The US may treat European visitors like vermin (see previous post) but we’re hardly spotless in our attitude towards immigrants, as events in Naples show:

Residents of the former communist stronghold on the northern outskirts of Naples have been raising hell about the camp since Saturday, when a woman claimed a Gypsy girl had entered her flat and tried to steal her baby.

The first Molotov cocktails descended on the improvised huts and cabins on Tuesday evening, after which the 800-odd inhabitants began moving out of the area in groups. On Wednesday the fire-raisers, said to belong to the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia, burnt the camp in earnest, watched by applauding local people and unchallenged by the police. When firefighters showed up to douse the blaze, local people taunted and whistled at them. The last Roma moved out under police protection.

Only then did local politicians shed a few crocodile tears: Antonio Bassolino, governor of the Campania region, declaring: “We must stop with the greatest determination these disturbing episodes against the Roma.” Rosa Russo Iervolino, the Mayor of Naples, chimed in: “It is unthinkable that anyone could imagine that I could justify reprisals against the Roma.”
More…

I don’t know enough about the state of Italian politics to say that we’re seeing a surge of modern Mussolini-ism with the reaccession of Berlusconi to the presidency - but it doesn’t half look like it. Crimes committed by Romanians are a hot political issue in Italy:

Since Romania’s accession to the EU this year, the authorities say that over 1,000 Romanian immigrants have arrived in Italy each month.

Since June last year 76 murders have been committed by Romanians.

The mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, says that 75% of arrests for murder, rape and robbery in his city this year can be attributed to Romanians.

Mr Prodi believes Italy is not alone in facing this new wave of crime and he has called on Europe’s home office ministers to meet and find a solution.

The Romanian prime minister has responded by sending police liaison officers to major Italian cities to help.

Of course this is Naples and there’s more to this particular outbreak of violence than just politically organised hatred; Naples is well-known to be a stew of corruption, crime and poverty and the local mafia don’t like rivals. Times are getting harder too, for the worried poor and worried-about-getting-poorer middle classes - where Berlusconi sees his support - who are looking for scapegoats for their troubles. The Roma fit the bill, as has been depressingly usual throughout their peripatetic, outcast history in Europe.

As is also depressingly usual in European history concerted government and police action intended to pander to the political base is fostering a culture of tacit approval for mob violence.

Police in Italy have arrested hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in raids across the country.

Expulsion orders were issued for several dozen of those detained. More than 100 Italians were also arrested.

One raid was on a makeshift camp housing Roma (Gypsies), on the edge of Rome. Italian concern about immigrant crime has tended to focus on the Roma.The police crackdown was part of a week-long operation in Rome, Naples and northern Italy.

It is an apparent sign of the change of policy promised by the new right-wing government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

.

(Except it isn’t new policy, it was his predecessors’ policy too.)

What is important to remember is that this isn’t a case of plucky litle Italy repelling invading criminal gangs from Fortress Europe’s borders: after all, Romanians are our fellow EU citizens, with theoretically equal status to all other EU citizens, including the right to reside in other EU countries. If other EU member countries were to follow Italy’s example, in light of the spread of the mafia EU-wide we’d be expelling Italian criminals from the capitals of Europe by the planeload and Berlusconi would be complaining about ethnic cleansing - which is essentially what this is, but because it’s Roma, it’s OK.

But the first act of ethnic cleansing in the new Italy passed off with little fuss. Flora Martinelli, the woman who reported the alleged kidnap attempt on her baby, said: “I’m very sorry for what’s happening, I didn’t want it to come to this. But the Gypsies had to go.”

Wasn’t that the refrain of the Good Germans, and the Hutus too?

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

His crime? Nothing. Visitors from the European Union do not need a visum to visit the States, as long as they stay no longer than ninety days and don’t come over to work, but admission isn’t automatic, as the article explains:

Though citizens of those nations do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.

While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, “there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases,” Ms. De Cima said. And because such “arriving aliens” are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.

Emphasis mine on that last sentence, which is a key reason why I won’t visit America in this lifetime. It’s an admission that everytime you cross the border you run the risk of being disappeared if some border agent takes a dislike to you, with no recourse available to you. Fortunately for Salerno he had friends in high places, friends who knew how to use their influence to get the New York Times interested in his story. But if you’re not a well connected citizen of an EU country, you’re out of luck.

Apart from the danger it puts any visitors in, this idea that because you haven’t been formally allowed into the US even though you are incarcenated on US soil, you’re not entitled to the protection of the US law and constitution, is more evidence of a worrying trend to hollow out these rights by defining more and more categories of non-citizens; the same happened with Guantanamo Bay, remember?

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

“Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was “dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,” according to an airline crew member’s written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards “taking down” a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse’s account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, “Nighty-night.”

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 — the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

It’s tempting to lay this yet again at the feet of the Bush administration, but I doubt it would’ve been any different under a Democratic president. The entire justice and law enforcement industry in the US operates on a level of casual cruelness that is unthinkable here. Police officers can taser or murder people with impunity, prison rape is at best seen as a joke, at worst as an extra punishment and in general there’s a culture that demands the complete and utter subjugation of a detainee or suspect and which harshly punishes anybody who steps out of line. The news that returned asylum seekers are routinely drugged therefore should come as no surprise.

Politicians are increasingly seving up their most intimate relationships for public inspection, either for money or the spin value: the ins and outs, so to speak, of the Sarkozy-Brunis’ married lubriciousness are regular fare in the print media, David Cameron is laying his family life bare-ish in online video (did those poor bloody kids get any say in the matter?) and this week, noted Catholic hypocrite Cherie Blair has been rubbing her contraceptive arrangements in our faces. Enough.

I really don’t need to think about those those two rictus-grinned hypocrites copulating in the dark or even in the feeble light of a thrifty royal 40 watt bulb. I really don’t need to think about it at all. No.

But exposing all to the media is a growing trend and now a Minnesota governor has joined the throng by using his his marriage to a sports-fan as radio comedy material:

“I have a wife who genuinely loves to fish. I mean, she will take the lead and ask me to go out fishing, and joyfully comes here,” he told radio station WCCO. “She loves football, she’ll go to hockey games and, I jokingly say, ‘Now, if I could only get her to have sex with me.’”

Cue mortified dead air. I wouldn’t want to have been him when he finally summoned up the courage to go home.

But really, how far are politicians willing to go with this? How much further can you go than into your contraceptive arrangements? When we will see the first webcam over the marital bed?

It’s one thing having your private life exposed by a prying media, but what if you invite them in for the purposes of advancing your own career? The Blairs and Sarkozys I submit are special cases, being as both halves of each couple are equally voraciously publicicity-hungry, so no harm done there except to themselves.

I suppose too there’s something to be said for the argument that a public person should be completely public and their life an open book. But there are other people in these relationships besides politicians - and I should think that they may feel somewhat less positive about the exposure of the inner workings of their marriages.

Sometimes I just want to bang my head on the wall with the sheer jaw-dropping, mind-numbing hypocrisy of it all.

The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley writes this morning about the New York Times April ‘expose’ of Rumsfeld’s paid media sockpuupets, already exposed by many, many progressive bloggers; and in the light of the Times own trumpeting of the White House line and Judith Regan’s fake reports, it’s frankly a bit of a joke.

Ashley purports to be horrified at what the NYT reveals about the revolving door between the media, defence industry, government, military and lobbyists and about US media figures’ personal complicity in building a false case for an illegal war.

So what are the darker messages for us from this American scandal? I was struck by the way in which the deal between the analysts, the TV bosses, the Pentagon and - behind them all - the military contractors, never needed to be explicit. The Pentagon didn’t need to offer cash, or lean on anyone. The TV networks did not ask too much about their experts’ sources of information, or their outside interests.

That this comes as a surprise to her makes me wonder where this woman, who’s paid well to be plugged into politics and world affairs, has been for the past few years. Has she not met the internet? The central narrative of progressive blogs since 2000 has been the complicity of mainstream journalists in pushing the right-wing, pro-Israel, militarist neoliberal line and parroting the White House’s fake war rhetoric.

It;s not as though she’s shown herself unaware of the Murdoch press’ in particular’s role in making the case for war; this is what she said in 2003 during the David Kelly/BBC/Gilligan affair:

Those papers have been intertwined with New Labour ever since it became clear that Blair would be in Downing Street. Blair wooed them, and from the first Murdoch, sensing a winner, responded.

Sun and Times journalists were courted and favoured with leaks, which they could promote as scoops; Murdoch editors were treated as visiting royalty when they were entertained at No 10 and Chequers. It is shameless, unabashed, and was driven both by Blair and by that high-minded socialist and critic of journalistic standards, Alastair Campbell.

Why do they do it? Because the deal is frank, and even on its own terms, honest. Murdoch wants media power and Blair wants reliable media support. So long as nobody takes journalistic principle or the public interest too seriously, then there is a deal to be done. One day, if Murdoch gets his way, he will be in a position of terrifying influence over any future government. So this is a dangerous time for the BBC. In some ways it has been here before. In the wake of the Falklands war, when Alasdair Milne was director general, Margaret Thatcher berated him about BBC funding and journalism in terms almost identical to those we hear from Labour now. John Birt had his rows too

Yet this is the woman who professes to be horrified at the way the system in which she works works.

It was all nods and winks. Does this begin to sound familiar? It wasn’t cash for peerages. It was propaganda for access. But isn’t the underlying structure - you do me a favour, I’ll see you right, while neither of us says a word - just the same?

Why yes, it is just the same.

Has it never, ever occurred to Ashley - New Labour’s cheerleader-in-chief this past decade at New Labour’s favourite newspaper - that she’s had privileged access to the PM and cabinet ministers and their aides because, funnily enough, she repeated their lies, supported the party and no matter what her disclaimers, as a result was objectively in favour of the Iraq war ?

Apparently she thinks all that access and tips and cosy invitations and the like came because they like her. Nothing to do with the fact her partner is also a chief political bigwig for the BBC either, oh no. It was all for the sake of her beaux yeux.

Surely no well-educated, observant opinion writer for a major modern newspaper could be either so naive - or so disingenuous - as to truly think that the British punditerati are less compromised than those in the US, could they?

We see the cost of not having an honest, open argument, whether about Pentagon strategy or about how the banking system really works, and the media feel embarrassed: “How did we miss that?” In Washington, and elsewhere, the answers are often the same. It comes down to unspoken deals between powerful people, and smiling faces telling fairytales.

“How did we miss that”? I’ll tell her how she missed that; you never see the dirt you’re sitting in.

Israel at 60 is an intractable historical fact. It has one of the world’s strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Palestinian militants may be able to make life in certain parts of Israel exceedingly unpleasant at times, but they are unable to reverse the Nakbah of 1948 through military means. (Hamas knows this as well as Fatah does, which is why it is ready to talk about a long-term hudna and coexistence – although it won’t roll over and accept Israel’s terms as relayed by Washington in the way that the current Fatah leadership might.)

[…]

The curious irony of history, though, is that while the Zionist movement managed to successfully create a nation state in the Middle East against considerable odds, that movement is dead — the majority of Jews quite simply don’t want to be part of a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East. And so the very purpose of Israel has come into question. Jewish immigration to Israel is at an all-time low, and that’s unlikely to change. In a world where persecution of Jews is increasingly marginal, the majority of Jews prefer to live scattered among the peoples, rather than in an ethnic enclave of our own. That’s what we’ve chosen. So where does this leave Israel?

My only comfort is that just like so many others are as a result of their policies, they’ll be dead soon too. Brown Clinton Blair Bush and all their fellow travellers and conspiracists betrayed the postwar ideals of their parents and in the name of ‘neoliberalism’ led us into a world where tyranny’s on the rise not in retreat. Yet still they cling on grimly to power despite almost universal calls for their exit.

The music is about all that they and their fellow greedy boomers with their boundless sense of entitlement and equally boundlessly shallow morals will leave behind them that’s worth cherishing.

The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t - and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs.

Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze.

I was one of those face to face advisors for a long time and immediately post Labour’s landslide in ‘97 a government packed with provincial solicitors and honourable members of the Bar began to deliberately dismantle the already precarious network of community legal services and advice agencies with the imposition of the cost cutting, bureaucratising and horribly complicated legal services contract scheme.

It was dressed up to look like a bonanza in funding for the voluntary sector and a boon for the regularisation of patchy legal services - but it soon became clear that the aim was to control, divide and demolish opposition to corporate law firms while eliminating several campaigning thorns in the side of government as a happy side-effect.

Put broadly, advice services mostly staffed by volunteers were now to compete with high street practitioners and big professional law practices - and each other - for legal aid funding, despite the imbalance in staffing and resources. Advice agencies staffed by volunteers with already shaky finances could not even begin to put a legal aid bid together, but other funding streams from other national and local schemes were gradually turned off; after all, there was a proper scheme now, apply to that.

But even if you could jump through the hoops required under the contract scheme legal aid cash itself was strictly cut back, with, in some instances, an 80% chance of success being required by the Board before allowing more than a standard hour’s funding. (When I left it was about 42 pounds an hour on a case, out of which had to come all and any overheads including admin and support staff and all the on-cost that employing paid staff implies.) Any lawyer or advice worker knows it can take an hour just to get someone to open up to you, let alone assess the evidence or take a statement and especially not to estimate the chances of success; how many potentially winnable cases, with say a 50 or 60% chance of succeeding on the first hour’s investigation, have failed at that very first hurdle?

I was one of the first law graduates to leave university with a student loan and it’s still a millstone round my neck. I had a place to go the Bar but couldn’t take it. A Tory government and the banks between them made sure working class women with children had as many obstacles as possible put in their way. A loans or grant for necessary professional training? How dare you, silly woman.

I had to watch and grit my teeth as my dozy friend with the well off parents in the home counties funded her long party through bar school and arrange a cushy pupillage for her in a relative’s chambers, despite her emotional instability and worrying drug use. No millstones round the neck for her.

I also watched as another friend, academically talented and with better results lose out on a Phd scholarship because the head of department and the other candidate had both been in the navy and knew the same people. I somehow suspect that she was black, working class and female had something to do with it too… which is why we worked for a Labour victory in ‘97, despite clause IV and Tony Blair. We thought they’d be different. Listen to my hollow laughing.

But now it’s even worse for anyone who is at all interested either in becoming a lawyer and working in public interest law. You can either work fulltime in another job while studying fulltime, and almost kill yourself, or you can burden yourself with an amount of debt that will cripple you forever unless you can snag a place in a corporate law firm and again, half-kill yourself writing boilerplate contracts and doing some spotty senior partner’s nephew’s bidding for twenty-five years to pay it off.

Legal education is about much more than just educating lawyers, though - it’s about making information about the law available to the widest number of people so as to aid democracy. Rights and responsibilities, innit? An informed populace is an empowered and involved populace, yeah?

Isn’t that just one of Labour’s multifarious core values? Well no, not exactly:

A 62-year-old man from Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, on income support and facing eviction from his home of 50 years, was forced repeatedly to travel by public transport to west London to find a lawyer to advise him on legal aid.

His story came to light as a coalition of groups that provide legal and social welfare advice prepared to highlight the legal aid ‘desertification’ of England and Wales in the run-up to the introduction of the biggest reforms of public funding in more than 50 years.

A survey of law centres throughout the country by the Law Centre Federation, undertaken for Independent Lawyer magazine, has revealed the extent of the problem. It found that:

· Nine out of 10 centres regularly turned away clients eligible for legal aid;

· Seven reported that their ability to offer access to legal advice was deteriorating;

· One noted an alarming trend of violence towards staff;

· Seven identified specific gaps in provision where, for example, there was no publicly funded employment, housing or immigration advice in their area; and

· Three law centres reported problems finding help for victims of domestic violence.

‘The survey is a snapshot of what’s happening in the areas law centres serve,’ says Steve Hynes, director of the Law Centres Federation. ‘While we acknowledge that demand has always outstripped supply for civil legal services, there is a strong perception that things are getting worse. If the reforms are implemented as proposed, we will quickly see further fraying at the edges.’.

The negligence is deliberate. Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead? Why, such an informed populace migjht start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion. Hence the policy of dismantling community legal services and access to civil justice, and don’t get me started on the deliberate destruction of criminal legal aid.

Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing ‘inefficiency’ of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against ‘the system’, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)

The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by ‘accredited’ representatives who’ve done a training course – many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your ‘own’ solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.

One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier - warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside”. Now, “the system is in meltdown.” If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.

Keep ‘em ignorant, keep ‘em quiet.

Now a new set of legal aid reforms has been published by Justice Minister Jack Straw and on first glance it looks like bad news for those still doggedly fighting away trying to protect the rights of ordinary people. Injustice - it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Yes, it’s Eurovision again!

This year it’s being held in Belgrade and the semi finals are about to get underway:

Tue, May. 20th - 1st Eurovision Semi Final - Eurovision 2008
Thu, May. 22nd - 2nd Eurovision Semi Final - Eurovision 2008
Sat, May. 24th - Eurovision Final - Eurovision 2008

Britain’s entry last time was truly horrible both in concept and execution. I mean really, to enter a contest - whilst still in the throes of a massively unpopular, illegal war - with a bunch of uniformed bimbos singing “We’re Flying The Flag”? Could we have been any more arrogant? and then to sing it totally flat in an atmosphere of strained and embarassed silence? It was dire. In that instance the political voting and aesthetic voting happily coincided and the UK got a deserved bugger-all votes.

This is our entry this year, from Andy Abrahams: a nice, jolly, slightly funky seventies pastiche. Ncely innocuous, unlikely to win but itw on’t actively offend, which is always a plus. But bloody hell, he needs to sort out his offkey backing vocalist.

Is it just me, or does that sound like a rewritten version of ‘H.A.P.P.Y. Radio’ by Edwin Starr?

I make no accusations and I’ll leave that judgement to my fellow northern soul fans…

You’ve got 2 weeks to organise your Eurovision party: as per usual I myself willl be doing the Eurovision marathon fortified with massive amounts of beverages, herbs and snacks and accompanied by a lot of snark on IRC. Eurovision is the next best thing we’ve got to an entertaining war, a war with no actual blood shed except when one performer gets a hangnail snagged on another’s sequins, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Lordi might be hideous, but not as hideous as stormtroopers marching down the street.

I already mentioned the voting, which is a whole research topic in itself. As a guide to how it actually works as opposed to how it’s supposed to work (and for an explanation of the whole Turkey/Greece/Cyprus thing) here’s a handy graphic :

Click for bigger version

This year my money is on Ireland to win with their entry from that ineffable and reclusive superstar, Dustin The Turkey.

How could any nation beat that? Irelande Douze Pointe!

From Ananova;

Man complains after beer makes him drunk

A Romanian man has lodged an official complaint with the local trading standards agency after he got drunk on a single can of beer.

Iancu Boroi, 35, said he had bought the beer at a local supermarket in Arges in southern Romania but was so drunk after drinking just one can that he nearly passed out.

He said: “I am more than capable of holding my drink and it is ridiculous to think one can of beer can get me so drunk.

“There must have been something wrong with it and I am demanding compensation.”

He has written to Romania’s Consumer Protection Office demanding they investigate the case.