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Newsweek’s Ellis Cose reports that mail is running 50-to-1 in support of a Texas legislator’s attempt to criminalize births in Texas. But Jay Johnson-Castro answers with international law.–gm

Hey y’all…

I sent the following e-mail out nearly two months ago. To my knowledge, not one legal mind or organization has keyed in on the UN’s Rights of the Child. If someone had…there would be Congressional outrage by now…and even an international investigation.

I know it’s a lot to ask…to keep reading about innocent children that are in prison on American soil. But one day of a preschool, elementary school or a high school student being imprisoned in American because he or she is an immigrant is one day too long.
BUT…someone has to free these kids and their moms! Who will do that? We must keep pushing until they can “breath free”. Knowing that razor wire was taken down and plastic plants put in the prison hallways of Hutto does not make Hutto any less a gross violation of the Rights of the Child. …

Aside from Texas …Just ask Tacoma , Washington . Ask Massachusetts . How American is ICE? How humane…or rather…inhumane is the conduct of Chertoff’s armed forces that is ravaging our county? But…don’t ask Tony Snow.

Bush directs his henchman, Chertoff, to use his ICE company to round up the helpless and innocent…and then spend $7000 per month of our hard-earned taxpayers’ money per child to keep them in a prison cell. $7000 per month…to hold one innocent child in a cell…is paid to a private for-profit prison company…friends of the administration.

DeLay took $100,000 from Corrections Corp of America…the Hutto for-profit prison company. Gov. Perry took $10,000 last year just before CCA opened Hutto. Is it any wonder that he’s so quiet and has yet to speak out about this inhumane children’s prison in Texas…just 35 miles northeast of his luxurious surroundings in Austin. And then we the taxpayers pay billions of dollars to round up these working people…sometimes with their children…and sometimes not.

Most of Americans think Walter Reed is disgraceful American…and a failure of the current administration. But that’s because it got national coverage. Treating American troops as a commodity in a privatized for-profit hospital scheme is repulsive. Ask those very same Walter Reed soldiers how they’d feel about the same government imprisoning innocent children…in America…by the same for-profit elitists…and see what they think. Is that why they serve and sacrificed themselves for their country?

Will someone with a legal or international relations mind…PLEASE…try to explain why Americans get all outraged over the torture camps in other parts of the world and can’t see what’s going on right here in our own country? And these same demented, immoral and corrupt acts are being committed by the same for-profit forces.

To imprison a child is an international crime. And…will someone PLEASE look at the attached Rights of the Child document and tell me what part of that United Nations resolution IS NOT being violated with depravity by Bush, Chertoff & ICE?

And where’s the courage of the free press of America? Has investigative reporting in this country become that corporate and ratings driven that the great investigators can’t challenge Chertoff and ICE? Why don’t they demand to interview the hundreds of innocent children and their moms who are not even charged with a crime? My gosh! Murderers on death row get comfy feel good interviews by the media all the time.

So…what is it that ICE does NOT want you, the media…or we the public…to know? Does not the very secrecy of ICE in itself belie the darkness that is being hidden?

Is it time for indictments…yet? But of course…who has the power to indict Chertoff? Gonzales? How about Congress?

How about “We the people of the United States ”? Think about it. Do “We the people”…a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”…have jurisdiction to indict the abusers of these children?

Jay

P.S. Hot of the press from Newsweek/MSNBC…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17552883/site/newsweek/from/ET/

JJJ

************

From: Jay J. Johnson
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 12:07 PM

Subject: UN Rights of the Child

Afternoon amigos…

For those within our ranks that are legal experts, I have attached a copy of the UN’s Right of the Child…along with some highlights.

Essentially, Chertoff, ICE and Hutto are in flagrant non-conformance with he most basic laws and moral standards on children’s rights by the way they are treating the families and the children in Hutto and other prison camps in Texas and elsewhere. This is not only immoral but criminal. There should not only be a Congressional investigation but an international investigation as well.

Additionally, I am sharing the following link. Perhaps someone knows how to access the UN’s High Commissioner on Human Rights. http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/index.htm

Jay

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Border Ambassador

Connecting.the.dots…making.a.difference…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.
Del Rio , Texas , USA
Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila , Mexico

jay@villadelrio.com

A Weekend Editorial
By Greg Moses

Quorum Report Morning Call Mar. 13, 2005

Last week we reported that the Republican-led contest to unseat Hubert Vo was a massive intrusion into voter privacy enabled by new voter management software (VEMACS).

The power of this software to enable partisan harassment of voters after close elections raises serious issues, especially considering that Texas faces a Jan. 1 deadline to adopt a statewide voter management system. (See Help America Vote Act (HAVA) timeline.)

On March 8, the Secretary of State for Texas announced that IBM and Hart InterCivic would be lead vendors for the statewide voter management system.

The experience of the Republican-led effort to unseat Vo helps to formulate one clear principle for advancing technologies of voter management: the technology should enable robust voter participation, not increase the likelihood of post-election criminalization.

After seeing what happened in Houston, voting-rights activists who have been pre-occupied with verifiable vote counting could very well augment their agendas to include responsive registration.

As technology is centralized to register voters and to produce voter rolls for election day, voter activists need to take a harder look for ways that powerful technologies can be made ever more flexible to meet registration needs of voters.

For example, what is the logistical reason why voters should have their registrations completed 30 days before an election if new databases can enable real-time production of precinct lists on election day?

What we do not need is a powerful, centralized voter database that enables the kind of criminalization and invasion of voting rights witnessed in the Republican-led contest for HD 149.

A press release from Hart InterCivic phrases the challenge of voter management in terms of preventing fraud.

In most states, voter registration data has been maintained at the local level. The increasing mobility of the population results in voter registration files that are quickly outdated, increasing the complexity of voter registration management and the possibility of voter fraud or inaccuracies.

The paragraph gives us a shiver, because it sounds so much like the baseless suspicions raised by Republican attorney Andy Taylor as he led a massive invasion of voter privacy in the HD 149 race. When busy voters went back to their old polling places and divulged their new addresses, they were NOT attempting any fraud, they were just trying to cope with their responsibilities in a rather inflexible environment.

We would rather see a paragraph like this:

As the vaunted free market system increasingly tosses workers from one home to another, local registration can add frustration and inconvenience to the experience of voting, allowing Republican attack dog lawyers the opportunity to increasingly criminalize more hard working and honest people who don’t always vote for powerful Republican incumbents. A statewide database can enable voters to more easily maintain their livelihoods, their voter registrations, and their privacy without fear of desperate partisan reprisals.

On the other hand, maybe the federal mandate for statewide registration is altogether a bad idea. It will put more power over voter registration and enforcement into fewer hands and may end up causing more trouble than it was supposed to save. If non-partisan voter registration is really non-existent, maybe it’s best to keep the partisan puzzle in smaller pieces.

Looks like we have some questions to follow next week. Stay tuned.

by Greg Moses

DissidentVoice / CounterPunch / The Rag Blog

Like fabled ruts gouged into dirt by heavy wheels, or war trenches widened by running boots, English language usage has hardened against all recent attempts to veer away from a mainline madness of selfish and violent arrogance.

Suicide pilot Joseph Stack wanted to write a note that would supply enough therapy “to fix what is really broken.” Instead, he found the process of writing “frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless.” There was a storm in his head that he could not “gracefully articulate.” And so last month he blew up his house and slaughtered a Black, federal worker in a fury of violent self-expression.

Or take the case of voters in the Texas Republican Primary who last week cast 61 percent of their ballots for the last name “Porter” because it was not a Hispanic name. Their English-only prejudice ended the promising political career of Victor G. Carrillo, the sitting Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.

“Given the choice between ‘Porter’ and ‘Carrillo’ — unfortunately, the Hispanic-surname was a serious setback from which I could never recover, although I did all in my power to overcome this built-in bias,” explained Carrillo in a pained letter to supporters.

These ritualized usages of English that we have seen lately in Texas can only trigger rapid-fire bursts of ignorance, aggression, and intolerance. Maybe we have the internet to thank for this? Communication as flame war? Chairman Carrillo put it this way: “political dynamics have changed some.”

What Stack and Republican voters share is a language they can’t use properly either as an adequate expression of their own feelings or as a medium of critical democratic autonomy. Whether your advanced technology is a single-engine aircraft or an electronic voting machine, if you can’t use your own language to think with, how will you make the wisest use of your tools?

Of course, the language failures of Stack and Republican voters are symptoms of something more widespread. We recall how the “great communicators” of our political life — from Reagan to Obama — can be most effective only when they work from ritualized scripts.

If we believe that Stack dedicated the life of his mind to the triumphant conquest of IRS code, then plain language would warn us right away that he was stalking the domain of the language slayer. The day Stack killed himself and IRS worker Vernon Hunter, I received a communication via federal mail from my online broker regarding the official tax accounting procedures for certain trusts: “Please note: 1099’s will never match the original cash payments received.” In plain English: my income tax for these things will never be based on my income.

As for the bramble of language that counts for Republican discourse in Texas, you could easily get hooked on the idea that Texas government is always superior to Washington government. Until they count the votes in Texas. Then you realize that Texas Republican voters don’t even know the names of Republicans who run the government of Texas.

To be sure, IRS code is imperial jargon, not a living language. And voting is little more than a lottery of jargon mongers. But whatever else might be true of the new anti-taxers or Texas secessionists, they have not proved that they are capable of transcending the jargon of their own white, racist heritage.

Stack’s note asks us to agree that against the jargons of power in America, violence is the “/only/” answer. But isn’t this jargon in its essential form as the murder-suicide of language itself?

By Greg Moses

With 206 workers transferred to Texas immigration prisons from Massachusetts this week, Massachusetts state authorities were quick to follow.

The Rio Grande Guardian reports that two teams of 15 officials apiece traveled to immigration prisons at Bayview and El Paso as Massachusetts Senator John Kerry demanded “full accountability as to why hundreds of children were stranded and separated from their parents.”
In Texas, there is no comparable state response to plans by federal immigration authorities to deport a long-time Israeli immigrant tomorrow, leaving his 15-year-old daughter behind.

In contrast to lackadaisical Texas officials who have been invisible on issues involving children of immigrant families, Denise Monteiro of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services told the Rio Grande Guardian that, while the federal government’s role was enforcing immigration law, the state’s role was protecting children.

“It’s our sole purpose – the children,” she said. “We’ll work through the night if we have to.”

As Jay Johnson-Castro declares in yesterday’s email, there is something shameful about the silence we have heard from Texas officials regarding the treatment of immigrant families on Texas soil. That shameful feeling now finds its silhouette against a background of Massachusetts illumination.

What did we hear from Texas officials upon word that 2-year-old Zahra Ibrahim, a Texas citizen, had been separated from her family by immigration authorities?

What did we hear from Texas officials upon word that 4-year-old twin daughters of the Suleiman family had been separated from their parents while their father was held in solitary confinement in Oklahoma City?

What do we hear from Texas officials today, now that the Suleiman twins have been deported with their parents to Jordan, leaving behind the family’s first-time home purchase?

What do we hear today from Texas officials about the fact that 11-year-old Mohammad Hazahza cannot live with his father who is imprisoned at Rolling Plains prison in Haskell, Texas?

What do we hear from state officials about the very existence of the T. Don Hutto children’s prison at Taylor, Texas?

And please don’t point me to some press conference by hand-wringing politicians proposing some resolution or other. What we are looking for is prompt action, power on the move, just like the immediate mobilization of Massachusetts child advocates working for the people.

“We’ll work through the night if we have to,” says the brave state worker from Massachusetts.

By contrast we have a Governor who will go to bat for the right to wear a confederate flag t-shirt on stage at his inauguration, but who says nothing about the right to live free with respect, even if you are an immigrant family trying to make a home in the so-called “Friendly State.”

Free Suzi Hazahza. Today.