The question regarding Alejandrina Cabrera is poignant. She is the city council candidate in San Luis, Arizona, who is being blocked from the ballot by political rivals and the courts for not being able to speak English well enough to handle the city’s business. I am a great defender of HispanicLatinos using, retaining, relearning or strengthening their Spanish. I believe using Spanish confidently is instrumental in creating secure individuals who can succeed professionally. Continue reading
Category Archives: Leadership
Iran Raises an Ungodly Specter
When America’s enemies look at a map of the United States, they cannot but see through the inverse funnel that is Mexico. With each passing mile northward from the narrowest point of its border with Guatemala, most of the Mexican funnel bends towards Texas. The opportunity from the south to penetrate the land to the north opens up like the horizon itself. To friendlier eyes, the same terrain forms a natural market of trade separated only by artificial barriers. It is as if the two countries should be one.
But it is easy to see why the Germans in World War I wanted to open up a front with Mexico against the United States and why the 1968 student protests in Mexico City that were thought to be Soviet-inspired were put down with murderous impunity. Mexico, like America’s HispanicLatino population, is an evident strategic-geopolitical asset.
And now in The New York Times yesterday comes Israel’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon warning about the new threat that Mexico via Texas could pose to the United States from a nuclear-armed Iran. Building upon its funding of a new television network in Latin America to counter American influence in the hemisphere, Iran is said to be contemplating cultivating the lords of the drug netherworld. To think the drug lords would cooperate with the Iranians to bring in a device or something as threatening is almost not believable. Continue reading
The Eagle Ford: Hope from the Ground Up
So the story of the Eagle Ford Shale is fairly well known to anyone who reads a newspaper. The story is rooted mostly in South Texas, a poor and often marginalized region of the country that today carries significant national and geopolitical ramifications for the future. The story has to do with the discovery of an oil and gas formation that stretches across 30 counties, some the poorest in the country. Together with new and greater volumes of oil and gas production in Canada, North Dakota, Mexico, Brazil and other areas off the coasts of the continents, the South Texas find is realigning the components of the international energy equation that is essential to the country’s energy security and lessening dependence on the Mideast and its chronic instability. With activity in the area expected to last for decades especially as new technology maximizes production, the importance of the Eagle Ford and South Texas to the country’s geopolitical interests should be evident. Continue reading
Time + Ideas = Success
I recently sat down with a mid-career HispanicLatino who wanted my advice about where he stood in his professional life. At the age of 35, he is in a job that he sort of likes, but not really. I asked him if he had other interests than his job and, of course, as I feared, he responded energetically with a list of activities related to entertainment and sports.
This is a reasonably young man who had he had better schooling and better counselors should have his own medical practice. But he spends his truly invaluable time seemingly irrationally – a product of the kind of neglect that seems to be a societal curse these days for even the brightest of HispanicLatinos. By the time they mature and are ready to raise families, young men and women such as these who remain unfocused end up underperforming for themselves and for the country as a whole. But perhaps there is madness in their method. Continue reading
Remaking the Future by Reconstructing the Country
The HispanicLatino population through its continuing growth is remaking and reconstructing the country’s population at the same time that the country’s infrastructure also needs to be remade and reconstructed. Continue reading
On Iran, North Korea: Little Input from HispanicLatinos
It would seem we are headed for a national security moment with Iran almost certainly and with North Korea by happenstance probably. One or both of these nuclear-charged events might take form during the presidential campaign. The timing would probably help Barack Obama win re-election, most of the country rallying behind its commander-in-chief. A national security crisis – especially one dealing with Iran – in which the United States either participates in militarily or is thought to support the actions of any ally – would encumber serious repercussions on American foreign policy and set it on a course for decades to come.
On Iran, not one credible HispanicLatino is known generally or publicly to have been engaged in developing any of the provisional strategies to deal with an armed conflict or its aftermath. Since HispanicLatinos already fight – often disproportionately – in the nation’s wars and will do so in greater numbers as their population grows, the decisions that might generate future conflicts must be developed with the active participation of qualified and credible HispanicLatinos lest any policy of war or peace adopted lack credibility as it unfolds or lose it over time. Unbeknownst to most policy decision-makers the war in Iraq was hugely unpopular within the HispanicLatino community. Continue reading
A Very Chávez Christmas, and it’s not Hugo Boss
Another gift from Hugo Chávez to the United States and the rest of the countries of the Americas. How touching. Just in time for Christmas. Not just any kind of gift, but one with long-term strategic complications: His announcement that the Chinese have loaned Venezuela another $4 billion in loans on top of the $26 billion already outstanding. The loans, secured by future sales of Venezuelan oil, ordinarily would be a normal transaction between sovereign nations, but, of course, it isn’t. The Chinese also have pledged to invest another $40 billion in other energy-related projects. Continue reading
Newt: Not America’s BFF
When writing, it takes effort and discipline to not hurl labels at people. By now, though, Newt Gingrich has revealed himself for what he is: Aside from being labelled as unstable by people who worked with him, he has all the makings of a budding fascist. Gingrich’s attacks on the judiciary are nothing less than breath-taking. His suggestions that judges be hauled before legislative committees by police to explain their decisions speaks to a time and place that the History Channel deals with every day.
From the ashes of war perhaps light
The images of U.S. troops leaving Iraq after a senseless, tragic waste of lives and money that left America nearly bankrupt is a blunt and brutal lesson for HispanicLatinos. Except for the families who suffered the direct loss of loved ones, few individuals should walk away more sobered than HispanicLatino men and women in charge of businesses. Business owners intuitively understand the impact of an $800-billion war debt to a struggling economy.
LBJ: An Eternal Gift to DOJ
What was it worth to me, those many years ago, as a young teenager watching President Johnson give his memorable speech in support of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to a joint session to Congress? When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke Tuesday at the LBJ Library on the very matter that made Lyndon B. Johnson a hero in American history, my mind went back through time, and I was left pondering the void of leadership that has formed since.