by Claire Bernish

Award-winning actor and longtime environmental and animal rights activist, James Cromwell, held nothing back in an interview late last year, when discussing ongoing exploitation and brutalization of Indigenous peoples battling Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

To Cromwell, like innumerable observers, that the government would lash out violently against Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and their supporters to defend the construction of a pipeline for Big Oil profit evinces systemic racism and oppression practiced since the first Europeans arrived in these lands.

Months of a veritable blackout by mainstream media, he contends, shows the appalling complicity of reporters obligated to deliver a narrative acceptable to corporate backers.

In a typical protest, Cromwell told The Young Turks’ Jordan Chariton, “for the most part, the police arrest people, but they behave very rationally. When they come to the Indigenous community, they behave like thugs. And that shows the racism that sort of underpins the entire thing.

“It’s either environmental justice for people of color in the East, or for Indigenous people here, in the middle of this country, who always get the short end of the stick.”

To wit, Cromwell gave the interview from the Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several encampments near the Lake Oahe reservoir on the Missouri River erected to peacefully block Dakota Access construction, and one of two which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers intends to evict.

Led by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, unnecessarily-militarized law enforcement from at least nine states have unleashed the full fury of the Police State against the unarmed water protectors in a pattern of escalation and brute force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, Tasers, bean bag projectiles, concussion grenades, sound cannons, and weaponized water, have left hundreds injured, traumatized, and even maimed.

Vanessa Dundon, a Native American water protector better known as Sioux Z, faces permanent vision loss in one eye after police launched a tear gas canister at her head, severing her retina, during the most explicitly barbarous crackdown on water protectors on Nov. 20 on Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge. Lacking health insurance, Sioux Z — who has acted as security and a first responder during such police offensives — has been forced to rely on crowdfunding for surgery necessary to save her sight. A non-Native supporter of the water protectors, Sophia Wilansky, had her arm blown to shreds by what might have been a Stinger grenade during the same skirmish as she delivered water to 400 people trapped on the bridge. Surgeons were still trying to save her arm and avoid the possibility of amputation — a medical effort also being partially funded with donations.

Eyewitnesses say both women appeared to have been intentionally targeted by police — an allegation reinforced by medics and first responders from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the City of Bismarck, who observed the riot-cop army aiming for water protectors’ heads and legs.

As many as 300 people suffered various injuries during the over six-hour attack by law enforcement. One tribal elder twice went into cardiac arrest amid the fog of tear gas, hail of rubber bullets, and — most astonishingly dangerous and appalling of all — a near-constant soaking by icy water in sub-freezing temperatures, a la 1960s police use of fire hoses against black civil rights protestors.

Cromwell’s distinction between the Standing Rock Sioux’ fight to preserve clean water and typical anti-fossil fuel protests isn’t an arbitrary one — and he would know from firsthand experience.

In December 2015, Cromwell and others were arrested for disorderly conduct after attempting to block the entrance to a Competitive Power Ventures power plant. A second arrest came in June 2016 for blockading the entrance to the Crestwood Compressor Station — part of an expansion of fracked-energy infrastructure greenlighted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and ignored by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, despite vociferous condemnation by local residents.

Similar to actions at Standing Rock, both incidents involved physically obstructing the commerce of Big Oil — but, quite unlike police defense of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Cromwell, and the other arrestees weren’t physically brutalized or treated as enemies of the State.
That striking contrast is additionally evidenced in mainstream media coverage — or astonishing lack thereof.

As TYT’s Chariton notes, corporate media arrives instantaneously at the scene when protests, rioting, or violence occurs following a police killing — such as with Ferguson and Baltimore — but in the case of Standing Rock, because the peaceful battle is against Big Oil, there has been a dearth of coverage by the mainstream press.

Asked to describe what he sees as this dereliction of duty by the corporate-backed media, Cromwell responde:
“They have a divided allegiance, because their allegiance should be to their viewership or their readership — but it’s not. It’s to the corporations. It’s all about the bottom line. And, therefore, they have to protect not only those sponsors, [but] the people who control the corporations who are usually involved in this sort of activity because it represents profits. And they have lost their connection, which has shown in this election — nobody believed the mainstream media.”

Controversy about the Dakota Access Pipeline has been a prime example of this, as corporate presstitutes continue pushing the official police accounts of violent incidents via Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier — whose laughably-thin explanations for officer use-of-force have been wholly invalidated by independent and alternative media outlets time and time again. In fact, independent journalists on the scene in Standing Rock have collected physical evidence of and filmed law enforcement engaged in the exact activities Kirchmeier denies.

Inaccurate or utter lack of reporting on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to end pipeline construction have been the nail in the coffin for many already weary from horrendous mainstream coverage of the 2016 presidential election cycle. Online alternative media — which has been a font of thorough and accurate information for both issues — presents quite the tenable option for those seeking non-corporate, non-establishment-biased journalism.

“That’s where people go,” Cromwell continued. “People who want to know what’s happening go online and find it — and it is there. There is real journalism, but it’s certainly not the mainstream media.”

by David Bacon

While the government officials developing and enforcing U.S. immigration policy will change on Jan. 20, the economic system in which they make that policy will not. As fear sweeps through immigrant communities in the United States, understanding that system helps us anticipate what a Trump administration can and can’t do in regard to immigrants, and what immigrants themselves can do about it.

Over the terms of the last three presidents, the most visible and threatening aspect of immigration policy has been the drastic increase in enforcement. President Bill Clinton presented anti-immigrant bills as compromises, and presided over the first big increase in border enforcement. George W. Bush used soft rhetoric, but sent immigration agents in military-style uniforms, carrying AK-47s, into workplaces to arrest workers, while threatening to fire millions for not having papers. Under President Barack Obama, a new requirement mandated filling 34,000 beds in detention centers every night. The detention system mushroomed, and over 2 million people were deported.

Enforcement, however, doesn’t exist for its own sake. It plays a role in a larger system that serves capitalist economic interests by supplying a labor force employers require. High levels of enforcement also ensure the profits of companies that manage detention and enforcement, who lobby for deportations as hard as Boeing lobbies for the military budget.

Immigrant labor is more vital to many industries than it’s ever been before. Immigrants have always made up most of the country’s farm workers in the West and Southwest. Today, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, about 57 percent of the country’s entire agricultural workforce is undocumented. But the list of other industries dependent on immigrant labor is long—meatpacking, some construction trades, building services, healthcare, restaurant and retail service, and more.

During the election campaign, candidate Donald Trump pledged in his “100-day action plan to Make America Great Again” to “begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country” on his first day in office. In speeches, he further promised to eventually force all undocumented people (estimated at 11 million) to leave.

In a society with one of the world’s highest rates of incarceration, crimes are often defined very broadly. In the past, for instance, under President George W. Bush federal prosecutors charged workers with felonies for giving a false Social Security number to an employer when being hired. He further proposed the complete enforcement of employer sanctions—the provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that forbids employers from hiring workers without papers. Bush’s order would have had the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) check the immigration status of all workers, and required employers to fire those without legal immigration status, before being blocked by a suit filed by unions and civil rights organizations.

Under President Obama, workplace enforcement was further systematized. In just one year, 2012, ICE audited 1600 employers. Tens of thousands of workers were fired during Obama’s eight years in office. Given Trump’s choice of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, greater workplace enforcement is extremely likely. Sessions has been one of the strongest advocates in Congress for greater immigration enforcement, and has criticized President Obama for not deporting enough people. Last year he proposed a five-year prison sentence for any undocumented immigrant caught in the country after having been previously deported.

Industry Needs Immigrants

Both deportations and workplace firings face a basic obstacle—the immigrant workforce is a source of immense profit to employers. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that, of the presumed 11 million people in the country without documents, about 8 million are employed (comprising over 5 percent of all workers). Most earn close to the minimum wage (some far less), and are clustered in low-wage industries. In the Indigenous Farm Worker Survey, for instance, made in 2009, demographer Rick Mines found that a third of California’s 165,000 indigenous agricultural laborers (workers from communities in Mexico speaking languages that pre-date European colonization) made less than minimum wage.

The federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.50/hour, and even California’s minimum of $10/hour only gives full-time workers an annual income of $20,000. Meanwhile, Social Security says the national average wage index for 2015 is just over $48,000. In other words, if employers were paying the undocumented workforce the average U.S. wage it would cost them well over $200 billion annually. That wage differential subsidizes whole industries like agriculture and food processing. If that workforce were withdrawn, as Trump threatens, through deportations or mass firings, employers wouldn’t be able to replace it without raising wages drastically.

As president, Donald Trump will have to ensure that the labor needs of employers are met, at a price they want to pay. The corporate appointees in his administration reveal that any populist rhetoric about going against big business was just that—rhetoric. But Hillary Clinton would have faced the same necessity. And in fact, the immigration reform proposals in Congress from both Republicans and Democrats over the past decade shared this understanding—that U.S. immigration policy must satisfy corporate labor demands.

During the Congressional debates over immigration reform, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) proposed two goals for U.S. immigration policy. In a report from the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy, Senior Fellow Edward Alden stated, “We should reform the legal immigration system so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness.” He went on to add, “We should restore the integrity of immigration laws, through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system.” The CFR, therefore, coupled an enforcement regime—with deportations and firings—to a labor-supply scheme.

This framework assumes the flow of migrating people will continue, and seeks to manage it. This is a safe assumption, because the basic causes of that flow have not changed. Communities in Mexico continue to be displaced by 1) economic reforms that allowed U.S. corporations to flood the country with cheap corn and meat (often selling below the cost of production—known as “dumping”—thanks to U.S. agricultural subsidies and trade agreements like NAFTA), 2) the rapacious development of mining and other extractive concessions in the countryside, and 3) the growing impoverishment of Mexican workers. Violence plays its part, linked to the consequences of displacement, economic desperation, and mass deportations. Continuing U.S. military intervention in Central America and other developing countries will produce further waves of refugees.

While candidate Trump railed against NAFTA in order to get votes (as did Barack Obama), he cannot—and, given his ties to business, has no will to—change the basic relationship between the United States and Mexico and Central America, or other developing countries that are the sources of migration. Changing the relationship (with its impact on displacement and migration) is possible in a government committed to radical reform. Bernie Sanders might have done this. Other voices in Congress have advocated it. But Trump will do what the system wants him to do, and certainly will not implement a program of radical reform.

To read the complete article, please visit: http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2017/01/what-trump-can-and-cant-do-to-immigrants.html