People Before Profit blog

Whats taking so long?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:07:00 +0000

Protestors demand action on citizenship

DALLAS — As morning sunshine began to push back the surly night on a cold Jan. 28, two big buses rolled into the Grauwyler Park Recreation Center here. Young activists from as far away as Las Cruces and Albuquerque, N.M., who had traveled all night, greeted their Dallas comrades. Virtually all of them were part of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

Television cameras and newspersons gathered. Texas State Rep. Roberto Alonzo, a major spokesperson for Latino and immigrant rights, gave interview after interview.

He then stepped off through the wet grass beside Harry Hines Boulevard. Behind him came 150 protesters joyfully chanting in English and Spanish, “What do we want?” “Citizenship.” “When do we want it?” “Now!”

The long procession snaked through the rough, sidewalk-less streets for well over a mile. The last few blocks were along the service road of Interstate 35, the NAFTA highway. Around 9:30 a.m., they arrived at their first destination. The big stone marker read, “Department of Homeland Security.” Inside were the offices of the United States Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS).

Alonzo told the crowd, in English and Spanish, that the Immigration Service raised the price of becoming an American citizen by $275 last summer. USCIS affirmed, at that time, that the extra money would make it possible for them to expedite the processing of the mountains of citizenship applications they were receiving. But the time lag did not shorten — it lengthened. ACORN speakers said the waiting time had doubled from six or seven months to more than a year. It was time to protest.

Bureaucrats rushed out of the Immigration Service offices to tell the protesters to stay off the grass! The enthusiastic group lined up along the outer edge of the property. They waved to the cars and trucks who were serenading support with automobile horns.

Dallas immigrant rights leader Margarita Alvarez, one of the best orators in any language, blasted the bureaucracy. Speakers told personal stories about how much money they had spent and how long they had waited for fair treatment.

Reporters covered it all, then followed the two big buses as they brought the protest to the Dallas offices of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Hutchinson and her Texas co-thinker, Sen. John Cornyn, had both stonewalled all efforts for a federal solution to immigration questions during the previous year.

More bureaucrats rushed to the lobby to tell the protesters that they could not come to the senator’s 11th floor offices, but they were late. About 75 demonstrators had packed themselves into the hallway just outside the senator’s door. While the security guard threatened them with arrests, they delivered hundreds of letters to Hutchinson’s office. Then they left as swiftly and quietly as they had come.

About a dozen police gathered to watch the protesters in the parking lot as they waited for their buses to return. The participants exchanged hugs, smiles, kisses and promises to carry on their fight for justice, then mounted the buses for the long trip home.

flittle7 @ yahoo.com

New Jersey apologizes for slavery

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:00:00 +0000

New Jersey recently became the first Northern state to issue an apology for slavery, which claimed the lives of millions of African people “imported” to North America since the 17th century. In 1865, when slavery was abolished with the victory of the United States of America over the slaveholder-controlled Confederate States of America in the Civil War, there were nearly 4 million people in bondage.

Slavery was a lucrative business connected to the development of capitalism as it expanded in the first half of the 19th century, linking New York bankers with Mississippi plantation owners. Slave workers produced major cash crops: tobacco, sugar and especially cotton for the developing textile industry. Most of the value created by U.S exports before the Civil War was produced by slave labor.

Also, Native Americans were driven off their lands as part of Andrew Jackson’s murderous “Indian removal” policy of forced relocation to make way for the development of large slave plantations.

The slaveholder class dominated the slave states and exercised power over the federal government, largely through the presidency. Of the first 16 U.S. presidents, eight were slaveholders, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and Polk. Polk annexed Texas and conquered the Mexican northwest in the Mexican-American War, which abolitionists saw as a war on behalf of the slave power.

The cruelties of slavery are too great to summarize, but it should be remembered that slave workers were treated, in effect, as farm animals, bought and sold, beaten when they didn’t work up to expectations, and fed and clothed at the lowest level necessary to keep them working. The system denied the humanity of the slave workers in order to both shield and justify the inhumanity of the slave owners.

It took a revolutionary civil war to end slavery, but its social consequences didn’t end. The struggle for the civil rights of millions of former slave workers was lost in the late 1870s as Northern capitalists, who had fought the war to gain hegemony over the slaveholder class, not to “free the slaves,” concluded that their main enemy now was an alliance of former slaves and poor whites in the South and potential solidarity of whites and Blacks in the developing Northern labor movement.

With federal indifference and a pro-big-business Supreme Court’s blessing, Ku Klux Klan terror and “conservative” white supremacy governments created a racist dictatorship in the former slave states based on segregation in all public life from education and transportation to public bathrooms; voter disenfranchisement; and removal of African Americans from police forces, juries and general citizenship participation. Poll taxes also reduced the civil rights of poor whites, who were encouraged to blame Blacks for their problems, as in slavery times.

As the 20th century opened, slavery was seen nationally as an issue of the past. Many former slave states flew the Confederate flag in courtrooms and over state capitols with impunity. Lincoln freed the slaves in the 1860s and that ended the issue, generations of Americans were taught. One could celebrate Lincoln’s birthday and forget what was going on in contemporary America, both South and North.

Today, in the 21st century, Americans are taught that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement ended segregation in the 1960s and established equal rights. One can celebrate King’s birthday and forget about institutional and ideological racism, both North and South.

New Jersey’s apology helps Americans remember both slavery and, by implication, the segregation and racist terror that followed the defeat of Reconstruction.

Other states and Congress should issue apologies as well. The Supreme Court might even issue an apology for its Dred Scott decision, and its rulings in the 1880s and 1890s reversing Reconstruction civil rights laws and supporting segregation and de facto disenfranchisement. Most of all, the U.S should revive affirmative action policies, which began in the 1960s to eradicate the crippling effects of institutional racism, slavery’s real “legacy.”

History is about learning from the past to apply that knowledge in the present and build a progressive future. Along with its recent abolition of the death penalty, New Jersey’s formal apology for the horrors of slavery should be emulated at all levels throughout the country. It is a step in the right direction and, like ending the death penalty, it is what one should expect as right conduct from a civilized society.

Norman Markowitz is a history professor at Rutgers University.

The people speak: Bush stimulus plan a bust!

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:21:00 +0000

CHICAGO — “Bush offered nothing in his State of the Union talk that will make a damned bit of difference in my life,” declared Sarah Smith, a mother of two who works for minimum wage as a cashier at the Halsted Foods supermarket in this city’s Bridgeport neighborhood. “Any rebate I would get has to go to pay medical bills I owe on my credit card. That might stimulate the bank but it won’t do a thing for my kids and me.

“There is so much to be done,” Smith said. “The schools in this neighborhood need renovation, they need repair, we need new schools altogether — wouldn’t that create jobs? I need a wage increase, millions of people need higher wages — wouldn’t that stimulate the economy? Why does it always have to be the rich getting tax breaks when they talk about fixing the economy?”

As she ran a customer’s food stamp card through the machine on her register, she said, “Give these people benefits big enough so they can put some real food on their table. I’m tired of having to tell them they don’t have enough to pay for their food. Hungry folks deserve to eat and food prices are going through the ceiling in here and in all the stores.”

Marge Cantanello, a senior citzen waiting to pay for her purchases at Smith’s register, said, “I worked all my life as did my husband before me, and now all I have is Social Security and Medicaid. There is absolutely nothing in that Bush plan that will help senior citizens. What are we — something to be tossed aside?

“We would spend money if we had it,” Cantanello said. “They tell us there is no money. You wanna find the money? Bring home all those boys and girls from Iraq. They will be safe and then we’ll have I don’t know how many billions to fix things here and help senior citizens.”

The stimulus package Bush called for in his State of the Union speech gives one-time tax rebate checks of $300 to $1,200 for most taxpayers, with those who earned less getting the smaller checks.

It also gives tax breaks to many businesses.

Bush demanded that Congress pass this plan with no add-ons.

AFSCME President Gerald McEntee called the package a “Band-aid, half-hearted solution to the economic crisis.” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said Bush was “blind to Americans’ day-to-day economic realities.” Change to Win Chair Anna Burger said “the best thing about Bush’s address was that it was the last such speech.”

The House approved the president’s plan with very few changes. So the struggle shifts to the Senate, where pressure can be applied for extending unemployment benefits, increased food stamp benefits and aid to senior citizens before the planned mid-February vote.

Despite threats from Bush that he will veto the package if the Senate acts to strengthen it, senators have already indicated they will add a 13-week unemployment benefits extension.

Some senators voiced support for longer-range solutions to the economic crisis put forward by labor — for example, increased spending on infrastructure projects.

“I think that there are 51 Democratic senators without exception who believe this package can be made better,” Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said.

Reid blasted the proposal to send rebates to those with higher incomes, saying it “causes me to want to gag.”

Workers understand it will take more than rebates to stimulate the economy.

In Chicago, Mike Gerard, a bus driver on the #6 CTA route, commented, “I’m lucky I’m still working. If the state had gone through with the cuts they were planning on Jan. 20, I’d be out in the streets and there would be a lot less busses.”

Gerard said, “A decent plan to fix the economy has to help state and local governments. I’m no fan of the CTA, City Hall or the state, but on this issue they have a point. The local governments are running out of money. They can’t afford what they have to pay now and Bush wants them to pay a bigger share of Medicaid and everything else. They need quick help. That’s what his plan should be talking about.”

Calling it “outrageous” that three times now over the last year the workers and the riders have been subjected to scare campaigns from the CTA about impending service and job cuts, Gerard said, “Put the money in public transit. That’s the kind of thing that will help fix the economy.”

jwojcik @pww.org