If you haven't been paying attention to the "Blue's News" section in the sidebar, you're missing one of the most interesting features of The Blue Voice.
It's updated daily, with various Blue Voice partners rotating as the Blue's News provider. Josh Marshall recently wrote (Talking Points Memo blog 11/09/05:
It's a cliche to say how we're all overloaded with information today with the proliferation of news outlets. But it's quite a thing to actually consider in some detail how true it actually is.
A dozen years ago, only an extremely small minority of people had access to any newspapers beside their local paper and perhaps the New York Times, USA Today or the Wall Street Journal, which have a national or quasi-national distribution.
Today anyone with an Internet connection has immediate access to every major paper in the country and the great majority of local papers which contain all manner of information flying beneath the radars of the big regional outlets. That of course doesn't even touch on international papers, native online news outlets, websites for the news networks and much else.
We try to make Blue's News one of the thousands of information sifters available in the blogosphere. And Sundays are my favorite day for that. Because many papers start off a series of investigative reports on Sunday, or run long feature articles about a particular subject or story. This Sunday's Blue's News includes the following.
From the Sacramento Bee, we have "The Pineros: Men of the Pines" 11/13/05, the start of a multi-part feature on the exploitation of immigrant forest workers. Today's first installment of the series by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua is on Guest Workers. They write:
Pineros - pine workers, as Latino forest laborers are known - have long battled abusive working conditions. But today, there is a new edge to the drama: Much of the mistreatment is unfolding inside a government program that invites foreign workers to the United States to fill labor shortages.
Unlike millions of Latin Americans who cross the border illegally to work in El Norte, the pineros toiling on federal land in Idaho were in this country legally, part of a small army of foreign residents who fill low-paying, non-farm jobs under a little-known federal guest worker program.
Yet the 10,000 or so forest guest workers, who plant trees across the nation and thin fire-prone woods out West as part of the Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative, have hardly been treated with hospitality.
A nine-month Bee investigation based on more than 150 interviews across Mexico, Guatemala and the United States and 5,000 pages of records unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act has found pineros are victims of employer exploitation, government neglect and a contracting system that insulates landowners - including the U.S. government - from responsibility.
Three other of Sunday's selections also deal with immigration-related issues. A piece from the Nashville Tennessean reports on the annual convention of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. Deep South and Southern border states are receiving larger numbers of Latino immigrants, which were more a phenomenon of California, Texas and Florida in previous decades.
Then there is a column by Scott Waller from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger about the immigration of Japanese capital into Mississippi, in the form of a large Nissan plant north of Jackson.
The plant began production of its first model, the Quest minivan, in May 2003.
Today there are 5,000 people working at the plant and more than 40 suppliers have located in various parts of the state.
Nissan hired Mississippi people and are working with the state's universities and community colleges to train those workers. ...
Now other automotive manufacturers are looking at the state as a possible site to locate a plant.
This summer, South Korean automaker Kia said a site near Meridian was its preferred choice.
Nissan and Kias made in Mississippi: that's globalization. Scott Waller, I should add, is originally from my hometown of Shubuta MS.
I'm particularly fond of the St. Petersburg Times, a Knight-Ridder affiliate that also does old-fashioned investigative reporting, at the local, state and national levels. Sunday they began a five-part series about the case of Jennifer Porter, a white schoolteacher who killed two African-American children and injured two others in a hit-and-run incident. All four were from the same family.
She was tried and recently sentenced: to house arrest and probation. Not surprisingly, the question of whether someone who had killed two white children in a hit-and-run would have received such a lenient sentence.
Race is also a factor in this story from the New Orleans Times-Tribune: Blanco accused of race baiting: Richmond escalates feud with governor 11/13/05. The Democratic governor of Louisiana who received national attention during the Katrina crisis is involved in a heated dispute with the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus over program cuts.
And besides that, we have a stories from the Portland Oregonian on class issues with historic preservation, a Knight-Ridder piece on the Guantánamo station of the Bush Gulag, a Des Moines Register story on the recent tornado disaster there and a Toledo Blade editorial about Jimmy Carter's new book Our Endangered Values. The latter has this to say about Carter's book:
The book reveals a different Jimmy Carter than the pleasant, conciliatory soul the nation has come to know since he left office in 1981. There's outrage and disgust for what he sees as the sins of the Bush White House.
He attacks Mr. Bush's "arrogance," and as a Christian, Mr. Carter insists Mr. Bush is using his "fundamentalism" to take the nation on a path it doesn't want to go. The former president maintains that unyielding partisanship has overcome civility in government, and that deficit spending is out of control. ...
The invasion of nations that don't pose a direct threat to America is lamentable, he believes, as are long-term peace agreements that have effectively been dismissed.
The White House has abandoned human-rights agreements while graying the lines between church and state, and it worries him that Americans' civil liberties are being restricted, that the administration might have secret prisons abroad, and that it opposes a congressional ban on torture of foreign prisoners.
"I never dreamed we'd ever even consider that," he said. "I have been reluctant to criticize this President. But this President has radically departed from [the policies] of all previous presidents."
