[GPSCC-chat] "Political Correctness" About MALDEF

[Spencer Graves]

Hi, Alex:  That kind of race bating make it very difficult for Occupy 
San Jose to build a relationship with local Latino groups.  I think 
we've gotten past that because of some hard work by Pablo Ghenis and 
many others, but it does make things difficult.  Some of that may come 
from plants -- agent provocateurs -- who want to destroy the movement.  
Others, I think, don't think deeply enough to realize that they can 
accomplish more by building alliances than divisions.  (We catch more 
flies with honey than vinegar.)  Thanks for your comments.  Spencer Graves


On 11/15/2011 11:06 PM, alexcathy at aol.com wrote:
> Dear Green Friends,
>
> I know some of my "Lefty" friends think I'm a little crazy with my 
> emphatic rejection of our idiotic "race" politics. Some Greens have 
> recently been scolded here as "racist" in some over-the-top E-mails 
> being circulated for "politically incorrectness" regarding the Mexican 
> American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But thanks to my personal 
> experience with similar African-American groups, I'm not surprised by 
> Harold Meyerson's commentary below.
>
> This is the same MALDEF that has posted slanderous stuff on its web 
> site denouncing the Green Party for "racially motivated" attacks.  I 
> guess if you are the 1% like the Big Boys at Wal-Mart, then you are 
> free to be as much of a union-busting, polluting, sweat-shop 
> operating, sexist, and racist scoundrel as you want to be.  Dear 
> friends, I've seen this kind of double-dealing crap from 
> African-American groups like the NAACP, SCLC, and even Jesse Jackson's 
> Rainbow/PUSH for twenty years.  That's a big reason why this is one 
> African-American "Lefty" who detests "race" politics.
>
> Alex Walker
>
> = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
> *Published by The Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2011
> MALDEF's misstep 
> <http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-maldef-20111115,0,7508035.story%20>
> By Harold Meyerson
> *
> On Tuesday, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 
> or MALDEF, will hold its annual awards gala and fundraiser in downtown 
> Los Angeles. The awardees include such indisputable worthies as Linda 
> Ronstadt and former MALDEF leader Antonia Hernandez. The real awardee, 
> though, should be MALDEF itself, whose decades of civil rights 
> litigation have yielded significant gains for Latinos. I haven't 
> always agreed with all of its actions, but I generally find myself 
> cheering it on (as I do its current campaign to create a second 
> Latino-majority district on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors).
>
> There's just one problem with this gala. Front and center on the 
> invitation are the words: "Gala Chair: Wal-Mart."
>
> Wal-Mart may be giving money to MALDEF, but it isn't a friend to 
> Latinos, and most definitely not here in Southern California. In 
> weighing the advisability of MALDEF's taking Wal-Mart's money and 
> granting the corporation Latino street cred (or if not that, suite 
> cred) in return, consider what happened on Oct. 12 in Riverside 
> County, about an hour east of Tuesday night's dinner.
>
> On that day, inspectors from California's Division of Labor Standards 
> Enforcement paid an unannounced visit to one of the mega-warehouses in 
> Riverside County to which trucks bring a huge amount of Asian (chiefly 
> Chinese) imports from the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. None of 
> these warehouses has any signage, but each does the work of a specific 
> retail chain, and the one that the state inspectors checked out was 
> one of many in the area that is a Wal-Mart warehouse.
>
> Not that Wal-Mart directly owns or runs its Inland Empire warehouses. 
> They're all run by logistics companies with which Wal-Mart contracts 
> to move its stuff, which also allows Wal-Mart to avoid any 
> responsibility for what actually goes on inside.
>
> Here's what the inspectors found: The logistics company (Impact) and 
> the employment agencies from which it hired the workers in its 
> warehouse failed to document the hours and wages of its workers. The 
> workers are paid "piece rate" based on the number of containers they 
> load and unload, but the pay rates remain a mystery to them, as they 
> are not spelled out on their paychecks. The company apparently had no 
> records of its own either.
>
> The inspectors fined Impact $499,000 for violations of wage and hour 
> laws. The following week, six of the warehouse workers filed a suit in 
> federal court for back pay and additional remedies, and U.S. District 
> Court Judge Christina Snyder on Oct. 31 issued a preliminary 
> injunction compelling the temp agencies to alter the way they paid 
> workers to end the immediate harm that the existing pay system was 
> causing them.
>
> The men and women who work in these warehouses --- they number roughly 
> 100,000 in the Inland Empire --- are overwhelmingly Latino. An 
> official of Warehouse Workers United, an organization of those 
> workers, told me that he's "never seen a non-Latino worker at the 
> warehouse, other than managers." All these Latino workers are at the 
> very bottom of a labor system that Wal-Mart has erected --- a system 
> that keeps the wages of the workers in its supply chain at rock 
> bottom, and also keeps any responsibility for those workers' 
> mistreatment as distanced as possible from Wal-Mart itself....
>
>
> Read the Original Text of the Full Article at:
> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-maldef-20111115,0,7508035.story
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567
web:www.structuremonitoring.com


-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567
web:  www.structuremonitoring.com

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