The beginnings of some-thing

American students and immigrant workers also take to the streets today.  Let's call this an open thread on all things protest, borders, employment, class and immigration, world-wide.

From here:

At least 500 students at Huntington Park High School near Los Angeles walked out of classes in the morning. Hundreds of the students, some carrying Mexican flags, walked down the middle of Los Angeles streets, police cruisers behind them [strangely addictive surveillance video here, second one from left].

The students visited two other area high schools, trying to encourage students to join their protest, but the schools were locked down to keep students from leaving, said Los Angeles district spokeswoman Monica Carazo.

In Georgia, activists said tens of thousands of workers did not show up at their jobs Friday after calls for a work stoppage to protest a bill passed by the Georgia House on Thursday.

That bill, which has yet to gain Senate approval, would deny state services to adults living in the U.S. illegally and impose a 5 percent surcharge on wire transfers from illegal immigrants.

Supporters say the Georgia measure is vital to homeland security and frees up limited state services for people legally entitled to them. Opponents say it unfairly targets workers meeting the demands of some of the state's largest industries.

Teodoro Maus, an organizer of the Georgia protest, estimated as many as 80,000 Hispanics did not show up for work. About 200 converged on the steps of the Georgia Capitol, some wrapped in Mexican flags and holding signs reading: "Don't panic, we're Hispanic" and "We have a dream, too."

Jennifer Garcia worried what would the proposal would do to her family. She said her husband is an illegal Mexican immigrant.

"If they send him back to Mexico, who's going to take care of them and me?" Garcia said of herself and her four children. "This is the United States. We need to come together and be a whole."

On Thursday, thousands of people filled the streets of Milwaukee for what was billed as "A Day Without Latinos" to protest efforts in Congress to target undocumented workers.

Comments

[Woo-hoo]

Open thread, alright!

[Matt]

..new OpenDemocracy is out, w/more than a couple items of potential interest.

[Keith]

Sometimes you just have to step outside of your car and check to see if those borders and divides are even real, and not just a manifestaion of representation.

Tansey's "Doubting Thomas":
http://www.zaunschirm.de/doubting_thomas.jpg

[Alain]

Nous somme tous des Framcais!

[Charles]

OT, but apparently solving the problem of how to restrain CR from Holbocrates, without merely enabling CR, as discussed, or--best of all--ever needing to read Holbocrates: AK will do it for us!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Hippies. God damned dirty hippies...and deadlocks too! In the same post/comment!

Everyone RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

[Charles]

Scott's not funny.

[Matt]

http://pjoris.blogspot.com/2006/03/student-protests.html

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

This is an open thread, Charles. If you want to say I'm not funny, you're sort of obliged to prove it, preferably empirically. I should add that I have some evidence that I am...

[Charles]

No, really. You're just not. Sorry.

If you want to say I'm not funny, you're sort of obliged to prove it, preferably empirically.

I take it back, this was a little funny.

[Matt]

500,000 protest

1 Million Protest in Los Angeles, March 25

Tell Congress: Vote No on Sensenbrenner's, Specter's, or Any Other Anti-Immigrant Bill!

Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that will decide how immigrants will be treated for decades to come. 11 million undocumented immigrants and those who help them get food, a job, or a home would be turned into criminals -- unless we act now!

A powerful conservative alliance sold the Iraq war in the name of making people safe from terrorism. Now they want us to believe that our security depends on making being in the U.S. without proper papers a felony and aiding undocumented immigrants a federal crime. Our harsh immigration laws already break up hundreds of thousands of families and often leave U.S.-born children without a mom or dad. This vicious attempt to manipulate people's post-9/11 fears would further strip immigrants of rights all people should have.

This weekend, more than a million immigrant rights supporters marched in Los Angeles and in other cities around the country to protest this anti-immigrant attack and demand that immigrants are treated with the dignity and respect that should be accorded to every human being. On March 10 up to 300,000 marched in Chicago. Another protest is taking place today in Washington, DC, as the Senate Judiciary Committee begins debate on immigration reform.

CALL YOUR SENATORS TODAY
United for Peace and Justice urges you to add your voice to the chorus that is calling for real immigration reform that does not criminalize immigrant adults and children or the social workers, nurses and others who provide them with help:

Capitol Switchboard: (888) 355-3588 (toll-free) or (202) 334-3121

Please call both of your Senators TODAY. You can ask for the Senator by name at the number above. If you don't know his/her name or the line is busy, see: http://www.senate.gov and click on "Senators" at the top left.

Tell your Senator to vote NO on HR 4437, the Sensenbrenner bill, Senator Arlen Specter's bill, or any other version that retains anti-immigrant provisions. Instead of undermining civil rights and civil liberties, they should support immigration reform that enables undocumented immigrants to legalize their status and gain a path to citizenship, reunifies immigrant families, stops mandatory deportations and indefinite detentions, and supports the rights of all workers.

To find out about protests in your community, see: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/
MORE INFORMATION
In December 2005, the House of Representatives passed HR 4437, which was introduced by Representative James Sensenbrenner. HR 4437 is a punitive, anti-immigrant bill that would, among other things, make an undocumented immigrant's presence in the US a federal crime; fund 700 miles of wall on the US-Mexico border; and expand the definition of smuggling to include assistance to an undocumented person.

Now the Senate Judiciary Committee is considering its own immigration legislation, starting with Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter's "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006." This alleged "compromise" bill is in fact virulently anti-immigrant. Specifically, it would:

* Make it a felony to be "out of status" or in technical violation of immigration laws. A student who drops a course, a lawful permanent resident who does not notify DHS that she moved, the mother of a sick, US citizen child who overstays her visitor visa, an undocumented farm worker -- all could be arrested, prosecuted criminally, and/or deported.
* Make it a felony to help an undocumented immigrant find a job, a place to live, or to get to a grocery store, even if you are a religious institution, family members, or a nonprofit organization. Green cardholders convicted of "Good Samaritan" acts can get deported.
* Force local and state police to enforce immigration laws -- immigrants may be afraid to call 911 for help.
* Deport more Green Card Holders for smaller criminal offenses.
* Put more money into detaining immigrants, a costly and overcrowded system that is already full of abuse.
* Make it more difficult to gain legal status or get citizenship.
* Drastically limit the federal courts' abilities to review immigration decisions -- forcing all appeals into a single court in order to silence courts around the country that have found Immigration's actions to be wrong. Many people's appeals will just be thrown out or dismissed without being heard.

For more information on the current immigration legislation, visit:
- National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
- Rights Working Group
- Detention Watch Network

Thanks as always for your hard work on behalf of peace and justice,

United for Peace and Justice

UFPJ Needs Your Financial Support!
Visit http://www.unitedforpeace.org/donate today.

APRIL 29
New York City
March for Peace, Justice, and Democracy
End the war in Iraq -- bring the troops home!
Unite for change -- let's turn our country around!

ACTION ALERT * UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
www.unitedforpeace.org | 212-868-5545
To subscribe, visit www.unitedforpeace.org/email

These issues are not unconnected to resistance movements (against neoliberal hegemony) in France, though this connection may not be explicit or articulated yet, yes? Or is "hegemony" an outmoded concept these days?

[Keith]

A great post over at irrational numbers: Down with Guardrails! Up with Precarité!. From the site:

"The event will never arrive until every dream of carrying some political booty back to the land of the 'real' is renounced; until we reach a universal affirmation of something beyond the picket line, beyond unemployment - unemployability, vagrancy, precarity, the reversibility of futility and unconditional joy, the positivity of anguish. Refusal of the wage-labourer as fetishised ideal in favour of the vagrant, the vagabond. Beckett would surely appreciate this sentiment: only when every worker and student finds their inner tramp is the purposive exoskeleton of capitalism shed and its relative deterritorialization accelerated into the production of a 'new earth'."

[s0metim3s]

That is quite something.

[Matt]

"The constant movement, the circulation of everything is a paradoxical condition for the functioning of the capitalist machine. In the same paradox, interrupting its functioning is a condition for its disruption."

Substitute *acceleration* for *interruption*. Capitalism-schizophrenia functions only in virtue of its axiomatisation, in the freeze-frame of its systemic recuperation. If the CPE releases the brakes a little, of course it is only to shortly re-engage them. For all this, it cannot be mistaken for the enemy.

Ok, I'll bite... I don't know nothin'bout the ontologizing of axiomatization, but I find this notion that "acceleration" in itself (of capitalism-schizophrenia) is revolutionary, and in a good way, sort of hard to swallow, though quite possibly I'm missing something.

(Where's this notion of 'acceleration' from anyway?)

[Matt]

A good reader of Derrida can only fear the worst.

[Keith]

Woah, Matt...slow down there.

[Matt]

I take it you're a platitudinous liberal, then?

(Me, I'm wild. And when I google the safe search comes all the way off.)

[Keith]

"The question of boundaries, of possible shifts or displacements along them, and the question of what is being bounded (or unbounded) are preeminent ones. If we are indeed in a liminal period, then the border is not out there somewhere at the edge of the frame but rather it is here, at zero degree, where the x and y coordinates meet. It is a site of encounter, a point of transition."
- Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, p.234

[Matt]

interesting

[Keith]

Well now we can all just simulate our protests

[Amie]

"...deterritorialization accelerated into the production of a 'new earth'."
yikes!?

terre ingrate, mais pas totalement. (Beckett)

[Keith]

I checked out the book for the Spivak interview it had, but also found this essay from 1989 by Jean-Luc Nancy that seemed especially relevant. It's from An Other Tongue, Ed. Alfred Arteaga (Duke, 1994)

The link posted by Bruno Mitchell is incorrect. That is a hoax site. The correct site is http://www.april29.org.