Category: Uncategorized

By Greg Moses

Zzine News

IndyMedia Houston / Austin / North Texas / NYC / LA

Texas Aggies love to say

that Highway Six runs both ways. At Beechnut St. in Houston, Highway Six runs into the rest of the

world.

Of 6,000 people living in the neighborhood at the Southeast corner of Highway

Six and Beechnut, 47 percent were born outside the USA. About half of them have become citizens,

according to the US Census Bureau (Census 2000, Tract 4539).

“Hubert Vo does represent

District 149,” says Rogene Gee Calvert, speaking by cell phone about the newly elected state

representative for the district that includes Highway Six between Interstate 10 and Beechnut. “It is a

district with many first generation immigrants like Hubert, and they feel like he understands their

issues.”

Calvert is president of the Houston 80-20 Asian American Political Action

Committee. During the campaign season, 80-20 endorsed Vo, knocked on doors for him, placed ads in

Asian media, and sent out campaign literature in five Asian languages. Now, with Vo’s slim electoral

victory being challenged in the Texas Legislature, Calvert is organizing to keep Vo in

office.

“We do not want to see his victory stolen away,” says Calvert. On Vo’s behalf,

Calvert is helping with a petition drive that aims to collect 10,000 signatures, and she is organizing

a delegation of Vo supporters that will appear in his behalf at the Legislature’s inauguration day,

Jan. 11.

According to sources close to Vo, the newly-elected rep is spending his days

with the people who elected him, listening again before he begins working in Austin.

“He

has an apartment in Austin, but he has his hands full back in the district,” reports our source. “His

schedule is as tight as it was in the campaign.” On Tuesday Vo attended a holiday party with the Alief

Super Neighborhood Council, a civic group that he belonged to before he decided to run.

“Oh, yes, I have seen him several times this month at different functions,” says 80-20 communications

chair Steven Pei. “He’s doing his homework.”

“It’s also important to stress that

Hubert has grassroots support from other communities as well,” says Pei. “Hubert has support among

Africans, African Americans, Hispanics, and Anglos.”

“We felt that Hubert represented

the community best,” says Calvert as she explains an endorsement process which requires a two-thirds

majority from 80-20 participants. “He has been successful in his own life, and he was running a

successful campaign. We took those to be good indications that he would also be a successful voice for

us in the legislature.”

80-20, explains Calvert, gets its name from a concept that

assumes any group of people will have 20 percent of its population loyal to one side of the political

spectrum and another 20 percent loyal to the other side. The challenge then becomes one of moving the

middle 60 percent to one side or the other to create an 80-20 bloc. In some races, 80-20 moves the

middle toward Republicans, in other races, like Vo’s, the middle moves toward a

Democrat.

In the legislature, Calvert and Pei want Vo’s help in passing a bill that would

give definition and funding to a Southwest Chinatown area East of Vo’s district. You can see a

colorful map of the area at, where else, chinatownmap.com (see link below).

“We want to

promote the area as a major tourist attraction,” says Calvert. But the area needs work first,

especially with lighting, police protection, and other infrastructure.

“Safety of the

community is the number one issue that keeps coming up at our meetings,” says Pei. “People want more

security in their neighborhoods.”

Meanwhile a source close to the Vo camp says that the

election challenge is “just chugging along” as the parties inspect about 200 names of voters that

Republicans allege cast illegal ballots.

“We have to see if their ballots were actually

illegal and who they voted for,” reports the source.

But it seems that a larger wisdom

should prevail when the challenge hits the chambers of the legislature. Does Texas want to understand

and develop the issues that work best for immigrants like Vo, create a Southwest Chinatown, and extend

Highway Six as a global highway that runs both ways? I don’t see why not.

Why not go

for Vo? It’s a simple thing to say, and a smart thing to do for Texas.

NOTE: 80-20

President Rogene Gee Calvert can be reached by cell phone at 832-723-4508.

See the map

of Southwest Chinatown

at:
http://www.chinatownmap.com/houstonswchinatownmap.htm

Selected as Lead Story for Harvey Kronberg’s Quorum Report, Feb. 1, 2005

So Many Eyes of Texas Watching, So Little Seen

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / GlobalResistanceNetwork / ILCAonline

In live internet broadcasts last week, a Master of Discovery appointed by the Texas Legislature to investigate allegations of a stolen election in West Houston indeed found some ‘fact patterns’ that looked scandalous, but you can’t tell it by reading any press reports. The hearing was supposed to look for evidence of voter fraud committed by Democratic voters. Instead, every time one of these curious patterns emerged, it was a hint of possible fraud not by Democratic voters, but against them.

On Thursday for example, Master of Discovery Will Harnett (R-Dallas), a cum laude graduate from Harvard, noticed that several voter registrations in the West Houston area looked strangely alike. They were all dated late 2003, presented accurate mailing addresses, yet re-registered voters to addresses where they did not live. In effect, the series of fraudulent registrations ‘deported’ African American voters out of Texas House District 149 and therefore made the voters appear illegal when they attempted to vote in their usual precincts.

So when the defeated Republican incumbent in the District 149 race went looking for evidence of ‘massive voter fraud’ that would explain his embarrassing loss to a Vietnamese immigrant, he snared the names of these ‘illegal’ voters and brought them to the state capitol accusing them on live broadcast of voting where they did not live. Instead of proving these voters had cast illegal ballots, however, the Republican team of lawyers actually produced evidence of another kind.

Thanks to the careful eye that Hartnett cast upon the evidence, it appeared that someone was moving voters without their knowledge. Hartnett suggested the cards might be forwarded to the Harris County District Attorney. In press reports Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I have not been able to locate a sentence, much less a headline about Hartnett’s discovery of this criminal pattern.

On Friday Hartnett noticed another curious thing. As he examined original questionnaires that were supposed to be filled out by alleged illegal voters and notarized as depositions, he found two kinds of ink used to fill out the answers and two kinds of handwriting. Larry Veselka, the Yale-educated lawyer who represents the elected Democrat in the race, Hubert Vo, then noticed that handwritten ‘no’ and ‘NA’ answers on at least two questionnaires looked to be written in the same hand.

Again, nobody reported this alleged ‘tampering with evidence,’ especially not the state capitol press corps, who let this open-air revelation pass without even quoting the words that were mentioned in the broadcast. However, since the proceeding took place under the jurisdiction of Austin prosecutor Ronnie Earle, maybe reporters are simply waiting to quote him on the matter of ‘assisted depositions.’ Or maybe I’m trying too hard to find a sensible motivation for media behaviors.

Finally, Hartnett was caught grinning at the flexibility he found at the official website of the Harris County voter registrar, which changed its listing of more than one voter from legal to illegal sometime during early January, following consultations with Republican lawyers. Hartnett seemed perversely amused when lawyers for the defense showed him a web page confirming a voter registration, dated early January, as Republican lawyers submitted more recent web pages showing the voter was not registered. Sometimes this duel of conflicting web pages seemed enough for Hartnett to say that he just couldn’t be sure if the voter was illegal or not.

At one point Republican lawyer Andy Taylor openly admitted that when he was not satisfied with a listing he found at the web site, he contacted the registrar’s office, presented his own findings, and got voters kicked off the rolls so that he could submit revised web pages as evidence. That wasn’t mentioned in the press, either.

In the end, it appears that the Republican challenge not only failed to prove ‘widespread fraud’ among Democrat voters of West Houston, but actually served up a fine public record of practices by Republicans and unknown others that would suppress their rights.

But you had to be watching the hearings in their 19-hour entirety to know any of the above, because according to inscrutable laws of Texas journalistic selection, nothing of this sort has yet been counted as news. How could so many eyes of Texas be upon the hearing, and yet so little be seen? If this is the kind of reporting we get about publicly broadcast events, what kind of independent reporting can we expect during this legislative season session about anything happening off camera?

To view copies of the Aug. 29 report from the 2003 Task Force on

Admissions, please go to the Open Records section via the menu at your upper

left.

The Truth you Can’t Hide From

By Greg Moses

I once asked a

student what percent of the American population did he think was Black. “At least sixty percent!” He

said eagerly.

“Are there any other guesses?” I asked the class. How was I going to

talk this young man down?

In fact, 77 percent of voters in the Bush-Kerry-Nader

election were white. It is the most obvious reason why the election turned out the way it

did.

For white voters and their pundits, however, the stupidity of the election would be

experienced as an expectation of politics as usual. “Of course, it’s a stupid election,” they would

tell you. “Aren’t all elections stupid?” OK. But every great stupidity has its personality. And

not enough folks are talking about the personality of the white vote in the wake of this most recent

election.

In fact, the stupidity of American elections to date has been heavily imprinted

with the specific personality of white America. Imagine, for instance, any other race of a candidate

acting as stupidly as George Bush, performing as poorly, and yet–among white voters–being so well

liked.

But if you live in white America, George Bush’s stupidity is the very form of

mind necessary and sufficient to constitute political power. That’s why white folks in America could

serve up a majority for Bush, unlike Black, Latino, and Asian voters–who would not have re-elected

him.

And if I’m wrong about this, why else do you think the South was considered

untouchable all year long? The solid South is not solid without a big, fat, white vote. So among

elites who claim their latitude to bypass the American South, it sounds like a far better idea to work

around this problem. Pressures are enormous to find some other thing to talk about. Take

responsibility for transforming the white vote and do it in the South, too? Do you have any idea what

you’re talking about?

Only Howard Dean was willing to talk about the Confederate Flag

waving white voters down in Dixie. Dean is occasionally discredited on that account (for example, see

Chait’s column in today’s LA Times [Nov. 26]). Now that we are four years away from the next

Presidential election (Lord willing and the creek don’t rise) it is not yet too late in the election

cycle to raise the question–what are we going to do about the white vote? No white Democrat without

an answer is smart enough to lead.

“But white voters will dominate the electoral process

for decades,” reports Aurelio Rojas in a preview of the California vote. There, Kerry wins 47 percent

of the white vote compared to Bush’s 51. In New York, Kerry gets 49 to Bush’s 50. Compare the margins

of the Kerry losses among white voters in those progressive states to Texas, where Bush got 74 percent

–of the white vote. In none of these states (nor in Illinois for that matter) do white voters favor

Kerry, but in the blue states a significant bloc of white voters present themselves to the Democratic

Party.

A Massachusetts liberal is such a dangerous spectre to raise among white voters

(who are not Massachusetts liberals) because white voters in Massachusetts behave differently. They

actually gave a majority to Kerry.

Tom Hayden in a recent essay encourages anti-war

activists to “become more grounded in the everyday political life of their districts, organizing anti-

war coalitions including clergy, labor and inner city representatives to knock loudly on congressional

doors.” But I wonder if this outreach to “inner city representatives” doesn’t hide the political

problem that anti-war activists actually have, that is, convincing white voters to favor less

belligerent politics.

Perhaps Hayden means to say that anti-war activists should get

more grounded in their existing political base. The Congressional Black Caucus, for example, does very

well on the war issue already. The CBC and the NAACP were two groups who early on expressed “strong

opposition to war” (writes the Associated Press in 2002, archived at NathanielTurner.com). So if it

were up to “inner city representatives” there would be no need for an anti-war movement in the first

place. And if it were up to black voters, Bush would never have been elected.

So, yes,

it was a stupid American election, and many of us did stupid things along the way. Let’s not be so

stupid again as to quit working on the transformation of the white vote–especially in the South–until

we’ve made Massachusetts liberals of them all.

Back to my student. Obviously, he was an

urban youth. For him, sixty percent of life was Black life. And God bless him for not imagining

things any differently. I can still recall, after hearing several guesses from the class, that I

looked back at him and gave him Perlo’s numbers on percent Black in the USA. It was a cruel moment

for the same reason that the election was cruel. And white folks who scoff at Massachusetts liberals

should think about the eagerness that falls out of a person’s eyes when he realizes there’s no getting

around white folks in the

USA.

LINKS

NathanielTurner.com

http://www.nathanielturner.com/pol

lwaragainstiraq.htm