Blindman's Buff #197
HILARIA VS. BARACKO: CRUNCHING THE LATINO VOTE IN 2008
MEXICO CITY (Jan. 29th) - Stealing elections is the cultural norm in the new millennium. Massive fraud in last December's Kenyan presidential
elections orchestrated by encrusted incumbent Mwai Kibaka has generated slaughter in that once-stable east African nation. Opposition
candidate Raela Odinga claims to be receiving daily messages of encouragement from fellow Kenyan, Barack Obama.
Across the Indian Ocean, Benazir Bhutto appears to have been whacked by an elite Musharref intelligence unit when she threatened detailed
disclosure of how the Pakistani president intended to steal parliamentary elections now scheduled for February 18th. Vladimir Putin's snow job in
last year's Russian Duma elections was roundly condemned by European election observers as unvarnished vote stealing - Gary Kasparov, the
nation's most outspoken opposition voice, called the vote "the most unfair and dirtiest in modern Russian history."
Here in Mexico, the stealing of the 2006 presidential elections from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has divided the country down the middle
despite U.S. assurances that everything is hunky dory south of the border.
When Washington disapproves of the outcome of democratic elections such as in Venezuela and Palestine, the elections suddenly become
"undemocratic" and the results are disqualified.
The U.S. is, of course, no exception to election flimflam. Bush's gross finagling in 2000 and 2004 stank just as much as Turkmenistan
presidential "elections" or Felipe Calderon's supposed "victory " over Lopez Obrador in this country where fraud is a fine art.
In 2008, the U.S. electorate is offered rigged, sabotaged, and/or dysfunctional voting machines to facilitate this sting (last year, voting machines
in one Ohio district reportedly flipped all the votes cast to the incumbent.) Vote-caging makes it a virtual felony for citizens of a darker hue to go
to the polls. Billion buck smear campaigns and a cataract of deceit, lies, and fake promises are designed to bamboozle U.S. voters into believing
that casting a ballot will slow the drift to disaster.
Yet despite this deluge of negatives, in an exercise of collective cognitive dissonance on any given Tuesday (Saturday in some states), millions of
Americans are flocking to their local polling places to select the candidate of "their" party - as if the political parties belonged to anyone but those
who have had a lock on power in the U.S. for the past 232 years.
The election business is big Big Business - Fortune Magazine estimates that $44 billion USD, the price of a fleet of B1 Bombers, will change
hands before November.
One of the more enthusiastic constituencies in this state-sponsored scam are so-called "Latinos" and/or "Hispanics" who are expected to turn out
9.3 million voters next November, according to a Pew "Hispanic" Foundation survey, 1.7 million more than in 2004. Organizations such as the
Southwest Voter Education Project and the Willie Velazquez Institute are spreading the hooey that voting will hold back the anti-immigration
tsunami sweeping across the U.S. and are signing up new voters the moment they swear in as citizens.
But how many of these new citizens actually get to vote is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration
Services division which claims an 18 month backlog in processing citizenship applications. In a Bush administration gambit to monkey wrench a
predicted avalanche of new Latino voters, Citizenship and Immigration Services laid off 800 workers on the pretext of "cost-cutting" last spring.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security is hiring thousands to fill out the ranks of the Border Patrol and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport
potential voters.
With or without the new citizens, Latino/Hispanics counted for 11% of the vote in New York in the 2004 primaries, 9% in Florida, and 16% in
California where their numbers will increase to 40% of the electorate by mid-century. Because Mexicans, the overwhelming majority of Latino
voters, are no longer concentrated in border states, they now have potential clout in such far-flung entities as Georgia, Minnesota, Oregon, North
Carolina, and Nevada. But who actually gets registered and goes to the polls when just going to the store is an invitation to deportation in
America these days, is another matter.
Consolidating Latino/Hispanic voters into a bloc is an illusion. L/Hs are split on many levels. Nations of origin are distinct - perhaps 29 million
Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent are dominant in this mix but regional differences water down cohesion. Central Americans and
Caribbean immigrants are equally as uncohesive - Haitians and Hondurans are not necessarily on the same page. South Americans, chiefly
Ecuadorians, Colombians, and Brazilians, don't even speak the same languages back in their old countries and Cubans in Florida are a whole
other can of worms. Because their anti-Castro antics were so pertinent to Washington's Cold War psychosis, Cuban "gusanos" have
disproportionate influence even in Florida where they are a minority among other Latino/Hispanic immigrants.
Like the general voting population, Latinos/Hispanics are sharply divided between generations and across class, gender, and race lines -
Afro-Latinos have joined the migration swim north in increasing numbers.
The going myth is that immigration issues bond Latinos and Hispanics into a voting bloc but Puerto Ricans who wield substantial numbers in east
coast cities and Chicago are citizens and immigration is not a core concern. While first generation new citizens may have residual sympathy with
the indocumentados pouring in from the south, second and third generations have a greater stake in the American pie and often feel that the
newcomers, with whom they compete in a diminishing job market, should be sent back to where they came from. Despite their overriding concern
with immigration issues, the undocumented don't vote.
Until the U.S. immigration crackdown in the wake of the 9/11 terror attack, Mexicans had a poor track record for nationalizing as citizens and
voters - over 4,000,000 Mexicans living north of the border retain "green card" resident alien status but the Migra offensive is pushing more and
more greencarders to convert to the Stars & Bars. Mexicans and other L/H alien residents have voting rights in their own country although
Mexico's electoral mechanism effectively denies suffrage to its citizens in the U.S.
With the debacle in Iraq being replaced by the economic doomsday looming on the horizon as the crucial campaign issue, immigration has
become a fallback for 2008 presidential hopefuls - when in doubt, bash the immigrants. On the Democrats' side of the aisle, the candidates'
voting records on immigration are redolent with bad faith. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for the ill-fated Kennedy-McCain
immigration reform measure that mandated construction of hundreds of miles of walls along the southern border and the deportation of nearly
5,000,000 Latinos/Hispanics to their home countries, the largest forced repatriation of a population in the history of North and South America.
John Edwards, to his questionable credit, voted with Republican "social conservatives" to kill the bill which died a dog's death on the Senate floor,
and Dennis Kucinich (drop-out), a member of the House, did not get to vote on it. Neither did Mike Gravel (drop-out) who is a member of nothing.
Significantly, no Democratic candidate, including drop-out Bill Richardson, the scion of a Mexican mother and U.S. businessman father who grew
up wealthy in Mexico City and officially dubbed himself "the Latino (Hispanic) candidate", has ever dared to utter the "A" word - Amnesty for the
12,000,000 plus undocumented workers who hide in the nooks and crannies of America, a low wage workforce that has kept the U.S. economy
booming - at least until the sub-prime disaster put the banks in default.
Nonetheless, the L/Hs are swelling the Democratic Party's rank and file in ever-greater numbers - Pew "Hispanic" reports that while 48% of L/Hs
queried declared their affinity for the Dems in 2006, 56% were on board by 2007.
Meanwhile, Latino/Hispanic Republicans are an endangered species. Bush bamboozled a respectable 34% of L/H voters to back his candidacy
in 2000 and magically grew those numbers to 40% by 2004 - if the numbers are to be believed. But Pew put those L/Hs embracing the
Republican Party at 28% in 2006, a figure that sunk to 23% last year. Given the nativist taint of the Republican field, those preferences will dip
even deeper in 2008.
Of eight candidates that started out of the GOP gate, two proved outright Nazis when it came to immigration - Duncan Hunter, the San Diego
congressperson and father of the separation wall, and Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Klansman who wants to shut down public libraries that stock
books in Spanish because indocumentados might read them, were both engineers of HB 4437 sponsored by Wisconsin right-winger James
Sensenbrenner that made being in the U.S. without papers a felony crime.
Law & Order Judge Fred Thompson (drop out) was right behind dropouts Hunter and Tancredo, advocating the rounding up of alien "criminals"
and their imprisonment. Mormon Mitt Romney beats up on immigrants at every stump speech and Ron Paul, the libertarian adored by
Larouchites and a gaggle of delusional lefties who raised $20 million on the Internet in the last quarter of 2007, is a big fan of the Border Wall
and internment camps for the indocs.
Rudy Giuliani, who stands accused of turning New York into a "sanctuary city" (ask Amadou Daillo about that) is now gung-ho to send them all
back to where they came from. Giuliani has been stumping for bolstering the Migra by the installation of an "electronic border" but what he
neglects to tell voters is that he once owned a 12% share in Skywatch, which has partnered with Raytheon to sell their "electronic border"
technology to Homeland Security for untold millions.
The two purported immigration liberals in the Republican pack are shedding their past inclinations at the speed of sound. Mike Huckabee, who
provided scholarships and health care to the children of "criminal" immigrants while governor of Arkansas, has gone Minuteman with a
vengeance. A flaming anti-abortionist southern Baptist preacher, Huckabee maintains that legalizing abortion encouraged illegal immigration by
killing off potential U.S. workers. John McCain is, of course, saddled with co-sponsorship of the defunct Senate immigration reform measure that
was ultimately so corrupted immigration advocates could not support it.
But no matter who wins the Republican sweepstakes, L/Hs are focused on the Dems - and, indeed, only one Dem - the Femme AKA Hilaria.
Clinton, who opposes granting drivers licenses to the undocumented, is backed by a crack team of Tio Tacos chaired by Chicano dinosaur Henry
Cisneros whose "Juntos Con Hilaria" is out beating the barrios for votes. When Hilaria dined on tacos of carne asada at King Taco in east L.A.,
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was her waiter. Later, she cut a half hour infomercial with a barrio family - both Hilaria and Obama are spending big
on Spanish-speaking TV and radio.
For his part, Obama has adopted Caesar Chavez's cry of "Si Se Puede", only in the English tongue - "Yes, We Can!" - for his white Anglo
audiences.
Nevada with 20% of the voters catalogued as Latino/Hispanic (Cuban mobsters, Mexican hotel maids) was supposed to be the first mano a mano
between Hilaria and Baracko but Clinton went into the match-up with a 32 point lead in voter preferences according to the Las Vegas Review
Journal and doubled that in the caucuses. The gender thing worked like a charm among Latinas (Hispanas?) for Hilaria - upwardly mobile Latina
school administrators, charter schoolers, and education workers, who are increasingly the power brokers in L/H communities across the country,
won her the powerful teachers' union endorsement.
But gender is not the only factor in the L/H stampede to Clinton who, in an ill-natured display of plantation politics, has taken to calling Obama
"boy." The race card is really her strong suit when it comes to wooing Latino voters. Latinos and Afro-Americans have fought for crumbs over
jobs and housing for generations. Black resentment runs high against perceived gains by the L/Hs and no effective Black-Latino coalition has
ever been built to overcome the bitterness. The angry recriminations between Black hotel workers and Latina women at the Nevada caucuses is
not a good omen for reconciliation.
On the other hand, L/Hs have their own brand of racial profiling. Obama, light-skinned and whitified as he is, is still referred to as "El Moreno"
(the Brown One) in the Mexican press. Moreover, many Mexicans, brown as they are, consider themselves to be white. "Do you really think the
barrio is ready to vote for a black man for president?" Arturo M., a Mexico-born, Los Angeles-based immigration activist, asks a U.S. reporter
incredulously.
Super Tuesday (Feb 5th) is being billed by Bill Richardson as a "Latino primary" - with big Hispanic states like California, New Mexico, and Arizona
on the docket, how the L/H votes shake out could decide who the next occupant of the White House will be.
But in the end, L/H votes for or against the two Democratic superstars may be a moot point. "The war in Vietnam is only a symptom of a much
more profound sickness in the American spirit," Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York only months
before he was gunned down in Memphis. Given the tortured histories of race and gender in the United States, both Clinton and Obama are
prime candidates - for assassination.
******************************
Congratulations? You are now a lifetime subscriber to Blindman's Buff. If you think that's a good thing donate to keep BMB and its aging author
going - two lifetimes are better than one. If you have further information write johnross@igc.org
HILARIA VS. BARACKO: CRUNCHING THE LATINO VOTE IN 2008
MEXICO CITY (Jan. 29th) - Stealing elections is the cultural norm in the new millennium. Massive fraud in last December's Kenyan presidential
elections orchestrated by encrusted incumbent Mwai Kibaka has generated slaughter in that once-stable east African nation. Opposition
candidate Raela Odinga claims to be receiving daily messages of encouragement from fellow Kenyan, Barack Obama.
Across the Indian Ocean, Benazir Bhutto appears to have been whacked by an elite Musharref intelligence unit when she threatened detailed
disclosure of how the Pakistani president intended to steal parliamentary elections now scheduled for February 18th. Vladimir Putin's snow job in
last year's Russian Duma elections was roundly condemned by European election observers as unvarnished vote stealing - Gary Kasparov, the
nation's most outspoken opposition voice, called the vote "the most unfair and dirtiest in modern Russian history."
Here in Mexico, the stealing of the 2006 presidential elections from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has divided the country down the middle
despite U.S. assurances that everything is hunky dory south of the border.
When Washington disapproves of the outcome of democratic elections such as in Venezuela and Palestine, the elections suddenly become
"undemocratic" and the results are disqualified.
The U.S. is, of course, no exception to election flimflam. Bush's gross finagling in 2000 and 2004 stank just as much as Turkmenistan
presidential "elections" or Felipe Calderon's supposed "victory " over Lopez Obrador in this country where fraud is a fine art.
In 2008, the U.S. electorate is offered rigged, sabotaged, and/or dysfunctional voting machines to facilitate this sting (last year, voting machines
in one Ohio district reportedly flipped all the votes cast to the incumbent.) Vote-caging makes it a virtual felony for citizens of a darker hue to go
to the polls. Billion buck smear campaigns and a cataract of deceit, lies, and fake promises are designed to bamboozle U.S. voters into believing
that casting a ballot will slow the drift to disaster.
Yet despite this deluge of negatives, in an exercise of collective cognitive dissonance on any given Tuesday (Saturday in some states), millions of
Americans are flocking to their local polling places to select the candidate of "their" party - as if the political parties belonged to anyone but those
who have had a lock on power in the U.S. for the past 232 years.
The election business is big Big Business - Fortune Magazine estimates that $44 billion USD, the price of a fleet of B1 Bombers, will change
hands before November.
One of the more enthusiastic constituencies in this state-sponsored scam are so-called "Latinos" and/or "Hispanics" who are expected to turn out
9.3 million voters next November, according to a Pew "Hispanic" Foundation survey, 1.7 million more than in 2004. Organizations such as the
Southwest Voter Education Project and the Willie Velazquez Institute are spreading the hooey that voting will hold back the anti-immigration
tsunami sweeping across the U.S. and are signing up new voters the moment they swear in as citizens.
But how many of these new citizens actually get to vote is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration
Services division which claims an 18 month backlog in processing citizenship applications. In a Bush administration gambit to monkey wrench a
predicted avalanche of new Latino voters, Citizenship and Immigration Services laid off 800 workers on the pretext of "cost-cutting" last spring.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security is hiring thousands to fill out the ranks of the Border Patrol and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport
potential voters.
With or without the new citizens, Latino/Hispanics counted for 11% of the vote in New York in the 2004 primaries, 9% in Florida, and 16% in
California where their numbers will increase to 40% of the electorate by mid-century. Because Mexicans, the overwhelming majority of Latino
voters, are no longer concentrated in border states, they now have potential clout in such far-flung entities as Georgia, Minnesota, Oregon, North
Carolina, and Nevada. But who actually gets registered and goes to the polls when just going to the store is an invitation to deportation in
America these days, is another matter.
Consolidating Latino/Hispanic voters into a bloc is an illusion. L/Hs are split on many levels. Nations of origin are distinct - perhaps 29 million
Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent are dominant in this mix but regional differences water down cohesion. Central Americans and
Caribbean immigrants are equally as uncohesive - Haitians and Hondurans are not necessarily on the same page. South Americans, chiefly
Ecuadorians, Colombians, and Brazilians, don't even speak the same languages back in their old countries and Cubans in Florida are a whole
other can of worms. Because their anti-Castro antics were so pertinent to Washington's Cold War psychosis, Cuban "gusanos" have
disproportionate influence even in Florida where they are a minority among other Latino/Hispanic immigrants.
Like the general voting population, Latinos/Hispanics are sharply divided between generations and across class, gender, and race lines -
Afro-Latinos have joined the migration swim north in increasing numbers.
The going myth is that immigration issues bond Latinos and Hispanics into a voting bloc but Puerto Ricans who wield substantial numbers in east
coast cities and Chicago are citizens and immigration is not a core concern. While first generation new citizens may have residual sympathy with
the indocumentados pouring in from the south, second and third generations have a greater stake in the American pie and often feel that the
newcomers, with whom they compete in a diminishing job market, should be sent back to where they came from. Despite their overriding concern
with immigration issues, the undocumented don't vote.
Until the U.S. immigration crackdown in the wake of the 9/11 terror attack, Mexicans had a poor track record for nationalizing as citizens and
voters - over 4,000,000 Mexicans living north of the border retain "green card" resident alien status but the Migra offensive is pushing more and
more greencarders to convert to the Stars & Bars. Mexicans and other L/H alien residents have voting rights in their own country although
Mexico's electoral mechanism effectively denies suffrage to its citizens in the U.S.
With the debacle in Iraq being replaced by the economic doomsday looming on the horizon as the crucial campaign issue, immigration has
become a fallback for 2008 presidential hopefuls - when in doubt, bash the immigrants. On the Democrats' side of the aisle, the candidates'
voting records on immigration are redolent with bad faith. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for the ill-fated Kennedy-McCain
immigration reform measure that mandated construction of hundreds of miles of walls along the southern border and the deportation of nearly
5,000,000 Latinos/Hispanics to their home countries, the largest forced repatriation of a population in the history of North and South America.
John Edwards, to his questionable credit, voted with Republican "social conservatives" to kill the bill which died a dog's death on the Senate floor,
and Dennis Kucinich (drop-out), a member of the House, did not get to vote on it. Neither did Mike Gravel (drop-out) who is a member of nothing.
Significantly, no Democratic candidate, including drop-out Bill Richardson, the scion of a Mexican mother and U.S. businessman father who grew
up wealthy in Mexico City and officially dubbed himself "the Latino (Hispanic) candidate", has ever dared to utter the "A" word - Amnesty for the
12,000,000 plus undocumented workers who hide in the nooks and crannies of America, a low wage workforce that has kept the U.S. economy
booming - at least until the sub-prime disaster put the banks in default.
Nonetheless, the L/Hs are swelling the Democratic Party's rank and file in ever-greater numbers - Pew "Hispanic" reports that while 48% of L/Hs
queried declared their affinity for the Dems in 2006, 56% were on board by 2007.
Meanwhile, Latino/Hispanic Republicans are an endangered species. Bush bamboozled a respectable 34% of L/H voters to back his candidacy
in 2000 and magically grew those numbers to 40% by 2004 - if the numbers are to be believed. But Pew put those L/Hs embracing the
Republican Party at 28% in 2006, a figure that sunk to 23% last year. Given the nativist taint of the Republican field, those preferences will dip
even deeper in 2008.
Of eight candidates that started out of the GOP gate, two proved outright Nazis when it came to immigration - Duncan Hunter, the San Diego
congressperson and father of the separation wall, and Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Klansman who wants to shut down public libraries that stock
books in Spanish because indocumentados might read them, were both engineers of HB 4437 sponsored by Wisconsin right-winger James
Sensenbrenner that made being in the U.S. without papers a felony crime.
Law & Order Judge Fred Thompson (drop out) was right behind dropouts Hunter and Tancredo, advocating the rounding up of alien "criminals"
and their imprisonment. Mormon Mitt Romney beats up on immigrants at every stump speech and Ron Paul, the libertarian adored by
Larouchites and a gaggle of delusional lefties who raised $20 million on the Internet in the last quarter of 2007, is a big fan of the Border Wall
and internment camps for the indocs.
Rudy Giuliani, who stands accused of turning New York into a "sanctuary city" (ask Amadou Daillo about that) is now gung-ho to send them all
back to where they came from. Giuliani has been stumping for bolstering the Migra by the installation of an "electronic border" but what he
neglects to tell voters is that he once owned a 12% share in Skywatch, which has partnered with Raytheon to sell their "electronic border"
technology to Homeland Security for untold millions.
The two purported immigration liberals in the Republican pack are shedding their past inclinations at the speed of sound. Mike Huckabee, who
provided scholarships and health care to the children of "criminal" immigrants while governor of Arkansas, has gone Minuteman with a
vengeance. A flaming anti-abortionist southern Baptist preacher, Huckabee maintains that legalizing abortion encouraged illegal immigration by
killing off potential U.S. workers. John McCain is, of course, saddled with co-sponsorship of the defunct Senate immigration reform measure that
was ultimately so corrupted immigration advocates could not support it.
But no matter who wins the Republican sweepstakes, L/Hs are focused on the Dems - and, indeed, only one Dem - the Femme AKA Hilaria.
Clinton, who opposes granting drivers licenses to the undocumented, is backed by a crack team of Tio Tacos chaired by Chicano dinosaur Henry
Cisneros whose "Juntos Con Hilaria" is out beating the barrios for votes. When Hilaria dined on tacos of carne asada at King Taco in east L.A.,
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was her waiter. Later, she cut a half hour infomercial with a barrio family - both Hilaria and Obama are spending big
on Spanish-speaking TV and radio.
For his part, Obama has adopted Caesar Chavez's cry of "Si Se Puede", only in the English tongue - "Yes, We Can!" - for his white Anglo
audiences.
Nevada with 20% of the voters catalogued as Latino/Hispanic (Cuban mobsters, Mexican hotel maids) was supposed to be the first mano a mano
between Hilaria and Baracko but Clinton went into the match-up with a 32 point lead in voter preferences according to the Las Vegas Review
Journal and doubled that in the caucuses. The gender thing worked like a charm among Latinas (Hispanas?) for Hilaria - upwardly mobile Latina
school administrators, charter schoolers, and education workers, who are increasingly the power brokers in L/H communities across the country,
won her the powerful teachers' union endorsement.
But gender is not the only factor in the L/H stampede to Clinton who, in an ill-natured display of plantation politics, has taken to calling Obama
"boy." The race card is really her strong suit when it comes to wooing Latino voters. Latinos and Afro-Americans have fought for crumbs over
jobs and housing for generations. Black resentment runs high against perceived gains by the L/Hs and no effective Black-Latino coalition has
ever been built to overcome the bitterness. The angry recriminations between Black hotel workers and Latina women at the Nevada caucuses is
not a good omen for reconciliation.
On the other hand, L/Hs have their own brand of racial profiling. Obama, light-skinned and whitified as he is, is still referred to as "El Moreno"
(the Brown One) in the Mexican press. Moreover, many Mexicans, brown as they are, consider themselves to be white. "Do you really think the
barrio is ready to vote for a black man for president?" Arturo M., a Mexico-born, Los Angeles-based immigration activist, asks a U.S. reporter
incredulously.
Super Tuesday (Feb 5th) is being billed by Bill Richardson as a "Latino primary" - with big Hispanic states like California, New Mexico, and Arizona
on the docket, how the L/H votes shake out could decide who the next occupant of the White House will be.
But in the end, L/H votes for or against the two Democratic superstars may be a moot point. "The war in Vietnam is only a symptom of a much
more profound sickness in the American spirit," Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York only months
before he was gunned down in Memphis. Given the tortured histories of race and gender in the United States, both Clinton and Obama are
prime candidates - for assassination.
******************************
Congratulations? You are now a lifetime subscriber to Blindman's Buff. If you think that's a good thing donate to keep BMB and its aging author
going - two lifetimes are better than one. If you have further information write johnross@igc.org
| Return to Archive Menu |