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U.S. Commission on Civil Rights holds hearings on Arizona and Alabama apartheid bills

This was on the front page of to-day’s OA News (front page, continued on p. 8A). The online copy is a bit longer than what appeared in print (there are a couple paragraphs at the end that the OA News cut from the printed edition). The U.S. Civil Rights Commission recently held a meeting in Birmingham to discuss SB 1070 and HB 56, the international apartheid police-state bills in Arizona and Alabama. Demonstrators showed up to inject some reality into the proceedings.

From the Associated Press.

Quarrelsome commission

Civil rights panel has first meeting to discuss laws

BIRMINGHAM — A quarrelsome U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its first hearing on state laws that target illegal immigration, with Republican backers arguing Friday that the measures are vital to protecting American jobs and fighting crime.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write similar immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said unemployment in Alabama has dropped three times faster than the national average since parts of the state's law took effect last fall — a change he credited at least in part to the act.

Attempting to head off claims that the laws lead to racial profiling by police, Kobach said the immigration enforcement specifically bars officers from making stops or arrests based on appearance.

As he spoke, four Hispanic women and a girl stood in the audience with their backs toward Kobach. Demonstrators, some speaking Spanish, stood up holding signs that said Undocumented and shouted at Kobach.

These laws are based on hate, said one man.

The meeting room quieted after officers escorted protesters away, but the commissioners still bickered among themselves. . . . Congressional appointee Todd Gaziano, legal director of the conservative Heritage Foundation, accused the demonstrators of hateful speech . . . . Gaziano and chairman Martin R. Castro, appointed by President Barack Obama, exchanged sharp words throughout the opening session. Members even disagreed over who should be allowed to testify, with organizations accusing each other of being hate groups.

The commission will issue a report within months on the findings of the hearing, which focused on whether the state laws foster discrimination and run counter to civil rights laws. But the panel doesn't have any enforcement power, and it can't make states alter their laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down three parts of Arizona's law in June, but it upheld a section that requires police to check the status of people who might appear to be in the country illegally. The ruling was closely watched because Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana and Utah have approved similar laws.

Courts have blocked all or parts of the laws in each state, and legal challenges are now moving forward since the justices ruled on the Arizona statute . . . .

Law opponent Tammy Besherse, an attorney with South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, accused law officers of destroying immigrants' legal documents and of playing computer games in which participants kill Mexican immigrants.

GOP state Sen. Scott Beason, a key sponsor of Alabama's law, said opponents of the laws and the media place more value on the rights of illegal immigrants than the plight of legal U.S. citizens who can't find work because of people living in the country unlawfully.

We cannot solve the world's problems, but we can make sure we don't import some problems, Beason said. Responding to a question about a U.S. Chamber of Commerce that cast immigration in a positive light, Beason said the business organization is pretty slanted because some of its members employ illegal immigrants.[1]

Castro said the Alabama hearing was the commission's first outside Washington, D.C., in years. The panel's first-ever was held in Birmingham in 1958, when state and local laws mandated racial segregation.

— Jay Reeves, Associated Press, Quarrelsome commission: Civil rights panel has first meeting to discuss laws. Opelika-Auburn News, 18 August 2012.

* * *

Source: Social Scientists on Immigration Policy.

The article goes to some effort to make it out that the fights amongst the panel members were signs of a clear divide between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Of course the notion that the Democratic Party appointees maintain any divide, or have any quarrel, other than a purely rhetorical one, from the Republicans, is absurd. In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised comprehensive immigration reform, paths out of the shadows for undocumented immigrants, and promised that immigration reform would be a top priority in my first year as President. In 2012, four years later, Liberal Democratic President Barack Obama has accomplished nothing at all towards comprehensive reform or towards paths to citizenship. The claim that it would be a top priority in his first year in office was a lie; he abandoned it as soon as he sat down in the Oval Office, concentrated on pushing stimulus bills and fighting wars and bailing out failed capitalists — and then he radically escalated the militarization of the border, and he presided over the largest mass deportations of peaceful immigrants in the history of the United States. Even his weakest, latest-coming promises have been lies, broken as soon as they were made. But there is a real divide here. It’s not a divide on the panel; it’s the divide between the panel, and the protesters who courageously stood up to challenge them. I am glad to see people calling out Kobach, and challenging this kind of political palavering over the lives and livelihoods of immigrant families. More power to them.

Also.

  1. [1][I-word and xenophobia sic. –RG.]↩

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Happy birthday!

So, as you may have noticed, it’s June 27th; I don’t know if you know this, but it’s quite a day for radical birthday parties. To-day take some time to say:

  • Happy birthday to Emma Goldman, revolutionary Anarchist organizer, agitator, speaker, writer, and publisher — born June 27, 1869, in Kaunas, Lithuania (then occupied by the Russian Empire).

    The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail….

    … There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. —My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).

    At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. —Living My Life (1931)

  • Happy birthday to FW Helen Keller, the Alabamian author, scholar, lecturer, and radical agitator — born June 27th, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Remembered today mainly for being blind and deaf and an inspirational example for the moral uplift of the young, what didn’t make it onto stage or screen was how, in her adult life, Keller won fame and infamy as a radical agitating for worker’ freedom, feminism, peace, anti-militarism, and the revolutionary unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World, which she joined in 1912.

    I became an IWW because I found out that the Socialist party was too slow. It is sinking in the political bog. It is almost, if not quite, impossible for the party to keep its revolutionary character so long as it occupies a place under the government and seeks office under it. The government does not stand for interests the Socialist party is supposed to represent. … The true task is to unite and organize all workers on an economic basis, and it is the workers themselves who must secure freedom for themselves, who must grow strong. Nothing can be gained by political action. That is why I became an IWW.

    –Helen Keller, interviewed by Barbara Bindley, Why I Became an IWW, New York Tribune (January 16, 1916)

    [Bindley:] What are you committed to–education or revolution? [Keller:] Revolution. She answered decisively. We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now. … Again the advisability of printing all this here set forth. And this finally from the patience-exhausted, gentle little woman: I don’t give a damn about semi-radicals! –Helen Keller, interviewed by Barbara Bindley, Why I Became an IWW, New York Tribune (January 16, 1916)

    The future of the world rests in the hands of America. The future of America rests on the backs of 80,000,000 working men and women and their children. We are facing a grave crisis in our national life. The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists. You are urged to add to the heavy burdens you already bear the burden of a larger army and many additional warships. It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery and the dread-noughts and to shake off some of the burdens, too, such as limousines, steam yachts and country estates. You do not neet to make a great noise about it. With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms.

    … They know that if the government dresses them up in khaki and gives them a rifle and starts them off with a brass band and waving banners, they will go forth to fight valiantly for their own enemies. They are taught that brave men die for their country’s honor. What a price to pay for an abstraction–the lives of millions of young men; other millions crippled and blinded for life; existence made hideous for still more millions of human being; the achievement and inheritance of generations swept away in a moment–and nobody better off for all the misery! This terrible sacrifice would be comprehensible if the thing you die for and call country fed, clothed, housed and warmed you, educated and cherished your children. I think the workers are the most unselfish of the children of men; they toil and live and die for other people’s country, other people’s sentiments, other people’s liberties and other people’s happiness! The workers have no liberties of their own; they are not free when they are compelled to work twelve or ten or eight hours a day. they are not free when they are ill paid for their exhausting toil. They are not free when their children must labor in mines, mills and factories or starve, and when their women may be driven by poverty to lives of shame. They are not free when they are clubbed and imprisoned because they go on strike for a raise of wages and for the elemental justice that is their right as human beings.

    … Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war. Srike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing scrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human being. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.

    — Helen Keller (January 5, 1916), Strike Against War, speech at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the Women’s Peace Party and the Labor Forum

  • And while we’re on the subject, let’s also wish happy birthday to the Industrial Workers of the World! The IWW’s founding convention began 105 years ago today in Chicago, on June 27, 1905.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move, lying absolutely silent, they are more powerful than all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for attack.

— FW Joe Ettor, in the Bread and Roses textile strike of 1912

  • And happy birthday to the radical gay and trans liberation movements! Late at night, 41 years ago today, on June 27th, 1969, and early in the morning on June 28th, the Public Morals Squad [sic] of the New York City government’s police force infiltrated and then assaulted the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, believing that they would use violence, prison, and social shaming yet again in their ongoing campaign on behalf of the Basher State. But something happened that night that they didn’t expect — when the poorest and most marginalized in the queer and trans community said no more, began to resist, and then fought back against the cops. When people dressed as women refused to be taken back to the bathroom to have police verify their sex, men began to refuse to show their IDs, and cops started bullying and groping lesbians during frisks, the police shoved the people in the bar outside. Those who hadn’t been singled out for arrest refused to leave, and stayed to witness in solidarity. People began to shout Gay Power! and sing We Shall Overcome. When a cop smashed a stone butch over the head with a billy-club for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd finally erupted, turned on the police, and freed the prisoners from the police wagon. The police, humiliated and massively outnumbered, barricaded themselves inside the bar until the NYPD’s Tactical Police Force arrived to pull them out and beat a hasty retreat. Running battles with police in Greenwich Village streets continued the next night. Witnessing the example of street kids, gay men, lesbians, drag queens and trans folks rise up, fight back, and win against the government violence of the Morals Police brought about a new urgency, a new daring, and effectively a new movement. Within a few months, the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, and Gay Pride organizing committee had sprung up in New York, with the first Gay Pride march in New York City’s history being held on June 28, 1970, in honor of Christopher Street Liberation Day. As Frank Kameny, a longtime organizer for the Mattachine Society put it, By the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to sixty gay groups in the country. A year later there was at least fifteen hundred. By two years later, to the extent that a count could be made, it was twenty-five hundred.

    We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration. It was spontaneous. That was the part that was wonderful.

    Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We didn’t really have the freedom totally, but we weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t.

    –Michael Fader, quoted in David Carter (2004), Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, p. 160.

Here’s to many happy returns.

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