Arizona Rising

Arizona's ethnic cleansing continues apace. The Los Angeles Times reports that Latino merchants are fleeing the state in droves for fear of the new immigration law. See undocumented aliens tend to buy things from Latino merchants and the shop-owners don't want the police snooping around. Rage Against the Machine is holding an LA-based concert to encourage the boycott of Arizona. Local rock bands in Pheonix think that it might be better for bands to come to the state and openly protest the law. All in all, the tourist business is evaporating much like it did during the boycott over Arizona's refusal during the 1990s not to honor Martin Luther King Day. That boycott cost the state hundreds of millions in revenue. It's likely this one will be even more costly.

Local Arizona television stations are beginning to investigate the assertions of Gov. Jan Brewer about the problem itself and have found almost everything she has said is flat out wrong. She refuses to comment on camera about these little discrepancies. One fine piece of reporting discovered that one group will profit handsomely by the law--the Corrections Corporation, which runs private prisons and detention centers for illegals. They apparently are paid over a $140 million a year for their services in Arizona alone.And the catchy thing about the new law--which its proponents will not tell you is that it ensures undocumented workers will stay longer in the States, even if detained. So who benefits--the chief of staff of the Governor,who was an employee of Corrections Corporation, and his wife, who is a lobbyist for the company, as well as a senior policy aide, who also was an employee of the company. We don't know whether Gov. Brewer herself is on the take for this deal. So rather than run a nice tourist resort or hotel, it's more profitable for you to run a prison for undocumented illegals--a new boom business in the state.

It seems John McCain keeps tripping over himself with his embrace of the Arizona state law. It seems his sheriff for that "Danged Fence" not only appeared willingly on a white power radio station. But he even said that the only politician who really interested him was David Duke. You'll recall I wrote that the real sheriff from the area of the fence was an Hispanic-American who thought the whole thing was ridiculous. The A3P, the new white power group based in California, has donated to the Arizona state legal defense fund to pay to defense the state against all the lawsuits.

So how does one of the chief inspirations for the teabaggers, George Washington, feel about immigration? After all if you are a conservative constitutionalist, you must obey the Founding Fathers. This Founding Fathers thing is not turning out very well for the teabaggers. Washington said," The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges..."

Having come from undocumented aliens, it seems to me that white Americans need to be a little humble about this subject. Even the native Americans came from across the Bering Straits so none of us are "from here". Do undocumented immigrants create more crime? Actually, the statistics show they create less for the obvious reason they fear deportation. Do the undocumented take more of our medical services as was argued by the Right during the healthcare debate? A Kaiser Permanente study actually showed that white Americans go to the Emergency Room 20%, while undocumented immigrants represent 13%. Do undocumented immigrants take away from American jobs? Actually the CATO Institute did two studies that show just the opposite--undocumented immigrants add to the economy and their presence in the United States creates jobs. The last Administration had the US Government conduct similar studies, which showed the undocumented immigrants are overall an economic boon to the country. Will the fence stop the traffic of undoumented workers? Apparently, there are studies that show it won't and that politicians even argue it's merely symbolic.

For a very nice essay on all this, read Jorge Ramos' A Country for All:An Immigrant Manifesto (Vintage, May 2010,153 pages). Mr. Ramos, a journalist for Univision, makes the above points but with much more detailed data. After you read Mr. Ramos' essay, you realize that the great immigration problem is totally manufactured--then and now. While he won't say it, it's all about race and ethnicity and has been since the 1920s, when we really started controlling immigration.

America first tried to restrict immigration with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was meant to curtail the Chinese population in California and the Western states. It coincided with the Gold Rush and the flood of Easterners trying to settle in California. And then America didn't return to the issue until 1921 with the Quota Law,which placed numeric limits on immigrants from certain countries and was heavily influenced by the racial studies being done by American groups, who advocated the intellectual superiority of certain groups over others. Then, inspired by JFK, there was the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened the door to immigrants from all over the world. For the last three decades, various groups such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Rand Corporation have done countless studies, which show the immigrant--legal or undocumented--contribute more to our society than they take away. In fact, one study showed that when the Immigration Act of 1986 was passed, that it was the tax revenues from immigrants that stabilized the economy during that time of deep recession.

If you were a member of my political party, The Pragmatist Party, you would legalize the undocumented and call it a day. Instead, we have proposals for immigration reform ,which will be a nightmare for undocumented immigrants already here. They will have to wait 13 years before they can become citizens. And the fence will be created to the tune of about $15 billion and will only interrupt the migration of animals and probably bring a few to the brink of extinction. And all this is if immigration reform passes. If it doesn't, we will see more nativism and racism against Latinos and the deportations will accelerate as they have been durng the Obama Administration.

Of course, you could adopt the Rush Limbaugh solution of shipping all undocumented back to their countries. The Pew Foundation estimates there are 12 million undocumented here. Homeland Security says 10.5 million. These could all be rounded up in the public view of the world and interned in the Glenn Beck FEMA camps and then flown back to their countries. While our own self-image as a nation of immigrants would be destroyed forever and we would have put the final kinife into out world image, at least this program would serve as an economic stimulus for our airlines and as a side benefit then the rest of us could get meals and free baggage again.

So let's check off the Immigration issue as another thng that doesn't concern me. Next issue is Social Security, which is under attack again with the Republicans threatening to raise the retirement age and cut benefits in the holy name of the national debt. The Social Security has literally nothing to do with the national debt. Harry Reid talked at the Netroots Nation conference that he had just received two reports on the state of social security. Both concluded Social Security will pay full benefits until I am 100--not 86 as I wrote before--and then would pay off about 80% benefits after that for about a period of 10-15 years and then to 60%--all this if we do nothing. There is virtually no compelling reason to raise the retirement age to 70, especially if you have any consideration of blue collar workers, which apparently we do not. So anyone telling you Social Security is in trouble, they are simply lying to you. Even my ideas of raising the FICA limit, which I think would be a good idea, was based on me being deluded into actually thinking there was a problem and I am marinated in politics. What is happening to the rest of Americans.

My last note for today concerns the troubling appearance in the teabagger movement of anti-semiticism. We already know about the racism and nativism but I hadn't seen any overt signs of anti-semiticism, although that is part and parcel of the white supremacist groups who have infiltrated the movement. Throughout the Midwest teabaggers are circulated a DVD, which purports to demonstrate that President Obama is in league with the Rothschilds to control the United States and turn it into a socialist country. My gut instinct is that this is the work of the LaRochites who have been trying to play the teabaggers. The motif is as old as the Third Reich. The Rothschilds were said by Hitler to be the ringleaders of the Jewish conspiracy to control the world's economy. Now the threat to the United States is President Obama and Jewish bankers. Sort of like Jewsvelt or Ike the Kike--highlights from our own sordid history of anti-semiticism. Why I flag this is that Countdown ran the results of a survey given GI's in World War II, which revealed an immense amount of anti-semiticism in our armed forces at that time. Then I discovered the appearance of this DVD, which shows the disease is never dead. As one survivor of the Holocaust commented about the teabaggers "the monster never stays in its grave."