Posts by David Neiwert

David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle, and the assistant editor of Crosscut.

Domestic terrorists plotting against Obama
Posted by David Neiwert, Orcinus on June 16, 2008 at 1:33 AM.

If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.

You can find the signs in the things they're saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

Bradley T. Kahle, 60, of Troutville, was one of five people arrested in last weekend's sweep. He told undercover agents he hoped Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would be killed if they were elected president, and that he would shoot judicial and law enforcement officials if he became terminally ill, according to an affidavit of probable cause made public Tuesday.

"Kahle said words to the effect of, that 'if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,'" the affidavit stated.

The same man also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people. And of course, the judge let him go on bail. Would I be crazy to suspect that if he were a Muslim talking about shooting white people from a high rise and hoping John McCain would get killed, no judge on earth would let him go?

In any event, a pattern is already developing, ranging from the Klan fellows who promise that Obama will be shot to the white supremacists who are actually rooting for him to win because they're certain he will fail. We're hearing a lot of language from the racist and "Patriot" right indicating that they expect a Democratic president to enact policies (particularly regarding gun control) that will inspire "civil war." Which means they are looking for excuses to act out.

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The Media Don’t Care About The Other Kind Of Terrorists
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on June 11, 2008 at 7:10 AM.

Our ever-astute friends in the mainstream media have apparently identified the latest terrorist threat: Barack and Michelle Obama and assorted other "jabbers".

Meanwhile, when a group of actual terrorists is arrested as they prepare to strike in the American heartland ... well, the media mostly snooze.

But as usual, it may have something to do with the fact that they were the wrong color:

Marvin Hall of Rimersburg, Perry Landis of the Clarion area, Morgan Jones of Lucinda, as well as Melissa Huet are in custody.

Investigators say they were stockpiling a cache of weapons with plans to target local government buildings.

The FBI, in raids over the weekend, confiscated hundreds of weapons - including everything from hunting rifles, homemade bombs, rudimentary rockets and cannons.

Sources tell KDKA's Marty Griffin the suspects made threats to blow up government buildings and carry out other extreme acts of domestic terrorism.

Imagine, if you will, how this would have been handled were these folks of Arab extraction or believers in radical Islamist ideology instead of your garden-variety far-right American ideology. CNN would have the cameras and reporters there, NBC would host an hour discussing the threat, and Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs' Chuck Johnson would bouncing around the walls of their rubber rooms even more frenetically than usual amid shouts of "Jihad!!!!"

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Gun Proponents Pushing for "Open Carry" Laws
Posted by David Neiwert, Orcinus on June 10, 2008 at 10:02 AM.

I was raised in an NRA household. My dad is an amateur gunsmith; he's very good at fixing the arcane and often delicate machinery of firearms, and is a real problem-solver -- so much so that I recall the local gunsmith begging him for help with special problems. I used to help him in his shop, watching and learning -- loading ammo, fixing rifles, carving stocks.

So I'm reasonably comfortable around guns, though I only own a couple of memento pieces. What I'm not comfortable around are the people who make fetishes out of the damned things.

This weekend's LA Times piece about people advocating the open carry of firearms really made me squirm -- with dread, mostly.

The Jensens are part of a fledgling movement to make a firearm as common an accessory as an iPod. Called "open carry" by its supporters, the movement has attracted grandparents, graduate students and lifelong gun enthusiasts like the Jensens.

"What we're trying to say is, 'Hey, we're normal people who carry guns,' " said Travis Deveraux, 36, of West Valley, a Salt Lake City suburb. Deveraux works for a credit card company and sometimes walks around town wearing a cowboy hat and packing a pistol in plain sight. "We want the public to understand it's not just cops who can carry guns."

You hear a lot of this kind of nonsense from the gun lobby whenever there is some kind of horrendous massacre involving guns: "Oh, if only the victims had been allowed to carry guns openly, somebody could have stopped this from happening."

Besides having watched too many bad action movies to understand the realities of gunplay, none of these geniuses seem to have stopped to think about what a culture in which people openly and casually carry guns would look like. Every interpersonal conflict would take on life-and-death dimensions because of the constancy of the implicit threat of guns becoming part of the human equation. If you think we're paranoid now, just wait.

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Immigration Raids: Harbinger of a Police State?
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on May 26, 2008 at 9:24 AM.

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.

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Bushvilles: Middle-Class Hoovervilles for the 21st Century
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on May 22, 2008 at 6:03 AM.

Reading a CNN report on a homeless woman in California (video here), I came across this:

Harvey now works part time for $8 an hour, and she draws Social Security to help make ends meet. But she still cannot afford an apartment, and so every night she pulls into a gated parking lot to sleep in her car, along with other women who find themselves in a similar predicament.

There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers.

The lots open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. and are run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, a homeless outreach organization.

It is illegal for people in California to sleep in their cars on streets. New Beginnings worked with the city to allow the parking lots as a safe place for the homeless to sleep in their vehicles without being harassed by people on the streets or ticketed by police.

Well, we all know that California is usually several steps ahead of the rest of the country in fashions -- cultural, economic, and otherwise. I fully expect we'll be seeing similar programs cropping up wherever the Big Shitpile is hitting the fan, compliments of the economic stewardship of George W. Bush & Co.

Can't afford a home? Well, you can take up residence in your car in a parking lot at night, just like these fine middle-class housewives do.

These transient homes for the once-prosperous deserve their own name, too. I propose we call them Bushvilles.

You all remember Hoovervilles from your history books, don't you?

They were products of an eerily similar economic policy: favor the wealthy, soak the poor, and screw the middle, then let God sort it out:

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Corruption Bubbles Up Amidst the Immigration Crackdown
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on May 16, 2008 at 5:58 AM.

Whenever you hear nativists like Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo wank endlessly about "cracking down on illegal immigration," you always hear them give lip service to the idea that they also have to crack down on the people who are doing the hiring. That's why Bush's "immigration crackdown," when announced, featured lots of talk about making employers toe the line too.

But this week's immigration raids in Iowa -- like similar raids elsewhere -- have made clear that this is all just a lot of empty wank. The reality, as always, is that the impoverished brown people are the only ones facing consequences.

So far, the chief employer involved in the raids, Agriprocessors Inc., has not been charged with anything, nor have the plant's managers or owners been rounded up like cattle and herded into detention centers.

I wonder if this couldn't be because one of its top officials is a major donor to Republicans:

A top official at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville that was the subject of an immigration enforcement action Monday is an active Republican campaign contributor, records show.

Sholom Rubashkin, whose family owns the company, since 2000 has made $23,750 in federal campaign contributions, according to Federal Election Commission records.

That includes $5,750 to the Republican Party of Iowa from 2002 through 2004.

Rubashkin also gave $2,000 to Rep. Tom Latham, an Ames Republican, in 2004; $1,500 to candidate William Dix in 2006; $3,000 to candidate Stan Thompson from 2001 through 2004; $2,000 to Sen. Charles Grassley of New Hartford in 2004; and $2,500 to former Rep. Jim Nussle in 2000 and 2002.

Grassley collected another $2,000 each from Abraham Rubashkin, Leah Rubashkin and Ryfka Rubashkin, all of Postville, in August 2004.

To be fair, it seems that other plant officials have also given money to some Democrats. But the fact remains that the people who should be joining the Latino immigrants behind bars -- and are not -- are people with heavy GOP connections. The Register story notes:

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Handling Immigrants the Republican Way - Like Cattle
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on May 14, 2008 at 1:03 PM.

It's not without reason that Latinos in the USA are feeling terrorized these days, thanks largely to the increasing "crackdown" in illegal immigrants being pursued by ICE officials. This week in Iowa, they had the largest immigration raid yet:

The number of illegal immigrants detained Monday in Postville has risen to 390 in what federal officials now describe as the largest single-site raid of its kind nationwide.

The detainees include 314 men and 76 women, according to figures released this morning by federal authorities. Fifty-six detainees – mostly women with young children – have been released under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We’re here to discuss not only the largest operation of its kind ever in Iowa, but in fact the largest single-site enforcement operation of its kind in the country,” U.S. Attorney Matt M. Dummermuth said.

The detainees included 290 who claimed to be Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, three Israelis and four Ukrainians. Among the detained were 12 juveniles, six of whom have been released.

It's all reminiscent, as the folks at America's Voice pointed out, of the kind of "round 'em up, ship 'em out, and let God sort it out" rhetoric favored by the nativist faction that's overtaken the Republican Party nowadays, especially folks like Rep. Steve King, the Iowa congressman seen in the video below equating undocumented to workers to cattle and saying, among other things:

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Things Americans Don't Want To Talk About
Posted by David Neiwert, Orcinus on April 30, 2008 at 9:32 AM.

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.

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Racism In The Ranks
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on April 25, 2008 at 4:13 AM.

One of the right's favorite ways of characterizing the state of racial relations in recent years has been to proclaim that for the most part, racism is a dead letter, an anachronism, a quaint artifact of dusty history mostly relegated to a few dark fringish corners. Dinesh D'Souza even wrote a wingnut-welfare book about it titled The End of Racism. And then there was the time Tony Snow proclaimed: "Here's the unmentionable secret: Racism isn't that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It's rapidly becoming an ugly memory."

Liberals, of course, have snorted at such nonsense, with good cause: You only need to have tuned in to any of the past couple years' worth of Republican fulminations about immigration to know what a load of crap that is. Of course, they deny with vigorous red faces that racism has any part of it, but then we listen to their spokesmen -- from Pat Buchanan to Douglas Bruce -- and it's not hard to figure out that this is just so much hot air. For that matter, we only need to turn to some of their dog-whistle fulminations about Obama and their post-Katrina speculations about black people and in general, the way they talk about race, to figure out that the GOP is the main refuge of the lingering racist element in American society. But then, we've known that since the advent of the Southern Strategy.

But before Democrats start feeling smug about that -- and the fact that one of their two major candidates is African American -- they better take a hard look within their ranks as well. Because, as Greg Mitchell reports, the election results from Pennsylvania indicate that there's a problem with race for many Democrats, too:

Long before that, I had suggested that many understate the number of older Democrats who are (still) racist and who would tip many contests to Clinton. But I closed yesterday's post by saying that if Obama won or came close in Pennsylvania that might put the issue to rest.

Didn't happen. And the exit polls show, again, that one in four Clinton voters claim they would not vote for Obama in November -- for whatever reason. And she got 70% of the white, blue-collar vote in most regions, including the area of central Pennsylvania where I spent a lot of time growing up and heard many a racist remark.

Here's the money quote from a New York Times analysis of the exit polls: "Sixteen percent of white voters said race mattered in deciding who they voted for, and just 54 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election; 27 percent of them said they would vote for Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama was the Democratic nominee, and 16 percent said they would not vote at all."

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"Subversiveness" In Schools A Bigger Problem Than Failing To Educate?
Posted by David Neiwert, Orcinus on April 24, 2008 at 4:19 AM.

Just 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.

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The Minutemen Scam
Posted by David Neiwert, Firedoglake on April 21, 2008 at 4:32 AM.

One of the few pleasures to be derived from watching the antics of the American right is that more often than not, the whole scene devolves into something like a Punch-and-Judy show on acid (bad acid, admittedly), which if nothing else has its moments of amusement. If they're not turning up dead from self-asphyxiation dressed in wet suits, they're busy ripping people off -- most particularly each other. At which point much more head-clubbing ensues.

Take, for instance, that erstwhile Neighborhood Watch on Androgenic Steroids, the Minutemen. It seems that even though the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, whose finances have come under close scrutiny, reported income to the IRS that finally jibed with what they reportedly spent, there's something not quite right about their accounting:

But Stacey O'Connell, former MCDC Arizona state chapter director who is now a member of the Patriot's Border Alliance, a separate Minuteman-style organization, said the money listed in the new 990 filing does not match claims by Mr. Simcox on how much MCDC has actually collected.

Mr. O'Connell said that in past interviews, Mr. Simcox said the organization had collected $600,000 in donations in its first year, along with $1.6 million for a border fence MCDC is building. He said he also is aware of a single $100,000 donation given by an Arizona man. He later filed a fraud lawsuit against MCDC that has since been withdrawn because of a lack of funds to pursue it.

"After reviewing the Minuteman Foundation 990 from 2006, it appears well below the donation amounts Simcox has claimed in the past," Mr. O'Connell said. "Many of us, perhaps thousands of volunteers and supporters, have donated not only to MCDC but to the fence project as well.

"Many of us also feel that the lack of cooperation in showing where the money goes, how it is spent; that there is something very wrong within the organization," he said.

MCDC, on its Web page, said donations have been "used wisely and effectively, and have focused the nation on illegal immigration," saying it "cannot ... accept responsibility for conspiratorial, disruptive and inappropriate speculations about MCDC organizational process and finances, nor will we waste precious time or resources upon those who refuse to accept the IRS nonprofit organization financial accountability standards."

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Eliminationist Rhetoric Poisons Our Discourse
Posted by David Neiwert on April 16, 2008 at 8:25 AM.

There's something deeply wrong with our public discourse when a reviewer like Niall Ferguson can pen a piece at the New York Times Book Review that contains, almost glibly, language like this:

The terrorists are at once parasitical on, and at the same time hostile toward, the globalized economy, the Internet and the technological revolution in military affairs. Just as the plagues in the 14th century were unintended consequences of increased trade and urbanization, so terrorism is a negative externality of our borderless world.

The difference, of course, is one of intent. The rats that transported the lethal fleas that transported the lethal enterobacteria Yersinia pestis did not mean to devastate the populations of Eurasia and Africa. The Black Death was a natural disaster. Al Qaeda is different. Its members seek to undermine the market-state by turning its own technological achievements against it in a protracted worldwide war, the ultimate goal of which is to create a Sharia-based “terror-state” in the form of a new caliphate.

I know, of course, that we're talking about the Enemy: terrorists. But it doesn't take a Dalai Lama to recognize that this kind of dehumanization is part of what brought us to this pass in the first place. And it only takes a historian to point out where it is likely to take us.

This is, in fact, classic eliminationist rhetoric: speech designed not merely to dehumanize and demonize other human beings, but to create the conditions for, and ultimately provide permission for, the actual elimination of those elements from society. As Kalkaino points out, Ferguson's description of Middle Eastern terrorists is nearly indistinguishable from from Nazi prewar propaganda about the "filthy Jewish vermin."

Of course, there is an essential difference there as well: the Jews in reality posed no threat to Germany whatsoever, and so any danger they represented was concocted almost entirely in the imaginations of anti-Semites. Middle Eastern terrorists, of course, are very much a real threat, though almost certainly not the dire existential threat that the Fergusons of the world make them out to be.

But Nazi Germany hardly provided the only example of eliminationist rhetoric and its toxic effects -- the American historical landscape is littered with them as well: the genocide of Native Americans, the lynching era, "sundown towns," and perhaps most tellingly in this case, the campaign against Asian immigrants and its culmination in the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

Because that whole episode began with rhetoric nearly identical to Ferguson's, directed at the "filthy Asiatic hordes" and producing bestsellers like Lothrop Stoddard's The Passing of the Great Race, a warning that "white culture" was about to be overwhelmed by rapidly reproducing brown hordes (sound familiar?) from Asia. It was so powerful that when war with Japan broke out, it seemed in fact only a natural step to round up those untrustworthy Asian vermin and put them in concentration camps.

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