Category: Uncategorized

To The Georgetown City Council:

It has come to our attention that the Georgetown City Council will vote on January 8th to consider enacting a new Hazleton style city ordinance that will require contractors and subcontractors to prove their employees are in this country legally.

LULAC Council 4721 requests that the Georgetown City Council table the creation of any anti-immigrant ordinance. Georgetown’s anti-immigrant ordinance is simply not needed. Immigration law is a matter reserved for the U.S. Congress and federal law. In fact, in 1986 Congress enacted sweeping legislation that makes it unlawful for businesses to employ illegal immigrants and expressly pre-empts states and localities from imposing their own civil or criminal penalties.

The ordinance that is being contemplated is fueled by a mixture of misinformation and fear, if enacted, it will foster discrimination and racial profiling in Georgetown. This ill conceived ordinance will create opportunities to discriminate against anyone who simply looks like he or she might be an undocumented worker, citizen and non-citizen alike.

Other states and municipalities across the country have unsuccessfully attempted to adopt similarly divisive, unnecessary and illegal measures. Court’s across this country have found Hazelton type ordinances unconstitutional because it encroaches on federal immigration powers, fails to provide procedural protection to people before they are fired and violates federal civil rights laws. The Supreme Court has already determined it was the exclusive province of the federal government to determine whether a person is in the United States lawfully or not.

Our Council urges the Georgetown City Council to avoid spending taxpayer dollars on an ordinance that will simply produce legal challenges that will burden the local taxpayer.

Jose Orta,President LULAC Council 4721

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From KXAN (Dec. 19, 2007)

The City of Georgetown is taking new steps to crack down on illegal immigration.

The council voted unanimously to have staff write a proposal for a new city ordinance that would require contractors to prove their employees are in this country legally.

That’s how Georgetown council member Keith Brainard came up with the idea to create an ordinance ensuring anyone working for the city in any manner, including sub-contracted, is a legal immigrant.

“People are tired of illegal immigration,” Brainard said. “They would like this country to police its borders.”

While some in Georgetown agree, some like Guadalupe Rodriguez don’t.

“When they come here they are willing to do anything, just as long as they can make enough money to support their families,” Rodriguez said.

She said one reason the council may support the idea is because there is no one on the council who looks like her.

“We have five men and two women,” Brainard said. “I don’t really think in terms of people ethnicity. As far as I can tell, they are all caucasion.”

“It’s just very hard, I guess, for a different kind of race to get on the board,” Rodriguez said.

Meanwhile, Brainard said the issue is not about race.

“If you are in this country legally than you won’t have a problem with this proposal,” Brainard said. “It really boils down to that. It really gets down to the issue of whether or not the City of Georgetown is going to support and encourage illegal immigration, or not support illegal immigration.”

Georgetown staff members are preparing the proposal for the city council to consider at their next meeting on Jan. 8.

Toleration and the American Pulpit

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / OpEdNews

What happened to Rev. Wright’s religious freedom? Sen. Barack Obama’s ‘race speech’ continued to presume that Rev. Jeremiah Wright deserves no special consideration on grounds of religious freedom. On Easter Sunday, perhaps, Americans will want to consider whether the pulpit at church deserves any special respect.

A cable newscaster on Good Friday asked in a tone of voice that expressed her wide-eyed naivety: “What is liberation theology?” Having covered the news for many years, and having covered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright thunderstorm for two weeks, it was still a question that she had not bothered to research. And frankly, I don’t want to experience that learning curve as part of my continuing coverage of the Presidential campaign.

I doubt that the summer of ’08 will be the time to provide a sufficient, good-faith answer to the question of liberation theology or how the black social gospel is spiritual grandfather to these momentous American movements. Such an attempt at national education played out upon our contemporary media landscape would likely morph into witch-hunt.

Sen. Barack Obama appears to agree with this assessment. The Senator’s public review of Rev. Wright’s oratory during Tuesday’s ‘race speech’ did not mention either keyword, neither liberation nor theology. And yet, Rev. Wright has asked that these be the key words applied to any serious assessment of his work.

Because it would likely be a poisonous time and place for the adult discussion that liberation theology requires, I think Obama’s judgment call is valid as he tries to move public discussion around the issue of liberation theology rather than through it.

However, I think there is a stronger argument than Obama’s for going around Rev. Wright’s oratory as a campaign issue. The stronger argument is that the American unity that Obama claims to want will require some faith in the principle of religious toleration.

Since it is liberation theology that is required to understand Rev. Wright, and since theological agreement is precisely the kind of thing that should not be required in the context of public policy debates, then it is time to agree that when Rev. Wright speaks from a pulpit in a church, it is better that a tolerant society back off of his comments as a Presidential issue.

There is some sophistication in the careful wording of Sen. Obama’s speech, which hints that he knows the difference between theology and policy discourse, even as he confines Rev. Wright’s oratory upon a two-dimensional plane of public policy. The clues are in the repeated uses of the phrase ‘as if’: “he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”

Sen. Obama has three times denied the truth of his own pastor with the phrase ‘as if.’ But is not the theological function of prophetic speech to talk precisely ‘as if’? Public policy may spend long hours concerning the need to ‘store up’ resources for long-term planning. But does that dismiss the value of the prophet who walks up and says: “You fools, not tomorrow, but today, your souls are required of you!” As if there is no time.

Although it is unlikely that the cable news cyclists would respect calls for religious toleration in behalf of Rev. Wright, I think that toleration is the better argument for moving on.

The argument from toleration has the benefit of refusing to flatten theological oratory onto the plane of policy-speak. And if we achieve this act of toleration for Rev. Wright, then we will strengthen the three-dimensional life of spiritual language for all theologies (or anti-theologies), and maintain a more healthy distance between church and state as a precious resource for everyone’s freedom of worship in a robust democracy.

Not only do the continued houndings of Rev. Wright exemplify racialized ignorance, as Sen. Obama argues, but they also tighten the bands of religious intolerance that have too broadly constricted our national character for at least the past seven years. On this issue, perhaps, another great speech needs to be written that would restore Rev. Wright to the dignity that any theologian deserves when his name is dragged through the galleries of public-policy clamor.

NOTE: Article revised for OpEdNews (Easter Sunday, 2008)

Email from Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

The Spring Break…March Against the Border Wall is a 9-day 115-mile walk from Roma, TX to Brownsville. It will start on March 8 and end on March 16 at the UTB campus. This protest walk/march is being organized by the academic community. It is designed to allow the students, many of which have friends and family on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande, to have a chance to be heard, whether they want to be condemned to a costly and grotesque border wall on American soil that cuts through their community and their land. What better time than Spring Break for the future leaders of America to speak up and be heard?

Through Border Ambassadors networking the 1250 mile Texas-Mexico from El Paso to Brownsville, the entire border region is not caving in, bowing down or bending over to the dictates of the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. When it comes to our ecology, our environment, our economy, our culture, our history, our geology, our solidarity or our friendship, as long as we live in a democracy, “we the people” of the borderlands will have the final say. To Chertoff, the border is little more than a black line that runs the thread of the Rio Grande. In his mind, the border will be defined as a totalitarian “iron curtain” that will cut through people’s lives and community and turn a culture of friendship into a war zone.

For those of us who live in this militarized zone, the region “inside checkpoints” on the north and every form of military surveillance on the south, the border is not a line, but the blend of we the people on both sides of the Rio Grande. It is diverse and tolerant. We get along, despite the political corruption, oppression and racist supremacy from the north. We are the poorest and most neglected region of the great state of Texas. Worse, we are the poorest region of then entire United States of America. Yet, today, because the Texas delegates will more than likely determine the Presidential candidates in the March 4 primaries, and therefore the next President, the Presidential hopefuls are rushing to South Texas to garner the predominantly Hispanic vote.

It will therefore be the vote here in South Texas that tips the scale in the presidential race. We the people “inside the checkpoints” on the Texas-Mexico border will not squander this opportunity. We will make THE difference.

Can we the people of the Texas-Mexico border shape the future of Texas and therefor the entire United States and therefore the world?

“We sure as hell can”

We will…

Jay

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Connecting the dots
…Making a difference

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Border Ambassadors
Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

See: Scrutiny for a Bush Judicial Nominee
Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008 By ADAM ZAGOR IN /WASHINGTON

“Now, a former CCA manager tells TIME that Puryear oversaw a reporting system in which accounts of major, sometimes violent prison disturbances and other significant events were often masked or minimized in accounts provided to government agencies with oversight over prison contracts.”

Don’cha Know?
A Texas Civil Rights Review
Column of Dissent

By Faddy MacMough

In your article I found at CounterPunch.org, “Beauty from the Heart of Texas: Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debators” you started out with the following paragraph:

Over at the Internet Movie Database, redneck trolls are saddling up their cyber posse to go night riding on the message boards against Denzel Washington and “The Great Debaters.” All of which is a good thing if you like to see relevance in contemporary art. Because deep down, “The Great Debaters” is a film about how to grow yourself into a real person despite the needlers, taunters, and brutes who dominate the space around you — and who dominate it, still.

By now you ought to know I’ll come back at you on any generalizations you make that excoriate Rednecks — it is my solemn duty after all as a leftie redneck. I’ll be the first to admit there are, as you suggest, trolls of a redneck variety. But there are trolls of all sorts of varieties that include folks who are not rednecks. And amongst the trolls who are busy attacking Denzel Washington and the great debaters are some who just don’t have the credentials to be good decent rednecks.

I’d suggest, based on his betrayal of his own roots, that Justice Thomas is a troll who, if his past maunderings are any indication, is perfectly capable to giving Denzel Washington and the movie a needling, a taunting, and a brutalizing. Given his lofty position, that would also carry some weight.

Now don’t get me wrong, trolls are trolls (especially if they are the Tolkienian persuasion) and are to be avoided, and brought to light at every opportunity. And if they happen to be rednecks as well, they certainly do need to be brought into the light of day. (Light, it seems, of a sunlight variety, causes trolls to turn to stone as any student of the Hobbit can attest.) That is just fine and dandy by me. In fact, I applaud anyone who helps to sanitize the redneck blood lines by ridding us of their influence.

However, and this is important, there are rednecks who should be your allies . . . and the allies of all sorts of people (dare I suggest types?) who are struggling against oppression and bigotry in this class society of ours. They are all on the same side of the civil rights equation and shouldn’t be alienated by a slip of the hyperbolic tongue. It doesn’t help your cause, and it only makes theirs all that more difficult.

Had I not recognized you as a fellow traveler in the art and practice of civil rights, someone who has, at least for me, sterling credentials, I wouldn’t have gone much further than the racist epithet: redneck trolls. Nor would you have done much reading if you’d run up against ‘n-word trolls’ — or ‘m-word trolls’ — or any of a number of other racist terms.

Now that brings us around to the closing paragraph:

So please don’t bother believing what the bigots tell you about this film, not even the trolls who claim to have Harvard degrees. You don’t have to be Black to feel beautifully about Denzel Washington’s fine new film, “The Great Debaters.” The “message” of this film is for anyone who still desires the capacity to dream higher than what you already are.

Here, I suppose you come close to redeeming yourself in spite of some rather grandiloquent attempts at grand eloquence. Not believing trolls, or bigots, or even folks with some fancy degree (Harvard being one), is very good advice. We should all heed your advice . . . whether our necks are black or red or brown . . . and we should, all of us, all celebrate the desire to dream higher than what we already are. Those of us wallowing in the under classes of our society have a hell of a lot more in common that we have that the power elites want us to understand and recognize.

Alas, your introductory paragraph does a great deal to continue the tradition of division and intolerance for those who are sometimes frighteningly mirrors of our own existence. It’s high time, in my not so very humble opinion, that all of us with our necks under the yoke of economic oppression were willing to celebrate our mutual successes and quit the divisive language. And it is high time that you, as one of our leaders, should watch out for those killer phrases that have our mutual antagonists smiling with delight at our antagonizing each other.

Fredegar N. MacMough (his friends call him Faddy) is a self-styled leftie, of redneck parentage, holding forth from one of those nasty little oil towns where the glories of Friday Night Lights sustain a population so used to being abused that they think things are just fine and dandy . . . where a peppermint patty world is an illusion foisted upon them because the boys did take state again.