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NumbersUSA’s Three Branches of Financial Shadiness

NumbersUSA, the grassroots mobilizing arm of the John Tanton Network, has had a long history of lies and deceit. Executive director Roy Beck has long denied his connections to white nationalists. Beck spoke at the 1997 Council of Conservative Citizens National Conference, a fact he denied on numerous occasions until recently. At a recent event in Glenarden, Maryland, Beck told the crowd that he hadn’t been invited back since, in reference to the 1997 Conference.

NumbersUSA’s financial information is as murky and misleading as its leader. The group itself is split into three arms: NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation, NumbersUSA Action, Inc., and Americans for Better Immigration. According to financial documents, all three share offices and personnel with one other. NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization which means its lobby for legislation powers are limited. NumbersUSA Action, Inc. and Americans for Better Immigration are 501(c)(4) organizations meaning they have unlimited lobbying ability. Read more

Biggie Smalls and Lil Wayne

Yesterday was a sad day for many hip-hop fans. It was the 13th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace aka Biggie Smalls. It was also the first day of rapper Lil Wayne’s one-year prison sentence for attempted gun possession.

Both men represent the huge success of commercial hip-hop over the last 15 years. The Hip-hop of MTV and BET has a very different façade than it did 20 or even 40 years ago coming up out of urban Black communities. Today, hip-hop makes billions for the major record labels and influences nearly all popular music in ways Biggie Smalls probably never imagined.

Who else would we turn to but MTV for a little context in these emotional times. The Network has called both men “arguably one of the greatest MC’s of our time”. A recent MTV article about Lil Wayne quotes rappers Young Jeezy and Diddy saying that the “hip-hop community is under attack” and rappers need to “watch themselves”. But it’s not the hip-hop community that’s under attack; it’s the entire black community. Read more

Center for Immigration Studies Manipulates Poll Results from African Americans

It’s hard to swallow when others are putting words in your mouth. But that is exactly what the Tanton Network has been doing with African American communities. In its latest attempt to twist the views of African Americans, the Tanton Network through The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has released a poll titled ‘An Examination of Minority Voters’ Views on Immigration’.

It is not unusual for CIS to twist and skew facts to fit its extreme agenda. Anti-immigrant leaders are using this poll to convince the public that their view is race neutral and that ‘Minority Voters’ agree with their fringe views.

The press statement released with the poll downplayed the fact that a plurality of the ‘minority voters’ they had polled favored allowing immigrants staying in the country if they met certain conditions including: pay a fine, study English and undergo a background check. Read more

Racism Rampant in Food Production

Traveling in western Kansas, where the bad odor from big feed lots and meat processing plants is present in several communities, I held conversations with immigrant workers who mainly work in feed yards, dairy, land fields, restaurants, and processing plants.

Several times they expressed that they feel racism is present in their workplaces and how they’ve been discriminated against because of the color of their skin.

They comment that at some companies, having dark skin automatically put them at a disadvantage when it came to distribution of jobs. This, they say, is the case in meat processing plants where the most dangerous and difficult jobs are given to immigrants or refugee workers of color, and the less dangerous, easier jobs to white workers. Read more

Cross-post: Pentagon Shooter Was Right-Wing, Anti-Government Terrorist

Think Progress contributor Alex Seitz-Wald gives a run down on Pentagon shooter, John Bedell, and the increase in right-wing domestic terror.

Last night, a California man armed with two semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition opened fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two before being killed by police. The shooter, 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell, was “well dressed in a suit” and “very calm,” walking “very directly to the officers” before engaging them, a police spokesman said.

Bedell “appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings,” the Christian Science Monitor reports, who traveled from California specifically to attack the Pentagon. While police were hesitant to assign a motive, “writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.” Read more

Congressman Trent Franks: Good Time to Pick Up Foot, Insert in Mouth

Rep. Franks, a virulent anti-abortion activist and extreme right-wing conservative from Arizona, suggested in an interview with blogger Mike Stark that the Black community was better off under slavery than it is today.

“In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say what was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible. And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery.”

Read more

Tanton Network Uses E-verify to Terrorize Immigrant Communities

The John Tanton Network is more interested in terrorizing immigrant communities than helping employers.

Nothing else can explain its recent response to a comprehensive report on the failure of E-verify. Rather than accept the program’s failures and promote more effective ways to fix the immigration system, the network of anti-immigrant groups led by John Tanton is attacking the report and trying to discredit hard facts. The anti-immigrant trifecta of the Tanton Network – FAIR, Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA – came out swinging against the report which effectively debunks their data on E-verify.

Mark Krikorian of Center for Immigration Studies said, “Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that E-Verify isn’t tight enough yet, but in a glass-half-full sense, this isn’t really bad news,” and “…we know perfectly well what the problems are, and they don’t have much to with with the E-Verify system itself.” Read more

Anti-immigrant Bill Dies in Mississippi

So what’s got me smiling today? Could it be the “surprised kitten” YouTube clip floating around the office? No, as sweet as that is, I’m most excited about Tuesday’s civil rights victory in Mississippi which saw the state’s legislature kill the so-called “Immigration Reform Act of 2010” (SB2032).

The bill, which initially passed the senate, died in a house committee despite being promoted by the anti-immigrant group, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) and a last minute endorsement by the white supremacist hate group, Council of Conservative Citizens. Read more

Peter Brimelow Starts New Anti-immigrant/White Nationalist Website

On March 1, a new white nationalist online magazine, AlternativeRight.com was launched. Peter Brimelow announced the move at VDARE.com where he stated that “Alternative Right is currently a project of the VDARE Foundation and donations are tax-deductible.”

This marks an attempt to forge a new right-wing publication that is a direct challenge to the more intellectual magazines out there such as the anti-Semitic Occidental Dissent, white nationalist Chronicles, and The American Conservative, a magazine founded by white nationalists.

AlternativeRight.com’s ‘about us’ page states that it is “an online magazine of radical traditionalism.” The website features blogs, videos, radio interviews, the magazine itself, and even an online store. It is obvious that the website’s content is weightier and more academic than VDARE or Chronicles. Read more

The Food Trusts: A Call for Backbone

Next week the Departments of Justice and Agriculture will jointly convene the first of five national hearings on “competition and regulatory issues in the agriculture industry.” If the first gathering in Ankeny, Iowa is any indicator, the Departments will have to go to the meat counter soon to buy some backbone to take on the food trusts they want to “hear” about.

Monsanto—the seed giant that brings us all those pastoral TV ads from “American farmers”—has a place at the table next week to address (the utter lack of) competition in the seed sector which it dominates. Politicians of all stripes have the first say of the day. Then come all the academics, many of whom hail from the land grant universities that helped guide producers into the grip of the Food Trusts. Finally come the enforcers (really?), some of whom have gone after the Trusts in their respective states; it will be enlightening to see what the federal “enforcers” have to say about a century of utter neglect by successive Administrations that let the Trusts take over the food system. There is one real farmer on one panel. Read more

English-only Policies Threaten Civil Rights

Tomorrow marks the 42nd anniversary of the Chicano Student walkout from LA high schools in 1968.

Bold Chicano students organized high school students across east LA to demand the right to speak their language without institutionally sanctioned abuse in their high schools. Students were forbidden from speaking Spanish in class or from using the restrooms during lunchtime.

While nearly 70% of the high school students in east LA originated from a Spanish speaking country, the teachers were mandated to physically abuse and humiliate students in front of the rest of the class who spoke Spanish. The common drill: a young person slipped and responded to a question in Spanish. The teacher calls the student to the front of the room demanding that they place their hands out for the class to see, and proceeds to use a baton against their hands until blood is drawn. Read more

White Nationalists Write for Mainstream Financial Publications

Ok, I’ll admit it; I have a subscription to Financial Times. I read the newspaper six times a week because it tells me what’s going on in the world without getting into too much detail and dragging it out. It also tells the news from a financial perspective, something that has always fascinated me.

Since the age of the internet, news about stocks and bonds has rapidly moved off the paper and onto the computer screen. One website that has taken full advantage of that is Marketwatch.com Marketwatch is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a billionaire conglomerate-owner who also runs the Wall Street Journal and Barrons.com. World famous websites like Barrons.com and The Wall Street Journal are well respected within the financial and political community and are the last place that people would expect white nationalists to exist. This, however, is sadly not the case. Read more

Anti-immigrant Movement Attacks American Property Owners

The anti-immigrant movement wants private property owners to enforce immigration laws, and be punished when they don’t. It’s shocking the lengths some groups have gone to in order to pressure, intimidate or force ordinary citizens into complying with their anti-immigrant activities.

Leading this effort is Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the legal arm of the John Tanton Network. IRLI’s primary purpose is to push legal causes that unfairly target immigrant communities. IRLI works with extremist anti-immigrant groups and leaders to push anti-immigrant ordinances at the municipal level. In 1985, John Tanton launched IRLI, but made sure he kept it firmly under the control of Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has tried to portray itself as a mainstream organization despite its links to extremist groups, including white nationalists. Read more

Cross-post: Are you a farmer at heart?

Tom Philpott of Grist talks about a surge of young farmers ready to tackle organic farming and the huge challenges they will need help surmounting.

A growing number of young people are finishing college and resisting the pressure to plunk down in a cube behind a computer. Others skip college altogether—given the spiraling costs involved, it’s hard to blame them—and yearn for meaningful, hands-on work.

Community-scale organic farming has emerged as an attractive profession for such talented, energetic youth. But there are problems with this choice. Hours are long, the pay too often stinks, and land prices remain crushingly high. To top it off, our nation lacks universal health coverage. Read more

Thousands Die in the Desert as a Result of U.S. Border Policy

Stephen Lemmons chronicles the activists who are fighting back in this Phoenix New Times feature article.

Gene Lefebvre remembers the day in late August 2008 when 20 to 25 Border Patrol agents, half of them on horseback, raided the Arivaca, Arizona campsite of No More Deaths, a group dedicated to providing humanitarian assistance to migrants in the desert.

“They said they had tracked 10 migrants into our camp,” says Lefebvre, a retired Presbyterian minister who helped co-found the organization in 2004. “There weren’t 10 migrants, and there weren’t the tracks.”

No More Deaths did have a couple of migrants in the camp’s medical tent, but there was nothing unusual about that. Migrants often showed up at the camp seeking first aid or water or food, sometimes getting directed there by local ranchers. The Border Patrol was and is aware of how NMD operates. Read more

Tanton Memo of the Month – U.S., Inc.

This February’s Tanton Memo of the Month* details a list of nearly 30 organizations founded by U.S., Inc., John Tanton’s financial “umbrella” organization. The other day I found this document in our archives. As I plied through a variety of anti-immigrant documents, I stumbled across John Tanton’s description of his “umbrella”, U.S., Inc. For those unfamiliar with John Tanton, he’s the founder of a variety of anti-immigrant organizations, including Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), NumbersUSA, Pro-English, U.S. English, the white nationalist publication The Social Contract, and a variety of environmental and anti-immigrant projects.

Tanton has also financially supported over 50 organizations and individuals who, essentially, campaign on his behalf. Not all of his projects directly relate to immigration issues. Some support projects preserving wildlife, like ProWild, “a project that promoted the ranching of native animals in East Africa, or “Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves”, which “is a series of small grants to local public and parochial schools,” and Scenic Michigan, “an affiliate of the national organization Scenic America.” Read more

Divided Workers Can Come Together

When I entered the workforce as a young adult, I had to learn to navigate professional relationships and sometimes conflicts. I have been fortunate enough to be upfront with my differences or conflicts, even with people in more powerful positions than me. Unfortunately, in places such as meatpacking plants or other factories where there are immigrants, refugees and other workers of color who are earning low wages and little to no other fringe benefits, this is not possible.

I would like to tell you a story of two unlikely friends, in an unlikely place, who found themselves in the same situation. These two fellows were not free to express opinions or disagreements in their workplace. Both were trying to work hard in order to feed their families, one is a Latino man named Jose and the other an African American man named Fred, both lead workers. Jose started working at this place about five years ago, the African American about six months ago. Jose had been waiting for a small promotion to become head of a particular line. Fred came in and worked hard and was able to attain the position within 35 days. Nevertheless, no one can blame him. Read more

The John Tanton Network Brings Hate to African American Community in Maryland

Tonight in Glenarden, Maryland, a townhall meeting is taking place entitled, “Understanding the Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Citizens of Prince George’s County and the State of Maryland.” The event features three groups connected to the John Tanton Network: Help Save Maryland, a group that is listed as a state contact on FAIR’s website; NumbersUSA, a project of the John Tanton Network; and Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), another project of the Tanton Network. The discussion’s moderator is Sandy Pruitt of People for Change. Leo Alexander, a candidate for mayor of Washington DC and Paulette Faulkner, a former State of Maryland employee are also speaking.

When I first read about this event the immediate question that came to mind was, ‘why is the John Tanton Network, a network of organizations with strong ties to white nationalists, coming into a town that is 95% black and holding a discussion on immigration?’ Read more

White Supremacist Group Advertises on Conservative Websites

Last Thursday we reported that the white supremacist hate group Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) has been actively involved in recruiting new members at tea party rallies. The most recent rally attended by the group was this past Saturday in Crystal River, Florida – an event hosted by the Citrus County Tea Party. As shocking as this was, there have been recent developments regarding CofCC’s efforts to grow its organization and spread its racist message to a larger pool of conservatives – mainly through online advertisements.

In a recent issue of The Citizen’s Informer, CofCC’s boasts that its “national website is stronger than ever, with daily traffic getting higher all the time.” It attributes this increased traffic to “CofCC ads (which) can be found on the Drudge Report and the Ann Coulter Report websites.” The group claims that these ads link directly to its national website and have helped increase its web presence. Read more

Great White Hopes: Race and the Right

One of the high privileges of being white in America is to be able to speak of race in coded terms and language—or by allusion to “broader” political issues, critiques, and concerns—and then profess innocence (“plausible deniability”) when called out for one’s racism.

Recent gatherings of the Tea Party and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) provide a case in point, as do almost daily sound bites from so-called Congressional leaders determined to prevent the Obama Administration from moving forward on any agenda. Tea partier and former Congressman Tom Tancredo called for a return to Jim Crow-era voter literacy tests, declaring the President was elected by “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English.” CPACers Mitt Romney declared that “President Obama fails to understand America,” while Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty suggested taking a nine iron to the “window of big government,” as Tiger Woods’ wife had done to his vehicle. House Minority Leader John Boehner told CPAC that, “Voters thought they were electing a commander in chief; instead they got a finger-wagging professor.” Read more

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