Hot on the heels of massive protests of potentially abusive revisions of the immigration laws, federal officials conducted immigration raids in Indianapolis and other cities in the United States. The raids included arrests and detentions of hundreds of employees, including 7 executives, of IFCO Systems which apparently manufacturers pallets in Indianapolis.
stAllio! has a good roundup (so to speak).
(Updated stAllio! has good followup post as well.)
I imagine Representative Hostettler, who wanted the feds to arrest the protesters, must be pleased.
arresting ‘7 EXECUTIVES’ sounds serious.( but maybe they were in the ‘detained’ group
I agree. On the other hand, the fact that arresting a handful of executives gets our attention where arresting a multitude of workers does not probably says something about the tiered nature of our society. Though it’s probably not a revelation any deeper than that revealed in one of my favorite quotes (which I’ve mentioned before) from Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Consequently, the rich are not forced into as many situations where they might need to violate the law and are, therefore, not arrested nearly as often.
i’d seen them referred to as “managers” rather than executives. but still, 7 managers/execs across the entire country, compared to more than 1,000 undocumented workers, strikes me as disproportionate.
I am surprised Hostettler wasn’t there for a photo opportunity.
i’ve plugged the names of the 7 ifco higher-ups into google. i couldn’t find job info for 4 of them, but dario salzano was definitely a hiring manager or HR rep, because he was the contact person for this job posting. hardly an executive position; that’s middle management at best.
two of the others, james rice and william hoskins, both held the title of “manager of new market development”. their job title was “manager”, but it’s possible those were executive-level positions.
dhs has more information here, along with a list of the nine arrestees:
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=5547
According to that DHS release:
Here is IFCO’s business summary. The four key executives: Karl Pohler, CEO; Michael Nimtsch, CFO; Wolfgang Orgeldinger, COO; and David Russell, Pres. of IFCO North America were not arrested.
(I thought maybe one of these folks would turn up in a quick campaign finance search at opensecrets.org or the Texas Ethics Commission database (IFCO North America is based in Houston) but no such luck. Maybe their problem was lack of donations!)
Looks as if they went after local managers/executives, rather than the top tier of the company. Are we to believe that The top execytives were supposedly unaware of illegal (or at least suspicious) hiring practices?
Pila,
Not only are we not supposed to believe it, we’re not even supposed to ask that question in the first place.
As the Alabama Republican Party website says: “
We believe in faith, family, and personal responsibility.”
If you’re wealthy enough, you don’t have to sweat the family values, let alone the personal responsibility.
We are repeatedly informed that the stridency of one’s faith is the only thing that matters.
Whoops. Once again, hosed up the formatting on that one. I put in lots of line breaks to help me keep track of the closing tags for the hyperlinks, but didn’t know that the software wouldn’t consolidate the whitespace.
Doug, can you fix that please? Sorry for the inconvenience.
Not a problem.
Wow Branden! I got a little more than I bargained for as an answer to my question. Not all Christians are right wing nutjobs, though.
Pila,
Heh, yeah, I do tend to come out swinging on this subject. :)
I agree with you completely that not all Christians are right wing nutjobs — I’ve met many who weren’t. My problem is that these people don’t speak up and reclaim their faith from those who claim so loudly to speak for it exclusively.
The same criticism could have been made of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, before the pheonomenon of the “blogosphere”. But they are being heard now, with some help from sites like Free Republic and Little Green Footballs who increase progressive sites’ profiles merely by bashing them. (In my opinion, I don’t do FR and LGF any particular favor by citing them because their viewpoint is already blasting out 24/7 on Fox News Channel anyway.)
So we know it can be done. I want to hear why the concept of a “fundamentalist left-wing Christian” seems such a laughable concept, even to those who are familiar with much of the New Testament.
I want to hear people who feel their faith misrepresented to stand up and speak out, and let there be no mistake that the Randall Terrys and Jerry Falwells of the world don’t speak for them.
People don’t even have to go on the record about their faith, and it might even be good for our *secular* democracy if they didn’t. But if there’s a silent majority of that 82% of Americans that are Christians that isn’t represented by theocratic reactionary lunatics, they need to speak up. And cast their votes accordingly.
Can anyone tell me if there have been any updates in this case? One of the “execs” (and I use the term loosely) is a very good friend of mine! Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any updates on the case. They were all middle management. The corporate office is not taking any of the responsibility. But some sites state that more than 50% of the company’s 5,800 employees had invalid social security numbers. There’s no way corporate should let these men take the fall.