The idea that pregnant women are crossing the Mexican border in droves in an effort to make their babies American citizens is mostly untrue, so it’s fitting that this week’s debate over the so-called problem has already morphed into a less substantial dispute over the term “anchor babies.” Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and several other GOP candidates used the term this week, prompting objections from those who say it’s a slur. “Children are widely seen as innocent and pure … yet there is an unspoken racial element there, for children of color are all too often pictured as criminals or welfare cheats in training,” Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, told NBC News.
Unsurprisingly, the man who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists has no problem with the term. At a press conference on Wednesday, Donald Trump snapped at a reporter who said it’s offensive. “You mean it’s not politically correct, and yet everybody uses it?” he said. “I’ll use the word ‘anchor baby.'”
Also unsurprisingly, Bobby Jindal was quick to side with Trump in the controversy du jour. He told Fox News on Thursday that people are “too politically correct” and “too easily offended,” adding, “The real issue here — yeah, I’m happy to use the term — but the reality is the real issue here is we need to secure our border.”
Jeb Bush also doubled down on his decision to take a slightly more Trump-esque tone. On Thursday, Bush got testy when a reporter asked if he regrets referring to “anchor babies” in a radio interview on Wednesday. “No, I didn’t. I don’t! I don’t, regret it!” Bush said. “Do you have a better term? You give me a better term and I’ll use it. Don’t yell at me behind my ear, though.” He dismissed the suggested phrase “children born of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.” as too clunky and noted that he merely said they’re “commonly referred to” as “anchor babies.” “I didn’t use it as my own language,” Bush said.
“From the depths of my heart, I look at someone like Jeb Bush, who really should know better and that all I can think of is the Spanish term, sinvergüenza, which means somebody who is completely without shame to attack children this way,” Representative Linda Sanchez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told NBC News.
As the New York Times recently noted, “anchor baby” isn’t the only derogatory term making a comeback in the 2016 race. During the 2013 immigration debate there was a push for media outlets and politicians to stop using the “I-word,” yet there was a question about “illegals” in the first GOP debate, and the preferred term “undocumented immigrants” has not caught on with Republicans.
Still, not everyone is embracing “anchor baby.” When asked about the issue in a CNBC interview published Thursday, Marco Rubio took the opportunity to show he’s more compassionate than his rivals on the immigration issue. “Well, these are 13 million — those are human beings,” he said. “And ultimately, they are people. They are not just statistics. They are human beings with stories.”
By: Margaret Hartmann, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 21, 2015
August 22, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Immigrants, Jeb Bush | Anchor Babies, Birthright Citizenship, Bobby Jindal, GOP Presidential Candidates, Linda Sanchez, Marco Rubio, Mexican Border, Racism, Republicans |
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He wanted to start a race war.
That, you will recall, was what authorities say white supremacist Dylann Roof had in mind when he shot up a storied African-American church in June. It might have surprised him to learn that we’ve already had a race war.
No, that’s not how one typically thinks of World War II, but it takes only a cursory consideration of that war’s causes and effects to make the case. Germany killed 6 million Jews and rampaged through Poland and the Soviet Union because it considered Jews and Slavs subhuman. The Japanese stormed through China and other Asian outposts in the conviction that they were a superior people and that Americans, as a decadent and mongrel people, could do nothing about it.
Meantime, this country was busy imprisoning 120,000 of its citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps and plunging into a war against racial hatred with a Jim Crow military. The American war effort was undermined repeatedly by race riots — whites attacking blacks at a shipyard in Mobile, white servicemen beating up Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, to name two examples.
So no, it is not a stretch to call that war a race war.
It ended on August 15, 1945. V-J — Victory over Japan — Day was when the surrender was announced, the day of blissfully drunken revelry from Times Square in New York to Market Street in San Francisco. But for all practical purposes, the war had actually ended nine days before — 70 years ago Thursday — in a noiseless flash of light over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One person who survived — as at least 60,000 people would not — described it as a “sheet of sun.”
The destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb — Nagasaki followed three days later — did not just end the war. It also ushered in a new era: the nuclear age. To those of us who were children then, nuclear power was what turned Peter Parker into a human spider and that lizard into Godzilla.
It was also what air-raid sirens were screaming about when the teacher told you to get down under your desk, hands clasped behind your neck. We called them “drop drills.” No one ever explained to us how putting an inch of laminated particle board between you and a nuclear explosion might save you. None of us ever thought to ask. We simply accepted it, went to school alongside this most terrifying legacy of the great race war, and thought nothing of it.
The world has seen plenty of race wars — meaning tribalistic violence — before and since 1945. Ask the Armenians, the Tutsis, the Darfurians. Ask the Congolese, the Cambodians, the Herero. Ask the Cherokee. The childish urge of the human species to divide itself and destroy itself has splashed oceans of blood across the history of the world.
The difference 70 years ago was the scope of the thing — and that spectacular ending. For the first time, our species now had the ability to destroy itself. We were still driven by the same childish urge. Only now, we were children playing with matches.
This is the fearsome reality that has shadowed my generation down seven decades, from schoolchildren doing drop drills to grandparents watching grandchildren play in the park. And the idea that we might someday forge peace among the warring factions of the planet, find a way to help our kind overcome tribal hatred before it’s too late, has perhaps come to seem idealistic, visionary, naïve, a tired ’60s holdover, a song John Lennon once sang that’s nice to listen to but not at all realistic.
Maybe it’s all those things.
Though 70 years after a flash of soundless light blasted away 60,000 lives, you have to wonder what better options we’ve got. But then, I’m biased.
You see, I have grandchildren playing in the park.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald, August 3, 2015
August 10, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Race War, White Supremacy, World War II | Atomic Bomb, Dylann Roof, Emanuel AME Shootings, Germany, Hiroshima, Japan, Jews, Nagasaki, Racism, VJ Day |
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Whether any of the Republican candidates for president will be perceived as having “won” the first prime time debate of this year’s primary season is unclear. In the initial coverage of the debate, however, one winner has emerged: Fox News. Many observers praised the tough questioning of the candidates. A particular target for rave reviews was news anchor Megyn Kelly. “She may not be in the presidential race, but it looks like Megyn Kelly earned at least the popular vote on Thursday,” wrote Elle’s Mattie Kahn. Her hometown newspaper beamed with pride about the debate’s “star.” And there’s plenty more where that came from.
I agree that at least some of this praise was justified—it may not be hard to get Donald Trump to whine, but Kelly was really onto something. Early on in the debate, I was struck by questions that were indeed tougher and more substantive than one would be likely to see from less consciously ideological media outlets. And I agree that Kelly deserves credit for addressing Donald Trump’s history of egregiously sexist comments (“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”)
Even better was the question Kelly asked Walker about his abortion policies. You might expect Fox News moderators to allow Republican candidates to sidestep their least popular views on the subject. To her credit, Kelly asked Walker to defend his position that bans on abortion should not even contain exemptions for the life of the mother—making the laws even more restrictive than they were in most states before Roe v. Wade—observing that Walker’s position was opposed by 83 percent of the public.
Given that the abortion debate is so often conducted on terrain Republicans would prefer, and not just on Fox News, this question was a welcome surprise and yielded important information about one of the Republican frontrunners, who confirmed his radical views.
But before we get carried away praising Kelly and the other moderators, we should keep a couple of things in mind. First of all, even if Kelly is a good journalist and asked some good questions last night, she has some views that are nutty enough that Trump would sign for them. In particular, she has expressed consistently bizarre and retrograde views on race: obsessing over the utterly irrelevant New Black Panthers as if Richard Nixon was still in the White House, defending the racist emails sent by police officers in Ferguson as normal, and insisting that the fictional Santa Claus “just is” white. Not to mention her willfully misleading attacks on Black Lives Matter.
Granted, the personal politics of the moderators don’t matter if the questions are fair. But even on this score Fox News has been overpraised. It’s certainly true that some of the candidates were asked tough questions—Trump, most notably, but also other candidates like Walker and Ben Carson. But consider the kind of questions that were given to Florida senator Marco Rubio:
WALLACE: All right, well, Senator Rubio, let me see if I can do better with you. Is it as simple as our leaders are stupid, their leaders are smart, and all of these illegals coming over are criminals?
WALLACE: Senator Rubio, when Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for presidency, he said this: “There’s no passing off responsibility when you’re a governor, no blending into the legislative crowd.”
Could you please address Governor Bush across the stage here, and explain to him why you, someone who has never held executive office, are better prepared to be president than he is, a man who you say did a great job running your state of Florida for eight years.
BAIER: Senator Rubio, why is Governor Bush wrong on Common Core?
WALLACE: Senator Rubio, more than 3,000 people sent us questions about the economy and jobs on Facebook. And here is a video question from Tania Cioloko from Philadelphia. Here she is. (begins video clip) “Please describe one action you would do to make the economic environment more favorable for small businesses and entrepreneurs and anyone dreaming of opening their own business.”
KELLY: Senator Rubio, I want to ask you the same question. But I do want to mention, a woman just came here to the stage and asked, what about the veterans? I want to hear more about what these candidates are going to do for our nation’s veterans. So I put the question to you about God and the veterans, which you may find to be related.
Rubio wasn’t so much thrown softballs as he was given softballs set up on a tee with 10 strikes and the defensive team told to leave the field. (When Kelly asked the last question, I expected her to ask Rubio his position on motherhood and apple pie too.)
The questioning, in other words, was much less fair than it might have seemed on the surface. Donald Trump, who isn’t going to win the nomination but has a toxic effect on the party as long as he’s in the race, was treated to a brutal inquisition. Rubio, who is arguably the most appealing general election candidate in the field but whose campaign is floundering, was thrown one life preserver after another. John Kasich and Jeb Bush were also treated more gently than the other candidates.
In other words, as Ed Kilgore noticed last night, the candidates who Republican elites would most like to see get traction were given much easier questions than the candidates Republican elites would prefer pack up and go away. Ultimately, Fox News gotta be Fox News.
By: Scott Lemieux, U. S. Contributing Opinion Writer, The Guardian; Talking Points Memo, August 7, 2015
August 9, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP Primary Debates | Abortion, Black Lives Matter, Chris Wallace, Ferguson, Marco Rubio, Megyn Kelly, Racism, Scott Walker, Sexism |
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One year ago, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer. Since then, the nation has debated the justice system more feverishly than any other period in recent memory. Most of the scrutiny has rightly fallen upon the police, which is where the justice system meets the people viscerally and sometimes fatally. Cops only have the power to arrest, though; the power to prosecute and put millions of Americans in prison—and more than a few to death—rests with prosecutors.
And too many are abusing that power.
Suppressing evidence, coddling informants, even outright lying are some of the instances of prosecutorial misconduct that sent away nearly half the 1,621 people convicted for crimes they didn’t commit since 1989, according to the University of Michigan Law School’s National Registry of Exonerations. These are only the cases we know about, and they are surely only a fraction of the wrongly convicted. Even so, the figure is stunning—especially when you consider that 115 of them were people condemned to die.
The punishment for bad prosecutorial misconduct is virtually nil. In a 2011 report on 707 such cases, only six prosecutors were disciplined. Almost all still have their licenses, and are still practicing law.
Almost nothing is being done to systematically fix prosecutorial misconduct despite multiple avenues available for reform and bipartisan agreement that there’s an epidemic on our hands. But, let’s face it, convicted criminals (even wrongfully convicted ones) don’t play well at the polls.
Over the next several weeks, The Daily Beast will dive into this blight on the judicial system. We’ll look at how money, race, and politics distort the judicial system, and incentivize even decent attorneys to misbehave. We’ll talk with some of the leading critics of the system, liberal and conservative. And we’ll hear some of the most appalling tales of prosecutors run amok—in many cases, involving attorneys still on the job, unsanctioned and undeterred.
The prosecutorial role is an unusual one in the American judicial system. Usually, attorneys have one client, and their responsibility is to advocate solely for that client’s interests. Prosecutors, however, have a dual responsibility. On the one hand, they are the government’s lawyers, charged with making the state’s best case against the accused. On the other hand, prosecutors are also part of the judicial system, and they are meant not simply to secure convictions, but to pursue justice.
At times, those two obligations conflict. When a prosecutor discovers potentially exculpatory evidence, he or she must disclose it—as confirmed by the Supreme Court in the 1963 Brady decision. No civil lawyer would do this; nor would any criminal defense lawyer. But prosecutors are uniquely cast in the dual roles of advocates and what some have called “ministers of justice.”
In theory, anyway. In practice, numerous factors cause many prosecutors to tilt toward convictions. Perhaps the best known recent example is the corruption trial of former Senator Ted Stevens, which resulted in his conviction, and in which the government was later found to have withheld exculpatory evidence. By that time it was too late for Stevens, who had already died.
America is the only country in the world in which many prosecutors are elected—and many of them run as being “tough on crime.” The disciplinary commission that sanctioned Durham County, North Carolina District Attorney Michael Nifong—prosecutor of the Duke lacross team on false rape charges—noted his upcoming primary election as a motivating factor for his misconduct. The pressure to produce wins has led to a “win-at-all-costs” mentality in some offices, especially when voters reward such behavior.
Perhaps most importantly, prosecutors are granted immunity for most kinds of misconduct. It’s easy to see the reasons for this policy: otherwise, every well-heeled convict would sue, clogging the system and making it impossible for prosecutors to do their jobs. At the same time, that immunity is so absolute that prosecutors simply get off scot-free, even when misconduct is established. Even worse, most states lack any meaningful oversight of prosecutors: no commissions, no review boards, nothing.
Then there’s race. Ninety-five percent of elected prosecutors are white, and two-thirds of the states that elect prosecutors have no black ones. Yet 40 percent of the incarcerated population is black and one in three black men will have spent time in prison. How is the justice system supposed to be seen as fair when this crucial element of it is almost exclusively run by white people?
Despite the racial divide, the response to prosecutorial misconduct and overzealousness has been striking in its bipartisan nature.
In some ways, the issue of prosecutorial misconduct is an ideal opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to work together. Republicans wary of overzealous state action become concerned “when district attorneys attack,” to quote the National Review. Conservatives also place a high value on public trust in the justice system, and are thus keen to root out bad prosecutors who may undermine it.
Judge Alex Kozinski, no bleeding heart liberal, recently called the problem an “epidemic,” excoriated a California prosecutor for trying to maintain a conviction (in probably the only appellate court recording to qualify as “viral” on YouTube), and proposed a host of major reforms.
Liberals, meanwhile, may see overzealous prosecutors not as anomalies within an otherwise just system, but as examples of an inherently unjustice system doing little to protect the vulnerable, especially people of color. Liberals tend to value fairness and compassion over the strong administration of justice, even when some guilty people may go free as a result. Thus they, too, are wary of prosecutorial misconduct, albeit for very different reasons from conservatives.
It’s odd, then, that so little has been done. For example, efforts to create an oversight commission in New York have failed two years in a row, and there is nothing on the congressional agenda.
That’s not for lack of proposed reforms, which The Daily Beast will explore in detail in the coming weeks. These include proposals to:
– Create oversight boards, like those that already exist for judges, to monitor, censure, and report misconduct;
– Allow the wrongly convicted to sue for monetary relief—including from the prosecutor’s office, if misconduct is established;
– Reduce prosecutorial immunity to a qualified, rather than absolute, form. In particular, open prosecutors to be tried for perjury if they have lied under oath;
– Eliminate the election of prosecutors, which distorts the incentives they face;
– Expand Brady requirements with model rules which states could adopt as they see fit. These could include an “open file rule,” in which all information about a case must be shared with defense counsel; and
– Investigate the racial disparity among prosecutors and treat it as a civil rights issue.
Perhaps the time for such reform is, at last, at hand. The seemingly unlimited use of police violence against people of color, and the failure of prosecutors to take action against it, has led to a crisis of confidence in the criminal justice system at large—one amplified by the racial disparities within that very system.
Is it possible that the left’s concern with racial justice, and the right’s concern with law and order, might converge in this area where reform is so desperately needed? Will there be progress at last?
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, August 8, 2015
August 9, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Criminal Justice System, Police Abuse, Prosecutorial Misconduct | African Americans, Alex Kozinski, Brady Decision, Democrat, Michael Nifong, Prosecutors, Racism, Republicans, Ted Stevens |
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The finances of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker got a rather stern once-over from National Journal on Monday.
“Walker has two credit-card debts of more than $10,000 apiece on separate cards and is paying an eye-popping 27.24 percent interest rate on one of them,” the Journal harrumphed, before quickly lasering in on the irony. “The Republican presidential candidate has cast himself as both a fiscal conservative leader and a penny-pinching everyman on the campaign trail, often touting his love of Kohl’s, the discount department store.”
Walker isn’t the first Republican presidential hopeful to get this treatment either. Back in June, The New York Times took Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to task for a “strikingly low savings rate” and some household purchases of questionable wisdom.
This is a deeply silly genre of journalism. It treats troubles the vast majority of Americans grapple with as vaguely scandalous. And it implicitly assumes the same rules of thumb that should guide household budgets should also guide the federal budget, which is catastrophically wrong.
More to the point, other details in the Journal piece offer a brief look at a presidential candidate of relatively modest means.
“Walker listed only six investments worth between $1,000 and $15,000, a whole life insurance plan worth between $15,000 and $50,000, and a deferred compensation plan from Milwaukee County worth between $15,000 and $50,000,” the Journal continued. Walker received a $45,000 advance for a book in the last year, and it looks like his annual salary since assuming the governorship in 2011 has been around $140,000. That’s certainly a lot of income compared to most Americans — it puts Walker just below the threshold for the top 10 percent — but it’s obviously nothing compared to the fortunes Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have amassed.
This gets at something poignant about Walker the politician, and by extension Walker the man. While most all presidential candidates and politicians have a significant amount of socioeconomic distance from the median American, Walker has less than most. Besides his income and wealth, Walker came from modest beginnings as a preacher’s kid in a small Wisconsin manufacturing town. He attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, but didn’t finish his degree — passing on one of the key status symbols that American elites use to separate themselves from the pack.
And yet few Republicans, and certainly no other Republican presidential candidate, has been so ferociously focused on grinding everyday workers into the ground.
Like any good conservative, Walker pushed massive tax cuts for the well-to-do through Wisconsin’s state budget, creating a hole he’s now trying to fill by slicing education spending. But he also drove a blistering and brutally successful push to crush Wisconsin’s public-sector unions, followed by “right to work” laws that will likely cripple the state’s private unions as well.
Nor does it look like Walker did this because Republican and business interests were demanding it — he did it because he wanted to, as a matter of ideology.
An explanation probably lies in the unique and poisonous way the history of race and class intersected in the Milwaukee political milieu Walker came from. In the early 20th century, large numbers of black Americans migrated from the South to northern urban centers. But no sooner had they put down roots than the mid-century collapse of manufacturing arrived, sucking away jobs and bringing poverty to the cities.
Black Americans had never been permitted to build up the wealth that white Americans had: Along with the aftereffects of slavery and the social consequences of segregation, they were initially excluded from policies like Social Security and the G.I. Bill, which helped build the white middle class. And racist policies like redlining and the construction of the highway system destroyed many of their neighborhoods and prevented them from accessing areas of economic vibrancy.
So when the white middle class fled to the suburbs, the poorer black populations could not follow. That set up Reaganite white suburbs, which surrounded and disdained the urban interiors of impoverished African-Americans, and all the vicious politics that followed. The funny thing, as Alec MacGillis laid out in a 2014 profile of Walker, was that this process came a few decades late to Milwaukee. The future governor cut his political teeth as a member of Milwaukee’s fleeing white upper-middle class, just as this conflict was reaching its apex.
So it should come as no surprise that those public-sector jobs Walker helped crush have also been one of the great economic havens where black Americans can actually earn a decent living.
For decades, American macroeconomic policy has done a terrible job providing enough work to keep everyone employed. That’s introduced a bottom-up desperation that’s trickled higher and higher over the years. On top of that, while America has a hidden welfare state for the rich and the upper-middle class, its explicit social safety net is skimpy and targeted at the poorest Americans. This creates a perverse circumstance in which many Americans in the middle of the pack feel left behind, while they see people with different skin colors and alien cultural habits — habits often shaped by poverty — receiving aid (however grossly inadequate).
More and more, American society is becoming a brute contest, in which the groups of varying power must trample one another for the scraps that fall from the elite table. This sort of divide-and-conquer effect, in populations that should be uniting over common interests and common foes, has a long history in U.S. labor struggles.
When people find themselves outside the elite inner circle, and see themselves as in a zero-sum economic game with impoverished subcultures that look and act different from them, the likes of Scott Walker is often what emerges from the ferment.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, August 5, 2015
August 7, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP Presidential Candidates, GOP Primaries, Scott Walker | African Americans, Conservatives, Education Cuts, Marco Rubio, Public Sector Unions, Racism, Right To Work Laws, Tax cuts, White Middle Class |
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