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.
You Can Take It With You
It is hard right now to quantify the impact that immigrants leaving the country are having on the national economy. Soon enough, though, a think tank will put pencil to paper and we should have a better idea. But it stands to reason that those of us who through the years have seen cities revitalized from one coast to the other will not be surprised at the data that will show a downtick in economic activity and increased joblessness across the board. Indeed, entire towns and industries in the Midwest and in the South are being saved from extinction by immigrants who do work no one else wants.
We seem to forget so quickly that a growing population drives an economy forward. It is a simple lesson. The term ‘ghost town’ might invoke scenes from old western movies but it also is an economic epitaph: No people, no economy. No economy, no city.
The Smallness of Not Knowing
It if was not enough to have to listen to Michael Wilbon gratuitously ping soccer for no good reason on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption – which I watch religiously – now comes CNN’s Rowland Martin not only to demean the world’s most popular sport but to advocate violence against gays. Wilbon is quite sane on the gay matter but civil rights pressure groups are after Martin’s head.
On the Catholic Vote
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.
Drugged and Ignorant
I have stopped paying attention to most people who think they know what they are talking about when it comes to the situation in Mexico and Latin America regarding the drug threat. In almost all the public pronouncements of know-it-alls from presidential candidates to the lowliest of citizens, they seemingly all profess to know how to best handle the border against drug smuggling. Fences. Lampposts. Sensors. Armed guards. Pilotless drones. Moats. Walls.
Morons. Few ever consider that the fault lies on this side of the border.
Texas Means More to the Nation Than to Texans
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
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
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
English as the Second Language: Geeeez, I Don’t Know…
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
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