COMMENT
Comment So Long, Civil Liberties 'Lost in the rhetorical posturing of political crime-fighting is any understanding of the social conditions that propel so many inner-city blacks toward the...
...In fact, it would turn employers and schoolteachers into Border Patrol officers...
...Unfortunately, even the new and improved leadership of the AFL-CIO may not be up to that task...
...Alex English of the players' association made the obvious point: that the American flag should mean the freedom to dissent...
...Peltier was convicted of murder after the FBI engaged in a firefight with members of the American Indian Movement at the Pine Ridge reservation in 1975...
...There's a cheap and sleazy effort under way to pin our economic woes on immigrants...
...When mosque members confronted them, one of the men attempted to force headphones onto a worshiper's head for a live interview...
...Native-American activist Leonard Peltier remains a political prisoner of the U.S...
...There is an alternative to pesticide berries—atd that's organically grown ones...
...Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich wouldn't even appear on one of the Sunday morning shows during the GM strike, according to The Washington Post, because the White House feared it "might look like Reich was taking sides against GM," even though he had urged the strikers to settle...
...Two years after California's tough 'three strikes and you're out' law went into effect, twice as many defendants have been imprisoned under the law for marijuana possession as for murder, rape, and kidnapping combined," The New York Times reports...
...Last December, the U.S...
...Clinton also says that he wants to get federal agents more involved in tracking down teenage gang members who peddle drugs...
...Despite efforts to ban the pesticide, the strawberry growers manage to keep on using it...
...Comment So Long, Civil Liberties 'Lost in the rhetorical posturing of political crime-fighting is any understanding of the social conditions that propel so many inner-city blacks toward the underground economy of crime and drugs.' —Salim Muwakkil President Clinton is trying to fuel his reelection campaign by setting fire to the Bill of Rights...
...In a remarkable move, the House voted 269 to 151 to deny benefits even to children who are born in the United States if their parents are undocumented immigrants...
...Peltier has consistently maintained his innocence, and even the government concedes that there is no direct evidence against him...
...McCaffrey, who headed the U.S...
...Recently, the President threatened to remove a federal judge—one of his own appointees, no less—tor having the gall to dismiss evidence in a drug case because it was turned up during an illegal search...
...It's an ominous beginning...
...Some 1,600 Californians were sickened by methyl bromide that year...
...To prove it...
...Sprayed as a gas, it has injured many pickers and poisoned the air in neighborhoods near treated fields...
...The gist of the bill was to allow states to bar children of undocumented immigrants from getting a public education...
...the White House issued a challenge to Republican legislators to compare the records of Clinton's judicial appointees with those of Republican presidents...
...Leonard Peltier's next real chance for parole is in December 2008...
...In California, the big growers spray methyl bromide onto their strawberry fields...
...Clearly, the enormous growth in the prison population has done nothing to reduce drug abuse or crime, or the conditions that create these social ills...
...Two FBI agents and one AIM member were killed in the firefight...
...An African-American male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five has an 80 percent chance of encountering the criminal-justice system," Salim Muwakkil points out in a recent column for In These Times...
...We saw the power of organized labor...
...At that time, Robert T. Johnson was running for Bronx district attorney, and he issued a statement declaring his opposition to the new law...
...Too often, American piety does exactly the opposite: It immobilizes dissent and bashes difference...
...The Republicans want to rewrite everything, from scriptures to the Constitution, so that the sins of the parents fall on their offspring...
...In late March, Pataki, who has repeatedly clashed with Johnson on the death penalty, removed him from a high-profile case against an ex-convict charged with killing a police officer...
...But on March 20, the Parole Board overruled that recommendation...
...Pataki made good on his campaign promise and pushed the death penalty into law in New York in 1995...
...This may not be the end of the story, though, since there's discontent at other UAW locals, and the UAW is gearing up for national bargaining this summer...
...That's odd...
...With the appointment of drug czar Barry McCaffrey, a four-star general and the first military officer ever to head the White House drug office, Clinton announced a sudden change in approach...
...Knowing his position on capital punishment, the voters in Johnson's district went ahead and elected him...
...Now, after appointing McCaffrey, the President has asked Congress to increase the number of drug-policy staff positions to 150...
...And there was always the possibility that the court might sentence the wrong person to death...
...Abdul-Rauf...
...It's the corporations exporting our jobs and slashing our wages that are at fault...
...Labor Might For a while there in March, we had a glimpse of yesterday, and perhaps a glimpse of tomorrow...
...Capital punishment was an expensive and inefficient crime deterrent, argued Johnson...
...Unfortunately, the UAW itself seemed uneasy about its own might...
...According to a recent report, 321 California elementary schools were within one-and-a-half miles Of commercial strawberry farms that used more than five tons of the stuff in 1992 alone...
...On March 21 two Denver disc jockeys and a third man broke into the Colorado Islamic Center, blasting "The Star-Spangled Banner" on a trumpet...
...Do not come to live off law-abiding taxpayers," he said with customary charity...
...More black youths than ever are being exposed to jail culture...
...In 1984, California passed a law that would have banned methyl bromide in 1991, but the growers succeeded in pressuring the legislature for a five-year extension...
...Clinton is struggling to demonstrate that he's as tough as any Republican...
...But while the President does his best to make the Congressional Republicans look like card-carrying members of the ACLU, the law Congress did pass is bad enough...
...American Piety A few months ago in these pages, Barbara King-solver said: "Even though we're a secular state, we're deeply religious about the religion of America...
...And what has Clinton done to deserve this...
...Local housing authorities will begin holding eviction hearings for people who are accused of illegal activity, or whose guests or kids are accused of illegal activity...
...Methyl bromide damages the brain and nervous system, and causes birth defects in animals...
...Strawberry Fields It's strawberry season, time to eat those ruby fruits straight out of green plastic cartons, or in your cereal, or on top of vanilla ice cream, or in a shortcake or a rhubarb pie...
...The growers ha« persuaded the legislature to grant another extension...
...government...
...A common quip in California is that half the state's population will soon be behind bars, and the other half will be employed as guards...
...The worst example is his sudden boosterism for the war on drugs...
...The parole officer investigating his case actually sided with Peltier, noting his good behavior in prison, and recommending parole...
...Clinton's judges have taken fewer "pro-defendant" stances than the Republican appointees, the White House boasts...
...evidently, do their kids...
...The New York Times didn't cover it...
...So because Peltier maintains his innocence, he can't get paroled...
...The Washington Post gave it a total of forty-eight words...
...They did not remove their shoes...
...Governor George Pataki wants to keep it that way even if he has to prevent elected officials from representing their constituents...
...But for the unions to prevail, they need to take their own power seriously, along with their obligation to workers 'To believe that patriotism wilt not flourish if patriotic cermonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.' —Justice Robert Jackson, as cited by Nat Hentoff 'It is more convenient to keep an innocent man in prison than to deal with the controversy.' —Leonard Peltier Defense Committee around the country who may not be union members yet...
...But Pataki isn't letting Johnson serve his electorate...
...After seventeen days out on strike, the UAW conceded the main issue: allowing GM to buy brake parts from non-union shops, as long as the company agrees to increase employment at Dayton...
...Thus GM buys off a small part of the labor movement at the expense of the rest...
...Never mind the facts...
...But the trial against Peltier proceeded, and it was a joke...
...Some of Abdul-Rauf's fellow citizens in Denver speedily communicated their adoration of the flag, mixed with a nice smattering of hate...
...Living in public housing is a privilege, not a right," Henry Cisneros declared...
...Not only is Pataki's action unprecedented, it is undemocratic...
...But immigrants make an easy target...
...In typical fashion, the President then backed down from his threat...
...The UAW then decided to end the strike prematurely, and on GM's terms...
...But Newt Gingrich disagrees...
...In the last few months, the President has proposed legislation that would crack down on criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists by curtailing the civil liberties of all Americans...
...But the point was not lost...
...Following his about-face on the drug policy office, the President announced he would pump $250 million over the next year into the tried-and-failed war on drugs...
...The House cut provisions that would expand the wire-tapping powers of the federal government, revive guilt by association, allow for the summary deportation of suspected terrorists, and target groups in the United States suspected of raising money for terrorist activity abroad...
...Parole Commission took up his latest appeal...
...They're not causing our decline...
...This country has a long history of that," added Abdul-Rauf...
...By the way, the parole officer who recommended in Peltier's favor has since lost his position with the U.S...
...There must be something better to do with that $35 million...
...But the President is reaching new lows with the repressive measures he's proposing as he builds up to his next campaign...
...Ironically, the Republican-controlled House saved us from some of the most egregious portions of Clinton's terrorism bill...
...That extension is now expiring, and guess what...
...Three thousand UAW members at two brake factories in Dayton...
...Free Leonard Peltier...
...From now on the rule for residents [of housing projects] who commit crimes and peddle drugs should be: One strike and you're out," he announced...
...This fundamentalism was recently on display in the NBA...
...It seems much more interested in reelecting Bill Clinton and the Democrats than in anything else...
...And his rush to sacrifice both his principles and our legal rights raises another question: Why vote for him...
...The desecration clearly targeted Abdul-Rauf...
...During the strike, it even allowed its own members to cross the picket line, as long as they were working on non-GM parts in the Dayton factories...
...Dictating Death Enter the New York state court system these days, and you might not come out alive...
...At the national level, the methyl-bromide crowd his managed to prevail, with the connivance of the Clinton Administration (see "Slime Green," Page 18), so much so that the pesticide might soon be permanently »¦ empt from the Clean Air Act...
...We support Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and we support the American flag, which symbolizes Mahmoud's right to precisely the action he is taking," English said...
...The reasoning was right out of a kangaroo court: "You have not given a factual, specific account of your actions at the time of the offense that is consistent with the jury's verdict of guilt," the Board wrote in its letter of denial to Peltier...
...which suspended Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets without pay...
...An appellate court found that witnesses lied and were coerced, evidence against Peltier was fabricated, and evidence supporting him was suppressed...
...Come to America for opportunity...
...So do the 200 hate crimes against Muslims that followed the Oklahoma City bombing...
...One of the participants wore a mock turban and a Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf T-shirt...
...As the prisons fill with nonviolent drug offenders, the President is introducing policies that will make the problem even worse...
...It recently announced that it was pouring $35 million into the November election races...
...Clinton's tough-guy posturing raises the question: Who will defend our civil liberties...
...Southern Command in Panama, assured reporters he would put the money to good use, collaborating with Pentagon military planners to devise a domestic anti-drug strategy...
...But Pataki may have undermined his cause...
...Clinton is on a roll with his 8/May 1996 punitive policies, and he is showing an alarming lack of concern for civil rights...
...since the last time we checked the fine print in the Constitution, it said anyone born here was a citizen...
...the NBA charged, must stand during the national anthem, or he could not play basketball...
...They're more expensiS but they taste better, and they don't stain the oil-science...
...You can't be for God and for oppression...
...The American flag, says Abdul-Rauf, is a "symbol of tyranny...
...He rammed NAFTA and GATT down labor's throat, and now he tries to toss it a lozenge, blathering about the need for corporations to be good citizens—after they make all the profits they can...
...At the beginning of his term, Clinton gutted the White House drug-policy office, drastically reducing the number of staff positions in that office from 146 to twenty-five...
...No one was ever charged with killing the AIM member, but Peltier and three others were charged in the deaths of the FBI agents...
...That's hardly the way to build solidarity...
...But still he sits behind bars...
...And the mainstream media have all but ignored the story...
...Employers would be responsible for verifying the work papers of their employees, and schoolteachers and principals would be responsible for verifying the citizenship papers of their students...
...Music and shoes are forbidden in Muslim mosques...
...Abdul-Rauf had staged a season-long protest against the anthem because he sees the religious fervor that underlies American patriotism as conflicting with his religion, Islam...
...His action may give the defendant, Angel Diaz, grounds to appeal, especially if Diaz receives a death sentence...
...And he demonstrated his disdain for civil liberties long before the Oklahoma City bombing when he introduced his first crime bill...
...But the bad news is that the strawberry habit is a dangerous one...
...See "The Return of Reefer Madness" by Mike Males and Faye Docuyanan, Page 26...
...who attends the Colorado Islamic Center, but was out of town during the break-in...
...Among other things, it seriously limits the ability of prisoners on death row to appeal their cases, and creates several new categories of federal offenses punishable by death...
...Don't Bless the Child On March 20, the House voted to crack down on the children of immigrants who are here illegally...
...Instead, the crackdown breeds rampant distrust of the police, especially in black communities, where abuse and the overzealous pursuit of drug offenders are perceived as part of a concerted attack on African-American youth...
...Parole Commission, according to those close to the case...
...Clinton has advertised his avid support for the death penalty since his first Presidential campaign, when he attended the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a mentally handicapped African-American prisoner in Arkansas...
...The bill aims to reduce even legal immigration by 30 percent over the next five years, and it would increase the number of Border Patrol officers...
...Such "pranks" send a powerful message...
...Nothing better illustrates the heroic audacity of the President's attempt to run against his own first term" than the resurrection of the drug war, Paul Gigot wrote in The Wall Street Journal...
...The Supreme Court ruled fourteen years ago that these children were entitled to public education...
...Ohio, demonstrated that labor still has the clout to bring industry to a standstill...
...Now Clinton is complaining that the House "took the teeth" out of the bill...
...Two of the accused were acquitted on grounds of self-defense, and the charges against the third were dropped...
...I don't think you can argue the facts...
Vol. 60 • May 1996 • No. 5
