Friday, September 30, 2016

Defeat Trump: The Latino Vote


By Dolores Delgado Campbell and Duane Campbell

Immigration issues along with the changing composition of the U.S. electorate will shape the 2016 Presidential and Congressional races, as well as many state races.
While working class non-union white voters in the upper Midwest appear to be abandoning the Clinton-led Democratic Party in response to immigration and neo- liberal trade policies, Latino voters are putting some traditional Republican and swing states in play, noticeably Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Texas.  In these states with a close electoral contest, the Latino vote may make the decisive victory.
The U.S. electorate in 2016 will be the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse ever. Nearly one in three eligible voters  (31%) will be Latino, African American, Asian or another racial or ethnic minority, up from 29% in 2012.  Much of this change is due to strong growth among Latino voters, in particular U.S.-born youth. Latinos will constitute an estimated 11.9% of the total electorate.

According to Pew Research, the projected number of eligible voters will be:
White – 69%; African American  12%; Latino 12%; Asian 4%.

(For a detailed description of the various national  groups within the Hispanic category  see  http://www.dsausa.org/dl_hispanic_heritage_month)

Latino millennials will account for nearly half (44%) of the record 27.3 million Hispanic eligible voters projected for 2016. (Pew, 2016)
Donald Trump began his campaign for the Republican nomination with an assault on Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. This was his strategic choice.  He has expanded his assault to encompass additional immigrant groups including Muslims and other Latino immigrants (but not Cubans).

Friday, September 23, 2016

The Left Under Estimates the Danger of Trump

By Arun Gupta (September 21, 2016)
I know it’s the fifth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, but there is little to celebrate at such a grim moment. That being the likelihood Trump may very well win.
If he does, Black Lives Matter will be declared a domestic terrorist outfit, just like the Earth Liberation Front was under Bush.
Trump and Attorney General Giuliani would relish using the National Guard to crush blockades of oil pipelines and trains, and indigenous people defending their lands. There will be no more climate justice movement or even hesitant steps toward limiting climate change.An English-only law would likely be passed, DACA be withdrawn, and sanctuary cities outlawed. White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the Klan, and the Alt-Right would all be welcome into his administration, overtly or covertly.
There would be an all-out assault on reproductive rights and Planned Parentood
Significant gains made at the National Labor Relations Board in the last few years will be overturned.
Huge swaths of the West under federal control will be turned over to logging, ranching, mining, and oil and gas industries.
Tens of millions would go from inadequate healthcare to no healthcare.
The Alt Right will aggressively disrupt the left.
Massive voter suppression becomes the norm.
There will be organized vigilante violence, perhaps even mini-pogroms, against Muslim and Mexican communities with the state turning a blind eye.
Don’t think it can’t happen; the WWI period saw hideous pogroms against African-Americans and Chicanos with state support. Entire communities were wiped out and thousands killed.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Defeat Trump - Defeat Racism Campaign

At American River College today.



















DSA members taking up the effort.
Well received.  Our take is different than the non- partisan workers.  To join the campaign and get access to materials, etc. contact campd22702@gmail.com
The Defeat Trump- Defeat Racism bumper stickers are very popular. 

Monday, September 19, 2016

How Waves of Latino Immigration Turned California Democratic


How Waves of Latino Immigration Turned a Purple State Blue
The political impact of our changing demographics


September 19, 2016 Harold Meyerson L.A. History, Politics 0 Comments

Demography may be destiny—at least in places that hold democratic elections—but it always needs a little push. Numbers alone don’t dictate outcomes. Last year, for instance, the percentage of Latinos in both California and Texas was an identical 38.6 percent. But given the immense gap between the two states’ politics, you have to wonder why the influx of Latino immigrants has changed California from a purple state to a blue one while, despite a similar influx, Texas remains the deepest shade of red.

The answer is that the assimilation of immigrant groups into a city’s, a state’s, or a nation’s politics is never an automatic process. Some powerful political force has to believe it is in its interest to mobilize such groups—as New York’s Tammany organization did when it registered Irish immigrants as they clambered out of steerage in New York’s harbor in the mid-19th century. The difference between California and Texas is that in California, and more particularly in Los Angeles, labor unions reached out to the great wave of Latino immigrants who began coming into the state in the 1980s. The Texas labor movement, by contrast, is far smaller and weaker than its California counterpart. Absent the resources that labor can provide, no equivalent effort has yet been waged in Texas—though progressive foundations and other liberal groups are finally realizing that turning Texas blue will require a massive commitment of their money and manpower.

Trump Lies Again about the Border

TRUMP: CLINTON WANTS TO ABOLISH BORDERS: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Saturday that Hillary Clinton wants to eliminate the United States' borders. While speaking to an anti-immigrant group at a luncheon, Trump described Clinton as "the first person in history to run for the presidency who is proposing to abolish the borders around the country that she is supposed to protect." Trump's accusation, of course, bears no resemblance to the truth. Clinton supports a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, and would continue the Obama administration's policy of allowing certain undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. But "she has never advocated halting deportations of undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, or reducing or ending border enforcement," Eli Stokols reports for POLITICO. More here.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Dolores Huerta: A Legacy

Ken Burt,  For Hispanic Heritage Month. See video link at the end. 
Seventy-seven years ago, in March 1939, Juan Fabian Fernandez of New Mexico opened a session of El Congreso de los Pueblos Mexicanos e Hispanos Americano de los Estados Unidos (National Congress of the Mexican and Spanish-Speaking Peoples of the United States) in downtown Los Angeles. He stood out as the only Latino state legislator present, but he was not the only politico there. Seeking to bring the New Deal to California, Latinos, labor and the left had banded together the previous year to elect a slate of progressives, led by California Governor Culbert Olson.
Members of El Congreso cheered when the new lieutenant governor, Ellis Patterson, addressed them: “I pledge to you that President Roosevelt and the present administration in California is sincerely fighting to bring real democracy into being!”
Author and Olson administration official Carey McWilliams also spoke about the anti-immigrant bills in Congress, then being championed by representatives from the segregated Deep South. Elements of this California New Deal coalition clearly supported El Congreso. Sponsors included actor Melvyn Douglas and his wife Helen Gahagan Douglas, a future California Congresswoman.
Politics in California, then as now, was to the left of New Mexico’s. However, voters in New Mexico had done a much better job of electing Spanish-speaking elected officials, beginning with Dennis Chavez, who was then serving in the U.S. Senate.
Latinos had been in New Mexico for 400 years, and Representative Fernandez, who had run for office to improve the lot of working families, symbolized a long tradition of civic engagement. While serving in the state legislature, the 31-year-old miner also served as secretary-treasurer of the 600-member CIO Mine-Mill workers’ union local at the American Metal Company in Tererro, a gritty coal town. He was allied with a group of labor and community activists that included leaders of the Liga Obrera de Habla Español, or Spanish-Speaking Workers League. Together, these Latino leaders developed an agenda revolving around the right to organize workers and an increase in the level of relief for the unemployed. What was needed was someone to promote the agenda in New Mexico’s state capitol. So Fernandez and an AFL official secured the Democratic Party nomination and won seats in the state’s House of Representatives.
The founding of El Congreso provided the opportunity to meet with like-minded people from around the nation and held the promise of forming a national movement to empower Latinos within the framework of President Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Unfortunately, El Congreso proved to be short-lived, and Fernandez served only one term in the state legislature. Still, this New Mexico Solon deserves greater recognition and placement in the pantheon of Latino political pioneers. From the vantage point of history, Fernandez’s most lasting legacy is not his role within El Congreso or a legislative bill or a negotiated union contract. His greatest legacy is his daughter: Dolores Huerta.
In her speech to the 2016 National Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, the Latina icon spoke proudly of her father, a man who became a long-distance mentor after she moved, as a young girl, with her mother from New Mexico to Stockton, California.
In 1960, then working for the Community Service Organization, Huerta played a leading role in registering 140,000 Mexican Americans to vote for John F. Kennedy, before she became a principal leader of the farm-workers movement. She is also a Honorary Chair of DSA. To better understand her Philadelphia reference to her legislator father—his foray into Latino politics during the 1930s and her connection to that history—watch Huerta’s speech.

reposted from Capitol and Main
Ed. note.  Campaign materials for the Defeat Trump: Defeat Racism effort are available. contact campd22702@gmail.com 

Another California Water Crisis

Cruz Reynoso
We’re in the midst of a hot, dry summer. While you’re thinking about how you’ll cool off, consider this: four times more Californians than the entire population of Flint, Michigan do not get clean, safe water from the tap in their homes. They live where water must be trucked in for drinking and cooking. Where they wait in line to shower in public trailers. And where they’ve been living like this for a long time.
California’s drought didn’t cause these third-world country problems, but it certainly exacerbated them.
The hardest-hit communities, most in rural areas that are not served by large municipal water agencies, relied on groundwater sources that are contaminated or dry. Their small water agencies don’t have the funding to operate and maintain new infrastructure projects that could treat the water or bring in drinking water from other regions. And the customers – most living well below the poverty line – simply cannot cover the high cost of this expense.
This tragic situation is a study in paradox. It cuts very close for me, in part because of the experiences of my professional life, but perhaps more by virtue of having grown up in a farm worker family.
In California, the sixth largest global economy – and one of the most affluent—more than 500 communities are served by water agencies that cannot provide clean, safe water to their residents.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Proposed Texas textbook on Mexican American studies 'dripping with racism and intolerance'

Proposed Texas textbook on Mexican American studies 'dripping with racism and intolerance'

Solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe : Stop the Pipeline

Photo/ Indian Country Today
Statement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) National Political Committee
September 9, 2016
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) condemns the ongoing state and corporate violence against the just resistance of the Dakota Sioux Standing Rock indigenous people to the violation of their land and treaty rights by the Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline. Energy Transfer has vengefully bulldozed a historic tribal burial ground and with state sanction assaulted peaceful protesters with private security dogs. Both acts represent another atrocity in the long history of forced removal and genocide against indigenous peoples by an occupying white power structure. Contrast these brutal tactics with the cautious treatment of far-right-wing racist white hate groups that have tried to privatize federal lands. We hope that the federal government’s recent decision to reconsider the building of the pipeline on native land will lead to the permanent end to the construction of the pipeline.

Thursday, September 08, 2016

Support the Standing Rock Resistance




A pipeline for fracked oil that would go from North Dakota to Illinois must be stopped. Bernie Sanders issued a call to action to stand with activists who are fighting the Dakota Access pipeline.

Will you add your name to stop this pipeline?

I AGREE!
STOP THIS PIPELINE »



An oil company is trying to build a pipeline for fracked oil all the way from North Dakota to Illinois. It would carry some of the dirtiest oil on the planet and present a tremendous threat to our planet's fight against climate change.

It's called the Dakota Access pipeline, and it must be stopped.

Activists led by farmers and Native American tribal nations are fighting the pipeline with both grassroots activism and legal tools. Bernie Sanders issued this call to action to support their work:
"The major global crisis facing our planet today is climate change. The vast majority of scientists tell us that climate change is real, it is caused by humans and it is already causing devastating problems. They say that if we do not aggressively transition our energy system away from fossil fuels toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy, the planet we leave our children will be a much less habitable place.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

Sunday, September 04, 2016

Labor Day and Farm Workers





Arturo Rodriguez,


While a few short years ago a $15 minimum wage seemed like a moonshot, today municipalities and states across the country are standing with workers and adopting a minimum wage that will ultimately lift 35 million hard-working American families out of poverty.

Earlier this year, the Obama Administration expanded overtime pay protections to more than 4 million working Americans.

And in California we are on the cusp on progress that builds on what the President has accomplished and paves the way for reforms that have the potential to put millions of working Americans on a pathway to the middle class.

Last week, California lawmakers passed first-of-its-kind legislation that allows farm workers to get paid overtime like all other workers.

Saturday, September 03, 2016

Black Progressives Go All In to Defeat Trump



Alicia Garza of the Black Lives Matter movement talks about the relationship between progressives and the African-American community during the People’s Action People’s assembly on Sunday in Milwaukee.
A newly formed national network of grassroots organizations with affiliates in 30 states that represent more then 1 million people has agreed to throw its weight behind an all-out effort to defeat Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 elections and to build support for a progressive economic and social justice agenda.
About 100 leaders of People’s Action, the organization formed out of an alliance between National People’s Action, Alliance for a Just Society, USAction and Campaign for America’s Future, voted on the “defeat Trump” resolution at its first-ever People’s Assembly, a governing body comprised of affiliate leaders.
The resolution is not an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, although it calls for the organization to “reinforce and strengthen Hillary Clinton’s (and the support of down-ballot candidates) for our key issues in order to move our agenda after the election.

Thursday, September 01, 2016

Mexican American Votes Will Count

 ‘Why Would They Be Trying to Suppress Them?’: Dolores Huerta on What’s at Stake in 2016

Ally Boguhn, Rewire

Republican nominee Donald Trump launched his campaign for president in June 2015 with a speech notoriouslyclaiming [1] Mexican immigrants to the United States “are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and their rapists.”
Since then, both Trump’s campaign [2] and the Republican Party at large have continued to rely upon anti-immigrant [3] and anti-Latino rhetoric to drum up support. Take for example, this year’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio—whose departmentcame under fire [4] earlier this year for racially profiling Latinos—was invited to take the stage to push [5] Trump’s proposed 2,000-mile border wall. Arpaio told the Arizona Republic that Trump’s campaign had worked with the sheriff to finalize his speech.
This June, just a day shy of the anniversary of Trump’s entrance into the presidential race, People for the American Way and CASA in Action hosted an event highlighting what they deemed to be the presumptive Republican nominee’s “Year of Hate.”
Among the advocates speaking at the event was legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, who worked alongside [6] César Chávez in the farm workers’ movement. Speaking by phone the next day with Rewire, Huerta—who has endorsed [7] Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—detailed the importance of Latinos getting involved in the 2016 election, and what she sees as being at stake for the community.
The Trump campaign is “promoting a culture of violence,” Huerta told Rewire, adding that it “is not just limited to the rallies,” which have sometimes ended in violent incidents [8], “but when he is attacking Mexicans, and gays, and women, and making fun of disabled people.”

Chicano Moratorium