Sunday, December 18, 2011
Quintessential Goobers
The Arizona Republic's Clay Tompson claims you're goober if you don't help others by contributing to the Seasons for Sharing campaign. Let me propose an amendment to that. You're a goober if you don't patronize local businesses. That camera or computer you're thinking about buying at Amazon.com where you won't get charged Arizona sales tax. Think about buying it from a local store, especially one owned locally. You'll help a local working family have a merry Christmas, and you'll help fix the state's budget deficit with your sales tax contribution.
No Tax Breaks for Companies that Won't Hire Arizona Workers
We need a scorecard for every company doing business in Arizona. Let's start with four columns. Column 1: the tax breaks they've gotten. Column 2: the new jobs they've created in Arizona. Column 3: all the defense contracts they're working on. Column 4: all the jobs they've outsourced to foreign countries. If a company's column 2 is zero, then we take back everything in column 1. If column 4 is greater than zero, then we take away everything in column 3.
I love tax breaks, but prove you deserve them if they're supposed to create jobs. I love loyalty, too. If your company gets American defense contracts financed by our tax dollars, then nowhere in any of your businesses are you allowed to have a policy that prohibits hiring American workers.
I love tax breaks, but prove you deserve them if they're supposed to create jobs. I love loyalty, too. If your company gets American defense contracts financed by our tax dollars, then nowhere in any of your businesses are you allowed to have a policy that prohibits hiring American workers.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Fiery Trial and the Holy Cross
There's a hypocritical element in the Ed Montini's complaint (6/23/11) about Senator McCain blaming immigrants illegally crossing the Mexico border for starting Arizona's wildfires. Some years ago in its inimitable tradition of publishing stories that annoy Irish Americans on St. Patrick's Day, The Arizona Republic featured a column by Chicago Tribune writer Clarence Page that blamed Irish immigrants for pushing African-Americans off America's ladder of social mobility. Page claimed that Irish immigrants had prevented African Americans from working their way out of slavery. Neither the Arizona Republic nor Mr. Page have apologized for, or even published a complaint, about this preposterous canard. But for Irish immigrants the entire Civil War and the 13th and 14th Ammendments were completely unnecessary?
Recently, eminent historian Eric Foner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for chronicling Abraham Lincoln's world and his rise to leading our nation during the great contest over how to resolve the presence of slaves in a "free" society. As Foner points out, African Americans -- slave or free -- weren't included as citizens in Lincoln's America. The Constitution implicitly treated slaves as property, and beginning in 1795, United States naturalization laws restricted citizenship to white people.
Furthermore preventing the spread of slavery wasn't simply a moral quibble, poor whites like the Lincolns feared being forced off their land by the slave powered plantation economy, not without reason. But as Foner points out poor farmers weren't the only ones who wanted a whites only society. When a bright young black named Martin Delany showed up at Harvard Medical School, he created quite a stir and was told to go home, and it certainly wasn't Irish immigrants who told him to leave.
Ironically at the very same time Harvard slammed the door on Delany, a remarkable story was unfolding at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester a few miles down the pike from Harvard. The Healy brothers, children of an Irish immigrant, but slaves according to the law of Georgia, had been taken in by the Jesuits (aka, the Society of Jesus). "Incredibly," Holy Cross had been bankrolled by the successful Irish canal and railroad builder, Tobias Boland, one of the immigrant class Mr. Page blamed for bumping African Americans of America's ladder of upward mobility. Instead of making a dangerous return to Georgia, the Healy children spent their holidays with the Boland family. In time the eldest Healy son would become Holy Cross's first valedictorian and Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland. His brother Patrick would become president of Georgetown University and his brother Michael the Coast Guard's hero of Alaska who defended Native Americans and helped inspire Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."
Furthermore preventing the spread of slavery wasn't simply a moral quibble, poor whites like the Lincolns feared being forced off their land by the slave powered plantation economy, not without reason. But as Foner points out poor farmers weren't the only ones who wanted a whites only society. When a bright young black named Martin Delany showed up at Harvard Medical School, he created quite a stir and was told to go home, and it certainly wasn't Irish immigrants who told him to leave.
Ironically at the very same time Harvard slammed the door on Delany, a remarkable story was unfolding at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester a few miles down the pike from Harvard. The Healy brothers, children of an Irish immigrant, but slaves according to the law of Georgia, had been taken in by the Jesuits (aka, the Society of Jesus). "Incredibly," Holy Cross had been bankrolled by the successful Irish canal and railroad builder, Tobias Boland, one of the immigrant class Mr. Page blamed for bumping African Americans of America's ladder of upward mobility. Instead of making a dangerous return to Georgia, the Healy children spent their holidays with the Boland family. In time the eldest Healy son would become Holy Cross's first valedictorian and Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland. His brother Patrick would become president of Georgetown University and his brother Michael the Coast Guard's hero of Alaska who defended Native Americans and helped inspire Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."
The connection between the Irish and the building trades also brought Dennis Hart Mahan to West Point, where the son of a carpenter excelled as a student and was sent to France to study engineering. He returned and helped turn West Point into early America's premier engineering school. Mahan was also interested in military science. His students would lead the Union army during the Civil War. Notably, Sherman, Sheridan and George Gordon Meade, commander of the Union army at Gettysburg, like Mahan, were all rasied by Irish Catholic families. Even Grant had a Kelly in his closet.
Making immgrants scapegoats for American's problems has a long and enduring history and, if John McCain is mistaken in his remarks, putting them in their historical context might help us better understand our problems today... even the most sanctimonius among us, including Mr. Page and the Arizona Republic, have their senior moments and substitute traditional prejudice to for reality.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
WII: America Did Not Sleep
Richard Cohen's opinion piece recently reprinted in the Arizona Republic makes the despicable claim that the United States and Franklin Roosevelt "slept" and ignored what was going on in the world in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. Never mind that it's egregious to mention Republican presidential hopeful John Huntsman in a column about Hitler, it's a canard to claim America slept and did nothing until Pearl Harbor. Canard means despicable lie. Do you think the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they had nothing better to do? Or that Hitler declared war on the United States because he thought it wasn't sporting to just beat up on the Russians.
Events in the world, particularly in the Far East (completely omitted by Mr. Cohen), resulted in the Roosevelt administration starting a major expansion of the United States Navy prior to World War II. This began with the Trammel-Vinson Act of 1934, which authorized an addition of 95 ships and 1100 naval aircraft. In 1934, work began on the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise. Famously, the Yorktown and Enterpise would defeat the Japanese at Midway in the Pacific only six months after the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Hornet, the third American aircraft carrier at Midway, was ordered in 1939 and commissioned six weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Only a few days after Hitler captured Paris, the Navy began work on building the first three Essex class super-aircraft carriers of that era.
World War II began in Asia in 1937 when Japan attacked China and began killing off millions of Chinese. When the US imposed economic sanctions, Japan responsed by attacking the US at Pearl Harbor. But by then the US was already secretly engaged in the U-Boat war in the Atlantic and providing ships, aircraft and guns to the British. US pilots in US-supplied aircraft secretly hunted down the German battleship Bismark in 1940 for the British Navy. By July of 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, US troops occupied Iceland, the key base for protecting North Atlantic convoys. In the course of the war this American-protected convoy route not only saved the British, but also supplied the Soviet Union with the 375,00 trucks, 50,000 jeeps, 15,000 aircraft, 7,000 and 8,000 artillery guns. This equipment -- provided by Franklin Roosevelt and America -- saved the Soviet Union and enabled the Red Army to overwhelm the Nazi's in a lightning offensive in 1944 that swept out of Russia to the gates of Warsaw and Krakow.
There were 1,000,000 American casualties during World War II. Calling that sleep or a moral lapse is the most despicable anti-American lie I have ever read.
Never mind that Stalin was the real villian in this. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 1939 gave Hitler the greenlight to invade Catholic Poland. As the Germans invaded from the west, the Communists invaded Poland from the east, a fact totally neglected by our media today, along with the hundreds of thousands of Poles who disappeared during the Soviet occupation. We remember Charles Lindbergh as the infamous America Firster, what the lefties don't like to remember was that in 1939 and 1940 America's lefties backed Stalin and were singing the same tune as Lindbergh.
Events in the world, particularly in the Far East (completely omitted by Mr. Cohen), resulted in the Roosevelt administration starting a major expansion of the United States Navy prior to World War II. This began with the Trammel-Vinson Act of 1934, which authorized an addition of 95 ships and 1100 naval aircraft. In 1934, work began on the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise. Famously, the Yorktown and Enterpise would defeat the Japanese at Midway in the Pacific only six months after the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Hornet, the third American aircraft carrier at Midway, was ordered in 1939 and commissioned six weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Only a few days after Hitler captured Paris, the Navy began work on building the first three Essex class super-aircraft carriers of that era.
World War II began in Asia in 1937 when Japan attacked China and began killing off millions of Chinese. When the US imposed economic sanctions, Japan responsed by attacking the US at Pearl Harbor. But by then the US was already secretly engaged in the U-Boat war in the Atlantic and providing ships, aircraft and guns to the British. US pilots in US-supplied aircraft secretly hunted down the German battleship Bismark in 1940 for the British Navy. By July of 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, US troops occupied Iceland, the key base for protecting North Atlantic convoys. In the course of the war this American-protected convoy route not only saved the British, but also supplied the Soviet Union with the 375,00 trucks, 50,000 jeeps, 15,000 aircraft, 7,000 and 8,000 artillery guns. This equipment -- provided by Franklin Roosevelt and America -- saved the Soviet Union and enabled the Red Army to overwhelm the Nazi's in a lightning offensive in 1944 that swept out of Russia to the gates of Warsaw and Krakow.
There were 1,000,000 American casualties during World War II. Calling that sleep or a moral lapse is the most despicable anti-American lie I have ever read.
Never mind that Stalin was the real villian in this. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 1939 gave Hitler the greenlight to invade Catholic Poland. As the Germans invaded from the west, the Communists invaded Poland from the east, a fact totally neglected by our media today, along with the hundreds of thousands of Poles who disappeared during the Soviet occupation. We remember Charles Lindbergh as the infamous America Firster, what the lefties don't like to remember was that in 1939 and 1940 America's lefties backed Stalin and were singing the same tune as Lindbergh.
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