Month: July 2009

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One day our luck runs out, these young Islamists will not be traveling to an overseas Jihad country but will enter a local mall in Minnesota and maximise terror with a deadly suicide attack.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

The Village’s desire, almost a demand really, that President Obama transcend his half-blackness is very offensive to me. Why does his outrage at the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. violate the protocols of Washington? Is it okay to arrest a man in his own house after he provides documentation that he owns the house?

Katharine Seeyle opens her article with this: “Americans got a rare glimpse Wednesday night of what it means to have a black president in the Oval Office.” What the fuck does that even mean? I get a glimpse of what it is like to have a black man be president everytime I turn on my teevee. The only time that ‘means’ anything is when Obama stands up for black people? Please.

This week’s immigration blog roundup discusses the National Summit on Local Immigration Policies, new poll findings revealing different immigration patterns for women, and more. 

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

At the National Summit on Local Immigration Policies, sponsored by the the Police Executive Research Forum, about 100 police chiefs and administrators from around the country called upon Congress to adopt a measures for comprehensive immigration reform.

Participants said their local law enforcement agencies are struggling to deal with crime and confusion caused by a broken system, and agreed that there needs to be reform. According to Chuck Wexler, the forum’s executive director, such reform would include guest-worker programs, a means for immigrants to become permanent residents, and federal enforcement of the prohibition against hiring illegal immigrants.

Police administrators said that Department of Homeland Security enforcement efforts have been inconsistent and unreliable for years. Police administrators were especially critical of the government’s 287(g) program which provides for state and local police to enforce immigration law. Representatives of local law enforcement argue that immigration enforcement by local officers conflicts with community policing by making undocumented immigrants fearful of reporting crimes or serving as witnesses.

National, local and community level immigration news

According to recent poll,"Women Immigrants: The New Face of Migration in America,” the majority of new immigrants coming to the United States are now women, a change from the past when most immigrants were men. The poll was sponsored by New America Media , and conducted by Bendixen and Associates, a Florida-based firm that specializes in multilingual and multiethnic research.

A panel of immigration advocates and experts has been meeting around the country as part of a national tour to discuss the implications of the poll findings. The advocates want to bring the face of immigrant women to center-stage around the discussion of comprehensive immigration reform.The poll sheds lights on the daily lives of immigrant women, their roles in their families, and the impact of migration on their lives.

Irasema Garza, president of Legal Momentum, a New York-based legal defense and education fund for women rights, said that the poll is a good opportunity to change the tone of the discussion.

"Unless Americans start seeing immigrants as they are, hard-working people, most of them women, not terrorists or criminals, we won’t see real changes," she said.

Another study released by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University documents the violations of law and agency rules by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during home raids in Long Island and New Jersey. The study by the school’s Immigration Justice Law Clinic found a widespread pattern of misconduct by agents after analyzing 700 arrest reports. ICE agents illegally entered homes without judicial search warrants, arresting hundreds without any legal basis. Two-thirds of those arrested in home raids were undocumented immigrants, largely Latinos, and with no criminal records.

"If any local law enforcement agency in the nation were involved in these types of widespread constitutional violations it would prompt a federal investigation,” said Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau city police commissioner, who led a panel that guided the report.

The ICE responded to the study with an e-mail statement defending the conduct of its agents and the home raids.

Health Care and Immigration

In a recent interview with CBS News’ Katie Couric, President Obama stated that while undocumented immigrants should not be covered under a new health care plan, an exception could be made for children.

"The one exception that I think has to be discussed is how are we treating children,” he said.

Advocates will continue to follow the debate on health care reform and how it will impact undocumented immigrants.

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda’s website.

Just how bad a bill for health care reform will be passed by Congress this year, or will they pass anything at all?*

* Yes, I’m a damn cynic.

Newsflash: Cop acts like douchebag, and uses the standard charge of “not scraping enough to the man” to wrongly jail citizen.

I am of more than one mind about the incident. Had a cop come to my home when someone saw people trying to jam in the door, I would probably thank him for responding so fast and say, “Wow, had this been a break in, I am so glad you would have been here!” But of course, as a waitress and big 3 sales negotiator, (not to mention wife) I am well trained in the subtleties of diffusing any situation.

However, when cops go asshat, and try and swing their dicks just because it grates their egos to not be feared and obeyed instantly, I think the professor played it perfectly maintaining his rights within the law. His only mistake was stepping outside, wherein the bogus charge of “Public” disorderliness could be made. It could not have been made had he stayed inside his threshold.

While profiling happens, and happens a shitload in white communities, this problem is bigger than racism.

Its siege mentality, the paramilitary training and choosing of officers that would have been culled from the force in my youth as “loose cannons” with “bad attitudes.”
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Really, the FAIL comes from the Top: The For REVENUE Police State.
As M_A can attest, the first thing they teach you is that YOU have to be in control of situation, and that every stop or call is potentially your death.

Gone are the days of neighborhood cops, ones that live by you, eat with you, whose kids go to school with your kids. Unnecessary force would make them societal pariahs. Gone are the days when responsible young men and women joined to protect their families and neighbors, and help be “peace keeper.”

It is not only the demographic of large communities that changed this.

It changed when “arrest quotas” were used to make the police department a money-making business for communities. Officers who made quota got rank and more money, those who did not were written up. It worsened with all the Bruckheimer neo-con, anything the cops do to get the bad guys is ok brainwashing. Hell, that started with Dirty Harry… and you cannot help but add in Reagans absurd war on drugs, that put thousands of non-violent pot smokers behind bars to support Law Enforcement’s sister industry, the Prison System.

But I digress.

You can choose almost any societal model today, and find its failure lies essentially in the making that system “For-profit” of private business. Read: Control for and by the rich, to amass wealth of the citizenry.

Sure the cop was a douche, a racist and deserves to be stripped of his badge. But these days, that is the gene pool from which the police are chosen. I know more than one ex-cop, who left because they could not stomach the type of men they had to work with. Its all revenue, man. They say the attitude is “Take all prisoners, take no excuses!” They are expected to arrest, no matter what. Show no humanity. No wonder all they get is ego impaired power trippers on staff.

Money is the root of all evil.

Really, it is.

Revenue as priority has tainted and ruined every fucking thing in our system, from who gets elected, to how they vote, to health care to traffic stops.

As in yesterday’s open, I pointed out to Aristeides how little I trust this system, and the fact they patented the vaccine before the outbreak, and that regular flu kills more regularly than H1N1 has… and NOT amazingly, the politicos in the pharmas pocket are now trying to force the population into taking a not well-tested vaccine, that should it go wrong, has protection against any legal recourse or monetary compensation.

Its all about the Big Business man.

The traders at the top.

TRUST

NO

ONE!

We can jail the pig (but we won’t) and we can have the discussion. But NOTHING will change as long as Revenue Rules.

In thinking about Attorney General Eric Holder’s deliberations on how and to what extent to investigate Bush-era torture policies, I think it pays to look back at what I consider the closest historical parallel: the Japanese internment camps. Both cases involved overreactions to unprovoked attacks on our homeland. In 1988, Congress determined that the decision to inter Japanese-Americans was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” and authorized $1.6 million in reparations. Ronald Reagan signed the bill. I don’t think we want to wait forty-three years to recognize our post-9/11 errors.

One interesting parallel between the 1940’s and the Bush era is that offending policies were justified in part by difficulties in using sensitive electronic surveillance in court.

In Magic: The Untold Story of US Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents From the West Coast During World War II (2001, Athena Press), David Lowman (1921-1999), a Former Special Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency, argues that Roosevelt was persuaded to authorize the evacuation when told the US had only partly and with great difficulty broken the Japanese Naval codes. Successful prosecution of Japanese-Americans would force the government to release information revealing their knowledge of Japanese ciphers. If the Japanese Imperial Navy changed its codes, Roosevelt was told, it might be months or even years before they could be read again. Magic was the code-name for American code-breaking efforts.

In other words, Roosevelt was convinced to round-up all the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast because singling out the few we knew to be spies and prosecuting them in a court of law would require introducing evidence that could only be obtained by breaking the Japanese ciphers (thus, revealing that they had been broken). In a similar vein, Bush was convinced that our efforts to surveil al-Qaeda members would be compromised if we attempted to prosecute them in a court of law. Bush was also convinced that he needed to violate the Foreign Surveillance Act of 1978 and the National Security Act of 1947 in order to adequately protect the country with the necessary level of secrecy about sources and methods.

As in the case of the internment camps, I think it fair to say that historians will have a modicum of sympathy but will ultimately judge Bush’s actions quite harshly. One significant difference between the two cases is that the Supreme Court ruled in Roosevelt’s favor in 1944, while the Supreme Court ruled against Bush repeatedly, even while he was still in office.

Another difference is that the war with Japan ended suddenly and definitively, while the struggle to prevent massive acts of terrorism is going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Yet, the country didn’t seek to prosecute the people that ordered or carried out the internment of Japanese-Americans. In part, the reason why we didn’t do that is because it took decades for our attitudes about race to change sufficiently to gain a consensus that the internments had been wrong and unjustified. But another part of the reason is that the war was over and the internment camps were closed. There was no currency to the debate. We don’t have that luxury when it comes to protecting our privacy rights in a surveillance state, or in determining the right way to interrogate, detain, or prosecute terrorism suspects.

It may be unpleasant to investigate an administration of such recent vintage, but we must do it because we have to get these policies right going forward. In the end, the investigators will have to use prosecutorial discretion in determining who should or should not be charged with crimes. But our policy makers need a good understanding of what was done, what worked and didn’t work, and why, so that they can make wiser decisions for our future. Holder needs to authorize someone to get the facts. What to do about those facts can wait until after they are collected.

Do you think Congress should work through August to pass health care bills or go on vacation and leave the work to September?

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It’s been rated a pandemic by the WHO, spreading faster than ever seen before due to air travel. Harms the youngest between 1 and 5 years old. The small number of elderly who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic seem to be immune. The virus nestles deep in the respiratory airways and causes pneumonia. Death rate 1 in 200 patients, 1 in 3 of population will be effected. This means 70,000 deaths in UK alone this fall which will cause further economic downturn, except for the drug companies, they will earn huge profits. Life just ain’t fair. [CDC report]

My earlier diaries on Swine Flu pandemic here, here, here and here.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Got any predictions?

The New York Times reported last Wednesday that the Obama administration will support granting asylum for at least some victims of severe domestic violence. This new position, written in a court filing submitted by the government in a currently pending asylum case, reverses the previous Bush administration stance.

Just why the Bush administration opposed granting asylum in this case is a mystery. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security had indicated in the asylum case of a Guatemalan woman named Rodi Alvarado that they would be open to granting battered women asylum in limited circumstances, but as the Times article notes, the administration never pushed the position forward. Indeed:

“As recently as last year, Bush administration lawyers had argued…that battered women could not meet the strict standards of American asylum law.”

The reason most often cited for opposing gender-based asylum claims like this, is that allowing battered women to apply for asylum would lead to an overwhelming flood of applications from women all over the world.  But this hasn’t been the experience of other countries which allow domestic violence to be grounds for asylum.  Take Canada, for instance. Two years after they put into place guidelines on accepting gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum (including domestic violence), these types of cases made up less than 2% of the 40,000 refugee claims.<sup>1</sup&gt Because our asylum systems are similarly structured, it’s likely that we’ll have a comparably small number of applicants.

Moreover, the requirements for gaining asylum as battered women under this new rubric are extremely stringent:

“In addition to meeting the existing strict conditions for being granted asylum, abused women need to show a judge that women are viewed as subordinate by their abuser, according to a court filing by the administration, and must also show that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country.”

Adopting guidelines like the ones above will make it more likely for us to recognize gender-based asylum claims among women who already come here, but likely will not encourage more women to flee here in the first place.  Unfortunately, most women just don’t have the resources or support systems to leave their batterers or their countries in the first place.

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1. Hannah R. Shapiro, The Future of Spousal Abuse as a Gender-Based Asylum Claim: The Implications of the Recent Case of Matter of R A , 14 Temp. Int’l & Comp. L.J. 463, 486 (2000).

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda website.