Lowell Ponte: Uno de Mayo

lLowell Ponte
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
May 1, 2006

“We’re going to close down Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Tucson, Phoenix, Fresno” on May Day this Monday, labor organizer Jorge Rodriquez told the British wire service Reuters.
“We want full amnesty, full legalization for anybody who is here [illegally],” said Rodriquez, organizer for one of the unions of AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees of the AFL-CIO. “That is the message that is going to be played out across the country on May 1.”

Listen to the cynicism behind Rodriquez’s arrogant statement. Government workers who belong to AFSCME unions will not see their jobs taken or wages depressed by illegal aliens, as will poor and undereducated American citizens. On the contrary, illegal aliens will generate more government jobs – the one sector where unionization is growing – with their demand for more taxpayer-funded services (read: welfare).

By one estimate, every illegal alien household in America on average consumes at least $2,736 more in taxpayer-funded services than it pays in taxes each year. This adds a total burden that could exceed $27 billion on American citizen taxpayers.

Six decades have passed since the last large organized labor protest in the United States staged on May Day, the traditional date of the Soviet Union’s annual parade of its latest weapons through Moscow’s Red Square and holiday for its Euro-socialist fellow-travelers.

The radicals have insisted on May Day for “Day Without Immigrants” nationwide Hispanic rallies and “Buy Nothing Gringo” business boycotts, as well as work and school walkouts, and planned disruptions of major American cities (including cities such as New York and Chicago that historically were never “Mexican” territory).

The radicals behind this protest chose May first, rather than Cinco de Mayo, for a reason – and their allies in the Democratic Party, the racist Hispanic reconquista movement, and the Mexican government are behind them all the way.

The most vocal of these radicals, who also set last month’s nationwide pro-amnesty immigration protests that blocked Los Angeles streets with half a million Mexican flag-waving marchers, are activists with International ANSWER, a front group for the avowedly Marxist Workers World Party.

Do not be surprised on Monday if ANSWER activists in one guise or another try to cause violent confrontations with police, property damage or other violence. A longstanding radical tactic, such confrontations are intended to produce overreactions that polarize an issue and force those involved to “choose sides.” Confrontations on May Day would be calculated to produce a public backlash and to push otherwise-culturally conservative Hispanics into the arms of the Left.

This prospect has troubled even fellow leftists. Some of these graying comrades worry the backlash would stiffen the spines of politicians of both major parties who until now have been more than willing and eager to grant amnesty to America’s 12 million or more illegal aliens, despite overwhelming public opinion against doing so.

“It’s no accident that those pushing hardest for the May 1 boycott,” wrote Marc Cooper of the far-Left Nation Magazine and host of its tax-exempt foundation’s Radio Nation, “…have never shown much concern for real-world results, preferring to act out their ideological impulses.”

May Day was chosen for this mass demonstration as a “conscious nod” to the class confrontation traditions of this day, wrote the Socialist Worker. This journal proudly describes itself as standing “in the tradition in the Marxist tradition, founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and continued by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.”

May Day, traditionally a spring day of pagan fertility rites, May Poles, and sprinklings for the May Queen (as celebrated in a song by Led Zeppelin), was expropriated in the 1880s to become the holiday of European and North American labor radicals, socialists, and Marxists.

Democrats, who dominate the California legislature, voted last week along party lines to endorse May Day’s protests in resolutions describing the school, worker and buyer walkouts as the “Great American Boycott 2006.”

“American wouldn’t have been created without illegal action,” said State Senator Richard Alarcon and Democratic Senate Whip of the Los Angeles suburb Van Nuys. “They dumped a bunch of tea in Boston harbor, illegally.”

And where does Senator Alarcon fit on the ideological spectrum? His sister Evelina has been Vice Chair of the Communist Party USA and chair of the Southern California District of the Communist Party USA as well as a “state coordinator” for the United Farm Worker union. Senator Alarcon has been featured speaker at a banquet for the People’s Weekly World, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA.

In voicing his support for the May Day protests, Democratic State Senator Gil Cedillo of Los Angeles “likened the debate over immigrant rights to the fights over slavery, women’s suffrage, the internment of Japanese during World War II, and the Vietnam War.”

Senator Cedillo has relentlessly authored bills to provide valid California Driver Licenses to illegal aliens, a legal document for the undocumented. He refuses to acknowledge that Mexicans in the United States can use a Mexican driver’s license. Cedillo has rejected Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s request that any such California license carry a distinguishing mark so it could not be used as ID to register a voter or for other privileges requiring American citizenship.

As a student at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1970s, Cedillo was an activist in the racist Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, MEChA, dedicated to reclaiming the southwestern United States for Mexico.

The head of UCLA’s incendiary MEChA chapter in that era was Antonio Villaraigosa, later to become Speaker of the lower house of the California legislature, later Los Angeles City Councilman, and current Mayor of Los Angeles. As documented in this column, both Cedillo and Villaraigosa attended and became lawyers with the help of the People’s Law School, a factory for the manufacture of radical left-wing lawyers.

Another close Villaraigosa friend and ally has been Mario Obledo, co-founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), who was awarded the 1998 Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton.
“California is going to be a Hispanic state,” Mario Obledo has proclaimed, “and anyone who doesn’t like it should leave. They should go back to Europe.” (Does this refer to the Europe that includes Spain and the Spanish language?)

This kind of racist MEChA-like thinking has largely taken control of California’s Democratic Party, whose longtime chairman has been veteran politician Esteban “Art” Torres.
“Power is not given to you. You have to take it,” said Torres at a January 1995 Hispanic gathering to discuss non-compliance with ballot Proposition 187 at the University of California Riverside. “Remember, 187 is the last gasp of White America in California!” (For audio of Torres’ statement, check out this website.)

Proposition 187 would have denied taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens. It passed with the support of 60 percent of California voters, including 30 percent of Hispanics. Recalled Democratic Governor Gray Davis refused to defend it in court. A federal judge set most of its provisions aside, her entire declared legal rationale for doing so being that “it would hurt people.”

This same Art Torres, Chairman of the California Democratic Party, who thrilled at “the last gasp of White America in California,” has attacked Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for having spent many years on the advisory board of U.S. English. This organization advocates English as the common language for all Americans. (English is now also the world language of diplomacy, science and business, as Latin and French were in previous centuries.)

U.S. English “has used its English-first message,” charged Torres, “to hide a more racially divisive agenda.” But America’s shared language, English, is a bridge that ends division and opens opportunities to members of all races. By contrast, leftists such as Torres have tried by hook and crook to keep Hispanics chained inside a Spanish language ghetto.

Research studies have found that when Hispanics learn to speak English and move from the barrio into the larger society, they start voting Republican in roughly the same proportion as other Americans. If this continues to happen with America’s fastest-growing minority, it would mean demographic doom for the Democratic Party. No wonder its members in California want to deny opportunity and education to young Hispanics, as will happen during Monday May Day – when Hispanics will walk out of school and work.

More evidence of the left-wing divide-and-conquer effort to drive wedges that split Americans apart came this past week in what purported to be a Spanish language version of America’s National Anthem, the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

As this columnist has noted, it’s odd to have a National Anthem that would get you arrested for speaking its lyrics about “bombs bursting in air” at a public airport or school. But the remixed Spanish version changes our anthem’s lyrics to say such things as “These kids have no parents, cause all of these mean laws…let’s not start a war with all these hard workers; they can’t help where they were born.” These new lyrics pervert America’s anthem into doublespeak making morality appear immoral and illegality appear legal.

The man who conceived this distortion is British music producer Adam Kidron, who will market it on the album Somos Americanos, “We Are Americans.” One dollar of the album’s $10 price, he said, will go to the National Capital Immigration Coalition (NCIC) in Washington, D.C.

No leftist mainstream media reporter pressed Kidron on what this organization is. NCIC is a front group for the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that twisted arms to install Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. A majority of SEIU members are government employees, so it shares the same cynical politics against working Americans and in favor of higher taxes and bigger government as AFSCME. It is one of America’s biggest and richest labor unions. SEIU also played a major role in organizing the massive illegal immigration rallies throughout the Southwest.

The president of the newly-formed NCIC is Jaime Contreras, who arrived from his native El Salvador in 1988 and worked his way up from an SEIU janitor’s union to become one of the leaders of SEIU. No wonder he has been featured on every left-wing media outlet from National Public Radio (NPR), to Pacifica Radio, to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” These outlets know how to build up and promote their own, although few bother to tell their audience of Contreras’ union background or extremist connections.

Unlike many other unions, SEIU retains the old radical dream of concentrating all union power in a few hands able to shut down all of America at the snap of a union boss’s fingers. It has welcomed illegal immigrants as a source of new membership to save the dying labor movement. SEIU has promoted the use of mass walkouts and disruption of entire cities to intimidate and force itself on employers and politicians.

It should not surprise us that this new anti-American anthem in Spanish is being used not only to advance radicalism but also to help fund the activities of a radical labor union disguised as a neutral-sounding immigration coalition.

“I think the National Anthem ought to be sung in English,” said President George W. Bush (who grew up in Texas, speaking both English and Spanish). “And I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to
sing the National Anthem in English.”

As we debate this issue, said President Bush, we should take care “not to lose our national soul.” Unlike other nations rooted in a single religion, race, culture, or history, the United States has gathered its people from throughout the world; Americans are held together by our ideals, our laws, our shared language English and our Manifest Destiny. The radicals behind Monday’s May Day demonstration advocate immigration that breaks our laws, rejects assimilation into America and insists on using Spanish as a language to keep it apart from the rest of America.

If illegal immigrants, most of whom are Mexican, in America want a day of protest, why not Cinco de Mayo, the Fifth of May, that arrives this coming Friday?

This is already a Mexican and Latino day of pride, the anniversary of Mexican forces in 1862 defeating a slightly larger French force in that first Battle of Puebla? In fact, during that battle, French troops were surprised to hear their opponents singing “La Marseillaise,” the revolutionary French national anthem, in Spanish.

Cinco de Mayo is already widely celebrated in the southwestern United States. But just as Hanukkah is celebrated more in the United States than in Israel, Cinco de Mayo is more of a holiday in the U.S. than in Mexico. Mexicans know that in the second Battle of Puebla in 1863, French troops crushed the Mexican army, days later occupied Mexico City, and continued to rule Mexico for the following four years.

The French Emperor Napoleon III dared to send troops to occupy Mexico only because the United States was preoccupied with its own War Between the States, a.k.a. our Civil War. When our war ended, we massed a huge American army on the Texas border with Mexico and informed the French Emperor that under the Monroe Doctrine we would not tolerate European control of Mexico.

Napoleon III beat a hasty retreat, leaving his installed “liberal” Hapsburg puppet “Emperor of Mexico” Maximilian I to be overthrown and executed by the locals in 1867. But drinking their beer each Cinco de Mayo, educated Mexicans bitterly remember that it was pressure from the United States that liberated their country from French colonial rule. The cultural residue of French influence in Mexico remains in many odd ways, e.g., the hired singers called Mariachis, whose name (despite frantic Mexican nationalist denials) was first used in 1852 and probably derives from the French word for marriage that arrived via the surreal 1838 French incursion known as “the Pastry War.”

France could also be blamed for Mexico’s loss of what is now the western United States. Napoleon I sold the U.S. the Louisiana Territory, which created a potential legal claim to a large, poorly-defined share of the wild West. Napoleon I also overthrew the government of Spain and put his own brother on the Spanish throne, which plunged Spain’s colonies such as Mexico into political chaos. The resulting uprisings in Mexico ousted Spain and installed a domestic revolutionary government that could not control the centrifugal forces that broke apart Spain’s old North American empire in Mexico (as well as South America with the uprisings of Simon Bolivar and Jose San Martin).

Many who stayed in the New World remained loyal to Spain. Mexico thus sent troops three times into California to suppress revolutionary Californios who did not want to be ruled by newly independent Mexico. The lands now part of the western United States were slipping free from Mexico’s tenuous, anti-democratic control even before America moved to secure them (preemptively, as it were, before Great Britain attempted to do so).

When American forces arrived in California in 1846, half the Californios greeted the Trailblazer John C. Fremont (in 1856 to become the first Republican presidential candidate) and his men as liberators freeing them from Mexican tyranny. President Abraham Lincoln returned to the Roman Catholic Church the Spanish missions that the greedy and corrupt Mexican government had expropriated.

Spain might have a weak historic claim to the southwestern United States. But post-revolutionary Mexico has virtually no legitimate claim whatsoever, contrary to the propaganda of racist groups such as MEChA. Since such groups speak of a mythical land they call Aztlan that they aim to restore, were the Aztecs ever here? Apparently not, except for rare raiding parties to attack tribes near today’s Mexican border in search of fresh victims for its pagan human sacrifices. What sane person would embrace such a flimsy territorial claim? And, as mentioned earlier, Monday’s May Day protests have targeted New York City and Chicago, both many hundreds of miles beyond any imaginable historic Mexican lands.

These protests will exploit innocent Hispanic children and fearful Hispanic adults to create hostility between Latinos and American citizens. This advances the anti-American radicals’ agenda, and that is why the radicals behind this protest selected May Day.

A backlash against the May Day protests is almost inevitable. In this, as Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle recognized, American citizens will see students who refuse to go to school, workers refusing to be reliable, and illegal aliens thumbing their noses at the law.

In the wake of such protests more than a month ago, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute did polling in one state. The mass demonstrations made 17 percent of citizens more sympathetic to the immigrants’ cause, but they made 38 percent – more than twice as many – less sympathetic. The demands of these illegal aliens produced alienation.

…And Americans do not want to become an illegal aliens’ nation. As Quinnipiac’s assistant director Peter A. Brown observed, Americans are likely to respond negatively, not only to Monday’s protests but also to its deliberately having been set on May Day, a day associated with Communist nations. “The symbolism of [May Day’s] choice for the immigration economic boycott,” said Brown, “may not go down well in much of the country.” Moreover, wrote Brown, “American history is not one in which change has occurred in the streets. General strikes are not a U.S. tradition, as in many other countries in Latin America and Europe.”

The very nature of this style of mass protest, designed to show a group’s power by its ability to disrupt the lives and businesses of the rest of us, seems alien, threatening and un-American to most of us. We expect such things to be decided in the polling place, not on the streets.

Down on the border, meanwhile, the Minutemen have been constructing their own six-foot barbed wire fence 50 miles east of San Diego. They may be hoping that some illegals knock it down, thereby providing another polarizing issue for the other extreme of this debate. Even many leftists, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Washington Post’s columnist Robert J. Samuelson, now agree a border fence is necessary.

And the pro-illegal immigrants protestors have painted themselves into a corner. By making May Day a “Day Without Immigrants,” they must either demonstrate major social and economic disruption or become an example that America can, indeed, live happily without its illegal immigrant workers. If they “go on strike” and nobody notices, their political and economic clout will evaporate.

But if they “go on strike” and cause massive social disruption, this will make millions of Americans afraid, angry, and unhappy at the actions of these foreign bullies. Either way, the politicians in this election year might suddenly realign on the side of those demanding a crackdown on illegals. President Bush, who grew up among Latinos and won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, last Monday declared that the “massive deportation” of 12 million Latinos living in the United States is “unrealistic.” The Tonight Show’s liberal comic host Jay Leno, who lives with a wetted finger in the air to sense the shifting winds of public opinion, had a pointed rejoinder to the President. “We’re not able to send 12 million Mexicans out of our country?” said Leno. “Mexico did.”

To offset the economic impact of Monday’s boycott, radio talk show hosts across the nation have variously urged Americans to turn May Day into a “buycott,” spending as much as possible to erase any sign that a Hispanic boycott is effective.

One such radio host is Los Angeles radio station KFI’s Bill Handel. “Have you noticed,” he says, “that the politicians and activists talk about how important ‘immigrants’ are to American but never use the word ‘illegal’? What you won’t be shown on Monday,” said Handel last Friday, “is what illegals cost us in public services, in taxpayer dollars. That won’t be shown by the media.”

“Don’t want to pay $10 a head for lettuce?” say other opponents of illegal immigration. You already are in the form of overcrowded and dangerous public schools for your kids, hundreds of closed hospital emergency rooms where illegals broke the bank by demanding and getting free treatment, and in a thousand other burdens they impose on society that increase your taxes. This “cheap labor” already costs you a fortune and is on the verge of costing you your country.

South of the Border, meanwhile, the Mexican government is maintaining unconvincing official neutrality about Monday’s May Day boycott. It will be keeping its consulates and embassy open. Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez describes the boycott as “a strategy that is being defined by them [U.S. activists], not us.” But Mexican radicals in sympathy are staging a “Buy nothing Gringo” day to punish the Mexican owners of franchises such as McDonald’s. Approximately 40 percent of employed Mexicans in Mexico who do not work for government, work for American companies.

In Mexico, polls now show leftist candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador ahead for that nation’s July 2nd presidential election. This veteran of Mexico’s long-ruling revolutionary and corrupt PRI party cheers on illegals in the United States who send back $20 billion each year to relatives in Mexico, making them its most lucrative export. Obrador’s cultural advisor Elena Poniatowska openly advocates the reconquista, “reconquest,” of the United States. And he proposes to create a new electoral super-district which he calls the Sexta Circunscripcion for Mexican citizens. This Sixth Electoral District of Mexico would be the United States. Aztlan, anyone?

If Obrador becomes Mexico’s president, get ready for a very strange Fourth of July in the United States with lots of fireworks.

Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.

Mr. Ponte co-hosts a national radio talk show Monday through Friday 6-8 PM Eastern Time (3-5 PM Pacific Time) on the Genesis Communications Network. Internet Audio worldwide is at GCNlive .com. The show's live call-in number is 1-800-259-9231. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.