Focus on Bigger Picture in Shadow of Victory

Yes, it's encouraging in some ways that Arizona Senate rejects 5 illegal-immigration bills, yet of course this is no reversal of SB 1070 or anything before it.  As my partner noted to me, it's likely that it was more the pressure from the businesses than the people that made an impact this round, though I'd like to think that protesters are at least an annoyance if not worse to the politicians deciding the fate of so many.

I would like to point out, as I have in previous posts though perhaps buried within my writing, that the overarching goal of anti-immigrant legislation is not to remove all immigrants.  It is to criminalize them so as to make them more exploitable and controllable.  As many of you understand, migrants provide cheap labor.  They would to some extent, even if they were not "illegal", as they have been in the past.  But criminalizing them more and more keeps them in the precarious position that makes them easily exploited.  Of course what makes them "illegal" is their presence in this country, which implies that the law makers want them out--and some probably do.  But where blatant racists and business owners' interests come together is the interest in criminalizing a permanent underclass.

Let us not forget, however, that the prison industrial complex, the private prison industry in particular, directly profits from the criminalization of migrants.  This is a more direct and observable player in this game, especially where it connects with those in government like Russell Pearce and Jan Brewer as I discussed in What came first: the Racism or the Profit Motive? On Private Prisons' push for SB1070.  Then on a larger scale, with more funds and power, are the defense contractors who have been pushing for securing the border with walls and a variety of technological equipment.

 As I wrote in Ending criminalization of people of color must be priority,

Tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, like those whose faces I could barely see, are held in detention centers and jails.  SB 1070 has not yet gone into effect.  This has been going on for so long and will only continue to do so as long as activists only insist upon ending racial profiling and stopping SB 1070 or even all racist bills/laws if it stops before calling for an end to the border and criminalization of people of color.  There are so many undocumented immigrants who are living in our cities whose voices are overpowered by those who want to maintain the status quo.  There are so many indigenous people near the border or even throughout this state whose voices are not heard, who are also impacted by the border and will also be impacted by SB1070 and so much more.

We must not buy the rhetoric that if it weren't for this right-wing attack on immigrants, things would be just fine.  Even before so many people were worried they'd be deported at any moment, they still had to work shitty jobs for low wages.  Even before so many border patrol agents or national guard invaded O'odham land, there were still many problems faced by people in the border regions, or just with brown skin in general.  Let's address the reasons so many are forced here in the first place and why so many people of color are in prisons, who profits, how settlers can decide who does or doesn't belong, and how does it all come crumbling down?

Border Patrol Headquarters Occupation Protesters to Fight Charges Group Calls for Further Action Against Border Militarization

National Guardsmen Caught in Drug Smuggling Bust

So they say the border isn't safe and that's why we need the national guard there, but then when national guardsmen are involved in a huge drug-smuggling ring, the former AZ attorney general says, "The involvement of uniformed military personnel and children show the extent to which the cartels will go to pursue their illegal schemes."  It doesn't show the extent that national guard statesmen can go because they're not looked at with suspicion?

The involvement in the drug trade by military, police, border patrol, prison guards, not to mention the CIA and such, has been extensive.  It is ridiculous that migrants are the ones stereotyped as drug smugglers (yes there are drug smugglers from south of the border just like there are white drug dealers in middle class neighborhoods) and when people with some sort of authority get involved in the drug trade it supposedly speaks more to "the extent to which cartels will go".  Similarly, I point out in Ex-ICE Officer Charged in Drug-Smuggling, there is much more sympathy towards officials than towards Mexicans.  As though Mexicans are naturally corrupt, while officers get corrupted by the former.

No it couldn't be American demand, plus greed, poverty, capitalism, and the fact that drug smuggling (and human smuggling) is illegal that causes people to get involved in the trade.  And it wouldn't be the impunity, authority, and trust afforded officials that allows them to participate in the drug trade more effectively because of their position that causes them to be involved.  One wonders what the drug trade would look like if nobody tied to the government ever participated in it.

It's especially unfortunate that the drug trade negatively affects the Tohono O'odham and then on top of that, they have people who are "protecting the border" also negatively affecting the community, in addition to some involvement in the drug trade.  People transverse the entry port in the Tohono O'odham Nation and surrounding areas because of tightened border controls in other more urban regions.  It will be interesting whether this will be an excuse to tighten border security on T.O... just before the Unity Run too...

Anyway, here's the article: Authorities bust major marijuana smuggling ring. 
And Ex-ICE Officer Charged in Drug-Smuggling is worth reading too, in my opinion, even though it's a little old.

Private Paramilitary-Style Training Camp Approved for Border

A company called Wind Zero got approval to build a huge private complex for paramilitary-style training, similar to the camp proposed by Blackwater (now Xe).

According to Narco News' $100 Million Drug-War Garrison Approved for U.S.-Mexican Border, the company's founder, former Navy SEAL sniper, U.S. intelligence agency operative and author Brandon Webb said in a YouTube video: 

Mexico is very close to civil war right now; it doesn’t take much to buy off somebody and next thing you know, the president is assassinated and then what? A civil war breaks out, and we have a million Mexican citizens crossing the border into the U.S., and it’s the same situation that you have in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have all these refugees coming across and Pakistan’s like, “What do we do with this?”

It’s not outlandish for that scenario to happen. So how do you prepare for that? You got to train these guys, and that’s law enforcement and the military.

The article notes that there are likely to be plans to operate drones, aka unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) out of this facility.

Currently, under the oversight of the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection agency, about a half a dozen Predator B (Reaper) drones are now operating along the southern U.S. border and coastal regions of the U.S., from Florida through Eastern California.
And it seems the Mexican government itself is operating UAVs, or drones, over the U.S.-Mexican border. A recent news story revealed that a Mexican drone dropped out of the sky earlier this month and crashed onto an El Paso, Texas, street...

The U.S. and Mexican governments are already operating joint military missions targeting so-called “kingpin” narco-traffickers. As evidence of that reality, the Washington Post recently reported on a State Department cable made public through WikiLeaks that supports facts reported by Narco News in June 2010...

Would it be any surprise if the U.S. and Mexican governments, via private contractors and/or government operations, also are coordinating drone missions along the border?

(It's worth noting as well that Miami Police have recently purchased a drone for the use of keeping tabs on the residents as well.)

About the training "camp" Narco News continues: 

Beyond its usefulness as a drone operations and training center, the planned Wind zero camp also will offer plenty of other features necessary for training special operations soldiers and/or paramilitary forces.
The camp, which would be developed in three phases at a cost of up to $100 million (some $15 million for Phase 1), also will include numerous shooting ranges allowing for some 57,000 rounds of ammunition to be fired off daily; a mock-up of an urban neighborhood for practices assaults; a 6-mile dual-use race track for teaching defensive and offensive driving (and for private-pay recreational use); and enough housing and RV camper space (along with a 100-room hotel) to accommodate a small battalion of warriors.

The article states that residents of the town, in addition to the Sierra Club have opposed this project, but, "Wind Zero marshaled the support of numerous law enforcement agencies in the region that would be able to make use of the facility for training purposes."

Tucson Shooting Overshadows Border Shooting

Before Congresswoman Gifford and others were shot in Tuscon, Arizona , 17 year old Ramses Barron Torres was shot and killed by a bullet originating in Nogales, Arizona. There have been no national moments of silence for the apparently unarmed teenager. No memes speculating on the sanity of the shooter(s) or if violent rhetoric played a role. That’s probably because Ramses Barron Torres is Mexican and was shot by U.S. Border Patrol.

These points, made by Maegan La Mala on VivirLatino recently are ones that didn't really occur to me, even though I try to be aware of these sorts inconsistencies on the part of the media as well as the left.  The article explores some of the stories around the circumstances surrounding Torres' death.  But even if Torres had been throwing rocks, even if he had been on the US side of the border, the shooting was still unjustified.  Certainly violent rhetoric played a role in this shooting, as it did in the shooting in Arivaca a year and a half ago.

Border patrol agents, like cops, get away with shootings and other violence on a regular basis.  Even Ramos and Compean who were sentenced to prison for shooting at a man on the border (he didn't die), got their sentence commuted by Bush.  It will be interesting to see what comes of this shooting.  Either way, though, the outcry (as it is reported by the media as well as how it is coming across on the part of activists) is not nearly what it is in response to this shooting in Tucson.  Yes, it is different that it was so out of the ordinary and that it was several people who were shot at once, but just because immigrants already live in a state of fear for their lives does not mean it's any less painful or traumatic.

The Fascists Already Have the Keys and the Handcuffs

I've heard that even with the success of protesters holding up the nazis for over an hour from starting their rally last weekend, some folks still insist that they should just be ignored.  True, they wouldn't have had an audience and perhaps no media coverage had no one showed up to oppose them.  While I'm interested in what the opposition may have accomplished as far as the NSM's enthusiasm or ability to organize in this city goes, I am also interested in some differences in media coverage and what that might mean.

Last year, observations were made that at least one TV channel's coverage simply characterized the NSM rally as an anti-immigrant rally (well, that probably wasn't their wording).  They showed the seig heils and uniforms and such, but they made no reference to their extremist politics.  I thought this was good in a way- blurring the lines between swastika-wearing NSM extremists and the extremists who wear suits or police uniforms and deny their racism is probably a good thing.  Especially since most of those who oppose the NSM tend to ignore the other anti-immigrant rallies and tea-party rallies (much of which overlap).  On the other hand, it is important for people to know that there are actual nazis in town (okay, a lot of the ones who actually organize are from out of town, fortunately) and that nazis LOVE SB 1070.  The resistance against the NSM march and rally brought this out into the limelight.

Not so long ago, NSM members JT Ready (not in NSM anymore but affiliated is what we hear) and Harry Hughes (both attended this last NSM rally), called on others to patrol areas of Pinal County to for migrants.  Phoenix Insurgent writes in reference to Stephen Lemons' column, "one of the things I picked up on was Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu's failure to denounce the Nazi composition of the patrols. Sure, he says that he doesn't think the patrols would be helpful, but it seems as if Babeu, like the local media (with the exception of Lemons), has opted to treat Ready's little Nazi crew as legitimate, giving him a pass on his white supremacist beliefs and his many violent threats. Consider the fact the two media headlines about the event identify the NSM in the title only as a 'militia', not as Nazis or even a 'Nazi militia'. A more honest characterization would surely change the way people view the action" (Source).  The Feathered Bastard has also pointed out how newscasters are hesitant to call Nazis what they are.

This weekend, however, the media is being much more clear about who was being opposed.  "Neo-Nazi march met by protesters in Phoenix" was Channel 3's headline. "Police Arrest 2 In Clash With Neo-Nazis" was Channel 5's. Channel 10: "Neo-Nazis Protest in Downtown Phoenix".

In some ways it is useful that they are being identified as neo-nazis.  In other ways, we mustn't fall into the tendency of seeing the nazis as separate from the other anti-immigrant folks.  Within the anti-immigrant movement, they are the fanatics making the others look more legitimate, more reasonable.  If we only focus on them, we lose sight of the bigger picture, just as focusing on Arpaio draws opposition away from the other police who make even more arrests but without making a show of it.   This comparison also brings up the other point about separating white supremacists from institutional white supremacy/racism, which I brought up in my last post.  As pointed out by a sign in a photo on the Prison Abolitionist blog, "The Fascists already have the Keys".

We should consider the ways in which focusing on the fascists legitimizes the other forms of white supremacy- those with more power.  This is not to imply that the folks resisting the nazis otherwise ignore these other forms--in fact the protest was in many ways just as much against the police as the nazis.  The relationship between the two is explained at the Fires Never Extinguished blog as well, but of course the issue with the police is not only their protection of and participation with nazis, but their role being mostly to enforce the color line such as through police brutality and murder as we saw in the case of Oscar Grant earlier this year.

I hope to see the kind of enthusiasm that surrounds protesting nazis also shown in cases of police brutality and prison issues in the future.  There is something to say about how resistance affects the general population's view of things, not to mention the ability of those systems and people to function in the first place.

What came first: the Racism or the Profit Motive? On Private Prisons' push for SB1070

The private prisons' involvement in passing SB1070 illuminates an aspect of the anti-immigrant tendency that complicates things and is often overlooked.  Often the finger is pointed at racism as the cause of atrocities like SB1070, without looking at the bigger picture.  This is not to say that racism plays no part, even as a basis on which the prison industrial complex functions, but the prejudicial views of Russell Pearce or the minutemen for example are not necessarily the main guiding force here.  This is particularly interesting when we consider the potential of white people to reject racism and see it as manufactured rather than intrinsic.

I'm glad that news is being spread of the role of the private prison industry in the passing of SB1070.  A few months back, Governor Brewer's connections with the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the US were exposed, although of course they denied any underhandedness.  Now more information is coming out about the influence of private prisons in the new Arizona law, as NPR's new report details.  While I don't think there should be prisons in the first place, private prisons are particularly alarming in that this is the kind of thing that can happen when someone stands to profit (of course let's not lose sight of the ways the government profits from repression in different ways).

The private prison industry has profited greatly in the past few years despite the economic downturn.  The Detention Watch Network says that "The U.S. government detained approximately 380,000 people in immigration custody in 2009 in... about 350 facilities at an annual cost of more than $1.7 billion."  And the racists say that immigrants are a burden on the economy- how about the border enforcement?  Keep in mind here that this discussion is only on the detention centers- not on the border security technology and the wall, and other aspects of security which are all making people lots of money, including companies that have already made a shitload of money off the war.

An article that came out a few months ago (Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants)
discussed the lobbying efforts of CCA and the GEO group and how it paid off through more attacks on immigrants, who now fill the private detention centers. 

The lobbying paid off for both companies, in huge revenue increases from government contracts to incarcerate immigrants. From 2005 through 2009, for every dollar that GEO spent lobbying the government, the company received a $662 return in taxpayer-funded contracts, for a total of $996.7 million. CCA received a $34 return in taxpayer-funded contracts for every dollar spent on lobbying the federal government, for a total of $330.4 million... One problem for major investors seeking huge gains from the for-profit prison business was that revenue rates couldn’t keep rising because federal agencies didn’t have enough personnel to arrest and process more immigrants than the expanded number they were now handling. It became apparent that the only way to significantly raise revenue through increasing the numbers of people picked up, detained and incarcerated was to hire more law enforcement personnel.
The private prison industry now needed a new source of low-cost licensed law enforcement personnel. CCA and GEO then turned to state governments as the focus of business expansion. Both companies stepped up efforts to acquire contracts with state and local governments that were entering into lucrative agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants in state and local detention and correctional facilities.
The result of this shift in business focus is exemplified by CCA’s role in Arizona’s SB 1070 and both CCA’s and GEO’s roles in other legislative efforts aimed at dramatically increased numbers arrests of undocumented immigrants in over 20 states. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer, who received substantial campaign financing from top CCA executives in Tennessee and employs two former CCA lobbyists Chuck Coughlin and Paul Sensman, as top aides, signed SB 1070 into law on April 23.
On Friday, July 30, 2010 the Republican Governors Association, which so far this year has received over $160,000 in contributions from CCA and GEO, and their respective lobbyists, sent out a nationwide solicitation written by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer requesting contributions to fund an appeal of the partial injunction issued by a judge against SB 1070. (Read on).

The NPR report that just came out explains that CCA (and GEO group) also has some of their people in an organization called American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that Russell Pearce is also part of (described as a conservative, free-market orientated, limited-government group), and that this group developed SB1070 (limited government, my ass).  What is confusing is where Kris Kobach, the lawyer who works for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) comes into it, since he is said elsewhere to have authored the bill, although I know i'm not the only one wondering this.  I imagine FAIR has connections to private prisons, although I am not doubting FAIR's genuine (not profit-driven) white supremacist views, even if many of their participants and funders are driven by profit and desire for law and order.

Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce says the bill was his idea. He says it's not about prisons. It's about what's best for the country...
But instead of taking his idea to the Arizona statehouse floor, Pearce first took it to a hotel conference room.
It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC...

It goes on,

Thirty of the 36 co-sponsors received donations over the next six months, from prison lobbyists or prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation and The Geo Group.
By April, the bill was on Gov. Jan Brewer's desk.

In some ways, personal racism is convenient for exploitation for more profit: scare people into thinking immigrants are a threat (is Lou Dobbs and Fox news paid by CCA?), put them in private prisons, thereby creating profits for the private prison industry.  Yet, this implies that white supremacy existed before profit motives, which isn't quite accurate.  Although colonialism and accompanying attitudes about non-Europeans existed, these prejudices and such weren't so hardened along these imaginary race lines (just look at how the Irish were treated before being gradually included as white).  The concept of race was created on top of existing hierarchies, in the interest of maintaining order and capitalism.  Since i'm not feeling very articulate right now, I will leave you with a long quote from a friend's blog giving more insight into how white supremacy developed (see below).  This was written in response to the National Socialist Movement's efforts last year to organize here, and incidentally they will be back in a couple weeks to rally.  While I believe there should be visible opposition, I don't believe that it is any more important to protest the nazis than it is to protest the police, or the prison industrial complex.  Like Peggy wrote, "The NAZIS putting all my people in prison are the ones I want to run out of town."  I think most people who show up to these protests, at least the anarchists, tend to agree, although in practice it may not appear so.  Groups like Anti-Racist Action (ARA) have been long criticized nationally for focusing on white supremacists while institutional racism is the larger threat.  In fact if you think about it, if everyone is focusing on the 20-30 neo-nazis or the occasional hate crimes happening more and more across the country, we're not focusing on the state-sanctioned murders that happen everyday (and what if we include the deaths caused by border security as well?) 

In this description of the origins of white supremacy, you can see that the private prison industry is a prime example of the ways that white supremacy benefits capitalism.

The system of white supremacy is a cross-class alliance between rich whites and working class whites, the objective of which is the maintenance of the exploitative system of capitalism. White supremacy, by providing some meaningful, but in the grand scheme of things, petty privileges to whites, seeks to undermine class unity. These privileges are petty not because they aren't real and sometimes meaningful, but because those that accrue to the white working class are much closer to the ones that non-white people get than they are to the ones that adhere to rich whites. That is, Bill Gates gets to exercise way more benefits of whiteness than the lowliest Nazi scumbag.

In exchange for accepting these privileges, however, whites agree to police the rest of the non-white population. That's the reason white supremacy was created. Originating as an English imperial ideology for the conquest of Ireland and the rest of what we now call Britain, it moved to North America after the rich English elites had trouble with what we would now call a tri-racial alliance against them. Natives, English indentured servants (most of them transported here for petty crimes against the emerging capitalist system in England) and African slaves had a tendency to realize quite quickly in the so-called "New World" that they had much more in common with each other than with the pale-skinned, blue-blooded ruling class that lorded over them. So, they kept getting together and trying to overthrow those titled bastards. Again and again.

This was naturally a problem for the elite, so a hierarchical racialized system was created to divide this class, and to empower the wealthy. It was encoded in law. Whites were given several important privileges. Firstly, they were entitled to a limit on their servitude, while that of Africans was made permanent. Likewise, whites were given access to cleared Indian lands. The new role for whites demanded they act as police and, in relation to the native population, as soldiers. Therefore, a white man was obligated to serve in slave patrols and had the right to demand papers from any Black person he encountered. Likewise, no Native had any rights a white person was required to respect. Here in Arizona, Mexicans were repeatedly disenfranchised and expropriated of their land by white militias, vigilantes, soldiers and early police formations (Arizona Rangers were notorious). All this was backed up by the rich white elite who wanted to exploit Arizona's resources. (Source).

See also this older article: How the Jailing of Migrants Drives Prison Profits.


UPDATE: see this video which is meant to partly answer the question of the title: Private Prisons in a Wider Context: Video