[CitizensTruth] "Swine Flu, H1N1 & Fevered Anti-Immigrant Demagogues"

[Jay Becker]

>From www.worldcantwait.org

(Note how the current administration is building on - not halting, let alone reversing - much of executive branch 'over-reaching' of the previous administration. Jay)

Swine Flu, H1N1 Influenza, and Fevered Anti-Immigrant Demagogues
			
				
		
		
	





	
		Sunday, 03 May 2009 20:50	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.

    Stop thinking like an American, 
Start thinking about humanity!



      
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