Sunday, December 09, 2018
Saturday, December 08, 2018
Monday, December 03, 2018
America Media Stop Lying. George Bush Opposed Civil Rights His Whole Career
George Bush Sr. on Civil RightsPresident of the U.S., 1989-1993; Former Republican Rep. (TX) |
1998: gay status of personal aide "doesn't matter to us"
For the first 4 years after leaving the White House, my father's personal aide, Michael Dannenhauer, went just about everywhere with Dad. They had developed a very close relationship, but all that time Michael also lived with a deeply held fear. "All those years I always wondered if the president assumed I was gay," Michael said. "In 1998, in the back of my mind I wondered if he would want me to be his chief of staff if he knew I was gay."
1980: Supported Equal Rights Amendment, but not as V.P.
[In the 1980 GOP primary], the press forced George to clarify his positions, most of which contrasted sharply with Ronald Reagan's. Bush said he favored an Equal Rights Amendment, and he opposed an amendment that would overturn Roe v. Wade and ban abortion. He also opposed licensing and registering firearms.
1964: Advocated states' rights over Civil Rights Act
When Pres. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, George wrapped himself in the mantle of states' rights, which was conservative code for no federal intervention on racial matters. "The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14% of the people," George said. "I'm also worried about the other 86%."
1990: Signed Americans with Disabilities Act
Dr. John Walker, the brother of George's mother, Dorothy, had joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 1952 as a clinical assistant in surgery. He was struck with polio in 1950 and lost most of the use of his limbs, eventually becoming bound to a wheelchair.
1959 home carried a restrictive racial covenant
Moving from Midland to Houston in the summer of 1959 required logistical planning by the Bushes because they were transporting a business, building a house, and expecting a baby.
1963: Civil Rights Bill violates constitutional rights
In June 1963, the President sent to Congress the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the country's history. To demonstrate a mandate for the legislation, Martin Luther King led 250,000 people to Washington that summer with the incandescent rhetoric of his "I Have a Dream" speech.
1983: Debated Geraldine Ferraro; "We kicked a little ass"
Geraldine Ferraro, a former congresswoman from NYC, had been chosen as the first woman to run for national office on a major-party ticket. Her selection by Walter Mondale as his running mate had galvanized many women. [There was] enormous pressure on Ferraro, who had to surmount the bigotry and sexism her candidacy unleashed, particularly among men in the media.
No professional women on Bush staff, nor in Bush family
The day after the [1983 VP debate with Geraldine Ferraro] the Vice President referred to the previous evening: "I tried to kick a little ass." Hours later his staff showed up on the press plane wearing buttons that said, "We kicked a little ass."
1990: vetoed Civil Rights Act & voter registration bill
Ralph Neas, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, felt the sting of Bush's retaliation after the President vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which was intended to prohibit discrimination in employment. "I was very critical of the President for that veto and for calling the bill a quota bill simply to pander to the right wing," said Neas. "I said he was acting beneath the dignity of his office."
Signed 1991 Voting Rights Act after 1990 veto
The president had already vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, claiming it was a "quota bill." Determined not to veto any more civil rights legislation, the President directed his White House counsel to work with the Senate and House Democrats to reach a bipartisan agreement on the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
Legislation is not enough to eliminate discrimination
If we seek--and I believe that every one of us does--to build a new era of harmony and shared purpose, we must make it possible for all Americans to scale the ladder of opportunity. If we seek to ease racial tensions in America, civil rights legislation is, by itself, not enough. The elimination of discrimination in the workplace is a vital element of the American Dream, but it is simply not enough.(Remarks on signing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Rose Garden.)
Civil Rights Act: ban discrimination without quotas
I wrote this note to Senator Jack Danforth, when we could not agree on a civil rights bill.Dear Jack,I signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 on November 21. It did not include quotas. It did promote the goals of ridding the workplace of discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, national origin, and disability....Needless to say we don’t feel we are “turning back the clock on civil rights.” Indeed I have stated that I want to sign a civil rights bill. I’ve also said that it is important that we get a bill, and rather than haggle over what some have called tiny differences, why not take a gigantic step forward by going with a bill where we have total agreement, leaving a handful of the knotty unresolved questions to later on.Isn’t it more important to take a 90% step forward than to take no step at all? Anyway, let’s keep plugging away not letting the extremes on either side of this debate carry the day.
ADA is first declaration of equality for disabled people
Author's note: The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 President Bush would later call "really the world's first comprehensive declaration of equality" for disabled people.(Remarks on signing the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, White House South Lawn.)
Avoiding censorship more important than defunding NEA
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were under fire for underwriting an art exhibit that featured a controversial painting of Jesus.Diary entry March 28th:
Take the NEA for example. When I see Jesus Christ shooting up heroin or floating on a bottle of urine, I figure that there ought not to be one dime of federal funds going into this. And then you think of the alternative that comes to mind-federal censorship-and you worry, “Where will this lead?”
Called for Constitutional Amendment against flag burning
Much to my disappointment, the Supreme Court had just ruled 5-4 that the Constitution did not protect the flag from being burned. Justice Scalia was in the majority opinion. His wife feared I might be holding it against him, which of course I did not. However, I did immediately call for a constitutional amendment banning flag burning.
Supports school prayer, like Pledge of Allegiance
I think you’re wrong on prayer in schools. It is not just ideologues who want the voluntary prayer in school. Believe me, it is much deeper that that. And then there’s the Pledge of Allegiance. It feels good to go to some Rotary meetings in Iowa and say the Pledge-it really does-especially that part “one nation under God.” It’s all winners and no losers. I have a funny feeling it keeps us a little more together. Is it okay to say the Pledge in schools but not to have voluntary prayers?
Will Anger About Voter Suppression Drive Turnout in the Georgia Runoff for Secretary of State? | The New Yorker
"During the high-profile race for governor of Georgia—which the Republican Brian Kemp won, beating the Democrat Stacey Abrams by around fifty-five thousand votes—another political office came under an unusual amount of scrutiny: secretary of state. That was Kemp’s job, until shortly after he declared victory in the governor’s race, when he stepped down from the position. In Georgia, the secretary of state is responsible for overseeing elections, and Kemp provoked outrage with his refusal to resign from the post while running for another office. He was also accused of suppressing the vote, by purging the rolls of more than three hundred thousand voters, and of undermining confidence in the result by allowing the use of a “dated, vulnerable voting system that provides no independent paper audit trail,” as a civil lawsuit filed in September, and naming Kemp as a defendant, put it. When Kemp finally stepped down after the election, the state’s outgoing governor, the Republican Nathan Deal, appointed an interim secretary of state, Robyn Crittenden; she is also a defendant in a lawsuit, filed last Friday, that seeks a new election for lieutenant governor on account of a “large number of missing votes and other significant election irregularities.”
As it happens, that election, in November, did not decide upon Kemp’s replacement: the race for the next secretary of state, between the Democrat John Barrow and the Republican Brad Raffensperger, a state representative, went to a runoff, because Raffensperger, who earned less than one percentage point more of the vote than Barrow, did not reach the fifty-per-cent-plus-one-vote threshold required to settle elections in Georgia. On Tuesday, when the runoff election will be held, the many people who were furious about the way Kemp fulfilled his duties have the chance to pick someone who might perform the task better. The question, though, is how many of them will show up.
“I think people aren’t as much interested in this race,” Adrian Durden, a fifty-nine-year-old electrician who is currently unemployed and who has voted for both Democrats and Republicans in the past, told me. Durden, who is African American, lives in southeast Atlanta. “I don’t even know the people who are running,” he said. Turnout for the runoff is unlikely to resemble the historic levels seen in the governor’s race, in which nearly four million Georgians voted. An organizer for the New Georgia Project, a voter-mobilization group that Abrams once directed, told the Washington Post that she had to let go of her canvassers in suburban Atlanta because she did not have enough funding. At a planned televised debate recently, Raffensperger was a no-show—the Republican attended a fundraiser in rural Georgia instead—leaving Barrow “debating against an empty podium,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it.
Still, Durden said, he would be voting—“straight Democrat.” He added, “I just want to vote against the party in office now. It wasn’t a fair election.” Seni Alabi-Isama, a forty-year-old restaurateur in Statesboro, in the middle of the state, agreed. “It’s clear that something needs to be done with how voting is handled in Georgia,” he said. Alabi-Isama, who is also African-American, said he, too, planned to vote for Barrow, though he didn’t express unchecked enthusiasm for the candidate. “Barrow might not yield the result we want,” he said. “But it’s the only option we have to vote against the party that sustains the current system.”
Barrow, who is white, strikes a decidedly moderate tone—for one thing, he, like Raffensperger, and in contrast to Stacey Abrams, is in favor of current voter-identification laws. He has largely staked his chances on pushing for a transition to paper ballots, which many deem a safer as well as cheaper alternative to the machines that Georgia currently uses. Raffensperger, meanwhile, has defended the use of electronic voting machines as well as Kemp’s culling of voter rolls.
Marilyn Marks is the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a nonpartisan nonprofit which filed Friday’s lawsuit against Georgia’s interim secretary of state. “Barrow is clearly committed to the universal recommendation of cybersecurity and computer-science experts,” she told me over e-mail, citing his support for “hand-marked paper ballots, counted by machines and audited for accuracy.” Raffensperger, on the other hand, “has fallen for the vendor-promoted next generation of un-auditable high-risk touchscreen voting machines that turn votes into barcodes, with little improvement over the current machines that plague Georgia’s elections,” she wrote.
On Saturday afternoon, on a conference call with journalists, Abrams talked up Barrow, too, as well as the Democrat in a runoff for Georgia’s next public service commissioner. Of Barrow, she said, “He understands that rampant voter suppression on Election Day and during early vote disincentivized voters.” Abrams mentioned issues that her new political-action group, Fair Fight Action, seeks to address with a federal lawsuit alleging gross mismanagement of the recent election, including long lines, registration-database issues and missing absentee ballots disproportionately affecting the poor and minorities. “While we’ve been able to use the court systems to force some of these changes, we need a leader who will do these voluntarily,” she said.
Everlean Burston, a fifty-nine-year-old house cleaner in Decatur, Georgia, near Atlanta, voted for Abrams last month, in what she called the second most disappointing election of her life after the 2016 election. She told me that a lot of people weren’t able to vote—especially in black neighborhoods like the one she grew up in—“because of the lack of machines and messed-up machines.” She went on, “I’m frustrated about what happened. It’s like a cycle. A never-ending cycle, a merry-go-round. It keeps spinning, but there’s no results for the people who are really, really in trouble.” She sighed. She’ll be voting on Tuesday, she said. “I’ll vote Democrat. Something has got to be better than what it is now.”
Will Anger About Voter Suppression Drive Turnout in the Georgia Runoff for Secretary of State? | The New Yorker
Sunday, December 02, 2018
Opinion | America Didn’t Always Lock Up Immigrants - The New York Times
"Last Sunday, as Border Patrol agents were tear-gassing Central American asylum seekers, including parents with their toddlers, more than 40,000 other migrants were being held in detention facilities across the United States.
Like the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy enacted earlier this year, which separated children from their parents while in detention, the tear-gassing of Central Americans immediately gripped the nation’s attention and was decried by many as inhumane. There was almost no mention of the fact that if these migrants did ever manage to cross the border and apply for asylum, many of them would end up in some form of detention or other.
But detaining migrants was not always seen as normal. On the contrary, immigration detention has a short-lived and complicated history.
The United States first imposed immigration detention in the late 19th century. But by the early 1950s, detaining migrants no longer seemed necessary. European and Asian migration had fallen drastically as a result of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Great Depression. In 1954, officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service concluded that a vast majority of migrants could be released on conditional “parole,” while their cases were being reviewed. Detention was reserved for migrants who were deemed likely to abscond or who posed a threat to national security or public safety. By January 1955, only four people in immigration custody were seeking entry into the country.
Reflecting on this change, in 1958 the Supreme Court, in Leng May Ma v. Barber, held that “physical detention of aliens is now the exception, not the rule,” pointing out that “certainly this policy reflects the humane qualities of an enlightened civilization.”
How did we move so far away from the notion that detention — and not just family separation and tear-gassing — is inhumane? How did holding more than 40,000 migrants behind bars come to be seen as normal?
The answer lies with the migration of Cubans and Haitians in the 1980s. The change was prompted by the Mariel Boatlift, when approximately 125,000 Cubans fled for the United States in a highly politicized migration that garnered national and international media attention and inspired fear among many Americans. The unfolding of these events can be seen in the stories of individuals like Alberto Herrera, who shared his experiences with Mark Hamm, a professor of criminology at Indiana State. During the 1980s, Americans came to see Mr. Herrera and hundreds of other Cuban exiles as such a dangerous threat that they once again turned to detention as an acceptable way to manage immigration.
Born in Havana in 1952, Mr. Herrera was the eldest of seven children. Like many an elder sibling, he felt responsible for his family’s well-being. But life in Cuba was hard and he was regularly unemployed. His family often went hungry. At the age of 18, he decided to do something about it: He walked into a government grocery store in Havana, hid two pounds of goat cheese under his jacket and fled. He did not get far. He was arrested and imprisoned for seven years. When he was released, he was even less prepared to find a job than he had been before spending time in prison. On Sept. 21, 1979, less than five months after his release, Mr. Herrera was sentenced to 13 years for stealing two pairs of pants.
But on June 24, 1980, Mr. Herrera’s luck seemed to change. That day, a guard came to his cell and told him that he was going to be placed on a boat headed to the United States. Mr. Herrera didn’t know it, but two months earlier, Fidel Castro’s government had announced that anyone who desired to leave Cuba could depart from the port of Mariel. In response, thousands of Cuban émigrés who were living in Florida set out in shrimpers, yachts and sailboats to pick up their relatives. When the émigrés arrived at the port of Mariel, however, the Cuban government informed them that if they wanted to take their relatives to the United States, they also had to transport anyone else the government wanted them to take. On some of those boats, government officials forcibly placed mentally ill individuals and prison inmates, including Mr. Herrera.
As he sailed across the Florida straits, Mr. Herrera heard other passengers talking about Disneyland and expensive cars. He pictured himself holding a job and finally being free.
When Mr. Herrera’s boat anchored in Florida, however, his dreams of freedom sank. News had spread swiftly that Mr. Castro’s government had sent criminals and mentally ill people among the arriving exiles. Although very few of the exiles had committed crimes, much less serious ones, fear of this wave of immigrants became widespread. This fear, fueled by rising crime rates in Miami and other communities where the Cuban exiles settled, led many Americans to demand the detention of the new arrivals.
Upon questioning Mr. Herrera, American officials determined that he had been in prison in Cuba and sent him, along with the other exiles suspected of having committed crimes, to the Federal Correctional Institution at Talladega, Ala.
Thousands of other Cuban exiles, who officials believed not to be criminals, were placed in military bases around the country. There, the exiles waited to be sponsored by someone (or some institution) who agreed to take care of them until they could settle on their own.
As the months went by, most exiles left the military bases, but those who had no family members or acquaintances in the United States often had difficulty finding sponsors. This placed them in an impossible situation. Without sponsorship, the only way they could leave the camps was by leaving the United States. But government officials could not deport them because the Castro government refused to take them back.
These exiles, many of whom were labeled “antisocial” but not accused of having committed any crime, were to remain in cages in the United States on an indefinite basis, with no prospects of being set free. Americans had come to fear these exiles so much that few of them protested their imprisonment and only a small number of legal workers tried to help them. The practice of detention was seen as necessary and normal.
By 1982, about 400 Mariel Cubans who still had not been sponsored were sent to prison, primarily to the maximum-security penitentiary in Atlanta. These exiles, it seemed, no longer belonged in a refugee resettlement camp, which was intended as an interim location to await sponsorship. Now they belonged in a prison.
Those sent to the Atlanta penitentiary joined the ranks of Cubans from the Mariel Boatlift who had broken the law in the United States (sometimes by committing misdemeanors) and those who were believed to have committed serious crimes in Cuba.
They also encountered Alberto Herrera. When he had arrived at Talladega, Mr. Herrera was told that his release depended on good behavior, but even though he had an exemplary record, he was never released because he had no sponsor. Instead, on Feb. 14, 1981, he was sent to the Atlanta prison.
An encampment for Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 1994.David Scull/The New York Times
An encampment for Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 1994.David Scull/The New York Times
Government officials were determined not to allow another Mariel Boatlift. They drafted contingency plans demanding the establishment of “suitable facilities to hold 10,000 to 20,000” migrants, so that if another large migrant group arrived, they would be prepared. They also conceived of detention as a way to deter migrants — particularly Haitians, who had been fleeing their country since 1971 — from setting sail to the United States. Up to that point, immigration officials still tended to follow the policy of releasing Haitians on parole pending a hearing and status determination, although they also intermittently detained arriving Haitian migrants. By 1981, immigration officials were detaining all Haitians who arrived without offering them the possibility of parole.
A year later, the I.N.S. formalized the practice of blanket detention with very limited parole and extended it to all migrants. This rule reversed the policy, which the Supreme Court had hailed in 1958, that had allowed most migrants to be released while their cases were determined.
Instead came the race to build a massive detention infrastructure, driven in large part by for-profit companies, like Corrections Corporation of America. As Mark Dow, author of “American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons,” notes, the first facility opened by the Corrections Corporation held immigrant detainees. Immigration detention came to be part and parcel of the growing incarceration trend of the 1980s.
It is because of this history that we now imprison undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. In 2016, the government detained nearly 360,000 people in a vast network of over 200 detention facilities, consisting of county jails and privately run prisons. In 2017, the cost of this colossal detention system was $2.6 billion.
Examining the practice of immigration detention today, as Central Americans are fleeing their home countries for the United States, demonstrates that the failure of our asylum system extends far beyond the instances in which migrants are tear-gassed and children are separated from their parents. The system itself is designed to treat migrants and asylum seekers like felons to be placed behind bars.
But it does not have to be like this. The history of immigration detention shows us that a more cost-effective and humane way of dealing with migrants and asylum seekers is possible. After all, in the years between 1954 and 1980, we already had just such a system in place.
Ana Raquel Minian (@AnaRMinian) is a professor of history at Stanford and the author of “Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration.”
Opinion | America Didn’t Always Lock Up Immigrants - The New York Times:
Saturday, December 01, 2018
A supporter of racism and segregation. The Nation; When the Subject Is Civil Rights, There Are Two George Bushes - The New York Times
"But as a candidate for the Senate from Texas in 1964, Mr. Bush came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark law that ended segregated lunch counters, restrooms, movie theaters and other public accommodations, and made employment discrimination illegal. In the campaign, Mr. Bush said the law was "politically inspired and is bad legislation in that it transcends the Constitution." He was essentially following the lead of his party's Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, who had denounced the bill. Hopes and Regrets."
The Nation; When the Subject Is Civil Rights, There Are Two George Bushes - The New York Times
BUSH VETOES CIVIL RIGHTS BILL - The Washington Post
"As the American myth machine begins let's look at the truth. HW Bush was anti-Black, period.
"By Ann Devroy October 23, 1990
President Bush yesterday vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, prompting the sharpest criticism he has endured from women, unions, blacks and other minorities since taking office.
In a three-page veto message to Congress, Bush said that "despite the use of the term 'civil rights,' " the legislation "actually employs a maze of highly legalistic language to introduce the destructive force of quotas" in the workplace.
The dispute has centered largely on the defenses available in the legislation to employers sued for so-called "unintentional" discrimination. The White House has charged that the provisions in the bill were so burdensome to employers that they would create "powerful incentives" for them to "adopt hiring and promotion quotas" to avoid lawsuits, as the president said yesterday in his veto message.
Proponents of the bill contend that it essentially would have restored the law of employment discrimination that had been in force for nearly two decades, prior to six recent Supreme Court rulings that made it more difficult for minorities and women to win discrimination suits. They strongly dispute the contention that the new law would result in quotas.
Equal opportunity, Bush said, is "thwarted," not served, by quotas, and "the very commitment to justice and equality that is offered as the reason why this bill should be signed requires me to veto it."
The Senate has scheduled for today a vote on overriding Bush's veto. But White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater as well as civil rights groups agreed they lack the two-thirds majority needed to override. The Senate vote for passage was 62 to 34; the House vote was 273 to 154.
Bush, who enjoyed a cordial relationship with civil rights leaders even in the bitter years of the Reagan administration, found himself yesterday being described as Reagan in disguise.
"The rhetoric may be gentler and kinder, but the policies of George Bush are no less dangerous and regressive than those of Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese," said Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
Arthur Kropp of People for the American Way accused Bush of trying to "out-Reagan Reagan." John Sturdivant, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, accused Bush of "political rhetoric designed to please Jesse Helms, David Duke and their followers in the ultra-right-wing of the Republican Party."
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said Bush's veto demonstrates "that he is more interested in appeasing extremists in his party than in providing simple justice" for working Americans."
BUSH VETOES CIVIL RIGHTS BILL - The Washington Post
Friday, November 30, 2018
Lies, lies and more lies: This is not how innocent people act - The Washington Post
"Imagine for a moment that President Trump is right when he claims there is, in fact, no Russia scandal — because the entire thing is a hoax, a fraud, a witch hunt — and that neither he nor any of his family members, employees, or associates did anything wrong.