Trino mural & why we're losing our casas

Tribute includes Trinidad Sanchez, Jr.

A reader sent us this great website about San Anto, Tejas, that includes photos of the city's Chicano murals. The mural in which poeta Trino was honored is identified as "Lideres de Westside". There are other website pages with cultural facets of the town, some of which are commercial.

Here's more links to it:

Los Tres Reyes dedican un corrido al barrio de San Antonio TX WestSide, en un video homenaje, para más información visitar aquí.

Los Tres Reyes dedicated a corrido about the Westside of San Antonio, TX, in a video tribute, for more information visit here.

Trino Presente!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Getting it put to us

The following excerpt is taken from TomDispatch and reprinted here because it's about Chicanos, mexicanos, latinos in general getting the worst of the American dream:

"We already know that it’s party time for the financial elite who gave real meaning to the phrase “economic meltdown” in 2008, that bonuses are soaring, that corporate profits for the third quarter of 2010 are beyond the stratosphere, and that the corporate chieftains and Wall Street titans of our new gilded age have, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote recently, “waged economic warfare against everybody else and are winning big time.”

"What we know far less about is the degree of the catastrophe they inflicted on the rest of us. Here’s just one story that should be front-paged in our major newspapers, but for which, at the moment, you have to turn to Dollars and Sense, a modest if intriguing economic publication. There, Jim Campen, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and an expert on racial discrimination in mortgage lending, has written a piece entitled, “Update on Mortgage Lending Discrimination: After a Disastrous Detour, We’re Back Where We Started.”

"It may not sound like much, but what a horror story it tells. If you were black or Latino in the 1980s or early 1990s and wanted to buy a home, the odds were that the banks had “redlined” your neighborhood and were denying you mortgage applications at “disproportionately high rates” compared to whites in similar economic circumstances. In other words, you would have a tough time becoming a homeowner.

"Then came those high-cost subprime loans whose fine print ensured that you would never be able to pay them back. In a case of “reverse redlining,” they were aggressively targeted at black and Latino neighborhoods in numbers strikingly disproportionate to white neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, when the housing bubble burst, the financial world shuddered, the economy went south, and wave after wave of foreclosures began to sweep across the country, it was black and Latino homeowners suffered the most.

"In Boston in 2006, the peak year of the subprime lending boom, Campen discovered that “49% of all home-purchase loans to blacks, and 48% of all home-purchase loans to Latinos, were high-cost loans, compared to just 11% of all loans to whites.” In the carnage that followed, he informs us, nearly 8% of black and Latino homeowners were foreclosed on, compared to 4.5% of whites. In other words, while the people TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll calls “the New Oligarchs” bought Dom Pérignon and celebrated, they had let loose the financial equivalent of a neutron bomb on nonwhite neighborhoods in America. It’s a scandal that should be at the top of the news, not in obscure magazines or at websites like this one, and it’s just a small part of the larger, distinctly un-American scandal."

by Tom Englehardt

To read the entire article regarding how American wealth is eluding almost all of us, go here.

What we don't know is more than a surprise

Americans are famous for their ignorance about the world, maybe in part because they rely on local newspapers or Tom Brokaw to know what's going on in the world. In the so-called information age, less and less reliable information is what we're being served up. Where cities had two newspapers, they now barely hold on to one. The number of publication companies has shriveled. And journalism's standards have commensurately fallen.

Journalistic standards too, he says? Remember the Vietnam War years, when daily we saw photos of suffering Vietnamese civilians? When's the last time you saw a photo or video of Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan civilian suffering? News of the first caliber helped influence Americans to pull out of Vietnam. News of the second caliber helps Americans ignore what happens in our present wars.

There are countless more examples: "imbedded" American journalists are no longer free to cover wars; they're constantly escorted by military types, helping to filter what Americans know of the world.

The result will be Surprise! not simply ignorance. In our name, with our tax money, the (presently) most powerful government on the planet goes about its business with little free press coverage to inform us of what may come. Then, Surprise! the Gulf of Mexico is suddenly no longer useable.

Below are some reliable free press sources that aren't "imbedded" and snippets of the types of information they make available daily.

Frontera NorteSur

The editor asks: "El Paso and other places on the US side of the border are actually far less violent than many communities in the interior of the US. Is anyone proposing to send troops to Albuquerque or Oakland?"

From their July 16, 2010 Immigration News release: "A report by Mexico’s National Institute of Geography, Statistics and Informatics provides details on the emptying of the countryside in the Mexican state of Michoacan. Of 537,000 homes in rural Michoacan, nearly one in four, 23%, stand abandoned throughout the entire year or portions of it, the study finds.

According to the federal agency, Michoacan’s population dropped from approximately 4.2 million people in 1995, a year after the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a time when economic crisis clawed the landscape, to an estimated 3,926,000 inhabitants today.

"Every year for the last 15 years, between 25,000-30,000 residents of Michoacan have moved to the United States, said Zaira Mandujano Fernandez, secretary of migrant affairs for Michoacan. Despite economic downturn and tougher US border security, Mandujano said she expected the current rate of migration to the US to continue for the next 20 years. Michoacan is a main battlefronts in the so-called narco war.

"Victor Castillo, of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, told reporters that 400 Mexican families have moved to McAllen and other nearby towns during the last six months. Further inland, in San Antonio, a representative of RE/MAX said Mexicans now make up 80 percent of the local company’s clients, up from 35% four years ago."

You can subscribe to Frontera NorteSur for free and without submitting more than your Email.

TomDispatch.com

"Tomdispatch.com is for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our post-9/11 world and a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works." For 15 years, he was Senior Editor at Pantheon Books where he watched the publishing world getting swallowed by corporations more interested in profits than literature.

Recent dispatches:

Nick Turse writes American War Versus Real War (July 13, 2010) comparing news coverage of today's wars to the Vietnam War: "The horrific shots Army photographer Ron Haeberle took of what became known as the My Lai massacre as it was happening. . . The suffering and destruction our soldiers were bringing to ordinary civilians in a distant, disastrous war was far clearer then. . . Nick Turse points out in his discussion of Sebastian Junger’s new film Restrepo, our Afghan War is now generally being recorded in real time in the fashion made familiar to Americans on screen in the post-Vietnam years--that is, largely without Afghan suffering."

And you can find out Why We’re Losing the War Against Influenza - by John M. Barry.

Want to know where all the U.S. terrorism is coming from? Stephan Salisbury writes Plotting Terrorism - July 6, 2010.
"The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four -- each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds--provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones--provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition--issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions--leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions."

You can sign up free for TomDispatch or get it on Facebook, Twitter and Podcast. Again, just providing your Email.

Democracy Now!

This is the "daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airing on over 800 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the U.S."

They Have Terrorized Our Community: Anti-Immigrant List Targets Latinos in Utah

"An anonymous group has distributed a list that is spreading terror and outrage among the Latino community in Utah. The list includes names, addresses, workplaces, phone numbers, birth dates and, in some cases, Social Security numbers of some 1,300 people that the group alleges are undocumented. The list was sent to law enforcement officials, state lawmakers and the media, and urges that those on the list be immediately deported. All the names are Latino, and they include over 200 children and the due dates for six pregnant women."

It's mid-July here in Denver and the temperature today might break 100. But that doesn't compare to: Global Warming to Bring Increased Heat Waves to US
"Following last week’s record-breaking East Coast heat wave, a new study by Stanford University climate scientists says as global warming continues, such heat waves will be increasingly common in the future. The study found exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next thirty years, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health."

OR

Himalayan Glaciers Melting Faster Than Anywhere Else in World; Impact Could Devastate Over 1 Billion People
"We look at the impact of climate change in the Himalayas region in Asia, where scientists are warning glaciers are receding faster than anywhere else in the world, with the potential to devastate over a billion people. The Himalayan glaciers have been described as the water towers of Asia, as they provide a key source of water to ten major Asian river systems."

Goodman's voice is a little raking, but the content is worth listening to on NPR around the country. Or you can go to their website. And the site's even in Spanish. Gonzales couldn't work on Good Morning Vietnam but "he was the first reporter in New York City to consistently expose the health effects arising from the September 11, 2001 attacks and the cover-up of these hazards by government officials." And he started "the Parity Project, an innovative program that creates partnerships between local communities and media organizations to improve coverage of the Latino community and to recruit and retain more Hispanic journalists."

Es todo, hoy
RudyG

A Latino soldier's memoirs of Iraqi "collateral damage"

With every passing of Memorial Day, Chicanos, mexicanos, green-card holders and immigrant Latinos enter the U.S.'s military with hopes for acceptance by American society, driven by their newly adopted patriotism, and with aspirations to grub-stake their own American dream. Unfortunately, along with this comes our sometimes even naïve complicity to use the weapons of war on innocent civilians who are too often dark-skinned peoples not unlike us.

I read a piece this week that affected and impressed me such that I asked and received permission from TomDispatch.com to share parts of it with La Bloga readers. Two weekends after Memorial Day, seems a fitting time to post the following, adapted by Chris Hedges from his just released Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (Nation Books),
co-authored with Laila al-Arian. (Hedges is former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute.)

What impressed me most was not only Hedges' strikingly insightful and brutally compassionate analysis of what the Iraq War has done to American soldiers and Iraqi citizens, but more the words of Camilo Mejía, who became the first American veteran of this war to refuse service. (Mejía, originally from Nicaragua, became a permanent resident. In 1995, at age 19, he joined the Army and served nearly 9 years. In 2003 he was sent to Iraq. Mejía applied for a conscientious objector discharge after five months in Iraq, was charged with desertion, and served nine months before being released.)

You may not agree with the views expressed in my opening paragraph, and I am reviewing neither Hedges' nor Mejía's books for you here. You can do that for yourself for the reasons Hedges expresses in his last sentence below. Go here to read Hedges' entire piece or find out more about his book, as well as here to learn more about Mejía and his memoir, Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía. And if you choose, let us know your thoughts. My own thoughts became confused as I read. I couldn't keep from hearing parallels between the attitudes and treatment of the Iraqi people there, and we and our brethren here in the U.S. But maybe that's just me.

Collateral Damage by Chris Hedges [excerpts]

Sgt. Camilo Mejía, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "sh-tting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals.

The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. [Bloga note: haji is an honorific for those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca.] Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music."

Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejía remembered, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."

These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejía watched, not daring to intervene yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When Army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gunpoint, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.

"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.

"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also noted.

Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze.

"It's fun to shoot sh-t up," a soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."

"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," Mejía said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."

At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejía and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejía checked his clip afterward and determined that he had fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers, and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Mejía said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."

* * *
Mejía said, regarding the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, "This sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."

Mejía also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. He related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf---er," said one of the soldiers who had been in Mejía's squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.

The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really f---ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Mejía noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

The senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely experienced combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejía noted, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks."

This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges -- bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath -- were finally awarded, the commanders brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.

"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejía noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."

[Final thoughts from author Hedges]

"Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves." (© 2008 Chris Hedges)

Rudy Ch. Garcia