Category Archives: Leadership

Justices Damage the Nation and HispanicLatinos — Its Very Future

Posted on by

The damage the Supreme Court inflicted on the country with its wrong-headed ruling in Citizens United should be evident enough even to its most ardent proponents, except for the columnist George Will, of course.  The justices, with the likes of Will pulling at the floodgates, enabled multi-billionaires to pour millions of dollars into a presidential campaign that demonstrates how unceremoniously and crudely Citizens usurps the constitutional intent that the vote of any one individual is no more equal than the next.

Now come the warning signs that the court is going to undo programs that seek to increase the number of minority students in institutions of higher education.  The court has accepted for review a case involving The University of Texas at Austin that five justices will use almost undoubtedly to roll back so-called affirmative action programs.

Continue reading →

Religion as Danger to the Constitution

Posted on by

The spectacle of fundamentalist preachers extending their hands blessing Rick Santorum’s candidacy at a religious convocation in McKinney, Texas, several weeks ago was jarring.  The image stays with the mind, especially as the controversy over birth control – can that be right, a controversy in the year 2012 over birth control? – continues to roil the race for the Republican nomination for president and leaves Andrea Mitchell breathless.

Continue reading →

Without Solutions, Things Could Get More Complicated Still

Posted on by

HispanicLatinos are more important to America than simply holding up a national population that otherwise would be in serious decline.  Yet they are a complicated blessing, given their complicated history.  Significant-enough discrimination, legally-mandated exclusion, ample geographic isolation and individual self-neglect in many HispanicLatinos sheltered their culture from full-fledged assimilation in American society.

Thus hindered and restrained, HispanicLatinos began to fall behind early and have lagged through the years.  But change can happen quicker today than in any time in history.  HispanicLatinos now can develop a new way to manage their immediate future, and they can look to the just-immediate past to see how the prospects of a whole country can change in the span of only a few years.

Continue reading →

A Challenge for HispanicLatinos: To Wholly Understand Themselves

Posted on by

How America proceeds into the future with a growing but economically disadvantaged HispanicLatino population is hardly a question on the national agenda.  In almost defaulting on its financial obligations last year, the United States demonstrated in real time that after 40 years of economic change, precious few Americans understand how the country got to this point and fewer have a clue about the way forward.  Having barely devoted time to understand the larger economic and demographic story transforming the country, the vast majority of Americans could not possibly understand the criticality of raising the country’s debt ceiling.

HispanicLatinos are no different.  Beyond knowing the general framework of the problems and challenges facing the country, few have any idea about what they should do next.  Even though many more HispanicLatinos are sensing how critical they are to the nation’s future, the true scope of their importance does not animate their daily lives.

Continue reading →

HispanicLatinos: A Different Deal at an Important Moment for the Country

Posted on by

Through the years most Americans have believed that their country is exceptional and assume it is eternal.  Indeed, its ability to provide opportunity and freedom and to convert human potential into spectacular scientific and technological progress eclipses other nations, and America remains a shining example of the promise of humankind.  Despite its faults and shortcomings and because it is not a perfect union, it could have become a slave-holding, colonial-imperialist power for longer than it was tempted.  Enough of its people, however, chose differently.

Americans have spent hundreds of thousands of lives and invested trillions of dollars to make the world a safe and better place for humankind.  Most Americans – including the vast majority of HispanicLatinos for whom loyalty is almost part of their DNA – take immense pride in their country, and rightfully so.  Yet history is not destiny; demography is.

Continue reading →

To Be or Not to Be: A Nation in Decline with HispanicLatinos at Its Center

Posted on by

The United States is in decline and in danger and, like nations throughout history, can fail.  Unless HispanicLatinos – continuously becoming a larger part of the national population – understand the circumstances confronting them and the country, they will jeopardize their own existence and further complicate the viability of America’s future.

Continue reading →

On the Catholic Vote

Posted on by

A headline in a news story the other day asked ‘Is Obama losing the Catholic vote?’  The story sought to answer a question that might interest political strategists more so than the American public.  It is a curious thing, the relationship that Americans have to government and to religion.  Depending on the political environment, Americans rush to any and all sides of any debate involving both.

Continue reading →

Texas Means More to the Nation Than to Texans

Posted on by

Though I like to believe I think broadly and that I have strived to shed provincialisms, I am a Texan by birth, and I am heart-broken at the beating my home state is taking and has taken since George W.  Bush became President under suspect circumstances in 2000.

It is hard for people, perhaps, to understand what Texas means to Texans.  But more so than in sheer nativist or parochial loyalty, my sentiment for the state is rooted in the view that it is essential to the future of the country.  So my feelings are more than resentments about how the national press is making a joke out of Texas through the lens of the national political stage.  If Texas fails as a state – which it might well do if its growing HispanicLatino population does not accelerate its economic and social standing – the country will fail.  Think California, which remains on the ropes and whose educational system – meaning its future – has cracked.  California schools no longer are the foundation from which the state blasted into the future and took the world – not just the country – with it.  Continue reading →

Small Steps in the Direction

Posted on by

Because HispanicLatinos already are a great part of the nation’s military and will be a larger part still in the years ahead, they should monitor President Obama’s recent decisions to assert American power in the South China Sea.  From Australia to the Philippines to Thailand, the United States is creating pockets of American strength to make sure China’s growth as a world power does not retrace the erroneous path that Japan took more than 70 years ago.  Left unchecked, a totalitarian Japan swept across the Pacific and only a bloody effort led by the United States pushed them back.

You have to be on top of things to know how cleverly China is going about its business as it senses that the balance of power not only in that region but in the world is moving away from the United States.  Building gigantic commercial ports that also can accommodate the large naval vessels it is constructing at high speed is one of the easier examples.  China is active on all fronts, from Iran to Latin America to outer space.  No one begrudges them their advancement as a world power and their development as a new and important nation.  But let us make sure that the Chinese rise to power is not predicated on thinking that the United States is going to go silently into the night. Continue reading →

Ten Million Here, Ten Million There, Pretty Soon It Adds up to Real Corruption

Posted on by

The reader comments section on the AP story of a Mexican official detained last week at an airport with $1.9 million in a briefcase and backpack were predictably sanctimonious, and of course the money run cannot be defended legally.  To these readers, corruption is endemic in all of Latin America and is part of the HispanicLatino genetic makeup.

The same readers might note that at the same time that the official’s plane was in the air, millions of dollars in wire transfers whizzed through cyberspace into the coffers of the so-called super-pacs by supporters of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich – legally, of course.  Two good fellas – a casino owner and his wife from Las Vegas – gave Gingrich $10 million.  No corruption or outsized influence there.

When the Supreme Court of the United States unleashed the wave of money that has engulfed the American political process – already undermined by the system before the Court’s disastrous decision, mind you – it made any bungled Mexican money-packing operation look like a lollipop compared to the ten pounds of Belgian chocolate on which the Republican candidates have already gorged themselves in just the first month of the primary season. Continue reading →