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American Outsiders: The Border Crisis and Civil Rights |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26684"><span class="small">Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 July 2014 07:56 |
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Cobb writes: "Strip away the minute identifiers, the stray license plate, and the occasional bit of bureaucratic signage, and the images emerging from the growing crisis at the border have the look of dispatches from someplace far beyond America."
(photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
American Outsiders: The Border Crisis and Civil Rights
By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
13 July 14
 trip away the minute identifiers, the stray license plate, and the occasional bit of bureaucratic signage, and the images emerging from the growing crisis at the border have the look of dispatches from someplace far beyond America. They evoke the type of story that invariably features terms like “insurgency”and “vulnerable population”—conflicts in which the moral obligations are clear. The crammed concrete-walled rooms, the padlocked fences, and the dejected women and children bear the look of circumstances that, aside from an incident like Hurricane Katrina, we prefer to think of as outside the American frame of reference. The paralytic political discussions would be the stuff of dark satire were the human consequences of inaction not so damning. There are fifty thousand people stalled in migrant purgatory: that is not simply a crisis, it’s a culmination.
Partisans will debate the role of the 2008 immigration law and Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order in sparking the surge of minors entering the country illegally, but only in the most blinkered of perspectives can the crisis be understood outside of the immigration policy that has been failing for decades. The most immediate questions—What is to be done regarding the detainees? Where should they sleep, and which will be sent back?—invariably lead to broader, more complicated ones that have been too long deferred. What are the rights of people who reside within our borders, who occupy a niche in the lower tiers of the economy, whose citizenship remains an unsettled question?
The questions are critical, but they are not novel. Fifty years ago this month, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. The opening paragraph of the legislation reads like a to-do list for the creation of a modern democracy:
To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.
In the sepia-tinged version of the story, the law was the result of a collaboration between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Johnson—the orator and the operator, a testament to the possibilities of galvanic will. The reality was not nearly as neat. The heavy lifting, as Clay Risen points out in “The Bill of the Century,” was done by under-heralded lawyers and activists. There were opponents who, like Al Gore, Sr., and William Fulbright, did not easily fit into the mold of morally benighted segregationists; they were more akin to the contemporary elected officials who look at immigration reform and find themselves hemmed in between morality and self-preservation. (Orval Faubus, whom history recalls as the recalcitrant Arkansas governor whose opposition to integration triggered the 1957 crisis in Little Rock, had in fact seized upon segregation as protection against McCarthy-era attacks on his earlier leftism and his integration of public transit.)
We commonly think of the civil-rights era as a moral quest for equality. But the movement understood itself as engaged in a struggle for something more foundational: for citizenship, the status from which freedom and equal rights flowed. The more charitable critics of the racial order that then existed referred to the problem of “second-class citizenship.” Those less prone to euphemism recognized that there are no tiers in a true democracy; you are a citizen of a nation in which you have the right to vote, or you are an outsider in one in which you do not.
That outsider population was nonetheless a critical part of the economy: swelling the ranks of the military in times of war, paying taxes without reasonable input on how funds were allocated, alienated by Jim Crow from the political process. For nearly a century after emancipation, black labor remained the cornerstone of American agriculture. Those who migrated into cities were derided for “taking jobs” from whites, some of whom, during the Great Depression, organized under the banner of “No Work for Negroes” until there was full employment for whites. It’s worth recalling that Social Security and certain other liberal reforms of the New Deal era initially bypassed agricultural and domestic-service workers—who were disproportionately black (and female)—specifically to appease Southern Democrats who might otherwise oppose Roosevelt’s legislation.
The Civil Rights Act had as its objective the unambiguous rejection of the binaries that had defined the nation up to that point. And we have, for understandable reasons, become accustomed to speaking of it in the context of its successes. Obama’s second term coincides with the half-century anniversaries of the most pivotal moments in the civil-rights movement. His mere existence is a comment upon its abiding hopes. But boundless self-congratulation requires overlooking the parallels between the status of unauthorized immigrants today and of African-Americans fifty years ago.
Last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out that non-native-born workers—a category that includes those who are undocumented—are 16.3 per cent of the population. They have a labor-force-participation rate of 66.7 per cent—four points higher than that of the native-born population—and are disproportionately represented in the service sector. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Urban League fought against the sexual and economic exploitation of black women domestic workers. We’re far enough beyond that history for films like “The Help” and “The Butler” to be billed as uplifting narratives about a cartoonish past. Look beyond the borderland limbo, and the unsettling question becomes whether we’ve vanquished the antiquated contempt that made a civil-rights movement necessary or simply given it a new form. We scarcely notice the extent to which women working in domestic service—nannies, housekeepers, health-care aides—encounter problems much like those that confronted black American women in the Jim Crow era.
It’s easy to overlook the extent to which the civil-rights struggle was connected to economic questions that remain achingly familiar. Black exclusion from the burgeoning labor movement effectively created a separate, lower wage scale for black workers, who commonly were denied legal rights to challenge those differences. The 1963 March on Washington is now understood as a massive demonstration in support of the Civil Rights Act, but A. Philip Randolph—a labor leader and its chief architect—initially conceived of it as a gathering to protest economic exploitation. Later discussions with Martin Luther King, Jr., led them to collaborate on an event for civil and economic rights; it became the “March for Jobs and Justice.” The wage gap between blacks and whites persists, though now it exists in tandem with the gap between citizen and non-citizen labor.
There are also stark divergences in the dilemmas of immigrants and African-Americans. The point of recalling the civil-rights movement, though, is not to confirm the triumph of the American moral conscience. It’s to understand what happens to people whose labor is compensated under the table, to whom the legal system offers scant protection, and who exist along the social margins.
The year after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson signed the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, which eliminated the immigrant quota system that was designed in the xenophobic early twentieth century. The 1965 Act liberalized immigration from places like Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean—and, in so doing, set in motion demographic resentments that are quietly ubiquitous in our current immigration debate. Until the recent dethroning of Eric Cantor, it was possible to understand the Tea Party as fundamentally driven by economic conservatism; it’s now apparent that it is, in large measure, an outlet for nativist anxieties.
One suspects that we have not eliminated the concept of second-class citizenship so much as replaced it with second-tier humanity—a category all the more durable because the denial of the title of “citizen” masks its true hypocrisy. A part of America lives in a precipitous state of exploitation. Fifty years after Johnson’s defining endorsement of civil rights, what is past is present. It is all familiar, all irreducibly American.
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Children at the Border, Another U.S. Foreign Policy Debacle |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 12 July 2014 14:55 |
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Boardman writes: "The pictures of thousands of children huddled in shelters are upsetting, and the tales some tell are horrifying, and that is all a real but sentimental distraction from the entrenched American power that created these conditions. American power uses these children and their families and their countries for its own ends."
The crisis at the border shows who we are as a nation. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Children at the Border, Another U.S. Foreign Policy Debacle
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
12 July 14
Seeing through the tear-jerking to the guilty U.S. Government
 he pictures of thousands of children huddled in shelters are upsetting, and the tales some tell are horrifying, and that is all a real but sentimental distraction from the entrenched American power that created these conditions. American power uses these children and their families and their countries for its own ends. American power is not likely to make any meaningful changes to solve what is essentially a permanent crisis. Whatever official alleviation there is will be just enough to get those heart-rending images off the front pages, so that the profitable stream of human exploitation can be managed more “effectively.” American power insists that these are “illegal immigrants,” rather than face the reality that they are refugees from the exercise of American power.
So it’s no wonder President Obama doesn’t want to have his picture taken amid the terrible results of American policy to which he has been as much a guilty party as every other president at least since Polk.
By his actions over the years, the president appears committed to the U.S. imperial role in the world, especially in “our backyard.” There is little serious debate among the governing classes, who seem to feel their mandate is expressed by racist rioting against brown children. But there seems to be another, better America as well, perhaps a majority, out of power and out of the media, but stepping up to care for these refugees, humanely, where they are.
On July 7th, more than 100 civil rights and civil liberties, human rights, faith, immigration, labor, criminal justice, legal, and children’s rights organizations signed an open letter to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, the man President Obama says keeps him intimately informed on the refugee situation. These organizations adamantly object to the inhumanity of administration plans to open new detention centers for families:
Family detention profoundly impacts the emotional and physical well-being of children and breaks down family relationships…. locking babies in prison cells and deporting women and young children to dangerous situations are not the solution.
This open letter has not been widely reported in mainstream media and there has apparently been no response from the administration to date.
Another coalition of civil rights and civil liberties organizations in Seattle filed a class action suit against the U.S. government on July 9th. The coalition argues that “putting children into immigration court without counsel violates both constitutional due-process rights and immigration law.” The coalition represents eight children, age 10 to 17, who face deportation hearing without representation.
The president was in Texas on July 9th, meeting with Texas governor Rick Perry, among other things, and sharing a tarmac handshake photo op. Governor Perry has been asking for help with child refugees for a few years now, although the help he’s been asking for is mostly military and para-military (which may be the way he feels all teenagers should be handled, who knows?). For most of that time, the Obama administration has been relatively unresponsive, but Governor Perry has chosen not to make a big deal of it until now, so there’s little evidence to show that those people in power care much about children until there are enough of them to make embarrassing headlines.
As long as the president was going to Texas anyway, lots of people wondered, why didn’t he visit the border area where thousands of children constituted a growing humanitarian crisis that was getting global attention?
The president’s answer during a press conference in DalFort Fueling in Dallas seemed oddly bloodless, not only uncaring, but evasive of accountability:
This isn’t theatre. This is a problem.
I’m not interested in photo ops.
I’m interested in solving the problem.
Because these were American journalists covering an American president, there were no meaningful follow-up questions. No one asked: How do you define “the problem?” What is your idea of a good solution? Why were you OK with a photo op last night [July 8] shooting pool and drinking beer with the Colorado governor?
On MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” the next day, Mitchell talked about this odd set of presidential priorities with Congressman Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, who has warned that the border crisis could become Obama’s “Katrina moment,” a reference to President Bush’s apparent callous indifference to the suffering in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricane. To be fair, Obama has not done a detached flyover, looking down on the Rio Grande Valley, as President Bush did over flooded New Orleans (in a famous White House photo op).
Andrea Mitchell and other reporters have speculated lately about why the White House has, in their view, seemed surprised by long-festering problems like this flow of refugees, or others like the Veterans Administration’s failures and the collapse of Iraq. Congressman Cuellar commented:
If he’s saying he’s too busy to go down to the border but you have time to drink a beer, play pool, the appearance means that he’s not paying attention to this humanitarian crisis.
To be fair, this humanitarian crisis is not new. Nobody has been paying meaningful attention to it for decades. It’s getting attention now only because the flood of refugees has topped the figurative levees and threatens to inundate higher-priced real estate. Almost everyone talking about it is fundamentally cynical, focusing only on symptoms, offering nothing approaching a cure for the underlying pathology.
The most obvious example of a cynical band-aid is the president’s proposal of $3.7 billion in emergency spending, roughly half for caring for and processing refugees, and half for more military and para-military border protection. The inherent logic in the increasing militarization of the border is increased killing of refugees: how far will Americans be willing to go with that?
In any case, more spending of this sort will not solve the problem, though it might relieve the crisis. The chance of the spending bill getting through Congress (it passed the Senate 93-3) is presently near nil. One measure of the president’s cynicism is his unwillingness to photo op the refugee camps, which might actually pressure Congress to act – and that might not be useful to Democrats who need an inactive Congress to run against in the fall.
To be fair (again), the prospect of Republican control of Congress is itself a potential crisis that could emerge from long-festering failures. But that’s another story, even though it wouldn’t likely improve the refugee crisis story.
There is nothing but cynicism on all sides of the refugee story
Another measure of the cynicism of the emergency spending proposal is what it proposes to do to “solve” the problem: make nicer refugee camps and get more officials to speed up deportation of these people back to the hellish places they came from. That’s what the White House has already said is likely to happen. Well, that’s a solution of sorts for the U.S. But it’s not a permanent solution, and hardly one decent people can be proud of. In every meaningful sense of the word, these children (and most of the adults) are real refugees from the ravages of American power.
On June 20, the White House announced what was reported as “a slew of aid programs to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. They include $US9.6 million in aid for the countries to ‘receive and reintegrate’ their citizens who have been denied entry into the U.S., as well as multi-million dollar crime and violence protection programs in each of the three Central American nations.”
Calling $9.6 million “a slew” of aid to three impoverished countries is something of a joke when you compare it to the $3.7 billion spent in the richest country in the world. Who even thinks the aid will reach the neediest people, much less reintegrate them? That comparison shows a roughly 40-to-1 disparity of spending on the rich to spending on the poor. That’s already a structural problem in Central America and it’s a growing one in the United States. No wonder most of the spending in all four countries is for military and para-military means of protecting plutocracy.
Cynicism permeates media explanations of events as well, with mainstream media like the Washington Post and The New York Times blaming the present humanitarian crisis on a 2008 law signed by President Bush. The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 was designed to counter global sex trafficking in part by providing legal rights for children picked up by immigration authorities (with the exception of children from Mexico and Canada). As Charles Lane in the Post put it:
This law’s special mistake was to guarantee an immigration hearing to unaccompanied minors arriving in the United States on the theory they might be victims of sex trafficking and to let them live with U.S.-based family, if any, until a judge was available….
[The bill’s authors] failed to anticipate that trafficking mafias in Mexico would market temporary entry pending the delayed hearings as a new form of “permiso” (“permit”) and can charge families $10,000 per child to pursue it.
More refugees a result of crime, poverty, gangs, and following the law
One of the things driving the right crazy about all these underage refugees is that the problem has grown, in part, because the Obama administration has been following the law. And the law protects children, of all things. And it was signed proudly by President Bush, can you believe it?
Governor Perry has recovered from a booing by his own Republican Party in 2011, when he said of those opposed to educating refugee children: “I don’t think you have a heart.” He hasn’t come close to expressing such decency lately, but has managed to encapsulate current American political dysfunction exquisitely on Fox News, by saying:
The federal government is just absolutely failing. We either have an incredibly inept administration, or they're in on this somehow or another. I mean I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort?
Governor Perry is absolutely right about a “fairly coordinated effort,” which overlaps with other coordinated efforts smuggling drugs, guns, and sex slaves. Asked on ABC’s “This Week” about the president’s following the 2008 law against sex trafficking, Perry ducked the question entirely, saying, when pressed:
What has to be addressed is the security of the border. You know that. I know that. The president of the United States knows that. I don't believe he particularly cares whether or not the border of the United States is — is secure.
Interviewer Martha Raddatz let this blatant political lie pass unchallenged. She didn’t ask Governor Perry to explain why President Obama is referred to as the deporter-in-chief, since his administration has deported record numbers of people. This administration has also detained record numbers of people crossing the border. And this administration has record numbers of officers patrolling the border, and even shooting people across the border.
Governor Perry says he has requested 1,000 National Guard soldiers for border patrol. He was not asked why he hasn’t used his own authority as governor to call up the National Guard. Perry claimed, somewhat unclearly, that he had been asking the administration for help since 2010, without a response. He said, “I have to believe that when you do not respond in any way, that you are either inept, or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from.” Again he went unchallenged, as the segment ran out of time.
Is the Rio Grande Valley comparable to Katrina as a racial event?
After meeting with Governor Perry in Texas on July 9th, President Obama spoke affably to reporters, saying , “there's nothing the governor indicated he'd like to see that I have a philosophical objection to,” including the 1,000 National Guard troops. But the president’s emphasis was leaning, instead, on the Texas Congressional delegation to support his $3.7 billion emergency appropriation request. In Congress, House Republicans have reportedly hardened in opposition to the $3,7 billion bill, leaving the party in the position of simultaneously demanding that the border be secured and refusing to spend more money on securing the border.
For his part, Governor Perry followed up on the meeting without noting any agreement with the president on anything. He did say that the president’s refusal to visit the Rio Grande Valley was “no different” from President Bush’s response to Katrina. In response to Perry’s jibe, a White House representative offered patent nonsense, but in complete sentences:
I think it doesn’t make sense to compare this to a natural disaster. This is a humanitarian situation that we have been on top of from the very beginning. It involves the entire federal government, it involves our partners in Central America who have acknowledged that we all share a responsibility to make sure we stop this situation before it starts.
If the White House has been on top of the situation from the beginning, why has it gotten so bad (from the beginning)? The beginning of just this phase was more than three years ago, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. Those figures show that child refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador have both increased more than twelve-fold since 2010. The number of children from each country is now about as many as Mexico's child refugees (whose numbers have been declining for more than a year, but still remain high). The most child refugees now come from Honduras, whose numbers have increased fifteen-fold since 2010. (The number of child refugees continues to climb: between October 2013 and June 2014, some 52,000 child refugees were taken into custody by the U.S., about 75% from the three Central American countries.)
Despite the White House statement, it’s obvious that the humanitarian crisis does not involve “the entire federal government” in any meaningful way. Or if it does, what is the role of the Marines? Or the IRS? Or the ambassador to Iceland?
But the rest of the statement – “it involves our partners in Central America who have acknowledged that we all share a responsibility to make sure we stop this situation before it starts” – is perhaps as revealing as it is strange (since it’s already decades past the situation’s start).
What do El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have in common?
Insofar as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are “our partners” rather than free and independent states, they are decidedly junior partners. Each of them shares borders with the other two. More than anything, they share more than a century of exploitation by Americans, both governmental and corporate. Since the 1950s, they have all suffered brutal, anti-democratic coup d’etats orchestrated or approved by the United States. They have all suffered especially brutal dictatorships supported by the United States for the benefit of a tiny elite that controls most of the wealth in each country. The United States has brutalized these countries for decades, has helped make them unlivable, and now pretends to wonder why people don’t want to live there.
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras account for almost 75% of all the refugee children coming out of Central America.
These three countries also share the honor of having served in recent decades as American proxies in wars against their own people or their neighbors, or both. By way of illustration of what it means to be an American “ally,” the streams of children from these three countries are unmatched by other countries in the region. Almost no children are fleeing Nicaragua, a former American enemy (full of phantom threat and against whom the U.S. committed war crimes). On the contrary, Nicaragua is a host country for asylum seekers, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) found in a study (“Children on the Run”) released in March 2014:
While the United States is receiving the majority of the new asylum claims, UNHCR has documented a 712% increase in the number of asylum applications from citizens of these three [El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras] countries in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize, combined, from 2008 to 2013.
When the White House says there’s “a responsibility to make sure we stop this situation before it starts,” it’s time to start some White House soul-searching, not just about American military and corporate predation over decades, not just about trade agreements (NAFTA and CAFTA) that have hurt the poorest people in these poor countries, but especially about the Obama administration’s own deeply bloody role in what has happened in Honduras since 2009.
When it came to Honduras, America offered no hope and no change
Five years ago, Honduras had a democratically-elected government that was beginning to make reforms. Five years ago, most of the Honduran population of 8 million were safely staying home.
On June 28, 2009, Honduras suffered a military coup. Almost immediately, the Obama administration blessed the new dictatorship and soon set about lying to the American people in order to avoid enforcing American law that’s supposed to apply to any coup (later the administration did the same dishonest dance around the Egyptian coup).
The United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union all condemned the Honduran coup. On July 5, 2009, the OAS voted unanimously to suspend Honduras from membership (the suspension was lifted two years later). None of this affected unwavering U.S. support for the coup (which some people even argued was not a coup).
Less than a month later, the U.S. embassy cabled a report to Washington titled, "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," asserting that there was no doubt that the military coup was unconstitutional and the removal of the Honduran president was a “kidnapping” with no legal authority. The cable went to the White House and to the Secretary of State. No one in the Obama administration – not Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, no one – told the truth about Honduras. They kept this cable secret and they lied about it.
The embassy cable remained secret till November 28, 2010, when Wikileaks released it (as part of the release of 251,287 confidential State Department documents). Reported then by Just Foreign Policy, the cable had little impact.
The coup – and the continued degradation of Honduran governance – had the quiet, bi-partisan support of American power. The United States has dirty hands throughout the hemisphere, dirty hands that are equally at home in strangling democratic governments or children’s futures.
The obvious horrors of Honduras, the crime and personal suffering, are well-documented anecdotally in mainstream media, almost always without critical context. The Honduran government commits and allows atrocities, as is well known, but they continue to receive tens of millions of American tax dollars to support their crimes.
Some critical context for Honduras has come from reporter Dawn Marie Paley for years. In February 2014, Toward Freedom ran a trenchant Paley piece, “War on the Poor in Honduras,” in which she vividly describes the fear, violence, danger, and extortion (“war tax”) of daily life for most Hondurans. She observes that:
The biggest shops, US fast food chains and grocery stores, are the only ones who seem to get away without paying the so called “war tax” to gangs.
Critical context also comes from history professor Dana Frank on her Huffington Post blog. She describes some of the deep corruption among Honduran politicians, police, prosecutors, and judges, which even the U.S. State Department. acknowledges:
Among the most serious human rights problems were corruption, intimidation, and institutional weakness of the justice system leading to widespread impunity; unlawful and arbitrary killings by security forces, organized criminal elements, and others; and harsh and at times life-threatening prison conditions.
In response to his country’s police corruption, Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández has increased the country’s militarization, as Frank reports:
Not only does the regular military now patrol residential neighborhoods, airports, and prisons, but Hernández's new 5,000-strong military police force is fanning out across the country.
On May 13, the new military police surrounded, tear gassed, brutally beat up, and forcibly ejected from the main hall of congress all 36 congress members of the center-left opposition party LIBRE.
Ultimately the surge of child refugees into other countries has less to do with gangs and extortion, or with rape and murder, or even with poverty and political repression, than it has to do with the American role in the world – the American power that promotes and profits from all these horrors, and expects gratitude in return.
This is what the United States government has become, and it is despicable.
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Taxpayer-Financed Bigotry |
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Saturday, 12 July 2014 14:54 |
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Excerpt: "President Obama should resist a pressure campaign by some religious groups to weaken a promised executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against gay men, lesbians and transgender people in their hiring practices."
Will Obama's executive order curb workplace discrimination? (photo: Shutterstock)
Taxpayer-Financed Bigotry
By The New York Times | Editorial
12 July 14
 resident Obama should resist a pressure campaign by some religious groups to weaken a promised executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against gay men, lesbians and transgender people in their hiring practices.
Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s addlebrained Hobby Lobby decision, several groups wrote to Mr. Obama on July 1 asking him to allow federal contractors to fire or refuse to hire workers based on their religious objections to a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
This is not a question of religious freedom. It is a question of whether to allow religion to be used as an excuse to discriminate in employment against a particular group of people. Many states already have laws protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender workers. There is no such federal law, so the presidential order (promised but not yet produced) would extend those rules to companies that receive federal contracts in states without those kinds of anti-bias laws, protecting millions more people.
READ MORE
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Michael Bloomberg Isn't Afraid of the NRA |
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Saturday, 12 July 2014 14:47 |
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Vozick-Levinson writes: "Two months after concluding his 12-year mayoral term, Bloomberg is eager to discuss his ongoing commitment to reducing gun violence. Just don't call it gun control."
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gestures while speaking to the media at City Hall in New York August 12, 2013. (photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
Michael Bloomberg Isn't Afraid of the NRA
By Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone
12 July 14
In a rare interview, the former New York mayor takes on the gun lobby, Congress and critics of his controversial stop-and-frisk policy
 n a Friday afternoon in February, Bloomberg sits in a sleek boardroom near a pin-covered world map outlining his foundation's global work. Beside him are close advisor John Feinblatt – chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the national lobbying group Bloomberg founded with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in 2006 – and a pair of staffers. Two months after concluding his 12-year mayoral term, Bloomberg is eager to discuss his ongoing commitment to reducing gun violence. Just don't call it gun control. "Control has the implication that you're going to take away people's guns," he says. "[We want] sensible regulations: background checks to prevent minors and mentally ill and people with criminal records from buying guns." He notes that 16 states already require background checks for private handgun sales – California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island – and that these laws have been proven to work. "In those states, the murder of domestic partners is way down. The suicide rate is half of the national average. [The background-check system] isn't perfect, but the bottom line is it saves people's lives."
On a local level, the former mayor stands by his defense of the aggressive NYPD tactic known as stop-and-frisk, which targeted guns in high-crime areas by searching hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers each year, mostly black and Latino, the vast majority of them innocent of any crime. While federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled key parts of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional last August – and public debate over the policy helped sweep new mayor Bill de Blasio, a vocal stop-and-frisk critic, into office in the fall – Bloomberg remains convinced the controversial program saved thousands of lives.
Read on for a rare Q&A with Bloomberg about his strategy to beat the NRA, what he's doing to punish the senators who killed federal background checks last year, his personal history as a teenage gun owner, and more. "I'm in a very lucky position," says the businessman turned politician, whose net worth is estimated at $31 billion. "I've made a lot of money. I can devote a lot of my time to public service. There's not a lot of things that I will ever do that will save as many lives as focusing on guns, with the possible exception of smoking and obesity."
[UPDATE: In April, two months after this interview, Bloomberg announced the formation of a $50 million umbrella organization called Everytown for Gun Safety, combining the efforts of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Moms Demand Action, and a new grassroots advocacy group. "We’re not waiting for Washington to act: we're taking the fight to the state houses and city halls across the country," Bloomberg wrote in a follow-up email. "For too long, elected officials have only heard from the gun lobby. That won’t be the case any longer."]
[This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.]
Tell me why you're still fighting for better gun laws even after leaving office as mayor.
I and the foundation are trying to save lives. Particularly, I want the foundation to focus on things that other people aren't focusing on. So we took on smoking. We're working on obesity. Polio, [Bill] Gates is really the spearhead, but we've given him a lot of money. Malaria, building a better mosquito. Traffic deaths. Maternal health in Tanzania.
Guns are another one of those things that nobody was willing to take on. 12,000 people get killed with handguns every single year; 19,000 people commit suicide with handguns. And we're the only country with this problem. That's why we took this on. But the NRA, and even more right-wing organizations like Gun Owners of America, are so against anything because [they think] it's a slippery slope. I think if there was an issue of "Could you have your own nuclear bomb?" they might gulp, but they might say, "We should not have a law against that." In fact, the NRA testified a number of years ago in favor of background checks. They really did! But the trouble is, the NRA is losing numbers to the more right-wing groups, so they can't cave.
Has running Mayors Against Illegal Guns for the last eight years made you more or less optimistic about this issue?
Well, there are 16 states that already have [background checks], and they're populated states. So there's a big chunk of the country that's already protected by these laws. And, yeah, you're not going to get everybody until you get to a tipping point, but the fact that you save a lot of lives is not something to sneer at. And the fact that you can't save every life is not an argument not to try to save any lives.
In Colorado, we got a law passed. The NRA went after two or three state Senators in a part of Colorado where I don't think there's roads. It's as far rural as you can get. And, yes, they lost recall elections. I'm sorry for that. We tried to help 'em. But the bottom line is, the law is on the books, and being enforced. You can get depressed about the progress, but on the other hand, you're saving a lot of lives.
Isn't it dispiriting that Congress was unable to pass national background checks even after Sandy Hook?
I think it's naïve to think one story in the paper, one massacre, where the press gets in high dudgeon and says, "Everybody reads the story, everybody cares" – there's not a lot of evidence that that's true. It's great theater, but for most people it doesn't affect their lives.
What's your strategy to break the NRA's stranglehold on Congress?
I'm trying to support candidates – Democrats in the Senate and then the Republicans in the House – who will vote the right way on guns. Some of them have changed their positions, like [Pennsylvania Senator] Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican, and [West Virginia Senator] Joe Manchin. There are others who have stood up. Mitch Landrieu's sister [Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu] stood up.
But the NRA takes no prisoners. Put yourself in the following scenario. You're a Senator or Congressman, a Democrat. I ask you to have background checks. You say, "Mike, I can't be with you on background checks, but my opponent, the Republican, is worse." What the NRA says is, "Babes, we don't care. We're going after you. We're going after your spouse and your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren. Long after you're dead, we'll still be going after you." It's hard to think these guys aren't cuckoo and wouldn't probably do it, when they say that. A rational person would consider all of my views before they make a vote – maybe he won't be happy with my gun position, but I'm so good on the others I'll probably still get his vote. But for the NRA that's not an option.
Given that reality, how do you make it more attractive for politicians to come over to your side?
You go and you make sure that the senator or the congressman knows, if he goes against the NRA, you will support him. If he goes with the NRA and they support him, you're going to be against him. You run ads against them and try to get the public. We have been out campaigning against people like Mark Pryor. [ED. NOTE: Arkansas Senator Pryor, a Democrat, voted against federal background checks last year; in a follow-up email, Bloomberg confirmed that this strategy remains in place.] We've gotta convince Pryor that from a selfish, political point of view, he is better off voting with the great bulk of the American people – the 88 percent of all gun owners who say they want [background checks]. He'll do, I assume, what is in his interest in terms of getting elected and re-elected. If we make it more attractive to be on our side, to better accomplish his election and re-election, he'll do it. And if the NRA makes a better case, he won't.
Do you think President Obama has done enough on this issue?
The President can't do enough until we win. He's been okay on it. He gave Biden the responsibility, and Biden has spoken out. Whether you like the President or not, he has made his position known. Has he gone out there and said "I'm going to jump on a sword if you don't pass this"? That's probably a way to get it done, as a matter of fact. So many people on the Republican side would love it. Actually, maybe they wouldn't. Who knows. But you cannot fault Obama. He's out there.
What's it like to be, essentially, the public face of stricter gun regulation? Do you get a lot of hate mail?
Yeah, you get, every once in a while, a bad letter. But a lot of people will say, "Thanks for what you're doing on guns." Now, keep in mind, my friends and the people that I meet tend to be not rural hunters. But I have a lot of friends who are hunters, and they think I'm right on this. They want to keep their guns, and I don't have a problem with that.
It's like smoking: I've always defended your right to smoke. I think you're crazy, but I don't think we should take away your right. I do think we should take away your right to smoke where other people have to breathe your smoke. But if you go outside away from everybody else, I don't have a problem with that. And if you want to have a gun in your house, I think you're pretty stupid – particularly if you have kids – but I guess you have a right to do that. Someday, there is going to be a suit against parents who smoke in their houses or have guns in their houses by a kid. It's not that far-fetched.
Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, has said you're "insane" for proposing background checks. What's your response?
Well, number one, he was the one that testified [in favor of background checks in 1999]! So it's a little bit ridiculous. What's changed? More people are dead today. Certainly it isn't a problem that cured itself. The only reason Wayne is saying that is obviously because he's desperately trying to keep his members, because they've become less relevant given Gun Owners of America.
Ever met him?
I think I once called him and asked to get together, and he said no. Whether I got to him or his secretary I don't remember. Every once in a while, somebody sends me a guest membership in the NRA for a year. Then they send a renewal notice, which I've never bothered to send back. That may be somebody being cute. I discarded the last two issues of Rifle. You should see the guns that are offered! Straight in the wastebasket.
The NRA's position is that even something as simple as background checks is a way to chip away at the Second Amendment and take away everyone's guns.
You have a Second Amendment right, whether you like that or not – it's in the Constitution, we ain't gonna change it. But the Supreme Court says it's not a way to hurt the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court should be the decider as to what the Constitution says and doesn't say. That's the system! They're the decider. And we have [background checks] for 58,000 gun dealers. It hasn't stopped a normal person from getting a gun. What's the evidence of that? They just don't want anything.
Does it even make sense to wonder what James Madison would have thought about an AR-15?
I may be old, but I'm not that old. [Laughs] No, but also, I think you've gotta remember they were in different times. In James Madison's days, everybody lived in the country, out on the farm. Everyone went out and hunted. Today, we live much more densely, and when these people want to have a right to carry on campus – I don't know what you did in school, but I shouldn't have had a gun in school. I mean, come on! And that was before grass.
Have you ever owned a gun?
I had a .22-caliber rifle when I was a Boy Scout. I used to target shoot at camp in New England. You know, the usual things you do. I actually had built a little target in the basement, two-by-fours filled with sand. I don't know what the law is today on a 14-year-old owning a .22-caliber rifle. It may be that it's against the law today, because you're a minor, but it wasn't in those days. We went to a store and bought a rifle, and we had training of how to handle it – making sure there's no bullets in there, never pointing it at anybody, carrying it very carefully, locking it up at night. That's what you got from the Boy Scout riflery merit badge. But that was some time before 13 or 14, and not since then. I'm not a hunter. I certainly haven't killed anything with a gun.
No, I mean, guns are dangerous. The statistics are overwhelming. You're something like 22 times more likely to get killed in your home if you have a gun than if you don't. [Gestures at a staffer.] Let's say Amanda's trying to break in. "Excuse me, Amanda, I've gotta go get my gun to shoot you. Now, where did I put that combination to that lock? And the bullets were where? I don't know what the fuck…how do you turn the safety off?" Are you kidding me? The last thing you want to do when somebody breaks in and puts a gun toward you is try to go for a gun. That's really stupid. I don't know if you're going to get shot one way, but I guarantee you're going to get killed the other way.
Another aspect of this problem is that gun manufacturing is big business. There are corporations that have a lot of money riding on this.
Let's not get carried away. How big are they, for god's sakes? [ED. NOTE: The gun industry's yearly sales have been estimated at $11.7 billion.] Compared to the average business, no, they're not that big. And incidentally, if the issue is "Do you want to have jobs here in New York, or do you want to have, let's say, 3,000 New Yorkers killed?" How can you compare one to another? And the journalists never write that. I hear you about your job – is it more important than their lives? Come on.
You made reducing the number of weapons on the street in New York a priority when you were mayor. Did you learn any lessons about which policies worked best?
I've always thought that going to where the crime is reported by victims, looking for people that match the description of the perpetrator as provided by victims, and then looking to see if they are kids on the street – because almost all murders are young minority males killing young minority males. It's like 90 percent. Take out domestic violence, after that there's nothing left. [Gesturing at staffer again.] Amanda has no chance of getting killed in any meaningful sense. She can take the subway every day, she can walk in every neighborhood. If she got killed, it's gotta be somebody she knows, or she was dealing, or buying with a lot of cash, or something like that.
So you go to those places where the crimes are reported, you look for people that look like the description, and then you use good police work. Is there any reason to stop them? The courts say if you act furtively, or there's a bulge in their pocket or something like that, you stop 'em. And what happens is the kids learn, "I don't want to carry a gun."
A federal judge ruled last summer that the policy you're talking about, stop-and-frisk, violated the constitutional rights of black and Latino New Yorkers as it was applied.
Well, that's what cops do. That is the job. If you don't do that, you're not gonna ever stop anybody. And in fact, one judge did rule that it was discriminatory. We argued – and I am 100 percent convinced it would have won on appeal – that that's not true. We are not targeting any race. The sick thing in our society is, the perpetrators and victims fit that description, 90 percent of them. That's where we should be focusing our efforts. We did two things, really: Less incarceration, because you create less criminals, and stop-and-frisk. If you hadn't done that in the last 12 years, 9,000 more murders would have taken place in New York City, and they all would have fit that description of male minorities, 15 to 25. Just think about the carnage. Think about the families.
Your successor as mayor has dropped the city's appeal of that ruling. Are you saying you think that will lead to a rise in gun violence?
I don't … I have no idea. But [new NYPD commissioner] Bill Bratton is a very competent police officer who has a record of being tough on crime while he was here, and tough on crime when he was in California. And he used basically the same methods that we use here, although, in that case, when they stopped it was generally stopping somebody in a car rather than stopping them on the street. But that's just the difference. I think Bill Bratton is a competent guy.
Do you think there's a way to continue searching for guns that addresses the judge's concerns about discrimination?
One of the problems with this is the way the reporting works. We didn't go from 600,000 to 100,000 stop and frisks in one year. [ED. NOTE: Public data compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union records approximately 601,000 police stops in 2010; 685,000 in 2011; 532,000 in 2012; and 191,000 in 2013.] When there's pressure to report stop-and-frisks, Amanda says, "Hello, how are you?" Guy writes out a ticket, "I stopped-and-frisked him." When the pressure is to not do it, he may have strip-searched her and found a gun and whatever – he doesn't file a thing. That's a difference in reporting. It's virtually impossible to imagine that the police totally changed their tactics from one year to another. Come on. They read the press, and when there's pressure, they say, "I don't want to have somebody come after me." Court decisions that put an inspector general or more oversight will have the unintended consequences of possibly changing actions, but certainly changing reporting.
Did the controversy over stop-and-frisk ever make you rethink how efficient it was as a means of limiting guns?
I've looked at it very carefully, and I am 100 percent convinced that as explained to me by lawyers, we were consistent with the law. That we were doing the right thing, and that we saved 9,000 lives. You can actually get a list of those 9,000 lives. It'll be an interesting list. That's what we should do – run an ad with the names of the 9,000 people.
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