Forum Post: Imagine That!
Posted 11 years ago on Aug. 15, 2012, 11:53 a.m. EST by LeoYo
(5909)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Imagine That!
A Republican telling someone to take their divisiveness and hate back to Chicago.
It's just another case of the porcelain calling the china white.
Prosecuting Hate Crimes to the Fullest Extent of the Law
Wednesday, 15 August 2012 10:55 By Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, Dr. Cintli's Blog | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10916-prosecuting-hate-crimes-to-the-fullest-extent-of-the-law
At the Aug 7 trial for Randall Leon Thompson, the person accused of leaving three death threats against me in my university voicemail, was placed under supervised probation for a year, but was spared jail time.
The judge said he found his behavior disgusting and was inclined to throw him in jail, if I strongly objected to the deal negotiated by the attorneys.
For a moment, I had the power to send Mr. Thompson to jail. I had good reason to do so; the threats he sent in May 2011 were vicious and laced with racial venom. His tirades were in response to my purported role in defending TUSD's Mexican American Studies (MAS) department, which has since been dismantled as a result of the district complying with the anti-Ethnic Studies HB 2281.
These threats came subsequent to one posted on YouTube against the UNIDOS students who had taken over the Tucson school boardroom several weeks before. That threat urged viewers to "shoot them in the head," but was dismissed by the Tucson Police Department as "a joke."
The reason I did not exercise the judge's option is because I don't consider Mr. Thompson to be the intellectual author of the threats against me. True, he vocalized them, but he, like many in this state, have been goaded, and manipulated, often by the state's top politicians and others who exploit racial or cultural divisions within society (for an insight into hate from above, see stories re former State Senate President Russell Pearce's emails, along with Sheriff Joe Arpaio's communique's).
That daily spewing of hatred towards Mexicans and Mexican culture, disguised as "a war against 'illegals'" is a form of dehumanization that permits these politicos to spew out their hatred. They do this while claiming that they are not aiming their disdain at actual peoples, but rather simply at "lawbreakers" (The MAS struggle has nothing to do with migration, illegal or otherwise). The hatred spewed out by Mr. Thompson, is little different from what one reads in the comments section in the daily newspapers.
That's not to negate that Mr. Thompson is a conscious adult. Indeed he is responsible, or needs to be made responsible, for his actions. Seeing him in the courtroom, it was difficult to see him as the same man who threatened to use a 357 Magnum against me and who also threatened to war against Mexicans. And yet, for all his threats, he pled guilty but to one count of using a telephone to terrify, intimidate, threaten or harass.
On the same day, Jared Lee Loughner, pled guilty to 19 counts in court, for the shooting of 19 in Tucson the year before, including the serious wounding of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. This is on the heels of the murder of 6 Sikhs in Wisconsin last week and the Colorado massacre that left 12 dead and 58 injured last month. The reason I did not "strongly object" to this deal, is because I was unclear why Mr. Thompson was not facing felonies.
At an earlier hearing I had asked the court that question, and when I was permitted to read a statement in court Aug. 7, I also asked why no hate crime charges were filed? In response, the judge said it was a good question and one that I need to ask of the region's U.S. Attorney.
I do plan to do this, as these threats appear to come under the U.S. Justice Department definition of a hate crime (http://www.justice.gov/crs/). It reads:
"Hate crime is the violence of intolerance and bigotry, intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious, sexual orientation, or disability. The purveyors of hate use explosives, arson, weapons, vandalism, physical violence, and verbal threats of violence to instill fear in their victims..."
Given Arizona's recent history, it shouldn't be up to me to pursue these hate crime charges. State Atty. General, Tom Horne, the intellectual author of HB 2281, stated on Aug 3, 2012 in Tucson, that he believes the threats to be hate crimes.
Beyond that, true justice can only come about when the intellectual authors of this hate also have their date in court. Here's another quote from that same memo:
"When perpetrators of hate are not prosecuted as criminals and their acts not publicly condemned, their crimes can weaken even those communities with the healthiest race relations."
In Arizona, how do you prosecute that hate when it appears to come from the very top? My suggestion: one perpetrator at a time.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Romney Uses Banksters' Money to Play Race Card
Wednesday, 15 August 2012 00:00 By Danny Weil, Truthout | News Analysis
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10888-romney-uses-banksters-money-to-play-race-card
Whether one is voting this presidential election or not, Mitt Romney's most recent TV ad proclaims that president Obama eliminated the work requirement for welfare recipients and promises that Mitt Romney will make welfare recipients work for their benefits - unlike the lax Obama who can't seem to exercise parental control.
Not only is the Romney TV ad not true, the ad is classic racist "code." It is, in fact, a deliberate intent to incite racial animosity by mentioning welfare for the down and out, not welfare for the rich, Romney's real constituency. Yet another cynical appeal to poor white voters and the growing right-wing racist fringe, it conjures up images of working people of color as lazy and non-industrious, when - in fact - the so-called "job creators," like Romney and his supporters, are busy shipping employment overseas or engaging in high risk, high frequency trading on Wall Street where the real non-industrious can be found. Unfortunately, thanks to eight years of George W. Bush and the Great Financial Crisis that has now become a perpetual depression, we have a whole lot more poor white folks out of work, many of whom are, unfortunately, moving targets for racist appeals.
From Willy Horton, to the white woman telling Harold Ford Jr., "call me," the race card has long been a trusted weapon in the Republican arsenal when it comes to dividing the American people. To this mendacious ad - with more likely to surface - add voter suppression efforts and the Republican theme is glaringly obvious: Do you want a white man in the White House or a black man in the White House? And it is no surprise that all of this racist hyperbole is appearing during the emergence of the New Jim Crow, the latest ugly head rearing of Social Darwinism by the elite of a new cyber Gilded Age.
Plutocracy, Propaganda and Neo-feudalism
Racist appeals to the public by the Romney campaign conceal the fact that eight out of ten of Romney's top donors are scurrilous banking scoundrels - the one tenth or one hundredth of the 1% who essentially run this country - and I can assure you they are not African-Americans. They are multinational corporations whose deep-pocketed CEOs have made mega-billions since the crash of 2008. According to opensecrets.org, Mitt Romney's top ten financial donors are the usual colluders, grifters, economic vipers and corrupt suspects one would imagine:
Goldman Sachs
$636,080
JPMorgan Chase & Co
$502,874
Morgan Stanley
$476,300
Bank of America
$465,850
Credit Suisse Group
$421,310
Citigroup Inc
$345,265
Barclays
$322,400
Kirkland & Ellis
$295,042
Wells Fargo
$276,700
Deloitte LLP
$250,510
What Mitt Romney offers Americans is a lurid, Dickensian future where plutocrats, banksters and corporate hucksters are society's shot callers, drafting and writing laws allowing them to engage in criminal activity, while they dismantle regulations and directives that prevent them from continuous looting and pillage of the planet. And while the rich use grimy for-profit colleges, sub-prime mortgages and for-profit prisons to extract wealth from the poor and working class, they deliver a deracinated trail of tears, hardship, decaying environment - a toll-booth society to replace a vanquished public commons creating untold human misery. These companies traffic in poverty.
Just as an example, take Romney's top donor, Goldman Sachs. This corrupt, global crime syndicate engages in all three activities listed above with the for-profit college Educational Management Corporation (EDMC) recently being sued for the alleged theft of billions of dollars in federal funds. Yet, they even announced recently they're bagging a contract to provide so called "educational services" at New York City jails. This corporation is a key player among the criminals and thieves that crashed the casino economy and brought down whole countries like Greece.
Yet, instead of going to jail themselves, the CEO of Goldman Sachs is now financing the construction of burgeoning jail services for working people whose lives the corporations and their surrogates have left in ruin, some of whom will become candidates to occupy the New York city jail cells and use the Wall-Street-driven "educational service" products. The company is now trying to corner the market on financing incarceration for the poor.
According to Reuters, Goldman Sachs will invest nearly $10 million in:
... the nation's first "social service bonds" to help fund a New York City program that aims to lower the 50 percent recidivism rate among youthful offenders jailed at the Rikers Island correctional facility.
It is quite extraordinary that the recidivist plutocrats, the corporations they run and the surrogate class that serves them are getting away with financing prison and jail "services" rather than being prosecuted, convicted and then frog marched into jail cells. Not one of the fraudsters from the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 ever ended up in Rikers Island nor any other correctional facility, federal or state, and it is doubtful any of them will.
Meanwhile, Romney will continue to accept corporate largess in untold quantities in exchange for carrying the plutocrats' water, and he will resort to racist and sexist tactics, advertisements and outright lies to do so. With Citizens United now the law of the land, we might not know where all the money is coming from or just how much, but one thing we do know: Mitt Romney will do anything to get "selected" as CEO of America, Inc.
Copyright, Truthout.
"Veni, vidi, vici" If Julius Caesar didn't also say, "divide and conquer" it was apparent that he employed the technique regularly in the conquest of the Celts in the three parts he divided them into for categorization and clarity in his written account of the wars.
GALLIA est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt.
All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.
Divisiveness has a long and venerable history in the West.
For more on dysfunctional economy and culture see: How Does That Work? https://www.createspace.com/3852916
I think people really need to think about what diversity means:
It's Dem versus Rep, Left versus Right, Liberal versus Conservative... it's Black versus White, Yellow versus Green.... it's male versus female, father versus mother, mother versus child, and it's masculine versus feminine; it's Gay versus Straight... it's marketeer versus marketer and marketee; it's employer versus employee... it's MSNBC versus "Fox" and fox versus hen and "Amen" versus "amend"... it's North versus South, East versus West, and City versus Country... it's Cowboy versus Indian, Redneck versus Creole; Catholic versus Protestant, Gentile versus Genteel...
It's light versus dark, love versus hate, and joy versus misery...
And all the world is but a dichotomy.;
Divisiveness may serve your purpose very well but it does not serve mine; Chicago? Take it to Kenya, it doesn't belong in America.
Since 1492, much in America doesn't belong. Better to take it all back to Europe.
Since 1776, our answer has always been the same - you want it, come and get it.
And that's exactly what is happening. The corporations are getting more and more? Who's going to take it away from them? Certainly not non-voting protesters.
The intent has never been to take anything from anybody; the intent was to install leadership that considered both the corporation AND the people because life in America is a shared experience - we all want to do well.
The intent is always to take and grow at the expense of others to secure one's position in the world.
Absolutely. And we're about to take what means most to all - and it's not money or wealth - it's power.
Who's intent?
You can't just throw that out there.
Who's intent?