Immigrants are for sale in this country. Sold to private prison corporations who are locking them up for obscene profits!
Here are the top 3 things YOU need to know about the Private Prison money scheme:
1.The victims: Private prisons don’t care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night at their prisons, this is a money making scheme that destroys families and lives.
2.The players: CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), The Geo Group and Management and Training corporations?combined these private prisons currently profit more than $5 billion a year.
3.The money: These private prisons have spent over $20 million lobbying state legislators to make sure they get state anti-immigrant laws approved and ensure access to more immigrant inmates.
How is all this possible? They profit from locking people up.
[ By: Greg Grandin ] For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate.
Yet unable even to leverage environmental catastrophe, drastic economic inequality and near global financial collapse to their advantage, Democrats have instead mastered trimming and triangulating, accepting much of the conservative agenda while promising to implement it more effectively.
But if Democrats could overcome their shortsightedness and embrace immigrants’ rights — as passionately as Republicans mobilize around tax cuts, fetuses and war — they may find the holy grail they’ve been looking for, one with the power to transform domestic and foreign policy. Here are nine reasons immigration reform, especially legislation that will grant citizenship to the millions of undocumented Latinos, is a progressive game changer:
1. Immigration reform ends the Southern strategy. For more than four decades, the conservative movement’s base has been the segregationist South, subsidized by an archaic Electoral College system that grants disproportionate power to majority white voters in Southern states. The enfranchisement of millions of undocumented Latino workers, combined with the votes of Latino citizens, would change that, turning red states purple and purple states blue. Almost 10 million Latinos voted in 2008, 7.4 percent of the total, and a large majority voted for Barack Obama. Analysts believe Latinos were responsible for giving the president larger than expected victories in key swing states like Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. They helped him squeak out a win in North Carolina and forced John McCain to defend Republican strongholds like Georgia. Then there are Texas’s thirty-four electoral votes, without which the GOP’s chances of winning national office collapse. Latinos make up more than 20 percent of registered voters there, with their turnout increasing 30 percent between 2000 and 2008. Even direr for Republicans, in ten years Latinos are expected to be the state’s largest ethnic group, surpassing whites. By 2040 they will be an absolute majority.
Every election cycle, the number of registered Latinos, as well as actual voters, increases. They are trending Democratic — 67 percent voted for Obama, up from 59 percent for Kerry in 2004. Democratic support for reform would ensure that this trend continues. Seventy-eight percent of Latino voters identified immigration as important to them and their families; 62 percent say they know someone who is undocumented. Forget futile efforts to abolish the Electoral College; the best way to wrench the dead hand of the Confederacy off the throat of the political system is to enfranchise Latinos.
2. It wins back the Catholic Church to social justice. Catholics, mostly white ethnic working-class migrants, were stalwarts of the New Deal coalition. But they began to peel away in 1980, with the backlash to Roe v. Wade. In 2004 the future pope Benedict XVI, then the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, helped Karl Rove execute his “Catholic strategy,” urging priests to deny communion to politicians who support abortion (i.e., Kerry). The combined Catholic vote roughly split that year, with white Catholics breaking for Bush and Latinos for Kerry.
But immigration reform now has the potential to trump abortion as a wedge issue. Latinos, who make up one-third of its membership, are the best shot the US Catholic Church has of remaining viable. And though the church has become increasingly conservative over the past two decades, when it comes to immigration its social justice ethos is still intact. Priests and congregations have been vocal in opposing Arizona’s SB 1070, and central in providing safe havens and basic services to migrants. Even the Vatican’s recently appointed conservative archbishop of Los Angeles, Mexican-born José Gómez, a member of Opus Dei, has stated that in “Catholic teaching, the right to migrate is among the most basic human rights. It’s very close to the right to life. Why? Because God has created the good things of this world to be shared by all men and women — not just a privileged few.”
3. It slows the inclusion of Latino evangelicals into the religious right. “Woe to the legislators of infamous laws, to those who issue tyrannical decrees, who refuse justice to the unfortunate and cheat the poor among my people of their rights…. What will you do on the day of punishment, when, from afar off, destruction comes? To whom will you run for help?” This bit of fire and brimstone from the Book of Isaiah was recently cited by the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the nation’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, to condemn SB 1070.
The religious right is actively courting Latinos, who make up a small but growing percentage of evangelicals. But the poor, precarious situation of many congregations limits their inclusion in conservative politics. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant pastors spend much of their frontline ministry helping undocumented workers. After a recent meeting with Obama, Pentecostal pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has been wooed by 2012 Republican hopefuls, said that the president’s position is “99.9 percent” in line with evangelical doctrine. Likewise, Latino Mormons are demanding that leaders of the Mormon church take a stand against the Arizona law, even while many conservative white Mormons — like State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and Utah Representative Stephen Sandstrom, who hopes to implement a similar law in Utah — are on the other side of the issue, insisting that church law demands enforcing immigration laws.
4. It is lose-lose for Republicans. Put immigration reform on the docket before the midterm elections and watch Republicans squirm. If they support it, they enrage their Tea Party base. If they oppose it, they keep the Tea Party and might win, even big, in November, but will so anger the more electorally important Latinos that not even Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush, with help from his Mexican-born wife, will be able to win them back. As Ruy Teixeira notes, the “GOP dilemma” is that the Tea Party might help Republicans win in November but that short-term gain will be a long-term loss, a death embrace with a rump political movement that “concentrates in one place the most extreme and reactionary views.” By pushing immigration reform before the midterm elections, the Democrats would magnify this dilemma. Let South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley explain to Latino voters why she calls for stepped-up deportation, opposes amnesty and applauds SB 1070 in the name of “states’ rights.” Immigration reform could also short-circuit any attempt to restore the Bush dynasty through Jeb, who has spoken out against the Arizona law and in favor of reform.
5. It splits the conservative coalition in other ways. A fight over immigrants’ rights drives a wedge between business Republicans and the GOP’s “no-amnesty,” know-nothing wing. Last year, the powerful National Association of Evangelicals issued a statement calling for comprehensive, dignified reform, which was strongly criticized by the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy. And the “purity” of Ron and Rand Paul’s libertarianism — as the mainstream media never cease to describe what is largely a rebranding of paleoconservatism — seems a lot less pure when they get started talking about “electronic fences,” “helicopter stations” and “making English the official language of all documents and contracts.” So much for the right to engage in economic transactions as one wishes.
6. It revitalizes the union movement. Latino immigrants have already helped turn Los Angeles, Las Vegas and other cities into union towns. They’ve often done so against great odds and with impressive courage, since many undocumented union workers are not fully covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Imagine what they could do if they were protected by labor law. Despite all the Republican talk about Latinos being natural conservatives, committed to family, religion and hard work, most reject the extreme economic individualism that is the bedrock of the GOP. They come from countries where democracy means social democracy, including workers’ rights, welfare and economic justice.
7. It dilutes the power of Florida Cubans. Since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuban exiles have had a toxic effect on US domestic and foreign policy. They have repeatedly helped deliver Florida’s large number of electoral votes to Republicans and in 2000 served as the shock troops for the infamous “Brooks Brothers Riot,” which shut down Dade County’s recount of its disputed presidential ballot, a critical event that helped hand the election to Bush. Beyond forcing Washington to keep up its pointless embargo of Cuba — which handicaps US diplomacy in the rest of Latin America — they have backed a hardline foreign policy, supporting Ronald Reagan’s patronage of death squads in Central America and last year’s coup in Honduras. Their power is on the wane; in 2008 other Florida Latinos helped deliver the state to Obama, overriding the Miami Cuban-American vote, which went for McCain. But candidate Obama still felt compelled to genuflect before them, traveling to Miami to criticize Bush from the right for losing Latin America to leftist “demagogues.” Legislating a way to citizenship for Latino immigrants would dampen Florida Cubans’ ability to influence foreign policy, as well as change the terms of the debate: even Cuban-Americans are in favor of immigration reform.
8. It helps America’s cities. I lived in Durham, North Carolina, for a few years, and for all the romance of Southern porch culture, it was mostly Latinos, nearly all of them undocumented laborers from Mexico and Central America, who were outside, facing the street, talking, listening to music, raising families. The city’s more settled residents were inside with their air-conditioners and TVs. Throughout the United States, Latinos are re-energizing neighborhoods and populating downtowns, opening stores and pumping money into established small businesses. Not too long ago cities were rearguards of a progressive ethos in retreat. Today, with the help of Latinos, one of the fastest growing urban demographics, they are again vital hubs of social democracy. Google the words “Latinos,” “cities” and “revitalize” and you will be led to any number of stories about how stressed city centers in Detroit, Dallas, Memphis, Newark and the Hudson Valley are being rescued by Latinos. No wonder the right hates them.
9. It is the morally right thing to do. And as a result, it is strategically smart. Progressives need not just wedge issues but driving righteousness, and the heart-rending plight of more than 10 million vulnerable residents who are denied basic human rights and hunted by random raids, their families split apart, is as morally urgent an issue as the civil rights movement was in its heyday. Considering the role Latinos would play in burying, once and for all, the Southern strategy, the issue needs to be understood as essential in finally achieving the promise of the original civil rights movement. With one eye on November’s midterm elections and another on polls showing support for Arizona’s SB 1070, many Democrats are reverting to hedging. It’s a “toxic subject,” says Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee. For all the reasons above — plus the fact that many Latinos might just wash their hands of the Democrats if betrayed — that temerity itself is toxic. And considering Democrats’ perpetual minority status in Tennessee, if I were a Democrat there, I’d want as liberalized an immigration policy as possible.
About The Author: Greg Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including most recently Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan 2009). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Fordlandia was picked by the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and NPR for their “best of” lists, and Amazon.com named it the best history book of 2009.
Timothy Rutten of the The Los Angeles Times writes of Fordlandia: “Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed . . . a marginal event. . . and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told. . . Fordlandia is precisely that–a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. It’s a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.” And The American Scholar says that “Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone–about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.”
Grandin is also the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Empire (Metropolitan 2005), The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War (University of Chicago Press 2004), and Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke University Press, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America in any discipline.
A professor of history at NYU and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grandin writes on US foreign policy, Latin America, genocide, and human rights. He has published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The American Historical Review. He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. Grandin also served as a consultant to the United Nations truth commission on Guatemala and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. His most recent book, edited with Gil Joseph, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, will be published by Duke University Press in September. Visit his web site at: http://greggrandin.com/.
By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez How do you end a column after 16 years? With regrets and unfulfilled dreams? Perhaps, but truthfully, Column of the Americas as a deadline-based column ends with even bigger dreams.
There indeed is disappointment with the ease in which the U.S. populace has accepted and normalized 1) the notion of permanent war as a God-given U.S. birthright; 2) the further militarization of the nation & world; 3) the politics of fear, hate and blame; and 4) Big Brother Government. All with nary a whimper.
Under George W. Bush, this was not surprising. The disappointment has come in seeing the Obama administration generally embrace the reactionary policies of Bush’s 9-11 Nation. Despite the 2006 & 2008 electoral sweeps – in which the electorate thoroughly repudiated the Republican program of war, xenophobia and corporate welfare – [angry] conservatives act as though they won. The irony is that president Obama actually has governed as though he agrees, and owes them. For example, his health care reform is actually a centrist compromise; universal health care it is not.
There are regrets; while many of us drove CNN’s Lou Dobbs into political exile, we didn’t consistently go after the entertainment industry – an industry that enables dehumanization and what amounts to racial apartheid. During this era, Jay Leno made Americans comfortable laughing nightly at “illegal aliens.” After 35 years, Saturday Night Live has still not taken its “No Red-Brown comedians need apply” signs down, and Spanish-language TV continues to generally be an assortment of “all-blonde” networks.
Another regret is that the journalism profession has now become the lapdog of government.
Even now, there’s plenty of money for invading, occupying and bombing nations, but little for health and education.
While pols are seemingly unaware of this jarring equation, media lapdogs are nowadays handsomely rewarded for being consistently wrong and/or silent.
Enough on these failings.
The bigger dreams involve ceasing writing reactively and writing from a point of creation. Column writing is necessarily reactive; I’ve been writing about human/Indigenous rights, anti-immigrant hysteria and U.S.-support of brutal military dictatorships since 1972. And now, with a president lying us into Iraq, the instinct is to counter. The same holds true when society unabashedly scapegoats brown peoples, and treats migrants as disposable populations; witness the March 21 rally in Washington D.C. More than demanding reform, it was a demand by more than 100,000 marchers to treat migrants as full human beings. While the president’s centrist approach to immigration reform places a heavy emphasis on draconian enforcement, conservatives will interpret human rights for migrants and “the path to legalization” as nothing short of “freeing the slaves” and a cause for insurrection.
Simply creating, without countering is akin to burying one’s head in the sand. But there comes a time when always responding means always reacting – rarely creating. But because of permanent war, my focus as a writer lately, has become heavily tiled towards resistance. The creation element of who I am has suffered (this is true of most people). It’s time for balance, thus a time to create.
Through the years, I’ve been exposed to great maestros/maestras and great Tlamintini – great teachers – who have shared their knowledge and Huehuetlahtolli (ancient guidances) about what it means to be human. Hereafter, I want to continue with those traditions and contribute to the definition of what it means to be human.
In discontinuing the column, I take no pleasure in hereafter writing strictly for an academic audience. It goes against who I am. I’ve always written for mass audiences, including writing Column of the Americas since 1994 for more than 100 newspapers nationwide. For the first 12 years, it was co-written as a weekly, syndicated column with my wife, Patrisia Gonzales, for Chronicle Features, then Universal Press Syndicate (Her Patzin column is slated to return). In writing for the academy, the audience is much smaller and narrower, while jargon is the preferred means of communication. It’s not naturally conducive for storytelling. Even beyond that, the acceptable experts continue to be “the usual suspects.”
I will continue to assert that if our own aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents, neighbors and other elders – whom we used to quote frequently – can’t understand our own writing, then what good did all our years of schooling accomplish?
As such, I plan to continue to make public the knowledge that has been passed on to me via elder knowledge – in forthcoming essays and columns and academic and non-academic books. I look forward to the day when I will not have to write for two separate audiences.
I also look forward to the day when we as a society have finally eliminated war as a “solution” to anything, and when society ceases to divide human beings into legal and illegal categories. I am convinced that even the most conservative of conservatives don’t either want such a society. I look forward to the day when we can all truly say: San Ce Tojuan – Nosotros Somos Uno – We Are One.
It’s not something that comes about solely through dreaming. One has to imagine it, fight for it, and then live it.
————————————————- You change my way of writing, you change my way of thinking. You change my way of thinking, you change who I am.
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• Rodriguez can be reached at: XCol...@gmail.com or PO BOX 85476 – Tucson, AZ 85754
In just one week, CNN will launch its “Latino in America” series, which tells the stories of Latinos from across the country. There’s just one thing missing: Lou Dobbs. That’s right. Four hours about the Latino experience in America, and not a word about the man who spends every weeknight telling lies about immigrants, and spreading hatred and fear about Latinos.
Together with award-winning filmmaker Arturo Perez, we’re calling out CNN’s hypocrisy with a powerful new video: “CNN: Lou Dobbs or Latinos in America?” Please watch the video and add your voice to the more than 50,000 others already demanding that CNN dump Dobbs. And then spread the word to your friends and family.
Our campaign against Lou Dobbs is clearly getting to him – he’s railed against us on his radio show, and rumors are now swirling that he’s looking for other jobs at more conservative networks. Now is the time to keep the pressure on. We’re trying to gather as many signatures as we can before “Latino in America” airs on Oct. 21-22. Will you join us, and share this action with your friends and family? It only takes a moment:
MediaMatters: For years, Lou Dobbs has been one of the most dangerous hosts on cable news. He benefits enormously from the legitimacy of the CNN brand, which provides him with an unparalleled platform from which to mainstream the hate speech and racially charged conspiracy theories normally relegated to Fox News and other conservative news outlets. Dobbs calls himself an “advocacy journalist,” but he doesn’t even live up to that ambiguous standard. Good journalism enhances the discussion of serious topics, but Dobbs helps to undermine and debase that discussion, routinely infusing it with misinformation and fear. And when it comes to issues like immigration, he has more in common with birther Orly Taitz than with Anderson Cooper. [ READ MORE ]
Hispanic group to CNN: Rein in Dobbs: One of the country’s leading Hispanic organizations is launching a campaign designed to pressure CNN to rein in host Lou Dobbs.
The organization behind the campaign, Democracia Ahora, is kicking off the effort Friday with the release of a report based on interviews with 100 Hispanic leaders about the impact of Dobbs’ evening show.
The results of the report are not surprising – 90 percent of the interviewees believe Dobbs is helping create a negative image of Hispanics, with his frequent criticisms of illegal immigration.
But Democracia Ahora is hoping the report inspires a grassroots movement aimed at executives at CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, to draw attention to what the group calls “frequent negative portrayals of Hispanics on the Lou Dobbs show.” It is using its release to start a national campaign, “Enough is Enough!” that will be carried out through a Web site, www.TellCNNEnoughisEnough.com, that goes live Friday. [ READ MORE ] [ You may also take action at: DropDobbs.com ]
Dobbs thanks FAIR (a hate-group) for hosting “great town hall event” on “amnesty”
MediaMatters REPORT: CNN’s Lou Dobbs problem and the immigration debate — In light of Lou Dobbs’ reported plans to help lead the upcoming lobbying campaign of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — an organization designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center — Media Matters for America reviews some of the most egregious conspiracy theories, hate speech, and undisclosed conflicts of interest in Dobbs’ immigration reporting. [ READ MORE ]
Dobbs suggests Media Matters is “hate group” for calling attention to his FAIR ties
Also, the Southern Poverty Law Center has joined the campaign calling on Dobbs’ Advertisers to Dump Him. The avuncular CNN host has a long history of stirring up hate against Latino immigrants by reporting wildly inaccurate information and sneeringly focusing on the immigration issue day after day on CNN. Click here for details
For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate. 
The religious right is actively courting Latinos, who make up a small but growing percentage of evangelicals. But the poor, precarious situation of many congregations limits their inclusion in conservative politics. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant pastors spend much of their frontline ministry helping undocumented workers. After a recent meeting with Obama, Pentecostal pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has been wooed by 2012 Republican hopefuls, said that the president’s position is “99.9 percent” in line with evangelical doctrine. Likewise, Latino Mormons are demanding that leaders of the Mormon church take a stand against the Arizona law, even while many conservative white Mormons — like State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and Utah Representative Stephen Sandstrom, who hopes to implement a similar law in Utah — are on the other side of the issue, insisting that church law demands enforcing immigration laws.
