Category: Uncategorized

Email from Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

The Spring Break…March Against the Border Wall is a 9-day 115-mile walk from Roma, TX to Brownsville. It will start on March 8 and end on March 16 at the UTB campus. This protest walk/march is being organized by the academic community. It is designed to allow the students, many of which have friends and family on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande, to have a chance to be heard, whether they want to be condemned to a costly and grotesque border wall on American soil that cuts through their community and their land. What better time than Spring Break for the future leaders of America to speak up and be heard?

Through Border Ambassadors networking the 1250 mile Texas-Mexico from El Paso to Brownsville, the entire border region is not caving in, bowing down or bending over to the dictates of the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. When it comes to our ecology, our environment, our economy, our culture, our history, our geology, our solidarity or our friendship, as long as we live in a democracy, “we the people” of the borderlands will have the final say. To Chertoff, the border is little more than a black line that runs the thread of the Rio Grande. In his mind, the border will be defined as a totalitarian “iron curtain” that will cut through people’s lives and community and turn a culture of friendship into a war zone.

For those of us who live in this militarized zone, the region “inside checkpoints” on the north and every form of military surveillance on the south, the border is not a line, but the blend of we the people on both sides of the Rio Grande. It is diverse and tolerant. We get along, despite the political corruption, oppression and racist supremacy from the north. We are the poorest and most neglected region of the great state of Texas. Worse, we are the poorest region of then entire United States of America. Yet, today, because the Texas delegates will more than likely determine the Presidential candidates in the March 4 primaries, and therefore the next President, the Presidential hopefuls are rushing to South Texas to garner the predominantly Hispanic vote.

It will therefore be the vote here in South Texas that tips the scale in the presidential race. We the people “inside the checkpoints” on the Texas-Mexico border will not squander this opportunity. We will make THE difference.

Can we the people of the Texas-Mexico border shape the future of Texas and therefor the entire United States and therefore the world?

“We sure as hell can”

We will…

Jay

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Connecting the dots
…Making a difference

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Border Ambassadors
Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

See: Scrutiny for a Bush Judicial Nominee
Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008 By ADAM ZAGOR IN /WASHINGTON

“Now, a former CCA manager tells TIME that Puryear oversaw a reporting system in which accounts of major, sometimes violent prison disturbances and other significant events were often masked or minimized in accounts provided to government agencies with oversight over prison contracts.”

Don’cha Know?
A Texas Civil Rights Review
Column of Dissent

By Faddy MacMough

In your article I found at CounterPunch.org, “Beauty from the Heart of Texas: Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debators” you started out with the following paragraph:

Over at the Internet Movie Database, redneck trolls are saddling up their cyber posse to go night riding on the message boards against Denzel Washington and “The Great Debaters.” All of which is a good thing if you like to see relevance in contemporary art. Because deep down, “The Great Debaters” is a film about how to grow yourself into a real person despite the needlers, taunters, and brutes who dominate the space around you — and who dominate it, still.

By now you ought to know I’ll come back at you on any generalizations you make that excoriate Rednecks — it is my solemn duty after all as a leftie redneck. I’ll be the first to admit there are, as you suggest, trolls of a redneck variety. But there are trolls of all sorts of varieties that include folks who are not rednecks. And amongst the trolls who are busy attacking Denzel Washington and the great debaters are some who just don’t have the credentials to be good decent rednecks.

I’d suggest, based on his betrayal of his own roots, that Justice Thomas is a troll who, if his past maunderings are any indication, is perfectly capable to giving Denzel Washington and the movie a needling, a taunting, and a brutalizing. Given his lofty position, that would also carry some weight.

Now don’t get me wrong, trolls are trolls (especially if they are the Tolkienian persuasion) and are to be avoided, and brought to light at every opportunity. And if they happen to be rednecks as well, they certainly do need to be brought into the light of day. (Light, it seems, of a sunlight variety, causes trolls to turn to stone as any student of the Hobbit can attest.) That is just fine and dandy by me. In fact, I applaud anyone who helps to sanitize the redneck blood lines by ridding us of their influence.

However, and this is important, there are rednecks who should be your allies . . . and the allies of all sorts of people (dare I suggest types?) who are struggling against oppression and bigotry in this class society of ours. They are all on the same side of the civil rights equation and shouldn’t be alienated by a slip of the hyperbolic tongue. It doesn’t help your cause, and it only makes theirs all that more difficult.

Had I not recognized you as a fellow traveler in the art and practice of civil rights, someone who has, at least for me, sterling credentials, I wouldn’t have gone much further than the racist epithet: redneck trolls. Nor would you have done much reading if you’d run up against ‘n-word trolls’ — or ‘m-word trolls’ — or any of a number of other racist terms.

Now that brings us around to the closing paragraph:

So please don’t bother believing what the bigots tell you about this film, not even the trolls who claim to have Harvard degrees. You don’t have to be Black to feel beautifully about Denzel Washington’s fine new film, “The Great Debaters.” The “message” of this film is for anyone who still desires the capacity to dream higher than what you already are.

Here, I suppose you come close to redeeming yourself in spite of some rather grandiloquent attempts at grand eloquence. Not believing trolls, or bigots, or even folks with some fancy degree (Harvard being one), is very good advice. We should all heed your advice . . . whether our necks are black or red or brown . . . and we should, all of us, all celebrate the desire to dream higher than what we already are. Those of us wallowing in the under classes of our society have a hell of a lot more in common that we have that the power elites want us to understand and recognize.

Alas, your introductory paragraph does a great deal to continue the tradition of division and intolerance for those who are sometimes frighteningly mirrors of our own existence. It’s high time, in my not so very humble opinion, that all of us with our necks under the yoke of economic oppression were willing to celebrate our mutual successes and quit the divisive language. And it is high time that you, as one of our leaders, should watch out for those killer phrases that have our mutual antagonists smiling with delight at our antagonizing each other.

Fredegar N. MacMough (his friends call him Faddy) is a self-styled leftie, of redneck parentage, holding forth from one of those nasty little oil towns where the glories of Friday Night Lights sustain a population so used to being abused that they think things are just fine and dandy . . . where a peppermint patty world is an illusion foisted upon them because the boys did take state again.

From today’s Austin American Statesman:

Charles Laws, a water company executive whom local officials are calling on to resign, on Friday defended his decision to characterize a proposed detention facility for illegal immigrants as a “holding pen for w*tbacks.”

Laws said “w*tback” is widely acknowledged to mean immigrants who swim the Rio Grande and enter the United States illegally, not American citizens. Laws said the term is not racial, an assertion that others dispute. He said he wishes he had not used the word in an agenda item for the Creedmoor-Maha Water Supply Corp.’s board of directors but will not resign over it.

From yesterday’s KLBJ News:

According to Laws and other Mustang Ridge city officials, the proposal is to build a 1,000 bed facility that would employ approximately 200 people. Laws says the firm is interested in being within 30 miles of the Austin Bergstrom Airport, so that the detainees could be flown back to their countries of origin.

City officials tell us the proposal is to build a family detention center, much like the T Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, which is run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). That facility is run by the private jail firm to house immigrants and their children who have been detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers.

According to attorneys who represent people held in T Don Hutto, some of the detainees say they are in the U.S. seeking asylum from persecution. The large majority of the immigrants are not from Mexico or South America. Many are from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Canada. The roughly 400 adults and children are held in the facility until their on-going immigration hearings are complete. Williamson County is named as the administrator of that contract, and receives a fee per inmate per day.

In December of 2007, Emerald made a proposal to the Caldwell County Commissioners Court to build a facility in north-east Caldwell County, between Lytton Springs and Dale.