Op Ed

Yes, jobs are hard to come by these days, but don’t despair. Here’s a company that’s hiring—if you can stomach the work.

It’s the Talx Corp. It helps major outfits like AT&T Inc. and Walmart Stores Inc. prevent former employees from getting unemployment benefits. Sound like fun?

When a corporation’s laid-off workers are denied jobless benefits, the corporation pays less in taxes to our nation’s unemployment fund. Denying benefits is a messy process, and it’s hardly a plus for the corporate image. So in comes Talx to do the dirty chore.

Talx has become notorious in state unemployment offices for the tons of paper it flings to clog and game the process, thus denying or stalling benefits that laid-off people are due. Stalling a case is often all it takes to make it go away since many jobless folks don’t have the resources to battle a deep-pocket opponent like Talx. They just give up.

Lying seems to be another Talx weapon. A recent New York Times report cites several examples, including the case of a mentally disabled man fired from his job as a night janitor in a New Hampshire Walmart.Talx stalled for three months before the fellow could get a hearing. The hearing officer granted benefits to the jobless janitor, but Talx appealed, claiming Walmart had requested permission to testify by phone, but been disallowed. There had been, it was found, no such request. Finally the janitor won his appeal, but thanks to Talx’s long stall, he had no money for rent and lost his apartment. “That was a nightmare,” he said of the experience.

Talx officials say the company improves the“efficiency” of the unemployment system. It doesn’t. It strips the system of decency.

For more than 120 years, the Texas Capitol has been free and open to the public: no locked doors, no restrictions or guarded entryways, no metal detectors or X-ray machines. (After 9/11, detectors were installed but soon removed.) Citizens could open any of the building’s four main doors and walk right in without getting screened, patted down, or queried.

That changed on the afternoon of Jan. 20, when 24-year-old Fausto Cardenas wandered into the Capitol. He entered a Senate office, where his odd behavior aroused suspicion, and he was asked to leave. He walked back outside, took out a handgun and fired several shots into the air. State troopers quickly swarmed him. No one was injured, and Cardenas was hauled off to face felony charges.

The incident, while scary, was minor. But lawmakers called for increased security.

On April 13, the State Preservation Board—a panel of elected officials and one public member that oversees the Capitol—voted to install metal detectors and X-ray machines. Under the plan, the east and west entrances to the Capitol will be closed to the public. Tour groups will be screened through the south entrance, and everyone else will have to pass through security at the north doors. The lines to get in—especially on the busiest days of legislative sessions—will be daunting.

Only one board member voted against the proposal: Gov. Rick Perry. “I’m always up for looking at new ways to protect our citizens, but the last thing I want is for the Texas Capitol to turn into DFW Airport,” Perry told the Houston Chronicle back in January, two days after the shooting.

We don’t often find ourselves in agreement with the governor. But in this case, he couldn’t be more right.

It’s important to remember that anyone with a concealed-handgun permit is allowed, under Texas law, to carry a gun inside the Capitol. Once inside, people with permits will be handed back their guns. There are numerous public buildings—like courthouses and police stations—that need metal detectors and security screening. At the Capitol—already adequately protected by security cameras and state troopers—the screening will be mostly for show.

Too often in recent years, Americans have enacted pointless measures to give ourselves a false sense of security—from taking our shoes off at airport checkpoints to allowing the National Security Administration to wiretap without a warrant.

This plan is one more concession to fear. It makes the Texas Capitol less of a people’s building.

By Mark Dow

The immigration debate is about two things:how to stop the illegals trying to get in and what to do about the illegals already here — or, as they say inside the beltway, enforcement and legalization.

But the focus on illegals on both sides of the border has obscured something more urgent:harm being done by immigration laws already on the books to legal immigrants who are already here.

Since 1996, we have been deporting lawful permanent residents (despite the label) by the hundreds of thousands. Rhetoric from the Bush administration and its kinder, gentler successor has helped convince the public that when someone with a green card is deported, it’s because he is a dangerous “criminal alien.”

But that’s usually not the case. Between 1997 and 2007, “[a]mong legal immigrants who were deported, 77 percent had been convicted for such nonviolent crimes” as drug possession and traffic offenses, according to Human Rights Watch (April 2009).

Using Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) statistics, Human Rights Watch has estimated that in those ten years, there were 434,495 people deported as a consequence of non-violent criminal offenses, compared to 140,572 for violent offenses.

So how did this happen?

Fourteen years ago, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building by an American citizen, Congress hurriedly passed — and President Bill Clinton signed into law — the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and shortly thereafter the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).  Together these led to an unprecedented increase in the number of people detained by ICE:  from 1994 to 1998, the average daily number of persons in immigration detention rose from 6,785 to 15,447.  Legal immigrants have accounted for the most significant increase in these numbers since the numbers have been kept.

In his recent reflections on the legacy of the Oklahoma City bombing, former President Clinton singled out the new Arizona law.  He was too modest to mention his own role in tearing families apart and costing the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary enforcement spending and lost tax revenue with the most anti-immigrant federal laws passed in generations.

Here’s what the 1996 laws did.  First, they drastically expanded the range of crimes for which lawful residents are subject to mandatory detention and deportation or “removal.”  Then they stripped these immigrants of the right even to apply for a so-called waiver of deportation from an immigration judge.

A typical case stemming from the 1996 laws might involve a legal resident who has served in the military, runs a business, and has paid taxes for decades.  His wife and children may be U.S. citizens, and he might not even speak the language of the country in which he was born.  And now he is detained and removed as a consequence of a decades-old misdemeanor for which not even a short prison sentence was imposed.

While these 1996 detentions-and-deportations are handled by immigration authorities and governed by “immigration law,” the cases are not really about immigration at all.  They are more accurately viewed as part of a two-tiered criminal justice system for non-citizens.  As Arizona troopers begin checking the status of brown-skinned people they “lawfully”  encounter, let’s remember that the definition of “U.S. citizen” has changed over time.  People of African descent used to be ineligible to become U.S. citizens; do we need any other reminder that such change is progress?

Already in the late 1990′s, once the hysteria had settled — and before it was revived — Republican and Democratic members of Congress came to understand the devastating and unjust effects of the laws they had passed.  They began to see that citizen and non-citizen are already much more interconnected than the laws, much less the rhetoric, acknowledge.

The legislative reform movement known as “Fix 96″ began in a household in Mesquite, just outside Dallas.  It reached far into the nation’s capitol, and all over the U.S.

Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle introduced private bills to exempt lawful, taxpaying, upstanding citizens — sorry, immigrants — from the new dragnet.  Pressure from groups of (actual) citizens and non-citizens made bipartisan reforms appear likely.  But the plans for reform came to an abrupt end with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

It’s time to revive Fix 96.  This time around, those involved in the debate on “comprehensive immigration reform” — whether governors, legislators, presidents, or ex-presidents — should take a closer look at what our laws are already doing, and to whom.

–Mark Dow is the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California 2004).  He teaches English at Hunter College in New York.

“Oh my, oh my,” chittered the Chicken Littles of Wall Street when the public demanded cuts in their obscene pay packages. “The sky is falling,” they cried, flocking to Washington to save their pay.

Wall Street’s preening executives insisted that the linchpin of America’s financial system was their multimillion-dollar salaries, bonuses, stock options and perks. Cut their money, they threatened, and they would flee to greener pastures, taking with them the expertise needed to repair the financial system.

That was a ludicrous claim, since there’s not a huge job market for failed bankers demanding rich rations and constant stroking. Nonetheless, skittish officials backed off, and the bankers are again feeding on multimillion-dollar pay packages. But would they have actually fled if Washington had stood up to them?

One who did take a stand was Kenneth Feinberg, a special regulator brought in to set the pay of top executives in five financial and automobile companies that got multiple bailouts from us. He has cut their pay by 77 percent since 2008. Yet most of them stayed on the job.

Why? Even with their paychecks whacked by three-fourths, the top execs are still drawing an average of $1.6 million a year—enough to make ends meet, even for a corporate big shot. And it turns out that not every executive is a greed machine motivated only by money. Such human factors as personal pride and loyalty (to both their companies and their country) made them want to stay and help fix America’s economic wreck.

So let’s stop pampering the Chicken Littles. They’ve got nowhere to go, and even if some leave, others can do the job.

Find more information on Jim Hightower’s work—and subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown—at www.jimhightower.com

Texas wisdom warns us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But too many Texans believe that we can cut taxes and still expect the government services we need. They somehow think we can get something for nothing.

Conservatives have been pushing voodoo economics for 30 years. They promised that if we reduced taxes, it would free up cash that would go into the economy and float all boats. They argued that less taxation would somehow generate more tax revenue, and therefore better state services. But that hasn’t happened, and it never will.

Just look at the numbers. Along with our low taxes, Texas ranks near the bottom in education and health care. Despite all of the Fortune 500 companies based here, we are facing a massive budget shortfall. In a political sleight of hand, Gov. Rick Perry and conservative legislators took $14 billion of federal stimulus funds to balance the 2010-2011 budget, all the while denouncing Washington for supplying it. But next year they will face an $11-$20 billion shortfall, without the federal government to save them. If they stick to their “no new taxes” ideology, vital government services will go away. If you want to see what happens to a place that has little government and no taxes, visit Somalia.

When conservative leaders and their tea party brethren promise good governance with few taxes, they are making a promise they can’t keep. Most Texans know better than to hire a guy living out of his truck to put a discount roof on their house. The reason they know better is because someone else has already made that mistake. We can learn by looking at California, which Perry wants to emulate by passing constitutional amendments t hat would make it harder to raise taxes or state spending. Do we really want the wholesale budget chaos we’ve seen in California?

The question now: How soon will Texans realize that civilization only exists through government? Crows are already coming home to roost in high death rates for treatable diseases, low test scores at public schools, and crumbling bridges and highways. Voodoo economics promised trickle-down benefits, but instead they are creating bubble-up anger, ironically demonstrated by tea party followers who are protesting the wrong president. If progressive politicians can channel that anger to where it belongs, Texans may just wise up.