Marc Cooper's Blog, page 4

Obama's Empty Promise On Immigration Reform

President Obama offered up a campaign-style impassioned speech Tuesday in El Paso demanding comprehensive immigration reform. Too bad it's an empty promise.

To paraphrase the president's recent remarks on a different subject, anybody who really believes there's going to be any meaningful reform in the near future "needs their head examined."

There is going to be NO liberalization or rationalization of our broken immigration policy in the foreseeable future. Instead, individual states are going to continue ahead implementing more and more punitive and retrograde nativist measures that show the worst side of our national character.

Yes, Obama said all the right words on Friday. Indeed, it was a great speech. But it was purely political theater.  We're already deep into the 2012 election cycle and the Latino vote is going to be key in so many, many states — and not just in the Southwest.  Let it be noted, as his advisers certainly have, that Obama's popularity among Latinos has sunk 25 points over the last year, according to Gallup. From a favorability rating of 79% among Latinos, Obama is down to just over 50%.

Blame must be properly apportioned here.  Just when comprehensive reform seemed a real possibility a handful of years ago, the Republicans got cold feet and punked out.  It's hard to imagine that the grumpy, nasty and reactionary John McCain of today was the same guy who in the middle of the decade co-sponsored truly enlightened reform legislation in partnership with Teddy Kennedy.  McCain reversed course abruptly and yet he's still paying a price for it among his know-nothing Republican constituencies.  Immigration reform COULD have been a reality if the GOP has followed the blueprint laid out by none other than GWBush in his 2004 State of the Union speech where he offered a surprisingly forward view of the issue.

So. first and foremost, the Republicans must take the blame for maintaining our official policy of denial.

The Democrats, however, are in close second place. During the four years they controlled congress, and two of those during the Obama administration, they didn't lift a finger to advance comprehensive reform.  Nobody fought for it, including Obama. And 'nary a Democrat as much as even talked about reform.  Even the tepid DREAM Act, which addresses only the tip of the iceberg, was relegated to a lame duck session by Harry Reid in which it was defeated.

The common wisdom is that comprehensive immigration reform is too hot an issue for an election year. Well, folks, every year is an election year. So you can do the math.

One can also argue that the math is such that Obama is prisoner to a reactionary congress.  That's true, for the most part. The president could stand on his head and spit nickels and it would doubtfully open any congressional doors on this issue.

The president could, however, use his executive and administrative power to at least not make things worse. Instead, he has done the opposite. The rate of deportation is now higher than ever as Obama's ICE has taken on an unparalleled aggressiveness.  His abhorrent Secure Communities program, effectively granting federal immigration authority to local police, has been rejected in several states by his fellow Democratic governors and legislators — who would also like to get re-elected.

Staying well within his constitutional authority, the president could direct his Justice Department and DHS leaders on where to put their emphasis. It has been a conscious decision by Obama to have the DOJ ease up enforcement and federal bigfooting on state marijuana laws, for example. There is a whole host of similar directives — both formal and informal– that the White House could issue that would treat the enforcement of immigration law in an infinitely more rational and humane way.

For the Democrats, refusal to take immigration reform seriously is a cynical fraud.

For Republicans to continue to impede it is nothing short of mid and certainly long-term political suicide.

Too bad they have to take so many other honest people down with them.

Cuba: Worst of Both Worlds

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I very much enjoyed Lawrence O'Donnell's ditty tonight on Cuba (see video above). He pointed out an amusing parallel between the Island and the Empire. Something both countries have in common. Even as Cuba moves toward more and more capitalist measures, Raul Castro calls the latest economic market reforms steps that guarantee the "irreversibility of socialism." The word 'capitalism' dare not be spoken. Likewise, O'Donnell says, here in the U.S. what are clearly quasi-socialist programs like medicare, publicly subsidized universities and transportation, are NEVER referred to as such (except by right-wing nutballs).

It's an interesting point and a valid observation.

I also had a chuckle when he compared Raul Castro's proclamations on the recently approved 313 economic "reforms" as using language that Paul Ryan would approve of. You can see the quotes for yourself in the video. Basically, it's Raul pissing and moaning about the cost of unjustly maintaining a welfare state and about how it's time to start means testing for the ration book and other Cuban state subsidies.

Let me be use clearer language: it's all about the Cuban state ending the fiction of equality and not only recognizing but also codifying class differences. The only thing missing from Raul's statements was calling half the population "welfare queens."

So, look out, mis amigos.  Here come a batch of market reforms. Some of which have always been inevitable and that the Cuban dictatorship has merely postponed for a half century. And a whole lot more that are going to be savage capitalism in its worst form. Nothing like a market economy in the Third World to neatly shake out the rich from the poor.

On the positive side, Cubans will now be allowed to travel abroad. I think that's very white of the Castro boys, no?  Not sure what brought on this bout of excessive generosity and permissiveness given that Cubans have NOT been allowed to freely travel since the early 1960′s. I mean, there was always some B.S. reason why travel was prohibited. So, what's changed in the world that now makes it ok? (The best part of this, however, is how Cuban apologists abroad will now react, given that they have always contended that Cubans were free to travel! LMAO).

In reality, this new privilege will remain mostly abstract for the overwhelming majority of Cubans who earn about $25 a month and not only do not qualify for most tourist visas but couldn't even pay the cab fare to get to a foreign consulate.

Cubans will also now be allowed to sell their own houses and cars!  Wonders never cease, do they? Fact is, Cubans have been buying and selling such stuff for years, albeit "informally" — on the black market. The legalization of land sales grease the vast accumulation of wealth by elites who, until now, have had to remain somewhat covert. The inequality that, in fact, runs deep through Cuban society will now be quickly highlighted and increased as the desperate poor start to sell of their assets to the privileged and connected and corrupt.

There's also going to be a lot more poor people to prey upon as Cuba moves ahead with plans to cut one million workers from state payrolls (a veritable wet dream for Scott Walker!). They will now be allowed to legalize the already thriving black market in personal services and menial trades, though now without a ration book and with heavy taxation.

Ahh, perhaps this economic reform is entirely inevitable and we should go easy on the dinosaurs running the state.

What is not to be forgiven is the complete and total lack of even a whisper of political reform. It's half-assed perestroika with no glasnost.

The Stalinoid economic structure and its political companion have always been rationalized as a response to this or that threat.  OK. If the threat has dissipated enough to allow a liberalization in the economic sphere, what's the justification for maintaining a complete ban on democracy and civil liberties? What's the great fear? That if elections are held and right-wingers are elected, they will privatize the economy like Raul is doing?

Well, yes. that IS the rationalization.

The reality, of course, is quite different. This is golden parachute time for the octogenerian Cuban nomenklatura.  Thus is pinata time!

Before exiting the historical stage, the ruling elite is going to cash in its strategic chips, just as the Soviet leadership did 20 years ago. More and more officials with access to state property, funding and power will grab as much of the newly privatized economy as possible. If you were in that position, would you risk getting unelected out of power? I don't think so.

The Cuban people? Well, screw them. They will now get all the deficits of Western capitalist society with none of its benefits. More unemployment, more dog-eat-dog competition, fewer state services. They will not, however, get any freedom of speech, any right to assemble or petition their government for redress, no impartial (at least in name) justice system, and certainly no open and competitive elections.

It's the worst of both worlds.

Socialismo O Muerte!

P.S. Yes, I know O'Donnell is a centrist Democrat. Yes, I know the U.S. undermined and subverted Cuba for decades. Yes, I know the U.S. embargo on Cuba should be lifted. I know education  is free in Cuba (though there is no academic freedom). And its hospitals are also free (if you bring your own bedding and antibiotics). None of that changes one word offered above.

Memo to Chomsky: Retire

I was sort of waiting for this. Noam Chomsky coming out in public to declare that Osama Bin Laden was an "unarmed victim" and, better, to strongly suggest he just might also be innocent i.e. that he's just bullshitting when he claims credit for the Al Qaeda attacks.

Chomsky argues:

In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it "believed" that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn't know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence – which, as we soon learned, Washington didn't have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that "we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda."

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's "confession," but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

Sorry, Noam. But I'm gonna put my down on the greater possibility that Bin Laden has been intimately involved in the killing of thousands than you puffed along a 26 mile run. It was also back in the 90′s that Bin Laden openly declared war on the United States and quickly began to prove it. I daresay he was a good deal more effective in achieving his goals than Chomsky has been in overthrowing world capitalism. Bin Laden's military attacks led to the deaths of thousands — mostly Shia Arabs– and he proudly positioned himself as an active commander of a global armed force.  This was no empty boast. It was a deadly reality.

When Bin Laden was surprised by U.S. commandos, whether he was in his pajamas at the moment, or whether he was oiling a rifle or dying his beard, he was –nevertheless– the commander of a force actively continuing a war against civilians across the globe, including Americans.  He was a target — not an unarmed victim as Chomsky bleats.

Natch, we're treated to the usual political symmetries and asymmetries by Chomsky.  Code-naming OBL Geronimo was an imperialist choice of words. Bush has killed more people than OBL. The U.S. harbored the anti-Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch.  True or not true, they don't change the underlying fact that OBL — as the leader of an international murder organization– was armed and dangerous even if he was in his P.J.'s playing with his dongle. And even if the U.S. is rife with hypocrisy. That changes nothing.

Chomsky asks how we would have reacted if an Al Qaeda squad had flown into Washington D.C., assassinated the president and dumped his body into the Atlantic.  I don't think we have to search very hard for the answer as that is more or less what Al Qaeda did do!  They flew two planes into office buildings that house up to 25,000 civilians at a time. killed as many as of them as they could,  and buried them under a sea of steel and rubble. They flew a third plane into the Pentagon and tried to kill as many U.S.military officers as possible. And they used a fourth plane, unsuccessfully, to try and kill their commander-in-chief.

We know how we reacted to all this. Bin Laden went on to camera to gloat over his butchery and to mock the dead. We went after him, cornered him, and blew his head off. It took ten years to get to but seems like a fair enough deal to me.

I don't think sending commandos into other countries to assassinate leaders we don't like is a defensible U.S. policy.  But sending in soldiers to execute an active commander of a ruthless and lethal enemy force who is being protected by the government whose sovereignty we violated is a once in a decade exception I am more than happy to tolerate AND celebrate.

Just what did Chomsky propose in this case? That U.S. forces ask Pakistan to extradite the criminal they were harboring and and then have Ramsey Clark defend him in court? Or was Chomsky wishing to parlay with OBL and ask him, come on Osama, aren't you just making up all this crap about what you're doing?

Chomsky was a courageous voice during Vietnam and has often been a valuable counter-point to official propaganda.

But not for a long time.

Noam, it's time to retire.

The Gender Politics Of The Midwest Labor Fight

My one and only daughter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, publishes an opinion piece in this Sunday's New York Times about the impact, good and bad, of cops and firefighters moving to the front of the current labor war sweeping the Midwest.

We Work Hard, but Who's Complaining?
By NATASHA VARGAS-COOPER
Published: April 2, 2011Los Angeles

WHEN a couple dozen brawny, uniformed and helmeted firefighters, led by a bagpipe player, marched through a crowd of pro-union protesters in Madison, Wis., last month, I knew, almost to a certainty, that Gov. Scott Walker had picked a fight with the wrong crew.

As the firemen assembled on the Statehouse steps, the swelling, boisterous crowd, which had raucously encircled and occupied the Capitol for days, pushing back against Governor Walker's plan to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights, all of a sudden slipped into silent reverence.  READ THE REST HERE.

Whoring For The Butcher

This photo, with me on the left, dates from happier times — at least for me.  This shot was taken in 1984 or so when the man in the middle, Father Miguel D'Escoto, was serving as foreign minister for the Nicaraguan Sandinista government (the woman on the right is one of his nieces).  Despite the rhetoric and the intervention of the Reagan administration, the Sandinistas were hardly running some sort of authoritarian dictatorship.  It was a revolutionary regime but there was a vibrant, legal opposition (in spite of its direct links to the armed contras), civil liberties were imperfect but better than most places in Central America, and there was a mixed economy with more than enough room for the private sector.

The cream of the Nicaraguan intelligentsia stood with the Sandinistas and D'Escoto — educated at Columbia — was an erudite and wise voice in the mix.

Unfortunately, he has gone off the deep end in the intervening years and has been one of the very, very few intellectuals who has remained loyal –if not servile– to Sandinista leader and national president, Daniel Ortega.  Far from being a Commie, Ortega has proved to be a puerile PRI-style demagogue. He postures as a revolutionary but governs with the extreme right wing and the ossified Catholic hierarchy while tolerating no opposition or debate in his own sclerotic party.

Ok, so it's one thing to be an aging, pathetic lap dog for a tin-pot demagogue like Ortega. It's quite another to accept the position, as he did today, to become the official UN representative for The Butcher of Tripoli.  That's right, the former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister is now repping in the UN for Muammar Gaddafi.

The Sandinista Revolution was a rather glorious event with a lot in common with the current Arab Spring. The Sandinistas were maybe a couple hundred dedicated revolutionaries who had been fighting the dynastic Somoza regime for more than a decade. But in 1979, thousands of mostly unorganized, really fed-up young people — mostly teenagers– joined the insurrection. Braving tanks and airplanes of the regime, these young men and women gave their lives to push a corrupt U.S.-backed dictatorship from power. The Sandinistas were young and fresh and while mostly socialists of some sort or another, they seemed to have learned many of the hard and bitter lessons derived from the Cuban experience.

I long ago overcame my disappointment and disgust with Ortega who today seems little more than a power-drunk hustler who kisses the ass of Chavez, Ahmadinejad and…. Gaddafi.  I thought I had done the same with D'Escoto.

But I had a pang of nausea this afternoon when I heard of D'Escoto being appointed as Libya's new UN ambassador.

Truth is, I don't give a plugged nickel for him.  Thinking about those hundreds, thousands of Nicaraguan youth, however, who gave their lives to battle Somoza and then the contras only to have their sacrifice defiled by this deluded old man, really makes me sick.

Juan Cole's Open Letter to the Left on Libya

The Libyan revolutionary forces, under western air cover, are now rapidly pushing back Gaddafi's lines and advancing westward. The momentum has once again shifted and there are few betting on the regime's future. Would the Left actually be disappointed if the intervention was swift and successful and not a prolonged quagmire that embroiled U.S. imperialism in dirty oil deals? What happens if it actually works?  Below the video, see leftist professor Juan Cole's Open Letter to the Left on Libya in which he compares the anti-imperialist absolutist ban on western military intervention to the absolutist ban on abortion by religious fanatics.

A teaser graph from Juan's essay. Read the whole thing.

Some have charged that the Libya action has a Neoconservative political odor. But the Neoconservatives hate the United Nations and wanted to destroy it. They went to war on Iraq despite the lack of UNSC authorization, in a way that clearly contravened the UN Charter. Their spokesman and briefly the ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, actually at one point denied that the United Nations even existed. The Neoconservatives loved deploying American muscle unilaterally, and rubbing it in everyone's face. Those who would not go along were subjected to petty harassment. France, then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz pledged, would be "punished" for declining to fall on Iraq at Washington's whim. The Libya action, in contrast, observes all the norms of international law and multilateral consultation that the Neoconservatives despise. There is no pettiness. Germany is not 'punished' for not going along. Moreover, the Neoconservatives wanted to exercise primarily Anglo-American military might in the service of harming the public sector and enforced 'shock therapy' privatization so as to open the conquered country to Western corporate penetration. All this social engineering required boots on the ground, a land invasion and occupation. Mere limited aerial bombardment cannot effect the sort of extreme-capitalist revolution they seek. Libya 2011 is not like Iraq 2003 in any way. MORE…

How Fascism Works

The footage being carried by CNN and others of how an alleged rape victim is manhandled and brazenly kidnapped by the thugs in the Libyan security forces tells you all you want to know about the character of the regime. In any civilized country in the world, the outburst of this woman would have not risen beyond the level of hotel security.  And the police would have taken her testimony instead of spiriting her way, beating the press and smashing their cameras. This is a thug regime in Tripoli and this smashede sooner it is smashed, the better.

By the way, looking at the video below which includes additional footage, I'm wondering if the Libyan government spokesman we see is actually our commenter AV2TS.  It sure sounds like something he would say.

The Marxist Argument For Libyan Intervention

Marxist scholar Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon, and is currently Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London.  Some of the argument contained in this piece is shoe-horned into some rigid ideological boxes, but the core of his thesis is a potent rebuke to the knee-jerk "no intervention" chants.

Here's a few key graphs but read the whole piece via the link above:

The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous. Equally preposterous is the idea that what they are after is laying their hands on Libyan oil. In fact, the whole range of Western oil and gas companies is active in Libya: Italy's ENI, Germany's Wintershall, Britain's BP, France's Total and GDF Suez, US companies ConocoPhillips, Hess, and Occidental, British-Dutch Shell, Spain's Repsol, Canada's Suncor, Norway's Statoil, etc. Why then are Western powers intervening in Libya today, and not in Rwanda yesterday and Congo yesterday and today?…



…To these considerations one should add the following: it is nonsensical, and an instance of very crude "materialism," to dismiss as irrelevant the weight of public opinion on Western governments, especially in this case on nearby European governments. At a time when the Libyan insurgents were urging the world more and more insistently to provide them with a no-fly zone in order to neutralize the main advantage of Gaddafi's forces, and with the Western public watching the events on television — making it impossible that a mass-scale slaughter in Benghazi would go unseen, as it was so often the case in other places (like the above-mentioned Hama, for instance, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo) — Western governments would not only have incurred the wrath of their citizens, but they would have completely jeopardized their ability to invoke humanitarian pretexts for further imperialist wars like the ones in the Balkans or Iraq. Not only their economic interests, but also the credibility of their own ideology was at stake. And the pressure of Arab public opinion certainly played a role in the call by the Arab League of States for a no-fly zone over Libya, even though there can be no doubt that most Arab regimes were wishing that Gaddafi could put down the uprising, and thus reverse the revolutionary wave that has been sweeping the whole region and shaking their own regimes since the beginning of this year….



…Can anyone claiming to belong to the left just ignore a popular movement's plea for protection, even by means of imperialist bandit-cops, when the type of protection requested is not one through which control over their country could be exerted? Certainly not, by my understanding of the left. No real progressive could just ignore the uprising's request for protection — unless, as is too frequent among the Western left, they just ignore the circumstances and the imminent threat of mass slaughter, paying attention to the whole situation only once their own government got involved, thus setting off their (normally healthy, I should add) reflex of opposing the involvement. In every situation when anti-imperialists opposed Western-led military interventions using massacre prevention as their rationale, they pointed to alternatives showing that the Western governments' choice of resorting to force only stemmed from imperialist designs….

John Judis On What The Left Got Wrong About Libya

An excellent and lucid piece.

I think Judis hits all the right points including questions about consultation with Congress. I think that an important and not insignificant issue. Unfortunately, for the last 30 years BOTH political parties have totally punted on exercising congressional power over the waging of war. That's not an excuse for Obama's action. It's a reality.

Dumbest Libya Tweets Of The Day