The immigration debate in the country is one of the more complex issues we face as a nation today. It’s about border security in a post-9/11 world, law and order, race, human rights and the economy. In an odd and rare juxtapositon, Senator Kennedy sponsored the Senate bill that was backed by the pro-business White House but not by socially conservative Republicans. It seems like everyone has their own angle. Kennedy wants to “take care” of immigrant communities and end the vigilante actions of citizen border patrols. The Bushies want a steady stream of cheap labor.
Top U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist R. Bruce Josten said this week that the immigration issue is “divisive in the Republican base, it’s divisive in the Democratic base, it’s divisive in the business community. It splits organized labor, it splits the immigration community.”
Republican senators who backed the immigration bill felt particularly exposed to fierce attacks from conservative activists in their home states, including talk show hosts and local GOP officials.
It was this groundswell of public reaction that stymied the legislative process and left Reid, Kennedy and Bush holding their jocks this week. With all this confusion, let’s turn to Vermont’s Independent Senator, Bernie Sanders, for his view of the issue.
What most concerns me about this legislation are the provisions that would bring low-wage workers into this country in order to depress the wages of American workers, which are already in decline. With poverty increasing and the middle-class shrinking, we must not force American workers into even more economic distress.
The CEOs who want this bill aren’t even embarrassed by their hypocrisy. One day they shut down plants with high-skilled, well-paid American workers, and move to China where they pay desperate people 50 cents an hour. The next day, they have the nerve to come before the U.S Congress and tell us that they can’t find skilled workers to do the jobs that they need. Give me a break.
Sanders said on C-SPAN that the same business forces that supported NAFTA are supporting the Bush/Kennedy agenda on immigration. That’s a bad sign.
BBC News reports on Amnesty International’s efforts to keep censorship from the interwebs.
“The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers,” said Tim Hancock, Amnesty’s campaign director.
“Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.
More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts,” he said.
According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
CNN is reporting that U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin—Karl Rove’s handpicked choice for U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas—has resigned under the weight of scandal.
Of course, CNN gives up very little information on this character and no information on why he’s stepping aside. For that, we must turn to investigative reporter Greg Palast, who recently mentioned Griffin in a Buzzflash interview.
Of course, the reason my book was subpoenaed is that it has to do with the US prosecutor firings. The prosecutor firings were 100% about influencing elections — not about loyalty to Bush, which is what The New York Times wrote. The administration team couldn’t tolerate appointees who wouldn’t go along with crime. In the book I present the evidence that Karl Rove directed a guy named Tim Griffin to target suppressing the votes of African American students, homeless men, and soldiers. Nice guy. They actually challenged the votes and successfully removed tens of thousands of legal voters from the voter rolls, same as they did in 2000. But instead of calling them felons, they said that they had suspect addresses.
Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney, said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.†And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is — badda-bing — U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying — it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.
Chicago-based In These Times offers a look at a political struggle taking place in Chicago’s city government.
Chicago’s labor unions decided to send Mayor Richard M. Daley a message: The “city that works†doesn’t work for working families. In the February and April elections, the labor movement broke with the city’s fabled but feeble Democratic machine, and helped oust key Daley allies and elect seven new members to the 50-seat city council.
Unions spent roughly $3 million and fielded a political operation stronger than Daley’s that backed challengers to the mayor’s council allies.
University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor Dick Simpson says, the new council bloc will be pushing a “working-class, middle-class agenda, as opposed to the global economy tilt of the Daley administration.â€
According to Chicago Tribune, Chicago is governed under a “weak mayor, strong council” system. But that hasn’t been the case for much of Daley’s 18 years in power, with critics contending the council has all-too-humbly served as a rubber stamp for the popular mayor.
We watched Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp last night. It was frightening to see just how serious the radical right is about the ongoing Culture War in this nation.
There are many poignant (or scarring, depending on one’s point of view) moments in the film. One of the most telling is the scene from New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Pastor Ted Haggard appears in the film and we learn, among other things, that he has a standing call every Monday with President Bush. Of course, Haggard has since been embroiled in a high-profile scandal involving homosexual prostitution and methamphetamine use. Oops.
I kept asking myself throughout the screening, “How did the filmmakers get this kind of access?” In the interview presented above, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady say they came to the film with no pre-determined agenda, which is a bit hard to believe given their status as sophisticated New Yorkers. Agenda, or no, the film is near perfect in its revelations.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich is a fearless man and a true American patriot. True patriots fight to uphold The U.S. Constitution at all costs. I admire him. By the way, Dennis is running for President again. And while he likely won’t win the Democrat nomination, the more support he gets now the more progressive the Dem’s platform will be going into the general election.
On the eve of the season’s first Presidential debate tomorrow night in Oranegburg, SC, I thought I’d take a look at what really matters—the number of MySpace friends each candidate has to his or her name.
But hey, let’s not say that numbers are everything. What kind of friends do these politicians attract? That must count for something (not at the polls, of course). With this in mind, Edwards the Handsome looks good. He has Liz for Edwards [& a better America] in his corner, for instance. Liz is 16, attractive, likes good music and isn’t afraid to express her progressive values. One of the stickers on her MySpace page reads, “I’m Straight, Not Narrow.” Another reads, “Born Okay the First Time.” Liz is too young to vote, but she’s already an influencer. Maybe there’s hope for America yet.
For the past few years I’ve been saying in private how I think the nation is sliding towards fascism. I don’t like saying it, nor do I enjoy contemplating this thesis. It’s sickening to examine; yet if we are to remain free, we must have the resolve to do just that. So, I am heartened today to find Naomi Wolfe’s treatise on the subject, published by The Guardian (outside the U.S., of course).
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
Wolfe then goes on to list 10 steps, a “blueprint” she calls it, that leads a nation into fascism.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law
She argues in detail that the Bush administration is engaged in ALL of these atrocities against our history and our people. We all need to judge for ourselves the merit of her claims. Personally, I feel that claims 4, 8, 9 and 10 are beyond reproach. And while I’m mad about all 10 points, number 8–control the press–is for me a particularly poignant issue. For instance, there is so little press coming out of Iraq. The only TV news organization with any credibility on the topic is Frontline on PBS, a program Newsday calls “Television’s last fully serious bastion of journalism.”
We just spent 10 action-packed days in Austin for SXSW. Austin is a great American city (GAC)—one we hadn’t visited in four years. During South By there are a million places to be and even more things to do. It’s a challenge to shrink it all down to manageable portions. But one way to do this is to focus on a neighborhood. To go hyper local, as it were. And there’s no better place in Austin to do this than on South Congress Avenue.
The hilly neighborhoods that flank the east and west sides of South Congress are populated with street after street of classic bungalows built in the 1920s and 1930s. Many have been remodeled. Others wait for the tender loving care of new well-heeled owners.
Given that we live in a gated community with strict regulations requiring conformity, it was a pleasure to see Austinites freely flying their freak flags. We rented a lovely cottage in Travis Heights for our stay, and while there the neighbor across the street placed a sign in her yard that read, “No War. No Empire. No Occupation.†I want one of those! We can’t place it in our front yard for all Rose Hill to see, but we can place it in our front window to remind ourselves that we’re not alone in the fight to save America, and maybe our sanity in the process.
Anna G. Arutunyan, an editor at the Moscow News, writing about the Russian blogosphere for The Nation, reports that 700,000 LiveJournal users post in Cyrillic, making them second only to English speakers.
The LiveJournal community in Russia is known as Zhivoi Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short. Arutunyan says Russian bloggers are becoming a lively alternative to mainstream media, and they’re using the site as an online organizing tool for offline protests.
LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick first visited Moscow last October when his company, Six Apart, announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP-Fabrik, which would service the enormous Cyrillic sector. What struck him was the social magnitude of ZheZhe and the serious content of its journal entries. In America, “LiveJournal is lots of people writing to ten people [each, and] reading each other,” he told me. In ZheZhe this is magnified into thousands of readers. What for Americans is an electronic diary accessible to a few chosen acquaintances became, for Russians, a platform for forging thousands of interconnected virtual “friends.” And Fitzpatrick believes it has potential as a tool for activism. “I really appreciate what it is as a political platform.”
What ZheZhe seems to illustrate is that a crucial aspect of civil society is not just the freedom to report on what you see but the ability to get people inspired enough to react. Russians are already notorious for their centuries-old communal spirit–or sobornost. ZheZhe might be one of the technologies that will finally get them to act on it.
For additional user-generated content from Russian, check out RuTube.
