Maybe it’s time we start talking class war.

You can never be too rich or too lined up against the wall.

— Astro Zombie commenting on In America, everyone thinks of themselves as middle-class.

In 1984 I came back to El Paso from Israel, but the tension did not go away. I brought the war home with me. Or maybe there had always been a war here and I just hadn’t seen it before. The concrete barricades at the Santa Fe Street bridge. The barbed wire. The Border Patrol checkpoints. The surveillance cameras and sensors along the river levee. The hovering helicopters. The floating bodies in the Rio Grande. Before, it had all seemed so normal to me that I hardly noticed. But I had come back with new eyes and now understood how abnormal everything was.

— David Romo, A River Runs Through It: Texas Monthly June 2010 [via]

So our history isn’t everything — it’s also what people bring with them. While we have a racist past to be sure, we likewise have the ongoing settler expansion, which continues to this day as an internal influx of people from other parts of the US. The population of Arizona has more than doubled in the last thirty years, thrusting Phoenix practically overnight from a backwater to the fifth largest city in the nation, and gobbling up land at a rate that quickly gave our city a geographical area larger than LA, bumping uncomfortably up against the two O’odham reservations that sit to the south and east of the Valley.
While many people in states outside Arizona bemoan the backward nature of Arizona politics, it’s important to note that given this flood of people from other parts of the US, Arizona’s politics are not really just “Arizona’s politics”. They are the politics of the rest of the country, magnified — smashed together in collapsing now but once overpriced suburbs and set on fire by long commutes to work in the company of hot-headed right wing radio jocks.
In Arizona, white people who have moved two thousand miles in just the last few years to set up their suburban homestead or to secure their cheap retirement denounce the movement of people who may have only traveled a few hundred miles, or who may have migrated back and forth for generations. Or, it’s true, who may have been deported during one of the previous economic crashes, dispossessed of their labor and their meager earnings and deposited across la linea when they became inconvenient to the demands of Capital, just like the Wobblies from Bisbee in an earlier era, the largest part of whom were Mexican.
Perhaps people who move here can be forgiven for not knowing the history of Arizona, but did they not at least look at a map before they piled their possessions in a U-Haul and headed West? That funny shaped thing to our South is Mexico! And Phoenix is in the “Sonoran Desert”, a name it shares with the Mexican state of Sonora that borders us. The Sonoran Desert also contains the O’odham pilgrimage site of Magdelena. The rising border fences and military deployments that so many new Arizonans request will impede or even make impossible this yearly voyage. Likewise the demands for papers cannot be met by many traditional people, born outside cities and unable to acquire documents acceptable to law enforcement and border authorities. Sometimes the obvious ain’t so obvious to everyone.
But, unfortunately, when these internal white American “immigrants” and migrant workers to Arizona (and what else do you call people who moved here for jobs at Taser International and Boeing that now find themselves foreclosed and dispossessed in the era of the new austerity?) left their crowded East Coast cities and turned West, their RV’s and East Coast and Midwest accents weren’t all they brought with them: they also brought their racist politics, which finds fertile grounds in the not-so-long-ago-stolen Arizona land.

— The fight continues: A reminder from the Phoenix Class War Council about the struggle in Arizona

Even France accused the U.S. of occupying rather than aiding Haiti, the former jewel of the French empire, but its very difficult to interpret this as anything but Frances pseudo moral complaint against its longstanding imperial competitor—England and the Anglophone world—in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

— Just what Haiti doesnt need: Rwandan police [via]

Flag on the play. This isn’t about hospital capacity.
This is about the cost for the long-term treatment of seriously injured survivors. In fact, federal officials had planned to evacuate as many as 50 seriously injured patients a day from the devastated island to the U.S. – with Florida one of the primary destinations due to geographic proximity – before Governor Crist reacted. This would be for an indefinite period once they are released from critical care, still needing follow-up and rehabilitation. Worried hospital administrators and local politicians might have been assuaged with a clear plan for who will cover the bill. Crist’s request that the federal government shoulder some of the cost of the care should be supported.
However, I believe what we are also seeing are the early stages of a renewed debate about the status of Haitians as refugees in the US in the years to come. Florida has the highest percentage of Haitians and Haitian-Americans in the country. Their reception has long been characterized by negative stereotypes and hostility, and even those with legal status are often treated as unauthorized immigrants. In Miami, home to both Little Havana and Little Haiti, immigration policy has benefited Cuban political refugees over Haitian “economic” refugees, despite the fact that many Haitians who arrive in the United States have fled political oppression in their home country. Evidence suggests that the local community does not have a clear understanding of the differences among refugees, asylees, and immigrants in South Florida, nor of the preferential treatment of some groups over others. In contrast to Cuban nationals, Haitians do not benefit from the policy that allows them to the right to stay if they reach the US by boat.
Last year, the US Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency stated that they would proceed with the deportation of the estimated 32,000 Haitians residing illegally in the US. In a turn of events, on January 13 ICE announced that it would temporarily halt all deportations in response to the devastation caused by the earthquake. Paul Farmer and colleagues, in a recent op ed in The Miami Herald, have supported this move and called for a stop to all deportations as part of the long-term resettlement and reconstruction effort of Haiti.

— What do Haitian Earthquake Survivors and the Super Bowl Have in Common?

Of course, the phrase “winning hearts and minds” has never identified any American imperial project that has actually succeeded, apart from Hollywood perhaps.

— Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan