Hi. Here's a pyramid of potential, with last night's victory as motor. And I don't mean that as symbol alone. Assume the best and work like hell. Si, se puede!
Oh yeah, I'm very soon changing my service to hotmail and my address to [EMAIL PROTECTED] There may be a day or so without service. I hope this will eliminate problems, including some within these mailings. Ed --- Villaraigosa was elected Mayor of Los Angeles last night! This is a major victory for many Angelenos, especially progressives. It is a testament to the success of building a true progressive coalition that unifies all racial and ethnic groups and geographic areas. Larry Frank, Anthony Thigpen, Miguel Espinoza, and the myriad staff and volunteers I came across in the very marginal role I played as a volunteer on the campaign are some of the most hard working and dedicated people around. We are very lucky to have them in the movement! For many of us, this is a time to celebrate, but also a time to take the energy from this victory and join with others to save California from the Governor's clutches. We must work locally to stave off budget cuts to working families, the poor, and the disabled. We must work to save the UCLA Labor Center from complete elimination by the Governor. We must work to save California's public education system. We must double our efforts to counter the Governor's attacks on our Labor Unions. Join with thousands of people May 25th at Pershing Square, downtown LA, to say NO to the Governor's agenda and find out how you can get involved! Details: Wednesday May 25th (next week, not today!) Pershing Square - (Downtown L.A. at the corner of Olive and 6th) 4:00 pm - Entertainment Begins 5:00 pm - Program Starts Plan to use public transportation. Info at http://www.cta.org/Features/StateBudgetCrisis/05/ActionDay.htm Hope to see you there. Warm Regards, Susie Shannon [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2378 Vigilante Man by Mike Davis "The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them -- armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand." -- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s, they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with tear gas and buckshot. Vigilantes have always been to the American West what the Ku Klux Klan was to the South: vicious and cowardly bigotry organized into a self-righteous mob. Almost every decade, some sinister group of self-proclaimed patriots mobilizes to repel a new invasion from some subversive threat or other. Their wrath has almost always been directed against the poorest, most powerless, and hardest-working segment of the population: recent migrants from Donegal, Guangdong, Oklahoma, or, now, Oaxaca. And their rant, as broadcast daily on dozens of AM hate-radio programs in California and the Southwest, is still the one described by John Steinbeck back in the years of the Great Depression: "Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. . They said, 'These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They're degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They'll steal anything. They've got no sense of property rights.'" The most publicized of today's vigilantes, of course, are the so-called Minutemen who began their armed patrol of the Arizona-Mexico border -- appropriately enough -- on April Fool's Day. The Tombstone, Arizona-based group is the latest incarnation of the anti-immigrant patrols that have plagued the borderlands for more than a decade. Vowing to defend national sovereignty against the Brown Peril, a series of shadowy paramilitary groups, ordinarily led by racist ranchers and self-declared "Aryan warriors" -- and egged on by rightwing radio jocks -- have harassed, illegally detained, beaten, and possibly murdered immigrants crossing through the desert cauldrons of Arizona and California. The Minuteman Project -- picturesquely headquartered at Tombstone's Miracle Valley Bible College -- is both theater of the absurd and a canny attempt to move vigilantism into the mainstream of conservative politics. Its principal organizers -- a retired accountant and a former kindergarten teacher, both from Southern California - mesmerized the press with their promise of a thousand heavily-armed super-patriots confronting the Mexican hordes, eyeball-to-eyeball, along the international border in Cochise County. In the event, they turned out perhaps 150 sorry-ass gun freaks and sociopaths who spent a few days in lawn chairs cleaning their rifles, jabbering to the press, and peering through binoculars at the cactus-covered mountains where several hundred immigrants perish each year from heatstroke and thirst. From one perspective, it was a silly ending to an obvious publicity stunt. Armageddon on the border was never very likely, if only because undocumented immigrants read or hear the news like everyone else. Confronted with the Minutemen and the hundreds of extra Border Patrol sent to keep them out of trouble, campesinos simply waited patiently on the Sonora side for the vigilantes to get sunburned and go home. Then the normal, deadly business of the border resumed. Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact of this incident on Republican politics. For the first time, the Bush administration is feeling seriously embattled - - not by Democrats (they would never be so impolite), but by incipient rebellions on its own flanks. The unpopularity of Bush's proposed privatization of social security has provided so-called "moderate" Republicans (think Colin Powell and John McCain) with a wedge issue to contest the presidential succession in 2008. More importantly, the activist grassroots of the party, especially in the West and the South, are aflame with anger about the President's proposed guest-worker treaty with Mexico, as well as his larger strategy of wooing Latino voters. The anti-Latino backlash -- which that evil sorcerer, former California Governor Pete Wilson, helped summon to life in the early 1990s (culminating in immigrant-bashing Proposition 187) -- has failed to quietly die away as Karl Rove and other Republican strategists might have wished. Over the last decade, instead, campaigns against immigrant social rights and the use of Spanish in schools, which originated in California, have been exported to Arizona, Colorado and Southern states with growing Latino populations. Like earlier anti-abortion protests (which culminated in rightwing terrorism), the vigilante movement offers a dramatic tactic for capturing press attention, galvanizing opposition to immigration, and shifting the balance of power within the national Republican party. Moreover, to the discomfort of the White House, the Minutemen have found an ardent admirer in Sacramento. In an interview on one of his favorite rightwing radio shows on April 28, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the vigilantes as heroes. "I think they've done a terrific job," he said. "They've cut down the crossing of illegal immigrants a huge percentage. So it just shows that it works when you go and make and effort and when you work hard. It's a doable thing." Later, after furious Latinos leaders accused him of "scapegoating and immigrant bashing," Schwarzenegger defiantly reiterated that he would welcome the help of the Minutemen on the California border. (As he so often does, the governor followed this with a convenient non sequitur -- reassurance that he was a "champion of immigrants.") If the governor sounds like he is channeling his "inner Nazi," it is because he is desperate. Schwarzenegger's hulking celebrity is no longer a novelty, and he is dogged everywhere he goes these days by angry nurses, schoolteachers, and firefighters whose budgets he has slashed. In recent months, his rating in opinion polls has fallen by 20 points and the ghost of Gray Davis now shadows his future. Not surprising, then, that Arnie has returned to the same dismal swamp of hate radio and angry white guys in pickup trucks where he won the governorship in 2003. The issue then was drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants. (Otherwise, how would we know that Bin Laden himself wasn't tooling down the Hollywood Freeway?) Now, it's the right of citizens to "help the Border Patrol" or, if need be, to render Western justice themselves to the alien invaders. With a Vigilante Man in the governor's mansion in Sacramento, the next Minuteman provocation ("tens of thousands of volunteers blockading the Mexican border this fall") may prove to be tragedy not farce. Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities and the forthcoming Monster at the Door: the Global Threat of Avian Influenza (New Press 2005). � 2005 Mike Davis *** Our entire way of life is at stake By Jesse Jackson Chicago Sun-Times - May 17, 2005 http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse17.html And now the "nuclear option." Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist vows to blow up the Senate by getting the Republican majority to outlaw any filibuster against President Bush's judicial nominees. Democrats have approved 208 of Bush's 218 nominees, but are blocking 10 as too extreme. That is unacceptable to Frist. Bush might sensibly have defused the situation in the hope of moving forward on the business of the American people, but instead he threw gasoline on the fire. In a direct insult to his opposition, he renominated the same handful of extremists previously blocked. Now he demands an up-or-down vote on them -- essentially ordering Frist to blow up the Senate. As in the run-up to the war in Iraq, he's intent on winning, with little sense of the costs and consequences of what he's driving the country into. Outside groups on both sides are mobilizing. The right of the Republican Party has called blocking a handful of Bush's nominees an assault on "people of faith." (The president apparently is so infallible that to question even 10 of more than 200 nominees is to risk eternal damnation.) Liberals have started touting the filibuster as the bedrock of democracy. But this debate isn't about freedom of religion. And it isn't about the filibuster. It's about the judges and the direction of the country. Bush's mantra is that he simply wants judges who will follow the law, not legislate their own will from the bench. He wants judicial restraint, not judicial activism. But that is simply nonsense, and the president knows it. Bush isn't nominating conservative judges as his father did; he's nominating radicals, vetted by the right-wing Federalist Society, and dedicated to advancing the movement's agenda through the courts. He's naming judges who will overturn precedents that the conservative movement doesn't like -- from Roe vs. Wade that gave women the right of choice, to Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation, to the core jurisprudence of the New Deal. This is central to the right's battle to remake America in its image. Whenever a movement pushes for dramatic social change, it naturally runs up against the status quo bias of the courts. The New Deal movement ran headlong into the free market doctrines that conservative judges had implanted into the Constitution. Those doctrines made labor unions an illegal restraint of trade. They deemed the 40-hour workweek, or health-and-safety regulations, to be unconstitutional infringements on the market. For Roosevelt and the New Deal to wrench America into the modern age, new doctrine was needed. The result: a brutal struggle over the courts. When the civil rights movement challenged apartheid in America, it ran into the racist doctrines that segregationist judges had implanted into the Constitution. Once more, those doctrines -- separate but equal -- had to be overturned. And a Republican chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, led the court in doing so -- and the courts came under vicious attack. "Impeach Earl Warren" signs went up across the South. And a right-wing backlash against the courts began. What does the right-wing movement want from judges? It wants judges who will overturn the precedent set by Roe and outlaw abortion. It wants an end to affirmative action, with many saying the Brown ruling that outlawed segregation was wrongly decided. But it wants much more than this. The Federalist Society is dominated by an obscure sect that believes in the "Constitution in exile." Essentially, adherents argue for a return to the 19th century jurisprudence of the Gilded Age -- calling on judges to overturn the New Deal jurisprudence that empowered Congress to regulate the economy, defend workers, protect the environment and consumers, and hold corporations accountable. No, I'm not kidding, and neither are they. Will the right be able to use a current Republican majority in the Senate to ensconce zealots on the bench to enforce their agenda over the next decades? This answer will say much about what kind of country we will become. No one should be on the sidelines in this one. Copyright (c) The Sun-Times Company All rights reserved. To subscribe: http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Has someone you know been affected by illness or disease? 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