AS WITH ALL News With Nezua vids, you can catch this one in a dark viewing room at The XOLAGRAFIK Theater, or at La Frontera Times.

APPARENTLY, the hot glare of modern day law casts some disturbing shadows when turn on dinosaurs like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of the Arizona Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department. An FBI investigation (for his using law to intimidate critics) that began under the George W. Bush regime has been slowly closing in on Joe, and the cameraphile has become a cameraphobe, refusing interviews now on major news networks like CBS.

Men like this don’t actually believe in law, as his antics make clear again and again. They believe in their own right to enforce their own ideas, and they think taxpayers oughtta pay for the guns. This attitude is quite evident in hisoffice’s actions. First, in the way he carries out his sweeps for “illegals,” in the way he profiles to determine who is “illegal,” and now in the way he wields his entire office and power.

Watch this video above, and marvel at how the rogue cop can scoff off two major concurrent investigations by both the USDOJ and the FBI! Methinks hethinks he is his own lil country. And maybe he is. For now. Then again, I bet there was a day the T-Rex thought he’d walk the planet forever.

And then, it turns around and it’s Dia de los Muertos. Which is…sort of the flip side. Not jokey or scary or silly, but rather a beautiful way to revisit and welcome and cherish the spirits who are and have long been a part of your journey. The family that has passed on from this plane, and yet moves through your heart, moves through your hands, moves still, with your familia.

My altar is up, and though it’s not as well decorated as it’s been before (I’ve been so busy with work that I’ve not even had time to properly shop for it), the important part is the path is open, the candles are burning, the home is welcoming to those who were once, and will always be, a part of my family.

Happy dia de los Muertos to you!

I don’t necessarily think that it is bad for children to work alongside their parents. Actually, I think that is very good. And missing from what I see in the culture out there. It’s a sad loss. But as long as parents can be teachers in other ways (and not relegate it all to strangers) I suppose not all is lost.

This story, reporting on the Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Company, in South Haven, Michigan, and the fact that many children are doing the work of picking the blueberries that we delectably drop into our desserts kicks off the lede by framing the magnanimous actions of Walmart, who is cutting ties with Adkin. I’m sure this is seen as a great opportunity by Walmart, known to many as the “most anti-union company” out there, a way to boost their image. But what will it do to those families who need that money? Is that really the most righteous thing they can think of doing?

Truth is, I watch these kids picking berries, smart kids who know about pesticides; strong little girl that can carry two buckets at five years old or so, and think to myself they are going to be so much more prepared for life than the little girl who is learning to feel self esteem when handed a trophy and tiara for being “Little Miss Blueberry.” Truth is, I see that little girl stooped over carrying two buckets for measly pay, and then those shots of kids happily eating blueberry ice cream or getting crowned Little Miss Blueberry, and it all feels very wrong. It’s just too symbolic of a larger truth. And anyway, why don’t they go out in the fields and crown the little girl with buckets? SHE is Little Miss Blueberry as far as I’m concerned. And her crown is the sacrifice of what most of us think of as childhood.

Despite the benefits of working closely with your parents, it’s obviously true that it’s egregious and wrong that this is what people are forced to do to live decently in this country. People should not have to enlist all their children to help them earn a living, to barely get by, to get paid by the bucket and not much. We know how spendy those little crates of blueberries are at the store!

But it’s not as simple as punishing the company. That punishes the families, too. Soon, lest we perish as a nation, it is incumbent upon us to open our eyes and begin seeing a larger picture.

We need to realize that this is the price of Capitalism as we know it, today.

The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.”

- Che Guevara

There is no free ride, there is no cheap food, the reason we get delicious berries out of season anywhere in the nation is similar to the reason Madoff got rich. A lot of “little people” get screwed for these conveniences, to make it possible for distributors and retailers to jack up the cost and rake in profit on the sweat of children’s backs. It ain’t just going on in Michigan. It’s going on all over the nation, as the report says. (If you’ve TV, watch the special tonight on Nightline.) And you know what? This is the story of how this nation even got its feet of the ground. Enslavement and exploitation of people just like this, just like today.

Who works these fields? Who built this land? Who builds it today? Who keeps your fruit and vegetables on the table? Who keeps the agricultural engine running? It ain’t Pat Buchanan and it ain’t Mister Perdue and it ain’t Lou Dobbs.

Whenever will we get smart about the world? Stop pretending that economic problems sneak across borders with brown skin? Start staging ICE raids in DC, where the real border thievery goes on? When will we stop playing these little games, selling fake dreams that profess a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, while leaving off the whole truth of all the people that sweat and bled and died nameless to carry that pot there?

They’ve created an atmosphere and they’ve been unrelenting in their propaganda,” Dobbs said in reference to pro-immigration groups.

—Shots Fired at NJ Home of Lou Dobbs

Get that? It’s the people fighting for the rights and humane treatment of immigrants who are creating a violent atmosphere. Yeah. Nothing like a little projection to help a ghoul live with itself.

Also chiming in is William Gheen, anti-immigrant president of ALIPAC, who tellingly admits in a newsletter that when you create an atmosphere of revulsion and loathing around people, this leads to violence: [my emphasis]

Friends of ALIPAC,

We have just learned that someone has fired a gun at the home of Lou Dobbs, with his wife just a few feet away from the incident. The gunfire followed a series of threatening phone calls.

Lou Dobbs is being targeted by the pro-illegal alien groups and pundits who feel that Dobbs is stopping Amnesty from passing.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti Defamation League, the National Council of La Raza, Media Matters, and Geraldo Rivera of Fox News are using false information to foment hatred towards Lou Dobbs or any American who speaks out against Amnesty or illegal immigration.

They have pushed for Lou Dobbs to be fired and since CNN has refused to do that some people are now turning to violence to try and achieve their goals.

The lies and hate coming from these radical pro-illegal alien groups is now manifesting in the form of gunfire fired into the occupied home of an innocent multi-racial family.

What conclusions can we draw from their only now admitting this connection many of us have been trying to underline for so long?

1. Lou Dobbs and William Gheen understand that what they do normally leads to the violence that continues to bring death and fear to our communities

thus

2. They enjoy causing that violence.

But now, ALLEGEDLY, shots are fired near Lou’s house, and they are up in arms talking about this dangerous environment. It is to laugh.

Lou, for the first time in his skanky life, is being held to account by organized groups online and off for the negativity and hostility and vile things he puts out into the air all year. And all he can come up with is calling people “fleas” as a response, go back to his daily demonization routine, and then whine about a violent environment from which he is normally cushioned due to his station, class, and situation.

Live by the sword, Lou?

(PS: Well, hardly a sword. And hardly a bullet, apparently! After all, if the projectile “struck the siding and then fell to the ground,” I’m guessing it was a slow moving BB, perhaps. Which means Lou’s well-layered makeup would have stopped it cold.)

I covered the very first use of Tasers in Eugene, Oregon while working for MTV’s Street Team in 2008. I also covered the fifth use of tasers here in Eugene, when demonstrating college student Ian Van Ornum was tazed to the ground until he had seizures (video here, and embedded below; article here). +/-»

Well, now we have another incident of Taser abuse in Eugene, Oregon (sombrero tip to Angry Asian Man) and believe it or not, it’s by the same cop who tazed Van Ornum. This time, he sent 50,000 volts into the body of a human being for Sleeping While Chinese.

The same Eugene police officer who used a Taser to subdue a protester last year in downtown Eugene is at the center of another high-profile stun gun incident — this one involving a Chinese, non-English-speaking college student whom the officer shocked during an ill-fated confrontation last month in west Eugene. …

This isn’t the first time Warden has faced Taser-related criticism. In May 2008, he used the weapon to control anti-pesticide protester Ian Van Ornum at a downtown rally while another officer struggled to handcuff the University of Oregon student.

Several witnesses charged that Warden unjustly used the Taser on Van Ornum, who was later convicted of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

Van Ornum filed a formal complaint with the city against Warden and other officers involved in his arrest, which prompted a city investigation into their actions.

That’s about the connection to Van Ornum. Here’s the recent result of our new Electric Sadism Machines:

An investigation is under way to determine whether a Eugene police officer overreacted when he used a Taser stun gun to subdue a foreign college student who the officer mistakenly believed was trespassing in a west Eugene apartment.

The male student is a resident of an Asian country who does not speak English. He is involved in a University of Oregon program, but it is unclear whether he is an enrolled student, city Police Auditor Mark Gissiner said.

The incident unfolded the evening of Sept. 22 when a prospective tenant of an apartment on West 11th Avenue saw a man sleeping inside and reported it to police.

The property’s landlord, Timothy Breen of Eugene, said police called him about the initial report. Breen — who said transients had caused trouble at the complex before — met officers at the apartment complex and told them that he believed the unit should have been vacant.

A few minutes later, Breen said, he overheard the sound of a stun gun being deployed. Officers then came outside and spoke to Breen.

It was then that the landlord realized that the two Asian men inside the apartment had picked up keys for the unit from his office about three hours earlier.

The last time Officer Judd Warden was accused of discharging his Taser in an inappropriate way, the Lane County District Attorney pulled some sneaky stuff. Before Cristina Beamud finished auditing the situation to determine if Warden should be disciplined in any way, the DA decided to jump up before she was done and instead charge Van Ornum with crimes. (See second letter for one Eugene resident’s feelings on this—they were not alone, many felt this way because it was a plainly dishonest maneuver.)

The cop was declared righteous, the student deemed criminal, the electricity that laid him to the ground in spasm, validated and just. And so the law and the law’s thugs work hand in hand to prevent a larger sense of justice from playing out, while a young man concerned with toxins in the environment learns a harsh lesson in college. Fighting the power means you are in a serious underdog position and that sooner or later, they will come for you with violence sanctioned by law.

This time, the Officer Judd Warden and the landlord, and probably the state will excuse this as “Well, Jeez. I meant to blast the shit out of a sleeping transient! Not a person who rents an apartment!” and I hope it’s immediately clear how amoral this type of thinking is.

And why is it that the cops—these supposed badasses with jingly guns, darts, masks, cuffs, and training in submission holds—are always blasting homeless people, sleeping people, wheelchair users, shackled people…?????

You really want the nation to fear and hate cops even more than so many do now? Keep at this. Keep zapping people. Keep electrocuting people for “attitude problems” or “fast moves” (like turning away from you), or for sleeping in the wrong place; keep making it clear that being law-abiding isnt good enough anymore. Keep creating a collective mental image of bulletproofed goons shocking vulnerable or already incapacitated people, and handicapped, and pregnant, and elderly, and mentally confused, and homeless people.

Enough of that and one day you’ll need to hire your own protection from those you are ostensibly here to protect!

[This is the video I made while the auditing process—of what was deemed a "test case" by the Oregon Emerald for Taser use in the city—was still playing out.]

By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger

Anti-immigration groups and pundits cling to phrases like “Illegal Alien” because they only focus on foreignness and danger. These extreme factions are all about casting immigrants as what ails our society, conjuring up demons upon which to focus national ire, and perpetuating a subhuman category of being. It’s a convenient distraction from things that are actually endangering our nation. A new web-only series from ColorLines called “Torn Apart by Deportation“ is the perfect antidote to people like CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

The stories in this series are thoroughly investigated, not sensationalized, and haunting. “Torn Apart” reveals how the push against immigrants in the U.S. is, once all the pieces come together, a cultural death wish on families of color. “Torn Apart” gives faces and feelings to the results of the nation’s post-1996 immigration policies, which made it easier deport undocumented people for any criminal infraction. Two articles are currently available:

• “Home in Name Only” follows Calvin James, who was deported after living in the US since the age of 12, back to Kingston, Jamaica. James is percieved as an undesirable and unwanted part of Jamaican society, which pins its crime rates on deportees. James was uprooted from a loving, productive life in the US and cast into a criminal class spanning two nations.
• “Double Punishment” explores the nexus that people like James find themselves in, where they suffer under a clash of laws that target immigrants and criminals in a justice system already slanted against people of color.

Wiretap tackles the issue of the upcoming census count slated for Spring 2010. The census has become a point of political contention and moved abruptly away from its very practical purpose of counting all people in the country. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) are trying to add an amendment to an appropriations bill that would include a question about citizenship status to the census form, disrupting the entire well-established process of the census. The move would also cement growing fear in immigrant communities that the census is not to be trusted.

Further, it’s simply too late to raise questions like this. As M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes, “two congressionally mandated deadlines for registering objections [to the census form as it stands] have already passed.” Surely Vitter and Bennet are quite aware of this. Then again, as Levesque-Alam makes clear, the intended effect of the amendment is primarily “to dissuade undocumented residents from participating in the census out of fear that the information will be shared with other government agencies and lead to deportation.” It is, yet again, one more Republican political maneuver that shows no consideration for the damage such legislation causes.

Misguided and troublesome attempts to legislate hate are rippling out and hurting other communities. America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, H.R. 3200, negatively impacts the African American community in its attempts to deny immigrants access to health care, as TPM reports. And Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) anti-immigrant agenda hurts the working class, according to The Washington Independent. A new report released Tuesday by “three labor and employment advocacy organizations,” points the finger squarely at the Bush administration policies that leave undocumented and legal workers alike open to exploitation.

When workers are afraid to report their employers for abusive practices, they are exploited further. When there is a labor conflict, abusive employers will summon ICE and simply provoke a raid before the dispute is resolved. It adds up to a situation that keeps wages artificially suppressed and many workers voiceless. As Daphne Eviatar writes, “labor complaints are not supposed to lead to retaliation against illegal immigrants.”

Even LA police chief Willam J. Bratton writes that “a person reporting a crime should never fear being deported.” Yet they have good reason to. As the Colorado Independent reported last Wednesday, the 287(g) agreement “has resulted in a ’sweep of terror,” according to a floor speech given by 2nd Rep. Jared Polis on the same day. His speech came as a reaction to the announcement by ICE last Friday that it was signing 67 more 287(g) agreements.

Irresponsible pundits, racist legislation and exploitative labor conditions are all the symptoms of a nation wrestling with a fundamental truth: United, we stand. Divided, we fall. The healing we need lies not in harsher means to divide or separate, but in a new body of laws that exemplifies that age-old and beloved maxim.

For the past week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office has been looking for a Republican co-sponsor for an utterly non-controversial resolution honoring the legacy and role of Hispanic media.

None came, his office confirms. On Tuesday, Reid introduced and passed a resolution designating October 25 through October 31, 2009, the “National Hispanic Media Week” in honor of the Latino Media of America.

The Nevada Democrat was joined by Sens. Robert Menendez (New Jersey), Mark Udall (Colorado) and Kirsten Gillibrand (New York) — all of whom are Democrats.

—Huffington Post, Reid Gets No GOP Support For Resolution Honoring Hispanic Media

I’M TRYING TO IMAGINE what the GOP strategy is anymore when it comes to our nation of many peoples. Do they cling so tightly to some 1950s vision of reality that they simply won’t budge, won’t open the lids, won’t peep the new day? Are they of the Ken Burns philosophy: that as long as we recognize whites publicly for achievements, that’s a “universal” statement about everyone?

I’m guessing that by having a black man front the party and use lots of fake street cred noise (like Michael Steele’s throwing in a “bling” there and a “pahty peeple” here, or his blog “What Up” or “Wut B Tha DL” or “Slick Steele” or whatever it’s called today) in addition to their pattern of demonizing Latinos, Mexicans, people of color, and now this move to NOT recognize the growing power of the Latino/Hispanic voice in media, which as they article notes, should not be a controversial one—

I think the elephant as an icon for the GOP has run its course. Here’s my offering:

A NEW WEB-EXCLUSIVE SERIES ON THE EFFECTS OF DEPORTATION on families (of color) and the people who make up those families here in our nation and in the nations to where they are deported is called Torn Apart, by Colorlines. It’s pretty strong stuff.

I like it because it draws clearly and plainly the effects of deportation and you begin to peek around the corner, or I should say, over the border. To these lands utterly foreign, overall, to the people being flown and dumped there. You see how their families miss them here, how often the phone calls home begin to grow less and less…over there struggling for survival, over here, ending up in homeless shelters. Deportees criminalized in two lands, daily errands to take out trash and go to work shattered by exile. No second chance, no appeal. Not even for 20 years.

Again, for what? How does it make a nation safer, you wonder. To multiply pain. It’s just bad math, let alone the morality of it all….

AS ALWAYS, you can find this week’s News With Nezua at my joint, or at La Frontera Times. And for those who prefer a dim viewing room, I’ll meet ya over at the XOLAGRAFIK Theater.

This week’s offering is short, spare, and simple. But I hope still worthy of your attention. Peace, Y’all!