James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.

Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and “numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination”.

“It’s a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level,” he said.

Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education.

“For example, with the treatment of children in schools both by their peers and by teachers as well as the educational system itself; the way native Americans and indigenous peoples are reflected in the school curriculum and teaching,” he said.

“And discrimination in the sense of the invisibility of Native Americans in the country overall that often is reflected in the popular media. The idea that is often projected through the mainstream media and among public figures that indigenous peoples are either gone or as a group are insignificant or that they’re out to get benefits in terms of handouts, or their communities and cultures are reduced to casinos, which are just flatly wrong.”

Close to a million people live on the US’s 310 Native American reservations. Some tribes have done well from a boom in casinos on reservations but most have not.

Anaya visited an Oglala Sioux reservation where the per capita income is around $7,000 a year, less than one-sixth of the national average, and life expectancy is about 50 years.

The two Sioux reservations in South Dakota – Rosebud and Pine Ridge – have some of the country’s poorest living conditions, including mass unemployment and the highest suicide rate in the western hemisphere with an epidemic of teenagers killing themselves.

“You can see they’re in a somewhat precarious situation in terms of their basic existence and the stability of their communities given that precarious land tenure situation. It’s not like they have large fisheries as a resource base to sustain them. In basic economic terms it’s a very difficult situation. You have upwards of 70% unemployment on the reservation and all kinds of social ills accompanying that. Very tough conditions,” he said.

Anaya said Rosebud is an example where returning land taken by the US government could improve a tribe’s fortunes as well as contribute to a “process of reconciliation”.

“At Rosebud, that’s a situation where indigenous people have seen over time encroachment on to their land and they’ve lost vast territories and there have been clear instances of broken treaty promises. It’s undisputed that the Black Hills was guaranteed them by treaty and that treaty was just outright violated by the United States in the 1900s. That has been recognised by the United States supreme court,” he said.

via US should return stolen land to Indian tribes, says United Nations.

This special report includes revelation of a scheme by anti-Indian organizers to finance a hate campaign against the Lummi Nation through funding by the Peabody-Goldman Sachs consortium behind Gateway Pacific Terminal.

As I noted in my editorial Anti-Indian History, the Anti-Indian Movement (including Skip Richards, one of the current hate campaign organizers) has a history of fomenting violence against Indian tribes. The current nationally coordinated campaign to mobilize racial resentment against tribal governments is a tried-and-true strategy. In fact, as documented in the Public Good Project special report Wise Use in Northern Puget Sound by Paul de Armond, this strategy has been used before, by the same people, in the same region.

In Paul’s 1995 report, he documents the fact that the Wise Use (industry)/anti-Indian/property rights/militia alliance in which Skip Richards played a key organizing role, was organized and funded by industry. The Wise Use Movement, initially funded by the energy extraction industry, now includes the real estate development industry, especially on public or Indian lands.

With the Citizens Alliance for Property Rights as a local activist group at the Anti-Indian Conference, Richards is in a position to bring in the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise to launder industry funding and provide Wise Use ideology to bolster the anti-Indian rhetoric. Combined with CERA legal and organizational support, Tea Party activists and white supremacists could easily inspire Christian Patriot militias to join them in creating a political climate best described as a Reign of Terror.

via Hate For Hire.

The Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) – and other organizations active in the Campaign for Dignity and other national organizations – believes that the impact of the proposed law will affect the lives of millions of people, and that a new immigration law should recognize the full rights of immigrants.

We stand on the following points:

1) The date of December 31, 2011 as the deadline for income to qualify for a legalization initiative posed excludes entry to thousands of migrants who could not regularize their immigration status. This date should be moved for at least a year ahead to December 31, 2012 to incorporate the greatest possible number of undocumented migrants.

2) The time that the bill proposes to allow immigrants to obtain residence (ten years) and citizenship (total of 13 years) is too long. Applicants should be served within a maximum of five years.

3) On the “Merit Based Program” that would grant legalization based on a merit system according to education and skills, we propose to remove the requirement on educational attainment as many people would be left out, if it applies.

4) The proposal excludes immigrants from [working in] health services and public benefits, which threatens the health and welfare of people.

5) The electronic verification system known as E-Verify to be required of all employers will affect all irregular workers who are in the process of ‘normalizing’ their legal status.

6) The Guest Worker Program would place farm workers in a vulnerable position as it would give unfavorable treatment to immigrants compared to resident workers and citizens.

7) That the requirement of being employed and demonstrating financial stability for given a period of time does not allow the person to adapt to their new temporary status because many people right now are unemployed and because their current immigration status makes it difficult to get employment.

8) The so-called strengthening of border enforcement creates a process of militarization affecting populations of both countries. We are especially concerned with the use of unmanned aircraft (drones). At present there already exists a huge border surveillance system and yet border organized crime operates, which carries out human trafficking and make immigrants prey to kidnappings and other human rights violations.

9) The U.S. government should take responsibility as the entity that causes the migration and displacement of our communities by imposing economic policies like NAFTA on southern countries in addition to supporting the extractive neoliberal system that plunders our communities and generates misery, violence, unemployment, and social instability, which are factors underlying migration.

Preserve the Past. Credit: Wayne Morse Center

As a binational organization we believe that this bill does nothing to alleviate the causes of migration in our home countries, which are increased poverty, low wages, and violence due to international policies imposed by the government of the United States and their financial support with millions of dollars dedicated to the drug war implemented by the Mexican government and has displaced thousands of citizens.

We urge legislators in both chambers to be aware of the impact this law, if passed, would have not only on the lives of people who are undocumented in the United States but in relations with migrant-sending countries.

The United States must demonstrate in practice that is in favor of a fair, humane, and equitable policy for all those who have worked and who aspire to become citizens of this country.

via Immigration Struggles | Part 2 in a Series – An Indigenous Critique and Position Statement | mexmigration: History and Politics of Mexican Immigration.

In Tucson, we’ve been battling for seven years and Sal was well aware of the struggle there, in Arizona. He wanted to speak in Tucson when TUSD and the state decided that what he stood for was not welcome in this backward state. Still we invited him, but his health was already not in the best of shape. Two years ago, one of his brightest students, Paula Crrisostomo, came in his place. And she was banned from speaking not by one, but two schools in Tucson (Tucson High and Cholla). Still she spoke to my students at the University of Arizona. Her presence was powerful that year. After speaking to my students she went to one of the most chaotic school board meetings in Tucson’s history. The entire school board, the building and its surroundings were heavily militarized… And she was there in the middle of it all… 40 years after having taking part in a historic battle with thousands of students throughout LA schools, she was right in the middle of another historic battle, this time, in defense of Raza Studies

Sal was the essence of what it means to be a teacher. In some societies a teacher is the highest example of what it means to be a good human being. A teacher imparts knowledge, imparts wisdom and sets an example.

Soon, I will feel compelled to write about him. A little more about him. At the moment, I am like many, attempting to digest the significance, the impact, of his life and his death.

When I spoke about that we had entered an era of turbulence, I meant something bigger, or something beyond Los Angeles or even beyond this country.

Just recently, the Constitution Project (a two year study) found that the United States had engaged in torture. The previous administration suspended both the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. This of course is mind-boggling. Mind-boggling that the entire previous administration is not behind bars. There is no mystery. These politicians willingly ignored the law, and also, as collateral damage, sacrificed our rights for a false sense of security. And then you have the current administration, from day one, speaking about needing to move forward and not looking back (that’s a pretty ridiculous notion as all prosecutions of crimes and all judicial proceedings deal with the past). Failure to prosecute those that engage in torture is itself a crime. The previous administration willfully defied international law, and even U.S. law. They did not hide their intentions. What they said was that the law does not apply to this country. That was a unilateral decision. And worse the current administration has been complicit in this. The current administration’s policies, in regards to war and specifically the use of drones, is, as illegal as the previous administrations war activities.

But let’s switch gears. A generation ago dictators throughout the world, including on this continent, committed unspeakable crimes against humanity, including genocide. A generation later many of these same dictators and generals have now been put to trial. Truth commissions were not and are not good enough.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: Dr Cintli: UPDATE: Nin Tonantzin Non Centeotl.

Eusebio’s kidnapping, though, was exceptional. He served as the town commissioner of Rancho Nuevo and was a member of the community activist organization Union of Towns and Organizations of the State of Guerrero (UPOEG), and the brazenness the criminals showed in snatching him up pissed off his neighbors so much that they took matters into their own hands.

The day after Eusebio was abducted, hundreds of people from the nearby towns of Ayutla de los Libres and Tecoanapa decided that they could do a better job policing their communities than the local authorities. They grabbed whatever weapons they had—mostly hunting rifles and shotguns—set up checkpoints at entrances to their villages, and patrolled the roads in pickup trucks, often hiding their faces with ski masks and bandanas. Overnight, UPOEG transformed from an organization of advocates for better roads and infrastructure into a group of armed vigilantes operating without the endorsement of any branch of the government. The kidnappers released Eusebio that day, but UPOEG’s checkpoints and patrols didn’t disappear with his return. In fact, there was a groundswell of support. Five municipalities in the surrounding Costa Chica region followed suit and established their own militias. Soon, armed and masked citizens ensured that travelers and strangers weren’t allowed to enter any of their towns uninvited.

These militias captured 54 people whom they alleged to be involved in organized crime (including two minors and four women), imprisoning them inside a house that became an improvised jail. On January 31, the communities gathered on an outdoor basketball court in the village of El Meson to publicly try their detainees. The charges ran the gamut from kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking, and homicide to smoking weed. More than 500 people attended, and the trial was covered by media outlets all over the world.

This uprising of the citizenry complicated relations with the authorities who were assigned to govern and police these villages. Initially, the state’s governor, Ángel Aguirre, praised the militias and even said that the law gave villagers the right to rule themselves. However, his position shifted quickly thereafter, and he publicly declared that no one had the right to take justice into their own hands. Following intense negotiations between UPOEG and the government, the prisoners were surrendered to the state police in February. But the villagers had no intentions of handing over their guns.

Federal and Guerrero state laws give indigenous groups some authority to govern themselves, and the militias are mostly composed of indigenous people, so there’s legal precedent for what’s happening in Costa Chica. Francisco Lopez Bárcenas, a renowned lawyer who’s a member of Oaxaca’s indigenous Mixteco people and has documented these sorts of rebellions in Mexico for decades, told us that while these communities have policed themselves for centuries, the “self-defense groups” that have formed in Guerrero and elsewhere are a different beast.

“The community police are groups that are part of the inherent structure of the towns and villages, and are legitimized by the rights of indigenous people,” Francisco said. “The self-defense groups are formed by the groups’ own initiative to defend the people, but they are not part of the towns’ social structures, so they aren’t truly accountable to the communities. That’s why they don’t have the same legitimacy. Also, self-defense groups don’t necessarily have be a part of indigenous communities—they could be farmers, or [they could form] in the cities, wherever a particular group feels threatened.”

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: The Warrior State | VICE United States.

Reblogged from Unsettling America:

*Mexikaresistance.com Editor’s Note: Cesar Chavez never considered himself a Chicano, and he actively worked to deport Mexicans. So why do our people continue to mindlessly worship him as a hero of the Chicano Movement? Also, why do so-called “Latinos” bend over backwards to apologize for his anti-Mexican views and actions? Are we really that desperate for role models that we will meekly accept whatever we can take? We should have higher standards. Cesar Chavez is no hero of mine.

:The UFW’s Anti-Immigrant Legacy by JUSTIN FELDMAN:

Last Sunday was Cesar Chavez’s birthday. The United Farm Workers, founded by Chavez in 1962, marked the occasion by organizing five pro-immigration reform marches throughout California. Other groups organized Cesar Chavez Day events in San Antonio and Phoenix that shared the pro-immigration reform theme. The irony is that during most of his tenure with the UFW, Chavez was virulently anti-immigrant in his public and private lives. He led his union to campaign for the deportation of undocumented workers and, at times, even green card holders became targets.

Anti-Mexican gathering or Cesar Chavez Rally?

Over the last couple of decades, the racist, xenophobic right has invoked Chavez’s unsavory history with immigration in their efforts to delegitimize the immigrant rights movement. Us leftists have typically come to his defense. We do need heroes after all. Of the countless people of color who have stood up for workers, all but a few have been written out of history. But even more than our need for heroes, we need a critical analysis of the past that can inform our current and future organizing.

The latest Chavez apologism comes from an article on Latino Rebels, which draws on excerpts from a few books addressing the union leader’s views on immigration. The author concludes that Chavez only opposed immigrants brought in as scabs during strikes, that he wasn’t responsible for the UFW’s Minutemen-like patrolling of the Arizona-Mexico border, and that he ultimately came to support immigrant rights in 1974 when he outlined his views in a letter to the San Francisco Examiner. But Frank Bardacke’s book Trampling Out the Vintage (reviewed in Counterpunch last year by Saul Landau) documents Cesar Chavez’s aversion to all undocumented immigrants, not just strikebreakers, and pursuit of pro-deportation campaigns that can only be described as vicious.

Cesar Chavez began anti-immigrant campaigning during a strike at the Guimarra Vineyards in 1967. Some of the strikebreakers were undocumented. Others were green card holders who were prohibited from working at struck businesses under existing regulations. As part of the strike campaign, Chavez led a march of 150 union supporters to a federal building in Bakersfield to demand that the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrest non-citizen workers. The INS soon conducted a series of raids in the area, arresting 500 undocumented workers, 62 of whom were employed by Guimarra.

In May of 1974, Chavez proposed the “Campaign Against Illegals”. In a memo sent to all UFW offices, Chavez informed staff of

“the beginning of a MASSIVE CAMPAIGN to get the recent flood of illegals out of California… We consider this campaign to be even more important than the strike, second only to the boycott. If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight” (emphasis in original).

On May 20, Chavez presented the Campaign Against Illegals to the UFW’s executive board. Bardacke notes that the meeting’s minutes indicated no dissent from board members. At Chavez’s direction, the UFW’s national headquarters distributed forms to its offices in California, Florida, and Arizona that staff were to use for reporting undocumented workers to the INS. Fresno’s border patrol alone received more than 2,600 names from the UFW, though it only arrested 195 of them. Chavez also urged supporters to call their Congressman demanding more INS enforcement, then testified before Congress urging the same, and also gathered 40,000 signatures in a related petition drive.

Chavez’s correspondence with UFW staffer Liza Hirsch in June of 1974 reveals that his disdain for undocumented immigrants went beyond his perception of them as strikebreakers. Hirsch presented a flyer to Chavez’s approval with Spanish text saying “the union isn’t against illegals if they don’t work where there is a strike”. In a letter dated June 25, Chavez writes that the flyer is “a bunch of shit. We’re against illegals no matter where they work because if they’re not breaking the strike they’re taking our jobs.”

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: Reinventing Cesar Chavez » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

The United States today qualifies as a plutocracy – on a number of grounds. Let’s look at some striking bits of evidence. Gross income redistribution upwards in the hierarchy has been a feature of American society for the past decades. The familiar statistics tell us that nearly 80% of the national wealth generated since 1973 has gone to the upper 2%, 65% to the upper 1 per cent. Estimates as to the rise in real income for salaried workers over the past 40 years range from 20% to 28 %. In that period, real GDP has risen by 110% – it has more than doubled. To put it somewhat differently, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top earning 1 percent of households gained about 8X more than those in the 60 percentile after federal taxes and income transfers over a period between 1979 and 2007; 10X those in lower percentiles. In short, the overwhelming fraction of all the wealth created over two generations has gone to those at the very top of the income pyramid. That pattern has been markedly accelerated since the financial crisis hit in 2008. Between 2000 and 1012, the real net worth of 90% of Americans has declined by 25%. Theoretically, there is the possibility that this change is due to structural economic features operating nationally and internationally. That argument won’t wash, though, for three reasons. First, there is no reason to think that such a process has accelerated over the past five years during which disparities have widened at a faster rate. Second, other countries (many even more enmeshed in the world economy) have seen nothing like the drastic phenomenon occurring in the United States. Third, the readiness of the country’s political class to ignore what has been happening, and the absence of remedial action that could have been taken, in themselves are clear indicators of who shapes thinking and determines public policy. In addition, several significant governmental actions have been taken that directly favor the moneyed interests.

The latter include the dismantling of the apparatus to regulate financial activities specifically and big business generally. Runaway exploitation of the system by predatory banks was made possible by the Clinton “reforms” of the 1990s and the lax application of those rules that still prevailed. Attorney General Eric Holder just a few weeks ago went so far as to admit that the Department of Justice’s decisions on when to bring criminal charges against the biggest financial institutions will depend not on the question of legal violations alone but would include the hypothetical effects on economic stability of their prosecution. Earlier, Holder had extended blanket immunity to Bank of America and other mortgage lenders for their apparent criminality in forging, robo-signing, foreclosure documents on millions of home owners. In brief, equal protection and application of the law has been suspended. That is plutocracy.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: Plutocracy in America » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Many people – including some of his own Republican Party members – are expressing “disgust” with Young’s use of the disparaging racial slur, “Wetbacks” during a radio interview yesterday (to listen use this link here to take you to HuffPost). In the interview with KRBD-FM, Young was discussing his own experience with the hiring of farm workers: “I used to own — my father had a ranch. We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes…You know it takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”

Presente.org just issued a Press Release with an active link to a petition asking for Rep. Young’s resignation and a real apology. Arturo Carmona and the rest of the Presente team qualified the remark as “…one of the most dehumanizing comments we’ve heard from a public official in a while” and that “even with Senate and House Republican leaders condemning him, Rep. Don Young has simply issued a non-apology, claiming he ‘meant no disrespect.’”

I understand Presente.org’s disgust with Young’s statement, but I do not believe it ranks that high in the pantheon of politicians’ hate speech against Mexican-origin and other Latina/o workers. For example, during the 2010 midterm election – just as the anti-immigrant hysteria was reaching a crescendo – Pat Bertroche, a Tea Party Republican candidate for the Congress from the 3rd district of Iowa, argued that apprehended “illegal aliens” prior to being deported should have micro-chips implanted in their bodies. He offered this as a solution to re-entry and compared undocumented workers to dogs:

I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I microchip an illegal? That’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s a lot cheaper than building a fence they can tunnel under.

That still ranks higher on my “offensive discourse meter,” along with Republican Presidential hopeful Herman Cain’s remark about how his border fence is “…going to be 20 feet high. It’s going to have barbed wire on the top. It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you — Warning’” earlier adding that the sign would be written “in English and in Spanish.” See? They are sensitive to Latina/o concerns. Gosh, Cain even respects bilingualism!

I actually think that the criticism Young is getting from his own ranks seems like an opportunity for his colleagues to take cheap shots on their fellow Republican to earn fake cookie points with Latina/o voters. The Republicans must think Latina/o voters are stupid enough to believe that just because John Boehner is not as boneheaded as Young he actually favors policies that would protect and empower our working-class and indigenous communities. If the GOP partisans really cared about immigrant demands and needs they would stop blocking humane immigration reforms and give the undocumented workers and their families a quick and fair path to legalization and end all this talk of guest workers.

I agree with Presente.org that “racial slurs and dehumanizing terms are worse than disrespectful—they cause harm.” Words can hurt; they can break bones. Ideological discourse can fan hatred and encourage and/or rationalize behavior that leads some persons to commit hate crimes against members identified with the dehumanized group. As Presente.org notes: “We’ve seen this through an alarming rise in hate crimes against Latinos at the height of immigration reform debates[i] and in the policies that emerge from dehumanizing language like Rep. Young’s.”

There is a history to this type of language and Presente.org notes how the slur “wetback” led to the creation of Operation Wetback, a racist program in 1949 that rounded up and deported hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants and U.S. citizens through the targeting of specifically Mexican American barrios.[ii]

That was hardly the end of the use of this term. In his recent book, State Out of the Union, Jeff Biggers notes how in the spring of 1954 the Stanford Law Review published a controversial article entitled, “Wetbacks: Can the states act to curb illegal entry.” Biggers notes how the article “aired a sentiment about states’ rights and immigration policy that hauntingly foreshadowed the SB1070 debate.”[iii]

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: ‘Wetbacks’ redux | mexmigration: History and Politics of Mexican Immigration.