Trickle Up Poverty (28 page)

Until 1998, California’s liberal educators and administrators, along with La Raza and MEChA and other Hispanic separatist activists, countermanded the wishes of 85 percent of the state’s Hispanic population by perpetuating bilingual education. In effect, they were reverting to the “separate but equal” doctrine of education outlawed in the late 1950s in the United States. California Proposition 227, which passed with a landslide majority in 1998, outlawed bilingual education. By August, 2000, the average reading scores of the state’s more than one million Hispanic elementary students had improved more than twenty points across the board.21

The Hispanic and left-liberal education segregationists were dumbfounded.

This misguided cultural vanity, which somehow sees Hispanic culture as superior to “gringo” culture, has led to the need for Hispanics to insist on pursuing yet another leftist goal: Racial and ethnic preference for Hispanics—in other words, “affirmative action”—in areas such as hiring and college admission. Even though it’s clear that Hispanic students are perfectly capable of competing with their peers of any race if they’re given the tools with which to compete, the champions of Hispanic separatism aren’t willing to provide them with the tools.

No, they’d rather Hispanics be given a free ride, the same special treatment that has done so much harm to Blacks’ ability to make real progress in the classroom and in the marketplace. Underlying this agenda item is, of course, the ultimate desire to become the dominant ethnic and cultural force in America. You can bet that La Raza wouldn’t allow English to be taught in its Spanish-only classrooms.

Two other closely intertwined La Raza goals, allowing illegal aliens to get drivers’ licenses and giving the right to vote to illegals, are part of a broader conspiracy to gain a permanent Democratic majority at the polls. Eleven states already issue drivers’ licenses to illegals, and illegal aliens use them as “breeder documents.” Once you have a driver’s license you can get on an airplane, rent an apartment, and open a bank account. It’s a passport to a fraudulent existence, because it makes it look as if you’re legitimate. In most states, you can use a driver’s license as identification when you register to vote, and so it’s a free pass to cast an illegal ballot.22

La Raza and Racism in the Obama Administration

As its name suggests, La Raza (NCLR) is an overtly racist organization.

Its ultimate goal is to see one “race” of people (Hispanics or Chicanos) conquer another race (Caucasians) by rapidly taking over the latter’s social territory. Here’s one of the many ironies associated with La Raza’s and MEChA’s desire to take back the birthplace of the Aztecs for “Chicanos”: the Aztecs were not Chicanos, of course, but Indians. What’s more, the Spanish, from whom Chicanos are descended, are the original imperialists, having conquered and destroyed Central American Indian civilizations centuries ago.

Simply put, La Raza doesn’t represent an ethnically pure population.

It’s the conqueror calling the conqueror guilty.

Of course, La Raza and MEChA aren’t going to listen to that argument. Their logic is as twisted as their goals and their methods for achieving them. Their ancestors include the Spanish conquerors who brutally decimated the Indian populations of South America in their own imperialist expansion into the new world, and NCLR members are no less tied to “European imperialism” than are the Americans from whom they seek to reclaim portions of the United States.

NCLR’s best-known member is newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a dismally under-qualified, racially biased woman who insisted in a speech she gave in 2001 that “I would hope that a wise Latino woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The remarks were published a year later in, appropriately enough, the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal of the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law. Yes, the commies at California’s most radical leftist university have a racist law journal.

What did you expect?

The Almanac of the Federal Judiciary cites comments by Sotomayor’s peers describing her as “a terror on the bench.” The Supreme Court nominee “abuses lawyers,” “she really lacks judicial temperament.” And finally, “she doesn’t understand [lawyers’] role in the system—as adversaries who have to argue one side or the other. She will attack lawyers for making an argument she does not like.”23 She’s yet another reason why I say the stench on the bench is making me clench.

Sotomayor had amassed an ugly record of judicial incompetence before she was confirmed as Supreme Court Justice. Among other things, she had her decisions reversed on appeal more than 60 percent of the time! 24 Her approach to the law is at best sloppy and uninformed, and, as her testimony in her Senate confirmation hearings revealed, she’s a truly second-rate intellect. Sotomayor used the phrases “imminent domain” when she meant “eminent domain” and “providence of Congress” when she meant “province of Congress.”

She also referred to her “story of knowledge” when she clearly meant to say “store of knowledge.” And she used the phrases “vagrancies of … the moment” and “the national labor relationships board,” the latter possibly a dating service we’re not familiar with. As “allahpundit” describes her gaffes, “she only ever claimed to be wise, not to have the vocabulary of, say, the average 10th-grader.”25

She’s the judge, by the way, whose racial and gender bias led her to rule—along with two other judges in the three-judge panel of which she was a part—against twenty New Haven firefighters, eighteen white and two Hispanic, receiving the promotions they rightfully earned in a competitive examination. Her denial of the firefighters’ promotions was in response to a challenge by seven African-American firefighters who did not score high enough on the test to earn advancement to Lieutenant or Captain. Soto-mayor ruled in the Blacks’ favor on the grounds that they had been discriminated against on the basis of race.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Sotomayor, saying that her ruling unfairly discriminated against the people whose performances merited promotions, two of whom were Hispanic, by the way. Sotomayor’s ruling was essentially a race-based affirmative action decision, in this case one which the courts correctly reversed. In the process, though, the firefighters waited the better part of seven years, their careers on hold, for justice to be served.26

Most thinking Americans understand that the quality of empathy, which Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor value much more highly than they do true judicial temperament or respect for the U.S. Constitution, is better applied to raising one’s children and giving to charity than to judicial decisions. In the current environment, empathy for anyone bent on breaking the law in order to subvert the United States is precisely what is needed from a racist judge in the continuing war against freedom, religion, and capitalism that the Obama administration is so intent on pursuing.

The real problem is that Sotomayor’s racism seems to be her primary qualification for a Supreme Court judgeship in this most racist of administrations. In other words, she’s the perfect choice for a judge in the American legal system, which exists, in Obama’s and other leftists’ eyes, as a tool for the imposition of the “politically caponized” principles on the American people. Such a court system is at the service of its administrators’ political agenda, and it ridicules any attempt at impartial justice.

In addition to Obama’s managing to get a highly unqualified La Raza member on to the Supreme Court, La Raza is also well-represented in the Obama administration. Cecilia Muñoz, NCLR’s Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation, has been appointed Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. Muñoz has been a La Raza member for eighteen years, and she’s also on the boards of directors of Center for Community Change and the Open Society Institute.

In other words, she’s a career activist and community organizer, not unlike the president himself. And Cid Wilson, a member of the board of directors of NLCR and the LatinoJustice PRLDEF (Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund) is an appointee to the Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino.27 Obama also appointed John Trasviña to the position of Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment Practices. Trasviña is a long-time civil rights attorney and president and general counsel for the Mexican American Defense Fund, as well as a board member of the NCLR Lawyers Association and the Latino Issues Forum.28

In another example of the arrogance and blindness to the wishes of the American people—not to mention the laws of the United States—that characterizes this administration, Obama appointed Maria del Carmen Aponte to the position of Ambassador to El Salvador. This despite the fact that when Bill Clinton appointed her in 1998 to be the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, the vetting process revealed that she had intimate ties with the DGI, the Cuban intelligence agency. She’s a committed communist who was also a board member of NCLR, and shares its subversive goals. The nomination was withdrawn, but it stands as a marker of the arrogance and incompetence of this administration.29

One of the things that is clear, and one of the things that makes Barack Obama a danger to the republic, is that he seems simply to be unaware that any of the numerous subversives he’s appointed to serve in his administration might be objectionable to rational, law-abiding, freedom-loving Americans. His administration is riddled with appointees who, like the La Raza members he’s selected, have ties with any number of subversive racist, leftist, and Islamist groups.

Because of its racism, La Raza’s’s agenda fits perfectly with the left’s overall political agenda, which includes supporting policies to pursue identity politics at every possible opportunity. If you’re not a member of a minority group, you don’t count. If you’re a member of a racially identifiable group—Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans—even better. There’s a place for you in the big leftist tent as long as you’re willing to give up your individuality and any thought of taking responsibility for your own life. And if you’re a member of a racial group that has a grudge against Whitey, even better. Finally, if your chip-on-the-shoulder attitude leads you to want to help in the destruction of the United States, welcome aboard!

The USS Hate America is about to set sail.

We’re all in for a very bumpy ride.

Illegal Aliens: Crimes and Consequences

In April, 2008, San Francisco launched a new ad campaign boasting that it was a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants. At the ceremony held to kick off the campaign, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proudly announced, “We are standing up to say to all of our residents: We don’t care what your status is. We care that you, as a human being, are a resident of our city and we want you to participate in the life of our city.”

On June 22, less than three months later, Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, shot and killed forty-eight-year-old Tony Bologna and his sons, Michael, twenty, and Matthew, sixteen, in cold blood while they were in their car on a San Francisco street. Ramos apparently mistook them for rival gang members. Either that or, as several reports had it, Bologna’s car temporarily blocked Ramos from making a left turn and Ramos killed him and his sons in a fit of road rage.

His weapon? An AK47 assault rifle.

When Ramos was a juvenile he had two previous felony convictions: one for assault and one for attempted robbery. He even served time in California juvenile incarceration facilities. Despite this, San Francisco juvenile authorities failed to alert federal immigration officers about Ramos’ immigration status because it was against the municipality’s illegal-friendly policies to do so.30 Ramos was a member of Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, a gang of illegal aliens with ties to El Salvador.

In his post–murder spree news conference, Mayor Newsom seemed almost proud of the fact that the killings occurred on his watch, as if it somehow validated the policy that enables illegals to violate the law with impunity in their “city by the bay” (with profound apologies to Tony Bennett).

The whole issue of whether illegal immigrants commit more crimes than do American citizens, which leftists love to argue when they’re trying to convince America to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, is moot. In the first place, someone in this country illegally is committing a crime. If you’re an illegal alien, you’re a criminal. Period. Beyond that, if you’re in the country illegally and you commit another crime, it’s a crime that could have, and should have, been prevented by more stringent enforcement of immigration laws.

It’s a crime that’s an affront to decent, law-abiding American citizens everywhere. The blood of the victims of these crimes is on the hands of America’s elected officials, legislators, and judges. They share in the responsibility for the unnecessary death and suffering caused by the violent acts of illegal immigrants everyday.

The argument that being in the country illegally is a “victimless” crime is as stupid as not recognizing that it’s a crime in the first place. Every taxpayer is being victimized financially by every illegal alien in the country. It’s not the same thing as being robbed at gunpoint, which so many illegals are prone to do. However, it’s being robbed nonetheless. You’re being robbed when the child of an illegal attends school at taxpayer expense. You’re being robbed when an illegal shows up at a hospital emergency room with an injury or illness that needs to be treated and it gets charged to taxpayers. And you’re being robbed when an illegal takes a job “off the books” and doesn’t contribute his or her fair share of the taxes that should be levied on that person’s earnings.

It’s not a victimless crime.

Don’t let anybody tell you it is.

Although the victims of the crime of illegals’ simply being in the United States are indirect victims, illegals also commit crimes directly against American citizens, as Government Accountability Office report GAO-05-646R shows in this disturbing analysis. The report identifies more than 55,000 illegal aliens in prison at the federal, state, and local levels based on Homeland Security Department data. These prisoners have been arrested a total of 459, 614 times for more than 700,000 criminal offenses.