Por ley, ahora en Arizona el indocumentado es “criminal”

Ordena Arizona tratar como criminales a indocumentados

Culpa la gobernadora a la Casa Blanca
Es una ley irresponsable: Barack Obama

Cientos de manifestantes salieron a las calles este viernes para protestar contra la promulgación en Arizona de la legislación denominada SB1070, la cual permite a policías detener e interrogar a quienes consideren “sospechosos de ser indocumentados”, entre otras medidas.

David Brooks

Washington, 23 de abril. El estado de Arizona promulgó hoy la ley más antimigrante del país, ante la crítica del presidente Barack Obama, quien la calificó de “irresponsable”, y la denuncia de una amplia gama de organizaciones, detonando así –otra vez– una nueva batalla nacional sobre el tema.

De pronto, con Arizona en el trasfondo, líderes demócratas de ambas cámaras del Congreso federal junto con la Casa Blanca han retomado como prioridad, dicen, el tema de una reforma integral, mientras que sus opositores buscan, de nuevo, cómo usar el triunfo de las fuerzas antimigrantes en ese estado a escala nacional.

Y todos, tanto críticos como promotores de estas medidas, están de acuerdo en un punto: acusan que es resultado del fracaso de Washington en abordar y tomar acción sobre el tema.

La gobernadora republicana Jan Brewer firmó la norma que criminaliza a todo indocumentado en Arizona y faculta a la policía a detener e interrogar a cualquier sospechoso de ser “extranjero ilegal”, entre otras medidas.

Al firmar la ley, conocida como SB1070, Brewer responsabilizó a Washington de la situación. “Nosotros en Arizona hemos sido más que pacientes esperando que Washington actúe. Pero décadas de inacción y políticas mal guiadas han creado una situación peligrosa e inaceptable”. La legislación es, justificó, “otra herramienta para nuestro estado, mientras trabajamos para resolver una crisis que no creamos y que el gobierno federal se rehúsa a componer”.

Horas antes, el presidente Obama calificó la iniciativa de “mal guiada”, cuestionó su legalidad y ordenó una evaluación de las posibles consecuencias sobre los derechos civiles.

Obama, en una ceremonia de naturalización de migrantes en las fuerzas armadas, entre ellas una mexicana, reiteró la necesidad de una “reforma integral” y aceptó que hay ausencia de acción federal. “El fracaso de actuar de manera responsable a nivel federal sólo abre la puerta a la irresponsabilidad de otros, y eso incluye los recientes esfuerzos en Arizona, los cuales amenazan minar nociones básicas de justicia que apreciamos como estadunidenses”.

Desde que el proyecto fue promovido por la legislatura estatal se han intensificado campañas locales y nacionales contra la iniciativa, con expresiones de condena: desde el arzobispo de Los Ángeles, cardenal Roger Mahoney –quien la comparó con el nazismo–, hasta las principales organizaciones latinas y de defensa de migrantes nacionales, así como sindicatos y políticos.

Algunos líderes sociales pronostican que los hechos en Arizona acabarán nutriendo las movilizaciones proinmigrantes en la nación, como las programadas para el próximo primero de mayo.

Hoy en Arizona cientos de manifestantes acudieron a las oficinas de Brewer en demanda de que no promulgara la ley. En días recientes han circulado peticiones con miles de firmas para instar a la gobernadora a usar su veto para anular el proyecto. Se realizaron todo tipo de protestas, incluyendo caravanas de activistas que viajaron a Arizona desde varios puntos del país para sumarse a la resistencia. Esta semana estudiantes de Phoenix y otras ciudades acudieron a las oficinas de la gobernadora para demandar el veto a la iniciativa, por lo que ocurrieron algunos enfrentamientos.
Hoy, el caucus hispano del Congreso y algunos gobernadores como Bill Richardson, de Nuevo México, entre otras figuras políticas, deploraron la promulgación de la ley.

Se están preparando demandas legales contra la legislación (la cual entrará en vigor en 90 días) por diversos actores –incluso el propio alcalde Phil Gordon, de Phoenix, la ciudad más grande de Arizona– cuestionando la constitucionalidad (sobre la base de que el gobierno federal tiene el deber exclusivo de implementar leyes migratorias).

Entre el temor y el coraje

Pablo Alvarado, director de la Red Nacional de Jornaleros, uno de los promotores de las campañas para detener la legislación, llamó a la resistencia. “Nuestro pueblo inmigrante en Arizona se debate entre el temor y el enojo por la SB1070. Pero entre el miedo y la imprudencia está el coraje… Coraje para resistir pacíficamente… Salgamos a la calle con la frente en alto, que no robamos nada a nadie…. No permitamos que se nos retrate como los pobrecitos a los que hay que proteger porque tienen miedo. Somos un pueblo en resistencia, noble, pacífico y valiente”, dijo.

Agregó: “la crisis de derechos civiles en Arizona va más allá del tema de migración. Se trata del futuro de nuestro país… O somos un país donde todos tenemos el derecho a la vida, a la libertad y a la búsqueda de la felicidad; o somos un país donde se juzga y se limitan las oportunidades de las personas por el color de la piel”.

Las fuerzas antimigrantes celebran su triunfo y lo justifican con la insistencia en la seguridad frente a la violencia y el crimen organizado, que viene de México. Algunos legisladores afirmaron que los ciudadanos están hartos de la inseguridad, y muchos mencionaron la ola de secuestros en Phoenix y otros delitos cometidos por “extranjeros ilegales”.

La hostilidad en ese estado ha alcanzado tales niveles que el representante federal demócrata de Arizona, Raúl Grijalva, cerró sus oficinas locales en Yuma y Tucson este fin de semana ante amenazas de violencia y hasta de muerte por oponerse a la legislación. Hay policías vigilando ambas oficinas, reportaron medios locales. Grijalva ha pedido a organizaciones que van a celebrar convenciones en Arizona suspenderlas. Hoy la primera agrupación en cancelar su convención nacional programada en ese estado fue la Asociación Americana de Abogados de Inmigración (AILA).

En tanto los políticos en esta capital están calculando los efectos de Arizona para las elecciones intermedias legislativas de noviembre, como para varios concursos estatales (incluyendo la gubernatura de Arizona).

Por tanto, una vez más, los migrantes no sólo serán empleados para generar riqueza en este país, sino piezas en el juego de ajedrez político que dicen llamar democracia en Estados Unidos.

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Haiti - Mesa Politica - Lorenzo Meyer, Sergio Aguayo 18/01/2010 NOTICIAS MVS

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Is Obama's Problem That He Just Doesn't Want to Deal with Conflict?

Somehow Obama has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010.

By Drew Westen, AlterNet.

As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it's time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those "pesky leftists" -- those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.
Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.
What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.
What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.
The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.
Leadership, Obama Style
Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it.
Health care is a paradigm case. When the president went to speak to the Democrats last week on Capitol Hill, he exhorted them to pass the bill. According to reports, though, he didn't mention the two issues in the way of doing that, the efforts of Senators like Ben Nelson to use this as an opportunity to turn back the clock on abortion by 25 years, and the efforts of conservative and industry-owned Democrats to eliminate any competition for the insurance companies that pay their campaign bills. He simply ignored both controversies and exhorted.
Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.
We have seen the same pattern of pretty speeches followed by empty exhortations on issue after issue. The president has, on more than one occasion, gone to Wall Street or called in its titans (who have often just ignored him and failed to show up) to exhort them to be nice to the people they're foreclosing at record rates, yet he has done virtually nothing for those people. His key program for preventing foreclosures is helping 4 percent of those "lucky" enough to get into it, not the 75 percent he promised, and many of the others are having their homes auctioned out from right under them because of some provisions in the fine print. One in four homeowners is under water and one in six is in danger of foreclosure. Why we're giving money to banks instead of two-year loans -- using the model of student loans -- to homeowners to pay their mortgages (on which they don't have to pay interest or principal for two years, while requiring their banks to renegotiate their interest rates in return for saving the banks from "toxic assets") is something the average person doesn't understand. And frankly, I don't understand it, either. I thought I voted Democratic in the last election.

To read more HERE.

10 of the Most Obscenely Stupid Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories and Attacks Against Obama

Obama's nefarious plan for the nation's genitals? His evil designs on your children? Here are the most absurd right-wing assaults on the president -- and logic and reason.

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet.

Today President Obama gave a speech urging America's schoolchildren to do their homework and stay in school.
Naturally, conservatives have been extremely alarmed about the address, because obviously the president is looking to create a vast army of adorable little zombies that will help him destroy America faster.
All last week, conservative bloggers and pundits gleefully accused the centrist president of plotting to force radical politics on America's impressionable youth, after Florida's Republican chairman Jim Greer said Obama's address would "indoctrinate" children and spread "socialist ideology."
The week of right-wing echo chamber freak-outs led to protests by conservative parents, which put school districts throughout the country in the unenviable position of having to deal with the "controversy": Some decided not to air the president's address; others required parental permission.
So, thanks to the right-wing saviors of America's youth, a bunch of kids have been shielded from the president's dangerous message that learning things is good.
Could this be the stupidest, most irrational way conservatives have tried to tear down Obama? Is it even possible to answer that question?
We've assembled the most absurd, logic-defying right-wing attacks on the president. Some you've undoubtedly encountered before; all are incessantly blared by conservative pundits and shock jocks, while many are cynically embraced by GOP lawmakers.
Assembled together, they illustrate the absurd extremes to which right-wingers are trying to drive the public discourse in their efforts to thwart essential reforms in health care, energy policy and the economy.
The Advent of Socialism/Fascism
Most historians would agree that fascism and socialism represent vastly different ideologies and historical phenomena. But not the historians at Fox News! Since Obama took office, right-wing pundits have lobbed these smears interchangeably, not quite clarifying whether Obama is leading the proletariat to a glorious Utopian Future or trying to bring the master race to world dominion.
Obama's Nefarious Plan for the Nation's Genitals
When news leaked of a CDC report recommending that boys be circumcised as a preventative measure against HIV infection, right-winger conspiracy theorists decided to fret that the federal government would mandate circumcision. Since Patrick Henry isn’t around, it was up to Rush Limbaugh to sound the rallying cry against tyranny: "Leave our penises alone, too, Obama!" roared Limbaugh in a July 24 radio broadcast.
The next day, while discussing an unrelated dispute with Jay-Z, the talk show host said, "I would remind the rapper Jay Z; Mr. Z, it is President Obama who wants mandated circumcision. We had that yesterday. That means if we need to save our penises from anybody, it's Obama."
Needless to say, Obama had nothing to do with the CDC report, and doesn't appear to have ever publicly uttered the word "circumcision." Nor did he recommend the CDC promote circumcision.
None of this, of course, discouraged Limbaugh from running with the best metaphor for white male anxiety in the age of Obama, ever.
The Birthers
Remember when the president invented a time machine and traveled back in time to plant his own birth announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper and forge a certificate of birth proving he was born in the States, all to hide the fact that he's a foreigner from a country filled with scary black people?
That, of course, appears to be the only explanation for why the birther nonsense continues to gurgle up online (even though certain idiots, who for mysterious reasons still have shows on CNN, have finally stopped giving this nonsense the patina of mainstream credibility).
Recently, some birthers on Free Republic argued that the only way to determine the president's birthplace for sure was by checking if he is circumcised. (It would seem that there needs to be a subcategory on this list for these patriots' obsession with the president's penis.)
The Deathers
In America in 2009 -- a time and place where most people have access to a high school education and can read -- a rumor emerged that the overhaul of our terrible health care system would allow the government to put old people to death. This rumor was stoked by the crazy people on Fox News and talk radio, then embraced and propagated by Republican lawmakers and others who are supposed to be sane adults.
"A lot of people are going to die. This program of government option that‘s being touted as being this panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price, is going to kill people." said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga, said.

In order to read the complete article HERE.