Denia remembers: “I was really scared. I would say: “Dear God, what am I going to do with a newborn here? He’ll die in this freezing cold. It was so cold, and the worst thing was that they wouldn’t give us enough blankets… And how could I get enough rest if resting is prohibited here? I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself properly the way one should after giving birth. I was really worried.” Given an $18,000 bond that they could not afford to pay, she despaired at the thought of giving birth in prison.

The rise of family detention

Unfortunately, Denia’s experiences are not unique. The U.S. has been detaining families since March 2001. In an effort to end what was labeled the ‘catch-and-release’ policy — wherein migrants with immigration violations were given a mandate to appear in court and then released back into the community — the Department of Homeland Security under Michael Chertoff began detaining all immigrants without documents — even those with small children. The first facility for families was an 84-bed converted nursing home in Berks County, PA. At Berks, families were separated by age and gender and slept in dorm-style rooms, 2–8 per room. (Children under 5 slept with their parent.) But even with Berks open, there was not enough room for all the families ICE was detaining. Some were still being released. Others were separated — adults sent to adult facilities while children as young as 6 months old were sent to children’s facilities or foster care. After 9/11, DHS announced it needed more room to expand, and turned to long-time partner Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for solutions.

The largest for-profit corrections company in the country, CCA is best known for its infamous failed bid to take over the corrections operations of the entire state of Tennessee. However, by 2000 CCA had hit hard times and its stocks were at an all-time low. In July 2005, it had been forced to shutter the T. Don Hutto Detention Facility — a medium-security prison in Texas — due to lack of demand. CCA jumped at the government’s offer to pay $2.8 million a month to house immigrant families. In May 2006, it reopened the prison as the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility. Little had changed except the name and the population. Razor wire still laced the fencing, though now with wooden playgrounds in the yard and painted murals in the halls.

“I was shocked. It was like nothing I had ever seen,” said Barbara Hines, director of the University of Texas Immigration Clinic and one of the first to visit Hutto. Frances Valdez, a former UT Immigration Clinic student, adds: “It was surreal. It was everything I had already experienced in other jails, but here was this baby. I would go out [to Hutto] asking [the inmates] about their immigration issues and … they started telling me about the conditions… They were like, ‘Hey, I can’t be here, get me out of here.’ My kids are getting sick, and they can’t eat the food and I can’t eat the food, and they separate us at night and they yell at us and they only give us 15 minutes to eat and my children are really scared and crying and it’s horrible.” Other reports from initial visits describe children in prison garb, poor sanitation, limited education for the children, only one hour of access to fresh air and recreation, and armed guards threatening the families.

Denia’s 5-year-old daughter remembers: “For me it was terrible because I would always dream at night that they were yelling at my mother and they were going take her to another jail. And they had told us that mothers who misbehave and take extra cookies in their pockets [for their kids to eat] would be sent somewhere else and …that they would take the children away from their mothers.

Word spread about the facility and outrage grew. An early report of the rape of an inmate by a guard mobilized neighbors. Local activists from Williamson County and nearby Austin began staging candlelight vigils and protests. Representatives from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children testified to Congress about its findings at Hutto, recommending the facility be closed immediately. Jorge Bustamante, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, attempted an investigation on conditions in Hutto and was denied access. Two documentaries were made, and screenings staged across the country. Articles appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Economist, salon.com, and local papers.

In March 2007, the ACLU and UT Law Clinic waged a lawsuit against ICE maintaining that children were being held in inhumane conditions. Several months later, ICE settled and pledged improvements to facility. Education and recreation times increased, pregnant women were allowed more food, and families permitted to close the door to their rooms as they slept. CCA officials maintain that reforms at Hutto had been underway already and were not due to the lawsuit.

Immigrant detention continued to expand throughout the Bush years. Plans were announced for three similar facilities to be built in other parts of the country, and rumors spread of families held in other unauthorized facilities.

With Obama’s election, hopes soared that the new administration would usher in comprehensive change in immigration policy. In August of this year, ICE Secretary John Morton announced a reworking of the nation’s immigration jail network into a “truly civil detention center.” In August 2009, ICE announced Hutto was to stop taking families, and that plans for three additional family detention facilities were to be scrapped. Obama’s call for progressive reform was, it seemed, coming to fruition. By September 17th, all families had left the facility.

Family Detention Under Obama

Today, Hutto looks pretty much the same as it always has: a drab building tucked just out of town, sandwiched between a train car storage yard and fields of Texas beef cattle. The razor wire is gone, and freshly painted murals inside the facility depict smiling cartoon animals, a reminder to visitors of its former occupants. Hutto is back at maximum occupancy, though this time with women. Even before the last of the families were out, CCA had worked a new contract with ICE to house women from its other immigrant detention facilities at Hutto.

“By more fully utilizing the facility’s capacity and consolidating the female populations from multiple facilities, this change will yield substantial savings each month, “ ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said. And indeed, current reforms seem driven as much by the bottom line as by humanitarian concerns. By ending family detention at Hutto, ICE will save nearly $900,000 per month in contract costs.

The question remains, though: Where are arrested families going today? According to ICE, detained families will now be housed at Berks Family Residential Center in PA. Yet not a single family from Hutto made it to Berks; all were either deported or released. And at an 84-bed capacity, it is hardly sufficient for current needs, let alone for future expansion. Compounding this is an August announcement in the Reading Eagle that Berks County commissioners “are considering getting out of the alien-housing business.” New federal regulations prohibit governmental agencies from turning a profit on these types of services, and the county is just breaking even.

According to ICE spokesperson Carl Rusnok, today “each family… is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The Berks Residential Family Facility is the only facility ICE now uses to house families. Families that are encountered may be placed at Berks, placed on an ‘alternative to detention’ or issued a notice to appear before a federal immigration judge and released on their own recognizance.”

But Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership worries: “I think it is still unclear what is happening to people apprehended at the border. ICE says it is sending people to Berks, but I think there is some concern ICE may facilitate a new family detention center. I think it is important to look critically at Berks… and see if conditions are adequate or if people are being held for long periods of time. Is Berks another 84 beds that ICE doesn’t have to use?” Libal adds: “The advocacy community is ready to fight for increased use of alternatives rather than increased family detention.”

Others worry that ICE has no intentions of limiting detention, only of avoiding the flashpoints that caused public outcry in the past. This spring, it released a request for comments on standards for a family residential facility, leading some to suggest that it will be building its own facilities. “ICE says they are in the process of developing a new assessment tool that will help them determine whether a family can be released, or placed into an alternatives program pending resolution of their status instead of being detained,” says Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refuge Commission.¹ “They have told us in the meantime that they are releasing families and using alternatives to detention.”

Alternatives to detention- such as supervised release and ankle-bracelet monitoring- allow a family to remain in the community while greatly improving the chances they’ll make their court hearing. It also saves the government a substantial sum of money: the most expensive alternatives to detention cost $14 per day, compared with detention rates that can exceed $100 per day.

“In general, ICE seems to be moving away from subcontracting its detention needs out to private companies and local jails,” said Lauren Martin, doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. This continued reliance on detention “indicates a lot of continuity between Bush and Obama. They’re going to build facilities for low-risk populations like asylum seekers, families, etc, and actually expand capacity.”

Though all sides agree that Hutto is better than it was when it initially opened, it’s hard to find such enthusiasm about the broader picture. “Even though Hutto no longer holds families, there’s still 512 women being held there. That’s not something that anyone would have advocated for. Beyond that, here they haven’t made any moves to shut down or improve the most egregious conditions in Texas detention centers… There’s a lot of skepticism,” contended Martin.

A recently report by Dr. Dora Schriro, former director of the ICE Office of Detention Policy, focuses federal priorities on detainee care and uniformity at detention centers. The report recommends that ICE establish standards and assessment tools for its detention facilities, improve medical care, and provide federal oversight of its detention operations — all goals lawyers and activists have been calling for.

But with nearly 380,000 immigrants detained in ICE custody a year — 30,000 on any given day in 300 facilities nationwide — it is clear that Obama has not brought a shift away from detention, only a repeal of some of the worse malpractices of the Bush administration. Where family detention will go from here, no one knows for sure. “ICE has made clear that they plan to issue [a Request For Proposals] and open a new facility, one that they say will be better suited to families with young children. It is still unclear what that means,” says Michelle Brane. “For the present, we are all still waiting for answers from ICE.”

1. The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children has since changed its name to Women’s Refugee Commission.

This means that no war has broken out, no suicide bomb has exploded, no Qassam rocket has been launched at Sderot. Ahmadinejad has not test-fired a new missile that can reach Tel Aviv. Just another murder.

Not that Israel is the world’s murder capital. We shall have to work much harder to reach the heights of New York or Moscow, not to mention Johannesburg. Statistics even show our murder rate is declining.

But lately Israel has been shocked by a series of exceptionally brutal murders. A husband took revenge on his wife by killing his little daughter and burying her in a forest. A man who lived with the wife of his son killed her daughter, his own granddaughter, put her little body in a suitcase and threw it into Tel Aviv’s Yarkon river. A son who quarreled with his wife killed her and her mother, cut up both bodies and dispersed the parts in garbage bins. A young man who had a quarrel with his mother killed her, and then went off to kill his brother, too. A man in his 70s killed his wife in her sleep with a hammer.

In recent weeks, there were two cases that trumped even these atrocities.

Damian Karlik, an immigrant from Russia who worked as head waiter in a Russian restaurant, was dismissed for theft and decided to take revenge on the owners, Russian immigrants like him. He went to their apartment and stabbed to death six people, one after another – the owner and his wife, their son and his wife and their two small grandchildren.

An immigrant from the US called Jack Teitel, an inhabitant of one of the most extreme West Bank settlements, has now confessed to the killing some years ago of two random Palestinians. He returned briefly to America, and, after coming back, put bombs into police cars. Why? Because the police were protecting gays and lesbians. He is also suspected of killing two traffic policemen for the same reason. He also claimed responsibility for the mass killing of gays in a Tel Aviv club (though that may be empty bragging). He planted a bomb in the home of some Messianic Jews (Jews who regard Jesus as the Messiah) and grievously injured a 15-year-old. He tried to kill the leftist professor Ze’ev Sternhell with another bomb which wounded him.

What is so special about these two cases is that they involved new immigrants who were allowed into Israel in spite of already being under investigation for crimes in their homelands.

The Law of Return accords every Jew the right to immigrate (“make Aliyah”) to Israel, where he or she automatically receives Israeli citizenship on arrival. But even according to this law, the Minister of the Interior can reject people suspected of serious crimes.

This makes the case of Karlik especially interesting. He was suspected in Russia of armed robbery, but the organization in charge of issuing Israeli immigration permits in Russia asserts that they did not know about it.

This organization, Nativ (“path”), was active in the Soviet Union as one of the Israeli secret services, like the Mossad and Shin Bet. Its particular job was to infiltrate Jewish communities and induce Jews to come to Israel.

Apart from this, Nativ was also engaged, of course, in espionage. It is no secret that for decades immigrants arriving from the Soviet Union were interrogated exhaustively by the Shin Bet about military, economic and other installations in their former homeland. The precious information thus gathered ensured Israel a high standing in the Western intelligence community.

After the collapse of the Communist regime, Nativ was to be disbanded, but like every threatened organization it fought for its life. It was decided to leave it intact and put it in charge of immigration to Israel from all the former Soviet republics. They now have to make sure that immigrants are kosher Jews according to religious law.

The religious credentials of the immigrants interest Nativ much more than any criminal record they may have. It seems Nativ has no contacts with the Russian police, who probably suspect it of other activities.

Thus it happens that a person like Karlik, a man under investigation for robbery with violence, was found suitable for immigration. His ethnic pedigree was impeccable. After his arrival in Israel, the Russian authorities officially applied for his extradition for robbery, but the request was denied. The escaped robber was issued a license for a gun and allowed to work as a guard.

Teitel’s case is similar. True, in the US there is no Nativ, but the logic of those in charge of emigration to Israel is the same: to bring immigrants without asking unnecessary questions. According to religious law, a Jew remains a Jew even if he sins.

These affairs shine a spotlight on one of the guiding principles of the Zionist establishment: to bring Jews to Israel, whatever the price. Statistics must show that this year – or any other year – a record number of Jews have “made Aliyah”. In many communities, the bottom of the barrel is scraped in order to bring more Jews. Emissaries find “lost tribes” of Jews in Peru and Ethiopia, India and China.

In this situation, there is an understandable temptation to overlook the criminal past of would-be immigrants. So what if somebody, a kosher Jew, has robbed a bank or mistreated children? In Israel he will perhaps mend his ways. Or if somebody was put on trial abroad for illegal arms deals, money laundering and/or selling blood-stained diamonds – he is welcome, and if he brings his millions with him, the leaders of the state will be happy to be photographed in his company.

That is true, of course, only for an immigrant who is a Jew according to the Halakha (religious law). If he is a Goy, the story is quite different. That is the province of the leader of the Shas party, Eli Yishai.

In the present Israeli government there are several candidates for the title of Racist in Chief. An objective jury would be hard put to choose between them.

The favorite is the Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a certified racist whose entire career in Israel is built on hatred towards Arabs and foreigners. It was he who appointed as Minister of Justice the kippa-wearing lawyer Ya’akov Ne’eman, who is now busily engaged in securing the all-important position of Legal Advisor to the Government (practically the Attorney General) for a judge educated in a Yeshiva (Orthodox school), who lives in one of the more extreme settlements and who has become notorious for several rightist judgments. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, of course, is also an excellent candidate.

But the King of Racists is the Minister of the Interior. He is more dangerous than his colleagues because he has absolute power over the civil status of every person in Israel, immigration and emigration, the Register of Residents and the expulsion of foreigners. In this position he is now doing to foreigners what others have done to Jews in many countries. He is untiring in his efforts to guard the real Israel – not the “Jewish and democratic state” as it is officially defined, but rather the “Jewish and demographic state”. For this purpose he has recently created a special para-police force for the detection and deportation of illegal foreigners.

It is difficult to decide whether Yishai is an extreme fanatic or a complete cynic, or some strange combination. As matter of fact, when Shas was still a moderate party, in those distant days when its guru, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, ruled that it is permissible to give back the occupied territories, and its former leader, Aryeh Deri, was the darling of the left, Yishai, too, declared, “Yes to Oslo, Yes to the evacuation of Jews from Hebron, Yes to Arafat!” But since then much dirty water has flowed down our polluted rivers, Shas has turned into a radical right-wing party and Yishai is now the most extreme rightist in the government.

His unshakable devotion to the purity of the race arouses admiration. Hardly a day passes without some shocking news about his activities. He fights like a tiger for the expulsion of 1500 children of foreign workers who were born in Israel, who speak Hebrew and attend Israeli schools, who have no other homeland. Yishai is ready to lay down his life for their deportation.

The Interior Ministry prevents the entry of American and European citizens who bear Arab names. Officials of the UN and the EU in charge of projects for the Palestinians are normally unable to enter from Jordan (or anywhere else outside Israel), and if they somehow do obtain permission – they are then forbidden to cross the Green Line into Israel. Foreign women married to Israelis are expelled without mercy. There is no end to the examples.

In the eyes of Yishai, every son of a Thai is an enemy of the Jewish state, every daughter of a Colombian worker is a threat to the purity of the Jewish people. He has declared that the foreign workers are an “infection”, and warned that Tel Aviv is “becoming Africa”. He has disclosed that the foreigners carry frightening diseases, such as AIDS, tuberculosis and such. (And in this respect they resemble gays and lesbians, who, according to Yishai, are “sick people”.

Such a person would not remain a minister in the cabinet of the US or most European countries. In the homeland of the Nuremberg laws he would not even come close to a government position.

Recently, during the operation “Cast Lead”, Yishai demanded that we “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza” – which does not hinder him from denouncing Judge Richard Goldstone as an abominable anti-Semite. He himself, by the way, never risked his skin as a combat soldier – this national hero served as an NCO for religious services in a transport unit.

800 years ago, Rabbi Moshe Ben-Nahman, called Nahmanides, coined the phrase “Scoundrel with the permission of the Torah” – meaning a person who does despicable things which are not expressly forbidden in the Bible. I am not sure if even this appellation would fit Yishai, since the Bible forbids more than once the mistreatment of strangers – “Ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow” (Jer. 7:6), “He… loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment” (Deut. 10:18) and many other commandments to this effect.

But more important than Yishai himself is the phenomenon that he represents: the invocation of the demographic demon, which terrifies the country.

62 years after its foundation, the State of Israel is still living in fear of the “demographic danger”. It is afraid of its Arab citizens, and therefore discriminates against them in every sphere. It is afraid of the 400 thousand Russians who have come to this country with their Jewish relatives in accordance with the Law of Return, but whose mothers were not Jewish. Here is a built-in contradiction: while the Nativ operators are interested in maximizing the number of immigrants, Yishai and his people deny these very same immigrants the right to marry Jews or to be buried in Jewish graveyards. They serve in the army, but if they fall in action they cannot be buried next to their comrades.

Practically all Hebrew Israelis want a state with a Hebrew majority, where the Hebrew language, culture and tradition are cultivated. But many of us do not want a man-hunting, woman-hunting and child-hunting state, closed to asylum-seekers, where foreign workers who outstay their welcome must live in permanent fear, like our ancestors in the ghettoes.

In order to exorcise the demographic demon, my friends and I have applied to the courts and requested that the registration “Nation: Jewish” in the Ministry’s Register of Residents be replaced with “Nation: Israeli”. Our application was rejected by Judge Noam Solberg – the very same person the Minister of Justice is moving mountains to get appointed as Attorney General.

In 1998, Vern received a notice that he should leave the United States — his asylum application had been denied. Vern was devastated — he had established a life in the US, and had few ties to Guatemala. He decided to stay, and hope that his wife’s application would be approved, and that she could apply for him to legalize his status. They had another child, and continued to make their lives in Ohio. Vern rose up the ranks in the food processing plant, eventually becoming supervisor. Maria also worked there, but she worked on the line, earning less money than Vern.

Vern and his wife had a comfortable life in the US, but Vern lived in fear that immigration agents would come for him. To avoid this, he stayed out of trouble. He did everything he could to avoid problems with the police; he never drank, avoided making traffic violations, and abided by the laws at all times. He learned English, took his kids on outings every weekend, and tried to blend in as much as possible.

It wasn’t enough. One Sunday morning, two ICE agents came to Vern’s house and arrested him in front of his children — aged 12 and 9. The immigration agents were part of a Fugitive Operation Team — designed to find “fugitive aliens” — people like Vern who had ignored their deportation orders. Vern was put into detention, and, eight days later, he was in Guatemala, the country he had left eighteen years before.

Vern was never given the opportunity to explain to a judge that he had ignored his deportation order because he had already formed a family in the US, that his family depended on him to meet their daily needs, that he had worked at the same job for sixteen years, that he had never had any trouble with the law, that his two children are Americans, or that his wife was very close to attaining legal status, and thus to ensuring his own legal status. Vern had no opportunity to explain anything. He had sought entry to the United States, and had been denied admission. In one reading of the law, despite his years in the US, the fact that he entered illegally means that he never actually entered the US. As an extraterritorial subject, Vern was not afforded the Constitutional protections and due process we presume to be part of the US legal system.

Vern, like most non-citizens who face deportation, had no right to judicial review of his case. If a person entered the country illegally, he is considered to be seeking entry to the US, and not to be a person physically present in the US. As a person seeking entry, he is not entitled to Constitutional protections and judicial review in immigration proceedings. The right of the United States to deny due process to people seeking entry has merit insofar as it makes sense to avoid burdening the court systems and to protect the sovereignty of the US. However, it makes little sense to refer to a person as seeking entry when he has lived in the US for over two decades, is married to a US citizen, has US citizen children, and has few if any ties to any other country. To deny that person judicial review of his deportation order is to ignore the notions of due process and Constitutional protections that are so important to the United States. It also ignores his human right to form a family and to be with his family.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. My kids and I get to pretend that we are somebody else, wear a crazy costume, shock and surprise people for one day and then safely return to the comfort of our homes, our lives and our personal identities.

What I will tell my children that we don’t get to do is mock the experiences of millions of members of our communities by perpetuating the lies and stereotypes as reflected in the illegal alien costume. While some have observed that the extraterrestrial mask dehumanizes undocumented immigrants, perhaps even more dehumanizing is the creation of a generic costume that suggests that all undocumented immigrants are not only criminals but that they are all the same, indistinguishable. The “funny” part is the combination of an obviously fake green card that cannot disguise the alien status, which is evident in the mask, get it? The “alien” is simultaneously trying to slip one by but not smart enough to outwit the state, and is therefore imprisoned. End of story.

Absent from this generic orange pantsuit story are the complicated personal, social and political experiences of real human beings facing difficult circumstances with extraordinary courage. Absent are the specific experiences of the Guatemalan workers of a kosher meat plant who were arrested in a raid in Postville, Iowa in 2007 and unjustly charged with identity theft, despite the fact that most did not even know what a social security card was. Absent is the story of Flor Crisóstomo, a factory worker turned activist who was arrested in a raid in Chicago in 2006 and sought sanctuary in a Methodist church in 2008, which she just left his week — at risk of deportation — to continue a new phase in the struggle for the rights of all undocumented immigrants. Absent is Rigo Padilla, a model student and community member who came to the U.S. as a young boy, committed the youthful indiscretion of drinking a few beers at a party and then upon driving a few blocks back to his house, was stopped by police, and is now facing deportation to a country that he barely remembers.

Also absent from this story is a state that has been far from benevolent or neutral, importing labor from south of the border while failing to find a just way in which to regularize and legalize this flow; attempting to criminalize undocumented immigrants when they have only committed a civil violation; empowering local police to act as immigration officers, leading to the deportation of thousands of people who are racially profiled, stopped for minor infractions and then deported; and placing detained immigrants with common criminals in privatized prisons, where they often face harsh conditions and egregious human rights violations.

The truth is that I know too many faces, too many names, too many stories of detention, deportation, family separation and pain to “get” the generic illegal alien joke. Perhaps you know some too. It is time to teach our children that there is nothing laughable about the uncertain fate of 12 million people and their families in a context of increasingly restrictive immigration policy, egregious human rights violations, massive fear, annual family separation and financial devastation of hundreds of thousands who are not wearing a mask, but are in fact exposed and vulnerable every day of their lives, cannot escape their circumstances, and cannot rely on the comfort provided by slipping out of a costume.

This year just before Halloween, I will do something different. I will take my boys to the national Mexican Museum here in Chicago to visit the altars created to commemorate the Day of the Dead, a Mexican tradition designed to remember a person who is no longer with us, allowing us to reflect on the inevitability of death while contemplating the precious value of life. There, we will remember not only the dead in our families, but the 104 immigrants who have died in detention, the thousands of people who have died trying to cross the border, and the two young immigrant men who were beaten to death for being immigrants, Luis Ramirez of Pennsylvania, and Marcelo Lucero of New Jersey.

I will tell my sons that these people were human, not alien, that their lives were as valuable as any others and that their tragic deaths should never be forgotten, not even on trick-or –treat day. I want them to learn that there are some things that we just don’t laugh about.

Fortunately, though, the cause of immigrants rights is still alive at the grass roots.

Updating the harassment.

Bill Clinton took militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border to a new level. His buildup has caused many immigrants to lose their lives by crossing at the physically harsh, but less patrolled, Arizona border. George W. Bush expanded upon what Clinton initiated.

Obama is on the same track. In April, his administration announced plans to expand a $1.1 billion program to check the immigration status of everyone arrested for a crime. This Bush-era policy broadens the power of local authorities to enforce federal law.

Obama intends to further develop Bush’s “zero tolerance” program, which puts undocumented immigrants caught crossing the border into detention. He will also continue to put billions toward more border patrol and the construction of high-tech “security fence” dividing people along the border.

During the Bush years, workplace raids increased dramatically. While these are still happening, Obama has announced a shift in focus to the prosecution of employers who hire unauthorized workers. This puts pressure on employers to participate in the mostly voluntary E-Verify system, which became mandatory for federal subcontractors on Sept. 8.

E-Verify checks the immigration status of potential workers by way of a federal database (which is acknowledged to flag huge numbers of people who are actually authorized to work in the U.S.). E-Verify loss of employment is not as visible as armed raids, but it has the same results. Obama wants the program to become mandatory for all employers.

Under Obama, just one division of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Flight Operations Unit, is deporting an average of 4,200 immigrants every week, up from 3,700 last year.

Accommodating to the racist right wing.

Like Bush, Obama says he believes that undocumented people in the U.S. who want legal status should go to the back of a very long, extremely slow line, behind people applying while still in their home countries.

He also has said that applicants must learn English. Although most immigrants acquire enough English to get by, many do not have the time or resources to take classes. Learning English should remain a voluntary learning skill, not an unconstitutional requirement.

Additionally, Obama wants immigrants to pay fines and back taxes as part of gaining legal resident status — which puts this goal out of reach for most immigrants.

Obama is silent about the devastating free-trade policies that force immigrants to come to the U.S. just to survive. And he has nothing to say from his presidential bully pulpit about the anti-immigrant racism that is directed today primarily toward Latin Americans from many quarters, including media blights like CNN’S Lou Dobbs. Instead, the president caters to anti-immigrant sentiment.

This was obvious in his Sept. 9 healthcare speech, when he sternly reassured Congress that his plan would not cover “illegals” — deliberately adopting the right wing’s term. This validates the racist myth that immigrant workers deplete tax dollars when, in truth, immigrants contribute more than their fair share.

Where to look for change?

The economy is in a perpetual state of crisis — poverty, sexist and racist inequality, declining profits, unemployment, foreclosures — none of which are the fault of immigrants! But Democratic politicians, just like Republicans, will do whatever they can to bail out their profit system.

Throwing money at big corporations to build and secure borders or run private immigration detention centers is one strategy. Another is to ensure the flow of cheap labor. Accordingly, it would not be surprising should Obama follow in the Clinton/Bush footsteps by calling for some sort of “guest-worker” bill — in reality, legislation for indentured servitude.

Obama is obligated to act in the interest of the business elite, making unlikely any moratorium on raids, detentions, and deportations — much less unconditional amnesty, open borders, or the dismantling of ICE. The moral of the story: support for Democrats needs to end in favor of political parties that actually represent the needs of workers, truly independent from both parties of big business.

Look too toward a bold immigrant rights movement to turn things around. The power of such a movement shone through during the 1996 student walkouts and big marches, which prevented the imminent enactment of a guest-worker bill and greatly increased solidarity for immigrants by organized labor. Many specific acts of resistance are keeping the spirit of that movement alive today.

Community organizations across the U.S. have staged protests against raids. In Washington state, groups protested an ICE raid at an auto parts factory. In California, residents at the Woodlawn Mobile Home Park demanded an end to police brutality against immigrants who are fellow residents. In Ohio, a group rallied against raids at Casa Fiesta restaurants.

The Stop the Checkpoints coalition in western Washington state has mobilized hundreds against border patrol checkpoints and immigration raids. Their organizing led the local sheriff to announce that his office will not cooperate with Homeland Security.

In Texas, several protests took place outside the T. Don Hutto facility, a private detention center that also jailed young children. It was recently announced that families will no longer be held at this notorious prison.

Obama will never deliver on immigrant rights. That’s a job for immigrants themselves, unionists, socialists, and other social-change groups, united in a common struggle to “lift all boats” by providing justice and fairness for those on the bottom.

Along with Muslims, Latinos are its prime targets, often using militarized unconstitutional tactics against vulnerable, defenseless people. Post-9/11, the Bush administration initiated them, and they continue under Obama.

On May 23, 2007, as a senator, Obama said: “The time to fix our broken immigration system is now. We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace.”

Then on July 8, 2009, Wall Street Journal online writer Cam Simpson said on politicalforum.com: “The Obama administration (today) said it would move forward with a Bush-era program aimed at cracking down on illegal-immigrant workers and their employers, just as Republicans in the Senate are pushing legislation that would mandate a similar move.”

With about 10% of DHS’ $55 billion FY 2010 budget, ICE will continue targeting Latinos at the border, at work sites, and at their homes with some recent examples below:

– in a September 18 press release, ICE’s Miami field office announced it “removed” 423 “criminal aliens from 36 countries” in August, charging them with drugs traffickin, robbery, and various fraudulent activities;

– on September 11, 23 alleged gang members faced deportation after being being arrested in a four-day operation; unmentioned was whether any of them are undocumented;

– on August 25, 15 Latinos were arrested in San Antonio, TX on alleged drugs trafficking charges;

– on August 11, 50 arrests were made on charges of “enter(ing) into sham marriages to gain citizenship,” including those undocumented and their US citizen wives;

– on July 31, 53 alleged South Florida gang members and associates were arrested in a two-day operation; some “were found to be in violation of the immigration law (and) were processed for removal from the United States;”

– on July 31, eight San Francisco area alleged gang members and associates were seized “during a six hour surge;” some were “foreign nationals who are being processed for deportation;”

– on June 30, 116 alleged gang members, their associates and “immigration status violators” were targeted in a five day operation in Houston, Beaumont, and Corpus Christi, TX;

– on June 30 in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, 81 others were arrested; foreign-born ones seized were from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Laos;

– on February 25, 28 “illegal workers” were arrested at Yamato Engine Specialists in Bellingham, WA during an earlier Obama administration raid; and

On February 18, the Washington Post reported that “immigration officers had been raiding targets across Prince George’s and Montgomery counties all night long in search of fugitive and criminal immigrants but only netted a handful.”

Earlier, a Baltimore ICE supervisor warned about being well behind “a Washington-mandated annual quota of 1000 arrests per team” and ordered his agents to seize more saying: “I don’t care where you get more arrests, we need more numbers,” and apparently he meant from any street corner, work place, or personal residence. An hour later, 24 Latino men were seized at a nearby 7-Eleven store.

Since established in 2003, Congress appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to let ICE “bring in tens of thousands of immigrants who have not evaded a deportation order or committed a crime….” Since then, it continued the operation, and, during 2007 and 2008, expanded tactical home entries using militarized agents for illegal warrantless raids without the consent of their owners.

On July 26, the New York Times reported that:

Federal immigration squads with shotguns and automatic weapons (are) forcing their way into citizens’ homes without warrants or lawful consent, shoving open doors and climbing through windows in predawn darkness, pulling innocent people from their beds, holding groggy occupants at gunpoint, (and) taking people away without explanation — after invading the wrong house.

This is a true account of the depths to which the Bush administration sank in its twilight, when immigration enforcement was ramped up to a feverish extreme.

Shamefully, these practices continue under Obama.

A recent New York City Cardozo School of Law Immigration Justice Clinic (IJC) study titled “Constitution on Ice: A Report on Immigration Home Raid Operations” examined the problem in New York, New Jersey, and Long Island from 2006-2008 and included other examples in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia and elsewhere. Researchers documented a nationwide assault on poor immigrant workers, the great majority being Latinos. Many times ICE broke into homes, seizing all occupants “without legal basis.”

IJC discovered a systematic pattern of misconduct “suggest(ing it) may be a widespread national phenomenon reaching beyond” the areas studied. It involves:

• illegal ICE agent entries with no legal authority;
• illegally arresting people randomly, including innocent ones in their bedrooms;
• conducting lawless searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment; and
• making arrests based on ethnicity, race, appearance, and English proficiency.

These police state tactics have no place in a democracy, yet ICE (on its web site) lists dozens of monthly swat-type raids, often against innocent people and their families in their homes. IJC described them this way:

A typical home raid has “a team of heavily armed ICE agents approaching a private residence in the pre-dawn hours, purportedly seeking an individual believed to have committed some civil immigration violation. Agents, armed only with administrative warrants, which do not grant them legal authority to enter private dwellings, then push their way in when residents answer the door, enter through unlocked doors or windows or, in some cases, physically break into homes.”

All occupants are then seized and interrogated with no legal authority, and often “no target is apprehended.” These aren’t random, standard operating procedures in violation of the Fourth Amendment that protects citizens and non-citizens alike. The Office of Detention and Removal (DRO) conducts them cooperatively with the Office of Investigations (OI), charged with investigating national security threats, immigration violations, and various other suspected crimes.

Home raid operations include:

• the National Fugitive Operations Program (NFOP) using over 100 seven-person Fugitive Operations Teams (FOTs) to target individuals for deportation;
• Operation Cross Check focusing on specific immigrant populations or ones working in certain industries like dangerous, low-paying meat packing operations, unattractive to workers able to find safer, better-paying jobs;
• Operation Community Shield (OCS) against suspected immigrant gang members; and
• Operation Predator against suspected immigrant sex offenders.

Most often, high priority targets aren’t seized. Instead, “collateral arrests of mere (suspected) immigration status violators” are made, and since 2006 the numbers expanded eight-fold because of primarily relying on home raids despite their illegality.

On April 15, 1980 in Payton v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled that “The Fourth Amendment… prohibits the police from making a warrantless and nonconsenual entry into a suspect’s home in order to make a routine (criminal or civil) felony arrest.” Such “entry… is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”

Searches are also prohibited. Only an adult resident’s consent permits either or both. Administrative warrants have no authority, and police may only interrogate suspects based on “reasonable suspicion” of unlawful activity. “In addition, agents can never rely solely on the racial or ethnic appearance or the limited English proficiency of an individual to justify a seizure.”

DHS’ own regulations cover these restrictions, and ICE’s Detention and Deportation Officer’s Field Manual states: “Warrants of Deportation and Removal are administrative rather than criminal, and do not grant the authority to breach doors. Thus informed consent must be obtained from the occupant of the residence prior to entering.”

Nonetheless, “empirical data drawn from ICE’s own arrest records (obtained by Freedom of Information Act lawsuits) strongly suggest a significant and disturbing pattern of (agency) misconduct during home raids” during which over 1000 people were seized. The evidence is alarming and shows “an unacceptable level of illegal entries” in clear violation of the law. In addition, most arrest records indicate “no basis for the initial seizure” and a disturbing racial profiling pattern against Latinos.

In recent years, defense lawyers increasingly have used suppression motions to prevent illegally obtained evidence being used. Earlier, they were rare in immigration courts, given the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza (July 5, 1984) that deportation proceedings are: “civil action(s) to determine a person’s eligibility to remain in this country… not to punish past transgressions. (As such) various protections (including suppression motions don’t generally) apply… in a deportation hearing.”

In immigration courts, they’re not standard procedures. Since 2006, however, they’re more often used because the High Court also “reasoned that the exclusionary rule may (apply) in immigration proceedings for egregious and widespread Fourth Amendment violations” even though prevailing in immigration cases remains challenging, expensive, and time-consuming.

Political and Local Law Enforcement Concerns

ICE often requests operational help from local police who complain that Fourth Amendment violations undermine their central crime suppression mission. Political leaders voice similar concerns. New York state Senator Kirstin Gillibrand said she was “appalled by some of the practices I have heard about,” and New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said, “We won’t stand for the violation of constitutional rights and racial profiling” in reacting to city raids.

In September 2007, the Nassau County Police Department pulled out of an operation it agreed to because of “serious allegations of misconduct and malfeasance.” In this case, no warrants were used, not even administrative ones. ICE fraudulently claimed they weren’t needed because consent to enter all homes was received. In response, Nassau County Police Commissioner, Lawrence Mulvey, said:

“In my 29 years of police work, I have executed countless warrants and have sought to enter countless homes. ICE’s claim that they received 100% compliance with their requests to enter is not credible even under the best of circumstances.”

Evidence Suggests a National Pattern of Constitutional Violations

Since 2006, lawsuits have been filed against ICE “in every region of the country — including two large class actions” and several with multiple defendants — all alleging a similar pattern of misconduct.

They pertain to illegally entering private homes as well as other misconduct charges. In March 2009, Jimmy Slaughter, an Arizona DHS officer, filed suit as well, stating:

“I was at home with my wife when the door bell rang. I opened the door and noticed approximately 7 uniformed ICE agents with vests and guns…. I opened the door to look at the paperwork and five agents entered my house…. The agents then told my wife to stand in the center of ‘OUR’ living room. Not once did anyone say they had a warrant.”

Numerous other instances confirm a national pattern of constitutional violations, including:

• unannounced pre-dawn raids;
• illegal entries into private homes, at times forcibly with drawn guns;
• some with administrative warrants; others with none; often with no probable cause or consent;
• unconstitutional searches and seizures;
• all occupants arrested and interrogated;
• commonplace use of excessive force; and
• at times, individuals prevented from calling attorneys.

New York Immigration Judge Noel Brennan ruled on one case saying:

It is hard for me to fathom a country or a place in which we live in which the Government can barge into one’s house without authority from the Third Branch after a probable cause finding. So for all these reasons I find that what is essentially a warrantless search in the meaning of the Fourth Amendment… was an egregious violation, and therefore I suppress all the evidence and order these proceedings terminated.

ICE’s 2006 Policy Changes

Three new memoranda issued dramatic enforcement changes that led to and facilitated nationwide home raids. Fugitive Operation Team (FOT) annual quotas were raised eight-fold (from 125 to 1000 arrests) and didn’t have to include “criminal aliens.”

Another change permitted “collateral” arrests of suspected civil immigration status violators. These actions “incentivized the pattern of unlawful behavior” and put tremendous pressure on ICE agents to deliver. As a result, home raids increased sharply and illegally. Wrongful arrests became common. Easy targets were chosen, including women and children, often at the expense of real criminals remaining at large.

Immigrants are some of “the most vulnerable of populations in this nation’s legal system.” Most are poor, are unfamiliar with the law, and many speak imperfect or limited English. Often those seized have no lawyers, are kept in detention, and are then deported summarily with no ability to pursue justice. In addition, “traditional civil remedies are (often) ineffective deterrents to unlawful ICE home raids.”

IJC Policy Recommendations

Major constitutional issues are at stake making everyone potentially as vulnerable as immigrants. If authorities can get away with constitutional violations against some, they can do it against anyone. That said, IJC recommends the following:

• home raids should only be for criminal arrests or civil ones in cases posing real risks to national security or for persons with violent criminal records;
• judicial warrants should be required, not administrative ones;
• in all cases, “high-level centralized pre-approval in advance of any home raid operation” should be required;
• if judicial warrants aren’t obtained, residents’ consent should be required after informing them “explicitly and clearly” of their right to refuse before entry is made;
• in all pre-dawn and nighttime raids, judicial warrants should be required;
• in all cases, a high-level supervisor should be involved on site;
• home raids should be videotaped;
• ICE agents should be trained on home raid procedures stressing compliance with the law at all times;
• local law enforcement agencies should be apprised of raids and their results;
• they should not be asked to participate in or facilitate lawless activities;
• emphasis should be on arresting dangerous criminals, not collateral ones to meet quotas;
• arrests should be race, ethnicity, and English proficiency neutral;
• agent misconduct should be assessed and properly addressed;
• a clear public complaint procedure should be established; and
• illegally obtained evidence should be disallowed.

Obama Administration’s Immigrant Detention Policies

On August 7, Washington Post writer Spencer Hsu headlined, “Agency Plans to Improve Oversight of Immigrant Detention” in saying the Obama administration intends to “restructure the nation’s much-criticized immigration detention system by strengthening federal oversight and seeking to standardize conditions in a 32,000-bed system now scattered throughout 350 local jails, state prisons and contract facilities.”

Since 1979, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) has represented, protected, and promoted “the rights of low income immigrants and their family members (and) earned a national reputation as a leading expert on immigration, public benefits, and employment laws affecting immigrants and refugees.”

It calls US immigrant detention centers “A Broken System” in a recent report that presents “the first-ever system-wide look at the federal government’s compliance with its own standards regulating immigrant detention facilities… based on previously unreleased first-hand reports of monitoring inspections.”

Annually, over 320,000 immigrants are incarcerated. They face enormous obstacles challenging their detention, and they’re held under conditions “as bad as or worse than those faced by imprisoned criminals.” They’re kept in three types of facilities:

• ICE owned and operated Service Processing Centers (SPCs);
• privately run Contract Detention Facilities (CDFs); and
• Intergovernmental Service Agreement Facilities (IGSAs) holding two-thirds of detainees — mostly state or county jails plus a small number in US Bureau of Prisons or other facilities.

Since 1992, immigrant detentions have increased from 6,259 to 20,000 in early 2006 to the current 31,000 total — a number that continues to grow due to policies discussed above.

NILC learned that detention standards are poorly regulated and that government efforts to monitor compliance have been “woefully deficient and in need of a major overall.” Testimony obtained from ICE employees revealed that monitoring is understaffed. Before inspections, facilities get at least 30 days notice to fix or cover up problems and abuses in advance. Multiple review levels are used, yet headquarters rarely requires violations to be corrected and often gives facilities “higher overall assessments than the review team’s original ones.”

Systemic problems were also uncovered pertaining to annual review procedures and their inadequately identifying and correcting noncompliance with acceptable standards. ICE plans to let private contractors monitor compliance, yet current failures suggest that new management will let a broken system fester and worsen as the detention population grows and overcrowded facilities get further stretched.

Despite repeated calls for reform, greater transparency, accountability, and better controls, “the government has not taken effective measures to ensure that even its nonbinding standards are met.” It shows an appalling indifference to some of the nation’s most vulnerable people, no match against a system in place to repress them.

Currently, numerous violations are systemic, serious, and numerous. They include:

(1) Visitations by family, lawyers and others

Detainee visitations are severely restricted in violation of clear constitutional and statutory rights, especially to free access to counsel and close family members.

(2) Recreation

Standards require safe recreational time for physical, mental and emotional well-being, including for those with special needs or in segregation. Yet they’re routinely denied or offered at the discretion of facility staff. In addition, programs are way inadequate, and many detainees get limited or no access to outdoor recreation and a chance to interact with others in a natural environment.

(3) Telephone access

Many facilities didn’t comply with standards. Monitoring of confidential legal calls was conducted, and restrictive time limits were imposed. Numerous facilities also prevented detainees from contacting courts, consulates, and getting access to free legal service providers.

(4) Access to Legal Material

Immigration law is so complex that good counsel is essential. Yet it’s expensive and few detainees can afford it. Instead they must rely on pro bono help if available or their own resourcefulness. Standards require facilities to have a law library and an adequate environment to research and prepare legal documents. Yet numerous facilities have none, and the limited information on hand is inadequate and outdated. Still other facilities require specific document requests, even though detainees have no way to know what applies to their case.

(5) Group Presentations on Legal Rights

Facilities are required to let authorized attorneys or representatives, on written request, conduct immigration law and detainee rights presentations. Few do it, and individual counseling is also limited.

(6) Correspondence and Other Mail

Most facilities restrict access, monitor incoming and outgoing mail, and confiscate items at times. As a result, confidential correspondence is compromised. At times, identity documents are destroyed. Detainees miss court deadlines, and they’re intimidated from freely sending and receiving mail.

(7) Administrative and Disciplinary Segregation

It’s supposed to be non-punitive isolation to ensure detainee safety or facility security. Instead it’s done punitively for extended periods for even slight rule infractions. Reports also uncovered severe privilege restrictions, unsanitary conditions, and poor health care protection for segregated detainees and the entire facility population.

(8) Disciplinary Policy

They’re supposed to protect detainees from arbitrary disciplinary actions with rules conspicuously posted so they’re known and can be obeyed. Yet most facilities don’t do it.

(9) Detainee Handbook

Facilities are required to develop and make available a “facility-specific handbook” covering policies, rules, and procedures. However, those having them “presented an inaccurate or incomplete picture of facility policy” because important information was missing, erroneous, incomplete, or inappropriate.

(10) Hold Rooms in Detention Facilities

Physical space requirements and design specifications are supposed to be followed and monitored. Yet poor compliance was found, including inadequate toilet facilities and detainees held there too long in violation of rules requiring a maximum of 12 hours.

(11) Detainee Grievance Procedures

They’re to assure detainees can file grievances with uninvolved officers without fear of retaliation. Widespread noncompliance was found, and most often facilities don’t inform detainees of their rights.

(12) Detainee Transfers

Procedures are to protect their security in transit and make a traumatic experience easier, especially when to locations remote from their families. Transfers also interfere with attorney-client relations and harm constitutionally protected due process rights.

(13) Funds and Personal Property

Rules are supposed to safeguard detainees’ money and personal property with written procedures for receiving, processing, storing, and returning them. Evidence showed instances of theft, forfeiture of funds and property, and failure to conduct audits to assure none of this would happen.

(14) Admission and Release

Official procedures protect the health, safety, and welfare of detainees. Most facilities don’t do it, including providing proper medical care and personal hygiene considerations from admission to the time of release.

NILC concluded that “the nation’s immigrant detention system is broken to its core (and) reveals pervasive and extreme violations of the government’s own detention standards as well as fundamental violations of basic human rights and notions of dignity.”

On August 6, the Obama administration announced remedial plans amounting only to a cosmetic fix for a dysfunction system. A day ahead, the New York Times headlined “US to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants” and called the effort “an ambitious plan… to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it (into) a ‘truly civil detention system.’ ”

According to ICE Assistant Secretary, John Morton, ICE will create an Office of Detention Policy and Planning (ODPP) effective immediately. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said: “This change marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to enforce immigration laws smartly and effectively. We are improving detention center management to prioritize health, safety and uniformity among our facilities while ensuring security, efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”

What’s planned, in fact, is more centralized control and better ways to track, process, incarcerate, and/or deport growing numbers of undocumented immigrants — not treat them humanely as international law and DHS/ICE regulations stipulate.

The Obama administration has expanded and intensified the same harsh Bush administration policies, and ICE’s August 6 announcement signifies nothing more than a cosmetic repackaging of a broken system.

In May, the Obama administration asked Congress for a 30% funding increase to expand the controversial Bush administration Secure Communities program (begun in December 2007) to identify, arrest, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants, mostly Latinos from Mexico and Central America.

In declaring “zero tolerance” for undocumented immigrants, he’ll also keep building the $8 billion virtual border fence, planned for hundreds of miles, and will continue the same harsh Bush administration policies.

On August 4, the Immigrant Solidarity Nework said that despite early pledges that he’d moderate them, Obama “is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.”

They call for “no-nonsense immigration enforcement” followed later in the year or early next year by immigration legislation to create a new bracero program, among other harsh measures, that immigrant rights group oppose. They also include extensive employee paperwork audits, an expanded (and much criticized) program to verify worker immigration status, and greater cooperation between federal and local authorities while rejecting proposals for legally binding rules regarding detention center conditions. Non-binding Bush administration ones still followed hold no one accountable and let detainees be treated harshly under a system described above.

In response to Obama’s decision, the National Lawyers Guild’s Paromita Shah, associate director of its National Immigration Project, said the government is “disregard(ing) the plight of the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees” by continuing a dysfunctional system. DHS “has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost dozens of lives” and shows an appalling indifference to the fate of defenseless people.

Highlighting the plight of immigrants, the National Immigrant Justice Center’s Mary McCarthy described the current detention system as a “human rights nightmare. The past administration created this, and now we need to dismantle it.” Instead, Obama officials plan to make a “broken system” worse, then harden it with discriminatory immigration reform legislation later in the year. According to University of Houston immigration law Professor Michael Olivas, “We literally have the worst of all worlds,” and nothing is being planned to improve it.

Though there is laughter there’s also poverty, for one sees only the tip of the iceberg in the Zócalo. No one has any money or, as a scruffy looking artist with a loud voice and thatched gray hair proclaimed: “No one that is, except the governor! And he’s so corrupt the Devil won’t have him in Hell!” How close in contact the artist is with the Devil, I don’t know, but one doesn’t have to have lived a long time in Oaxaca to know that cell phones, women’s slacks and Internet are merely twentieth century window dressing on a colonial cacique system of hacendero and impoverished, dependent sharecroppers.

Oaxaca’s government is one of most corrupt in a country noted for corrupt state governments. All the power is concentrated in the hands of a privileged few and very little money trickles down to the unprivileged. Oaxaca journalist Pedro Matias ruefully explains that Oaxaca does not require that a governor give an exact accounting of the billions of dollars available to him. Oaxaca’s ex-governors are among the wealthiest landholders in the state.

But the state is one of Mexico’s poorest. The central valley, where nearly half of the inhabitants live and where its capital, the city of Oaxaca, is located, is ringed by a series of mountains intersected by deep canyons that isolate many rural communities. Nearly 45 percent of the state’s more than three million 500 thousand residents are indigena; 40 percent of them speak one or more of the fifteen different native languages and 76 percent of them earn less than seventy pesos—a little more than $6 U.S. dollars—a day. The main source of revenue for the majority of rural families is money sent to them from relatives working in the United States.

“At first only the men went and they returned every winter. Then they started staying longer,” rural schoolteacher Thelma Leger explained to me. “Now the women are migrating too. Often a twelve- or thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl is left to take care of the younger children. Instead of going to school they work. It is sad. It is very, very sad.”

So great is the expectancy that young people will go to the United States to seek work that another teacher told me that parents of some of her indigena students asked that she teach them English instead of Spanish “so they would do better when they got to the ‘Other Side.’”

While officially Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz and his predecessors in office voiced consternation over the massive migration out of Oaxaca they quietly shifted government funding away from social programs. Oaxacans receive over $1 billion dollars a year in remittances of $50 to $500 sent from the United States, over 95 percent of which goes for food, housing, clothing and medical expenses that the state government no longer funds. Instead it has invested in marinas, new administrative offices, airplanes, helicopters and around-the-world visits by Ruiz and select Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI for its initials in Spanish) members.

Attempts to break what many Oaxacans call “the tyrannical power” of the privileged elite have driven governors out of office and triggered a century-long push-pull of violence, protest and repression but the elite not only controls most of the material wealth but has had the backing of the federal government—also a power elite of a select privileged few—who since they came to power through revolution early in the twentieth century fear popular uprisings and act immediately and often brutally to detain them.

How brutal and how violent was evident in October and November of 2006 when a force of nearly 5,000 federal police and military and that many or more state and municipal police swept through the city of Oaxaca, arresting, beating and torturing innocents and protesters without consideration of their ages, occupations or political affiliations. For nearly five months the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, led by the 70,000-strong Oaxaca branch of the national teachers union striking for better salaries and working conditions, had taken over the governing palaces of the city of Oaxaca and several other cities throwing the state into convulsions that forced the closing of thousands of small businesses. Tourism sank to its lowest level in sixty years nightly barricades throughout the state impeded the passing of police and paramilitary death squadrons and airlines and surface transportation severely cut back their services.

The Popular Assembly burst into being after Ruiz ordered state police backed by helicopters spewing tear gas to break up a sit-in by the teachers’ union in May 2006. Women’s committees, priests, students, indigena organizations and human rights groups rallied to support the mauled strikers. Within two weeks the Popular Assembly not only had active spokespersons and a plan of action but tens of thousands of supporters.

“That day was the parting of waters for Oaxaca,” Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. “There was only going forward, no going back.”

Although the Popular Assembly seemed to have come together by magic, Miguel Vázquez, co-founder of Oaxaca’s Services for Alternative Education, insists that the attack on the teachers encampment provided a catalyst for uniting groups that had been organizing for over twenty years. Once organized, and with a center of control in the capital city’s historical district, the Assembly voted to restore the traditional “usos y costumbres” (uses and customs) participatory way of community government and social responsibility that had been the Oaxacan way of life before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

“Under usos y costumbres,” Miguel Vázquez explains, “every community member participates in every aspect of government. There are no caciques, no leaders or chiefs. Everything is decided by assembly. Whether the community is tiny — a few dozen members — or huge, with thousands of members, those within the community assemble and make their decisions. Whatever the majority decides, that is what the community does.”

Not only are policy decisions made during the assemblies but those involved also decide what cargo (charge, or office) each community member will hold. Under usos y costumbres each male member of the community serves in a designated capacity for a predetermined length of time, usually a year. To fulfill these communal obligations an individual may serve as a policeman one year, be responsible for arranging traditional fiestas the next, be the street sweeper the year after that. (Migration has so decimated most rural communities adhering to usos y costumbres that many women now serve in their husbands’ places.)

In addition to the assigned cargos all community members practice tequio — unremunerated community service. Much like in early U.S. pioneer communities, tequio involves everything from house and fence building to road construction and childcare services. Like all other community matters projects are determined by assembly vote.

The third salient aspect of usos y costumbres is the guelaguetza: “giving.” To those whom God has been generous, and who have profited financially during the year, guelaguetza becomes a way of returning to the community some of the individual’s good fortune. The giver may build a community cistern, sponsor a fiesta or provide scholarships for high school students. And he does not expect anything but sharing in return.

Over the past 450 years most Oaxacan communities have become Roman Catholic although evangelical Protestant congregations have multiplied throughout the state. Padre Manuel Arias, the spokesperson for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, sees no contradiction between either branch of Christianity and usos y costumbres.

“Usos y costumbres,” he explains, “is a way of social organization. It is horizontal, rather than vertical. It is very similar to social conformations established by the early Christians. Many priests are, in fact, usos y costumbres advocates.”

Oaxaca law currently authorizes community self-government by means of usos y costumbres. By vote communities elect either usos y costumbres or the partido (political party) system. But no matter which they choose their independence is very constricted.

“Ruiz controls the finances. He controls the police. Communities can organize their tequios and have their fiestas but they really have very little authority,” Pedro Matias sighed.

Although the teachers union abided by Popular Assembly decisions (many of which they instigated) both the leadership and the majority of members regarded the Popular Assembly as a support organization built around the union. Whereas the Popular Assembly advocated a “horizontal” governing structure (which in many cases resulted in no structure at all), the union maintained its traditional “vertical” organization with elected leaders who directed activities and assigned teachers to schools throughout the state. The union continued to act on its own apart from the Popular Assembly, coordinating with other sections of the National Workers in Education Union (SNTE) to protest the privatization of Mexican social security and to urge the deposing of federal education czar Elba Gordillo. The various regional indigena organizations also focused on their own activities while vocally supporting the Popular Assembly and sending participants to the assemblies and protest marches. The same was true for the smaller NGOs.

The Popular Assembly’s primary goal was getting rid of Governor Ruiz. Elevated into office in 2004 after elections widely criticized as fraudulent, Ruiz controlled not only executive functions but also the legislature, law enforcement and the judiciary. Past governors, including Ruiz’ predecessor José Murat, successfully quashed potential uprisings but none had to deal with a force as large or as organized as the APPO.

For five months the teachers’ encampments covered over fifty square blocks in the center of the city. They barricaded hundreds of streets and highways to prevent Ruiz-paid death squads from circulating at night. Even so, snipers gunned down José Jiménez while he was participating in a Popular Assembly march. Others waylaid and killed eighteen protesters before non-uniformed police stormed a barricade in Santa María del Camino, a city of Oaxaca suburb, and shot U.S. video photographer Bradley Will.

The news of Will’s murder flashing around the world prompted Mexico’s federal government to demonstrate that it wouldn’t tolerate non-conformance. Outgoing president Vicente Fox sent over 4,000 soldiers and federal preventive police (PFP), along with dozens of armored vehicles and helicopters, to Oaxaca. Two days after their arrival they launched an all-out assault, destroying the barricades and occupying the center of the city. Four weeks later they caught the fleeing remnants of a protest march in a pincer movement and indiscriminately beat and apprehended everyone they could lay hands on, including many men and women who had not participated in the march. As Governor Ruiz proclaimed, “Oaxaca is again safe for tourists,” federal and state police and paramilitaries continued to intimidate and jail Popular Assembly leaders and participants. Others went into hiding. Thanks to brutal federal support Ruiz, the cacique, was in charge again.

But despite the arrests, imprisonments and media control of reporting the events, the Popular Assembly remained a symbol throughout Mexico of the possibility for political change. Julio Hernández of the Mexico City daily La Jornada told a March 2008 Día de Mujer forum in the city of Oaxaca, “What happened here is an example, an example of action… that gave hope to the entire pueblo of Mexico.” He affirmed that the Popular Assembly awakened “a sleeping giant.”

Like the student rebellions of 1968 in Mexico City and the anti-Vietnam and integration movements during the same period in the United States, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca ruptured traditional mores, which is a grand precursor for permanent change. Women throughout Oaxaca began challenging the old order, even in indigena strongholds of machismo. The successes of the barricades, if temporary, convinced people who never had participated in any kinds of political act that they have rights and can exercise those rights. They exposed the PRI’s weaknesses and corruption and the teacher’s union, reorganized under new aggressive leadership in 2009, is challenging federalization of teacher placement and many indigena communities are expelling corrupt caciques and forcing multi-national corporations to curtail hydroelectric and mining projects.

Marcos Leyva, one of the Popular Assembly founders, explained the movement’s sudden formation as “combustive” — Oaxaca had been a dry brush land waiting for a spark to ignite it and Ulisés Ruiz provided that spark when he ordered state and municipal police to break up the protesting teachers’ sit-in and drive them out of the city center. For nearly six months the conflagration raged and abated only when federal militarized police and army tanketas and troops overpowered the pacifist protesters by brute force.

They crushed the outward manifestations — the symptoms — but they didn’t stamp out the disease. Oaxaca continues to be a crackling dry tinderland. When will the next spark set off a conflagration? And what will the consequences be?

They will burn more than just Oaxaca. The entire country will feel the flames.

Many readers know at least one man or woman who has done time in Iraq or Afghanistan. Although most vets seem to adjust to civilian life once they are through with their military duty, many others do not. indeed, even those who appear to be adjusting just fine often cause concern among their friends and relatives because of changes in their behavior. The Veteran’s Administration (VA) is notoriously inept and callous in its treatment of vets, despite the best efforts of some individuals within the organization that struggle against the overwhelming bureaucratic odds and inadequate funding endemic in the agency. Newspapers run stories regularly about veterans lacking care, lashing out at family members or others, and most tragically of all, killing themselves. Yet, the Pentagon continues to push for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan while carrying on what appears to be a heated debate over whether or not to withdraw from Iraq.

Meanwhile, the US antiwar movement founders in the wake of a substantial part of its membership giving their collective soul to the Democratic Party. Since November 2008, it’s as if the bloodshed perpetrated by US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is okay because Barack Obama is leading the charge instead of George Bush. Besides the National Assembly’s call for local and regional protests against the Iraq occupation and Afghan war in October, there has been barely a peep from other national antiwar organizations. This is despite the fact that Congress and Obama have approved several more billion dollars for the wars and the size of the US force in Afghanistan has nearly doubled while the promised withdrawal of US forces in Iraq has not even begun.

It is the opinion of many anti-warriors that veterans have a key role to play in any organized resistance. After all, it was their presence in the movement against the Vietnam war that shook the conscience of the US public in that war’s later years. However, as Dahr Jamail and his subjects point out again and again, the strength in numbers and the political power of the GI movement against the war in Vietnam was directly related to the strength of the greater antiwar movement. So, despite the commitment of today’s GI and veteran resisters profiled in Jamail’s book, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, that commitment is limited by the weakness of the antiwar movement as a whole.

Jamail highlights the various organizations organizing GI resistance, from the Iraq Veterans Against the War to the group Courage to Resist. He also commits a chapter to each of the primary forms of resistance and reasons for that resistance. He describes instances of individual resistance and the refusal of entire units to carry out missions. He also explores the nature of the sexist culture of the military and the immorality of the wars themselves. One of the most interesting chapters in The Will to Resist is titled “Quarters of Resistance.” It describes the mission and interior of a house in Washington, DC run by a couple veterans. The purpose of the house is to operate as a sort of clearinghouse for the GI resistance movement. At times, the house has provided shelter for veterans and GIs attending antiwar activities in DC. It is also a place that the founder of the house, Geoffrey Millard, calls a “training ground for resistance.” In addition to these quarters, Jamail discusses the beginnings of a coffeehouse movement slowly developing outside major US military bases.

Jamal’s book is also about his learning to understand and appreciate the humanity of the US soldier. Originally inclined to consider them all killers without conscience, his conversations and other interactions with the young men and women who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill in America’s name have led him to understand that many of these folks struggle with their souls on a daily basis. With this growing understanding of folks who are essentially his contemporaries, The Will to Resist becomes more than just another collective biography of troops who discover their conscience under the duress of war.

If the current commander of US troops in Afghanistan has his way, there will be more than 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of the summer in 2010. Already, Barack Obama has approved adding 20,000 more active duty troops to the 1,473,900 already on duty. Without public protest, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan is certain to continue. In addition, General Odierno in Iraq insists that US troops remain in that country, as well. Furthermore, the likelihood of combat against other foes chosen by Washington increases. Resistance is never easy, as the men and women in The Will to Resist can tell us. However, if the people who poured into the streets to protest Bush’s war are truly opposed to war, then they should also make an appearance in those same streets now that the war is Obama’s.

We start with William Volcker, considered to be the true “father” of classical liberalism, libertarianism and modern conservatism. In 1932, the ultra-wealthy Volcker created the William Volcker Fund as a charitable foundation whose mission it was to subsidize the promotion and dissemination of “free market” economics ideas.

Establishing a pattern that would later become the hallmark of similar foundations, the Volcker Fund “started to spin-off organizations by the boatload, each intended, not just to serve specific purposes but to give the appearance of many ‘independent’ efforts spawned by a ‘mass’ appeal.”² Among the first of these spin-offs were complimentary institutions including the Earhart Foundation and the Reim Foundation as well as think tanks such as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), later renamed Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Foundation for Economic Education or FEE.

The Foundation for Economic Education or FEE was established in 1946. Dubbed the grand daddy of all Libertarian think tanks, it produced The Freeman, which became the founding journal of Libertarianism.

In 1947 FEE initiated the Mont Pelerin Society meetings from which would be spawned some 500 additional “free market” foundations and organizations in nearly 80 countries. Some of these foundations in turn led to the creation of umbrella foundations that were global in scope and reach. One such foundation which came out of the early Mont Pelerin meetings was the Institute of Economic Affairs based in London and created in 1955. The Institute of Economic Affairs led to the creation of the global Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which in turn created a network of over 50 think tanks in 30 countries.

According to its website, “The Atlas Economic Research Foundation serves as a catalyst and connector to link free-market organizations and individuals to the ideas, people and resources they need to promote a free society.” On the “Sound Money Resources Page” of the website you will find Mises Institute luminaries Murray Rothbard, and many others. On the main page is a link to “The Atlas Shrugged” project, promoting Ayn Rand’s “influential novel Atlas Shrugged”.

As it happens, the lofty-sounding goals of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation dovetail nicely with public-private partnerships – that is to say privatization of public resources – advanced by the United Nation’s Committee on Economic Cooperation and Integration (CECI)³ as well as many governments around the world, including the United States.⁴ According to UNECE (parent of CECI), one of its main areas of expertise involves “global economic cooperation and integration”.

UNECE’s “expertise” in turn fully supports the Atlas Economic Research Foundation’s “Campaign for Free Trade” which is designed “to combat harmful economic nationalism”. Whether coincidentally or otherwise, it is the type of synergy created through the complimentary goals of these seemingly disparate groups, institutions and agencies which is fast propelling the entire globe toward the new economic/police state.⁵

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation was just one of a myriad of descendants of the Mont Pelerin Society, whose first meeting was held at an out-of-the-way posh resort in Switzerland in 1947. There were a total of thirty-nine participants at that meeting. Ten of the thirty-nine were American – giving the United States a noticeable presence in Switzerland. The Volcker Fund paid the way for all ten American participants, including Frederick von Hayek who served as meeting coordinator. Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises were also among those ten American participants.

FEE was the conduit through which the Volcker Fund provided its largess. According to an undated “Welcome letter” written by former FEE staff member and board member Gary North, FEE has been replaced by the Mises Institute. Thus says North, while FEE had been blessed “with piles of money” among other things, the Mises Institute itself was blessed with the name Mises, a popular website, an even more popular feeder website (LewRockwell.com), multiple mailing lists, a facility located in an affordable area attractive to young scholars, and more.⁶

A second think tank, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or ISI was created through the Volker Fund in 1953 to combat what would eventually be called “political correctness” and “‘left-bias” in colleges and universities. Today, ISI consists of 50,000 college students and faculty and the organization sponsors dozens of programs representing the entire spectrum of Libertarian causes through generous subsidies.

Yet another think tank, The Institute for Humane Studies was created in 1961 by Floyd “Baldy” Harper, after he had served as a star recruiter for the Volcker Fund. The IHS identified and subsidized thousands of students friendly to the new Libertarian doctrine, and it also spawned dozens of similar organizations throughout the world. It was the strategic successor to the Volcker Fund.

After the Volcker Fund closed, subsidies for the IHS shifted to The Scaife Foundation, Koch Family Foundations, The Bradley Foundation, and the Carthage Foundation. The Volcker fund itself was replaced with the short-lived Center for American Studies. Ten years later, the remainder of Volcker Fund money, some $7 million, went to the Hoover Institute.

Early Volcker protégées included Frederick von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard among others. The following excerpt from author Eustace Mullins provides a 1984 snapshot of the Volcker-inspired “free market” movement:

The present star of the Hoover Institution is Milton Friedman, who is credited with bringing economic disaster to Chile, Israel, the United States, and other countries in which his ‘monetarist’ theories have been introduced. Friedman’s ‘monetarism’ is the same old bankers’ swindle of endless creation of more interest bearing debt money, requiring ever increasing taxes merely to meet the interest payments…

Friedman came to the Hoover in 1977 as senior research fellow, simultaneously accepting a post as economic consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He and his consort, Murray Rothbard, dominate a closely interlocked network of ‘hard money, ‘conservative’ groups, which includes the Heritage Foundation, Mont Pelerin Society, Cato Institute, Ludwig von Mises Institute, and American Enterprise Institute … Their mentor is the late Ludwig von Mises …

Their economic principles stemmed from the ‘Viennese School’ founded by Karl Menger and Eugen von Bauwerk … At that time, Vienna was dominated by the House of Rothschild, which had controlled the national debt of Austria since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Austria’s Tyrol silver mines were owned by the Rothschilds, as were her railways.”⁷

In the United States, Friedman, von Mises and Hayek, together with dozens of other early Volcker Fund recruits, shared in common the fact that all had their teaching positions and various forms of financial, publishing and public relations assistance arranged for them by Volcker Fund associates.

For example, “in 1950, the Fund arranged for Hayek to secure a position at the University of Chicago…. When the University only granted an unpaid position, the Fund arranged for the Earhart Foundation to pay him a salary.” The Fund also made arrangements for the republication of Hayek’s book Road to Serfdom by the University of Chicago (which itself provides a recurring and important connection to the gatekeepers). These arrangements for republication were undertaken despite the fact that the book had been almost universally rejected by the Economics establishment. A year later the Fund arranged for the book’s serialization in Reader’s Digest.²

Book sales for Hayek, Friedman and other Volcker protégées were given massive levels of financial and promotional support through the National Book Foundation, which was among the first “front organizations” of the Volcker Fund. Importantly and although “the Foundation’s affiliation to the Volker Fund was not hidden, it was circumspect enough to suggest, even to most ‘Libertarians’, that it was independent…. [But] As the Volcker efforts geared up, the Foundation began to distribute millions of books [to college libraries and through other channels] from dozens of authors, all coming from the Fund’s stables. Many educational ‘incentives’ were initiated such as ‘teach a course on Hayek, get 10 (or 100) textbooks for free.’”²

Similar to Hayek, “the Fund and its progeny identified Friedman early on, shepherded his career at the University of Chicago, subsidized him through a paid lecture series …, paid his way to Mont Pelerin, arranged for the serialization of his book by Reader’s Digest, and bought a significant number of the books that Friedman was so proud of ’selling.’”²

A slight deviation in the pattern occurred with von Mises, who actually had taught at the University of Vienna — but again in an unpaid position. In point of fact the University had turned von Mises down on four separate occasions for a paid position.

After von Mises emigrated to the United States in 1940, associates of the Volcker Fund obtained an unpaid visiting professorship for him in 1945 at New York University. Further arrangements allowed for von Mises’ salary to be paid by Volcker Fund associates for a total of 25 years. “This was typical of the Fund’s ‘bait and switch’ tactic for developing resumes. In the United States, von Mises was the ‘famed economics professor from the University of Vienna.’ In Europe, he would become the ‘famous American economist from New York University.’”²

Murray Rothbard never held a Volcker-arranged teaching position. Instead, from 1951 through to 1962 when the Volcker Fund was dissolved, Rothbard served as a consultant to the Fund. He would later call this the best job he ever had.

A large portion of his work “consisted of reading and evaluating books, journal articles, and other materials. On the basis of written reports by Rothbard and another reader — Rose Wilder Lane — the VF’s directors would decide whether to undertake massive distribution of particular works to public libraries…. The VF also asked Rothbard to submit reports on particular questions, such as how to rank sundry economists in terms of friendliness to the free market, [and so on -- all of which] shed ‘much light’ on how the Fund decided which ’scholars’ to promote, and which to attack.”²

Over the many decades since William Volcker was first inspired to subsidize the promotion of “free market” principles, there has been “[t]ens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of books, hundreds of journals, dozens of universities, tens of thousands of people and thousands of professorships, and so on in a network touching virtually everyone in the ‘Western Democracies’ — all of it centrally planned, all of it subsidized, none of it capable of existing by itself in the commercial marketplace or in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and all of it failing dozens of times until hooked into the river of cash produced by the simple subsidies of the rich designed to derail the ‘free’ evolution of ideas …”²

In contrast to “free market” think tanks which spread their ideology through countless independent-appearing spin-offs, we have the findings of the Reece Committee whose final report to Congress was made in 1954. Essentially, what this committee discovered was that the foundations they had studied, including the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, were occupying themselves with financing liberal political groups, civil rights groups, and political extremist groups. The committee further found that these foundations, along with a number of others, were in effect supporting revolutionary activities throughout the world.

One avenue through which this support was achieved was through the cross-financing of organizations that were concerned with internationalism, including the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations. Thus, as the Committee reported: “Substantial evidence indicates there is more than a mere close working together among some foundations operating in the international field. There is here, as in the general realm of social sciences, a close interlock.”

We might want to ask how all of this might be playing out in the current “war of ideas.” As it happens, the increasingly heated debate over immigration provides one example. For some insight, we can look to one of the largest coordinated marches in history which occurred on April 10, 2006. One journalist vividly describes this event and then cogently relates its occurrence to money flowing from tax exempt foundations:

In the streets of Dallas, Texas, a human tidal wave surged through the streets. The immense crowd carrying the Mexican flag … [was] estimated to be at least 100,000 strong, with other estimates running as high as 500,000 …

The scene was the same in countless cities around the country. One of the largest … was held, predictably, in Los Angeles. There at least 500,000 people poured into the streets. Of them, 25,000 were students released from Los Angeles public schools in order to take part in the demonstration …

… The demonstrations … were organized by a number of radical groups, with one of the primary sponsors being LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) …

But the demonstrations were large enough, and widespread enough, that they were more than the work of just one special-interest pressure group…. The size of the April 10 demonstrations, and their national coordination, hints at the existence of a massive organizational structure pulling the strings behind the scenes. The lifeblood of such an infrastructure is money, and lots of it …

In fact, it turns out that the radical Hispanic groups that orchestrated the marches are not the grass-roots groups they seem to be. Instead, they are funded, and in some cases were created, by money flowing from pedigreed “establishment” sources, primarily the large tax-exempt charitable foundations, like the Ford Foundation and others.”⁸

While it is true that the above article was written for a publication of the John Birch Society — itself a beneficiary of “right gate keeper” largess — this fact alone does not diminish the importance of the points made. This is particularly true in light of what has been discussed in Part III of this series.

It is important to note however, that the article emphasizes the impact of “left gate keepers” without informing us as to how the right gate keepers might be contributing to the “created conflict.” And yet, however repugnant and foreign it may seem to the unsuspecting critic, the fact is that each and every one of us alive today has been held captive to — and in a very real sense become victims of — the largely phony “war of ideas”. This war has in reality been orchestrated with astonishing success and almost endless financial support by the “winning organizations” of both left and right gatekeepers, for the express purpose of advancing those interests, not the interests of you and me.

The net result has been mass marketing — and indoctrination — of corporate-sponsored history, science, economics, medicine, diet and nutrition, law, politics and more, all brought to you by “the money trusts.” It is through our educational and other formal institutions that gatekeeper spin has managed to obtain a significant degree of credibility and legitimacy in this phony war of ideas.

But in the end, it is you and I who not only allow it to continue but who help sustain and nurture it as well. The ONLY way to break free of this trap is to clearly identify and focus on the underlying causes of what John Perkins and others have alluded to as “created conflict.”

The escalating conflict over illegal immigration is a case in point. It is wholly a man-made conflict stemming primarily from the economic havoc wreaked upon Central and South America by NAFTA, as well as the TRIPS agreement and the Agreement on Agriculture which were delivered to the WTO to enforce in 1995. These portions of what might be called the economic matrix have been added on top of the phony War on Drugs which has allowed the U.S. Government to rain down lethal chemicals on peasants living in foreign countries, in what is at best a misguided attempt to eradicate coca crops.

As usual, ordinary American workers along with peasants and small farmers bear the brunt of BOTH the so-called “free” trade agreements set up to benefit the investment classes⁹ and the phony war on drugs which serves to fuel the economic engines of the industrial north.¹⁰) So untenable has the situation become for South and Latin American peasants that they are willing to literally risk life and limb to come to the U.S. in an increasingly desperate search for a way to sustain themselves and their families. The massive influx of immigrants in turn creates a pronounced drain on local resources and living wage jobs — and serves to inflame passions on all sides.

Tensions between illegal immigrants and residents in the American Southwest — particularly in Arizona and Texas — have become sufficiently severe that many ordinary citizens have taken it upon themselves to take the law into their own hands, even in some cases going to the extreme of organizing armed patrols to protect their lives and property. Meanwhile human rights groups work feverishly to provide water and other vital, life-saving support to those secreting their way across the border. Ironically and alarmingly, a growing portion of these illegals includes a dangerous criminal element.

Within the context of this particular battle, as in all similar “created conflicts,” rarely is it ever mentioned that the root of the problem can be found within the fabric of the economic matrix itself. Any real resolution will require addressing this economic matrix in all its segments – beginning with a sovereign, debt “free,” Constitutional money system.⁵

Whether Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell and associates understand the extent or exact manner in which the “right” gatekeepers affects them or their politics — or indeed is a factor to be reckoned with — is open to question, and in the larger sense beside the point. After all, they, like the rest of us, have been shaped by the phony “war of ideas” created and paid for by both right and left gatekeepers.

The important thing is what you and I choose to do about it.

1. Left Gatekeepers.com.
2. “Mr. Anonymous and the Not-So-Spontaneous Birth of the Libertarian Movement” by anaxarcos, December 22, 2008. Scoop Independent News.
3. United Nations Committee on Economic Cooperation and Integration for Europe.
4. The National Council for Public Private Partnerships.
5. “The Encroaching Economic/Police State” slide presentation by Geraldine Perry.
6. Gary North “Welcome Letter,” undated.
7. The World Order by Eustace Mullins. 1984.
8. “Sponsoring the revolution: illegal immigrants are pawns in a game aimed at fomenting revolution and funded by the nation’s major tax-exempt foundations” by Dennis Behreandt. The New American, February 19, 2007.
9. Whose Trade Organization? by Lori Wallach, etal. New Press, 2004, 2nd edition; Stolen Harvest by Vandana Shiva. South End Press, 2000.
10. “American Drug War: The Last White Hope.” 2007 documentary, available online. Beyond Bogota by Garry Leech. Beacon Press, 2009. Whiteout by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Verso, 1999.

So Russia’s agreement, announced at Obama’s summit in Moscow 6-8 July, to ferry primarily US troops and arms through Russian land and air space to Afghanistan to accelerate the slaughter there – without any reciprocation on other outstanding issues – comes as a bit of a surprise. Obama faces a reservoir of resentment among Russians who believe that the US has rarely followed through on its occasional peace gestures. “At this point, there is a little bit of hope and a lot of distrust,” said talk show host Vladimir Pozner on Channel One.

If the object is to stem the flood of opium, there is lots of evidence that the current Afghan government and the US occupiers themselves actually benefit from this lucrative business, and that the only conceivable endgame which the US can salvage there – a secular military dictatorship propped up by the US – will never deal with this albeit serious problem for Russia. True, Russia also fears the catalysing effect of a Taliban victory on its Muslim Central Asian neighbours. It apparently wants any kind of secular government in Afghanistan, come hell or high water.

But the humiliation of so directly supporting the US military campaign in Afghanistan after the earlier US-sponsored campaign there which destroyed the Soviet Union and led to the deaths of 15,000 Soviet soldiers is surely not lost on the Kremlin. And to drop this plum in Washington’s lap as it continues to insist that Ukraine and Georgia will soon join NATO and that Poland will have its missiles looks too good to be true from the US perspective. Maybe the Kremlin is deriving some satisfaction from abetting the US in what it sees as a losing battle in Afghanistan, letting the Taliban give US troops some of the medicine inflicted on Soviet troops in yesteryear?

In addition to his meetings with President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, though he publicly scolded him prior to the summit. “It’s important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev, Putin understands that the old Cold War approach to US-Russian relations is outdated … I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new, and to the extent that we can provide him and the Russian people a clear sense that the US is not seeking an antagonistic relationship but wants co-operation on nuclear non-proliferation, fighting terrorism, energy issues, that we’ll end up having a stronger partner overall.”

This is diplo-speak for “Take us or leave us.” Special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian affairs on the National Security Council Michael McFaul made the point less nicely when he said, “We don’t need the Russians.” This taunting of Putin was formalised by a US suggestion to establish a Biden-Putin working group to renegotiation the START treaty which expires in December, named after the Gore-Chernomyrdin task force that negotiated the 1991 treaty when Al Gore was VP and Viktor Chernomyrdin was Russian PM. That suggestion was immediately brushed aside. “I am not a vice president,” said Putin coldly.

Obama also visited Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. None of the three presidents gave any ground on the missile bases, including Gorbachev, who told talk-show host Pozner the missile bases are aimed at creating a situation that makes it possible for NATO to be first to launch a nuclear strike while staying under its own shield. “There is a need for a common European security, which was written at a conference in Paris in 1990.” The USSR was preparing its answer to Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev said. “I did not agree then and do not agree now with the opinions that it is a bluff and that one should not pay attention to it.”

The Obama camp may not be as united on the missile issue as the Russians are. Obama acknowledged “Russian sensitivities” in a Novaya Gazeta interview but made clear he would not link arms-control talks to missile defence. Grasping at straws, Medvedev said, “The current administration is prepared for discussions. I think we are smart enough to find a reasonable solution here. Really, to get this problem solved, one must not necessarily cross out the decisions made earlier.”

Obama threw him a bone by reiterating his readiness to draw a line between offensive and defensive weapons, something that Bush had refused to do since America withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001. The sides agreed to limit their nuclear arsenals to 1,500-1,675 warheads with the cap on the number of delivery vehicles set as low as 500-1,100 units.

No public mention was made of Georgia and Ukraine actually joining NATO, with Obama stressing, “NATO seeks collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.” But he nonetheless sent (allowed?) Vice President Joseph Biden to fly directly from Moscow to Georgia and Ukraine after the summit. “We’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense,” warned McFaul.

Here again, the US administration is not united, with Obama having made no firm commitment to further NATO expansion. Just how much say he actually has in such strategic decisions is a moot point.
Obama was hoping to throw the Russians another bone by assuring them admission to the World Trade Organisation. But Putin unexpectedly suspended Moscow’s membership bid in June, deciding to approach the issue jointly through a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, without the need for US “help”.

After years of increasing strain, Moscow clearly did its best to ensure the summit was a success, giving Obama lots of rope. But Obama’s apparent attempt to drive a wedge between Putin and Medvedev will not bear fruit. If the US pushes ahead with its missile bases, it is unlikely that even a cowed Moscow will go along with START II, despite its own desire to rid itself of costly, useless weapons. Maybe McFaul’s crack about not needing the Russians means the US really doesn’t give a damn about START.

The new Russian WTO plan, in light of the recent BRIC and SCO summits in Russia, suggests that the Russian government is more concerned about putting flesh on its project of creating a multipolar world than with confronting the US directly anymore. Perhaps planners are willing to let the US continue its Afghan gambit, gambling that it will merely sap US strength while helping to fill Russian coffers, a kind of poor man’s revenge on Russia’s Cold War enemy. Analyst Fyodor Lukyanov sees the establishing of a customs union with Russian neighbours as part of Russian plans to “transform itself into a centre of integration.”

There has indeed been a significant change in Russia’s relations with the rest of the world in the past few years, but it is not necessarily the one Washington would like. It’s not so much a question of Russia ceding to US hegemony, as Obama’s hawks think, but of acknowledging that Russia is not the powerful player that the Soviet Union was, and that the best Russia can do is help usher in a non-US centric multipolar world, which will include disparate allies from all but the North American continent and act to limit the US empire’s wilder plans.

It’s one of realism on the Kremlin’s part, faced with an array of tinpot “democracies” around it, ready to sell out to what they see as the highest bidder. The most glaring example of this is Kyrgyzstan’s President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who played Russia and the US off against each other over its Manas airbase, first telling the US to get lost when Russia promised $2.15 billion in aid, and then last month reversing the decision and allowing the US to stay, tripling the rent and extracting other goodies in the process. Even Russophile Lukashenko in Belarus plays the same game with Russia and Europe. And then there’s Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, who said yes and then no an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, not to mention Turkmenistan, Georiga, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Lithuania, and on and on. “A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way?” wrote analyst Aleksandr Golts when news of the Manas decision broke.

Russia cannot compete with NATO, certainly not without strengthening the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and certainly not with Afghanistan a black hole threatening to suck in its Central Asian neighbours. The CSTO is important less as a counterbalance to NATO than as a viable guarantor of regional security and it’s only a matter of time for Russia’s neighbours to realise this.

It looks like Washington has won this stand-off with Moscow, getting its Afghanistan yellow-brick road and its Polish cake. The market value of allying with flashy but fair-weather Washington outshines the more reliable but less alluring Moscow for the present. But US support is for local elites willing to do its bidding. Local populations will gain nothing, and they are wiser than their leaders, with fond memories of their Russian bulwark. The US may have won the battle. Let the US and NATO play out their lethal games in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Progress must be shared,” Obama said in his “Moscow speech” to university students. Let’s see what fruits his policies bear that we can divvy up.

* Norman E. Nickle, 54, who lived in Pottsville, the county seat, was sentenced in April to two life terms, without possibility of parole after he pled no contest to killing two teens the previous year. Nickle’s only defense was that he was high on drugs and alcohol at the time of the murders.

* Jarrid Finneran, of Shenandoah, was sentenced to 2-1/2 to five years in prison after a jury convicted him in December 2007 of pushing his girlfriend in front of a car. Finneran said that the incident was the result of an accident, was not deliberate, and that he and the victim continued their relationship after the incident. The jury, however, convicted him of aggravated assault, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person, and disorderly conduct.

* Kyle J. Bluge, 23, of Frackville, admitted he shook a baby in April 2008 to try to stop the boy from crying. A pediatrician testified that the physical abuse resulted in significant brain injuries. Bluge, who will be sentenced Aug. 5, could face 10 to 20 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for aggravated assault.

* Mark P. Wilner, 40, of Mahanoy City, in June was found guilty of simple assault after a street fight that led to injuries to the victim who, according to court testimony, had begun the fight by punching a woman, causing her to fall to the ground. Wilner, who apparently initially tried to avoid confrontation, could be sentenced, June 29, to one to two years in state prison.

* However, the life of Luis Eduardo Ramirez-Zavalo, 25, an illegal Mexican immigrant who lived and worked in Shenandoah before dying in June 2008 after a beating by a gang of about a half-dozen drunken Shenandoah Valley High School football players is worth no more than 23 months in a county jail for his assailants.

Judge William E. Baldwin sentenced Brandon J. Piekarsky, 17, Shenandoah Heights, to six to 23 months, and Derrick M. Donchak, 19, Shenandoah, to six to 20 months, June 17, after an all-White jury convicted them only of simple assault, a second degree misdemeanor. Baldwin also sentenced Donchak to one year probation for three counts of corruption of minors, a first degree misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of two to five years in state prison; Baldwin also sentenced Donchak to three months in prison on each of three counts of furnishing alcohol to minors; the sentences would be served concurrently. His total sentence is seven to 23 months in county jail.

The jury about six weeks earlier refused to convict Piekarsky of criminal homicide, although witnesses said that it was Piekarsky who kicked Ramirez in the head after he had already been on the ground; Ramirez died two days later from the beatings. The jury also found both Piekarsky and Donchak not guilty of aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person, criminal solicitation/hindering apprehension or prosecution, and ethnic intimidation, although witnesses said they distinctly heard racial slurs and obscene language during the beating. Court testimony revealed that the teens had apparently baited Ramirez into the fight.

In sentencing the two teenagers, Judge Baldwin, confined by the jury’s verdict, said neither defendant showed remorse — Donchak had even worn a “Border Patrol” T-shirt to a party four months after the beating. Contrary to defense claims, the judge ruled that the beating was not “a street fight gone bad [but] a group of young athletes ganging up on one person.” Because of the jury’s verdicts, the death of Ramirez could not be considered in sentencing. Baldwin said that if the attack “wasn’t motivated by ethnic intimidation, it was plain meanness. You don’t kick a man when he’s down.” Even with the relatively light sentences, both defense attorneys said they were contemplating appeals.

Two of the gang were not charged, and two others are likely to spend more time in confinement than Piekarsky and Donchak. Brian Scully, 18, Shenandoah, charged as a juvenile, was previously ordered to spend 90 days in a treatment facility before sentencing, expected at the end of Summer. He could spend as much as three years in juvenile detention. Judge Baldwin had said that Scully “was not only involved [in the assault] he was the instigator.” Scully admitted he tried to kick Ramirez in the head, missed, and kicked him in the shoulder.

Colin J. Walsh, 18, Shenandoah Heights, whose state charges were withdrawn after he pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation in federal court, cooperated with state and federal authorities and testified against Piekarsky and Donchak. Walsh, who like Scully had expressed remorse for his actions, testified that after he had punched Ramirez who fell and hit his head on the street, Piekarsky kicked him in the head. Medical testimony concluded that “the combined effects from these injuries” caused the death of Ramirez. Walsh was sentenced in federal court to up to nine years, but could be released in four years because of his cooperation.

The beating and subsequent trial divided the region, and brought national news media to the coalmine region of northeast Pennsylvania. Thousands rallied against what they believed were lax immigration enforcement, and argued that Ramirez would still be alive if he had not been an illegal immigrant. Others argued that the area’s bigotry and racism was the cause for the tension before the beating and continues to divide the people. The Pottsville Republican-Herald, the county’s only daily newspaper, reports that more than 4,400 comments were submitted to its website the first three days of the five-day trial, but that many were not posted because of vulgarity. The newspaper, which published more than 160 articles about the beating, subsequent events, and the trial, also reports that during the trial the website recorded 72,000 unique users just for the trial coverage.

The case left a lot of questions, in addition to what many saw as “jury nullification” of a murder. The Shenandoah police upon arriving at the scene, July 12, 2008, checked Latino witnesses for weapons rather than pursue the White attackers. Schuylkill County detectives filed arrest papers about two weeks after the fight; the district attorney filed court charges on Sept. 30, 2008. Based upon court testimony, Judge Baldwin noted, “the boys were ushered around and given counsel about getting their stories straight because it didn’t look good for Mr. Ramirez.” Testimony had also revealed that one of the officers was not only in a personal relationship with Piekarsky’s mother, but that he was living with both of them. The Shenandoah police, originally the primary investigative agency, did not make any arrests; on July 25, about two weeks after the assault, criminal complaints were filed by the Schuylkill County detectives in the office of the District Attorney. The Department of Justice told the Republican-Herald that there was “an open investigation” into the assault, and was “working cooperatively with state authorities on the matter and monitoring the state’s prosecution.” Further, the prosecution, which said it was pleased with the sentence, refused to say why it didn’t put on the stand a retired Philadelphia police officer who witnessed the beating and had called 911.

Most residents, those who believe that even a simple assault charge was too much for what they still maintain was a “street brawl,” and those who believe the gang got away with murder, seem to just want the spotlight to shine on other towns and other issues. But, that isn’t likely for at least a few more months.

Piekarsky and Donchak could still face significant prison time. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the Anti-Defamation League, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and other organizations have asked the Department of Justice to pursue hate crime charges against Piekarsky and Donchak. Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s, the Department of Justice was vigorous in bringing to trial and conviction, especially in Southern jurisdictions, persons who either were not charged or had received light sentences for attacks upon civil rights workers, Blacks, and their businesses and churches. Although civil rights prosecutions diminished in some subsequent administrations, the Department of Justice has again resumed the priorities established during the 1960s.

Shenandoah is a community of about 5,600, located in the anthracite coal region, about 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The 2000 census revealed that 97.4 percent of the population is White, with about 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line. During the early and mid-19th century, the population was primarily English, Welsh, Irish and German immigrants, all of whom faced discrimination from large numbers of second- and third-generation Americans who objected to the influx of immigrants. Conflicts between the lower-class miners and the supervisors and management of coal companies led to the rise of the Molly Maguires, whose original purpose was to promote unionized labor and serve as a protection for the immigrants. Cultural and ethnic conflict led to violence against the Mollies and the Mollies, in turn, became violent, especially as other immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe moved into the area, sometimes taking jobs the northern Europeans thought belonged to them. By 1920, the population peaked about 25,000, falling after World War II when it no longer became profitable for the robber barons to continue to strip the land of anthracite coal.

It is many of the descendants of immigrants who now support stronger immigration enforcement, and whose children and grandchildren carry the prejudices that have formed the patina of the place once known as the “city of churches”; it is the descendants of immigrants who have shown the prejudice against a rising Hispanic population and whose attitudes may have fueled the violence that led to the death of a Mexican immigrant who just wanted to work and help raise his three children.

* Assisting on this story were Rosemary R. Brasch, Brandi Mankiewicz, the office of the clerk of courts of Schuylkill County, several Schuylkill County residents, and the news staff of the Pottsville Republican-Herald.

The EP cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, as many hasty commentators tend to claim. This perception is also widespread among the people, who tend to consider European institutions, including the EP, as dark venues for technocrats who are only interested in rubbish, like determining what the maximum size of eggplants should be. Such claims, it should be said, are sometimes not too far from the truth. European institutions and mechanisms are difficult to grasp, even for experts. As members of the Commission are mostly technocrats and the Commission enjoys the exclusive right to introduce bills, and the EP does not have an exclusive role in the decision-making process, but shares it with the Council and deals with issues that in most cases are economic and commercial, and popular control is very feeble due to the lack of a real European public opinion, EU institutions are prey to lobbies of all sorts. The European Community and European Union are two distinct but somehow overlapping entities. European institutions have developed over time through the approval of various, complicated treaties. The European Constitutional Treaty, which has, however, never been ratified, was a monstrous entity consisting of hundreds of pages and articles, which incorporated the previous treaties.

Now, it is true that the EP is dissimilar from classic Parliaments (for example, MPs do not have the right to introduce bills within the assembly, as only the European Commission can do it), and that it does not have a say on each and every issue. Nevertheless, the EP has been constantly expanding its powers, following the drafting of several pan-European treaties. However, the highest expression of its (rather limited) powers is the approval of the EU budget, although the EP has the last word on non-compulsory spending, whereas the Council (made up of Ministers from each member State, who shift depending on the issue under discussion: for example, the Economic and Financial Affairs Council consists of all the Economic and Finance ministers in Europe), which could be quite incorrectly considered as some sort of German-style Upper House, has the last word on compulsory spending, that is, all the expenses resulting from European treaties, and is therefore the most important part of the budget. However, it is also true that some three-quarters of EU issues are decided through the co-decision procedure, which means that a bill (a term that might sound incorrect, as binding EU legislation does not consist of Acts of Parliament, but, rather regulations and directives) has to be passed by both the Council and the EP. EU legislation is directly applicable all over the Union, in the case of regulations and detailed directives, or needs to be given execution through state legislation, in the case of directives. EU legislation is therefore binding on member States and their citizens, and prevails over clashing State legislation, just like federal law prevails over state laws in the US. It has been estimated that between 70 and 80 percent of all member states’ legislation is decided upon at the European level. Thus, it is undeniable that the role of the EP, and the European Union in general, is crucial.

The European Constitutional Treaty, in addition to making the Nice Charter of fundamental rights part of the acquis communautaire, amongst other things, would have also conferred upon the EP the power to appoint the President of the Commission. However, as unanimous ratification of the treaty was required, its rejection in popular referenda in France and Holland brought the process to a halt. The ensuing Lisbon Treaty, a different version of the Constitutional Treaty that was drafted after the negative referenda, expanded the co-decision procedure, thus giving the popular assembly a say on further matters. The Treaty, however, was rejected in Ireland in June 2008. A new referendum is due to take place during the upcoming fall. Still, the EP already enjoys very relevant powers.

Why, then, is Europe seen as a far-away entity? Why do political leaders spurn the EP, and stick with State assemblies? Would a US politician, for example, give up his seat at the federal Congress for one, say, at the New York State Lower House? Why did only 43 percent of the voters show up in polling stations (with lows, in States like Slovakia, of 20 percent), when, normally, in state Parliamentary elections, even when voting is not compulsory (as is the case of Belgium), no less than 70-75 percent of the people go to the polls? And, finally and more importantly, as this will define EU policies for the next few years, why did these few voters severely punish the Socialists and the Left in general, with the exception of the Green party, and rewarded Conservatives and extreme right-wing, quasi-Fascist xenophobic parties?

All these elements are certainly linked. Although the EP enjoys relevant powers, it nonetheless does not have any say on those fundamental issues that make the headlines on papers and ignite widespread political debate, that is, a common foreign and economic/fiscal policy. These remain local, although some sort of coordination, or at least talks among States exists. The events preceding the Iraqi war are a clear example: part of Europe, notably Germany and France, which Donald Rumsfeld defiantly termed as “Old Europe”, sided together against the intervention; and then Britain, Italy, Spain and most of the new Eastern members, despite widespread popular opposition, joined the US in its mad Iraqi effort. The EU has a High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, who is nevertheless tasked with not much more than a coordinating role. He is no minister, of course.

The Constitutional Treaty provided for the creation of a “Union foreign minister”, a name that gave many the shivers, especially the British; the Lisbon treaty changed that name back to “High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”. In the end, the substance does not change: the coordinating role would be strengthened, but the typically “diplomatic” name shows what the reality is: all foreign affairs decisions, and only for issues included in the treaties, are made unanimously, and EU member States preserve their sovereignty and do as they wish, as in Iraq. There is no common army, nor common embassies. Just coordination. If there has always been little hope of achieving a common foreign policy due to British opposition, this proves practically impossible now after the entry of euroskeptical, pro-US ultras in the East (although, it must be said, all euroskepticism vanishes when it comes to cashing in European funds). This adds to immigration policies. Passports have the same color, but they are issued by member States (although it says European Union on the cover). Short-term visas are common for the Schengen area (which means that if you intend to go to France, then Germany and England, for example, you’ll need two different visas), but long-term ones are issued by Member States. Only EU citizens are allowed to move to another member State and work there; the same does not apply to foreign residents. However, there is no such thing as a “European citizenship”: you are an EU citizen if you are a citizen of a Member State. Decisions on the granting/loss of citizenships are still made at the state level. All States act selfishly with regard to immigration: when illegal immigrants are found on a State’s territory, the first goal of State authorities is trying to understand whether they came from some other Member State, in order to send the immigrant back there. When immigrants come by sea, quarrels between member States over who should send ships to save these people before their boat sinks, and land them for identification, take place almost daily (Italy and Malta being, for obvious reasons, the most contentious ones). In particular, Italy, after recently signing an agreement with Libya, where immigrants are normally tortured and raped, has adopted a policy of direct repulsion. This means that people are not even landed: they are taken from their boats and embarked on Italian military ships, and then carried back to Lybia, where they are likely to be incarcerated for years, whatever their nationality, age, sex, thus without even verifying whether they are entitled to political asylum. Europe, though officially protesting against this practice, silently applaudes. In the end, no matter what one thinks of immigration policies, in this case as well each State is on its own. The lack of a common policy dealing with what happens around Europe does not help.

The crisis has helped deepen these xenophobic feelings, which are directed also at fellow Europeans, not necessarily Asians or Africans. The lack of a common response to the crisis has made things worse. Last January, “British jobs for British workers” became a widespread slogan at the Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire, an economically depressed area of Britain , where construction jobs had been regularly awarded to Portuguese and Italian workers: the typical war among the poor. The lack of a common European response to the crisis can only result in such episodes. And the reason why there is no common response is not just nationalism and selfishness but, above all, the lack of legal instruments to pursue a common economic policy.

The Euro-zone (therefore, only those member States that have adopted the Euro as their currency) has a common monetary policy, which is decided upon by the European Central Bank, located in Frankfurt. The ECB decides on interest rates. However, the ECB represents the den of monetarism in Europe. Modelled on the German Bundesbank, its main concern is price stability. Therefore, this “philosophical” approach resulted, before the economic crisis, in the constant growth of interest rates in order to keep inflation at bay. This, however, made loans and mortgages more expensive, thus heavily affecting people’s everyday life, especially the millions of Europeans with variable-rate mortgages. The monetarist approach is also well visible in the Stability Pact, which provides that each State’s annual budget deficit should be no higher than 3 percent of GDP, and the national debt lower than 60 per cent of GDP or close to that value. This has tied the hands of many European governments, due to the massive size of their national debts (Italy represents the perfect example, with a national debt equivalent at the moment to 113 percent of the GDP and growing). The fact that interest rates are now around 1 percent should not fool anybody: as soon as the crisis is over, the Central Bank will start pushing interest rates up one more time.

A common monetary policy alone is not enough, however. The EU does not have a common economic policy: each Member State has been pouring money into its own economy, in different amounts. The crisis has struck very badly in Spain , which based its recent growth on a real estate bubble that has, obviously, burst (unemployment is now 18 percent). Ireland and Greece have also been hit with particular violence. “Healthier” Western Member States have refused to bail out the crisis-devastated Eastern part of the Union. Last 22 February, European G20 members decided, during a summit in Berlin, to entrust the IMF with the bailout of Eastern Europe. What this means is obvious: IMF policies will have to be enforced in Eastern members, with the obvious, notorious effects. No need to repeat them here, as they are well known.

Also, there is no common taxation system. States like Ireland and Latvia based their impressive growth on fiscal dumping, as most of Eastern Europe. As chance would have it, the crisis has been more violent wherever deregulation and laissez fair had been brought to the extreme. The response, however, has not been European: it has been local.

Thus, if the European Union does not have those powers which typically characterize a sovereign country, and these powers remain within state Parliaments, it is obvious that well-known political leaders will rather keep their office in their home States (unless the aim is getting rid of them, as when Romano Prodi’s candidacy to the presidency of the European Commission was strongly hyped by the Italian ruling center-left coalition after his resignation as Prime Minister). If European politicians are therefore a bunch of complete unknowns, dealing with policies which deeply affect the people, but are not at first as visible and are not given coverage in the media as the ones state Parliaments deal with, will the people discuss European matters? Will a European public opinion ever arise? Will European issues be part of the electoral campaign? The answer can only be no, and the issue, as it is clear, is not only linguistic. Indeed, European electoral campaigns mostly concentrate on local issues; and European elections are a test for political parties or coalitions ruling a specific Member State, especially when state parliamentary elections are near (like in Germany, where the Bundestag will be renewed on 29 September). Perhaps, the only party that based its electoral campaign entirely on European issues was the French Green Party, which won an astounding 18 percent of votes. Low turnouts are the result of such apathy, and prove that disaffection with the EU is constantly growing. Paradoxically, the highest turnout was at the first EP election, in 1979, when the turnout was 63 percent, a rate that has been constantly diminishing. Nowadays, perhaps, the only cases when the people talk about Europe are when referenda for the ratification of treaties are held in Member States. In those cases, turnouts tend to be higher.

As said, disaffection is growing. It is growing, because in the past there was, especially in Member States like Italy and Germany, widespread enthusiasm about this project. Now, after having achieved a common currency, it is not clear what Europe is, nor what it will become. Europe ’s institutions appear stalled. The balance was very unstable when members were fifteen. Opening to Eastern members without a previous reform and strengthening of institutions has been a terrible, tragic mistake. What is clear, however, is Europe’s obsession with competition, deregulation, high interest rates and cuts to social spending, and its subjugation to the United States and Israel on most foreign policy issues (that is, States go on their own and cannot build a common policy, but Europe as a whole gets the blame). What is clear is that leftist parties are far too often hardly distinguishable from conservative ones, both locally as well as at the European level. One typical example is the bipartisan approval of the Bolkestein directive, although in a watered-down version. The original version aimed to create a common market of services, and, in doing so, created the “country of origin principle”, according to which a company or individual may provide services in another Member State on the grounds of the laws of its country of establishment/origin, and without registering with the regulators in the host Member State. That would have obviously created social dumping, especially in the case of citizens of States with more lax labor laws operating in States with more stringent ones. The principle has been left over, although no “country of destination principle” has replaced it, and therefore it will be up to the European Court of Justice to determine jurisprudentially which labor laws should be applied in specific cases.

The Left is usually deeply affected by abstentionism. That explains the collapse of the Socialists, who have tumbled from 27.6 percent to 21.9 percent of votes, thus going from 194 to 159 seats (although it should be said that the seats available for this election were 736 instead of 785 of the previous election). This has been particularly true where the economic crisis has been more violent, like in Spain; where the leadership has long been compromised, as in Britain; where the Socialists have had a subordinate role and have endorsed centrist policies, as in Germany; or where their opposition to the ruling party or coalition is completely insubstantial, in particular because of internal divisions, as in France and Italy. Not strangely, the least damaged Socialist parties have been the Scandinavian ones. Even the scandal-ridden Socialist Party in Greece was the most voted party, due to the disastrous management of the economic crisis and the countless scandals of the ruling conservative party.

Conservatives, however, won in all major EU member States, which was perhaps due more to the weakness of Socialist parties than the strength of conservatives. Italy continues to represent a pathological anomaly in Europe, where a completely unsubstantial opposition is opposed to the Prime Minister’s unlimited control of the media.

As it is normal in a time of crisis, right-wing, xenophobic parties won support in many sectors of the population, particularly Geert Wilders’ Dutch far-right Freedom Party (PVV) (17 percent of votes, second party in Holland behind the Christian-Democrats). Also, the Italian Northern League confirmed its strength, and in Austria two anti-immigrant far-Right parties won an unprecedented 17.7 percent of the vote. The far-Right Danish People’s Party won two seats and 14.4 per cent of votes. Hungary’s far-Right Jobbik won three seats for the first time. Britain even elected Nick Griffin, the leader of the (Fascist) British National Party. All these parties have a least common denominator: no to the EU; no to foreigners; no to Islam; no to Turkey in the EU.

The extreme Left basically held and lost a few seats, although votes were widely dispersed when separate lists were presented, such as in France or, even worse, in Italy (at least 8 percent of votes were disgracefully wasted on three separate lists, none of which was able to reach the 4 percent threshold). Amidst this leftist disaster, the Greens have enjoyed great success, increasing their seats from 42 to 52, probably a sign of stronger environmental awareness on the part of Europeans.
Now, what future expects Europe? The economic crisis is expected to deepen, and this will certainly exacerbate nationalism and xenophobia. War is luckily a bygone possibility, a thing of the past. Protectionism is often invoked, but it is not a possibility, especially when we consider that Europe exports massively abroad. There is only one possibility for Europe: sticking together, and talking with one voice. But it has to be the voice of the people, rather than lobbies and monetarism. In a sense we are together, but what degree of unity do we want? Is what we have now satisfactory? Are we afraid of a European federation? Europeans are probably afraid of this Europe, an amorphous entity incapable of making decisions, especially when it matters, as well as standing up to the world’s superpowers when it comes to defending the values that have characterized most Europeans for the past 50 years: in particular, a belief in the active role of government and social safeguards for the mitigation of social inequalities stemming from capitalism (what the Germans call “social market economy); a belief in human rights; the awareness of the importance of defending the environment as well as protecting typical local products and producers; and a faith in multipolarism and in peace amongst nations and the refusal of war as an instrument to solve international disagreement. Allowing extraordinary renditions on Europe’s territory, backing the bombing of Gaza uncritically, pushing the economy towards the Anglo-Saxon model, trying to standardize those local products Europeans have been making for thousands of years, are just few examples of the things Europeans do not want and today’s EU is doing. A stronger Parliament and the creation of a real government would help Europeans become more European, while still preserving their differences when they should be preserved, and better defend popular interests as common policies in the aforementioned fields would lead to higher transparency and more in-depth debates at the European level. The extreme Left as well as the Socialists could have an important role in this, in proposing a different idea of Europe. But when the Left apes the Right, voters will punish the former and vote for the original version (the latter). Let us hope the Left has grasped the lesson this parliamentary election has taught.

As such, the “phenomenon” may now be in the process of sowing the seeds for a viable third party that could unite not only the more impassioned elements of the far right and the far left but also a good portion of the more mainstream segments of the electorate. The problem is that there is the very real possibility that this shared dream (and potential third party) may yet again be subverted or destroyed altogether.

The importance of that truly extraordinary, yet-to-be-realized American dream requires that you and I together carefully examine how it was that the “phenomenon” came to be. In so doing we will be better equipped to detect fault lines and possible pitfalls we might need to avoid if we are to keep at least the promise of our shared dream alive. It must be said that this endeavor will also ultimately require a coming together of ALL of us, not just a few target populations, and it must rest on the principles that are actually contained in the founding documents — not just someone else’s interpretation of them.

To begin real movement toward our goal, each of us must examine — with as much deliberate care and objectivity as we are able to muster — the facts as they exist for each of the various components of the larger phenomenon that goes well beyond Ron Paul the man. One such component concerns what Paul himself has described as “ancient history”; that is to say the long defunct “racist” newsletters going under various titles including The Ron Paul Political Report and The Ron Paul Survival Report.

The lingering questions over authorship of these newsletters only add more questions as to exactly who might now be responsible for all or most of Paul’s current and future work and writings. If indeed other individuals assist with — or provide the bulk of — Paul’s material, we might also wonder whether the agenda of these unidentified others completely matches — or subtly re-frames — Paul’s own thinking and philosophy.

Another aspect to consider is that — if it is true that the original purpose of those newsletters was part of a Machiavellian style campaign strategy designed by Paul’s associates in order to build a support base that may not in fact be aligned with Paul’s own sentiments — what assurance do we have that Paul (or his handlers) may not yet again utilize at least a mutated version of such tactics? This is especially troublesome in that Paul himself has so far made NO move to either satisfactorily explain or sever the ties to the relevant, controversial portion of his support base or the tacticians who dreamed it all up.

In the long run, the whole newsletter issue is far less about racism than it is about campaign tactics and what we as voters are willing to tolerate or accept as “part of doing business.” Thus a good portion of our undertaking necessarily involves considerable self-examination. Our own individual responses to and opinions of those old newsletters will tell us as much about ourselves and more importantly how we approach politics in general and our leaders in particular, as they can tell us about Ron Paul the politician. This is a critical element of the task at hand because all too many of us are inclined to take short cuts which eventually can come back to haunt us.

I for one confess that I had watched various reports of the nature of these controversial newsletters which made it to CNN, Tucker Carlson, Wolf Blitzer, and the Bill Moyers Journal. But, like a lot of people, I summarily accepted the answers Ron Paul gave in those interviews.

Suffice it to say, my decision has come back to haunt me, and so today we revisit those old newsletters in order that we might together examine the facts as they exist. We begin with a very cursory review of a few of the statements that were again garnering a flurry of criticism in 2008. We include a series of rebuttals, some of which charged that the quotes cited were made up.

You can be the judge of all of this by carefully investigating scanned copies of the recently recovered original documents for yourself. But as you move through this material, please remember to ponder carefully the real implications of your personal reactions and opinions — as well as the potential long range consequences of even tacit acceptance of this sort of campaign strategy.

Selections from the newsletters are as follows.

“Hmmm. I hate to agree with Rev. Al, but maybe a name change is in order. Welfaria? Zooville? Rapetown? Dirtburg? Lazyopolis…”¹

“Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks. . . Many more are going to have difficulty avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin…”²

And: “They [homosexuals] enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick…”³

A May 1990 issue⁴ cites a man by the name of Jared Taylor, who six months later would go on to found the eugenicist and white supremacist periodical American Renaissance. A May 1991 issue⁵ offers a subscription to American Renaissance.⁶ Four years later, in July 1994, Taylor was cited by The Ron Paul Survival Report, this time as a “criminologist.”⁷

In 1996, Paul said that the newsletters were taken out of context. Five years later he said he didn’t write them — but he took “moral responsibility” for them. The chronology goes something like this.

When interviewed separately by the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American Statesman, the Dallas Morning News and elsewhere in 1996, Ron Paul and his staff all claimed that Paul wrote the Political Reports — but insisted the media was taking them out of context. Later, in 2001, Paul claimed someone else had written the controversial passages. “‘Old News’? ‘Rehashed for Over a Decade’? ” by Matt Welch, January 11, 2008. Reason.

Then in January 2008, during an interview on the Tucker Carlson Show, James Kirchick of The New Republic said that Paul spokesman Jesse Benton told Kirchick that he (Benton) had written those newsletters. Shortly thereafter Benton changed his story somewhat by saying the offensive parts were ghostwritten.⁸

Immediately after this interview, long time friend and one time congressional chief of staff Lew Rockwell posted a short rebuttal to Kirchick on the Lew Rockwell Blog beginning with the charge that “TNR [The New Republic] has a long and checkered history of pro-fascism, pro-communism, and pro-new dealism…”⁹ Concurrent to Rockwell’s post, a much longer article asserted that “Another hack journalist intent on making a name for himself in the establishment media peanut gallery is the latest to spuriously attack presidential candidate Ron Paul, making completely baseless claims … Ron Paul is a hero. He stands for uncompromised integrity and unwavering adherence to the core principles of the Constitution.”¹⁰

These rebuttals notwithstanding, a few days after the Carlson/Kirchick interview, Congressman Paul told Wolf Blitzer that he had “absolutely” no idea who “wrote those things”and allowed that it is the editor, not the publisher (in this case Ron Paul & Associates) of a magazine, who has responsibility for the daily activity of such publications. Paul also stated that there were “some hirings” during that time period, but since “people come and go” he did not know any of their names.¹¹

So we might ask: how and why is it that several of the Political Reports listed Paul as the editor? How often is it that Paul places his name on articles or books he may not even have read? How is it that no one can identify the true authorship of those newsletters inasmuch as there were only four primary employees listed during this time period — Paul’s family and Lew Rockwell — together with another seven nationwide.¹² Moreover why were these newsletters (with one exception which carried the byline of another writer) all published under the banner of Ron Paul’s name, thus creating the impression that they were all written by him, and therefore reflective of his views?¹³

Another question arises: and it has to do with what the nature of those newsletters say about Paul’s supporters, past and present. Specifically, why were there apparently few or no complaints or cancellations from past supporters — and presumably newsletter purchasers — over the twenty year period they were written and during a time period in which their publisher, Ron Paul & Associates, was earning some $940,000 annually?

In other words, were the majority of Paul supporters at that time all racist or “homophobes” — or were only selected publications used to target such groups? Moreover, and given the fact that Paul convincingly asserts that he is not a racist, should we now be at all concerned that the kind of language used in those newsletters clearly appealed to racists and similar “hate” groups who seemed to have helped establish a support base that is still with him?

Additionally, why have so many present supporters, myself included, been so readily dismissive of the many inconsistent explanations — and in turn remiss in considering the long term implications of such campaign tactics (assuming that is indeed what they were)? Part of the explanation rests with the simple fact that the pressure and activity of everyday life often seduces us into relying more on emotion and assumption than might be warranted or required in our decision-making processes, but might this just as easily be as much an excuse as an explanation given the extent of our national problems?

There are of course some thought-provoking assessments of those old newsletters and how they might be related to campaign strategy. Here is one such assessment:

The whole newsletter campaign was marketing genius, in a Machiavellian, the-ends-justify-the-means kind of way. It was a bare-knuckled attempt to build a list of donators and supporters that could be mined when Ron Paul returned to the political scene in the 90’s–it was pre-meditated… In the end, the strategy was entirely successful, and worked masterfully. Ron Paul crushed his political rivals, despite voting almost entirely according to the Libertarian platform … I’m sure that the rural Texans were unaware of Ron Paul’s progressive positions … Ron Paul has shrewd (if not always politically correct) campaign strategists working for him. I now see Ron Paul with eyes wide open. He is human, and a political animal.¹⁴

In considering the above, we might also want to ask what relationship or relevance these “rural Texans” might have to certain high profile supporters and even certain employees. For example a man by the name of Randy Gray was employed by Paul as the Midland County Coordinator in Michigan for Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. It so happens that Gray is a member of the KKK, and is also a “white nationalist” who posts under the user name “Central Michigan” on the Stormfront website which carries the motto “White Pride Worldwide.”¹⁵

Stormfront brings us to Don Black, another Paul supporter, who donated $500 to the Paul campaign — about which incident Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said, “Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom.”¹⁶ The fact remains however that Don Black is an avowed white supremacist, owner of the Stormfront website and a former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Black had succeeded David Duke as Grand Wizard of the KKK, and David Duke was another Paul supporter.

To be sure, politicians cannot handpick supporters. But the methods employed to cultivate — and maintain — a support base are by their nature deliberative acts. Thus the strategies employed by those newsletters, together with who is selected for key positions in a campaign and the manner in which issues are framed are all matters which should be of concern to any of us who consider ourselves to be part of the voting public.

So it is that portions of Paul’s more contemporary politics, upon examination, likewise raise some questions within the context of those old newsletters.

For example, Paul wants to end “birthright citizenship” so as to allow the deportation of children of undocumented workers — and he leads an effort to “secure our borders.” One could, and perhaps should, ask whether Paul’s framing of immigration issues might be construed (or misconstrued) by certain factions as a perhaps more subtle form of racism and as such still function as a part of campaign strategy. Some of his 2008 campaign ads and posters indeed seem to support this possibility.¹⁷

Importantly, this suggestion in NO way is meant to minimize the severity of the situation that exists along the US/Mexican border. As anyone who has visited or has friends and relatives in the affected areas can well attest, the problem is not only showing no signs of letting up, it is becoming untenable for those living there. Moreover, accusations of “racism” hurled at those who dare to suggest that illegal aliens are, well … illegal are little more than the expressions of the phony war of ideas we are all being subjected to through the work of tax exempt foundations — an issue we will explore in future articles.

This being said, it must be recalled that prior to NAFTA, migrant workers moved freely across the U.S. Border and back without incident. Now they must sneak over as illegal aliens in order to work for pennies on the dollar, and outside US labor laws. Moreover, prior to the TRIPS Agreement and the Agreement on Agriculture which in 1994 became a part of the WTO, many peasant farmers from Mexico and points south were at least able to eke out a living for themselves in their own countries without the need to become migrant workers.

The cumulative economic fallout of these various “free” trade agreements has either forced these peasants off the land and into the cities and newly built industrial border towns — or they have become unwilling pawns of the drug cartels, or they must risk life and limb, quite literally, in order to have a chance at earning a very marginal, fear-infused living. Most troubling is that a big percentage of these illegals are women and teenage children, many of whom, once in the U.S., must risk their lives daily in order to work in slaughter houses, meat packing plants and similar situations where the Clinton-inspired “Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray” regulatory rules now apply.

Moreover, the increased efforts at border security since 9-11 have in fact decreased the numbers of these job-hungry illegals, while at the same time there has been a marked increase in drug-related violence along the Southern border. So it is that peasants seeking to do little more than feed themselves are — together with working Americans — the real victims in a much, much bigger economic game.

With this in mind, wouldn’t it be far more productive, and less open to misinterpretation, for Paul to maintain a primary focus on the root of the problem — which is the WTO, the TRIPS agreement and other portions of the “economic/police state matrix” against which Paul himself so eloquently and frequently expresses strong opposition?¹⁸

In the interim, why not demand that appropriate authorities take actions against employers who hire illegal aliens — under current laws already in effect. Why call for still more laws and most importantly why allow employers to escape penalty when it is — to a significant extent — their actions which pit American workers against immigrants, illegal and otherwise? Finally, why not expose the phony drug war for what it is, which is a tool by which to fuel the economic engines of the “industrial north” at the expense of the peasant farmers in the south?

Without question, Paul’s biography reveals an impressive individual who seems to be endowed with almost super human abilities — even if others do substantial ghost writing for him. In addition to his medical and political careers, Paul co-owned a coin dealership, Ron Paul Coins, for twelve years, and is the author of numerous books.

Paul also had what was reportedly a minority stake in the publishing group known as Ron Paul & Associates (which was dissolved in 2001), out of which variously came the infamous Ron Paul Political Report along with The Ron Paul Investment Letter, and The Ron Paul Survival Report. Indeed, Paul and his associates seem to have a “midas touch” if the earnings from Ron Paul & Associates alone are any indication.

Impressively, these diverse careers are in addition to his being the father of five children and now grandfather of 18.

Adding to a VERY long list of activities, publications and books together with multiple careers and an apparently full family life, Paul has also established a number of foundations, together with a variety of political action committees or PACS.

For example: Paul established the non-profit (tax exempt) “think tank” known as the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education or FREE in 1976, while on the House Banking Committee and after a political career was added to his medical career. FREE was “intended to be a vehicle to increase understanding of the economic principles of a free-market society.”

In 1989, FREE established the National Endowment for Liberty (NEFL) in order “to develop programs that take advantage of electronic media.”

Paul is also a “distinguished scholar” for the Von Mises Institute, even teaching at its seminars. The institute has also published a number of Paul’s books — and is itself a tax exempt foundation.

It is the tax exempt foundations which leads us to the subject of Part 3 of The Ron Paul Phenomenon Is NOT Dead. Stay tuned.

1. October 1990 issue of The Ron Paul Political Report, 4.
2. June 15, 1992 Special Issue of The Ron Paul Political Report, 6.
3. January 1994 of The Ron Paul Survival Report, 5.
4. May 1990 issue of The Ron Paul Political Report.
5. May 1991 issue of The Ron Paul Political Report, 3.
6. American Renaissance Magazine
7. July 1994 issue of The Ron Paul Survival Report.
8. ”Ron Paul Revealed,” Tucker Carlson Interview with James Kirchick.
9. “The New Republic” post by Lew Rockwell, LRC Blog, January 8, 2008.
10. “Vicious Ron Paul Hit Piece Hits the Barrel of Yellow Journalism,” by Paul Joseph Watson and Steve Watson. Prison Planet, January 8, 2008.
11. ”Ron Paul Accused of Racism by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.”
12. “More Selections from Ron Paul’s Newsletters”, January 14, 2008, The New Republic.
13. “Angry White Men”, by James Kirchick. January 8, 2008. The New Republic.
14. “Ron Paul’s Klansman Kampaign Koordinator”, by “phenry”, Jan 15, 2008, The Daily Kos.
15. “The Authors of Ron Paul Newsletters: Discovered”. January 16, 2008. Intellectually Stimulating.
16. “Paul Keeps Donation From White Supremacist”, Associated Press, MSNBC, Dec. 19, 2007.
17. ”Ron Paul: The Deep Dark Details Part 2,” 7 minute mark.
18. “The Encroaching Economic/Police State” slide presentation by Geraldine Perry.

The movie receiving these fawning reviews is Sin Nombre (Without a Name), directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. His first feature-length film — “[o]ne of the most memorable directorial debuts in recent memory” according to the Post — it won the California-born and –raised Fukunaga the directing and cinematography award in the dramatic competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

There is certainly much to recommend the film. It tells a visually compelling tale that takes the viewer on a gripping journey from the streets of Tapachula, Chiapas — a mid-size Mexican city on the border with Guatemala — to Mexico’s boundary with Texas. In doing so, Sin Nombre brings the audience into the underworld of Mexican youth gangs, one depicted as often horrifically violent, while providing a window into the grueling trip from southern Mexico taken by many Central American migrants to reach the United States.

The movie revolves around a young member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, Willy, and a young Honduran woman, Sayra, who is trying to reach the United States with her uncle and her father, recently deported from New Jersey, and who she hasn’t seen since she was a child. The two teenagers’ paths cross on the top of a freight train, an efficient but highly dangerous form of transportation for migrants traveling to “el Norte.” On the trip, Sayra develops — rather far-fetchedly — a deep attachment to Willy as he tries to outrun his former gang brothers intent on hunting him down.

While the story in and of itself is quite engrossing, it presents a largely one-dimensional view of Mexico as a land of violence with few honorable people. At the same time, it presents no context to help the viewer understand who the gang members are, and how and why they — and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) itself — came to be.

Apart from a single reference to the gang’s presence in Los Angeles, there is no mention of the MS-13’s origins in southern California, and the U.S. government’s role in facilitating its emergence and spread. Salvadoran migrants, whose very residence there was owed to U.S. support for El Salvador’s brutal military-oligarchy alliance, created the gang in the 1980s as a form of self-protection. U.S. deportations of members helped to internationalize the gang, which now has a strong presence in many Central American countries, and in southern Mexico.¹

Given the focus of the film, it is perhaps far too much to expect Sin Nombre to address such matters. But is begs the question of what the movie — or, more precisely, the filmmaker — is trying to accomplish by focusing on gang violence and its intersection with the Central American migrant passage through Mexico. It is in this area where Sin Nombre proves to be quite problematic and confusing.

A question-and-answer session with Fukunaga and Focus Features CEO, James Shamus, following a recent showing of the film at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, helped to shed some light onto the production- and marketing-related thinking surrounding the film.

Shamus somewhat cryptically called the film “radically political” (suggesting that it was so in a progressive sense), and praised the fact that it gives voice to people rarely heard in feature films — Latinos (which is like lauding a film on the Bloods and the Crips for giving voice to African Africans). He also gushed about how the film is bringing large numbers of Latinos into art-house theaters, evidence of its cross-over appeal.

Fukunaga indirectly took issue with Shamus’s suggestion that Sin Nombre was political. “I didn’t write it as a political film,” the filmmaker asserted. “I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind.” Instead, he stated that he wanted viewers to have an “experience” and to “make up their own minds.” The question is, what is it that he wants people to make up their own minds about?

In published interviews, Fukunaga makes clear that the migrant journey — specifically the dangerous odyssey by train from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the U.S.-Mexico divide — and the violence and suffering that surround it is his intended focus.² Yet, this is at best a secondary aspect of the film, as Sin Nombre privileges the gang-related drama to a great extent. And in doing so in the way that it does, the film paints a picture of Mexico — and, by extension, its people — that is anything but flattering. Indeed, it is difficult to come away from the film not feeling a sense of revulsion toward and fear of many things Mexican, in particular the country’s men. In this regard, the film plays into some of the worst stereotypes that fuel anti-migrant sentiment — especially as it relates to Mexico.

Undoubtedly there is a lot of brutal violence — perpetrated by Mexican authorities, gang members, and bandits — associated with the migrant passage from southern Mexico to the United States.³ And, in addition to the deaths and injuries brought about by such brutality, innumerable migrants lose their lives or limbs each year by falling off and underneath what many call the “train of death” or “the beast.”⁴ Sin Nombre provides a valuable glimpse into these varied forms of violence, but the film doesn’t give the viewer a sense of the frequent nature of the fatalities and injuries associated with the train itself.

At the same time, Sin Nombre makes invisible the U.S. enforcement apparatus. In terms of the actual movement across the U.S.-Mexico boundary, it only shows a single unauthorized crossing, one that is successful and seemingly challenge-free. The films does this despite the fact that the size of the boundary and immigration apparatus has exploded in the last 15 years — the U.S. Border Patrol, for instance, has more than quadrupled in size (there are today 18,000+ agents) during this period. Meanwhile, more than 5,000 migrant bodies have been recovered in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since 1995, a tragic manifestation of the boundary’s “hardening.”

In addition to such misrepresentation, the movie effectively exculpates the United States for its role in helping to make Mexico a grueling zone of passage for migrants from Central America and beyond.

In the 1980s, during a northward exodus of Central American refugees, Washington put considerable pressure on Mexico, and assisted Mexican government efforts, to crackdown on third-country nationals migrating without authorization through Mexico to get to the United States.⁵ Since the 1990s, U.S. authorities have intensified such pressures and efforts,⁶ while extending them geographically so that the U.S. boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus is today effectively present in Mexico and in countries well beyond.⁷ In other words, the arduous and dangerous journey across Mexico that the film helps bring to light has been made in no small part in Washington, D.C.

Given this reality — and the almost omnipresent and highly charged nature of present-day debates surrounding immigration and boundary enforcement — it is, at best, pure fantasy to think that one can avoid politics in making a film that is to a significant degree about migration from Mexico and Central America. The title of one of Howard Zinn’s book says it best: You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.

To pretend that you can be otherwise facilitates the myopic thinking that led Fukunaga to make a film that purports to be a sympathetic portrayal of the migrant passage, but that ends up obscuring much and inadvertently fueling some of the flames which underlie the very making of the journey’s fatal obstacles that seem to concern him.

It is easy to decry migrant deaths and the many forms of suffering endured by unauthorized migrants as they make the dangerous trek to the United States. Everyone from the Minutemen to the most ardent congressional advocates of increased enforcement does so. It is much more difficult — and important — to analyze and challenge the factors and agents that compel migrants to leave their homes and that deny them passage and entry to the relatively safety and security of places like the United States. Because it does the former without doing the latter, while reinforcing ugly images of Mexico that inform anti-immigrant sentiment, Sin Nombre is hardly progressive or radical, and is regrettably part tragedy in more ways than one.

1. Alfonso Gonzales, Rethinking U.S. Involvement in Central America’s War on Gangs, Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 2006.
2. See, for example, indieWire, “Cary Joji Fukunaga on ‘Sin Nombre’: Border Crossings, Authenticity, and Authorship,” indieWire, March 17, 2009.
3. See N.C. Aizenman, “Meeting Danger Well South of the Border,” Washington Post, July 8, 2006: A1+; Velia Jaramillo, “Hipocresía migratoria,” Processo.com.mx, August 14, 2006 and Jeremy Schwartz, “Mexico’s Southern Border Snares Central American Migrants,” The News & Observer (North Carolina), March 10, 2007.
4. Christine Evans, “Train Jumping: A Desperate Journey,” Palm Beach Post, November 11, 2006; a compelling photo essay — with audio — accompanies the article. See also Mariana Van Zeller, “Death Train,” Current TV, Nov. 25, 2005; and “Amputee Shelter,” Current TV, Jan. 4, 2006.
5. See Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home, Austin: The Center for Mexican American Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, 1996.
6. Ginger Thompson, “Mexico Worries About Its Own Southern Border,” New York Times, June 18, 2006.
7. See Michael Flynn, “Dondé está la frontera?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 58, No. 4, July/August 2002: 24-35.

Obama’s movements were strictly confined to a limited area, unlike in Europe where he was able to stroll about in Strasbourg or walkabout almost gingerly in Prague. His 24-hour visit which began Thursday afternoon and ended Friday morning was limited to a Los Pinos (the Mexican White House) greetings ceremony complete with noisy schoolchildren waving flags of both nations, an overnight stay at the Inter Continental and a gala dinner in his honor (without his wife by his side) at the Archeological and History Museum. In attendance at the elaborate evening’s banquet were 100 guests, carefully selected by the American embassy. The select list comprised a Mexican who’s who of its most powerful business barons and members of this Latin American nation’s corporate elite including, the billionaire and international investor, Carlos Slim.

The U.S. president arrived into the city on Thursday afternoon, in his official limousine called affectionately “the beast,” a gleaming glamorous version of an armored personal carrier really. He brought along an almost imperial retinue of advisors and top government officials with him, among them: Jim Jones, national security advisor, Steven Chu, secretary of energy, Janet Napolitano from Homeland security, Larry Summers, the White House chief economic council; John O. Brenan, the deputy national security advisor, Daniel Restrepo, U.S. advisor on hemispheric affaires and finally Jeffrey Davidov, former U.S. envoy during the Vincente Fox presidency (2000-2006) and special advisor to the president for the summit of the Americas.

On his agenda with his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon was of course, the issue of security related to the ongoing drug war and arms trafficking. Other just as pressing matters such climate change, its impact on both states, the demands of Mexican farmers to renegotiate NAFTA to make the treaty more equitable for them, and the ongoing immigration issue or the legalization of 12 million “Latinos” living and working illegally in the U.S was sidelined due to the border drug wars.

Why did Obama come to Mexico?

¿A que viene Obama? (Why did Obama come?) was the question asked the most in the Mexican media ahead of his visit it seemed. Obama’s first “working visit” to Mexico as president comes at a time when relations are severely strained between Washington and Mexico City. Issues like the flow of narcotics to the north and the back flow of high caliber weaponry which originates in the U.S, have frayed bilateral ties. In a historical context, Obama came almost 95 years after the notorious “Tampico affair” which led to the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the two neighboring states and prompted U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to dispatch a contingent of U.S. marines to seize and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz on April 21st, 1914 during the upheavals of the Mexican revolution.

The port city was bombed twice by the U.S. Navy with large civil causalities being incurred on the Mexican side. In an article entitled a “Open letter to Barack Obama,” (La Jornada, 17-04-2009) which the U.S president is unlikely to have read, the columnist Gilerto Lopez y Rivas gives readers a historical refresher course which rings alarm bells now; chronicling the military interventions into Mexico by U.S troops when diplomacy simply failed to deliver the desired results.

In his provocative piece, he then questions the legitimacy of the Mexican presidency: “… you should know [Mr. president] that millions of Mexican consider Felipe Calderon a president who came to power by means of an electoral fraud with the support of the military and the complicity of leaders and governors of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (The Institutional Revolutionary Party), which governed Mexico for over 70 years) … This governing group has brought the country into the current disaster and seeks to consummate a silent annexation with the United States.” Is such treasonous treachery really afoot or this exaggerated nationalist rhetoric? That’s hard to say, but one thing is for sure: the future of Felipe Calderon’s presidency seems to be tied to Obama’s actions or inactions when it comes to border security issue. The White House for its part has put all its chips on Calderon, betting he can vanquish the violent drug lords (with 1.4 billion in U.S assistance wreaking havoc in the country and spilling over into the U.S. This is a risky gambit.

Dr. Obama’s patient, President Calderon

As Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, one of Mexico’s most esteemed journalist and observers of the local political scene pointed out in his daily one man morning radio show last week, Obama’s visit to Mexico was like a quick check up, to assess and take the weakening pulse of his designated crusader against the drug villains, Felipe Calderon. Calderon is a man beleaguered by the increasing violence in his country. And his presidency is in trouble too. The legitimacy of electoral his victory in 2006 remains marred by unrelenting accusations of electoral fraud. Fifty percent of the Mexican voting public repudiated him in the July, 2006 elections. Furthermore, mid term congressional elections are coming again in July. And a very high abstention rate is anticipated this time around; this is hardly a rousing endorsement of the PAN (National Action party) party president.

For many Mexicans it seems Calderon not only “stole” the elections but he also has failed miserably to bring stability and security to his fellow citizens. He is losing “his” drug war. For this reason, Obama has come to prop up his foundering counterpart and try to rescue and extricate Washington’s man, from a perilous quandary. Yet great expectations, on both sides were dampened by harsh and sobering realities; the violent struggle among Mexican drug lords battling for control of the narcotics trade, compounded by a civil war like struggle between the well armed cartels and the federal armed forces who are supposed to put them out of business. But few experts expect this very lucrative trade to diminish any time soon. There’s just too much cash involved and corruption on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border to curb or even control the two way “free trade” of narcotics and weapons.

A “new era” in the bilateral ties or a simulated change?

A “new era” in bilateral ties was hailed during Obama’s visit. But as Laura Carlsen, a specialist on Latin American affairs based in Mexico City puts it in her assessment of the visit: “President Obama’s visit to Mexico produced vague and contradictory statements, centered on worn-out strategies. Many people who had hoped for a new approach that would seek to redress the inequities of the binational relationship will find little in these declarations to pin their hopes on.” (Huffington Post, 17-04-2009)

In that sense, the visit was high flying in grandiloquent praise for Calderon from Obama and vise versa. It was also a bit of schmooze session in which the Mexican president had hoped some of Obama’s magic might rub off on him as well. Beyond the handshakes and back patting, few substantive measures were agreed upon to deal with the drug war. It looked as if the White Houses wanted to reassure skittish Americans that Mexico was now on the map and a top priority for the Obama administration.

Carlsen sees it as also reassuring the Mexican side: “These overtures no doubt served to decrease tensions between the two governments that built up following U.S. statements of the Mexico as a near ‘failed state’ that was losing a grip on its own territory to drug cartels, and a potential national security threat.” The snag in the U.S.-Mexican game plan she writes, could be that “by focusing the trip on the person of Calderon and seeking to bolster his leadership rating, Obama forgets that Calderon is a polemical president in a deeply divided nation as a result of both his rightwing policies and the doubts of legitimacy that hang over his presidency.”

Nevertheless, the White house strategists have tied outcome of the drug war to the fate of the Calderon presidency. Calderon for his part sees it differently: the ball is in the U.S court. Everything from limiting the flow of high-caliber arms into Mexico from the U.S. side to immigration (Obama promised Calderon to achieve sweeping migration reform, despite a hostile U.S. Congress and rising protectionism north of the border).

Hence, Obama’s patient is ill, and the U.S. knows it. But by rushing to his bedside, Obama hopes his near cult-like status and popularity abroad can magically cure what ills Calderon and his country. Besides the drug war, Calderon also has to deal with the impact of the global financial crisis which is hitting home hard which began north of the border. Recently he asked for a $ 47 billion USD credit line or loan from the IMF as a preventive measure or to bolster the wobbly pesos and offset potential speculative attacks against the historically wobbly currency.

Mr. Obama tear down this border wall!

Ronald Reagan on a visit to West Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, implored his Soviet counterpart to break down barriers to end the call war. “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!” He exclaimed to cheerful throngs of cold war weary, Germans divided for decades. Mexico and the U.S. may not be on the opposite sides of an ideological struggle today, but none the less there is an irony here. While Obama stood “shoulder to should” with his Mexican host and expounded on the close and neighborly ties and shared values of both nations, the U.S. Department of homeland security proceeded with the construction (613 miles so far) for the so-called “border fence” meant to deny Mexican migrants their chance to achieve the increasingly elusive “American dream.” The militarization of the border area continues apace, despite the flowery verbiage at the highest levels. Perhaps this huge fence can be interpreted as a “Mending wall,” the title of a poem by Robert Frost from which the adage “good fences make good neighbors” originated. But Mexican may not see it this way.

Obama previously came from a “borderless Europe.” Yet North America remains a divided continent in terns of borders and wealth and opportunity. The equal partnership looks more uneven than ever before. There is however, thankfully no more talk publicly of Mexico being the U.S.’ “backyard” but as Jesus Velasco Marquez summed up the state of the relationship: “The United States will not change the position by which Mexico must submit to [the U.S.] its strategy.” (La Cronica, 13-04-2009). A strategy whose success or failure, from now on it seems depends on the fate and future of Felipe Calderon.

The world was shocked — or rather embarrassed — this week when Canadian Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney announced he was banning Galloway from entering Canada, as a “security risk.” Well, sort of. Kenney’s Director of Communications Alykhan Velshi explained that it was really the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Kenney merely chose not to overturn their decision, taken, no doubt, after long and costly sleuthing by Canada’s ace security forces. No official reason was given.

Is Galloway planning to enter Canada as part of some top-secret global terrorist operation? The more likely explanation is because of his outspoken and eloquent opposition to the war in Afghanistan and his success in breaking the siege of Gaza with the historic Viva Palestina convoy last week. He is being accused of supporting Hamas, which Canada officially considers a terrorist organization. However, his only weapon is his fiery oratory, a fine example of — to paraphrase the old saw — words are mightier than white phosphorus bombs.

The Conservative government is on shaky ground these days. It is only because the opposition is split almost equally three ways that the united right can pretend to govern. Conservative strategists obviously feel that Galloway is not an issue that the opposition will rally around. After all, the new Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff supported the war in Iraq and the Liberal government under Prime Minister Jean Cretien provided troops for Afghanistan as early as 2002. The socialists and separatists are not happy with the war but are afraid to say so too openly, considering who controls the media and hence politicians’ fate in any elections.

Galloway’s host Toronto Coalition to Stop the War coordinator James Clark said: “We will not accept this ban, and we plan on challenging it.” Galloway stated that the government’s action merely proves that “unjust wars abroad will end up consuming the very liberties that make us who we are.” The obvious violation of Canada’s traditional tolerance and freedom of speech is in fact a windfall for the peaceniks.

Plans are going ahead for the speaking tour, which will start 30 March in Toronto, after which it goes on to Mississauga (home of many Afghan refugees), Montreal and Ottawa. Organizers are encouraging the public to continue buying tickets to show their support for free speech. “One way or another, we will bring George Galloway to Canada,” vowed Laith Marouf, coordinator of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. “We’re currently planning a delegation of MPs, lawyers and activists to escort Mr Galloway from the US across the Canadian border.”

Like last week’s attack on Chas Freeman in the US, this attempt to disrupt the support for the beleaguered Palestinians is backfiring. After a campaign by the Israeli lobby that Freeman said plumbs “the depths of dishonor and indecency,” he was forced to withdraw as Obama’s nominee for chairman of his National Intelligence Council, causing a furor that still resonates. The Galloway ban is giving much greater exposure to Canadians of his withering critique of Canada’s failed war: “Flagwaving, or in the case of Canada, shroud-waving of the brave Canadian soldiers who gave their lives for this failed policy of the Canadian government [in Afghanistan] is despicable beyond words.”

The decision to deny Galloway entry stands in stark contrast to the warm welcome the Conservative government and the Canadian media gave former US president George W Bush last week. Only a hardy band of 500 protesters braved the Calgary cold to throw shoes as close as possible to a man who many believe should not have been granted entry for his role in perpetuating crimes against humanity.

How unfortunate for Harper that this clumsy faux pas merely makes him and Canada look foolish around the world. Just about the only praise for Harper comes from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which represents all 50 of the Israeli lobby groups in the US, and is arguably even more powerful than AIPAC. They honored Harper and the entire Conservative government last year by awarding them their very first International Leadership Award for his support of Israel.

The Galloway gaffe is not all the Conservatives have been up to. Immigration Minister Kenney just announced he was cutting funding for social programs provided by the Canadian Arab Federation for new Muslim immigrants (including many Afghans) because it openly criticizes the current government’s strongly pro-Israel stance in the Middle East.

Kenney has also been busy deporting another five US war resisters, including Kimberly Rivera, the first US woman Iraq war resister to go to Canada. Rivera, her husband and three children, including her six-week-old daughter, were forced to leave before parliament reconvened last month, when an angry opposition, smelling blood, could have overturned the heartless ruling. Kenney is on record saying the refugee claims of war resisters are “bogus”, that he “has no sympathy for them.” This is the same Canada that was a haven for 125,000 US Vietnam war resisters in the 1960-70s, the largest migration from the US to Canada since the American Revolution.

Curiously, Kenney’s 24-year-old yes-man, Alykhan Velshi, is a self-styled “moderate Muslim” who described Galloway as an “infandous street-corner Cromwell.” “We’re not going to seek to overturn that [CBSA] assessment in order to let into the country someone who … is, in a sense, a popinjay for those Taliban fighters who are trying to kill Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.”

Though denying the charge that he financially supports Hamas, Galloway is otherwise treating the matter tongue-in-cheek. In a press release, he pointed out: “In 2006 [Kenney] addressed a rally of the so called People’s Mujahideen of Iran, a Waco-style cult, banned in the European Union as a terrorist organization . . . Being banned by such a man is like being lectured on due diligence by Lord Conrad Black, a Kenney ally, now breaking stones in the hot sun.”

Concerning his views of the Taliban, as a young Labour backbencher he told prime minister Margaret Thatcher that she “had opened the gates to the barbarians” and that “a long, dark night would now descend upon the people of Afghanistan.” He calls the current policy “equally a profound mistake … worse than a crime, as Talleyrand said, it’s a blunder.”

The irony of refusing to allow Galloway to come to Canada after he managed to break the two-year siege of Gaza by the Israelis was apparently lost on Kenney and Velshi. Galloway has spoken in Canada before about the Middle East without setting off any alarm bells.

Galloway recalled another such attempt to prevent free speech across the US-Canada border, when “Paul Robeson was forbidden to enter Canada not by Ottawa but by Washington, which had taken away his passport. But he was still able to transfix a vast crowd of Vancouver’s mill hands and miners with a 17-minute telephone concert culminating in a rendition of the Ballad of Joe Hill. Technology has moved on since then. And so from coast to coast, Minister Kenney notwithstanding, I will be heard one way or another.”

2) We don’t have souls and don’t go anywhere but into the ground to be eaten by worms when we die. Let’s bravely acknowledge that fact.

3) Quit contending that global warming isn’t real. Except for discredited, charlatan “scientists” of the kind who promote Intelligent Design, the overwhelming majority of truly qualified experts agree that manmade greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. Conservatives can’t bring themselves to admit that “liberals” and United Nations types could ever be correct about anything, so they nay-say, sit on their hands, and would allow their grandchildren (and ours) to ultimately perish, fearfully gasping for precious breath.

4) Nationalism sucks. Belief that one’s own country is better or more important than all others has generated massively destructive jingoism and xenophobia through the ages. Combined with religion, it’s been the chief cause of war for bloody centuries. Join me in pledging to never take up arms against anyone on bogus pretexts — or to imagine them inferior, “evil,” etc. — just because they live beyond the ocean, look strange, and have unfamiliar customs.

5) Let’s jettison monopoly capitalism, which is so parasitically harmful that it makes a starving vampire bat seem benign. If we the people took over the economy, democratically controlling it for public profit and common gain, we’d never get robbed at the gas pump again, pay an arm and a leg for medical care or prescription drugs, lose our homes to usurious mortgage thieves, or get sent off to die in meddling neocons’ criminal invasions abroad. Fire the boss! Become a fair-minded owner of America, along with your fellow workers and neighbors!

6) Stop bashing immigrants. Each of our own arriving ethnic groups was accused by existing nativists of stealing jobs, being a societal drain, having criminal and otherwise unsavory tendencies, or spreading disease, just as mostly Hispanic immigrants are condemned today. Such successive discrimination plainly benefited divide-and-conquer corporate profiteers. It was only when ethnicities, races, and genders united — understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all — that the overall U.S. working class made decisive advances and acquired a mutually better living standard.

7) Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It’s abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word “justice,” for it’s a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women’s suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few.

8) Accept that, while abortion isn’t pretty, it’s often necessary. Furthermore, only each female in each specific, unique circumstance has the right to determine what constitutes a legitimate abortion need. No male, or male-dominated institution, should interfere in this most personal and difficult choice. Before guys say one word about the supposed impropriety of terminating an unacceptable pregnancy, they should produce ironclad guarantees about controlling their reckless libidos and keeping their penises in their pants, if that’s where they’re told they should remain.

9) Repeat after me: “Better gay than grumpy.” The only problem with homosexuality is that some straights, insecure about their own orientation, get uptight over it. Most animal species engage in same-sex contact on a minority basis. Therefore it isn’t “unnatural,” just different, and entirely involuntary, like being left-handed rather than right. Besides, aren’t the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”? Quit being hypocrites and get aboard the freedom train!

10) To nurture the collective human spirit, which is quite different than a religious “soul,” think less about what you can personally acquire, in a material sense. Instead, join struggles for shared prosperity. Know that the greatest reward is giving a deprived child reason to laugh. Honor and guard our earthly home. Lie down beside a blade of grass and contemplate its simple magnificence. Then, when relentless age takes its final toll, buy the farm with a contented smile. You lived well. You did the right thing.

Feed those worms and help make that grass grow!

On December 9, ICE resumed deportations after halting them in September following summer storms that battered the country leaving 800,000 people without food, clean water, other essentials, and for around 70,000 their homes.

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas announced: “We fully expected to resume deportation flights when it was safe. And we made a determination that it was appropriate to (do it now) based on the conditions on the ground….The individuals being returned have final orders of removal and the necessary travel documents” — even though advocates say things are worse in Haiti, not better.

BBC called the situation “eye-popping,” and the Miami Herald said it was “the worst humanitarian disaster (for) Haiti in 100 years” leaving:

• Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city, uninhabitable;
• most of the nation’s livestock and food crops destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting;
• irrigation systems demolished;
• collapsed buildings throughout the country; 23,000 houses destroyed; another 85,000 damaged; 964 schools destroyed or damaged;
• conservatively about $1 billion in storm damage;
• the threat of famine, especially for children and the elderly;
• 2.3 million Haitians facing “food insecurity,” according to USAID, reeling under 40% higher prices than in January;
• inadequate sanitation and clean water;
• the widespread threat of disease; and
• overall millions lacking everything needed to survive who in normal times struggle to get by.

In December, Director Randy McGorty of Catholic Legal Services for the Archdiocese of Miami said:

After dealing with this administration on Haitian issues for eight years, I’m forced to conclude that its policy toward Haiti is based on racism. It’s shocking. People (lack everything and) are starving. This callous disregard for human life is inexplicable. Many deported Haitians simply have no communities to return to. It is disappointing that the Bush administration would even consider sending people back to this incredibly fragile nation…(Haiti’s) humanitarian crisis…continues and worsens.

(South) Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center’s (FIAC) executive director, Cheryl Little, said: “We are attempting to do whatever we can to convince government officials to change their minds on this. It’s an outrageously inhumane act.”

On January 26, FIAC urged new DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to “immediately stay the inhumane deportations and to seriously consider granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians already in the United States.” On December 19, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff denied the Preval government’s TPS request. As a result, Haiti won’t cooperate, so ICE is making Haitians get their own travel documents (including passports) and assist in their own deportations.

Throughout 2008, around 1000 occurred in total. After a near-three month suspension (from September 19 – December 9), they resumed slowly, but picked up noticeably after Obama’s inauguration. According to FIAC, men like Louiness Petit-Frere are affected, deported on January 23: “Here ten years with no criminal record, he leaves his US-citizen wife behind along with his mother and four siblings, all (with) legal status…One of his brothers, US Marine Sgt Nikenson Peirreloui, served and was injured in Iraq.”

In 2008, Obama campaigned vigorously for South Florida’s Haitian vote. Now he’s betrayed it the way he’s abandoning millions of distressed households by providing little in real relief compared to trillions in handouts to Wall Street and the rich.

After Congress established TPS in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant temporary immigration status to undocumented residents unable to return home due to armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” Besides El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, past recipients included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Angola. Six nations still have TPS, but all face expiration in 2009 unless extended.

Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on redevelopment while Haitians in America help through remittances back to families. In 2006, they sent $1.65 billion, the highest income percentage from any foreign national group in the world.

In 1997, the Clinton administration granted Haitians Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for one year. Currently about 20,000 Haitians qualify for TPS, a much smaller number than for other recipient countries.

Nonetheless, deportations are proceeding with 30,299 on “final order of removal” status, meaning an immigration judge ordered them out. About 600 are in detention, 243 others are electronically monitored, and all 30,000 will be removed by an administration as callous to the poor as previous hard-liners under George Bush. In America, everything changes, yet stays the same, even under the first black president.

Some Background on Haitian Immigration to America

Haitians began arriving in South Florida about 50 years ago, but were denied the same rights and treatment as more favored immigrants like Europeans. Fleeing repressive dictatorships hardly mattered during years under “Papa” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier or when military dictatorships ran the country.

In September 1963, the first boatload claiming persecution arrived but were denied asylum and deported. Decades later, it’s the same. After a 1991 coup deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, thousands of Haitians fled to America. Most were intercepted at sea and sent home while around 300 were detained at Guantanamo because tests showed they were HIV positive.

Conditions at the camp were deplorable. Treated like prisoners, they were held behind razor wire in leaky barracks with bad sanitation, poor food, and little medical care even for the sick and pregnant women. After protests and a hunger strike, crackdowns were severe, many were imprisoned, and Clinton White House justification was no different than today. The DOJ claimed Haitians had no legal rights under the Constitution, federal statutes, or international law. Wrong.

International law protects asylum seekers, Haitians as much as others.

Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines one as:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.

Refugee-seeking persons are “asylum seekers.” Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to help them. To gain legal protection, individuals must:

• be outside their country of origin;
• be afraid of persecution;
• be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
• fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
• pose no danger to others.

In the 1980s, Haitians fared no better than earlier. From 1981-1990, 22,940 Haitians were interdicted at sea, yet only 11 qualified for asylum compared to tens of thousands of Cubans who automatically get it if they reach South Florida.

After the September 1991 coup against Aristide, the OAS’s strong condemnation forced the first Bush administration to soften its policy slightly, but not much. By November 11, about 450 Haitians were in detention while the State Department sought a regional solution, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees arranged for several Latin countries (including Belize, Honduras, Trinidad, Tobago, and Venezuela) to provide temporary safe havens. Still hundreds were forcibly returned and thousands more interned at Guantanamo.

By May 1992, citing an inflow surge that month, president Bush ordered all Haitian boats interdicted and peremptorily returned without determining if their occupants were at risk of persecution. Repatriation continued until Bill Clinton offered to process arrivals at a regional location, but only as it turned out for three weeks because the flow was much greater than expected. Thereafter, refugee processing was suspended with arrivals offered regional “safe havens” but no option for US refugee status.

In October 1998, under the newly enacted Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA), eligible Haitians (who filed asylum claims or entered the US before December 31, 1995) were allowed to live and work in America permanently without applying for an immigrant visa in advance from overseas.

However, under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), aliens arriving in America without proper immigration documents are immediately processed for removal. If they fear persecution, they’re kept in detention until an asylum officer determines the threat’s credibility. In 2005, 1850 interdicted Haitians were sent to Guantanamo. Only nine got hearings and of those, one man got refugee status.

Under the 2002 Homeland Security Act, at least five separate agencies handle Haitian migrants:

• the Coast Guard for interdictions;
• Customs and Border Protection for apprehensions and inspections;
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for detentions; and
• DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) for asylum and removal hearings.

Earlier and more recent policies highlight how Haitians are mistreated. On October 29, 2002, fleeing poverty, not repression, 212 Haitians arrived in South Florida, hoping for asylum and safety. Instead, they were rounded up, handcuffed, held in detention, and treated like criminals in gross violation of international law. Families were separated from children, husbands from wives, and siblings from each other, but it wasn’t an isolated incident.

Unknown to most Americans, the Bush administration had a secret Haitian policy that took affect in late 2001. It authorized the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), now DHS/ICE, to detain all South Florida arrivals regardless of their asylum eligibility.

The result was dramatic, insensitive, and immediate. The Haitian release rate for those passing interviews dropped from 96% in November to 6% between mid-December and mid-March 2002. Even Haitians granted asylum weren’t immediately released.

On February 25, 2004, days before the second February 29 coup, the US State Department urged US citizens in Haiti to leave. In addition, George Bush said all interdicted Haitians would be returned and those reaching shore would be held prior to deportation, regardless of their protected status.

Detention conditions then and since are appalling and for women dangerous with reports of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape. Men and women both are subjected to frequent strip searches, lockdowns, nightly sleep interruptions, and often denial of needed medical care.

Official Haitian policy under George Bush and currently under Obama is:

• deny asylum seeker status;
• summarily return arrivals without screening their claims;
• detain others under harsh conditions prior to deportation;
• deny Haitians their rights under international law; and
• now expeditiously deport over 30,000 refugees to desperate poverty and storm-ravaged conditions in a country under repressive military occupation.

Haitian and Cuban Policies Contrasted

Except for the Aristide and first Preval administration years, Haiti has a history of some of the worst regional repression. So did Cuba until Castro overthrew Batista and transformed the country politically and economically. For decades, refugees from both countries sought asylum in America. Yet Cubans and Haitians get vastly different treatment.

Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (as amended), a “wet foot/dry foot” policy applies under which interdicted asylum seekers are returned home, but those reaching shore are inspected for entry, then nearly always allowed to stay — in contrast to Haitians getting no equivalent treatment even after “the worst humanitarian disaster in 100 years” leaving the government unable to handle the overwhelming environmental and human fallout. TPS would help, but neither the Bush or Obama administration offered it, so Haitians are left on their own.

It’s an old story in America. White Anglo-Saxons and most Europeans are welcome. For poor blacks, Latinos (except for Cubans) and most Asians, far different standards apply, none harsher than for Haitians despite dangers, poverty, and devastation at home, risks they take at sea, and rights international law grants them — ones America disdains or observes as it wishes.

In its 1996 Annual Report, the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that America’s Haitian interdiction and repatriation policy violated the following provisions of the American Declaration of the the Rights and Duties of Man:

• the right to life;
• liberty;
• security of person;
• equality under the law;
• resort to the courts; and
• to seek and receive asylum.

Conditions worsened under George Bush, especially after the February 2004 coup. Since January 20, the Obama administration is continuing the worst of his predecessor’s policies. This from America’s first black president who governs the same as white ones. Around 30,000 Haitians will be among first to learn how harshly firsthand.

As I write, I am listening to an Israeli military spokesman telling an Al-Jazeera reporter that the reason for all of this bloodshed is Hamas. Hamas, he says, “is running a con game on the people of Gaza.” According to the bloody logic of Israel, Tel Aviv has no blame in the mass murder being perpetrated on the people of Gaza. This is despite the fact that Israeli weapons are what is killing the Palestinians. This is despite the fact that the bombs and rockets rained on the people of Gaza are considered legitimate weapons while the rockets launched by Hamas’ military wing are labeled weapons of terrorists. At the risk of redundancy, how can anyone genuinely believe this? How can anyone call the Israeli rockets that kill more civilians in one stroke than all the thousands of rockets fired into Israel anything but weapons of terror?

This is a war. It may be a very lopsided war, but it is a war. The longer it goes on, the more innocents will die. The longer it goes on, the more Palestinians will side with the resistance in all its forms, including Hamas. The longer it goes on, the likelihood that it could spread heightens. Israel most likely hopes it can end Hamas’ rule in Gaza and force Palestinians to acquiesce to the peace plans contrived in Tel Aviv and Washington. Hamas and its allies are probably hoping for a scenario where they bring the IDF to a stalemate, somewhat like the situation that occurred with Hezbollah during the summer of 2006. Speaking of Hezbollah, if Israel achieves its goals in Gaza, does it plan to revisit Lebanon in a sequel to that 2006 war? Would Israel open a second front on its northern border if Hezbollah began an effort to support the resistance in Gaza? On January 6th, 2009 the Lebanese media reported that the Israeli Air Force was intensifying its reconnaissance flights over southern Lebanon, an area considered to be a Hezbollah stronghold. In addition, Major General Amos Yadlin, the head of Israeli military intelligence, told Israel’s cabinet that a response from Hezbollah to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza was a possibility. Hundreds of IDF reservists have been called up and sent to the Israeli-Lebanese border. On January 8th, AP reported that Hezbollah rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon and that Israel had returned fire. Hezbollah denied any involvement.

Despite the fact that the powder keg of the middle east is on fire once again, Tel Aviv has shown no intention of agreeing to a ceasefire. Indeed, it continues to ignite even more powder. This can only mean that they believe their forces can destroy the supply routes used by Hamas and other Palestinians and weaken the resistance to such a point that Tel Aviv can neutralize the Palestinian rulers in Gaza just like those in the West Bank. If this occurs there may no longer be war, but their peace will be one that insures another battle. The current talks Egypt is holding with representatives from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas seem to indicate this to be almost certain. Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council continues to prove its subservience to Washington by refusing to demand a ceasefire in the conflict. This from the same body that used the lies of the Pentagon and White House as a reason to approve an attack on Iraq in 2003.

Let’s go back to those civilians Tel Aviv and Washington claim Hamas hides behind. Besides the quite obvious physical fact that Hamas members are Palestinians before they are anything else and therefore live in Palestine, the other fact is that the IDF, too, lives among its civilian population. After all, they are all Israelis and most of them go home after their work day unless they are stationed on a border or involved in a war. Israeli military facilities, like those of most every nation, are situated near and in civilian areas if for no other reason then the fact that civilians work at them in a variety of support and other functions. The very nature of Hamas and other resistance factions since the dawn of guerrilla warfare is that they are like fish in the sea. This is not only because they have the support of the people but because they need it to exist. If Hamas is holding the Gazans hostage, then Tel Aviv is holding the entire population of Israel hostage by its refusal to negotiate with Hamas and its deception and lies in its negotiations with other more moderate Palestinian groups. Furthermore, the current Israeli offensive places Israeli civilians in an almost certain future danger as it places Gazans because sooner or later the battle will once again shift back to Israel itself in the form of bomb attacks.

This is, once again, the point where the inhumanity becomes clear. Political agendas are important and the right of the Palestinian people to a nation is accepted by most people in the world. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Israel — the nation with the second most say in the matter– has made it their national purpose to deny this right, except under terms that amount to continued occupation. So, instead of honest and lasting attempts to work towards a Palestinian state, Israel (with the monetary and moral support of Washington and other western governments) invades, destroys, and lies its way towards a future that frustrates Palestinian hopes for a nation while simultaneously weakening the Israelis’ ability to keep theirs. After all, wars and occupations are never permanent and rarely destroy the will of those being warred against. Indeed, the history of the Palestine-Israel seems to indicate that they only multiply the opposition. How many more years will it take before Tel Aviv understands this?

It’s absurd enough the Bureau claims a five-figure population of free-roaming horses and burros is too big — while ranchers, covetous of any blade of grass or drop of water these horses find, graze more than five million cows, buffalo, sheep and goats on public lands.¹

It’s shameful enough that the Bureau takes the horses and burros — animals the agency is responsible for protecting — away from the land to which they were born, and severs these animals’ own relationships. That it privatizes these horses and burros — more than 216,000 of them over the years — selling them at auctions and sale yards, or “adopting” them off — taking $125 per head, under current law, as the minimum adoption fee.

It’s disgraceful enough that the government even threatens to kill them.²

It’s nauseating enough that the government enables people to break free-living mustangs and turn them into lifestyle accessories through schemes such as the “Extreme Mustang Makeover” — a circus-like spectacle complete with hoops of fire, which is trumpeted by Mustang car maker Ford as though it were some kind of noble environmental activity.

And now, in one of the bitterest twists of all, these so-called American icons will not only be made to march at the forthcoming inaugural parade, but also used to guard the US borders. Instead of moving uncontrolled, these horses will be trained and enlisted to stop humans from moving uncontrolled.

I received a message from the National Public Outreach Specialist at the Bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program earlier this month telling me I ought to think it’s all awesome. Here’s the entire message:

—–Original Message—–
From: Bureau of Land Management Wildhorse and Burro [mailto:whb-news@Bureau of Land Management.gov]
Sent: December 17, 2008 2:45 PM
To: leehall@friendsofanimals.org
Subject: BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT Wild Horse and Burro Program

Hello Lee Hall, J.D.,
I just wanted to share with everyone an article that is really awesome. Our Mustangs are going to be \”strutting their stuff\” at the inaugural parade in January. Some of you may know that the U.S. Border Patrol, both North and South, are using Mustangs as their choice of the best \”breed\” for the type of work; endurance, sure-footedness, sense of danger, etc. There is an article on the national wild horse and burro website regarding the parade. Please visit [tiny url]

I am not sure if you URL will work in this form of an e-mail, so, if not, please go to www.wildhorseandburro.Bureau of Land Management.gov. Then go to Newsletter and News (right navigation bar), click on Success Stories and you will find the article. It is the last one shown.

YEAH, for our Nation\’s Living Legends!

Thank you,
Janet Neal
National Public Outreach Specialist
Janet_Neal@Bureau of Land Management.gov

(775) 861-6614
——————–
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please visit [tiny url]

These hapless horses are now involuntarily participating in the border militarization which has destroyed so many communities of free-living animals even as it has killed so many human beings. When migrants at the southern border die in the summer, it’s after first falling unconscious or succumbing to seizures and finally heart failure. The fluids from their defeated organs seep out onto the earth. In winter, they die on dunes and in canyons, shivering uncontrollably, losing their ability to grip, and then to think, to move at all; their pulses slow, their pupils dilate, their skin turns bluish and their breathing fails. Still, people come. They come when the need to feed their families overwhelms their fear of detention or death. Wild horses surely wouldn’t keep them away.

At the same time, border construction has disrupted the lives of the few remaining Sonoran pronghorn antelopes — beings who never got hung up on the dividing line between nations until a big fence was built on it. Road-building for patrols near the Tijuana Estuary disturbs coastal sage scrub birds. The habitat of mountain lions and black bears, Mexican spotted owls, and the elusive, solitary jaguars revered by ancient Aztecs and Mayans, is being irreparably torn and fragmented. Stadium lights and security equipment upsets nocturnal animals and those with natural radar. As Julia Whitty explains, the 700-mile border wall is, from an ecological perspective, severing the spine of the Americas “at the lumbar, paralyzing the lower continent.”³

The ecological balance of a hemisphere apparently does not strike much of our officialdom as awesome — or even noticeable. It would be nice to think change is going to come. But Barack Obama was one of the supporters of the law that, when signed by Bush in 2006, authorized the grotesque barrier. Wall proponents want the thing completed by the close of June 2009.

We ourselves may well be headed for extinction, because so many living beings with whom our physical lives are intertwined are disappearing from nature. If the trend, which walls and fences exacerbate, continues at the current rate, more than half of all plant and animal species will be gone by 2100. The unremitting spate of extinctions — even more than escalated climate change — is the most certain threat to human life on Earth.⁴ Notably, of those species recorded as recently extinct, more lived in the United States than anywhere else, followed by the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Mauritius.

Wild Inspiration

“The wild mustang has been an inspiration for Ford Motor Company for decades.” So says a corporate press release. The wild mustang, described through a singular noun: an inspiration, a living legend, an icon of the West, a concept for car designers instead of a community of individual horses and burros with distinct characters, cohabitants of the land who know each others’ struggles. Human laws and customs treat other animals as a pool of potentially useful natural resources, scientific specimens, pets, food or entertainment. Unfettered ones are mist-like and unreal, fetishes or symbols of the past, mascots or marketing concepts. We’ve systematically obstructed our ability to perceive them as beings with their own interests and experiences.

Ford taps into the public notion that adoption into private ownership is a saving grace for horses struggling to survive. That rationale misses some critical points. First, a benefit is not conferred on these animals when we pull their territory out from under them and auction them off or otherwise put them into private hands.

About 200 years ago, three million wild horses roamed most of the North American continent, in evident harmony with the rest of the biocommunity.⁵ At the beginning of the 20th century, 2 million mustangs roamed free.⁶ Now, including those stored in government pens, there are merely a few tens of thousands. Alarmingly, and despite the limited numbers of genetically viable herds, the Bureau of Land Management and the Humane Society of the United States have collaborated in subjecting these animals to invasive experiments with the contraceptive porcine zona pellucida. The Bureau of Land Management claims that reducing and repressing the free-roaming equine population is necessary to maintain a natural and ecological balance between these animals and watersheds, vegetation, and ranches. The claim is result-oriented. Cattle ranches have no part in the natural and ecological balance.

The mission of the Bureau of Land Management is, in part, “to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”⁷ But ranchers, for whose convenience the horses and burros are snatched from their habitat, are devastating public lands, usurping precious water and oxygen-giving trees. The United States — home to about 5% of the world’s population — generates approximately 24% of the world’s extra greenhouse gases.⁸ A major cause is animal agribusiness, responsible for large amounts of methane, a gas that packs more than 20 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, and for 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, a gas with nearly 300 times CO2’s potency. And this business expands our population’s footprint by clearing forests solely to grow feed for animals bred to be killed.

And it’s all unnecessary. Thus, boycotting ranchers’ products and exerting pressure on the government to stop subsidies to animal agribusiness are genuine ways to help horses and burros. Depriving them of their freedom is not.

On Their Own Terms

The West is overpopulated, but not by horses. Where the land is not overtaken by concrete, only a few strongholds of dense forest and some ice peaks are free from the effects of animal agribusiness, which gradually destroys waterways, shelters and food for birds and other animals. But there are precedents for reversing the damage. Twenty years ago, land around the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona, where the Bureau of Land Management had long granted grazing permits, had become a barren wasteland. On 1 January 1988, the Bureau instituted a moratorium on nearly all cattle grazing. Congress subsequently designated the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area a nature preserve of 58,000 acres. The river deepened, and fish reappeared. Native grasses and bushes thrive once more.⁹

The treatment of North American horses to date is, in contrast, anything but a success. More than a million wild horses once roamed Canada, but in the 1960s, after decades of continual shooting and slaughtering, only four small herds existed.¹⁰ By 1974, the Alberta herd had been reduced to about 1,000 — too small to maintain its genetic health. The other three herds, all in British Columbia, are now gone.¹¹

In 1971, Richard Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act into US law. Responding to a public outcry over roundups, the law directed the Bureau of Land Management to protect the animals. Nevertheless, roundups were codified in the law. Lawmakers simply failed to consider these animals on their own terms. They described the equids as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” — rhetoric befitting a made-for-television western of that time, when most people thought nature could be treated as though it existed for human purposes alone, and global warming was yet unheard of. The Act’s mission needs updating to match current human knowledge and an evolving environmental ethic.

Moreover, free-roaming horses and burros have their own interests. They should be entitled to genuine protection. No exemptions or permits should exist to sell or remove a wild free-roaming horse or burro from the public lands. Free-roaming equids should be just that: free from roundup, capture, sterilization, and deliberate harassment — and any obligation to defend politics and borders they have nothing to do with.

1. See Bureau of Land Management Public Lands Statistics, “Summary of the Authorized Use of Grazing District Lands” (FY 2004).
2. On 23 October 2008, Sally Spencer, Director of Marketing for Wild Horses and Burros, told Friends of Animals 30,000 horses are being stored in corrals, and their futures would be decided at an advisory meeting on 17 November 2008; options proposed included stepping up adoptions, selling the animals without limitation, killing them, or requesting more money for management purposes.
3. Julia Whitty, “Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth’s Vanishing Biodiversity,” Mother Jones, 25 Apr. 2007.
4. See ibid.
5. Robert Alison, “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” Toronto Star, 15 Oct. 2005.
6. Deanne Stillman, “Wild Horses Aren’t Free,” Los Angeles Times, 2 Jun. 2008.
7. As stated on the Bureau of Land Management website, in the public release “BLM’s ‘Seeds of Success’ Program Aimed at Improving Health and Productivity of Public Lands” (24 Aug. 2007): “The Bureau’s multiple-use mission is to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”
8. See generally U.S. Dept. of Energy, Energy Information Administration, “Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2003,” Report #: DOE/EIA-0573 (2003) (released 13 Dec. 2004), at page 2 (“US Emissions in a Global Perspective”), following the Executive Summary.
9. David Kreuper et al., US Geological Service’s Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Center, “Response of Vegetation and Breeding Birds to the Removal of Cattle on the San Pedro River, Arizona” (2003).
10. See “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” note 5 (citing information from the Canadian Wild Horse Preservation Society).
11. See “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” note 5. Additionally, some 300 free-roaming horses exist in relative privacy on Sable Island, off Nova Scotia. Before they were legally protected, they were subject to roundups and use as “pit ponies” in coal mines and for other purposes. The free-roaming population of about 150 horses on the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague off the eastern US coast are accessible by road to tourists, and horses from this population are rounded up yearly and auctioned off for fundraising purposes by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company.