Vote Democratic

President Obama and the Democrats have not received their proper due from the body politic for saving us from financial collapse, which all too easily could have come with the Great Recession. In fact, even AIG, the last of the big bailout recipients, has just agreed upon a plan to pay back the U.S. taxpayers. Most importantly, the Democrats have ensured that from this point forward healthcare will be deemed a right for all in the US, like primary and secondary school education. The Democrats also enacted new laws to protect consumers from the abusive and predatory credit card and mortgage practices of financial companies; began to ensure better taxpaying compliance and rules to ensure fairness in our tax system and redistribute some wealth (from the top 1% of Americans who have taken nearly 25% of the nation’s wealth). They have made financial aid for college more generous, easier and less expensive to access; saved the auto industry; assisted the moribund housing sector; brought serious reform to the education field including valuing difficult to teach students over teachers unions; invested in next generation energy efficiency and scientific development.
President Obama and the Democrats have changed or begun to change the U.S. from a place where one can, with impunity, primarily look out for ones’ own financial interest, to a place where one is required to look out for those who are less fortunate. Yet, the “sacrifice” President Obama and the Democrats have asked for comes only from those at the top of the financial pecking order. The contribution called for from those at the top is still less than required by those who live in most European countries and developed Asian countries. All the squealing one hears comes from those simply defending the old “wild west” concentration of financial-based power, clinging to every last vestige, from their now familiar perch.

The Road Taken

The big question about this year’s election is whether it’s about smaller government or better government?

Tea party people will tell you emphatically it’s about: (1) smaller government; (2) the Constitution; and (3) and (4) the freedom and will of the people. Those who object to this interpretation will say that the election is about the hardship and fear caused by the economy and the discontent of citizens over how self-serving those in the government sometimes act.

It is easy for Tea Party and conservative types to claim the mantle of broad philosophic revolt against the direction the country is going. Yet, for many Americans, the emotive voicing of revolt is driven by the current yet mostly temporary pain created by the turn of the economy, and the fear instilled in older people by the coming new health care system more than by a broad distaste for government intervention generally.

For me, the Obama administration has us on the right track, but most of the economic changes are concentrated more on improving the long-term prospects of the US to compete and succeed in a global economy than immediately bringing down unemployment in the short-run. People just don’t see the plan, as they are blinded by the temporary fog of their own personal debt and anxiousness over the inescapable truth that we as a people need to change. We need to be more educated and more disciplined in this globalized era wherein each country’s workers are rewarded only according to what they do more efficiently than other workers in the world. That hurts, as discipline and deferred gratification are not consistent with the American’s pleasure principle.

Two years from now, during the next Presidential election cycle, we will see that the road travelled by Obama and the Democrats will, in the words of Robert Frost, “make all the difference.”

Moral Values v. Intellectual Property: This is a Tough One

Change. Radical change; a different point of view. Rebellious people not fully socialized and tamed to follow ‘the system” are clawing at the establishment: corporations, brand-names, franchises, patents, lobbyists, laws, lawyers, moneyed interests and the powerful. This is the establishment in America, and America is the establishment to the rest of the world.

A serious challenge, or more like the threat of a serious challenge materialized a few years ago. Not the terrorist attack. That is a threat to our lives and our way of life. Instead we saw the beginning of a real radical revolution challenging the system America helped create. A country, the nation of Brazil, announced (and then withdrew) the threat to no longer respect the international system which ensures and protects patents. They did this because thousands of their fellow citizens were dying of AIDS and the government was unable to adequately treat them if it paid anywhere near the market price for the pharmaceutical companies’ drugs. Twenty million people in the developing world have HIV/AIDS.

The industrialized world adheres to patent protections, even reluctantly allowing people to die to protect an international system that protects private property and capital. This system has brought both affluence and very sophisticated drugs and medical treatments to the industrialized world (the U.S., Western Europe and Japan), and is very slowly, yet increasingly, bringing affluence to other parts of the world such as Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Brazil, a country from “the developing world” threatened to become the first country to publicly announce it would break international trade laws and to allow production of a generic replication of a patented anti-AIDS drug. This is big news, and a real challenge on many fronts.

For us in America, debate is related to prescription drugs debate about whether we should (a) immediately allow importation of drugs from Canada or (b) regulate the price of prescription drugs ourselves. Our question is how to keep the price of prescription drugs down so they are affordable in a system where the prices paid for newer drugs are astronomically high. Further disconcerting is the fact that many experts agree that drug companies have much larger profit margins on their products than most other businesses.

Worst yet, the pharmaceutical companies have recently reached beyond their usual practice of marketing their drugs to doctors, who then decide which drugs to prescribe, and started advertising their drugs to the mass market the same way Proctor and Gamble sells soap – directly to the consumer. Talk about “pushing drugs”. When lawyers advertise like this – trying to create demand – they’re called sleazy.

The pharmaceutical companies, like the music and video recording and software industries, claim that patent and trademark protections are required to protect the value of the creative process, human ingenuity and the creation of new and better drugs for that benefit us all. The pharmaceuticals also argue that the high cost of F.D.A approval of the new drugs require multi-year long payback periods as reimbursement for the cost of developing the drug (and to compensate for the development of the other pharmaceutical products which never made it to market). It is undoubtedly true that bringing new drugs to market necessitates a very high risk and cost to the companies. Further, if we make an exception and allow anti-AIDS drugs to break international patent protections system to save lives – what’s next, other drugs not intended for life or death treatment? And after this, what’s next, computer software protections, copyrights on music, books, and plays? How will we protect, not only property, but the value of one’s creative ideas and the cost of developing them? We cannot minimize the fact that people with diseases who can only be treated with new advanced drug treatments are very, very thankful they exist (and implicitly for the system that encourages their creation).

Increasingly, concerned people around the world are questioning global integration and globalization. Here, one country, Brazil – probably speaking for others as well – said the globally integrated system is not working, (at least, in this context). It threatened that it could and should copy the chemical formulas of international drug companies to make drugs that will save the lives of its people. The Brazilian government spoke loud and clear: if you the drug company will not lower your price to make the drug available to dying people we will imitate them ourselves. Your international system isn’t working for us. Eventually, the drug companies backed down and sold anti HIV infection drugs at a cut-rate price, nearer to the price it sells the drug in Africa.

The issue itself however should not go away. The heartfelt appeal of Brazil was real. The people it spoke for are truly needy and the drug companies profits are immense. But the integrity of the international patent and trade system is also vitally important. If
Brazil were to violate the patent protection part of the international trade system would it then still have the right to complain about European governments giving price supports to their farmers, and thus keeping Brazilian farmers poor, because they cannot compete with government subsidized farmers from other countries? Further, can there be a system wherein a country has the right to pick and chose which international agreements it will adhere to. Isn’t this like you or me withholding a percentage of our taxes for government programs we do not support? Wouldn’t the whole system then break down?
Or is Brazil encouraging us to make an intelligent exception to free market and private intellectual property protections due to the basic value of people’s health? After all, due to the value of education, we do not ask students in school who attain less than a B average to resign and stop wasting the system’s resources for the sake of efficiency. The point is that our economic system, though generally controlled by the free market, appropriately has other values placed upon it besides just the freedom and efficiency of the market. There are some values which we have concluded are more important than economic efficiency. Doesn’t a country have the right to reject a system, which allows its citizens to die? These are hard issues, just the kind of issues an integrated world forces us to decide. In the end the Swiss drug company Roche, came to a price agreement with Brazil, which settled the matter for now.

Are we in America ready to regulate drug prices so that many people can get good drug treatment, even at the cost perhaps of lessening the creation of new and even better drugs? I would be, I don’t know about you?

The Shirley Sherrod Affair

The Shirley Sherrod affair inspires probing questions about racism, media, politics, personal redemption, U.S History and libel law.

How can someone who had racist inclinations overcome the motive for vengeance (Shirley Sherrod herself)? How could the White House rush to seal a story so that its major accomplishment of passing financial regulation gets its full airing and credit, when someone’s personal reputation and livelihood is at stake? How can media outlets, interest groups and bloggers not be ashamed when rushing to put out stories simply because the public find them salacious? How should President Obama, as our first President of color, handle issues related to race? How can an insignificant blogger have such an influence on the national media? How can a snippet of tape from such a non-objective source be trusted without the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NAACP, or Fox News questioning the objectivity and fairness of the source? And how can we allow major media news sources like MSNBC, and especially FOX, to have their own political agenda, which actually dominates its news broadcasting function, yet be held to be objective and fair by the public?

With all these interesting questions bought to bear, how could the Worcester Telegram and Gazette editorial page concentrate its inquiry exclusively on how one interest group, the NAACP, did not get the facts right? (See article "So easily Snookered" http://www.telegram.com/article/20100724/NEWS/7240334/1020/opinion

What’s Wrong With the Editorial Page of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette

The debate on immigration law has highlighted some Worcester Telegram and Gazette (owned by The New York Times) editorial choice and orientation. It is interesting to look at what the Telegram changes and omits in New York Times articles before publishing them. A recent April 2010 front page article had the following change:

The Telegram ran the same story as The New York Times, but changed the Archbishop of Los Angeles’ words by stating that Cardinal Roger Mahoney said: “The Catholic Bishop of Los Angeles called the authorities’ ability to demand documents Nazism.” In The New York Times article which the Telegram reprinted, before the words were changed from “Cardinal Roger M. Mahoney of Los Angeles said the authorities’ ability to demand documents was like ‘Nazism’” (quotes around the word Nazism were in the NYT story, italics and underlining added).

Cardinal Roger Mahony’s criticism of the Arizona law is about how it empowers citizens to sue individual police officers, police departments and/or government agencies to force them to confront people about whether a “reasonable suspicion” exists that they are in the U.S. unlawfully. He said this could turn U.S. resident against resident, even over some personal disagreement, exposing someone’s unlawful status to the police over a matter unrelated to someone’s status. The effect of the Arizona law, is what Cardinal Mahoney stated was like, “reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people were required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.”

Every moral dilemma consists of the person and the act. The Telegram mutated the Cardinal’s attack to be on the “person,” or, in this case, the Arizona legislators. However, this is unfounded since the Cardinal’s attack was solely on the act, not the person. This is a vital distinction the Telegam eviscerated.

In further defense of the Arizona law, in the T&G’s Sunday, May 2 editorial, it stated that illegal immigrants crossing the border are, “...often engaging in drug trafficking and criminal behavior as exemplified by the recent murder of an Arizona rancher.” However, repeated studies by government and other independent sources conclude that immigrants engage in criminal behavior less often than the population at large.

Fact: Nationwide, immigrants are five times less likely to be in prison than native-born Americans. From 1994 to 2004, the undocumented immigrant population has doubled to about 12 million. During this time, violent crime in the U.S. declined by 35% and property crime decreased by 25%. Crime declined not just in major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami, but also declined in border cities like San Diego and El Paso. In Arizona itself from 2005-2008 (the last year statistics are available) violent crime fell from 512 to 447 per 100,000 and property crime fell from 5,850 to 4,291 per 100,000.

Although one can legitimately fight about what statistics mean and which ones to concentrate upon, it is safe to say that anecdotes, such as a rancher being killed by drug runners, does not mean that immigrants often commit crimes (although it does mean that greater enforcement against illegal border crossers is vitally necessary; while infringing on everyone’s civil rights living in the U.S. is not). This must be emphasized, especially given the statistics presented above. An anecdote is not proof of one’s proposition. This line of thinking inevitably leads to generalizations about a broadly defined group of people, based on the actions of a few. In this case, it is a very wrong generalization.

The level of violence in the urban core of our major U.S. cities is much more significant than at the U.S.-Mexico border. Where has the conservative movement, including the Telegram’s editorial page, or, for that matter, anyone else’s righteous indignation been about this high level of violence, chaos, and degradation? Why have there been so many calls for greater law enforcement at the border but never in South Central Los Angeles or the South Bronx? Drug running and violence have ruined these areas for fifty years and hardly a peep has been heard from minor or major sources of editorial comment. Lives have been ruined and continue being ruined today, but no huge call for a commitment to order or to law have been forthcoming. If editorial writers lived in the South Bronx, you can bet there would be regular editorial shouting “how can we allow people to have to live like this!”

Further, the Telegram and Gazette’s Sunday, May 16, editorial tying terrorist activities to the search for those unlawfully in the U.S., again, concentrated on the search for law and order at the expense of rational distinction. Terrorists are one issue, best dealt with by effective intelligence gathering, while undocumented immigrants are a problem that should be dealt with by having sensible and adequate laws which are then strictly enforced. Of the millions of foreign people who come to the U.S. each year, both with and without permission, one would need a Hubble Telescope to identify the very few who have terrorist intentions. A newspaper has an obligation to clarify, not confuse, that an immigrant, even an “illegal” immigrant, does not equal a terrorist.

Fact: In 2009 the Obama Administration deported the highest number of people in U.S. history for any one year; 387,790, up from 116,782 in 2001 and 349,041 in 2008, the last year of the Bush Administration. This year, the Obama Administration is on pace to nearly double the number of deportations from our previous high to over 600,000. The Obama Administration has also doubled the number of agents assigned to the Border Security Task Force and tripled the number of analysts along the Southwest border. The Bush Administration kept doubling the number of border agents throughout the past decade, none of which stopped the unauthorized crossing at the border. Only workplace enforcement of immigration restrictions will do that, which is a lot smarter than the $150 billion needed to be spent over 30 years to send 12 million unlawfully present people home. Earned legalization, along with stricter enforcement of tighter immigration laws, is the only humane and cost-effective solution to this situation.

Fact: Arizona has the 9th most immigrants in the U.S. (one place behind 8th place Massachusetts). If a fair minded person looks around our city and state, does one feel “over run by unlawfully present immigrants?” Further, Arizona’s undocumented population is in real decline, due mostly to the recession, dropping from 560,000 to 460,000 in 2008, an 18% drop, which is the largest of any state.

During the 1990’s Arizona’s Hispanic population grew by 88% and more recent estimates state that around one-third of Arizona’s population has become Hispanic. One could postulate that the Arizona law can thus be seen as a push-back by their former virtually all-Caucasian population being changed (this stands in stark contrast to Texas, New Mexico, and California which have long histories of assimilating Hispanic immigrants and culture). Don’t forget Arizona was the only state in the nation that for years refused to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday. Granted, the border must be secured to re-establish law and order but the problem is not so grave that brown skinned people with imperfect English need to live in a state of siege and resentment where violations of one’s personal autonomy and dignity are acceptable if one is under suspicion of not having legal papers. Do we really want U.S. citizens held at police stations, while documents are attempted to be gathered showing their citizenship? Do we really want Massachusetts children and those with out-of-state drivers licenses held in jail for the weekend if stopped while traveling by car to Las Vegas?

Further, the T&G editorial page continuously laments against big government’s overbearingness and dominance, advocating for the freedom and autonomy of the individual. Yet, when the state’s enforcement agents, the police, can take you down to the station to make you prove you are a U.S. citizen, it is apparently an appropriate state concern worth violating one’s personal freedom, even if you are a U.S. citizen, or otherwise legally in the United States. Perhaps the T & G Editorial page is only really fighting for one’s liberty not to share one’s wealth by paying taxes?

When The New York Times purchased the Telegram and Gazette, and other newspapers around the nation, it said it would leave its editorial comment a local concern. Yet, as our community’s largest newspaper of record, the T&G has a responsibility to adhere to an expansive view of opinions, and reporting, outside of the right wing editorials it regularly expounds (The T&G reporters, however, regularly try to reflect all sides of an issue in their reporting). Even with uninspiring Martha Coakley as the Democratic candidate, the City of Worcester still voted for her and not Scott Brown for Senate. After decades of the T&G editorial page not reflecting the City of Worcester’s political predisposition, it would be nice to see it start.

To all the hoopla and charges about who read the Arizona law, and the healthcare law before that, and who did not, I offer this: As someone who is a lawyer, I can say that law is an extremely specialized profession. Even those of us who practice law defer to experts who specialize in that particular area of the law. Laws that legislatures pass (called statutes) require a lawyers’ expertise, who has spent many years mastering statutory construction, to fully understand. It’s the same as why a family practice physician cannot conduct open heart surgery, though both are doctors. So even we lawyers defer to legal specialists to tell us what a particular statute actually means, or we wait until the agency charged with instituting the law comes out with regulations which more clearly define the meaning of the law, and pay attention to cases being decided pursuant to it, before we can give a conclusive definition of what the law means. What most lawyers, as well as others in the editorial, op-ed, radio, and television community do, is analyze what those legal experts on statutory construction believe the law says and decide who makes a more compelling argument given what we already believe. We lawyers conclude, out of humility, that this is the best we can do unlike the Tea Party members, who claim to base their political agenda on its members’ individual understanding of the Constitution. Hence the charge “read the law” is simply a political attack devoid of significant merit.

I.B.M.

America’s behemoth corporation, I.B.M., should be the model for the changes needed for our country. Just as Big Blue recognized where value exists in the new world economy and moved from selling computer hardware to business and software services; so must Big Red, White, and Blue concentrate on economic activity that creates more wealth.

I.B.M. recognized that intelligence added products - not commodity products like the chips and encasing of computer hardware boxes - is where its competitive advantage and value proposition exits. Eighty percent of I.B.M.’s business, up from fifty percent in just 2000, comes from selling, not computers, but business services and software. Further indicative of that future is that much of I.B.M.’s sales growth, and the jobs it fills, are now overseas.

It seems clear that the U.S. will never again reach our pre-Great Recession employment highs in domestic construction, manufacturing and, perhaps, financial services. Instead, a prosperous future depends on developing and selling proprietary products worldwide in computer science/analytics, medical devices, software, electro-medical equipment, robotics, communications, lasers, semiconductors, business and insurance services, scientific research and pharmaceuticals, airplanes, satellites, automobiles, defense systems and, most especially, in green energy production and conservation technology.

It is understood already that for the U.S. to compete successfully more American students must be encouraged to study STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Math and Engineering. We must also make it easier for foreign students and workers who show a proclivity and expertise in these fields to stay and work in the U.S. This is how we will grow companies that create jobs, not reduce the number of available jobs for U.S. workers. Our economy’s competitiveness depends upon the technical and creative skills of our workers, irrespective of where they were born. Our own deficiency is demonstrated by two facts: First, roughly ten percent of college graduates in the U.S. have engineering degrees compared to more than one-third in China and India. Second, last year, China increased its patent filing by 30%; in the U.S. patent filing dropped by 11%.

What is more controversial, but equally required, is making our education and research systems much more efficient consumers of capital. So many people cannot be dropping out of college with huge loans, and without a degree to pay them back. In fact, the number of years required for a college bachelor degree needs to be reduced from three to four. Then, people will stop spending so much money on unnecessary educational time and, instead, start working. Four years of studying liberal arts (and the meaning of life) at a reasonable price made sense: but an undergraduate business degree at $50,000+ a year? One might as well go to work one year earlier. For those in technical fields, their graduate education or employers will need to build on core competencies developed be an undergraduates. For those who look to a college as their time to party, three years is also enough.

We also need our young college graduates to fan out across the world to teach English to a world hungry to learn it, teach in U.S. universities based abroad, learn, from the world, what others do to live well, and make business/cultural contacts and friendships for the future and work abroad to expose the rest of the world to the innovation and technical skills we possess.

Our educational instruction must move from business and scientific research, the two disciplines whose buildings and curriculums have overtaken college campuses, to engineering and technical mastery. Training more people in technical fields will simultaneously expand the supply of skilled labor and, through supply and demand, meet growth industries needs. We also need all technical high schools to be open at night for adult retraining – not just for a few limited adult training courses. This will also sufficiently contain the salaries of manufacturing technicians, medical and computer workers, electricians, mechanics, plumbers, and HVAC workers in order to keep jobs, factories and offices in the U.S. Making production more competitive will dissuade employers from sending work abroad. In return, we need to provide all workers with affordable health insurance, education and training programs as well as more than two weeks, annually, of vacation/personal time than. This emphasis on technical mastery, diligence, and occasional rest and relaxation is how Germany’s export driven economy dominates that of other European Union countries year after year.

Our new technical emphasis must be in engineering of all of types: especially clean energy technology (including nuclear), and the application of computer analysis to smart grids and transportation systems (as well as health care delivery). This will lead to more U.S. energy independence and world leadership in the next cyber-industrial revolution. This is also where the most value is to be gained in selling products to a rapidly industrializing world.

We need a complete reorientation of our investment dollars from biology-based to engineering-based research and production. Job growth and industry leadership are more probable and predictable in the fields of energy, transportation, smart-grid technology, computers, robotics and medical devices, as their products are much closer to coming to market than those based on biologics. Overemphasizing the pharmaceutical hunt, especially when the U.S. government stops overpaying so significantly for prescription drugs, is less advantageous than supporting engineering based solutions. Just as private equity investors have fled risky searches for the next miracle drug, so should federal and state government end such generous support with taxpayer money and tax credits. Sepracor in Marlboro, for example, which received $750,000 in government grant money and promised to create 25 jobs, laid off 940 people, or 20 percent of its workforce last year. Considerably more than 90 percent of researched biologic drugs never make it to the clinical trial stage and/or never obtain FDA approval. The amount of taxpayer money we’re spending on scientific research, without more guaranteed productivity or humanistic gain, is unsustainable. To lower the budget deficient cuts need to made somewhere in no federal budget and NIH funding is a reasonable target. Further, energy production conservation and weatherization programs will produce not only white collar jobs for people with higher degrees, but also manufacturing and construction jobs for those without.

Even the health care centers and research centers of universities that presently provide good paying jobs cannot forever continue using their current government supported model, as their success has depended upon taxpayer/government money to support scientific research, medical services and loans to students to pay for education. As our budget deficit grows and population ages, with a diminishing worker base to pay for the baby boomers’ retirements, severe cuts in government funding of health care inefficiencies and university-based research is inevitable. Worcester’s economy has been saved by UMASS Memorial Healthcare and UMASS Medical Schools. In the future these institutions, particularly the medical school’s research infrastructure and budget, will likely receive less direct and indirect government support.

Change means prosperity; the status quo means a decline in our nation’s wealth, as globalization exports less sophisticated work. If we do not do change our culture to master technical areas that do not come naturally to us, study analytical subjects we tend to think as boring, and give up part of our youthful, experimental, carefree, adolescent years; or welcome foreigners in large numbers to our shores; or go study and work abroad ourselves – we will inevitably decline as a country. As IBM knew the present model of growth is unsustainable. Someone will always be able to produce simple products less expensively than us. We cannot compete in basic manufacturing, nor settle for low paid domestic service work. We must develop our knowledge and innovation based platforms where competition from other countries is rarer. Only through significant transformation will the next century be about American prosperity; instead of a more evenly distributed wealth between us, China, Brazil, India and other Asian, Latin, European and Middle Eastern countries.

We will always have our American personality: bold, innovative, fearless, confident, creative, aggressive, open, brave, hard working, fun-loving, responsible enough, yet a little crazed and unglued. But to prosper in the world to come we must also be more analytical, educated, directed, technical and serious. Cultures can change. No one is as good at changing as us Americans: Let’s get started.

Welcome to Arizona: I Will Need Your Papers

Does the Arizona law raise a civil rights issue or is it exclusively an immigration issue that easily passes constitutional muster? Although the motivation behind the law was a border problem, I believe that Arizona’s solution to the immigration problem raises more of a civil rights issue. Here’s why:

Louis and his family are traveling from Massachusetts to vacation in Las Vegas. As they pass through Arizona, they are pulled over by a police officer.

Police Officer: Sorry ma’am, you’ll have to get out of the car and come down to the station. Please exit the vehicle and turn around so we can cuff you.

Brown Skinned Person with imperfect English: Why?

Police Officer: A) Because your out-of-state driver’s license doesn’t prove you’re legally in the U.S. Seven states still issue driver’s licenses to those without authorization to be in the U.S., including our “neighbor” New Mexico. Your driver’s license doesn’t prove anything to me.

B) Because you don’t have a driver’s license or U.S. Passport on you.

C) Because you don’t have a driver’s license…it doesn’t matter that you’re not driving. Our law says I must make you prove that you’re here legally if I’m reasonably suspicious that you’re not in the U.S. legally. I am suspicious.

D) Because the baby in the back seat doesn’t have any legal papers showing where the baby was born. How do I know where she was born?

E) Because you have a Mexican thing-a-ma-chig hanging from your rear view mirror and that causes me to be somewhat suspicious right there (as would a Brazilian bumper sticker). I want to see whose name the car is registered under. If it isn’t yours, everyone in the car is coming with me.

One night or day on the street, the following legal stop occurs,

Police Officer: You’re loitering, which is a crime. This is a legal stop. Let's see your papers.

Brown-skinned person who’s English is imperfect: But…but… I’m just standing here. I’m not, I… was it littering or loitering you said I did?

Police Officer: Don’t give me flak. Do you want to be taken in for disturbing the peace, too? How about resisting arrest? We now have the authority to finally kick your asses out of here and get control of this situation. [Recently, upon pulling over, by a Marlboro Policeman, a Brazilian driving his car without a license a Marlboro Policeman, reportedly said to the driver’s pregnant U.S. Citizen wife: “Criminals like him your husband should all be deported, you just wait and see…” Yet, the person had never been accused or convicted of any crime.]

Brown-skinned person with imperfect English responds: But officer, I wasn’t loitering or littering I was only:

A) Leaving the movies with a friend.

B) Looking for work.

C) Heading home from school.

D) Leaving the club.

E) Trying to defuse the conflict before it became a fight.

F) Trying to break up the fight.

G) Making out with my girlfriend on the park bench, it was my friends who were horsing around.

These possible anecdotes were mostly taken from real-life events that occurred before or after the Arizona law passed.

Is the threat of those unlawfully present in the U.S. really so grave that U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, legal non-immigrants and those unlawfully present in the U.S. all need to be subjected to this kind of police inquiry, questioning or interrogation?

If this were done to those who live near the Canadian border, those of us who look like we might be Canadian, I think the answer would be clear.

So, that there is no mistake about the matter, within 100 miles of any U.S. contiguous border, the U.S. Border Patrol has the authority to stop anyone it wants, at any time, for any reason, to ask for someone’s papers. Arizona’s law created the crime of trespass, for people unlawfully present, so that pursuant to a legal stop, all “reasonably suspicious” people, anywhere in the state, could be charged with that crime.

As a matter of public safety, we’re much better off having immigration investigations and border patrol agents (even if we need more of each) identify and catch people without legal papers and have those without such papers still be able to call the police when they are victims of domestic assault, theft, mugging, house invasions, or are witnesses to such crimes. Let police be police, let immigration officials be just that.

Why should Worcester City Council take up the measure?: First, to show states like neighboring Rhode Island that we find this to be a civil rights issue. Second, to the claim that we have a federal justice system that will decide the case, so why should we get involved? What if during the five years or so the case takes to get to the Supreme Court, the court does not issue a stay of the law going into effect? What if it actually goes into effect until the Supreme Court decides to overturn it? How will the Worcester City Council feel then? We should take up the Arizona measure as a matter of choice, because we can.