By David A. Sylvester. Cross-posted on Tikkun Daily.
Undocumented migrants have a right to work here because they deserve economic reparations for failed U.S. economic policies and disastrous military interventions.
Hundreds of thousands march for immigration rights in Chicago, May 1, 2006. Credit: Alana Price.
We hardly need another symptom of the spiritual and social bankruptcy of the system, but this new Arizona law targeting and criminalizing undocumented migrants is a good example. You might know that Gov. Jan Brewer signed last week a new law that broadens police power to stop anyone at anytime for virtually any reason simply for looking suspiciously like an undocumented immigrant. It is supposed to take effect in August, but this is unlikely since it is probably unconstitutional and will face a barrage of court challenges.
This Saturday, May Day, the traditional day for workers rights, more than 70 cities are planning protests against the law, and boycotts against Arizona are spontaneously spreading — as they should. Mexican taxi cab drivers are apparently refusing to pick up anyone from Arizona, and the Mexican government has issued a travel advisory warning Mexicans of the danger of traveling through Arizona. In California, pressure is growing to join the boycott.
In the midst of this uproar, few are asking one simple question: Why? Why do so many Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans enter the U.S. by the most dangerous and expensive route possible? READ FULL POST
Nearly four years ago, retired coal miner and grandfather Ed Wiley walked from Charleston, West Virginia to Washington, DC, asking state and federal officials to intervene in the nightmare situation of his granddaughter’s elementary school. Blanketed by coal dust from a nearby coal silo, Marsh Fork Elementary also sat below a weakened 2.8 billion coal slurry impoundment, as mountaintop removal operations blasted nearby.
Welcome to the Ed Wiley Elementary School!
Thanks to a generous $2.5 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the long march for a new elementary school for children in the besieged Coal River Valley hamlet of Sundial, West Virginia, has come to an end: A new school will now be built in a different location.
The campaign for a new school–which should be called the Ed Wiley Elementary School, if any justice is served in West Virginia–has surmounted unthinkable odds. Despite his announcement today, Gov. Joe Manchin has shamefully dragged his feet on the documented issue of school safety and coal dust for years. Last summer, the West Virginia Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision to allow a second coal silo to be built near school grounds.
Along with the Annenberg funds and a gift from the Coal River Mountain Watch, the school also received commitments of $2.6 million from the West Virginia School Building Authority, and $1.5 million from the Raleigh County Board of Education and Massey Energy, which is responsible for the whole mess of coal dust and the dangerous coal slurry impoundment.
Coal River Valley citizens still remain in danger of a potential catastrophe--a 72-foot tidal wide of coal sludge–should the impoundment break.
But tonight, Ed Wiley and his granddaughter, and all the kids and parents in the Coal River Valley are celebrating the new school.
Here’s a clip of Ed’s long-time work to move Marsh Fork Elementary:
And here’s a clip on Ed Wiley from the forthcoming documentary, On Coal River:
Arizona’s draconian immigration law is creating a wave of Latino social network activism. Following the signing of S.B. 1070, one of the most anti-immigrant laws in the country, Latinos have chosen to mobilize online in numbers rarely seen before. Within 24 hours of launching the “Do I Look ‘Illegal’?” campaign, the Latino page Cuéntame has seen an immediate response — with thousands adopting the mantra and ready to take action.
The Arizona bill has hit a nerve within the Latino community, with emotions ranging from disappointment to right out anger. The idea behind the “Do I Look Illegal” campaign is precisely to channel those emotions into a new form of social network activism. It is aimed at highlighting how the Arizona law essentially institutionalizes the discrimination and persecution of the Latino community through racial profiling.
Along with the visual campaign, there is a nationwide boycott-taking place and a video series being produced to highlight the movement. For a very long time Latinos have represented a strong economic engine for Arizona. It is often one of the most under-rated and misrepresented aspects of the Arizona economy. The spotlight almost always focuses on the effect of undocumented individuals in the state, and as the signing of S.B 1070 shows, the response is almost always backwards, misguided and a direct attack to the community as a whole.
Latinos taking part in this new wave of social network activism have not only spread the message by wearing “Do I Look ‘Illegal’?” T-shirts, signs and posts but are spreading the message of the campaign online via status updates, pictures, blogs, video and making full use of all the social media tools available. It is reminiscent of the Twitter green movement that took place last year. As such Cuéntame along with other Latino groups continue to plan actions in Arizona and Los Angeles with on-the-ground organizations to protest S.B. 1070.
The “Do I Look ‘Illegal’?” movement shows that not only have Latinos arrived in full force to the world of social media activism but that these actions are prompting massive on the ground efforts which represent the first major Latino mobilization in light of the 2010 mid-term elections. Help the mobilization, sign the petition and post the “Do I Look ‘Illegal’? message on your Facebook profiles, Twitter, blogs and continue spreading the message that a law based on racial profiling is a step backwards for all.
By Lita Kirth. Cross-posted on Tikkun Daily.
Credit: FlickrCC/Chaz_Wags.
I once worked for a small greeting card company in Berkeley, piecework packing cards into plastic bags: $7 for a box filled with twelve-card bags. After a while, I became quite efficient and could fill almost two boxes in an hour. The owner, however, was outraged at what my hourly wage had become and moved to cut it.
Clearly she had earlier decided she could afford $7 a box, but now, apparently, the idea of a mere worker getting a decent wage was more than she could stand. Disgusted and furious, I left as soon as I could find another job.
Little injustices like that and far bigger ones are the reasons we have a labor movement. It has been a long, long, bitter struggle for workers to have a small share of democracy at work. Their rights are won and then eroded or circumvented.
Now, so many people work 12-hour shifts or wildly fluctuating hours; several part-time jobs or full- plus part-time jobs that the eight-hour day and forty-hour week, designed for rest, human development, and Sabbath, are moving out of range once more. It’s symptomatic that few American workers could tell you what May 1 is about. READ FULL POST
I have a question for you: Do I look “illegal?”
I’m probably not going to get pulled over and questioned about my citizenship while driving in Arizona. I’m probably not going to have to carry my birth certificate in my car to prove I was born in the United States. And let’s be honest: The only reason this is true is because I am not a Latino.
It’s disgraceful that Latinos have to worry about this in any state in the union in 2010.
Brave New’s Cuéntame project has been at the forefront of the fight against Arizona’s racist anti-immigrant law, which allows the targeting of anyone a police officer “reasonably suspects” is in the country without documentation. (Reasonableness in the state that just threatened the jobs of teachers with accents is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.) We’ve tracked this issue in a series of short videos and launched a Facebook drive for an economic boycott targeting this unjust law.
A couple of days ago, though, we had a real breakthrough in our activism online. We let our supporters on Facebook vote for a slogan for a t-shirt to protest the racist law, and we got an avalanche of comments. “Do I Look ‘Illegal?’” came out on top, and within hours we had hundreds of orders for t-shirts bearing this slogan. Shortly after, the phrase was in use on the major Latino groups on Facebook.
Clearly, there’s a hunger out there for ways to push back against the racism insinuating itself into state policies and the wider national discourse.
I have a second question for you: Do you look “illegal?”
Just weeks ago, activists gathered in Bolivia to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the ousting of Bechtel from the country after the water system was privatized. As the right to water movement grows stronger, advocating for public control of water resources, it seems like the opponent is also gearing up. The Guardian reports:
Private companies are poised for a surge in demand to take over water supplies, despite widespread opposition to privatisation of what is seen as a life-giving public service.
Global Water Intelligence analysts expect the water supply market to grow about 20% in the next five years, and demand is especially strong in North Africa, the Middle East and China, GWI’s publisher Christopher Gasson told the Guardian.
Another big growth area is likely to be the US, where “hundreds” of public water authorities thought to be talking to private operators, said Dan McCarthy, president and CEO of the global water division of engineering group Black & Veatch.
In the U.S. tough economic times coupled with a huge decrease in federal funds for water utilities over the last few decades (and especially during the Bush years) has meant that many municipalities are struggling to keep aging water pipes and infrastructure in shape. Private companies are swooping in, hoping to cash in on a deal but so far, privatization has been a nightmare for many of the towns that have attempted it. Food and Water Watch has a detailed report here on their website — but the most common complaints are poor service and higher rates — pretty much a no brainer when you think that companies are serving shareholders and not customers.
The Guardian reports on some of this, but this list of towns and cities who are fighting privatization is big:
Passionate opposition remains however, and not everything is going the private operators’ way: officials in Gary, Indiana, in the US, want to terminate their private contract early, claiming they can do the job for half the price; and the concession to supply 2 million residents in central Paris was recently awarded to a public authority, after 25 years of private operation.
The reason why, Maude Barlow sums up well:
“I don’t think anybody should be making money from delivering water because it can be done in the public sector on a not-for-profit basis,” said Barlow. “No corporation can survive on that basis … You make decisions about life and death because you have to make a profit, and that’s the issue here.”
States that the Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.
Provisions
States that the Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.
Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:
Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
States that if the SBE determines that a school district or charter school is offering a course that violates this act, the SBE must direct the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Superintendent) to notify the school district or charter school that it is in violation.
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The classroom is and has always been a political space.
This is a textbook example of Eurocentrism and Whiteness in action–and the irony here is priceless. Pursuant to this new law, children of color and their parents in Arizona should sue to demand that funding be cut off to most public schools because from American history to English to Science and the Arts, the curriculum as presently taught devalues people of color, encourages White solidarity, is designed to reinforce Whiteness as the “normal” and “preeminent” state of being, and generates resentment on the part of those left out of America’s grand narrative.
Last week Arizona instituted draconian laws that were designed to curb illegal immigration. In an effort to one up themselves, the state legislature has now passed a resolution banning “Ethnic Studies” programs in public schools. Once more, for those of you who are not connecting the dots between white racial resentment and the Tea Party movement; resurgent White Nationalism in the moments since Obama’s election; and White anxiety about the “browning of America,” here is another data point.
When the tea baggers and the Vox Right Wing Populi harp on about taking “their America back,” those dead-enders do in fact want to take America back to the good old days when black and brown folk were silent and obedient–at least as seen by the gaze of the White imagination:
Although this bill is initially limited to public schools, one should make careful note of the language. “Ethnic Studies” is a particular nomenclature that applies almost exclusively to colleges and universities. On one hand, as someone who loosely works in Ethnic Studies I am emboldened and pleased that the essentially political nature of our work is identified as such by our enemies:
This is validating in a way. However, I am also chilled because this new law signals an increasing escalation in the assault on academic freedom and free thinking in American society. Moreover, these assaults are a further signpost on the road to a corporate, bottom line, lucre and profit oriented approach to higher education that results in lower quality instruction, poorly trained students, and ultimately, a less competitive economy.
There is a frightening coincidence of interests at this moment. The enemies of tenure, those such as David Horowitz and his ilk who rail against “liberal professors,” and the minions of folk such as Ward Connerly and others who work lockstep against the “diversity business” are certainly sharpening their knives at the announcement of this new law. How long until they come for private and public universities and colleges?
To what ends will this slippery slope lead? Who will the Know Nothings, and the neo-John Birther tea baggers and their allies come for next?
Just in case this recent CNN headline — “Government: More than 22,000 dead in Mexico drug war” — didn’t make this point crystal clear, we now have a scientific study published by the good folks at International Centre for Science in Drug Policy to drive home the painfully obvious.
Study links drug enforcement to more violence
via The Associated PressThe surge of gunbattles, beheadings and kidnappings that has accompanied Mexico’s war on drug cartels is an entirely predictable escalation in violence based on decades of scientific literature, a new study contends.
A systematic review published Tuesday of more than 300 international studies dating back 20 years found that when police crack down on drug users and dealers, the result is almost always an increase in violence, say researchers at the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, a nonprofit group based in Britain and Canada.
… In 87 percent of the studies reviewed, intensifying drug law enforcement resulted in increased rates of drug market violence. Some of the studies included in the report said violence increases because power vacuums are created when police kill or arrest top drug traffickers. None showed a significant decrease in violence.
Predictably, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske — like all prohibitionists — would rather stick his head in the sand than acknowledge the obvious.
When asked whether he believes that legalizing and regulating marijuana — the crop that, according to his own office, provides Mexican drug lords with over 60% of their present profits — would in any way stave this ongoing violence, he responded: “I don’t know of any reason that legalizing something that essentially is bad for you would make it better, from a fiscal standpoint or a public health standpoint or a public safety standpoint.”
Really? So does the Drug Czar favor outlawing alcohol, tobacco, red meat, trans-fats, soda, corn syrup, junk food, caffeine, sugar, and any one of thousands of other products and activities that are “essentially bad for you” too?
And what about those 20,000+ dead since 2006 — many as a direct result of the United State’s prohibitionists policies? The Drug Czar doesn’t believe that staving such violence isn’t benefiting the public’s health? (Answer: You can’t make someone understand when it is in their job description not to.)
Sickeningly, ex-Drug Czar John Walters does Gil K. even one better — reiterating the notion (previously expressed by pending DEA head Michelle Leonheart) that the soaring violence and death south of the border is a sign that U.S. marijuana prohibition is working!
According to the AP: “The former drug czar, John Walters, said the researchers gravely misinterpret drug violence. He said spikes of attacks and killings after law enforcement crackdowns are almost entirely between criminals, and therefore may, in a horrible, paradoxical way, reflect success. ‘They’re shooting each other, and the reason they’re doing that is because they’re getting weaker,’ he said.”
Yes, you read that right. In John Walters’ deluded mind, murder victims Lesley Enriquez, — who worked at the U.S. Consulate and was four months pregnant — and her husband must have been ‘criminals,’ and the rising death toll on the U.S./Mexico border is obviously a human billboard of our success!
It’s now apparent that only a fool — or someone who is paid to act like one — would fail to see that it is time to remove the production and distribution of marijuana out of the hands of violent criminal enterprises and into the hands of licensed businesses. Of course, the only way to do that is through legalization — yet this is a policy that, tragically, remains devoid from the Drug Czar’s, and the President’s, vocabulary.
Drug Law Enforcement
Anyone who doubts the power of the Tea Party movement and its corporate-funded manipulators need look no further than the defection of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist from the Republican Party to remove those doubts.
Yesterday, Crist announced his withdrawal from the Republican primary for Florida’s open U.S. Senate seat, a nomination once regarded as a sure thing for Crist. It was such a sure thing, in fact, that he won the endorsement of the party establishment — most notably, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — before the primary campaign even began.
But members of the Tea Party movement and its allies were having none of it, for not only had Crist declared his endorsement of President Obama’s stimulus package, he HUGGED BARACK OBAMA IN PUBLIC! Ewww! Yes, he did: Charlie Crist hugged the magic Negro socialist.
That was enough to stir the Tea Party grass roots into a frenzy against Crist, which opened the door wide for the astroturfers and the conservative establishment to step in.
FreedomWorks, that grand exploiter of the movement, stepped through to endorse Marco Rubio, the anti-Crist. Perfect story: right wing, loves waterboarding the ‘bad guys’, an anti-immigrant son of immigrants. Tea Party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., stepped forward to endorse Rubio, and with DeMint’s endorsement came $10,000 from DeMint’s own political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund.
At the Web site of DeMint’s PAC, there’s a fascinating timeline of Charlie Crist’s fall from GOP grace; it shows his fortunes falling steadily with each endorsement gained from a major conservative player, including FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey, DeMint himself, and the Club for Growth.
Left out of that timeline is the impact of the movie “Outrage,” which makes the case that Crist, an opponent of same-sex marriage, is a closeted gay man. (Gay people are not terribly popular among the Tea Party crowd.) A graph on BlogActive, the Web site run by Mike Rogers, the protagonist in “Outrage,” shows the beginning of the decline in Crist’s polling numbers versus Rubio’s beginning with the premiere of the movie. I don’t mean to suggest that the “Outrage” premiere is the cause of Charlie Crist’s misfortune, but it is one of those delicious coincidences that speaks to a subtext in the race.
Now that Crist has jumped into the general election as an independent, it’s a three-way race between the governor, Rubio and the likely Democratic nominee, Kendrick Meek, an African-American. And it’s anybody’s guess how it will turn out.
Though the Tea Party’s foot soldiers will likely wear out their combat boots toiling for Rubio, the movement’s maniupulators — DeMint and Armey, et al — won’t consider it an overall loss if either Meek or Crist win Florida’s Senate seat. As they did in New York’s 23rd congressional district last year, they’ll have made their point to the GOP: check with us first before you endorse, ensuring an even further shift to the right (you thought that was impossible?) by the Republican Party.
By Valerie Taliman, Indian Country Today correspondent, Race-Talk contributor
NEW YORK – A groundbreaking report examining the roots of Christian domination over indigenous peoples and their lands was released this week at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
North American Representative to the Permanent Forum Tonya Gonnella Frichner, an attorney and founder of the American Indian Law Alliance, presented a preliminary study on the “Doctrine of Discovery” and its historical impacts on indigenous peoples, with a focus on how it became part of United States laws.
“The first thing indigenous peoples share is the experience of having been invaded by those who treated us without compassion because they considered us to be less than human,” said Frichner, a citizen of the Onondaga Nation serving her first term on the 16-member UNPFII.
“Dehumanization leads to the second thing indigenous peoples share in common: Being treated on the basis of the belief that those who invaded our territories have a right of lordship or dominance over our existence and, therefore, have the right to take, grant, and dispose of our lands, territories, and resources without our permission or consent.”
Frichner said human rights violations faced by indigenous peoples can all be traced to the Doctrine of Discovery and its interpretive framework which has been used for five centuries to take Native lands.
It has also been cited in U.S. Supreme Court land claims cases decided against Indian nations, including the 1955 ruling Tee Hit Ton Indians v. United States, and the 2005 decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York.
The Doctrine of Discovery was among Vatican mandates dating back to the 15th century, called papal bulls, that declared Christian monarchs had the right to claim superior title over land and territories that they “discovered.”
The claimed right of “dominion” over Native peoples was based on the thinking that non-Christians were “heathens and uncivilized savages,” with no, or limited rights, to land.
The Vatican’s Doctrine of Discovery was based on the premise that all non-Christian land belonged to no one because no Christians were living there and no Christian monarch or lord had yet claimed dominion. Once Christian monarchies like Spain or France claimed the right of dominion, that claim was transferred to political successors over centuries.
“Indian land rights have been characterized in U.S. law as nothing more than a permissive right of occupancy or permission from the whites to occupy their own Indian lands,” Frichner said.
There were theologians who did not agree that Christian discovery could give dominion over and title to non-Christian lands. The issue was debated at length in the early 1550s in Spain with no input from indigenous peoples, she said.
It was a debate among Christian Europeans about whether the Indians of the Americas were human.
“Clearly, (we) have joined the debate by declaring definitively that we are human beings. However, for more than five centuries, the doctrines of discovery and dehumanization have been institutionalized, and this is the context of the work we are doing on the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Frichner said.
The study focused on the history of the United States, and points out that the Doctrine of Discovery had been officially incorporated into U.S. Indian policies in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall identified the royal charters of Great Britain pertaining to North America as the source of the argument that “discovery gave title” to the government by whose authority the “discovery” was made.
The royal charter issued to John Cabot in 1496 authorized Cabot and his sons to seek out “isles, countries, and regions of the heathen and infidel, which before this time have been unknown to all Christian people.”
This and similar language were cited as the basis for the ruling in Johnson v. M’Intosh that the United States had the ultimate dominion over Indian peoples and lands.
Frichner said the report is a first step in investigating the global scope of the Doctrine of Discovery as a key source of violations of human rights of Native peoples.
A comprehensive study will provide the opportunity to understand that all the struggles that indigenous peoples are engaged in are rooted in “the claim by one people of a right of dominance over another.”
Frichner said the discriminatory legal framework that exists today is directly tied to the Doctrine of Discovery which has resulted in the dispossession and impoverishment of indigenous peoples and unlimited resource extraction from their lands.
Kuriakose Bharanikulangara, observer for the Holy See, responded to Frichner’s report by saying that the papal bulls that paved the way for European expansion had been abrogated over centuries. He insisted the Church had upheld the rights of indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands, regardless of whether the inhabitants were Christian or not.
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Valerie Taliman, Navajo, is president of Three Sisters Media, which offers publishing, social media and public relations services. She is also an award-winning journalist specializing in environmental, social justice and human rights issues. She is based in Albuquerque, N.M. Contact her at valerietaliman@gmail.com.
