People Before Profit blog

We are Joaquin: the legacy of Corky

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 03:29:00 +0000

During the 1960s, the American people broke out of the McCarthy era with mass movements for peace, civil rights, women’s rights, and labor organizing of agricultural and public workers. At the same time, throughout the Southwest, like a hardly noticed leitmotif, emerged the “movimiento Chicano,” the Chicano power movement.

As the African American community brought forth civil rights and “Black Power” leaders from Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, Mexican Americans came forward with Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, and Reis Lopez Tijerina.

On April 12, one of the giants, Corky Gonzalez, 76, passed away at his home in Denver. For us Chicana and Chicano “boomers,” Gonzales was like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali from the barrio.

Gonzales grew up in the fields and barrios of Colorado. He was an amateur boxing champion. He ran successful businesses and became a local Democratic official.

Then in the mid-1960s he gave up his “establishment” career and wrote the epic Chicano poem, “I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin,” which captured the essence of Mexican American history, identity and struggles.

Gonzales founded and led Crusade for Justice, a grassroots civil rights organization. The “Cruzada” organized school walkouts for better education, pickets and marches against police brutality, antidraft and antiwar activities, a boycott of Coors beer for discriminatory employment practices, independent political campaigns, a grassroots movement newspaper and support for farm workers.

Gonzales identified himself as a cultural nationalist, but his politics and personality projected a deep humanism and internationalism. He inspired youth to organize Chicano/a power to build a better world. In 1968, he was the main organizer of the large Chicano contingent in the Poor People’s Campaign that King initiated before his assassination. He spoke at peace rallies, including the November Moratorium in San Francisco where 250,000 attended.

It was the Crusade for Justice that hosted a watershed event for the country. In 1969, 1,500 activists from barrios and campos throughout the Southwest and Midwest came to the National Youth and Liberation Conference, where “Plan de Aztlan” was produced. The legendary plan called for cultural and race pride and independent political action. The event galvanized the youth movement. It stands as a foundation for today’s Latino political power, vital to all U.S. progressive struggles.

In 1970, a second conference was held. I went and was fortunate to head up the peace workshop where we developed plans to hold a National Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. The plenary of nearly 2,000 unanimously approved the motion I brought from the workshop. A reporter named Ruben Salazar put the plans on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

Thirty thousand marched at that demonstration. The local police and federal agents viciously attacked us. They killed Salazar and arrested Gonzales on trumped up charges. The FBI hounded Gonzalez and the Crusade well into the 1980s.

I attended a memorial for Corky organized by Mecha student leaders on April 14. Without permit we occupied the big gondola of La Placita Olvera, the historic first plaza of Los Angeles. We lit candles, recited all of “I Am Joaquin,” and reflected on what Corky’s life and poem meant to us. I asked the youth to speak of what they were working on now: a May Day march for immigrant and labor rights, fighting cuts by Gov. Schwarzenegger, counter-military recruitment, planning for the World Youth Festival, campaigning for a Chicano mayor of L.A., organizing support for the farm workers, organizing conferences for high school youth. They are carrying on the legacy of Corky Gonzales, the Chicano/a champion.

Put the Hammer in the slammer: DeLay linked to swindle of Indian tribes

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 02:16:00 +0000

WASHINGTON — The downfall of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) may come from his crony ties to Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, DeLay’s former chief of staff. Over a three-year period, they allegedly fleeced six Native American Indian tribes of $82 million by pretending to represent their casino interests.

Abramoff used at least $70,000 of the stolen money to pay for a golf junket to Scotland in which his honored guest was none other than DeLay, the former cockroach exterminator better known as “The Hammer.”

In e-mails released during a Senate probe of the scandal, Abramoff revealed his racism when he described the victims of his fraud as “monkeys,” “idiots” and “morons.”

Two of DeLay’s top aides are under criminal indictment, and a Travis County judge is expected to rule soon on charges that DeLay’s TRMPAC (Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee) violated Texas law in soliciting corporate contributions to pay for DeLay’s redistricting power grab two years ago.

The stench surrounding DeLay is so pervasive that, when he spoke to a convention in his hometown, Sugar Land, Texas, April 16, he was met with a picket line and a full-page local newspaper ad demanding that he resign. “Put the Hammer in the slammer,” the crowd chanted.

President Bush has stood squarely behind DeLay, calling him “an effective leader.” DeLay, for his part, has suggested that he is being persecuted on ethics questions by a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Craig McDonald, director of Austin-based Texans for Public Justice, told the World, “I think DeLay is slipping on his own home turf. His junkets were paid for out of money stolen from the Indian tribes. He’s getting caught up in it. These guys are scum. It is outrageous.”

Bernie Sprague, sub-chief of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe in Michigan, told the World that Abramoff and Scanlon swindled his tribe of at least $14 million over a three-year period, posing as “lobbyists” for the gaming industry.

In testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee last Sept. 29, Sprague charged that Abramoff and Scanlon secretly bankrolled a campaign that elected eight tribal members to the 12-member Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Council.

“Two days after the new council took office in December of 2001, a divided Tribal Council approved the contracts to hire these firms against the strident recommendation of our Office of Legal Counsel,” Sprague testified. “In doing so, they fulfilled their part of the deal, these D.C. lobbyists were hired, and the looting of the tribal treasury soon followed.”

Sprague told the hearing he was elected sub-chief in 2002. “When I began to ask questions about the outrageous fees our tribe was paying these lobbyists, I learned that there were no reports or documentation for any work they may have performed.”

For example, the tribe paid Scanlon $4.5 million for a database of Michigan voters that can be purchased from the state for $75,000. “That’s right, $4.5 million for a database that we never saw,” he said. “To this day we do not know where the money went. And this type of spending was repeated over and over again, costing our tribe over $14 million.”

Sprague told the World Abramoff and Scanlon “are still hounding this tribe even though we have exposed them for what they are: liars, thieves, criminals. What it is all about is making money for themselves.”

McDonald said Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, “did the hatchet job” in scamming the Indian tribes. Reed served as a top Bush-Cheney hack in the 2004 election and is now running for lieutenant governor in Georgia.

Abramoff hired Reed for $4 million to build grassroots support in Texas for then-Attorney General John Cornyn’s drive to shut down the Tigua Indian tribe’s casino in El Paso, McDonald said.

Wrapping his campaign in “born-again” Christian opposition to gambling, Reed did not reveal that the $4 million came from a rival Indian tribal casino that was seeking to eliminate competition.

Hours after Cornyn closed the Tigua casino, Abramoff contacted the Tigua tribal chief from his private jet. “He told the chief that for $5 million he would get a special bill passed through Congress to allow the casino to reopen,” McDonald said.

“Abramoff bragged that he knew DeLay and could push it through. Tigua tribal leaders called back and offered to pay Abramoff $4.2 million to get the casino reopened. The Tiguas probably did not know that Abramoff was instrumental in getting their casino closed.”

Both DeLay and Reed have built their base in the Christian right, with many of their faithful genuinely opposed to gambling, not to speak of criminal fraud. Now they are caught accepting money and corrupt favors from gambling interests all paid for by hard-pressed Native American Indians. “This is another nail in Tom DeLay’s coffin,” McDonald said.

Congressional hypocrisy on medical care

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 03:40:00 +0000

People’s Health

As an emergency physician and former governor, I am struck by the towering contradictions — and indeed the hypocrisy — in the controversy over the tragic plight of Terri Schiavo. On the same day that the U.S. House of Representatives voted to involve the federal courts in her case, it also approved a 10-year $92-billion cut in Medicaid funding — $30 billion deeper than the cut recommended by President Bush.

The relationship between these two decisions, virtually unreported by most media, goes to the very heart of why we’re unable to resolve the growing crisis in our health care system. While involving the federal courts in an attempt to save the life of one highly visible individual, Congress made a fiscal decision that will deny thousands of other Americans timely access to health care, some of whom may die as a result.

When the Congress cuts Medicaid funding, it is a direct cost shift to the states that administer the program. However, unlike Congress, which has run up a $7 trillion national debt over the past four years, states are required to operate within a balanced budget. So they respond to cuts in Medicaid by dropping people and/or services from coverage.

In 2003, for example, in an effort to balance the budget in the face of falling revenue due to the recession, the Oregon Legislature discontinued prescription-drug coverage for certain categories of citizens covered by the state’s Medicaid program. This action was apparently based on the assumption — widespread in legislative circles — that if we just stop paying for the health care needs of the poor, they’ll somehow go away and the public sector can avoid the cost.

As a consequence of this decision, Douglas Schmidt, a man in his mid-30s suffering from a seizure disorder, was no longer able to afford the medication that controlled his seizures. He subsequently had a grand mal seizure and suffered severe brain damage. He was put on a ventilator in a Portland hospital, where he remained for several months. Eventually he was transferred to a long-term care facility where he died after life support was withdrawn — following a court order to do so.

The cost of his anti-seizure medication was $14 a day; the cost of his hospital care was over $7,500 a day — a total medical bill exceeding $1 million. The Legislature saved no money through its implicit rationing decision. Mr. Schmidt died of political and budgetary expediency based on a policy that said, in effect, we will not pay pennies for medication to manage a seizure disorder, but will pay thousands of dollars to keep an individual on life support after that unmanaged seizure disorder causes severe brain damage.

It is a policy that says we will not pay to manage many very manageable health issues in ways that would prevent people from ending up in long-term hospital stays; or says we will not pay to provide all pregnant women with good prenatal care, but we will pay to resuscitate their one-pound infants in a neonatal intensive care unit. And this should not be acceptable to any of us.

Certainly no one in Congress could openly support this kind of policy; no one could justify the human consequences or the tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars. Yet, that is exactly the policy Congress embraced when slashing Medicaid funding, even while calling for court intervention to save Mrs. Schiavo’s life.

Nobody in Congress rushed to give Schmidt access to the federal courts when he could no longer gain access to his medication. There was no moral outrage over his death — or the deaths of thousands of other Americans who die each year unable to afford timely access to health care.

Schmidt was a statistic — one of the millions of Americans who had no way to pay medical care. The cause of his death was not as dramatic — and therefore not as newsworthy — as the plight of Mrs. Schiavo. But it was no less tragic because it went largely unreported.

If indeed we claim to be a society guided by moral values, then surely we cannot apply them selectively.

John A. Kitzhaber, a physician and former governor of Oregon, is the director of the Center for Evidence Based Policy at the Oregon Health Sciences University.

Reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor with permission of the author.

L.A. labor challenges county board

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 06:47:00 +0000

News Analysis LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles area labor movement, spearheaded by the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, is turning its attention to reversing the anti-worker trend of the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

If Los Angeles County were a country, it would be among the 10 largest economies in the world. Yet its more than 10 million people are represented by only five supervisors. The board has sweeping legislative and executive powers and controls a budget in the tens of billions of dollars. It relies heavily on Wall Street for credit to meet cash flow needs.

In recent years the supervisors “have been decidedly anti-union in collective bargaining with several of our unions” affected by county policy, Miguel Contreras, county labor federation executive secretary-treasurer, told the World recently. They have also been “a major reason for transit strikes and the failure of home care workers to get good wage and insurance agreements.” The board also broke the doctors union in the county hospitals, he said.

“We have met with them and tried to work with them … but they think they can’t be beat,” Contreras said. “We have to do something to get more of their attention.”

Over 90,000 L.A. County workers are AFL-CIO union members, he said. In addition, the county administers wages and benefits to 75,000 home care workers, “and the supervisors have great influence on workers for the [transit authority]. That’s 180,000 workers, more than 20 percent of our members.”

Contreras, who joined the labor movement in the 1970s as an activist in the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers, is widely credited with helping make Los Angeles a “union city.” The county labor council has developed strong rank-and-file activism in contract and legislative struggles among its affiliates.

Contreras is noted for working to elect politicians who not only give labor a vote but who are also “warriors for working families.” Many such “warriors” have been elected with labor’s support to the Los Angeles City Council and other area city councils and school boards and to state legislative positions in recent years.

The county board can be vulnerable to electoral pressure. Three of the five county board supervisors are Democrats who have been considered liberals, but Supervisor Gloria Molina, for example, “has 127,000 union votes in her district and in the last election she only got 114,000” votes overall. Molina is up for re-election in 2006.

In the March 8 city primaries in the county, all the labor-backed city council members won in the city of Los Angeles, and many won in smaller cities. With both Los Angeles mayoral runoff candidates strong labor supporters, unions are working hard to generate big union family turnouts in the May 17 primary, building momentum to take on more conservative policies at the County Hall of Administration and the Statehouse.

rosalio_munoz@sbcglobal.net

Happy birthday, Paul Robeson

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 06:06:00 +0000

April 9 is the 107th birthday of one of the foremost African Americans of the 20th century — Paul Robeson.

Robeson, a world-renowned singer and actor, was a leading civil rights activist and stalwart fighter for human dignity, peace and democracy.

During his lifetime, Robeson gave his considerable talents and energy to the struggles of workers around the world. While performing in “Show Boat” in London’s West End in 1928, he met a group of unemployed miners who had walked to London to draw attention to the hardship endured by thousands of unemployed miners and their families in South Wales. Thus began a long relationship between, which included numerous visits by Robeson to Welsh mining towns. He also starred in the 1940 movie, “The Proud Valley,” a film about life in a mining community in the Rhondda, Wales.

The U.S. government denied Robeson the right to travel from 1952-57 because of his outspoken left-wing and anti-racist views, which included solidarity with the socialist Soviet Union.

In an act of resistance, Robeson participated in the 1957 Miners’ Eisteddfod, a famous sports and cultural gala in Wales, through a transatlantic telephone link to a “secret recording studio” in New York.

After an international campaign, which included the Welsh miners, the Supreme Court was forced to reinstate Robeson’s passport in 1958.

“Paul Robeson’s record of fighting for his political beliefs, of giving substance to his vision of working-class solidarity, was quite simply unparalleled by any other cultural figure in American history,” wrote Dr. Mark Naison, chairman of Fordham University’s department of African American studies.

“He did so, at great financial sacrifice, when he was at the height of his commercial popularity, and he did so when he was an outcast in his native land, unable to find a commercial concert hall which would rent him space,” Naison wrote.

Robeson pointed to the essential part African American labor, paid and unpaid, played in the building of the United States.

“He sang to African American tobacco workers in the Carolinas in schoolyards and Baptist churches, around the campfires of Filipino and Japanese pineapple workers in Hawaii, to Black and white stevedores and factory workers in union halls in Memphis, to Jewish-American garment workers in Catskill bungalow colonies and Bronx social halls, to Finnish miners in their social clubs in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota,” Naison wrote, “to Mexican American miners in Colorado and Arizona, to black Panamanian government workers assembled in a stadium in Panama City, to crowds of thousands of auto workers outside of factories in California and Michigan, to an audience of Canadian miners and metal workers on the border between Washington state and Vancouver, to congregations of his brother’s AME Zion church.”

Robeson died in 1976. The U.S. Postal Service released a stamp in his honor in 2003, after a grassroots struggle initiated in Robeson’s centenary year of 1998.

Often referred to as “the tallest tree in the forest,” Robeson is an enduring role model for today’s artists and workers struggling for an end to the Iraq war, the Bush administration’s ultra-right and corporate onslaught and for a just and equitable world.

“The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative,” Robeson once said.

Millions have pledged never to forget his legacy. Happy birthday, Paul!

Rallies around the nation

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 04:45:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO: Some 2,000 demonstrators made a human chain surrounding San-Francisco-based Charles Schwab home office March 31. Demonstrators also demanded that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger drop his proposal to privatize pensions for all new public workers.

Schwab has given $400,000 to the Republican agenda in California, and its executives were among guests at a recent fundraiser to promote Schwarzenegger’s objectives, which include state pension privatization.

“The only thing that is broken is the trust that Social Security will be there when we need it,” California Labor Federation head Art Pulaski said, as he pointed out the parallels between Bush’s and Schwarzenegger’s plans.

“Young workers stand to lose over $150,000 in benefits over their lifetime if Social Security is privatized!” declared Young Workers United leader Chris Jackson.

Betty Muruato, a member of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 265 in San Jose, was joined at the protest by her two young nieces, Julia and Amanda Summers. Their participation was important, Muruato said, because “it’s the next generation that will be hurt the most.”

— Marilyn Bechtel

HOUSTON: We held a small noontime picket line in front of the local Schwab office, in an upscale shopping center, located in a heavily Republican congressional district. They told us there had never been a protest in that shopping center before. There were a lot of people in their shiny Mercedes who drove by and shot us the finger or gave us thumbs down. However, there were also a lot of people who drove by and gave us thumbs up. One pretty young woman came out of the Schwab office and got in her shiny, new, black Mercedes and as she drove off (from the safety of her high performance vehicle) yelled, “Why don’t you get a f------ job?” One of the workers shot back to her, “I’ve got one, do you?” As I stood by the street holding my sign, an old woman pulled up to me and rolled her window down. I looked inside and could see a wheelchair. She said, “Thank you so much for doing this.” I gave her a leaflet and told her, “We all have to work together on this.”

— Paul Hill

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.: The “In This Together” coalition held a town hall meeting at the CUNY college here, attracting hundreds of people. Rep. Vito Fosella (R-N.Y.), the only congressperson from NYC who supports Bush’s privatization plan, was slated to come but failed to show. Worried about cuts to the program, Staten Island resident Sue Macananama told the audience that her family had only been able to survive after her father passed away because of the dependents’ benefits offered by Social Security. “Every month,” Macananama said, “my mother would show us the check, and say ‘Thank God for Social Security.’”

— Dan Margolis

BATAVIA, Ill.: They were young and old; male and female; Black, Hispanic and white; and dressed in everything from a tuxedo to jeans. But the message was the same from about 300 people who stood along River Street in downtown Batavia, April 2, in front of the office of Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert: Do not privatize Social Security.

“This is about our children and grandchildren,” said Auroran Art Velasquez, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens Council 5218. “That’s what we’re here about — to protect their rights.”

— Steve Lord (Aurora Beacon-News)