"Georgia Immigration" - (Google) News Sweep - 4/20/'06 2:15 PM
"Georgia Immigration" - (Google) News Sweep - 4/20/'06 2:15 PM
4/20/'06 - The following article(s) were found in the media. Several stories are provided ... with links to the original sources ... for your convenience:
- ICE Agents Arrest Seven Managers of Nationwide Pallet Company and 1,187 of the Firm's Illegal Alien Employees in 26 States (DHS)
Is Bush the Worst President in American History? (Takkun)
-
Companies using illegal workers to be targeted (CNN)
- Federal agents take 44 suspected illegal immigrants into custody (WISTV)
- READERS WRITE (AJC)
- Latinos leaving Perdue's panel (Online Athens)
--------------------------------------
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=5547
 |
| Press Releases |
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: ICE Public Affairs, 202-514-2648
April 20, 2006
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff; Julie L. Myers, Assistant Secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and Glenn T. Suddaby, United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, today announced the results of a nationwide worksite enforcement operation targeting IFCO Systems North America, Inc. ("IFCO"), the largest pallet services company in the United States headquartered in Houston, Texas.
Yesterday, ICE agents arrested seven current and former managers of IFCO pursuant to criminal complaints issued in the Northern District of New York. All these individuals are charged with conspiring to transport, harbor, and encourage and induce illegal aliens to reside in the United States for commercial advantage and private financial gain, in violation of Title 8, USC Section 1324 (a). The conspiracy charge carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for each alien with respect to whom the violation takes place. Two other IFCO employees were arrested on criminal charges relating to fraudulent documents.
In addition to the criminal arrests, ICE agents yesterday conducted "consent" searches or executed criminal search warrants at more than 40 IFCO plants and related locations in 26 states that resulted in the apprehension of approximately 1,187 illegal alien IFCO employees. Three of the criminal search warrants were executed at residences in Guilderland, NY, where IFCO was allegedly housing illegal alien employees.
The consent searches and search warrants were conducted at locations in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, Virginia and Utah.
The arrests and search warrants are part of an ongoing criminal investigation of IFCO's Pallet Management Services division that began more than a year ago. The investigation is being conducted by ICE, New York State Police - Upstate New York Regional Intelligence Center, Social Security Administration Inspector General, Internal Revenue Service - Criminal Investigation, and the Department of Labor Inspector General. The Guilderland Town Police Department and Schenectady Police Department also provided assistance.
According to a government affidavit filed in the Northern District of New York, the investigation began in February 2005 when ICE agents received information that IFCO workers in Guilderland, NY, were witnessed ripping up their W-2 tax forms and that an IFCO assistant general manager had explained that these workers were illegal aliens, had fake Social Security cards and did not intend to file tax returns.
According to the affidavit, subsequent investigation indicated that IFCO officials transported illegal aliens to and from work; paid rent for the housing of illegal alien employees; and deducted money from the aliens' monthly paychecks to cover these expenses. Former IFCO employees also said it was common practice for IFCO to hire workers who lacked social security cards or produced bogus identification cards.
The affidavit also alleges that IFCO officials knowingly hired an illegal alien who was an informant for ICE. In numerous recorded conversations, IFCO officials reimbursed this person for obtaining fraudulent identity documents for other illegal alien employees; used the person to recruit other illegal workers; and advised the person and other illegal alien employees on how to avoid law enforcement detection, the affidavit alleges.
The affidavit further alleges that approximately 53.4 percent of the Social Security numbers contained on the IFCO Systems North America Inc. payroll of roughly 5,800 workers during 2005 were either invalid, did not match the true name registered with the Social Security Administration for that number, or belonged to children or deceased persons. The Social Security Administration sent at least 13 written notifications to IFCO headquarters about such discrepancies on its payroll records in 2004 and 2005, the affidavit alleges.
Employers and workers alike should be on notice that the status quo has changed," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "These enforcement actions demonstrate that this department has no patience for employers who tolerate or perpetuate a shadow economy. We intend to find employers who knowingly or recklessly hire unauthorized workers and we will use every authority within our power to shut down businesses that exploit an illegal workforce to turn a profit."
ICE Assistant Secretary Myers said, "ICE has no tolerance for corporate officers who harbor illegal aliens for their workforce. This nationwide enforcement action shows how we will use all our investigative tools to bring these individuals to justice, no matter how large or small their company."
Glenn T. Suddaby, United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York said, "The IFCO case is an outstanding example of intense cooperation between prosecutors, federal investigators, and state and local police which has successfully concluded a 14 month conspiracy investigation."
New York State Police Superintendent Wayne E. Bennett said, "It is disturbing that there are businesspeople who have decided to exploit illegal aliens for the sole purpose of their own financial gain. Compounding the issue is the fact that corporation officials also engaged in tactics to obtain false identifications; instructed illegal aliens on how to avoid detection by law enforcement officials; and, practiced deception with government agencies regarding the true identifications of the workers."
Those arrested yesterday pursuant to the criminal complaints are:
- Robert Belvin, 43, of Clifton Park, NY, the former general manager of the IFCO plant in Guilderland, NY; arrested yesterday in Guilderland.
- Abelino "Lino" Chicas, 40, of Houston, TX, the assistant general manager of the Houston West IFCO plant in Houston, TX; arrested yesterday in Atlanta.
- James Rice, 36, of Houston, TX, a former IFCO new market development manager and regional general manager; arrested yesterday in Houston.
- William "Billy" Hoskins, 29, of Cincinnati, OH, an IFCO new market development manager and the general manager of the Cincinnati IFCO plant; arrested yesterday in Milwaukee.
- Michael Ames, 44, of Shrewsbury, MA, the general manager of the IFCO plant in Westborough, MA; arrested yesterday in Westborough.
- Dario Salzano, 36, of Amsterdam, NY, the assistant general manager of the IFCO plant in Guilderland, NY; arrested yesterday in Guilderland.
- Scott Dodge, 43, of Amsterdam, NY, a former foreman at the IFCO plant in Guilderland and at the IFCO satellite location within the Target Distribution Center in Amsterdam, NY; arrested yesterday in Amsterdam.
- Vincente Araus-Rivera, 44, an employee at the IFCO plant in Guilderland, NY; arrested yesterday in Guilderland.
- Ovidio Umana, 28, an employee at the IFCO plant in Guilderland, NY; arrested yesterday in Guilderland.
It is important to note that criminal complaints contain mere allegations. Defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.
###
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was established in March 2003 as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE is comprised of four integrated divisions that form a 21st century law enforcement agency with broad responsibilities for a number of key homeland security priorities.
-------------------------------------
http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/news_item.2006-04-20.9549078952
Is Bush the Worst President in American History?
"White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove."
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz carefully assesses the discussion taking place among American historians.
The Worst President in History?
One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
* * * *
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
* * * *
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.
* * * *
BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
* * * *
BUSH AT HOME
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.
The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."
The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
* * * *
PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT
Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
* * * *
Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
SEAN WILENTZ
---------------------------------
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/20/immigration.raids/index.html
Companies using illegal workers to be targeted
Immigration arrests 9 IFCO bosses along with 1,000 workers
From Terry Frieden and Mike M. Ahlers
CNN Washington Bureau
 An immigration enforcement officer examines the IFCO facility Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona. | |
WATCH | Browse/Search |
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration unveiled Thursday what it said is a new strategy aimed at companies employing illegal immigrants, illustrating it with a crackdown on the German-based firm IFCO Systems.
Law enforcement officials will "use all the tools we have, whether it be criminal enforcement or immigration laws to break the back" of businesses that exploit undocumented immigrants, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
"We're looking at them in the same way we look at criminal organizations," he said.
Federal immigration authorities arrested nine people linked to IFCO Systems and rounded up more than 1,000 illegal immigrants in multistate raids, federal law enforcement officials said.
Among those arrested and charged in connection with the employment of immigrants are seven current and former managers and two lower-level employees of the company, said U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby.
IFCO is an industry leader in the manufacture of wooden pallets, crates and containers. The criminal complaint involving IFCO charges the seven managers with conspiracy to transport, harbor, and employ illegal immigrants for private gain. (Watch the young woman whose boyfriend got hauled in -- 1:06)
Federal authorities checked a sample of 5,800 IFCO employee records last year and found that 53 percent had faulty Social Security numbers, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said.(Watch how workers allegedly got help faking records -- 1:25)
"That is, they were using Social Security numbers of people that were dead, of children or just different individuals that did not work at IFCO," ICE chief Julie Myers told CNN.
"The Social Security Administration had written IFCO over 13 times and told them, 'Listen, You have a problem. You have over a thousand employees that have faulty Social Security numbers. And we consider that to be a big problem,'" said Myers. "And IFCO did not do anything about it."
A yearlong investigation revealed that IFCO managers had induced illegal aliens to work there, telling some to doctor W-2 tax forms and others that no documentation was needed at all, Myers said.
As public concern over illegal immigration has grown in recent months, federal law enforcement officials have sought to tighten enforcement of immigration laws, through criminal charges against those who employ illegal aliens. Those charges would include money laundering, alien harboring, illegal alien employment and wire fraud.
"We are turning away from focusing only on civil liability," Myers told CNN. "It used to be in these cases that they amounted mainly to a slap on the wrist or a small civil fine. We're now focusing on criminal cases and bringing as many criminal charges as we can when we find employers that blatantly violate worksite enforcement laws."
Asked if senior managers knew or should have known about the alleged violations, Myers said, "There's no allegation of that at this time. It's certainly an ongoing investigation. I will tell you, though, that we are troubled by some of the things that we've seen at IFCO."
She said the company is cooperating with the investigation.
Under the Secure Borders Initiative, law enforcement officials would detect and catch those who cross the border illegally; detain and return them to their home countries; and target those already in the U.S. Of particular importance are illegal immigrant smuggling operations, which have become a multibillion dollar business.
In its 2007 budget request, the Department of Homeland Security is asking Congress for more money to expand its documentation verification system. The abuse of the social security system and its documents are a key challenge, Chertoff acknowledged.
Industries relating to critical infrastructure -- like transportation, nuclear power plants and national defense -- are among those being targeted, Chertoff said.
IFCO Systems, with more than 40 offices across the U.S., issued a statement late Wednesday acknowledging the federal action.
"IFCO Systems is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating a workplace free of discrimination," the company said. "It is our policy to comply with all federal and state employee requirements."
But the IFCO statement did not directly address the charges.
"Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials today conducted employee background checks at a number of IFCO facilities across the country. We are cooperating fully with representatives from ICE and hope to have this matter resolved as soon as possible," the statement said.
ICE officials said agents made more than a thousand arrests in nearly 40 locations including Houston; Cincinnati; Phoenix; and Albany, New York.
----------------------------------
http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4794350
Federal agents take 44 suspected illegal immigrants into custody
The people were taken into custody Wednesday at a company called IFCO, which makes wooden pallets.
Immigration officials would say only that the arrests at the company are part of a nationwide operation.
In the nationwide raids, immigration agents arrested seven executives and hundreds of employees of IFCO Systems in at least nine other states as part of a crackdown on employers of illegal workers.
The raids were part of a yearlong criminal investigation.
Glenn Suddaby, the chief federal prosecutor in Albany, New York, where some of the arrests were made, says US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested seven current and former IFCO Systems managers. They were arrested on charges they conspired to transport, harbor and encourage illegal workers to live in the United States for commercial advantage and private financial gain.
Raids took place at several locations in upstate New York and in Biglerville, Pennsylvania; Charlotte, North Carolina; Cincinnati; Houston; Indianapolis; Phoenix; Richmond, Virginia; and Westborough, Massachusetts.
Posted 8:42am by Bryce Mursch
--------------------------------
http://www.ajc.com/thursday/content/epaper/editions/thursday/opinion_44748111541200b2007b.html
READERS WRITE
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Catholics on immigration: Responses to "Catholics full of show on illegal immigration," @issue, April 18
Hidden agenda drives support
I once had great respect for the Catholic Church, but its recent support for illegal aliens has made me reconsider. The Catholic Church generally supports an amnesty for all illegal aliens and thus supports a dismantling of our immigration laws. There is little doubt in my mind why the Catholic Church has taken such a stance. Its bishops and priests may claim their interest is simply "humane," but they certainly long for increasing the numbers of illegal aliens who coincidentally happen to be Catholics.
ERNEST WADE, Loganville
Christian compassion remains genuine
Upon reading Mary Grabar's column, I feel a deep sadness. I joined the Roman Catholic Church on Easter in 1987 at the age of 37, feeling that I had been loved into the church. The Catholics who I worked with had shown me, a stranger, the same love that Christ asks us to show all people. I wanted to be like them.
That same love was planted within me as I, too, accepted this beautiful faith. Now, 19 years later, I strive to live my faith and to speak out for the voiceless, the "least of my brothers and sisters," not because I want to be seen and heard, but because I love them. Really.
Christ's love is real. It is true. It is strong. It is alive and well in the Catholic Church. Please come back and give us a chance.
ELLEN HOWE, Sandy Springs
------------------------------------
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/042006/news_20060420057.shtml
Latinos leaving Perdue's panel
Immigration law angers some members
By Walter C. Jones | Morris News Service | Story updated at 11:40 PM on Thursday, April 20, 2006
ATLANTA - Controversy over legislation targeting illegal immigrants has prompted a rash of resignations within a Latino advisory panel created by Gov. Sonny Perdue.
The latest resignation came Wednesday, bringing to six the number of departed members of the Latino Commission for a New Georgia, one-third of the panel. Several of the members reminded the governor of their Republican loyalties as they quit.
At issue is Senate Bill 529, passed by the Georgia General Assembly in March and signed into law by Perdue on Monday.
Many objected to a provision in the law that empowers local police officers to enforce federal immigration statutes, saying the change will make illegal immigrants afraid to call police to report crimes or to cooperate as a witness.
When he announced the commission in 2003, Perdue said it was designed to help lure business and "play a consulting role in policy development."
Yet Perdue never met with the commission to discuss the bill before he decided to sign it, even though the measure prompted public protests and was the most significant issue before the immigrant community.
Morris News Service obtained copies of the commission's letters and e-mails through the Open Records Act.
Some members had harsh words, such as Alex Salgueiro, president of Savannah Restaurants Corp.
"As a dedicated Republican and citizen of Georgia, I do not feel it is a good use of my valuable time to serve on a sham commission," Salgueiro wrote in his resignation. "By continuing to serve, I feel I would be giving you credibility for having compassion and understanding of the plight of the Latino people which you obviously do not have."
Jacqueline Thomas Rosier, managing partner of the public relations firm IRGroup in Duluth, was equally blunt.
"This commission clearly has no other reason to exist other than to be a line in your campaign literature," Rosier wrote.
Sara Gonzalez, president of the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said her beef was more with the commission chairman, Mario Martinez, than with Perdue for signing the bill. She said Martinez should have called a meeting.
Martinez, the head of Tecnix LLC in Alpharetta, did not return two messages requesting a comment for this story.
Perdue's press secretary, Heather Hedrick, said the governor didn't meet with the commission because he didn't meet with any other groups voicing opposition or support for the bill. But Perdue aide Julie Smith did send an e-mail March 30 inviting commission members to contact her with opinions to be passed along.
The next day, Gonzalez resigned along with Venus Ginés, founder of the health organization Dia de la Mujer Latina in Tucker. Ginés is the former Cobb County chairwoman of the Republican National Hispanic Association.
To date, six commission members have resigned.
Martinez urged them to if they couldn't keep from publicly criticizing Perdue for signing the bill, according to copies of e-mails between commission members.
Hedrick said Perdue didn't want to see them leave.
"We are disappointed that these members of the commission resigned," she said. "We are particularly disappointed because this is not an anti-immigrant bill. Georgia is a welcoming state."
And commission member Gilbert Esparza wrote Perdue to thank him for signing it.
"I feel that anyone coming to live and work here should abide by our rules set down by so many godly people so many years ago," wrote Esparza, president of Concordia Advisory Group in Norcross.
There may not be many Republican Latinos who agreed with Perdue's action, according to Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of GALEO, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.
"This further backs up what I've been saying all along that Latino Republicans are upset about this bill," Gonzalez said.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 042006
----------------------------
Erik Voss
erik@ICAtlanta.org
404-457-5901 Direct
<< Home