alias Bruce.

After Paris, "an odor of early fascism" in America: the demented appeal of Trump, Carson, and the Republican Party

The wicked irony of our insulation as Americans, living as we do galaxies away from the agonies that daily afflict the global billions affected by our domination, is that we entirely lose our minds at the first sight of our own blood.

One-hundred-thirty, the number of people who died horrible deaths two Fridays ago in Paris, is less than half the number of Iraqi civilians killed weekly by bombs, gunfire and other political murder, and an even smaller fraction of those steadily murdered in the Syrian civil war: 220,000 in the past four years or one every 10 minutes. The chaos that set this colossal carnage in motion was the destruction of the Iraqi state by an American war of choice.

And yet, cushioned here in the plush headquarters of global capital and war -- with oceans and empire shielding we Americans from anything like the cascading catastrophe of parts of Africa and the Middle East and even Europe -- our politics now teeter, at even the threat of one or more attacks, into panicked flirtation with fascism. Go ahead, say the word out loud. It is, horribly, the accurate term for a national conversation in which journalists have begun soberly quoting politicians' calls for forced internment of selected immigrants, religious tests for immigration, banning certain nationalities, treating people from some countries like "mad dogs," and suspending checks on state power. The ease with which many of our news media accept this new lexicon is chilling.

It is as if this American readiness to panic and lunge toward authoritarianism is in direct proportion to the outsized privilege the nation has for so long taken for granted: North American conquest and genocide, white supremacy, global riches with little cost, foreign invasion with impunity, a guaranteed satisfactory consumer experience. 

Sasha Abramsky, in The Nation, puts it this way:

Over the past several days, one Republican governor after another has closed his state to refugees from Syria—or, since they technically do not have the legal power to prevent the federal government from admitting refugees, has pledged to refuse all state resources to aid in this process. A Republican mayor in Virginia has called for using the World War II internment system that was used against Japanese Americans—itself one of the most widely discredited and shameful episodes in recent American history—as a model for how to approach the Syrians. 

Jeb Bush has said we ought to prioritize refugee status for Christians. John Kasich has called for a government agency that would beam “Judeo-Christian values” over Middle Eastern airwaves. In Congress, the GOP-led House, with a shockingly large number of Democrats in support, just voted on a bill that would make it virtually impossible, in practice, to admit Syrian refugees into the country. And Donald Trump has used the crime against humanity that occurred last week in Paris as a prop in his vicious campaign of demagoguery: Because of Paris, he has said, we must get serious about building a wall to close off Mexico. Because of Paris, we must put security first above all civil liberties. Because of Paris, we must start up again the few post-9/11 surveillance programs that were curtailed by courts and politicians because of their abusive properties, and must maintain and expand a raft of others. A surveillance state briefly put in the dock by Edward Snowden will, in this vision, be fully unleashed and unchecked. And because of Paris, we ought to consider registering American Muslims in a special database.

There is an odor of early fascism, or rather of the hysteria that precedes the march away from democracy, to much of this Trumpian rhetoric. An odor of the street fight. An odor of the iron fist.

Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi drowns. We watch. For centuries.

400 years ago, West African mothers and fathers cradled dead children in their arms on beaches as slave ships bucked in the surf.

It is 2015. How much longer will you and I and the world stand for this?

Little three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi drowned, his tiny sneakered feet dangling from the arms of a soldier who picked him up out of the sodden Turkish sand, because his own nation’s government did not belong to him, and because governments from the United Kingdom to the United States do not belong to those whom they purport to serve. They belong, instead, to strongmen and CEOs and senators who prosper when international capital makes money from a fragmented and corrupt Africa and  a politically leaderless Middle East and an obese and self-obsessed America.

The power brokers work with available materials. In a Europe now destabilized by plutocratic greed, we see the tip of a resurfacing iceberg of racist xenophobia that we last saw rise in the ascent of the Third Reich. We also see anti-immigrant xenophobia in the United States, as a portion of the white electorate, for whom Donald Trump is the present demagogue, clings with venomous desperation to its legacy of privilege.

We know, too, that this worldwide crisis of displaced and suffering people is part of the continual wreckage that began with pre-colonial European conquest of the global South and continues through the havoc wreaked upon entire regions of the world, including the Middle East, by centuries of Western-capitalist-fueled war. From Columbus to G.W. Bush, it’s about destroying local sovereignty and sucking all we can from the resources that are exposed.

Yesterday I sent an email to the Hungarian Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Réka Szemerkényi, registering my disgust with the actions and baldly racist statements of Hungary and its Prime Minister with regard to the Syrian refugees who suffer there:

September 4, 2015

To: ambassador.was@mfa.gov.hu

Dear Ambassador:

Shame, shame, shame on Hungary for your treatment of Syrian migrants, your disingenuous excuses for your actions, and your Prime Minister's contemptibly racist statement in a radio interview on Friday that "We may one morning wake up and realize that we are in the minority on our own continent." 

You bring shame upon your citizens and your nation. I shall surely not travel as a tourist to Hungary as your website so cynically assures readers that we can. And I have lost all respect for your moral stature. 

With disappointment and disgust,

Bruce A. Jacobs

Baltimore, MD USA 

Please email the ambassador yourself at ambassador.was@mfa.gov.hu .

But what will it take for we Americans, fat within our padding of Big Gulps and Big Macs and Big Savings, to walk out of our front doors and actually do what citizens do when our government is not ours, and when Syrians’ government is not Syrians’, and Hungary’s government is not Hungarians’?

What the Charlie Hebdo Paris murders may bring next

will depend on how people and powers choose to respond. And that leaves open a fearful range of possibilities.

As the worst terrorist attack on France since World War Two, at a moment when France and Europe are already torn between racist nationalism and more moderate forces, the shock of a massacre such as this could push things in any number of directions.

Like a tsunami that has yet to hit the shore, the massive crowds filling the streets in a "Je suis Charlie" outpouring of grief and outrage carry all of the clashing currents of current French political momentum: pent-up anti-immigrant fury, proud libertarianism, proto-fascist nationalism, progressive inclusionism, cynical racist populism, plain old dizzy fear. As with America's current battle between an entrenched and entitled police culture and the fight against police brutality, all kinds of things could happen.

What we must know, though, is that there is a huge amount at stake on either side of the Atlantic. Weimar Germany pivoted on traumatic national identity crises such as this. In France, the anti-immigrant National Front is already the third largest political party on the strength of widespread fear and anxiety about the economy, North African immigrants, and Muslims. Millions of scared voters in France – just as in the U.S. – are stumbling along the slippery edge of whatever-it-takes-to-protect-the-Homeland. These are times when armed soldiers on street corners can begin to feel ordinary, and when increasingly restricted rights for certain groups of people can start to feel okay. Or not. Time, and events, will tell.

But one of the gravest dangers is amnesia. Beneath the news coverage of the horrific Charlie Hebdo story, which begins with a series of satirical Muslim cartoons and culminates in 12 brutal murders, lies a much longer and unspoken history of rampages and massacres involving France, North Africa, and Muslims. This from a New York Times 2013 obituary containing the memoirs of famed French general Paul Aussaresses during France's 1954-62 attempt to crush rebellion against its colonial rule of Algeria:

He coolly recalled rounding up 1,500 unarmed prisoners — almost all of them Muslims — then selecting “the die-hards” and having them shot. He had the bodies taken to a Muslim cemetery and laid side by side facing Mecca in a 100-meter ditch that a backhoe had dug. Lime was shoveled onto the bodies to hasten decomposition.

He set up death squads, he said, and called them by that name. He ordered the assassinations of Algerian leaders and ordered the killings be disguised as suicides. When he got word Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the independence struggle and later Algeria’s first elected president, was aboard an airplane, he ordered it shot down, then changed his mind when he learned that the crew was French.

That history is just one stream in the current. Add to it the decades-old turmoil in France over the presence and underclass stature of waves of North African immigrants; the global inequities that fuel virulently anti-Western strands of fundamentalist Islam; and the recent French trends toward Islamophobia in dealing with religion.

Believe the dead French general when he suggests to us that this cataclysm is about much more than cartoons and freedom of speech.

What we've learned so far from the non-indictments in Ferguson and Staten Island: 1.

This looks to be the start of a running list, in the coming days, of things that recent events have proven true:

1.) Racism + militarized policing = nascent fascism.

I know: it's the much-ridiculed f-word, something that reasonable Americans are taught cannot happen here in our ostensible democracy. Problem is, though, that it is already happening to selected groups of Americans nationwide.

Consider fascism's necessary ingredients:

• A chilling national fear about the safety and future of the "homeland."
• Sinking national self-esteem.
• Deprivation and desperation in a nation of people who believe they deserve better.
• Designated scapegoats for the threats of crime, treason, and national ruin.
• Military-style police who target these scapegoated groups – both in the communities where many of them live and in their movements in the larger society – and who enforce upon these groups a daily regime of random street stops, questionings, beatings, arrests, payoffs, assaults, occasional murders, and brazen judicial injustice.
• A colossal national project of incarceration that warehouses these groups in wild disproportion to their numbers.

That is the time-honored recipe. And that is what we now have in selected areas and populations of the United States. Call it Stop and Frisk, call it broken windows policing, call it immigration enforcement. Call it what you like. But see it for what it is. It has already regimented the daily lives of millions of poor Americans of color for years. And, one quiet act of "national security" and "public safety" at a time, it is making itself at home in every community across the country.

That is why the defiantly non-quiet response to the atrocities in Ferguson and Staten Island, both among the long-targeted and the recently-enraged, is a good thing for every neighbor on every street in America.

The George Zimmerman Trayvon Martin acquittal takes the anger of we black men

to a whole new level.

Me, I am so angry right now that I barely know how to write how angry I am. I am so goddamned angry I could spit hot nails and then take a boiling bath to cool off. I am so angry I could make a movie about 10 million black men going out and buying handguns and starting target practice collectives. And it would be a documentary.

That's what happens when six people on a Florida jury conclude that a white man can seek out, pursue, antagonize and then shoot to death an unarmed black boy but not be guilty of murder or manslaughter. While 200 million white Americans, whether they are outraged at the verdict or not, still feel entitled to walk around in public with a feeling of relative safety.

Whether George Zimmerman had been acquitted Saturday or not, most white people would and do still expect to be able to go to the store on any given night and walk down the street with their Skittles and iced tea without being hunted and/or shot, whether by the police or by a wanna-be cop. And most black and brown people, especially black and brown males, do not.

And now that Trayvon is the latest of us to be waylaid with impunity while white people – including those with sympathetic or even passionately empathic intentions – will still get to drop by the convenience store without thought of being racially stalked, I as a black man feel a plume of rage that gives me empathy for your average volcano. Multiply that by millions and you can do the emotional math on what churns in the innards of black males nationwide.

I am angry that any white person anywhere in the United States of America can wake up in their bed this morning and believe that anything about their life as a white person, anything at all, is normal: the way whites can hurry down the highway without fearing that their mere whiteness will get them "accidentally" shot in a car search by a race-conditioned state trooper instead of simply being fined for speeding; the way whites can innocently and thoughtlessly walk through a department store without thinking about how their mere whiteness might get them followed by a race-trained store detective; the way whites can wait for friends in a hotel lobby without any thought of how a race-trained guest might take their mere whiteness as a cue to approach them and ask for help with his bags; the way whites fail to suffer consequences for their whiteness in airport security lines and on planes and hailing taxis and waiting to be seated in restaurants and walking the thin roads of the suburbs and ex-urbs and ex-ex-urbs of an America that has made an industry of perpetual flight from brown faces and brown bodies. I am angry beyond belief at the casual, bloodless manner with which so many white Americans can, with no intent or awareness, stroll through a landscape of brown blood.

And more than anything, I am angry about being angry.

I am angry that I need to write this to you. I am angry that I am driven to take time away from the infinite beauty of being alive – and the preciously finite moments of my life – to respond to a nation that will not leave me alone, a country that forces me into hand-to-hand and eye-to-eye combat for the mere ability to be who I already am. As if being myself is a privilege granted by white consent and not a right. As if entrusting my blood pressure and risk of heart attack and stroke and premature death to the pre-set dials of America's racial machinery is something I should expect and accept. As if my entirely natural rage at this lifelong bloody gear-mashing is the thing that's abnormal.

I am angry that time after time, day after day, year after year, I am called away from the simple and peaceful act of being the person I am by large and small acts of war. "Hey!" says the landcape of white presumption. "Look up from where you're standing in that perfectly burbling trout stream so I can call you 'nigger' from a passing car. Hey! Look away from the sweetness of your dinner date while I march you past nice empty tables and seat the two of you next to the kitchen and force you, once again, to think about race when it is the last thing you want to think about. Hey! Quit feeling unwatched as you wait for the 'walk' sign and I lock my car door at you. Hey! Let me interrupt your casual and comfortable speaking of proper English by letting you know how bizarre it is for me to hear a black man talking that way. Hey! Stop composing that piece of music in your head for a second so I can re-inflame your awareness of how afraid I am that you'll rob me here in this hallway. Hey! Drop those Skittles and stop that conversation on your cell phone so I can chase and kill you because of who I think you are."

I am angry that I have to walk around with a particular and situationally-triggered kind of anger that white people are spared. Take it from one who knows: I wish such anger upon no one. But I am furious as hell at its selectivity, at the way a certain kind of anger can break into my house late at night or suddenly turn a relational traffic light red or bring a scream into any song I write at any given time, while in a certain skin-filtered way a white person can roll over unawakened in bed or drive on through the intersection or continue on with their music uninterrupted.

The very same is true of the anger of a woman to whose experience I as a man am blind. Or a gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered person. Or a Palestinian person. Or a person who is in the United States illegally.

And if you deny the realities behind this anger, too bad for you. Because if you yourself are not angry on this day, you are the one with the problem.

The Jim Crow side of "cosmopolitan" Europe is showing more than ever these days,

as reflected, for instance, in an exchange of comments (including one by yours truly) in response to Steve Hynd's post at Agonist.org about the motivation underlying European treatment of North African boat people.

Many Europeans are showing their true colors about "those people" in a manner similar to that of the many white Americans for whom a Rick Santorum's hateful preachings offer self-destructive solace.

What goes unnoticed in both Europe and the United States – in addition to the sheer distractive value of demonizing poor brown people instead of CEOs and their hired political representatives – is the actual origin of the wave of northward immigration from Africa and Mexico: the dysfunction of neocolonial economies that starve their citizens for the benefit of European- and American-based commerce. Europe likes to forget that its colonial carving up of previously stable African nations and economies is the direct precursor to their current states of disaster. And the U.S. conveniently ignores the key role of dire Mexican poverty and political chaos in enabling American banks' benefits from the American-bound drug trade and American commerce's pleasing profits from Mexican maquiladoras and cheap illegal immigrant farm and service labor.

It's the same scheme on both sides of the Atlantic: diverting the anger of the working classes by encouraging them to kick the goose that lays the golden egg for the rich.

Here is the exchange from The Agonist, in which I have substituted the word "Person" for all names except my own: 

Germany When I lived in Munich in the 60s and 70s the Germans were extremely xenophobic. Munich had about a 15% Turkish population. They did all the grunt jobs the Germans wouldn't do - sound familiar? The Germans/Bavarians hated the Turks. I'm sure they would have sent them all back except they didn't want to do the shit jobs they did. Of course they could never become citizens of Germany but then neither could Americans. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:00pm

Probably still similar. I have a friend who recently moved to Germany. She is American, of German extraction, and speaks German. Blue eyes, blonde hair. She was still treated as an outsider at her first job in the countryside. She reports it's better in Munich. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:05pm

OK I too have blond hair and blue eyes and spoke German. I was treated very well in Munich. Of course I worked with the Bavarian State Police and many of them were friends so that might have had something to do with it. It was strange but the Bavarians had a fascination with black GIs and frequently befriended them. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:30pm

Anecdotally... To be African-American in Europe (France / Germany) is not the same as being African-American here. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:35pm

Damn straight. Ask Jack Johnson, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, the Tuskegee Airmen (of whom my Dad was one), the entire generation of post-bop black jazz musicians, or virtually any black American artist who has spent time there. In my travels as an African American in France, Germany, and Italy some years ago, I found some fascination with me (one night when I walked into an arty Berlin bar an entire line of young hipster women stood and invited me to light their cigarettes for them, and it wasn't because I'm some irresistible hunk). I also found, though, that my American-ness counted (often negatively) more than my skin color. And, most tellingly, I saw an entirely different set of wickedly racist rules applying to Turks and North Africans. In Germany Turks were the niggers of the culture -- persecuted, abused, and ridiculed (it's the first place where I ever heard "Turk jokes"), and in France North Africans were widely hated and sometimes even killed by mobs. This was years ago, mind you, but if anything it appears that Europe's post-colonial race hate is showing more than ever now that the recession is slamming The Motherland. –Bruce A Jacobs March 14, 2012 - 10:01pm

What happened on the first Columbus Day.

Most of us know that the Christopher Columbus for which the celebrations and holiday are named is nothing like the man who actually lived.

But do you know any of the actual details of what happened on Columbus's landing in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492 – and in the weeks, months, and years that immediately followed?

If you're prepared for this information, read the following excerpt from the late historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. A caveat: this excerpt covers just the beginning of what was done by Columbus's hand.

Chapter One

Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

Arawak men and women... emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

"They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells, They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote: "As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."

The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic--the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the, Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.

Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia--the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die...

– from A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. Copyright © by Howard Zinn. Published by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Hi from El Paso, TX.

El Paso, ranked the safest city for its size (about 700K) in the U.S., is directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico's deadliest city, where there were 3,000 murders in 2010. This is the bridge where pedestrians walk across to Juarez. Someone was shot here two nights ago. (I'm here to give a talk, BTW.)

 


People park here to walk across the bridge (in background) to Juarez. Many also work in El Paso and live in Juarez. A woman from Juarez told me that the state of terror there (routine execution of families and children; on a single day, 6 kids between 8 and 16 were shot) continues because the Mexican government is in bed with drug gangs and can't or won't intervene in any real way.

 

The difference between the tourist zone (note slick building in background) and the section proximate to Juarez is striking. A half-mile from this sign, everything is different.

This is a half-mile from that arrow sign on the same street. See what I mean? An interesting thing is that everyone here stands and waits for "walk" signs, even if there's no traffic. I wonder if cops use jaywalking... or maybe it's more innocent than that.

 

Speaks for itself, baby!

A March 4 NYT editorial on immigration pretty well

lays out the problem. Here is an excerpt:

Washington’s inaction on immigration reform has left the states feeling abandoned and wondering what to do. When the frustration boils over, as it has most scarily in Arizona, Republicans have been pushing what amounts to vigilantism — states taking on federal enforcement, shouldering aside civil rights and the Constitution and spending whatever it takes to get rid of illegal immigrants. It’s a seductively simple vision, and lawmakers across the country are grasping at it, pushing Arizona-style copycat laws.

Thank goodness for the pushback. In dozens of states considering such crackdowns — including Nebraska, Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas — elected officials, law enforcers, business owners, religious leaders and regular citizens are providing the calm voices and cool judgment that are lacking in the shimmering heat of Phoenix.

They are reminding their representatives that replacing federal immigration policy with a crazy quilt of state-led enforcement schemes is only a recipe for more lawlessness and social disruption, for expensive lawsuits and busted budgets, lost jobs and boycotts. And all without fixing the problem.

If you are of a certain age, this entire scenario looks familiar. That is because we have seen it before: in the "states' rights" movement of the mid-20th century through which the monstrous laws and practices of Jim Crow were enforced and excused.

There are differences, but the basic dynamic is the same: an oppressed minority becomes more prominent and powerful in seeking its rights; a section of the privileged majority grows belligerent and even violent in its panic over the oppressed minority's emergence; the federal government shows little or no leadership on the issue; and states construct a crazed patchwork of evil legislation and brutal customs to "deal with" the troublesome oppressed minority within their own borders. When challenged, the states declare their "right" to act as they choose, and proclaim the necessity of their vicious actions in order to quell the "crisis" caused by the minority upstarts.

And so 50 years later we see it again. While nationally the Mean Money Party waffles between appeasing its racist base and appeasing its corporate sponsors' satisfaction with the existing division of legal and illegal labor, and the Gentler Money Party waffles on nearly everything, the states take up a new pursuit of homemade legal discrimination spurred by a combination of racism and economic panic.

The good news, though, as the Times points out, is the pushback: not only from the immigrants' rights movement and traditional liberals but also from cops, businesspersons and others who have no desire to get mired in an economic version of lynch law. The great thing about social justice is that in the long run, it is, without exception, the only option that will actually work.

Wisconsin, unions, and the limits of lies.

Today's absurdity comes from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said on Meet the Press on Sunday in response to President Obama's remark about Wisconsin's attempt to scuttle public employees' collective bargaining being an attack on unions:

"I think the president should be focusing on what we're doing in Washington. When the president talks about Wisconsin, I think that is really inappropriate."

Senator Graham didn't get the joke: a representative of the Washington-rooted Money Party – which is busy these days trying to hide its Big Business Insider agenda by shouting about Main Street and dissing government – now telling the president to stop caring about the country and to focus on the Beltway instead.

It was a ridiculously cheap shot by Graham. But it points to the nasty jam in which the Money Party finds itself: being driven to more and more extreme anti-average-American positions by the storm troopers for the corporate right, AKA the Tea Party. Increasingly, the GOP has to choose between spitting in the faces of working (and unemployed) Americans or being spat upon by the Tea Party mobs who make up the party's most vocal base. What's a respectable corporate shill of a senator to do?

For now, mainstream Republicans are straining nationally to try to demonize targets that they hope the overall electorate won't sympathize with: gays, illegal Mexican immigrants, government employees. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's attempt at trampling the collective bargaining rights of public servants tries to play on antipathy toward ostensibly spoiled-rotten government workers, and even that isn't going so well: Tea Partiers have had to be bused in to try to counter the huge pro-union crowds with (smaller) contingents of let-'em-suffer anti-demonstrators.

Obama's going on record against Wisconsin's union-busting is nice, if a little too easily calculated. He really had little choice; after freezing federal employee wages and using his State of the Union address chiefly to suck up to the private sector, Obama's silence on the Wisconsin Massacre would have crucified him with unions who are already deeply disappointed with his presidency.

The bigger questions, as before, are, 1) How long can Republicans lie to the Tea Party and lie to level-headed working-class whites without losing credibility with either or with both? and 2) When will both Dems and Repubs be forced to confront the economic reality of a nationwide depression on the state level, requiring more courageous federal intervention than either party has bargained for?