Orcinus

Immigration raids: Harbingers of a police state

2008-05-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

It's telling that last week's mass immigration raid in Iowa, during which immigrant workers were rounded up and treated like cattle, was heralded by the whupping of federal helicopters hovering over the town and its meat-processing plant.

One of its warning signs was that the feds showed up a week before and blackened out the windows of the Cattle Congress facility to prepare it for holding large numbers of detainees.

As one of the locals put it:

"What's that all about? You know, what does that sound like? That's just creepy, just things that seem really unAmerican, that seem on the down low," Howard says. "No one should be treated this way. These aren't drug runners. They're not terrorists." Howard calls the raid "political maneuvering" to show people the Bush Administration is doing something on illegal immigration.

As Joshua Holland at AlterNet suggests, the feds' behavior throughout, while "professional" enough, has raised the specter of law enforcement that is all about keeping workers in a state of fear, and leaving the employers who are manipulating them completely unscathed.

According to the Associated Press, an attorney who interviewed some of those swept up in the raid said that the company itself "obtained false identification for immigrant workers." But in the overwhelming majority of these raids -- 98 percent, according to the Washington Post -- the only people to pay any penalty are poor people trying to earn a substandard wage working in America's growing unregulated economy. Meanwhile, ICE charged many of the detained with "identity theft" for those faked papers, effectively giving immigration hard-liners what Congress hasn't granted them through the legislative process: serious criminal charges for what have always been misdemeanor immigration violations at most.

Most of all, it's clear that the plant's owners were in the business of seriously exploiting the illegal status of their workers -- abusing them, underpaying them, exposing them to hazardous working conditions -- and the raids actually had the effect of covering that up:

In this case, as in many others like it, many of the workers appear to have been seriously exploited. The AP reported that the plant's management "improperly withheld money from employees' paychecks for 'immigration fees,' didn't allow workers to use the restroom during 10-hour shifts, physically abused workers and didn't compensate them for overtime work."

According to MSNBC, workers at the plant were routinely started at $5 per hour for their first three or four months on the job and then raised to $6, still well below Iowa's minimum wage of $7.25. Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil confirmed to the Des Moines Register that Agriprocessors was being investigated by the state on suspicion of wage violations, paying people off the books and hiring underage workers. A copy of the federal warrant obtained by the Register described an incident in which "a supervisor covered the eyes of an employee with duct tape and struck him with a meat hook."

It's unclear what the raids' impact will be on the ongoing investigations into the company's workplace violations. With hundreds of workers -- and potential witnesses -- carted away, Jill Cashen, a spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), asked: "how can justice ever be served on these exploitation issues?" Agriprocessor's management must have been pleased with the timing of the raid. Not only did it put at least a crimp in the ongoing investigations of serious allegations of abuse by the company, it also derailed an effort by UFCW to organize the plants' workers and give them a shot at bargaining with management for better working conditions.

According to the Boston Herald, the fine folks at Agriprocessors in fact were helping illegal immigrants with their illegal paperwork:

A federal informant who worked at Agriprocessors told officials about workers who appeared to be undocumented having trouble getting paid. ... Other workers admitted to gaining employment using fraudulent documents. One worker claimed that he got a job without having any documents. When he received his first paycheck, the warrant application says, "it had another unknown person's name on it. This check was then taken to another portion of the plant where it was cashed."

This strongly suggests that company officials were systematically helping undocumented people work at the plant.

While the arrested workers, particularly those who used fake IDs (which is nearly all of them) are looking forward to prison time and then deportation, the plant's politically connected owners and managers are evidently facing no charges at all. But for ordinary folks in Postville, it isn't just illegal immigrants who are feeling the weight of this kind of law enforcement -- it has terrorized legal immigrants and longtime residents alike. And maybe that's the point:

Still, the impression among many non-Latinos in Postville is that the federal government targeted the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Any discussion of the subject often begins with the phrase, “The law is the law, but …”

“We got raped and we got plundered and we got pillaged Monday. Everybody in this town ought to be angry,” business owner Lyle Opheim said.

chools Superintendent David Strudthoff said the raid has been enormously disruptive for local children. When the helicopters appeared and word spread of what was happening, some students started crying in their classrooms. A third of the elementary school's 387 pupils were missing the day after, and about half of them were among the 400 women and children who sought sanctuary at St. Bridget's.

Most have now returned to school, but 10 or so have already left permanently, and with the end of the school year looming, dozens of children whose parents face deportation are set to return to their native countries, including those who are U.S. citizens by virtue of being born here.

“These people have been here 15 years and they're entwined in our families and in our community,” Mr. Strudthoff said. “When 10 per cent of the population is imprisoned, it brings a community to its knees.”

And there have been questions as well about how the detainees have been given their due process:

The hearings drew renewed criticism from advocates who contend that the federal government was rushing the immigrants through mass hearings. The setup suggests "that the government is more interested in getting people deported without hearings than in achieving justice," said Ben Stone, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa.

A local nun probably voiced the outrage best:

"I am also a United States citizen who grew up believing that this is a democratic country in which the dignity of all people is respected and their rights protected," she said Tuesday at a news conference here, surrounded by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

"This is not the country I experienced this past week."

Thill, several times choking up with emotion, told of the shock and distress of immigrants who gathered at St. Bridget's Catholic Church the day of the raid.

"Hundreds of families were torn apart by this raid," she said.

The mother in one family was released, while her husband was still detained, said Thill. Her children are upset and frightened. The mother has no income and cannot work or provide for her children, she said.

"The humanitarian impact of this raid is obvious to anyone in Postville," Thill said. "The economic impact will soon be evident."

Indeed. But this is what happens when we do what the right-wingers want us to do, to "enforce the laws that are on the books." The problem is that, as we've explained previously, these laws are so misbegotten and unworkable in the first place that travesties like this -- installing a virtual police state in small-town America, terrorizing and suppressing workers in a way that lets employers exploit them without consequence -- are inevitable.

And then, perhaps, we should contemplate what happens when these scenes are repeated in town after town, city after city, plant after plant.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Dobbs bare his nasty nativist teeth

2008-05-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

The other day, when the folks at Media Matters Action Network released their scathing report on the mishandling of the immigration debate on the news networks, I made one of those tomorrow-the-sun-will-be-up predictions:

However, I will also predict that the subjects of this critique will simply dismiss it out of hand because, well, that's what they do with their critics. MM, of course, is just a bunch of dirty Naziesque liberals funded by George Soros, right? And now, I'm sure we can expect to see "open borders crowd" added to the list of pejoratives.

Well, Lou Dobbs had MM's Paul Waldman on his CNN program last night, and he did not of course disappoint. His defense rested almost entirely on dismissing Media Matters as a "left-wing" and "open borders" organization.

But what was surprising was how ugly and vicious Dobbs got. In the video above, you can see him leaning towards Waldman, baring his teeth in barely suppressed rage. I thought he might reach over and bite him.

Let's go to the transcript:

DOBBS: Let me ask you this. You're hooked up with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Media Matters is itself a left-wing organization. I mean, why -- what credibility do all of you have on this issue? Would you have any more credibility, for example, than the Chamber of Commerce and the Bush administration in proposing amnesty and open borders?

WALDMAN: Well, I know that's the kind of thing you've been saying about this for the last day or two. I heard on the radio today that you said I was out to lunch.

DOBBS: Were you actually out to lunch?

WALDMAN: Yes.

DOBBS: If I said it, but I don't recall saying it.

Right off the bat, Dobbs' argument rests on the ad hominem: They're a left-wing organization and therefore must not be credible. That is, the entire body of evidence they present can be dismissed because of their political orientation.

Most of all, Dobbs reflexively trots out the "open borders" canard; when the Southern Poverty Law Center criticized Dobbs, he attacked them with the same argument, even though the SPLC has never enunciated any position with regard to border security or general immigration policy. And the same is certainly true of Media Matters. The concern of both of them is the way people like Dobbs spread provably false information, based on falsehoods propagated by the racist and nativist right -- and of course, Dobbs simply won't address that issue.

And so it goes throughout the interview:

WALDMAN: Is there some kind of a document that they say this is going to go from Mexico to Canada? Because we looked around, and we tried to document...

DOBBS: Why did you not -- why did you not call? How can you call research -- if you didn't call this broadcast and ask us for these documents and ask us for the proof in the reporting...

WALDMAN: Do you have one?

DOBBS: Of course, we do.

WALDMAN: I would love to see -- because we looked around...

DOBBS: You are a left-wing advocacy group. You're charging nonsense.

WALDMAN: Lou...

DOBBS: And the only way to appease both you and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus would be for me to support illegal immigration and open borders. I reject it, I reject you, and I reject your position.

Now let's get to your report.

And then Dobbs just began filibustering and refused to let Waldman finish a single statement -- while accusing Waldman of filibustering. It's quite a performance:

WALDMAN: Lou, if I had my own television show, and I knew that there were extremist groups like the John Birch Society and white supremacist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens that were cheering me on on their Web site, it would make me want to step back and say, "OK, what am I doing? How can I change to make sure that this debate is responsible in the way it could be?"

DOBBS: Do you like balance? Do you like balance? Do you like balance? Do you like balance?

WALDMAN: Balance is fine, Lou. But the question is whether or not the rhetoric is responsible and whether it's feeding into...

DOBBS: What have I ever said about illegal aliens? Have I said that illegal aliens, I think, are the most rational actors in this entire mess? Have I said that I have worked with and respect greatly illegal aliens? Have I not said I've got great respect for the work ethic, the family values of most illegal aliens working in this country.

Have I not said that their wages should be increased? Have I not said that we should come to terms with the reality and raise wages of illegal aliens working in fields?

Because you are an ideologue, and a left-wing hack, you will ignore the reality.

WALDMAN: Calling me names is the way to avoid talking about...

DOBBS: I'm talking to you, partner. And I'm telling you exactly. Respond to what I just said. I just...

WALDMAN: Absolutely. OK. So I'm...

DOBBS: Name one of them that you mentioned in your report.

This becomes the only other component of Dobbs' defense: That at some point, he actually said one or two fair things about illegal immigrants. But journalistically speaking, it's a defense that fails utterly.

If I write a book and 98 percent of it is good material, but 2 percent of it contains libelous and false material, perhaps plagiarized material taken from a white-supremacist website, then it should not surprise me if the public and critics decide to discard the remaining 98 percent as unreliable. Journalists should always strive for complete accuracy and reliable, responsible sourcing, and understand that when they fail, it mars the rest of their work -- and moreover, good journalists recognize that, cop to their mistakes, and move immediately to correct them.

But with Dobbs, the equation is actually reversed. His show is such a major font of misinformation on immigration that it's fair to say that probably only about 2 percent of it is either reliable or responsible. And Dobbs not only never cops to his mistakes -- he says he does, but in fact the record shows otherwise -- but he badgers and attacks the people who call him on them (see, for instance, his treatment of Mark Potok of the SPLC).

But then, this is how Dobbs operates, and how he is able to keep doing this schtick. His entire show, even when it's not talking about immigration, is all about drumming up Limbaughesque outrage -- everything on the planet, it seems, is a head-shaking outrage.

Too bad he can't look in the mirror and see that it's his own misbegotten reportage that is the outrage.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

The stupid it burns: Media fan the flames of immigation irtrationality

2008-05-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

[A note to my readers: My work at Firedoglake has been, unsurprisingly, awfully time-consuming these first few weeks, though things are starting to settle down a little. I apologize for my extended absence here, but I'll be posting here more now -- at the very least, I'll cross-post more now -- like the post following. In the meantime, I do hope you all are coming over to the lake to see what I've been cooking up there.]

It isn't exactly news in these quarters that the mainstream media have been playing a critical role in the otherworldly irrationality surrounding the immigration debate, particularly in their willingness -- no, eagerness -- to spread provably false information and distorted "facts" that demonize and dehumanize Latino immigrants.

Now Media Matters Action Network has done us all the public service of documenting and delineating the problem with a study titled Fear & Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News.

The study acknowledges it is in many ways only a sampling of what's out there, considering the breadth and depth of the problem. It focuses on the three most significant offenders: CNN's Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, and Fox's Bill O'Reilly:

An examination of the rhetoric on immigration on these programs reveals the subtle and not-so-subtle ways these myths find their way into mainstream discourse and are validated by figures like Dobbs, O’Reilly, and Beck. On some occasions, the hosts repeat a myth’s key elements in explicit terms; at other times, they mention some of those elements but not others; and sometimes they bring up the catchphrases associated with those myths without elaborating. Through sheer repetition, they help propagate the myths. For instance, by airing dozens and dozens of segments on individual cases in which an undocumented immigrant committed a crime, Dobbs, O’Reilly, and Beck feed the misperception that these immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime in America, even if their comments about the specific case in question don’t stray from the facts. Finally, these programs, particularly Lou Dobbs Tonight, have hosted some of the most radical immigration opponents, offering them a national platform to disseminate extremist views.

The study essentially delineates the misinformation into two categories: the most common myths, such as those about crime and undocumented immigrants, and the costs of illegal immigration in social services and taxes; and the right-wing urban legends, such as the "Reconquista!" conspiracy theory, the "NAFTA Superhighway" tale involving creation of a tax-free roadway running from Canada to Mexico, and the claim that illegal immigrants are responsible for a mass wave of election fraud.

The first category involves a sometimes-subtle distortion of facts (such as the constant association of Latino immigrants with crime) while the latter, as we all know, is just straight-out wingnuttery that in nearly every instance actually has its origins as an idea with the most racist and hateful elements of the American right.

The study explains:

During 2007, the alleged connection between illegal immigration and crime was discussed on 94 episodes of Lou Dobbs Tonight, 66 episodes of The O’Reilly Factor, and 29 episodes of Glenn Beck.

During 2007, the allegation that undocumented immigrants drain social services and/or don’t pay taxes was discussed on 71 episodes of Lou Dobbs Tonight, 13 episodes of Glenn Beck, and eight episodes of The O’Reilly Factor.

Dobbs and Beck have perpetuated two related myths, that there are plans to construct a “NAFTA Superhighway” running from Mexico to Canada, and that there are plans to join Mexico, Canada, and the United States in a “North American Union” similar to the European Union. Dobbs has discussed the fictional North American Union on 56 separate programs during the past two years. (These two myths were also given a boost by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who pushed the ideas on the campaign trail.)

All three programs have presented as fact the “reconquista” myth, which states that there is a movement afoot for Mexico to take over the American Southwest.

Lou Dobbs Tonight has also been the show on which viewers are told about a mythical explosion of leprosy cases due to illegal immigration, and a mythical epidemic of voter fraud due to illegal immigration.

One thing the study includes, but doesn't particularly examine, is the inhuman and hateful quality of much of the rhetoric being employed by right-wing talkers. A lot of it, unsurprisingly, is overtly eliminationist:

“I’ve got a quick message for illegal aliens if you happen to be watching. You better start packing your bags. And to the politicians in Washington who are soft on illegal immigration, start packing up your office, because when the terrorists strike, which they will, and we find out that they’re here illegally from some other country, we will be telling all of you to get the hell out.” -- Glenn Beck, May 9, 2007

“You’ve got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country.” -- Pat Buchanan, Hannity & Colmes, November 26, 2007

“The never-ending criminal alien revolving door -- that’s the subject of this evening’s ‘Talking Points Memo.’ Here we go again -- another heinous crime, another illegal alien suspect with a mile-long rap sheet, another bloody tragedy wrought by open borders.” -- Michelle Malkin, The O’Reilly Factor, August 10, 2007

“I would say, let them fast until they starve to death, then that solves the problem. Because then we won’t have a problem about giving them green cards because they’re illegal aliens; they don’t belong here to begin with.” -- Michael Savage, The Savage Nation, July 5, 2007

“This person sent me an email, said when -- when we defeat this illegal alien amnesty bill and when we yank out the welcome mat and they all start going back to Mexico, as a going-away gift let’s all give them a box of nuclear waste. Give ‘em all a little nuclear waste and let ‘em take it on down there to Mexico. Tell ‘em it can -- it’ll heat tortillas … I love it.” -- The Neal Boortz Show, June 21, 2007

Media Matters, as usual, has done superb work here. However, I will also predict that the subjects of this critique will simply dismiss it out of hand because, well, that's what they do with their critics. MM, of course, is just a bunch of dirty Naziesque liberals funded by George Soros, right? And now, I'm sure we can expect to see "open borders crowd" added to the list of pejoratives.

For the rest of us, well, MM has a petition for you to sign.

Y'all Come Now, Y'hear?

2008-05-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

-- by Sara

In about half an hour (2:00 PDT, 5:00 EDT), I'll be hosting the FDL book salon. I'm kind of excited about it -- particularly given that I've been discussing the coming generational shift for a while now, and 2008 is shaping up to be the year we finally get it.

My guests, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, have written entire book on this shift -- what's creating it, how the Democrats can best navigate it (and how not to screw it up), and what it means for the next 40 years of American politics. Their thesis draws on William Strauss and Neil Howe's saecular theory of history, which is the theory that got me interested in futures in the first place. After all these years, it's still got more predictive value than any other theory I've encountered, and Millennial Makeover shows in very concrete terms how that theory is playing out right now.

Come on by and say hi. We'll be around for a couple of hours.

A thousand words redux

2008-05-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

In the fine tradition of previous great right-wing minds.

From the Houston Chronicle.

The Passing of the Great White Kvetch

2008-05-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

Just when you think Pat Buchanan's racism -- already evident for some time -- couldn't get any more explicit without him donning the pointy-headed white hat, he's always going out and topping himself.

Now he's gone and done it again:

An Augusta, Ga., group, The National Policy Institute, has meshed the figures on fertility rates with the continents and races on Planet Earth -- to visualize what the world will look like in 2060.

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world's population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.

More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth -- a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany -- will vanish by 2060.

The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.

It's revealing, of course, that Buchanan's thesis hinges on a report from an "academic racism" institute that's been designated a bona fide hate group by the SPLC:

After a year of soliciting funds for a "new think tank" in Washington, D.C., the National Policy Institute was established with a staff of four in September 2005 by far-right publisher William Regnery. The institute's mission statement says it aims "to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute ... will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity." In an August 2005 speech to the Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance (see group profile below), Regnery warned that "within the first or secondhand memories of people in this room, the white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity." The institute has published two studies: a critique of affirmative action, which the institute opposes; and "Mass Deportation is a Viable Solution to America's Illegal Immigration Crisis," written by Edwin Rubenstein. (Rubenstein, a frequent contributor to the V-Dare hate site, is president of ESR Research Economic Consultants of Indianapolis and has served as research director for the conservative Hudson Institute, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an economics editor at the National Review, and a contributing editor at Forbes magazine.) The institute's senior fellow is Wayne Lutton, an extreme-right writer, and its spokesman is Kevin Lamb. Its board includes Louis R. Andrews, American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor, and James B. Taylor, who is also on the board of directors of the Reagan Ranch Program. Its advisory committee includes Kevin MacDonald.

But even more remarkable -- and obvious, really, to anyone with a knowledge of the history of racism -- is that this piece doesn't just echo old racists who have been uttering the same -impending-doom warnings for the, as so much of his previous work does. It practically plagiarizes them -- and one in particular.

That would be a fellow named Madison Grant, whose 1916 national bestseller The Passing of the Great Race. Its thesis:

"We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America 'an asylum for the oppressed,' are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all 'distinctions of race, creed, or color,' the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo."

Grant not only inspired a whole generation of American eugenicists, his book was also a major source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, particularly in developing the notions of "racial cleansing" that produced the Holocaust:

It received a large boost during the '30s under Nazis patronage. Seeking a holistic artist, scientific, and philosophic basis for their political program based on race especially the blond, blue-eyed Aryan ideal, Grant's book and the genre in general received significant support. Hitler had read Grant's book and wrote a letter to him stating that it was "his Bible". The Nazis used Grant's ideas about eugenics to justify compulsory sterilization, and used his ideas about Nordic superiority to justify programs such as Heinrich Himmler's Lebensborn Society, which existed to preserve typical Nordic genes, such as blond hair and blue eyes, by sheltering blond, blue-eyed women and subjecting them to breeding programs. All this was related to Grant's claim that the Nordic Race is in danger of being out-bred by inferior racial stocks.

Just so we're all clear on where this kind of stuff inevitably heads. The "white race," meanwhile, seems to continue to be doing just fine, and probably will continue to do so for many generations to come. But no doubt, ninety years from now, and a hundred and ninety, there will be some fresh new Buchanan or Grant to warn them of their imminent doom.

Things Americans don't like to talk about

2008-04-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

One of the oddities of the emerging media meta-narrative about Jeremiah Wright is the way it is now readily assumed by the broad range of talking heads that Wright's recent comments have only proven the charge that he is deeply "anti-American," embodied in the endlessly repeated "God damn America" sound bite.

There's no doubt that a lot of Wright's views are indeed deeply critical of America, even pugnaciously (and thus disconcertingly) so, and some -- particularly his apparent absorption of racial theories regarding the spread of HIV -- are dubious at best. Considering Wright's contentious performance yesterday at the National Press Club, one really can't blame Obama for washing his hands of the man.

But it's also apparent that the larger context in which Wright condemns American behavior -- the reason he shouts "God damn America" -- in fact reflects hard historical realities that Americans, and the American media especially, really don't want to talk about, let alone confront the present-day consequences thereof.

And doing so, evidently, is now proof of being "anti-American."

Among the things, evidently, that we're not supposed to bring up because it interrupts Peggy Noonan's fantasy vision of an American history populated mostly by noble 49ers and industrious Henry Fords, are the following:

-- The genocide committed against Native Americans.
-- Slavery.
-- The "lynching era" and Jim Crow.
-- Sundown towns.
-- The forced incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

It's human, of course, to want to think of yourself as a good person, and your country as a good country. Which is why it's human of white Americans -- the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who perpetrated these atrocities -- to want to forget that these things happened. And they want to believe that because these events were in the past, and they took some initial steps toward reconciliation 40 years ago, the issues should have gone away, and if they haven't, well, it's the victims' fault.

The victims and their descendants, however, cannot forget that these things happened, because they continue to live with the legacy of them every day. And white Americans should not delude themselves into thinking that they could or should have forgotten, either. Ask any Native American living on a reservation, or any descendant of Japanese camp internees, or any African American, whether they can forget these things.

Perhaps when young black men no longer face persistent job discrimination or lowered life expectancies, when racial residential segregation is no longer a persistent reality, when hate crimes are a distant memory, when our response to great national war-inducing traumas is no longer imbued with xenophobic hysteria -- perhaps when white Americans take actual steps beyond those four-decade-old baby steps to confront the legacy of their very real history of shameful behavior toward nonwhites, then perhaps we can ask for that forgetting.

Assuming that they should -- and indeed insisting that the fact that they haven't is proof that they "hate America" -- is simply childish. But then, that's what we've come to expect both of the American right and the American media.

These historical realities in fact were what provided the context of Wright's "God damn America" snippet. Here's the key passage from the sermon:

Where governments change, God does not change. God is the same yesterday, today and forever more. That’s what his name I Am means. He does not change.

God was against slavery on yesterday, and God, who does not change, is still against slavery today. God was a God of love yesterday, and God who does not change, is still a God of love today. God was a God of justice on yesterday, and God who does not change, is still a God of justice today. God does not change.

And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on the reservations.

When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps.

When it came to treating the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing. Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lowest paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of the racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating its citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme.

What's obvious, in fact, is that the longtime right-wing "America, love it or leave it" style of patriotism has become part of the media's standard narrative in the post-9/11 world. I think Al Franken had it right:

If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that conservatives love America and liberals hate America.... They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different Way. You see, they love America the way a 4-year-old loves her Mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups.

To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.

In the new media universe, Mommy America would never ever hurt those poor black people. And if maybe she did once upon a time, well, she made up for it a long time ago and now things are all better. Bringing up evidence to the contrary just means you hate Mommy.

Which might explain why people like Wright get all contemptuous on their asses.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Tuesday Bloggage

2008-04-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

-- by Sara

This week's post at Blog For Our Future is about Jeremiah Wright, who (as it turns out) has a long history of being one of liberal Christianity's most stubborn and durable bulwarks against a variety of conservative efforts to corrupt the Christian message. That fact, it turns out, has everything to do with why the Wright story won't die -- and why the right wing will stop at nothing to take him down.

I talk about how this battle has been fought on a couple of fronts. There's a lot about Obama and Wright (and, for that matter, John Hagee and Rod Parsley) that doesn't really come into focus until you know the whole backstory. If you want some context the media's not giving you, check it out. As usual, ratings love is always appreciated.

A lot of the information in this post came from Sarah Posner's new book, God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, which is a short, brisk, very enlightening read.

And yes, I know I'm on deck to write another post or two on the FLDS. Now that this is done, that's coming up next. Stand by.

Just another viewpoint

2008-04-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

In the age of Drudge and "Fair and Balanced" news, we all know that facts and falsehoods are just two sides of the same coin, right? So I guess it's inevitable that some Republican somewhere would find it acceptable to speak before neo-Nazis because they're just another interest group, after all.

Sure enough. Jason Miller at the New-Dispatch in Michigan City, Indiana, reports that a bright republican attorney named Tony Zirkle, vying for the GOP nomination in his local congressional district, decided to do just such a thing:

U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn't know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it.

"This is just a great opportunity for me to witness," he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn't believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn't Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.

The Crown Point Republican spoke in front of about 56 "white activists" at an event honoring the birth of Hitler. The German leader was responsible for the genocide of millions of Jews and others during World War II.

Zirkle said the group asked him to speak to discuss the effect of pornography and prostitution on young, white women and girls.

Actually, it does matter who you speak to if you aspire to publicly elected office: Your presence before any organization lends them legitimacy; and when it comes to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, that's simply irresponsible. That's why it was a problem when folks like Ron Paul and Trent Lott and Haley Barbour spoke before the Council of Conservative Citizens. If nothing else, it speaks of incredibly poor judgment on the part of that official.

But when you read the report of the event from the South Bend Tribune, it's clear that Zirkle's problems go beyond just a lack of judgment:

An account of the gathering on www.Overthrow.com says "Zirkle spoke on his history as a state's attorney in Indiana, prosecuting Jewish and Zionist criminal gangs involved in trafficking prostitutes and pornography from Russia and the Zionist entity.''

... Zirkle said he feels he was misunderstood. His real mission, he said, is to rid the country of pornography, and that's what he was saying at the ANSWP gathering. So how did his comment about Jews fit in?

"Most of the male porn stars were Jewish at the beginning," Zirkle explained.

The Floyd Brown schtick strikes again

2008-04-24T20:33:00.001-07:00

-- by Dave

In a way, you have to admire the Rovean evilness of Floyd Brown's schtick, now playing in North Carolina.

The new ad recounts the deaths of three Chicago residents in 2001 at the hands of criminal gangs. "That same year, a Chicago state senator named Barack Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders," an ominous female narrator intones. "So the question is, can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?"

What's clever about the schtick is that it lets John McCain look noble and "moderate" by officially denouncing it -- to, of course, no effect, because that's how these things work -- while the ad gets national play and permeates not just North Carolina voters' consciousnesses but that of Americans generally. It's how the right runs these kinds of appeals up the flagpole to see how it flies -- and the way it's flying so far, I'd guess it's just a preview of what we'll see this fall.

And so it's been playing on my cable TV all day, over and over -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox, they're all playing it. Atrios has it exactly right, as usual:

Some Republican or conservative group runs a dumb ad.

John McCain nobly distances himself from it.

Cable news spends all day talking about it and showing it for free.

Rinse. Repeat.

That's the Brown formula: Create an incendiary ad, typically reverberant with far-right (often racist) themes repackaged for more mainstream consumption; spend a little bit of money in a few precincts, let the Republicans involved look good with the soccer-mom contingent turned off by racially incendiary campaigns, by officially denouncing; but still reaching the closet-racist bloc with the ad itself -- which of course gets national play in the mainstream media as it discusses the outrage that ensues. This, of course, expands the audience exponentially, and for no added expense. Diabolical, really, but clever as hell.

It's important to understand that the media are being deliberately gamed here, but they have no excuse whatsoever, ethically speaking, for allowing this to happen. After all, this is Floyd Brown we're talking about here. He's played this game before -- many, many times -- and has boasted afterward about how easy the media were to manipulate. But they never learn. Or perhaps they don't want to learn, because it makes for an easy narrative, and there's nothing they love like easy narratives.

It's also been striking how often the narrative veers into a discussion of Rev. Wright and Obama's judgment, which is ostensibly the ad's chief storyline. But anyone watching it can see that there's a larger, underlying theme: the ad is all about associating Obama with black criminality and supposedly lax liberal policies to "blame" for it. It's all about scaring white suburbanites while giving them the cover of hand-wringing about his "judgment."

Well, that's Floyd Brown for you. It is simply the Willie Horton campaign updated with the special edge of targeting a black candidate. And stirring the racial pot and widening the cultural divide is what Brown is all about.

Everyone, in fact, mentions the Horton ad as a classic example of Brown's tactics. But it's also important to remember that he's been a major player in nearly every right-wing smear of leading Democratic figures in the ensuing years, including the Clinton impeachment fiasco and the Swift Boating of John Kerry.

Joe Conason wrote about Brown and his cohort, David Bossie, back in 2004, when he was involved in swift-boating John Kerry:

At Citizens United, the boisterous Brown and his sidekick Bossie are raising money to air their latest video creation, which blasts Kerry for his expensive haircuts and his wife's wealth, tagging him as a "rich elitist liberal from Massachusetts who says he's a man of the people."

... If the names of Brown and Bossie sound more familiar, they attained notoriety together during the Clinton era as indefatigable promoters of the bogus "Whitewater" scandal. They served as publicity agents for David Hale, the crooked and discredited former Little Rock municipal judge whose allegations against the Clintons forced the appointment of an independent counsel. Among mainstream journalists panting for a career-making Watergate-style scandal, Brown and Bossie found many a gullible mark. For nearly a decade they churned out junk night and day. For a while, Bossie went on the payroll of the Senate Whitewater Committee; later he worked for Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on Government Operations investigating Clinton and Al Gore -- until he was caught distributing doctored tapes to the media.

Their scorched-earth campaign tactics were epitomized by Brown and Bossie's 1992 paperback broadside "Slick Willie: Why America Can't Trust Bill Clinton." Among the ugliest features of this little pamphlet was a chapter of unsupported and anonymous insinuations about Clinton's role in a female student's suicide. Their "investigation" was later called "an unusually brazen dirty tricks operation" in a report on "CBS Evening News." (In light of recent discussion of the president's National Guard service, the authors may nowregret at least one of "Slick Willie's" chapter titles -- "Brave Men Died in Vietnam: Where Was Bill Clinton?")

The Horton ad appeared not as part of the Bush-Quayle campaign, whose strategists shied away from such obvious racism, but under the auspices of a shadowy organization called "Americans for Bush." According to testimony filed with the Federal Election Commission, which investigated the financing and planning of the Horton ad in 1990, the ad's actual creators included Brown and Shirley. Others involved included Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, and a young producer named Jesse Raiford who was simultaneously working on TV commercials for Roger Ailes, then his boss at the official Bush-Quayle campaign. (FEC commissioners and investigators strongly suspected unlawful collusion between Bush-Quayle and Americans for Bush, but Republican members of the commission quickly killed the probe.)

The rather primitive commercial featured the scary mug shot of Horton -- a sullen, scruffy-looking, African-American murderer who got weekend passes from prison while Dukakis was governor. Its provocative appeal to white fear was so blatant that even the Bush campaign was embarrassed, but Brown gleefully described it as the "silver bullet" that ruined the Democratic nominee.

Brown hasn't entirely lost his taste for stoking racial animosities. He currently works for the Young America's Foundation, where he oversees the indoctrination of youthful conservatives at the former Reagan Ranch. The YAF recently honored Rhode Island student Jason Mattera as the "top conservative student activist in the country," apparently because he sponsored a "whites only" scholarship at his school in protest of affirmative action.

I also wrote about Brown that year, discussing his long connections to far-right extremists in the "Patriot"/militia movement, citing a Chip Berlet piece on Brown's career:

Brown remains proud of the 1988 Willie Horton ad, widely denounced as racist pandering. In 1992, he attempted to place ads for a $4.99 paid phone call that would play tapes of Gennifer Flowers in a telephone conversation with then-governor Clinton. The hook was a promise that the conversation probed sexual matters. The incident was so tasteless that the Bush/Quayle campaign was again forced to condemn Brown and his tactics. Brown also arranged a screening for a reporter of Militia leader Linda Thompson's video, "Waco: The Big Lie," a potage of conspiracy theories linking Clinton to premeditated murder.

Two of Brown's senior staff are veterans of the ultra-conservative subculture with its conspiracist worldview of communism as a vast left wing conspiracy-a worldview that originated in the Old Right. Cliff Kincaid is director of Citizens United Foundation's American Sovereignty Action Project. He the author of two conspiracist books on the United Nations, Global Bondage: The U.N. Plan to Rule the World and Global Taxes for World Government, both published by Huntington House. Kincaid's claims about the U.N. are promoted within the patriot movement. Kincaid also works for Accuracy in Media, and writes columns for Human Events and the American Legion Magazine, with a circulation of 3 million. In a 1991 article for Human Events, Kincaid red-baited groups protesting the Gulf War and quoted right-wing undercover operative Sheila Louise Rees, claiming antiwar demonstrations were concocted "by the traditional hard-line peace activist organizations that have always worked with the Communist Party U.S.A." Human Events is now published by Eagle/Phillips Publishing. Regnery Publishing is primarily owned by Phillips Publishing and the Regnery family.

It's important to understand the role that people like Brown play. Not only does he enable the right to feed red meat to their more extremist elements while giving them a certain "plausible deniablity" (thus the official distancing, which Brown explicitly welcomes), he plays an even greater part in transmitting ideas from the extremist right into the mainstream, thanks largely to a complaisant media willing to lend him the mantle of credibility he doesn't deserve. For instance, I've discussed how the Wall Street Journal lapped up Brown's bill of goods on Clinton in the 1990s:

Likewise, the WSJ indulged all kinds of extremist propaganda in its pursuit of Clinton. One of its chief sources was Floyd Brown, a longtime enemy of Bill from Arkansas days. Brown was responsible for the circulation of much of the early Whitewater dirt on Bill Clinton, mostly through Citizens United's top investigator, David Bossie (who later gained notoriety as the erstwhile chief investigator for Rep. Dan Burton's campaign-finance probe). Brown's credibility was already of questionable value; by 1998, this had become unmistakable. For instance, at Brown's Citizens United Web site -- in addition, naturally, to a bevy of Monica-related impeachment screeds -- you could find screaming exposes of the Clintons’ alleged involvement in the United Nations one-world-government plot. A streaming banner on the site shouted: "Secret United Nations Agenda Exposed In Explosive New Video!" (The video in question prominently featured an appearance by then-Sen. John Ashcroft.) A little further down, the site explains: "This timely new video reveals how the liberal regime of Bill Clinton is actively conspiring to aid and abet the United Nations in its drive for global supremacy." For those who follow the militia movement, these tales have more than a familiar ring.

Yet in 1994, members of the WSJ's editorial board sat down with Brown and examined his anti-Clinton information -- which in nature was not appreciably different from what he was flogging four years later -- and shortly thereafter, nearly half of the Journal's editorial page was devoted one day to reprinting materials obtained from Brown. Moreover, the WSJ continued to recycle the allegations from that material for much of the following six years.

More recently, Brown played similar games in the 2004 election in Martin Frost's congressional race against Pete Sessions: Came in with an "independent" group that ran racially incendiary attack ads against Frost. Sessions, of course, won.

Every time out, the media have played along with Brown. And it's clear that won't change anytime soon.

Tuesday Bloggage at Blog For Our Future

2008-04-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

-- by Sara

It's that time again. This is rapidly turning "FLDS 'Till Your Eyes Bleed" theme week. I'm planning to spend another couple days working through my current pile 'o facts, and then (unless something really unique happens) I'm done with the subject for a while.

This week's Our Future piece riffs off of my "Crazy Dangerous" series of a couple months back. It's basically a threat assessment: Does the FLDS have what it takes to become truly dangerous? Several perspicacious commenters have already invoked those pieces and drawn some parallels, so I went ahead and did damn near 5,000 words on the subject today. (The short answer is: Yes. And No.)

I'm a long-form blogger, but that's excessive even for me. If you've got time this evening, go take a look. Be warned, though: this one's chewy, and it takes a while.

Another compassionate conservative

2008-04-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

I'd really like all those nativists and border watchers who claim that their activism is only about illegal immigration to explain this:

Disparaging remarks aimed at migrant workers got resident House rabble-rouser Douglas Bruce banned from speaking on a temporary-worker bill today.

"We don't need 5,000 more illiterate peasants in the state of Colorado," Bruce, R-Colorado Springs, told the chamber to an audible gasp.

Rep. Kathleen Curry, leading the House at the time, immediately barred Bruce from speaking at the podium, an uncommon maneuver.

"How dare you?" she asked Bruce, before House members moved back to discussion of a bill aimed at helping seasonal farm workers from other countries enter the state legally on a temporary basis.

The pilot program, which sets up liaisons in Mexico to assist foreign workers, would allow up to 5,000 laborers into Colorado
over five years.

The next day, Bruce was unrepentant, even going so far as to explain that he brought it up because he wanted to raise the issue of, yep, illegal immigration:

Bruce stood by his statement afterward, saying his colleagues are "offended by the truth" and contending the term was technically accurate. He said
he'd been planning the bill-related speech — at least two pages, single-spaced — for about a week.

"I was trying to make illegal immigration an issue for the House," Bruce said. "They just don't want anybody to disagree with a bill that they like."

The legislation in question, of course, was all about bringing in legal immigrants. Not that the nativists actually make that distinction.

[HT to Sam Smith at Scholars and Rogues.]

What We're Not Talking About, Part I: Other Issues With the FLDS

2008-04-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

FLDS founding patriarch Rulon Jeffs with his last two wives
-- sisters Edna and Mary Fischer -- on their wedding day.
He received the pair as a 90th birthday present.

-- by Sara

So far, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the state of Texas's raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints compound in Eldorado, TX has been focused on just a couple of narratives. The first, of course, is the state's dogged and thorough -- and long overdue -- attempt to prove that the church's young women have been systemically sexually abused by the men of the group; and that this abuse is not just rare, but rather an inherent and accepted feature of the group's social order.

The other is the cultural curiosity of the sect's women in general. We see them, looking like they just walked out of the 1890s in their bizarre high hairdos, pastel prairie dresses, and sturdy shoes, and wonder how such a group of fossils (let alone tens of thousands of them) could still exist in modern America. It makes for great TV; but I often look at these women (most of whom have never watched TV in their lives), and feel like they're lambs being dragged out in front of media wolves they've never learned to recognize or fear. In a world when all of us seem to be in permanent rehearsal for our own 15 minutes of fame, these women are so unprepared for all this that they're downright fascinating.

These are the two current storylines the media is focused on -- at least, so far. In time, though, if the reporters and investigators stick around, they might find other things to talk about. A careful reading of Daphne Bramham's excellent The Secret Lives of Saints reveals that there are plenty of other questions we should be asking about the FLDS -- and months worth of stories we're not hearing about right now, but which need to be discussed and generally understood if the country is going to deal with the group appropriately and effectively.

And the country will be dealing with it -- probably for quite some time to come. Throughout its 60-year history, the FLDS has dealt with prosecution (or persecution) by seeding itself into new states, laying down roots for new communities that it can migrate to. (Eldorado itself started out as one of these.) New compounds are coming together now in Idaho and South Dakota; and there are rumors of others being staked out in Colorado and Nevada as well. Hildale/Colorado City may have been effectively taken over by the state of Utah, and Eldorado is in crisis; but with somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 adherents, this is a group that's not going to pass from the American scene any time soon.

One of the things we need to understand is just how the FLDS managed to stay so far under the radar for so long -- and what twisted consequences were allowed to follow from that lack of oversight. Bramham shows that they did a stunningly effective job of building their own self-sufficient infrastructure of community institutions -- hospitals, police forces, courts, financial trusts, schools, and employers -- that allowed the church to function without interacting with the outside world any more than necessary. Most of the group's institutions were designed to mimic and supplant outside authority well enough to keep the group (and especially its treatment of women and children) hidden from the prying eyes of outsiders. And, for 60 years, those who were responsible for providing higher-level oversight for all these institutions have almost always been somehow induced to look the other way.

In the existing FLDS communities in Utah and Arizona, state authorities have already begun investigations on many of these fronts -- not least because they are the stuff on which further legal battles, and the future of the sect, may turn. However, keeping the FLDS at bay in the years ahead will require county, state, and professional authorities everywhere in North America to stop averting their eyes, stay on their toes, and show a strong willingness to challenge these attempts to build this kind of sheltering infrastructure.

And there are other, less obvious reasons we need to be keeping an eye on them, too. Here's the first half of my motley list -- a few assorted areas of interest I'd be poking at more deeply, along with questions I'd be asking, were I a New York Times front-pager, a TV talking head, or a public official in any county or state where the FLDS has set up camp. The list is long, so I'll discuss a few today, and then follow up with the rest by Wednesday.

For-Prophet Health Care
FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they're not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital -- built partly with public funds -- that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.

As a result, the group's women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).

The FLDs has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community's doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.

Of course, this misuse of mental health care has turned into one non-obvious but critically important cultural land mine for the Texas authorities who are trying to figure out how to deal with their FLDS wards. Along with everything else, they're trying to work with women who've learned to see mental health evaluations as tantamount to an incarceration threat -- are thus predisposed to regard gentile doctors or social workers as a mortal enemy. It's not making things easier.

Based on this long history, counties and states that find themselves hosting FLDS compounds need to be keeping a close eye on how these communities manage health care. Who provides it? Are they keeping good records? Are they following the law? Do they adhere to accepted standards of care? Are they holding the line as our first line of defense against child abuse -- or are they helping the community hide its abusive secrets? If the state officials in charge of supervising hospitals and doctors had stepped up and asked these questions decades ago, thousands of women and children might have been spared generations of abuse.

Cops and Courts: No Law But God's Law
Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they historically controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado City area. Though these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally public courts, they weren't concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the law according to the FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective recourse to the laws the rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have their property seized by nominally "official" cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil government, for violating church laws.

Like African-Americans in the slavery era, women who tried to run were captured by these police and returned to their husbands for punishment -- or taken to the hospital for the dreaded mental health evaluation. The police force's main job is to be the muscle that enforces the Prophet's control of the entire community. When the Prophet decides that a man no longer deserves his home, these are the cops who enforce the eviction. Appealing to the FLDS judges has been useless: due process as we understand it doesn't even enter into the conversation.

There is progress on this front. The state of Utah began to move against the Hildale police force in 2005, revoking the certification of its polygamous chief. Sam Roundy admitted that he'd investigated over 25 sexual abuse cases in the past decade -- including one that involved the rape of an eight-year-old -- and never reported it to child protection authorities. (He pleaded ignorance of all mandated reporter laws.) However, Roundy was replaced with another polygamous officer who immediately sent Warren Jeffs a letter pledging his loyalty, and I found no word that he's left office since. Later that year, the Utah Supreme Court also disbarred the local polygamous judge, which paved the way for reform of the local courts.

But the Saints are now in many places besides Utah; and officials in these other states shouldn't be surprised if they try to hijack cops and courts and replicate this system wherever they go. In Utah, decades of failure to attend to this effectively deprived tens of thousands of people of their civil rights. It can't be allowed to happen again.

Death Among the FLDS
These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own crematorium), which opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates -- and ensures that no questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed. Given the genetic instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be wise for them to have the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to be asking questions about who's in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and what kinds of records are being kept.

The Fatal Flaw: Inbreeding Takes Its Toll
One of the most striking things about the FLDS is that certain surnames -- Jeffs, Blackmore, Fischer, Jessop, Barlow, Steed -- occur over and over again. In a community of over 40,000 people -- many of whom share fathers, grandfathers, or uncles -- the degree of blood relationship between any two people is likely to be very close indeed. In fact, over half the people in Hildale/Colorado City are blood relatives. So it's not surprising that, starting in 1980, the tragic results of three generations of tight inbreeding began to appear.

That was the year the first Colorado City child was diagnosed with fumarase deficiency -- a genetic disease so rare that only a handful of cases had ever been diagnosed worldwide. The disease causes severe mental retardation, seizures, hydroencephaly, growth failure, and physical deformities. Two of the FLDS's old-line families, the Barlows and the Jessops, both carry the recessive gene -- which is now present in several thousand FLDS members who trace their descent to those two founding fathers. By the 1990, Bramham writes, the twin FLDS cities had the highest concentration of children with fumarase deficiency in the world.

There are also signs of widespread hereditary eye problems among the current crop of children, along with evidence that that the community has a higher-than-average infant mortality rate. Arizona coroners recently -- and finally -- got involved in investigating these. But there's plenty more here for public health officials to look at; and it's becoming clear that the custom of close intermarriage needs to end on genetic grounds alone.

In the next post, I'll cover a few more reasons that the FLDS should never again be allowed to operate without close oversight from the outside world.

What to Give the Racist Who Has Everything

2008-04-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

-- by Sara

The spirit of the Confederacy is alive and well -- and now available for just $99 (in three easy payments!) from The Bradford Exchange:

Also, apparently, doubles as a dog whistle:

Civil War Men's Sterling Silver Ring Shows Your Southern Pride! Exclusive Civil War Gift for History Enthusiasts!
Hold history in your hands with a dramatic jewelry exclusive that pays tribute to an unforgettable time in American history. Introducing the Civil War men's sterling silver ring, available only from The Bradford Exchange. Detailed with striking Civil War era symbols, this fine jewelry design is a handsome presentation that represents Southern pride and memorializes those who fought for the South during this turning point in our country.

Proudly wear this Civil War memorabilia, individually crafted of solid sterling silver for a gleaming finish. At the center, this Civil War men's sterling silver ring bears the Confederate flag and shield in rich red and blue enameling and trimmed in silver to boldly stand out against an inlay of genuine black onyx. C.S.A. (Confederate States of America) and the years of the Confederacy (1861-1865) are emblazoned on the banner below. As a special finishing touch, the inside of the band is engraved with "Pride of the South." What a stunning keepsake for you to treasure every day or give as a unique Civil War gift. Hurry, strong demand is expected. Order now!

However: I'm puzzled that it's missing that all-important secret compartment for your Viagra pill, which strikes me as a very serious oversight considering the audience.

Remember: Just eight shopping weeks till Father's Day!

h/t Andrew Kar, who found this little gem in Parade magazine.

It's about American values, Mandrake

2008-04-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

-- by Dave

JJust as Californians are considering finally repealing the McCarthy-era "anti-communist" laws that threatened the firing of any teacher suspected of promoting communism, it seems that the Arizona Legislature is considering passing their 21st-century counterpart:

Arizona schools whose courses "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization" could lose state funding under the terms of legislation approved Wednesday by a House panel. SB1108 also would bar teaching practices that "overtly encourage dissent" from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Schools would have to surrender teaching materials to the state superintendent of public instruction, who could withhold state aid from districts that broke the law.

Of course, such subversiveness is an overwhelming problem in today's schools -- far more pressing than dropout rates and declining academic standards. Now if only we could figure out who's doing the subverting ... unless ... that's it! It's that insidious Reconquista! plot!

Sure enough, that's what this bill is in fact all about -- killing Latino studies and MEChA clubs:

Another section of the bill would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if it is "based in whole or in part on race-based criteria," a provision Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said is aimed at MEChA, the Moviemiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a student group. The 9-6 vote by the Appropriations Committee sends the measure to the full House.

MEChA is the nativist right's favorite flogging boy, even though there is no evidence at all that it's actually subversive or racist or whatever it is they seem to think it is. Unless you consider holding school bake sales subversive. Most likely it's the Cinco de Mayo parties.

As Roberto Lovato observes:

By targeting Chicano studies, MECHA and other groups and individuals promoting critical thinking among Latinos, the forces of white fear get two important benefits: they get to motivate their aging, flaccid base with the political Viagra of a new “threat” while also turning critical thinking among Latino youth in a dangerous and expensive endeavor. Better for the young barbarians to be disciplined by institutions and environments free of critical thinking - military and police boot camps and other hero factories, shiny new prisons, Dickensian and de-unionized workplaces and schools that promote “American values”, “capitalism” and “civilization”.

None of this is particularly surprising for Pearce. After all, this is the guy who a couple of years ago opined that illegal immigrants have no free-speech rights, and is pals with neo-Nazi J.T. Ready. He's well on the Arizona GOP's right fringe.

What's astonishing and disturbing, really, is that his compatriots in the Arizona Legislature would actually let this bill proceed. That nativist Kool-aid in the Republicans' drinking water must have a cumulative effect.

The Secret Lives of Saints

2008-04-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

-- by Sara

For most watchers of the religious right, the definitive book on fundamentalist Mormonism has been Jon Krakauer's 2003 bestseller, Under the Banner of Heaven. That book centered on the murder of a woman, along with her child, who dared to defy her husband's involvement with that polygamous sect. It also introduced America to Warren Jeffs, long before he became a fugitive and eventually a convicted felon; and put Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, UT on America's cultural map.

A lot has gone down in the FLDS world in five years since the book came out -- and much of it has occurred in locations far afield from those dusty twin cities straddling a southwestern state line. The FLDS has dealt with the increased scrutiny by diffusing its 40,000 or so members (some counts put the number as high as 100,000) across North America. The sect has always been strategic in using state and national borders to shield both its money and any "persons of interest" in their midst, which is why they built compounds in British Columbia and Mexico as far back as the late 1940s.

But that strategy has gone into overdrive in the past decade, as governments have grown increasingly interested and the group's population has continued to explode (as tends to happen wherever women average seven to ten kids apiece). The compound at Eldorado is only one of these expansion efforts: others are afoot in Idaho, South Dakota, and suburban Las Vegas. Beware of Mormons claiming to build "hunting lodges for wealthy businessmen." That seems to be the usual cover story whenever they go land shopping.

One of the most perceptive and tenacious reporters covering these developments as been Daphne Bramham of the Vancouver Sun. (A collection of her reporting on the FLDS over the past several years can be found online here.) Bramham's focus has been on the remote 2500-member Bountiful compound just outside Creston, BC, which was founded in 1947 by Roy Blackmore and a group from one of Canada's largest historical Mormon settlements in Cardston, AB. Roy's son Winston Blackmore inherited the role of patriarch for the community until Warren Jeffs cheated him out of control in 2002.

Bramham's take on the story has been different -- and in some ways, both broader and deeper -- than Krakauer's. For one thing, she's spent a lot more time with the women of the community, and has become good friends with several of the better-known escapees like Debbie Palmer and Carole Jessup. That friendship gives her an insider's sensitivity to the emotional and social dynamics of these families -- the interior lives of the women as they deal with their husbands, their children, each other, and the outside world.

For another, while Krakauer's book focused tightly on Colorado City/Hildale, Bramham's northern perch gives her a much broader view of the far-flung geography of the FLDS nation -- and a much keener sense of the way the sect has used that geography to escape government interference to date.

Over the past four years, I've been fortunate to be able to follow the vagaries of the international FLDS through Bramham's articles in my local paper. And now I'm delighted to be able to recommend her new book, The Secret Lives of Saints, released in Canada just a few weeks ago -- barely ahead of the Texas raid. (Amazon will be filling US pre-orders starting in May.)

The book provides the best available backstory and context for anyone trying to make sense out of what's happening now in Eldorado. It also fills in the details of the past five years, picking up where Under the Banner of Heaven left off and bringing us up to date. Most importantly, it explains precisely why this group has been left to go on as it has for as long as it has -- even when local and state-level authorities were well aware that laws were being violated.

Ghosts in the Machine
The problem, as Bramham portrays it, comes down to one issue. Nobody -- not in Utah, nor Arizona, nor British Columbia -- has yet dared to challenge the FLDS on the basic legality of polygamy itself. Where prosecutions have succeeded, they've been on other charges: Brenda Lafferty's murder, Warren Jeffs' role in facilitating statutory rape, and the more general economic exploitation of the church's members. These efforts have done much to undermine the church's functioning (especially the latter one, which I'll get to in an upcoming post). But they've all been criminal and financial assaults that dance around the deepest question at the heart of this church's existence: Is polygamy acceptable in modern North American culture?

That's a debate that can be had all kinds of ways -- and will be had in the months ahead. (Bramham, personally, thinks the answer is a firm "no"). So it's striking to realize just how far out of their way prosecutors from BC to AZ have gone through the decades to avoid putting polygamy itself on trial. And the reasons for this have to do with the ghosts that seem to haunt the political machines everywhere the FLDS has sunk roots.

In BC, they've shied away because Canada's religious freedom laws have only been in place since 1982. They're still new enough that the country hasn't really had enough time to establish the conditions under which they shouldn't apply -- and prosecutors are terrified that if they bring a challenge, Canada's supreme court will rule all existing anti-polygamy laws unconsitutional. It's a Catch-22: there are laws on the books that nobody dares to enforce, because they're afraid that if they do, the courts will void those laws entirely. Which means, of course, that they might as well not exist at all.

Bramham points out, however, that the BC attorneys may be misreading the mood of the justices in Ottawa. Immigration Canada routinely rejects Muslim immigrants with plural wives. Ontario courts have also recently decided that allowing Muslims to deal with divorce using Sharia law is a violation of Muslim women's civil rights, thus establishing the principle that religious freedom does not apply when the religion in question is depriving people of their basic liberties. These two precedents suggest that Canada's Supreme Court might well rule that polygamy doesn't merit religious freedom protection -- and BC now has a new AG who seems a bit more inclined to push the issue.

Similar ghosts haunt both Utah and Arizona. In Arizona, the state government still cringes at the memory of the 1953 Short Creek raid -- an earlier attempt to disband the FLDS community that backfired badly on every politician involved. (The memory of Short Creek is everywhere in this story, and I'll come back to it later, too.) In Utah, prosecution is hobbled by the fact that many of the state officials involved are themselves descendants of polygamous Mormon pioneers. They want very much to get rid of the FLDS, which they regard as a PR blight on their faith, But at the same time, it feels much too much like they're prosecuting Grandpa and Grandma. The ghosts of their own ancestors stay their hand.

What's remarkable about Eldorado is that the Texas authorities have had no such qualms. For the first time in the 60-year history of the FLDS, a state government appears to be carefully building a case that polygamy (at least, as practiced within this community) is so harmful to the women and children involved that it does not deserve First Amendment religious freedom protections. It's hard to overstate how audacious and unprecendented this is: it's the very first time anywhere in the 60 years of the FLDS that anyone has dared to say this right out loud. But it's an effort whose time has clearly come -- and it's probably no coincidence that Texas was the state to finally take it on.

Don't Mess With Texas
In choosing Eldorado, Jeffs may have, at long last, picked the wrong place to hide. Texas doesn't harbor the ghosts of Mormon pioneers or FLDS martyrs. Any liberal Texan will tell you that the Lone Star State is not cursed, as BC is, with an overbroad sense of religious freedom. What does lurk in its memetic closet is the memory of Waco -- another closed, secretive, sexually abusive cult that was left to fester unattended too long, with horrific consequences. Many of the people who are dealing with the FLDS had enough of an up-close-and-personal view of the 1993 disaster with the Branch Davidians to know what they're dealing with here.

There's no shortage of people in the media trying to make this a debate about religious freedom, which is fair enough. But the question they're not asking -- and the one that is central to that debate, in my mind -- is how we can reasonably and justly incorporate America's historical ideas about religious freedom with what we know now about how to identify and chart the prognosis of dangerous cults. As I've written before, governments in both Canada and the US are well aware of the signs that indicate a community headed toward violence. The FLDS exhibits almost all of those signs. As a society, it's time to figure out where the line gets crossed, and when government intervention becomes justified.

In an upcoming post, I'll discuss the specific ways the FLDS is following that well-understood path -- and how current events could conspire to either pull them back from that fate, or push them farther toward it. In the meantime, go over and put in your pre-order for Daphne Bramham's The Secret Lives of Saints. It's essential for anyone seeking a broader context and a deeper understanding of the events of the past two weeks.

Are FLDS women brainwashed?

2008-04-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

The FLDS's first consecrated Mormon Temple at the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, TX.
It was built by the order of Warren Jeffs, and consecrated by him
while he was a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

-- by Sara

I've spent the day wrangling with a post (which will probably turn into several posts) about the FLDS raid in Eldorado, TX. Oddly, last week's events occured while I had my nose buried in the best new book on the subject of the FLDS since Jon Krakauer's bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven came out in 2003, so I've got a lot of fresh and deep perspective on the matter -- too much, in fact, to be wrestled down into one coherent post.

Over dinner, I'd just about decided that the only way to deal with the overload was to chip away at the story in short blats over the next few days, which will attempt to put some new context to these events. And then I got an e-mail from Pastor Dan Schultz of Street Prophets, containing ample proof of just how badly that context is needed now that the media talking heads are all holding forth on this story.

Dan pointed me to the second most inane thing ABC News has produced today (the first, of course, being Charlie Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos' performance at the Pennsylvania debates) -- an odd little story by Emily Friedman asking "experts" whether or not FLDS wives are "brainwashed."

Between hysterical sobs, the women of the Yearning for Zion Ranch in rural Texas tearily pleaded Monday for the return of their children from state custody, but at the mere turn of a phrase, those tears mysteriously, uniformly stopped.

When conversations with reporters shifted away from the 416 children in state custody toward touchier subjects surrounding the mysterious religious sect, the overflowing emotions were quickly replaced with blank stares and terse replies.
Clad in conservative prairie dresses, hair back in buns and tight braids, the women stuck to monotone, emotionless responses in declining to answer reporters' questions concerning allegations of plural marriages and sexual assault within the sect.
Asked whether 14- and 15-year-old girls get married on the compound, a tight-lipped woman who would only give her first name, Marilyn, gave what appeared to be a rehearsed response.
"We are talking about our children now," she said, shaking her head, unwilling to stray from the subject of her children.
The shift to blank-faced denial was jarring in both its immediacy and consistency. Not a single one strayed from the script, an impressive display of solidarity, if a bit peculiar to the outsiders granted unprecedented access to the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
To outsiders, everything about these people is strange — from the way they dress to the way they talk and especially the way they live. To the uninitiated, it may even appear that these women must be brainwashed to live within the confines of the isolated, controlled sect.
Questions about rumored child brides, teen pregnancies and men assigned multiple wives garnered stoic expressions and a relentless determination to defend the sect's lifestyle.
"Do you know the definition of Zion?" responded Marie, when asked by a reporter what life within the sect's gate is really like. "Heaven on Earth."
It's an extreme statement, and the women of the sect have begun to realize that their devotion to their lifestyle is unusual to those on the outside.

So, are these women just fanatically, independently religious, or are they victims of something more sinister, like mind control?....
Mental health professionals told ABCNEWS.com that it may all depend on how you define brainwashing.

The piece goes on to interview several mental health professionals, who (except for one outlier) ome to the consensus that no, probably, these women aren't brainwashed -- just weirdly socialized. Brainwashing, after all, would require real coercion:

"Just because they are different doesn't mean they've been brainwashed," said H. Newton Malony, a senior professor of psychology at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "Brainwashing occurs when a person is physically incarcerated in order to believe something."

As far as we know, said Malony, these women and children — and even men, for that matter — have not been held against their will, but rather, have grown up in the sect and have become socialized to its customs.
"Are these woman just parroting strong pleasure or is this a strong religious conviction?" asked Malony. "I doubt it; they grew up in this [environment].
"This is just an example of a different culture," added Malony....
Nancy Ammerman, professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University and author of "Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World," also discourages the labeling of the West Texas polygamists as victims of brainwashing.
"Brainwashing is actually extraordinarily rare," said Ammerman. "It implies that the person has literally lost the ability to think independently and to make choices.
"We really don't have any evidence that anything even vaguely resembling that is going on with this particular group or with most religious groups," Ammerman told ABCNEWS.com.
....Most of these experts sided with Maloney, who said, "It only becomes brainwashing when a person is physically held against their will."

The problem, as it so often is with the mainstream media, is that absolutely everybody involved with reporting or commenting on this story has been airlifted into it in the past few days. (You'd think somebody would have at least taken the time on the plane flight to skim Krakauer's book and get up to speed. You'd be wrong.) And this is just one example of the ways that ignorance of the backstory cheats the rest of us out of a real understanding of what's going on here.

Because, by the definition offered by these experts, the FLDS is very coercive indeed.

Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet."

At the very least, women who do decide to leave the sect leave without money, skills, or a friend in the world. Most of them have no choice but to leave large numbers of children behind -- children who are the property of the patriarch, and whom many of them will never see again. If a woman is even suspected of wanting to leave, she's likely to be sent away from her kids to another compound far yonder as punishment for her rebelliousness. For a woman who's been taught all her life that motherhood is her only destiny and has no real intimacy with her husband, being separated from her children this way is a sacrifice akin to death.

At the very worst, death is indeed what awaits them. The FLDS preaches "blood atonement" -- the right of the patriarchs to kill apostates who dare to defy them, usually by slitting their throats. And they've done it: Krakauer hung his entire book on the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her year-old daughter, who were both killed by her husband's brothers because Brenda rejected (and mocked) her husband's desire to take plural wives. (Warren Jeffs also liked to rouse people out of their beds in the middle of the night for dramatic mass meetings testing their readiness for the Final Judgment -- meetings that had dark shades of Jonestown.) Brenda is the only one known to have been killed, but others who've left report being threatened with the same fate.

So ABC's reporters blather on about how these women aren't really brainwashed, because that would require coercion and being held physically against their will. One hopes that if they understood that they're holding forth about a group that routinely controls women by threatening to take away their kids -- and tells them that God justifies the slaying of wayward brides and their babies -- they'd change their minds and admit that this isn't just another odd, quaint sect on the American religious scene. Without that information, though, everything else that's going on in Texas loses much of its context.

There's a whole lot more depth and nuance to this story, and I'll try to get at some of it over the next several days. But let's start with the premise that almost nothing you're hearing in the mainstream media about this group can or should be taken at face value. Stand by for more.