Funny story about Linda Chavez's concern of Iranian women,
Don't remember it?
Do you remember that Linda Chavez was George W Bush's first pick for Labor Secretar but she never took office? Do you remember why?
Yes, because she had allegedly hired an "illegal immigrant" (she admitted making payments to one, but that's not exactly the same as proven hiring) which put her into the pits with the right so she had to go.
No this isn't about one woman possibly hiring one undocumented immigrant for up to ten years as news sources reported. It's about how the undocumented system is a form of apartheid and it appears that Ms. Chavez appears an active user of that system.
It's hard to imagine the pain behind hidden by that nonchalant excuse. Not for Ms. Chavez, but for the friend, maybe a relative as I think she was described as a distant cousin.
Yeah, when an employee is not being treated well, they tend to quit. They may return if they can't find a better offer, but repeated leavings means something is wrong. And no one ever disputed that Ms Chavez knew she was illegal. So the best thing to do would be to give her a permanent job and sponsor her for residency like an honest woman.
So what does hiring an undocumented immigrant and refusing to help her become legal have to do with an apartheid situation? Apartheid treats one set of people like they aren't worthy of human rights.
Like Meg Whitman fired her maid/babysitter Nicandra Diaz-Santillan when the woman asked Whitman to sponsor her for legal status (documentation leading eventually citizenship). It had also turned out that Whitman hadn't paid Ms Diaz for copious amounts of overtime the woman had done for the candidate's family. Whitman paid up in 2010 so as to not add criminality to her obvious unconcern for her former maid's documentation problems, but only because the spotlight had been focused so harshly on her distasteful treatment of Nicky.
What is this ability to treat others as unworthy of respect, just reward for work, and employer FICA payments (unless a person is self employed, the employer pays half of Social Security tax)? What is the ability to neglect to pay overtime when an employee is asked to work over 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week, just because a person is undocumented?
That certainly smells like apartheid to me. And in both cases the women came to know that these two women were undocumented. In Linda Chavez case she ignored the plight of her "friend". In Meg Whitman's case she fired a long time trusted maid, instead of getting into a politically messy
situation that would have helped a woman who worked overtime apparently uncomplainingly for many years.
So Linda Chavez's worry about the women of Iran seems like she has cataracts obscuring her vision, but we do know that the neocons are desperate to get into another long protracted war. Remember all the great things that were supposed to happen if we took a little "cake walk" in Iraq?
Turning Iraq over to the majority was supposed to free people, instead it forced women to don hi-jabs and spurred a civil war that drove millions out of the nation to seek safety across borders. At least over 100,000 Iraq citizens were killed by the most circumspect number. More than four thousand five hundred US soldiers died. About ten times that were "wounded", but other analyses showed that up to a quarter million US soldiers have had their bodies, lives, or mental and emotional capacities harmed so greatly that normal lives will be impossible in the future.
I think America now understands we can't just march into a nation and fix it, but most Americans (70%) were against invading Iraq too. With the wrong party in office, it doesn't matter what the people want.
That is why I keep trying to remind people about what happened when Republicans were in control before and to point out the hypocrisies of those who support neocon agendas when we haven't even fixed our own very apartheid approach to people who work in our nation.
Word stunts, though seem to be all some political people have to offer. will we let them drag us back into war?
Picture at top used via Creative Commons license Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to flickr user Nagarjun/Nagarjun Kan-dukuru who has no connection to this blog or blogger.
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