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Malibu politics prison Rant Whitstable

Sheriff Lee Baca the ACLU and Me

So, yesterday.

I’m sure you want to know.

Firstly, I want to thank the ACLU for co-counseling my suit against the Sheriff.

They have worked for months on this case and they have every reason to believe in a positive outcome.

My personal suit separated from the class action.

I am suing the Sheriff’s Department for a considerable amount of money.

I arrived early at the ACLU office down town.  I met with my lawyers.  I watched the 30 or so cameras being set up from TV stations all over the USA.

Jennie Pasquarella spoke first.  A more eloquent speaker one could not hope to listen to.  A more brilliant lawyer one could not hope to meet.

Like all of the lawyers who work for the ACLU she is motivated by fairness for all.

She said:

The principle of bail is something so fundamental, that you shouldn’t be held until you’re found guilty.

I waited my turn.

I listened again to this startling fact:  The Immigration Department is mandated  to deport 400, 000 people a year from the USA.

This fact alone never ceases to shock and amaze me.  The implications, I’m sure, are not lost on any of you.

The last time I faced a barrage of press like that I was at the Sundance Film Festival.  It was all about me.

Yesterday I was representing thousands of the disenfranchised, the oppressed and the wrongly imprisoned.

In light of Jerry Brown’s veto of the Trust Act and set against the back drop of a recent, damning report documenting violence and abuse in The Men’s County Jail, this case could not be more relevant.

Sheriff Lee Baca has been effectively told that he is incapable of running a jail by the board of supervisors.

Humiliatingly the Supervisors, not the Sheriff, will find someone more competent to run the jail.

Within minutes of the end of our press conference the Sheriff’s representative disputed the charge that the Sheriff’s Department has denied bail to anyone because of ICE holds.

“If you are able to post bail — say it’s $10,000 — and you’re an immigrant from wherever. With or without an ICE hold, we accept that,” said the spokeswoman, Nicole Nishida.

An outright LIE.

A report by prison expert James Austin cites data from Baca’s office indicating that at least 20,000 Los Angeles County inmates, nearly all of them Latino males, were subjected to ICE holds in 2011.

Latino males arrested, held in the MCJ, forced to accept spurious guilty pleas and deported equals: ethnic cleansing.

Nobody cares about them.  Nobody gives a damn about undocumented workers.  They are treated like animals.  Even by my most (so-called) progressive friends.

Latinos spending their lives doing jobs white people don’t want to do, refuse to do in SoCal.  They are the real victims of the economic catastrophe.

During the good times, we turn a blind eye to these men and women working at our behest for minimal wages.

When things get bad they are thrown out like yesterdays trash, rounded up like cattle to satisfy immigration deportation quotas.

It’s the same everywhere, when things get tough:  blame the immigrants.

I heard my own mother blame Eastern Europeans for ‘taking our jobs’ back at home in Britain.

The Spanish-speaking press asked me: “Do you think Lee Baca is anti-immigrant?”

“You mean, do I think Lee Baca is a racist?”  I replied.  “Well, he is just part of the racist problem in the USA but he gets to be the executioner.”

In a country where most people are enslaved by debt, lack of education, obesity, religious/corporate ideology and hubris it is very easy to forget about ones own enslavement and think nothing of enslaving and demonizing others.

The primary reason I would never vote (if I could) for a second Obama term, regardless of his so-called pro gay marriage smokescreen (designed largely to melt liberal hearts) is his appalling deportation record.

The Obama administration’s deportation policies, which rely on cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, have already been challenged in California.

Legislation that would have prohibited sheriffs and police departments from enforcing ICE holds in most cases was, as I have already written, vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month.

Barrack Obama has deported more people from the USA than any other President in this country’s history.

It goes without saying that the Gay media and my local Malibu newspaper will totally ignore this story.  I am neither pretty enough nor non-controversial for either to cover the story.

Even though it may be of interest to both communities.

Most gay men are unaware that if they fell in love with a non-American their state marriage certificate or their Foreign marriage certificate would mean absolutely nothing to the Federal Immigration Department.

Their husband/wife would risk deportation.

The gay men I know think that deportation happens to other people… you know… brown people.  Not people like us.

Those same gay men run the gay media.

Scott McPherson from The Advocate told me recently that he totally supported The President’s immigration policy and (after I explained to him what a drone was and who was being killed by them) he told me he had no interest in who drones were killing.

All Scott wants is marriage equality.  Apparently, only for Americans to marry other Americans.

You might think that Malibu is a liberal, open-minded place…. with all those rich über gays living down there on the beach… but I have endured more homophobia in Malibu than even my small home town village of Whitstable in Kent where one might expect the crushingly narrow-minded.

My Armenian neighbor was so vile about me and my young gay renter, her invective so shocking… it almost took my breath away.

So.  It has begun.

Where the runes fall… is none of my business.

Somehow the very act of laying ones self bare, open to all sorts of scrutiny, is a relief.

Regardless of the outcome, I am very happy to be of service to those who can least help themselves.

Categories
Los Angeles politics

Fuck You Jerry Brown

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Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the TRUST Act, a bill championed by immigrants rights advocates.

The bill, which was the antithesis of Arizona’s SB 1070, would have helped stop racial profiling and restore trust and transparency between California’s communities and law enforcement officials.

While the outcome of the fight is disappointing, I am thankful for activists who appealed to Governor Brown by signing thousands of petitions then making hundreds of calls to his office urging him to sign the bill.

Adam Luna, is the Political Director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrants rights organization wanted to share this message:

“While it was a bitter disappointment to see the governor veto the TRUST Act, I wanted to let you know how much your activism and solidarity made a real difference.

11,300 petition signatures (more than any other organization!), which were hand-delivered in Sacramento, hundreds of phone calls — it was amazing.”

Those of us in the immigration reform movement know that this is not a fight which is going to be won overnight and the governor said that he’s open to making a deal next year because he knows that you, and we, won’t rest until the fight is won.

While Governor Brown’s failure of leadership on this issue is disheartening, the campaign for fair and sensible immigration policies will go on.

Next week I will be announcing my very own action against the secure communities protocol that incarnated me and thousands of people like me.

A few months ago a young, gay Australian man here legally in the USA on a tourist visa was arrested for peeing in public (a sex crime felony in the state of California) and held in the Men’s Country Jail until he agreed to be deported.

Why?

IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW!

Categories
Rant

Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman has now spent nearly $200, 000, 000 of her own money on an election campaign to become California’s next Governor.   This is a woman who previously never voted in any election nor to my knowledge ever engaged in public life at any level either charitably or politically.

Perhaps for what she is best known will end up losing this election:  the treatment of her Latino housekeeper Nikki Dias.

Only yesterday Whitman said that nobody would remember Nikki Dias after she has been deported.  An undocumented worker who for 11 years worked tirelessly for one of the richest women in America.  Meg’s cavalier attitude toward Nikki has without doubt influenced the people and their opinion about Meg Whitman.

UPDATE:  Meg actually said “Come November 3rd nobody will care about Nikki Dias”

In these tough economic times most people can relate to disenfranchised Nikki Dias and not Whitman who spent as much as it costs sending 2000 California students to an Ivy League University…which is why Jerry Brown now has a 12% poll lead over the profligate, uncaring, miserable Meg.

By the way Meg 2010, smiling that big false smile your advisors have advised you to smile on TV simply isn’t working.  It looks absurd.

Come November 3rd everybody will be thinking/caring/remembering Nikki Dias because they know that the way you treat your staff may say something about the way you treat us.

Therapy at 7am.  Home by 8.30am.  I had a lovely time in my group this morning.  Felt strong and secure.  The sun is shining.  The Santa Ana’s are blowing.  Ashley is eating gluten-free corn flakes.

Dan Savage.  Hmmm.  Still not ready to eviscerate him.  Still researching.

My mother wrote this to me when she heard about the JB debacle/fiasco/upset:

Those who have never been wounded in love will never be able to say I have lived…because they haven’t.

I think that it may surprise some that I have a parent who cares sufficiently to say that she loves me and is as upset as any parent when her child suffers.

I know that she is there but I rarely call for help.  This health thing will be dealt with as I have dealt with any hard ball thrown my way..on my own.  Part of the sadness around him was that he seemed to dump me at the very moment I called for help.

For this very reason I loathe asking for help.  That I will be abandoned when I am most vulnerable.  His inability to help me selflessly when I needed it undoubtedly fueled my rage.  After all, I really tried to be of service to that boy.

The Bad Baby slept through the night.  He is still sleeping soundly.

OK.  Dan Savage and his It Get’s Better campaign.

This is difficult.  My primary beef with Savage is that he rejects that Sex and Love Addiction exists.   Surely it exists if self-diagnosed addicts say it exists?  Addiction is always self-diagnosed.  Acceptance is key?

Listen, my doubt about the ‘It get’s better’ thing is that for so many young men who come out it simply does not get better..because the community of gay men ready to accept these boys and girls is predatory, limited and frankly without morals.  What and where is our ‘community’?

Breaks my heart to write that.

What in hells name, outside of big cities, do we have to offer young gay men and women?   Younger gays, indeed like most young people, simply don’t relish the idea of being identified as different.

This is a country where difference is rarely celebrated and oft maligned.

Categories
Dogs Malibu Rant

For Sale

I showed the house for the first time yesterday.  A Persian man who lives not far from here.

He was looking for a cheap house as an investment.  I really don’t care who buys it.

I spent the morning rearranging.

I rearranged the furniture so the dining area is set above the sitting room on the terrazzo plinth.   It looks great.  I used the black leather chairs that I bought for ElCerrito Place.  I tried using the Morrison chairs but they looked too complicated.  Compromised the aesthetic.

I am going to sell my Jasper Morrison dining room chairs.  They are now stacked outside looking really forlorn, they need to go else where..where they can be loved.

Had tea with JA in West H’wood yesterday.  Everybody is in such a funk.  Things have ground to a halt.  Is this just on the West Coast?   Nobody knows how to crawl out of this hole?  Maybe we don’t crawl out of anywhere but learn to live with new parameters.

Popped in on Trevor at the bottom of the canyon to see the young doe that the coyote had savaged in his garden.  It was all gnawed at.  Its tongue sticking out.  Trevor’s wife was a bit pissed that I had made the effort to see the dead deer but not their new baby.  Sorry Jen.

Meg Whitman the ex Ebay CEO is running in the Gubernatorial race here in California against Jerry Brown.  She has spent over $119, 000, 000 of her own money on her campaign.  She becomes the largest self-funded political candidate in history.

Yet all of this might come to naught if her ex-maid and nanny of nine years Nicky Diaz Santillan swings the vote.   Nicky’s story is a familiar one in California.  An illegal immigrant (undocumented) who worked hard for Meg and her husband is cruelly let go when she asks for help to become legal.

“Thown away like trash.” she sobbed on TV.

The latino population in SoCal will take notice.  They know what that feels like.  To be part of a family, whether Witman’s or family USA only to be thrown away when things get tough.

The economy in this part of America has relied heavily on the cheap labour that these illegal immigrants offer.  Making the rich richer, they are hard-working, uncomplaining people.  I have employed Spanish-speaking men at the local labor exchange and they work tirelessly in scorching heat, lugging great hessian bags of garden waste up and down the mountains like donkeys.  I don’t ask any questions.  Nor do my neighbors.

These latino workers have no expectations, except to be treated poorly by white folk like me.  They don’t have much choice.

When they do not get treated poorly they are grateful and go the extra mile.

The truth is, frustrated white people in the USA very begrudgingly gave up their slaves so having illegal Mexican immigrants who do as they are told for very little somehow placates their desire to be slave owners.

White people may say they are pissed off by illegal immigrants yet I don’t know any one of them who would be prepared to do what these people do.  Washing up, gardening, busing, etc.  Menial tasks.  White people wouldn’t know how.  They don’t know how.

We tried to import a bunch of colourful faces into the UK to do the same during the 1950’s but they opened corner shops and restaurants and got richer than the people who imported them.  Anyway, we had colonial apologists who refused to see these people used like American white people use Latinos.

Thank GOD for bouts of socialism.

I could bang on about the racism that exists here but I can’t be bothered.

White people are hurting.  They have lost their jobs and their homes. There is no industry.  They can’t seem to relearn working skills and get humble and wash dishes for other white folk.  The dream is dead.  Arianna Huffington is on TV telling people that America is a Third World Country, that the middle class is over and that the American Dream has been compromised.

Similar circumstances existed in Germany before the second world war.  Crippling debt (war reparations) unemployment, hunger, desperation, hopelessness.  Do not underestimate the gruelling effect of hopelessness..regardless of how comfortable you are if you feel hopeless your view on the world changes.  It gets easy to blame the immigrant, the jew, the gay…the innefectual black President.

I pray that I am wrong but given the current state of the USA, these extreme economic circumstances I am guessing that the people of America will, come the next election, elect a far right, socially conservative Palin type President who will irrevocably damage the entire world.  We are desperate for strong, innovative, modern leadership yet it seems that only the far right have the balls to serve what the people hanker.

We are witnessing the cynical destruction of the USA as we, and millions before us, dreamed it.  It is a crying shame.

By the way.  Rich Sanchez the latino CNN host fired this week for saying that Jon Stewart was pompous and that the media was controlled by the Jews.  Well, that’s how it was reported.  Not quite the way he said it.  Actually he said he felt bullied by Stewart, looked down upon.  That people like Stewart look down on latinos..and he’d be right.  I am sure what he felt about Jon Stewart may very well be right.

I rather like Rick Sanchez.  Isn’t it amazing that Sanchez can get fired for saying two rather obvious things (one an opinion and one true) and that Glenn Beck gets to say terrible shit everyday but nobody lifts a finger?

Willie just took a huge dump on the carpet…nice.  Thankfully I know how to clean a rug without resorting to calling a maid service.