Federal Goverment Prefers Their Way Better Than Arpaio's

The federal government has finally decided it doesn't exactly like how Arpaio has been enforcing immigration, huh?  Admittedly I can't help but get a little kick out of the blow to Arpaio's ego (and career?) but at the same time, I really can't stand the idea that people would be celebrating the federal government for finally putting their foot down against maltreatment of migrants.  Why?

I broke it down almost three years ago in my blog post, Federal Government will not be Maricopa County's Savior, one of the main points being that the federal government is just as bad if not worse in handling the immigration issue.  I think of Arpaio as an extremist clown- he is a spectacle that pushes the limits of what the public will accept.  He makes nearly everyone else who is pro-immigration enforcement (aside from Pearce who was right there with him) look responsible and reasonable.  So the federal government militarizes the border, holds thousands of migrants in detention centers and/or deports them, still conducts huge raids (Obama's raids surpassed previous ones, i.e. here and here), etc,. but they get to decide, to the delight of many, that Arpaio just went to far because he's been using his federal authority to discriminate. 

"The Department of Homeland Security is troubled by the Department of Justice's findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office," Napolitano said in a statement. "Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust. DHS will not be a party to such practices. Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO's 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office access to the Secure Communities program." (Source).

Apparently the federal government knows how not to erode the public trust. For similar reasons I have a problem with people focusing on the "innocent" victims of racial profiling and such.  Sure, go after the real criminals, we won't question that concept, just as long as all the people caught up in the deportation/detention system are the ones you say you're going after- because blatant maliciousness and hypocrisy erode the public trust, the status quo doesn't.

Yes, I'd like to see Arpaio gone, just as I liked seeing Russell Pearce gone (it'd be better if he was goner) but the illusion of victory distracts from what's really happening.  As I've mentioned numerous times, the Phoenix PD continues to deport more people than MCSO, but they do it without all the media hubbub, and therefore without comment from Stephen Lemons and migrant rights groups.  Arpaio is the face that can be pasted to a piñata, but he's not the only one we should be hitting with the metaphorical (or not) stick.

Some of what I wrote in early 2009 is pretty out-dated, but the following concluding paragraphs are more timeless.

One problem with appealing to the government is that to do so would require not being a threat. But any real just solution to the “immigration problem”, inevitably involving the dismantling of NAFTA and other neoliberal projects, as well as a serious change in social/political structure, is and always will be a threat to the government.

Another problem is that the government has an interest in appearing to be able and willing to deliver justice. But overall it is not in its interest to truly liberate the people from injustice and in fact its existence is actually antithetical to such an action. It would like to have people ask instead of demand changes, however, and would like us to think of it as a benevolent force in such cases when it’s actually worth the time to make reforms that benefit the people. Therefore, if we ask and they give, they are the heroes. If we demand and they give, they are still the heroes although we still have some sense of having played a part.

Related, the government is not a just one. We cannot expect a government that has been built on racism and continues to practice it in various ways (much higher rates of incarceration of people of color than whites, lack of indigenous rights, wars, just to name some examples) to be a force against white supremacy. The operator of immigration detention centers (or the ones who outsource private detention facilities), the performer of raids, is not the one whose going to save us from the similar actions of the Sheriff. He is doing their work for them. He's just doing it in an extra "look how demeaning i can be to these people" way. If the federal government does anything about it, it will only be to legitimize and continue its own actions and those of other jurisdictions.

Law Enforcement Doesn't Stop Sexual Assault: On the MCSO Controversy

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

While it's embarrassing for the MCSO that former investigators' claims led to media attention such as MCSO priorities blamed for sex-crimes snafu, I cringe when thinking about how this will be framed, as usual, that regular police departments who are not led by extremist clowns like Arpaio, do a fine job at dealing with sex-crimes.  Interestingly, the articles I read barely mention Arpaio's focus on immigration, whereas independent media like Sheriff Arpaio ignored rape cases for years does.  It is clear that solving sexual assault cases took a back seat to the politically-motivated anti-immigrant campaign of attrition.  Yet this is not to insinuate that law enforcement is meant to prevent or even solve crime for the most part- particularly when it happens to especially-marginalized people.

Let's contrast this recent MCSO controversy with the situation that is rarely talked about: Immigrant Detainees: The New Sex Abuse Crisis.

There is abundant evidence that rape is a systemic problem in our immigration detention facilities—for women, for men, and, as the Women’s Refugee Commission has documented, for children. In 2010, Human Rights Watch released a report based on over fifty known incidents and allegations of sexual abuse of immigration detainees. The American Civil Liberties Union has discovered 185 government reports of such allegations since 2007, and a senior ACLU staff attorney says this is only “the tip of the iceberg.”

For crossing a man-made line in the sand in an unauthorized way, people are made particularly vulnerable to abuses inside and outside the prison system.  Sometimes the coyotes assault those they're helping to smuggle across the border.  Men have dressed as ICE agents to assault women.  Real ICE agents, police, and detention officers get away with abuses of this sort all the time.  Whether this behavior is excused or ignored because of racism or because the survivor is "illegal", it is made easier and more commonplace because of the criminalization of people.

Police or ICE officials sometimes make themselves out to be saviors of people held against their will, such as in drop-house busts in cases where migrants are held for ransom, only to turn around and hold the migrants in their own cages, where many of the same abuses occur.  The question that arises while people are calling out Arpaio for de-prioritizing sexual assault cases is, whose bodily integrity matters?  Are we considering the cases of those who get picked up for overstaying their visa?  Do they even have the choice to report the crimes perpetrated against them?

Terrified of deportation and separation from their families, immigrants in detention are often extremely reluctant to file grievances against facilities run by the very people who can expel them from the country; and there is little question that deportation is sometimes used as retribution against immigration detainees who complain, and sometimes as a way of forestalling investigations into abuses. And it’s clear that facilities holding people who do not feel able to complain are particularly fertile grounds for abuse, as are institutions that can easily deport witnesses against them. 

What comes to mind is the situation with criminalization of sex-workers, especially where it overlaps with immigration.  While sex-trafficking does occur, laws that are written to supposedly curb sex-trafficking actually make things worse for sex-workers.

As Nandita Sharma said in an interview,

Anti-trafficking legislation is used to target so-called “illegal migration.” Instead of placing the blame for migrants’ vulnerability on the restrictive immigration policies of national states that force people into a condition of illegality, it blames those who are actually facilitating their movement across borders... Anti-trafficking legislation criminalizes people who facilitate migrants’ entry into national states. I think this is the underlying agenda behind anti-trafficking legislation. It offers ideological cover to target both the migrants themselves and the people who facilitate their movement. In this way, anti-trafficking legislation strengthens border policing...

Let me give you two examples of how anti-trafficking legislation actually increases the vulnerability and exploitation that many women migrants face. First, anti-trafficking legislation targets people who are helping women cross borders. This raises the cost of moving across borders and, as a result, women have to go further into debt in order to do so. Second, by imposing these enormous penalties – which, in Canada, can include a life-sentence and in the United States can include a death sentence – those facilitating movement make migrants use routes that are less safe. People are being forced to cross borders in very vulnerable places like deserts and mountains, places where hundreds of migrant bodies are found dead every year. Anti-trafficking legislation is thus making migration less safe for women.

Jessica Yee was also interviewed:

Women around the world, especially racialized women, shoulder the burden of labour that doesn’t get acknowledged or reported. Forced labour and exploitation are reported even less. When we’re talking about “trafficking,” people assume we’re talking only about sex work, and only about cross-border trafficking. We need to remind ourselves that sexual slavery and the forcing of sexual acts are not the only kinds of exploitation, even though they seem particularly salacious compared to other forms of forced labour. We also need to understand that “trafficking” takes place within nation states, and against Indigenous people.

Many people uncritically accept the conflation of trafficking and sex work. The same people who think it is taboo to talk about sex are the first to suggest that this is the number one issue of forced labour, but it’s not. And people who are actually being trafficked and moved against their will receive no attention because the state is so focused on raiding massage parlours and arresting women who are sex workers. This neglect occurs in the name of righteousness and “saving” women, yet it is merely the further colonization of women’s bodies, women’s spaces, and women’s choices.

(Listen to the radio show here).

This is all to familiar to those of us who had been following the situation of the migrants in Maricopa County who were charged with conspiracy in human smuggling cases.  Even though the law wasn't meant to go after migrants themselves, hundreds of migrants were charged with conspiracy by MCSO over the last few years.  While many who didn't take a guilty plea were not convicted, MCSO was still able to get them caught up in the legal system because they could take them in under reasonable suspicion.  And even though the authors of the bill said they didn't intend for the law to be used that way, it was clearly an effort to cut down on migration, while likely increasing the risks of those involved in a similar way as the sex-trafficking laws discussed above.  This is also similar to the ways in which the Employer Sanctions Law should really be called the Employee Sanctions Law because many more employees have been arrested under the guise of going after employers, few of whom have seen any consequences (Another workplace raid targets workers not bosses).

The criminalization of unauthorized movement, drugs, and sex-work is done allegedly for the sake of minimizing violence, issues of security, and health problems, when in fact it perpetuates these things.
The badges, guns, and official vehicles, this assumption that law enforcement are never/rarely law-breakers, allows violations to occur against people, not to mention the drug smuggling enabled by the authority provided to various agents (Mexican Smugglers Exploit the Corrupt Reputation of U.S. Border Officers).  This is not about the unfortunate bad apples who spoil the barrel- this is a systemic, institutional problem.  And even while Arpaio gets publicly called out for deprioritizing sex-crimes, it is not as though the media doesn't praise the (other) police as well as perpetuate victim-blaming.

ALEC Resistance Continues with SRP Protest

As a follow-up to my last post, I want to say, that I had not closely seen the banners in the following photo, which clearly show a more radical message. Of course there were others, but I felt that overall it was not an adequate attempt at drawing a bigger picture of people. It's difficult however, as when I found myself explaining ALEC to passersby tonight, since so few people have ever heard of it, it makes sense to just stick to the basics. Anyway, these banners had great messaging.



When I wrote my last piece I also make a distinction between tactics and message. I include the call for shutting down ALEC more as tactics than messaging. Again, many people were down with the "shutdown" message as well as the actual tactics which were as close as could be gotten to that goal, which you can read about here.

Check out this zine also: N30 Shutdown ALEC zine

I was delightfully surprised about the protest planned for the morning of Dec 2nd at the Salt River Project (SRP), which is a local energy company and an ALEC board member, and has collaborated with Peabody Coal (another ALEC member) for resource extraction. I wasn't aware of the issues with SRP specifically and so I imagine very few other people were until this action. This action definitely addressed the broader issue of colonization, which was present at the N30 event, but perhaps a bit drowned out. Although several people involved with Occupy Phoenix showed up, some of whom were down with what was going on while others didn't get it but showed up because they got the message to, this action steered away from the occupy message. It helped to make clear that the opposition to ALEC is not just coming out of occupy, even though the media seems to be portraying the N30 action that way.

Please check out the following independent media: BREAKING NEWS: Indigenous Elders & Supporters Occupy ALEC Member Salt River Project Headquarters
PHOTOS & VIDEO Indigenous Elders & Supporters Occupy ALEC Member Salt River Project Headquarters
and more at http://azresistsalec.wordpress.com/

ALEC Protests: Any more radical than Bush protests?

Considering that ALEC has not been shut down (yet?), I'm concerned that some of the message has been lost in the interest of gaining numbers and exposure. I do think it's important to expose ALEC, and that has been accomplished on a large scale over the last year, with this protest in Scottsdale being the largest and most militant yet.

I've been concerned about ALEC being the new public enemy #1 when in fact they are just a good example of the larger system(s) at work that affect laws to the benefit of the rich and powerful. So we're talking colonization, capitalism, slavery and the continued criminalization of people of color, which included borders and prisons, etc. There certainly are benefits to the exposure of the World Trade Organization (WTO) culminating 12 years ago, but in a sense, it focused on neo-liberalism/globalization at the expense of a focus on capitalism.

While ALEC came to be exposed to us in AZ because of its links to SB1070 and private prisons, I was concerned that the private-ness of prisons would be the focus, rather than the history of criminalization people, primarily people of color, which has also benefited the rich and powerful. But while I don't know a lot about the messages coming out of the liberal/progressive/democrat groups that are also opposing ALEC, it seems that even the private prison connection is not the main focus. And with the occupy rhetoric, ALEC can just be understood as representing the 1%.

Today I asked myself what made these ALEC protests different than the old Bush protests where democrats and anarchists gathered together to oppose a common enemy. Not to say we shouldn't oppose a common enemy, but it is clear to anarchists (for the most part) that democrats can be just as bad if not worse in their slimy deceptive ways. Or they don't have to be deceptive, it's that those who would oppose Obama's higher rates of raids and deportations are more isolated because the left is too afraid or enamored to oppose Obama. It's similar to how Arpaio has been the face of evil anti-immigrant schemes, while the Phoenix PD has made more arrests than MCSO and with hardly a peep from the immigrants' rights movement.

All this is intended as constructive criticism and self-criticism. What is it that we'll wish we had done differently, and is it to late? The indigenous gathering was very encouraging. There will be more media releases that address the wider context. It was great that the "SHUTDOWN ALEC" message did not alienate many people, even if it hasn't resulted in the achievement of that goal. I hope that now that ALEC has been further exposed, we can bring the bigger issues into the forefront. Because if ALEC didn't exist, there would still be prisons, borders, colonization...

It's the never-ending conundrum: say what only anarchists will say at the risk of total isolation, or compromise a bit in hopes that people will slowly be drawn towards being open to what only anarchists will say. I honestly fall somewhere in the middle of these, but sometimes more towards the former.

See also: ALEC protest Wednesday
ALEC in context...
Private Prisons in a Wider Context: Video

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