Nationalism Is BS

[from 4/28/10]

One of my favorite questions, when I'm out in the public, is the one that goes, "Yeah, you're right about how homeless people get a raw deal, but what do you think about illegal immigrants? They take our jobs! " I love expressing my absurd opinions on this subject, while watching my audience scowl and reach for his shoes. So I'm very happy that the State of Arizona has passed an insane law meant to get rid of illegal immigrants there, practically forcing me to trot out my crazy ideas. Let's see how many I can squeeze into 666 words!

How come corporations can go set up almost anywhere they want in the world, but I can't? I was born a human. I didn't have Made in the USA stamped on my butt when I popped out. Nationalism is One Hundred Percent Made-Up BS. Where's MY Free Trade?

Illegal immigrants who use fake ID to get jobs where their taxes are withheld don't dare file to claim refunds. I only wish the stress and the identity theft were taken out of it. Let's agree that anyone who wants to work a wage-paying job in our country may do so, without showing ID, for as long as they don't claim refunds. Let's apply that to citizens, too. If I don't want any part of my tax money back, I'm paying more than my share to keep this thing going. I'm not talking about, say, day-care jobs, where you'd need to know if someone had ever been a priest before giving them the position. I'm just talking about ordinary grunt work.

Countries that are multilingual, like Holland, have higher standards of living than we do. Most illegal immigrants bring languages here that we average Americans would do well to learn, as they would stimulate our neurons and enable us to land better jobs catering to a multilingual clientele. For example, as high-class "escorts" for diplomats. This is mainly an argument to keep out Canadians and Australians. I almost learned Spanish once, but my teacher was deported.

Speaking of deportment, the governor and legislature of Arizona need to all write on the blackboard, whiteboard, whatever, "I will not violate the civil rights of American citizens just to spite illegal immigrants," 500 times.

The worst of the new Arizona law is the part that would have police arresting people suspected of being illegal if they can't produce papers to prove otherwise. It's said this won't result in racial profiling. Let's analyze that claim.

Possibility #1. The claim is false. Racial profiling will occur. All brown-skinned citizens who have lost their ID can and will be jailed, without bail (as stipulated in the law), until somehow, in jail, they can come up with proof of citizenship. Such people will include descendants of the original Mexicans of greater Mexico, whose ancestors have lived continuously in Arizona since before Arizona was US territory, longer than almost all the white people there, and whose claim to belong to that land is that much stronger, if birthright really matters.

Possibility #2. The claim is true! Hooray! That means, since they won't racially profile, they will have to assume every white person in the state is a potential illegal immigrant from Canada or Australia and throw all of those who've lost their ID into jail. This will result in actual white Americans, who were in favor of this law, languishing endlessly in prison on misdemeanor charges, just because they got crossed up by the police right after having had their wallets stolen.

One lovely feature of the law that I approve is that it calls upon citizens to turn illegals in. It even goes so far as exempting the snitch from having to provide a social security number!

Mother-in-law been staying too long in the guest room? Sneak in at night, nab her ID, hide it in the attic, and call the cops in the morning! "She's lying! She's not my mother-in-law, she's from Ontario!"

They Have the Right to Remain Silent, But Won't

[from 1/27/10]

I want to tell you the story of "Carl U." I'm keeping Carl's real name from you for now so you won't be prejudiced against him, and you'll appreciate his story better.

Carl was born in Washington, DC, in 1988. He was a big child, and faced cruel discrimination from an early age. He was denied admittance to daycare, just because he looked different and didn't have normal birth parents. He was refused enrollment in public schools. His guardians home schooled Carl, but couldn't get the authorities to recognize it, so to this day, at the age of 21, going on 22, Carl has not been credited with any education. He must fend for himself in the world with no degree, no GED, no diploma, not even a certificate showing completion of first grade.

Unbelievably, Carl was not unique in all this. There were hundreds and thousands of Carls throughout the country. Not only were they kept from attending schools, but federal laws denied them basic freedoms due any citizen, including our highest right, the right of freedom of speech, guaranteed by the 1st and best Amendment to the Constitution. Just because they were physically different and, essentially, orphaned.

Carl and others like him were prevented from doing all the usual things that children do growing up. Admittedly, some of these, like playing house with a cutie, or riding a tricycle, were of no interest to Carl. And true, Carl was actually not at all poor (he could afford chauffeurs.) However, it must have hurt emotionally to know that laws in all 50 states prohibited Carl and his kind from obtaining a driver's license, or even a state ID.

They have been barred from enrollment in Social Security. They are denied TANF, Medicare and Medicaid.

Speaking of TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) Carl et al are not allowed to form families! A gay man can at least marry anywhere in this country, so long as he marries a woman. A lesbian has the right to marry a man. But Carl is not permitted to marry anyone at all! And if Carl tried to raise children they'd be taken away from him by the authorities. It is amazing that anyone should be treated that way in our so-called free country.

But that's all about to end. The times they are a-changin' and soon freedom will ring and Carl and his kind will overcome! For the Supreme Court, the Highest Law in the Land has spoken!

That's right. Carl U is Citizens United, and his was the case that finally established that corporations are people, too, when it comes to the 1st Amendment.

They've come a long way, baby! At our country's founding, corporations had less rights than slaves. Their existence was a privilege to be granted and periodically re-established. Only in 1886 did people begin to admit that corporations were persons, with rights and feelings, with people who love them, with hearts and souls. OK, people didn't say all that then, but they will.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is just the beginning. Once a people begin to take their freedom they cannot be stopped.

The Carls of this country now have 1st Amendment rights. They have had 2nd Amendment rights. Don't ask me how, but they got those first. I guess when you're a big baby, no one takes your popgun away. Anyway they're going to collect the whole set of rights, now. Protection from unreasonable search and seizure, right to due process, freedom from double jeopardy, right to jury trial.

Above all the 14th Amendment will come to have full force, and corporations will enjoy equal protection under the law throughout the land. In 43 states, it will be legal to breast feed a corporation in public. Here in Washington, you will only be able to commit a corporation to a mental institution if it is a danger to itself or others.

On the plus side, we might be able to commit some.

WTO Memories

[from 12/2/09]

I'm writing this a full week before it's due out, because Glorious Editorial Manager wants Thanksgiving Day AND Thanksgiving Weekend off, and he has the better union. Whenever I have to write a column so soon I wonder what irrelevant topic I'll write about this time. It should seem vaguely entertaining, while not having anything to do with anything recent.

One possibility was to talk about squirrels. I think squirrels can be very funny. You know the expression "squirrels away"? When I hear it I think of Seafair Pirates loading squirrels in their brass cannon, and firing it off, shouting "squirrel's away!" Technically, I'm not so amused there by the squirrel as by the apostrophe. But it's fun to imagine the squirrel's high pitched squirrel curses as it sails through the air. Don't worry, they aim him at a tree and he lands safely. I abandon this line of thought, on the grounds that it not only has nothing to do with anything recent, it has nothing to do with anything ever.

Because I'm writing this so early, I'm not over the whole WTO Ten Year Anniversary hoopla that's sweeping Seattle, as you are. You there, with your cigarette in your rosy future one week from now. You are so blasé about WTO now. "I'm done; I'll turn in as soon as I smoke this down," you say.

Well you shouldn't be blasé! The WTO and the protests surrounding it continued from November 30 all the way to December 3, when the conference collapsed. So if it's not Friday yet you can still remember it in that cute annual way that you all enjoy! Because secretly you all worship the Sun, and still think the seasons are due to its progress through space, when they are actually due to changes in the Earth's position relative to it!

Here are some personal memories of WTO.

1. Watching two files of storm troopers form on 3rd Ave between Pine and Stewart by the Bon before a crowd of onlookers, to goose-step, literally, around the block to the west and back, just for show.

2. Walking north on 2nd Ave between Virginia and Lenora, and witnessing the "occupation"  of 2nd & Lenora by storm troopers delivered to the scene hanging to the side of a Humvee, after they first softened up the desired acquisition by lobbing gas canisters at it. The most memorable aspect of this was that there were no protesters, no anarchists, and no vandals at that intersection. There weren't even cars as the occupiers arrived. But, boy, did they look proud of themselves.

3. Several hours later after a prohibition against walking downtown was lifted, I remember walking from Belltown to Pioneer Square. I remember the helicopters with the searchlights trained on Westlake. I was most taken by the file of, I estimated, fifty cop cruisers, all with sirens on continuously, winding randomly through the city streets at fifty miles per hour, with no other evident purpose than to terrify.

As much as those memories mean to me, just because I saw those things myself, and in the case of #2, smelled them, I have to say, and I don't think I'm alone in saying this,  that the worst thing that happened at WTO 1999 was Mayor Paul Schell's downtown 50-block no protest zone.

We've all got over everything else. We've cleared our lungs of the pepper spray. Our courts dismissed charges against 200 wrongly arrested protesters. Our city paid 200 wrongly arrested protesters damages for having arrested them in the first place. Justice is what you get when get what you had coming to you. Like when you stand in front of a speeding ice cream truck, you get the ice cream you deserve.

But we haven't overcome the result of Paul Schell's illegal abrogation of the Constitution and the imprimatur it was given by the so-called liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Our Constitutional Rights have not yet been restored.

That's the current news.

Hot Pants

I am totally hacked off.

What really steams my trousers is that I can't tell you why they're steamed, because they're too steamed. If I were to explain why, they'd explode. No one wants to see that.

All I can say is, it has to do with Mayor Nickels, sweeps of homeless encampments, a new draft policy for the city, a definition of what constitutes potentially hazardous articles that could include blankets, bunnies, and daffodils, which definition would be allowed to justify the destruction of such articles at the whim of sweepers without due process, while meanwhile no such outrageous justifications would ever be used to destroy, say, warehouses, without due process, because the city can't get away with that, but denying civil rights to homeless people is a snap.

[Above: Officer Bonehead says, "We have a reasonable suspicion that there are hazardous materials all over this park. Let's destroy the park without due process!"]

After talking over the state of my hacked-offedness with Farmer Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor Compost Worms Have Died" Freeman, we agreed that I should not talk about Mayor Nickels or his administration or their new draft policy that if implemented should be grounds for the federal imprisonment of the whole lot of them. (Not that it'd ever happen -- look who's running the Justice Department now.) I should talk about things that make me less angry.

[Below Left: Sacks of trash from downtown businesses litter our public alleyways. We can't trespass the businessmen responsible from their private buildings, but we can deny them the use of our public streets to get to them. Officer Bonehead says, "Let's see how many of these filthy businessmen spring for personal helicopters! Ha, ha!"]

Something that doesn't quite fry my pantaloons: The other day a Boston psychiatrist wrote a story that appeared in the New York Times about a homeless man who went to an ER for the first time for a sore shoulder and found out that the hospital had records that he had been there before for a drug overdose. But that was impossible, the man said, because he doesn't do drugs. When the doctor looking at the records verified that the ID used in the previous visit matched that of the patient in front of him, the patient said the other guy must have stolen his ID.

Reading the story, I was a little incredulous. It was suggested that his wallet might have been stolen, the ID copied, and the wallet returned intact, so our guy didn't know anything had happened. But never mind, because the doctor bought the premise. And, having done so, she then refused to let the patient see the previous record in his name, for the sake of the confidentiality of the suspected identity thief! Identity thieves have confidentiality rights from the people they steal from? That steams my socks, but my trousers are cool, because I can convince myself that state and federal lawmakers will have no problem coming up with a cheap and easy fix. Even I won't mind if identity thieves are denied rights under the law.

A story from Morecambe in Lancashire County, England tells of a homeless man sleeping outdoors at 6:30 AM Christmas Day, following a righteous Christmas Eve drunk, when a guy delivering presents (I'll call him "Santa's Smartass Helper") in the neighborhood saw him and disturbed him by sarcastically wishing him Merry Christmas. Whereupon the homeless man pulverized Santa's Smartass Helper for five minutes. What makes me angry about this story is that the writer referred to the beating as "unprovoked" and evidently the court that convicted the homeless man of assault agreed with that assessment.

Word to the wise: Anybody -- ANYBODY -- who wakes me up out of sleep at 6:30 AM on Christmas Day, just to wish me a Merry Christmas, better be prepared to hurt. Sarcastic or sincere, it doesn't matter.

There's the judge's decision to grant an injunction allowing pharmacists to deny medication. This whole situation has been cast as a clash of rights -- the right of the pharmacists to practice their private morality versus the right of the people they serve to prescribed medicine.

There's no such things as private moralities. The pharmacists who don't want to fill prescriptions don't have to be pharmacists. There's no clash of rights. I am hopeful this decision will be overturned on appeal so that I won't have to soak my trousers in ice.

[Below: Officer Bonehead says, "I found a dirty needle in the bathroom of this place. Can I burn the whole place down without a court order?"]

The Public Interest

Let’s talk about something important! I have right here in front of me a 44-page decision by Judge Anna Diggs that says that Bush’s unwarranted wiretapping of Americans’ calls out of the country violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Separation of Powers Doctrine, the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and “the statutory law.” I need to read this thing and do all the other important analysis that an analysizer guy like me needs to do in order to talk about this judge’s momentous decision to grant a permanent injunction against this violation of your and my civil rights.

But first, how about that John Mark Karr freak? Did you hear how he got prawns and champagne on his flight from Bangkok to the U.S., even though all he deserves is dog food? He is a reprehensible pedophile who may or may not have killed a 6-year-old beauty queen, but regardless, he is a sick reprehensible pedophile who only deserves dog food. Did I just write the words “6-year-old beauty queen”? Well, be that as it may, it could not possibly be that the public’s interest in this case has anything to do with the fact that JonBenet Ramsey is the only 6-year-old girl most of us have ever seen competently wearing bright red lipstick, eye makeup, earrings, rouge, and high-heels, while showing off her thighs. We’re not the pedophiles, John Mark Karr is. And he only deserves dog food until proven guilty, at which point we’ll think of something worse to feed him.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, violation of civil rights, separation of powers, statutory something something.…

“This just in: Ernesto has been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm! More details at the top of the hour!” The downgrading of Ernesto Saturday threatened to destroy the entire hurricane reporting industry. Fortunately for the public interest, several experts were quickly found to remind us that the weakened hurricane could re-strengthen and become news again, if we get lucky.

By the way, I’ve been wondering what we should call the movie version of Ernesto’s potential devastation of one or more as-yet-undetermined Southern or East Coast U.S. cities. Ernesto Blows Again? Ernesto Goes to Cuba? Ernesto Saves Bush from Bad Press? Ernesto Scares Us Stupid?

Back to Judge Diggs. She’s a federal district judge, whatever that means. I guess I’ll have to do some work and look that up. She says that the public interest in compelling the Bush Administration’s unwarranted wiretapping to end is clear. She says the public interest is.…

Stop the presses! Tom Cruise and Paramount have ended their relationship! They won’t be making truckloads of money hand-in-hand any more! They’ll be blocks away from each other, making completely separate mountains of change!

Fortunately for the public interest, Tom Cruise is not retiring. It’s not that we care about his acting, but we need him, like I say, for the public interest. If it weren’t for Tom Cruise, what public figure would we have to criticize or condemn? I’m sure I couldn’t think of one.

So let’s see. Judge Diggs spends about 12 pages discussing and ruling upon the Attorney General’s claim of a state secrets privilege, then about nine pages discussing and ruling upon the standing of the plaintiffs that had sued the government. I’m sure those discussions are extremely important, for the public interest, so that’s why I should be reading them carefully and discussing those discussions here.

But first, I’ll talk about whether Pluto is a planet or not. It is of the utmost importance to find out whether scientists in some dumb conference somewhere want to call a big rock six billion kilometers away a planet or not. It’s even more important to find out that the scientists don’t all agree in the matter, so their “agreement” to agree to say Pluto is not a planet isn’t worth anything.

We have a public interest in knowing that!

Potatoes Don't Grow On Trees

Last week my copy of the American Civil Liberties Union 2006 Workplan arrived in the mail. Having experienced something of a windfall last year I had dished out some cash to the ACLU in order to fulfill a 13 year old wish to be a “card carrying member” of the organization, just like Dukakis. So now I’m on their mailing list, and by the way I’m also on the mailing lists of countless other organizations seeking money to correct societal ills, because for all their talk about rights to privacy the ACLU apparently doesn’t mind sharing my name and address with the whole world.

But I’m not going to whine (anymore) about that. After all, it hasn’t been so bad. The begs for money just fill my mailbox and there’s a wastebasket right below it, so I don’t have to carry them too far. Plus I find some opportunities that I appreciate. For example the NAACP offered to make me a card carrying member for a price that I thought was quite reasonable, considering that I could use the card for fun things, like convincing dumb people that I’m an honorary Person of Color. Oh yeah, and I like some of the work they do.

Of course you can join organizations without liking everything they do. Believe it or not, even though I’m on the board of this rag-plus-do-good entity, I don’t agree with everything they do. For instance, I think vendors should be able to get papers on Sunday. Or, to take a better example, I think I should be paid for writing this. I would accept the Calvin Trillin /Village Voice deal: one column, one baking potato. Taking into account the fact that Washington grown Russets are now hovering near 30 cents per pound and that single potatoes average less than half a pound, I think that would be eminently reasonable. But, “no, if we paid you a potato, we’d have to pay everybody a potato,” is all I hear.

Anyway, when I got my ACLU 2006 Work Plan out of my mailbox, Anitra Freeman was there. Ms. Freeman happens to be a Raging Granny, so she is under surveillance by the FBI for such things as singing parodies that might or might not hurt politicians’ feelings, wearing silly outfits, and lying down on city property, pretending to be dead. So she appreciates a lot of what the ACLU does, but when she saw my mail she complained “the ACLU doesn’t see homelessness as a civil rights issue.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” I thought. “Of course they do,” I thought. For instance they’ve fought LA’s version of a No Sitting Ordinance, not just because they care about the right of ordinary citizens to sit down on sidewalks, but specifically, they care about the right of homeless people to do so. Or, there are the lawsuits in a number of places to stop police from confiscating homeless peoples’ property. Or, there's work that could prevent homelessness, like lawsuits to stop wrongful evictions. A recent case took a landlord to court for trying to evict a battered woman. The landlord didn’t want her out because she was battered. He wanted her out because she called the police. She was supposed to just take it. So the ACLU got involved. So there, Anitra.

But then I read the Workplan itself and could not find homelessness addressed in all 8 pages.

Would it have taken too much ink to mention, somewhere among the ten paragraphs under the heading “Defending the Right to Vote,” for example, that the right of homeless persons to vote has been increasingly under attack in this country? How about mentioning somewhere that the work to protect the right of homeless people to their property is barely begun?

After that I set myself down with pen and paper to think of how many ways homelessness is a civil rights issue, and in two minutes I had two pages of notes on the subject.

Hey, ACLU, you could do that too.