Text “Justice” (“Justicia” for Spanish) to 69866 to be the first to know when the DREAM Act is introduced. FIRM’s Mobile Action Network is an excellent way to stay connected and have maximum impact at just the right moment.

http://fairimmigration.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/action-join-the-fight-for-immigrant-rights/

—Citizen Orange

Sometimes I find it hard to advocate for things that seem common sense. I don’t know what to say to convince people that everyone should have air, or water, or love, or freedom of movement or opportunities such as this. It seems a win-win to me. Give people room to excel and contribute, give them the homeplace they already feel they belong to and do belong to, increase happiness and productivity all ’round. This can be a nation brimming with good will and joy and community. We just have to believe it is possible and make a few small steps toward that vision.

This is one.

by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger

A grafik made in 2007 for an older post, resurrected here for this special purpose

In 2008, a disturbing trend developed in mainstream media regarding Mexico. While Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón began his aggression against the Cartels roughly two years ago, the resulting uptick in violence was of no real interest to mainstream media. But when the U.S. Joint Forces Command report Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008) was issued in November, 2008, and declared Mexico and Pakistan nations in danger of a “rapid and sudden collapse,” mainstream news outlets and certain politicians began broadcasting fears of violence spilling over into the US.

Coverage quickly snowballed into a cycle of reporting grounded in unsubstantiated fear, which led to calls to further militarize the border. Democracy Now! highlights how President Obama’s readiness to deploy the National Guard to the border is directly linked to the sensationalized mainstream coverage. In an interview with host Amy Goodman, Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program for the Center for International Policy, says:

When we started to look at some of these articles talking about spillover of Mexican violence into the United States, what we found is that there’s no evidence of that whatsoever at this point. … In the case of using statistics, like there’s a lot of talk about the number of kidnappings in Phoenix, it turns out that many times those statistics are spurious, and they have no backup. They’ve been invented, or they’ve been twisted in many cases.

This is a real warning sign for us, because when we see an exaggerated threat assessment, as we’re seeing right now in terms of spillover of Mexican violence to the United States, it’s generally a prelude to militarization.

And it is: Truthdig reports on “a crime-fighting operation targeting Mexican drug cartels on a scale not seen since the battles against the US mafia” in F.B.I. Runs for the Border.

The War on Drugs has returned, via aid/force packages like Plan Mérida that simply recycle failed plans (like Plan Colombia). Under increased militarization, drug production actually goes up, as does the body count, but the seizure of drugs decreases.

In the interests of full disclosure, the increasing exploitation of the Mexican people and militarization of border towns like Ciudad Juarez and El Paso—my father’s birthplace—affect me on a deeply personal level. My father was the first of Herreras in my family to be born here. I am a citizen. He makes sure to remind me that my abuela (grandmother) gained her green card legally. I read of harm done to people like my grandmother—legal and undocumented and citizens alike—in jails teeming with neglect and hatred and it disturbs me. Immigration must be discussed as a human, not military issue.

In the below video from GritTV, Rosa Clemente, Immigration Campaign Director for Amnesty International USA, talks about the lack of response from the Obama Administration on immigration, even though ICE is predicting 400,000 arrests in 2009 and our 2009 budget allots 6.1 billion to the construction of new prisons. How many of those prisons will be detention centers?

Opponents of immigration reform (who are often opponents of immigrants themselves) often imply that they really do adore legal immigrants. Joshua Holland makes it clear how very tenuous that line is in AlterNet’s I Married an Illegal Immigrant. Holland writes that “the difference between legal and illegal is often a matter of simple chronology rather than a reflection of the character of the person in question.”

Disguising undocumented “aliens” as an unwanted, criminal horde, rather than productive members of our own society runs counter to American ideals of freedom and equality. It becomes easier to simply lock down the border and take a harsher stance, even if many of those who migrate were displaced by our own government’s actions in the first place.

The Drug War model is a failed method of dealing with immigration, even though Obama seems intent to resurrect it. Writing for The Progressive, Yolanda Chávez Leyva says:

For more than twenty years, those of us who live on the border have witnessed the increasing militarization of the border. The border wall is a daily reminder of this, as are the helicopters that fly over our neighborhoods, the checkpoints manned by the Border Patrol and local law enforcement, as well as the daily harassment of citizens who happen to have darker skin. We are frequently the target of various “wars” —against undocumented migration, against terrorism and now against drugs. I am tired of living in a war zone.

The model of “war” has not worked, and it will not work.

President Felipe Calderón—who Democracy Now! reports was elected in “the most controversial election in Mexican history”—is spoken of glowingly by our politicians, who are full of praise for his violence against the Cartels. Elena Shore details some of this language for New America Media.

Going back to Lauren Carlsen’s interview with Democracy Now!: “It’s completely unacceptable to ask a society to accept higher levels of violence as a sign that we are winning the drug war.” She’s right. We will never “win” the “drug war.” The body count is growing. More prisons are being built. People of color are the primary victims. And now, President Obama talks of sending the military down to meet Mexico’s military at the border. But what about the people caught in the middle? What about the people suffering in ICE’s custody today? What about the 400,000 more that ICE plans to capture in 2009?

We need better solutions than more guns and more soldiers. Militarization simply leads to more violence.

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Also featured at The Sanctuary, Huffington Post,Talking Points Memo, Open Salon, DailyKos, MyDD, Open Left, FDL, Rabble.

[As usual, this edit on UMX may differ from the version published at the media consortium site and that which circulates on the above named outlets]

by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger

This week, two comprehensive reports on the health of immigrant detainees were released by Human Rights Watch and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. As Public News Service reports, “Immigrants are, literally, dying for decent care.”

There have been many cases of inadequate medical treatment or neglect leading to death in U.S. detention centers. The cases are horrific—ranging from an ignored broken spine to deadly metastasized genital cancer—and must stop immediately. But, a thorough accounting of the realities of detention is needed if the United States can engage in an honest dialogue about immigration policy.

RaceWire doesn’t shrink from offering an incisive analysis in Health in Detention. Michelle Chen writes that “Part of the problem is that the mission of ICE’s Division of Immigration Health Services isn’t really to ensure that all detainees receive the care they need, but rather, to keep people essentially well enough to be kicked out of the country before they die.” Chen adds that in some cases, that low bar isn’t met.

There are many causes. After 9/11, the U.S. stopped aiming for a “more perfect union” of its diverse population. The Bush administration responded (starting in Florida) to the immigrant community with suspicion and force. And so it has continued, ultimately leading to the conditions outlined in this week’s reports. The poor treatment of immigrants in U.S. custody reveals a very ugly side of the country, but it’s hardly a new side. AlterNet’s Lynn Tramonte offers a scathing indictment of how dangerous Agreement 287(g), which recruits local police to enforce immigration law, has become to communities.

The stalemate on immigration reform is sometimes portrayed as a disagreement over “safety” and “security” and “jobs.” But, in many cases, it’s a disguised resistance to the always-changing face of America. It’s an old game of Tug-of-War. Wiretap reminds us how long this culture battle has been going on in the below video. It recalls eerily familiar past attitudes:

We don’t know why the human race has such a short memory when it comes to cyclical xenophobia. It’s confounding, especially in the U.S.: How can we be so proud of our own families’ immigrant roots, but not wish that happiness for others? If a mother, daughter, or sister is called “immigrant”—in the U.S. or the Middle East—she’s suddenly worth less.

Going back to the aforementioned Public News Service article: According to Human Rights Watch researcher Meghan Rhoad, “the detention system routinely subjects women to suffering and humiliation. It is a system that needlessly shackles pregnant women with no criminal background, that ignores requests for care, and does all of this with impunity.”

But confront ICE officials, even their spokesperson, with the many documented cases of medical neglect or human rights abuses, and reporters will be given the standard statement that the agency is “committed to humane and safe treatment of detainees.” The inadequacy of the answer mirrors their effectiveness.

Speaking of inadequate approaches, we now turn to the investigation into Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). On March 12, RaceWire reported on the positive reaction to the investigation from local activists and community groups in Arizona. Click through to see photos of Members of Maricopa Citizen for Safety and Accountability (MCSA) delivering the Sheriff numerous “pink slips” or see letters the DOJ delivered to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on March 10.

In other immigration news, The Texas Observer reports on non-profit consumer advocate group Public Citizen’s suit against DHS on behalf of Denise Gilman. Their efforts are helping shed some light on the construction of a border fence.

It also appears that Speaker Pelosi was actually forecasting a change in immigration policy last week. Yesterday President Obama met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and announced his intention to move forward “possibly within the next two months” with the unveiling of a legislative package that will address immigration reform. Hours later, at a town hall meeting in California, he repeated his conviction to do so.

Some have expressed concern that President Obama is taking on too much at once. But all of these things, the economy and immigration and healthcare, are intertwined. For example, the growing detention center industry will continue to take the place of productive workers and damage a healthy economy.

It is in our nation’s best interest to veer sharply away from the path that George W. Bush set us upon. Obama’s announcement yesterday is exciting news, considering how long the nation’s immigration laws have languished and how many humans have suffered because of them. The change that President Obama promised the nation seems to be coming for one and all.