ALEC protest Wednesday

Check out http://azresistsalec.wordpress.com for more info.

Wednesday is November 30, which is the 12th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle.  It's also the first main day of the ALEC States and Nation's Summit in Snottsdale.  This is the Summit at which two years ago they agreed upon SB1070 becoming one of their many pieces of model legislation, which corporations and legislators collude on propagating across the country.  In the case of SB1070 and legislature before it (three strikes laws, mandatory minimums, etc.), the three largest private prison companies in the country were involved in the discussions.  It also turns out that various companies involved in resource extraction are also involved.

I haven't spent much time on the details about ALEC because ALEC is just an example of what happens on a large scale, everyday and with a long history.  There are many horrible things about ALEC, but they didn't create the border wall, they didn't build the prisons.  Sheriff Joe's jail is as bad or worse than any private prison or detention center, with the temps reaching 117 in tent city this summer.  When I first learned about ALEC last fall, i wrote What came first: the Racism or the Profit Motive? which i would write a bit differently today, but has some important questions within.   Now i would answer that question by describing it as an intricate combination of the two. I do believe that people will try to profit off something that is already happening, as in the case of private prisons, and that they do try to shape how we see different populations so as to justify criminalization (not to mention the ways that other interests seek to justify exploitation- and this is justified partly through criminalization). But i also think that there is a history of racism that this concept of privatized prisons is built upon. Yet at the same time, as i discussed, this racism is built on a desire for stability for the rich and has ultimately resulted in a divided working class that could not rebel in unity, and therefore could not successfully rebel.

Based on this, i was motivated to create this video, which is explained further at this link: Private Prisons in a Wider Context (maybe you watched part one, but did you watch part two?). It brings the focus more towards a historical arc that incorporates colonization, the criminalization of slaves then ex-slaves, and the continuation of criminalization of people of color. This doesn't have to be directly for profit as in the case of private prisons.

Anyway, hope to see you out at the ALEC protest events (there's more going on than just wednesday by the way).

ALEC in context...

This is the text of a flier, which can be viewed or printed, here.

What!? Politicians and private companies get together to create laws that benefit those companies? AZ Senator Russell Pearce and other legislators from around the U.S. meet in a group called ALEC*.
You never thought it would be so blatant as private prison companies** having a say in laws that can create more demand for their facilities and services.  How could people be criminalized so companies can profit from imprisoning them?!?! Not only is ALEC behind mandatory minimums and three strikes laws, they also had a hand in SB1070. When they see immigrants, they see dollar signs, and so they participate with other racists to paint immigrants as a problem--deserving of imprisonment.  This is nothing new...

The deviousness that occurs within ALEC is just an example of how people are criminalized for profit.  But it does not have to be as directly profitable as this. Colonization has of course provided settlers with land and other resources at the expense of those who are native.

Slave codes & convict leasing created crimes that made it easier to exploit the labor of people of color. Criminalizing unauthorized migration did the same thing, specifically affecting the Chinese and Mexicans for many decades.  More recently, the drug war also criminalizes people of color more disproportionately to maintain racist policies without them appearing race-based.

* American Legislative Exchange Council ** Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group are the largest private prison companies.

More info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QDtTK1uxrg

Satire for Russell Pearce- again, because he's GONE

I haven't posted in a while as things seem somewhat tame for a bit, and I've been working on other projects. 

In celebration of Russell Pearce's ouster, i'd like to repost this piece i compiled/edited/wrote which i have always felt somewhat awkward about, but nonetheless gets the point across in a more creative way.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Satire for Russell Pearce

No more catch and release of the unwelcome male
(or, what if you took the extremist position of our anti-immigrant Arizona Senator Russell Pearce, and put it in a different context?)
by Senator Valerie Solanas Pearce

I sat ashen as I watched the news reports. Several chiefs of police stood at a press conference and publicly refused to enforce the law. Less than a month after the brutal murder of a police officer at the hands of a male, they snubbed the opportunity to make necessary changes and violated their oaths of office for the sake of political correctness. Meanwhile, people are killed, maimed and raped. Men cost citizens billions to educate, medicate and incarcerate, and they take jobs from women.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to prevent the potential crimes that men commit, by destroying or at least repressing the entire male class. I will not stand by and be a spectator to male-perpetrated violence because we refuse to enforce our laws and fail to put women first.

The courts have not identified any policy or humanitarian argument that would negate the fact that men in the United States are more likely to abuse others. The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live, as no one has the right to life at someone else's expense.

Women have a constitutional right to expect the protection of federal laws that prohibit unauthorized activities by men, cluttering up the world with their ignominious presence, and are denied equal protection by law enforcement, police departments or magistrates that fail to enforce those laws.

This is the only law we put conditions on before a police officer can enforce it. Men as a social category are the only criminals we protect by policies. No other crime or criminal gets this protection by our elected officials. The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see us barreling down on them, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won't protect them against us; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in his forceful, dynamic pants.

Studies and reports have cited alarming statistics: Men commit about 91% of all homicides, and they commit 98% of all sexual assaults. Gratuitous violence, besides 'proving' he's a 'Man', serves as an outlet for his hate and, in addition--the male being capable only of sexual responses and needing very strong stimuli to stimulate his half-dead self--provides him with a little sexual thrill.

Phoenix runs second in the world in kidnappings and third in the United States for violence. Arizona has become the home-invasion, carjacking, identity-theft capital of the nation. These are not statistics Arizona should be famous for.

The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy. Enough is enough. The laws must be enforced.

I pledge that if we eliminate all men in this state, the result will be less crime and lower taxes. The costs of these crimes are far more than financial to our citizens, and HB 2280 will help make Arizona a safer place.

"What is this?" you must be asking. An op-ed piece taken from a sci-fi novel depicting a feminist semi-utopia? Well, it is a stretch to imagine women's livelihood and bodily integrity being considered valuable, much less a priority, but it is not sci-fi or fantasy. This is a hodgepodge of an editorial by Russell Pearce with some nouns and statistics altered, with some gems from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (SCUM stands for Society for Cutting Up Men).

While I disagree with most of Solanas's manifesto, it is an example of an extremist position. And though Russell Pearce, our dishonorable anti-immigrant senator, would be repulsed by the SCUM Manifesto, I insist that his position is equally unreasonable. He has been advocating for dealing with the crimes committed by some of a certain class of people by removing the whole class of people (undocumented immigrants), even though those crimes are also committed by others. He has praised Sheriff Arpaio for being the only one to do “preventive law enforcement”. What can be made of that other than he prefers to stop crime before it is even committed. What happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?

Of course, Pearce is saying that undocumented immigrants have already committed the crime inherent in being in the country illegally, though clearly he needs to defend this point ad nauseam because crossing a man-made line is just not something most people find important. The satirical piece is a bit of an exaggeration, as Pearce probably wouldn't publish such harsh words about immigrants as Solanas did about men. For one, he learned his lesson when he forwarded out an email from the National Alliance, a white supremacist organization. And two, it's just not politically useful. In addition, Pearce doesn't have to make insults--it is implicit in his position. He unflinchingly equates all undocumented immigrants with murderers and rapists.

The change in references to “illegals” to men in Pearce's op-ed were made so one can see that he is targeting a whole class of people to prevent the violent crimes that some of them commit. No doubt it seemed really extreme to the reader, particularly because men in general are not seen as the "other" like immigrants are. Despite the fact that the statistics about men committing such crimes are true and far worse than the statistics about undocumented immigrants, no one, aside from Valerie Solanas perhaps (tho she seemed less concerned about violence than men’s dullness and egocentricity), would propose that such pre-crime fighting should be exercised to thwart male-perpetrated violence.

What would seem absurd to most people, unfortunately, is to actually get at the root of the problem regarding violent crime. Mental health issues, poverty, social alienation; racist, heterosexist, capitalist patriarchy. But instead, undocumented immigrants are scapegoated for various problems including the crimes that a few commit, usually due to the fact that they must live a criminal, clandestine, and desperate lifestyle, one which is rewarded by exploiting others. Meanwhile there are worse criminals who don't have to be secretive because they are part of the establishment.


Russell Pearce's op-eds which ran with similar tho not exact text in two publications: http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/141045
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2009/06/24/20090624pearce25.html
The SCUM Manifesto: http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm

ALEC thinks they're meeting in Scottsdale, AZ this November...

ALEC thinks they're meeting in Scottsdale, AZ this November...
 
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a massive non-profit body that brings corporations and legislators together to draft "model" legislation.  For example, AZ Senator Russell Pearce and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest private prison firm, have been members for years.  ALEC finalized the model legislation which became, almost word for word, Arizona's SB1070, aka "Support Our Law Enforcement."  It's the latest in the historical pattern of colonization, slave codes, convict leasing, and the drug war, that CREATES crimes and therefore criminals, for profit.
 
With British Petroleum (BP) and the Koch brothers as some of their funders, ALEC has pushed for Three Strikes and Mandatory Minimum sentencing, as well as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.  More than 200 of ALEC's model bills became actual laws throughout the country over the past year.

We're a group of people in occupied Indigenous lands, now called Arizona, who demand the end of SB1070 and 287g, the criminalization—and then the incarceration—of migrants, and the militarization of the border. We oppose private prisons, detention centers, and security companies, not simply because they are private, but because we are sickened by profiteering on human misery.   ALEC desires "free markets" and "limited government," which means they use the state to support profit-making, the continuance of colonization, and neo-liberal policies (NAFTA, CANAMEX, etc.) that draw lines, make laws, and build freeways and prisons to exploit labor and the earth.

Whether maintained by the state or corporations, we're against all systems of control.  We are for freedom of movement for all people.
 
ALEC should know there are a million better things to do with their time than plotting mass incarceration.  But there’s nowhere we’d rather be than confronting their meeting. We're calling for four days of action here in occupied Onk Akimel O’odham lands from November 29th - December 3rd, 2011, with an emphasis for action on November 30th (N30!).  We encourage a creative diversity of tactics on N30, the 12th anniversary of the Seattle uprising against the WTO.  No matter the acronym, ALEC is no different than all the other gangs of businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats that we’ve been resisting for over 500 years.

In solidarity with everyone locked up and locked down in AZ, and all O’odham, Yaqui, Lipan Apache separated by the border, and anyone dispossessed by the wealthy and powerful… 

Project Baldwin
projectbaldwin@riseup.net


see also: azresistsalec.wordpress.com

NOLA Anarcha- Why Anarchists Should Protest the ALEC Conference

It is important for everyone interested in the topics I write on here to know what ALEC is.  I've written a bit about it on a few occasions, and included a bit about them in the video I compiled.

ALEC is meeting in New Orleans in just a few short weeks.  ALEC protests have thus far mostly called for transparency and similar watered-down demands.  The article I include below calls on anarchists to participate.  What I like about the article is that it argues that anarchists should be involved not so much because of the specifics of ALEC's heinousness, but because of what they represent.

While ALEC's dealings aren't a meaningful divergence from the normal machinations of power, it is easier for people to see that the system's a sham, and easier for them to finger the true culprits, when corporations are writing their own legislation. This is why the anti-ALEC organizing to confront those economic power structures is worth supporting.

The article below didn't emphasize the privateness of prisons the way a lot of websites and articles do.  At the same time, the reason I put together the video "Private Prisons in a Wider Context" is because ALEC and privatization of prisons is part of a broader trajectory that we must oppose on that macro scale, which is something I'm seeing very little discussion of so far.

Why Anarchists Should Protest the ALEC Conference in New Orleans, August 5th

via NOLA Anarcha Blog ---

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is coming to town! They are a bunch of nasty fuckers who bring corporations together with state legislators so corporate lawyers can hand pre-written bills to the politicians, who then try to get the bills passed in their state legislatures.


ALEC has been making the news a lot recently, with NPR pieces[pt.1, pt.2] about how, in meetings with private prison corporations, they wrote the infamous SB1070, the anti-immigrant law that anarchists and others have been fighting against in Arizona.

Leaked documents from inside ALEC prompted an interview segment on Democracy Now! The documents show that ALEC, in partnership with it's corporate members, actually wrote many pro-corporate laws that have since gone into effect, including free trade agreements that were a main focus of the anti-globalization movement many anarchists participated in after the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.

And on the Huffington Post, an article explains how ALEC is carrying forward the ideological program of deregulation and privatization pushed by Milton Friedman. This simplistic, fundamentalist capitalist ideology has had many negative local effects, as was mentioned in a recent article on this blog.

Now, anarchists have no illusions about the fact that big business owns and runs the government, but at least corporate power usually fears public anger that arises from the blatant merger of State and corporate power enough to put on a political puppet show for us! Mostly, the way elites legitimize the unequal and unjust system that they preside over to the rest of us is to make sure that it at least has the appearance of people, through elected politicians, getting to decide democratically what happens in our country. ALEC doesn't bother with that populist song and dance, they facilitate the outright penning of legislation by corporations themselves becoming law. So we end up with things like Immigration Policy, brought to you by Corrections Corporation of America! etc...

Beware the Funders of Immigrants’ Rights

What would make a giant foundation headed by rich people be interested in donating money to so many groups promoting social justice? What’s Ford Foundation’s interest in all the immigrants’ rights non-profit organizations that are involved in Arizona (and beyond)? While a member of the Board of Trustees at Ford Foundation is simultaneously on the Board of Directors at none other than the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)[1], Ford funds groups who have campaigns against CCA.[2] Other groups[3] also funded by Ford, are working on campaigns to counter the racist overpopulation myths that have been promoted by institutions like the Population Council who have received close to $100 million from Ford[4]. This speaks not so much of blatant hypocrisy, but that those in charge of the Ford Foundation have a completely different agenda than a lot of the groups they fund.

The publication in 2007 of the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded put out by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence sparked discussions about the role of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)[5] in movements. The book delves into “…the way in which capitalist interests and the state use non-profits to (1) monitor and control social justice movements; (2) divert public monies into private hands through foundations; (3) manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism; (4) redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society; (5) allow corporations to mask their exploitive and colonial work practices through ‘philanthropic’ work; (6) encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.”[6]

This article will focus on points one and three, addressing not only Ford’s historical involvement with the CIA and violent coups, but also their tendency to channel resistance into “reasonable” and “responsible” activities like legal defense and reform, and how their hollow push for “equality” is part of “progress” on their terms. Although there is emphasis here on the Ford Foundation and how it may impact the immigrants’ rights movement, this article also addresses funding from other foundations[7], private donors and the government, which may have similar impacts on groups, as does the desire to win over politicians, mainstream media, etc. This is about whether the world we want to live in is compatible with that of any funder or anyone in positions of power whether they’re promoting social justice or not. This is about how people orient themselves in relation to the current power structure. 


History of Manipulation

Many of us are engaged in a battle against the deeply engrained myths about overpopulation which are part of the attack on the fourteenth amendment which gives citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The argument that immigration means overpopulation and destruction, reeking of racism, has infiltrated various sectors of politics and activism, including environmental groups. These myths can partly be traced back to the Population Council, which Ford Foundation has been funding since 1954. What does it mean for organizations working to fight these ideas about immigrants and overpopulation to accept Ford Foundation funding?

A little context: “The 1957 report of an ad hoc committee, consisting of representatives from the Population Council…outlined the emerging strategy of population control. Titled Population: An International Dilemma, the report depicted population growth as a major threat to political stability both at home and abroad.”[8] As I have written in “Invasion by Birth Canal?” “The efforts to supposedly end poverty through population control…is actually an attempt to decrease the threats that Black/Brown and poor people’s desires for freedom and equality (or even just survival) represent to these systems,” and to deflect responsibility for the poverty which is usually due to “resource/labor extraction as part of colonialism, capitalism, and neo-liberalism.”[9] Ford Foundation and others, making themselves out to be benevolent funders of the “empowerment” and “education” of poor (brown) women, are making deflecting responsibility for poverty and environmental problems onto these same women in the U.S. and abroad.

Ford Foundation, along with other institutions has sought stability across the world including within the US. In so doing, it has made itself a player in supporting the promotion of population control, as well as Capitalist-influenced economic change that has been accompanied by coups and horrendous human rights abuses, such as in Indonesia:

“Sukarno’s independent foreign policy greatly antagonized Western powers, and during his regime international agencies such as the Ford Foundation focused on sending the country’s intellectual elite [known later as the Berkeley Mafia] abroad for training, in the hope that one day they would inherit power. Their investment paid off in 1966, when a bloody military coup, which left a million dead, brought the country’s current ruler, General Suharto, to power. Under the influence of Western-trained technocrats, Suharto embraced the philosophy of population control. Today he has become one of its most prominent spokesmen in the Third World.” Naomi Klein describes Ford’s involvement a bit more in depth, “The Berkeley Mafia had studied in the U.S. as part of a program that began in 1956… Ford-funded students became leaders of the campus groups that participated in overthrowing Sukarno, and the Berkeley Mafia worked closely with the military in the lead-up to the coup, developing ‘contingency plans’ should the government suddenly fall.”[10]

Extremely similar was Ford’s link to the 1973 coup in Chile, involving the Chicago Boys who were trained (funded by Ford) in Milton Freidman’s neo-liberal program at the University of Chicago.[11] The coup and the resulting detainment, torture, and deaths are an indirect result of Ford’s vision for stability and development.

Of course Ford Foundation is a different entity now and has turned to superficially supporting human rights efforts in response to the torture, disappearances, and murders. Yet, maybe Ford is not all that different. Naomi Klein wrote, “Given its own highly compromised history, it is hardly surprising that when Ford dived into human rights, it defined the field as narrowly as possible. The foundation strongly favored groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for the ‘rule of law,’ ‘transparency’ and ‘good governance,’”[12] which, as we’ll see, is part of a larger pattern.

In reading about Ford, one might get the sense that they didn’t fully comprehend the implications of that which was being taught to the Chicago Boys. Compared to many other institutions, Ford Foundation hasn’t pushed a neo-liberal agenda much. However, despite the fact that they have funded projects that are critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), they have also funded organizations with a more successful pro-NAFTA stance.[13] It is commonly acknowledged that NAFTA contributed to the loss of land and jobs in Mexico and so not only is Ford tied to the myths about overpopulation, they also share responsibility for the economic/political conditions that have led to mass immigration. It also appears that they are funding research that would help facilitate Homeland Security, as well as trade and growth in the border region, something that may cause more migrants and indigenous people to face displacement and dispossession.[14]

Private Prisons in a Wider Context: Video

It has been encouraging to see the awareness about the role of private prison companies in influencing criminalization of people grow and grow in the last year.  SB 1070 and the relationship between various legislators like Russell Pearce and private prison companies like CCA and Geo Group within the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and between governor Jan Brewer and CCA, has been exposed recently.  People had already started to address the connection between Wells Fargo and private prison-run detention centers that hold thousands of migrants in other parts of the country and a tiny bit here in AZ.  Now there are country-wide campaigns popping off against private prisons companies and against ALEC.

However, as horrible as the conditions in private prisons are (and they do tend to be several times worse than state-run facilities), and as obvious as it is that SB 1070 passed with great influence on the part of those who stand to make millions off of putting people in cages, I would hate to see the focus be solely on this most recent phenomenon.  An anti-private prison campaign can easily fall into the same traps as the "go after the real criminals" message, as though there's nothing wrong with the "criminal" "justice" system.  As though the criminalization of people who cross a man-made line is not similar to the criminalization of so many of the people in prisons today and historically.  We should also consider the limitations of previous nation-wide anti-private prison campaigns like the one that targeted Sodexho in the early 2000's. A focus only on the privatization of prisons can only divert energy from addressing the prison system in general; the various reasons people end up in jail or prison, and the ways in which the system will never and is not meant to address the real ills of our society.

I put together the following video to provide a complex yet still simplistic (limited by time and resources) history of criminalization of people for the benefit of the few.  Please share it with anyone you think would be interested.  This video is a follow up from several of my blog entries including No Borders or Prison Walls and What came first: the Racism or the Profit Motive? On Private Prisons' push for SB1070



Please also view the 2nd part.  It all ties together, and there's some good commentary towards the end.