Mainstream Liberal Political Discourse has become embarrassingly dumb and shallow, and this “Minutemen” nonsense is the most immediate and egregious example I have seen in a long, long time.
I will not ask “Have you no shame?” because that is a foregone conclusion, at this point.
Instead, I will ask “Have you no brain?” because it is clear that a significant number of both the self-proclaimed and the popularly acclaimed “experts” are apparently incapable of remembering, reading about, or understanding events beyond a time horizon of about 3 weeks.
For more than 100 years, and probably a lot longer than that, Liberal, Labor, Leftist, Progressive, and Internationalist activist groups have been working across our southern border to promote and support Human Rights, Civil Rights, Labor Rights, Children’s Rights, and Immigrant Rights.
Over that same time span, our government has been harassing, arresting, hindering, sabotaging, and outright betraying those activists and the people those activists are working for and with.
Here’s some reading:
Border Politics
Race, Place, and Reform
Power and Transnational Activism
Legalizing Transnational Activism
Cross-Border Activism and its Limits (PDF)
American Dissidents...
Council on Hemispheric Affairs (activist website)
Doctors Without Borders
Engineers Without Borders
Teachers Without Borders
IFCO/Pastors for Peace
And there are many, many, many more of us who have been working in many ways on the urgent issues of cross-border, cross-cultural, transnational political and social organizing for many, many years.
One of the main obstacles to this work has always been US government intransigence and obstruction, in some cases leading directly to harassment and violence against activists in the US, at the border, and once across the border. Activists have been held in jail for “Trading with the Enemy,” activists have been assaulted, harassed, and murdered by many different governmental and extra-governmental and “rebel” forces in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.
In many instances, information about people, travel routes, and cargo has been transmitted to those repressive forces by US agents and agencies as a part of the attempt at obstruction, in service to US imperial designs and “real-politik” support for the regimes that these activists are combatting.
The Amendment that is the subject of the recent spate of smear-mongering was proposed by a right-wing fool whose clear aim was to prop up idiot militias. There is no doubt of that.
Bernie Sanders supported that amendment. The record is clear.
Ask yourself, why would an avowed Leftwinger with a long and public record of support for transnational activism, of criticism of the Contras and other Coups and Dictatorships, of clear support for liberalization of immigration laws and progressive political action in favor of immigrants and immigrant labor support an amendment like that?
Was he not paying attention?
Was his secret nativist and racist xenophobia suddenly showing?
Was he “trading votes” with the congressman who put forward that Amendment?
Or was he showing that he’s actually a lot fucking smarter than all the caterwauling fools who cannot seem to think beyond “gotcha” soundbite politics in service to the shallow aims of the next political cage-match?
The text of the Amendment:
None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide a foreign government information relating to the activities of an organized volunteer civilian action group, as defined by DHS OIG-06- 4, operating in the State of California, Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona, unless required by international treaty.
Quite obviously and clearly, and as a matter of record, the person who introduced that Amendment is a rightwing fool trying to gin up official support for a bunch of racist militia thugs.
But the language of the Amendment names no names, and states no framework for applying this rule to any particular group with any particular political agenda.
Without being inside Sanders’ brain, and without having communicated with Sanders in discussion on this topic, I am willing to bet that the one and only reason that he voted for this Amendment is that it categorically forbids US government interference with Transnational and Cross-border activism. It makes illegal the obstruction and interference that has so long been a serious (and sometimes fatal) barrier to organizing for Human Rights in opposition to continued US imperialist support for Dictators to our south. The next time Pastors for Peace tries to bring shipments of pencils, printers, EKG machines, computers, notebooks, backpacks, dialysis machines, or whatever, to Chiapas, to Cuba, to Honduras, to Panama, to Peru…
maybe they won’t get held up at the border. Maybe they won’t get their vehicles searched and their goods confiscated. Maybe they won’t be thrown in jail for Trading With the Enemy. Maybe they won’t have their travel routes and transport plans broadcast by US authorities to the Military, the Police, the Contras, or whatever death squads or terrorist thugs are waiting to kidnap and kill them in the places where they are trying to bring aid and spread cooperative organization for regional progress.
If a Right Winger proposed an Amendment that outlawed government surveillance of activist groups (with the exception of due and probable cause)… would you vote for it?
Maybe, just maybe, Bernie Sanders is a lot smarter than you might give him credit for, hmmm?