Don't Remember

This might get kinda long. I had something I wanted to say and now I have more after being out all day.

I spent all day at work today. I guess I haven't gone into much detail about myself on this thing yet so here it is. I work at an amusement park for an unamusing amount of money per hour. I've just graduated and moved to a liberal city on the west coast. I'm about as far from ground zero right now as you can get and still be in the Lower 48.

I regularly see people at work that I assume are Muslim. Mostly women wearing the hijab (headscarves). Sometimes a bit more covered up than that. Nothing too out of the ordinary. It's not often that I see as many presumed Muslims as I did at work today. I have no problem with this. In fact, I saw women wearing the full burqa/niqab combo along with the hijab for the first time today. Still no problem. One of the (many) points of America is that people are allowed to practice all their freedoms here including speech, religion, and right to assembly. It's fabulous really.

I heard the most disgusting things coming out of the mouths of some of my fellow Americans today. Mostly out of my fellow white Americans. I've never been so ashamed of people of my race in general. Some of the things I heard shouldn't be typed or repeated. But of some of the milder there were many scoffs of "foreigners" and a lot of talk about how we could "let them into the park on 9/11". Because clearly, since 19 men none of these people knew or agreed with doing horrible things on the other side of the continent nine years ago is a good reason to bar an entire class of people from freely going about their business.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me talk about what I wanted to touch on originally. Segue!

Many of the kids I was helping amuse today weren't alive in 2001. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was in school. Some business class that didn't do me any good. At the time I didn't even know what the World Trade Center looked like. Sheltered southern girl. I suspect that this is very similar to people talking about how they remember what they were doing when they found out that the Challenger blew up, or Kennedy was assassinated, or Pearl Harbor was attacked. The world has changed so much in the last nine years. Much of it for the worse. I and grew up in those nine years. I came of age, started driving, voting, and drinking in those nine years. (I just got really close to telling you how old I am.) In essence, who I am as an adult has been changed by the events on 9/11/2001. I would not be the same sort of political thinker if I had come of age under an inept and awkward Bush Administration who was not armed with the political power gifted it by the events of that day. I would not be a liberal in all probability. And there are people who have never known anything else!

I know this isn't groundbreaking. I imagine the same can be said by older people than about me and the Vietnam War, the Nixon Administration, or (again) the Kennedy Assassination. But knowing how our country and our world have changed since then, I cry for the children of the post-9/11 era. Don't get me wrong, I know the world wasn't all sunshine and daisies before then. But these children are growing up in a world where the First Amendment isn't a given. You're only allowed free speech and free exercise of your religious liberties if you don't look like you might be a terrorist. They have a world where anyone who says the wrong things is looked at suspiciously by their government. Where the economic stability of the now as well as their own futures are not too high a price to pay for two ill-advised wars. And lets look at these wars for a moment.

First is the joint invasion of Afghanistan by the US, UK, and the "coalition of the willing" shortly following 9/11 in 2001. We're still there. We've been fighting and dying in Afghanistan for nine years now. That's longer than any other war America has ever fought aside from Vietnam. And we're on the way to passing that one. Believe me. Second is the even more ill-advised invasion of Iraq originally to be termed Operation Iraqi Liberation until some genius at the Pentagon realized that spelled OIL. Known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, we've been fighting there since 2003. "Combat Operations" are over now. Twice. Once for each President, natch, and we only have 50,000 more fighting men and women there.

But you all know this. In short, these kids don't remember. They have never experienced a world without these problems. And unless we get our house in order and start framing our policy around something other than a regrettable tragedy of nearly ten years they won't ever know anything else.

I've remembered!

If you read my previous post on SB 1070, the for-profit prison system, and marriage equality you will remember that I said I had another issue that I thought important to discuss but had forgotten it at the time I sat down to write. Well....I've remembered!

It's this "Ground Zero Mosque" business. Everyone's freaking out. The President has weighed in on the topic during the annual Iftar dinner (did Bush do that too? Would that make him a closet Muslim?) at the White House. Polls have been taken every which way with (surprisingly) Fox News' being the best. And news and opinion people of all stripes have had their say. So now I'm going to have mine.

Firstly, check out the map at the top of the 538.com post I linked to. It's the second link down in the above paragraph. That's what people mean by "at Ground Zero". They actually mean not at Ground Zero. The proposed location is some 5 blocks from Ground Zero in a closed Burlington Coat Factory. So important fact number one is that when someone says, "They're going to build a Mosque at Ground Zero! That's so wrong!" they have their facts wrong.

Important point number two, more widely disseminated by the media, is the fact that this is really a community center. It will have worship spaces. But it'll also have a swimming pool and art rooms and all sorts of stuff. It's a sort of Islamic YMCA as this sketch from Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution makes clear.

Important point number three, which should be noted to be the most important, is that Amendment One to the Constitution states in part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

 That's the first part of the very short, very explicit First Amendment. Our country doesn't have an official religion. Congress can't make an official religion. And people are free to practice their religion how, when, and where they want provided that it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights; which Islam doesn't.

President Obama had a moment at the Iftar that I think reminds me of the way he talked on the campaign trail. It's very moving. In part, this is what he had to say.

 Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities -– particularly New York.  Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan.  The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country.  And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable.  So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders.  And Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.

But let me be clear.  As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.  And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.  This is America.  And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.  The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.  The writ of the Founders must endure.

You're free to make the argument that a mosque or Islamic cultural center that close to Ground Zero is in poor taste. I don't think it is. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people who want to actually stop the construction/move in. They want to use eminent domain and other governmental powers to keep this from happening. And that's unconstitutional. In short, I don't care if you think muslims are the spawn of satan. In this country they're free to worship. And I'll fight for that right. Me. The damned atheist. Freedom of Religion, as it's enshrined in the Constitution doesn't just mean Protestant versions of Christianity that you're okay with. You don't get  to pick and choose. The freedoms granted American citizens by the Constitution come free to everyone regardless of race, color, creed, sex, religion, ability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy, how many piercings they have, whether they like oranges or not, or any other status that you can thing of to use to discriminate against people.

Let's be honest. This is just intolerance and muslim bashing. Just like the rest of the last ten years. I'm pretty thoroughly ashamed of my country and how it has reacted to the events of 9/11. It could have been a turning point for us and for the world. Instead it's just another excuse for war and division.

EDIT: They have a wonderful post with a couple of points I didn't even think of over at Feministe. Take a look.

Who's on cleanup duty?

I was going to write an economic article tonight for you, but Mia Mingus, fabulous activist that she is, tweeted this story from AlterNet this afternoon and I have to write about it. There's a similar article up at thenation.com. The other post will be up soon.

In short, BP, who since capping the gushing well in the Gulf early this week has been a bit more off the radar than they should be, has been using local prison labor to clean up Gulf beaches. I'm a southerner born and raised. I don't know why I didn't think to write about this before. When I initially saw photos of the cleanup crews working on the beaches I noticed that they were pretty much all African-American men. That should have been all the tip off I needed to start digging and see where BP's labor force is coming from. I didn't. But thankfully several other people are on top of the issue. Although it's been WAY underreported in my opinion if it's only being mentioned now. This was also a topic for discussion for Mike Malloy on my way home from work tonight. It seems he was keyed in from The Nation article.

So, lets take a look at this situation critically. BP is a foreign corporation. The US has higher incarceration rates than most industrialized nations and the inmate population is heavily skewed toward men and racial minorities. Inmates have few recognized rights when it comes to work including little to no pay. BP gets a tax write-off for every inmate they employ in the clean up effort. And every employed inmate is one less Gulf Coast resident who isn't being hired in an economy where jobs are already scarce.

According to the Pew Center on the States 1 in 31 US adults are either in prison or on parole. Men are five times more likely to be imprisoned than women and African-Americans are four times more likely to be imprisoned than white Americans. Is it any wonder that BP is using our prison population to do this dirty and dangerous work? And then denying them the rights to talk to the public and the press as well as the right to wear protective gear and respirators? No one else in society seems to care about these people, their welfare, or their rights. So BP is just following our lead. They found a cheap, disposable work force to clean up their mess for them. They don't have to pay anyone to do the clean up and they get a tax break for doing it to boot! BP has been all about saving money here from the beginning. In fact, the drive to save/make as much money as possible is why we have this problem. Just days before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig as they were finishing the drilling a BP employee made the decision to use six pins to keep the riser pipe in line rather than the recommended twenty-one. That's #2 on this list published on BP's own website for reasons the well failed.

This is about BP and their behavior, make no mistake. But it's about much more than that. We (that is Americans) have been using free or nearly free prison labor for years. Starting with the mental image of prisoners stamping license plates we now uses these people to clean up highways, mow public right-of-ways, make goods for government usage including basic protective gear for the military, and the list goes on. This is about race relations in America. When African-American men are over-represented in the prison population, and we willingly employ prisoners to do dirty, dangerous, and difficult labor for little or no pay, that's called slavery. We simply find different ways to justify it in our modern era. This Prison-Industrial Complex is the true reason for such harsh sentencing in non-violent drug offender cases that pass though the US Justice System. An excellent example is the 100 to 1 ratio for mandatory minimum sentencing for cocaine and crack as outlined below from www.drugwarfacts.org:

As a result of the 1986 Act, federal law10 requires a five-year mandatory minimum penalty for a first-time trafficking offense involving five grams or more of crack cocaine, or 500 grams or more of powder cocaine, and a ten-year mandatory minimum penalty for a first-time trafficking offense involving 50 grams or more of crack cocaine, or 5,000 grams or more of powder cocaine. Because it takes 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to trigger the same mandatory minimum penalty, this penalty structure is commonly referred to as the '100-to-1 drug quantity ratio.'"

What is not explained here is that many many times more African-Americans are arrested in possession of crack than white Americans. It's important that we keep feeding the system after all.

So, we feed the system and BP makes use of it. And the end result is that when BP makes an error and releases millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and then makes only a half-hearted attempt to keep it off the area's beaches, they call in the free labor to clean it all up later. Nobody will care.

Thurgood Marshall Take 2

Let's take a look at this Thurgood Marshall as judicial activist meme that's coming out of the Kagan nomination a little closer. As has been noted, Marshall was a Supreme Court Justice for twenty-four years so he has no dearth of opinions to be looked at. First, a little Marshall history.

Marshall began arguing before the Supreme Court in 1940, the same year he became the Chief Council of the NAACP. During this part of Marshall's life he argued numerous cases including Chambers v. Florida that upheld confessions obtained under torture violate the 14th Amendment in an 8-0 decision, Smith v. Allwright that ruled that segregated political primaries were illegal in an 8-1 decision, and of course Brown v. Board of Education that struck down separate but equal as established by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). That was a 7-1 decision. These are all race based cases and all of them are nowhere near split courts.

After Justice Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1967 he sat for many other important cases and expanded his reach outside of the race based cases he mainly worked with while with the NAACP. In Furman v. Georgia, a 5-4 decision, Justice Marshall sided with the court that the death penalty was cruel and unusual and when, four years later, the court reversed itself in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was acceptable under the constitution he dissented in every other death penalty case he heard. In Teamsters v. Terry he held union members seeking backpay have a right to a jury trial.

If this case history describes an "activist judge" so be it. But if that's the case then Justices Brown, Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham, Brennan, Douglas, Stewart, Blackmun, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, etc. are all activist judges too. Clearly, Justice Marshall has a liberal judicial record. That isn't under dispute. He's viewed by pretty much everyone in that context. But I think this simple  overview shows that there was nothing activisty about Justice Marshall

Signs of the Times

I've got two people that are new in the news that I want to go ahead and talk about for just a moment. They're names that you may have heard if you keep up with some political stuff on a daily basis. If not, they might be new to you. The first is Sharon Angle, the now GOP Senate candidate who is running against Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She has a pretty cooky resume that we'll get into in a second. The second person is Alvin Greene, the Democratic Senate candidate who is running against GOP Senator Jim DeMint. He has his own special story as well.

First up we have the esteemed Mrs. Angle. She has routinely supported and espoused what could be generously called crazy ideas. She's of the mind that flouride is an international commie plot, we should pull out of the UN, and that privatizing Social Security is the best plan ever. Since she won her primary her website has been gussied up so that it looks better and some of the craziness has been removed. Cached images are available however. Check out motherjones.com Watching as the more mainstream (I use that word loosely) of the GOP try and put a shine on Mrs. Angle's website and try to play down her statements by putting her in front of cameras on Fox and Friends and letting her interviews go to Rush Limbaugh.

On the other side of the aisle, we have Alvin Greene. He is a veteran and former service member in both the Army and Air Force who is now unemployed and living with his elderly father. There has been a lot of discussion about where Mr. Greene got the $10,400 filing fee for the primary. Personally, I believe that a filing fee that is so high is pretty un-American. Both parties have huge filing fees as standard although the GOP's is higher still than that of the Democrats. I share some of the general public skepticism that has been explained by several different people including fivethirtyeight.com in the previous link as well as Countdown and Rachel Maddow. At the same time, I want to show some caution. I'm afraid that we're all way to willing to assume that Mr. Greene has done something against the rules because he is a southern black man and, by the display of poor speaking skills on his Countdown interview from the other evening. It's true that the situation is fishy, but I feel like the truth will come out and the question really is how shocked people are once the investigation comes to its conclusion.

And Now, A Post You Should Read.

Just to get this out there, I'm white. I'm really white. I'm never sure if I'm doing what I should be be an ally to people of color. But I know good writing about race and whiteness when I see it. Read this story.

Womanist Musings

Copy and Paste

This article over at Pandagon was excellent. It goes in depth on several other laws coming down the pipe in Arizona following Papers Please. I'm gonna talk about a couple of sections but you really ought to read the whole thing. All bolding is mine.

English-only is classic wingnuttery, right down to the bad faith.  The stated intentions are to help kids, but the reality is that the initiatives are about making sure students don’t learn any other skills while learning English.  It’s a racist program that aims to make sure the children of immigrants have just enough skills to do manual and service labor, but no skills that would make middle class aspirations a possibility. 

 This is the issue right here. Whenever right wingers have the "gall" to talk about immigration reform (and fewer and fewer of them are) it's always in the context of letting people into the country to do jobs that Americans refuse to do. They just want to gain the political points with the independents for doing immigration reform and ensure they're strawberries keep getting picked and their chickens keep getting plucked. These people are getting paid but usually minimum wage or lower to do these sorts of jobs. At the risk of sounding pretty strong language wise here, this looks like modern day, legal slavery to me. It's all about making sure that we have a poor class of people who have little choice than to do our dirty work. By keeping important skills from immigrants and children of immigrants we ensure that there isn't and there won't ever be a large, vibrant hispanic middle class. And that, ostensibly, is the American Dream. Which is bullshit itself, but that's another post.

Proponents really do believe that Latinos have nothing to offer, and they often treat them like they’re not even human beings.  Immigrants especially get this kind of treatment.  Having grown up in the Southwest, I can tell you that a lot of the racism that white people express has an undercurrent of insecurity to it.

I didn't grow up in the Southwest. I grew up in the Southeast and 100% of this is still the case. People get pissed when they can't understand what the people ahead of them in line are saying etc. This is, in my experience, a large part of the racism that still pervades the Old South in regards to African-Americans too. White supremacists seem to be deathly afraid that white culture, anglo culture, won't be able to survive unless it's enforced upon everyone. I haven't heard anything so silly in a long time. By that logic white people aren't as good. If our culture would die unless it's dominant than clearly people of color (who's many cultures continue to thrive while assaulted by white racism every day) are better than we are. You can twist this argument around all you want.