Posts tagged with 'Michelle Chen'
Weekly Audit: The Closing Bell
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
This week marks the final edition of the Weekly Audit. It has been a pleasure compiling the best financial and economic writing in the Media Consortium. Thanks to all the contributors whose work we’ve showcased and to all the loyal readers who have shared in this experience.
Debt Ceiling 101
As the Weekly Audit wraps up, we’re looking ahead to some critical economic issues facing the country. Christen Simeral and Veronica Beebe of The American Prospect explain what the debt ceiling is and why the debate over raising it is shaping up to be the political battle of the year.
In short, the debt ceiling is the maximum amount the government can borrow. The debt ceiling is currently $14.294 trillion. At the current rate of spending, we’re due to hit the wall around May 16, if Congress doesn’t vote to raise it. Usually, raising the debt ceiling is a formality. Congress has voted to raise the debt ceiling 10 times in the last 10 years.
If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the government can’t take on any new spending commitments. Worse still, the government may not have the cash it needs to pay tax refunds, Social Security payments, and other critical disbursements. Failing to raise the debt ceiling would hurt the U.S.’s credibility in global markets, making it more expensive for us to borrow money in the future.
The war on unions
All across the country, right wingers are trying to turn union workers into scapegoats for the nation’s economic woes.
Right wing media baron Andrew Breitbart tried to frame some labor history instructors at the university of Missouri by deceptively splicing together hours of classroom footage to make it look like the professors were advocating violence and sabotage, Dave Gilson of Mother Jones reports. The unedited video shows that the instructors are discussing the bloody history of the American labor movement, in which violence has overwhelmingly been perpetrated by management against workers.
NAFTA reprise
Multinational corporations are renewing their lobbying push for more NAFTA-like trade deals, Michelle Chen reports for Colorlines.com:
The construction giant Caterpillar is reportedly planning to treat its workers to steaming cups of Colombian coffee in the coming weeks, to warm them to the benefits of doing business with their “partners” in Latin America. While employees enjoy their break, lobbyists will be working hard, in their name, to peddle so-called “open markets” in Colombia, Panama and South Korea.
Chen reports that lobbyists for multinationals are besieging Congress to push for three new accords. The Panama deal is expected to be first on the agenda. Advocates for fair trade have been fighting these deals since the George W. Bush administration.
The push for deregulated international trade is on at the state level, too. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is handing out boilerplate resolutions to state representatives urging Congress to approve the trade deals. Chen notes that the Koch Foundation is among the major backers of ALEC.
High gas prices
Gas prices have long been seen as a bellweather of the electorate’s state of mind. When gas is cheap, incumbents rest a little easier. When gas prices rise, challengers start licking their chops. Daniel J. Weiss and Valeri Vasquez report in Campus Progress that rising gas prices are frustrating consumers and enriching speculators:
This year “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” Oil prices are rising to heights not seen since 2008. Oil rose from $85 per barrel to $112 per barrel in a little more than two months—a whopping one-third leap. Gasoline prices have followed along, rising by 70 cents per gallon—or 23 percent—during this same time. As our economy struggles to recover from the Great Recession, Americans are again forced to pinch pennies to afford their commute to work, school, and worship. Meanwhile, oil companies prepare to reap record profits in the first quarter of 2011.
The authors note this combination of rising pump prices and soaring corporate profits looks an awful lot like the oil shock of 2008, which helped push the economy into recession.
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Weekly Pulse: Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Christine O’Donnell, Condoms, and Concussions
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) in New York City may soon have to level with the public about their real agenda. At the Ms. Blog, Michelle Chen has an update on proposed legislation which would force CPCs in New York to disclose that they aren’t reproductive health centers.
CPCs are anti-choice ministries that masquerade as full-service reproductive health clinics. They typically set up shop near real clinics to trick unwary clients. Real clinics dispense medical advice from doctors, nurses, and other licensed health care professionals. They are required to tell clients about the risks and benefits of all their treatment options. They don’t push clients towards abortion or adoption. CPCs are typically staffed by volunteers. Instead of medical advice, they hand out over-the-counter pregnancy tests and medically inaccurate information about the risks of abortion. They use pseudoscience and high pressure sales tactics to derail as many women seeking abortions as they can.
Chen reports that if the bill becomes law, New York CPCs will have to post signs disclosing that “they do not provide abortion services or contraceptive devices, or make referrals to organizations that do.” If the facility lacks licensed on-site medical professionals, the center would have to inform prospective clients of this fact. This is an excellent piece of consumer protection legislation. If CPCs are honest about who they are and what they do, they should have no problem with the law. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Rotten Eggs, Drowsy Doctors, and Expensive Insurance
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Tainted egg shell game
The Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club is pushing state regulators to investigate two factory farms and a feed mill linked to this summer’s massive recall of salmonella-tainted eggs, Lynda Waddington reports in the Iowa Independent. The Sierra Club sent a strongly-worded letter to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller urging him to investigate Wright County Egg, Hillandale Farms and the Quality Egg LLC feed mill. All three firms were linked to the salmonella outbreak that sickened an estimated 1200 people; and all three firms are linked to agro-baron Austin “Jack” DeCoster.
Tom Philpott of Grist calls DeCoster a “habitual” environmental offender and “one of the most reviled names in industrial agriculture.” In 1996, the Department of Labor fined DeCoster Eggs $3.6 million for what the then-Secretary of Labor described as “running an agricultural sweatshop” and “treating its employees like animals.” Over the years, DeCoster enterprises racked up additional fines in other states. A previous Attorney General of Iowa dubbed DeCoster a habitual offender for water pollution. In 2002, five female employees at the DeCoster’s Wright County egg operation alleged that their supervisors had raped them and threatened to kill them if they reported the crime. The company paid $1.5 million to settle the lawsuit. (more…)
Weekly Audit: More Jobs Please
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
One year after President Barack Obama secured passage of his critical economic stimulus package, the U.S. Senate is finally taking anther look at how to create jobs and repair the economy. These issues are more important than ever, but absurd Republican obstructionism and timid Democratic negotiation are once again threatening good public policy.
Not really bipartisan, is it?
As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the Senate Finance Committee reached a “bipartisan” agreement to supposedly spur job creation last week. Republicans demanded billions in tax cuts for wealthy people, but kept on caterwauling about the federal budget deficit. In exchange for $80 billion to dedicate to jobs—an extremely modest figure given the state of the labor market—Republicans asked for hundreds of billions in giveaways for the rich. And that’s just to get the bill through the Finance Committee, much less the full Senate. (more…)
Special Report: Haiti After the Quake + How to Help.
By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger
Over 100,000 people are believed dead after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday afternoon. The quake buried countless buildings, from shantytowns to the presidential palace. All hospitals in Port-au-Prince have been leveled or abandoned. The United Nations headquarters and the city’s main prison have collapsed as well. Thousands of residents are homeless and without food, water, or electricity.
On the ground in Port-au-Prince
Haiti is in a state of chaos, as Kayla Coleman reports for Care2. “The streets…are flooded with the rubble of collapsed buildings and displaced people. … The earthquake has destroyed much of the already fragile and overburdened infrastructure.”
Because all hospitals have been destroyed, there is nowhere to take the injured. According to Coleman, the United Nations says it will immediately release $10 million from its emergency fund to aid relief efforts.
Haiti before the earthquake
And though Americans are now paying attention to Haiti in the wake of this disaster, little to no attention was paid to the “daily chaos and misery” that plagues the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, as James Ridgeway writes for Mother Jones. “It is hard to imagine what a magnitude 7 earthquake might do to a city that on any ordinary day already resembles a disaster area.”
Ridgeway also cites a 2006 New York Times report that details how the Bush administration helped destabilize Haiti in the years leading up to the 2004 coup.
Ridgeway writes:
“For the most part, Europe and the United States have continued to sit by as Haiti has grown poorer and poorer. When I was there you could find the children just outside Cite Soleil, the giant slum, living in the garbage dump, waiting for the U.S. army trucks to dump the scraps left from the meals of American soldiers. There they stood, knee deep in garbage, fighting for bits of food. As for the old, they people every street, gathering at the Holiday Inn at Port-au-Prince in wheelchairs, waiting at the doorway in search of a coin or two. They have no social safety net. And nobody with any money—no bank, no insurance company, no hedge fund, no mutual fund—ever makes any serious investment in the country.”
Will prevailing attitudes towards Haiti change?
At RaceWire, Michelle Chen writes that Haiti, a place “where buildings have been known to suddenly collapse on their own, even without the help of a natural disaster,” was still trying to recover from the severe tropical storms last spring that leveled hundreds of schools and left tens of thousands homeless.
Now the situation is desperate. “There will be an outpouring of sympathy across borders, a spasm of humanitarian aid,” Chen writes. But “will there be an attitude shift in the power structures that have long compounded natural disaster with politically manufactured crisis?”
‘Supporting the right kind of aid’
For those in Haiti, outside help is crucial. The country is in need of search and rescue volunteers, field hospitals, emergency health, water purification, and telecommunications. To ensure that you are supporting the right kind of aid—”the kind that builds local self-resilience, strengthens the local economy, and fosters local leadership,” as Sarah van Gelder details for Yes! Magazine—donate to one or more groups with a proven track record, such as Doctors without Borders, Grassroots International, Partners in Health, and Action Aid, among others.
Hip-hop artist and Haitian native Wyclef Jean has led efforts to help Haiti for years through his charity Yele Haiti. Jessica Calefati at Mother Jones reports that Yele spends $100,000 a year on athletic programs for Haitian children and helps feed 50,000 people a month with food donated by the UN. When Jean received word of the disaster, he immediately acted, sending a “flurry of tweets” for people to donate $5 by texting 501501. He has already returned to Haiti to help.
How you can help
For more details about how you can donate effectively, check out Yes!, Mother Jones, Care2, and The Nation‘s roundups. You can also watch Free Speech TV’s action update video for more information.
GritTV aired a segment on Haiti featuring Danny Glover, Marie St. Cyr, and a performance by the Welfare Poets. The video (below) covers the devastation in Haiti after the quake as well as the state of the country prior to the crisis:
How not to help
For an example of how not to help in a time of crisis, take a look at televangelist Pat Robertson, who claimed yesterday that the quake was Haiti’s payback for a “pact with the devil” that slaves made to obtain independence from French colonials. As a rebuttal, Afro-Netizen points out how Haiti’s liberation greatly benefited the United States, and Tracy Viselli at Care2 writes that “if there is a god, Pat Robertson is one of the devil’s pied pipers.”
More coverage of the crisis
For more information about relief efforts in Haiti, what you can do to help, and some historical context, check out the below list of coverage by Media Consortium members.
- Video from the Real News Network on how World Bank policies led to famine in Haiti.
- Garry Pierre-Pierre of Inter Press Service reports on humanitarian efforts of Haitian-American leaders in New York.
- Monica Potts explains why Americans should concentrate on our policies toward Haiti for The American Prospect.
- Erin Rosa at Campus Progress writes about Ansel Herz, a young journalist that is on the ground at Haiti.
- Video from The UpTake of President Obama’s pledge to send aid.
This post is a special report on Haiti and features links to the best independent, progressive reporting by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. For more updates, follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Immigration Wire: White House Meeting a First Step to Reform
by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger
After postponing twice, President Obama finally met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on June 25 to discuss moving immigration reform legislation forward. The meeting was applauded by activists and advocates for immigration reform, as the issue seemed to have stalled, and the acrimonious tone of the debate has proven deadly.
All parties emerged from the meeting with positive feelings about the prospect for progress, as I heard on last Friday’s White House debriefing conference call. A confluence of positive factors are contributing to the momentum: Major labor leaders are united for reform, Democrats are leading much of Washington, and voters in the U.S. clearly want to see reform passed. President Obama made his intention to pass reform very clear and the White House predicts the process will begin late this year or early 2010.
New America Media calls the meeting a hopeful beginning, but makes it clear that nothing is guaranteed this year—despite the pressing need. And we can’t wait too long for reform to begin. 2010 is the beginning of the 2012 Presidential election cycle and the issue could be “too easily politicized” at that time.
Wiretap Mag’s M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes that, while Obama complimented Senator John McCain for taking risks, he seemed averse to boldly stating what he hoped to see or would stand behind; that “nothing [Obama] said indicated significant political movement” on the issue. But, Levesque-Alam hypothesizes that Obama’s caution is related to tension caused by “core contradictions not simply between but within the political parties.” The immigration issue is contentious, even among members of the same party.
GritTV and The Nation teamed up to present a panel asking Is Immigration Reform Dead or Alive? (video). The panelists discuss a potential future in which immigration reform does not pass. Their predictions make a grim scene, centered around the horrors of a growing detention industry. Children are incarcerated in these facilities. Over 90 people have died in detention and they are damaging families. Guest Ravi Ragbir, now a member of Families for Freedom, spent two years in a detention center. Ragbir’s young daughter was so disturbed by the sight of her father in shackles that Ragbir requested she no longer visit while he was detained.
A Truthdig article titled America’s ICE Backwards Approach to Immigration details the broken legal system that further clouds the immigration process. Over 200,000 immigration cases are backlogged and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has risen by 35%, stressing the court system accordingly. Add a declining number of judges and a sharp increase in the number of border guards and the result is a setting where “the equivalent of death penalty cases” are heard “in a traffic court setting,” according to Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
New America Media also explores the results of a study that finds a low rate of crimes are committed by the undocumented, which is a stark contrast to the accusations of right-wing pundits. The undocumented population in Utah grew from 70,000 to 110,000 in the last four years, according to a new study released by the Sutherland Instituate, but the number of incarcerated undocumented increased by only 28. That’s 28 people, not percent. In fact, the crime rate for undocumented immigrants in Utah is only 3.9% and dropping.
Finally, RaceWire’s Michelle Chen reports on the impact of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative on Mexican Americans who want to deliver children using a midwife. The Initiative, which went into effect yesterday, “requires Americans passing across the Canadian and Mexican borders to have a valid U.S. passport or passport card.” Previously, only a valid driver’s license was required. This is yet another policy that refuses to recognize the long pattern of movement over the border area, and is culturally antagonistic to Mexican Americans.
Law indicates humankind’s attempt to be just; it is an extension of a civilization’s morality. Immigration reform must come soon; it is a moral duty. It must pass not just for the benefit of the undocumented community, but so we can live up to our national ideals, and also, to decisively stave off a destructive energy made possible by the lack of humane law.
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: Ending the Economic Status Quo
by Zach Carter, TMC MediaWire Blogger
The banking lobby still holds enough sway inside the Beltway to torpedo sensible consumer protection rules, even after releasing a flood of predatory mortgages that kicked off the current economic crisis. On issues ranging from payday loans to subprime mortgages, the banking industry continues to successfully defend itself against new regulations that would protect the consumer. As if that weren’t outrage enough, the finance lobby has also joined other corporate interest groups to fund misinformation campaigns that smear unions and block wage growth.
As Mary Kane explains for The Colorado Independent, the push to rein in predatory mortgage lending appears to be losing steam on Capitol Hill. An extremely complex mortgage reform bill that is conciliatory to the finance lobby passed the House last month, angering consumer advocacy groups. Among the problems: the bill pre-empts many stronger state predatory lending laws and protects the Wall Street investment banks that gorged themselves on mortgage-backed securities.
Consumer protection shortfalls are not limited to messy mortgages. Lagan Sebert and David Murdoch detail the payday loan industry’s continued assault on U.S. consumers for the American News Project. By offering small loans, typically in amounts ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, payday lenders target consumers who need money for basic necessities, then charge them outrageous interest rates (as in, above 700%).
For years, newspaper editorials have denounced payday lenders for systematically exploiting the most vulnerable members of society, including members of the U.S. military, who are often targeted as a result of their reliable paychecks. The solution to the problem is as simple as the business is repulsive: Capping annual interest rates on all consumer credit products at 36% would make this kind of predation impossible.
Nevertheless, the payday loan industry has been able to escape a regulatory crackdown via an intense and sustained lobbying effort. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., is now parroting payday lending lobbyists. Since payday loans are supposedly paid back within a matter of weeks, Dodd and the payday lending lobby say that it’s unfair to hold them subject to the same standards as a 30-year mortgage.
The argument is insane. No bank would ever get away with charging a 36% interest rate on a mortgage. Even the most predatory subprime mortgages didn’t have interest rates anywhere near that high. But Sebert and Murdoch go further, highlighting a report from the Center for Responsible Lending which found that payday lenders make 90% of their revenue from borrowers who do not pay their loans off on time. The loans are structured to be so expensive that consumers become trapped into making payments for the long-term, often spending thousands of dollars over multiple years to get out from under an initial loan of just a few hundred dollars.
Dodd has received major campaign contributions from the banking industry, but sometimes the lobbying effort is much more subtle. Several major corporate lobby groups have united under the misleading moniker of “Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs” to finance shoddily researched projects that defend the interests of the executive class in economic policy. An Alliance for Main Street Jobs report written by Anne Layne-Farrar has received quite a bit of attention for its claim that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would kill 600,000 jobs by making it easier for employees to organize. Several major news outlets have cited the allegation, including Fox News, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News. As Art Levine reveals for In These Times, however, this research relies on completely meaningless statistical trends and disingenuous research design that render its findings utterly hollow.
Corporate executives are not afraid of EFCA because they think it will kill jobs or disenfranchise workers. They are afraid because it will empower workers to fight for living wages and provide safe working conditions—things that leave less money around for big executive bonuses at the end of the year and give workers a greater say in how companies operate.
In some respects, EFCA also represents the other side of the predatory lending problem. It is important to ban abusive loans, but it is just as important to make sure people are paid fairly for their work to ensure they don’t need to seek out shady credit just to make ends meet.
When so many brewing legislative battles relate to the economy, it’s easy to forget about the programs that have already been enacted. Some of the tax cuts included in the economic stimulus package were aimed at fostering investment in low-income and minority neighborhoods—a worthy goal. But as Michelle Chen notes for ColorLines, the program has some significant flaws. Chen highlights a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which found that minority-owned community development entities are largely being excluded from the program, with approval rates about 67% lower than other applicants. The GAO could find no reasonable explanation for why minorities were not making the cut, especially when some recipients of the tax credits have a history of consumer exploitation. Capital One Bank, for instance, is receiving $90 million of these tax credits, despite its long history of abusive subprime credit card lending.
There have been some successes this year in the push for an economy that answers to workers and consumers. Much of the stimulus bill is designed to make sure important jobs don’t disappear during the recession, and Sen. Dodd’s credit card reform bill passed both chambers of Congress by comfortable margins and included some very strong improvements. But we know what caused the economic crisis: stagnant wages and predatory lending. A true recovery will have to empower workers and protect consumers, both of which will require breaking with the corporate status quo.
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 Audit: Workers will build the recovery, not Wall Street
With new bailout plans for Wall Street being unveiled almost every week, it’s easy to forget that nearly all of the work that fuels our economy takes place outside of Manhattan. While reviving the financial sector is an important part of recovery, any lasting economic solution must also empower American workers and protect them from corporate abuses.
Workers’ rights are a core issue for our democracy, as progressive icon Noam Chomsky argues in an interview with Paul Jay of The Real News. The discussion covers the current economic crisis and its implications for the democratization of the U.S. economy. It’s a fascinating exchange. In the video below, Chomsky advocates for a much broader palette of reform than a simple clean-up the financial sector.
Chomsky notes that while the recent bank bailouts have brought a great deal of attention to the disconnect between public investment and private profit, it has become routine for the taxpaying public to foot the bill for important research that eventually creates big corporate profits. To ensure that we all reap the benefits of our investments, it is essential to make institutions accountable to their communities, rather than exclusively dedicated to maximizing shareholder returns.
The first step in democratizing the U.S. economy, according to Chomsky, is promoting unionization by enacting the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier for workers to organize.
“The Employee Free Choice Act is always misrepresented,” Chomsky says. “It’s described as an effort to avoid secret elections. It’s not that. It’s an effort to allow workers to decide whether there should be secret elections, instead of leaving the decisions entirely in the hands of employers.”
EFCA would give workers more control over their circumstances, leading to improved wages and living standards for laborers. In a column for The American Prospect, Terence Samuel points out that even if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to bailout Wall Street succeeds in stabilizing the banking sector, banks can do little to bring about recovery if U.S. citizens are all broke. If we want to get out of the bubble-and-bust cycle, we must establish a middle class that has money to spend. Fundamentally, that means raising wages.
Robert Eshelman puts the plight of today’s workers into focus in a devastating piece for Salon. Even where clear, straightforward laws to protect laborers from predatory employers exist, major corporations have been able to use the fear of being fired to push employees into “voluntarily” working under illegal conditions (Wal-Mart just agreed to pay out $640 million to settle charges that it intimidated its own employees into skipping mandatory breaks and accepting pay rates below the minimum wage).
“If corporations were able to exert such coercive power when the unemployment rate was around 5 percent, what can they do in a job market in which 14.8 percent of the population can’t find adequate work?” Eshelman asks.
Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Labor systematically ignored its duty to enforce labor laws. Writing for Colorlines, Michelle Chen highlights a report from the Government Accountability Office that takes the Department to task for failing to even return phone calls from workers who complained about employer abuses.
Millions of jobs are hanging in the balance as President Barack Obama formulates his rescue plan for the U.S. auto industry. But while the administration has insisted that factory workers at GM and Chrysler have to accept wage cuts, they’ve almost bent over backwards to funnel bonus money to executives at failed insurance giant AIG. General Motors’ CEO Rick Wagoner has stepped down at the Obama administration’s request, and while it’s hard to feel sorry for an executive who lobbied aggressively against the environment and ran his company into the ground, his ousting reflects Wall Street’s privileged status in Washington. As Josh Marshall highlights in Talking Points Memo, it is astonishing that executives at Bank of America and Citigroup, who have put taxpayers on the hook for far greater sums of bailout money than GM and Chrysler, have not been subjected to the same treatment as Wagoner.
We’ve all seen the grim statistics indicating how severe the current economic crisis really is, but the proliferation of roving tent, shack and lean-to communities along U.S. railways underscores the true costs of the recession more grimly than any consumer spending metric or gross domestic product projection. All over the United States, people who cannot afford even rental housing are living in makeshift structures without access to basic amenities. It’s much like the rise of Hoovervilles in the late 1920s and 1930s, where out-of-work laborers took up residence anywhere they could.
While these squatter communities are growing as the crisis deepens, the worst part of the whole phenomenon is that they were common before the current downturn, as Scott Bransford notes for High Country News.
Whatever happens on Wall Street, fixing the economy will mean making sure ordinary people have access to basic amenities, and guaranteeing that workers have the power to prevent abuses from corporate America’s executive class.
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: Obama’s Hard Line on Immigration
by Nezua
TMC MediaWire Blogger
Last week, President Obama announced his intention to address immigration reform in the next few months in a meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The statement came as a relief to many, especially with recent reports of human rights abuses within the U.S. detention system. But, as most of the President’s statements seem crafted to appeal to warring political constituencies, his actual intentions are still elusive.
Jorge Rivas of RaceWire, for one, wasn’t wholly won over by the President’s speech during a town hall meeting in California, and noted that Obama got “a little nasty.” Stressing ethnocentric arguments such as “You will learn English” while pointedly avoiding any comment on the suffering tied to the detention process makes for a poor juxtaposition:
You’ve got to..say to the undocumented workers, you have to say, look, you’ve broken the law; you didn’t come here the way you were supposed to. So this is not going to be a free ride. It’s not going to be some instant amnesty.
What’s going to happen is you are going to pay a significant fine. You are going to learn English. You are going to — you are going to go to the back of the line so that you don’t get ahead of somebody who was in Mexico City applying legally.
—March 18, President Barack Obama, Orange County, California
Perhaps his strategy is to soften opposition to migrant rights, but lines about language fuel the anti-immigration culture war. Do all immigrants have a problem with English? Or is he talking specifically about the demographic that Sheriff Joe Arpaio targets? If so, why?
President Obama is no Joe Arpaio. But, in this climate, anti-immigrant sentiment does not need to be fed. Our President is a smart and oratorically gifted man. In light of the current economic crisis, he could speak about how the current immigration crisis is tied directly to our trade practices.
Obama also spoke about joining militarily with Mexican President Calderón in efforts to stamp out the violence flaring up since his attacks against the deeply entrenched Cartel families. Democracy Now! has a roundtable discussion on the implications of further militarizing the border.
But the implications aren’t fully drawn out for the American public. In the modern world, borders do not separate families, nor commerce, nor soldiers, nor bank accounts and their owners. We need to begin addressing cross-border issues. For example, if NAFTA is supposed to help Mexico’s economy, why are Mexican farmers on tractors in the streets protesting the policy, as Michelle Chen reports. NAFTA has allowed Mexico’s corn crop to be so devalued that Mexico—the land where the plant was born roughly 5,000 years ago—now imports corn. Streams of campesinos have migrated north…where we lock them up.
Just as the economic crisis is very real to the people losing jobs, the Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raids are very real for a large faction of America. New America Media reports on the President’s second town hall meeting in California, where immigration reform activists showed up to “remind him we’re still here,” according to Nativo Lopez, state and national president of the Mexican-American Political Association. The President did not address immigration issues at this event, however.
President Obama speaks of beefing up security on our border, but avoids the growing immigrant detention industry and the problems that accompany it. At the same time, Mexico is flooding the country and its border cities with troops. But what does all the enforcement get us?
Mother Jones, in a collaboration with the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, profiled the resurrection and subsequent destruction of one town’s economy due to ICE raids in A Year Without A Mexican:
The 389 arrests [in Postville, IA] eliminated more than one-third of the meatpacker’s workforce and nearly one-fifth of the town’s population. It also prompted an exodus of hundreds more Hispanic residents who were either afraid of being targeted or simply opted to escape the town’s inevitable tailspin. Postville’s businesses began to suffer almost immediately.
The article paints a grim picture of a warm, thriving community that is decimated. Postville is now a strange, “open-air prison,” with various residents wearing visible electronic shackles. Rowdy citizens have been bused in to fill the place of the deported workers.
The Nation highlights a documentary on detention called “The Least of These.” The video explores the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility, “a for-profit prison”, where Latin American families live in a converted prison environment. They don’t get enough sun, they don’t get enough exercse, and the children draw crayon pictures of the American flag, with tiny, fragile letters spelling out Please help us. How long should they wait?
In Up Against The Wall, RaceWire reports on the growing indications that the Obama Administration may not break with Bush policies regarding immigration. In fact, it may increase enforcement measures while siphoning money away from worker protections in the U.S.
And all this “just days after huddling with Latino members of Congress on immigration issues.” If Obama isn’t careful, he will give the Republican party a foothold to regain trust with Latino voters. I suspect that in any approach to Immigration, compromise is inevitable. But, if the Latino community feels used or betrayed by unkept promises, it could be disastrous for Democrats.
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 Immigration Wire: ‘Systematic Failures’ in U.S. Detention Healthcare
by Nezua
TMC MediaWire Blogger
This week, two comprehensive reports on the health of immigrant detainees were released by Human Rights Watch and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. As Public News Service reports, “Immigrants are, literally, dying for decent care.”
There have been many cases of inadequate medical treatment or neglect leading to death in U.S. detention centers. The cases are horrific—ranging from an ignored broken spine to deadly metastasized genital cancer—and must stop immediately. But, a thorough accounting of the realities of detention is needed if the United States can engage in an honest dialogue about immigration policy.
RaceWire doesn’t shrink from offering an incisive analysis in Health in Detention. Michelle Chen writes that “Part of the problem is that the mission of ICE’s Division of Immigration Health Services isn’t really to ensure that all detainees receive the care they need, but rather, to keep people essentially well enough to be kicked out of the country before they die.” Chen adds that in some cases, that low bar isn’t met.
There are many causes. After 9/11, the U.S. stopped aiming for a “more perfect union” of its diverse population. The Bush administration responded (starting in Florida) to the immigrant community with suspicion and force. And so it has continued, ultimately leading to the conditions outlined in this week’s reports. The poor treatment of immigrants in U.S. custody reveals a very ugly side of the country, but it’s hardly a new side. AlterNet’s Lynn Tramonte offers a scathing indictment of how dangerous Agreement 287(g), which recruits local police to enforce immigration law, has become to communities.
The stalemate on immigration reform is sometimes portrayed as a disagreement over “safety” and “security” and “jobs.” But, in many cases, it’s a disguised resistance to the always-changing face of America. It’s an old game of Tug-of-War. Wiretap reminds us how long this culture battle has been going on in the below video. It recalls eerily familiar past attitudes:
We don’t know why the human race has such a short memory when it comes to cyclical xenophobia. It’s confounding, especially in the U.S.: How can we be so proud of our own families’ immigrant roots, but not wish that happiness for others? If a mother, daughter, or sister is called “immigrant”—in the U.S. or the Middle East—she’s suddenly worth less.
Going back to the aforementioned Public News Service article: According to Human Rights Watch researcher Meghan Rhoad, “the detention system routinely subjects women to suffering and humiliation. It is a system that needlessly shackles pregnant women with no criminal background, that ignores requests for care, and does all of this with impunity.”
But confront ICE officials, even their spokesperson, with the many documented cases of medical neglect or human rights abuses, and reporters will be given the standard statement that the agency is “committed to humane and safe treatment of detainees.” The inadequacy of the answer mirrors their effectiveness.
Speaking of inadequate approaches, we now turn to the investigation into Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). On March 12, RaceWire reported on the positive reaction to the investigation from local activists and community groups in Arizona. Click through to see photos of Members of Maricopa Citizen for Safety and Accountability (MCSA) delivering the Sheriff numerous “pink slips” or see letters the DOJ delivered to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on March 10.
In other immigration news, The Texas Observer reports on non-profit consumer advocate group Public Citizen’s suit against DHS on behalf of Denise Gilman. Their efforts are helping shed some light on the construction of a border fence.
It also appears that Speaker Pelosi was actually forecasting a change in immigration policy last week. Yesterday President Obama met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and announced his intention to move forward “possibly within the next two months” with the unveiling of a legislative package that will address immigration reform. Hours later, at a town hall meeting in California, he repeated his conviction to do so.
Some have expressed concern that President Obama is taking on too much at once. But all of these things, the economy and immigration and healthcare, are intertwined. For example, the growing detention center industry will continue to take the place of productive workers and damage a healthy economy.
It is in our nation’s best interest to veer sharply away from the path that George W. Bush set us upon. Obama’s announcement yesterday is exciting news, considering how long the nation’s immigration laws have languished and how many humans have suffered because of them. The change that President Obama promised the nation seems to be coming for one and all.
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.
