Hate Letters Confirm Racism of Anti-Immigrant Codes Movement

A leader against Hazelton, Pennsylvania's anti-immigrant worker codes, Dr. Lopez, has made public hate letters from from racists. It's yet more evidence that much of the current immigrant worker hysteria is driven by pure and unadulterated racism.

Instead of crafting solutions and fixing the broken immigration system, petty politicians seek to score easy points by passing anti-immigrant worker legislation. The result is that the more anti-immigrant codes are proposed, the more racists in America are encouraged.

Emboldened racists are very bad news for America.

SCRANTON -- A Latino community leader testified this morning to receiving racist hate mail from as far away as Hartford, Conn., and as nearby as Wilkes-Barre.

The letters warned him to stop speaking against Hazleton's Illegal Immigration Relief Act.

Recalled to the witness stand in the William J. Nealon Federal Building, retired eye doctor Agapito Lopez, who helped organize several protests against the ordinance, examined three letters sent to him in the past eight months. The first was a note slipped under his door July 12, the day before Hazleton passed its controversial law.

It included an article "We are under invasion from Mexico."

He received a second letter postmarked from Wilkes-Barre, he testified. It claimed Latinos are responsible for the city's slide toward violence and crime.

"It is implying we are criminals, we are thieves, we are lazy and our women are promiscuous," Lopez testified.

The third letter from Hartford, Conn., included a cartoon of a "Mexican warrior type" wearing a sombrero and included racial epithets which he read aloud in court.

"This is the most degrading thing I've read in my whole life."

Bloomberg Speaks the Truth about Immigration, Education and Inequality

In New York Mayor Warns Against Growing Inequality in U.S. (NYTimes, 3.14.07), Mayor Michael Bloomberg was dead on in his remarks before a gathering of financial heavy weights to discuss the country's competitiveness problem.

Bloomberg staunchly defended open immigration and free trade. He said...

The things that we have to worry about is this protectionist movement that has reared its head again in this country and the anti-immigration movement, which will destroy our children’s future if we let it go unchecked.

The mayor’s most striking remarks were about economic inequality, as he voiced views not widely articulated by his fellow Republicans.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It’s not politically viable; it’s not morally right; it’s just not going to happen.

Additionally, he blames “the abject failure of public education in this country” as a major cause of inequality, arguing that too many young people had not been given the skills essential for a technologically advanced economy.

Bloomberg clearly gets it!

It's no wonder a growing number of people are taking note of Bloomberg as a potential national leader.

Why Won't the Feds Arrest Millions of U.S. Citizens, Too?

Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby in Illegal immigrants are here to stay, lays bare for all to see that the current immigrant worker witch hunt is fueled more by racism rather than a quest to uphold the law--as so many anti-immigrants love to claim.

If the witch hunts were really about enforcing the law, wouldn't the authorities also arrest and imprison the millions of U.S. citizens that break the law each and everyday when they employ undocumented workers? And wouldn't a real effort in this regard cause the immigrant worker supply to dry up overnight?

But this is not what is happening. Why not?

My take is that it doesn't happen because the U.S. citizens breaking the law are white. They break the law but only the workers--which are brown--get punished.

Until I see real evidence that the anti-immigrants and the government (at all levels) begin arresting U.S. citizens on par with their "criminal" activity, I'll not believe any of them when they claim that they're simply upholding the rule of law.

Applying a law unevenly is not upholding the rule of law. It is simply officially sanctioned racism.
Illegal immigrants are here to stay (by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe -- 3.14.07)

SUPPOSE YOU LEARN that a New England manufacturer is exploiting its employees, many of them illegal immigrants, with wretched working conditions. It fines them for talking on the job, refuses to pay overtime, and penalizes them for bathroom breaks of more than two minutes, all in addition to low wages, long hours, and squalid facilities. What do you do?

Well, if you're the United States government, you send armed agents to haul the workers off in shackles to a military base 100 miles away, then fly scores of them more than 2,000 miles to a holding pen in Texas. You provide the frightened detainees with little information and no access to lawyers. You act so rashly that many of those you seize are separated from their children and can't get word to spouses or babysitters. You display such ineptitude, in fact, that babies end up in the hospital, dehydrated, after their nursing mothers are taken away.

The company's owner and managers, meanwhile, you arrest, charge, and release on bail. They reopen for business the next day.

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Paglia Disses the Pols

Camille Paglia is a liberal guts. She can spot hypocrisy a mile away--and it doesn't matter one iota if its owner is liberal, conservative, gay or straight, black or white. She uses her keen intellect and wit to expose and obliterate without prejudice.

After a six year hiatus, Salon announced her return as a contributor to the online magazine with this banner:

After a six-year absence, our cultural high priestess and pioneering Web proto-blogger has returned! And nobody -- not Hillary, Obama, McCain nor Anna Nicole -- can escape her level gaze.

Today's four page Paglia musings Hillary vs. Obama: It's a drawl! is a must reads. She takes on Hillary, Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and pretentious liberals--among others.

Hillary

[Hillary's] aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year. At times, it approached the Southern Gothic burlesque of Bette Davis chewing up the scenery in "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte." Does Hillary Clinton have a stable or coherent sense of self? Or is everything factitious, mimed and scripted (like her flipping butch and femme masks) for expediency?

Obama

I loved the way Obama's campaign handled the dust-up -- some nice sharp barbs from an underling followed by the candidate's lofty assertion of statesmanlike unconcern. It made me take Obama seriously as a candidate for 2008 (rather than 2012) for the first time.

Senator Dianne Feinstein

I'm a longtime admirer of Feinstein and have sent small sums to her campaigns. Watching her field tough questions about North Korea, I was impressed anew with her analytic mind and her steadiness of character. She has that rarity among women politicians -- true gravitas.

Feinstein vs Hillary

Dianne Feinstein is far more presidential than Hillary Clinton, who alternates between smugness and defensiveness before pulling out that tiresome middle-aged mom card. Feinstein, even when maneuvering strategically, always seems genuinely focused on the idea at hand, while Hillary isn't really there -- she's just riffling mentally through her team's cue cards.

Coulter

[S]atirists who play on gender themes need some whiff of self-knowledge, or they look ridiculous. Is Coulter truly oblivious to her gender weirdness?

Gingrich

[W]hen Newt Gingrich announced last week that he had had an adulterous affair during the 1998 investigations of Bill Clinton, I burst out laughing -- not simply at Gingrich's hypocrisy, about which I was never in doubt, but at the comic mental picture of Gingrich in erotic extremis.

Liberals

"This kind of outreach to expose and remedy injustice represents the finest spirit of leftism, a practical, compassionate activism -- not the pretentious postmodernist jargon and sanctimonious attitudinizing that still pass for leftism among too many college faculty."

Democrats and FoxNews

What is this morbid obsession that liberals have with Fox? It's as if Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda, are so shaky in their convictions that they cannot risk an encounter with opposing views.

Cheney

I detest Cheney for having led the country into this disastrous, wasteful war, whose repercussions will be felt for generations here and in the Mideast. I know absolutely nothing about Cheney's family background, but I would bet on some ambivalent dynamic in his past with masculine authority figures, whom he internalized and carries around as a visibly heavy burden but whose oppression produced his sarcastic sneer, his one facial mannerism.

GWB

I feel pity for him -- he is a genuinely tragic figure who made the wrong choices and destroyed the promise of his presidency. As he blustered with dangling arms and stiff cowboy legs to the podium during last week's South American junket, I felt embarrassed at his lack of diplomatic courtesy and simple savoir faire. Confident manhood does not need to constantly strike poses.

Cheney and GWB together

There's something creepy about how Cheney, after heading the candidate search, insinuated himself into the vice presidency. It's an unsavory, toxic relationship, a vampiric pseudo-marriage like that of the shadowy, Machiavellian Roger Chillingworth and the impressionable, waffling Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."

FoxNews

Fox is certainly disingenuous with its absurd "fair and balanced" motto. Oh, come on, give it up! Why can't Fox honestly admit its conservative agenda, as do major radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and simply argue that it represents a culturally necessary antidote to the omnipresent liberal line?

Capitalism

[L]eftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism -- without which Western women would have no professional jobs to go to but would be stuck doing laundry by hand and stooping over pots on the hearth fire all day long.

Doomed Surge?

'Surge' doomed to final failure (by H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe - 3.13.07)

[A]ren't the American soldiers there to stop sectarian violence -- to stop Iraqis from killing each other?

Colonial powers, when they take over a foreign land, can keep the remaining power structure, as the British did in Iraq by ruling though the Sunnis, or they can upset the existing order and empower the previously down trodden, as the Americans did with the Shia.

In America's case, the United States now doesn't like what it wished for, and has decided to fight both the Sunni insurgents and the Shia militias, inserting itself into a civil war.

The Taíno People of Cuba

Indians in Cuba (by Jose Barreiro, Cultural Survival Quarterly Issue 13.3 - 9.30.89)
Punta Maisi, Cuba

The old Indian woman, a descendant of Cuba's Taíno-Arawak people, bent over and touched the leaves of a small tree. Her open-palmed hand lifted the round, green leaves in a light handshake. "These are good for inflammations of the ovaries," she said. "I gave them to all my young women." "She knows a lot," her daughter, Marta, said. "She doesn't need a pharmacy. You have something wrong with your body, she can make you a tea - un cocimiento - and fix you up."

The mother and two sisters, part of a large extended family known in this town for its Indian ancestry, continued to show me their patio. Around an old well, where they wash their laundry, they pointed out more than a dozen herbs and other useful plants. The Cobas Hernandez clan, from which Maria and her several daughters, her son, Pedro, and his brothers spring, counts several living generations of families from here to the city of Baracoa, about 120 km west from Los Arados on Cuba's southern coast. They are not the only such extended family and they are not the only people of clear Indian ancestry in Cuba still living in their aboriginal areas.

It may surprise many social scientists that nestled in the mountains of the Oriente region (eastern Cuba), from Baracoa on the southern coast all the way to the Pico Turquino, the highest mountain in Cuba, there are numerous caserios, several barrios, and at least one community of more than a thousand Indian people. They were called Cubeños by Father Bartolome de Las Casas, who helped some of their communities to survive, and are ancestors of the original Taínos who met Columbus.

In March and April 1989, I traveled to Santiago de Cuba to attend a conference, "Seeds of Commerce," mutually sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and a Cuban research center, the Casa del Caribe. I took the opportunity to extend my visit for two weeks, first in the Baracoa-Punta Maisi region and then west to the plains country of Camaguey. I wanted to ascertain the veracity of testimonies that I had heard as a child and that have been recently published in Cuban academic journals, to the effect that Taino-Arawak descendants inhabit the eastern region of Cuba. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the people of guajiro background still prevalent in the Camaguey countryside.

Click here for the full article.

Thanks to Tomas Waribonex Luzojos of the Taíno Nation of the Antilles for finding this article. The Taíno Nation's Official Taino Nation News is an informative site for Taíno related articles, notices and commentary.

Cultural Survival promotes the rights, voices and visions of indigenous peoples.

Read other articles by Jose Barreiro published in Indian Country Today.

Minnesota Proposal: Let non-citizens vote

Proposal: Let non-citizens vote in local elections (by Rachel E. Stassen-Berger - Pioneer Press 3.12.07)

A constitutional amendment introduced today in the Minnesota House would allow non-citizen residents to vote in local elections.

If the House and Senate pass the measure, 2008 voters would be asked: "Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to allow local units of government to authorize permanent resident non-citizens to vote in local government elections?" A majority of those voting in the 2008 general election would have to approve the measure for it to be written into the constitution.

Illegal immigrants would not be permitted to vote.

The measure is sponsored by four Twin Cities DFLers — Rep. Phyllis Kahn, Minneapolis, Rep. Jim Davnie, Minneapolis, Rep. Carlos Mariani, St. Paul, and Rep. Frank Hornstein, Minneapolis.

The measure comes on the heels of a Take Action Minnesota's move to ask St. Paul city council candidates their opinions on a similar change in the city. Take Action Minnesota is an influential political group in St. Paul's elections.

Immigration panderfest

Immigration panderfest
Suffolk legislators descend into mania in futile effort to solve global problem
(Long Island Newsday - March 12, 2007)

In the past year or two, the Suffolk County Legislature has looked statesmanlike in contrast to the zany events in the Nassau County Legislature. But now, anti-immigrant mania is driving Suffolk lawmakers off the rails. Overnight, they're tumbling from statesmanship into demagoguery.

First, it was an anti-loitering bill, designed to keep the day workers off county roads. At a raucous public hearing last Tuesday, Legis. Elie Mystal (D-Amityville) - a verbal loose cannon - "joked" that he "would load up my gun and start shooting" if large numbers of immigrants gathered near his home. It's not funny. Anti-immigrant talk, even in jest, can lead to violence.

Now Legis. Ed Romaine (R-Center Moriches), a former history teacher who should know better, wants the county to stop using the Bank of America, all because of an innocent and legal pilot program in Los Angeles that he construes as aiding illegal immigrants. The bank is serving its customers and following the rules. If some of them are immigrants striving to build a credit rating, that merits praise - not censure.

The essential mismatch is between ill-conceived local laws and the global scope of the problem. Critics of the day workers like to say that they're illegal. Some are. But they got to be illegal because of the nation's inconsistent policy about globalization. We seek complete integration of all the elements of the world economy, such as the flow of goods, capital and services - but not labor. At the same time as trade with Mexico opened up, Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey points out, we have closed down the borders.

Immigration used to be circular. Workers came here, made money and went back to Mexico. Now, our immigration policy has made that homeward flow harder. Those macro policies are the real cause, and breathtakingly dumb local laws like these will do nothing to alter that reality.

It's bad enough that County Executive Steve Levy is the panderer in chief on this issue. The legislature, whose role is to counterbalance the executive, abdicates its responsibility when it tries to demagogue right along with him.

Hillary, King and Goldwater

In Hillary, King and Goldwater, Chicago-Suns Times columnist Robert Novak examines the incongruity between the Hillary Clinton of 1963 who was allegedly 'inspired' by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Hillary Clinton of 1964 who campaigned as a "Goldwater Girl" for Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.

First, Hillary is moved by Martin's challenge to "...us that evening to stay awake during the great revolution that the civil rights pioneers were waging on behalf of a more perfect union." But then she joins arch-conservative Barry Goldwater's campaign for president.

Not only was Barry Goldwater the founder of modern day political conservatism in America, but his failed presidential bid of 1964 was animated in part by his staunch opposition to the historic voting rights act of 1964. Claiming that the federal government undermined "state rights", Goldwater joined Southern Democratic segregationists in opposing the voting rights legislation championed by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Goldwater won in only Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and his home state of Arizona in his landslide defeat to LBJ.

Democrats question Hillary's electability

Democrats question Hillary's electability (by Donald Lambro - THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3.12.07)

Talk among Democrats that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton could end up losing the Democratic presidential nomination is increasing because of growing doubts about her electability, fueled by her declining poll numbers.

"To go from 43 percent in January to 34 percent Democratic support in February this early in the nominating cycle is a sign of serious weakness for a front-runner that is feeding doubts about her at our party's grass roots," said a Democratic press adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Hillary's problem is that her presidential campaign is not about anything but Hillary," said David Sirota, a Democratic campaign strategist.