The Benignimizer

Youngest Victims of Anti-immigrant laws

2006-12-18T23:17:00.000-05:00

By Alvaro Lopez | December 15, 2006 |

CHILDREN BORN in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants will no longer be entitled to health insurance through Medicaid, according to the Bush administration.

Administration officials say they are instituting the new policy as a result of a law signed by George Bush at the beginning of 2006 that tightens requirements on applications for Medicaid, the government’s health care program for the poor.

Under a 1984 law, once a woman received emergency care under Medicaid for the birth of a baby, the child was considered eligible for coverage as well for one year. Under the new policy, applications must be filed for the child, and parents must provide documents to prove the child’s citizenship.

“The federal government told us we have no latitude,” Marilyn Wilson, a spokesperson for the Medicaid program in Tennessee, told the New York Times. “We will not be able to cover any services for the newborn until a Medicaid application is filed. That could be days, weeks or months after the child is born.”

Tens of thousands of children born to undocumented workers in the U.S. will be affected.

According to a spokesperson for Rep. Charlie Norwood, the sponsor of the law that George Bush signed earlier this year, “Charlie’s intent was for every person receiving Medicaid to provide documentation...[W]ith newborns, that shouldn’t be a problem. All you have to do is provide a birth certificate or hospital records verifying birth.”

But Dr. Jay Berkelhamer, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics told the New York Times that obtaining a birth certificate can take up to several weeks, making this a new hurdle for immigrant parents. The policy, Berkelhamer said, “punishes babies who, according to the Constitution, are citizens because they were born here.”

What’s more, the restriction is one more factor pushing undocumented immigrants underground. Because of the escalating crackdown on the undocumented through Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and Social Security “no match” letters, immigrants have a good reason to avoid contact with any type of government official.

Elena Delim, head nurse of the pediatric unit at New York City’s Elmhurst Hospital Center, said she had no idea such law existed. “First and foremost, I’m an immigrant myself and will never refuse to help someone in need,” Delim said. “Secondly, laws will be laws, but we actually run this center.”

So much for the Bush administration and Congress’ talk about family values--apparently taking care of infants doesn’t count.

“I don’t think that people will accept this [law],” said Alberto Reyes, a day laborer organizer in New York. “We should continue organizing in our communities, reach out to nurses and doctors, and confront these attacks on undocumented workers.”

Letter from the past

2006-10-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

Dear President Bollinger and co.,

You deplore the demonstrations taking place at Columbia. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place at Columbia, but it is even more unfortunate that Columbia's white power structure left the immigrant community with no alternative.

You may well ask: "Why direct action?" You are quite right in calling for dialogue. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to engage in dialogue is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to dialogue. I therefore concur with you in your call for dialogue. Too long has our beloved Columbia been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the great stumbling block is not the Minuteman or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension at Columbia is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the immigrant passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that an men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. We be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? Perhaps Columbia, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.

The above is much abridged from the original. "My dear fellow clergymen" was replaced with "Dear President Bollinger & co." All direct location references were replaced with "Columbia". "Negotiations" was replaced with "dialogue". "White Citizens' Councilor" was replaced with "Minuteman". "Negro" was replaced with "immigrant". And that is the sum total of the changes.

Another quote is apposite:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

Columbia protest videos

2006-10-12T13:42:00.000-04:00

Univision footage of the protest.

Abortive debate between Karina Garcia and Jim Gilchrist on Democracy Now! The latter cuts it off "on legal advice".

Debate between Monique Dols and Chris Kulawik (and the "moderator") on Fox.

Jon Stewart takes it on, and manages to be funny, even though politically backwards.

Protest and free speech

2006-10-11T00:35:00.000-04:00

Brief but eloquent comment from Nick Cooper at NarcoNews:

Both "Minuteman" James Gilchrist and those who took over the stage when he began to speak at Columbia University were attempting to express free speech. Gilchrist had more authority to speak than the protesters, and that is the essential distinction. To portray it as an issue of free speech vs. anti-free speech is disingenuous.
Do invited speakers have more right to free speech than others? People in the U.S. are familiar with a society where invited speakers are allowed to have the stage for an hour and where audiences should keep quiet, but this is only custom. The members of the audience have every much a right to be heard as the more famous speakers.

Anti-fascists support both freedom of speech and a confrontation of oppression and racism. Occasionally these two are at odds, as with Germany banning Hitler's books. This tension creates a dynamic that is interesting to explore, but such explorations would be meaningless without considering issues of authority and power.
To think of what happened at Columbia as nothing but an affront to free speech, is to pretend that there are not essential differences between the voices of the oppressed and the propaganda of armed groups or powerful institutions. In the market place of ideas, we listen and learn. However, that does not mean that groups that we consider to be racist paramilitary organizations should not be therefore denied venues. In a society where the voices of millions are routinely silenced, and the same empty meaningless nonsense of politicians dominates our media day after day, the voices of those in power and invited speakers need more often to be preempted by the voice of the people.

Colonialism and fascism

2006-10-10T15:08:00.000-04:00

Lenin quoted Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism at length a few months back, saving me the effort of typing up a section I just noticed re-reading it for a class, and thought worth posting in the context of the legalization of torture:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated", all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but sulrey, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

The directness of the applicability to the external and internal components of the "war on terror" is obvious. However, a further point is worth discussing. Cesaire continues:

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind - it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

This seems a very useful way of thinking about what Nazism is, because not only does it refute the myth of a superior Western civilization, but also it makes Nazism itself explicable in a historical context, as something that wasn't a sudden unique burst onto the historical stage, but had precedents and causes in history before the 20th century.

But at the same time, it seems problematic. It's important within European or U.S. politics to distinguish fascists from simple liberals or conservatives; fascists and ordinary capitalist politicians use vastly different strategies at home and must be fought with very different tactics. One relies on a putatively neutral state apparatus to maintain power and the other on a mass movement with a pseudo-populist ideology to maintain the system by street politics and vigilantism. The German Communist Party's mistaken tactics flowing from its lumping of social democrats together with Nazis as "social fascists" helped allow the rise of Hitler. George Bush is not the same as Jim Gilchrist.

How to resolve this? I'm not sure. Cesaire further remarks that what whites cannot forgive Hitler for

is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'niggers' of Africa

Maybe this can help. If fascism is nothing more than the extension of colonialist methods to maintain power at home, it is still something special, and uniquely dangerous to the ability of people in the colonizer country to struggle for justice at home or abroad.

Racist and fascist groups are not welcome!

2006-10-06T19:32:00.000-04:00

... send a letter, sign a petition ...

Statement of Columbia anti-Minutemen protesters who took the stage against Jim Gilchrist on October 4

October 6, 2006

In the aftermath of the protest on the night of October 4 against Jim Gilchrist and the racist Minutemen at Roone Arledge auditorium, we want to state clearly: We are proud to send the message to the country that racist and fascist groups are not welcome at Columbia or in New York City.

As Chicanos and Latinos, alongside African Americans and progressive people of other nationalities, we took it as our responsibility to give voice to the undocumented immigrant families who live in fear at terrorist vigilante groups like the Minutemen. Armed patrols by these groups force more and more people desperate for work to find even more hazardous ways into the United States. Over 3,000 people including hundreds of children have died in the desert. Their blood is on the hands of Gilchrist and his thugs.

Fascist scapegoating is not up for academic discussion. Like Hitler in pre-Nazi Germany, Gilchrist and the Minutemen attempt to demonize foreign-born poor people, blaming illegals for society s problems. His group doesn t present reasoned debate. It spouts racism and hatred, aiming to divide people against one another.

Regardless of how Gilchrist tries to sanitize his message for national audiences, more candid moments tell the real story. Gilchrist is a member of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, which is now notorious for referring to Mexicans as savages. Speaking about Mexicans and Central American immigrants, Minuteman co-founder Chris Simcox once said, "They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughter and they are evil people."

This vile racism translates directly into violence on the ground. It should be legal to kill illegals, said one Minutemen volunteer. Just shoot 'em on sight. That's my immigration policy recommendation. It is no wonder that neo-Nazi organizations like the National Alliance praise the Minuteman Project in their publications, and have members signing up for Minutemen militias.

We are sure that if the Nazi party held a public meeting on campus, Jewish groups would be there to challenge them so would we. We are sure that if the Ku Klux Klan held a public meeting on campus, African American groups would be there to challenge them so would we. The Minutemen are no different.

We are pleased that an overwhelming number of people answered our call to demonstrate against the racist, fascist Minutemen the night of October 4. The hundreds of people outside Roone Arledge chanting, Minutemen, Nazis, KKK, racists, fascists, go away! represented students and community people from all walks of life. Inside the auditorium, perhaps as much as 80 percent of the crowd was repelled by the Minutemen s message of hate.

When we walked on stage on the night of October 4, with anti-racist banners for immigrant rights, we were met with violent attack by Gilchrist s goons. We were the ones who were punched and kicked. We are proud that despite these attacks, we held our ground. When Gilchrist walked off stage, it was because he and his Minutemen outfit were isolated.

This is not an issue of free speech. The Minutemen were able to reserve a hall at our university and had the protection of campus security and the NYPD all to espouse their hate speech. We along with hundreds of others expressed our right to speak and protest.

Over the last 50 years, throughout the Civil Rights movement and the women s rights movement, ultra-right wing groups have routinely used violence, lynchings, armed assaults and bombings against oppressed people. Yet when we organize to oppose them to express our contempt for their violence, we are criticized for inhibiting the free speech of the ones who perpetrate violence.

We thank everyone who joined our protest inside and outside of the auditorium.

Shame on the Columbia University administration for launching an investigation of peaceful protesters, and failing to condemn the perpetrators of violence. Shame on the College Republicans for inviting this fascist thug and provoking such outrage on our campus.

Latin America and the Fight for Worker's Rights

2006-09-28T01:04:00.000-04:00

BY ALVARO LOPEZ
The battle to control natural resources was the underlying cause for slavery in Latin America. This battle for natural resources continues to be the noose around the continent’s neck. From the massacres waged in the name of the United Fruit Company to Coca Cola’s use of union organizers for target practice, the people of Latin America have been caught in the crossfire for more than five centuries. Today, as corporations have replaced conquistadors in their raping and pillaging, ordinary workers, farmers, and the displaced have begun to organize and challenge those in control of resources. From taking power of factories in Argentina to Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution, to the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Latin America has become the sight of a class war where both sides are armed and fighting.
So important was natural resources that the great Bernal Diaz del Castillo, co-conquistador of Mexico, along with Hernan Cortes, claimed at the arrival of the “new” land “We have come here to serve God, Our majesty, and also for its natural resources” (Galeano 18). Sadly enough this statement remains true five hundred and twelve years later. America was discovered as a business for the imperialist powers of the time which were the Spanish, British, Dutch and Portuguese. Unlike modern day scavenger hunting for oil fields or natural gas reserves, in the Americas not only was their seas of gold, copper, and silver, but free labor as well. Bartolome de Las Casas explains it best when he portrays the blood spilled by the indigenous people of America in order to support the new world market:
Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starving for many days…for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola, once so populous having a population that estimated to be more than three millions, has now a population of barely two hundred persons. (Quoted in Zinn 34)

However, like modern day economists who feel that in order to support the world market and the demands of the market, we must break our backs twice, Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the discovery of the “New World” and the ensuing opening of trade with Asia began “to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendor and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to” (quoted in Weatherford 39). This new trade and splendid mercantile system that Smith speaks about is actually the two structures that supported the world market, the slave trade with Africa and the piracy of American silver. Karl Marx, satirically echoed Smith’s assessment when he said that the turning of hunting dark skin to a business and the looting of the West Indies “signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production (quoted in Wallerstein, p. xv). As the rivers of indigenous blood strolled on, the Africans made up for the lost labor in the Americas.
The picture has not changed much in Latin America, just the faces. No longer are there Spanish flags flying at every harbor, and no longer are the Latin Americans waiting for the orders of the Consejo de Indias. However, they are those pirates that represent neoliberalism, i.e. the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and of course there is U.S. imperialism and the sacred Monroe doctrine that must be preserved. In all over the world especially in third world nations the fever of a new world economic and political order reached its height during the 1990’s. Professor of Sociology, James Petras explains in detail:
The economic conditions of this “new world order” were created on the basis of a “new economic model”, which provided the underpinnings of a process of structural adjustment, globalization, and neo-liberal capitalist development. (Petras 3)

Neoliberalism also known as the “Washington Consensus” represents the new stage of capitalism and that’s mass privatizations of natural resources (water, gas, and oil), globalization, and the absolute dictatorship of the “free” market;
Neo-liberalism describes a familiar set of policies that became orthodoxy in Latin America in the 1980’s and 1990’s—privatization, free trade, deregulation, balanced budgets, production for export on the world market and the dismantling of the social safety net. In what had previously been highly state-controlled economies, neo-liberalism unleashed the capitalist market to determine nearly every facet of social life. In sum, neo-liberal “reform” brought Latin America the economic policies associated with right-wing politicians like President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (Selfa 7)

Without a doubt this resurgence of capitalism in Latin America was a direct result of the military dictatorships throughout the 1970’s and also the result of a class war conducted at the national, regional and international levels against the working class of the world.
In today’s major class struggles of Latin America the fight against neoliberalism is the catalyst. In Brazil there is the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), which organizes hundreds of thousands of peasants to take militant actions like land occupations, peasant militancy of Paraguay, the ongoing guerrilla war in Colombia led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the factory takeovers in Argentina and the mass riots by the unemployed workers (piqueteros), and the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico led by subcomandante Marcos. However, the most significant change in this mass radicalization and resurgence of labor power has been the re-election of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the newly elected President of Bolivia Evo Morales.
After the coup/bosses strike in 2002 against Hugo Chavez, that was supported by the United States, the rank and file oil workers who were avid defenders of Chavez took over the factories and started to run them on there own saving Venezuela’s population of mass devastation, reminiscent of the cordones in Chile during the 1970’s, when bosses decided to shut down factories out of rage against the reformist Salvador Allende policy’s to nationalize resources. What Chavez has helped to do in Latin America is to exorcise the myth that capitalism and bourgeois representative democracy has triumphed on the corpse of socialism, and open up the debate on socialism as an alternative to capitalism. He has along with the Missions program; help meet basic human needs throughout the urban poor by providing basic healthcare, social security, and cheap food distributions. However, Venezuelan socialist and leader of the National Workers Union (UNT) Americo Tabata is correct when he says:
The missions, being community and revolutionary gains for the oppressed masses, are not properly understood socialist measure. Rather, they are democratic achievements, wrested from the bourgeoisie and imperialism by popular struggle…the “solidarity economy” based on cooperatives, is another chimera. It is impossible to achieve this kind of spirit throughout the population while we are still bound by the limits of consumerism, individualism, and competition…Socialism is in essence, a system where social and collective property in the means of production prevails. Where workers are the owners and decision makers in the factories, businesses, and services…only by radically transforming the relations of production, and beginning to build socialism, can democratic policies like those discussed above reach their full potential. (Tabata 15)

In other words, Hugo Chavez represents an alternative to the dead-end road of neoliberalism; however, real socialism does not come through parliamentary means or isolated guerrilla struggles, but through the self-emancipation of the working class with a revolutionary socialist party as the fighter for their interest.
In Bolivia the election of indigenous leader Evo Morales is electrifying. Completing Jose Marti’s prophecy that Latin America will one day be governed by its most oppressed, Evo Morales is also another symbol for an alternative to neoliberalism. However, as president Morales repositions himself from a different seat and his recent gestures shows his willingness to actually work with the neoliberal agenda pushed from giant corporations, but at the same time has nationalized the nations natural gas resources:
The need to negotiate with foreign investors for development capital will limit how far he can go toward full nationalization. His stated plan is to nationalize only subsoil resources—the gas, oil, and minerals in the ground—and to leave the surface property and exploitation largely in private hands. (Lewis 17)

The struggle over natural resources is inextricably linked to capitalism and the struggle against capitalism. A fundamental question we must raise is who controls the Earth’s resources, who controls society, and how the overall quality of life for the majority is actually lived under these circumstances. As millions across the world get piled up on urban slums, workers living standards continue to decline, and imperialist wars continue to kill innocent lives, the time for a socialist alternative has never been more needed and necessary than ever.

WORKS CITED

--Galeano, Eduardo. Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, s.a. de c.v. Septuagésimo segunda edición, 2000.
--Lewis, Tom. International Socialist Review: Hope and challenge in Bolivia: Will Evo Morales end neo-liberalism? March-April 2006, Issue #46. Published by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.
--Petras, James. Social Movements and State Power in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Pluto Press, London. 2005.
--Selfa, Lance. International Socialist Review: Latin America: Rebirth of Resistance. Winter 2000, Issue #10. Published by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.
--Tabata, Americo. International Socialist Review: Venezuela An unconscious socialist revolution. March-April 2006, Issue #46. Published by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.
-- Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.
--Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. Fawcett Books: New York, 1988.
--Zinn, Howard. Voices of a people’s history of the United States. Seven Stories Press: New York, London, Toronto, Melbourne. 2004.

Polls

2006-09-27T18:17:00.000-04:00

A San Francisco Chronicle article summarizes four polls:

In Baghdad, for example, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65 percent of those asked favoring an immediate pullout, according to polling results obtained by the Washington Post.

Another new poll, scheduled to be released today by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, found that 71 percent of Iraqis questioned want the Iraqi government to ask foreign forces to depart within a year. By large margins, though, Iraqis believe the U.S. government would refuse the request, with 77 percent of those polled saying the United States intends to keep permanent military bases in the country.

...

"Majorities in all regions except Kurdish areas state that the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) should withdraw immediately, adding that the MNF-I's departure would make them feel safer and decrease violence," concludes the 20-page State Department report, titled "Iraq Civil War Fears Remain High in Sunni and Mixed Areas." The report was based on 1,870 face-to-face interviews conducted from June 26 to July 6.

...

The Program on International Policy Attitudes poll, which was conducted over the first three days of September for WorldPublicOpinion.org, found that support among Sunnis for a withdrawal of all U.S.-led forces within six months dropped to 57 percent in September from 83 percent in January.

...

The State Department report did not give a detailed methodology for its poll, which it said was carried out by an unnamed Iraqi polling firm.

The director of another Iraqi polling firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared being killed, said public opinion surveys he conducted last month showed that 80 percent of Iraqis questioned favored an immediate withdrawal.

A University of Michigan poll a month ago gave a more detailed sectarian breakdown:

The bottom line: 91.7% of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition troops in the country, up from 74.4% in 2004. 84.5% are "strongly opposed". Among Sunnis, opposition to the US presence went from 94.5% to 97.9% (97.2% "strongly opposed"). Among Shia, opposition to the US presence went from 81.2% to 94.6%, with "strongly opposed" going from 63.5% to 89.7%. Even among the Kurds, opposition went from 19.6% to 63.3%. In other words, it isn't just that Iraqis oppose the American presence - it's that their feelings are intense: only 7.2% "somewhat oppose" and 4.7% "somewhat support."

So a vast majority ("nearly three-quarters" to "91.7%") of Iraqis want the U.S. out, almost as many ("majorities" or "65%" to "80%") want the U.S. out immediately, and though Kurds tend to dissent on the timeframe, the desire for withdrawal is cross-sectarian.

Yet, not only do Bush, Hillary, and friends jabber about democracy as a reason for continuing the occupation, but even United for Peace and Justice, the alleged antiwar umbrella organization, refuses to take a clear stance in favor of bringing the troops home now? What possible justification could there be for determining the demands of the U.S. antiwar movement by the needs of Democratic politicians, rather than the expressed needs of Iraqis?

Interview with day labor organizer Carlos Canales of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y.

2006-09-26T18:54:00.000-04:00

An organizer on: workers taking a stand for their rights
Showing day laborers have the power to fight
June 30, 2006
CARLOS CANALES is the day labor organizer of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. Carlos fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and became a well-known organizer in New York. He talked to Socialist Worker’s ALVARO LOPEZ and AFSANEH MORADIAN about the conditions that immigrant day laborers face and how they have organized.

CAN YOU talk about what conditions were like for day laborers before there was a workers’ center?
IT HASN’T changed too much. We can say that for day laborers who are on the official side, there are some differences. The most important difference is that contractors tend to respect day laborers more when they’re in a workplace center we’ve organized than when they pick them up on the street.
The majority of the nonpayment of workers that we see here every week--I’d say 99 percent of it--is workers who are on the streets. They’re not coming from our workers’ centers.
That would be the most concrete difference. But there are other differences. For instance, workers in the workers’ center are more organized. They participate in the process of improving their condition or quality of life.
There’s only one rule that you hear me repeat over and over again every day when I go visiting: “You do not have to obey rules that are coming from outside the trailer. You have to disobey any rules that are imposed on you.”
You have to create your own rules--you have to create your own government here. Whatever’s happening at this trailer, you have to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to participate, that’s okay, but you have to ask whoever the coordinator or organizer is. Nothing that’s happening can be secret. It must be open.
HOW DO you organize workers’ centers?
MOST OF the time, workers call the workers’ center. We usually go to visit the place and we start a long process, visiting every day to establish relationships with the majority of people, because it may have been two or three who called on behalf of the others.
They’ll have a big meeting, and we’ll elect a board of workers. They are five or six workers, representing the rest. So after that, we train the new ones about what to say to the press, what not to say to the press, how we are going to face the issues, what the issues are.
Once they’re trained, in many cases, they realize they don’t have the power by themselves to change what they want to change. Politicians know that they don’t vote. So how will the gringo listen to us?
Sometimes they say that we’re immigrants, and they won’t pay attention to us. Then we go look for support before we go to negotiations with local authorities. We visit churches, identify people who’ll be in support of the workers, and then we organize a group of supporters to support the day laborers and a workers’ center.
The day laborers begin a steady process of negotiations, asking local authorities to assign an official place where they can stand and wait for contractors. So that the media and the authorities know that they have a place to stay, and the police from now on won’t come to bother them.
Also in the workers’ center, there are other complementary benefits, like English as a Second Language, computers to use, workshops on basic labor rights, heath information about things like TB, immigration courses, and any other workshop that people want.
Every Friday, we have general assemblies with workers, because the maximum authority is with the workers. They have to do the deciding in an open meeting. So they can debate and everybody can give opinions and vote.
HOW DID the contractors respond? Have you had run-ins with the Minutemen?
IT DEPENDS. Here in Long Island, in Nassau County, the most difficult place that we’ve found to organize labor is Farmingdale. In Suffolk County, it’s Farmingville. In Farmingville, it has been impossible to organize a working center because there are a lot of people who are anti-immigrant.
In Farmingville, you have Sachem Quality of Life, a group of local residents who are organizing, and their only purpose is to target day laborers. They were protesting at a 7-11 to stop contractors from picking up day laborers. They told the contractors to go to the Department of Labor.
They’ve done a lot of other things, like passing legislation that will prohibit contractors from picking up day laborers on the street. The last thing they did was lobby Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, and made him order the police to arrest any day laborers standing at that 7-11 for more than 30 minutes.
IS SACHEM Quality of Life part of the Minutemen?
THEY ARE the Minutemen.
THERE HAVE been some counter-protests against the Minutement, right?
THERE WAS a counter-protest against Sachem last December, when they came to Massapequa.
Last year, the Minutemen targeted the border with Mexico. Then, by December, they changed their target and said the new target would be day labor. So they came to New York State.
By last summer, they came to Massapequa to recruit people, supposedly to patrol the border with Canada. But then in December, they came to protest day labor sites. They were just 6 or 7, and we got about 50 or 60 local residents.
WHAT ROLE would you like to see day laborers play in the immigrant rights movement?
A LOT of day laborers in the future will make a transition to more permanent jobs. So after some five or 10 years, they stop being day laborers.
They participate in the immigrant rights movements--in the rallies. If a good law is passed, which is improbable, maybe they will be assimilated into the community, build families and stay here. A lot of them want to stay here and live here.

Solidarity with Teachers in Oaxaca

2006-09-26T18:23:00.000-04:00

Solidarity in NYC for Teachers in Oaxaca
La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras
BY ALVARO LOPEZ On September 21st over 60 activists came out to the Mexican consulate in New York City in order to show their support for the striking teachers in Mexico. The picket drew in various groups on the left, as well as members of unions like the United Federation of Teachers and the Professional Staff Congress. The picket was called in order to protest the blatant attack by the Mexican state led by the governor of Oaxaca Ulises Ruiz, on the over 70,000 striking teachers. This international show of solidarity came in a time when leaders of the world found themselves just a few blocks away at the United Nations General Assembly. The demonstration shows that activists in The United States are watching the horrors of the Mexican government and their attack against working people in Oaxaca.
Several speakers at the picket connected the attack against working people in Mexico with working people in the United States. In particular with the immigrant rights movement, the fight against the unjust Taylor Laws which deny public workers the right to strike and the need for the rebuilding of a genuine independent labor movement.
The picket sends a clear message to the Mexican government that activists in the United States are in solidarity with the teacher's strike in Oaxaca and the fight for democracy in Mexico City.

Dershowitz

2006-09-24T18:49:00.000-04:00

Alan Dershowitz, already a good candidate for the most despicable person in the world:

THE NEWS IS filled these days with reports of civilian casualties, comparative civilian body counts and criticism of Israel, along with Hezbollah, for causing the deaths, injuries and "collective punishment" of civilians. But just who is a "civilian" in the age of terrorism, when militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong toregular armies and easily blend into civilian populations? We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare. A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis ofcurrent events in the Middle East: "the continuum of civilianality."... the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear... Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those "civilians" who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks. The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit... Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.

(LA Times)

... now also the most pathetic:

Thanks to the Venezuelan president's surprise endorsement of ``Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" during a vitriolic address at the United Nations on Wednesday , the paperback edition of Chomsky's 2003 book has catapulted to number one on Amazon.com's list of best sellers, ahead of such eternally popular authors as John Grisham and Lemony Snicket.
...
"There'll always be a planet Chomsky in the solar system, a place where the lunatic left, the neo-Nazis, the anti-Semites, and the anti-Americans all live together," Dershowitz said.
"People buy his books, but they don't read them, because Chomsky's one of the worst writers in the English language. On issues of substance, he's had virtually no influence."

(Boston Globe)

Fascism in the U.S.

2006-09-21T00:31:00.000-04:00

Following up on my earlier post on the facts of immigration, lets examine the nativists. (Again, this is a reworked version of something I wrote a couple months ago. It will be followed, when I get around to it, by a new post on the role of the Democrats.)

China Mieville, on why the categories of ‘fascism’ and ‘vigilantism’ are essentially identical under capitalism:

Pashukanis [a Russian Marxist legal theorist of the 1920s first forced to recant and then murdered under Stalinism] argues that the logic of the commodity form is the logic of the legal form. Chris Arthur does an excellent job of expressing this complex relation:
Pashukanis argues that the juridical element in the regulation of human conduct enters where the isolation and opposition of interests begins. He goes on to tie this closely to the emergence of the commodity form in mediating material exchanges. His basic materialist strategy is to correlate commodity exchange with the time at which man becomes seen as a legal personality - the bearer of rights (as opposed to
customary privileges)… this is explicable in terms of the conceptual linkages
which obtain between the sphere of commodity exchange and the form of law.
The nature of the legal superstructure is a fitting one for this mode of production. For production to be carried on as production of commodities, suitable ways of
conceiving social relations, and the relations of men to their products, have to be found, and are found in the form of law…
As the product of labour takes on the commodity form and becomes a bearer of value, people acquire the quality of legal subjects with rights…
For Pashukanis, legal forms regulate relationship between autonomous subjects ‘ it is the subject that is the ‘cell-form’ of the legal system… the basic element in legal regulation is contestation – two sides defending their rights. In deliberately paradoxical fashion he says that historically law starts from a law-suit.
Pashukanis´s argument is that in commodity exchange, each commodity must be the private property of its owner, freely given in return for the other. In their fundamental form, commodities exchange at a rate determined by their exchange value, not because of some external reason or because one party to the exchange demands it. Therefore, each agent in the exchange must be i) and owner of private property, and ii) formally equal to the other agent(s). Without these conditions, hat occurred would not be commodity exchange. The legal form is the necessary form taken by the relation between these formally equal owners of exchange values…
Violence – coercion – is at the heart of the commodity form, and thus the contract. For a commodity meaningfully to be ‘mine-not-yours’ – which is, after all, central to the fact that it is a commodity to be exchanged – some forceful capabilities are implied. If there were nothing to defend its ‘mine-ness,’ there would be nothing to stop it becoming ‘yours’, and then it would no longer be a commodity, as I would not
be exchanging it. Coercion is implicit… taking the analysis from the individual to the social level, force must be a general condition for the maintenance of commodity
relations.
The reason is plain enough. Existing property relations [ie., not yet productive relations] systematically separate producers from the objects of their need, on an everyday and continuous basis. In commodity production, ‘need’ and ‘right’ stand opposed… The motive to trespass, steal, invade, oppress, rob and generally transgress property right is continually recreated through the pressure of material need. Hence this system of social production relations generates a permanent and general requirement for means of ´defence´, i.e. for means of violence and its organization…
In other words… coercion backed by force is implied in a generalized form and ‘addressed by one person to another’ – ie. By all owners of commodities to all other owners of commodities – in the very nature of commodity exchange and production…
[Pashukanis noted:]
In our time of intensified revolutionary struggle we can observe how the official apparatus of the bourgeois state recedes into the background in comparison with the ‘voluntary guards’ of the fascists and their ilk. This once more shows that when social equilibrium is disrupted it then ‘seeks salvation’, not by creation of ‘an authority standing above classes’, but by the maximum pressure of the forces of the struggling classes…
Thus there is nothing inevitable about the particular form of the bourgeois state… that very state will seek alternative, altogether less abstract methods to achieve its ends, without ceasing to be a capitalist state: it is the ‘official apparatus’ that recedes, not the state itself, which in this instance is the very body ‘seeking salvation’ through recourse to fascism…
(Between Equal Rights, pp. 78, 126-7, 125-6 [section on fascism moved to the end to fit the context; bracket inserts in Mieville are mine, but in the authors he quotes are his])

The anti-immigrant movement in the U.S. is a complicated one. It has three major components, all connected to a lesser or greater degree; a network of rich donor-funded foundations and lobby groups which have been around for decades, a number of small neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups which have also been around for decades, and a more recent and more popular grassroots network, with its roots in California in the 1990s and a rise to prominance with the appearance of the Minutemen in 2005. This has in turn been expressed in local and national electoral politics by a number of figures and pieces of legislation, most notably the 1994 California Proposition 187 and the 2005 Sensenbrenner Bill, HR 4437.

Foundations and lobbyists in Washington

In Washington, John Tanton has been the key behind-the-scenes anti-immigrant figure. According to the the Southern Poverty Law Center - a systematically alarmist and firmly liberal source but reliable and in fact invaluable for detailed factual information - writing in 2002 before the appearance of the Minutemen,

A four-month investigation by the Intelligence Report, conducted in the
aftermath of the September terrorist attacks, found that the appearance of an
array of groups with large membership bases is nothing more than a mirage. In
fact, the vast majority of American anti-immigration groups — more than a dozen
in all — were either formed, led, or in other ways made possible through
Tanton's efforts. The principal funding arm of the movement, U.S. Inc., is a
Tanton creation, and millions of dollars in financing comes from just a few of
his allies, far-right foundations like those controlled by the family of Richard
Mellon Scaife.

Those financers, the article goes on to mention, have included the Pioneer Fund, the notorious source of most of the money used for eugenicist and racist research in the U.S. since the Second World War. Groups founded, controlled and/or largely funded by Tanton and U.S Inc. include (but are not limited to!) the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the 21st Century Fund, Population-Environment Balance, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, NumbersUSA, The Social Contract Press (which publishes The Camp of the Saints), and Pro English. Several of these groups, in turn, have collaborated with various openly racist organizations, particularly the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens.

Tanton and his lobby groups work closely with Congressman Tom Tancredo, head of the 100+ member ‘Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus.' Tancredo believes that criminal immigrants are 'coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren,' that the West is engaged in a 'clash of civilizations,' and that 'If Western civilization succumbs to the siren song of multiculturalism... we're finished.' Tancredo is the most prominent spokesperson of a large, fanatically anti-immigrant minority in the Republican party, a minority which had sufficient influence to get the Sensenbrenner bill through the House but not enough to get it through the Senate, and to which Bush and the biggest corporate backers of the party are generally opposed.

California and grassroots nativism

As Mike Davis outlines in part one of No One Is Illegal, the history of populist vigilante anti-immigrant movements in the western United States, and particularly California, goes back to the nineteenth century, at times involving fights between thousands of demonstrators (e.g. in LA between the KKK and the IWW in 1919-23 and in the California fields between the CPUSA and CIO and the American Legion and Associated Farmers in the mid-30s). The latest incarnation can be traced back to the 1994 battle in California over the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, ¨Save Our State,¨ which was passed but defeated in court. The most prominent movement warrior for Prop 187 was Barbara Coe, a woman who remains prominent in the anti-immigrant movement. She is the head of the ‘California Coalition for Immigration Reform’, a major recipient of Tanton funds. She regularly refers to Mexican immigrants as ‘savages’.

The Minutemen and their spin-offs are a somewhat newer phenomenon, although most of their key activists have fought earlier battles in California. They appeared on the scene in April 2005 with promises to launch ‘citizen patrols’ of the border, and received a burst of media attention, but quickly split. The two largest remnants are now headed by Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist. Simcox, a regular Fox News commentator, heads the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. He believes that Mexican immigrants are "trashing their neighborhoods, refusing to assimilate, standing on street corners, jeering at little girls walking on their way to school." Gilchrist runs the Minuteman Project. He has said that "Illegal immigrants will destroy this country," and that "every time a Mexican flag is planted on American soil, it is a declaration of war." Probably the most active group since late 2005, however, has been ‘Save Our State’, named after Prop 187 though with no other connection, and run by Joe Turner, who (although he does not self-identify as white separatist) believes that "just because one believes in white separatism, that does not make them a racist." It primarily organizes protests at locations away from the border, such as day laborer meeting points. The Minutemen, etc, of course attend these, and organize some of their own.

The Minutemen and their various spin-offs and imitators are closely linked to the Washington nativists. Coe, with her Tanton connections, regularly appears at demonstrations; at one conference in Las Vegas in 2005, the featured speakers included Coe, Tancredo, and Simcox; several Republican House members have actually patrolled with the Minutemen. The Minutemen have been endorsed by Texas Governor Rick Perry and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and have received some cooperation from the Border Patrol, although Bush has denounced them as vigilantes. The Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona, Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano, have both declared "states of emergency" on the border, providing cover to the Minutemen, although neither has directly endorsed the project. Nevertheless, the Minutemen are something new. However, there is a substantial difference.

The social character of the Minutemen and friends

According to the SPLC report on Tanton,

The vast majority of funding for most of these groups comes from just a handful of donors, many of them large, right-wing foundations.

In 2000, the latest year for which tax returns are available, Vinson's American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF) received 90% of its funding from just three contributors.
Five contributions accounted for 82% of U.S. Inc.'s income in the same year.
Fifty-eight percent of FAIR's 2000 donations were provided by six donors.
Fourteen donors account for 94% of the Center for Immigration Studies income for that year.

As a leaked memo from a now-defunct Tanton-founded group, Witan, said, these groups "have spent some time, money and effort trying to build a membership for purposes of political validity and power... but this has not been a major emphasis." These are lobby groups like any other, not a genuine movement (alone). The Minutemen and company have operated with an explicitly opposite framework. Save Our State´s website states:

Currently, the anti-illegal immigration movement is trapped in the Old Paradigm that primarily consists of apathy, inaction and reaction. The result is a disjointed movement, ineffective and mired, barely functioning in a defensive and reactionary posture.

Save Our State is committed to creating a New Paradigm, one that consists of one singular tenet: the transference of pain. Our enemies in the open borders lobby are not going to change their policies or behavior unless we make it painful for them to continue propagating their anti-American agenda.

We are dedicated to utilizing aggressive activism to accomplish our objectives. We believe in taking the fight to our opponents, fighting the battles on our terms and defining the language of the debate.

Mike Davis summarizes the research on the social roots of vigilantism:

In his study ofTampa, Ingalls finds a fundamental continuity of elite control: "vigilantes take the law into their own hands to reinforce existing power relationships, not to subvert them... Whether the particular target was a black prisoner, a union organizer, a political radical, or a common criminal, extralegal violence was supposed to preserve the status quo." More ponderously, Ray Abrahams, who looks at vigilante groups as an international phenomenon, concludes that "vigilantism is rarely simply a popular response to the failure of due legal process to deal with breaches of the law. 'The people' and 'the community' are, on inspection, complex concepts, and the populism of much vigilante rhetoric conceals... a self-satisfied elitism." Richard Brown, in an earlier study of vigilantism on the frontier, argued that "again and again, it was the most eminent local community leaders who headed vigilante movements... "

(No One Is Illegal, p. 19)

There also doesn't appear to have been any systematic study of the Minutemen specifically, but their are indications that the same applies. A New York Minuteman describes the group as made up of "middle-class people who are sick to death." This should be taken with a grain of salt, since almost everyone in the U.S. claims to be middle class, but various reports do seem to back it up. It´s also hard even to give an estimate of the number of people involved in groups like the Minutemen that isn´t a sheer guess, but they´ve certainly been much more active than earlier anti-immigrant groups. At demonstrations, they rarely bring out more than a few score people and are generally outnumbered by counterprotesters, but demonstrations have been frequent and widespread since 2005. They are closely associated with right-wing pundits with large followings, like Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, and Michelle Malkin, all of whom have recently turned from the disastrous war in Iraq to immigration as a source of red meat for their listeners. And their ability to force into the open tensions within the Republican party demonstrates a genuine independence that their Washington backers have lacked. Although public opinion on the whole has actually gotten relatively more friendly to immigrants in the last few years, polarization has been sharp.

Fascism in the U.S.

Though the leaders all disavow racism, the Minuteman-related organizations are shot through with neo-Nazis, who are generally allowed to participate in demonstrations and even organizing as long as they keep their swastikas under their jackets. Joe Turner, expressing the general spirit, said the following when neo-Nazis unfurled flags at one of his rallies:

So, if you are in [S.O.S.]...accept this reality [of Nazis being at our events]. If you cannot accept this reality or feel uncomfortable about it, then it is time for you to bow out and move on to another organization. No hard feelings. No grudges.

Or, from the other direction, one neo-Nazi wrote:

This is a movement every WN [white nationalist] should support and be active in.
It moves in our direction even as it does not even acknowledge, or even
know, that the WN movement exists.

The neo-Nazi or ¨white nationalist¨ movement in the United States is small and universally despised but not quite a joke. It has branches across the country, regularly holds small public demonstrations at which Nazis are always massively outnumbered by counterprotesters, and has influence inside the prison system and, apparently, in the Army. Nevertheless it has no popular appeal, and no corporate media figure or elected politician local or national will touch it. The Nazis have their heroes and their scapegoats wrong – American nativists aren´t concerned about Jews, but about Mexicans, and reserve their ultra-patriotism for the U.S., not for Hitler´s Germany. They´re out of date and out of place; to paraphrase Orwell, one of the few things we know about a new fascist movement is that it won’t be called ‘fascism.’ This is not to say that the neo-Nazis aren´t dangerous - only that they will not be the base of a serious national fascist movement in the U.S. The one area of significant success they have had, in visibility, a popular stance, and therefore probably recruitment, is in the anti-immigrant movement. However, they have had it at the expense of remaining largely secretive.

Although open Nazism is a dead end, as the ´WN´ quoted above implies, the Minutemen and the other various anti-immigrant vigilantes are the beginnings of a genuine American fascist movement in all but name. They are a group based in the insecure petty-bourgeoisie with an ideology built around scapegoating foreigners in defense of the nation, and a faux-populist hostility to the rich overmatched by a hostility to the left. They are organized as a pseuir tactics focus on street activism and violence - although for now the latter remains latent in preparations; the Minutemen patrol armed but there has been no proof yet that any have used their guns. The neo-Nazi connections serve at least to demonstrate the ideological and practical convergance of the movement with earlier forms of fascism. And they have the roots in genuine American traditions and the ruling class connections and acceptability that the neo-Nazis lack. It is nearly impossible to imagine a popular pro-Hitler movement in the U.S., but the Minutemen have already had a great deal of success.

The border vigilantes are classic proto-fascists; they are ready and willing to take over from the state the task of enforcing the rule of law and capital, and although the capitalist class is certainly not yet prepared to give them the opportunity, a crisis could turn that around. With the appearance of the Minutemen, anti-fascism in the U.S. has gained a great deal of urgency.

The old haunts of Georgia renewed

2006-09-19T13:03:00.000-04:00

"These people might not have American rights, but they've damn sure got human rights," Robinson said. "There ain't no reason to treat them like animals."

This is a response to the recent series of deportations (beginning Sep. 1st) of undocumented immigrants from Stillmore, GA, where ICE (Immigration Customs & Enformencement) agents arrested 120 residents, destroying families and ruining lives.

A town of roughly 1,000, has seen its very livelihood and sense of community sapped right out from under it a move that reminds the residents of Emanuel County of a deeply segregated and racist past - as the Mayor of Stillmore, Marilyn Slater, describes:

"This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany, the Gestapo coming in and yanking people up," Slater said."

But Stillmore isn't the only town that ICE agents have descended on recently, in Santa Cruz, CA, 107 undocumented immigrants were deported last week, and this is what they have to say to justify their arrogant and inhuman actions:

"But a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman defended the agency's actions.

"A lot of these people are not good members of our community," spokeswoman Lori Haley said."

Good members of your community? Behind that statement lies a world of racism and condescension towards the Latino community in general, it isn't new, it is a hangover of the Bracero program reincarnated in the attitudes encompassing the Right's new pet project of hate: "Operation Return to Sender".

It could not be any clearer, that this is a struggle for civil and human rights, and that any movement addressing these issues will be tested by its ability to expand and generalize. In 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded to resist attacks by the state and white terrorists on the Black community. In 2006, we need to form a similar resistance that can defend our neighborhoods and communities from threats of deportation. In 1966 it was the KKK, in 2006 its the Minutemen and their state apparatus, ICE & CBP.

Immigration from Mexico to the U.S.

2006-09-17T13:12:00.000-04:00

"Illegal" Mexican immigrants are... An unprecedented flood? Leading to overpopulation? Hurting the economy? Stealing jobs? Willing to work for lower wages? Draining government funds? Committing crimes? Failing to assimilate? People who can be stopped by tougher enforcement? People to whom the U.S. owes nothing?

Some facts (an updated version of a list I put together some time ago):

Structural adjustment was imposed on Mexico following a peso devaluation and debt crisis in 1982. In the 1980s, Mexican real wages fell 66%. In the 1980s, the average Mexican worker's wage was one-third that in the U.S. In the 2000s, the ratio is one-eighth. (Chacon, p. 113)
The benefits of Mexico's economic growth since the imposition of neoliberalism have been negligible below the top 30%. (Stiglitz, p. 86) Union density has fallen from over 75% to under 30%. (Chacon, p. 113)
NAFTA was passed in 1994. In the following year, Mexico experienced an economic crisis due to capital flight, losing 1 million jobs. (Chacon, p. 120) Real wages and unemployment took 5 years to regain the status quo ante, although capital flows stabilized in less than a year. (Stiglitz, p. 121)
Beyond net poverty and unemployment, NAFTA resulted in massive rural displacement. In 1993, Mexico became a net corn importer from the U.S., and has remained one; since the passage of NAFTA, total U.S. exports to Mexico have doubled. 1.3 million Mexican small farmers went bankrupt between 1994 and 2004. (Chacon, pp. 120-122)
Of approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, 56% are Mexican. 5% of the U.S. workforce is undocumented. (Chacon, pp. 156-7)
Presently, 12% of the U.S. population is foreign-born, 71% of them legal residents. (Chacon, p. 159) At points during the 19th century, 20% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, including 70% of the population of the largest cities; the "legal-illegal" distinction is a 20th century creation. (Chacon, pp. 175-7)
Undocumented immigrants contribute just 3.3 out of each 1000 in U.S. population growth. (Chacon, p. 159)
The U.S. economy is growing at approximately 3.5% per year. 1% of this is attributable to increase in population through immigration. By this means, immigrant labor contributes more jobs than it occupies. (Chacon, p. 160)
Wages, even for workers at the lowest end of the wage scale, are higher in U.S. border cities than comparable non-border cities. Studies of sudden influxes of Cubans to Miami, Algerians to France, and Russians to Israel found no effect on employment or wages. (Henwood)
Immigrant workers have been more combative than the native-born in seeking greater wages and benefits. The absolute number of immigrant workers in U.S. unions grew 23% between 1996 and 2003. (Chacon, pp. 285-6) The absolute number of all workers in U.S. unions, immigrant and U.S.-born, dropped by 3%. (L.R.A.)
Undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in services, by an average of $1800 net per person. 49 states have a net fiscal gain from undocumented workers. (Chacon, p. 165)
Official crime rates are lower in U.S. border cities than comparable non-border cities. Correcting for socioeconomic disadvantages, the crime rate among Chicanos is lower than the U.S. average and among first-generation immigrants is lower than third-generation. (Cowen)
Nearly half of second-generation immigrants to the U.S. whose parents were Spanish-speaking are English dominant, and nearly half are bilingual. 7% are Spanish dominant. In the third generation, three quarters are English dominant, the rest bilingual. (Alba)
Since the 1980s, the Border Patrol has gone from a budget of $200 million to $1.6 billion and 2,500 officers to 12,000. Immigration rates have remained constant, and apprehension rates on the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped from 33% to 10% as immigrants switch from urban to desert crossings. Returns to Mexico, however, have dropped from 50% in the 1980s to 25% in the 2000s, and deaths on the border have jumped to 400 per year, now over 4000 in total. (Chacon, p. 210)

References
Justin Akers Chacon, professor of U.S. history & Chicano studies at UC San Diego, No One Is Illegal
Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia, Globalization and its Discontents
Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer, "A nation of (yesterday's) immigrants"
Labor Research Association, "Union Membership: Overall (1948-2004)"
Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason, "Does Mexican immigration reduce crime?"
Richard Alba, professor of sociology at SUNY Albany, "Mexican Americans and the American Dream"

Pope preaches prejudice

2006-09-15T19:38:00.000-04:00

What do Danish cartoonists and the Pope have in common? They're both apt to spew vile Islamophobic material, and act shocked that nearly 21% of the world's population are not only offended, but quite angry with them (from The Guardian):

"The Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio: 'It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to undertake a comprehensive study of the jihad and of Muslim ideas on the subject, still less to offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful.'"

Perhaps if the 'Holy Father' had undertaken a comprehensive study of jihad, he would have been less prone to 'offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful'. But then again, anyone who would completely overlook a backlash to statements such as the following, lives in a box so dark and cavernous that he espouses views held by a 600-year-old Byzantine emporer:

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the Pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

And apparently the writers at Time Magazine have also fallen into a 600-year old void of racist propaganda:

"In a provocative speech citing the concept of jihad and referencing the Muslim prophet by name, Benedict sends the world a signal that it's time for hard questions—not hugs and handshakes."

In other words, offending the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world is the right message to send, and I don't think George W. Bush could be any more pleased. In the wake of his "Islamic fascism" speech, Pope Benedict XVI must have seized the opportunity to keep the ball rolling, per say. And certainly the ball is rolling, with reports of hate crimes on the rise since 9/11.

We have to absolutely reject this sort of filth, and expose the vulgarity and depth of the racism that the Pope of all people, is now promoting on a global scale. But perhaps it is simply the case that he is just wanting to experience some childish irresponsibility again, like when he joined the Hitler Youth in 1941.

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