Check It Out for Wednesday, May 6th
Dawn Eviatar at The Washington Independent writes that Obama DHS rules on immigration are actually no different than that of the criminal Bush regime.
"When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials raided the Yamato Engine manufacturing plant in Bellingham, Washington in February, it wasn’t just the 28 workers they arrested who were taken by surprise. The Department of Homeland Security in Washington — of which ICE is a part — didn’t know the raid was going to happen, either.
"Napolitano quickly put a hold on the controversial workplace raids, promising to create a new policy.
"Last week, she indicated that she’d done just that as DHS issued new guidelines designed to govern the worksite raids. In an accompanying public “fact sheet”, DHS promised to target employers who hire undocumented workers instead of the workers themselves. DHS did not, however, promise to stop raiding worksites or arresting the illegal workers found there, leaving many advocates to wonder if the shift is more than window-dressing for the same old policy.
"After all, President Bush’s Homeland Security Department had similarly pledged to target employers who hire illegal workers. 'The days of treating employers who violate these laws by giving them the equivalent of a corporate parking ticket - those days are gone,' said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in November 2007. 'It’s now felonies, jail time, fines, and forfeitures.'
"So how different are the new guidelines, and what do they signal about the administration’s support for a significant change in immigration policy?
"..the law requires that the employer knowingly hired illegal workers. So long as the worker presents work authorization documents that “reasonably appear to be genuine and relate to the individual,” the employer is protected. Employers must record that information on what’s called an I-9 form, and submit that to the government. If a worker presents fake documents that look real, or that list a false social security number, the employer wouldn’t necessarily know that. So generally, only employers who don’t submit I-9’s for their workers at all, or fill them out fraudulently, or supply workers with the fake documents can be caught violating the law.
"The new DHS guidelines make clear that the Obama administration is not prepared to give up on workplace raids anytime soon. Because they tend to get local media coverage, raids are an easy way for the government to call attention to its immigration enforcement efforts. “For an administration that wants to seem tough on immigrants, raids provide good theater,” said Gordon."
Patrick Cockburn writes at Counterpunch that Afghans want the US out of their country and to take Karzai with them.
"A measure of the failure of Mr Karzai, his government and his Western supporters is that I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar eight years ago. But if I tried to make the same journey today, I would be killed or kidnapped soon after leaving Kabul.
"But it is corruption rather than patronage which is discrediting the legitimacy of the government at a moment when it is facing a new challenge from the Taliban. In Transparency International’s list of the most corrupt countries in the world, Afghanistan ranks fourth, out of 180. In few countries is corruption so widespread or so open as it is in Kabul.
"The US troop reinforcements sent this year might make Afghanistan’s roads safer. The American military will also have a lot of money to spend, as in Iraq, to carry out aid projects immediately. The Afghan police would perform a lot better if they were paid more than $120 a month (Taliban fighters are believed to get $200). The US is sending 4,000 extra military trainers, as well as more combat brigades. But these reinforcements will lead to more violence and more air strikes. These will inflict civilian casualties which infuriate Afghans and lead in turn to a rise in support for the Taliban. Given the government’s lack of legitimacy, and its inability to provide basic services, the Taliban does not have to do much to destabilize the country.
"In Iraq, the US occupation was always going to end badly. The occupation was never popular among Iraqis.In Afghanistan there were greater opportunities. The Taliban regime was always hated by the great majority, who were glad to see it fall. Here, the American presence was, at first, welcomed by most. There may not have been enough foreign aid, but there was enough to make a real difference to the lives of Afghans. It was Karzai’s dysfunctional state of warlords and criminals which opened the door for the Taliban’s return."
Johann Hari at The Independent writes about revisionist history being spun about Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party's continuing seduction by the former PM.
"The celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power have had a surreal quality. The moist panegyrics from David Cameron and Boris Johnson – followed by an army of cheering commentators, and a distant, shameful echo from Gordon Brown – have been filled with statements that are the opposite of the truth. Yet there they stand, unchallenged, as the road-map for our future.
"The arguments in defence of Margaret Thatcher invariably have three prongs. She made it possible for ordinary British people to "get ahead", and "aspire" once more. She expanded freedom. And her strip-down-the-state economic model saved Britain – and spread prosperity across the world. Each of these is simply asserted, as if these claims can't be measured objectively. Just shut up and rejoice!
"But your ability to "get ahead" – to rise up the social ladder – isn't simply a matter of hunches; it can be tested scientifically. And every study has found one thing: social mobility collapsed under Margaret Thatcher. As a massive recent London School of Economics study showed once again, in the 1980s and 1990s we became a country where if you were born rich, you stayed rich, and if you were born poor, you stayed poor.
"This is a leader who upheld a system of Protestant supremacism in Northern Ireland, while the police there conspired with criminal gangs to murder Catholics. This is a leader who at the height of the Aids crisis criminalised any mention of homosexuality in our schools. Freedom?
"What about the idea that her economic model "saved" us? Thatcher wanted to build a "nightwatchman state", where the government stopped anyone invading the country or your home, but otherwise stood inert and passive. She saw regulation as "red tape", and boasted of building a "bonfire" of it. And what happened? Her apostles took this to its logical conclusion, building a "shadow" banking system free of all government interference. If she had been right, it would now be the self-regulating engine of the global economy, pulling us all to a better world.
"It didn’t quite turn out that way. As John Campbell, her best biographer, has written, the tragedy of Margaret Thatcher is that she sincerely believed rolling back the state would create a generation like her father, a moral, self-reliant grocer. Instead, it created a wave of businessmen like her son, an amoral parasite who has contributed nothing to the economy.
"But oddly, the party that has found it hardest to get out of Thatcher's shadow is Labour. They drank so deeply of Thatcherism after the collective trauma of 1992 that they have become tarred with its worst failings.
"As Labour now collapses into a mess of fratricidal soundbites, it would do well to pause and remember a slap-in-the-face fact. Contrary to the ahistorical waffle pumped out over the past week, Margaret Thatcher never won over a majority of the British people. At every single election where she was leader, 56 per cent of us voted for parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending. She won because the centre-left majority was divided and at war with itself – and because of our lousy electoral system.
Ashfaq Yusufzai at AsiaTimes on the uprooting of civilians by Pakistan's military campaign in the Northwest Frontier.
"Thousands of civilians are continuing to migrate to safer places from Upper Dir and Buner districts - the new theatres of an internal war between Pakistan’s Taliban and the military in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
" 'We fled to escape the military operation,' says Mohammad Riaz from Nowagai area in Buner where the army launched an attack on Apr. 28 to flush out Islamic militants who have infiltrated from neighbouring Swat, a volatile district.
" 'Our area has gone Swat’s way. It won’t be long before schools and other government buildings are demolished (by the Pakistani Taliban),' he told IPS in a phone interview from Rustam village in adjoining Mardan district.
"Riaz, who was the owner of a shop in Sultanwas village, is staying with relatives in Rustam. He estimates that some 20,000 villagers from in and around Sultanwas have fled to safety.
"On Feb. 16, the provincial government of the NWFP announced it had signed a peace deal with the Swat Taliban. The government agreed to implement the Nizam Adle regulation (and impose the Shariah or Islamic law) in return to their agreeing to lay down arms.
"The Swat Taliban have however occupied nearby Buner district and accelerated their armed activities in Upper Dir. The U.S. has warned Islamabad that any Taliban expansion would strain relations between the two countries.
"Afghan Taliban crossed into the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, and continue to frustrate the Pakistani military and U.S. forces who regularly bomb the area from Afghanistan. Civilian casualties have been high. Islamabad has time and again asked Washington to stop these unmanned drone attacks but to no avail.
" 'The government launched an (military) operation in Buner and Dir just to show the U.S. that it was doing something,' comments Dr. Ashraf Ali, an authority on the Taliban at the University of Peshawar. 'Buner is still under Taliban control and will remain so,' he says.
"The spreading conflict has added to the numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Pakistan. An estimated 4 million were uprooted in the first wave of IDPs, from Bajaur and Mohmand agencies in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), last year.
"Ali believes the situation could snowball into a major humanitarian crisis since the government does not have the capacity to take care of even the 90,000 IDPs living in 11 camps in the province."
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