Update [2006-12-15 8:46:0 by XicanoPwr]
Hey what is going on here, it seems the day after Ciro Rodriguez was elected; Homeland Security’s Gestapo went on another raid. (hat tip to Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican). I guess we have forgotten “our place” and how we should thank our master’s for allowing us to lick their boots. Not really, this is just one more example of the Republican party under the Bushies’ facade of their “optimistic,” “color blind” society crap on how they work it behind the scenes and, even more importantly, how they work it in the two pounds of damp GOP meat between their ears. Maybe, in the immortal words of Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency on the Dixiecrat ticket, we would have avoided all these problems.
Dudya must have been slapped with a dose of reality – brown folk really do not to vote Republican, now that his only Mexican American Republican was shown the door. Guess he found out that we have been saying disparaging things about Republicans, such as, their shallow, indefensible, America-hating reason that Republicans do jack shit for us. As they do for anyone failing both the liquid asset and darker-than-a-grocery bag test.
Remember, as far as this administration is concerned, you are either with them, or against them, even if being with them would be against your own best interests to the point of pathological self-loathing.
The citizenship of people who happen to be brown, therefore, to protect their civil, Constitutional and human rights apparently carries very little weight with the Bush White House and his mindless followers with that little parenthetical “R” after their names.
“The illegal immigrants are using intimidation saying, and the media are as guilty as they are of saying this, that their civil rights are being violated,” McGill said. “If you are breaking the law and you are not a citizen of the United States, you are not eligible for any rights. They committed a crime when they walked across that border.”
You know how it is: Republicans are real Americans and then there are those whose ancestors either were brought here in chains or colonized. These are the ones who broke their backs for the ancestors of the real Americans who populate the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Any person who really thinks they are free while their neighbor is not should, at best, consider their freedom temporary because in a whim it can be easily revoked; and, at worst, their freedom is just a mere illusion. Think of it this way: Blacks and Latinos are targets by xenophobic racists, along with homosexuals and women, for no other reason than those doing the oppressing are still figuring out a way to cull the working class whites from the herd. Unfortunately, the sort of people who are better off don’t have Jim Crow laws, lynching, voting disenfranchisement, miscegenation laws and other forms of institutional racism that were common in America for most of the 20th Century as part of their living memory.
The sort of people who lived through this openly racist period in American history aren’t found in history books, they are the older ones still among us. And, it seems, if the Republicans have it their way, there will be a new generation of Americans who can say the same thing. Oh wait, I can hear them shrill how the undocumented are not Americans. The awful truth they are so happy to deny is that these are Americans because no matter what country of origin they are from, it is part of the Americas.
It also seems whenever Latinos get pissed off hearing about these Gestapo type raids, the automatic response from people who still buy into the idea of a functional democracy rather than a thin cardboard veneer of democratic-sounding bullshit pasted over feudal business and class dealings is, well, that’s just too fucking bad.
Unfortunately, the real information about these raids is what keeps slipping through the cracks of the great American “free” press whose net for this sort of thing couldn’t be used to strain bowling balls. Its not that the American press is incompetent, it’s just that after making a pact with the GOP devil in exchange for tax cuts and federal deregulation of media ownership, they are as corrupt as all hell. This is exactly the way they want to be if you are merely a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.
You’ll notice that the press is basing the purpose of these raid as a crackdown on identity theft and not the constant terrorizing of thousands of people and their families based on race. In this raid, ICE detained 1,282 and of those detained “5% resulted in identity-theft charges. Let’s do a little math, jejeje those cabrones forget math is in our blood. Out of all those people they arrested 64 resulted in id-theft charges. So what does that mean, Michael Chertoff had to release 1,218 because they were legal. Remember this is based on intelligence they gathered; so not only was the CIA’s information faulty, so, the same thing can be said about Homeland (In)Security. Why doesn’t Chertoff and the goon squad Homeland (In)Security go after the real ID thieves, like the hacker who hacked into the UCLA database and stole personal records which included social security numbers, of 800,000 students, faculty and administrators. If journalism is the first draft of history, then the story told about the illegal wire tapings, corrupt theft of elections by disenfranchising minorities, and terrorizing families, gives one an idea what the the final draft of history will look like.
Today’s Know Nothings are not just driven by ignorance but also by fear, religious bigotry and xenophobia. Their sheer ignorance is a wonderful tonic for them because it allows them to carry out a crusade against people of color with pleas for domestic internments, because they don’t know, or don’t care what happens to them once they are shipped of in buses to nowhere.
The paper confirms that the federal agents took an undisclosed number of people away in buses away to an undisclosed location.
But these actions just go to show that no matter how we Americans exalt that we believe in high-minded principles, when you get right down to it, most people in the US don’t have a huge problem with this these actions taken by their own government. This is especially true consider the torture and humiliation that is practiced in Abu Graib, at least not enough of a problem to hold George W Bush accountable for it, or raise hell about it when the architect of those abuses is elevated to the position of Attorney General.
Most Americans, unless they have the intelligence and force of character to think otherwise, are constrained to think of morality in more or less religious terms, and never expanding that moral judgment to question practices. At the same time, they so willingly give the red, white and blue stamp of approval for good intentions and noble aims of American policy regardless of who has to suffer and die for it.
Because of that, we have finally reached a point where everyone’s enemy is less than human. As a consequence Latinos and especially the undocumented have been easily relegated to a subspecies like “spics”, “beaners” and “wetbacks” or simply as faceless and statistical as the Iraqi civilian casualties that barely register on the conscience of most Americans, befitting a needless war justified with lies and carried out with self-serving political motives and mindless nationalism by the emerging American one-party state of corporate interests, inadequate white males and corrupted Christianity.
And those responsible for the present atrocities won’t even be phased by its weight. It’s not in their make-up to do so; although when the situation demands it, they, like so many sociopaths, can simulate actual human emotion. No, the ones terrorizing minorities and the working class and killing thousands of Iraqis will get promotions and presidential libraries, write books and go on the lucrative book circuit. And those Americans who are taking pleasure in the suffering of others will just continue going to their churches as fat and smug and irredeemably stupid as they ever were. One thing is for certain, they certainly won’t be ones who are up at night wondering they if will be eating the next day or worrying about that knock at the door.
That’s a curse left for those with a conscience who can still feel.
UPDATE: EBW at Wampum reported that the workers who were detained from the Iowa and Nebraska plant were taken to Camp Dodge.
These went up on the gates of Camp Dodge. The Des Moines Register reported that workers arrested at Swift & Co. packing plants in Iowa and Nebraska were being held at Camp Dodge. 90 workers from the Swift plant in Marshalltown, and most of the 261 workers from the Swift plant in Grand Island, Nebraska.(Source: Mike Marty with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union)
Here is a prefect example of the new bill that was passed not to long ago, Military Commission’s Act, about losing habeas corpus and our due process.