MAYAN CALENDAR NEWS: FEEDBACK FROM MCN READERS ON THE CIR ASAP SERIES....
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Carlos Perez
Dec 24, 2009, 2:48:34 PM12/24/09
to March 10th, Movimiento Marzo, K K, mexicapolitic...@yahoo.com, Greater Chicago
MERRY XMAS MCN READERS!!!
First I am going to let you read the feedback I have gotten - then in another MCN edition I will respond to some. I have made some minor edits to protect the identities of some of my readers.
Carlos
PEPE1942 WROTE:
"Carlos your the man. You are right on - sock it to them."
DONREG WROTE:
WOW! I totally agree that the organizations listed on the website in support of Gutierrez's immigration bill knew some of the details of his proposal. No and I must repeat no Public debate was made, no public hearings. Only a few individuals were made available to this "Strive Act" immigration proposal that must be DEFEATED. I will spend my time reading, reading and reading all the con's of this bill (the pro's are not apparent in this bill) and give the MY Voice readers, AND OTHER readers and anyone else that cares to see an analytical look of what this bill really give to the 12+ million undocumented workers. I would like to know if all those organizations really care about them (undocumented workers) or were
they following the status quo?
The real question is can we mobolize the undocumented workers and get the truth out to the people? It is hardening to see Latino leaders and progressive folk supporting an immigration bill that promises a path way to citizenship only when they pay a $500 fine, pass a criminal investigation (by whom?) and return back to their native country and wait in line. If that's the best of this proposal can give us, then gente don't complain about the massive deportations, the incarceration of "criminals" and the separation of families to increase in 2010. There is no gain without pain and the pain will be the fighting among "brothers and sisters" to expose the hypocrisy that this immigration bill will give to the 12 million undocumented and their families. How can we who want truth, justice and freedom support this bill and those who have engineered this proposal? Today, we are faced with unemployment, lack of adequate medical insurance (health care as well), violence, foreclosures, and two wars just to name a few. It is hardening that Congressman Gutierrez would have placed this proposal at the end of 2009 and not give any chance for public input. It is time to place progressive, honest, and loyal folk in Congress. Jorge Mujica must be supported by all progressive minded voters. Finally, the buck stops here, do not support the organizations that are on the website, do not support the politicians that are ramming this proposal down our throats and do not turn your back on the undocumented worker who is law abiding, hard working, caring family member, who fears God and is here because the USA is the land of milk and honey. Join us today so that tomorrow we will have a country that is far better that what it is today.
gracias.
SONNY WROTE:
Carlos,
I agree with you in principle, but what would you suggest we do? We can make all the demands that most all of us who are fighting for this want. But can we really win it? The people are too tired and too scared to stand up like they did in 2006. So with out that support it is going to be very difficult to pass the bill that we have let alone what is really necessary. I am all for going for the gold but lets be real! Would you rather see nothing pass and our people that are here RIGHT NOW continue to live in the shadows?
You can call all our brothers and sister fighting for La Causa sellouts, traitors and what ever other adjective you can think of but what would you suggest? And can we win it? That is the first question any organizer worth their salt should be asking them selves can we win this?
The problem as I see it that caused us to fail in 2006 and 2007 was the lack of unity. Everyone in Chicago wanted credit for what happened with the marches. Everyone wanted to be the big cheese...including you Carlos. Always screaming,yelling and crying that you were not given the credit you were owed for what you did. When the reality of the whole thing was that Enrique Morones from the Border Angles kicked the whole thing off w/ "La Marcha Migrante 1", and I dont here him screaming about not getting credit for it.
When I got involved with this in 2006 in my little ass Midwestern town of Bloomington IL and 1000 ppl hit the streets on April 10, 2006 and again on May 1, 2006. I was not saying that it was because of me that they came out even though I am the only one who organized it in my town. I said it then and I will say it again this is bigger then me and its bigger then you this was a joint effort involving everyone. Not one leader made it what it turned out to be it was El Pueblo Unido!!!...it was the people.
So stop the name calling and finger pointing, work on your group locally to push the reform the people want. Stop trying to stop this from happening. And stop trying to take the credit for something that you were just one spoke in the wheel of. No one person is this movement, we don't have a MLK or Chavez to rally around.
All the big dogs are doing their part with all their contacts and money that is not reaching us at the local level, and that is not helping, but we need to stay united or we will end up with nothing again!
I know that you are not the only voice of dissent and I am by no means jumping on the band wagon of ICIRR, NCLR and all the rest of the big dawgs. But I do know one thing, I am an organizer and I am doing what the "people" want, not what is going to make me look like el mero chingon.
You listed you demands, now how are you going to make them happen?
-And Remember: El Pueblo Unido Jamas sera Vencido!!!!
TONY HERRERA WROTE:
Dear Sonny,
My name is Tony Herrera. I am a founding member of Unidos en Arizona in Phoenix. We have addressed the very issue you raise today. We have been doing it for over three years on these lists.
I appreciate the tone of your response to Carlos. I agree, it is easy to "demand" and quite another to "win". Of course "win" depends on what one considers a victory.
One of the main weaknesses of our contemporary movement is the fact that we are split into two basic camps. I would consider these "mainstream" camps. They are:
1) Those that believe wholeheartedly that the only way to win reforms is to tail after, push, threaten, convince, elect into office, win as allies, etc. legislators who will fight for our just cause. All their plans, strategy and tactics are dictated by this fundamental belief. This includes all those who rally to "get out the vote", who organize phone call, fax and email campaigns at legislators, host citizenship classes, register voters door to door, organize "know your candidate" forums and debates, etc. All those who are 100% behind Luis Gutierrez for example, generally fall into this camp. I will refer to this side as the conservative or moderate camp for lack of a better description.
2) Those that believe that the only way to win reforms is to "take it to the street", to show grand displays of "force", of numbers whose sheer volume cannot help but be noticed. This includes all those who organize protests, petitions, press conferences, picket lines, demonstrations, etc. All their plans, strategy and tactics are dictated by this fundamental belief. All those who are behind the "emergency" protests and demonstrations and May Day marches and rallies for example generally fall into this camp. I will refer to this side as the left or radical camp for lack of a better description.
Each camp, to give them their due credit, has contributed to advancing this cause and practically every social/political cause for that matter and while they seem to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they are in fact two sides of the same coin. And herein lies the weakness I speak about.
What is that weakness? The fact that throughout all this effort, for over four decades, since the 1960's these two trends have dominated the political scenery, the great masses of our community have and continue to remain unorganized. What I mean by that is not that they may not be organized behind a march or a voter registration drive for either of these two camps.
What I am referring to is that fact that our community has not been able to organize to take full advantage of not only its voting or marching power, but the power contained in how it spends its money and its strategic position to industry and the fact that without them nothing moves.
What both camps have failed to do is to harness the real power contained in our community and that failure has come back to haunt us today as you correctly surmise and ask "...What can we really win?"
Both of these trends while whining about how bad things are and how much our community is suffering has done nothing to prepare our people to survive and resist the ever tightening noose that has been put around our necks. "Emergency" calls to "action" and "Emergency" trips to Washington have done a good job of generating publicity and to put these trends in the people's eyes, but it has not moved one inch towards arming them with the orgnanzation and consciousness that our community will need to wage a fight for our lives that will be upon us before we know it.
Already here in Arizona, the legislature has passed a law that forces public aid employees to act as immigration agents and report those who apply for aid for their CITIZEN CHILDREN to be forwarded to ICE! Some utilities now will NOT turn on new service without a valid social security number, sanitation workers have been instructed to report "suspicious" activity when making their garbage rounds throughout the city.
These are things to which we began sounding the alarm over three years ago before we even became aware of operation "Endgame", the 10 year plan by DHS to wipe the undocumented community off the US map. Men, women and children. All those on these lists are well aware of the warnings we sounded and the proposals we made to prepare our community to not only survive this period, but in doing so it would prepare them to make congress "an offer they couldn't refuse" when coupled with a grassroots reform proposal and allied with legislators with principles and ethics to fight for what was just. The only response we got from one person essentially told us that we should go ahead and see how our plan works. So much for strategic dialog!
Imagine entire communities across the country with the reserves to hold out without work for an extended and even indefinite period of time? How much bargaining power would that have thrown into the mix?
It is foolish to think that Gutierrez's bill is a "victory". It is anything but! It is exactly what Carlos says it is. A disguised move to put in place a systematic control mechanism for the entire US population. Why would would we need to be controlled? Its simple.
As the free trade agreements continue to devastate the economies of our Latin American neighbors, their workforce will be drawn to cross the borders at all cost. Once a temporary guest worker program is put in place in the new reform bill, this will lead to millions of "guest" workers flooding the labor market leading to a total impoverishment of us all. This will lead to widespread discontent and outright hostility not only to the government for allowing this to happen, but even more dangerous to us, to view our immigrant sector as the enemy, responsible for taking the food and livelihood from people who have been reduce to groveling for their daily existence. The U.S. workforce.
A new bill will not pass until it satisfies corporate designs. Those of us who are trying to lead the efforts to stop these outrages must keep up with the latest information which is readily available to us if we search it out on the Internet. Doing so, you would know that the World Trade Organization made up of the developed powers of this planet have already decided on the future of migrant labor and migrations by agreeing to the terms and conditions on a global scale on the use of "temporary" workers or "guest" workers as they are fondly called by these global parasites who like to use benign terminology. We refer to them as "disposable" workers as that is exactly what they will be. If you look at Europe you can see the same policies as here are being implemented all across Europe on all levels. It is no accident and it should give us the heads up as to what direction things are going in.
Does anyone happen to see a slight parallel between today and say, 70 years ago in a goose stepping European country? Does anyone have any doubt that the modern "Jews" of today are in fact, our undocumented community?
Lets summarize what that country was all about during that period in history. The criminalization and demonization of the Jewish population succeeded in dividing the German people and secondly diverting their attention from attacking those who were actually pulling the strings to going after the poor schmuck who had more in common with the Jewish people than with the German masters who were going to benefit from this state of affairs. Finally it succeeded in lowering the general standard of living as now Jewish slave labor was available to industrialists to keep the factories going to compete with the non-Jewish workforce. Why was this done? In order to enable total control of the German citizenry who by then had become totally militarized and under fascist dictatorship. All opposition had been long ago squashed and eliminated as a pre-cursor to war and the expansion of war for control of world resources and markets. Is it fundamentally any different today? I don't think so and I would challenge anyone to prove so.
The American people by allowing themselves to buy into this program are inadvertently buying into their own enslavement, willingly, under the guise of pursuing "illegals" and "fighting terrorism".
What does this mean for us today? It means that we must begin in earnest the building of organizations at the deep grassroots all across the country both internal to and external to the immigrant community in preparation for what lies ahead.
Here in Arizona we have begun the building of bases and alliances with the Anglo and citizen community where our undocumented community has natural links. It is these alliances that will allow for the spreading of consciousness amongst the citizenry that will give our movement the political muscle to sway politicians as their own bases begin to question the status quo. But someone has to start that work! It will not happen by itself.
It means the formation of family businesses and survival operations such as the growing of food, stashing money to have as reserves, making each church in our community becomes a bastion for community centers and such things as soup or community kitchens to be capable of feeding large number of people who will find themselves unable to work and buy necessities. We are talking here of developing micro economies that will enable our community to survive and thrive even during the height of repression.
It means forming mutual support groups and organizations tying together the natural networks that our community has in the form of families, friends, neighbors, work mates, etc. to enter into pacts where a commitment is made to support each other come what may "one for all and all for one".
It means finding means to setup clinics and health programs that can care for our community when they have no other sources to turn to as the doors are quickly shutting to the most basic of services. There are no statistics for how many of our people die for lack of medical care for fear of being discovered. We can only guess.
As the situation worsens, allies from amongst the citizenry are coming forward as never before, offering help and asking how they can be of assistance. Some citizen Anglo families have "adopted" immigrant families based on deep friendships that have developed over years of interacting together. They offer money when the immigrant family has none, housing when they find themselves without shelter, payment for medical expenses and so on. These are things that are occurring naturally without intervention or organizers playing a hand. Imagine if you will how much richer and deeper this movement could grow with a deliberate, organized effort on our part. Like the German families who risked it all to help Jewish families during the second world war, so too are citizens stepping forward to take their place alongside their immigrant brothers. The way forward is plain to see.
These are things which Unidos en Arizona has been steadily working on, not without difficulty as this has never been done in our lifetime and there are no models to emulate. We have to build them from scratch. Family business are springing up raising chickens for example whose eggs can be sold and meat available to eat for when no food is available.
Small cooperatives are in the making as families are coming together to help each other to figure out how they are to weather the storm. These are dynamics that didn't exist during the days when all that they were being told was to march, protest and run around "putting out fires" or help convert new citizens and voters.
There is so much that has to be done to build the type of movement nationwide that we will need to wage a real fight and not simply as observers to slick politicians or slaves to our own reactive habits. This includes formulating our own bill and seeking allies from amongst the legislators who are willing to stand with us, again dependent on having a base of support amongst the citizenry. This means we will have to enter into alliances and seek out new allies from amongst the citizen population and get them to begin the organization at the grass roots. These are organizational tools for when they too are forced into extreme poverty. It is only a matter of time.
This type of work is quantum leaps beyond the scope of the present dominant trends which are still locked into a path carved in stone like a boat with a broken rudder going in circles until it runs out of steam.
We cannot afford a movement like that anymore because our survival depends on breaking that mold and creating new ones.
Where does it start? When others start questioning the formulas they have been following in the name of our movement and decide to blaze new trails, to find creative solutions and develop real fighting strategies that are not the same ol, same ol way of doing things. This approach depends on people willing to build the types of relationships with our community at the deep grass roots where the movement and our community become one and new leaders begin to emerge that are not stuck in old formulas and can help teach those of us who are, but are open to change.
Please listen to us people as we do not have the luxury of time. The key is in building and expanding the bases of support and leadership both within and external to our community. One day those very people who came to our aid will be needing our support and help and if we do this work, we will already have built the bridges of mutual support. "One for all and all for one" must be the spirit that replaces the racial hatred and suspicions. That work must begin in earnest with no time to lose.
For those who would like a copy of our original proposal made twice in 2007, reply to this email and I will send you a copy.
I will close with the same statement that we made almost three years ago when we made our first public appeal for our movement to chart a new course back in March of 2007:
"We have to say that the time to reflect on these things is not when we are being herded off to detention centers for either being undocumented or for being allied with them. Their cause is our cause in a one for all and all for one proposition. There is no time to waste."
In solidarity,
Tony Herrera
Unidos en Arizona
My name is Tony Herrera. I am a founding member of Unidos en Arizona in Phoenix. We have addressed the very issue you raise today. We have been doing it for over three years on these lists.
I appreciate the tone of your response to Carlos. I agree, it is easy to "demand" and quite another to "win". Of course "win" depends on what one considers a victory.
One of the main weaknesses of our contemporary movement is the fact that we are split into two basic camps. I would consider these "mainstream" camps. They are:
1) Those that believe wholeheartedly that the only way to win reforms is to tail after, push, threaten, convince, elect into office, win as allies, etc. legislators who will fight for our just cause. All their plans, strategy and tactics are dictated by this fundamental belief. This includes all those who rally to "get out the vote", who organize phone call, fax and email campaigns at legislators, host citizenship classes, register voters door to door, organize "know your candidate" forums and debates, etc. All those who are 100% behind Luis Gutierrez for example, generally fall into this camp. I will refer to this side as the conservative or moderate camp for lack of a better description.
2) Those that believe that the only way to win reforms is to "take it to the street", to show grand displays of "force", of numbers whose sheer volume cannot help but be noticed. This includes all those who organize protests, petitions, press conferences, picket lines, demonstrations, etc. All their plans, strategy and tactics are dictated by this fundamental belief. All those who are behind the "emergency" protests and demonstrations and May Day marches and rallies for example generally fall into this camp. I will refer to this side as the left or radical camp for lack of a better description.
Each camp, to give them their due credit, has contributed to advancing this cause and practically every social/political cause for that matter and while they seem to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they are in fact two sides of the same coin. And herein lies the weakness I speak about.
What is that weakness? The fact that throughout all this effort, for over four decades, since the 1960's these two trends have dominated the political scenery, the great masses of our community have and continue to remain unorganized. What I mean by that is not that they may not be organized behind a march or a voter registration drive for either of these two camps.
What I am referring to is that fact that our community has not been able to organize to take full advantage of not only its voting or marching power, but the power contained in how it spends its money and its strategic position to industry and the fact that without them nothing moves.
What both camps have failed to do is to harness the real power contained in our community and that failure has come back to haunt us today as you correctly surmise and ask "...What can we really win?"
Both of these trends while whining about how bad things are and how much our community is suffering has done nothing to prepare our people to survive and resist the ever tightening noose that has been put around our necks. "Emergency" calls to "action" and "Emergency" trips to Washington have done a good job of generating publicity and to put these trends in the people's eyes, but it has not moved one inch towards arming them with the orgnanzation and consciousness that our community will need to wage a fight for our lives that will be upon us before we know it.
Already here in Arizona, the legislature has passed a law that forces public aid employees to act as immigration agents and report those who apply for aid for their CITIZEN CHILDREN to be forwarded to ICE! Some utilities now will NOT turn on new service without a valid social security number, sanitation workers have been instructed to report "suspicious" activity when making their garbage rounds throughout the city.
These are things to which we began sounding the alarm over three years ago before we even became aware of operation "Endgame", the 10 year plan by DHS to wipe the undocumented community off the US map. Men, women and children. All those on these lists are well aware of the warnings we sounded and the proposals we made to prepare our community to not only survive this period, but in doing so it would prepare them to make congress "an offer they couldn't refuse" when coupled with a grassroots reform proposal and allied with legislators with principles and ethics to fight for what was just. The only response we got from one person essentially told us that we should go ahead and see how our plan works. So much for strategic dialog!
Imagine entire communities across the country with the reserves to hold out without work for an extended and even indefinite period of time? How much bargaining power would that have thrown into the mix?
It is foolish to think that Gutierrez's bill is a "victory". It is anything but! It is exactly what Carlos says it is. A disguised move to put in place a systematic control mechanism for the entire US population. Why would would we need to be controlled? Its simple.
As the free trade agreements continue to devastate the economies of our Latin American neighbors, their workforce will be drawn to cross the borders at all cost. Once a temporary guest worker program is put in place in the new reform bill, this will lead to millions of "guest" workers flooding the labor market leading to a total impoverishment of us all. This will lead to widespread discontent and outright hostility not only to the government for allowing this to happen, but even more dangerous to us, to view our immigrant sector as the enemy, responsible for taking the food and livelihood from people who have been reduce to groveling for their daily existence. The U.S. workforce.
A new bill will not pass until it satisfies corporate designs. Those of us who are trying to lead the efforts to stop these outrages must keep up with the latest information which is readily available to us if we search it out on the Internet. Doing so, you would know that the World Trade Organization made up of the developed powers of this planet have already decided on the future of migrant labor and migrations by agreeing to the terms and conditions on a global scale on the use of "temporary" workers or "guest" workers as they are fondly called by these global parasites who like to use benign terminology. We refer to them as "disposable" workers as that is exactly what they will be. If you look at Europe you can see the same policies as here are being implemented all across Europe on all levels. It is no accident and it should give us the heads up as to what direction things are going in.
Does anyone happen to see a slight parallel between today and say, 70 years ago in a goose stepping European country? Does anyone have any doubt that the modern "Jews" of today are in fact, our undocumented community?
Lets summarize what that country was all about during that period in history. The criminalization and demonization of the Jewish population succeeded in dividing the German people and secondly diverting their attention from attacking those who were actually pulling the strings to going after the poor schmuck who had more in common with the Jewish people than with the German masters who were going to benefit from this state of affairs. Finally it succeeded in lowering the general standard of living as now Jewish slave labor was available to industrialists to keep the factories going to compete with the non-Jewish workforce. Why was this done? In order to enable total control of the German citizenry who by then had become totally militarized and under fascist dictatorship. All opposition had been long ago squashed and eliminated as a pre-cursor to war and the expansion of war for control of world resources and markets. Is it fundamentally any different today? I don't think so and I would challenge anyone to prove so.
The American people by allowing themselves to buy into this program are inadvertently buying into their own enslavement, willingly, under the guise of pursuing "illegals" and "fighting terrorism".
What does this mean for us today? It means that we must begin in earnest the building of organizations at the deep grassroots all across the country both internal to and external to the immigrant community in preparation for what lies ahead.
Here in Arizona we have begun the building of bases and alliances with the Anglo and citizen community where our undocumented community has natural links. It is these alliances that will allow for the spreading of consciousness amongst the citizenry that will give our movement the political muscle to sway politicians as their own bases begin to question the status quo. But someone has to start that work! It will not happen by itself.
It means the formation of family businesses and survival operations such as the growing of food, stashing money to have as reserves, making each church in our community becomes a bastion for community centers and such things as soup or community kitchens to be capable of feeding large number of people who will find themselves unable to work and buy necessities. We are talking here of developing micro economies that will enable our community to survive and thrive even during the height of repression.
It means forming mutual support groups and organizations tying together the natural networks that our community has in the form of families, friends, neighbors, work mates, etc. to enter into pacts where a commitment is made to support each other come what may "one for all and all for one".
It means finding means to setup clinics and health programs that can care for our community when they have no other sources to turn to as the doors are quickly shutting to the most basic of services. There are no statistics for how many of our people die for lack of medical care for fear of being discovered. We can only guess.
As the situation worsens, allies from amongst the citizenry are coming forward as never before, offering help and asking how they can be of assistance. Some citizen Anglo families have "adopted" immigrant families based on deep friendships that have developed over years of interacting together. They offer money when the immigrant family has none, housing when they find themselves without shelter, payment for medical expenses and so on. These are things that are occurring naturally without intervention or organizers playing a hand. Imagine if you will how much richer and deeper this movement could grow with a deliberate, organized effort on our part. Like the German families who risked it all to help Jewish families during the second world war, so too are citizens stepping forward to take their place alongside their immigrant brothers. The way forward is plain to see.
These are things which Unidos en Arizona has been steadily working on, not without difficulty as this has never been done in our lifetime and there are no models to emulate. We have to build them from scratch. Family business are springing up raising chickens for example whose eggs can be sold and meat available to eat for when no food is available.
Small cooperatives are in the making as families are coming together to help each other to figure out how they are to weather the storm. These are dynamics that didn't exist during the days when all that they were being told was to march, protest and run around "putting out fires" or help convert new citizens and voters.
There is so much that has to be done to build the type of movement nationwide that we will need to wage a real fight and not simply as observers to slick politicians or slaves to our own reactive habits. This includes formulating our own bill and seeking allies from amongst the legislators who are willing to stand with us, again dependent on having a base of support amongst the citizenry. This means we will have to enter into alliances and seek out new allies from amongst the citizen population and get them to begin the organization at the grass roots. These are organizational tools for when they too are forced into extreme poverty. It is only a matter of time.
This type of work is quantum leaps beyond the scope of the present dominant trends which are still locked into a path carved in stone like a boat with a broken rudder going in circles until it runs out of steam.
We cannot afford a movement like that anymore because our survival depends on breaking that mold and creating new ones.
Where does it start? When others start questioning the formulas they have been following in the name of our movement and decide to blaze new trails, to find creative solutions and develop real fighting strategies that are not the same ol, same ol way of doing things. This approach depends on people willing to build the types of relationships with our community at the deep grass roots where the movement and our community become one and new leaders begin to emerge that are not stuck in old formulas and can help teach those of us who are, but are open to change.
Please listen to us people as we do not have the luxury of time. The key is in building and expanding the bases of support and leadership both within and external to our community. One day those very people who came to our aid will be needing our support and help and if we do this work, we will already have built the bridges of mutual support. "One for all and all for one" must be the spirit that replaces the racial hatred and suspicions. That work must begin in earnest with no time to lose.
For those who would like a copy of our original proposal made twice in 2007, reply to this email and I will send you a copy.
I will close with the same statement that we made almost three years ago when we made our first public appeal for our movement to chart a new course back in March of 2007:
"We have to say that the time to reflect on these things is not when we are being herded off to detention centers for either being undocumented or for being allied with them. Their cause is our cause in a one for all and all for one proposition. There is no time to waste."
In solidarity,
Tony Herrera
Unidos en Arizona
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