We’re going to look at immigration today — but, to segue a moment, I’m listening to John McCrusty on CNN and I’ve discovered something … I can’t bear the sound of his voice; I can’t look at him, either. He and Dubby are morphing in my senses like a huge, gelatinous blob of primordial ooze – something you want to blow into a hanky and dispose of quickly. His speeches are ill-crafted, simplistic, bombastic and accusatory, and he’s clumsy in delivery. The stink of hypocrisy rolls off him when he infers … for instance … that Obama wants to get cozy with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez and all other enemies of our glorious nation-state. This leads me to worry that if the Hillary youtubes and the Appalachian vote gives us this old fart for four years, I’m going to have to open a vein. SIGH.
OK - on to another thing to make us nuts … immigration. Talk about elitism! There it is, there … class and profit and xenophobic fear woven into a Gordian Knot that threatens the bogus exceptionalism of a single race. That’s what’s on our plate across the board, in a country that is roughly 2/3rds Caucasian, and less by the hour. We’ve got to let go of the tribal distinctions and move our intention toward the humanistic possibilities, the unity that working together for the common good has always offered us. “Take the hand of the person next to you,” has its priorities straight … person; no other distinctions. We’ve gotta get over ourselves.
It can be done — yesterday, 90 year old Robert Byrd, our oldest Congressional member and Senator from … gasp! … West Virginia, endorsed Barack Obama, saying, “Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support.” I find this particularly poignant NOT because West Virginia rejected him along lines of race, but BECAUSE Byrd held a leadership position in the Klu Klux Klan in his youth. One mans evolution is apparent with these words, from 2005: “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.” He went a little farther to redeem himself yesterday.
Immigration is a sleeping giant … it drives the Republican base, who [in my opinion] bolster their insecurities by needing to have “inferiors” around [not enjoying the same status as themselves.] I expect they ARE afraid they’ll be wiped out in their sleep, their possessions looted and their daughters carried off in the night — but they have only their own history of repression and exploitation to thank. Homeland Security hasn’t made all this easier; they’re SNAFU from start to finish, and mean-spirited to boot. Besides the illegals, legal immigrants are not finding America the ‘land of opportunity’ and freedom … our ability to attract bright minds and talent to this nation, as we always have, is being hampered effectively.
Here are reads — and another big SIGH. This also reminds me of ALL that must be looked at and reconfigured when the Dems get the Hill.
[R]evolution — it’s what’s for breakfast.
Jude
Some U.S. detainees drugged for deportation: report
Reuters via Yahoo
Wed May 14
WASHINGTON - The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.
The newspaper said it has identified 250 cases in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003.
Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees without medical justification is a violation of some international human rights codes, the Post reported.
Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.
The Department of Homeland Security’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) took over deportations in 2003.
ICE has stepped up the arrest and removal of foreigners who are in the
United States illegally, who have been turned down for asylum or have been
convicted of a crime in the past, the Post reported.
A spokesman for the agency was not immediately available for comment. ++
[here's the official tit for tat]
Caring for Immigration Detainees
Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Washington Post
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Too Much Secrecy
Information on deaths of immigration detainees should be public
Las Vegas Sun Editorial
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
The deaths of U.S. immigration detainees are lost in a patchwork process in which they can be dead for days or even weeks before their families are notified.
The New York Times reports that detention for immigration violations is administered through a tangle of federal detention centers, county jails and privately run prisons. And no government entity is required to report or investigate detainees’ deaths.
In one horrific example, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor, died in May 2007, four months after he collapsed in a bathroom and his head hit the floor, the Times reports.
Bah, a native of Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa, was detained at a New Jersey facility privately run by the Corrections Corp. of America. After his collapse, Bah was restrained on the floor with handcuffs and shackles as he cried and vomited. He was then placed in a solitary confinement cell where he remained - incoherent and foaming at the mouth - for 14 hours.
Detention officials then called 911 and Bah was taken to a hospital, where an examination showed he had a fractured skull and was hemorrhaging in several areas of his brain. He underwent surgery but never regained consciousness.
A friend told Bah’s family of his fall four days after it happened. Detention center officials refused to give Bah’s relatives the records of his treatment, which had been labeled “proprietary information.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials review cases of detainee deaths internally but are not required to investigate them or report them to the public.
Members of Congress have said such a system gives the agency too much discretion and allows mistreatment to go unreported. Legislation that has passed in the House, but is stalled in the Senate, would require states that receive federal law enforcement funding to report detainees’ deaths to their attorney general.
But even that is not enough. That a man can lie shackled on the floor in his own vomit without medical assistance is beyond disgraceful. Detainees are people and deserve to be treated humanely. ++
Immigration Raid Jars a Small Town
Critics Say Employers Should Be Targeted
Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post
Sunday, May 18, 2008
POSTVILLE, Iowa — Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest.
“I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa,” said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. “Are they mad because I’m working?”
Monday’s raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration’s largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself “Hometown to the World.” Half of the school system’s 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.
Current and former officials of the Department of Homeland Security say its raid on the largest employer in northeast Iowa reflects the administration’s decision to put pressure on companies with large numbers of illegal immigrant workers, particularly in the meat industry. But its disruptive impact on the nation’s largest supplier of kosher beef and on the surrounding community has provoked renewed criticism that the administration is disproportionately targeting workers instead of employers, and that the resulting turmoil is worse than the underlying crimes.
“They don’t go after employers. They don’t put CEOs in jail,” complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff, 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 “is like a natural disaster — only this one is manmade.”
He added, “In the end, it is the greater population that will suffer and the workforce that will be held accountable.”
Congressman Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) said enforcement efforts against corporations that commit immigration violations have “plummeted” under the Bush administration. “Until we enforce our immigration laws equally against both employers and employees who break the law, we will continue to have a problem,” he said.
Julie L. Myers, assistant homeland security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said that to the contrary, the agency has seldom been so aggressive, including opening criminal investigations of company officials. While cases have netted only a handful of sentences for low-level managers so far, Myers said, such white-collar crime investigations typically take years to develop.
“Can we really execute a search warrant without taking any action against [illegal employment] that we know is taking place?” she asked. “Or will just taking business records through a search warrant cause illegal aliens to leave, and then we’re not fulfilling that part of the mission, as well?”
Lobbyists and former officials say that in unleashing ICE, the administration is trying to “turn up the pain” to motivate businesses and Congress to support the comprehensive immigration changes sought by President Bush, such as a temporary-worker program and earned legalization. If the existing legal tools are too blunt, they said, Congress should create a fairer system.
But the pressure on employers — whose wages and hiring practices have lured illegal workers to both large cities and small towns — has mostly been indirect and economic: While workplace arrests have risen tenfold since 2002, from 510 to 4,940, only 90 criminal arrests have involved company personnel officials.
So far, no officials at Agriprocessors have been charged. The company, founded by Aaron Rubashkin, has a storybook history whose recent chapters have turned murky. After some of Rubashkin’s Lubavitch Hasidic family moved here from Brooklyn in 1987, the firm became the nation’s largest processor of glatt kosher beef, the strictest kosher standard. It produces kosher and non-kosher beef, veal, lamb, turkey and chicken products under brands such as Iowa Best Beef, Aaron’s Best and Rubashkin’s.
According to an affidavit filed by an ICE agent in conjunction with this week’s arrests, 76 percent of the 968 employees on the company’s payroll over the last three months of 2007 used false or suspect Social Security numbers. The affidavit cited unnamed sources who alleged that some company supervisors employed 15-year-olds, helped cash checks for workers with fake documents, and pressured workers without documents to purchase vehicles and register them in other names.
In addition, the affidavit alleged that company supervisors ignored a report of a methamphetamine drug lab operating in the plant. It also cited a case in which a supervisor blindfolded a Guatemalan worker and allegedly struck him with a meat hook, without serious injury.
Agriprocessors has faced other troubles, as well. In 2006, it paid a $600,000 settlement to the Environmental Protection Agency to resolve wastewater pollution problems, and this March it was assessed $182,000 in fines for 39 state health, safety and labor violations. In 2004, the U.S. Agriculture Department’s inspector general accused the company of “acts of inhumane slaughter” after animal rights advocates publicized an unauthorized video of a stumbling, dying cow, and some Jewish groups attacked its worker practices.
And last month, the company lost a federal appellate court battle over whether it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize, on grounds that those in favor were illegal immigrants and not entitled to federal labor protections.
“This employer has a long history of violating every law that’s out there — labor laws, environmental laws, now immigration laws,” said Mark Lauritsen, international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has waged a bitter battle to organize the Postville plant. The union charged that the immigration raid disrupted a separate U.S. Labor Department investigation into alleged child labor law violations and other infractions.
ICE may be “deporting 390 witnesses” to the labor investigation, Lauritsen said, adding, “This administration seems to place a larger value on big, splashy shows in this immigration raid than in vigorously enforcing other labor laws.”
In November, Sholom Rubashkin, company vice president and the founder’s son, wrote a letter to customers decrying “a slanderous and patently false campaign” by the union, and defending the company’s record and its products as “safe and wholesome.” After this week’s raid, the family released brief statements expressing its sympathies to workers, commitment to customers and cooperation with authorities.
Chaim Abrahams, a company representative, said Agriprocessors is working to “bolster our compliance efforts to employ only properly documented employees” and has launched an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to the raid.
The blitz, which occurred after a 16-month investigation, began with helicopters, buses and vans encircling the western edge of town at 10 a.m. Witnesses said hundreds of agents surrounded the plant in 10 minutes, began interviewing workers and seized company records.
By early afternoon, illegal immigrants began arriving by bus at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa, about 75 miles from Postville. ICE held 313 male suspects at an exhibit hall and 76 female suspects in local jails for administrative violations of immigration law.
Those arrested include 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 2 Israelis and 4 Ukrainians, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Iowa.
Eighteen were juveniles who have been released or turned over for refugee resettlement, and the prosecutor’s office would not say if there were underage workers at the plant. Of the adults, 306 face criminal charges for aggravated identity theft and other crimes related to the use of false documents. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the workers on Thursday, meanwhile, accused the government of violating their constitutional rights through arbitrary and indefinite detention.
For now, Postville residents — immigrants and native-born — are holding their breath. On Greene Street, where the Hall Roberts’ Son Inc. feed store, Kosher Community Grocery and Restaurante Rinconcito Guatemalteco sit side by side, workers fear a chain of empty apartments, falling home prices and business downturns. The main street, punctuated by a single blinking traffic signal, has been quiet; a Guatemalan restaurant temporarily closed; and the storekeeper next door reported a steady trickle of families quietly booking flights to Central America via Chicago.
“Postville will be a ghost town,” said Lili, a Ukrainian store clerk who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld.
But Cesar Jochol, 48, a native of Patzun, Guatemala, and owner of a market called Tonita’s Express, questioned whether the raid will be a deterrent. People who can afford to eat meat only once or twice a week in Guatemala, while earning $4 a day, can earn $60 a day in Iowa, enough to eat beef or chicken three times a day, he said. “You take away a hundred people. A couple hundred more will come tomorrow; they’ll just go to L.A., New York, New Jersey and Miami,” said Jochol, a 21-year U.S. resident.
At St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, Eduardo Santos, 27, who came from Guatemala and lost two of his fingers working at the factory, said the raid was “fair . . . but it’s bad for everybody. There’s no work.” He plans to go home.
“The problem is, who is going to do the work?” said Stephen G. Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor who wrote a 2000 book on the clash of cultures in Postville as Agriprocessors’ Lubavitch Jewish leaders gained influence in the mostly Lutheran town. “This is a no-win situation.” ++
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
Immigration agency plans new family detention centers
The federal ICE, which already runs two such facilities, is taking bids for as many as three more. Critics say detaining families is punitive and unnecessary.
Anna Gorman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 18, 2008
The federal government is accepting bids for up to three new family detention centers that would house as many as 600 men, women and children fighting deportation cases.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a call for proposals last month and set June 16 as the deadline. New facilities are being considered on both coasts and on the Southwestern border. The agency calls for minimum-security residential facilities that would provide a “least restrictive, nonsecure setting” and provide schooling for children, recreational activities and access to religious services.
Family detention has been condemned by human rights groups and immigrant rights organizations as punitive and unnecessary. But immigration authorities said it ensures that immigrants show up for their court hearings and leave the country when ordered deported.
“Family detention has had the desired impact,” ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. “We don’t see as many families coming across the border. That automatic pass is no longer there.”
There are currently two family facilities — a former nursing home in Pennsylvania and a former prison in Texas. The T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas, opened in 2006 and faced protests and lawsuits within the year charging that the children were living in substandard conditions. A settlement resulted in changes in how the children are treated.
New facilities would allow the government more flexibility and enable the agency to keep families together, Nantel said. In Los Angeles this week, three illegal immigrant mothers and their toddlers, including one American child, were among about 60 people discovered at a drop house used by smugglers. Because there is no family facility nearby, the women and children are being housed in a private shelter.
The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the proposed plan to open new family detention centers.
“After the horrible conditions that were revealed at the Hutto facility, it is very disappointing that the government appears to want to produce more immigration prisons for families and children,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney at the Southern California office.
Arulanantham said most families do not pose a safety or flight risk and should not be detained. Instead, he said, they should post bonds, wear electronic monitors or be part of an intensive supervision program.
“There are other ways to deter illegal immigration without imprisoning children,” he said. “This shows that we have become addicted to incarceration as a method to solving our problems, which it is obviously not.”
In extreme cases, Arulanantham said, he could see families being housed in some sort of halfway house, but not a former prison run by a private prison company.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to review the proposals and make a decision within several months, Nantel said. The bids could come from county governments or private companies. The facilities would house up to 200 people each, about 150 juveniles and 50 adults. Authorities estimate detainees would be kept at the center for between 20 and 30 days.
The proposal calls for minimal security facilities and refers to the centers as residential family shelters, but says the contractor should structure programs “designed to prevent escapes” and should provide a plan that “monitors resident movement and physically counts residents.” Nobody with a criminal record would be admitted.
Corrections Corp. of America senior vice president Damon Hininger said he was aware of the request for proposals and that the company was “taking a look at it.” The company already runs several immigration detention centers, including Hutto.
Hutto has 450 beds, and as of last week there were about 150 people being held in family detention there. If new facilities are built, Nantel said the agency would consider transferring the families out of Hutto and using it as an adult immigration detention center.
“Running a residential facility in what was a former prison, that was a challenge,” she said. “There have been lessons learned out of Hutto.”
When the center opened, children were given hospital scrubs to wear, forbidden to have toys and allowed only one hour of recreation per day, attorneys said. As a result of the settlement, children are allowed to wear pajamas, move freely around the center and bring toys into their rooms. There also have been changes made to the facility, including adding individual bathrooms, adding murals and replacing metal doors.
Given the national security goals of the Department of Homeland Security, advocates said they are skeptical about future family centers.
“They really do have this penal system model in their heads,” said Andrea Black, coordinator of Detention Watch Network, a coalition advocating reform of immigration detention and deportation. “I think it’s going to be challenging for them to actually be able to run a family facility that is nonpunitive given their current philosophy and practices.”
The need to imprison families stems from the presence of so many illegal families sneaking across the border or hiding in the United States, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that advocates a reduction in the number of immigrants.
“This is really recognizing the realities of the illegal alien population,” he said. “They used to let everybody out and trust them to come back. That hasn’t worked out, to say the least. This is simply the pendulum moving back the other way.” ++
Blunt Federal Letters Tell Students They’re Security Threats
SCOTT SHANE, New York Times
May 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.
What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: “I have determined that you pose a security threat.”
Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.
The officials also said they were sorry about the language, which they may change in the future, but had no intention of withdrawing letters already sent.
“It’s an unfortunate choice of words in a bureaucratic letter,” said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman.
Ms. Howe and Maurine Fanguy, who oversees the new ID card program, said that most foreign students did not qualify for the identity cards, but that the letters were not intended to label the recipients as potential terrorists. (Some applicants are also turned down because of criminal records.)
Mr. von Appen, 23, one of at least four oceanography students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received identical letters, said he was stunned by its language.
“I was pretty much speechless and quite intimidated,” said Mr. von Appen, whose research is supported by a $65,000-a-year grant from the National Science Foundation.
A British student at M.I.T. who was rejected, Sophie Clayton, 28, said that at first she was amused at what appeared to be a bureaucratic absurdity. But as she pondered the designation, Ms. Clayton said she grew worried. “The two words ’security threat’ are now in the files next to my name, my photograph and my fingerprints,” she said.
Institute officials were also disturbed. The agency controls airport security, and “our students travel in and out of the country a lot,” said Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, associate dean and director of the international student office at M.I.T.
And the agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration matters, including student visas.
Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said the security agency should remove the misleading language from all files and issue new letters formally withdrawing the “threat” label.
But Ms. Howe, the agency spokeswoman, said that the letters were legal, if flawed, and that there were no plans to send replacements.
She said she did not believe the denial letters would cause students any problems with visa renewal or airport security checks. They will even be able to enter secure ports and ships for their work as long as they are accompanied by someone with the new ID, Ms. Howe said.
The Transportation Worker Identification Credential requirement is being phased in starting Oct. 15. The cards cost the applicant $132.50 and have been issued to 275,000 people so far of 1.2 million people expected to receive the credential, officials said. ++
Hospital Attempts Deportation of Woman With Inadequate Insurance
An immigrant women from Honduras - with legal documentation - faces deportation because her insurance does not cover long-term care.
Cara , Feministe via Alternet
May 19, 2008
An immigrant woman from Honduras who has very recently awakened from a coma is being threatened with what can effectively be called deportation, because she does not have the insurance needed to cover her medical bills. (Don’t read the comments in these articles unless you want to lose your lunch.) But here is the real kicker: while it would be repulsive and incredibly inhumane to deport an uninsured/under-insured person with a serious medical condition because of their undocumented status, despite the lack of adequate facilities for their care in their nations of citizenship, it isn’t even the case here. Sonia del Cid Iscoa has a current visa and in the U.S. legally. (All emphasis in quoted text is mine.)
A gravely ill woman at risk of being removed from the country for lack of adequate insurance coverage awoke from a coma Tuesday.
The hospital has been seeking to return her to her native Honduras; her family took the hospital to court.
[. . .]
Iscoa, 34, has a valid visa and has lived in the United States for more than 17 years. She has no family in Honduras.
But St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center sought to have her sent to Honduras when she went into a coma April 20 after giving birth to a daughter about 8 weeks premature. Iscoa has an amended version of Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System coverage that does not cover long-term care, Curtin said. But her family worried that the move would seriously harm her, or, at the very least, prevent her from ever returning to the United States.
Iscoa’s mother, Joaquina del Cid Plasecea, obtained a temporary restraining order to keep her from being moved. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Carey Hyatt also ordered that the family post a $20,000 bond by Tuesday to cover St. Joseph’s costs of postponing the transfer.
However, Curtin said that the hospital gave the family three more days to come up with the money before a hearing Friday.
If the family can prove that Iscoa would suffer irreparable injury by a move, the bond will be refunded and Iscoa will not be transferred. But if Hyatt determines that Iscoa is not in imminent danger by a move, the family will forfeit the bond.
A stipulation to a court order issued by Hyatt Tuesday evening said that the parties were “actively exploring alternative sources of securing payment for the medical bills of Sonia Iscoa.”
The original story is close to a week old — but a judge has postponed the hearing until this Friday (which would be May 23rd). As I said, the Honduran hospital that St. Joseph’s is looking to transfer Iscoa to has agreed to accept her as a patient but warns that they cannot provide her with the care she needs.
Iscoa went to the hospital on April 16 because of abnormal bleeding, but the hospital sent her home, family members said. The next day, her doctor asked her to return, and when her water broke and she began having contractions on April 20, she was rushed into surgery and did not regain consciousness afterwards.
“They told us that she was bleeding excessively, and they had to do a hysterectomy on her, but they didn’t know why she was in a coma,” said Maria Adame, a family spokeswoman.
Iscoa went into kidney failure. She had two more surgeries and had an ovary removed.
Meanwhile, Adame said the family is having trouble getting medical records from St. Joseph’s.
An independent doctor was scheduled to examine her on Saturday to help assess whether she can or should be moved.
Liliana Flores, a spokeswoman for Hospital Escuela, said that the hospital would accept Iscoa but cautioned that its ICU unit only has four beds and the hospital has no dialysis unit.
There are attorneys and Honduran groups who are desperately trying to help Iscoa and her family.
Suzanne Pfister, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said that as many as eight patients are transferred each month to other countries, mostly to Mexico.
It’s a practice some lawyers are calling into question, specifically whether a hospital has the legal authority to force patients to cross international borders against their will. One attorney in Tucson has twice called police and accused hospital staff of kidnapping to stop the transfers.
“Right now the hospital is exploring with us the alternative means of being able to try to provide a long-term solution to the problem,” said Iscoa’s attorney, Joel Robbins.
[. . .]
The relatives contacted attorneys and got a temporary restraining order.
Judge Carey Snyder Hyatt of Maricopa County Superior Court ordered that the family post a $20,000 bond against expenses incurred by the hospital in the delay.
Robbins said it will be posted by the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association.
Nora Montoya, consul general for Honduras in Arizona, said that Honduran groups here and in Los Angeles and Washington are raising money for her medical care.
Robbins is hopeful that a compromise can be reached to find long-term medical care for Iscoa in Arizona, and he and his associates are talking with other health-care organizations.
[. . .]
Mitchel, who has lived with Iscoa for four years but is not married to her, wondered how they could send her to another country against their wishes.
Hospital representatives were not sure if such transfers had been successfully challenged in court, despite the frequency with which they are carried out. It is the federal government that ordinarily determines who must leave the country.
Fernando Gaxiola, a criminal-defense and immigration attorney in Tucson, said that he has twice thwarted such transfers by calling police and Mexican authorities and reported the transfers as kidnappings.
You know, the question really does seem like a no-brainer. In what rational world does a hospital have the right to send a patient to another country against her wishes? I know that on a day-to-day basis, our shitty health care system seems to have as much if not more direct power over our lives than the government does. But despite the common perception, they are not all-powerful. They are not the government. And they do not have the right to deport anyone, let alone a woman who is in the country legally and in grave medical condition. Gaxiola was entirely right to report previous “transfers” to authorities as kidnappings. And pretty damn smart to have done so.
Furthermore, knowingly and forcibly transferring a patient with kidney failure to a facility that does not have a dialysis unit is nothing short of violence. Plain and simple. Regardless of how we tend to behave, being a citizen of any nation other than the United States does not revoke your status as a human being. This is both racist and classist. This is flat out wrong.
A fund to help pay for Sonia del Cid Iscoa’s medical care has been set up through Wells Fargo Bank. Please help disseminate this information.
Helping Iscoa’s loved ones to pay for her medical care will not solve the bigger problem or help those who come after her. That is why the legal action is absolutely necessary. But we can help one woman receive the care she needs to live and to stay with her family, and loudly voice our opinion that this is in no way acceptable. ++
When is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Going to Start Using Gas Chambers?
E. Nelson, OpEdNews
May 19, 2008
Days after the largest Immigration raid in U.S. history netted nearly 400 workers, including 18 children, at a Kosher meat packing plant in the tiny town of Postville, Iowa, images of the crude detention camps setup by ICE agents at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo started highlighting a disturbing side to our countries immigration policy and enforcement. Are our immigration policies and enforcement spinning out of control?
What are we trying to protect ourselves from? The Washington Post quoted a Mexican caught in the raid as saying, “I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa.” He has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville, Iowa and he went on to say, “Are they mad because I’m working?”
From its wikipedia entry, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the largest and primary investigative arm of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), responsible for identifying, investigating, and dismantling vulnerabilities regarding the nation’s border, economic, transportation, and infrastructure security.” ICE was established in 2003 and has a yearly budget that has grown to over $5 billion dollars a year. With its stated mission of protecting America and upholding public safety by targeting the people, money and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities one has to wonder how this massive raid in Iowa has furthered the stated goals by ICE?
Initially the reports of the raid in Postville had a much different spin. A number of reports on major news outlets emphatically stated the following, “Other illegal immigrants were found along with a methamphetamine laboratory.” These initial reports stated that a Kosher meat-packing plant in Iowa was raided because federal authorities charged that a methamphetamine laboratory was housed there and that employees carried weapons to work. Headlines like the following that quickly followed this statement only stoked the fire — “Meth Lab Operated Out of Kosher Meat Plant in Iowa” or “Drugs made at Kosher Meat Plant”. Strangely or not so strangely as the facts started to come out these headlines disappeared and were replaced with headlines like, “Largest Immigration Raid in US History.”
In a story that ran a couple days later on the 14th of May in the “Times Republican” in central Iowa the following was said, “Multiple sources in the warrant application also said they saw what appeared to be underage workers at the plant. Another source cited in the warrant application, a former supervisor at the plant who was later fired, claimed to have seen a meth lab at the facility. The supervisor claimed to have been fired after trying to destroy the meth lab.”
Ben Harris of the Des Monies register wrote, “In laying the legal groundwork for a massive raid of the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, federal authorities cited claims that the factory housed illegal narcotics production and employed hundreds of illegal immigrants, including several of the rabbis responsible for kosher supervision.”
The claims for the presence of a methamphetamine lab seem to be quietly disappearing and now no evidence or statements have appeared in the past few days that it ever even existed. And most of the initial headlines stating this no longer exist on the major news outlets.
Nevertheless, immigration services stated that they had warrants for 697 people who worked at the plant and continue to be actively pursuing the ones who have not yet been caught in the initial raid.
Meanwhile the town of Postville has been ripped apart by the sudden removal of so many of its residents. Consider that the arrests of more than 10% of the entire population have occurred in the past week. Nearly half of the 600 school children from the Postville community were absent the day after the raid. Some businesses are empty and the streets are nearly deserted. One has to wonder how the economic and social devastation that will follow in the coming months to this small American town, has really furthered the stated goal of ICE “dismantling vulnerabilities regarding the nation’s border, economic, transportation, and infrastructure security.” Is this town really better off now? Is it safer and more economically viable now?
David Strudthoff, the Postville Community Schools superintendent stated that, “They don’t go after employers. They don’t put CEOs in jail.” He went on to say that the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 “is like a natural disaster — only this one is manmade.”
We were taught in school that the symbol of our country, the Statute of Liberty, was a reminder to the intent and formation of our country, to be a melting pot of immigrants seeking refuge in a country based on the ideal of liberty and freedom. Bring me your huddled masses searching for a better life. In many regards Postville, Iowa is the idyllic American town where long-bearded rabbis, Latin American immigrants, and German Lutherans had learned to live and work side by side.
Our immigration policies and enforcement are on a disturbing path to be sure. The intent seems to be more the creation of fear and distrust then the actual protection of US citizens. Will our kids someday see the miles of railcars packed with the human faces of men, women, and children, who entered this country without proper papers, peering out of the railcars as they are being shipped back to where they came from — or worst somewhere else? ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
May 20th, 2008
“Shift happens,” we’ve said, longingly — and now it has; the rallying cry used again and again by those who encourage others to activism and engagement is, “… if not now, when?” The question is answered — it’s now, today and tomorrow, and the day after that … and if not these political players, then the next to step up. You can feel the energy dancing on your skin — and if you enter the blogosphere, you see ONLY the new dialogue and the sure intent to pursue it. We’ve moved on — the nation has a new ‘center’ and it’s not the stilted, tight box we suffered in the early part of the century. The question now is … who’s coming with us?
The GOP is wounded, perhaps mortally, and — because they’re not quite sure why their ‘brand’ is so tarnished — bleeding out. They’re trying to repackage Bushy talking points with a ‘maverick’ logo, but very few are buying it; just those who can’t live without it anyhow. The meaner they get, the more void their argument becomes — like Hil’s big win in West Virginia, appealing to ignorance and racism, disappeared off the news page within minutes. When Dub was handed his presidency, he vowed to be a Uniter, not a Divider … and immediately divided the country and the world into separate camps; it’s become personal to just about everyone, now, and we are desperate for not only integrity and competence, but civility. ‘Business as usual’ just went in the dumpster. We’ve moved on.
George Bush went to Israel last week to help them celebrate their 60th anniversary with a message of divisiveness, partisanship and pettiness. He might have offered hope for the Peace Plan, or proposed a plan to shore up Lebanon’s tentative democracy … but nooooo. The Dumbbell-in-Chief went to Israel and likened ’some’ [i.e., Obama and the Dems] to Chamberlain’s placating Hitler and going soft. Let me say that again — George W. Bush … anathema in his own country and who, when welcomed warmly by an admiring Israeli leader choked up and wept … stood before the Knesset and invoked HITLER!
Here’s the dynamite, please pass the matches. American Jews, are you listening?? The Dem’s are endangering the Homeland!
This excited some of their Right-Wing, who declared that “Bush seems to be more Zionist than Olmert.” Good, maybe they can find a spot for him THERE — we’re done with him HERE.
So, the Dubster [feeling the love] effectively swift boated a presumptive candidate [although the Bushies said he didn't before they said he did] on foreign soil — but unlike Gore and Kerry, Obama smacked back immediately, saying, “I’m a strong believer in civility and I’m a strong believer in a bipartisan foreign policy, but that cause is not served with dishonest, divisive attacks of the sort that we’ve seen out of George Bush and John McCain over the last couple days;” you’ll find more of his comments below. That’s more than one trick pony, kids … an ‘empty suit’ talking endlessly about hope … that’s a smackdown with the President of the United States, linking him in the minds of the public to his minion, Johnny Mac [who is desperately trying to back peddle away from him.]
This squabble will play with the hard-Right, here at home, but Dubby’s speech writer should have used a shorter word than ‘appeasement’ … that’s what we call a 50 cent word, here in Missouri; it’s more like a $5 word in West Virginia. The notion that America is a reflection of West Virginia [and Kentucky, that votes on Tuesday] isn’t getting purchase either … Kentucky, with its 51 delegates looks good for Hillary — they don’t have a white man to vote for. It’s reported that she got off a plane at one scheduled stop, smiling and waving, and nobody was there to meet her; meanwhile, 75,000 people showed up to hear Obama’s stump speech in Portland … Oregon has 52 delegates and is enthusiastically anti-war.
Pragmatism is pushing us forward, even as we speak — Obama is the nominee, and even Hillary must acknowledge that in her private moments. Her big wins are now forever tarnished by the “working class white” me-me … she’d have done better speaking of them as “lunch-bucket Democrats.” Edwards called it when he intimated that it was all but done [Elizabeth is not endorsing;] and because the conversation is now strongly engaged between the two parties and drawing in the international theatre, it’s difficult to find an honest justification to continue this race. I have sympathy for Mrs. Clinton — if she whines that the press is leaving her behind, she would be justified: we’ve moved on. Obama will likely win enough votes tomorrow to declare, but he won’t … he’s not a divisive man. He thinks such a move would not be good for the country. Amazing, isn’t it … somebody who cares about the good of the country?
The smart vs. tough question is at hand — will we get swept emotionally into the GOP shredder again … I don’t think so. And the ‘elite’ bs can only go so far, with the candidate of the three who has the least amount of personal income; the ‘liberal’ bs doesn’t pack the punch it used to, either, much as gay marriage doesn’t — we’ve moved on.
Yeah, Obama’s smart … will we forgive him his intellect or even embrace it? We’ve lived without that for 7 long years and look what it’s got us. But he’s not just smart, he’s tough, as well. He certainly minced no words with the Tennessee GOP about messing with his wife. He called out the President of the United States and the GOP nominee in no uncertain terms. You’ll find a read on his taking on the FCC below. And he seems to have a way of deflecting what comes at him back onto the one who launched it.
We’re in a very different political space now, we can almost breathe — of course, I still read a lot of cynical stuff about how we can’t get past our West Virginia’s, how we can’t rely on people to vote in their own interest … but the numbers keep coming, the dialogue keeps shifting … and I can’t help but wonder how the world would look if intelligence was back in style.
Here’s a collection of really interesting reads that I find very encouraging, most indicating disapproval of Bush from all quarters, including links to the editorial boards of the New York Times and Boston Globe; a good rant from Attywood, and even a piece by Tom Friedman. At the bottom, reads on the Jewish issues and Obama, and an interview with him on the topic. Last piece, Moyer’s talks to the hard-Left.
Jude
Prepared Text of Bush’s Knesset Speech
Wall Street Journal
JFK Responds to Bush’s Appeasement Speech
Baldwin Park Democrat
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Probably one of the best responses to President Bush’s outrageous “appeasement” speech in the Israeli Knesset, and John McCain and Joe Lieberman’s support of that speech, was made on a cold snowy day in 1961. And it was made by another young American who inspired the nation then much the same as Barack Obama is doing today. It is as timely today as it was when it was first spoken to the American people, and to our enemies.
From President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s first Inaugural speech given on Friday, January 20, 1961.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request — that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course — both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.
So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
President Bush, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman should each listen to that remarkable speech and stop equating Barack Obama’s willingness to talk with our enemies as appeasement. It is not. It is statesmanship and diplomacy. And that’s what the world needs today. ++
Obama Unleashed
Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic
16 May 2008
The president pissed him off:
Well I want to be perfectly clear with George Bush and John McCain – if they want a debate about protecting the United States of America, that’s a debate I’m ready to win, because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.
“…in the Bush-McCain worldview, everyone who disagrees with their failed Iran policy is an appeaser. And back during his “No Surrender” tour, John McCain said anyone who wants to end the war in Iraq responsibly wants to surrender; he even said later on that he would be ok keeping troops in Iraq for 100 years, but yesterday he said our troops could be home by 2013. He offered the promise that America will win a victory, with no understanding that Iraq is fighting a civil war. Just like George Bush, his plan isn’t about winning, it’s about staying, and that’s why there will be a clear choice in November: fighting a war without end, or ending this war. Because we don’t need John McCain’s prediction about when the war will end – we need a plan to end it.
As I said, Bush just gave Obama a gift that will keep on giving. The more that McCain and Bush engage in this dated anything - but - us - is - unacceptable - appeasement nonsense, Obama will win. Do Bush and McCain think we’ve been asleep for the past seven years? How dumb do they think we are? ++
Biden: Bush’s comments were ‘bullshit’
Politico
May 15, 2008
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), piling on to Democratic complaints about President Bush’s speech in Israel today:
“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”
Speaking before the Knesset, Bush said that “some people” believe the United States “should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”
“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
Democrats have interpreted the comments as an attack on Sen. Barack Obama, and Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the president was out of line. ++
Obama and the Jews
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
May 18, 2008
Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said there has to be “an end” to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank “that began in 1967.” Yikes!
Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama said that not only must Israel be secure, but that any peace agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.” Yikes!
Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said “the establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.” Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!
Those are the kind of rumors one can hear circulating among American Jews these days about whether Barack Obama harbors secret pro-Palestinian leanings. I confess: All of the above phrases are accurate. I did not make them up.
There’s just one thing: None of them were uttered by Barack Obama. They are all direct quotes from President George W. Bush in the last two years. Mr. Bush, long hailed as a true friend of Israel, said all those things.
What does that tell you? It tells me several things. The first is that America today has — rightly — a bipartisan approach to Arab-Israeli peace that is not going to change no matter who becomes our next president. America, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration, is now committed to a two-state solution in which the Palestinians get back the West Bank, Gaza and Arab parts of East Jerusalem, and Israel gives back most of the settlements in the West Bank, offsetting those it does not evacuate with land from Israel.
The notion that a President Barack Obama would have a desire or ability to walk away from this consensus American position is ludicrous. But given the simmering controversy over whether Mr. Obama is “good for Israel,” it’s worth exploring this question: What really makes a pro-Israel president?
Personally, as an American Jew, I don’t vote for president on the basis of who will be the strongest supporter of Israel. I vote for who will make America strongest. It’s not only because this is my country, first and always, but because the single greatest source of support and protection for Israel is an America that is financially and militarily strong, and globally respected. Nothing would imperil Israel more than an enfeebled, isolated America.
I don’t doubt for a second President Bush’s gut support for Israel, and I think it comes from his gut. He views Israel as a country that shares America’s core democratic and free-market values. That is not unimportant.
But what matters a lot more is that under Mr. Bush, America today is neither feared nor respected nor liked in the Middle East, and that his lack of an energy policy for seven years has left Israel’s enemies and America’s enemies — the petro-dictators and the terrorists they support — stronger than ever. The rise of Iran as a threat to Israel today is directly related to Mr. Bush’s failure to succeed in Iraq and to develop alternatives to oil.
Does that mean Mr. Obama would automatically do better? I don’t know. To me, U.S. presidents succeed or fail when it comes to Arab-Israeli diplomacy depending on two criteria that have little to do with what’s in their hearts.
The first, and most important, is the situation on the ground and the readiness of the parties themselves to take the lead, irrespective of what America is doing. Anwar Sadat’s heroic overture to Israel, and Menachem Begin’s response, made the Jimmy Carter-engineered Camp David peace treaty possible. The painful, post-1973 war stalemate between Israel and Egypt and Syria made Henry Kissinger’s disengagement agreements possible. The collapse of the Soviet Union and America’s defeat of Iraq in the first gulf war made possible James Baker’s success in putting the Madrid peace process together.
What all three of these U.S. statesmen had in common, though — and this is the second criterion — was that when history gave them an opening, they seized it, by being tough, cunning and fair with both sides.
I don’t want a president who is just going to lean on Israel and not get in the Arabs’ face too, or one who, as the former Mideast negotiator Aaron D. Miller puts it, “loves Israel to death” — by not drawing red lines when Israel does reckless things that are also not in America’s interest, like building settlements all over the West Bank.
It’s a tricky business. But if Israel is your voting priority, then at least ask the right questions about Mr. Obama. Knock off the churlish whispering campaign about what’s in his heart on Israel (what was in Richard Nixon’s heart?) and focus first on what kind of America you think he’d build and second on whether you believe that as president he’d have the smarts, steel and cunning to seize a historic opportunity if it arises. ++
Obama, JFK, and Reagan vs. Bush, McCain
Carpetbagger Report
May 18th, 2008
I can’t help but enjoy the fact that Barack Obama is successfully taking attacks from George W. Bush and John McCain, and turning them into a positive. He’s effectively taking GOP talking points, and throwing them back in their face.
Sen. Barack Obama went one step further today in his pushback against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and President Bush on appeasement, suggesting that both Republicans have a problem with presidents past who have engaged in direct diplomacy.
“If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy, led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy because that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev, or Ronald Reagan, ’cause that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, or Richard Nixon ’cause that’s what they did with [Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung],” Obama said in Roseburg, Ore. “That’s exactly the kind of diplomacy we need to keep us safe.”
Obama called the dust-up “appealing,” after Bush said in Israel at the Knesset that it was a mistake to talk about diplomacy with “terrorists and radicals.”
I haven’t seen any polling on this, and I have no idea whether voters in general find the notion of diplomacy with unsavory international rivals appealing or not. But I think Obama has framed it exactly the right way — we’ve confronted dangerous enemies before, and open dialog has produced more results for our interests than closed minds.
I didn’t hear all of Obama’s remarks, but in case he didn’t mention it, I’d just add that we’ve already seen the results of the Bush/McCain approach. Did conditions improve with North Korea and Iran once we decided to stop talking to them?
In provides a context for the debate — Obama, Reagan, JFK, and success on one side; Bush, McCain, and failure on the other.
The McCain campaign responded:
“Offering the current Iranian regime an unconditional summit and the status of a super power akin to the Soviets, as Barack Obama has suggested, shows incredibly weak judgment and a dangerous lack of experience,” McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said.
My goodness, this sure is dumb. First, if McCain is troubled by the notion of equating Iran with the USSR, why hasn’t he said anything while prominent far-right Republicans have equated Iran with Nazi Germany for the last few years? Doesn’t that show “incredibly weak judgment”?
Second, Obama has not offered Iran an “unconditional summit.” That’s utterly absurd, patently dishonest, and the McCain campaign knows it. Obama has said for months that before any direct engagement with a country like Iran, there would have to be extensive diplomatic legwork completed first. Does any serious person think Obama, shortly after he’s inaugurated, is going to jump on a plane to Tehran or Pyongyang — without any advance work — just to see what happens? Does the McCain campaign really believe we’re foolish enough to buy such nonsense?
Obama is betting that voters, who may or may not be familiar with the details of five decades of diplomacy, will have an implicit understanding of the dynamics here — the United States is not afraid to sit at the table with rival nations. Kennedy wasn’t; Reagan wasn’t; Obama isn’t. Bush and McCain, meanwhile, harbor the notion that not talking to adversarial countries is punishment to them, and will somehow advance our interests.
I like our chances in this debate. ++
US rivals get nasty on foreign policy
Senator John McCain: On the attack
Paul Reynolds, BBC News
Foreign policy has already entered the arena in the US presidential election - and it is getting nasty.
It is the shape of things to come.
The McCain camp is trying to portray the likely Democratic candidate Barack Obama as soft on terrorism, as “Hamas’s favourite” and as a man who would not defend America’s security.
The Hamas tag followed a comment by a Hamas spokesman Ahmed Yousef who told WABC Radio: “We like Mr Obama. We hope he will [win] the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle.”
The McCain campaign circulated this comment: “We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad.”
In one sentence, John McCain linked three American foreign policy fears - Hamas, Iraq and Iran - and tried to isolate Mr Obama as unreliable on all three.
President Ahmadinejad of Iran is likely to play a prominent role in the McCain rhetoric.
It is a potent attack and Senator Obama has to see it off if he is to survive.
McCain approach
In contrast, John McCain is projected by his own side as the strong, independent figure who would stand up to terrorists. He is even promising victory in Iraq by 2013. That date marks the end of the next presidential term.
“By January 2013… the Iraq war has been won,” Senator McCain declared recently in a speech outlining his presidential ambitions.
Promising victory in Iraq has a strong appeal to the voters. Promising withdrawal might be seen as offering them defeat.
It undermines one of Barack Obama’s most heavily-stressed points - his opposition to the war. This has lost much of its resonance with the success so far, even if in relative terms, of the reinforcement of US troops in Iraq
John McCain came out in favour of the surge early on, at a time when others were calling for a withdrawal timetable. Now he is reaping the rewards of that approach.
It is ironic that the Iraq war, once such a weak spot for Republicans, should have turned out to be such a strong card for John McCain.
Bush intervention
Another flanking attack has come from President Bush himself. In a speech in Jerusalem, he used the “a” word - appeasement - in criticising those who wanted to “negotiate with the terrorists and radicals”.
“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement,” President Bush said.
Senator Barack Obama: Counter-attacking
Later, the White House stated that Mr Bush’s target was former President Jimmy Carter, who had met Hamas leaders.
But Barack Obama took it as a comment on himself.
“If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate I am happy to have any time, any place,” he stated.
Obama counter-attack
And he has found a weak link in the McCain chain.
The former State Department spokesman under President Clinton, James Rubin, who hosted an interview programme on Sky TV when he lived in London, revealed what John McCain had said about Hamas after it won the Palestinian elections in 2006:
“They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another… it’s a new reality in the Middle East,” said the senator.
John McCain responded by saying that he was quoted out of context and that he would not talk to Hamas before it recognised the state of Israel, one of the international conditions for its diplomatic acceptance.
To this Mr Obama added: “He was actually guilty of the exact same thing that he is accusing me of, and in fact was saying maybe we need to deal with Hamas. That’s the kind of hypocrisy we’ve been seeing in our foreign policy.”
Senator Obama has also said that engagement with Hamas can come only when it accepts the international conditions for its recognition.
Linking McCain
Mr Obama’s wider counter-attack is to link John McCain with the policies of the Bush administration, implying that McCain would represent a third Bush term.
He accused the White House of making “bombastic exaggerations” and of encouraging “fear-mongering”.
‘Smart’ versus ‘tough’ in foreign policy is going to be a theme of the campaign
“The American people are going to look at the evidence. We don’t get a sense that this has been a wise foreign policy or a smart foreign policy or a tough foreign policy,” he said.
Senator Obama has suggested that he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran to get it to behave “responsibly” and would organise a conference with Muslim countries “to have an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows every day between Muslims and the West”.
“Smart” versus “tough” in foreign policy is going to be a theme of the campaign. ++
Bush’s appeasement malarkey
The Boston Globe
May 17, 2008
President Bush committed political treason today
Attywood, Philadelphia Daily News
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Swift Boating Comes to Jerusalem
Amb. Marc Ginsberg, HuffPo
May 15, 2008
Outrage overload continues
Last Chance Democracy Cafe, BuzzFlash
Fri, 05/16/2008
The President Goes Negative
New York Times Editorial Board
May 17, 2008
Bush An “Appeaser,” Says Egyptian Press
Critics Raise Questions About Credibility Of U.S. Role In Middle East
CBS/AP
May 17, 2008
Are the Jews good for Barack Obama?
With Jewish voters critical in such swing states as Nevada and Pennsylvania, Republicans hope to exploit a supposed softness in Obama’s support for Israel. So far, it’s not working.
May 19, 2008
Mike Madden, Salon
WASHINGTON — Some political attacks come in subtle forms, with a hidden, “dog whistle” message audible only to the voters who are supposed to hear it. And then there was President Bush’s speech Thursday — yes, the speech to Israel’s parliament on the nation’s 60th birthday in which he indirectly compared Barack Obama to both infamous appeaser-of-Hitler Neville Chamberlain and to a famous Nazi sympathizer.
By this point in his administration, it’s clear that Bush is comfortable with unsubtle fear-mongering. But even by his standards, the point of that line — and of the fury ginned up by House Republicans over an interview Obama gave to the Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg — was pretty clear. The GOP is already pushing, and pushing hard, the idea that Obama has a problem with the Jewish vote, because of his proposals to sit down to negotiate with Iranian leaders who have threatened Israel, because of his former pastor’s ties to Louis Farrakhan and (though most Republicans don’t bring this up) because of false fears that Obama is secretly Muslim. Attacking Obama’s Middle East policy while in Israel, and playing the Holocaust card in the process, plainly fits into that pattern, even if the White House spent most of Friday being shocked — shocked! — that anyone would think Bush meant to refer to Obama.
If Jews do flock to John McCain this fall, Obama would be in some trouble (assuming, of course, that Hillary Clinton doesn’t win the nomination through a miracle more impressive than the one commemorated every year at Hanukkah); a strong majority of Jewish voters has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1924. Jews have favored the Democrat in 21 straight presidential elections, and by an average margin of 3-to-1. In battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada, the Jewish population is a large enough slice of the electorate that Obama can’t afford for them to abandon him.
In Florida, Jews make up around 5 percent of the voting population — more than enough to swing a close race. (If all the South Florida Jewish voters who intended to support Al Gore and Joe Lieberman in 2000 had actually cast their votes properly, Gore would have won.) Florida may be tipping from truly purple toward red; Bush won it easily in 2004 and the Republican governor, Charlie Crist, will work hard for McCain. But if the state is competitive again this fall, Obama can’t afford to let McCain take a big share of Florida’s Jewish voters, who turn out in disproportionately large numbers compared to their share of the state’s residents. With an older population than the national average, Florida already poses demographic problems for Obama without losing a traditional part of the Democratic coalition.
Nationally, the problem for Bush, Boehner and, above all, McCain, is that right now there isn’t much evidence of a lasting breach between Jewish voters and the presumptive Democratic nominee. By November, as the old saying goes, the Jews will most likely be good for Barack Obama.
For Republicans hoping to drive a wedge between Obama and Jewish voters, Israel is only the first stop. But it’s a big one. The standard GOP line against Obama on Middle East policy is this: He wants to sit down with Iran and Syria, both sworn enemies of Israel; he didn’t speak up loudly enough when former President Jimmy Carter, apparently a crypto-Obama supporter, met with Hamas leaders recently; he has listened to advice on foreign policy from people like Gen. Tony McPeak and Robert Malley, who some Jews believe don’t support Israel strongly enough; and he was “endorsed” by a Hamas spokesman, who said his organization would prefer that Obama wins the election. Obama was also friendly with Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi when Khalidi taught at the University of Chicago. The Arab-American Khalidi’s criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinians has made him extremely controversial among hawkish Jews. “[Obama] has not taken appropriate leadership on any of these issues,” said Suzanne Kurtz, a spokeswoman for the Republican Jewish Coalition. “If these are issues that are important to you, you really just find this alarming.” The coalition, founded in 1985, has 30,000 members now, and is running ads in Jewish newspapers featuring Jewish Republicans who used to vote Democratic but switched over security concerns.
Of course, the most prominent person matching that demographic is Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has become one of McCain’s most hawkish surrogates on foreign policy. “The fact that the spokesperson for Hamas would say they would welcome the election of Senator Obama really does raise the question why, and it suggests a difference between these two candidates,” Lieberman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last week. McCain himself picked up the same general theme after Bush’s speech Thursday, telling a conference call with bloggers, “If Senator Obama wants to sit down across the table from the leader of a country that calls Israel a stinking corpse, and comes to New York and says they’re gonna, quote, ‘wipe Israel off the map,’ what is it that he wants to talk about? What is it that [Obama] wants to talk about with him?”
Add to all that the months of controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose church once reprinted a column by a Hamas leader in its newsletter, and a series of e-mails that made the rounds of the Jewish community earlier this year alleging Obama is a Muslim, and you’d think McCain might actually have a chance at running away with lots of Jewish support this fall. “If people don’t mind, I’d like to be honest — a lot of the concern has been generated because of scurrilous e-mails that have been sent, generated based on speculation [regarding] the fact that my middle name is Hussein,” Obama told Philadelphia-area rabbis at a meeting at a Center City synagogue before the Pennsylvania primary.
But a Gallup poll last month — in the midst of the Wright drama — found Obama beating McCain 61-32 among Jewish voters, a far wider margin than among the population as a whole. While that’s lower than John Kerry’s 76 percent margin among Jews (and 5 points lower than the 66 percent Hillary Clinton got in the same poll), Obama’s campaign isn’t worried about making up the difference by November. “If we’re beating McCain 2-1 after ‘Obama is a Muslim’ scares and a month of Rev. Wright, then we’re doing pretty well,” one aide said.
Yes, Clinton has been beating Obama among Jewish voters in some primaries, but once the Democratic nomination fight finally ends, most observers of the Jewish community’s political behavior expect him to consolidate support. In Chicago, prominent Jewish politicos like fundraiser Penny Pritzker, operative Abner Mikva and Rep. Jan Schakowsky signed on with Obama early in his campaign. Still, Obama’s campaign appears to be taking the issue seriously, even though most Jewish voters live in safe blue states like New York, New Jersey, California and Maryland. Obama has been known to jokingly introduce himself to Jewish audiences as “Baruch Obama,” using the Hebrew version of his Arabic first name.
On a national level, Obama doesn’t have the long track record on Israel that McCain or Clinton has, but that’s mostly because he doesn’t have a long track record on foreign policy, period. “Senator Obama is not someone who has been familiar to the American Jewish community for decades,” said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., an Obama supporter and one of Israel’s most vehement defenders in Congress. “There are legitimate questions that should be asked and need to be answered … (but) the more Senator Obama expresses himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, the more support he gains in the Jewish community.” The largest pro-Israel lobbying group in the country, AIPAC, says McCain, Obama and Clinton all meet their approval. “All three candidates,” said spokesman Josh Block, “have strong congressional voting records on issues important to the pro-Israel community and have demonstrated their commitment to the special relationship between the United States and Israel.” AIPAC is nonpartisan, and won’t endorse either McCain or Obama. But if the group felt that Obama wasn’t sufficiently pro-Israel, you’d have heard about it.
That may be all Obama really needs to do about as well as most past Democratic candidates have done among Jewish voters. Observers of the Jewish vote say most Jews aren’t really classic single-issue voters; if candidates can get past the basic question of whether they’re pro-Israel or not, that’s usually enough for voters to move on to other topics. “There are definitely some voters for whom Israel is an issue, but it’s [one] issue among many,” said an advisor to Obama’s campaign on the Middle East and outreach to Jewish voters. Wexler, the campaign’s chief surrogate for appearances in the Jewish community, agreed. An Orthodox Jew, he represents a South Florida district that he claims has more Jewish constituents than any other. “If the Republican Jewish Coalition believes that large numbers of Jewish people are uni-dimensional, they apparently do not interact very much with Jewish people.” ++
Obama on Zionism and Hamas
Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic
12 May 2008
The Hamas leader Ahmed Yousef did Barack Obama no favor recently when he said: “We like Mr. Obama and we hope that he will win the election.” John McCain jumped on this statement, calling it a “legitimate point of discussion,” and tied it to Obama’s putative softness on Iran, whose ever-charming president last week called Israel a “stinking corpse” and predicted its “annihilation.”
The Hamas episode won’t help Obama’s attempts to win over Jewish voters, particularly those in such places as –- to pull an example from the air –- Palm Beach County, Florida, whose Jewish residents tend to appreciate robust American support for Israel, and worry about whether presidential candidates feel the importance of Israel in their kishkes, or guts.
Obama and I spoke over the weekend about Hamas, about Jimmy Carter, and about the future of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. He seemed eager to talk about his ties to the Jewish community, and about the influence Jews have had on his life. Among other things, he told me that he learned the art of moral anguish from Jews. We spoke as well about my Atlantic cover story on Israel’s future. He mentioned his interest in the opinions of the writer David Grossman, who is featured in the article. “I remember reading The Yellow Wind when it came out, and reading about Grossman now is powerful, painful stuff.” And, speaking in a kind of code Jews readily understand, Obama also made sure to mention that he was fond of the writer Leon Uris, the author of Exodus.
Here are excerpts from our conversation:
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?
BARACK OBAMA: You know, when I think about the Zionist idea, I think about how my feelings about Israel were shaped as a young man — as a child, in fact. I had a camp counselor when I was in sixth grade who was Jewish-American but who had spent time in Israel, and during the course of this two-week camp he shared with me the idea of returning to a homeland and what that meant for people who had suffered from the Holocaust, and he talked about the idea of preserving a culture when a people had been uprooted with the view of eventually returning home.
There was something so powerful and compelling for me, maybe because I was a kid who never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always having a sense of values and culture but wanting a place. So that is my first memory of thinking about Israel.
And then that mixed with a great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the kibbutz, and the notion that not only do you find a place but you also have this opportunity to start over and to repair the breaches of the past. I found this very appealing.
JG: You’ve talked about the role of Jews in the development of your thinking
BO: I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.
One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate.
JG: Do you think that justice is still on Israel’s side?
BO: I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea.
That does not mean that I would agree with every action of the state of Israel, because it’s a government and it has politicians, and as a politician myself I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don’t always act with justice uppermost on our minds. But the fundamental premise of Israel and the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is, I think, a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world.
JG: Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don’t know you –- Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski –- then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don’t feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it.
BO: I find that really interesting. I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions.
Sometimes I’m attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives. The point is, if you look at my writings and my history, my commitment to Israel and the Jewish people is more than skin-deep and it’s more than political expediency.
When it comes to the gut issue, I have such ardent defenders among my Jewish friends in Chicago. I don’t think people have noticed how fiercely they defend me, and how central they are to my success, because they’ve interacted with me long enough to know that I’ve got it in my gut. During the Wright episode, they didn’t flinch for a minute, because they know me and trust me, and they’ve seen me operate in difficult political situations.
The other irony in this whole process is that in my early political life in Chicago, one of the raps against me in the black community is that I was too close to the Jews. When I ran against Bobby Rush [for Congress], the perception was that I was Hyde Park, I’m University of Chicago, I’ve got all these Jewish friends. When I started organizing, the two fellow organizers in Chicago were Jews, and I was attacked for associating with them. So I’ve been in the foxhole with my Jewish friends, so when I find on the national level my commitment being questioned, it’s curious.
JG: Why do you think Ahmed Yousef of Hamas said what he said about you?
BO: My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I’ve repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements.
JG: Were you flummoxed by it?
BO: I wasn’t flummoxed. I think what is going on there is the same reason why there are some suspicions of me in the Jewish community. Look, we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy. We look at things as black and white, and not gray. It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,” and that’s something they’re hopeful about.
I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.
When I visited Ramallah, among a group of Palestinian students, one of the things that I said to those students was: “Look, I am sympathetic to you and the need for you guys to have a country that can function, but understand this: if you’re waiting for America to distance itself from Israel, you are delusional. Because my commitment, our commitment, to Israel’s security is non-negotiable.” I’ve said this in front of audiences where, if there were any doubts about my position, that’d be a place where you’d hear it.
When Israel invaded Lebanon two summers ago, I was in South Africa, a place where, obviously, when you get outside the United States, you can hear much more critical commentary about Israel’s actions, and I was asked about this in a press conference, and that time, and for the entire summer, I was very adamant about Israel’s right to defend itself. I said that there’s not a nation-state on Earth that would tolerate having two of its soldiers kidnapped and just let it go. So I welcome the Muslim world’s accurate perception that I am interested in opening up dialogue and interested in moving away from the unilateral policies of George Bush, but nobody should mistake that for a softer stance when it comes to terrorism or when it comes to protecting Israel’s security or making sure that the alliance is strong and firm. You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel’s security.
JG: What do you make of Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that Israel resembles an apartheid state?
BO: I strongly reject the characterization. Israel is a vibrant democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and there’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal. It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.
JG: If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?
BO: What I will say is what I’ve said previously. Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.
JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?
BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.
I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we’re going to be stuck in the same status quo that we’ve been stuck in for decades now, and that won’t lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.
The notion that a vibrant, successful society with incredible economic growth and incredible cultural vitality is still plagued by this notion that this could all end at any moment — you know, I don’t know what that feels like, but I can use my imagination to understand it. I would not want to raise my children in those circumstances. I want to make sure that the people of Israel, when they kiss their kids and put them on that bus, feel at least no more existential dread than any parent does whenever their kids leave their sight. So that then becomes the question: is settlement policy conducive to relieving that over the long term, or is it just making the situation worse? That’s the question that has to be asked. ++
Obama Stands Up to Bush, the FCC, and Big Media
Sen. Obama locks horns with the FCC and speaks up for diversity in media.
Matt Stoller, Open Left
May 16, 2008
John Eggerton at Broadcasting and Cable has the story.
The fight over the Federal Communications Commission’s Dec. 18 media-ownership vote set up a potential battle between the current president and a senator who wants to be the next one.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) Thursday urged the House to follow the Senate’s lead and pass a resolution of disapproval, an unusual legislative maneuver that would invalidate the FCC’s decision to allow TV and radio stations and newspapers to be co-owned in the top 20 markets, subject to some conditions.
After the Senate approved the measure, Obama, a co-sponsor of the bill, released a statement saying, “I urge my colleagues in the House of Representatives to expeditiously pass the legislation.”
He framed the vote, as he has before, as standing up to “Washington special interests,” a campaign theme. “Our nation’s media market must reflect the diverse voices of our population, and it is essential that the FCC promotes the public interest and diversity in ownership,” he said.
The FCC decision to consolidate yet more media was opposed by 99% of public comments. As Paul Rosenberg noted in this comments, this might be the single least popular decision by the Bush administration ever. But Obama, as he did with his media and tech plan, took this further, and called for diversity and representation for the public interest in media ownership.
With ownership levels for minorities and women in media in the low single digits, Obama is really saying that it’s time to reshape our media system. In discussing Reagan, one of the great conservative media reformers, remember he made the following comment.
“I didn’t’ say I liked Ronald Reagan’s policies,” Obama explained. “What I said was that was the kind of working majority we need to form in order to move a progressive agenda forward.”
With the Pentagon Pundit scandal coming on the wave of a number of serious breakdowns of the public legitimacy of the press, the public desire for a new media system is strong.
The technological capacity to create such a system exists, in fact, media has been dramatically reshaped already through the internet.
Broadcast media, though, is still somewhat untouched, but this kind of serious structural argument about the media from the likely President is something that cable and broadcast executives, as well as progressives, should take very seriously.
I’ve heard quite frequently from political operatives that this race is not Obama versus McCain, but Obama versus the media. And it’s clear that without breaking down the structure of the media conglomerates, public discourse will remain as polluted and dishonest as it is now. And so President Obama is telegraphing his intentions to be a media reformer. Now it’s up to us to help him get there. ++
7 Days: Moyers and Democracy:
He’d Rather Write Than Be President, w/ Huffington, vanden Heuvel & Green
Mark Green, HuffPo
May 18, 2008
There was lots of hard news this week — West Virginia, John Edwards, appeasement, McCain’s 2013 Space Odyssey — but it was Bill Moyers who uttered some hard truths on 7 Days in America on Air America…
Moyers is, simply, a national treasure, a reminder that we redeem the promise of America more through the morality, humanity and insights of unelected visionaries than insider politicians. By his books, TV programs and essays — this month stitched together into a new volume, Moyers on Democracy (Doubleday) — he’s a Sisyphus pushing his beloved country to higher ground.
In our interview, Moyers explains how he never was distracted by entreaties to run for president or any other office. No, his dream and achievement was to be a political journalist in general and a drum major for democracy in particular.
His book therefore explains how America needs less a laundry list of reforms after the Bush-Cheney junta leaves town but rather a new story to rebut Reagan’s version about “the freedom of the rich to get richer.” And the new story is — Democracy.
He goes on to note both that “Democrats talk about a new direction without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass” and that “the dilemma of democratic politics is how to translate Big Ideas into practical politics.”
Ok, I ask him — and our panel of Huffington and vanden Heuvel discuss — what would he urge the 44th president to do if he had his/her ear next November? His answer was clear and quick: Cut the Gordian knot of money that’s strangling our politics and policies. “There are no victimless crimes,” he concludes, meaning that there are huge public costs when polluters, defense contractors and the Business Roundtable control environmental policies, armament policies and tax policies by their lush campaign contributions. In other words, nearly all other reforms depend on this primary reform, even if it’s not part of the 2008 presidential campaign conversation. Why talk about democracy when you can be distracted by flag pins, Rev. Wright and appeasement?
As seen from the excerpt below and the audio, Moyers is not optimistic in the short term about accomplishing this fundamental change, comparing it to the anti-slavery struggle in the 1830s. His sober analysis has an historical basis. Recall how in 1993 there was a pro-reform Democratic president, Speaker and Majority Leader yet no campaign finance reform was enacted when congressional leaders convinced a young, new president to hold off.
So if the political stars are again in alignment in 2009 — and there are again Democratic majorities for change in Washington — what will be different? Now there’s a public disgusted by the corruptions and crimes of the Republican crowd of the past eight years, as turnouts and polls indicate. And there are also real successes to build on, like the clean money election law in Arizona and the matching public funding system of New York City. Hence the Durbin bill in the Senate that seeks to implement the best approaches to ending the golden rule of politics — he who has the gold, rules.
When politicians become more afraid of voters than donors — and when a new Democratic president and Congress show the backbone and solidarity toward changing the money game that Bush-Hastert-Lott did in changing the tax code — we’ll be closer to the Story of Democracy that Bill Moyers has spent his life explaining and pursuing.
EXCERPTS:
Listen to the show for free here.
MOYERS: Q: In the first chapter of your book, you write that while progressives need to propose a lot of reforms, what America really needs most in the 21st Century is a new story — and the story is Democracy. What did you mean by that?
“Well the story that’s been told for the last 25 years — the story that Ronald Reagan and the right have told — is that free markets are the answer to all of our problems, that America has the muscle of an empire and should flex it, and that everybody’s getting rich in America because the system is working. And of course that’s not true, That’s the story told from the top down. But the true answer to organized money is organized people, how people have to stand up and fight for their own rights as guaranteed by The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.”
MOYERS: Q: Can you give us a democracy report card on the Bush / Cheney administration?
“We are spoiling our nest, the Earth that sustains us. And the administration has placed the government in the hands of the industries that it is supposed to monitor. The gap between people at the top and people at the bottom grows larger everyday. As Vice President Cheney said in an interview many years ago after they passed the big tax cut for the wealthy, ‘we deserve it’.”
MOYERS: Q: You’ve been a big proponent over the years for public financing for public elections. What’s the chance that can happen in ‘09?
“Mark, I became interested in campaign finance reform because I read the book you wrote 30 years ago, Who Runs Congress? That book opened my mind even though I had been in Washington for seven years… You would think at the measure of any democratic system of politics would be its ability to address the problems that it has created for itself. And we cannot do that because money has a monopoly over the decisions of those in power. I’m pessimistic at the moment but I am not fatalistic, because I think we are in the drive for public funding where the abolitionists were in the 1830s or the women’s suffragettes were shortly after The Civil War. This is a long march toward a fundamental reform of a system that has gone terribly awry. It will take long-term commitments, the pursuit of a moral idea, that representation requires controlling the amount that can be raised and spent. It will require a couple of generations, I think Mark, before we get it. But we have to get it or, like slavery and inequality, it will be the issue that brings us down.”
MOYERS: Q: In 1988 we saw how exploitation of Willy Horton and the flag helped defeat a Democratic Greek nominee named Mike Dukakis; in ‘08 we see how Reverend Wright and the flag again is being used against a potential black nominee in Obama. What is your level of optimism that should Obama be the nominee, America in 2008 won’t be as gullible or easily distracted as in 1988?
“During the West Virginia Primary of this week, I heard a BBC report with some very frank responses from voters down there who said, in that West Virginia accent, ‘down here we don’t think much of black people, we’re not likely to vote for them.’ I mean there is latent as well as overt racism still prevalent in America. But it’s not what it was in 1988, when the Bush people ran the Willy Horton ad. There is a greater appreciation of our diversity.”
MOYERS: Q: Bill did you ever seriously think of running for president or any office?
“My seven years in government and politics were a detour. I set out at the age of 16 to be a journalist. That’s really all I wanted to do. And convergence and coincidence brought me into politics in 1960. I wanted to be a political journalist, that’s how I got to Washington in the first place. But as a young man I got caught up in that campaign and in organizing The Peace Corps, and then by the tragedy of John F. Kennedy’s assassination thrust into The White House with my mentor Lyndon Johnson. But as soon as I had the opportunity, January of 1967, only three and a half years after I’d been in The White House, I left because I had the opportunity to get back to journalism, to come to New York and be the publisher of Newsday. I’ve never looked back.”
VANDEN HEUVEL: Q: Katrina, we just heard Moyers’s closing comments on how he never ran for office because, in effect, he would rather “write than be president.” Tell us your view about Bill’s career as a journalist in the past now and going forward.
“I think of Bill Moyers as a kind of secular prophet of our time. He’s our media conscience. He’s someone who’s been close and in the belly of the beast, he has seen power as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. And he talks openly how after that experience it took a while to get his footing in journalism. But he has used that perch to talk about a morality in our politics, not hucksterism, but a morality about money and power. And what he does so well is explain that our deeper mission as journalist is to uncover the news that powerful people, whether in government or corporate life, would prefer to keep hidden.”
HUFFINGTON: “And he’s probably one of the very few people in America who can use emotional language, who can not just use dry words but somehow capture the imagination with what he says.”
HUFFINGTON: Q: If Democrats go from a 30 seat to a 50 seat majority in the House — which might happen given the recent Democratic wins in Republican districts in special, off-year elections — and from a one seat majority in the Senate to 56-57 Democratic votes in the Senate, which is nearly filibuster proof, doesn’t that create a realigning moment and opportunity for a new America?
“There is something pretty fundamental that’s going on, which is a new center in American politics and I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to it. A lot of the positions that used to be considered left-wing — bring the troops home, universal health care, some form of corporate responsibility, doing something about global warming — are now solidly mainstream. That’s really the reality that John McCain is dealing with.”
VANDEN HEUVEL: Q: What do you think of what Bush said in Israel about Obama types engaging in appeasement with terrorists, which was then seconded by McCain?
“You have a president who has done more to setback U.S. security in the Middle East than anyone in our memory, and he has become the smearer-in-chief. I thought of John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist, who wrote for Kennedy in that great American University speech in 1963, ‘Never negotiate out of fear and never fear to negotiate.’ And I thought that Obama’s push back suggests he is ready to fight and fight hard for leadership that this country so desperately needs”
HUFFINGTON: Q: Is there a chance that a referendum will overturn the California Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage — and will this decision have an impact on the 2008 presidential race?
“First of all, yes, there is definitely a chance that a referendum would overturn it. The right is already making noises. But in terms of whether it will impact the election, I don’t really think so. We’re in a different reality. People know that these are really terrible times for millions of Americans, that we are trapped in a war that we cannot win. So I don’t really know if the right can have as much success riling up people over same-sex marriage as they’ve done in the past.” ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
May 19th, 2008