Recent Comments

1. over 13 years ago on La Cucaracha

   This is not a racial profiling law. If I were say, pulled over for a traffic violation and could not produce ID, the law would apply to me.

   I have to carry ID anyway. So does every other adult.

   You can spin all you want, but the fact is that Arizonans (70% +) want this law. They want it because they are being inundated and the Federal government won’t do its job.

   Hey Alcaraz, why don’t you do some strips about something like, what happens to illegals in Mexico? For example people from Guatemala who enter Mexico without permission. It’s not pretty.

   Or how about, the vile corrupt incompetence and white-over-brown racism that keeps Mexico poor and motivates its people to leave.

   Or how about, the California state prison guard union lobbying for tougher laws to fill the prisons so they can work more of that sweet, sweet overtime.

   I know why you ignore that kind of thing. People, look up the definition of “rent seeking.”

   Lalo Alcaraz is a rent seeker.

2. over 13 years ago on La Cucaracha

   That’s some weak sauce Einstein, mighty weak:

   People guilty only of being in the country illegally are not detained in prison for lengthy periods. They are turned over to the Federal government for deportation as soon as possible. Unless of course, the Holder Justice Department follows through on its illegal threat to refuse deportees from Arizona. Is Holder in on this too? Is he plotting to cause a back-up of detainees?

   The law in question simply reproduces a Federal law that has been on the books since 1940, that the Federal government does not choose to enforce.

   The law was not written or proposed by the governor - that is the job of the legislature. All she did was sign it.

   70% of Arizonans favor the law.

   Folks, Alcaraz and his fellow spin artists in the media are employing Alinsky Rule # 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

   This is an intentional (and clumsy) distraction, and it’s probably coordinated, Journolist style. If she’s crooked she should go down for that. But SB1070 is not Brewer, and Brewer is not SB1070.

   70%, Alcaraz.

3. over 13 years ago on La Cucaracha

   So now you have links from both the right and the left.

   The first source, at Pajamas Media, goes to some lengths to authenticate its evidence.

   The second source, at Counterpunch, was written by an African American college professor who actually worked on the Sherrod plantation for a while back in the ’70s.

4. over 13 years ago on La Cucaracha

   Counterpunch:

   The Story of Annie Hawkins and New Communities, Inc.

   The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod

   By RON WILKINS

   Imagine farm workers doing back breaking labor in the sweltering sun, sprayed with pesticides and paid less than minimum wage. Imagine the United Farm Workers called in to defend these laborers against such exploitation by management. Now imagine that the farm workers are black children and adults and that the managers are Shirley Sherrod, her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod, and a host of others. But it’s no illusion; this is fact.

   The swirling controversy over the racist dismissal of Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post has obscured her profoundly oppositional behavior toward black agricultural workers in the 1970s. What most of Mrs. Sherrod’s supporters are not aware of is the elitist and anti-black-labor role that she and fellow managers of New Communities Inc. (NCI) played. These individuals under-paid, mistreated and fired black laborers–many of them less than 16 years of age–in the same fields of southwest Georgia where their ancestors suffered under chattel slavery.

   When I first noticed the story of her firing and the association of Shirley Sherrod’s name with the rural black poor and concern for “black land-loss”, I wondered if the person being praised was the same Shirley Sherrod whom I knew. One piece posted on the July 23rd Alternet and captioned “Shirley Sherrod and the black Land Struggle” even claimed that she “devoted her entire life to economic justice”. The mistreatment of black workers at NCI under the Sherrods is a matter of record that contradicts this claim.

   More:

   http://www.counterpunch.org/wilkins08022010.html

5. over 13 years ago on La Cucaracha

   Shirley and Charles Sherrod ran a plantation that exploited “their own” people under near slave labor conditions. Alcaraz knows this perfectly well, but ignores it because it would complicate his simple-minded narrative.

   Summary:

   • Paying farm workers as little as 67¢ per hour, far below minimum wage for the era. • Employing underage children to perform hard labor. • Compelling their employees to work in unsafe conditions, including getting sprayed with pesticides. • Firing any workers who acted as whistleblowers. • Forcing employees to work overtime in the fields at night with practically no advance notice. • Having a capricious payscale under which employees doing the exact same jobs were paid different amounts according to the whims of the managers. • Being unwilling to address the abuse even after it was raised by union representatives. • Seriously mismanaging the farm to such an extent that it went bankrupt.

   Source:

   http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/08/05/slave-labor-conditions-at-sherrods-farm/