Archive for February 2009
Weekly Immigration Wire: Obama Can’t Play Centrist on Immigration Crisis
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by Nezua
TMC MediaWire Blogger
The Obama Administration seems quite capable of centrist positioning on many issues, including immigration reform. While some argue centrist position allows Obama to effectively reach consensus, immigration reform is an issue that he cannot play sides with.
While immigration reform advocates cheered the passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program bill (SCHIP), there is also considerable upset concerning Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano’s “finessing” of crackdown tactics begun under President Bush. And more trouble is brewing.
While President Obama speaks of improving our approach to immigration, he has yet to call for a moratorium on the ICE raids that are devastating the communities and economies where they take place. And he has yet to address the detention crisis specifically. The first raid of the new administration occured in Bellingham, WA on Feb. 24. As Hatty Lee writes for RaceWire, “In these times of economic hardship, detaining hardworking men and women and dividing families is just perpetuating more fear in our communities. We need to bring the people together not push them further apart.”
One wonders how much supervision ICE is actually operating under, as Secretary Napolitano was surprised to hear about the raid:
Napolitano told lawmakers during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that she did not know about the raid before it happened and was briefed on it early Wednesday morning. She has asked U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which conducted the raid, for answers.
“I want to get to the bottom of this as well,” she said.
Statements like this do not gel with recent actions that indicate Napolitano’s desire to overhaul U.S. detention practices, such as creating a new advisory position to focus on these issues.
Through a more cynical lens, the gap between statement and action can be seen as typical political maneuvering, and specifically, Democratic doublespeak. There are factions on the left that disagree on many issues. Even among immigration advocates there is a rift regarding how to present the issue to the voting public. This conflict may be what we see playing out before our eyes.
The division among liberal advocates of immigration reform came into focus after 2006 and 2007’s failures to pass immigration reform. Democratic party leaders have adopted Right wing stances on the issue, just as they have regarding National Security. Party leaders are using words that imply harsh and punitive action, and eschewing morality or heart in the name of strategy.
These stances are based on the advice of a number of immigration advocacy groups such as the National Immigration Forum (NIF), and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), who felt that the focus must come away from what was best for migrating human beings and onto what was in the national interest. This stance was outlined in a confidential report called Winning The Immigration Debate, which was given to Democratic party leaders in 2007.
The report calls for tougher language, but 2007’s McCain/Kennedy bill contained more punitive wording and it failed. Are we now to repeat this error, even while the Democrats hold such power in Washington?
It will not do to simply “require” immigrants to “come out of the shadows,” to borrow lingo from 2007, and let the Department of “Homeland Security” continue its traumatizing actions on the community. ICE has not lived up to its promises, and worse, resorted to unethical means to justify its continued operations. Already, we’ve read many heartbreaking stories about those who suffer greatly or die in ICE’s custody. As AlterNet reports, we can now add those suffering from mental illness to the list of those impacted.
The number of mentally and developmentally disabled detainees in South Texas federal immigration detention centers has surged during the past year, according to area attorneys who call the trend “alarming.”
The AlterNet report details the Kafkaesque case of Pierre Bernard, a Haitian immigrant ordered to undergo six months of psychiatric treatment but who ended up, instead, in an ICE detention center.
Women migrants are also subject to exploitation, rape, and other abuse. But now, as Kevin Sieff writes in the Texas Observer, women in U.S. dentention centers are now being denied basic reproductive rights. “For pregnant women in immigration detention facilities, it is virtually impossible to obtain an abortion,” Sieff writes. In 2008, nearly 10% of detained women were pregnant.
Yesterday, Janet Marguía, President and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, responded to the Bellingham raids, and the challenges now facing the Obama administration.
Escalating immigration raids and local police crackdowns over the past eight years have spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat to the United States and who have lived peacefully and productively within our borders for years. Most have worked hard, paid taxes, lived productive lives, and been good neighbors. Many have children and spouses who are U.S. citizens. Many have served in our nation’s defense. Yet over the past eight years, U.S. policies have sought to criminalize this population, raid their homes and workplaces, suspend their civil liberties, put them in chains, and ultimately deport them.
And while Hilda Solis, the daughter of immigrants, has been confirmed as Secretary of Labor, and Obama has given another straightforward speech to congress and the nation (critiqued here by The Real News), DHS appears to be still mucking through the Bush agenda.
The so-called “Enforcement first” or ICE-centric approach to immigration is not a solution. It asks too much of ICE, it is not practical, and it is not going well. Such an approach is egregiously incongruent with the nation Obama asks us to envision under his administration. We truly are a “nation of immigrants,” and we must rethink our current treatment of migrants. To continue this destructive approach while speaking eloquently and carefully to the Press is a line the President cannot successfully straddle.
The administration is now faced with a confluence of reality and ideals. Some things you cannot split down the middle.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire blogger
The Obama administration may be about to pull the plug on the health czar. The position has gone unfilled since Obama’s appointee-apparent, former Sen. Tom Daschle, withdrew his name from consideration for both czar and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in early February. Several serious candidates are emerging in the unofficial race to lead HHS, but there’s no corresponding shortlist for health czar.
The czar and his Office of Health Reform were initially touted as proof that Obama was really serious about shepherding a health reform package through Congress. But the Obama team may ultimately decide that the Office of Health Reform is an obstacle instead of an asset without Daschle and ditch it altogether.
As Erza Klein explains in the American Prospect, the position was created especially for Daschle and any other candidate might be worse than nothing as far as passing a healthcare reform package goes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly agrees, and says that nixing the health czar doesn’t necessarily indicate that the Obama administration is any less committed to healthcare reform.
The purpose of the health czar was to create a single emissary to represent President Obama’s healthcare agenda to Congress. When the Clintons tried to reform healthcare in 1993, they discovered that various powerful administration officials were claiming to speak for the president.
The health czar was supposed to prevent future confusion as the president’s spokesperson. Many senior healthcare officials are already close to Obama and a similar situation could arise. Daschle would have been a credible health czar because he’s closer to the president than any of them, and a former congressional heavyweight to boot. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is a front-runner for HHS secretary and she has a very good relationship with Obama. But Gov. Sebelius is a Washington outsider who has never served in the U.S. Congress, which might make her a less compelling candidate for czar.
Ezra Klein, linked above, argues that if nobody can fill Daschle’s shoes, appointing a less compelling czar might just add to the din of executive branch officials vying for the attention of key Congressional leaders.
Maybe it’s a good idea to send as many Obama health officials to Congress as possible. If nothing else, they might cut into time the reps are currently spending with health insurance industry lobbyists, as Talking Points Memo reports.
Speaking of contenders for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Howard Dean recently published an article on AlterNet defending Obama’s comparative effectiveness research (CER) agenda against right wing critics like Rush Limbaugh. Dean draws on his experience as a doctor and a healthcare policy-maker to argue that CER is a way to put more scientific evidence in the hands of doctors, so they can choose the very best treatment for the money. Right wingers don’t like the idea. They’re literally afraid that if science determines that a treatment is bogus, the government will stop paying for it. Right wingers calls this “rationing.” Taxpayers might call it evidence-based policy. Last we checked, Medicare and Medicaid were not faith-based programs.
As Dean points out, the CER to be funded by the new economic stimulus bill is officially for doctors, not legislators. “Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research,” Dean wrote. Realistically, though, that’s kind of a hollow assurance. Once the research is done, there’s no way to stop legislators from using publicly available research findings to make healthcare decisions.
In another corner of the healthcare reform-o-sphere, Katrina vanden Heuvel says that time is right to reform New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in The Nation. These laws have been on the books 35 years. The laws essentially force judges to send drug possessors to jail based on the weight of the drugs they were caught with, whether the judge thinks imprisonment would be a good idea or not. New York’s budget crisis might be a blessing in disguise for drug reform, vanden Heuvel argues, because policy-makers are sick of paying to keep drug offenders locked up whether they need it or not.
And finally, some good news from RH Reality Check. Many people just wouldn’t feel right stepping out without a spritz of perfume, a blast of breath-freshener, or regrettably, a head-to-toe shellacking with Axe Body Spray. As Joe Veix reports for RH, another spray-on product may one day be added to the essential equipment list: contraceptive. An Australian company is currently testing a hormone spritz for women. The product is applied to the forearm. Like the contraceptive patch, the spray is designed to deliver hormones through the skin. Researchers hope that through-the-skin delivery can produce the same results as pills, but with lower doses of hormones and fewer side effects.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit
href=”http://healthcare.newsladder.net/” title=”Healthcare.NewsLadder.net” id=”so75″>Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, <a href=”http://economy.newsladder.net/”>Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: The Worst is Yet to Come
Last week’s passage of the economic stimulus bill marked the first major win for progressives on economic policy under President Barack Obama, but the hardest economic battles have yet to come. The fight against entrenched corporate interests and a global order that ignores the needy will likely be as long and arduous as the recession itself.
The stimulus package may be an absolutely essential step for fending off economic catastrophe, but it does nothing to overhaul the deeply flawed structure of our economic system. “In unleashing a flood of deficit spending and avoiding tax increases, the legislation didn’t threaten moneyed interests, didn’t alter the existing economic topography, and therefore didn’t attract the withering hostility from business groups that typically prevents ‘hope’ from becoming ‘change,’” David Sirota writes for Salon.
The Obama team seems to be considering nationalizing big, troubled banks temporarily, a prospect which was politically unthinkable just a few weeks back. Progressives have been pushing nationalization hard and it seems to be working. Several Republican Senators are supporting the idea, as temporary nationalization is already government policy for smaller banks that don’t employ massive lobbying teams.
But getting Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on board is only half the battle. In a piece for The Nation, Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson detail how hedge funds and private equity firms hope to capitalize on a big bank nationalization policy by using political clout to score unfairly cheap prices from the government.
“Much of the wind in the sails of this new push comes from private equity firms like KKR, Blackstone, or their political allies, mostly, though not entirely within the Republican Party,” Ferguson and Johnson write.
When the government nationalized troubled banks with the Resolution Trust Corp. under President George H.W. Bush, politically connected investors made out like bandits when the government resold the banks into the private sector. It is important that this corruption not be repeated. We don’t tolerate our politicians doing favors for wealthy constituents, and we shouldn’t allow our financial regulators to do so either.
The current recession has roots in excessive consumer debt—some of it predatory, some of it spawned by consumerism run amok. U.S. economic well-being has depended on destructive and environmentally unsustainable spending habits of its citizens for too long. Writing for In These Times, Terry Allen notes that “our own addiction to consumerism and failure to save tie us to debt and stress.” While consumer spending kept the economy from crashing until last year, it was very bad for individual households.
Over at The American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias discusses the global implications of lower levels of U.S. consumption. As the U.S. consumes less product, there will be major consequences for economies that rely on U.S. demand. Yglesias emphasizes that the current downturn is fully global, unlike every U.S. recession since the Great Depression. Potential solutions will have to involve coordinating policy responses with other countries to ensure that everyone is shouldering the stimulus load—and to help everyone adjust to an era in which U.S. consumers buy less stuff.
As Nomi Prins explains in Mother Jones, Wall Street bankers have always had a knack for bestowing lavish compensation upon themselves. Bonuses are routinely based on ill-conceived criteria that focus on short-term gains and create unnecessary risk. The key reforms, Prins says, do not merely involve capping executive compensation for bailed-out firms, but regulating bonus compensation and imposing heavy taxes on it in both good times and bad.
In recent years, Wall Street has dealt homeowners an absolutely devastating blow with various exotic mortgage schemes, but another major housing crisis is now looming for renters. Despite an overabundance of sprawling suburban developments, U.S. cities are facing a dramatic shortage of affordable rental housing. As hard as the economic crisis is for homeowners, those who rent in urban areas are being hit even harder. Many renters who cannot afford to buy a home under still face housing hardships today.
In the below video for American News Project, Garland McLaurin and Mike Fritz reveal the dire straits currently facing federal affordable housing programs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, known as HUD, received a significant funding boost under Obama’s economic stimulus package—its $40.4 billion 2009 budget was supplemented by $13.6 billion. But thanks to years of neglect and political cronyism under the Bush administration, HUD housing units have a backlog of at least $22 billion in needed repairs, which severely hinders HUD’s ability to expand operations.
And the number of affordable rental housing units falls well short of what is needed. McLaurin and Fritz highlight Baltimore in their video, a city that has roughly 30,000 subsidized housing spaces, but will require 60,000 more to built in order to meet the city’s needs.
The proliferation of subprime mortgages was one of the chief drivers of the foreclosure epidemic. They seem absurd in retrospect. Lenders charged people with relatively weak credit scores higher interest rates to counter the risk in making loans to people with bad credit. But since credit scores are fairly closely linked to income level, lenders were essentially charging people with less money more than they would have charged an ordinary borrower. Not surprisingly, that business model is now completely destroyed.
But, as Daniel Fireside reveals in Yes! Magazine, there is a more effective way to expand access to homeownership, one that relies on charging—shock!—less for homes. Several U.S. cities now make use of non-profit land trusts to lower the costs of homeownership.
Here’s how it works: The land trust purchases a swath of property and builds housing on it if none already exists. The trust then sells homes to new homeowners, but does not sell the underlying land. The trust negotiates mortgages with banks on behalf of low-income borrowers. By using the land equity as part of the mortgage calculation, the necessary down payment is dramatically reduced. As a result, the home never falls into the hands of real estate speculators and the cost of owning a home falls by around 25%. If borrowers ever run into trouble on their loan, the trust works with them and the bank to fend off foreclosure. Land trusts feature foreclosure rates 30 times—not 30 percent, 30 times—lower than the national average.
Each of these initiatives is absolutely essential and will, unfortunately, involve brutal policy battles. Many people make a lot of money from the status quo. Let’s hope Obama has the political clout to tell corporate opportunists that the times are a-changing.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Detention Industry Surges in Economic Crisis
by Nezua
Media Consortium Blogger
The nation’s eyes are fixed upon a trembling economy. It affects our ability to survive, to thrive, and even think rationally. Today’s economic crisis is also impacting the lives of immigrants and immigration reform on multiple levels, be it through provisions to the economic stimulus bill, individual lawmen exceeding the bounds of their office, or a scrambling Pentagon viewing immigrants as easy recruits.
It is understandable, though ironic, that the immigrant community is prey to multiple factions during hard times. Fear of survival makes it easy to point at “the other,” especially when we are worried about our resources. During the Great Depression, Mexican Americans bore the brunt of this type of fear. In light of today’s economic crisis, we haven’t come very far.
Voices are clustering on the Right to encourage this dynamic and immigrants are being scapegoated with no heed to how it might play out amongst a scared citizenry.
As Lisa Navarrete reports for Alternet:
He may have a new gig as a National Review columnist, but … [Mark Krikorian of the National Review] smears pro-immigrant and civil rights organizations, wrapping his divisiveness in the cloak of freedom of speech.
Krikorian is hardly the only example. We are repeating this terrible process without learning from previous experience. It’s tragic that the economic crisis is also helping feed the growing network of detention centers and raids that prey on migrant families, justifying them with talk of jobs and income.
As RaceWire reports, the detention centers sprouting up all over country are an industry that capitalizes on persecution. And the immigrant detainee population has tripled since 1996 according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) own records, as revealed by New America Media. It seems economically unsound and profoundly amoral to remove workers from producing areas of our economy to invest instead in an inflated prison system. Our current prison system includes the detention center industry and the 287(g) agreement, which enlists local law enforcement in enforcing federal immigration law.
ICE’s reach is growing and filling quotas has corrupted their purpose. Public News Service reports on a New York-based investigation that showed ICE “shifting focus” from the “most dangerous undocumented immigrants to just making lots of arrests.” ICE is casting a wider, sloppier net as part of the United States’ broadening security apparatus.
Alternet explains the terrifying relationship between ICE, migrants, the age of terrorism and a bloated detention system in The New Political Economy of Immigration:
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants — those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas — who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.
It is understandable that after being attacked, a nation would draw in and lean toward suspicion. But where has this gotten us? Are we more secure? Or are we simply enabling more systems in which the most vulnerable suffer?
As reported in past Weekly Wire articles, immigration reform supporters are coming together and speaking out in greater numbers. Even today, NDN and National Council of La Raza are holding a Washington D.C. event that is open to the public and that will “serve as a platform for identifying strategies that will move immigration reform forward in 2009.”
And yet, as Roberto Lovato writes for Alternet, we should be wary. The Obama administration and some allies, even, will not be as receptive to changing the national response to immigration as many hope.
In a such a dangerous climate, a climate in which economic decline worsens the undocumented condition — death in jail, hate crimes, death in deserts, daily doses of dehumanizing media — it is our duty to reject as extremely dangerous and in the most forceful terms any of the “smart enforcement” and other militaristic language and policy used by Napolitano, GOP & Dems and some “immigrant rights advocates.”
At the same time, the Democratic Party ought to be at least a little wary of the GOP using immigration as a wedge issue, as Angelo Falcón warns in New America Media. And Rahm Emanuel indicates he has “an appreciation for the high Hispanic voter turnout and support for Democrats in 2008 that dramatically shifted the political landscape.”
Which direction will we go? Which America will 2009 show us to be? We both work and wait to find out.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Bankruptcy Law is Key to Obama’s Foreclosure Fight
President Barack Obama unveiled his administration’s plan to fight foreclosures on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the most important element of the program will require Congressional action—and the banking and business lobbies are already on the attack.
The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan has three chief components:
- Offer financial incentives to persuade loan servicers to modify mortgages
- Allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance more mortgages
- Change bankruptcy laws and give judges the power to reduce the amount borrowers owe on their mortgages.
The financial incentives probably won’t help much, as Kevin Drum writes for Mother Jones. When a bank makes a mortgage, it doesn’t usually hold onto the loan. Instead, the loan is packaged into a security with a other loans and sold to several investors. Another bank collects payments on the mortgage for the security’s investors and acts as a point of contact, or loan servicer, for the borrower. To date, servicers haven’t shown much interest in keeping people in their homes, even though foreclosure is the worst option for all parties involved.
“Loan servicers already have an incentive to rework loans that would otherwise go into default, and for the most part they aren’t doing it,” Drum writes. “Will a couple thousand dollars [of incentives] change their internal calculus?”
The provision aimed at Fannie and Freddie will help some. It’s also a good use of the government’s authority over the companies, which were nationalized last summer. But the key to Obama’s plan is the bankruptcy provision. Until now, every government-enacted plan to reduce foreclosures has relied on incentives to encourage the banking industry to keep people in their homes. As Drum notes, bankruptcy is the stick behind those carrots. Obama is supporting a bill in Congress that would enable bankruptcy judges to reduce the amount a borrower owes to the present value of the home. The beauty here is that investors who own the mortgage securities, not taxpayers, will have to eat the losses. In short, investors will be held responsible for making a poor investment.
“The government is essentially presenting a choice for mortgage lenders: take our deal, which is standardized across the entire industry, or let a bankruptcy judge modify the loan however he or she sees fit,” Tim Fernholz writes for The American Prospect.
The bank lobby has been fighting the bankruptcy law change since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, and they wasted no time lashing out at Obama’s proposal today. Elana Schor of Talking Points Memo highlights a nasty statement released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of “Washington’s biggest lobbying groups.” The release not only attacks the Homeowner Affordability and Stability plan, but takes a shot at Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as well, saying the policy “should have undergone a stress test to determine if it’s ready to stabilize a major portion of our economy.” Stress tests for the financial viability of banks were a big part of the murky bank bailout plan Geithner rolled out last week.
If Congress fails to pass a bankruptcy law overhaul, the entire plan will fall apart. And the record so far is not very promising—last year’s bill garnered only about half of the votes necessary to override a filibuster in the Senate.
Team Obama deserves credit for taking action on foreclosures, as John Nichols writes for The Nation. The Bush administration spent years vilifying troubled borrowers and then dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out banks. If Congress can’t pass bankruptcy law reform, the government should simply force banks to modify loans. The strategy would be simple—either keep borrowers in their homes, or return your check from the federal government.
“Ohio Congressman Marcy Kaptur and economist Dean Baker have some smart ideas,” Nichols writes. “They argue that the proper role for the federal government is not to fund mortgage negotiations but to insist that banks—many of which have already collected billions in taxpayer dollars—carry them out.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Bristol Palin Calls Abstinence Unrealistic
“I think abstinence is, I don’t know how to put it — like, the main — everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all,” new mother Bristol Palin told Greta Van Susteren in an interview on Fox News (video below). Bristol’s unwed, teenage pregnancy made headlines last year just as her mother, Gov. Sarah Palin, kicked off her vice presidential bid.
Samhita of Feministing.com writes, “I feel bad for her. [Bristol's] story was used by her family and the GOP to make an example of what is considered “responsible” behavior for a teen mom. Holding all that, she is telling the truth that abstinence is not realistic for young people, even if it should be what everyone strives for. Comprehensive sex-ed wouldn’t be this unrealistic.” In Salon, Rebecca Traister dryly notes that all this honesty was too much for Fox News. As soon as Bristol said what everyone already knew, Sarah Palin hustled on stage to contradict her.
Jodi Jacobsen at RH Reality says it’s time for federal government to acknowledge what Bristol learned the hard way and axe federal funding for abstinence-only education.
Here’s wishing Bristol a happy National Condom Week. Too bad the stimulus package won’t included expanded opportunities to cover birth control under Medicaid. At Mother Jones, Taylor Wiles notes that Obama cut $335 million for STD prevention, and that Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) nixed $150 million to fund the Violence Against Women Act.
Over 600 public health professionals have written a letter protesting these and other health cuts in the stimulus. “A decent society doesn’t spent $70 billion on an upper-class tax cut and then cut costs around around the edges by eliminating public health programs that save the lives of the working poor and ease the lives of the chronically ill,” Ezra Klein writes in the American Prospect.
After Bristol Palin, Nadya Suleman is America’s most famous single mother this week. Society tells women that childbearing is the most important part of their lives. Nadya Suleman, the much-scrutinized mother of octuplets, was foolish enough to take that propaganda seriously. Suleman told Dateline that she felt obliged to use her frozen embryos from previous IVF treatments because each of those frozen eggs is a child: “Those are my children and that’s what was available and I used them.” When Suleman says it, it sounds obviously crazy. When the Pope says IVF embryos are little humans, we’re all supposed to nod respectfully like it makes sense.
At least Obama is poised to lift the federal funding ban on stem cell research, as the Colorado Independent reports.
Patricia J. Williams of the Nation is concerned about the vitriolic backlash against Suleman. “No doubt Suleman has emotional problems. But rather than caring about her mental health, much of the media are content to pillory her as a drain on the public dole–selfish, frivolous, calculating and cruel,” Williams writes. An unmarried, unemployed woman bringing 8 premature infants into the world pushes every button on the wingnut dashboard.
Elsewhere in the Nation, Katha Pollitt writes, “I’ve received a number of e mails urging me to defend Suleman on feminist grounds. But really, there is nothing feminist about borrowing all this trouble.”
I’m not sure what a feminist defense of Suleman would look like. To me, the feminist question is why one woman’s foolish decision is generating an outpouring of hate and derision so intense as to result in death threats against the new mom and even her publicists. After all, sperm donors don’t get pilloried for impregnating countless single women. As Patricia Williams noted, more moderate critics are calling for increased regulation of in vitro fertilization, as if Suleman proved that women can’t generally be trusted not to succumb to baby fever.
Conspicuously absent from the Suleman debate is reliable information about in vitro fertilization and multiple pregnancies. Mainstream media seems determined to infer that Suleman and her doctor were trying for eight babies from the get-go. Suleman’s doctor probably went outside accepted medical practice when he implanted so many embryos in a relatively young patient, but there’s no reason to believe that anyone expected octuplets. That’s a critical detail. It’s eccentric and risky for an unemployed woman with six kids to try for a seventh, but it’s not out-and-out crazy. That is, if you really believe that having children is the most important thing a woman can possibly do.
That Suleman is unmarried and broke apparently disqualifies her from the mantle of pro-life martyr. Conservatives lauded Sarah Palin giving birth to child she knew would have Down’s Syndrome. Yet, many of these same social conservatives consider Suleman a monster for carrying all eight fetuses to term, knowing they faced a high risk of lifelong health problems.
As Elisabeth Garber-Paul explains at RH Reality, it’s common to implant multiple embryos during a single IVF cycle because the chance of conception increases with the number of ova introduced. Yes, there’s a risk of multiple births, but introducing multiple embryos decreases the odds of a $12,000 IVF cycle failing completely. The answer, for many women, is to have multiple implants and selective abortions in the unlikely event that more than one or two eggs become fetuses.
Of course, Nadya Suleman is morally opposed to abortion. She made a choice, just like Sarah and Bristol Palin. Ironically, many of Suleman’s most vocal detractors also oppose abortion and embryo destruction. Few Suleman-bashers have come right out and said that she was morally obliged to get abortions, but that’s the subtext. Which is odd, because the pro-life party line for unwed mothers is that whatever “sins” got you pregnant will be overlooked as long as you Choose Life. (Cf. Bristol Palin.)
It’s about as logical as assailing Suleman for being a welfare bum and then threatening to boycott companies that offer to give her stuff for free.
Suleman is an unsympathetic character, but at least she inadvertently dramatized the contradictions of social conservatism.
Weekly Audit: Geithner’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Bailout
In this week’s Audit, we’re examinig Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s thoroughly uninspiring bank bailout plan, which fails on almost every level. What’s more, some of the most insightful (and stinging) critiques of the proposal are coming from progressive media.
Robert Kuttner offers a strong analysis of Geithner’s strategy to salvage the banking industry in The American Prospect, noting that Geithner is explicitly avoiding the simplest and cheapest solution in favor of propping up the current Wall Street regime. The current plan is designed to support a financial architecture that has proven completely ineffective in maintaining the nation’s basic economic functions.
Geithner has thus far refused to nationalize the big, insolvent U.S. banks and give taxpayers ownership authority in exchange for their financial assistance. Instead, the new Treasury Secretary’s proposal devotes $1 trillion to writing insurance policies on bad mortgage assets to encourage private companies to buy those assets from troubled financial firms. This complicated strategy is designed to reduce the amount of money the government will have to pay to save the financial sector by bringing private enterprise into the bailout. However, the sheer convolutedness of the plan makes it much less efficient than temporary nationalization would be. Instead of simply putting a troubled bank’s balance sheet in order, the government now has to make sure hedge funds and private equity companies can profit from the move. The end result? Showering more taxpayer dollars on Wall Street.
As Matthew Rothschild highlights in The Progressive, the government’s current commitments to banks exceed the stock market values of those banks. Citigroup has received over $50 billion in direct capital injections, plus insurance on $300 billion worth of assets, but the company could have been purchased outright for well under $20 billion since October, 2008.
The worst part, Kuttner notes, is Geithner’s seeming determination to rehabilitate the failed loan securitization network, in which loans are packaged into securities and sold to various investors. Loan securitization encouraged excessive risk-taking on Wall Street, spawned millions of predatory mortgages and turned the simple process of buying a home into an absurd game of hot-potato amongst speculators. The loan securitization system needs to be carefully dismantled, not restored. “Geithner, using public funds, hopes to restart the engine of loan securitization,” Kuttner writes. “In effect, he wants to rebuild the very model that caused the crash.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that much of the resistance to nationalizing the nation’s largest banks is based on a misunderstanding about how the nationalization process works. In an illuminating interview with Talking Points Memo, Stiglitz states that banks fail all the time and are placed into government hands to be disposed of. Lately, a handful of banks have failed every week.
“Banks have failed over and over again in the history of America, in the history of capitalism,” Stiglitz says. “To mention some recent examples, Washington Mutual went into bankruptcy, a number of banks went into bankruptcy . . . . It didn’t lead to a fundamentally systemic problem.”
When this happens, the government either takes the bank over for a short period of time and sells it to another bank, or liquidates the failed bank’s assets. The nationalization solution that progressive economists are pushing is simply the first approach. The nationalized bank is even kept open while its books are put in order, and when its affairs are straightened out, the government sells the company back out into the marketplace. The FDIC has decades of experience with this kind of operation.
Merely patching up the old economic model will not only fail to loosen Wall Street’s grip on the economy, it will also turn a blind eye to the severe ecological challenges we face. As the authors of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy, Peter Brown and Geoff Garver, write in a blog for The Huffington Post, unlimited growth and production is nonsensical in the context of finite natural resources. Taking the environmental crisis seriously will mean not only investing in technology to fend off catastrophe, but cultivating a culture that places value on sustainable lifestyles.
Geithner offered a few vague comments about averting foreclosures in his bailout roll-out last Tuesday, but the glacial pace of government-sponsored foreclosure relief may mean that it’s time for more direct action. Last month, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, called for evicted home-owners to exercise squatter’s rights and refuse to leave their homes.
In the Nation, Nicholas Von Hoffman proposes organizing community groups to take a stand and block banks from repossessing homes. While the current economic crisis looks much like the early days of the Great Depression, those hit hardest by today’s downturn have a few more tools to weild—most notably, the Internet. If the Treasury Department will not save the people from Wall Street, the people can, and should, save themselves.
The situation is already dire. As James Ridgeway writes for Mother Jones, today’s sky-high jobless statistics mask the actual number of people enduring tough times. While the official unemployment rate is at 7.6%, far more people who have given up looking for a new job or are stuck in part-time positions. If those people are included in the metric, the rate soars to 13.9%.
Geithner is scheduled to release more details on his bank bailout on Wednesday. Let’s hope the second time is the charm. Keep your eyes on the Weekly Audit for independent media’s response.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Policy Must Inspire Allegiance, Not Anger
by Nezua
Media Consortium Blogger
George W. Bush told the world that the US was targeted for 9/11 because “we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” And as President Obama said in his inaugural address:
The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
On this week’s Immigration Wire, we examine approaches to immigration that do nothing to synchronize real-life America with the America in songs and storybooks.
Law ought to match ideal. If Law means anything at all, it is because it is a symbol of Truth. And if these eloquent words spoken by two Presidents attempt to declare the true United States of America, then why are our government’s actions causing children to suddenly alter their life plans in ways that position them as adversaries? (video via RaceWire):
Not that becoming an attorney dedicated to helping the unprotected isn’t a good career plan. But as we see from the video, this child’s choice is born from anger at witnessed injustice. This should not be our legacy.
People are migrating North, and then South again. Just as those who live South of the Rio Grand/Rio Bravo do from season to season. How many who blame the immigrant community for so many of our troubles realize that (at least of the Mexican/Guatemalan/Latin American migrants) they wouldn’t put down roots if the border weren’t so militarized?
A nation that wishes to be The Land of the Free does not place fences above families, their property or their traditions.
As President Barack Obama champions change in Washington, D.C., Eloisa Tamez waits to see whether an 18-foot steel and concrete wall will be built in her backyard. The Department of Homeland Security has already taken Tamez to court in an effort to condemn a piece of property, a mile inland from the Rio Grande, that has been in her family since the 18th century.
—The Texas Observer, Back to the Wall, Feb. 6
Beacons shine. Beacons don’t cheat numbers and target the vulnerable to justify their own budgets and existence.
Bloated federal funding and political pressure pushed a U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement program to meet arrest quotas rather than focus on rounding up criminal fugitives and addressing national security threats, says a damning new report on the controversial agency.
—Colorado Independent, ICE fugitive unit inflating arrests with non-criminal immigrants , Feb. 10
And extending opportunity to every willing heart looks nothing like this:
Just as the Department of Homeland Security announces a review of the program that unleashed [Sheriff Joe Arpaio's] police department on non-criminal immigrants, he pulls this stunt. Marching chained immigrants awaiting trial through the public square on their way to a tent city prison is a new low, even for him.
—New America Media, Sheriff Joe Arpaio Marches Immigrants Through Public Square, Feb. 10
These kinds of treatment are not just or necessary. What would be the motivation for a person in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s position to do such things? According to Truthdig this lawman has “became well known for making inmates wear pink underwear, housing them in tents and feeding them green-colored food.”
As New America Media reported almost two years ago, Beacons of Liberty do not devastate families to pressure lawmakers to enact programs which are, in essence, modern day slavery.
A nation that wishes to inspire allegiance does not scapegoat or hunt the least protected members of its populace, as has happened to the immigrant community, and by extension to the Latino community, as well.
“Local police making Latinos and immigrants feel unwelcome in reporting crimes, local politicians speaking out against Latinos and immigrants contribute to the increased level of violence against Latinos and immigrants,” Foster Maer, a senior attorney at Latino Justice who filed a civil rights complaint against the Suffolk, Long Island police in November of 2008. —ipsnews.net, Immigrants Scapegoated as Economy Teeters, January 26
And who can argue against being humane to children who are wandering the world on their own, trying to find health and happiness?
Each year, tens of thousands of such children cross the border without papers and without their parents. They are caught up in our immigration system and too often mistreated, denied basic rights and expected to take on responsibilities well beyond their years.
—The Progressive, Unaccompanied immigrant children deserve protection, February 4
Current approaches to migrants and their families do not inspire others to look at the United States with admiration or respect. These actions alienate millions of people and engender an accumulating pool of pain amongst people who only want what the “American Dream” ideally offers all of us.
It seems like common sense. But it will take many voices and energies to shift this trend. We cannot place all our expectation and hope for change at the feet of Barack Obama and go about our lives. Nor can we blame Republicans alone for the arc that we’ve taken in regards to human rights and the abuse of immigrants.
Those who blame the recent Republican administration for the mess in the detention centers should be reminded that these laws were passed in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton, who was desperately trying to court conservative voters after the Democratic congressional losses in 1994. The law doubled the number of immigrants in detention; the number grew swiftly after the Bush administration moved against immigrants after Sept. 11, 2001.
—Truthdig, Obama’s Immigration Conundrum, February 7
But the time that George W. Bush brought to life—the era of Fear of Other—ought to be attacked with vigor. We must tear away the veil of xenophobia with an equal passion. One fueled by love and positivity; with a freedom that knows no boundary, and an inclusiveness that only makes us stronger.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Welfare, Work and the Bailout Bonanza
The U.S. economy lost nearly 600,000 jobs in January, bringing total losses in the past three months over 1.5 million—more than the entire population of Philadelphia. If there ever was a good time to mend the tattered U.S. social safety net, it’s now. While unemployment benefits and food stamps remain relatively uncontroversial, basic welfare continues to be neglected by the general media and vilified by the right. And as of this moment, a responsible welfare program is needed more than at any point since the 1930s.
Seth Wessler has a great blog on RaceWire about retooling welfare so that it actually provides relief to people in need. The welfare reform Congress passed in 1996 tied benefits to employment, thereby excluding those who most need help, especially in an economy like this. The law’s popularity was fueled by false stereotypes about the disadvantaged.
“The punitive rules established after twenty years of racially coded frenzy to ‘end welfare as we know it’ have left Americans with no safety net during this deepening economic crisis,” Wessler writes, arguing that it is high time for this hateful chapter of American history to be over.
Pointless haggling over the economic stimulus legislation also needs to stop now. In a post for The Nation, John Nichols details the damage Senate Republicans have inflicted on the economic recovery package, and by extension, the economy itself. If the current Senate bill becomes law, Nichols notes, states will get less money to keep public employees on the payrolls, education programs will receive less funding, efforts to create jobs will be less effective and public health initiatives will be stymied. Even conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy thinks that the changes the Senate has made to the bill are a bad idea.
And what do we get for sacrificing all of these public investments? Tax cuts. As Robert Oak notes in the Economic Populist: “We need income, people!” The government can try to create incentives for people to buy cars and houses and stocks, but without a job, a lower price tag means nothing. If tax cuts are to make any impact, they have to be accompanied by major job creation. And job creation programs mean government spending.
Has everybody forgotten that Democrats just won back-to-back elections? Trickle-down economic policies were rejected by voters across the nation last November. Republicans lost seats in Idaho and Virginia, of all places! When a party suffers such complete losses, it means that voters don’t put much stock in its ideological toolkit—and they probably don’t want the winning party to do so either.
“There’s been a sort of embarrassment at the prospect of aggressively using the Democratic mandate, and there shouldn’t be,” Ezra Klein writes for The American Prospect.
Of course, the U.S. government plans to do more than provide more tax cuts for rich people. It’s also going to bail out the shareholders and executives of huge multinational corporations that wounded the economy in the first place, creating a new welfare program for the wealthy. We will need some kind of financial sector to support economic recovery, and freshly sworn-in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could take one of two reasonable routes to economic salvation: The Treasury could nationalize the major “too-big-to-fail” banks outright, or simply let them die and have the Federal Reserve fill the credit-shaped hole in the economy. Unfortunately, the Obama team appears ready to pump money into the banks and shield shareholders from losses that stem from some of the worst management decisions in business history.
If Geithner and Co. orchestrate another bank bailout, however, we lose an opportunity to rebuild the U.S. economy that actually addresses the needs of individuals in an environmentally sustainable way. As David Korten argues in Yes! Magazine, the Wall Street-driven economy has created huge sums of money, but done almost nothing to meet any serious social challenge. To build a better economy, we need to transcend Wall Street. “Trying to solve the crisis with the same tools that caused it is the definition of insanity,” Korten writes.
Beyond Wall Street, the Obama administration has inherited a decimated manufacturing sector. It’s currently propped up by a deeply flawed loan the Treasury Department extended to General Motors and Chrysler in December. Below is a segment from a four-part series on the auto bailout from The Real News. In it, Host Paul Jay notes that unions are being asked to take pay cuts as part of the effort to retool the Detroit car makers, even as decades of dreadful management decisions and poor environmental policy are being shut out of the public discussion.
It’s important to note that autoworkers’ union could be helping cement the false perception that workers are responsible for Detroit’s problems by agreeing to accept pay cuts as part of the bailout plan. Acquiescing to the demands of incompetent executives and opportunistic lawmakers also sets a terrible precedent for other stand-offs between CEOs and their employees. The millionaire managers who created the mess should be held accountable for the clean-up, not the factory workers who had the audacity to ask for health insurance.
Something is terribly amiss when the most neglected members of society can’t ask for help paying the bills, while even those protected by union contracts can’t expect to have their health care costs covered. The U.S. economy will be losing at least half a million jobs for the foreseeable future. We cannot abide by a system that punishes those who are already being hit hardest by the economic downturn.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Abuses Rampant in US Detention Centers
by Nezua
Media Consortium Blogger
In political circles, we sometimes use the phrase “police state,” to describe losses of civil liberties or the encroachment of penal processes into our lives. But how does such a thing manifest in our every day experience? Some would point to the all-too-casual use of electric shock devices by legal authorities. Others would quickly mention the United States’ swiftly growing enterprise of detention centers, barbed wire and concrete compounds or camps managed by Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE).
These centers are at the forefront of this week’s Immigration Wire, due to a riot at the Reeves County Detention Center in Pecos, Texas—the “second uprising in recent weeks,” according to RaceWire’s Feb. 4 article:
The protest began after a group of immigrant prisoners attempted to meet with the detention facility’s authorities, demanding that a gravely ill detainee be released from solitary confinement and be taken immediately to a hospital. The prison authorities refused to listen and did not take action. The detainees responded by protesting after being ignored.
In Desperation in Detention, Michelle Chen reveals other abuses related to the riot and quotes Wallace County, TX district attorney Juan Guerra, who warns that these conditions are a nation-wide trend. Guerra is right. While the conditions at Reeves County are shocking, they are not new developments.
In July of 2008, Alternet’s Joshua Holland moderated a workshop called How to Win the Immigration Debate and Beat Back ICE’s Emerging Police State, where he spoke of Hutto Prison in Texas. Latino Politico’s Man Egee liveblogged the event:
Guantanamo Bay receives global condemnation, but right here in the US the poorest of the poor are being rounded up in a migrant gulag. Many are not charged with crimes, health care access is withheld, etc.
30 minutes to the north of Austin, the T. Don Hutto, half of the detainees are children, as young as three years old. It is a medium-security prison that has been changed very little to house families.
New America Media’s Feb. 3 article, Fear and Hate Policies Along the Border: R.I.P., clearly defines the inhumane conditions at work in detention centers across the country.
Here, in the United States, there is an entire detention system set up to house thousands of migrants, including women and children. They are generally incarcerated without rights, without due process and without trials. In Texas, the Hutto detention facility (also operated by CCA) continues to inhumanely imprison migrant children, separating them from their families. According to the recently released “Unseen Prisoners” study, by researchers from the University of Arizona, some 300 migrant women were being held in 2007-2008 in three detention centers (two are operated by CCA), subjected to unwarranted and inhumane conditions.
For those of you looking for additional reporting on immigration, The Sanctuary is tireless in their efforts to expose what goes on in these facilities, as New Report Details Abuse at Privately Run Ice Detention Center illustrates. The Sanctuary also casts some light on the Reeve’s operators in Feb. 1’s Prison Riot Underway Due to Inhumane Treatment & Death! GEO Group cited for Worst Prisons Ever!
…The GEO Group is an international corporation that operates prisons around the country and is frequently in the news for its abuse of prisoners in its care resulting in many preventable deaths. At least eight people died at the Geo Group-operated George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania, the state’s only privately run jail. Several of those deaths resulted in lawsuits by family members who say the facility did not provide adequate medical care or proper supervision for inmates.
In the U.S.’s detention centers, human rights violations abound. In March of 2008, there was the outrageous treatment of Francisco Castaneda, who died shortly after being released from the San Diego Correctional Facility as a result of what U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson deemed “one of the most, if not the most, egregious ‘violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment that the court has ever encountered.’”
And in August 2008, Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng died in the custody of ICE with advanced cancer and a fractured spine. His family has not given up the fight for justice, as New America Media reported on Feb. 4:
Ng’s family seeks answers about his treatment during his detainment at the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, RI, which allegedly denied him use of a wheelchair and failed to take him to scheduled medical appointments.
A Rhode Island court is expected to decide this month if the Wyatt Detention Center, which contracted with ICE but is not part of ICE, must turn over the records.
In the wake of the Decider, we are left with abuses of power, broken laws, and remnants of symbolic and wasteful movements, like the 669 miles of fencing along a minuscule part of the border between the US and Mexico.
Fear and persecution of the Immigrant come in cycles: We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. How will we handle it today? Will Obama’s agenda extend to migrant communities?
When President Barack Obama made it his first act in office to shut down Guantánamo Bay prison, effectively ended one shameful chapter in our country’s embarrassingly large book of human-rights abuses. It was not so much redemption as a reminder that this country has a long, long way to go when it comes to detention, due process, and the Geneva Convention. It’s not just alleged terrorists that are suffering from our inhumane treatment. [...] Children and families have suffered inexcusable indignities under this new policy, which treats them like convicted criminals instead of asylum-seekers and potential citizens. —The American Prospect, The Big Business of Family Detention, February 2, 2009
Maybe we truly are leaving behind some of our darkest days. There are signs here and there of positive change. Glimmers of hope.
Meanwhile we keep at it. At the least, we can do like the child who slipped a note into the hand of an adult visiting Hutto prison asked: “help us and ask questions.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.