Author: mopress

For months the Texas Civil Rights Review has pleaded with Republicans to present evidence of voter fraud. At last, the Texas Attorney General replies! We now have grand jury indictments against two voters for alleged fraud.

In Hardeman County a Commissioner is accused of having “handled or mailed ballots for six persons unrelated to him over several days” — a class B misdemeanor.

To comment on this article please go to the blog at gregmoses.net

In Beeville, a 53-year-old woman “allegedly posed as her deceased mother during early mail-in voting in the November 2004 election”– a third degree felony.

There we have it. So far in Texas there are seven mail-in ballots alleged to have been fraudulently “handled or mailed.”

And we dared to doubt the vote fraud epidemic? Only one question left standing. How would voter IDs have prevented any of these alleged activities?

Now that Republicans are spanking small time voters, clamping down on access, keeping vote-vendors protected, and refusing to provide verifiable ballots, we think the trend line is pretty clear in Texas. Soon they will add a scrubbed up voter list to the tool kit of voter management.

If you want a transparent, accessible, and accountable voting system probably you’re not going to get it out of the Attorney General’s office. On the other hand, if you want to fight school reform and spank on small time voters, he’s your man.

You want the power to wage democracy? You want elections back in the hands of the unruly masses? You want Texas doing the right thing for poor and Hispanic school children? Then don’t forget the motto of Gonzales: “Come and Take It!”

Immigration Judge Dietrich Sims has scheduled a pretrial conference in the Ibrahim family asylum case for 7 June 2007 at 12:30. At that time he is expected to schedule a final hearing on the merits.

John Wheat Gibson

Report from a Raided Neighborhood

By Susan Van Haitsma

Austin American Statesman

Texas French Bread is my neighborhood bakery. The homegrown business opened the year I moved to Austin, so our histories share a common starting point.

At the flagship Texas French Bread on the corner of 29th Street and Rio Grande, people meet to visit and conduct business as well as to eat. Even
when I stop in for a just a minute, I usually run into someone I know. Regulars include quietly focused writers and students along with groups of
schoolchildren holding lively discussions over muffins and juice. It’s a place that makes you feel comfortable whether you’re alone or with a table
full of friends.

On Saturday, June 3, the Austin American-Statesman reported that armed federal agents entered the bakery at 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 1 and
arrested 5 kitchen workers, 4 of whom were summarily deported to Mexico.

The bakery’s owner said that all of the arrested workers, who range in age from 28 to 59, have children and have been long-term employees – 10 years, in one case. “These people paid taxes. They worked like crazy,” the owner said.

I didn’t know these workers, but I should have, because they worked like crazy to provide the food I appreciated so much. When I read the news of
their arrest and deportation, I felt sick inside, a feeling that contrasted with the satisfied feeling their food always gave me. I felt sick because
the sudden deportations meant great loss and hardship for them, their families and their employer, and also because the raid signified a cruel
inversion of the hospitality the bakery represents.

Having freshly baked goods for breakfast is a luxury made possible only because there are bakers willing to work through the wee hours at wages
probably lower than my own. As a US citizen, I wonder if I enjoy this good food at the expense of those who prepare it. NAFTA policies undercut
Mexican staples such as corn and beans, forcing Mexican farmers to leave their land and head north to the treacherous border. Young men leave families behind, sacrificing parental involvement for critical monetary support.

The raid of a neighborhood establishment alerts me to the privilege my New York birth certificate allows in contrast to a false work visa and to how much more false that privilege feels right now. I am as much a migrant to Texas as anyone else. Despite the message on the Statue of Liberty, it is deemed a crime for certain people to seek work to support themselves and their families, and certain human beings are casually termed “illegals.”

Sending more soldiers and surveillance cameras to the border and deporting workers are false maneuvers that punish the wrong people, capitalize on security concerns and sidestep the root causes of northward labor flow.

When Governor Perry says, “A stronger border is what the American people want,” he doesn’t speak for me. He doesn’t speak for the thousands of people who have rallied in recent weeks for immigrant rights. Security will increase when our public treasury is used to improve education, health care, energy efficiency, habitat protection and transportation alternatives, not
when it is used to separate us from our neighbors and to separate family members from one another.

People gather at bakeries because human beings live by both bread and brotherhood. We cross the threshold to satisfy a natural hunger for food
and each another, and borders are crossed for these reasons, too. Making fences higher and stronger is a mean trick that hurts people instead of
addressing the hurtful trade practices that governors and presidents must acknowledge and reform.

Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth.

By Greg Moses

Dallas Blog

No doubt there is a growing problem with organized criminal activity along the border with Mexico, and innocent people are being murdered. No doubt there is a problem also with terrorist organizations who lash out in deadly ways. But today there is a bigger problem than these. The bigger problem lies with well-organized political machines who could be actually doing something about violent crime or terrorism but who instead simply exploit public fear to prey upon innocent victims, one more time.
Take for instance the recent immigration raid on the French Bread Bakery in Austin. What did that use of force have to do with fighting violent crime at the border or interdicting terrorist plots? I mean seriously. What ethic of state power did that little stunt display, rounding up bakery workers and tossing them out of the country because allegedly they may have used fake I.D.’s to find work?

Now I understand that fake I.D.’s can be used by gangsters and terrorists, and I understand that walking across the Texas border is sometimes against the law. But I also understand that fake I.D.’s can be used as pretexts by politicians running for re-election.

If it’s stopping violent crime and terrorism that needs doing, then do it. And brag about it if you want to. Show us the pictures. But stop picking on the migrant workers. Meanwhile, the people have some stopping to do, that is, stopping the rising tide of storm-trooper politics, which has come up to neck deep, and which never fails to name violent crime and terrorism as what must be stopped.

In the opening paragraph of the Texas Republican Party platform on Border Security, passed out of committee Thursday night, we were assured that “illegal aliens, organized crime, and potential terrorists” must be stopped from flowing across the border. Next day the Republican-led authorities of Texas made good on their promise by militarizing the border and deporting a few so-called “illegal aliens” who were working at a bakery. But what about “organized crime” or “potential terrorists”? What did the Party do about either of these? Fighting terrorism and organized crime are not what troops do best.

Are we going to fall for this shell game of power and rhetoric? I say not. And that means we have to see this phrase — “illegal aliens, organized crime, and potential terrorists” — for the setup that it is. If a Party wants to address organized crime and terrorism, they may speak and write about it in one sentence, maybe even supported down the page by a paragraph of precise techniques. Then, they may deal with that problem actually where it is to be found, in ways that are effective, with photo ops and headlines.

Then if the Party wants to address the issue of migrant workers who are “working their asses off” everywhere we look, it is time to begin a new paragraph and a new issue. In that paragraph the Party might want to discuss its historical connection to the state processes that are moving people where they don’t really prefer to go and how the Party intends to address those state processes.

For example, the Party might talk about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the way it pulled the rug from under Mexican peasant farmers. Talk about right-to-work laws in Texas and how growing labor pools can erode wage structures where workers have no rights to begin with. The paragraph on migrant workers could get quite long, but it’s a different issue than “organized crime” and “potential terrorism”, and so it should be treated under a different head, because “working your ass off” in Texas is another kind of crime altogether, and we will not be fooled into thinking that because you deport workers or import troops you are making the world either safer or more prosperous.

When the Texas Republican Party promises to bring “order to the border”; when its Party platform packs migrant workers into short phrases about terrorism and deadly crime; when Party officials the next day crack down on a lil-ole bakery in the nearest Democratic precinct they can find; and oh yes when that Party’s leader plays a well-oiled part in a world-historic militarization of the border between the USA and Mexico; when we follow a Party like that — you know what I’m saying? Soon enough at the bakery, we’ll all be sitting with our backs to the wall.