Hasta La Gadget!

Reports are mounting of a living nightmare in Lumpkin, Georgia, at Stewart, a 1,750-bed detention facility housing immigrants facing potential deportation.

According to multiple interviews with detained immigrants at Stewart, they are dealing with maggots in food, improper medical care, sweltering temperatures, and in many cases no communication with staff due to no translators on site. The Corrections Corporation of America operates the facility for profit, adding fuel to an already roaring fire of opposition.

While President Obama’s expanded deportation relief is a welcome move — the truth is that without addressing immigration detention, immigrants will continue to suffer horrifying conditions in detention centers.

Current U.S. legislation is read by some members of Congress to require that at least 34,000 immigrants be held in detention beds at all times at a cost of $2 billion annually. This would mean that tens of thousands of immigrants will continue to be detained every year even if others are granted reprieve from deportation.

That’s why executive action by the president on deportations should be accompanied by closing inhumane facilities like Stewart and ending the bed quota once and for all. Alternatives to detention are effective, much less costly, and far more humane than institutional detention.

Resistance inside Stewart has grown at the same time as external pressure to close the facility has mounted.

This past summer, dozens of detained immigrants there participated in a hunger strike. When a group of detained immigrants organized to bring concerns forward, things got ugly. There was a facility-wide, 24-hour lockdown in response, and participating units were shut down longer. Pepper spray was reportedly used against hunger strikers.

This retaliatory desire to shut down opposition in the face of gross human rights concerns is unacceptable.

Ismael, an immigrant detained at Stewart, had a stroke on March 9, 2014, and passed out in his unit. After being released from the hospital back into ICE’s custody, he received no further treatment, follow-up, or even a lower bunk. After a second stroke a month later, the detention center allowed him pain pills for resulting headaches, but no treatment or rehabilitation. Finally, before even reaching his hearing, Ismael decided under duress to sign his deportation papers and leave behind his life in the U.S. to avoid further suffering.

Alcides became a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. in 1996. He proudly served his country in Iraq, and is now a disabled veteran and wheelchair-bound. At Stewart, he was made to stand, causing him severe pain, and he has since lost feeling in his legs altogether. He went three and a half weeks without showering due to lack of assistance. After use of pepper spray at the facility in response to the hunger strike, he suffered seizures and was not provided with the correct medication upon return to the facility from the hospital. He joined the hunger strike in an attempt to get access to his prescribed medication.

This treatment is inhumane, un-American, and do recall, it is also for profit.

In a 2012 report by the ACLU of Georgia, “Prisoners of Profit: Immigrants and Detention in Georgia,” we found that Stewart has consistently failed to provide basic medical care, hygienic conditions, or edible and adequate food for those in detention. Detained men who spoke up suffered retaliation: a commonly used tactic was placing them in solitary. Stewart has been ranked by watchdogs like the Detention Watch Network as one of the worst facilities in the country.

Despite years of advocacy by detained immigrants, their family members, and human rights organizations, conditions have worsened.

This coming weekend, hundreds of people from across the country will converge at the gates of Stewart to once again call for closure of this facility.

The time has come for the Obama administration and ICE to shut Stewart down, and for this painful chapter in the American treatment of immigrants to close.

This article originally appeared in The Hill.

If you want to understand what makes Elizabeth Warren so special in American politics, consider her nervy leadership of the campaign to block President Obama’s foolish nomination of one Antonio Weiss to be the top Treasury official in charge of the domestic financial system, including enforcement of the Dodd-Frank Act.

For most of his Wall Street career, Weiss has epitomized everything that reeks about financial abuses. As chief of international mergers and acquisitions for Lazard, Weiss orchestrated what are delicately known as “corporate inversions,” in which a domestic corporation moves its nominal headquarters offshore, to avoid its U.S. taxes. It’s hard to improve on Sen. Warren’s description of this play, in her Huffington Post blog of last Wednesday:

Basically, a bunch of companies have decided that all the regular tax loopholes they get to exploit aren’t enough, so they have begun taking advantage of an even bigger loophole that allows them to maintain their operations in America but claim foreign citizenship and cut their U.S. taxes even more. No one is fooled by the bland words “corporate inversion.” These companies renounce their American citizenship and turn their backs on this country simply to boost their profits.

And that’s only the beginning. Many of the other deals orchestrated by Weiss resulted in operating companies being bought and sold by giant conglomerates, where the “savings” and “increased efficiency” came mainly from tax breaks and reduced worker compensation.
Weiss, who was paid $15.4 million by Lazard over the past 23 months, will receive another $21.2 million as an early retirement payment if he is confirmed for the Treasury job.

But that may not happen. With Warren’s courageous public declaration, other leading senators have announced their opposition, including Dick Durban of Illinois, who is number two in the Senate leadership structure and very close to Obama. And more will follow.

On the Republican side, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which will vet Weiss, said last week, “This nomination shows the continued hypocrisy of the Obama administration in this area,” referring to the Administration’s declared opposition to tax-evading corporate inversions. Grassley added, “Ironically, this nominee might be especially well-equipped to advise the Obama administration on inversion policy.”

So what’s going on here?

In the past few weeks, Obama has demonstrated that he can challenge powerful interests when a little courage seems politically opportune. He has embraced net neutrality, over the opposition of the most powerful companies in the telecom and cable industries and that of his own Federal Commission Chairman, Tom Wheeler.

He had also issued used his executive powers to spare four to five million undocumented U.S. residents from deportation, a move that enraged Republicans, heartened Hispanics, and enabled the president to sound almost like the Obama of 2007 and 2008 who raised such hopes among progressives.

On these issues, you could say that Obama is looking to the next generation of voters, or looking to his legacy; or that these two moves were astute politics. Younger Americans overwhelmingly favor net neutrality, and his executive moves to suspend deportation handily split the Republicans.

However, when it comes to coddling Wall Street, President Obama manages to clumsily out-flank Republicans — to the right. As Warren reminds us, for Obama this is business as usual (or if you like, it’s business — as usual.)

One top Treasury and financial official after another comes from Wall Street — a record that would make even a Republican blush. As Warren wrote:

Starting with former Citigroup CEO Robert Rubin, three of the last four Treasury secretaries under Democratic presidents held high-paying jobs at Citigroup either before or after serving at Treasury — and the fourth was offered, but declined, Citigroup’s CEO position. Directors of the National Economic Council and Office of Management and Budget, the current Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. trade representative, also pulled in millions from Citigroup.

Scores of lesser officials, from heads of regulatory officials to sub-cabinet officers at cabinet agencies, came from other top Wall Street banks and investment banks.

In contrast to its occasional populist moves like those on net neutrality and deportations, when it comes to letting Wall Street have its way with the rest of us the administration is basically on auto-pilot. The bankers rule. The idea of naming Weiss just bubbled up from the usual suspects, and there was no real counterweight inside the Obama White House.

If the last election teaches anything, it shows that Democrats need to demonstrate that they are on the side of regular working Americans. When Democrats are the party of Wall Street, it allows the Tea Parties to tap the resentment against Washington and Wall Street that ordinary working Americans rightly feel.

Imagine the confirmation hearing. On one side, the Finance Committee’s progressive Democrats will be challenging Weiss and embarrassing Obama. On the other side, Republicans will have a rare chance to identify against Wall Street.

President Obama doesn’t need this. He doesn’t need to divide his party, and he doesn’t need one more emblem of his coziness with the bankers.

Last year, when Obama sought to name his former top economic adviser, Larry Summers, to chair the Federal Reserve, he similarly divided Democrats. Obama let Summers twist slowly in the wind for several weeks as opposition built, embarrassing himself, his party, and Summers, before Summers finally withdrew.

This time, Obama would do well to abbreviate rather than prolong the agony and invite Weiss to withdraw sooner rather than later. The White House should pull the plug, and fast. Weiss can decide that he needs to spend more time with his family.

Elizabeth Warren’s bold leadership opposing the Weiss nomination is one more reminder of the vivid contrast not just between Warren and Obama but between Warren and the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s set of advisers and policy views on finance are right out of the playbook of Obama, and that of her husband, Bill: Raise a ton of money from Wall Street and then appoint top regulatory officials congenial to Wall Street.

If Democrats in 2016 are to stand for something other than the Wall Street-Washington axis, they will need to do a lot better.

Robert Kuttner’s latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect, a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, and a senior Fellow at Demos.

Like Robert Kuttner on Facebook.

I’m sorry, Jon Stewart. I’m really sorry because I love your Daily Show. I love that your satire holds the feet of politicians to the fire. But your film… well, someone needs to say this: it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. I think that, because you’re “Jon Stewart,” those who write about film have not been honest about this movie. Perhaps, like me, they’re simply enamored of the work for which you’re justly famous and see the film in that light. Perhaps they honestly believe that it’s terrific.

It’s not. It’s a well-intentioned effort to throw light on the plight of journalists everywhere whose brave work in “bearing witness” to the abuse of power is rewarded by imprisonment and torture. An important message. But the film’s most fatal flaw is that it lacks the fundamental ingredient of any good film: drama.

Drama happens through building tension, but nothing builds here. The initial scenes are promising enough, as the protagonist, the journalist Maziar Bahari, falls into the hands of the Iranian political police. And the interrogations begin with an appropriate sense of threat. But from the moment of the first interrogation scene, there’s no development, no action, just more words. You don’t want the poor guy to suffer more, of course, but there’s no delivery on the threat of worse to come. The scenes become repetitive, and predictable, and frankly boring. They go on far too long.

By the same token, simply numbering the days of solitary confinement — inhuman though this treatment is — does not make them more dramatic. Even the initially effective visual contrast between blinding white cells and black blindfolds remains somehow undeveloped. The eye longs for more interest and variety.

Advance publicity for the movie suggested, slyly, an important link between the satirical Daily Show skit with Jason Jones posing as an American spy in interview with Bahari. In fact, very little was made of this intriguing possibility, and the dark, absurdist humor I was somehow expecting was so low key, I might have missed it altogether if I hadn’t heard about it in advance. All in all, at the end, Bahari’s release came as something of an anticlimax. He did not, as the film’s protagonist, seem to have undergone the change we would expect. He has suffered, yes. But what has he learned, other than that torture is evil and torturers humorless and inhuman? How has he grown?

So we were left — I, as a viewer, was left — with little to have engaged me but the film’s message: reporters should be free to bear honest witness to the truth of the abuse of power. An important, even pressing one, but not enough to make a good movie.

HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) — President Barack Obama is shrugging off Republican criticism of his actions to lift the threat of deportation from millions of immigrants living illegally in the United States.

In an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama said it was important that he act unilaterally to prioritize the deportation of criminals and recent arrivals and spare those who have lived here illegally for at least five years and have roots, including children who are American citizens. “Why we would prefer a system in which they’re in the shadows, potentially taking advantage of living here but not contributing?” Obama said in the interview, which was taped Friday in Las Vegas after Obama delivered an immigration speech there.

The president pointed to executive orders issued by Democratic and Republican predecessors and said presidents exercise “prosecutorial discretion all the time.”

Obama’s executive actions, which he announced Thursday, have drawn a withering response from Republicans, but also has laid bare divisions within the GOP over how to deal with immigration.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rejected Obama’s claim of prosecutorial discretion. “Essentially he’s gotten in the job of counterfeiting immigration papers, because there’s no legal authority to do what he’s doing,” Cruz said on “Fox News Sunday.”

A second Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said his party shares the blame for failing to get an immigration bill through the House of Representatives.

“Shame on us as Republicans for having a body that cannot generate a solution to an issue that is national security, it’s cultural and it’s economic. The Senate has done this three times,” Graham said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Indeed, Obama cast his decision as the result of the Republican-led House’s failure to act on a comprehensive immigration bill the Senate passed with bipartisan support in June 2013, or advance legislation of its own.

He said Republicans still could pass an immigration bill.

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, said he had pressed the Republican leadership to start passing legislation two weeks ago on the immigration issue.

“We are going to pass legislation, but it is not going to be the legislation the president is asking for,” Labrador said. “We as Republicans don’t believe you should give amnesty first and talk about security later, which is what the Senate bill did.” Labrador spoke on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

Obama spent the weekend in Nevada, mostly playing golf, after the speech and returned to the White House on Sunday evening.

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker published a lovely little essay about the eccentric rocker, Ariel Pink. The whole conversation takes place in an SUV bound from Pink’s Williamsburg hotel to a show in Staten Island. Pink rehashes some recent social media controversies and some other thoughts on his own fame. The whole encounter could best be described as strange, which coincidentally, is the perfect adjective for Pink’s new album, pom pom.

Read more…