Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California. Show all posts

Monday, April 11, 2011

Decades Long Cover Up in California Shows Children Just Might Be Left Behind, In the Rubble

California politics have blamed so many for its financial woes.

The Mexicans.
The Gangs.
The Liberals.
The Greedy People who Bought Homes Above their Means.
Homophobic Black People Who Voted Against Proposition 8.
Charlie Sheen.

And lastly, they finally figured it out. It had to be the teachers.

Those no-good, lazy, money-hungry Jezebels and pimps who work at under-resourced schools, attempting to teach children with a union that makes deals like used car salesmen in a dusty, desert car lot.

Teachers were the ones who have undermined the financial progress of California.

Until proper poetic justice has given teachers a needed trump card; and has given all of California to really see the real corruption embedded in California politics.

This weekend, California Watch dropped a series of stories revealing the State has collected tens of billions of dollars to fix schools to be prepared for earthquakes, and have not delivered.

Here is a quote from one of the article,"Lax of Oversight School Construction Raises Doubt About Earthquake Safety."

Taxpayers spent $52 million to build the campus on a former General Motors factory site in South Gate, near Los Angeles. The school, which opened in 2004, sits in a liquefaction zone that could turn to mush in an earthquake, according to a report by a geological firm hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

And that was just for one building.

Here are some of the things that the stories uncovered.

  • Millions of children's lives are at extremely high risk if a quake happens.
  • 7,500 schools throughout the state of California have been identified by state inventory as potentially dangerous for high seismic activity
  • 20,000 projects have not been approved by the mandatory Field Act, a certification process that says all building repairs and the structure of buildings are within the guidelines of proper construction
  • 1626 schools are in liquidation zones (Liquidation zone means that in a strong earthquake, the earth liquifies)
  • 18 schools' instability with structural issues and sit in a landslide zone. (A zone where if an earthquake occurs, these schools sit on slopes and inclines that are dangerously unstable)
  • Hundreds of inspectors who received unfavorable marks regarding their work performance, and even one with a felony regarding fraudulent assessment on a construction site, are still getting $70 - $100 an hour to inspect buildings in which they have filed inaccurate reports.
  • The Schwarzenegger Administration made "adjustments" that crippled efforts for schools to receive funding in repairing these potential dangerous structural issues.
  • This all equals of funky as cover up and coffers that have been generously filled for decades.

You think Japan was bad. It an 8.9 rocks anywhere in California, we are talking about a possible tsumani that happens with land, in regards to the San Andreas fault.

It took an outsider, a black man from the South named Corey Johnson, to peel the thick layers of corruption.


Why California?
California is critical in talking about the future of the US, because it is the richest state in the country. If it were a country, it would be the sixth wealthiest nation. So when California shakes, then the rest of the country violently trembles.

What does this unveiling mean?

One, it shows that money and privileged didn't mean anything. Schools and hospital facilities built in the wealthiest communities from San Francisco to San Diego were built on fault lines and were given money to be properly constructed, but never happened.

Two, this story provides an excellent template of people investigating the real issues behind the fiscal failures in their own States and the federal government.

Three, it removes the culpability of teachers being the "problem" and gets to the real issue, systemic corruption that will even put children as sacrificial lambs in the quest for money and power.

Four, if this is happening in California, it is happening everywhere.

Lastly, being vigilante in holding the true people accountable will put billions of dollars back into education and into the US.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Black and Latino: The Unspoken Tale of Race Wars in California


One early morning in 1999, I got a message on my pager from someone who was a relative Chris Darden, the once famous member of the prosecution team in the OJ Simpson case of the mid 90s. I was told that his nephew was found unconsciousness in a dormitory cell in Pritchess Detention Center. The locals still called the prison by its former name, Wayside.

I was also told that there had been violent race riots between the Latinos and blacks for several days and the blacks, who were outnumbered by 15 to 1, were getting shanked, beaten unconscious, raped, and literally fighting for their lives, as the guards looked on. These riots would go on for months.

That call sparked about a two-month long string of stories regarding the race riots. I found out that the mostly Latino prison guards were supplying shanks and other weapons to Latino inmates in exchange for a piece of the drug money that the gangs profitted from outside of the prison walls.

There was also a program implemented a gang program called "Amer-I-Can" by former NFL hall-of-famer Jim Brown, to cease the racial rifts.

During my coverage of the riots, I spoke to dozens of black inmates and their relatives about what was going on. I began to hear that riots had already trickled down from the prisons to the county jails.

One story a relative of mine who went to jail told me that he was alerted by a fellow black inmate to get ready to rock and roll once they were in the holding tank. As soon as they were placed in the holding tank, fighting began.

In the end, we had learned that much of the reason was not race, but rather territory over drug selling and transporting. For years, the black gangs dominated in the sell of crack cocaine, but with the surge of Mexican immigrants and the flow of drugs through their home country, not only were Latinos of Southern California were more in numbers, but had a supply route that the now disorganized black gangs lost control of a long time ago.

What made the race riots racial, in my opinion, was the push by the Aaryan Brotherhood, the white supremacist group in the jails who sided with the Latino gangs. Their alliance and long-held agenda of ethnic cleansing prompted an all out war against all blacks who were locked up, be they gang affiliated or not, just like the Darden relative. Ironically, Aaryan's used a former enemy, Latinos to carry out what they could not do.

In California, the Mexican mafia forced an edict of an all-Latino alliance. And let me be clear, this is talking about Mexicans and Central Americans, not Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Columbians who have very different cultural and ethnic identifiers, especially because Boriquas, Cubanos and Columbians have significant African/black populations. However, there is discrimination in those places as well.

In all of my interviews, the prison inmates warned me over and over again, that the conflict would spill out into the streets. And it did.

For several summers there have been rumors of edicts of ethnic cleansings by Latino gang members to kill hundreds of black men during the summer. There are several communities in the harbor area of Los Angeles, where black folk, who are hard working, family-oriented people that are getting picked off by Latino gang members. In some communities, there are black residents that are scared to go outside in fear of getting killed.

In the high schools, years of race riots have changed the climates of many schools and student-teacher relationships.

I must emphasize in all of this, that this is not a one-sided issue of Latinos being the bully. For years, blacks and black gang members held contempt toward migrating Latinos whose numbers grew so rapidly that over half of the population resides in either California or Texas. This increase causes instantaneously conflict for those who are at the bottom.

In particular in the job and housing markets. Cheap Latino labor by mostly undocumented workers undercut the level of treatment for much of a black working class that was already struggling due to industries leaving cities like Compton and Watts. At the same time, slum lords rented out rundown houses and apartments to Latinos who were vulnerable to any type of abuse due to their undocumented status.

Many black people were extremely hostile to these streams of Latinos, but pointed their fingers in the wrong direction. The real culprit, Ronald Reagan, the former Governor of California and then President of the US who created a climate that allowed cheap, exploitable labor to flood into the state.

As a result, the antagony that some blacks projected onto Latinos created a clashing relationship between the two groups that have been passed onto other generations.

Another thing, many people don’t know about is the serious colorism and cultural war in Mexico itself. For years, majority of the immigrants were lighter-skinned or very fare Mexicans. However, within the last 15 years, the population has gotten darker. Those Mexicans in the rural south and in indigenous villages have started to migrate as well. These darker, and some, very dark or black skinned peoples are discriminated against in Mexico and are the subject to the worst forms of brutality. Moreso, some of these indigenous people don’t even speak Spanish, and often suffer under dominant Mexican ideology and culture.

Another thing I must add is that the conflict between Latinos and blacks is more prominent in Southern California than the north, but trust me it still exists. For much of Californias development, blacks and Latinos were inextricably linked to all civil rights causes. Communities were formed and alliances were forged. These have held tighter in the Bay Area, where activism such as the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the Chicano Movement recognized the importance of unity.

Needless to say, the race war between Latinos and blacks is very complicated, but at the heart of the issue is that you have two of most powerful groups in the state of California bickering over crumbs, while both are being locked up disproportionately, and the communities are totally neglected and underserved.

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