Tag Archives: HispanicLatinos

Small Steps in the Direction

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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

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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…

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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

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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 →

On Florida and Jan Brewer and Ann Richards

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It is interesting to see the national media try to make sense of the HispanicLatino vote in Florida before the Republican primary on Tuesday.  The media speaks of it as one vote, and it is in a sense.  The HispanicLatino vote next week could be as much as 80 percent Cuban American.  But most HispanicLatinos in Florida now vote Democratic, so the media would be more accurate to describe the group voting next week in the GOP contest as the Cuban Republican vote, and they should point out that it is shrinking as each day passes due to its aging nature.  Continue reading →

Basic Math: A No Vote is a Half Vote

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So a Peruvian student in the country illegally, Lucy Allain, now of New York, last week accosts Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and asks him why he does not support the Dream Act.  The expected confrontation occurs.  He withdraws his hand as if she were trash, she said later.  Aides move Romney away from her.  I can imagine how she felt.  Romney is simply wrong on the issue.  More so, in his world, Romney would be called a cad.

But Lucy is wrong on another, vital matter. Asked by Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Sunday news program, Al Punto, for whom she would vote for if she could, she responded that she would vote for neither Romney nor President Obama, who has failed the HispanicLatino community – and the nation – by not pursuing immigration reform, not pushing for the Dream Act and pursuing a deportation program that in the end will prove counter to the national interest if it stands over a protracted period of time. Continue reading →

Barbarains at the Gate

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President Obama in one speech displayed why only the angriest of furies that could be goaded into action by a Newt Gingrich can defeat him.  As important as the State of the Union speech last night was, so was the announcement by News Corporation – read that Fox – that it is creating a Spanish-language network to begin telecasting this coming fall.  It was only a matter of time before Fox plunged into the continuously expanding HispanicLatino market.  Continue reading →

The Eagle Ford: Hope from the Ground Up

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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 →

South Carolina Sends Message…to Obama

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— This blog is reposted from Saturday night; the usual business-oriented blog on Mondays will be published tomorrow. —

Though it is easy to dismiss that bane of the average American – the so-called “experts” – they do hold vast institutional and collective wisdom – but perhaps it is about the past.  All of them – from the left to the right – have been wrong this year.  And so in this uproarious year, their judgment is now near useless given South Carolina.  None of these experts expected that after three GOP contests three different candidates could call themselves a winner.  One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual.  I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina. For me, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election.  Continue reading →

South Carolina Sends Message to….Obama

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In this uproarious year, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election.  One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual.  I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina.

For conventional thinkers, this is not the year to be conventional.  My thoughts have been all along that Obama was going to sweep over any of the Republican candidates.  Now I am not so sure.  Will Florida tell the tale?  Perhaps.  Watching Mitt Romney on television was looking at someone who, it turns out, is not as good as he thinks he is.  This business of running for President is not like directing a takeover of another company – running for President is not insider work.  Romney talked tonight as if he were talking to his staff instead of the country.  His spiel was canned and repetitive.  Newt Gingrich offers something new: New language, new energy, new anger – the stuff of which most elections are made and won. Continue reading →