Wednesday News

• Why Bush Gave Scooter Libby a Pass


• 'Panic Mode' Over GOP Revolt on Iraq


• Fred Thompson is Dumb As Hell


• DC Madam Exposes GOP Senator as Hypocritical Whoremonger

  "While Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) was busy defending the sanctity of marriage against gays and the "Hollywood left" publicly, he was busy denigrating it behind closed doors with prostitutes."

• 62 Immigrants Die in US Jails

  "Sixty-two immigrants have died in US jails since 2004 for lack of medical care, human rights groups told members of the US Congress Monday. 'Deficient medical care in immigration detention is a systematic problem and needs to be addressed,' said Tom Jawetz, of the American Civil Liberties Union, the largest US group defending civil rights," reports Agence France-Presse.

• EU Mediterranean States Call for Middle East Peace Conference

  "Francois Murphy reports for Reuters that the foreign ministers of EU's Mediterranean states - Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Malta, Romania and Slovenia have welcomed Arab states' efforts for peace following the failed US-backed 'road map.' The EU states have called for an international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying Israel should make more concessions for peace."

• Iraq Study Group plan puts Dems in defense-bill bind

  Elana Schor and Manu Raju of The Hill report, "A bipartisan proposal to implement the Iraq Study Group's recommendations is gaining momentum among Senate Republicans, but is putting Democrats in a tough position with an anti-war base that wants the chamber to take a much harder line during this month's Iraq war debate."

• Official: Iraq Gov't Missed All Targets

  Anne Flaherty and Anne Gearan report for the Associated Press: "A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the US-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reforms. 'The 'pivot point' for addressing the matter will no longer be September 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called 'surge' plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released,' the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft is still under discussion."

• Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations

  John Solomon of the Washington Post reports: "As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. 'There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,' Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005. Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act."

How To Screw an American Out of a Job

How To Not Hire An American: MUST SEE VIDEO

"Our goal is clearly NOT TO FIND a qualified and interested U.S. worker."

Daily Kos reports:

"It's on video, believe it or not, and even presented as a selling point to peddle their services by Cohen & Grigsby Law Firm. That's right, this group of attorneys put an entire seminar on how to screw over the American worker on YouTube. Imagine that, a seminar from lawyers on how to make sure one doesn't have to hire an American worker!"

In the video attorneys explain how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and how they disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers.

'Our goal is clearly NOT to find a qualified U.S. worker ... our objective is to get this person a green card ... so certainly we are not going to try to find a place where applicants would be most numerous.' -- Lawrence M. Lebowitz, Vice President of Marketing, Cohen & Grigsby

And on getting rid of extremely qualified applicants:

'If someone looks like they are very qualified, if necessary schedule an interview, go through the whole process to find a legal basis to disqualify them.'

From Dr. Norm Matloff:

The law on employer-sponsored green cards is similarly riddled with loopholes. Though that law requires that American workers must be sought before the employer hires a foreign worker for a job, it is routinely circumvented. I've mentioned the outrageous comments by a well-known immigration attorney:

'Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply.'

--Joel Stewart, Legal Rejection of U.S. Workers Immigration Daily, April 24, 2000.

Here are just a few examples of fake job ads this seminar is referring to, run in the Sacramento Bee. The Bee's editor refuses to discuss the matter, and the fraudulent ads continue to run each week.

This video was amplified by the Programmers Guild and the original video clips are here.

This is what Bush and Congress via the current "comprehensive" immigration reform bill really mean by a 'shortage of skilled U.S. workers.'

Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.

Look at this folks, this is how bad it is.  A major selling point of law firms is all about how to screw over the American worker.

UPDATE: 06.18.07 4pm EST. It appears Cohen & Grigsby Law Firm has taken down their seminar videos. What a surprise but you can see at one time the originals were there.  We cannot put back up the originals for it's unclear if that would be a violation of copyright law, but let me assure you, they exist.

Technorati tags: H-1B, immigration, attorneys, labor, corruption, Department of Labor, green card, employment, news, video, youtube

Escape From North Korea

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

CHINESE-NORTH KOREAN BORDER

In an archipelago of safe houses here, part of a 21st-century Underground Railroad, I met groups of people who live every moment with sickening fear.

These are North Koreans who have escaped to the “free world” — China — and are now at constant risk of being captured by Chinese police. The Chinese government, in a disgraceful breach of its obligations under the 1951 Refugees Convention, hands these escapees back to North Korea, where they face beatings and imprisonment, occasionally even execution.

In one shelter is a 14-year-old North Korean girl: shy, sweet and terrified. Her parents led her across the frozen Tumen River from North Korea in the middle of winter, but then they became separated while trying to flee the police. “I don’t know where my parents are, or if they are even alive,” she said.

Now a joint crackdown by the North Koreans and Chinese is greatly increasing the peril for people like her.

The North Korean authorities used to detain citizens returned by China for a few weeks or months and then release them after a bit of “re-education.” But about a year ago, North Korea greatly increased the penalties.

Now those returned by China are often sentenced to prison for several years, and repeat offenders or Christians can be sent with their entire families to labor camps for life.

Some North Koreans told me that their government now holds regular sentencing rallies, at which the punishments are publicly announced — or in extreme cases, such as those who became Christian evangelists while in China, the accused are executed in front of the crowd by firing squad.

One Christian I spoke to had been beaten so badly after his return by China that he tried to commit suicide by swallowing a handful of pins. The prison, not wanting to have to dispose of a corpse, freed him — and he eventually made his way back to China.

“If he is sent back again,” said his wife, “he’ll be beaten to death.”

China has also increased its punishments for its own citizens who are caught helping North Koreans. The penalty used to be a fine, but now it is jail for a year or two — or for a decade or more if someone smuggles escapees to South Korea.

“Now most Chinese don’t dare help the Koreans,” said one local official who secretly protects a safe house full of North Koreans — and who even stood guard outside as I interviewed them. “But I feel so badly for them. They’re just wretched.”

With the help of incredibly courageous conductors on the modern Underground Railroad, I visited four shelters that together house dozens of North Koreans, and residents of a fifth shelter were brought to my vehicle so that I could talk to them safely. My entire visit was conducted under very tight security to make sure I did not lead police to the safe houses.

The North Koreans I talked to described a society that is increasingly corrupt and disillusioned. One said that even with the latest crackdown, a $400 bribe to guards will win a prisoner’s immediate release. Another estimated that up to 20 percent of North Koreans in her area are disaffected enough that they listen illegally to Chinese broadcasts.

Chinese and South Korean missionaries are also beginning to evangelize secretly in North Korea, a sign of weakening government control. One Chinese Christian I talked to had made four trips into North Korea to evangelize. “If I’d been caught, I don’t think I would have been executed,” she said, “but it wouldn’t have been good.”

All the same, none of these North Koreans thought an uprising was imminent. Indeed, a surprising number of them are so steeped in propaganda that they still insist that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is a good man. “The problem is with lower officials, not with Kim Jong-il himself,” claimed one man who has arranged for smugglers to bring his entire family out to freedom in China. (For more on the North Koreans, go to my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

President Bush should raise China’s breach of its international obligations with Hu Jintao. Mr. Bush might think of that 14-year-old girl, who spends her days minding two 9-year-old boys whose mothers were caught and sent back to North Korea. Those three children are modern reminders of the terrors of Anne Frank. They fear with every footstep outside their door that China will arrest them and send them back to their national torture chamber.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, China, North Korea, Prisons and Prisoners, Immigration and Refugees, news, commentary, op ed

Good Intentions. Bad Consequences.

Immigrants and Politics
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

A piece of advice for progressives trying to figure out where they stand on immigration reform: it’s the political economy, stupid. Analyzing the direct economic gains and losses from proposed reform isn’t enough. You also have to think about how the reform would affect the future political environment.

To see what I mean — and why the proposed immigration bill, despite good intentions, could well make things worse — let’s take a look back at America’s last era of mass immigration.

My own grandparents came to this country during that era, which ended with the imposition of severe immigration restrictions in the 1920s. Needless to say, I’m very glad they made it in before Congress slammed the door. And today’s would-be immigrants are just as deserving as Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

Moreover, as supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien, and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews.

Yet then as now there were some good reasons to be concerned about the effects of immigration.

There’s a highly technical controversy going on among economists about the effects of recent immigration on wages. However that dispute turns out, it’s clear that the earlier wave of immigration increased inequality and depressed the wages of the less skilled. For example, a recent study by Jeffrey Williamson, a Harvard economic historian, suggests that in 1913 the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers were around 10 percent lower than they would have been without mass immigration. But the straight economics was the least of it. Much more important was the way immigration diluted democracy.

In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn’t get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population — in general, the poorest and most in need of help — denied any political voice.

That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age, because those who might have demanded that politicians support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic social safety net didn’t have the right to vote. Conversely, the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal and sustaining its achievements, by creating a fully enfranchised working class.

But now we’re living in the second Gilded Age. And as before, one of the things making antiworker, unequalizing policies politically possible is the fact that millions of the worst-paid workers in this country can’t vote. What progressives should care about, above all, is that immigration reform stop our drift into a new system of de facto apartheid.

Now, the proposed immigration reform does the right thing in principle by creating a path to citizenship for those already here. We’re not going to expel 11 million illegal immigrants, so the only way to avoid having those immigrants be a permanent disenfranchised class is to bring them into the body politic.

And I can’t share the outrage of those who say that illegal immigrants broke the law by coming here. Is that any worse than what my grandfather did by staying in America, when he was supposed to return to Russia to serve in the czar’s army?

But the bill creates a path to citizenship so torturous that most immigrants probably won’t even try to legalize themselves. Meanwhile, the bill creates a guest worker program, which is exactly what we don’t want to do. Yes, it would raise the income of the guest workers themselves, and in narrow financial terms guest workers are a good deal for the host nation — because they don’t bring their families, they impose few costs on taxpayers. But it formally creates exactly the kind of apartheid system we want to avoid.

Progressive supporters of the proposed bill defend the guest worker program as a necessary evil, the price that must be paid for business support. Right now, however, the price looks too high and the reward too small: this bill could all too easily end up actually expanding the class of disenfranchised workers.

Photo Credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)

Related:

• Immigration Bill Provisions Gain Wide Support in Poll - New York Times

Technorati tags: Paul Krugman, New York Times, Immigration, Voter Registration and Requirements, Politics, Citizenship, news, commentary, op ed

Laughing and Crying

By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.

I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America’s great science and engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer read their names and each was handed their doctorate — in biotechnology, computing, physics and engineering — by the school’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson.

The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.’s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming — “Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang” — I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be Chinese, until “Paul Shane Morrow” saved the day. It was such a caricature of what President Jackson herself calls “the quiet crisis” in high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud that our country continues to build universities and a culture of learning that attract the world’s best minds. My complaint — why I also wanted to cry — was that there wasn’t someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next to President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.’s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we can’t educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we’d better make sure we can import someone else’s, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.

It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as wide as possible — to attract and keep the world’s first-round intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent. I’m serious. I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country — in any subject — should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.

Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is pleading with Congress to boost both the number of H-1B visas available to companies that want to bring in skilled foreign workers and the number of employment-based green cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies need them now, because we’re not training enough engineers, but they will, over time, start many more companies and create many more good jobs than they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that — and where innovation happens matters. It’s still where the best jobs will be located.

Folks, we can’t keep being stupid about these things. You can’t have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily than ever go back to their home countries to start companies — without it eventually impacting our standard of living — especially when we’re also slipping behind in high-speed Internet penetration per capita. America has fallen from fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.

My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of the Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make this an issue in the presidential campaign by creating a movement to demand that candidates focus on our digital deficits and divides. (See: http://www.techpresident.com.) Mr. Rasiej, who unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of New York City in 2005 on a platform calling for low-cost wireless access everywhere, notes that “only half of America has broadband access to the Internet.” We need to go from “No Child Left Behind,” he says, to “Every Child Connected.”

Here’s the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country — oxygen needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate change and competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian Magazine and author of the upcoming book “The First Campaign,” which deals with this theme. So right now, it’s mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr. Graff, but there is only so much they can do without Washington being focused and leading.

Which is why we’ve got to bring our occupation of Iraq to an end in the quickest, least bad way possible — otherwise we are going to lose Iraq and America. It’s coming down to that choice.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Immigration, Education, Colleges and Universities, Computers and the Internet, Engineering and Engineers, news, commentary, op ed

The Witness Next Door

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

One of the most unusual people in New Jersey these days is a tall 34-year-old black man named Daoud Hari. Others may lose their tempers at traffic jams on the turnpike, but he’s just glad he’s no longer being tortured.

Mr. Hari has just arrived in the U.S. from Chad and Darfur, where he says he was beaten and told repeatedly he was going to be executed. He is one of just a handful of Darfuris — his lawyer knows of two others — whom the U.S. has accepted as refugees.

I knew Mr. Hari in his previous life, because he interpreted for me early last year. We journeyed together along the Darfur-Chad border through a no man’s land of villages that were being attacked by Sudan’s janjaweed militia.

Mr. Hari helped me interview two orphan boys living under a tree, a 13-year-old girl shot in the chest, a 6-year-old boy trying desperately not to cry as doctors treated shrapnel wounds to his leg and a 15-year-old girl gang-raped by the janjaweed.

It is a different world there. It is the antipodes of New Jersey.

When our vehicle became stuck in the sand in one janjaweed area, we strained side by side to push it out before trouble arrived. We slept in the sand under the stars, we saw gruesome injuries, we witnessed people preparing to be killed, and we saw each other dusty and frightened. In that crucible, I grew steadily more impressed with Mr. Hari’s courage, for as a local person he was at greater risk of immediate execution than a foreigner like me.

He was scared, of course, but what drove him was a relentless determination to get out the story of what was happening to his fellow Darfuris. He was determined to fight genocide with the best weapon he had, his training in English.

Interpreters and drivers are the secret to good international reporting, and they do much of the work, take most of the risks and get none of the credit. Mr. Hari regularly interpreted for other journalists, repeatedly putting himself in danger to get out the stories.

Last August, he accompanied an ace Chicago Tribune reporter, Paul Salopek, into Darfur, but they were seized by an armed faction. Once, he said, a commander ordered his soldiers to execute him, but they were from the same tribe and balked. Another time, he says, a commander untied him and told him to escape — but he refused unless the driver was freed as well. So Mr. Hari was tied up again, and he was beaten as he was interrogated about his work with me and other journalists.

Finally, after more than a month, Sudan freed Mr. Hari along with Mr. Salopek and the driver. Eventually Mr. Hari made his way back to Chad, and the U.S. granted him status as a political refugee. It is disorienting to be with him here, where we are both clean, rested and safe.

Yet even here Mr. Hari is haunted by Darfur. He knows one brother was killed; the other was attacked and beaten, but Mr. Hari assumes he is still alive. Of his three sisters, Mr. Hari last saw one in 2003 and the others in 2006.

He plans to study and is also determined to speak out about Darfur and tell Americans what is happening to his people.

Mr. Hari’s presence in the U.S. underscores a profound difference between Darfur and past genocides: In the past, we could always claim that we didn’t fully appreciate what was going on until too late.

It was only a faint reed of an excuse, for in fact information always did trickle out about past genocides even as they were underway. But this time we can’t even feign ignorance.

A superb new documentary, “The Devil Came on Horseback,” provides a wrenching tour through the eyes of a tormented American military observer there. A handful of books chronicle the killings; one of them, “Not on Our Watch,” has hit the best-seller list with its suggestions for what citizens can do. President Bush has described the slaughter in Darfur as genocide since 2004.

Google Earth has developed a first-rate program to observe the devastation from above. On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, you can see a man whose eyes were gouged out by the janjaweed as well as video from the journey last year with Mr. Hari.

Or, if you live in New Jersey, you can simply turn to one of your newest neighbors, and see the pain in his eyes as he wonders if his sisters are still alive.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Darfur, Sudan, War Crimes, Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Immigration, Refugees, civil war, guerrilla warfare, news, commentary, op ed

Enough Already!

• A Nation in Silent Anger
  By Manuel Valenzuela

  "...Can you feel the betrayal of millions who for decades have been made to believe in the American myth of a nation benign and altruistic, only to become aware that only wickedness, greed and criminality define the Empire, that beyond the smoke and mirrors America's government is ruthless, corporatist and concerned only for the interests of the elite?..."

• "Are we headed for another Great Depression?"
  My talks with Elaine Meinel Supkis
  By Mike Whitney

  "...Our empire won't retreat from its distant borders but these same borders are bankrupting us for we never recovered from the Vietnam War, we literally papered over the mess which remained and continues to poison our nation. The military/industrial complex is not making us rich, it is making us poorer. And the paper being laid over all this is the same paper the Germans used in 1924 to paper over their own bankruptcy: printed money...."

• The War on Democracy
  An Interview - Audio Q & A With John Pilger

  John Pilger, talked about his new film: The War on Democracy which comes out on June 15th and takes a look at Latin America. The man himself says: "I've long regarded Latin America as the source of hopes of freedom from poverty for the very poor, and the current, extraordinary rising of millions against the old order is defying all the stereotypes."

• Inside Sadr City
  By Pepe Escobar
  Asia Times

  BAGHDAD - This is the 24-square-kilometer theater where a great part of Iraq's future is already being played out; a vital element in US President George W Bush's surge; the place Pentagon generals dream of smashing into submission; one of the largest and arguably most notorious slums in the world: Sadr (formerly Saddam) City.
  
  Sadr City is also, along with Gaza and the West Bank, the theater of the already evolving 21st-century war, pitting the high-tech Western haves against the slum-dwelling Third World have-nots. If the Bush administration had any intention of conquering any hearts and minds in Iraq, this is where it would be trying the hardest. Reality spells otherwise...."

• Feingold Rejects Compromise, Pushes Exit Strategy
  By John Nichols
  The Nation

  "Fifty-seven percent of Americans say that Congress should not compromise with President Bush in the Iraq War funding fight. That's the number that, according to a new CNN poll, wants Congress to give Bush another bill with a withdrawal timetable.
  
  
  Unfortunately, not all the Democrats on the Hill want to push back quite that hard. There is serious talk of giving Bush a substantial portion of the money with no strings attached and then returning to the issue later this year.
  
  
  Such a move would highlight the failure of all the major players to step up to the challenge the Iraq imbroglio poses...."

• Bush to veto new Iraq Bill
  The Daily Telegraph

  "THE White House has warned Democrats that President George W. Bush would veto an Iraq funding Bill that would bankroll the war in Iraq for just three months...."

• POLL: Most Americans back Iraq Pullout Timetable
  Reuters AlterNet

  "Six out of 10 U.S. adults support setting a timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, even though a clear majority predict civil war there if U.S. forces withdraw next year, according to a poll published on Wednesday...."

• Pelosi threat to sue Bush over Iraq bill
  By Jonathan E. Kaplan and Elana Schor
  The Hill

  "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is threatening to take President Bush to court if he issues a signing statement as a way of sidestepping a carefully crafted compromise Iraq war spending bill.
  
  Pelosi recently told a group of liberal bloggers, 'We can take the president to court' if he issues a signing statement, according to Kid Oakland, a blogger who covered Pelosi's remarks for the liberal website dailykos.com...."

• Afghan MPs demand end to military offensives
  Guardian Unlimited

  "Afghan MPs today called for an end to military offensives by international forces amid reports that 21 civilians had died in a wave of US-led air strikes yesterday...."

• CIA-backed raid 'killed 50 Afghan villagers'
  By Tom Coghlan in Kabul
  Telegraph

  "Military specialists with the CIA were among a US force accused of killing more than 50 civilians during the hunt for a Taliban commander in Afghanistan...."

• Afghanistan | No way to win hearts and minds
  Economist.com

  The killing of large numbers of civilians by American forces, through indisciplined firing or as a result of their heavy reliance on air-strikes, has been a bitter feature of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq-just as it was in Vietnam.

• Internet Calls Subject To Phone Tapping
  By Eric Thomas
  ABC News

  "Companies that provide Internet phone service have just six days to meet a deadline from the Justice Department. By next Monday, they'll have to make their systems easier to tap. That's right -- make it easier to secretly listen in on your phone calls, or face daily fines of $10,000 dollars...."

• Mayday Immigration Reform Demonstration: Video

  Watch the video: The police are brutal. It's only a matter of time. (Warning X-Rated Language in Video)

Technorati tags: America, Depression, Police, Iraq, Afghanistan, Domestic Spying, Democracy, Immigration