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FEEST Youth & KCFFI Partners testified last week at a public hearing on Land Use Code governing Seattle Urban Agriculture Uses. FEEST supports change in code/policy that make it easier for people in low income neighborhoods to grow, sell, by, prepare, & eat good food!
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What's Next for Arizona's SB 1070?
This morning at 12:01 a.m., SB 1070 went into effect in the state of Arizona. The most controversial portions of the law were blocked by Judge Susan Bolton when she issued her injunction ruling yesterday. But protesters are streaming into the Phoenix area today from all over the Southwest for a day of action and civil disobedience. Several groups have vowed not to comply with SB 1070.
Meanwhile, the modified law went into effect alongside promises from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to conduct another of his infamous immigration sweeps today. It will be his seventeenth. "I don't think the activists should be celebrating in the streets yet," Arpaio told the Arizona Capitol Times.
It should be an interesting day in the Grand Canyon State.
In its original language, SB 1070 would have made it a state crime to be caught without papers in Arizona, and would have allowed police officers to question any person's legal status while enforcing state and local law, and even civil code--like failing to recycle, or not cleaning up the weeds in your front yard. The law would have mandated that a police officer question any person they had "reasonable suspicion" to believe was undocumented. Further, a person who was arrested would have to be held in custody until their immigration status was confirmed. These are the parts of SB 1070 that were enjoined yesterday. Judge Bolton blocked those portions temporarily so she can preside over the lengthy court proceedings to now determine the constitutionality of those provisions.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law in April to great fanfare and controversy, dismissed the temporary injunction as "a little bump in the road."
"The federal government got relief from the courts not to do their job," she told reporters yesterday. "They need to step up, the feds do, to do the job they have the responsibility to do." She indicated that she planned to immediately appeal the injunction. If filed, that appeal will be heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
"This is an injunction, they haven't heard the merits of the bill," Brewer said. "This is just an injunction, this is just an injunction."
The portions of SB 1070 that still stand targed day laborers. They include a new statewide ban on entering a car when hired to work, and conversely, hiring someone who's entering a car that would obstruct the flow of traffic. Judge Bolton blocked another part that makes it illegal to seek labor.
Bolton did not enjoin the portions of SB 1070 that allow for the impounding of a car that's found to belong to a person who's undocumented or is used to transport people who are undocumented. Neither did Bolton enjoin a section that amends employer sanctions and adds new provisions against transporting and harboring undocumented immigrants. A provision barring cities in Arizona from forming "sanctuary" cities was also allowed to stand.
Yesterday's ruling was a response to the Department of Justice lawsuit against Arizona, and there are three outstanding motions for injunctions that Bolton did not respond to, although she mentioned the other cases in her ruling. Linton Joaquin, an attorney with the National Immigrant Law Center, which is one of the organizational plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, said on a telebriefing yesterday that there's still a long road ahead for SB 1070.
Attorneys from both sides will now return to Bolton's courtroom to begin the real proceedings, debating the constitutionality of the disputed portions of SB 1070--both those that were enjoined and those that were allowed to go into effect. That process could take months.
The Department of Justice's lawsuit against the state of Arizona rests on one clause in the Constitution, which says unequivocally that the federal government alone has the right to create and enforce immigration law. Of course there are many exceptions and tests to what's called the Supremacy Clause--complicated somewhat by the fact that the federal government actually does authorize local governments to assist in immigration enforcement, in the form of 287(g) and Secure Communities programs. The collection of six other lawsuits against SB 1070 charge that the law contains a slew of other constitutional violations (see our graphic breaking those suits down).
While attorneys hunker down for a lengthy legal battle, activists are ready to take to the streets today. Joaquin said now is also the time for people to diligently document their interactions with police and law enforcement. Already, reports abound of Arizonans who've been stopped by the police asking for their papers.
People are already gathered in Phoenix today to join a hundred-day vigil that's been going ever since Brewer signed SB 1070 into law on April 23. People met at 6 a.m. for a mass before marching to Sheriff Arpaio's office at 8 a.m. Vans of supporters are caravanning into the state, and dozens of solidarity actions have been planned from Brooklyn to Los Angeles today. We'll have images from those events later today.
Immigrant rights groups in Arizona are far from ready to claim victory yet. And many are trying to use the momentum against SB 1070 to demand an end to 287(g) and Secure Communities programs that allow for SB 1070-like enforcement and have been quietly unveiled in hundreds of cities. But Judge Bolton's ruling gives reason for cautious hope, at least in the short term.
"The judge ruled that Arizona cannot decide we are going to be a 'papers please' state for every person of color," said Isabel Garcia, a co-chair of the immigrant rights organization Derechos Humanos.
"We have the wind on our backs in a very, very long road to restoring civil rights protections to the state of Arizona," National Day Laborer Organizing Network legal director Chris Newman said yesterday. "We will continue all of our efforts on all fronts, legal, political and community organizing, to restore civil rights to immigrants and people of color in the state of Arizona."
The temperatures are already in the 90s in Phoenix, and there's talk of possible thunderstorms today--whether they'll come rom the skies or from the rising immigrant rights movement, it's hard to tell.
Domestic Workers Get Overtime Pay But No Union
After a six year fight, New York is now the first state to grant domestic workers the right to overtime pay, one day off per week, disability benefits, and unemployment insurance.
The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, signed into law by Gov. David Paterson earlier this month, is significant. It's breached through nearly a century of institutional neglect and standardized some basic human rights. But it does have one debatable feature: It doesn't allow collective bargaining among domestic workers, the bulk of whom in New York are women of color. In fact, the New York State's Department of Labor will be conducting a study with the explicit purpose of proving "once and for all, that collective bargaining would not be useful to domestic workers."
Organizers pushing to get the bill passed let this happen, sacrificing the collective bargaining option for the new protections. They felt collective bargaining wasn't critical right now because there isn't a counterpart on the side of employers with whom domestic workers could bargain as a group. According to Domestic Workers United, the lack of that employer counterpart proved advantageous these last six years since there wasn't organized opposition to the bill. But if domestic workers don't have a union holding lawmakers and employers accountable, what assurance is there that this bill will be effective or even enforced?
Immigrant workers may suffer the most without the right to collective bargaining. According to a survey by the Domestic Workers United, "an overwhelming majority of domestic workers are immigrants and 76 percent are not citizens." Given the language barriers and fear of deportation, these workers won't contact the Department of Labor. Collective bargaining would fill in the breach.
However, according to union organizer Stephen Lerner in the New Labor Forum, it might be time for the labor movement to go "beyond collective bargaining as we know it."
Lerner writes: "The lesson of recent years is that none of these [union] models alone---or in combination--- work because they are all, in some way, trying to repair and recreate the now-dead social compact-based labor relations system of the last century."
He suggests organizers "narrow the scope" of their demands and it's true that the work of Domestic Workers United, CAAV and Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles have proved that domestic workers can organize without the legal right to collective bargaining.
In an industry like domestic work, where workers negotiate their terms based on distinct levels of dependency and in an isolated work space, standardizing human rights might set a precedent for new labor relations and new forms of organizing.
Organizers nationwide are beginning to push for bills similar to New York's. It's not clear how much of a precedent New York is going to set. The California law that's going to be proposed still demands collective bargaining rights for domestic workers.
DREAM Act Moves to the Top of the List
In what can only be called a major win for youth activists, Democrats may finally be moving to pull the Dream Act away from comprehensive immigration reform. Yesterday, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to discuss the possibility of moving the Dream Act as a standalone bill.
In so doing, Reid proved he's not been deaf to the cries coming from outside--and occasionally inside--his office to pass the Dream Act this year. Yesterday Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who's been hosting three fasting Dream Act activists outside her Los Angeles office since last week, said that she supports "incremental change," code for a piecemeal approach that pursues smaller bills than one central overhaul to immigration reform.
The news comes on the heels of a week of public actions to get the Dream Act passed as a standalone bill. Last week, 21 Dream Act activists were arrested for a sit-in they staged in Democratic and Republican congressional offices in D.C. If passed, the Dream Act would allow hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth with a clean criminal record and a two-year commitment to either the military or college to adjust their status. Young people have been trying to pass some version of the Dream Act for almost ten years.
The new momentum around the Dream Act is also a tacit acknowledgment of what is by now plain fact: comprehensive reform won't happen this year. Beltway immigrant rights groups which have continuously urged the immigrant community to wait for comprehensive reform, seem to be coming around to this reality as well. The news about Reid's meeting with Pelosi came from America's Voice, a DC non-profit run by Frank Sharry, who's the former executive director of the National Immigration Forum. Sharry praised Reid's action on the Dream Act, calling it "the right thing" in the face of an intractable Congress. And yesterday, the Washington Post reported that other immigrant rights groups have decided to change course and put pressure on Congress to pass the Dream Act and Ag Jobs, the bill between farm worker unions and businesses that would provide employment authorization and legal residence for farmworkers.
But Democrats' habitual refusal to acknowledge the end of comprehensive immigration reform wasn't based on hopeful ignorance or even naivete so much as it was a strategy to hold off talk on immigration as mid-term elections near. In the meantime, Democrats have been able to keep some distance (but not that much) from Republicans, who make offensive and plainly untrue anti-immigrant claims regularly and with no provocation at all.
As activists well know, there's never a convenient time to discuss immigration. Congress has been trying to pass comprehensive immigration reform since before Sept. 11, and came close in 2006 and 2007, when millions of people across the country turned out for massive May Day rallies. Congress failed both times.
Still, political shifts in the movement don't come without their own growing pains.
As of yesterday, an unnamed non-profit had been pressing activists to take down a recording of a phone call between Dream Act activists and Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez in which Gutierrez scolds the Dreamers for their aggressive tactics. Dream Act activists would not publicly share the group's identity.
Other immigrant rights groups outside the Beltway have acknowledged the intra-movement controversies, but remain focused on their ultimate goals, which don't necessarily include comprehensive reform anymore. That comprehensive reform is desperately needed is common knowledge--- that there may be alternatives to it is much more controversial.
"Every movement goes through this. I think it's divisive, but only to a point," said Laura Rivas, a researcher with the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "It's only divisive on the top layer, the most public groups. But the people on the ground, organizing, doing the work...people all agree at least on what they're not going to accept."
"I can very openly say we disagree with the narrow legislative-only strategy that the mainstream groups have been espousing for the last few years, and channeling millions of dollars into," Rivas said.
In its current shape, immigration reform is little more than a package of enforcement-only legislation: increased funding for border security, more promises to extend and strengthen immigration enforcement for people who enter and live in the country without papers, and no end to detentions and deportations that have devastated immigrant communities.
"We agree that what we really need is rights and due process and a life free from fear and policing and without targeting," Rivas said, adding that her organization has been relying on old-fashioned organizing to fight the local immigration enforcement that's popping up in communities these days.
Sonia Guinansaca, a core member with the New York State Youth Leadership Council, which is pushing for the Dream Act, resisted pitting the Dream Act against comprehensive immigration reform. She says it's not an either-or proposition. "We want CIR, but the Dream Act is a stepping stone to that. Gutierrez said, "If we fail, let's fail together, but do we really want that? Do we want everyone to fail?"
"We want little steps. That's how you make change, and we need to recognize that," Guinansaca said.
Federal Judge Blocks Portions of SB 1070
[UPDATE 6:53pm ET] Attorneys on both sides of the lawsuit are already back behind their desks, sorting out the next steps in the legal challenge. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, speaking just after the ruling was announced, called it a "small bump in the road" and was undeterred by the partial injunction. Brewer announced immediate plans to appeal the injunction.
The National Immigration Forum praised the ruling as a "temporary victory," and took the opportunity to plug comprehensive immigration reform. The D.C.-based immigration reform coalition Reform Immigration for America held a call today to discuss to injunction and representatives from the group called the ruling a "decisive victory" against Arizona, and the beginning of a shifting "tide turning against the Arizona law."
Meanwhile, the mood was decidedly less celebratory in Arizona, where the modified SB 1070 is set to go into effect tonight at 12:01am. "The partial and temporary blocking of a law that should've never existed is welcome but in no way a victory," said Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "The conditions that created SB 1070 remain and are only worsened by the decision today."
The last word in reactions will go to Carlos Garcia, a leader with the immigrant rights organizing group Puente: "In Maricopa County, we've been living under 1070 conditions with Sheriff Arpaio for years. Many are celebrating today because some sections are being blocked. While they can breathe a sigh of relief for the minimal injunction, our breath catches with the added boots on our communities' necks."
The disconnect in messaging between Beltway groups and organizations on the ground stems from differences of opinion in strategy. Large immigrant rights groups remain invested in comprehensive immigration reform while other groups like NDLON and Puente have instead put their resources toward stopping SB 1070 and its cousins 287(g) and Secure Communities, the federal enforcement programs that link local law enforcement and ICE.
Both NDLON and Puente continue to press people not to comply with SB 1070 when it goes into effect tonight.
...................
[UPDATE 5:03pm ET] The Department of Homeland Security responded to Judge Bolton's injunction ruling with this statement:
The court's decision to enjoin most of SB1070 correctly affirms the federal government's responsibilities in enforcing our nation's immigration laws. Over the past eighteen months, this Administration has dedicated unprecedented resources to secure the border, and we will continue to work to take decisive action to disrupt criminal organizations and the networks they exploit. DHS will enforce federal immigration laws in Arizona and around the country in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens who pose a public safety threat and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor, as well as continue to secure our border.
"ICE works every day with local law enforcement across the country to assist them in making their communities safer and we will continue do so in Arizona. At the same time, we will continue to increase resources in Arizona by complementing the National Guard deployment set to begin on Aug. 1 with the deployment of hundreds of additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement personnel that will aid in our continuing efforts to conduct outbound inspections, patrol challenging terrain, and interdict illicit smugglers. We are focused on smart effective immigration and border enforcement while we work with Congress toward the type of bipartisan comprehensive reform that will provide true security and establish accountability and responsibility in our immigration system at the national level."
The White House has declined to comment on the ruling today.
...................
[UPDATE 3:27pm ET] Immigrant rights advocates are predictably relieved at Judge Bolton's injunction ruling today, which blocked the most controversial portions of SB 1070 from going into effect while attorneys battle over their constitutionality in the courts.
"Those enjoined provisions constituted their principle objectives," said Isabel Garcia, co-chair of the immigrant rights group Derechos Humanos. "It's a mixed bag, however. But the judge decided that Arizona cannot just decide we are going to be a "papers please" state for every person of color."
"The pressure and anxiety shouldered by Arizona families, businesses, churches and law enforcement agencies has been lifted for the time-being," said Tucson-based Border Action Network's executive director Jennifer Allen in a statement. "While there are still provisions of the law that we are concerned with and will monitor, we are elated that Judge Bolton blocked the most discriminatory, far-reaching provisions." The Border Action Network is one of the organizational plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit challenging SB 1070.
The group's original schedule of actions to protest SB 1070 will continue tomorrow as planned. Except tomorrow, people will also be "celebrating the court's recognition of the law's profoundly negative impact on the public interest," said Allen.
Garcia added that the bigger political landscape beyond SB 1070 is grim; even if the law is struck down eventually, she says there is much work ahead. "We've got a move by even our own president to militarize the border some more," Garcia said, referring the Obama's plan to send 1,200 National Guard to the border. They're set to be deployed later this week. Garcia said that today's ruling provided an opportunity to keep fight back against anti-immigrant legislation.
But everyone will be going back to court soon for what promises to be a long legal battle. Chris Newman, legal director for NDLON, summed up the prevailing sentiments after today's ruling: "We have the wind on our backs in a very, very long road to restoring civil rights protections to the state of Arizona."
...................
[UPDATE 2:41pm ET] Judge Bolton's 36-page ruling will take a minute to sift through, and there is already some confusion about which parts of SB 1070 have been enjoined.
Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit challenging SB 1070, said that overall, "the most pernicious parts" of the law were enjoined. "There is reason for optimism that we will restore civil rights to immigrants and people of color in the state of Arizona," he said.
SB 1070 made it a crime for day laborers to seek work in Arizona, but only part of that portion of SB 1070 was blocked. While Bolton enjoined a portion of SB 1070 that makes it illegal for those who are undocumented to seek and be paid for work, there was much more language regarding day laborers. Newman explained what's left over this way: "It is now a criminal offense for day laborers if they are obstructing traffic." He added, "A necessary element of this new crime is that they be obstructing traffic while soliciting work. We want to put Joe Arpaio on notice that merely because people are looking at day laborers doesn't mean that they are obstructing traffic."
...................
U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a ruling today, just hours before SB 1070 is set to go into effect tomorrow, blocking the most stringent portions of the new Arizona law. As passed, SB 1070 makes it a state crime to be undocumented in Arizona and empowers police officers to stop and question anyone they have reasonable suspicion may be in the state without papers. The law also requires law enforcement to question the legal status of anyone they stop while they're enforcing state and local law, or even civil code.
Judge Bolton granted a partial injunction, which stops a law from being implemented while the courts hash out the constitutionality of the law. Her ruling blocks the requirement that people carry their papers with them at all times; it was an offense punishable with jail time and fines. Bolton also blocked the provision that makes it illegal for those who are undocumented to solicit work. Most importantly, Bolton blocked the portions of SB 1070 that require officers to check a person's status while enforcing other laws and allow for the warrantless arrests of those believed to have committed "deportable offenses".
Read the ruling for yourself here (PDF). We'll have more reactions later today.
Community Launch of Engage Seattle
Mayor McGinn, Deputy Mayor for Community Darryl Smith, Community Engagement Coordinator Sol Villarreal, and Chief Service Officer Lynda Petersen present Engage Seattle:
To watch past Mayor videos please visit the Seattle Channel website
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July 26, 2010, 3:55 pm
How Much Credit Card Rewards Cost the Poor
By JENNIFER SARANOW SCHULTZ
http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/how-much-credit-card-rewards-cost-the-poor/?src=busln
In a Your Money column earlier this year, “The Damage of Card Rewards,” my colleague Ron Lieber hypothesized that the poor are actually the ones subsidizing the credit card rewards of the affluent.
How could this be? Well, in response to consumers who aggressively pursue credit card rewards by using their cards everywhere, stores raise their prices for everyone to cover the cards’ costs. As a result, the poor — those least likely to have credit cards and earn rewards — end up paying more without getting any of the benefits.
Now, a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston appears to confirm and quantify this “reverse Robin Hood problem” theory.
According to the report, “Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations,” released Monday, the reward programs create “an implicit money transfer” to credit card users from noncard users (i.e. cash payers) because of the across-the-board price increases merchants put in place to cover the costs of accepting the cards.
“This retail price markup for all consumers results in credit card-paying consumers being subsidized by consumers who do not pay with credit cards,” the researchers wrote in the report. The use of credit cards and rewards, according to the report, is positively correlated with income, meaning that lower-income consumers tend to be the ones not using credit cards and instead paying cash.
After accounting for rewards paid to households by banks, the researchers concluded that the lowest income household (those making less than $20,000 a year) pays $23 a year, while the highest income household (those making $150,000 or more annually) receives a subsidy of $756 every year.
As a result, the researchers wrote, reducing the transfers could potentially increase consumer welfare, and the transfers may be something that public policy makers may want to address.
In the meantime, Mr. Lieber’s column and accompanying Bucks post offered some ideas for what consumers can do now to alleviate any guilt they may have about using their cards everywhere. One option is using cash for certain purchases or at certain retailers. Others are donating some of rewards each year to nonprofit groups that help the poor or giving up the cards completely.
How will the results of the study affect your credit card use, if at all?
Credit Cards Transfer Money From Poor To Rich Households: Study
Huffington Post | Nathaniel Cahners Hindman First Posted: 07-28-10 08:40 AM | Updated: 07-28-10 08:40 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/credit-cards-transfer-mon_n_660768.html
Credit cards do more than drain money from your wallet -- they may actually create an "implicit money transfer" from the poor to the rich, according to a new study from the Boston Federal Reserve.
The study, titled "Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations", suggests that, as card use becomes more frequent, merchants have raised their prices to compensate for card-processing charges. (Hat tip to the WSJ)
As a result, the study suggests, the poor -- who usually lack access to reward-paying credit cards -- end up paying more for everyday goods.
Over the last two decades, the paper notes, the percentage of households using credit cards has remained stable at around 75 percent. But total card-spending has jumped from nine percent to 15 percent. The increased use of cards drives up fees paid by merchants, who raise prices to cover the costs of the cards.
As card-using households make more and more purchases with credit cards and jump to take advantage of card rewards programs, "cash-using" households bear the brunt of higher prices without any of the benefits of cards.
Here's more from authors Scott Schuh, Oz Shy and Joana Stavins:
On average, each cash-using household pays $151 to card-using households and each card-using household receives $1,482 from cash users every year. Because credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general.
The authors suggest a few approaches policy makers could take to mitigate the damage caused by credit cards, including allowing merchants to adjust prices based on whether a purchase is made by cash or credit, a practice that is currently against the law.
Story continues below
Read the study below:
Credit Cards - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/credit-cards-transfer-mon_n_660768.html
Charlie Rangel's Face Off With Accountability
Even though a four-member House Ethics Committee has been largely silent about the charges facing longtime Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel, at least some of the allegations are reportedly among the committee's most serious infractions. And, no matter what the Rangel saga could mean for Democrats come November, the public circus around his trial could have far reaching implications on elected black leadership nationwide.
The Ethics Committee is set to air the full charges against Rangel tomorrow, and some party leaders have urged him to cut a deal to avoid that potentially ugly moment. He has thus far refused.
Rangel has reportedly already spent $1.7 million on a legal defense team over the course of the 18 month investigation. The charges against him range from misuse of rent-controlled apartments in New York City and failure to disclose income from a villa in the Dominican Republic to reports that he exchanged official favors with an oil company in exchange for a $1 million gift to a City University of New York center that's named after him.
Rangel has not only vehemently denied the charges, he's done so with a unique brand of braggadocio--much to the chagrin of some fellow Democrats and even a former aide. What fuels the congressman's confidence may be exactly what makes his ordeal potentially devastating to other black elected officials: he's a co-founder and current dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and, until news of the ethnics investigation hit in March, led the all-important Ways and Means Committee. Any particularly egregious fallout could prove harmful to the CBC which, despite some missteps, has been key in pushing jobs and unemployment insurance legislation in recent months.
But that also begs the question of whether the CBC and other black elected officials will stand by Rangel rather than urge he be held accountable should he be found guilty of the charges. CBC Chair Barbara Lee has recently urged members of both parties to avoid presuming Rangel's guilt.
"Any rush to judgment to short-circuit the ongoing review of Congressman Rangel by the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct will do a disservice to the well-established processes of the House of Representatives, " Lee wrote in a statement. "Attempts by Republicans and Democrats to presume guilt before the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct completes its review of the facts, which are only known to them and Congressman Rangel, violates the core American principle of the presumption of innocence."
Another CBC member Rep. Chaka Fattah pointed to the Shirley Sherrod scandal as evidence of what happens when both parties jump the gun.
"The railroading of Shirley Sherrod at USDA should be a lesson learned about hasty judgment. . . . That lesson must be applied to current case of Congressman Charlie Rangel," she told the AP last week.
Still, Rangel's widely popular in his district, and as the fourth eldest serving member of Congress, his political track record speaks for itself. It's unlikely that he'll be ousted from his seat, but Politico wonders how much he has to lose if he continues to stand his ground.
The bigger question is how, and when, do we hold our elected officials of color accountable? So far, no member of the CBC has spoken publicly about what the Rangel investigation could mean to the Ways and Means Committee's work, or what it says about his relationship with his Harlem constituency.
Photo: U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) (L) faces questions from the news media after a House investigative committee found substatinial reason to believe Rangel has violated rules and laws at the U.S. Capitol July 22, 2010. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Ex-principal in Highline files claim over demotion
An Interactive History of Arizona's March to SB 1070
Aarti Shahani explained yesterday how Washington spawned Arizona's SB 1070 by deputizing local cops as immigration officers. That fact leaves the Justice Department appearing to split legal hairs when arguing that Arizona's law unconstitutionally usurps the feds' power to control the border. Shahani's analysis of the DOJ suit against SB 1070 is important, but it's also worth noting that the door for renegade, state-led immigration enforcement opened long ago. So check out Valeria Fernandez's interactive timeline of Arizona's long march toward SB 1070 as well.
Preach On It, Rachel Maddow
We're trying to avoid the replay-last-night's-cable genre of blogging here at ColorLines. But Rachel Maddow's segment on how Fox News creates these race-fright moments can't be missed. Watch all the way through--past the set up via her sparring with Bill O'Reilly. The good stuff comes as she winds into the big picture of Fox's craven programming.
Break
I'll be away next week, traveling in Shanghai, among other places, so this blog will be dormant until early August. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the new Colorlines and send us your feedback.
IMF Cancels Haiti's $268 Million Debt
There's finally good news in Haitian relief efforts: The International Monetary Fund announced that it's canceling the country's $268 million debt. The move may allow the country to start the arduous process of long-term structural readjustment after this year's devastating earthquake, which killed 230,000 people and decimated Port-au-Prince's already fragile infrastructure.
In addition to canceling the debt, the IMF pledged an additional $60 million to help with reconstruction.
"Donors must start delivering on their promises to Haiti quickly, so reconstruction can be accelerated, living standards quickly improved and social tensions soothed," IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in a statement.
Relief efforts have already proven difficult. Even though 60 countries pledged upwards of $9.9 billion to aid in recovery efforts, less than 2 percent -- or $534 million-- of that money has actually been delivered. The AP reports that most of the money is mired in "bureaucracy and politics" of the countries that pledged to help.
PHOTO: PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI - JULY 12: A dump truck kicks up dust as it passes through in the Fort National neighborhood on July 12, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Six months after an earthquake killed an estimated 230,000 people, many Haitians are struggling to rebuild their lives. (Photo by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
War Spending Bill Won't Pay for Teachers' Jobs
Late Thursday night, the White House successfully intimidated the Senate into passing its war-spending bill without $10 billion for teachers' jobs and other domestic spending that the House included weeks ago.
Part of the money inside the war-spending bill was meant to go to an emergency fund to stave off over 100,000 imminent teacher and school worker layoffs this coming fall. The resolution, introduced by Rep. David Obey from Wisconsin, would have also set aside an extra $5 million for Pell Grants, which are distributed to undergrads from low-income families. In order to pay for this $10 billion emergency fund, which itself was whittled down from an original $23 billion, Obey suggested shaving off a total of $800 million from some of President Obama's pilot education reform initiatives like the competitive grants program Race to the Top, a charter school fund and a new program that ties teachers' pay to their students' performance.
Earlier this week, the possibility that the Senate would include the $60 billion in domestic spending for social programs seemed unlikely ("dead" was the actual word used by some education policy bloggers) after President Obama announced a veto threat for any program that touched his flagship education reform agenda and a suite of Democrats backed Obama against David Obey. Obama administration officials reiterated the threat again last week.
Except that Obama's Race to the Top program was allocated $4.35 billion for this year alone, and got renewed again for 2011, even though it's still got more than $3.6 billion in unused funds. In light of the numbers, dipping into Race to the Top's coffers to pay for students to have teachers in their classrooms this fall seems like a relatively painless and logical step. The big picture remains that a last-ditch effort to save teacher jobs had to be shoved in at the last moment for a $33 billion supplemental war-spending bill to keep the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq going.
The jettisoned domestic spending package wasn't all going to go to social programs. NPR reports that another $700 million that would have gone to bolster border security measures didn't make the cut either. Unlike teachers jobs' though, we can't say Americans will notice the absence of that extra money at the already-flush and heavily militarized border.
The bill will now go back to the House, which will have just a few weeks to pass it before they go on August recess.
PHOTO: KANSAS CITY, MO - Students prepare to leave on school buses from Westport High School on March 11, 2010 in Kansas City, Missouri. The High School is among 29 in a district of 61 schools that will close due to the new budget plan that is making the cuts to ward off bankruptcy. (Photo by G. Newman Lowrance/Getty Images)
Feeling Cheap After Buying Obama's Abortion B.S.
A friend of mine recently joked that President Obama is like that cute guy at the bar who you know is talking bullshit--but you take him home anyway.
That's pretty much what happened in March when health care reform was signed into law. We took Obama home knowing he was bullshitting us about protecting a woman's right to choose, but we told ourselves that expanding health care coverage to millions of people---especially those who can't get insurance because of preexisting medical conditions---would surely mean that we wouldn't totally regret things the morning after.
Well, it's the morning after, and if we're not having regrets, we're certainly wondering how we could have fallen for so much crap.
Last week, Obama administration officials announced that they don't care if a diabetic Latina is having health complications and needs to end her pregnancy. They don't care if she got the advice from a doctor. If she's in the new pools, she can't get an abortion, regardless of who pays for it. This, even though Obama and Congress made no mention of banning abortion when they agreed to grant health insurance right away to people who have pre-existing conditions and thus struggle to get private coverage. The full law won't kick in until 2014.
That's the worst part of this story: Obama doesn't have to ban abortion in this part of the health care law. He doesn't have to support our country's two-tier abortion system, in which a woman working at Goldman Sachs can pay for the procedure as easily as she does her weekly manicure, while a woman cobbling dollars from cleaning jobs and family loans must travel to a clinic that does the abortion and pay for it out of pocket.
Yes, when health care reform passed in March, Obama signed an Executive Order saying the feds wouldn't cover abortions---in the new insurance exchanges that start in 2014 or in community health centers, which serve the poor and undocumented immigrants. But nothing in either the executive order or the new federal law bans abortion for the temporary pools. The law actually leaves the decision of abortion coverage to states, which is why Pennsylvania health officials thought they could have a program that paid for the procedure when doctors deemed it necessary.
But when Pennsylvania's proposal--necessary abortion included--was approved by the feds, the National Right to Life Committee freaked and the Obama administration caved, clarifying that abortion wouldn't be covered in the temporary pools, regardless of who paid for it.
Although the phrase "pre-existing conditions" sounds like a fancy way to say cancer, private health insurance companies use it as an umbrella term for anything they might have to pay more than $10 for. This covers everything from a terminal illness to heart disease and diabetes---the latter being conditions that are prevalent in communities of color, where seeing a doctor or getting the right meds has long been a luxury.
More than one in six Latinos has a pre-existing medical condition that private health insurance would find suspect, and the number's probably higher since more than a quarter of Latinos hadn't visited a doctor in 2007. And while the image of a grandma, or at least someone well into her 40s, might be conjured up by the phrase as well, about one in six college-age adults have something in their medical records that would make them ineligible for private insurance.
Oh, but wait. Obama did think about young people. There are millions of dollars for abstinence-only programs included in the health care law.
The best that can be said is that Obama's not doing a complete about face. Under the temporary program for people with pre-existing conditions, the feds will still pay for an abortion if the woman's about to die or has been raped by a stranger, a date or her father. That's the kind of generosity we've seen from the federal government since the Hyde amendment was tweaked in the late '70s to cover such exceptions.
It's more than probable, of course, that Obama is bowing to anti-abortion forces because he's worried about the mid-term elections, where Democrats are expected to be the underdogs. He knows that voters who care about women's reproductive health have nowhere else to go on Election Day but the Democratic line---which is why we keep taking him home from the bar in the first place.
The Kids Are All Right, But Not the Queer Movement
Every once in awhile, a Hollywood movie hits such a perfect note of familiarity that you leave the theater feeling like you just watched a film about your white friends and it was funny, sweet--marvelous, even. And, as you'd expect, messed up on race. Not messed up in a Mel Gibson sort of way. It's nothing outright hateful, but rather annoying and mundane, like when the white gay guy says his décor is, ya know, "Asiany," and you debate whether to spill red wine on his new, white rug or give him an Edward Said book.
This is the charm of Lisa Cholodenko's new summer hit, The Kids Are All Right. Her white characters are so familiar and even so likable that you want to believe all they need is a better reading list. If only race relations were so easy.
Ostensibly, The Kids Are All Right is about two lesbian moms and their teenage kids who want to meet their sperm donor dad. It's an all-star cast with Julianne Moore playing Jules, the flaky, new age mom, opposite Annette Bening, who delightfully remade herself into the soft butch mom Nic. There's Oscar buzz and critics are rightly praising Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) for the film's solid script and the actors for stellar performances. Salon's Andrew O'Hehire declared that the movie "ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history."
It's true. This is a film about two married people who are bored by their middle age sex lives, worried about their son's choice of friends, and still recounting with giggles how they first met while arguing about how much one of them is drinking. They're complicated, self-involved and, in their best moments, genuinely loving.
From another perspective though, The Kids Are All Right is also a revealing portrait of where the gay movement has been headed for some time now: white suburbia, Mexican gardener included.
The film is set in Southern California, where Nic and Jules have a comfortable, three-bedroom home, arguments about composting, a glass (or three) of red wine with dinner, a daughter (Alice in Wonderland's Mia Wasikowska) and son (Josh Hutcherson) testing the limits of parental authority. They're the all-American, white family next door.
The political reference point for their home life is not a group of pissed-off drag queens circa 1969. It's a Mad Men-style 1950s nostalgia. Jules is the stay-at-home mom trying her hand at a landscaping business and feeling that her doctor wife doesn't appreciate her. Nic is the breadwinner who has to have a drink when she gets home from work. The scenario is inviting, familiar, a storyline about American family life that we want to believe, gay or het.
Like cinematic white heteros and gays in San Francisco's Castro district, Nic and Jules' contact with people of darker hues is limited. There's a black restaurant hostess (Yaya DaCosta, a runner up from America's Next Top Model), a Mexican gardener (Joaquín Garrido, Like Water for Chocolate), and an Indian teenage love interest (Kunal Sharma, The Cheetah Girls). By the end of the film, the three people of color have been dumped, fired or left behind in confusion.
To be fair to Cholodenko, she was probably just following Hollywood's race rules. The moment a main character is darker than white bread, the movie becomes about race and doesn't appeal to a wider (read: white) audience.
But it's also a portrait of the white gay movement, which has struggled with its race issues for some time now, most publicly after Prop. 8 passed in California and hysterical white gay boys blamed black voters for keeping them from the joys of registering at Tiffany's. If that happened though it was largely because the movement has failed to build institutions where people of color, like those in The Kids Are All Right, play more than minor roles.
A few months ago, a friend recounted walking into a meeting with the directors of statewide LGBT organizations. It was a majority white room. That the convening looked more like a Tea Party gathering than a 2008 Vote Obama youth rally should have been on the top of the agenda. It wasn't.
Part of the success of Cholodenko's movie rests in that, intentioned or not, she's rendered on the big screen the racial realities of this new gay world order. When Jules is struggling with guilt about what she's doing outside her matrimonial bed, she thinks Luis, the Mexican gardener she's hired, is smirking at her, which he is. With comedic self-righteousness, Jules points out that he blows his nose too often. "I have allergies," Luis explains. Fumbling through her words, Jules accuses of him having a drug problem and fires him.
The audience laughs. I laughed. At Jules, at her hysterical reaction, at how uncomfortably true it is that behind the white lesbian niceties can sit the old racist stereotypes of a Gov. Jan Brewer.
It's a small moment in the film but a reminder of how the gay world mimics the straight one, where economic power goes hand in hand with a racial hierarchy. Were Luis, the Mexican gardener, to get home, take off his overalls and turn into a flaming queen, it would be hard to argue convincingly that he and Jules have a political struggle in common these days. Not impossible, but certainly a stretch.
Mayor’s Tunnel Briefing
On July 27th, Mayor McGinn held a media availability to discuss the City Council’s proposed resolution regarding the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel:
To watch past Mayor videos please visit the Seattle Channel website
Undergrads On the Brink of Homelessness
It's a story of our times: college enrollment is the highest it's been in the last 40 years, but the economic recession is the worst we've seen in as many decades.
For college students, this means fighting to stay in school, even if students have to choose between paying for tuition and books over rent and food. NPR reported this week on the story of Diego Sepulveda, a 22-year-old poli sci major at UCLA who's getting by in college by sleeping in the library and on friends' couches and showering in the campus gym. UCLA has created a crisis response team to help students stay in school and get help with basics like canned soup and toiletries.
It's a totally conceivable picture. College campuses are big, open communities full of lots of amenities if you've got the right passwords---couches in 24-hour libraries, computers to get homework done, gyms with hot water and towels.
Of course, people who are homeless have long fought their way inside college classrooms. But colleges are noting an increase in the numbers of students who started on the other side of the line: students from working-class homes whose families have fallen through the cracks in the last few years.
What the NPR piece fails to mention is that college tuition is also on the rise---all of the UC campuses have raised their tuition costs nearly every year for the last five years. Last September, UC students up and down the state turned out for mass protests against another 32 percent increase in their tuition. Students in the state and community college systems are getting hit just as hard by fee hikes and reduced class options. (And don't forget the decades of student debt that often follow graduation.) What once was an affordable college degree is becoming harder for students from working-class and low-income families to access.
PHOTO: David McNew/Getty Images
Civil Rights 101 for Social Service Providers
