Yana Kunichoff: "A Long Stay"

Yana Kunichoff:

More than 300,000 immigrants languish in detention centers around the country. Why are they there - and who is profiting from their imprisonment? MORE...

The Beltway Ponders Afghanistan, Financial Reform and Immigration

"House approves money for Afghan surge" (Reuters):

Key members of the Democratic majority decided to let the legislation go to the House floor Thursday evening after adding the money for domestic U.S. programs they favored.

There was $10 billion to help avert teacher layoffs, $700 million for security on the border with Mexico and $142 million to help the oil-sullied Gulf Coast. Cuts were proposed to other programs to offset the spending.

"If American money is going to be building a nation, I'd like it to be mine," said Representative Louise Slaughter, chairwoman of the powerful Rules Committee, before the vote. MORE...

Greg Sargent comments:

Yesterday House Dems approved war funding for Afghanistan, but the more interesting vote may have been that nearly 100 Dems helped Republicans defeat an amendment that would have required the president to submit a timeline for redeployment of American troops out of the region.

"Cantwell will vote for financial reform bill" Joel Connelly (seattlepi.com):

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who voted against a Senate-crafted financial reform bill saying it was too weak, is giving badly needed support to a stronger version of the legislation worked out by a Senate-House conference committee.

Cantwell was one of only two Democratic senators to vote against the Senate version of the bill.

Cantwell said the conferees' version holds significant improvements over the original Senate bill, especially in its language requiring transparency in derivatives markets and tough penalties for evading the clearing and exchange trading requirements for derivatives. MORE...

"Obama presses 11 Republican senators to revive support for immigration reform" (WaPo), with video (01:58):

In his first major speech on immigration as president, President Barack Obama says that while the frustrations over it aren't new, Arizona's tough new anti-immigrant law and the protests surrounding it have created new tensions.
MORE...

Bullets and Borders

"No One Cares" (Chris Hedges):

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

"Afghanistan: is it time to talk to the Taliban?" (Jonathan Steele-Guardian UK):

Eight years after they were overthrown by US air power, a drumbeat is starting to sound across Afghanistan in favour of talking to the Taliban, the country's once-hated former rulers. An idea that used to seem absurd, if not defeatist, is coming to be seen as the only credible way to end an ever-widening war. Moreover, the proposed agenda of negotiations is not a Taliban surrender, but an offer to share power in Kabul.

"Border First Hallucinations" (Eugene Robinson):

The notion that the first thing to do is “secure the border” between the United States and Mexico—and only then worry about comprehensive immigration reform—falls somewhere between hopeful fantasy and cynical cop-out. It’s a good sound bite but would be a ridiculous policy.

Fact-based analysis is increasingly out of fashion, however, and so the border-first hallucination has become popular among politicians and pundits reacting to Arizona’s new “breathing while Latino” law. The measure, which has sparked angry protests nationwide, orders police to act on “reasonable suspicion” in identifying, arresting and jailing undocumented immigrants.

Anyone who thinks such extremism could be quelled if the federal government would just “secure the border” really ought to visit Arizona and take a look. Or at least consult a map. Or even just read up on what is happening at the border—which, according to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, “has never been more secure.”

Palast: "Behind The Arizona Immigration Law: GOP Game to Swipe the November Election"

Reporter Greg Palast in a guard tower looking out on Joe Arpaio's jail in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Greg Palast:

Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.

Phoenix - Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote - and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for "Rolling Stone" with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters . . . directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no fewer than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanic, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens that Brewer tagged them to be, or just not-quite-white voters given the Jose Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, I didn't find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the president of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

(By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the president appointed Arizona's Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor's office.)

State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms, and alien job thieves are just GOP website wet dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they're American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by professor Matt Barreto, of Washington State University, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have the government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer's or Pearce's help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters, that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her US birth certificate was nowhere to be found, as it never existed.

In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County prison where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially charged and legally suspect methods.

Ok, I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors with a big sign, "NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL." I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are illegal as they come, but Arpaio's sophisticated deportee-sniffer didn't stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.

But that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona - after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? - but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

"King County Executive Dow Constantine calls for immigration reform" (video)

oneamerica08, video (03:24):

King County Executive Dow Constantine calls for comprehensive immigration reform. The April 10 Rally in Seattle for immigration reform in Occidental Park drew a diverse group of between 7,000-9,000 people from across the state. The rally was sponsored by Washington Immigration Reform Coaltion (WIRC).

Immigration Reform: "April 10 Seattle Rally" (with slideshow)

OneAmerica (via flickr) with slideshow:

The April 10 Rally in Seattle for immigration reform in Occidental Park drew a diverse group of between 7,000-9,000 people from across the state. The rally was sponsored by Washington Immigration Reform Coaltion (WIRC).

Howie P.S.: That is Mayor Mike under that fedora.

"Immigration Rally" (video)

Publicola, video (03:24):

The Washington Immigration Reform Coalition hosted a rally in Seattle's Occidental Square on April 10, 2010.

"Stand Up Seattle for Immigration Reform - April 10 Rally"

OneAmerica Washington:

Thousands already at Occidental Park in Seattle for April 10 Immigration Reform Rally! Come on down now!!--After tens of thousands of people march on Washington, D.C. to convince Congress and the White House to take action, communities across the country will be participating in a national day of action on April 10 to ensure their representatives know we want comprehensive immigration reform. The Washington Immigrant Reform Coalition (WIRC) For America, an alliance of over 50 organizations, faith groups, community groups and labor unions, is organized around one purpose - to achieve comprehensive immigration reform - and has been working to ensure that Washington's Congressional delegation will support and lead on the issue.