Category Archives: blog

Emil Guillermo: One minority view of the Tax-cut deal

If you come from immigrant stock,  here’s one way to look at this $858 billion tax cut plan Obama and the Republicans are proposing.

Consider how you, your parents or grandparents came to America for opportunity. But now the capitalists here have gotten smarter. They’re shipping jobs back to where we came from.  That’s the American Dream now. You stay put, our jobs will migrate to you.

You see, you never had to immigrate in the first place. The New America is global. It’s wherever you are. 

In the eight years of the Bush Administration, 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost as plants were shut down all over the U.S.  Opportunities? If you’re Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Indian, or from any other low wage country, it’s right under you nose. Just wait, America will be there and pay you in your native currency.

If you heard Sen.Bernie Sanders nearly nine-hour speech last Friday, you heard his lament. In 2000, there were 17,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. By 2008 there were less than 12,000.  Since the beginning of World War II, the U.S. has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs–a 29 percent reduction.

That’s just one of the reasons why so many people are out of work here.

And now those people  face  the indignity of being the pawns in this huge tax-cut game in Washington.

In order to get unemployment, the GOP wants to trade extension of benefits for the extension of the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy

That’s practically immoral.

An $858 billion  tax cut proposal is just insane given our $13.8 trillion national debt.

But this is the road advocates for the tax-cut deal us on.

Our jobs are gone, our people are unemployed, our future compromised.

If you’re in a Third World nation now, why would you ever want to come to America?

More on the tax cut bill on my blog at www.aaldef.org/blog

Keep Dreaming: Dream Act vote on hold in Senate

The fight over taxes trumped the fight over the undocumented this week.  No time for GOP handwringing over “illegals.” The rich want to make sure they get their dole extended.

I hope the people who want the tax cuts know that the undocumented pay more than their share in taxes.  They don’t need a tax cut. But they sure merit a reward for being productive members of our society. Residency, citizenship? None of that should be withheld.

The House passed the Dream Act this week to give the young undocumented hope.   But passing the dream in the Senate will be a problem next week.

On Thursday, the Senate voted  to put off the measure till next week because many Senate Republicans said they’d filibuster the bill if it came up before the tax compromise.

So the delay gives more time for supporters  to lobby.

Check out my regular post  to see the key senators who are important in the vote. It’s on my regular column/blog:

 www.aaldef.org/blog

It’s not as dreamy as I’d like, but Congress set to vote on Dream Act this week

Check out my blog post on the uphill battle for the Dream Act  at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund website:

http://www.aaldef.org/blog/

Many GOPers are planning to vote against the Dream Act. 

They’re not thinking.

All those undocumented students that would be legalized become voters for life. Voting for the Dream Act is ultimately a selfish act for a GOP legislator.

But they’re stuck in the old closed-minded thinking about immigration that believes the undocumented shouldn’t be rewarded for becoming educated and productive taxpayers. To them, the dream is to send people back to their countries and cut off any new access to the border.

That’s not my dream. Is it yours?

What’s so heroic about WikiLeaks’ wiki-dump?

I am no enemy of Democracy, but I’m having a hard time with the massive wiki-dump from WikiLeaks.

One thing I will grant WikiLeaks. If a journalist had to use the Freedom of Information Act to get all of 250,000 cables, it wouldn’t have happened. It would have come back super-redacted with so many blackouts it would read like an undone New York Times crossword.

Still, the sheer almagamation of stuff is mind boggling, as opposed to the little details which are kind of interesting, but not screaming front page headlines.

A deluge, however, is still a deluge. 

Got to hand it to the New York Times, which has become the de facto Cliff’s Notes of the Wiki-dump. As a sub-sub-leaker, the paper leaked in true old-fashioned  journalistic style. It went to the Obama administration and asked for more redactions, some of which it followed. But then it published it anyway because it didn’t want to be left out in the cold when WikiLeaks let everything out anyway.  Hard to be a journalistic purist in the age of the net. It was the same kind of thing when the Times quoted the National Enquirer in salacious stories. Hard to be a prude when everything’s exposed.

Still, if the best headlines are what’s been in the Times so far (the Yemenis, China hacking Google, “Let’s make a deal” for Guantanamo prisoners, South Korea and the U.S. baffled over China, and Qadafi’s blonde nurse),  I still don’t find anything as outrageous as the fact that some diplomats are getting personal  info on foreign dignatiries.

In other words, the diplomats are working as spies which can be used for surveillance and data mining. That’s not supposed to happen. And if it is, then you wouldn’t want to expose our spies, now would you?

Some critics are calling for Hillary Clinton’s head over this. I’m not sure it’s at that level yet. But the leaks have shown that our diplomatic efforts are far less diplomatic than they appear.

Is that something to thank WikiLeaks for? I don’t think so. They just stripped our diplomatic force of their dignity making it harder to carry on and do the work they must do if we are to avoid the stupid wars we find ourselves currently involved in. That’s not worth the gossipy tidbits that seem to excite the foreign policy wonks.

Check out my other post at www.aaldef.org/blog