Posted on 03/11/2009 12:24:08 PM PDT by theruleshavechanged
Ceclia Munoz, appointed to head the president’s executive office of inter-governmental affairs. Her lobbying job was as senior vice president of the National Council of La Raza. (La Raza’s translation is “The Race.”)
(Excerpt) Read more at dcexaminer.com ...
It's not even deniable that this guy is an anti-American socialist. All that's debatable is how the MSM will be able to dance around it for the rest of his term.
*list ping*
Color me surprised.
Not.
He never did. It was all lies and show. His only concern is how much he can get away with before the people wake up...............
Ceclia Muñoz on farmworkers, xenophobia and hope
Thursday, 13 March 2008 13:10
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Cecilia Muñoz, Senior Vice President for Policy, National Council of La Raza, a national Hispanic civil rights organization, written especially for Farmworker Justice’s new blog, Harvesting Justice!
I have always been impressed at how many of the leaders of the Latino civil rights field and the immigrant rights field, are people who come out of the farmworker labor movement or were inspired by it.
Farmworkers, whose immigration status ranges from native-born U.S. citizens to undocumented workers, are overwhelmingly Latino. They work in one of the three most hazardous industries in the nation, under a discriminatory set of labor laws which affords them fewer of the protections which other American workers take for granted. While the rest of us are accustomed to the basic protections of things like seat belt laws and safety standards for the vehicles we drive in, farmworkers often travel in vehicles lacking seats, let alone seat belts. They are exposed to toxic pesticides on the job, as well as exposure to extreme heat and cold. Every year we receive news of tragedies in the fields, like death by heat exhaustion, vehicle accidents that were entirely preventable, or the poisoning of tens of thousands of workers who are exposed to dangerous chemicals.
This is my 20th year at NCLR, and in that time, there has been alarmingly little progress for farmworkers using basic indicators like wages or health status. In the immigration arena that I work in, we have been engaged for years in a battle to keep from losing ground for farmworkers, as the agricultural industry agitates for changes in the law which would weaken labor protections and allow for greater access to temporary workers without some of the restrictions that current law provides.
The immigration debate which has been raging for the last several years offered some real hope for undocumented farmworkers, under the AgJOBS bill which was carefully negotiated by farmworker leaders and the representatives of the growers. The bill, which would legalize a significant number of the workers who toil in the fields, has suffered the same fate as the broader immigration debate; it has been stymied by the great wave of xenophobia which has washed over the Congress and poisons any attempt to enact reasonable policy.
But I see hope in the response of the larger Latino community to the ugliness that affects us all in the immigration debate. Around the country there are clear signs that Latinos are offended by the ugly rhetoric that they hear on the radio and see on television.
Around the country, record numbers of immigrants are naturalizing, and organizations are mobilizing to break new records in voter registration and turnout. There is real hope that, by participating, we can begin to turn around the ugly climate which has been so harmful to the hopes of immigrants and farmworkers.
As a community, we may be on the verge of demonstrating serious political power that can influence critical elections. I hope and believe that as a community we will use that power to be agents of change on the major issues of the day: health care, education, wages and working conditions. As we engage in these great struggles, we must remember the fundamentals, and the hard working men and women whose plight is at the heart of our civil rights movement. If we demonstrate, as I believe we can, real transformative power for this country, we must make sure that the farmworkers whose movement has formed so many of us, experience real change.
Cecilia Munoz - Failure of Conservatism Conference - May, 2007
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8366642855294204762
Muñoz continued her education at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a master’s degree.
Muñoz is married to Amit Muñoz-Pandya, a human rights lawyer
Amit Pandya - Open Society Policy Center (George Soros) - Washington, DC
Cecilia Muñoz
Born 1962
Politician, Lobbyist and Civil rights activist
Following the 1986 enactment by President Ronald Reagan of the Immigration Reform and Control Act—an amnesty program that allowed undocumented immigrants who met certain criteria (such as having lived continuously in the United States) to become legal U.S. residents—Muñoz helped more than five thousand immigrants obtain legal citizenship in the United States. Working double-digit hours, she operated 12 field offices throughout metropolitan Chicago, an intense experience. The racism and sexism she confronted in her job gave her greater empathy in working with immigrants.
Controversy Over Welfare Reform
On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the strictest federal welfare reform law in years. It had major implications for legal immigrants who were not citizens. They became ineligible for food stamps and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the latter of which assists aged, blind, and disabled individuals. The cost savings from these cutbacks was estimated to be between 20 and 30 billion dollars over six years.
Muñoz stated, “We have no other choice but to demonstrate the human cost of these policies. And the human cost is extraordinary.” It was predicted that an estimated one million immigrants would be adversely affected by rescinding food stamps. “Many of these immigrants are working men and women who supplement their income with food stamps in order to provide food for their families,” stated Muñoz in an article in The Orange County Register.
The public lobbying ultimately proved successful. In July of 1997, less than a year after Clinton originally signed the bill, lawmakers softened their legal mandates by allowing some legal immigrants to continue their SSI benefits. According to Muñoz, “The lesson of the last year seems to be you can only make policy change to undo terrible wrongs after people have died or after people have entered situations that are just excruciatingly painful to watch.” Muñoz believes that the decision to withhold food stamps should also have been reversed. She has spoken out for its reinstatement: “It was unfair to deny SSI to immigrants and apply this change in the law retroactively. It’s equally unfair to do the same with food stamps.”
Fighting Against Discrimination
The height of irony—but an example of the kind of issue on which Muñoz works the hardest—occurred on March 21, 1997, when Muñoz was twice asked on the telephone about her citizenship, just prior to her attendance at a White House briefing on immigration. Although the White House claimed that, for security reasons, a new policy required visitors to give their date of birth, Social Security number, and citizenship, Muñoz seemed to be singled out. According to fellow attendees Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington nonprofit advocacy group, neither he nor Josh Bernstein, policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, were questioned. “There are laws against this stuff in the workplace,” asserted Sharry in a Washington Post article. “This selective questioning of people is based on what, the number of vowels in their name?” An angry Muñoz said “[I had] smoke coming out of my ears. I hit the ceiling. This is exactly what we’re fighting against.”
As colleague Sharry says, Muñoz is as “tough and determined an advocate as you can find. She doesn’t back down an inch.”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=13863
“For La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.”
“For The Race everything. Outside The Race, nothing.”
I believe it was already posted to the list this week.
Obama White House discloses two more lobbyist waivers granted
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/03/obama-white-hou.html
Didn’t Obama say something like “No Lobbyists!”?
Oh wait, his mottos are Hope, and Change, not Honesty. Who could’ve seen this coming?!
Ping!
Machiavelli: The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
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