USA: Immigration Issue Could Split The Right

For years immigration has been an issue for the right wing to mobilize around - from the far-right vigilante groups like the Minutemen and the equally odious Tea Party movement to mainstream Republican governors, who bolstered their support during a period of mass unemployment and immiseration using immigrants as scapegoats. But it might yet turn out to be a pandora's box for the right wing in America.
As everyone knows, evangelical leaders have been a key component of the so-called conservative coalition, united around issues like abortion rights and same sex marriage. It seemed sometimes that the conservatives were an unstoppable monolith. Yet, an article in today's New York Times suggests that the big mobilizations against the immigration clampdown are creating schisms within the conservative coalition. With 15% of the large US Latino population self-declared evangelical Christian and with the majority as active Catholics, there is a danger that the politicization and mobilization taking place could push Latinos towards the left. US trade unions, for instance, have been vocal supporters of immigration reform to alleviate and normalize the status of the 12 million illegal immigrants living and working in the US.

“Hispanics are religious, family-oriented, pro-life, entrepreneurial,” said the Rev. Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm. “They are hard-wired social conservatives, unless they’re driven away.
“I’ve had some older conservative leaders say: ‘Richard, stop this. You’re going to split the conservative coalition,’ ” Dr. Land continued. “I say it might split the old conservative coalition, but it won’t split the new one. And if the new one is going to be a governing coalition, it’s going to have to have a lot of Hispanics in it. And you don’t get a lot of Hispanics in your coalition by engaging in anti-Hispanic anti-immigration rhetoric.”

Land's point - absurdity about hard-wired social conservatism aside - is an interesting one and speaks to the pressure that evangelists feel. On the one hand, the Republicans were substantially discredited by the Bush years, with his neo-liberal tax cuts that failed to stop the economy's implosion and the widely perceived debacles in the foreign policy arena, from Iraq to Israel to Afghanistan. Of course the Democrats have a natural ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and the Republicans may well pick up substantial numbers of seats in the mid-terms - but it won't be on the basis of enthusiasm. And those most enthusiastic of Republicans - the Tea Party - are likely so crazy that their "insurgent" candidates in a number of states will mostly suffer ignominious defeat. All this speaks to a right wing that is weakened and divided. It's only against this backdrop, and the mobilizations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters, that Land's bold talk of splitting the conservative coalition can be understood.
For progressives that offers some key lessons. It has been through mobilizations - not through waiting on the good will of the Obama Administration - that change has begun to take place. It will be through continued mobilizations that the conservative coalition will be fractured. It's also an opportunity to make broader links - something that the evangelicals understand. If Latinos are being driven away, it is also because they are being driven towards something. In California where Latinos likely voted in significant numbers to support the anti-gay marriage proposition two years ago there is the possibility of demonstrating that the LGBT movement understands the links between supporting immigrants rights and winning gay rights. In both cases it is about limiting freedom of choice and the right to a life with dignity. If the LGBT movement can demonstrate its principled solidarity it can not only help win a victory for immigrants' rights, it can also drive a deeper wedge, pulling Latinos towards reciprocating the support. That isn't to say it will be easy but the prize is so big that it is worth it. And a victory for both immigrants and LGBT people would be a massive blow to the confidence of not only the Republicans but the Democrats who have pushed hard to keep the movements in line behind Obama - even when he hasn't delivered so much as supportive rhetoric. Of course, in any crisis there is both opportunity and danger. There is always the possibility that, for instance, the LGBT movement doesn't support the immigrants' rights movement and is, instead, scornful of it. This may sound absurd but think about feminists attacking Muslims in placing like France and Switzerland, lining themselves up with hard-right anti-immigrant forces. If the oppressed don't unite, the right wing evangelicals could maneuver themselves into the leadership and steer it into a direction most advantageous to them - and with the most conservative outcomes possible. That could help cement the divisions between LGBT and Latino immigrants in a way that makes it much more difficult to overcome. Luckily, the recent mobilizations in the LGBT movement, post-Obama, have involved socialists in the leadership who are pro-immigrant and have a perspective of uniting the oppressed. Let's hope that they are able to find avenues to bring at least elements of these two movements together in a working relationship.

The Many Betrayals of Barack Obama: Part 1

What happened to change we could believe in?

With mid-term elections looming this fall, there are a flurry of articles assessing the results and prospects of Barack Obama’s first term as president. Not surprisingly, given how high were the expectations of an Obama presidency. Who can forget those massive election rallies? “Yes, we can”, he boomed and hundreds of thousands repeated the words. These were words that came from the Spanish “Si, se puede” of the immigrants’ rights movement that mobilized millions the year before the election. And as a black man running for and winning the presidency in a land built by African slaves, he seemed to represent America turning a corner.
Obama said that he was against the torture and imprisonment without end that was most starkly represented by Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-ray. He would shut it down within a year, he said. He opposed the “Defense of Marriages Act” that was signed into law by his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton in 1996, enshrining discrimination against gays and lesbians into law. He would end the war in Iraq (ahem, to divert resources to Afghanistan). He would finally bring public healthcare to the American people, 50 million of whom were without any insurance whatsoever, in an “industry” whose costs were ballooning every year because of the “market.” And, of course, he would turn around America’s economy, which was on the fast track to disasterville with the worst recession in the post-war era destroying jobs faster than a fire in a field of autumn corn.
At least that’s what he told us.

The First Betrayal
On election night, November 2008, not only did voters elect America’s first black president on a platform of change. California voters also voted on Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, which had previously been permitted and had led to a flurry of marriages, particularly in San Franciso. This immediately provoked a sense of outrage. And a sense of betrayal as it became clear that Obama would spare no effort to spare no effort to demonstrate his support for equality. In the lead-up to the vote in Maine, that was lost, Obama said not a single word in support of equal rights for gays and lesbians. And the Democrats didn’t use any of their electoral networks – there was a state election, along with the ballot on gay marriage – to promote equality. When Equality Across America was mobilizing a march of a quarter of a million people in Washington in support of gay rights, Obama advisors and Democrats not only did nothing to support the march, many of them derided it.
And now, the Obama Justice Department continues to aggressively defend the very Defense of Marriages Act about which Obama once stated: “Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does.” Even after a US District Court Judge ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional, it is expected that the Justice Department will appeal the ruling.

The Second Betrayal – Guantanamo

“As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”

So said Obama during the presidential election campaign. Yet, the prison at Gitmo is still up and running. And, as an article in the New York Times argued:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantanamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013...
"...the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat....
[According to one senior official] “Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”

The priorities of the Obama White House on this issue, in other words, are governed by cynicism and spin.

The Third Betrayal – Healthcare
Obama’s betrayal on winning a public healthcare system is really several betrayals rolled into one. For certain women’s right to have unhindered access to abortion has fared no better under Obama and he has, if anything given encouragement to the anti-choice by implementing an executive order excluding abortion services from the health reform. He did rescind Bush’s global gag order denying funding to international aid organizations that supported abortion services but he has done nothing to rescind Bush’s provider-conscience law in the US, which permits medical providers to discourage and deny women from access.
And the “reforms” as a whole are an unmitigated disaster for most Americans and a giant cash prize to the health insurance industry that has helped to make America’s healthcare system simultaneously the world’s most expensive and the world’s worst. This excellent article by Chris Hedges on countercurrents.org details some of the betrayals of Obama’s “reform” package:

The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10 percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will only pay for about 70 percent of our medical expenses. Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage. And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms. We will be forced by law to buy their defective products. There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health care costs. The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly female work forces can be charged higher gender-based rates. The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill-written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists-means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Toronto Council Votes To Silence Dissent

Who the hell are these guys and why do we pay their salaries? I mean, twice in one day these jerks demonstrate their utter disdain for the right to free speech and the right to protest without getting your head cracked in. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there supposedly some "progressives" on city council? What the hell - first they congratulate the cops for a $1 billion cock-up that left people injured, windows smashed and growing numbers of people and organizations clambering for an independent inquiry. They must be, like, the last people in the city who don't think that G20 policing was a total farrago.

And now this almost-unanimous vote - including "progressives" - to delay future Pride grants because they permitted, under enormous pressure, the right of a group critical of Israel to march in the parade.

Now, I know there's still some people out there that thinks the sun shines out of Israel's arse and that genocide is really just a civilizing mission with a case of bad marketing but to threaten the funding of one of Toronto's most successful festivals in order to squelch any criticism of a foreign government? Would they do the same if the group had been Queers Against Iranian Repression or Queers Against Radical Islam? I suspect not.

I'm not surprised that some of the council scumbags would support this - Mammoliti is a long-time anti-gay bigot who left the NDP provincial caucus because of his opposition to same sex spousal benefits. Rob Ford's ignorance on gay rights is on the record for all to see. But to see that people on the left of city council would engage in this sort of disgusting witch-hunting tactic is truly enraging. I suggest that people send a letter to their councillor asking them why they are spending our money to squash free speech.

Israeli Apartheid, Gay Pride & Craven Journalism

There's no doubt that Palestinians have gotten the shaft the entire world over. Their suffering at the hands of Israeli colonialism and its knock-on effects has been ignored, denied, facilitated and funded to the tune of billions of dollars.

In the immediate aftermath of the Nakba ("the Disaster"), as the founding of Israel is called by Palestinians, nobody was interested in how the Palestinians were made to suffer. To utter this truth in 1948, with the Holocaust so close at hand, was politically impossible in the West. The West, after all, had to take collective responsibility for the suffering and horror faced by Jews in Nazi Germany. They closed their doors to them. They closed their eyes to it. They refused to take action to stop the systematic slaughter. There was no moral authority amongst European and North American governments to say anything because it would expose their own hypocrisy.

But more than that. As far back as Lord Balfour in Britain it was recognized that a European Jewish colony in the Middle East could play an important Spartan role as a client state. As Balfour described it, a Zionist state would be a loyal "Jewish Ulster" in reference to the similar role played historically by Protestants in Northern Ireland.

So the Palestinians were sacrificed in the interests of a multi-layered realpolitik in which they were merely obstacles to larger strategic and political goals.

Not much has changed really - except for the rather important sea change in popular consciousness. The Holocaust, horror that it was, is now mostly a historic memory and is less and less a lived one. The daily misery that is the plight of Palestinians is here and now. The reference to a directly remembered event as justification for every crime and atrocity committed no longer functions in the same way that it once did for Israel's leaders. Even at the level of the elites ruling class commentators like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have expressed dissatisfaction with the policies of Israel. To be clear, they aren't so much concerned about the plight of the Palestinians as they are at the perception that with the rise of modern Arab regimes, the Israeli watchdog is becoming a liability to American interests in the region.

However, it is also clear that this is a contradictory and fraught process. More and more people may be skeptical of Israel's right to commit genocide and nearly countless war crimes in the name of past oppression. But the media and most of the establishment are still largely and fulsomely supportive of whatever the Israeli state does. And they condemn as beyond the pale, anti-Semitic, etc. anyone who questions this. And, of course, backing them up are the large institutions that politically dominate the Jewish community, collectively known as the Jewish Lobby. Their power to determine policy has been over-state for certain - Israel is supported because Israel is useful to western interests full-stop - but it would be wrong to think that they don't have sway.

All this was a rather long way of saying that our side - the side of Palestinian liberation - is gaining ground in a difficult but inexorable way. Every time Israel commits another war crime it is exposed. Every time Israel grants a concession it is also exposed for the repressive and genocidal apparatus that it still maintains. That's why the massacre on the Mavi Marmara of Turkish nationals participating in a humanitarian mission exploded in Israel's face the way that it did. The groundwork had already been laid by years of dedicated campaigning. And it's also why the petty concessions that Israel is offering up viz the siege of Gaza - without actually lifting a siege widely recognized as illegal - is also generating condemnation. Like the South African Apartheid regime, Israel is in a losing game against the forces of historical progress. The ethno-religious fundamentalism that underpins its raison d'etre are an anachronism that lacks any moral foundation.

The question then, to my mind, is not whether Israeli Apartheid is finished - I believe that we are seeing the beginning of the beginning of the end. It is a question of what methods will be used to sustain the unsustainable. They are, of course, different in different places but here in Toronto we have recently seen a battle fought and won by the pro-Palestinian side.

Recently the Pride Committee of Toronto, dominated by conservative, gay, white men (including the loathsome Kyle Rae), came under pressure from the even more loathsome Harper Tories and then Toronto City Council to exclude from the Pride Parade the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. The Committee also voted to exclude the use of the term "Israeli Apartheid" on the march.

Fortunately, the gay and lesbian activists and supporters behind QuAIA were persistent and mobilized a multiplatform campaign that ultimately forced Toronto Pride to rescind its ban (including its attempt to force all placards to be pre-vetted by an "ethics committee" - ugh). This happened on June 28 and QuAIA marched on Pride weekend. Yay for QuAIA!

Enter the craven and disposable Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn with his piece on this victory in today's Toronto Star, "Not All Apartheid Is Created Equal". He uses the usual Israeli hasbara method of the red herring. Why are QuAIA talking about Palestinian oppression under Israel and not about Palestinian oppression under Lebanese rule? he asks, suggesting that this is typical hypocrisy. After all, Arabs are given full rights in Israel but other Arab countries don't give Palestinians - their Arab brothers and sisters, no less - the same equal treatment. What's more, gays and lesbians are free in Israel whereas they are oppressed under Muslim/Arab regimes. Then he goes on to suggest that it would be only reasonable for QuAIA to march in the Santa Clause parade, St. Patrick's Day, etc.

Now, this is all utterly, utterly dishonest or the product of a profoundly stupid man. I'm sure Mr. Cohn would rather be dishonest than an imbecile, so we shall grant him intelligence. In which case he would know that the reason there are 600,000 Palestinians in Lebanon is because they were expelled from Israel either in 1948 or in 1967. And nobody has justified the treatment of Palestinians at the hands of Lebanon - or Egypt or Jordan for that matter. But as regards Lebanon, let's show some further honesty. There was a civil war in Lebanon back in the late 1970s in which Palestinians and the Lebanese left were on the brink of victory - which would have dismantled "Lebanese Apartheid" as he calls it.

What happened to that victory? Israel illegally invaded Lebanon, bombed civilian areas, slaughtered Palestinians - remember Sabra and Shatilla? - and occupied the country for 20 years to ensure that such a situation never re-emerged. How did Israel during that occupation bring equality to the Palestinians of Lebanon? The answer: they didn't. In fact, so horrible was the Israeli occupation, so racist against the Lebanese, that the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon who had originally supported Israel against the Sunni Palestinians (and largely Sunni Lebanese left) formed Hizbullah, which drove the Israelis out of their country. And Hizbullah is a vocal ally of the Palestinian struggle and an inspiration to the Muslim world, including Sunnis.

As for Israeli "liberalism" towards gays and lesbians, it has to be said that this is much overblown given the significant and growing power of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel. This year's Pride Parade in Jerusalem was denied a permit for their planned route because it passed by a Yeshiva - a religious school. It was to end at parliament to commemorate and protest the anniversary of the shooting death of two youth at an LGBT event. What's more, the relatively liberal attitudes amongst a majority of the Israeli public are negated by the fact that close to a majority of the population under Israeli rule - which, after 43 years, must be said to include the Occupied Territories - are denied basic civil rights not to mention equal rights more generally. As QuAIA notes:

"Queer struggles against homophobia in Palestine will never flourish as long as Palestinians live under the intolerable conditions of occupation, violence, and Israeli state terror that disrupt and regulate their daily existence. Supporting queer rights in Palestine means fighting the apartheid system that denies self-determination to all Palestinians."

All this is to say that Martin Regg Cohn is exactly what he accuses others to be: a hypocrite. As the Chief of the Toronto Star's Middle East and Asia bureaus he certainly knows this history and the reality of the situation on the ground. He would know that the present Israeli Foreign Minister is an avid and outspoken supporter of ethnically cleansing Arabs from Israel and banning Arab political parties unless they support Israel's right to be an ethnically exclusive state (duh, that's what it means to call Israel "the Jewish State"). And he would know that such ethnic cleansing policies are being carried out both openly and by stealth in parts of the West Bank and, in particular, in Jerusalem as part of a program to "Judaize" the "eternal capital." The fact that he knows all this and can still find the stomach to write such a cringing, schoolyard article thumbing his nose at QuAIA's victory demonstrates two things: 1. Mr. Cohn is pathetic and 2. we are winning. As Ghandi once said: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

DC Catholic Church Blackmails City To Stop Gay Rights

THE CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF DC IS THREATENING to withdraw social service programs that it runs if the city passes a same sex marriage bill that forces the church to obey city laws opposing discrimination against lesbians and gays.
According to the spokesperson for the archidiocese, "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem."
We've heard this before, of course in the arguments about "religious freedom" that were raised here in Canada in the debate leading up to the victory of gay marriage. And, as in DC, religious organizations won't be required to allow same sex marriages on premises. However, they will have to provide same sex benefits to their employees. And they won't be allowed to discriminate in church run adoption services.
This blackmail by the church raises two questions that the gay and lesbian liberation movement is grappling with in the US. The first has to do with religious freedom. Frankly, the freedom to practice religion should not be the freedom to practice and promote discrimination and oppression. Churches receive tax free status and other public benefits, which makes this stance particularly galling. But even if they didn't - even if they were private for-profit businesses - they should not be permitted to discriminate. It wasn't acceptable when lunch counters would refuse to serve African-Americans and it isn't acceptable when a privately run wedding hall refuses to rent to a gay couple.
The second thing is that while winning gay rights in a geographically piecemeal way can help to give momentum, it can also divide and diffuse the movement, forcing lesbians, gays and their supporters to rush from place to place to try and hold up their basic rights. And it can allow the bigots to concentrate their resources. The result can be a series of Maine-like defeats that causes the struggle to lose momentum. What's more, the equal rights of lesbians and gays shouldn't be subject to a vote.
That means winning political victories at the national level - overturning the military's "don't ask, don't tell" law and the Bush-sponsored "Defense of Marriage Act". It means forcing the federal government to enforce the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which specifically prohibits states from enacting laws that remove the rights of US citizens, which are guaranteed under the Amendment. As this article notes, the support to win rights for gays and lesbians is there (90% oppose discrimination in the workplace), far more than it was for African-Americans in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. What is needed is a movement to mobilize that sentiment and to extend it to full civil rights.