Posted on 01/08/2006 1:22:16 AM PST by Simmy2.5
# The movement built by Cesar Chavez has failed to expand on its early successes organizing poor rural laborers. As their plight is used to attract donations that benefit others, services for those in the fields are left to languish.
Red letters flash inside the famous black eagle, symbol of the United Farm Workers: "Donate," the blinking message urges, to carry on the dreams of Cesar Chavez.
Bannered on websites and spread by e-mail, the insistent appeals resonate with a generation that grew up boycotting grapes, swept up in Chavez's populist crusade to bring dignity and higher wages to farmworkers.
Thirty-five years after Chavez riveted the nation, the strikes and fasts are just history, the organizers who packed jails and prayed over produce in supermarket aisles are gone, their righteous pleas reduced to plaintive laments.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Not for long, they don't. I mean, gimme a break.
I remember when I was a kid my mom talking about boycotting grapes, etc. The article describes how the Chavez name is used for leftist political activism in general--for gay marriage, among other things. So much for helping the plight of the farm workers.
Pass the popcorn! Eating their own...
Chavez's heirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy and invoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in public and private money. Most of the funds go to burnish the Chavez image and expand the family business, a multimillion-dollar enterprise with an annual payroll of $12 million that includes a dozen Chavez relatives.
The UFW is the linchpin of the Farm Worker Movement, a network of a dozen tax-exempt organizations that do business with one another [to] enrich friends and family... Chavez's heirs broke with labor solidarity and hired nonunion workers to build the $3.2-million National Chavez Center around their founder's grave in the Tehachapi Mountains, a site they now market as a tourist attraction and rent out for weddings.
ping
Just like in Animal Farm.
In the late '60s in Boston, Chavez came to town and organized a rally....a march to Boston Harbor, and throwing lettuce in the harbor, along with a very articulate speech.
Even then, I didn't get it. My reaction was...."why doesn't this guy just go back to Mexico with his lettuce-picking buddies and start their own farms, and pay and care for the workers there?"
I mean, even back then the Harbor was a polluted, gloppy mess. What was he trying to prove by throwing produce in it? Weird day, but free entertainment, surrounded by people who bought his nonsense.
I understand why he came to Boston--he was trying to spread the boycott. I also understand why he'd rather stay in the US than in Mexico.
What I don't understand is why people keep buying this liberal bs even when, as the article shows, the proof of the lies is right there to be seen. The Chavez family doesn't care about workers. It cares about what all libs care about--pushing their I Know Better Than You agenda.
Few realize that it was the UFW that was responsible for blocking the modernization and expansion of the H2A visa that played a major role in the growth of illegal immigration.
When the AFL-CIO joined the negotiations, AgJobs became the template for the broader reform bill that would be known as McCain-Kennedy.
That was the summer of '68. Many people bought this BS then because it was a time when EVERYONE was trying to change the world....the "conservatives" with VietNam, the "liberals" with school busing, jobs for the disenfranchised to equalize things, and stuff like a better life for poor Mexicans. (Read THE UGLY AMERICAN)
It was arrogance, with both "sides" thinking the whole world could be more like us. Nothing's changed much, really, except younger generations that aren't really into wanting to try to make the world a better place.
If you really want to catch the anger or the era, the best sources are un-altered music by Steppenwolf, Country Joe MacDonald, Buffy Sainte-Marie, etc.
(I remember the '60s)
Why do people keep buying the BS? Denial of where all the movements of the past have lead, maybe? Bad habits die hard, maybe?
When the AFL-CIO joined the negotiations, AgJobs became the template for the broader reform bill that would be known as McCain-Kennedy.
And there's this:
In Florida Groves, Cheap Labor Means Machines
By Eduardo Porter / NY Times 22mar04
Rather than make such investments [in mechanization], farmers mostly focused on lobbying government for easier access to inexpensive labor. California growers ... persuaded the government to admit Mexican workers during World War I. Later, from 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million Mexican farm workers were admitted into the country under the bracero guest-worker program.
Investment in technology generally happened when the immigrant spigot was shut. After the bracero program ended and some farm wages began to rise, scientists at the University of California at Davis began work on both a machine to harvest tomatoes mechanically and a tomato better suited to mechanical harvesting.
By 1970, the number of tomato-harvest jobs had been cut by two-thirds. But the tomato harvester's success proved to be a kiss of death for mechanical harvesting. In 1979, the farm worker advocacy group California Rural Legal Assistance, with support from the United Farm Workers union of Cesar Chavez, sued U.C. Davis, charging that it was using public money for research that displaced workers and helped only big growers.
The lawsuit was eventually settled. But even before that, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter's agriculture secretary, Bob Bergland, declared that the government would no longer finance research projects intended to replace "an adequate and willing work force with machines."
In 1986, farmers were instrumental in winning passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly three million illegal immigrants — more than a third under a special program for agriculture. Farmers' investments in labor-saving technology all but froze, and gains in labor productivity slowed.
snip
If we could only mechanize and automate, we could eliminate 20 million jobs?
Show me the robot that loads and unloads cotton bales. Show me the robot that hangs parts on the conveyor. Shoe me the robot that clears dirty dihes, changes sheets, and cleans toilets. Show me the robot that frames a house.
Did I say that it was? No.
If we could only mechanize and automate, we could eliminate 20 million jobs?
Did I say that? No.
Show me the robot that loads and unloads cotton bales. Show me the robot that hangs parts on the conveyor. Shoe me the robot that clears dirty dihes, changes sheets, and cleans toilets. Show me the robot that frames a house.
Settle down, Ben. There's still plenty of jobs for the illegal aliens to do.
Get out your IRS depreciation schedules.
ping
I was there in junior high school. We had a big hoopla
in the classroom over it.
Follow the money!
Because in Mexico their antics would last about 13 seconds before paid goons would mow them down with machine gun fire, and I'm not exaggerating.
Mexico is a feudal thugocracy. The landowners have private armies, staffed by professionals or police who collect pay from the "government" (there is no real organized government in Mexico, unless you consider a loose alliance of mafia gangs to be a "government") and the Patrons, and all property is held by force of arms - at least property worth having.
Anecdote: Christmas of 1974, my sister, managing an apartment complex in Tucson, had a tenant who came from a large landowning family. He had a Christmas list: guns of every make, including machine guns he was buying illegally. She said, "What the hell is all that for?" - he answered, "My dad needs them!".
The reality is that riots, demonstrations, radical organizations aimed at gutting the country, all the antics that Chavez and his heirs engage in, simply wouldn't happen in Mexico. They would end up dead, and no one could prevent that. Don't hear of much like that there, do you?
The massacre in Mexico City in 1968 was notable because it did have publicity. The reality is that crap like that happens all the time there - there just aren't any cameras or national press to talk about it. If they did, their buildings would conveniently burn down overnight.
Chavez and his UFW morons were cowards, in addition to being lightweight Communists. They knew what Mexico was like. If you run a "union" in Mexico, it's merely another thug operation, set up to chisel Mordida from the little people. Chavez tried to do the same here, just had to add a little more ideological patina to the whole thing to con the gullible. He probably couldn't have gone up against the real bad guys who run the "unions" (=gangs) down there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.