Now, I suppose it is conceivable that white supremacists and the private prison industry could join forces in support of a good piece of legislation. After all, anything is possible.

But it sure isn’t likely.

This is the situation we are seeing in Arizona with the passage of S.B. 1070, the anti-immigrant law that allows police to stop and arrest suspected undocumented aliens. Essentially, this law makes it a crime under state law to be in the U.S. illegally. The law allows police to stop anyone with a “reasonable suspicion” of being undocumented, and demand proof of citizenship. Those who cannot produce the documentation face arrest, a $2,500 fine, and 6 months in jail.

One must ask, where do they find these laws? Better yet, where do they find the people to write such laws? In searching for an answer, I turn to a colleague, the late Al Lewis. Yes, Grandpa from the Munsters. I knew him as a political activist and a radio show host when I worked at Pacifica Radio station WBAI ten years ago as a producer for Democracy Now! Al defined a law as “that which is bought and paid for.” It was one of the most simple, yet profound statements I had heard. And it definitely applies to Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

RELATED: Racist White Hackers Attack Black Sites

It is now no secret that two top level staffers in Gov. Jan Brewer’s administration — Paul Senseman and Chuck Coughlin — have financial ties to the private prison industry, and stand to benefit personally from S.B. 1070. After all, private prisons lock up the immigration detainees in that state — and they would like to run all of the prisons in Arizona, including death row — so the new law is good for business. Senseman, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, is a former lobbyist for Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA. And his wife presently is a lobbyist for the company. Meanwhile, Chuck Coughlin is one of the governor’s policy advisers and her campaign chairman. Coughlin’s firm, HighGround Public Affairs Consultants, currently lobbies for CCA. CCA and rival prison company Geo Group are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, where they ensured passage of the insidious bill.

But it gets better, or worse depending on your point of view. State Senator Russell Pearce, who introduced S.B. 1070, has extensive financial ties to the private prison industry. He also has friendships with neo-Nazis such as J.T. Ready of the National Alliance, who calls Jews parasites, and hunts and kidnaps people on the border with Mexico. Ready once said “The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in.” And he once told a neo-Nazi rally that “This is a white, European homeland. That’s how it should be preserved if we want to keep it clean, safe, and pure.”

Senator Pearce has built his career on the backs of the Latino immigrant communities he has so fervently scapegoated. He has supported Nuremberg-style legislation that would prohibit hospitals from issuing birth certificates to children born of undocumented immigrants, and a law that would not allow people to marry without providing proof of U.S. citizenship and social security numbers. That would make it illegal for citizens to marry non-citizens! Pearce wants to eliminate the Fourteenth Amendment. And he supported the bill that has eliminated ethnic studies in Arizona public schools and colleges and universities.

RELATED:  Concern Over Racism And Social Networking Grows

And Senator Pearce has ties to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). S.B. 1070 was written by Kris Kobach, a former Bush administration lawyer who now works for FAIR’s legal arm. The organization has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. FAIR was founded by the nativist trailblazer John Tanton, who warned of the dangers of the “Latin onslaught” in America, and declared “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And the group received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a racist eugenics foundation that funds studies linking race, genetics and intelligence.

For all of you conspiracy theorists out there, this is raw meat to be sure. But there’s nothing theoretical about this conspiratorial scenario. Klannish hate groups and prison companies worked together to pass an atrocious, twisted and unconstitutional law. The former hates Latinos and thinks they are inferior, and would love nothing more than to throw them all behind bars for good. Meanwhile, the latter wants to profit from locking up as many immigrant detainees as possible. Just to top it off, both groups collaborated with their tools in the Arizona legislature and that horrid governor’s office to make it all happen. This is Juan Crow in action. And sadly, it smells all too much like American history.

In fact, this reminds me of the days of Jim Crow, after slavery, when segregationist state and local governments enacted laws to maintain blacks in a state of virtual bondage. Laws targeted African-Americans specifically by going after offenses for which freedmen were presumed more likely to be charged, such as petty theft, vagrancy, burglary and bigamy. Under the convict lease system, an overwhelmingly black prison population provided free labor to the plantations, railroads and mining companies. “These companies assume charge of the convicts, work them as cheap labor and pay the states a handsome revenue for their labor…. The details of vice, cruelty and death thus fostered by the states whose treasuries are enriched thereby, equals anything from Siberia,” said Frederick Douglass. “Every Negro so sentenced not only means able-bodied men to swell the state’s number of slaves, but every Negro so convicted is thereby disfranchised.” Of course, the ideological justification for the Jim Crow legal regime was that black people were inferior, and posed a racial, sexual, criminal, political and economic threat to whites.

And today, there is profit in prisons, with whole industries that make their bread and butter over the warehousing of warm bodies -including some of the prisons themselves. Roughly 70 percent of America’s prisoners are black and brown because laws target communities of color. Yet, America’s legal profession is among the nation’s least diverse: Over 90 percent of the judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys are white. And law enforcement wages a racially-motivated war on drugs in poor black and Latino neighborhoods, with a financial incentive to maximize the arrests and convictions they win.

When racial scapegoats are conjured up–whether the black “crack babies” and “welfare queens” of the 1980s, or the Mexican “illegal aliens” and “anchor babies” of today–laws are created to legitimize the crimes that the state is about to commit against these groups, ostensibly in the name of the public good, but really for private profit. Sadly, in the land of the jobless and the hopeless, boogeymen are in great demand these days. And in Arizona, a group of greedy, unscrupulous folks got together with professional racists to criminalize the Latino community and make a buck at the same time.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’

s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

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From Pamela On Politics:

As if things aren’t bad enough with the faltering economy, devastating job losses and rapid home foreclosures, a new government report is warning that right-wing extremist groups could be planning to use the hard times and the election of the nation’s first Black president as a recruiting tool.

In a nine page report done by Department of Homeland Security in coordination with the FBI they found,  “No specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” but  the current climate “could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.”

The report was published April 7 and compared the current racially charged environment to the 1990’s, “when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession.”

Click here to read more.

Did you know that April is Confederate History month? Neither did we. Not surprisingly, according to the official Confederate History Month Web site, Confederate History Month is celebrated mostly in Southern states.

Click here for the full report.

There have been a number of videos circulating around the internet showing the ignorance, fear and hatred of McCain/Palin supporters. Many are disturbing and show the deep rooted ignorance of McCain’s supporters as well as what McCain and Palin are doing to to incite this anger. Here are our Top 5 McCain Palin Hate-Mob videos.

Number 1: McCain/Palin Ohio Hate Fest

In this video, Obama is referred to as a nigger and woman calls him a Muslim and fears that if he was elected the ‘blacks will take over.’

Number 2: McCain/Palin Hate Talk Express

This video is a compilation of several other videos of  McCain and Palin supporters spewing their right wing talk radio fueled hatred and fear as well as the statements McCain and Palin made to encourage their behavior.

Number 3: The Hate Talk Express Hits Pennsylvania

In this video a protester confronts McCain and Palin supporters on Palin charging victims for rape-kits, asking if his friend should have to pay for her rape kit, a McCain/Palin supporter says that she shoud die. The McCain/Palin supporters call Obama a terrorist and a Muslim and call protesters commie-faggots.

Number 4: The Hate Talk Express Comes back to Ohio

In this video there’s more of the McCain/Palin mob calling Obama a terrorist and questioning his patriotism and praising Sarah Palin without knowing anything about her. A young boy with his parents says of Obama, ‘You need gloves to touch him’

Part 2

Number 5: Man with Obama Monkey. I don’t know what is more disturbing, the fact that he is comparing Obama to a monkey, or the creepy pedophile smile he has.

Last night in the debate, McCain asked Obama to repudiate John Lewis’s comparison of McCain to Geroge Wallace. This is funny coming from a man who’s surrogates and campaign managers actively compare Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden. What McCain didn’t get and that Obama pointed out is that Lewis was not trying to insinuate that McCain was implementing Wallace’s segregationist policies but was utilizing the same tactics of fear and hatred.

Watch Obama Defend John Lewis Statement

Last August John McCain was asked by Pastor Rick Warren to name three people that he would confide in if he was president. The 3 people he named were former Ebay CEO, Meg Whitman, General Petraeus , and Civil Rights hero, John Lewis. Monday John McCain told CNN that John Lewis recent remarks were so disturbing that they stopped me in my tracks.

When contacted about McCain’s newfound admiration, Lewis replied that while he had worked with McCain for over 20 years, he had never confided in him. It is hard not to be cynical and believe that McCain had truly admired Lewis and wasn’t pandering to show he wasn’t a racist, but let’s believe what he said at face value.  If he truly admired Lewis for his Civil Rights work, he would take into consideration Lewis’s statement that his rallies are ‘Sowing the seeds of hatred and division’ and that he needed to control the hostility of his crowds.

Rather than taking into account John Lewis criticism. McCain’s campaign has chosen to attack John Lewis as a Barack Obama supporter.

“Congressman John Lewis’ comments represent a character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale. The notion that legitimate criticism of Senator Obama’s record and positions could be compared to Governor George Wallace, his segregationist policies and the violence he provoked is unacceptable and has no place in this campaign. I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I’ve always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track.

“I call on Senator Obama to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments that are so clearly designed to shut down debate 24 days before the election. Our country must return to the important debate about the path forward for America.”

Later McCain Would Tell CNN

“I say when anybody says anything like that that is so beyond the pale, that it stuns me, because that’s not what America and this debate should be all about, I will reject that kind of language, and again, I’m so disappointed in Congressman John Lewis.”

McCain called on the Obama campaign to denounce Lewis statements. The Obama camp responded.

“Obama does not believe that John McCain or any policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies but that he was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric.”

Watch McCain Address Lewis on CNN

Lewis was not condemning hardworking Americans who came to cheer but the ones who yelled ‘terrorist, traitor, socialist,  treason, off with his head and killem.’ When Palin accuses Obama of ‘Pallin around with the terrorists,’ where’s the criticism of his record and positions? When the announcer before the rallies emphasizes Obama’s middle name to connect him to Saddam Hussein where’s the legitimate criticism of his policies? When people shout from the crowd ‘kill him’ or off with his head, are they really just cheering?

There are several similarities between Wallace’s campaign and McCain’s. Both have tried to link their opponents with enemies of America. Just as Palin has accused Obama of ‘Pallin around with the terrorists,’ Wallace would accuse Kennedy of wanting to ‘surrender this state to Martin Luther King and his group of pro-Communists who have instituted these demonstrations’  While McCain rails against activist judges, the liberal media, socialists, intellectuals and elitists, Wallace would rail against ‘liberals, Communists, the Eastern press, Federal judges, ”pointy-headed intellectuals.’

Wallace would make it a point to make sure his crowds were fearful of  integration and what ‘foreign,’ ‘different’ African Americans would do to the white way of life. Just as McCain makes it a point that the crowds are fearful of what an exotic, un-American Obama would do for this country.

What McCain doesn’t get, is that Lewis was not comparing McCain to Wallace’s ‘segregationist policies,’ but to his tactics of hate, fear and alienation. McCain has shown a good grasp of crowd control. Most of his ‘town-hall meetings’ are stacked with supporters. When asked by a reverend at a town hall meeting if he had ever called his a wife a cunt, McCain angrily stated ‘We don’t use that kind of language here.’ So McCain has some control of the language used by supporters at his events.

How come he can’t tell his crowd to chill out. The other day McCain responded to a question in which a man referred to Obama as a hooligan and as a socialist and said ‘You’re right.’ McCain had a woman removed from a town hall meeting for having a sign that said ‘McCain=Bush,’ but he lets in a man proudly displaying his Obama monkey and a man whose sign says ‘Obama Bin Lyin.’

When all of McCain’s ads are negative and they all paint Obama as a an unknown, foreign figure to be feared and brings up allegations of him being connected to terrorism, he is creating an atmosphere of fear, division and hatred. This is compounded with right wing talk radio, which is constantly using Obama’s middle name or calling him Osama, and trying to connect him to 60’s radicals and arabs right wing newspapers and blogs.

I am not accusing John McCain of racism. I am accusing McCain of trying to use racism, fear and hatred for his own political gain. George Wallace was not a racist at first. When he first ran for Governor of Alabama, he was endorsed by the NAACP. After he was beat by an opponent who used racist hatred and was supported by the KKK he said, “Seymore, you know why I lost that governor’s race?… I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”

When asked why he started using racist messages, Wallace said ‘You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.’

In this way McCain can be directly tied to Wallace. After he has failed to invoke any passion out of his supporters by talking about his policies, McCain has finally managed to get some enthusiasm out of his supporters by turning to negativity and demonization of Obama.

Just as the racist opponents of Martin Luther King and his agenda attempted to portray him as Russian connected communist. McCain’s camp have tried to paint Obama as a foreign, un-American man with terrorist affiliations. McCain’s Virginia spokesman tried to connect Obama to bin Laden saying  ‘Both Barack Obama and Bin Laden have had friends who’ve bombed the pentagon. Isn’t that scary?’ McCain would not disown or condemn those statements.

The smearing of Obama is bigger than the McCain camp. It comes from right wing newspapers, FOX News, right wing  blogs and talk radio. If McCain wants Obama to condemn Lewis for what I believe is a legitimate criticism of McCain’s supporters, McCain should condemn every right wing radio show, blog or newspaper that smears Obama. While there are several difference between Wallace’s political campaigns and McCain’s, at the core they both are driven by negativity, fear of something different, and division.

Damn, these videos keep popping up. This is the first one that I’ve seen where Obama has been called the N-Word. Who is fueling their anger and ideas? McCain and Palin? Right wing talk radio? Is McCain now openly courting the racist vote?

Watch the Video Here

Recently John McCain said about his rallies “There is always the fringe element that’s in politics in America. The overwhelming majority of the people that come to my rallies are good and decent and patriotic Americans, For anybody to intimate that the overwhelming … 99 percent is anything but patriotic and good Americans is frankly unacceptable, and I won’t stand for it.”

It seems now that the majority of McCain’s supporters are not united in their patriotism but in their hatred and demonization of Obama. In many ways by yelling ‘terrorist’ to a bunch of angry uninformed voters is the same as yelling fire in crowded room. If McCain is not inciting this hatred for Obama, he certainly is doing nothing to derail it. Where are they getting their ideas that Obama is a terrorist, a Muslim, a communist? Right wing talk radio and Fox News have hinted at all those things and the McCain camp has done nothing to quell those suspicions and done a lot to further arouse them.

Watch a Video Compilation of the McCain Palin Hate Fest

Democrat Barack Obama accused Republican John McCain of trying to divide the country Friday, but he let other Democrats handle harsher attacks while he kept his message mostly upbeat.

Speaking to an outdoor crowd in Chillicothe, Ohio, Obama said, “it’s not hard to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division.” He said Americans want “someone who can lead this country” with a steady hand in a time of economic crisis, not divide it.

Echoing McCain’s “country first” motto, Obama said: “Now more than ever it is time to put country ahead of politics.”

Polls show Obama leading McCain in Ohio and several other battleground states, and he seems eager to keep his campaign on a steady, non-controversial course. As he has done for days, Obama criticized McCain’s economic plans and urged Americans to stay calm and confident amid the dramatic drop in the stock market.

He again did not mention McCain’s claim that he has associated with a former 1960s radical, William Ayers. When asked on a radio talk show, however, Obama said he thought Ayers, now a college professor and neighbor in Chicago, was rehabilitated.

Two high-profile supporters took sharper jabs at McCain before Obama came on stage on a sunny, cool day in front of the Ross County Courthouse.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland told the crowd, “the McCain-Palin campaign and some of their followers unfortunately want you to be afraid of Barack Obama.”

Ohio’s gun owners, Strickland said, “have nothing to fear from Barack Obama.” Nor do people who revere “family and faith,” he said, calling Obama “a strong Christian, family man.”

Internet rumors have falsely claimed that Obama is a Muslim.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, also criticized McCain by name, saying the GOP nominee learned his economic lessons from the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial pages.

Obama planned a rally in Columbus later Friday, his fifth Ohio event in two days.