Author: mopress

Excerpt from New York Times Editorial (Aug. 1, 2008).

The harsh prosecution [of workers] at Postville is an odd and cruel shift for the Bush administration, which for years had voiced compassion for exploited workers and insisted that immigration had to be fixed comprehensively or not at all.

Now it has abandoned mercy and proportionality. It has devised new and harsher traps, as in Postville, to prosecute the weak and the poor. It has increased the fear and desperation of workers who are irresistible to bottom-feeding businesses precisely because they are fearful and desperate. By treating illegal low-wage workers as a de facto criminal class, the government is trying to inflate the menace they pose to a level that justifies its rabid efforts to capture and punish them. That is a fraudulent exercise, and a national disgrace.

Note: The only thing we quibble with is the editorial board’s use of the word “now” and the allegation that Postville marks a “shift” from previously compassionate federal immigration enforcement. We invite the editors to hang around here and read up on what’s been going down in Texas –gm:

On second thought, maybe the New York Times should have been paying more attention to what’s been going on in Brooklyn. Here’s a clip from New York Magazine about a young immigrant named Rasha and her family, and what happened to them in 2002:

“They learned that they’d all be going to a facility in New Jersey, except for Wassim, who was under 18 and thus bound for a juvenile-detention center in Pennsylvania. Being split up was a fresh horror. Through her own waterlogged eyes, Rasha watched her family collapse in tears.

“At the jail in Bergen County, Rasha and her mother and sister were strip-searched and photographed before being taken to a filthy and overcrowded holding area. Everybody seemed nasty or catatonic. This is just like prison on television, Rasha thought. A corrections officer opened the door and told them to get inside. The door locked behind them.

“After six hours, they were herded into another holding cell, teeming with even more people, where they would stay for two days. Rasha’s mother raged and yelled until she was able to place a call to her brother-in-law about her youngest sons. Rasha, Reem, and their mother were eventually moved again, to a larger wing of the facility, where they were again strip-searched, then given beige jumpsuits and black-and-white Converse-style shoes and assigned to cells. The INS official who had told them at Federal Plaza that they would be deported within days was clearly wrong. When they joined the general population, Rasha realized with dread, they were going to stay for a while.”

From “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” by Moustafa Bayoumi (forthcoming from Penguin Press).

Here’s a refreshing press release from the campaign trail in Texas–gm

Statement of U.S. Senate Democratic Nominee Barbara Ann Radnofsky:

The Ku Klux Klan has announced its intention to rally on immigration issues on August 5 in Amarillo at City Hall. I condemn the Klan’s message and history of hate and violence and terrorism. I condemn the Klan’s application of its hateful activities in the context of
immigration reform and its planned rally in Amarillo, a fine city with concerns including water and drought, with inadequate federal relief due to wasteful government spending and misplaced priorities.
I call on my opponent to also denounce the Klan.
I oppose the latest impossible immigration proposal by my opponent, the fourth in a series of expensive, unworkable proposals by our senior senator, who has voted against each of the Senate compromise
immigration solutions.

The “self deportation” immigration plan proposed by my opponent this past week relies on major waste of our tax dollars and an impossibility of human nature: She hopes people will self deport, return for years of stay in their home country, subjected like cattle to tagging and waiting an eternity for the U.S. President to
certify, after spending billions and billions of our tax dollars, that the U.S. borders are “secure” so the immigrants might then return. The Hutchison plan, which has no chance of passage, also seeks to privatize our immigration and security in a vastly
expensive and unworkable series of private centers built at U.S. government expense by private corporations in foreign lands. They will require massive U.S. funded security.

It’s a hugely expensive process which will waste our taxpayer dollars even more than the waste we’ve seen to date, while creating ill will and easy targets in foreign lands.

The solution: economic improvement on both sides of the border and a comprehensive strategy encouraging fair trade, a workable registration system which includes an arduous path to citizenship, and integrated homeland security with U.S. personnel running our sea
ports, strengthening post-graduate requirements at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy to include port service obligations.

A video press release on this issue is now posted at
http://www.radnofskyvideo.com

PRESS RELEASE (Aug. 1, 2005)
Pastors for Peace announced a victory today when its16th caravan
crossed the International Bridge from Reynosa, MX into Hidalgo, TX
after returning from Cuba. But there is still no word about release of
the computers seized from the caravan’s cargo last week.

link to press release / see also July 22 report from Democracy Now

Kronberg Accounts for Impasse; TSTA Says New Bill not New; Gov. to Un-Veto

The new legislative analysis by Harvey
Kronberg being aired on News 8 Austin finally gets down to the bottom
line that motivates Texas dysfunction today. No, it’s not the
finer contours of personality among the top three patriarchs of Texas:
Perry, Dewhurst, & Craddick. This time, Kronberg argues that material power relations between school
districts and legislators must be differentiated–with a bloc of
legislators from rural districts deferring to their superintendents,
while another bloc would prefer to micromanage. This helps us to
understand the impasse in terms of different visions of state policy.

But also, Kronberg names "IT" as the problem–Income Tax. So long
as "IT" is off the table, there is no way to fund property tax
cuts. Yet property tax cuts have become the veritable (for
PinkDome readers that’s the fucking) bottom line. And this helps
us to understand the absolute contradiction between solutions that cost
more money and tax plans that produce less.

This kind of analysis we like. A scan of Kronberg’s news clips from
Sunday includes a Washington Times article about the latest ‘growing
gap’ in USA incomes, with 80 percent of working Americans getting thin
retreads on their old annual incomes while their bosses cruise in the
passing lanes on fat, new skid-proof treads.

Not only is an income tax needed, but a progressive income tax, one
that would return to the children of workers in the form of education
the excess profits being skimmed from the paychecks of their parents by
the bosses of Texas.

Such is the material basis of a civil rights outlook for education in Texas.

Unfortunately, according to the Texas State Teachers Association the so-called ‘new and improved’ Senate Bill for education is neither,
which leaves us with the same old problems and no new solutions.
Maybe that’s why the Governor is going to un-veto the old education
bill, just sign the damn thing into law, and be done with it.

Like many classic civil rights issues, this one appears headed back to
the courthouse for insight and guidance. We’ll hope for the best.

Posted below with unique URL.