Hate and the military

Last year, the Southern Poverty law Center issued a report on the growing infiltration of white supremacists within the military, in no small part because of the Pentagon's need for fresh cannon fodder in Iraq.

Now, according to a followup report by Joe Jackson at Port Folio Weekly, it's becoming painfully self-evident the military has little intention of changing things.

Jackson describes the extremist activism of a Navy PIO named John Sharpe, who also operates a couple of far-right Catholic organizations out of his home that specialize in classic anti-Semitic hatemongering:

The questions concern his involvement with the Legion of St. Louis and the IHS Press, which he runs from his home in Carrolton, Isle of Wight County. In March 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—a national watchdog organization that tracks hate groups and racism—identified them as among "the most nakedly anti-Semitic organizations in the entire radical traditionalist Catholic pantheon." This pantheon is bound by the certainty that Jews, Masons and others have conspired to topple the Catholic Church for 300 years. The SPLC’s report, entitled "The Dirty Dozen," claimed that "Sharpe blames the 9/11 attacks not on Al Qaeda but on ‘Judeo-Masonry.’" Sharpe’s writings were quoted, including his assertion that the "temporal power that the Jews have achieved since . . . 1798 is both pervasive and relatively unchallenged."

Jackson goes on to note that Sharpe's activities only heightened concerns raised by the SPLC about the infiltration of extremists and gang members in the ranks of soldiers being recruited for service in Iraq:

The timing could not have been worse for John Sharpe. In Summer 2006—one decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups—the SPLC reported that recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military to get training for a race war. The SPLC, citing interviews with Department of Defense investigators and its own monitoring of racist magazines and Web sites, estimated the numbers could run into the thousands. "We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," DOD gang investigator Scott Barfield told the SPLC’s Intelligence Report. "That’s a problem." The New York Times publicized the report, followed by the national and international media.

One consequence of the coverage was the perception that the military was sweeping the problem under the rug. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces," Barfield said, "and commanders don’t remove them . . . even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members." The military downplayed a neo-Nazi presence in the ranks, Barfield added, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

What stands out is the official response -- denial, denial, denial:

The SPLC called on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to appoint a task force and design a new response, but on Sept. 26, 2006, Under Secretary of Defense David Chu wrote to the SPLC that their findings were "inaccurate and misleadingly alarmist. Extremist activity is antithetical to the values of our armed forces. We already have the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that you recommend." The fact that Scott Barfield resigned from the military on Aug. 15, 2006, after being reprimanded for violating regulations on interactions with the media, added to the perception that the Defense Department did not like an airing of its dirty laundry.

"There’s an old saying: ‘The military will never admit to having a problem until they have a solution to the problem,’" said Hunter Glass, a former sergeant with the 82nd Airborne Division and now a nationally recognized expert on gangs in the military. Barfield, who reportedly felt "burned" by the military and media alike, could not be reached for this report, but Glass—who knows him and is reportedly his mentor—verified his claims.

"I wouldn’t doubt that there are thousands of gang members in the military right now," Glass said from his home in Fayetteville, N.C. "This is all gangs – black, white, Latin." For FY2006, there were 1.36 million active duty personnel in the U.S. armed services— 512,400 in the Army, 352,700 in the Navy, 179,000 in the Marines and 317,400 in the Air Force. "If, as the Pentagon says, only one percent of these might be gangbangers," that comes to at least 13,600 gang members, though Glass personally feels the number could be as high as 15,000.

"Think about it," he said. "Fifteen thousand gang members released on the streets of America after Iraq is over, trained in arms and combat by the best military in the world." What hits the press is only the tip of the iceberg, he fears. "Among the extremists, you’re on a mission . . . these guys are secret agents in their own minds." The problem is one for the future, he said, "and it’s huge."

This isn't a problem affecting just the Nazis, gang-bangers, and other violent personalities worming their way into the military. It also affects the many more formerly normal, non-racist recruits who have been dragged into multiple tours of duty in Iraq, regardless of the profound psychological effects of such treatment. This includes many people whose evaluations have recommended they not be returned for duty. There's a reason to call Iraq the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School.

This will, I fear, become a significant component of the predictable surge in far-right activity that is almost certain to manifest itself in the USA over the next couple of years, especially as Democrats and liberals expand and entrench their hold on power. We're essentially re-creating the conditions that arose in Germany and Italy after World War I: scores of angry, disaffected and psychologically damaged war veterans, poised to organize into a political force aimed at "rebirthing" the nation and its heritage.

What's even more disturbing, though, is that the top brass at the military seem all too willing to create those conditions.

O'Reilly and the pistol-packin' mamas

-- by Dave

We have long been aware that Fox's Bill O'Reilly has a marked propensity for credulousness when it comes to far-right conspiracy theories; he has a history of transmitting ideas from extremists and making them appear reasonable and factual when in reality they are simple lunacy spun from whole cloth.

Of course, New World Order theories have been getting fresh circulation in recent weeks from the likes of Glenn Beck and Ron Paul, but those hardly hold a candle to the completely whacked-out theory offered by O'Reilly late last week on his daily Fox broadcast, as the SPLC's Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse report:

A "national underground network" of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. "All across the country," they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, "The O'Reilly Factor."
Titled "Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem," the segment began with host Bill O'Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O'Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. "In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls," he reported. "And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well."

After this introduction, O'Reilly went to a split-screen live interview with "Fox News crime analyst" Rod Wheeler.

"Tell me what's going on," O'Reilly said.

Wheeler, a Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer-turned-paid Fox News commentator, launched right in: "Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country," he reported. "And they actually carry a number of weapons. And they commit a number of crimes."

Wheeler asserted that "we've actually counted, just in the Washington D.C. area alone, that's Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, well over 150 of these crews. … And they — like I said, they recruit these kids to be members of these gangs."

O'Reilly asked, "Now, when they recruit the kids, are they indoctrinating them into homosexuality?"

"Yes," Wheeler answered. "As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were forced into, you know, performing sex acts and doing sex acts with some of these people."

Flabbergasted by the sheer depravity of it all, O'Reilly nevertheless forged ahead. "I never thought of this," said the host of the "no-spin zone." "It makes sense that, if you had lawless gay people, they would do this kind of thing. You associate homosexuality more with a social movement, not a criminal movement. But you're saying this is all over the country, detective?"

"It's all over the country," Wheeler replied. "I mean, you go from New York to California to wherever you want to name, you can see these organizations." Next came the pink guns. "Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry—some of these groups carry pink pistols," Wheeler said. "They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols. That's 9-millimeter Glocks. They use these. They commit crimes, and they cause a lot of hurt to a lot of people."

So, what exactly was the basis of this report?

Turns out that Wheeler is not exactly the kind of source one would consider reliable:

Confronted by the Intelligence Report, Wheeler was unable, in several phone and E-mail exchanges over a two-day period, to specify a single law enforcement agency or officer, police report, media account or any other source he relied upon for his D.C. area lesbian gangs claim. But he insisted that his report was accurate and that any law enforcement officer who disagrees is "out of touch." "For some reason or other, these organizations don't lay it on the line because they don't know what is going on on the streets," said Wheeler. "This is a serious crisis and the so-called experts are missing it."

According to Wheeler's personal website, he is a member of Jericho City of Praise, a conservative Christian megachurch in Landover, Md., whose leadership publicly advocates against equal rights for gays and lesbians. The website details Wheeler's 500-plus appearances on MSNBC, Court TV and Fox News Channel shows including "The O'Reilly Factor," "On the Record With Greta Van Sustern," and "Hannity & Colmes."

...Wheeler told the Report that he spent seven years in professional law enforcement before going to work as a corporate security officer for McDonald's Corp., a job he has since left. These days, Wheeler is a "food defense specialist" for the American Institute of Baking. Just this spring, he publicly warned that the Big Mac is vulnerable to bioterrorist attacks at "250 points" during production.

So, what about the factual basis for the report?

Er ... what factual basis?

The only specific instance of actual violent lesbian gang activity that Wheeler cited on "The O'Reilly Factor" was a May 19 attack on a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed near a transit station in Prince George's County, Md. "And the police found out that it was a group of six women who identified themselves as being members of a lesbian gang that actually attacked this young man," Wheeler told O'Reilly.

According to a June 15 article in The Washington Post, however, two of the three individuals arrested in that assault were teenage males, though the article did note that, "Metro officials said the fight was between two gay and lesbian gangs that operate in Maryland."

An extensive Internet search seeking to verify O'Reilly's assertion in the introduction to Wheeler's interview that a lesbian gang called Dykes Taking Over is "terrorizing people" in Philadelphia turned up only one possible source. WCAU-TV, a local NBC affiliate in that city, reported in 2004 that a small group of 8th-grade girls at a West Philadelphia middle school were allegedly "bullying, groping and harassing" other girls in gym class with "gay remarks." The report made no mention of the 8th-graders using pink pistols or other weapons.

Similarly, O'Reilly's introductory mention of a Tennessee lesbian gang called Gays Taking Over that is "involved in raping young girls" appears to have been based solely on a highly dubious Feb. 28 television report from WPTY-TV, an ABC affiliate in Memphis, Tenn. Featuring dramatic "reenactments" of high school bathroom rape scenes shot in grainy black-and-white footage, the lengthy segment's vaguely salacious claims about local high school girls being raped and "sodomized" with "sex toys bought on the Internet" was based almost entirely on the lurid musings of a single Shelby County gang officer.

Titled "Violent Femmes," the sweeps-week segment was so thinly sourced and grotesquely sensationalized that it's difficult to believe that any professional journalist found it to be credible. And it wasn't. Under intense pressure from local gay and lesbian activists, the affiliate's station manager finally admitted that WPTY-TV's reporters had neither independently verified the gang officer's overheated claims nor obtained any documentary evidence such as arrest records or written police reports to substantiate their tale. As the station grudgingly conceded, "Our investigation did not turn up widespread violence in schools due to this."

O'Reilly so far is simply pretending that the report was accurate; he's refused to respond to SPLC inquiries.

Evidently, the "no spin zone" is increasingly resembling the Bizarro Universe.

Hate crimes and the law

A recent piece by Laura McPhee in Nuvo illustrates one of the real reasons to pass them: hate groups have proven propensity to exploit their absence, as we are seeing currently in Indiana, one of only four states not to have a bias-crime statute on the books.

The piece details a couple of hate crimes -- one involving a vicious assault on an African American man by some young white punks, the other an even more brutal murder on a gay man -- that occurred in the past year in different locales in Indiana. More importantly, it explores the ugly brew of right-wing disinformation that has kept the legislation from passing:

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia currently have what is known as Hate Crimes Legislation. While the laws vary in language and scope, most HCL defines hate-motivated acts based on race, religion and ethnicity bias as criminal. The majority of states also include hate-motivated acts based on sexual orientation (32) and gender (28).

“Hate crimes do more than threaten the safety and welfare of all citizens,” concluded the New York state Legislature, upon the passage of the state’s Hate Crime Legislation in 2000. “They inflict on victims incalculable physical and emotional damage and tear at the very fabric of free society.”

As recently as Feb. 22, 2007, Hate Crimes Legislation has been defeated in the Indiana General Assembly.

HB 1459 would have amended Indiana law to allow judges to impose stiffer sentences to those found guilty of committing crimes “knowingly or intentionally … because of the victim’s color, creed, disability, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or sex,” just as it currently does to allow stiffer sentences to those who commit crimes against police officers, pregnant women, children and other designated victims.

The measure died on the House floor due to lack of support and overwhelming opposition.

While Indiana is one of only four states in America to not have Hate Crimes Legislation, in accordance with the federal Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 law enforcement agencies are required to report incidents to the FBI in which a committed crime was motivated by bias against race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

... For nearly 20 years, Indiana lawmakers have declined to pass Hate Crimes Legislation in Indiana due to pressure by the powerful Evangelical lobbyists and the fundamentalists they represent who oppose it.

"It is wrong for the government to mandate special rights for the homosexual lifestyle -- a lifestyle that many consider immoral," contends Evangelical lobbyist Eric Miller, founder of Advance America, whose opposition to Hate Crimes Legislation is that it "represents an attempt to give special protection to homosexuals and cross-dressers."

"Victory in Indiana!" proclaimed a February 2007 e-mail bulletin from Monica Boyer of The Indiana Voice for the Family, "Hate Crimes Legislation [is] Dead!" after HB 1459 died in the Indiana General Assembly.

"This was a clear case of people making their voices heard, and some legislators standing up for what was right," said Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana.

Like Boyer and Miller, Clark contends that by defeating Hate Crimes Legislation in Indiana, "The good guys won on this issue, and a bad bill was averted."

Once again, for the record: There is nothing in either the Indiana bill -- or for that matter in the federal legislation that recently passed the House -- that would give "special rights" to homosexuals or cross-dressers. The laws as written clearly would protect all citizens equally from bias crimes, including anti-gay bias that targets non-gays. Moreover, the law isn't about "protecting" any group or another -- it's strictly about stiffening the sentences for people who are committing crimes, which are not a form of protected speech in any case.

It's also worth noting, perhaps, that even to the extent that the laws are intended to create some kind of protections for various victim groups from terroristic criminal acts, there is nothing "special" about the rights that might arise from these. It is, in fact, well within the scope of the law to punish such acts for the full scope of harm they cause. We are, after all, simply talking about protecting basic human decency and the rights of equal opportunity and association -- which are the rights that are under assault when hate crimes occur.

You'll also note that there has been a real lack of media attention to these two crimes:

While Evangelical groups and conservative lawmakers from Indiana continue to defend their opposition to Hate Crimes Legislation, local and national human rights groups and bloggers are beginning to take notice.

And while much of this focus questions why Indiana continues to not enact Hate Crimes Legislation, others are also beginning to question why so few Indiana media outlets are reporting the beating of Dexter Lewis or the murder of Aaron Hall.

On June 6, Bloomington Alternative Editor Steven Higgs published an editorial asking why The Indianapolis Star has yet to cover Hall's murder.

"The case should have been big news," Higgs contends. "Yet The Star left the Hall murder to the Jackson County media, the never-to-be-trusted Indianapolis and Louisville television stations and bloggers ..."

We untrustworthy bloggers have also been pointing out something that Leonard Pitts remarked upon regarding the supposed media bias involved in black-on-white crimes: namely, the reality is that actual bias crimes against minorities are grossly underreported, especially in contrast to gruesome black crimes in which no bias motive is detectable.

More to the point, there is a reason that skinheads and hate-group organizers of various stripes despise bias-crime laws: They send precisely the kind of message they don't want to hear -- namely, that both their communities and society at large acgtively condemn crimes undertaken against victims chosen simply for their identities.

As I've explained previously, a significant aspect of the mindset of bias-crimes perpetrators is the belief that not only does society silently condone their actions, but that it is a kind of heroic undertaking on behalf of their communities.

Silence, for the thugs who like to beat and murder people just because they belong to an "out" group, equals tacit approval.

That's what Indiana continues to tell its young haters, and the results are coming home to roost.

Likewise, in continuing to attack attempts at passing a federal bias-crime statute, national Republicans beholden to powerful elements of the religious right are doing the same strange kabuki dance, with the extremist right as an appreciative partner.

Truth & Reconciliation, Part II: James Loewen on Sundown Towns

-- by Sara

As the statistics here show, lynching was largely (though not entirely) a Southern phenomenon. But the North and West had other -- more subtle but no less devastating -- ways of dealing with their own African-American populations -- which is why sociologist James Loewen's two presentations on the phenomenon of sundown towns formed an interesting counterpoint to Sherrilyn Ifill's talk discussed below.

If you think the town you grew up in didn't have a race problem because either a) it wasn't in the South, or b) it was all white, Loewen -- the author of "Sundown Towns" and an active Unitarian himself -- has news for you.

"When I started researching this subject, I expected to find three types of sundown towns," Loewen recalled. "I expected to find small towns that were all-white because they'd expelled their black populations; suburbs that were all-white because they excluded blacks (and usually Asians and Jews, as well) from the very beginning; and then a third class of places that were all-white simply because African-Americans never got around to coming there.

"And what I discovered was that this third class is virtually non-existent. If you're an American who grew up in an all-white neighborhood, you need to realize that it was, almost certainly, all-white by intentional design."

There was a time when there were very few cities in America that didn't have a significant black population. "Between 1863 and 1890, they did live everywhere," Loewen asserts. Freed slaves spread far and wide throughout America, seeking to put down roots in places Jim Crow couldn't reach them. But reach them it did: within just a couple of generations, these towns began systematically harassing their black populations in a wide variety of ways designed to get them to move elsewhere.

"Between 1890 and 1940, there came what I call "the great retreat," said Loewen. Throughout the west and north, small towns and large cities -- some as large as St. Louis and Omaha -- expelled their African-American populations. In a nod to the conference venue, he mentioned that Oregon's history was particularly heinous: "I don't think there was a town in the state that wasn't a sundown town," Loewen noted. "The only place in the state you could live if you were black was in the center of downtown Portland."

The term "sundown town" refers to the signs that some of these towns put at their city limits, which typically said things like "Whites Only After Dark." (Some of them were far less polite.) However, most sundown towns didn't bother with overt signage: my own hometown of Bishop, CA never actually put up signs; but the police and certain other citizens made it their business to confront black visitors and advise them of the town's policies regarding their presence overnight. Innkeepers refused to rent them lodging as late at the 1980s. (And if you think sundowning was just out in the sticks, note that this was happening just four hours up the highway from LA.)

Loewen, who encourages anyone with details about specific sundown towns to register their stories at his website, ticks off names and places in a rapid-fire staccato. Pierce City, MO drove out its black population in 1901. Tulsa drove out two-thirds of its black community 1908. Norman, OK followed suit in 1912 -- Loewen recalls that a fraternity at the University of Oklahoma hire an all-black band for a party; found it had run afoul of the new sundown law; and had to cancel the dance and pay to put the band on the next train out of town so they wouldn't face police harassment. Viana, IL didn't go sundown until 1954 -- which led to a riot in which houses were destroyed. Anna, IL drove out its African-American population in 1909, and is still all white to this day.

There are regional wrinkles to the pattern. "I expected to find maybe 10 sundown towns in Illinois, and maybe 50 across the US," said Loewen. Instead, he's found over 500 in Illinois alone -- and estimates that there may well be over 10,000 across the US. The movement was apparently strongest in Illinios, Indiana, and Ohio; and weakest in the South. He's only found six sundown towns in Mississippi. "Sundown towns are rare in the south, particularly the 'traditional south,' he notes.

In the west, sundowning campaigns often included the Chinese as well. "The Chinese were almost 20% of Idaho in the 1880 census," Loewen recounts. "But in the mid-1880s, they were driven from Wyoming, Idaho, rural California, Seattle (though that lasted less than a week), and Tacoma (more permanently). Humboldt, California drove them out in the late 1880s; and the town didn't have another Chinese resident until the 1960s."

In small towns, it's typical for people to swear that sundowning happened after some kind of ordinance was passed -- though Loewen finds it remarkable that, even though he's looked, he's never found a single town that actually has such an ordinance recorded on the books. Nor has he found deliberations on a sundown law reflected in the minutes of any city or county meeting. Still, it's clear that city resources were often brought to bear to enforce this extra-legal intention. Loewen showed a slide of a "6 o'clock siren" mounted on a city water tower, which everybody in town knew had been installed to announce the curfew on blacks in town every evening. "That's city government in action," he noted. "You don't put up a thing like that on city property without somebody's approval." In other towns, the job of enforcing this unwritten law fell to the police force.

As the Portland example demonstrates, most of the African-Americans displaced by sundowning were left with nowhere to go but the inner cities. And so it happened that sundowning in small towns and suburbs across the country gave rise to the inner-city ghettos of the 20th century. And this, in turn, created an entirely new flavor of sundown town: the covenanted suburb to which white city residents fled in response.

"Most large cities had -- and many still have -- sundown neighborhoods," Loewen pointed out. "Many suburban developments, starting around 1905, were built with legal restrictions to ensure that only whites would ever live there. Often, city governments passed laws requiring that sundown deeds be included in any new subdivision they approved." By the 1950s, federal housing policy further reinforced these covenants by requiring developers to include them as a condition for federal funding.

Loewen recommended the 1947 film "Gentlemen's Agreement," which centers on the agreement by which the city of Darien, CT covenanted to kept out Jews and blacks. "And it was very effective," notes Loewen: the 1950 census found 200 African-Americans in Darien -- all of whom were live-in domestic help.

The interesting thing about all this, says Loewen, is that there are strong inverse correlations between sundown neighborhoods and the relative economic health of a region. "Detroit is an economic disaster zone. It's also among the most segregated cities in America. All five of the Grosse Pointe communities were founded as sundown suburbs, for example." This pattern, he says, recurs: ethnic vitality correlates with economic vitality virtually everywhere in the country, and cities that remain segregated do so at peril to their own well-being.

The practice of sundowning began to wind down around 1970, as fair housing laws were passed from the federal level on down, opening the nation's housing stock to all qualified buyers, regardless of race. However, Loewen says, it still lives on in Sunbelt cities catering to retirees from the Northeast with a sundown proposition; and towns (like Darien today) in which the police still pull African-Americans over for "driving while black."

Loewen, like Ifill, is hopeful that we've reached a point where we can begin to deal openly with this history, and begin to move past it. To that end, he offered a second talk -- a workshop filled with specific suggestions that individuals, groups, and communities can use to begin the process of truth and reconciliation where sundowning is concerned. Those recommendations will be the topic of the next post.

Glenn Beck and the black helicopters

-- by Dave

Has anyone noticed that Glenn Beck's continuing rise among the ranks of the pundit class seems to be in inverse proportion both to his seeming sanity and perspicacity, as well as the actual ratings he manages to obtain?

We already have seen him go completely around the bend in promoting militia-style New World Order conspiracy theories. But then, we already knew from his post-election demand for "real" conservatism that he was located somewhere out there on the extreme right anyway.

Now we have him peddling NWO crap over the public airwaves, as Michael Hood reports at Blatherwatch:

The horror story batting around the red states and right-wing radio is that Bush has secretly negotiated the creation of the North American Union, a mega-state created by erasing the borders between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

This huge globalist conglomerate would terminate U.S. sovereignty; make us beholden to the socialists to the North, and the Third World mother-raping beggar/bandits to the South.

The Yankee dollar would be worthless, and we'll be forced to spend (if we could get any) the "Amero," modeled after the Euro and just as godless.

What's more, a 17-lane "Monster Highway," road to hell, is being built by the Master Planners from Mexico to Canada up through the middle of the U.S. (Actually, they're talking about a real highway in the planning stages: the Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor, an I-5-like North/South highway stretching from Texas Gulf ports to Canada.

Feckless Beck told listeners, "Let's just face it: this is the plan, this is the real reason [Congress and Bush] want to cram this thing down our throats! What else could it be?"

Even a right-wing partisan like Michael Medved knows this is lunacy:

Medved writes: "...the entire horror story about “North American Union” is based upon the “Security and Prosperity Partnership,” an utterly innocuous, open, above-board, well-advertised and widely publicized initiative to promote inter-governmental cooperation to fight terrorism, the threat of Avian flu, improve and tighten border security, and promote mutual prosperity. The then Presidents of the three countries (Bush, Fox and Martin) met in 2005 to pledge to work together on such issues and to initiate open working groups to facilitate cooperation – BUT THERE WAS NO AGREEMENT OR TREATY OR COVENANT of any kind, secret or otherwise."

The real question is why producers and executives at places like CNN and at ABC's Good Morning America in giving a clear-cut extremist who promotes groundless and paranoid conspiracy theories a platform for expounding this kind of nonsense.

What's next, John Trochmann doing the weather forecast for the Today show?

Truth & Reconciliation, Part I: Reconciling the Wounds of Lynching

--by Sara

Unitarians are so deeply concerned with racism that my aunt, who spent eight years on the church's national board, calls it "our version of Original Sin." That concern expressed itself in a number of venues over the five days of General Assembly. Three of the talks, given by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill and author James Loewen, spotlighted several things that white liberals grappling with America's racist legacy would do well to understand better. (This post presents the points of Ifill's talk. My take on Loewen's two talks will follow.)

Ifill, who is a professor at the University of Maryland law school, has a new book out called "On The Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century." (The book was published by Beacon Press, the UUA's own publishing arm, which is how Ifill came to be at GA.)

The first thing whites need to know about the legacy of lynching, Ifill told us, is that Americans -- both black and white -- are still carrying deep scars, which are clinging to us through the generations. Working for many years on voting rights cases throughout the South, she noticed that people in the towns she visited had never really let go of these events. "Everywhere I worked, I heard from my clients about lynchings. Invariably, they'd tell me about some horrific act of racial terrorism that had happened in the past." The practice of lynching ended decades ago; but even today, Ifill found that the memories are still as fresh as if they'd happened yesterday.

The next thing Ifill noticed is that whites and blacks in a community talk about lynching differently -- and have very different memories of what happened in their towns so long ago. "When I spoke with my [African-American] clients, I deliberately used the word "memories" -- even though my clients often weren't even alive when these lynchings happened. Still, I discovered that they 'remembered' details of the lynchings in great detail. They'd heard the stories directly from their parents as tales of how to survive life in the towns they lived in." Ifill was struck that "memories" were invariably extremely vivid, recalled with such specificity -- where the bodies were found, how the corpses looked -- that even people born years after the event thought they'd been there themselves, even though they knew it wasn't possible.

White people in the same towns, on the other hand, usually had very vague memories, even if they or their parents had been witnesses to the lynching. " The difference was striking between the two communities," she marveled. Nobody knew anybody involved. Usually, the lynch mob comprised "people from the next county" or "over the state line" -- people not from around here. (The people from the next county would usually point the finger right back.) Even when photos were available -- and, as Dave has noted, photos were very often available -- nobody recognized anybody. "They closed ranks, and never opened them," explained Ifill. "The lynching was not really about their community, so there was nothing to talk about."

Ifill noted that she'd seen this same denial mechanism in action in the late 1990s, when she was in South Africa as part of the UN Truth & Reconciliation commissions holding hearings to catalog the crimes of apartheid. "I couldn't find anyone who'd supported the regime," she recalled. "Either they didn't remember, or they didn't know -- it was just all very vague. Whites were living in a fantasy that they didn't know." Still, the truth and reconciliation process in Africa involved a level of candor she hasn't yet seen in the US -- but she believes it is necessary if healing is to occur.

Third, Ifill stresses: the work of reconciling ourselves to this history isn't something the government can do for us. We need to do it for ourselves -- town by town, person by person. These were local crimes committed by specific individuals: diffusing the responsibility will not heal the wounds. "I don't think we can have a national conversation on race," she mused. "But we can have lots of local ones."

The healing, she insists, will happen one town at a time. "In any town you recall with some nostalgia, there's most likely some alternative story about your town you haven't heard." As an example, she cites Hope, Arkansas -- Bill Clinton's home town. "Hope was the lynching capital of the entire south. I wonder if Bill Clinton's mother knew that?" Ifill pointed out that the glowing stories of "A Town Called Hope" that accompanied the cultivation of Bill Clinton's personal legend never included this fact. "I have to wonder: when do we start talking about this?"

The title of Ifill's book reflects the odd fact that throughout the South, lynchings more often than not happened on the courthouse lawn. It wasn't unusual for victims to be brought from jails many miles away to the county seat for the occasion. According to Ifill, "This was a deliberate choice of venue -- a statement that 'we are in charge of justice; we decide who is guilty and not guilty.'" Lynchings, like all other forms of terrorism, are message crimes; the choice of venue sent a clear message to black communities across the south that the only justice that mattered was mob justice; and appeals to law would be fruitless. (One of the lynchings she describes in her book occurred in the front yard of the judge's house: another message sent, this time to the judiciary, about who was really in control.)

Ifill then turned to the particulars of her book, which details her research into two particular lynchings in her home state of Maryland -- the 1931 execution of 23-year-old Matthew Williams in Salisbury, MD; and the 1933 lynching of George Armwood on the Maryland shore. She notes that silence within and between the white and black communities is one of the central themes of her book -- and breaking that silence is the first and hardest step in creating reconciliation. " A curtain of silence fell between the two communities after these lynchings -- a curtain of fear and shame. And that's the part that has to be broached in the 21st century, because it continues to live on."

In both of the Maryland lynchings, Ifill noticed, nobody in either community ever talked about the lynchings after they occurred. Blacks would not speak of it openly, even among themselves; only the whispered warnings to their children perpetuated the community's horrific memories. On the other side of town, silence gave whites safety from prosecution, and insulated them from a difficult truth -- that a Christian, civil town could also be beastly and lawless. Newspapers would refuse to report on these events: residents in the Armwood case were simply advised by their local paper to "return to normal" as soon as possible.

The silence continued into the churches. In both black and white congregations, nothing would be said on Sunday. White clergy would not challenge the immorality of lynching; usually, ministers were adamant about not mentioning events at all, especially if their own members had been involved. (They were often in denial about their members' participation.) Black ministers similarly refused to talk about it: Ifill recalled one black minister whose only comment the Sunday after one of the Maryland lynchings was a short acknowledgement that "the community has suffered a strain."

And the strain lingers far more strongly than most people realize. "Trying to talk about these events takes a lot of courage," said Ifill. "We need to realize that "conversations about race" are not always public. They are inter-racial, intra-racial, private, and public. They need to happen within families, within churches, as well as in communities."

But, she cautioned, it's important not to underestimate the hostility that's provoked when people attempt to begin these conversations. She recalled a trip to the county museum while researching the Williams lynching. The curator told her that a well-loved local professor had made a presentation on the Williams lynching to the historical society about 10 years earlier. The curator had attended the meeting -- and recalled that it was very hostile. The idea that whites should be blamed or feel responsible for the lynching "just wasn't going to go over with this group," Ifill quotes the curator as saying. He stuck to the usual storyline: the lynching was the work of a few disgruntled whites, most of them from out of town. She later found the professor's account of the same meeting, which matched the curator's verbatim. The professor was shattered by the rejection of her story: she never really forgave or forgot the outrage she felt at that meeting.

What does reconciliation look like? Ifill offered many concrete ideas in her talk -- and includes many more in her book. For one thing, she says, we need to commemorate these events. "This history has largely been erased," she notes. "There are markers for all kinds of things in small towns -- but never for these events. Reparation is about repairing the harm -- and one way to do that is to acknowledge in the public space that these things happened." Other commemorations might include annual rememberance days, community scholarships, and special exhibits in local museums.

Ifill was emphatic that the reconciliation process is hard, and participants need to be gentle with each other. "Sharing the stories means pulling the scabs off. You need to provide psychological support to help people deal with what gets stirred up. It complicates the process, but it's part of it."

Most importantly, she says, we need to recognize the ways in which these experiences made our grandparents -- both white and black -- the way they are. "Many small-town Americans harbor experiences they've had to swallow and get on with. Truth and reconciliation is largely about putting down those burdens." The process goes more easily if we start by respecting and acknowledging the courage of people who went through these horrible events and survived. Sometimes it helps to have outside facilitators to start and guide the conversation -- people who can take the heat, help people work through the emotions, and then leave town when it's over. Ifill cites the Alliance for Truth & Reconciliation as one group that's helping facilitate this process for interested communities.

Ifill's experiences in South Africa also brought home to her how important it is to include local institutions in this process. Churches and businesses, cops and prisons, lawyers and judges, and doctors and hospitals all supported the infrastructure of apartheid; healing was not possible until these institutions examined their role, and began to actively find ways to restore the trust they'd lost with the country's black population. African-Americans are similarly wary of both public and private institutions; reconciliation must involve them, and encourage them to open new pathways to greater trust in the future.

It's probably not a coincidence that the last lynchings in the US occurred in the 1950s -- and that two generations have passed in silence, leaving the third one to begin the process of uncovering the truth and cleansing the wounds. This pattern is a familiar one to people who work with adult children of alcoholic or abusive families; and also those who have worked with families who were victimized by the Holocaust or the Japanese internments. The first generation survives, often in silence; to speak of these things is simply too painful to endure. The second generation is often aware of the terrible things that happened; but respects their elders' silence, even as they strive to reassert the "normal" life of the family.

In all these cases, it typically falls to the third generation to break the silence, and begin the process of reconciliation. In the case of lynching, that third generation is us -- the current cohort of white and black Americans who are seeking to heal the wounds of long-ago terror that still create vast chasms between us, and limit our vision of what a shared America might look like. Our ability to create that America in the future depends, completely and utterly, on finding the courage to confront the past -- to open up our overwhelming load of shared baggage, examine its wretched contents with honesty and courage, and then agree on ways of putting these things in their proper historic place -- always remembered but never perpetuated -- so we can all move forward with a lighter load.

The hate also rises

I'm a little late remarking on this, but the threats against Leonard Pitts really raise some disturbing issues:

A white-supremacist Web site angered by a Leonard Pitts Jr. column alluding to the murder of a white couple posted The Miami Herald writer's home address and phone number -- leading to threats against the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner.

When Herald Managing Editor/News Dave Wilson asked Overthrow.com to delete the address and phone number, site editor Bill White replied: "We have no intention of removing Mr. Pitts' personal information. Frankly, if some loony took the info and killed him, I wouldn't shed a tear. That also goes for your whole newsroom."

Elsewhere on the Roanoke, Va.-based site, the N-word was used to refer to Pitts, who's African-American. He won a Pulitzer for commentary in 2004. His column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services.

White's reply to Wilson was posted on Overthrow.com, as was Wilson's e-mail message to White -- leading the Herald editor to also get some nasty responses from white supremacists. But Pitts has received most of the messages.

When reached today by E&P, Wilson said some of the messages were "thoughtful" but others were "very unsettling" in nature. "We did refer some of them to our legal representatives," added the Herald editor. "Our first concern is for Leonard, and we have been in close contact with him."

You may recall the case that sparked this brushfire: the right-wing brouhaha over a particularly heinous black-on-white crime for which no evidence of a bias crime is known to exist, though what we've seen in play is a classic far-right technique for muddying the public perception of what constitutes a hate crime. And Pitts had the matter pegged:

Pitts, in the early June column that set off Overthrow.com, wrote about the brutal January murder of a white couple in Tennessee. A group of African Americans were charged with the crime. "(I)f the defendants in this case did what they are accused of doing, I'd be happy to see them rot under the jailhouse," wrote Pitts.

But Pitts also noted that the supremacists and conservative bloggers who pushed the murder case into the national spotlight were examples of white people who "put on the victim hat" and allege that black crime against whites is underreported.

"Black crime against whites is underreported? On what planet? Study after study and expert after expert tell a completely different story," wrote Pitts, who's syndicated by Tribune Media Services .

Pitts concluded: "I have four words for ... any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized. Cry me a river."

The chief player in all this -- Bill White, the neo-Nazi former National Socialist Movement leader responsible for sparking the 2005 riots in Toledo -- has a real track record of fomenting hate and threats: he was one of the gleeful participants in the far right's celebration of the murderous assault against the family of the Illinois judge who put Matt Hale away.

He also is known for claiming that he has social connections to major right-wing media figures, particularly at the Washington Times, where he claims to be friends with Robert Stacy McCain and Fran Coombs (see more about them here and here). He once wrote the following in an Internet forum:

This is amusing. First, Stacy McCain is a pretty good friend of mine, Francis Coombs is a big fan of our website, and I've had lunch with his wife at an American Renaissance conference. Stacy, at least, is not anti-Jewish -- they all come from that weird part of the "far right" that buys into race theories but has a weird admiration for Semites. I once suggested to Mrs Coombs that the Washington Times should more virulently criticize the Zionist Entity, and she told me that several Jewish columnists -- Charles Krauthammer, Norman Podhoretz and AM Rosenthal, among others -- had threatened the Moonie organization if they ever took an anti-Zionist stance. Wes Pruden, who is in charge of the Times, however, is an extreme Zionist, and I have cussed him out violently for his extreme pro-Jewish views. People who know him tell me they can't understand his love of the Zionist state.

In any case, the SPLC has been trying to get these guys fired for years now. Stacy, in paticular, wrote a front-page story exposing how the SPLC made up the Y2K militia threat in order to con a multi-million contract out of the Clinton government, and has been on their shit list every since.

Anyways, read on, as the homosexual Jewish lobby rails against some of the few good folk still writing in an American newspaper:]

...

If they wanted to go after Stacy's FreeRepublic postings, they should have done it in a timely manner (this is all about a year and a half old) -- and just attacked him, since he's a little guy and the bigger guys at the Washington Times are political and not particular brave, and thus always willing to throw the little guy overboard if they think it will save their own asses.]

[You can read the cached version of this missive here.]

Rob Redding has been diligent in following up on this aspect of the threats. In addition to reporting on the connection, he obtained a clarification of sorts from McCain:

McCain, who has been linked to a pro-slavery group in the past, admits to knowing White.

"I first encountered Bill White who was, at that time, head of something called the Utopian Anarchist Party. He later, I believe, changed the name of his group to the Libertarian Socialist Party," McCain wrote in an emailed response. "In the past few years, Bill has associated himself with neo-Nazism. I have no explanation for this bizarre turn, except as a continuation of his tendency toward radicalism.

"The 'link' you assert is non-existent, and is irrelevant to anything happening in 2007" to Pitts, McCain wrote in an another emailed response. "That kind of thing is completely wrong. Opinion journalism should be provocative, and provocative opinions will necessarily generate strong disagreement, but disagreeing with someone's opinion should not lead to death threats, slurs, etc."

This is actually true as far as it goes. I first encountered White in the 1990s when he was indeed involved in various kinds of anarchism and libertarianism, though even then he clearly operated on the fringe and was a dangerously unstable character. McCain's judgment then was evidently as impaired as it is now.

More to the point, you'll note that nowhere does McCain indicate that he no longer considers White fit company -- he just makes clear that he himself disagrees with White, which is a small comfort, I suppose.

What's much harder to explain, exactly, is why White hasn't been charged with making threats against Pitts. It is difficult to read White's words and not comprehend them as an exhortation to violence and a threat against Pitts.

This is not a free-speech issue. Threats and intimidation are crimes in every state, and a crime by its nature is not a form of protected speech. I'm not certain why authorities haven't taken White's threats seriously, but their inaction, unfortunately, speaks volumes. If this were George Will being threatened by a Nation of Islam figure, you know you'd have seen the perp walk already.

The Dreams Train: Beyond the station

I guess I knew that the Dreams Across America experience was likely to be grueling, but I evidently underestimated the effect it would have on my 50-year-old body; I've spent the past couple of days, since arriving home from D.C., mostly resting and reconnecting with my family. Sorry for the absence, but it gave me some time to reflect on my experience and offer some closing thoughts.

It was, as you perhaps can tell from the posts I wrote along the way, an amazing human experience, most of all because it gave me a chance to meet and get to know a little about a genuinely inspiring collection of people from all walks of life. There were, however, a few disquieting moments toward the end of it all that, I believe, may give us some clues as to why we are still spinning our wheels somewhat in working toward sensible and effective immigration reform -- and also point our way to a solution.

We arrived in D.C. on Monday afternoon at around 2:30 and spent the next hour or so participating in the "Dreams" rally outside Union Station in the plaza in front of it. It might have been an unremarkable rally, if you've seen these things before, but for the presence of an 11-year-old girl, an American citizen who showed off her athletic medals, who described to the crowd her living nightmare after ICE agents descended on her home, with her parents narrowly escaping arrest -- but now the family is in chaos because the mother and father are in forced hiding.

This was a story that really resonated with those I had been hearing from those aboard the train: stories of a broken immigration system almost designed to break families apart and create a whole subclass of workers forced to live in terror that they might be ripped away from their loved ones at whim of that broken system.

And it seemed to be a current running through the speeches and marches that followed. The next day, after a breakfast at the station, the Dreamers all piled onto school buses to head up a march from the Metropolitan AMC Church in Washington down to the White House. Out in front of the church, organizers had prepared a phalanx of child strollers with signs pleading not to break up families [above]. One of the lead banners demanded: "Stop Breaking Families Apart!"

The size of the march was impressive; it appeared to have attracted somewhere between two and three thousand people. It wound in a continuous mass down 16th Street; when we reached Lafayette Park, I could see marchers nearly all the way back to where we started.



It was a remarkably diverse crowd, as had been the demographics of those aboard the Dreams Train. There were Latinos, Caucasians, African Americans, Asians, Indians -- you name it, they were in the march. And the spirit of cross-ethnic cooperation was both remarkable and quite visible.



When it reached the White House, much of the crowd dispersed around the lawn in front (park police wouldn't allow the marchers onto the sidewalk or driveway in front). Once most of the marchers had gathered around, the speeches began anew.

It should have been at this point, perhaps, that the Dreamers' achievement should have been celebrated, and their message made clear: We're all in this together, and we need to resolve this in a way that unites us all. But that message, it seemed, was being drowned out in chants and speeches.



I'd had an interesting encounter just as the crowd approached Lafayette Park. I was climbing up the back of a delivery truck that had crates of bottled water on board in (as it turned out, vain) hope of finding a decent vantage point to photograph the whole march. An elderly African-American man was below me off to my left a little, and he was watching the march.

As I hopped down off the truck next to him, the marchers broke out in a chant: "Si se puede! Si se puede!" The old man looked at me and said, "Si se puede? Who they talking to?" And he stalked off in apparent disgust.

I thought: "Well, there's one person they just lost." Not that movements like this need to appeal to everyone, but I couldn't help wonder, as I listened to the speakers carry on about their own agendas, how many more there were like him.

It's kind of a political reality that coalitions like the one that brought together the Dreams Train will be somewhat fractious -- in this case, ranging from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to the unions to immigration-reform groups -- and that when push comes to shove, the more powerful factions will take over. It was clear, in D.C. at least, that the unions were running the show, and in the process were shutting out some of the very elements of the coalition that had made the Dreamers' achievement remarkable. They also, in the process, managed to turn the Dreamers themselves almost into props.

Seeing this reminded me of one of the undercurrents that rode aboard the Dreams Train itself: Shortly after we first boarded in Los Angeles, the Dreamers began settling into their seats on board the train and forming their own social groups, as is normal in such situations. And unsurprisingly, many of the Latinos formed their own group, while non-Latinos tended to interact more with each other; this is probably only natural, since many of the Latinos spoke mostly Spanish, and some no English at all.

But over the course of the trip, I really saw these artificial barriers break down, especially as we ate and slept together and found ways to pass the time together. Sometimes translators helped break the language barriers; sometimes merely sharing a meal or watching the scenery together would work. By the time we reached D.C., it seemed that among most of the Dreamers, there was a mutual respect and camaraderie that can only come through being pushed and tested.

If there was an abiding lesson in all that we endured, it was this: The American Dream itself rests on a just, equitable, effective, and realistic immigration policy that reflects the best of our values -- family, hard work, human decency -- and enables us to share them. And that this isn't something we can achieve by promoting our own narrow interests; it's something we can only achieve by coming together, recognizing our mutual interests and needs, and building something from them that benefits us all. Not just Latinos, not just immigrants, but all Americans.

Yet all this seemed to be drowned by what followed the next few days. Symbolic of the outcome, I think, was what happened to the Dreamers the day they arrived in D.C. Instead of being transported immediately to their hotel accommodations (out in the suburbs) after the rally at the station, organizers inexplicably kept them around Union Station for the next six hours. They finally got to depart for their hotels around 8:30 -- dog tired, needing showers (Washington was a steam bath outside that day), and ready for some real rest, the kind you can't get on a rollicking train.

I'd left by cab around 5 p.m. so I could get some work done, so I at least was able to get cleaned up and refreshed in a reasonable time. If I'd been forced to wait until 9:30 p.m. (the time most of them got to their rooms) I'd have been furious.

It was, frankly, an awful way to treat a group of people who'd just made a tremendously difficult journey on their behalf. There was a feeling, at least among some of them, that they were just being used as props.

And when, after the Tuesday march, all of the Dreamers were left out of meetings with congressional leaders that followed, I can't help but figure that some of those feelings just hardened.

It's all small potatoes, really, but it's emblematic of the larger problems at play in terms of an effective approach to immigration reform. So far, most progressives are content to criticize right-wing policy, but the hard work of coming together for a just and humane solution is being evaded. We're ceding the field to a fairly narrow spectrum of powerful players.

I'm observing all this, of course, not with the intent of raining on the Dreamers' parade, but to point out that what they actually achieved hasn't been properly understood by even their own handlers. Going forward, it's clear that obtaining real immigration reform is going to require a broad-based effort that is inclusive, a real grass-roots movement drawing together Americans from all walks of life, instead of a product of power politics and the pursuit of our narrow self-interests.

The Dreamers demonstrated that it could be done, at least on a small scale. With their example in hand, we need to find a way to make it happen on a national scale.

It would be sad, after all, if everything the Dreamers worked to achieve were frittered away by the politics of the moment.

[A closing note of thanks: I'm really grateful for having had the chance to make as many friends on the train as I did; most of them are people whose names you'll find in my posts. A special thanks to the media crew I worked with on the train: Arthur Rhodes, Shaun Kadlec, and Visperd Mada-Doust. And a big big thanks to Rick Jacobs, who was the guy who made it happen.]

Thom Hartmann: Three Great American Myths

-- by Sara

The first thing that strikes you about Thom Hartmann in person is that he looks about 20 years younger than he actually is. The second is that he's got an energy level that's unbelievable.

"I got off the plane from DC at 3:15 this morning," he admits, apologizing for getting a name wrong in a story he was telling. "And I had to be on the air at six, so I'm running on very little sleep." It's now getting on toward two in the afternoon, and he's been speaking for 45 minutes, bouncing around the platform with energy and a recall of names, people, places, dates -- hundreds of years of American and English history -- that dazzles. If this is what he's like when he's been up all night, he must be hell on wheels when he's well-rested.

Hartmann's got a new book out (Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class). Thursday afternoon, given the chance to preach to the faithful of the religious left, the themes of the book became the text of his sermon. It's obvious that the skill set that makes for good radio talkers is pretty much the same one that makes for good preachers; and Hartmann warms eagerly to the task.

Today, he's debunking three dominant myths that he argues are undermining the American middle class. Culture, he says, is nothing more than a collection of shared stories -- collected over long periods of time, reflecting a lot of our past experiences. Unfortunately, the stories we tell ourselves as Americans about what democracy is and what it means to us are fraught with myths. These stories are at the core of our thinking about democracy: we are living our lives and basing our decisions on the basis of stories that are, in fact, not true. And change will not occur until we puncture these stories in order to make room for new ones.

The first myth Hartmann wants us to puncture is the myth of the free market, which has been elevated to the level of a religion. He invoked Grover Norquist -- who famously said that he wanted to shrink government down to where he could drag it into the bathtub and drown it -- and noted that New Orleans was what ended up getting drowned instead.

"Why does the Bush administration replace competent people with ideologues?" asked Hartmann. The answer lies in the essence of the conservative worldview. Conservatives believe that corporations are morally neutral; but human beings are essentially evil. Given that equation, it's obvious that corporations are thus morally superior to human beings, and thus should be given greater rights and dominance. Government, on the other hand, expresses the will of the people -- and since people are inherently evil, government is inherently evil as well.

Liberals, on the other hand, generally agree on the moral neutrality of corporations; but they believe that people are fundamentally good. "This is the fundamental cleavage between these two world views," notes Hartmann, pointing out that this worldview is clearly reflected in the preamble to the Constitution. "Our founders' six stated purposes reflect this belief -- that government exists to lift people up to their highest potential." We provide for the common defense in order to protect ourselves from the handful of bad apples in the bunch; but the rest of the document, asserts Hartmann, is about maximizing human opportunity.

On the other hand: "The free market is just a euphemism for large multinational corporations controlling the planet," he concluded.

The second myth, says Hartmann, is that "those who grew up in the middle class in America think a middle class is a normal thing. This isn't true. The middle class is an aberration, not a norm." In every case of laissez-faire capitalism in history, he argues, what has resulted -- every time -- was a very small, preposterously wealthy ruling class; a relatively small middle class of professionals and trades; and a huge class of working poor.

"A middle class is not a normal thing. It has to be created." Historically, middle classes only emerge under unusual (and usually unstable) circumstances: in fact, there have only been four great middle class periods in the past 600 years. The first occurred in Europe around 1450, after a quarter to a third of the population died in the plague. This drove up the cost of labor; and this rise in wages created the first major European middle class. We now call this period the Renaissance; and it led to some of the earliest democracies in Europe.

In time, the European aristocracy pushed back with maximum wage laws and other means of destroying this emergent class; and feudalism gradually returned. But when the Spaniards discovered gold in the Americas (and the Dutch and others were trading elsewhere as well), the amount of wealth available dramatically increased. Wages went up, families grew richer, and another middle class formed. We now remember this period as the Enlightenment.

The third wave was the American settlement, in which relatively few people took lots of land (killing the residents who'd long husbanded a rich array of resources), and used them to create a prosperous middle class in both the US and Europe from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. The upshot of this was the American Revolution. But once it was over, the upper classes reasserted themselves: from the 1830s through the early 1900s, we slipped back into feudalism.

To show how far that decline went, Hartmann pointed out that in 1900, the average American family made the modern equivalent of $9700 -- well below our current poverty line. Small business owners and family farmers struck back briefly through the Populist movement; and 30 years later, FDR codified their values in the New Deal, which reinvigorated the middle class once again.

Those of us who remember the American middle class as it existed between 1945 and 1985 find it hard to adjust to the idea that it doesn't exist any more. And, says Hartmann, we're right to be worried about it. "FDR got that a middle class is a) essential for democracy; and b) doesn't happen by accident. It isn't even normal."

Like earlier eras of middle-class dominance, the one just past was also a time of cultural renewal and unrest. Hartmann reminds us that conservatives consider the 60s a terrible aberration that must never be repeated -- and know that one way to keep it from repeating is to eliminate the middle class, thus reducing the number of agitators. "If you leave it to the corporate class, you will destroy the middle class. They know that when people are working 60-hour weeks, they don't have time to show up, be informed, or even vote." If the price of "social stability" is an entire nation of underpaid working poor, then it's a price our ruling classes are apparently all too happy to pay.

The third myth, according to Hartmann, is that we elect leaders in the United States. "We do not elect leaders…we elect representatives. We elect people to represent us." (And, looking at our leaders, it's sobering to consider just who and what it is that they represent.) "We can't sit around thinking some politician is going to save us….Congress, the Senate, the president, Ralph Nader's group -- none of them are going to do a thing until we push them into it. "

Politicians, Hartmann told us, don't initiate change. Invariably, they wait for a parade to form, and then get out in front of it and claim it as their own. "If enough of us create the parade -- I 100% guarantee it, because it's always happened this way -- some politician will run out in front of it, hoist up his flag, and say "This is my parade!"

So, concludes Hartmann: Like every generation of Americans before us, it's our turn to get out there and be the parade. The fate of the comfortable American middle class -- and the democratic government it supports -- hangs in the balance.

Generally Assembled

-- by Sara

Dave's on his way home from the Dream Train, which is why things have been so quiet around here. And I finally got my laptop back -- just in time to haul it along to the Unitarian Universalist Association's national General Assembly in Portland, which started yesterday.

I hadn't planned to blog this. What happens at church stays at church, I always say; far better to leave the public displays of religion to the fundies. But you gotta love a church where the national convention features Riane Eisler, Thom Hartmann, and James Loewen all speaking under the same glass-spired roof on the same afternoon. (Tomorrow, attorney Sherrilyn Ifill will be talking about how we confront the legacy of lynching; and Joanna Macy will discuss the seismic cultural shifts that confront us in the near future.) And, since so much of what they're discussing covers the purview of this blog -- and the Oregon Convention Center thoughtfully provides wifi -- I reconsidered, and decided to share a bit of my intellectual windfall with you over the next couple of days.

And then there's sweet comfort of sharing space with 6,000 earnest, polite, intelligent people -- most of whom are at least as well-informed and often more liberal than I am. You just sit down (or stand in line, more usually) anywhere, and someone will strike up a fascinating conversation about corporate accountability, sustainable living, or (yes, sigh) immigration policy. The Web is a daily reminder that there are a lot of people in the world who share my values. But there's nothing quite as affirming as having this many of them -- live, in person, all in one place together, talking about the stuff that matters and calling it church.

Lots of great blogging fodder. I'll post as I have time (and power -- outlets are, unfortunately, less ubiquitous than the wireless network). More soon: I've got to go hurry over to take Thom Hartmann to task for something he said on the air last week about moving to Canada being a cop-out. (It can be. But it's not mandatory.)

What America looks like

[Outside Union Station in Chicago. All photos by Visperd Mada-Doust.]

-- by Dave

One of the real attractions to joining the Dreams Across America train, for me at least, was that I would get to see so much of the country up close. When nearly all of your travel is done by air, you see America from a distance (if you even bother to look out your window).

But when you do it by land -- train, bus, car, or bike -- you really get to see it. I intend someday to cross the country by bike, though I haven't much desire to do the bus or car thing. But a train? That always sounded very cool to me.

And it has been. But what's turned out to be even more special about this trip is the fact that I've been traveling with a train full of immigrants from all walks of life from all over the nation.

If America is as much its people as its landscape, I've seen America up close and personal both ways on this trip. And it has been an amazing thing.

The group of immigrants and their advocates that has gathered for this tour is incredibly diverse. They range from Native Americans to Caucasian housewives to African-American teachers to Germans and Italians and Poles to Pakistani and Korean mothers to Iraqi soccer players to Salvadoran refugees to, yes, Mexicans.

The one thing they all have in common is an enormous strength of character and an idealistic belief in the American Dream. They are, really, America at its strongest and finest.

Take, for example, Mike Wilson. He is a member of the Tohono O'Odham Nation, a tribe whose reservation is located in the Sonoran desert on the Arizona-Mexico border. Wilson of course is not an immigrant in the least, but he is a fierce advocate for them, particularly for defending the humanity of the border crossers, who have been dying in ungodly numbers on his tribe's land. As a leader of Humane Borders, he makes it his business to set out water, food, and aid supplies in the desert to help save the lives of the crossers. In person, he's quiet and yet powerful, and you can tell that his convictions are backed up by sobering real-life experience.

Or there's Cathy Gurney, the Sacramento woman who tells her story in video here. Gurney operates a landscaping business that relies almost entirely on Latino labor; as I've mentioned, Gurney makes a powerful case that her business would not survive without that labor, not merely because it's work that white Americans won't do, but also because of the incredible work ethic that Latinos bring to the table. Gurney is bright and vivacious, a lifelong Republican, and absolutely adamant about the importance of recognizing Latino laborers as the formidable component of the nation's economic engine.

There's Hee Pok Kim, also known as "Grandma Kim," an elderly Korean woman from Los Angeles (originally from Pyongyang) whose lack of English skills doesn't keep her from communicating a real warmth and intelligence, as well as her fierce determination in helping to change the nation's immigration laws -- not for herself, but for her children and family and others like her, who have to jump through so many hoops to become "legal" immigrants that it's no wonder they eventually give up.

Or Samina Faheem Sundas, a middle-aged Muslim woman from Pakistan who runs American Muslim Voice. Samina's passion to fix the broken immigration system runs so deep that she gave up her job with a preschool-education foundation in order to make the trip. Or Doris Castaneda, an elderly woman from Guatemala who came along to try to change the laws for the sake of her children and grandchildren. Two of them -- a pair of beautiful little girls named Ashley and Desiree -- accompanied her on the trip to help make that point.

The list, really, goes on and on: Robert Guajardo, a bearded, very Caucasian-looking fiftyish man of Spanish lineage who emigrated here from Mexico. Jules Boyele, who came here from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Virginia Franklin, an African-American educator from Los Angeles who came along to help fight for the Dream Act, which aims to eliminate the provisions of federal law that harms the education of immigrant children. Father Giovanni Bizzotto, an Italian priest who spent 10 years in Mexico before relocating to California. Tonio Antonioni, a former soccer player from Iraq who fled Saddam Hussein's tyranny and whose wife remains in limbo in what he calls "the worst country in the world."

And on and on: Brian Bautista, a sergeant in the Marine Reserves who found his path to citizenship through a tour of duty in Iraq. Fermin Vasquez, a onetime undocumented student who fled a political nightmare in El Salvador to try to find peace and a new home in America. Gabriella Thomas, a blonde German woman who emigrated here in 1969.

Or Hang D. Youk, a Korean man who arrived in Houston in 1998 to join his family and found himself in limbo after his father, a legal immigrant, was killed in a robbery. Wynona Spears, a formerly undocumented emigrant from Belize whose love of jazz led her to dream of a better life, and whose son served two tours of duty in Iraq.

These people are the true face of America in the 21sty century: some white, some black, some Asian, some Latino, whatever -- you name the location on the planet, and there are Americans from there.

It might be easy to shrug them off, along with their stories, with the simplistic perspective of the nativists: "Well, these are all legal immigrants, and the problem we have is with illegal immigrants." But it is of course not that simple. Many of these now-legal immigrants were themselves "illegal" at one time or another in their journeys toward their dreams.

Moreover, as Nathan Thornburgh recently pointed out in his remarkable cover piece for Time on the amnesty issue, it's not logical to expect there not to be law-breaking when the law is onerous to the point of Kafkaesque absurdity:

If people are frustrated, as they should be, by the fact that some eligible immigrants have been waiting for citizenship for as many as 28 years, then by all means, fix that problem. Streamline the process for legal immigration. But don't blame that red-tape nightmare on the millions of low-wage illegals already here, who form a very different (and vastly more populous) group.

A century ago, the face of America was decidedly white. But two centuries before that, it was primarily Indian. The world changes and shifts, demographics with it.

What America has always been about is our shared values -- a love of freedom and a respect for others' freedoms, our willingness to work hard, our desire to raise our families in a safe and healthy place, and our wish to pass all that on to our children and their children.

For most of the past century -- since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which codified the racist desire to keep out people who were not white (specifically, Chinese and Japanese) -- our immigration laws have been predicated on the desire to keep people out, because we believed their skin color and nationality mattered more than their values. As the Dreamers and their stories make clear, it is time to find a way to welcome those who are, inside, truly American.

When that happens, we finally will begin living up to our own great ideal: the American dream.

Onward from Chicago

[The Dreamers enjoy some fresh air in San Antonio. Photo by Visperd Madad-Doust.]

-- by Dave

Well, the trip aboard the Dreams Train from Los Angeles to Chicago was in many ways a test of the Dreamers' endurance -- but so far, everyone's holding up well. We got cleaned up, fed, and rested in Chicago. We also got a fresh addition of even more Dreamers.

So as we pulled out of Union Station tonight, the energy was warm and positive. Everyone's looking forward to getting into D.C. this afternoon.

It helps, of course, that we all know the hardest part of the trip is behind us. It's all been worth it, because an important component of the experience has been in seeing America -- what it looks like, what the people are like, how they live and make their livings.

Getting from L.A. to San Antonio was unquestionably the worst. Once into the desert, the landscape became interminably dull, except for stretches of the Arizona desert, which can be quite beautiful. (Having grown up in southern Idaho, there is probably nothing more uninteresting and aesthetically unpleasant than unremitting sagebrush scrublands for me -- and it seems most of my fellow riders shared that feeling.) The route the train followed through New Mexico was much the same, and western Texas was even worse. It reminded me of nothing so much as the country between Boise and Mountain Home, which I think has been scientifically proven to be the most godforsaken and boring stretch of landscape in the United States.


[The Arizona sky and landscape. Photo by Visperd Madad-Doust.]

Things picked up quite a bit in central Texas on the second day of the trip -- the plains turned greener and grassier, and we saw quite a bit of wildlife: antelope, mule deer, even golden eagles and javelinas. As it grew dark near the town of Alpine, Texas was starting to look much better.

The problem was that, by then, we were many hours behind schedule. There is a good deal of track repair going on along that line currently, and the train was often forced to pull over and wait for hours at a time for the track to clear. Moreover, since the freight lines actually own the track, the passenger trains are forced to pull over and wait for oncoming freight lines whenever the schedule requires.

By the time we pulled in to San Antonio early Friday morning, we were eight and a half hours behind schedule. We were supposed to have had a night in a hotel there, which would have given us a break from the constant rocking, rolling, surging and stopping of a train ride and given us a chance to clean up and stretch our legs. Instead, we spent a second night sleeping in our cars, and once in San Antonio (which looks like a lovely city, but we didn't get to find out), we had to get out, wait at the station for three hours as the next train pulled up (the one we were on continued on to New Orleans) and get back on.


[Mike Wilson of Humane Borders watches the scenery, Photo by Visperd Madad-Doust.]

The trip through Arkansas and Missouri was remarkably scenic; I particularly enjoyed the stretch through the Mark Twain National Forest. But the toilets in our coach clogged up, and when we hit St. Louis, the Amtrak officials were unable to get them fixed and so we rolled on our way.

It was clear that someone in the Amtrak home office horribly miscalculated just how crowded the train was going to be, what with fifty dreamers on top of the regular riders. Food kept running out. Saturday afternoon, there were only about 30 lunches available. And then the train hit something that broke the water line in front, so none of the toilets on the entire train worked properly.


[The evening sky at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church in Chcago. Photo by Visperd Madad-Doust.]

Fortunately, we arrived in Chicago that evening. We pulled in to Union Station hot, tired, sweaty, smelly, and hungry. The worst part of it, I think, was that we had just spent four consecutive days riding relentlessly, squeezed together on a train and living on top of each other. People were getting irritable, and I think we were all tiring of one another -- though it was nothing that a big meal (courtesy of the Chicago organizers and our hosts at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church), a hot shower, and a good night's rest on a stationary bed couldn't fix.

The truth is, in fact, that everyone on the trip has been extraordinarily patient with one another. And that has a lot to do with the character of the people aboard the train.

The Dreams Across America train, in fact, has been most remarkable in my mind for the collection of people who have come together to ride on it. It's an incredible group of people, nearly all of them immigrants -- and you know what? They, too, look like America.

More on that shortly.