So Many Enemies He Needs Some Executive Time to Relax a Little

So the president repeatedly says the American press is America's enemy - but not one word about Russia threatening a nuclear attack on America ... 

Former FBI director says he fears the president is a Russian asset .... but the press is the enemy (oh, and the entire FBI).

Saudi Arabia murders a journalist, the president's staff has secretly sold nuclear weapon secrets to them ... because the press is the enemy?

The president calls for retribution against media comedies for jokes about his great self, and a coast guard officer is thankfully arrested for planning mass murder based on a hit list spreadsheet of media targets ....because the press is the enemy.

Except the press is not the enemy at our southern border. It's all the non-white people. Such a horrific enemy the president says America has a national emergency. 

Odd ...The press, non-whites, treaties with our allies, our military alliances, our trade with other nations, these are the enemies of America in the eyes and mind and actions of the president and his followers. Oh, and all the ex members of his administration. They are all bad people too. And his lawyers. And former friends. 

So many enemies. Gonna have to grab some Executive Time.

The Disappeared-In-America Immigration System

You can read this article and you can not believe it, or not believe it, you can call it a generalization, or call it an abomination. Yet, dear reader, your opinion about this story and the people in it does not matter. Many others will be treated like the individual in this story, no matter who you share this story with or how much you might not want to even believe it or protest against it. 

That's because right now, a loud chunk of the voting public and the elected leaders hate immigrants. Voters don't actively hate them, they do it passively . Elected leaders are, however, very actively drafting and enforcing policies which are beyond cruel and abusive. Everyone, of course, can just call this system inadvertently harsh and brutal. And do nothing about it.

So why am I posting this? As with so very many posts here - it is something I do for myself. I post this because I do not want to be part of such a system. I have many friends who are terrified to be even near the edges of our current war on immigrants. I post it because I have this awareness, this slim bit of knowledge added to what is already known.

Anyone (typically not white) can be taken by ICE agents, and as a their detainee, you have no right to call anyone, no visitors, nor right to counsel though the detainee can hire one if he/she fills out the proper paperwork, that is if they can read and write English, and in the meantime ICE can move you from prison to prison, no outside contact, no hearings, no pleas, no time limit on how long you can be held so they just wait for the detainee to wear down and sign a voluntary deportation order.

"Locking up accused criminals indefinitely is a tried-and-true way of getting them to plead guilty, whether they actually committed a crime or not. The same principle applies to immigration detainees. And criminal defendants, even those accused of the worst crimes imaginable, don’t get sent to three different states in a two-month period as part of their pretrial detention."

Indentured Servitude via TDOT Part 2

The Vanderbilt Landscaping company, awarded contracts by the Tennessee Dept of Transportation using money from the federal Stimulus programs and other programs, accused of making legal migrant workers live and work in vile conditions akin to indentured servitude has offered a response to the claims (original post here and on KnoxViews).

Channel 5 News reports:

"Joffery and Larry Vanderbilt said they could not believe the accusations when Hilario Jimenez and a group of protesters from the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice started protesting outside the company Thursday.

"All the allegations that they were stirring up were just -- it was crazy," said Larry Vanderbilt

They believe Jimenez was trying to retaliate for discipline he received at the end of June.

Vanderbilt Landscaping employs 60 people. The company has several contracts with the Tennessee Department of Transportation to cut grass along highways and interstates.

The H-2B program lets American companies bring people into the country as guest workers if they can't find Americans to fill the jobs.

Jimenez was one of them. Among his accusations -- Vanderbilt Landscaping doesn't pay overtime.

"Hilario made $12.33 an hour. We always pay our guys time and a half, and time and a half equals $18 and something cents an hour," Joffery Vanderbilt said.

The Vanderbilt's showed us Jimenez's last paycheck showing three hours of overtime. They also showed us a payroll journal showing how much he made.

The Vanderbilt's said workers get half hour lunches and two 15 minute breaks in addition to other breaks when they get too hot. As far as the accusation of working at gunpoint, the Vanderbilt's said that too is totally false.

"That is all false. None of us carry guns. That is false," Joffery said.

A Nashville Union leader also brought up the issue of taking jobs from American workers. The Vanderbilt's said they ran ads in newspapers in Nashville and Memphis for three weeks. They said they did 70 interviews, and said most of the applicants decided the work was too hard."

So not one, not one of the applicants accepted the job offered? That seems a real stretch of the imagination, and the firm got numerous contracts from TDOT and more money by claiming no one save migrant workers would take the jobs.

"What you have to understand is that the U.S. guest worker program binds workers to one employer. That means that no matter how badly a company mistreats a guest worker, he or she can't leave to work for anyone else. If they do, they can be arrested and deported back home, where they face crushing debt.

The other thing you have to understand is that Vanderbilt Landscaping got the guest worker visas by claiming to the U.S. Department of Labor that it could not find a single American worker to fill these landscaping jobs. I know a few that would have been interested, but neither Vanderbilt nor the Department of Labor ever gave me a call.

Hiring exploitable guest workers and locking U.S. workers out of jobs let Vanderbilt undercut the competition, and they won $2.48 million in state landscaping contracts paid for with our tax dollars. On top of that, Vanderbilt got $900,000 in guaranteed loans through the federal stimulus program. And instead of putting all that money toward good jobs for struggling Tennesseans, they locked American workers out and locked legal guest workers in.

Why has TDOT not responded to these allegations, or the State of TN? Though complaints have been filed, how long until an actual investigation occurs?

Southern Beale is on the story.

So is Coyote Chronicles.

I Don't Approve

A heap of non-factual, semi-factual and otherwise distorted paranoia landed in my email yesterday from someone I know, all about how this person is in a twist because of (whisper the word) "Mexicans."

The massive numbers of non-facts, the furor of fearfulness and my low threshold of tolerating hoo-ha yesterday made me actually write back to refute the info. This person who sent the original email is not a "bad person", but that email pretty much reeked of dangerously bad ideas.

Here's a sample of the email sent to me:

"I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. Now, I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year."

My response to that, from the very article cited, was that law prevents any such aid being given to "illegal immigrants". To legal immigrants, yes, aid is given. I'm not linking to the article cited as I am not eager to drive web traffic to that site.

And I also commented that the funding for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan comes from borrowing money, not from existing tax revenue streams. The response I got to that was the following:

"Do you sense we are being overrun? It's not easy to know know who is legal and who is illegal. Hang out at DHS some day, or the Health Department and just observe. I felt like a foreigner when at the Health Department for a T.B. test last summer. There was not one local in the waiting room, but it was filled with Hispanic people who did not speak English - or let's put it this way, they were not speaking English in my presence. Take a walk through our elementary schools and see even more. And there are days, when crimebeat makes my eyes pop!! I know several legal Hispanics and have a couple that good friends from Puerto Rico and one from Guatemala - so it's not that I dislike these folks, I don't, but it looks like if we continue the way we're going, one day, our local government will look a whole lot different. Hey! That might be a good thing! tee hee"

So I am sadly left with the realization the email was not meant to start a discussion - it was instead an unhappy emotional reaction to having non-whites in the neighborhood. Other problems are obvious in those comments, too.

I know I'm not the only person who gets ramped-up, half-truthful email screeds on some "vital topic" of the moment. And yes, responding to such is fruitless. But if I did not respond, then perhaps my silence could be taken as approval. And I don't approve.

"Morristown" The Movie

“We don’t make anything in this country anymore. If they closed the ports, we’d be naked and barefoot.”
- Shirley Reinhardt, former GE worker, Morristown, TN

The quote comes from a new documentary about Morristown and immigration, currently making the rounds at festivals and is also now available on DVD. Filmmaker Anne Lewis spent years on the project, which examines how immigration has changed the city and the city has changed the immigrants.

Lewis began her career as an associate director on the Oscar-winning "Harlan County U.S.A." and has been actively exploriing the lives and the worlds of working men and women ever since. Some info about her is here and here, where she explains her creative vision as a documentary filmmaker.



The movie, "Morristown" is described as:

"Working-class people in Mexico and eastern Tenessee are caught in the throes of massive economic change, which challenges their assumptions about work, family, nation and community. This film chronicles nearly a decade of change in Morristown, Tennessee through interviews with displaced or low-wage Southern workers, Mexican immigrants, and workers and families impacted by globalization."

A short clip can seen here via the Austin, TX university website.

The movie was made with the assistance from both the Highlander Center (where you can order a DVD copy of "Morristown Video Letters", an early spin off of the project) in New Market, TN and the Appalshop in Kentucky, where you can pre-order copies of the movie and should have them available for sale in the very near future. Thanks to Anne for the details about the availability of her film.

Part of the movie examines the recent efforts of workers at the Koch Foods chicken processing plant to form a union. Workers overwhelming approved the move to unionize and cameras take you into the plant to witness working conditions there.

And while the movie hasn't gotten much attention in Tennesssee, audiences from Albuquerque to Minnesota are watching the story unfold.

(photo taken from the movie, shows Alfredo and Silvia Perez and their children in Juarez, Mexico)