Sunday Op-Ed: Stop Playing Defense

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

One of the most bizarre notions to come out of the struggle for health care reform was being told over and over again, “Oh single payer never had a CHANCE!  It was never on the table!” said in tones by my fellow Democrats that implied one would be truly insane to suggest single payer be the starting point for any negotiations.

Well we’ve seen how that worked out.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get a weak and watered down public option that will take several years to get up and running, and we’ll be spending those years fighting tooth and nail with vested interests who will do everything they can to make it even more watered down and weak.   And the same will hold true for all the other regulations proposed in the health care bills, with insurance and pharmaceutical companies spending millions to create loopholes that will benefit them and make the rest of us suffer.

We’ve been playing defense far too long.

Yes I know, we have the Conservadems to deal with, we have those nasty Blue Dogs, we have a media who likes nothing better than to pursue inanities for ratings rather than inform the citizens of this country, we have many and dire obstacles in our path.

So why play defense, given that?  What is the advantage?

I hope we have learned an important lesson from the healthcare debate that will help us better deal with comprehensive immigration reform.

We should ask for the moon, imo.

I know President Obama won’t do this.  Nor will our representatives.  They’ve already begun to stress enforcement only policies in order to keep folks from saying they’re “weak on crime.”

From Duke1676’s diary Over 500 Groups Demand End To Local Immigration Checks:

Since taking office, the Obama Administration has been doing a carefully choreographed dance with both sides of the immigration debate in an attempt to place itself in a “sweet spot” where it believes it will be able to appease all concerned parties when the thorny issue of immigration reform finally moves up the legislative agenda.

Taking a cue from past administrations who tackled immigration legislation, like Reagan in 86, and Clinton in 95,  Obama has chosen to pave the way for negotiations by launching a pre-emptive strike against opposition from the right by engaging in increased crackdowns and heavy-handed enforcement to prove that he’s “serious about enforcing the law”.  Both Reagan and Clinton engaged in increased workplace raids and ramped up deportations before coming to the table to negotiate. Bush, did the same after the failure of reform legislation in 06.

We’ve seen how well that works, too, when it came to the ever more surreal War on Terror.  The Repubs and conservatives are always more draconian, militaristic and downright tyrannical, not having any of that nasty sense of justice that plagues the rest of us.  For us to think we’re going to fool those citizens of the United States who think of immigrants, whether documented or not, as the enemy, these kinds of “pre-emptive strikes” will not work and will put us once again in a defensive position for real immigration reform.

As Duke says in his ironically titled diary:  How about a “temporary bailout” for immigrants:

Why is it that when the private sector failed miserably, this administration could quickly jump to action, analyze the problem, assess accountability, and offer up solutions to stop the suffering of millions, yet, when the public sector is failing, they drag their feet, leave failed policies in place, and hunker down?

Just as they were willing to put temporary stop-gap measures in place to fix the economy… why can they not do they same now for those suffering from their inability to fix the immigration system?

It seems simple enough to me.

Call it what you want … “enforcement relief,” … “a temporary moratorium” … (let the PR people loose, I’m sure they can come up with a catchy phrase that will work). But the bottom line is it’s time to stop the arbitrary enforcement of laws all admit must be changed.

It’s time for this administration to stop asking migrants to suffer quietly and wait until the “political climate” is right before getting any relief.

So we know President Obama won’t be the one to aim high when it comes to negotiations.  Nor will our vaunted leaders in Congress (with, perhaps, maybe, possibly, the Progressive Caucus).

So that leaves us.  That leaves us to yell louder.

Here’s just one example of how we can yell louder and set the Overton Window as far left as it can get.  In 2007 Duke wrote a diary that got on the front page of Daily Kos entitled A progressive plan for immigration reform.  This was written before the economic meltdown so parts of it need to be updated, but the framing is exactly what we need to start pushing – against both the Repubs and our own reps who are playing defense.

Here’s the example:

Currently “workplace enforcement” revolves around the government rooting out unauthorized workers and deporting them. The businesses rarely receive any punishments and when they do they quickly pass those costs on to consumers through higher prices as part of the cost of doing business. But the terrible working conditions that have relegated those jobs to ones that only undocumented immigrants will accept remain the same.

This paradigm needs to shift. The government needs to shift its focus from attacking the symptom of unfair labor practices, to attacking those practices themselves.

Instead of swat teams of ICE agents storming factories and meatpacking plants looking for undocumented immigrants, we need armies of inspectors from the Department of Labor, OSHA, and other agencies, looking for labor violations and evidence unfair labor practices.  This is how you raise the standards for all US workers.

Think about that for a moment, if you will.  Think about pushing for more folks to be hired in the Department of Labor and OSHA and other agencies that would be pro-labor, and think of less ICE agents whose bloated budget under the aegis of Homeland Security is giving us far less bang for the buck.

That’s playing offense.

And it’s about time we did that.  Time we stopped playing defense.

Time to ask for the moon and negotiate from there, rather than ask for nothing and settle for less than nothing.