Mourning for an undefended border

These stories still get to me.

Detentions Rise at US-Canada Border

[Ibrahim] Dabdoub has been detained more than three times as he returned from Canada after visiting his parents and in-laws...

“I have never been in trouble with the law,” says Dabdoub, “I have never been arrested. I have a reputation with my family, close friends and business associates as being a stickler for following rules and valuing the integrity of the law.” ...

The United States, which recently swore him in as U.S. Citizen _ it was one of the proudest moments of his life – is directly targeting him with no just cause, because he is an Arab-American.

The first time that Dabdoub experienced the interrogation, about five officers gathered around him and his vehicle. One of the officers asked him to put his hands on the back of his car and made him spread his legs. He was frisked and then handcuffed.... After 30 minutes of being held, he asked an officer for the reason for his treatment. The officer replied by asking him questions about his ethnic background and his travels to the Middle East.

Par for the course as the United States becomes a fearful place, hiding behind walls and security fences, police, border patrols, and soldiers, trying desperately to shut out the world with which we are interdependent.

When I was a child in Buffalo, we were all very proud to live along and frequently cross "the world's longest undefended border." Soon we will need passports to make the crossings that used to be an unimpeded part of everyday life. This seems a sad and almost certainly unnecessary development.

The poet William Stafford might well agree, had he lived to see this present. Several weeks ago I heard Garrison Keillor read a poem of his that seems to speak directly to our predicament.

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed-or were killed-on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

Stafford knew what was and what ought to be.

"What do the Yanks care about a dead Arab?"

Apparently the Pentagon plans to hold war games in German Bavaria in late March and early April for troops on their way to Iraq. So it is looking for a few Arabic-speaking actors to take part in the training. Their job: to play C.O.B. -- civilians on the battlefield in U.S. military-speak -- in simulated urban warfare, speaking only Arabic and meeting the invaders with suspicion and incomprehension.

According to Der Spiegel, the casting service they've employed is having a hard time.

"Does anyone here have anything against working with Americans?" the gaunt German man asks the 29 Arab men and two women sitting in a bleak white-painted room in Berlin.

Several people answer the question by standing up, taking their coats and leaving the room.

"You can leave any time," the German tells the others, somewhat forlornly. ...

A Lebanese man wants to know how the roleplayers will be protected and if the press is allowed to be present at the training sessions for security. "Who guarantees that we will be helped if the Americans make a mistake?" he asks the room. "What do the Yanks care about a dead Arab?"

The mood becomes agitated. "No, not a single word of the operation will reach the outside world, there are no media there," says the German agent. He tries to reassure the potential actors: "But you'll be employed by a German firm. There are strict security precautions."

The actors are asked to work for three weeks for $117/day, with some exercises running 24 hours straight. This was a tough sell the day Spiegel infiltrated the casting call; only four of twenty-nine prospects signed up for further security screening for the job.

I guess we should be glad they weren't advertising for Farsi speakers ... yet.

"We need a flyer"...War on Iran ahead?

I've been recruited, or perhaps volunteered is the right word, to write a draft for a flyer. War Times/Tiempo de Guerras used to publish an antiwar newspaper; now we generate flyers as downloadable PDFs and send out monthly email updates. The project has always sought to supply print media materials in English and Spanish that a far-flung peace movement could use, but which local groups had trouble creating on their own. We believe, in our own small way, we've helped to delegitimize the misnamed U.S. "war on terror" and the Iraq fiasco. Now we need to make available a flyer on Iran.

This post isn't going to be that flyer. Rather, I thought it might be interesting to try to tease out how I think through drafting such a thing because the principles involved are probably applicable to creating any form of print propaganda -- and for all the new media we have, print materials are still useful for organizing.

So here goes....

Who is the audience?
This question comes before any others because it constrains the possible answers to other questions. Fortunately, War Times/Tiempo de Guerras has a general idea about that one: we view our audience as ordinary people of good will who are open to non-mainstream points of view about the wars, but who don't have the time or energy to take in much information about current events. Think large parts of the U.S. working class, with an awareness that many of those people are of color and/or speak Spanish as a primary language.

I suspect that these folks don't have much real information; they are likely to be among the 57 percent of us who depend on local TV for news. So on Iran, I suspect I'll be writing to something close to a blank slate with a vague sense of menace hanging around the edges. I can be sure these folks have no idea

• the U.S. overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government and supported an autocratic Shah who ruled brutally for 38 years

or that

• the U.S. aided Saddam Hussein in an invasion of Iran in the 1980s that killed over half a million Iranians.

On the other hand, they also don't know about or remember that

• Iranian revolutionaries who had overthrown the king humiliated the U.S. by holding 52 embassy workers hostage in Tehran in 1979-81.

Sort of a wash.

What is the flyer for? What is the simplest possible message?
Since you can never do everything on one piece of paper, the tighter answer you can give to this question, the better. And since we haven't put out anything about Iran before, the possible answers to that question are very broad. "Attacking Iraq is BAD" works generally, but what approach to take?

Some possible tacks to follow:

• Iran is no threat to the U.S. International Atomic Agency inspectors visit wherever they choose. If Iran does want to build a bomb (they say they don't intend to), it would be years before they'd succeed according to most (non-Israeli) intelligence estimates.

• It is Iran's fault the U.S. is bogged down in the middle of Iraq's civil war. Hey, wait a minute, who started this mess? Bush floated this insane theory in his January 10 speech announcing his counterinsurgency escalation. The Iraq disaster is Bush's fault.

• We can't believe Bush/Neocon regime about Iran. They lied us into war in Iraq. They are hyping a non-existent threat to shore up their falling domestic political standing. Demonizing Iran will help them tie the next president into their failed policies, regardless of which party elects that president.

• U.S. Neo-conservatives and right wing Israelis have long plotted to take the U.S. into war against Iran.

  President Bush's neoconservative advisors and pundit supporters have been beating the drums of war with Iran since 2003, when the president declared Iran to be part of an "axis of evil." Recall that a senior administration official told The Times that Iran should "take a number" in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.

• Iranian president Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denying populist demagogue (think Newt Gingrich or Don Rumsfeld for U.S. comparisons) but he doesn't control Iranian policy and only gains power within Iraq when we attack him.

• The U.S. military is already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no rational way to win another war. The U.S. could bomb, causing thousands of Iranian casualties, but has no ground forces to follow up. And without a ground invasion, most likely aerial attack will only speed up the Iranian nuclear ambitions. U.S. forces are vulnerable to counterattack in Iraq. The consequences of a U.S. aerial attack on Iran are unknowable, but could easily include regional chaos and carnage, oil prices surging off the charts, and worldwide economic dislocation.

What a list of possible themes for a leaflet -- and the one thing I'm sure of is that I can't throw all of them at any reader. Too much complicated, slightly crazed content just makes people give up. Maybe that's the theme. As Josh Marshall said

I've always viewed the fears that the White House would try expand the war into Iran with a mix of deep skepticism, fascination and latent foreboding. Logically, it makes no sense on any number of counts. But the last half dozen years has taught us all that that's simply not a significant obstacle. There are any number of ridiculous gambits I was sure these guys wouldn't try before they did try them.

Again, the 'sensible' interpretation of what's happening right now is that the administration is trying to regain control of the situation in Iraq. And to further that aim they're rattling their sabres at Iran to get them to back off and stop making trouble. That's the sensible explanation. But we're not dealing with sensible people.

That's what we're up against here. The possibility that our rulers will take the U.S. into Iran is not rationally explicable -- and that makes it hard to get people to repudiate something anyone with a smidgen of sense knows makes no sense.

As far as the flyer goes, it will be necessary to offer all these possibilities (and more) to my co-workers in War Times and then hope to prune the result as much as possible. This is not the best way to write a flyer, but circumstances permit nothing else.

What does the flyer ask readers to do?
There is no point in writing and distributing political information if we don't try to give people an opportunity to act on what they read. In this case, that's probably not too hard.

All of us need to demand that the Democrats we've newly put in charge of Congress get in the way of any plan to attack Iran. I've seen suggestions that we need a new "Boland amendment" -- an ironic notion. During the 1980s, opponents of Ronald Reagan's covert war on Nicaragua attached a prohibition on funding it to an appropriation bill the president had to sign, reluctantly. In order to get around this prohibition, U.S. covert operators sold arms to Iran to get cash to buy arms for the U.S. proxy army in Nicaragua. What goes around comes around?

Moreover, folks need to connect to their local peace organizations (there are probably over a thousand around the country) and to national groups such as Code Pink and United for Peace and Justice

Make sure the flyer is attractively designed.
If you want people to read it, at the very least it has to be clean and legible.

How is the flyer going to be distributed?
It would not be worth going to the trouble to produce a flyer unless you have a way to get it out into the world. I've seen political groups miss this truism. Fortunately, WT/TdG is a distribution system with a large email list and many contacts with local peace groups.

The prospect makes me tired, but I think I will be able to draft this flyer.... Suggestions for brief content are most welcome.

Now I know what to call myself...

Chris Bowers at MyDD has penned an accurate description of my political leanings. I'm a

movementarian who views the Democratic Party as an unavoidable vehicle.

Bowers said it of himself in the context of the likelihood that John Edwards will fire his bloggers under attack from a minor Roman Catholic rightwing nut. Not my fight, but Edwards will prove himself a grade-A wimp if, as seems likely, he knuckles under.

Feds jail "delusional" blogger

Journalist Sarah Olson, who just fought off a subpoena herself, speaks at a City Hall press conference.

Josh Wolf has been locked up for 169 days. As of today, Wolf became the longest-imprisoned journalist for contempt of court in U.S. history. He is a San Francisco video blogger who filmed some of a mini-protest march in the Mission district in July, 2005. (I live in this neighborhood; I wrote about the events at the time here.) A TV station bought some of his footage. You can see that story here.

So far so good.

Though a police office got hurt and a police vehicle was vandalized, that would have been the end of it, except that the Federal government decided to make an example of Wolf. Under California's journalist shield law, Wolf could not be forced to reveal any other pictures he took that night. But the vandalized police car had been paid for by the Feds, so they convened a Federal grand jury about this tiny local incident and tried to make him turn over his out-takes. Wolf refused. Last August 1 he was declared in contempt and sent to Federal prison. Appeals have been denied -- he is expected to be held until the grand jury's term expires in the summer, or perhaps longer if the U.S. Attorney chooses to be particularly vindictive.

Perhaps because San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams are also threatened with prison because they won't reveal who leaked them testimony about Barry Bonds' steroid use, the mainstream Northern California press has been quite supportive of Wolf. Along with those two, Wolf was named Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Reporters without Borders, the Newspaper Guild/CWA, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Civil Liberties Union have all called Wolf's imprisonment an effort to undermine press freedom.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan disagrees. To him, Wolf is just a dirty little blogger with no rights. In a Jan. 29 court filing,

he called Wolf "delusional'' and said additional time in prison might help him realize that he was not a genuine journalist, but "simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events.''

Numerous local politicians and civil libertarians have called for Wolf's release.

Even in prison, Josh Wolf has a blog. Go visit him. Those of us on the outside need to stand by a jailed comrade whose is defending our legitimacy.

Racial profiling in toyland

The German magazine, Der Spiegel, found this tableau at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany.

In this model train world, heavily armed policemen arrest a group of foreigners at a train station, including a woman wearing a headscarf and a black woman.

Wolfgang Maria Weber photo

Parking in the city

It started with illegible, unintelligible flyers on poles. The San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) announced their plans to increase street sweeping in our neighborhood -- and concurrently increase the number of hours a week that car-owning residents had to find alternative locations for their vehicles.


The item that really caught my attention (underlined) was their intent to label one side of my residential block "no parking" between 4-6 am several days a week! Having to move a car during the day I can deal with, but this amounts to outlawing overnight parking for most of us.




I wasn't the only person disturbed by DPT's plans -- soon a plaintive homemade flyer turned up next to the official postings. The flyer's author believes not only that alternate side of the street parking regulations are mostly about collecting fines for parking tickets, but also that DPT is picking on the Mission.


Next I found this authentic looking "ticket" on under my car's windshield wiper. The faux ticket announced the time and place of DPT's hearing. Opposition was mobilizing. Clearly I had to be there.


So last Wednesday morning, I was back in Rm. 400 of City Hall which was full...


... including standees.


A solitary hearing officer faced the anxious and disputatious crowd. Couldn't city authorities at least field some help for this guy?


A DPT worker explained the Mission was simply dirty -- they have to send multiple trucks out with the sweeping machines to pick up the garbage left on the streets. No mention that landlords don't pay for garbage, so poor tenants are tempted not to pay the exorbitant fees our private garbage monopoly pays for dumping their cans. Some folks simply put their trash next to the city cans to avoid the fees. This isn't great, but the city does still house some poor people....



Then the people began testifying. This gentleman urged even more parking restrictions to discourage car ownership and use, in conformity with the city's "transit first " policy. He was not popular with most in the room, but I have to say he has a point. We are choking on our cars.


This fellow gave the opposite point of view. He experiences the parking rules as a tax -- and since he works every day driving a bus for the city, he finds it very unfair that parking tickets should cost him hundreds of dollars a year.

Several other people got up to explain that if "no parking" hours were increased, they would have to drive their cars to work which they don't do now -- because increased driving would be their best way of avoiding tickets.


Somewhere along the line, a parking bureaucrat got up to explain that there were some mistakes on the posted notices and they didn't really intend to make us move cars from 4-6 am -- unless maybe they did. I was unconvinced.


One of the opponents pointed out that if this was the case, they have violated their own sunshine rules and ought to repost the true plans and hold another hearing. Meanwhile other organized opponents went off to try to pull in our district supervisor, Tom Ammiano.

I'll live through it if they put in more mechanical street sweeping, though watching the machines blow the dirt around, I am not convinced that they clean anything. (The slave labor [workfare] human sweepers do most of the actual trash pick up that gets done, not the machines.) I can probably avoid tickets, because I work at it.

But I don't know what I think the answer is about city parking. We have a society in which just about every adult needs a car either for work, errands, or a sense of the possibility of leisure. Car Share can help -- but I don't think we've gotten to where it can work for most people most of the time. Public transportation is spotty and irrational; for example, lots of janitorial workers can't afford to live in this city, but the transit system stops at night, so they have to drive from their suburban residences. The Mission is a transit hub, but it is very difficult to use public transit to get to the west side of the city.

As an experiment, I've decided to keep a diary of what I use my car for over the next month -- will report it on the blog when I have some data. I can't imagine not having one, but it would be good to know why. And when, and if, we get subjected to more parking restrictions, I'll report that as well.

SuperBowl Sunday

In honor of today's great event, got to share these Fox News poll findings:

35. It's Super Bowl time, and the coaches of both teams gave credit to God for getting them to the big game. Do you believe God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event? (Answers as percentages.)

Yes-27 No-66 (Don’t know)-7

36. Which team do you think God wants to win the Super Bowl this year? 1. The Chicago Bears 2. The Indianapolis Colts 3. (Same/No difference) 4. (God’s too busy/doesn’t play favorites) 5. (Don’t believe in God) 6. (Don’t know)

Bears-14 Colts-11 (Same)-16 (Too Busy)-33 (Don’t believe)-1 (DK)-25

Via Mystery Pollster.

California Dem bench looking frayed

LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa with SF mayor Gavin Newsom

In the San Francisco Chronicle, political reporter Carla Marinucci describes the fallout from Mayor Gavin Newsom's admission that he'd had an affair with an employee who was also the wife of his campaign manager (now hastily departed) as "a mushroom cloud over his promising political career." She quotes an unidentified Republican political consultant:

"This guy is no longer a credible candidate to be governor of California,'' said one of the Republican strategists. "It's an extraordinary good day for (Los Angeles Mayor) Antonio Villaraigosa ...

Well maybe.

Screwing his friend's addicted wife isn't going to kill Newsom at the polls in this city. Folks aren't going to pick a mayor based on who he fucks. We don't do that. But he may be in trouble for another reason. Before he was elected, he was generally considered a lightweight. Sure, he made an attractive front man for developers, landlords, and downtown business interests who are always afraid the raging rabble will rise up and take over "their" jewel box financial hub. But his program was just poll tested buzz words and wedge issues (clear out the dirty homeless now!)

Unexpectedly, Newsom has turned out to be a somewhat interesting mayor. Neither of his immediate predecessors, Frank Jordan and Willie Brown, showed any interest in trying to frame policy to make the city work. Newsom seemed, even if I disagreed with much of it, to be actually trying to govern. On good days, he even worked with progressive supervisors, notably on Tom Ammiano's universal health insurance plan.

He also had a moment of political brilliance in fronting for gay marriage. No -- this was not politically risky. In 15 years this will be a no-brainer -- note that today, after 15 years of "don’t ask, don't tell" the Harris poll reports that 55 percent of the population thinks gays should be able to serve openly in the military. Attitudes are changing rapidly -- Newsom smartly seized an opportunity to appear courageous and forward-looking with only short-term risk.

How did a lightweight prettyboy do so relatively well as mayor? It seems very likely that he was highly dependent on having smart, dedicated people around him who perhaps found opportunities that a more fully formed mayor might not have allowed. And it is the continued loyalty of this entourage that is threatened by the disclosure of Newsom's affair. Who wants to toil to promote a guy who'll betray you to follow his dick? Only ambitious schemers. Newsom might very well be able to rehabilitate himself politically over time by demonstrating maturity and policy accomplishments, but he may have a hard time finding aides whose quality can compensate for his weaknesses. ***So is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa the beneficiary of Newsom's at least temporary political eclipse? Again, maybe. As a San Franciscan, I'm not as close an observer of Villaraigosa, but from up here, he doesn't look to be sweeping all opposition aside or winning friends. His signature policy initiative, a school takeover law has crashed in the courts. He has alienated African-Americans by vetoing a settlement payment to an Black firefighter who was fed dog food in a hazing incident. The controversy revived scrutiny of a longstanding racist, Animal House culture in the fire department; the chief resigned; and Villaraigosa appointed a Black interim chief -- only further stirring the hornet's nest.

African American leaders questioned whether the mayor had tapped the incoming chief as a public relations ploy to mollify critics upset with him for vetoing a $2.7-million legal settlement for a black firefighter who sued the city after co-workers fed him a spaghetti dinner laced with dog food....

Among those wondering about the mayor's intentions was the Rev. Eric P. Lee, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles. "This was a move to quiet the storm of controversy," Lee said. "I'm concerned with the shallowness with which this seemed to come about."

For a politician whose stock in trade is having been elected through a Black-Brown alliance, this is pretty devastating stuff.

I'm afraid California Democrats are still looking for a new generation of standard bearers who have more to offer than being "not the Republican." The Governator has proved that Dems are vulnerable until we do better.

No escape from Iraq for Palestinians

Iraqi refugees asking for political asylum gather outside the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees office. These are lucky ones who somehow made it to Damascus. (Khaled Hariri/Reuters)

Travel in Jordan and Syria last summer gave us one insight that at the time was not something highlighted in U.S. media coverage of our nation's Iraq war: we've unleashed a flood of desperate refugees across the region. Now this is a commonplace. Literally millions are trying to get out of a country where, as James Glantz reported in today's New York Times, life amounts to trying to survive on "a deadly dartboard."

The International Herald Tribune recently attempted to quantify the situation:

To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the U.S. misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. ... Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. America has admitted a total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

Numerous news organizations have begun pointing out that the people who have helped U.S. forces and U.S. media particularly deserve some consideration as Iraq goes up in flames. And they do. And they are not getting it because to facilitate their escape would be an official admission that the U.S Iraq enterprise is out of control, kaput, down the drain. So our friends should die for GWB's lies.

Meanwhile, IRIN, the news organization associated with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is trying very hard to draw attention to another set of refugees created by the Iraq disaster.

BAGHDAD, 1 February (IRIN) - The number of Palestinians stranded at the Iraq-Syria border has risen to 700 as more refugees flee the escalating violence in Baghdad, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Wednesday. "Another 50 Palestinians have fled to the Iraq-Syrian border following a traumatic week in Baghdad, bringing the total number stranded at the frontier to about 700," Jennifer Pagonis, UNHCR spokeswoman, said at a press briefing in Geneva. ...

UNHCR said a group of 356 Palestinians has been in no-man's land between Iraq and Syria since May, and is living in a makeshift camp that was erected there. The second group of more recently arriving Palestinians, which now numbers around 340, is stuck in another improvised camp, al-Waleed, on the Iraqi side of the border. ...

"They are living in tents in very dismal conditions during this cold weather season, and have no access to potable water and medicine. Their children have left schools and they will be an uneducated generation in the future," al-Kasous said.

UNHCR is concerned that Palestinians have been systematically targetted and threatened by authorities and militias. The refugee agency said they face constant threats from death squads. ...

On 16 January, Iraqi security forces broke into two buildings in Baghdad that are rented by UNHCR for Palestinian refugees and arrested 30 men. But they were released shortly.

In another incident in Baghdad's central district of al-Batawyen, Interior Ministry forces broke doors and windows of a building and arrested 17 Palestinian men. A third incident took place in al-Amin district in the eastern side of the capital on the same day and 13 Palestinian men were apprehended by Iraqi security forces.

"We again urge the international community, including neighbouring and resettlement countries, to help find a humane solution for these refugees who are persecuted inside Iraq and have nowhere to go," UNHCR said.

Having lost their own country, these folks have become just more hidden collateral damage of U.S. aggression.

Molly Ivins

In her final syndicated column, Molly Ivins, who died yesterday after a long battle with breast cancer, wrote as follows:

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous."

I only saw her in person once. I'm glad I had the opportunity. She was special, the only populist whose books I could give to my conservative mother and know they would make a dent. We'll miss her.

Via Froomkin.

Two group attacks, two cities Where's the justice?

Judge Gibson W. Lee, shown the night he and lawyers visited the scene of the attack. (Christine Cotter / LAT)

All emphasis in following quotations is mine.
San Francisco:

The investigation of the alleged New Year's attack on Yale's Baker's Dozen singing club could finally be headed to prosecutors... Those same sources, however, said they're not sure if what allegedly started as taunting over the singers' rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner" inside a Richmond District home and later spilled out onto the street has the makings of a felony assault case.

Attorney Whitney Leigh, who was hired by the Yale victims' families to bring attention to the case when the cops were seemingly slow to investigate, said there's plenty to take to a jury. He said victims and witnesses have identified four local youths who were detained by cops that night as the attackers who allegedly repeatedly kicked Yalie Evan Gogel while he was on the ground....

However, things aren't as clear in a second alleged attack on fellow Yalie Sharyar Aziz Jr., whose jaw was broken in two places.

Leigh said Aziz has identified the person who initially punched him on the street, but couldn't ID any of the attackers who allegedly kicked him while he was on the ground -- which is when the jaw injury may have occurred....

Already four of the potential defendants are lawyered up. Two are from a prominent family with many friends and supporters in town.

... "Even with a conviction,'' said one veteran law enforcement officer watching the moves, "what are you going to get -- probation?''

Long Beach:

...the case against 10 Long Beach youths accused of beating three white women Halloween night hinges almost entirely on identifications made in a Ralphs parking lot the night of the attack.

In a procedure known as a field show-up, police told the victims and a reputed witness that the youths — nine girls and a boy, ages 12 to 17 — were suspects and asked if they recognized them from the melee. In several subsequent police interviews, witnesses were never asked to pick the juveniles out of a lineup that included non-suspects....

"I can't remember ever seeing a case go to trial in which the only identification is a field show-up," said Kathy Pezdek, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and expert witness in the area of eyewitness identification, in an interview. "It's extremely unusual."

Much of what has occurred in the Long Beach courtroom of Judge Gibson W. Lee, however, is unusual. ...Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrea Bouas has accused the youths of having gang connections, of orchestrating the destruction of a witness' car, of calling the witness "a stupid bitch" outside of court to intimidate her. None of Bouas' accusations are based on evidence in the case, and they normally would have been heard out of the presence of a jury. ...

There are no juries in juvenile court; a judge decides the minors' fate. ...In this case, Lee opened the doors based on the seriousness of the allegations: All 10 are charged with assault with intent to cause great bodily injury, and eight face hate-crime sentencing enhancements.

More from Long Beach:

Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrea Bouas relied on [victim Loren] Hyman and Kiana Alford, who said she witnessed the attack, to present a narrative that the nine girls and a boy viciously attacked the three women solely because they were white.

Alford, 18, was able to reconstruct the incident in extraordinary detail, describing who in the scrum punched and kicked which woman — including who threw lemons and pumpkins.

"That's the one throwing lemons," she told police of a 14-year-old girl she had never met. "She hit at least two people with them."...

Alford conceded that her observations were made from 175 feet to 300 feet away. And the friend who was with Alford that night testified that they arrived after the assault occurred and hadn't seen any of it. A 911 caller, talking to the victims, described the attackers as males.

Unlike the San Francisco case, which has not yet led to criminal charges, the Long Beach case dating from last Halloween is over. Of the 10 juvenile defendants, all of whom were held in jail awaiting trial, 9 were convicted of assault motivated by race hate. One 12 year old was sent home. The others now face sentencing.

About the only thing these two assaults have in common is that they happened in solidly comfortable neighborhoods.

Somehow San Francisco's privileged white boys allegedly beating up on Yale's privileged chorus just doesn't look like a case that local law enforcement thinks it can win. Lawyers on every side are getting big bucks to argue their points in the media. Early accounts suggested there was a gay bashing angle to this one, but all parties now seem to be minimizing that aspect (if it exists).

Meanwhile, in Long Beach, 10 children sat in jail for 2 months, were represented by $325 flat fee public defenders in an eight week trial, were subjected to a juvenile proceeding where ordinary rules of evidence don't seem to have applied, and now stand convicted of a black-on-white hate crime.

Those kids in Long Beach may be guilty as hell. But side by side comparison newspaper accounts of these two cases makes it very hard to label whatever we have as a "justice system."

UPDATE: 2/7/07: Judge Lee has sentenced all of the convicted young people in Long Beach to community service, house arrest, and probation. That is, after affirming the seriousness of their conduct under a hate crimes rubric, he has given them the lowest sentence possible. The women who were assaulted are outraged by the relatively mild sentences. Again, what kind of "justice system" is operating here?

What new immigrants learn on arrival...

Skin color scale used by researchers.

A new study from a Vanderbilt University scholar seems to prove that skin color is a very strong, maybe the strongest, predictor of how much money immigrant workers in the U.S. make.

Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.

“On average,” Dr. Hersch said, “being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education.”

...Dr. Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, like English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin, and found that skin tone still seemed to make a difference in earnings. That meant that if two similar immigrants from Bangladesh, for example, came to the United States at the same time, with the same occupation and ability to speak English, the lighter-skinned one would make more money on average.

“I thought that once we controlled for race and nationality, I expected the difference to go away,” Dr. Hersch said, “but even with people from the same country, the same race, skin color really matters.”

Although many cultures show a bias toward lighter skin, she said her analysis showed that the skin-color advantage was not based on preferential treatment for light-skinned people in their country of origin. The bias, she said, occurs in the United States.

Pretty straightforward; in this country, immigrants are taught, painfully, that Black is means being lesser. What's amazing is not that there are tensions between African-American and newcomer populations, but how commonly African-Americans recognize immigrants as just people trying to make their way through a system stacked against both groups.

Our mission -- and we have no choice

Like the line says, first do no harm. And for the United States as a country, right now, that means doing everything constitutionally, legally and politically possible to limit the president's and even more Vice President Cheney's free hand to shape and execute American foreign policy. Sift it all out and it's that simple. Stop them from doing any more damage. All the rest is commentary and elaboration.

Joshua Micah Marshall

King George by Ann Telnaes

She knows who she wants with her

This morning the feisty seventy-six year old co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, Dolores Huerta, got off a great quip at an interfaith labor breakfast:

If you were on that TV show -- Survivor -- who'd you want there along with you? I'd want a farm worker -- or a service worker! Wouldn't you, if your life depended on it?

The event rallied religious support for the Service Workers Rising campaign of UNITE HERE. The campaign is promoting a "code of conduct" in Silicon Valley where thousands of low wage service workers toil for big name high tech companies and don't get decent wages or benefits. The Palo Alto Daily News explains their predicament:

Genentech's professional employees command six-digit salaries, regularly get free time to work on pet projects, and enjoy perks such as gym memberships and weekly parties.

But a cashier in the company's cafeteria, Milarose Oriel, 53, said in a Wednesday teleconference she can't afford health insurance and is denied time off to refill her prescription for blood pressure medicine, without which she runs the risk of a fatal stroke.

The catch is that although Oriel works at Genentech, she doesn't work for Genentech. Her employer is Guckenheimer, the contractor that provides the company's food service.

In a survey of more than half of the 150 Guckenheimer workers at Genentech, [a new] report found that a quarter rely on government-funded health insurance or are uninsured because they can't afford the company's plan. The report notes that almost half of the county's residents spend more than a third of their income on housing. Food service workers on average earn 69 percent less than the median income for the area.

Silicon Valley companies say they aren't responsible for the conditions of these essential workers; they blame the contractors. Leaders from a couple of dozen Peninsula congregations who listened to Huerta this morning think these companies can do better. They are asking the companies to extend their good treatment to thousands of mostly overlooked, often new immigrant, workers whose labor makes their "campuses" such attractive places for white collar employees.

Structural barriers are Republicans' last best hope

Tamar Lewin reported in the New York Times Friday on the results of Ward Connerly's crusade to end affirmative action. Connerly has killed affirmative action by initiative votes in California (1996), Washington (1998) and Michigan (2006). He aims to spread his poison to 10 more states in 2008.

And what has happened in state higher education systems when affirmative action has been banned? The Times reports:

In California and Texas, the first two states to ban racial preferences, underrepresented minorities at the flagship universities declined -- even though both states, and Florida, adopted plans giving a percentage of top high school graduates guaranteed admission to state universities. ...

A decade after the California ban, only 2 percent of this year’s freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles, are black: a 30-year low. Hispanic representation at U.C.L.A. has dropped, too. At Berkeley, the number of blacks in the freshman class plunged by half the year after the ban, and the number of Hispanics nearly as much.

Systemwide, blacks make up only 3 percent of U.C. freshmen, although about 7 percent of the state’s high school graduates are black.

It's simple: under a ban on intentionally valuing racial diversity in admissions, Blacks and Latinos won't be attending the major public colleges covered by the rule. Mission accomplished: state higher education systems cease to be part of the aspirations of masses of young people who might go to college.

Connerly's attack on affirmative action is an attempt to preserve the crumbling white supremacist underpinnings of our society that are about to be swept away by demographic change. By 2050, whites will cease to be the U.S. majority. We'll be a demographic group alongside others, as whites already are in California, Hawaii and New York City.

So long as this country is something like a democracy, these changing demographics mean that people who aren't white (and also people who are white but have learned that their neighbors are not strange threatening creatures) will become the elected government. However, poor people and uneducated people don't make their weight felt inside the system in anything like their numbers in the population. For example, in 2000, over 80 percent of eligible people who had the highest 20 percent of U.S. incomes voted, as opposed to 51 percent of eligible people in the lowest fifth. Since educational attainment correlates with income, keeping a population out of higher education pretty well guarantees less of them will vote.

Of course, some students of color will find a path to higher education in the private institutions that are still legally allowed to value racial diversity in their student bodies. Private schools able to affirmatively weigh race in admissions and offer scholarship money to back up their choices will cherry pick smart, better prepared applicants of color -- and be known for offering a more welcoming atmosphere than the state schools. Many of those students of color will get good educations and do great things. But they'll also largely leave behind the expectation that government institutions have an affirmative duty to provide opportunities to all of us.

Ward Connerly, an African American developer who aims to pull the ladder of success up behind him, is helping to create structural obstacles to wider participation in our democracy -- and thus helping to keep his Republican buddies in power. Former California Governor Pete Wilson was his mentor and the key to his advancement; Wilson's Republican friends are getting a good return on their investment in Connerly. Connerly's crusade is about keeping people outside the system who might change the rules to the detriment of those who now have an inside track. It's that simple and that brutal.

Escalation brings out the peace movement

I took my own advice and attended San Francisco's antiwar march and rally today, despite not being sure I endorsed all the organizers. Who cares? I certainly endorsed the cause we all marched for: an end NOW to the US war in Iraq. The San Francisco Chronicle says there were 3-5000 of us on a dreary, drippy day on lower Market St. I would lean toward the higher number, perhaps even more. This was not some little demo -- there was a good, diverse, mostly serious crowd.


Protestors coming up the escalator from the BART (subway) station were met by this gentleman. His sign reads: "We are over your lies and tired of your bullshit, Bush."


Some thought it was time that for their votes to start making a difference.


Others took a very dim view of what party politics will do for us.






Mostly people milled around, finding the others they felt comfortable with. Powell and Market Streets is a lousy intersection in which to gather a crowd. There is nowhere for any large number of people to stand, so people spread out. That did have one advantage -- nobody could hear the speeches from the loudspeakers.


Eventually we got moving.


There were enough of us to fill Market Street.


Organized defenders of immigrants were out in force.


These young women look to be students.


Plenty of vets, some from this very war.




Various religious traditions walked together.


Peace marches are hungry work.

If wondering whether to march ...

in a protest organized by some strange faction who you suspect might not represent your views, consider these suggestions from hilzoy:

My presence at a march is not normally a sign that I endorse the people who are organizing it; it's a sign that I endorse whatever people are marching for. This has limits: I would not, for instance, participate in a march put on by the KKK or the American Nazi Party. On the other hand, since I do not normally spend huge amounts of time researching the sponsors of marches, it's perfectly possible that I might turn up at some march sponsored by an organization that's dreadful, but that I'm not familiar with. In this particular case, the American Friends' Service Committee is a member of UFPJ, and they're good enough for me.

I suspect that if I were to read through the list of member organizations (I started, but gave up; it's too long), I would probably find some that I really dislike among the many that I admire. But I'm not going to bother. I dislike the idea that before I can engage in any form of public political action, I have to investigate all the people involved in it for ideological purity; and besides, life is short.

My emphasis. If you can be in D.C. tomorrow, be there or be square.

Baghdad: "the real battle"

I really don't much like YouTube. I don't much like the Tube either, so I don't usually want it on my computer screen. Online, I'm often skimming, while video imposes its own pace. I want to be in control of how much time I invest in particular information; hence, I avoid video.

However -- very occasionally I'll play one of the things. The British Channel 4 news report below is long for a YouTube -- over 8 minutes I think. And worth playing all the way through.


If you had any questions, now you've seen why Bush's escalation is a failure before it begins. And more, why we shouldn't put any more U.S. soldiers into that meat grinder to destroy their moral bearings.

Thanks to Booman Tribune for pointing to the video.

Jimmy Carter: Israel, Palestine; amplifications, denunciations

Jimmy Carter has gone and spoken the unspeakable. By titling his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, he has put the simple truth that "zionism is a form of racism" back out in public view in the United States. For many years that notion was locked away in closet along with other unmentionables (think "George W. Bush is a narcissistic sociopath"), but Carter has sprung it amid great wailing from those who thought they'd staked it firmly in oblivion.

"Apartheid" is not a terribly specific or meaningful term in U.S. consciousness, especially now that majority rule in South Africa has been a fact for over a decade. I suspect it connotes, vaguely, an evil system of racist discrimination enforced by a bad government, nothing more precise. So to the casual consumer of U.S. culture (and it doesn't matter how much of a best seller Carter's book becomes, most will know of it only casually), the former President has said that Israel is a racist state.

Bravo, I say, as a citizen of another racist state still locked in a struggle to overcome its racist origins. Carter is really only restating what was the international consensus throughout the 70s and 80s according to U.N. resolutions approved by a majority of nations. Since Israel came into being as a nation at least in part because of U.N. resolutions designed to end the British mandate over Palestine in 1948, having its nationalist ideology labeled "racism" by the United Nations was profoundly threatening to Israelis and their supporters. In 1991, U.S. pressure forced the U.N. to rescind its statements. I suspect that the underlying belief remains the world's majority position.

So what does Carter actually say in this controversial book? Not much that is novel. The guts of his argument is as follows: the current situation in Israel/Palestine is

a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed, although many citizens of Israel deride the racist connotation of prescribing permanent second-class status for Palestinians. As one prominent Israeli stated, " I am afraid we are moving toward a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship. The West Bank is not worth it."

An unacceptable modification of this choice, now being proposed, is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them. ...

The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories. [pp. 215-6]

He arrives at this summary through a narrative of his many years of involvement in peace efforts, including the Camp David Accords signed on during his term of office, and his gradually expanding understanding of how Israelis have victimized Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. I agree with Helena Cobban:

it's a sweet and haunting book, in which he gives an intimate portrait of how he came to learn about many aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, and much well-presented information about the nitty-gritty of the Israeli-Palestinian encounter in the occupied territories. But really, I wish he'd done a bit more with that title of his.

And like Cobban and many other reviewers, I wish he'd admitted that Arab citizens of Israel, though much better off than Palestinians behind the Wall in the West Bank and Gaza, are also less than full citizens of "their country". Even to this distant observer, simply reading some English-language Israeli press, it was obvious last summer during the Lebanon war that Arabs in Israel felt their lives were expendable; bomb shelters for this population were simply not a priority. Ali Abunimah ran down the situation of Arab residents of Israel in a Wall Street Journal article (sub. req.)

They have nominal Israeli citizenship, and unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa, they do vote for the country's parliament. Yet this is where any sense of equality ends. ...

Discrimination against non-Jewish citizens both informal and legalized is systematic. Non-Jewish children attend separate schools and live in areas that receive a fraction of the funding of their Jewish counterparts. ...

Much of the land of the country, controlled by the quasi-governmental Jewish National Fund, cannot be leased or sold to non-Jews. ...

A 2003 law stipulates that an Israeli citizen may bring a non-citizen spouse to live in Israel from anywhere in the world, excluding a Palestinian from the occupied territories.

The current Israeli cabinet includes Avigdor Lieberman who recently "called for Israel to become 'as much as possible' an all-Jewish country without an Arab minority" according to the Scottsman. (Via the Christian Science Monitor.)

What about the situation of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, literally beyond the Wall? Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, urges us to pay attention to what is happening in Gaza after purported Israeli unilateral withdrawal.

Israel has spent the last five months unleashing missiles, attack helicopters and jet fighters over the densely packed concrete hovels in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army has made numerous deadly incursions, and some 500 people, nearly all civilians, have been killed and 1,600 more wounded. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinians, destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, including its electrical power system and key roads and bridges, carried out huge land confiscations, demolished homes and plunged families into a crisis that has caused widespread poverty and malnutrition.

Civil society itself—and this appears to be part of the Israeli plan—is unraveling. Hamas and Fatah factions battle in the streets, despite a tenuous cease-fire, threatening civil war. And the governing Palestinian movement, Hamas, has said it will boycott early elections called by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, done with the blessing of the West in a bid to toss Hamas out of power. (Remember that Hamas, despite its repugnant politics, was democratically elected.) In recent days armed groups loyal to Abbas have seized Hamas-run ministries in what looks like a coup.

The stark reality of Gaza, however, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of most Americans.... [Truthdig.]

Let's hope that Carter has opened the way for slightly more people in the United States to pay attention.

There are many people who want very much to shut Carter up. Though noisy, they are not doing that well, being up against both the megaphone of a Nobel Peace Prize winner ex-President who makes himself accessible -- and reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine. Here's a sample from the Detroit News.

The problem is Carter has always displayed an animus for Israel. ...

In every conflict with the Palestinians, Carter has always blamed Israel; thus the book is hardly a revelation. During the most recent war in Lebanon, he chastised Israel for bombing the "entire" country.

It is actually sad to witness Carter, once the most powerful leader of the free world, write what amounts to nothing but propaganda.

Little argument, no references to different sources of information, just denunciation.

The leader of the Carter denouncers is Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. I'll be blunt about this one. He forfeited any credibility he might ever have had with me when he advocated for torture by U.S. authorities after 9/11. He's obviously lost any moral compass he ever had, though he gets a lot of press. Boston has been rocked by a kerfluffle about whether Carter would debate Dershowitz before a student audience at Brandeis University. They ended up speaking the same night, in orderly sequence. Ellen McNamara, a Globe columnist and part time journalism teacher at the school reported:

No such civility would have prevailed if Carter had shared the stage with Alan Dershowitz, whose low opinion of Carter is matched only by his high opinion of himself. The Harvard Law professor wrote an op-ed piece in this newspaper last month calling the former president a hypocrite and a coward and a bully. Carter's sin was not so much writing a book that Dershowitz didn't like. It was Carter's refusal to debate him about the merits of that book that rankled the smartest man in Cambridge. Dershowitz delivered a rebuttal after Carter left the building last night. ...

Carter's refusal looked more like common sense than cowardice to anyone who remembers Dershowitz's debate with Noam Chomsky of MIT about Israel at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, an exchange that degenerated into personal attacks that Chomsky later characterized as infantile.

Carter's critics are clearly afraid that if he gets a hearing, somehow Israel, the Jewish people, will suffer, despite Carter's professed concern for Israel's future. Philip Weiss of the New York Observer watched a similar campus kerfluffle (not involving Carter) and came away with an insight (my emphasis).

It was one thing to have [an Israeli war resister] give a talk inside Israel, [a zionist speaker] said. "Outside of Israel, you're playing with fire."

This chilling statement was a candid expression of the goals of the Israel lobby. A member of a Jewish organization was saying that it's OK to have a wide-open discussion of these issues in Israel, but it's dangerous to have such a discussion here. Why? Because America is the mainstay of support allowing Israel to continue its policies in the Occupied Territories. The Israel lobby fears that Americans, if left to their own devices, will abandon Israel, out of indifference, or anti-semitism. So Americans must be influenced—in this case by having the information they get about Israel/Palestine vetted...

***
Has Carter's book encouraged any really interesting commentary? Fortunately, yes. Tony Karon, a Jewish South African who was part of the anti-aparthied struggle and is now a Time magazine journalist, has written a couple of moving and sensible blog essays about Carter and Israel/Palestine.

Carter’s contribution has been to remind Americans why they ought to be having a discussion on their responsibilities in respect of, as he put it, seeking peace for Israel and peace and justice for the Palestinians.

Definitely "read the whole thing" material.

And Israeli historian Tom Segev, writing in the newspaper Haaretz calmly mulls the long and the short of Carter's book.

One reason the book is outraging "friends of Israel" in America is that it requires them to reformulate their friendship: If they truly want what's good for Israel, they must call on it to rid itself of the territories. People don't like to admit that they've erred; therefore, they're angry at Carter. But the belief that a withdrawal to the Green Line will bring peace has been around ever since the Six-Day War. What else is new?

Israel has remained in the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights mainly because the United States has not compelled it to withdraw. As optimistic as only a God-fearing person can be, the former U.S. president also essentially only propose that we all try to be nice to one another, in the spirit of the ... Christmas holiday. He has no new ideas to offer and thus his book is something of a let-down, though this does not justify a rebuke.

Not to Carter. We owe him for the peace with Egypt.