By Larry Jones
The spread of the swine flu, or H1N1 influenza, is real and it has spread to 16 countries with 658 confirmed cases as of this writing. The World Health Organization has raised the pandemic level to stage 5 on a scale of 6. One death in the U.S. has been reported, a Mexico City toddler who traveled to Texas with family and died on April 29 at a Houston hospital.
Nut-job talk show hosts and television hate mongers have jumped on this to spew onto the airwaves a diatribe of invective against immigrants in general and Mexicans in particular. Among the worst was Michelle Malkin, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor.
"I’ve blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration. We’ve heard for years from reckless open-borders ideologues who continue to insist there’s nothing to worry about. And we’ve heard for years that calling any attention to the dangers of allowing untold numbers of people to pass across our borders and through our other ports of entry without proper medical screening — as required of every legal visitor/immigrant to this country — is RAAAACIST."
To which Keith Olbermann of MSNBC replied, “Well, yes, you are a racist.” Malkin also complained about Americans not waking up to her xenophobic fear of immigrants, saying that "9/11 didn’t convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality. Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools will." The problem with this argument is that the flu that spread from Mexico to New York City didn’t come by way of Mexicans. It was by a group of Catholic school girls who were in Cancun for spring break.
Michael Savage of The Savage Nation said that “Illegal aliens are carriers of the new strain of Human Swine Avian Flu from Mexico. Is this a terrorist attack?” Almost as if to answer that question, Neal Boortz said on his show that “There’s the bio-terrorism angle. What better way to sneak a virus in this country than to give it to Mexicans.”
So maybe some terrorist somehow was able to collect a vial of H1N1 and sneak it into Mexico City and dump it into someone’s drinking water. Do these poor excuses for media commentators think all of us are as stupid as they are?
Calls to Close the Border
There are other ranting Fox News personalities, such as the notorious Glenn Beck who said: “If this is so important, why haven’t we closed the border?” It may or may not be coincidental, but amid the babble of right wing calls to seal the border, The Washington Post announced on April 25 that the Pentagon and Homeland Security Departments have plans in the making to expand the military’s role at the Mexican border, to help fight the drug war. And what or who else?
Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a group of hateful anti-immigrant vigilantes, has called for an immediate deployment of National Guard troops at the border. He has also said he will run against John McCain in the 2010 Senate race.
Quarantines
The U.S. government appears to have seized upon what is clearly a public health problem, not an immigration problem, to put in place and test measures to control the population whenever leaders in the Obama administration say there’s a crisis, such as quarantine. According to CBS News, on April 27, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo stating: "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines."
Such authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders. President Bush added "novel" forms of influenza with the potential to create pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order could face a $250,000 fine and a year in prison. A problem for the government is that at this point no Surgeon General has been appointed and confirmed, but that should soon be resolved.
Scanners and wiretaps
Some countries, such as Canada use airport temperature scanners, which "determine the temperature of an object by measuring the amount of infrared radiation emitted by that object; the higher the temperature, the more infrared radiation that is emitted,” according to the Canadian government. http://www.slate.com/id/2217148/ The U.S. has not yet started using such equipment, but its potential could go far beyond testing for a flu virus. Other types of scanners, such as eye scanners and tetrahertz scanners which show anything hidden on your person, are now available in this country.
President Obama voted in the Senate last August for the changes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) law which granted immunity to telecoms which have participated in illegal electronic surveillance programs which include average American citizens.
When a suit was filed last October against Bush regime officials for illegally spying on ordinary Americans, the plaintiffs agreed to postpone hearings until April, when they hoped for a better response from the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ). But were they ever wrong! In other cases the Obama DOJ used the Bush argument that the suits could not proceed because they involved state secrets.
However, in the case filed last August the Obama DOJ’s response went even further. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com put it well when he wrote that “beyond even the outrageously broad ‘state secrets’ privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and — even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal — you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.”
Your response
It is evident that the response of people in this country to the calls to shut down the border, to target Mexican people, to prepare for large quarantines, to utilize modern technology to invade our privacy, and to deny our right to sue the government for illegal spying are calls for a major leap in repression, targeting Mexican immigrants specifically, but with much broader applicability.
Are we going to sit still in the face of all that, or are we going to mobilize a spirit-filled independent response to all these dangers? Tell us what you think.