‘Argo’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Showcase the Banal Militarism of Hollywood

Foreign Policy in Focus / By Fouad Pervez – ALTERNET

February 27, 2013

The latest Academy Awards ceremony, which crowned the well-intentioned but fatally flawed Argo as the year’s best film, merely formalized the nearly universal acclaim that director Ben Affleck has received for his gripping CIA drama set in Iran. It also said a lot about what’s wrong with Hollywood today.

Indeed, the Oscars this year seemed to exhibit more American exceptionalism and less diversity than previous years. Just 10 years ago, filmmaker Michael Moore used his acceptance speech to slam the recently launched Iraq war, issuing a prescient warning that was widely criticized for its political content but notable for its inclusion. This year, we had Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and a military entourage for the first lady. We also had very few brown faces, and no mention of anything happening in the world outside of Hollywood.

Hollywood may be returning to making “serious movies,” but the scope of that seriousness still only extends to mostly white American characters. Argo’s main shortcoming was its poor job contextualizing the situation in Iran in the 1970s. It also followed the Hollywood trend, frequently rewarded, of humanizing Americans while dehumanizing everyone else. Nearly every Iranian in Argoresembled a religious fanatic, and there was minimal effort to explain the source of Iranian rage—in this case, the imposition of a U.S.-backed tyrannical dictator. Given the strong beltway lobby for war with Iran, this caricature is not helpful.

One could argue that it isn’t Hollywood’s job to provide such context, but this misses the reality of the society we live in. The arts serve as a form of cultural diplomacy and fill in gaps in public understanding left by journalism. In an age when foreign news bureaus have been decimated, news research budgets slashed, and local stringers and fly-in celebrity journalists comprise “world news” in America, Hollywood could genuinely enhance the public discourse by giving life to regions of the world most Americans know little about. Instead, films like Argo andZero Dark Thirty opted to serve as PR arms for the Pentagon and CIA.

Instead of a critical examination of controversial issues like war, drone strikes, and torture, we get what David Sirota calls the “ Military Entertainment Complex,” whereby the government essentially lobbies Hollywood to serve as its mouthpiece.

There are exceptions—particularly in the Best Documentary category, year after year—but those mostly prove the rule. Argo gave us CIA talking points on Iran, missing most of the information from 1953-79, and even minimizing Canada’s role in the operation. Zero Dark Thirty gave us a Pentagon/CIA/White House-backed film with false information on torture. The artists and their studios opted to provide minimal humanization of any non-American characters. You feel horror at seeing the children during the violent raid scene in Zero Dark Thirty, but because you have no previous connection to them, it’s not exactly empathy. Finally, both films are passed as true stories. But while each makes use of historical facts, they play with context to manipulate the audience into a pro-American froth.

Appealing to jingoism is certainly easier than prompting national introspection, but is priming an audience for blood what we call art today? It doesn’t mean we need anti-American films, or films that downplay whatever real threats might be posed by Iran or international terrorists. But when dealing with contentious and critical global issues in films, one would think understanding perspectives other than our own, even for limited moments, would be crucial to both artistic integrity and public discourse.

We keep looking for the answer to “why they hate us” even 12 years after 9/11. The answer isn’t pretty, but it isn’t terribly elusive either. Unfortunately, our films keep us searching for the answer.

Fouad Pervez is a contributor toForeign Policy in Focus, where he writes on U.S. foreign policy and security issues in South Asia. He is currently pursuing his PhD in International Relations. He is a writer and policy analyst, and occasionally blogs on There is No Spoon. He can be reached at fouad0 at gmail dot com.

ARGO: Affleck’s conceit cannot hide his political obtuseness

February 25, 2013

The Shortsighted History of “Argo”

By Robert Parry

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Oscar for Best Picture went to Ben Affleck’s Argo, an escape-thriller set in post-revolutionary Iran. It hyped the drama and edged into propaganda. But Americans would have learned a lot more if Affleck had chosen the CIA coup in 1953 or the Republican chicanery in 1980.

Cross-posted from Consortium News

Actor/director Ben Affleck speaking at a rally for Feed America in 2009.

In some ways it was encouraging that several Best Picture nominees had historical themes, whether they tried to stick fairly close to facts as in Lincoln on passage of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery or they just used history as a vivid backdrop for an imaginative story about slavery as in Django Unchained.

It’s less encouraging that the Motion Picture Academy selected as Best Picture Argo, which — while based on real events — underscored Hollywood’s timidity about taking on more significant and more controversial events on either side of Ben Affleck’s film about the CIA-engineered escape of six staffers from the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979.

True, both bookend stories remain more shrouded in uncertainty than the much smaller Argo tale, but enough is known about them to justify a dramatic treatment. Participants in the 1953 coup and in the 1979-81 hostage crisis have described the events in sufficient detail to support a compelling movie script. Indeed, Miles Copeland, a CIA officer who worked on the 1953 coup even reemerged for a cameo appearance in Republican activities around Carter’s frustrated hostage negotiations in 1980. [See Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.] On one end of that story line was the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, a tale involving legendary and colorful American spies led by Kermit Roosevelt. On the other side of the Argo events was the mystery of Republican interference in President Jimmy Carter’s desperate efforts to free 52 embassy employees who were captured in 1979 and held for 444 days.

I realize that Hollywood is not primarily interested in increasing understanding among adversarial nations. But either a movie about the 1953 coup or one going behind-the-scenes of the 1979-81 hostage crisis could help inform the American people about the complex relationship that has existed between the United States and Iran. It’s not just good guy vs. bad guy.

Of course, that might be the key reason why Hollywood found the little-known Argo story compelling and the other bigger stories to be non-starters. Argo did largely draw its narrative in black and white, with strong propaganda overtones, feeding into the current hostility between the United States and Iran over its nuclear program.

Despite a brief documentary-style opening referencing the 1953 coup and the dictatorial rule of the Shah of Iran until 1979, Argo quickly descended into a formulaic tale of sympathetic CIA officers trying to outwit nasty Iranian revolutionaries, complete with a totally made-up thriller escape at the end.

Misreporting Afghanistan

In that sense, Argo recalls Charlie Wilson’s War, which presented a dangerously misleading account of the Soviets’ war in Afghanistan. Though “just a movie,” Charlie Wilson’s War’s storyline has become something of a baseline for America’s understanding of the historic challenges in Afghanistan.

Charlie Wilson’s War portrayed the CIA-backed Afghan jihadists (or mujahedeen) as noble freedom-fighters and the Soviet pilots and soldiers — trying to protect a communist government in Kabul — as unmitigated war criminals and monsters. The nuances were all lost.

For instance, the communist regime — for all its faults — brought some measure of modernity to Afghanistan. Women’s rights were respected. Girls were allowed to attend school, and strict rules demanding segregation by sex were relaxed. Indeed, in the real history, the CIA-backed jihadists were motivated in large part by their fury over these reforms in women’s rights.

In other words, the CIA-backed jihadists were not the noble “freedom-fighters” as they were portrayed in the movie. They were fighting for the cruel subjugation of Afghan women. And the jihadists were notoriously brutal, torturing and executing captured Soviet and Afghan government soldiers.

However, that cruelty was not depicted in Charlie Wilson’s War, nor was it presented as the chief policy failure of U.S. war effort. According to the movie, the big U.S. mistake was a supposed failure to see the Afghan project through to the end, the alleged abandonment of Afghanistan as soon as the Soviet troops left in early 1989.

In the movie, Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Texas, who is credited with organizing U.S. support for the Afghan “freedom-fighters,” is shown begging unsuccessfully for more money after the Soviets depart.

The real history is dramatically different. In late 1988 and early 1989, deputy CIA director Robert Gates and other key officials for the incoming administration of President George H.W. Bush rebuffed peace initiatives from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev who wanted a unity government that would bring the civil war to an end and prevent a wholesale return of Afghanistan to the Dark Ages.

Instead, the Bush-41 administration sought a triumphal victory for the jihadists and the CIA. So, contrary to the movie’s depiction of a cut-off of funds once the Soviets departed, the United States actually continued covert war funding for several more years in hopes of taking Kabul.

That rejection of Gorbachev’s initiative opened Afghanistan to the complete chaos that followed and finally the rise of the Pakistani-backed Taliban in the mid-1990s. The Taliban then hosted fellow Islamist extremist Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists.

Though Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks was “just a movie,” it cemented in the American mind a false narrative which has been repeatedly cited by policymakers, including Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, as justification for continuing a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Similarly, Argo confirms to many average Americans the unreasonableness of Iranians, who are portrayed as both evil and inept. If negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program collapse, this propaganda image of the Iranians could help tilt the balance of U.S. public opinion toward war.

By contrast, movies on the CIA’s 1953 coup or the Republican interference in Carter’s hostage negotiations in 1980 would demonstrate that there are two or more sides to every story. Granted, such movies would encounter powerful forces of resistance. The movie-makers might be accused of “blaming America first” and the Academy might shy away from handing out Oscars in the face of controversy.

But either of the bookend stories around Argo would get to more important truths than did this year’s Best Picture. The two stories would show how America has manipulated politics abroad and how that practice has come home to roost.

Submitters Website: http://www.consortiumnews.com

About the author

secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

TOO MUCH—Chronicles of Inequality (Feb. 25, 2013)

	February 25, 2013
THIS WEEK
This coming Sunday, voters in Switzerland will likely enact a landmark set of limits on executive pay — including a ban on both CEO signing bonuses and “golden parachutes” — by a landslide margin.This executive pay initiative, one poll shows, has 64 percent of the Swiss public behind it, and that poll came out before the alarming revelation that one retiring Swiss top exec was getting a $78 million bonus for agreeing not to go work for a rival company. The resulting public uproar grew so loud that the errant executive agreed last week to cancel the payout.Meanwhile, last week in the United States, a news report on a new tax dodge that can up hedge fund billionaire profits by over 50 percent sank without a trace.Why so much public outrage in Switzerland, so little in the United States? We’ll leave that question for another day. Instead, in this week’s Too Much, we’d like to take everybody on a little cruise ship vacation.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too MuchJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, we learned last week, saw his pay soar 73 percent last year, to $12.1 million. Moynihan is getting credit for restoring Bank of America to profitability. But the real credit for profits at America’s big banks, Bloomberg News detailed Wednesday, belongs to America’s taxpayers. Our too-big-to-fail banks, Bloomberg explains, enjoy an “implicit” taxpayer subsidy. They can borrow money at lower rates because creditors know Uncle Sam will never risk letting them go under. This subsidy saves America’s 10 largest banks about 0.8 percent off their borrowing rates, about $83 billion a year, “an amount,” notes Bloomberg, “roughly equal to their typical annual profits.”Over recent decades, changes in the rules that run the U.S. economy, on everything from taxes to trade, have helped redistribute America’s wealth to America’s wealthy. But some of those wealthy did their best to resist this greed grab. Last month, a pioneer among these egalitarian Americans of means, William Densmore, passed away at age 88. A top corporate exec in Massachusetts, Densmore retired in the 1980s and later helped found Responsible Wealth, the first national grouping of affluent Americans working for stiffer taxes on high incomes. Densmore would later evolve a list of15 “rule changes” that could help close America’s economic divide. Early this May, experts and activists will honor — and continue — Densmore’s work at a landmark national “Rules Change” conference at the University of Massachusetts . . .“Mrs. Patmore,” the frumpy cook in the TV hit Downton Abbey, probably wouldn’t make it as a personal chef for today’s rich and famous. Personal cooks for the rich these days, the Washington Post relates, tend to be a tad more glamorous — like Jenn Crovato, a 37-year-old private-jet-hopping chef who won’t do any meal for less than $1,000. Crovato hit the big-time whipping up treats for billionaire real estate mogul Joseph Robert. He had Crovato on a $100,000 annual retainer that left her free to fix meals on the side for his fellow deep pockets. The one aspect of cooking for the rich that hasn’t changed: the stress of dealing with the whims of the wealthy. Crovato’s former boss Robert would call from his car with 20 minutes notice, the Post notes, “and demand lunch for half a dozen friends.”	Quote of the Week “Only by the most debased principles can, say, bankers, be said to deserve their money, the same principles that led Thucydides to write that the strong do as they will and the weak suffer what they must.” Ian Welsh, On Economic Justice, February 21, 2013
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
The French minister for industry had a simple request: Would the U.S.-based Titan International consider buying a tire factory in Amiens that Goodyear was planning to close? Titan CEO Maurice Taylor’s answer, in a letter disclosed last week: “How stupid do you think we are?” French workers, Taylor’s diatribe went on, make high wages for not working: “They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.” Titan, the letter boasted, is going to “pay less than €1 an hour” to tire workers in China and India and export the tires they make to France. Taylor’s broadside sparked a French media firestorm. So how stupid is Morry Taylor? This stupid: He ran for President in the 1996 GOP primaries andspent $6.5 million of his own money. He won 7,000 votes. He paid, in effect, almost $1,000 for each one.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
Larry Chait, for the Billboard Project	Web Gem The World Top Incomes Database/ The world’s top scholars on high incomes have created a site that lets readers compare national income distributions over time.
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
By law, under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, U.S. firms must now annually reveal the ratio between what they pay their CEOs and most typical workers. But no major U.S. firm has yet made this disclosure — because the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has still not written the regulations needed to enforce the Dodd-Frank mandate. Last week, at long last, a glimmer of regulatory hope: SEC commissioner Luis Aguilar openly embraced pay ratio disclosure. A high ratio between CEO and median pay, opined Aguilar, can “create risks to an enterprise.” Aguilar’s remarks, notes the AFL-CIO’s Vineeta Anand, “may be the first time a SEC commissioner has said anything about the connection between the ratio and risks to a company.” Mary Jo White, the likely next SEC chair, has not yet signaled her stance.	Take Action on InequalityHundreds of ex-employees at the SEC, a new reportshows, are now selling what they learned as federal regulators to the firms they were supposed to be regulating. Urge Congressto shut the SEC revolving door to Wall Street.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
	Stat of the WeekIn the 2011-12 budget year, offshore tax havens saved wealthy individuals in California $2.94 billion off their state tax bills, notesanalyst David Cay Johnston, enough to make the University of California tuition-free for all UC students and their families.
IN FOCUS
From Inequality, We Can’t Take a Vacation‘A million ways to have fun,’ goes the cruise ship marketing slogan — but only, the fine print should read, if you have mega millions.Just over a year ago, the Costa Concordia, an ocean liner that belongs to Carnival Cruise Lines, ran aground on an Italian sandbar. Thirty-two died.“We expect to fully recover from the ship incident,” the subsequent Carnival 2012 annual report told shareholders. Earlier this month, Carnival suffered another “ship incident.” The Carnival Triumph, with over 4,200 passengers and crew onboard, lost all power after an engine fire. The ship drifted aimlessly in the Gulf of Mexico for days, with toilets overflowing and food rotting. Raw sewage spilled into cabins and passageways. Passengers would later describe “an overpowering stench.” Carnival CEO Micky Arison never caught a whiff of this stench. He stayed far away. In fact, two days after the fire, with the Triumph still stinking, Arison showed up courtside in Miami to watch his beloved Miami Heat do basketball battle. Arison owns the Miami Heat. Arison owns a great many things. This past September, the business magazineForbes put his total personal fortune at a clean $5 billion. Last year, after the 32 tragic deaths about Carnival’s ill-fated Costa Concordia, Arison displayed a rather similar cavalier disregard for his passengers’ welfare. He never showed up at the disaster scene in Italy either. Carnival would go on to offer the 3,200 passengers who survived that disaster a refund, travel expenses, and a bit over $14,000 each. Some perspective: The entire bill for the $14,000 checks — about $45 million — amounts to less than 1 percent of Carnival CEO Arison’s personal net worth. The Carnival passengers who experienced this month’s unpleasantness have received an offer that makes the Costa Concordia compensation seem downright generous. Passengers who waded through sewage on the Triumph for five dayswill get a refund, free rides home, a credit toward a future cruise, and $500. Theyalso get a complimentary bathrobe. More perspective: Under U.S. Department of Transportation airline regulations, passengers denied boarding on an oversold flight get up to $1,300 if the delay to their final destination costs them more than four hours. Cruise giants like Carnival essentially don’t face many regulations with that sort of bite. In fact, they face relatively few regulations at all. In a U.S. port, cruise ships do fall under U.S. Coast Guard jurisdiction. But on the seas, as U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller noted after the Triumph episode, “the world is theirs.” An international maritime organization does, to be sure, exist. But its guidelines don’t carry the force of law. Corporations can violate these guidelines,points out maritime legal expert Jim Walker, and face no real consequences. Cruise corporations have also made sure that any standards on the books only serve for show. All cruise ships, for instance, must now have auxiliary power systems to maintain propulsion and basic passenger services should a fire knock out the main power system, the fate that befell the Carnival Triumph. This standard, rather conveniently, only applies to ships built after July 1, 2010 and doesn’t cover the Triumph, built in 1999, or just about every other cruise liner on the seven seas. All these ships could, of course, retrofit to meet the new 2010 safety rule. But that retrofit would make a dent on their corporate profit margins. And billionaire Carnival CEO Micky Arison doesn’t like to see anything dent his profit. Especially taxes. Over the previous five years, Senate Transportation Committee chair Jay Rockefeller revealed at a 2012 hearing, Arison’s Carnival Corp. paid just 1.1 percent of its $11.3 billion in profits in combined local, state, and federal taxes. Dodging taxes and safety regulations certainly does help keep the dollars cascading into the pockets of top cruise industry execs. But you don’t get to become a billionaire just by stiffing Uncle Sam and skirting safety regs. Execs like Arison also never miss an opportunity to nickel-and-dime at passenger expense. Carnival and other cruise giants have been busily inventing new service fees to tack on passenger bills, $50 charges, for instance, for early boarding. Passengers on cruise liners used to have access to any on-board restaurant without paying anything extra. Now they pay extra if they want anything besides a buffet. All cruise ship passengers, of course, have at least a basic level of personal affluence. Whatever shipboard indignities they suffer, in the end, pale against the indignities so many millions of families suffer today, on a daily basis, in Great Recession America. But symbols do matter — and what more vivid symbol of the indignity our contemporary corporate-driven inequality imposes than the Carnival Triumph. Thousands of people adrift, going nowhere in a nightmare of sewage and stench, while a billionaire chief exec sits far away in a courtside seat and cheers. Like this article? Subscribe and get Too Much in your email inbox every Monday.	Email this Too Much issue to a friend New Wisdom on Wealth Paul Buchheit, Five Signs Extreme Wealth Deadens the ‘Empathy’ and ‘Honesty’ Parts of the Brain, AlterNet, February 19, 2013. A look at the excuses for inequality our wealthy regularly advance. Dylan Matthews, How the ultra-rich are pulling away from the ‘merely’ rich,Washington Post, February 19, 2013. Zeroing in on the top 0.01 percent. Jeff Bryant, New Report Urges Education Secretary To Take Inequality ‘More Seriously,’ Campaign for America’s Future, February 19, 2013. “Deep inequities between schools and between students” endanger the nation. Helena Bachmann, Why Rich Switzerland Is Livid About Rich-Executive Payouts,Time, February 22, 2013. The prospects for a landmark Swiss vote against CEO excess March 3 seem better than ever. Floyd Norris, A Tax That May Change the Trading Game, New York Times, February 21, 2013. Why speculators have reason to fear the new European financial transactions tax. Keith Speights, Are Big Pharma’s CEO Pay Packages Outrageous?Motley Fool, February 22, 2013. Three Big Pharma CEOs will collect over $33 million each if their company changes hands. Now free online: the Intro chapter to the new book byToo Much editor Sam Pizzigati, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970.
NEW AND NOTABLE
Digging Deeper into Executive Pay ExcessJoy Sabino Mullane, Perfect Storms: Congressional Regulation of Executive Compensation, and David Walker, Who Bears the Cost of Excessive Executive Compensation (and Other Corporate Agency Costs)? Villanova Law Review, Volume 57 (2012)Analysts who think deep thoughts about excessive executive pay have traditionally seen corporate shareholders as the primary victim of this excess. Shareholder returns would be higher, the thinking goes, if executive pay sank to more reasonable levels.Boston University’s David Walker thinks we need to think deeper. Executive excess, Walker explains in this new analysis, may be eroding worker “wages and returns on all sorts of investments.” And if we recognized this broader impact, he suggests, we would also recognize the folly of expecting shareholders, and shareholders alone, to eradicate that excess. And what broader steps might we take, as a society, to rein in executive excess? Villanova’s Joy Sabino Mullane offers up some ideas in her new survey of the last four-score years of congressional attempts to do that reining. Did you know, for instance, that lawmakers in the early years of the Great Depression denied federal airmail contracts to companies that compensated their top execs over, in today’s dollars, $305,000? Could a similar strategy today, if expanded to all firms that sought federal contracts, have a significant dampening impact on CEO pay excess? Mullane doesn’t ask that question. Maybe we should.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to someone you know who might want to subscribe
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies \| 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 \| (202) 234-9382 \| Editor: Sam Pizzigati. \| E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org \| Unsubscribe.

The Case of Marco Rubio

Bagman for the Politics of Reaction
and a repulsively opportunistic Cuban “maggot”

by RODOLFO ACUÑA

Senator Marco Rubio strongly criticized the first draft of President Obama’s immigration reform plan saying “It’s a mistake for the White House to draft immigration legislation without seeking input from Republican members of Congress… ,” predicting that “if actually proposed, the President’s bill would be dead on arrival in Congress.” The Rubio statement calls the bill “half-baked and seriously flawed.” It alleges that Obama’s bill is not tough enough on border security and that it penalizes “those who chose to do things the right way and come here legally” over “those who broke our immigration laws.”

Rubio’s statement undermines the social construct of a Hispanic group that bonds the disparate Latino groups. Many of the activist members of this group dismissed Rubio as a “gusano” – a worm or a maggot – a term popularly used to refer to reactionary Cuban exiles that came here during the 1960s.

Prior to his epiphany Rubio had no interest in Mexican or Latino immigrants; his sudden awakening and concern about immigration was kindled because of the strength of the Latino vote, and Mr. Rubio’s presidential aspirations. Based on his surname Rubio claims the right to take ownership of the issue, even though his base is the Tea Party and the far right of the Republican Party.

Up to this point, Rubio has not had to worry about other Latin American groups. His base is in Florida among Cuban-Americans. Cubans can legally migrate to the U.S. through various programs – options that are not open to other Latin Americans.

They get special treatment and are not subject to the restrictions and caps that Mexico and other countries are. “Cubans who have been physically present in the United States for at least one year may adjust to permanent resident status at the discretion of the Attorney General—an opportunity that no other group or nationality has.”

Many Cuban refugees are eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). They have received up to $637 a month — married couples $956. They are also eligible for other subsidies.

As refugees the Cuban Entrants and families with children under 18 may be eligible for cash assistance through a state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. More important they get health benefits. Cuban American organizations get special assistance from the federal and state governments.

Rubio’s duplicity has enraged Mexican Americans and other Latinos. He legitimizes the most reactionary of nativist rhetoric stating it would benefit those who broke the law, penalize the people who stood in line and got here legally and calls for tougher border control.

What Rubio shows is that Latinos in the United States are not a community. It raises other important questions such as why were Cubans allowed to cut into the line? Were they were being given preferential treatment? They received benefits that Mexicans and others have not received such free medical care, stipends or pension funds. Would life for many of undocumented immigrants have been any different if they had not been forced to go underground? If they had not been hounded, insulted and stereotyped?

The senator from Florida also calls for greater border security. Would he be so quick to ask for the same treatment for members of his own family? I don’t think so!

This is in stark contrast to the Mexican community that has done it the old fashion way, they worked for it.

It is understandable that the Mexican-American community is offended and enraged by Rubio’s statements. However, I do believe that our reaction should not include hyperbole such as calling him a gusano, although he may very well be one.

The term, however, is dated and unfair to many Cuban-Americans who have criticized and criticize the politics of the Miami Mafia. Many of the younger Cubans are breaking with the politics of reaction. The Christian Science Monitor reported: “President Obama won a record number of Cuban American votes in this election, 47 percent to Romney’s 50 percent. This is a full ten points above the previous high water mark (reached by Obama in 2008) by a Democratic politician. No longer can Cuban Americans be characterized a ‘reliable Republican’ constituency.’” The Pew Hispanic Center adds that Cuban Americans favored Obama 49-47 percent. This is a fundamental shift.

The truth be told, Rubio’s own constituency is shrinking. Cuban-Americans are not a homogenous group, and their words and actions should define them – not the sins of their grandfathers. They know that, and unlike their grandfathers they have experienced and recognize racism. In this they resemble Mexican refugees who came into the country after the start of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, many of whose great grandchildren are Chicanos. We must remember that not everybody’s’ grandfather rode with Pancho Villa.

At the same time, the Mexican-origin population should not be shy about defining protecting their own interests. Conservatively, over two-thirds of the Latino population is Mexican-origin; 75-80 percent are Middle Americans. In contrast 3.5 percent of the Latino construct is of Cuban-origin. This gap will grow with Mexican women having a median age of 24 versus 40 percent for Cuban women. It makes sense that the political, social and economic interests of the whole be addressed which is what Rubio forgets.

The picture of the immigration bill is blurred and it could become a nightmare. Something is not better than nothing. Families must be united, and the borders and human rights should not end or start at the Rio Grande. When we talk about the securing of the border we have to talk about protecting citizens on both side of the border from abuse. ICE must be controlled and repent – better still abolished.

Rubio is a bagman, and he should not be given the importance of calling him names. The worm has a useful function in our ecology. Rubio does not.

The focus should be taken away from Spanish-surname Republicans like Rubio and Ted Cruz (R-Tex). We have to remember that Cruz is a Cuban-American with a southern drawl. Like Rubio he is Tea Party poster boy. Cruz opposes the DREAM Act, advocates building a border wall and calls the deferred deportation policy for childhood arrivals illegal and unconstitutional.

Still, he was elected in Texas which has historically housed a large Mexican-origin population. Many people were surprised that he only received 35 percent of the Latino vote. I was stunned that he got that many. The overwhelming portion of the Latino vote is Mexican-origin. Considering his record, how could anyone have voted for him? The fact is that he had a Spanish-surname was a factor –after all we are all Hispanic, aren’t we?

Lest cynicism get the best of us, not all non-Mexicans are bad candidates and should be considered their merits. In hind sight the Mexican label was much stronger 30 years ago when we elected a slew of Mexican-American incumbents. What our success in electing Latino candidates proved is that Mexican Americans could mess it up as much as white people.

In my estimation, Dr. Richard Carmona was as an attractive candidate as is possible in Arizona. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012. He probably should have won but the election in all probability was stolen. However, the failure of some Mexican Americans to back him probably also played a role. Carmona is of Puerto Rican background – has a history of community service.

Senators such as Rubio and Cruz are giving the Latino label a bad name thus it is more difficult to separate the good, the bad and the ugly. The interests of our community are too important to leave it to them and their ilk.

RODOLFO ACUÑA, a professor emeritus at California State University Northridge, has published 20 books and over 200 public and scholarly articles. He is the founding chair of the first Chicano Studies Dept which today offers 166 sections per semester in Chicano Studies. His history book Occupied America has been banned in Arizona. In solidarity with Mexican Americans in Tucson, he has organized fundraisers and support groups to ground zero and written over two dozen articles exposing efforts there to nullify the U.S. Constitution.

Montana Bill Would Give Corporations The Right To Vote

By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress

Montana State Rep. Steve Lavin (R)—The kind of prostituted politician that is killing America—and the world. Brainwashed by corporate values or simply bought by the corporate powers—no difference as far as the damage he does to the public interest.—Eds

A bill introduced by Montana state Rep. Steve Lavin would give corporations the right to vote in municipal elections:

Provision for vote by corporate property owner. (1) Subject to subsection (2), if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election as provided in [section 1].

(2) The individual who is designated to vote by the entity is subject to the provisions of [section 1] and shall also provide to the election administrator documentation of the entity’s registration with the secretary of state under 35-1-217 and proof of the individual’s designation to vote on behalf of the entity.

The idea that “corporations are people, my friend” as Mitt Romney put it, is sadly common among conservative lawmakers. Most significantly of all, the five conservative justices voted in Citizens United v. FEC to permit corporations to spend unlimited money to influence elections. Actually giving corporations the right to vote, however, is quite a step beyond what even this Supreme Court has embraced.

The bill does contain some limits on these new corporate voting rights. Most significantly, corporations would not be entitled to vote in “school elections,” and the bill only applies to municipal elections. So state and federal elections would remain beyond the reach of the new corporate voters.

In fairness to Lavin’s fellow lawmakers, this bill was tabled shortly after it came before a legislative committee, so it is unlikely to become law. A phone call to Lavin was not returned as of this writing.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Lavin was a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) now defunct Public Safety and Elections Task Force. Last year, pressure from progressive groups forced ALEC to disband this task force, which, among other things, pushed voter suppression laws.