Tuesday, July 20, 2010

GOV. GARY R. HERBERT of UTAH FIRES EMPLOYEES THAT EXPOSED ILLEGALS! Who Exposes Millions of Illegals In American Jobs With Stolen S S Numbers?

Only 2 state workers responsible for Utah immigrant list

Gov. Gary R. Herbert and Kristen Cox, Executive Director of the Utah Department of Workforce Services, hold a news conference to discuss an alleged illegal immigrant list at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on July 16.


SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Gov. Gary Herbert said Tuesday that two state workers were responsible for compiling and distributing a list of personal information of 1,300 purported illegal immigrants, and that both would be fired.
State officials had been investigating as many as 10 employees for possible involvement, but nobody else will face disciplinary action.

"Others may have been aware, but not complicit," Herbert said.

Herbert also said that one of the implicated workers, whose names have not been released, was a temporary employee and already has been fired while the other is expected to be terminated by Wednesday. One has confessed to being involved, Herbert said.

Herbert's remarks came after a summit Tuesday on illegal immigration in which he said the public release of the list last week was damaging to immigration reform efforts. At the meeting, lawmakers, law enforcement and community leaders discussed duplicating an Arizona-style crackdown on immigration and a potential guest worker program, which Herbert said may have some appeal.

The list of purported illegal immigrants, which was mailed to law enforcement officials and the news media, contains Social Security numbers, birth dates, workplaces, addresses and phone numbers; names of children are included, along with due dates of pregnant women. An attached letter demands that those on it be deported, although some on it have said they are in the country legally.

The list sent chills through Hispanic community, with many fearing they could be unfairly targeted. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have acknowledged receiving the list but declined to say whether anyone on it is being investigated.

The two employees implicated in the list's compilation both work for the Department of Workforce Services, which administers food stamps and Medicaid programs. Herbert said the employees gathered the information in a methodical manner to get around department security protocols.

Intentionally releasing a private record in Utah is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Herbert has said federal laws may also have been violated. Information gathered in the internal probe will be turned over to the attorney general's office on Wednesday for possible prosecution; that office will also conduct its own investigation.

The summit Tuesday had been planned before the release of the list, primarily in response to calls from conservative state lawmakers looking to pass an immigration law similar to Arizona's.

Arizona's law, which takes effect July 29, directs police enforcing other laws to determine a suspect's immigration status if there is reason to believe the person is in the U.S. illegally. The Obama administration has sued Arizona to throw out the law and keep other states from copying it.

Utah Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, told attendees that he still intends to sponsor a similar bill when lawmakers convene in January.

Herbert has said he will sign an immigration bill into law if he's still governor in January following a special election, but it's unclear what that might look like. On Tuesday, he said a specific immigration proposal would not come out of his office, but he would work with lawmakers on their proposals.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

"THIS COUNTY BELONGS TO MEXICO"... LA RAZA ON THE MARCH!

Mexican Militants Tell white to "GET OUT" (Hollywood)
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Date: 2010-07-19, 10:33AM PDT
Reply to: comm-evdxq-1851322304@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
________________________________________

http://creoleneworleans.typepad.com/creole_folks/2010/07/latino-amnesty-supporters-tell-whites-to-go-back-to-europe.html

Why is not the media spalshing this video all over tv

"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!

Some Interesting Quotes from Hispanic "Leaders" :

"Go back to Boston!
Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims!
Get out!
We are the future.
You are old and tired.
Go on.
We have beaten you.
Leave like beaten rats.
You old white people.
It is your duty to die . .
Through love of having children, we are going to take over."
---Augustin Cebada, Brown Berets


"They're afraid we're going to take over the governmental institutions
and other institutions.
They're right.
We will take them over . .
We are here to stay."
---Richard Alatorre, Los Angeles City Council.


"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction
of Mexico without firing a single shot."
---Excelsior, the national newspaper of Mexico


"We have an aging white America.
They are not making babies.
They are dying.
The explosion is in our population and
I love it.
They are shitting in their pants with fear.
I love it."
---Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, University of Texas



LA RAZA AGENDA: 3 Examples
Richard Alatorre, Los Angeles City Council "They're afraid we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They're right. We will take them over. . We are here to stay."

Mario Obledo, California Coalition of Hispanic Organizations and California State Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Jerry Brown, also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton "California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn't like it should leave."

Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General We are practicing "La Reconquista" in California."





"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!

LA RAZA – “THE (MEXICAN) RACE”….
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA
1126 16th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
202-785 1670
Get on La Raza’s email list to find out what this fascist party is doing to expand the Mexican occupation. NCLR.org
FOR THE EXPANSION OF THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE, AND MEXICAN SUPREMACY
LA RAZA is the virulently racist political party for ILLEGALS (only Mexicans) and the corporations that benefit from illegals, and the employers of illegals. IT IS ILLEGAL TO HIRE AN ILLEGAL.
LA RAZA IS THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of AMERICA and has contempt for AMERICANS, AMERICAN LAWS, AMERICAN LANGUAGE, AMERICAN BORDERS, and the AMERICAN FLAG.
However LA RAZA does like the AMERICAN WELFARE SYSTEM. The welfare system in the country is so good that Mexico has dumped 38 million of their poor, illiterate , criminal and frequently pregnant over our border.
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LosAngelesTimes
Do a search for Mexican gangs, or go to “Mexico Under Siege”
“THE DRUG WAR AT OUR BORDERS” …ask yourself why the LA RAZA DEMS want these borders OPEN!
*
usillegalaliens.com
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USCFILE.org
Cut and paste articles and post email all over the country!
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REPORT ILLEGALS TO: 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.
http://www.ice.gov/ ICE, ice, ICE

NEW TERROR THREAT ON MEXICAN NARCO BORDER - Give Them Amnesty?

Early this year, the Los Zetas paramilitary drug cartel tried to blow up the Falcon Dam near Zapata, Texas, to destroy a rival cartel's smuggling route. Imagine if it was Hezbollah and the target was America. We'd better start imagining what Hezbollah could do in and from Mexico. Our worst nightmare may be yet to come.


New Terror Threat On Mexico Border


Posted 07/19/2010 07:05 PM ET



A police officer runs after an attack on police patrol trucks in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The bombings represent an unprecedented escalation of... View Enlarged Image
Border: A Hezbollah-like car bomb explodes in a border town as a congresswoman asks Homeland Security about links between the terrorist group and Mexican drug cartels. This is more than an immigration problem.

Car bombs are a terrorist specialty and not a drug cartel modus operandi. The heavily armed cartels are more into shootings and kidnappings. So the car bomb that exploded Thursday in Ciudad Juarez, near a federal police headquarters, killing four, was either a change in tactics for the cartels or a sign of teaming up with a terrorist group, one of which could be Iran-linked Hezbollah.

Officials called it a well-planned trap using what may have been the first time that traffickers have used a car bomb since the start of a military-led offensive against drug cartels. It also may be the first indication of Hezbollah's growing influence south of the border.

Erick Stakelbeck of the Investigative Project, a counterterrorism research group, says Hezbollah has established a base in the Americas in what is known as the Tri-Border area, where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet. As he reports, "the area is home to roughly 20,000 Middle Eastern immigrants — mostly from Lebanon and Syria — and has long been a hotbed for terrorist fundraising, arms and drug trafficking, counterfeiting and money laundering."

Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., recently sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking it to form a task force to investigate growing ties between Hezbollah and the drug cartels as well as growing evidence of a Hezbollah presence in Mexico.

"We have seen their cooperation in countries across South America, particularly the tri-border area of South America (bounded by Puerto Iguazu, Argentina; Ciudad del Este, Paraguay; and Foz do Iguanzo, Brazil). Hezbollah operates almost like a Mafia family in the region, often demanding protection money and 'taxes' from local inhabitants," Myrick said in the letter.

Last year we reported that Colombian officials were investigating the Medellin-based Office of Envigado cartel as a Hezbollah front organization. This came after the arrest in Bogota of Chekri Mahmoud Harb, a suspected go-between for Hezbollah and the Taliban in Colombia.

According to an April 30 report compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, "International terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, have also reportedly raised funding for these terrorist activities through linkages formed with (drug-trafficking organizations) in South America, particularly those operating in the tri-border area of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina."

Myrick says Farsi tattoos have been found on members of drug gangs in U.S. prisons. Farsi is the native language of Iran. She also raised concerns over Hezbollah's training of Mexican cartels in making car bombs and in sophisticated tunneling techniques used in its war against Israel.

If the cartels are able to smuggle drugs and people into the U.S., it has not escaped the attention of groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaida that they are also capable of smuggling other things into the U.S. — like trained terrorists or the makings of a dirty bomb.

State Department documents obtained by Human Events show that more than 180,000 illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico were apprehended from 2008 through mid-March 2010, including those from state sponsors of terror.

Steve Emerson, author of "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us," said on Fox News recently that compared with al-Qaida, "Hezbollah has got a greater network, much, much more developed around the world," including throughout the U.S., and that "potentially Hezbollah can wreak a lot more damage if they chose to attack the United States within the continental borders."

Border security is national security. The 9/11 Commission said the worst attack on American soil happened in part because of our lack of imagination. We couldn't conceive of young Islamic men flying passenger jets into building.

Early this year, the Los Zetas paramilitary drug cartel tried to blow up the Falcon Dam near Zapata, Texas, to destroy a rival cartel's smuggling route. Imagine if it was Hezbollah and the target was America. We'd better start imagining what Hezbollah could do in and from Mexico. Our worst nightmare may be yet to come.

HEXBOLLAH & MEX DRUG CARTEL - TERRORISM ON OUR OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS

Hezbollah at the Border
by Connie Hair
07/15/2010

Signs are growing that the terror group Hezbollah has expanded its long-established influence with South and Central American drug cartels into a working presence in Mexico.

Rep. Sue Myrick (R.-N.C.) is asking the Department of Homeland Security to form a task force to investigate ties between the Islamic terror group Hezbollah, the drug cartels in Central and South America and new indications of a Hezbollah presence in Mexico.

Documents obtained exclusively by Human Events reveal a well-established smuggling route into the U.S. Over 180,000 illegal aliens from countries Other than Mexico (OTM) were apprehended from 2007 through mid-March 2010.


Nearly 150,000 of those apprehended were from South and Central American countries that the State Department says are being used as corridors for smuggling people from the Middle East, Southwest Asia and East Africa.

State Department documents examined by Human Events raise concerns that Hezbollah has already used these long-established narco-terror relationships to establish terror cells in the United States.

From the State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2008:

“Over the past five years, however, smuggling rings have been detected moving people from East Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia to Honduras or through its territory. In 2008, there was an increase in the number of boats arriving on the North coast, ferrying people from all over the world seeking to enter the United States illegally via Guatemala and Mexico. Nationals of countries without Honduran visa requirements, especially Ecuador and Colombia, were involved in schemes to transit Honduras, often with the United States and Europe as their final destination. Foreign nationals have successfully obtained valid Honduran identity cards and passports under their own or false identities.”

Over the past three years, nearly 57,000 people have been apprehended in this country illegally with Honduran identification. Over 49,000 were from Guatemala and over 38,000 from El Salvador, home of the MS-13 narco-terror gangs.

Myrick has requested that a task force study new indications that Hezbollah has expanded their presence into Mexico. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Myrick gives several examples of Hezbollah’s influence on the drug cartels.

“We have seen their cooperation in countries across South America, particularly the tri-border area of South America (bounded by Puerto Iguazu, Argentina; Ciudad del Este, Paraguay; and Foz do Iguanzo, Brazil). Hezbollah operates almost like a Mafia family in this region, often demanding protection money and ‘taxes’ from local inhabitants,” Myrick states in the letter.

Of particular concern was evidence of Hezbollah influence in Mexico, which is the gateway into the United States for drug cartels.

Myrick’s letter warns that tattoos have been found on drug gangs in U.S. prisons showing the influence of Iranian-directed Hezbollah terrorists.

“If you go down to the San Diego area in the prisons that’s where you’ll see prison inmates with Farsi tattoos,” Myrick told Human Events in a recent interview. “It’s not a secret, it just something that people have chosen to ignore.”

Myrick also raised concerns over Hezbollah training Mexican cartels in bomb making and sophisticated tunneling techniques that they’ve used for terrorist attacks against Israel.

“I think that there is a bigger picture here that everyone is ignoring,” Myrick said. “I’ve asked Homeland Security for a task force. They said they would give me an intelligence briefing, which would be to shut me up so I can’t say anything. I’m not going to do that. I want some answers to my questions on the task force first.”

T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, recently told Human Events the Mexican cartels are building sophisticated tunnels into the United States.

“When you look at some of the pretty sophisticated tunnels that they’ve dug under the border where two adult males can walk side-by-side without bending over you know that they’ve built them not just for moving drugs through there but [to move] anything through there,” Bonner said.

When asked if the Mexican cartels would work with terrorist groups, Bonner said it’s all about the money.

“They don’t have a conscience. They really don’t care what they’re smuggling across the border—it could be a weapon of mass destruction—as long as the price is right they’ll move it,” Bonner said. “They don’t care whether the person is from a terrorist sponsoring country or whether that person is from Mexico, if the person pays the fee they’re getting across. The higher the fee you pay, the more likely it is that you’re going to get across.”

Bonner said that this year there is a higher percentage of border apprehensions for drug arrests and OTMs.

“It’s not that the OTMs and the drugs coming across have necessarily increased but we have seen our effectiveness increase because we have fewer people coming across,” Bonner said.


Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Mich.), member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, served for 12 years as an FBI Special Agent. He spoke recently with HUMAN EVENTS about the smuggling routes into this country from these South American countries.

“Remember there’s a difference in a criminal enterprise that seeks to come here that wants to be surreptitious,” Rogers warned. “They’re not showing up to get a job at a construction site. They’re showing up here to do a whole other set of activities that they also don’t want law enforcement to know about, so that makes that group of individuals more difficult to catch and they are much more dangerous.”

Rogers says the lines are being blurred between the terrorist groups and the drug cartels.

“What we see that happening in Pakistan, and we see it happening in Northern Africa and we see it happening in the Arabian Peninsula that these groups will work together,” Rogers said. “I think the five crime families in New York are a great example. If they can find a way to work together to benefit both of them between two families or three families or four families or five families they will do it. It doesn’t mean they like each other, it doesn’t mean they won’t shoot each other, but if they can find something that benefits them they’ll do it. These groups are no different.”

According to an April 30 report compiled by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, “International terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, have also reportedly raised funding for their terrorist activities through linkages formed with [drug trafficking organizations] in South America, particularly those operating in the tri-border area (TBA) of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina.”

“We have clearly seen that the line between the narco-terrorist and funding for terrorist operations is getting awful blurred,” Rogers said. “I think that the sooner we come to the realization that all of these groups will use each other to further their aims the better off we are.”

Rep. JOE BACAK (LA RAZA PARTY) PUSHING FOR QUICK AMNESTY TODAY!

DREAM ACT AMNESTY still a dream

JULY 20, 2010

ALIPAC NOTE: Please call, and then write via email or fax, your members of Congress and the US Senate to say "Please oppose the Dream Act Amnesty for illegal aliens. The Nightmare Act Amnesty will only encourage more illegal immigration while taking away limited seats in college from innocent Americans. More activism details at (ADD LINK)

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Thousands keep eye on bill that opens citizenship path
Josh Dulaney, Staff Writer
07/18/2010
The San Bernardino Sun

Andrea Robles, a 20-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who is struggling to pay for college because she can't get loans, is among more than a half-million illegal-immigrant youths and young adults in California who could be eligible to apply for legal status under legislation pending in Congress.
"I support it because I think that when everybody hears the word illegal, they think we're doing something wrong," said Robles, a Colton resident. "For me, when I'm going to school and working, there's nothing wrong with that."

She might find agreement from more than 2.1 million illegal immigrant youths - about 1 in 4 of whom live in California.

That's how many in the country could benefit from the federal Development,,,


Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, also known as the Dream Act, according to a report released by the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute. One opponent of illegal immigration said the bill is nothing more than partial amnesty with a pretty name slapped on it.

"It's the nightmare act," said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, based in Raleigh, N.C. "If we don't stop and reverse illegal immigration, pretty soon it's going to destroy the United States. See California. If you pass the Dream Act, America will be drinking her final vial of poison."

Under the bill, illegal immigrants under the age of 35 who came to the U.S. when they were 16 or younger, have lived here more than five years, graduated from high school and can demonstrate good moral character may apply for conditional legal status.

They would be allowed to stay in the country for six years under that status.

Students can convert their conditional status to permanent residency by graduating from a two-year college, studying at least two years toward a bachelor's degree or serving in the military at least two years.

Students receive green cards and could apply for citizenship, if the conditions of the probationary period are met.

While students such as Robles, who is looking to transfer from San Bernardino Valley College to Cal State San Bernardino, are excited about the bill's potential, the report estimates that only 38 percent - or 825,000 - of the 2.1 million potentially eligible beneficiaries likely would gain permanent legal status.

"Many potential Dream Act beneficiaries would face difficulties in meeting the legislation's higher education or military service requirements because of hardship paying for college tuition, competing work and family time demands, and low educational attainment and English proficiency," said Margie McHugh, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.

The report also shows that access to educational opportunities for Dream Act beneficiaries could vary from state to state because of significant differences in college enrollment practices and tuition policies.

Still, illegal immigrant students remain hopeful that the bill will help them realize their dream of a college education.

Gabriela Cruz, a 16-year-old student at Arroyo Valley High School in San Bernardino who is taking advanced placement courses, said without legal status, the best she could look forward to would be community college.

She was 9 months old when her parents brought her to the country illegally.

"I really want to go to college, and that would be a perfect opportunity to go," she said. "It's really expensive, and I would never be able to afford it. With the citizenship, I would be able to get a scholarship or at least a loan. It's really frustrating."

Gheen said what frustrates him and those Americans who oppose illegal immigration, is that students such as Cruz and Robles are seeking to take degrees away from Americans.

"Those seats in college are for the sons and daughters of American citizens and legal citizens, not the families that break our laws," Gheen said. "We're telling them no, you can't have that, it's not yours. It's ours. Our families built it. We have the constitutional authority to tell you to get out."

Elected leaders who oppose the bill say it rewards those that have broken immigration laws, while placing a fiscal burden on taxpayers.

A spokesperson for Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, said while the U.S. is an "open and welcoming society," it cannot allow its immigration laws to be violated and ignored.

"Giving citizenship and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants is wrong and sends the message that we do not take our immigration laws seriously," said Jessica L. Parker, press secretary for Miller. Those officials who disagree with Miller say the Dream Act doesn't go far enough.

Rep. Joe Baca, D-San Bernardino, said in a statement that "it is wrong to unfairly punish those young people who come to America through no fault of their own."

Baca has introduced the People Resolved to Obtain an Understanding of Democracy, or "Proud Act," which he says would give responsible immigrant students a realistic shot at citizenship "as long as they have kept up their grades, shown an understanding of U.S. civics, and stayed out of trouble."

"The bottom line is America needs comprehensive reform to fix our broken immigration system," Baca said. "Any attempts at immigration reform must include strong border security, tough punishments for employers who break the law, and a responsible pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are here to contribute."

Robles, who works in a restaurant and said she pays taxes on her wages, said her education could've moved along faster if she had the money to pay for certain classes that she wanted.

She did receive two scholarships.

One was a $1,200 scholarship from the Inland Empire Scholarship Fund, which gives scholarships to low-income, high-achieving Latino students throughout San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The other was a $1,000 scholarship from the Joe Baca Foundation.

Robles said she wants to major in English or Spanish and perhaps become a teacher.

"If the Dream Act passes, I can help this country," she said.

Gheen said illegal immigrants can contribute by going back to their homelands.

"We're encouraging illegal aliens who want to go to college to apply for school in Mexico," he said. "Mexico needs more help than we do."

MEXIFORNIA - Cities Continue to Fall to LA RAZA CORRUPTION

Residents irate as Bell council requests report on salaries

By Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives, Los Angeles Times

Community groups were demanding the resignation of Bell's city council members, most of whom make $100,000 a year; police chief, who makes $457,000; and city manager, who makes $787,637.



Mexico right here in America
________________________________________
Reply to: comm-354690469@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-06-18, 9:38AM PDT


Illegals' low expectations for the rule of law is turning Southern California into Mexico.

SEE: http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/the-town-the-law-forgot/15731/?page=2

EXERPT:

"A rough-and-tumble world of small-city politics has come to define the drug- and gang-infested cities clustered around the 710 freeway: Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood and South Gate, among others.

In recent decades, the demographic shift from white working class to Mexicans and Central Americans resulted in immigrants and their sons and daughters gaining political power. Now, most elected officials reflect the majority Latino population. But high unemployment, illegal immigration and a maze of freeways, truck stops and industrial areas — just a half-day’s drive from Mexico — have contributed to the busy drug-trafficking zones, blight and violence.

Residents, many of them illegal or too young to vote, have it rough. After complaining to authorities or taking too much notice of suspicious activity on their block, some low-income residents have been repaid with retaliation or violent threats. In Cudahy, one persistent complainer got a door-knock from the police — a public no-no that alerts drug dealers to the complainer’s identity and can result in that person’s property being vandalized.

“It gets a lot worse than that,” says a local cop, acknowledging that criminal threats are so common that police are hard-pressed to investigate them.

In contrast to the vulnerability of the average Cudahy resident, business owners who operate questionable businesses get velvet-glove treatment from politicians that would be considered scandalous in the city of Los Angeles. In Cudahy, the Potrero Club is one of several magnets for crime and is frequented by gangsters, but it is nevertheless embraced by Cudahy authorities. A notorious nightspot that parents warn their children to stay away from, the Potrero Club has a long record of being the scene of thefts, assaults and drug activity.

Officials in Cudahy openly promote this crime magnet, however, holding fund-raisers for the Cudahy Youth Foundation there and even using it as an annual gathering spot for a children’s Christmas pageant. Cudahy has sunk so low that each year at Christmastime, Perez and the city council parade around town on the back of a tow truck and toss candy to the children, with the procession ending in a toy giveaway at the Potrero Club, whose owners in the past have displayed photos not of Hollywood movie stars but of famous Mexican drug traffickers.

Crime statistics for the Potrero Club show 700 calls for police assistance there since September 2003, in response to reports of shootings, assaults, stabbings, beatings by security guards, drug use — even rape.

City leaders don’t find it strange that a dangerous nightclub passes for a civic pillar in Cudahy. Cars disappear from the Potrero at an alarming rate, according to police reports obtained by the Weekly. When asked about Cudahy’s use of the Potrero for official events, Perez says, 'It’s not my favorite place, but we’ll continue to use it.'"




*
IN THE LOS ANGLES BURBS, THE CITY CUDAHY UNDER MEXICAN OCCUPATION

“Cudahy is a strange little city; some say a scary one. In 2003, city leaders fired the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — which had policed Cudahy for 14 years, focusing on gang and drug crime — in favor of a nearby municipal police force that recently erupted over public allegations of police brutality and kickbacks to police and city officials from a towing company.
In Cudahy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has seized almost 20 times more cocaine over the past five years than in Bell, a bordering city of similar size, and the city suffers more crime per capita than small towns nearby. It’s a city with 200 active gang members, where shootings are common though homicide rare — that is, until 11 killings occurred in the wake of the sheriff’s departure in 2003.”

The Town the Law Forgot
An L.A. ’burb is mired in gangs, cartels and south-of-the-border-style politics
Jeffrey Anderson
published: February 22, 2007
The first sign of trouble for Cudahy City Council candidate Tony Mendoza was a pair of thong panties mailed to his wife, with a note telling her to watch her husband’s back. Then came the phone calls — and the death threats.
A political novice in a tiny city of Mexican immigrants that hasn’t had an election since 1999, Mendoza had expected dirty tricks. But to his dismay, the caller, who spoke poor English and called every day for three days, said Mendoza would be killed if he did not leave Cudahy, a 1.2-square-mile city 10 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. After the third call, Mendoza pulled out of the March 6 race. “I have my family to think about,” he said.
Running for council seats against a slate of incumbents in a city infested with gangs and drugs, Danny Cota and Luis Garcia faced similar tactics. A truck owned by Garcia, a former city employee, was painted with graffiti, and ex-felon and Cudahy city employee Gerardo Vallejo sought a restraining order against Garcia for criminal threats. A judge tossed the complaint, but Garcia’s campaign was rattled.
In late December, at a holiday gathering at the City Club in downtown Los Angeles hosted by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Cota ran into Bell Gardens City Councilman Mario Beltran, who was perplexed to see Cota, a 29-year-old teacher, hobnobbing and being photographed with Villaraigosa and others.
“Who brought him here?” Councilman Beltran asked onlookers, some of whom are friends of Cudahy’s Vice Mayor, Osvaldo Conde, who is running for re-election. “You better watch out,” Beltran warned Cota, the bright-eyed challenger. “Conde will take care of you with his cuerno de chivo.”
Though Beltran was smiling as he tossed off some Mexican slang for an AK-47, Cota says he did not appreciate such talk. A witness, Maywood Mayor Sergio Calderon, a friend of Cota’s, says, “It was a joke, a tasteless joke.”
Cudahy is a strange little city; some say a scary one. In 2003, city leaders fired the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — which had policed Cudahy for 14 years, focusing on gang and drug crime — in favor of a nearby municipal police force that recently erupted over public allegations of police brutality and kickbacks to police and city officials from a towing company.
In Cudahy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has seized almost 20 times more cocaine over the past five years than in Bell, a bordering city of similar size, and the city suffers more crime per capita than small towns nearby. It’s a city with 200 active gang members, where shootings are common though homicide rare — that is, until 11 killings occurred in the wake of the sheriff’s departure in 2003.
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Cudahy leaders seem satisfied. Consider the tone-deaf reaction of Cudahy City Manager George Perez in early February, after the news broke on KNBC Channel 4 and in La Opinión, a Spanish-language daily, that the city of Maywood, currently under a $2-million-a-year contract to police Cudahy, was facing a state takeover because the police department — the Maywood-Cudahy Police Department — is so out of control.
“Police problems in Maywood have nothing to do with us,” said Perez. “Our city council is happy, and our citizens are too.”
Cudahy resembles a Mexican border town more than it does a Los Angeles suburb. Entrenched gangs and Mexican drug trafficking have trapped working-class legal and illegal immigrants in a cycle of violence and fear, in a city where less than a quarter of the 28,000 residents are eligible to vote. An uneducated city council, a deeply troubled police force imported from Maywood two towns over, and the raw power of the 18th Street Gang — a complex criminal organization with a knack for setting up business fronts and obscuring underground drug activity — make Cudahy residents seem like hostages in their own city.
By most accounts, Cudahy City Council members — two retired union managers, an insurance salesman, a waitress and a grocer — do not run the city as they were elected to do. Rather, they defer to City Manager Perez, a former janitor who is known to favor revenue traps such as DUI and driver’s license checkpoints over aggressive tactics that make gangs and drug dealers less comfortable.
In 2001, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office convened a grand jury to investigate whether Perez violated criminal conflict-of-interest laws. The probe stemmed from his actions as a city councilman, when, after voting for an ordinance that lifted a one-year waiting period between holding political office and appointed office, Perez stepped down from the council and was promptly appointed city manager, the city’s highest-paying job. According to prosecutors’ memos and letters obtained by the L.A. Weekly, the D.A.’s office was forced to drop the investigation after concluding that it “could not prove a criminal violation” of state laws “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Known as a ruthless political boss, Perez is not running for city council in the upcoming March 6 election, but he is deserving of scrutiny. After all, he calls the shots in Cudahy.
Perez shrugs at allegations of foul play on the campaign trail, or any possibility that his minions could be involved. “I’ve talked with Mendoza,” he says of death threats that knocked the would-be candidate out of the running. “He apologized for talking bad about me.”
Since his revolving-door ascent from the council to city manager in 2000, Perez’s salary has risen by $30,000 — more than most residents make in a year — to $120,000. Meanwhile, the city’s problems remain dire: poverty, density, gangs and drugs. One-third of residents are under 14 — a vulnerable population. Out in front of Cudahy City Hall one November day, 16-year-old Erica summed up Cudahy this way: “It’s small, so everything is close by. But it’s ugly, and there are shootings.”
Victor, a 16-year-old honor student who plays varsity football, runs track and holds down a part-time job, says, “Some streets are too ghetto. There’s lots of violence. My mother has been going to community meetings to ask about this, but it always seems to stay the same.” Victor liked it better where his family used to live: Compton, one of L.A.’s notorious trouble spots. “There should be more police here in Cudahy. Kids don’t play outside. People don’t feel safe.”
With its narrow, deep lots — the result of an agricultural past that is long gone — its glut of rundown apartment buildings and its lack of economic growth, Cudahy offers a good example of how Mexican drug cartels, the prison-based Mexican mafia and gangs like 18th Street are attracted to the Los Angeles–adjacent industrial sprawl populated by poor immigrants.
Do these criminal elements influence Cudahy’s leaders, with city officials answering to someone other than the public or the rule of law, in a town policed by another town’s troubled police force? The answer is unknown.
Neither the DEA nor the FBI has ever established a connection between city officials and business fronts in the United States’ $65 billion illegal-drug market. Beyond the street crime, behind the scenes, groups finance border tunnels and run other drug-trafficking gateways that have helped make Southern California the highest-intensity drug-distribution center in the United States.
Who is actually responding to that? Local cities’ law enforcers have their hands full with violent street crime. Local gang- and drug-task-force police officers who talked to the Weekly on condition of anonymity say they are busy with three criminal groups: traffickers, who are not always involved in gangs; the Mexican mafia, which can be involved in either gangs or drug cartels; and gangs such as 18th Street, which specialize in drug transportation, distribution, money laundering and muscle.
Some cops say they lack confidence in the feds to clean house at the civic level, where drug traffickers rely on distribution fronts, money-laundering businesses and tainted law enforcement. “You hear about all kinds of scandalous shit,” says a local veteran detective. “But federal agents don’t have the street knowledge to figure out what’s going on. They rely on us.”
DEA agent Sarah Pullen says drug trafficking “has crept into society” via cash businesses, real estate deals and otherwise legitimate civic leaders with interests in both. “Southeast L.A. County has always been heavily involved in all levels of drug trafficking,” says Pullen, who pursued Cudahy-based targets in six of 12 cases in the past few years.
When asked by the L.A. Weekly why Cudahy has shown up so frequently in eye-popping drug busts from the 1980s to the present — sometimes with as much as 500 pounds of cocaine seized at a time — Pullen says her agency doesn’t track drug seizures by city. It tracks drug organizations, which aren’t confined by borders.
But after doing some research, Pullen was able to determine that from 2002 to 2007, the DEA seized 27.5 pounds of cocaine from the city of Bell, Cudahy’s neighbor directly to the north. In comparison, during that same time period, the agency seized 486 pounds of cocaine in Cudahy — more than 17 times the amount seized in Bell.
Mostly, Pullen says, gangs and traffickers go where they feel most comfortable. She cautions, “Once it gets past drugs and money, we turn it over to the FBI. We don’t have the tools to connect all the dots.” For its part, the FBI will not confirm public-corruption probes, much less whether any such probes involve drug trafficking or money laundering. When asked, FBI agent Laura Eimiller snaps, “I can’t talk about that. It could compromise ongoing investigations.”
A rough-and-tumble world of small-city politics has come to define the drug- and gang-infested cities clustered around the 710 freeway: Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood and South Gate, among others.
In recent decades, the demographic shift from white working class to Mexicans and Central Americans resulted in immigrants and their sons and daughters gaining political power. Now, most elected officials reflect the majority Latino population. But high unemployment, illegal immigration and a maze of freeways, truck stops and industrial areas — just a half-day’s drive from Mexico — have contributed to the busy drug-trafficking zones, blight and violence.
Residents, many of them illegal or too young to vote, have it rough. After complaining to authorities or taking too much notice of suspicious activity on their block, some low-income residents have been repaid with retaliation or violent threats. In Cudahy, one persistent complainer got a door-knock from the police — a public no-no that alerts drug dealers to the complainer’s identity and can result in that person’s property being vandalized.
“It gets a lot worse than that,” says a local cop, acknowledging that criminal threats are so common that police are hard-pressed to investigate them.
In contrast to the vulnerability of the average Cudahy resident, business owners who operate questionable businesses get velvet-glove treatment from politicians that would be considered scandalous in the city of Los Angeles. In Cudahy, the Potrero Club is one of several magnets for crime and is frequented by gangsters, but it is nevertheless embraced by Cudahy authorities. A notorious nightspot that parents warn their children to stay away from, the Potrero Club has a long record of being the scene of thefts, assaults and drug activity.
Officials in Cudahy openly promote this crime magnet, however, holding fund-raisers for the Cudahy Youth Foundation there and even using it as an annual gathering spot for a children’s Christmas pageant. Cudahy has sunk so low that each year at Christmastime, Perez and the city council parade around town on the back of a tow truck and toss candy to the children, with the procession ending in a toy giveaway at the Potrero Club, whose owners in the past have displayed photos not of Hollywood movie stars but of famous Mexican drug traffickers.
Crime statistics for the Potrero Club show 700 calls for police assistance there since September 2003, in response to reports of shootings, assaults, stabbings, beatings by security guards, drug use — even rape.
City leaders don’t find it strange that a dangerous nightclub passes for a civic pillar in Cudahy. Cars disappear from the Potrero at an alarming rate, according to police reports obtained by the Weekly. When asked about Cudahy’s use of the Potrero for official events, Perez says, “It’s not my favorite place, but we’ll continue to use it.”
Even before recent threats against the upstart Cudahy City Council candidates, politics and violence bled together in the surrounding and equally troubled immigrant suburbs.
The widely publicized nonfatal shooting of a councilman in South Gate by an unknown assailant in 1999 ushered in a brutal era. Soon afterward, police investigated the mayor of neighboring Bell Gardens for allegedly trying to run over a former city councilman. Former South Gate Treasurer Albert Robles allegedly threatened to rape and murder his political opponents. No charges resulted from the alleged threats, but Robles was convicted of bribery and sent to prison. In January of this year, a city council candidate in Huntington Park reported to police that he received “terrorist threats” on the street from three men in dark suits who sped off in a luxury car.
Some Mexican-American politicians are apologists for the dark side in these troubled little cities, chalking up the chaos to lack of experience on the part of the Latino officials who took power as the demographics changed.
“Just like a mother never gives birth to a criminal, no politician ever gets elected with criminal intent,” says Rosario Marin, former U.S treasurer and former Huntington Park mayor, who was followed in her car and terrorized by unknown assailants as her city struggled with gang violence, drug trafficking and federal investigations.
“I have to believe that,” adds Marin, a prominent California Republican with close ties to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who appointed her as secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency. “Yet it hurts me to see how people get corrupted.”
Confronted with an alarming pattern, District Attorney Steve Cooley distinguished himself from his predecessors by going after public corruption in L.A. County — with mixed results. Some say his convictions of officials in Compton and South Gate were low-lying fruit, and that Cudahy got away from him.
Ever-present in Cudahy and its neighboring cities are three attorneys who have, over the years, blended municipal law and lobbying to great effect. Arnoldo Beltran, Francisco Leal and David Olivas have made a small fortune representing scandal-plagued cities. Today, Olivas represents Cudahy and Leal represents Maywood, with the two cities sharing a police force that is in disarray.
Perhaps foremost among the many controversies in which these lawyers have been embroiled are allegations explored in a 1999 L.A. Times story that Beltran, a Stanford-educated lawyer, and Leal, a Harvard Law School graduate raised by immigrants in El Paso, were threatening to launch recall campaigns against elected officials in Lynwood, Commerce and Bell Gardens if they did not vote to retain the two men’s legal services.
Beltran and Leal, former partners in a now-defunct law firm that also included Olivas as an associate, at the time denied the allegations. Beltran would not comment for this article. Leal did not return several calls for comment. But they would be hard-pressed to deny that their political savvy has earned them a reputation for being influential advisers to many small cities.
In 1999, the firm split, with Leal and Olivas going off to form Leal, Olivas & Jauregui, which represented the city of Cudahy in 2000 when Perez made the revolving-door move, through a series of ordinances drafted by David Olivas, from city councilman to city manager. The resulting grand-jury investigation did not lead to criminal charges but left a lasting mark on the city.
Less than a year later, in Bell Gardens, Beltran drafted a slightly different ordinance with the exact same effect: to upgrade a city councilwoman, Maria Chacon, to city manager. The move had serious consequences. Investigators from the D.A.’s office searched Beltran’s offices in 2001 in connection with an investigation of Chacon, whom they later charged with criminal conflict of interest. Beltran hired celebrity defense lawyer Mark Geragos, though Beltran was not named as a target of the investigation, nor was he charged with a crime.
Chacon spent the next several years defending the charges on grounds that Beltran advised her it was okay to vote on the ordinance that allowed her to switch roles from council member to city manager. The state Supreme Court rejected that defense recently, clearing the way for Cooley’s office to take her to trial.
The methods of Beltran, Leal and Olivas left a mark on their former law partner Jesse Jauregui, who broke all ties with the group in 2001. Jauregui has this — and only this — to say about his old colleagues: “I’m glad to no longer be a part of Tammany Hall–style politics. How far it goes, I do not know. It became a seamy situation.”
The legal maneuvering that led to new leadership in Cudahy was part of a larger strategy, says former Cudahy councilwoman Araceli Gonzalez, a child of Mexican immigrants. “They were very outspoken,” says Gonzalez of the lawyers who advised Cudahy and Bell Gardens. “They were telling people they were going to take over these cities and put Latinos in power.”
Olivas, now in his own law practice while wearing two hats — as Cudahy city attorney and councilman in Baldwin Park — argues that the move to anoint Perez as Cudahy city manager was about Latino self-determination, and that change in leadership in small southeast L.A. County cities was for the better.
“People were tired of being governed by outsiders,” Olivas says. “This was people from Cudahy, of Cudahy and for Cudahy.”
But since that time of upheaval, certain actions by Cudahy officials have raised questions about whether they are acting in the public’s best interest as Maywood struggles to get the two cities’ shared police force under control.
Near downtown Cudahy, a thick haze hovers over the 710 freeway, with the Los Angeles skyline barely visible beyond an expanse of rail yards, storage containers, terminals and freight cars. Billboards for casinos and strip clubs and a tangle of power lines clutter the skies surrounding this bleak stretch of highway.
The cities around the 710 freeway — a gateway from the Port of Long Beach to the rest of the nation — are so small they share freeway exits. Graffiti is scrawled on overpasses, exit signs and the concrete banks of the L.A. River, informing visitors that they are about to enter gangland. The grimy strip malls, auto-body shops and fast-food joints further speak to a loss of prosperity.
Cudahy, the smallest, poorest and most violent of these cities, feels like a place the law has forgotten — a feeling that intensifies along Santa Ana Street, where a large “18” is spray-painted on a telephone-utility box at one end of the block, and another large “18” is tagged at the other end — on a government dumpster, no less, at Cudahy City Hall.
City Hall is a squat brick structure in a remote corner of the city bordered by the L.A. River and next to an often-empty park, a school and a weed-filled would-be basketball court with a sign that reads “Opening Fall 2006.”
Inside, City Manager George Perez sits behind his desk listening to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons on his iPod. His walls are adorned with photos of him and his ’64 Chevy Impala, with a license plate that reads, “2 Cudahy.” Perez, stocky with helmetlike black hair, is equally feared and loved in Cudahy.
He likes to tell people he has the city “locked down.” In his mid-40s, he’s the consummate Mexican-American political boss — just don’t tell him that. Perez, a man who sports a T-shaped tattoo between his thumb and forefinger, argues: “This is so different from Mexican politics.” Perez refuses to discuss the tattoo, or say much about the other one, on his leg — of Cudahy’s official city seal. “I’m not from Mexico; I’m from here.”
Perez is bracing for the March election, although he is not a candidate. He knows that two novice candidates are out there, hearing from poor immigrants, renters and property owners about how they are afraid to walk the streets at night, how there is nowhere decent to shop, and how other cities mock Cudahy, calling it “Crudahy.”
“We’ve never had greater public service in this community,” Perez insists. “We’ve broken down barriers by hiring more bilingual staff. I have an open-door policy. My wife and I grew up here and understand the underprivileged families.”
Thirty years ago, Perez started as a janitor, “fishing turds out of the toilets,” he says with bitter pride. Perez now owns four parcels in Cudahy and recently purchased a $700,000 house in Hacienda Heights, in the San Gabriel Valley, where he lives part-time. In addition to his Impala, in mint condition, he tools around in a convertible BMW, a luxury made possible by his $120,000-a-year salary plus a $600-per-month stipend — an unusually large fee to act as a commissioner on the board of one of three water companies serving Cudahy.
How Perez got to where he is today is a controversial subject in Cudahy.
As they did in Bell Gardens, investigators swept down on Cudahy City Hall and Perez’s house in 2001, looking for evidence that he violated criminal conflict-of-interest laws when he backed the maneuvering that led to his switch from councilman to city manager on the same day.
According to sworn statements and memos from District Attorney Steve Cooley’s office obtained by the Weekly, Cudahy employees were pressured to use the same law firm that represented Perez in the investigation. (That firm, astonishingly, was headed by Cooley’s best friend, former District Attorney Robert Philibosian.) A clause in the document that city employees were pressured to sign stated in part: “An advantage of using a single law firm in a criminal matter may be to help assure a common position and increase the likelihood that none of the clients will cooperate with the prosecution.” Other city officials, later named as targets, also retained top-shelf attorneys on the city’s dime. The result was a stonewall defense that cost Cudahy taxpayers $1 million in legal fees.
The aftermath has not been as promised by the upbeat Perez. Some of his harshest critics — L.A. Sheriff’s deputies who worked in Cudahy — accuse him of seeking out a predatory tow-truck company to tow cars for minor violations and thus boost city coffers. Property owners accuse him of being quick to aggressively ticket them for small building violations, even as the city's main commercial corridor wallows in blight.
L.A. Sheriff’s Detective Raul Gama patrolled Cudahy in the mid-1990s, trying to eradicate gangs. He claims that Sheriff’s Department raids and sweeps, aimed at catching gang members with probation and parole violations and putting them back behind bars, were reducing gang-related crime by 35 percent.
Gama describes his interactions with then-councilman Perez as “a game of cat and mouse.” He says Perez preferred him to focus on vehicle checkpoints, which allowed the city to tow cars and charge impound fees when the city nabbed mostly illegal immigrants for not having driver’s licenses.
“I had a problem with preying on people,” Gama says. “It wasn’t the best use of our resources.”
Later, as city manager, Perez eliminated jobs, concentrating power in his office, according to internal city memos obtained by the Weekly. After disagreeing with a member of the Chamber of Commerce, he stopped the city’s longtime contributions to the chamber, causing the chamber to leave Cudahy, which contributed to disarray in the city’s business community.
L.A. County Deputy Sheriff Miguel Mejia, who served for several years in Cudahy, says he always was baffled by Perez’s obsession with wielding power while law enforcers were fighting an uphill battle against gangs and drug dealers, who, he alleges, seemed to have an inside line into Cudahy City Hall.
Says Mejia, “We brought in helicopters, a special gang-enforcement unit. I seriously believe gangs felt our presence.” But, he says, “If we suspected someone of committing a crime, we’d have to keep it from the city.” Interviews with two former Cudahy municipal officers, who asked to remain anonymous, confirm that part of their job was to report to City Hall about what the police were doing, and who they were talking to.
Perez’s revenue-generating activities paid off —? sort of. The city reserve climbed to $3.8 million in 2006 — an unusually high reserve for any California city with an $8 million annual budget.
Yet unpaid bills mounted. The Weekly has reviewed internal e-mails from city employees warning that road-repair companies were threatening to send the city to collections and reminding Perez that payroll expenses were reported for employees no longer with the city. Despite the huge city reserve, payment on the police contract fell behind last year by $245,000, according to a June 20, 2006, letter to Perez from former Maywood City Attorney Cary Reisman.
A 2003 decision shows where the city’s priorities are — and may begin to explain why Maywood’s current police troubles are not easily separable from Cudahy.
Perez and the sheriff had already been at cross-purposes for years when, three years ago, Perez moved to oust two local tow-truck companies the Sheriff’s Department had long worked with. Perez wanted to bring in Maywood Club Towing, giving it access to sensitive law-enforcement data, according to Sergeant Ruben Martinez of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department.
“You’ve dealt with two companies for years that are located right in your city, and all of sudden you go outside with a company you’ve never worked with before?” asks Martinez. “We weren’t comfortable with that.”
Not to be thwarted by the Sheriff’s Department, Perez shopped for another agency to police Cudahy — and Maywood, despite sharing no boundaries with Cudahy, liked the idea of earning $2 million a year, which allowed Maywood to double the size of its small force. Perez says the move had nothing to do with a towing dispute.
Dumping the sheriff’s contract was bizarre. Interviews with local drug police and a review of search-warrant records from 2006 confirm that Cudahy — all 1.2 square miles of it — is a crime hotbed, even as Maywood police work overtime on traffic patrol. In April, federal agents seized automatic weapons and 270 pounds of marijuana and caught Cudahy-based suspects on a wiretap discussing plans to buy and sell “20 to 30 pounds” of methamphetamine and large amounts of cocaine.
“The Sheriff’s Department is a large, professional organization,” says former Cudahy City Attorney Michael Colantuono, who was fired by Perez. “But the city manager does not have as much control over the Sheriff’s Department . . . the sheriff won’t protect your friends or punish your enemies.”
Along with the Maywood Police Department came Maywood Club Towing. A mess ensued — at least in Maywood, which last week imploded in scandal. On February 13, under intense community pressure, the Maywood City Council unanimously voted to ask California Attorney General Jerry Brown to probe allegations of kickbacks to cops and city officials by Maywood Club Towing, as well as claims of police sexual and racial abuse. Among the accusations is that Maywood police flew to Las Vegas, courtesy of the towing company, getting free rooms and the services of prostitutes.
A spokesman for Brown said on Tuesday that the attorney general will defer to District Attorney Cooley, who announced last Friday that he has launched a criminal investigation of Maywood officials and police.
Last August, Maywood police officer Alfred Hutchings received anonymous letters at his office at Chapman ?University, where he works part-time as an ethics professor. The letters, copies of which were obtained by the Weekly, ?apparently were written by a Maywood Police Department ?whistleblower and contain graphic descriptions of racially and sexually abusive cops who were protected if they met quotas for impounding vehicles. The letters also accused two City Council members of taking kickbacks from Maywood Club Towing.
Hutchings turned the letters over to Maywood Police Chief Bruce Leflar, who in November named Hutchings to head the department’s professional-standards unit. But within a week, Leflar went on medical leave, according to an internal e-mail from Lieutenant Paul Pine, who, as the new ranking cop, promptly dismissed Hutchings.
The letters claim that Pine lived rent-free in an apartment in Maywood owned by the owners of Maywood Club Towing, and that many Maywood officers, including Pine, left previous jobs under pressure from superiors. According to civil rights lawyer Tom Barham, the new acting police chief, Richard Lyons, was promoted from patrol sergeant with no command experience or training, after leaving jobs with Santa Ana Park Police and the city of El Monte. “He’s no Audie Murphy,” Barham told a packed Maywood City Council hearing last Tuesday.
Sergeant Enrique Gonzalez, the Maywood Police Department’s official liaison to Cudahy, insisted to the Weekly recently that the allegations “are isolated to Maywood. In Cudahy the citizens want us there. They cooperate with us.”
In recent months the Weekly paid numerous visits to the Maywood Police Department to gather Cudahy crime statistics and ask about public safety. During one of our visits, in January, acting Maywood chief Lyons refused to discuss the Cudahy police contract or anything related to policing or public safety, referring all questions to the new Maywood city attorney, Francisco Leal, formerly of Leal & Olivas. (Leal’s former partner, David Olivas, served as Maywood city attorney until 2004.) The Weekly has called Leal for comment several times, but he has not responded.
Why did Cudahy want Maywood police and Maywood Club Towing in the first place, and why is Cudahy City Manager George Perez satisfied with them amid all the problems?
The Weekly confirmed with Perez that several of the officers named in the anonymous letters to Hutchings have policed the streets of Cudahy, including a current motorcycle officer named Florencio Mesa. Mesa stands publicly accused of sexual misconduct, and also is known as a prolific ticket writer, racking up some 100 impounds a month, which brings in $100,000 in revenue, according to the letters. Perez acknowledges Mesa’s ticket-writing prowess but says the allegations against Mesa are “out of character.”
Perez says that in Cudahy, people don’t tolerate bad police behavior. But some residents are extremely unhappy with the job Maywood police are doing in Cudahy.
Three months ago, 15-year-old Joseph Garcia was shot and killed on Santa Ana Street, less than 100 yards from Cudahy City Hall. Perez was at the scene when police arrived, and he received an earful from Garcia’s father, according to police sources, who say Garcia’s father was blaming Perez for his son’s death — not enough Maywood police patrolling the streets. Perez, when asked by the Weekly about the father's anger, replies dismissively, “People are always looking for someone to blame.”
Two weeks later, with residents still shocked by the City Hall–adjacent killing, a Neighborhood Watch meeting attracted 200 people — but crime was never discussed. Instead, Perez presided over a surreal pep rally featuring “happy birthday” sing-alongs, rounds of applause for new parents, sales pitches from Herbalife and New York Life, and a gift raffle.
For two hours, nobody mentioned murdered teenager Joseph Garcia, or street violence. The most pressing matter raised was speed bumps. “That’s how George plays it,” Sheriff’s Sergeant Martinez says. “He’s into petting puppies and kissing babies.”
Perez urges folks to call him with problems, but one woman went too far and ended up with an unwanted visit from Maywood police and a vandalized car. After the odd Neighborhood Watch meeting last November, the woman reminded Perez that he had advised her to call police about young men loitering outside her apartment, a chemical smell she thought was related to drugs, and strangers suspiciously running into the building from idling cars.
After she complained to Perez, police loudly knocked on her door in full view of the trouble spot. Then, someone scraped her car with a key. She was afraid to let her children outside after that. Perez listened intently, as she described her fear. “Call me next time,” Perez was now telling her, “and I’ll see it doesn’t happen again.”
The next day, Perez presided over another community event in which he once again acted as the benevolent political boss: free turkeys and bags of food for everyone — compliments of the city with a $3.8 million reserve and one of the highest unemployment rates in Los Angeles County.
Such events enhance Cudahy’s south-of-the-border image. While residents get these nominal handouts, the Weekly has learned, gang members get city jobs. In May 2006, according to a Maywood Police arrest report, police were attempting to pull over 20-year-old city employee Robert Garcia in traffic, when Garcia drove into Perez’s driveway and started yelling, “George! George! George!” Police searching Garcia’s car found a knife and less than a gram of meth and booked Garcia, identified in the report as an 18th Street gang member, for possession of drugs. Garcia pleaded guilty and is receiving drug counseling, according to the District Attorney's Office.
Perez says he believes in second chances. But when asked by the Weekly whether he believes he should be held accountable for the dangerous conditions in his city, Perez offers an anecdote that suggests he is unable to confront them.
In December 2005, 28-year-old Cudahy resident Francisco Lopez was shot and killed, Perez says, a murder which prompted a woman to loudly criticize Perez in public while her son, an active gang member, looked on. Perez, knowing about the son’s gang involvement, said nothing about the mother’s hypocrisy.
Clearly proud, Perez tells the Weekly, “The next day the son came and thanked me” for not publicly mentioning his gang affiliation.
Others find that benevolent attitude outrageous. “That is empowering a gangster and telling him it’s okay,” says former councilwoman Araceli Gonzalez.
At the same time, Perez has cordial relations with Hector Marroquin Sr., an 18th Street Gang member who, despite touting himself as a gang-intervention worker, also is a street enforcer for the Mexican mafia, according to confidential law-enforcement documents obtained by the Weekly. (See “Broken Bridges,” L.A. Weekly, December 15-21, 2006.)
Perez is hardly shy about his relationship with this alleged mafia associate whose street nickname is “Weasel.” Marroquin owns a bar called Marroking’s Deuces on Atlantic Avenue in Cudahy. This month, campaign signs for the longtime Cudahy City Council incumbents adorn the property, the scene of an alleged assault in 2005 during which Marroquin, according to an arrest report, warned a patron who owed him money: “You’re messing with the Mexican mafia. I run all of Cudahy.”
Last March, police searched the bar and adjacent buildings in connection with a home-invasion robbery they suspected Marroquin’s son had committed. The police found ammunition, drugs and gang literature.
Marroquin’s reaction to the police search? He called City Manager Perez.
Perez pauses briefly before conceding that he placed a call to then-Maywood Police Chief Bruce Leflar, going to the top on behalf of a dubious associate. “I’m concerned any time a business owner in this community feels harassed,” Perez says.
Perez fumbles for an explanation when asked why Marroking’s Deuces, according to city records, has not had a valid business license since 2004: “I don’t know how that happened.” When asked about the community’s low perception of the bar Marroquin owns, Perez shrugs, “We’ve noticed a certain element hanging out there.”
A key figure in the upcoming election is Cudahy Vice Mayor Osvaldo Conde, the owner of a meat market and check-cashing store. Conde, at times a Perez ally, seems to lead a double life.
A regular at the Potrero Club, where he doesn’t bother to clear security but just walks right in, Conde was arrested in the early-morning hours in December in Huntington Park on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol, according to information released by Huntington Park Police.
He was not booked as Osvaldo Conde but as Osvaldo Lopez. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge of drunken driving. But the Weekly has learned that Conde has two different birth dates and two different Social Security numbers on business-license records in Cudahy. Conde lives part time in Lynwood, four miles south of Cudahy. Conde would not respond to the Weekly’s requests for an interview.
It’s hard not to feel for Cudahy, the little city plagued by gang and drug crime — and no apparent interest on the part of local, regional or federal authorities in stopping it. Observers say the government won’t act until residents raise a big enough stink — as Maywood residents just did.
“People in Cudahy are immigrants and renters, and all they want is to come home from work and enjoy a barbecue on weekends,” says L.A. Sheriff’s Detective Gama. “There are good people there, but they don’t want to challenge authority.”
Drug police say that many drug shipments crossing the Mexican border make two stops in San Diego and head straight for Cudahy. Drug runners from Cudahy return from Arizona and Texas and bring new guns into the community, police say. Meanwhile, 18th Street is engaged in violent conflict with a group called Just Blazing It, and the Clara Street and Cudahy 13 gangs remain active.
Nothing is likely to change in Cudahy until elected officials and appointed City Manager George Perez take a different approach. That seems unlikely. Perez is campaigning for the longtime incumbents he appears to influence — and he is guaranteeing victory on March 6. “We’ve already won,” he declares.
Former councilwoman Araceli Gonzalez is concerned that upstart city council candidates Danny Cota and Luis Garcia, seen as challengers not to their rivals running on the ballot but to Perez, don’t stand a chance because they refuse to raise money for their campaigns.
Garcia says he doesn’t want to owe anyone. Cota seems like he’s just enjoying the thrill of an election. Despite the thuglike tactics that scared off their friend Tony Mendoza, Cota and Garcia are not intimidated.
Still, Garcia confides he has misgivings about life in Cudahy. “Our parents left Mexico to have a better life here,” he says, implying that Cudahy is falling short of that dream.
Gonzalez, who left Cudahy after George Perez took over as city manager, has moved back. She says she is interested in teaching people how to stand up to the city’s bullying. But she too knows her limitations. As a longtime resident of Cudahy, she seems to sense the darker forces at play. “Some things are not worth getting ?killed over.”
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When Mexicans take over..... THE LA RAZA (THE RACE) OCCUPATION PLAN at MAYWOOD or like Maywood’s sister city, TIJUANA?

The city of Maywood in Los Angeles County declared itself a sanctuary zone for illegal aliens this year. Then it got rid of its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division entirely, so that illegals wouldn't need to worry about having their cars towed for being unlicensed.





Have you ever heard of CALIFORNIA’S LA RAZA DEMS speaking out about the 30 billion Mexican drug invasion? OR THE EVER GROWING MEXICAN GANG INVASION?


What happens when the Mexicans invade. Beyond walls covered with graffiti, surge in crime, anchor babies, contempt for the American flag, language, and laws.... the place becomes a filthy Mexican ghetto.

The sad thing about this is there are communities being destroyed by Mexicans all over the 50 states. It’s not just the border states close to the Mexican drug routes.


1) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18881801/site/newsweek/

The city of Maywood in Los Angeles County declared itself a sanctuary zone for illegal aliens this year. Then it got rid of its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division entirely, so that illegals wouldn't need to worry about having their cars towed for being unlicensed.







latimes.com
Maywood to lay off all city employees, dismantle Police Department
By Ruben Vives
10:30 AM PDT, June 22, 2010


The city of Maywood will lay off all city employees and begin contracting police services with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department effective July 1, officials said.

In addition to contracting with the Sheriff's Department, the Maywood City Council voted unanimously Monday night to lay off an estimated 100 employees and contract with neighboring Bell, which will handle other city services such as finance, records management, parks and recreation, street maintenance and others. Maywood will be billed about $50,833 monthly, which officials said will save $164,375 annually.

"We will become 100% a contracted city," said Angela Spaccia, Maywood's interim city manager.

Deputies from the East Los Angeles Sheriff's Station will begin patrolling the 1.2-square-mile city by the end of the month, said Capt. Bruce Fogarty of the Sheriff's Contract Law Enforcement Bureau. The annual cost of providing those services for the small city is estimated at $3.6 million, Fogarty said.

At a council meeting Monday night, city leaders said they were forced to dismantle the Police Department and lay off city workers because they lost insurance coverage as a result of excessive police claims filed against the department. They also blamed years of financial abuse and corruption from the previous council. "We're limited on our choices and limited on what we can do," Councilman Felipe Aguirre told the standing- room-only crowd.

Frustrated and enraged residents blame the council for the city's predicament, and for not following an insurance agency's recommendations, which council members had agreed to last August. The recommendations included hiring a permanent city manager.

Some suggested that city leaders should step down.

"You guys had the power to change it and you didn't," said City Treasurer Lizeth Sandoval, 28, who addressed the council as a resident. "You single-handedly destroyed the city."

Sandoval, a city employee, will be laid off as part of the cuts.

Local activists, who refer to themselves as "A Group for a Better Maywood," announced their intention to recall four of the council members: Felipe Aguirre, Edward Varela, Vice Mayor Veronica Guardado and Mayor Ana Rosa Rizo. The same group sought a similar recall in 2008 and failed.

MAYWOOD’S SISTER CITY, TIJUANA ON OUR BORDER.....


Police tensions in Tijuana


With crime rampant, political rivalry fuels armed feuds between city and state forces.
By Richard Marosi


Times Staff WriterJune 4, 2007
TIJUANA — The two police forces eyed each other across the narrow downtown street. On one side of 8th Street, city cops formed a line in front of their headquarters. On the other, 30 masked state police officers dressed in black faced them, holding weapons. City police had detained two state agents for allegedly threatening the mayor's bodyguards. The state police had come to free the two. They marched forward and tried to shoulder their way inside the building. The standoff last year, which ended when city police released the agents, was one of several incidents that have pitted police force against police force in a conflict that seems to have deepened with each car chase and raid. Armed confrontations between law enforcement agencies are nothing new in Mexico, where police often take the sides of rival drug cartels. But in Tijuana the friction is at least partly a political fight between the National Action Party, also known as PAN, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.A period of relative harmony was broken when Jorge Hank Rhon, the PRI candidate, took office as mayor in late 2004 and hired his own police chief to run the 2,750-member municipal department, which the PAN had controlled for more than a decade. Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy Walther of the PAN remained in charge of Tijuana's state police force, which includes 450 investigators and a highly trained rapid-response team.The opposing parties have said they are a unified front against criminal drug cartels, but the police rivalry has exposed a troubling level of disarray. Both police forces have been heavy-handed. In March 2005, city police surrounded state police headquarters and at gunpoint freed two of their officers who had been detained in a homicide investigation. Last month, city cops again surrounded the state police building after agents detained a city cop. And over the last year and a half, there have been at least half a dozen confrontations between state agents and city police assigned as bodyguards to Rhon. The police infighting couldn't have come at a worse time. In the city of about 1.5 million people, drug cartels are fighting for control of lucrative trafficking routes. Many upper and middle-class residents are moving out to avoid being targeted by kidnap-for-ransom rings. Rampant drug addiction is fueling a surge of car thefts and robberies. Because public safety remains the most important issue for residents, perceptions of police can shape political destinies, causing agencies to try to outdo or embarrass each other. "Each police force tries to show progress and achievements while attempting to criticize and embarrass the other force  and the only groups benefiting from this situation are the crime rings," said Jose Maria Ramos, the director of the school of public administration at Tijuana's College of the Northern Frontier. After Rhon's municipal police chief took over, the agencies' areas of responsibility began to blur. State authorities are in charge of investigations, but municipal cops started expanding their turf and pursuing their own investigations in an effort to win over public opinion. They said they had to be more aggressive in a city overrun by crime. The feuding flared on busy thoroughfares when state agents started intercepting the mayor's motorcade of SUVs, which were filled with heavily armed bodyguards. The mayor's supporters called it harassment, but state police said the cars weren't registered. They said they had to watch such convoys closely because they fit the profile of organized-crime hit squads that carry out kidnappings and assassinations throughout the city. Each confrontation between the forces received ample coverage in local newspapers, and some PRI politicians called the stops an orchestrated campaign to embarrass the mayor. Police relations worsened in January when Mexican President Felipe Calderon dispatched thousands of soldiers and federal agents to the city. The general in charge of "Operation Tijuana" ordered city police to turn in their weapons while the officers were inspected for links to organized crime. City cops protested by patrolling with slingshots hanging from their holsters, complaining that the anti-corruption inspections should be extended to the state police. Rhon stepped down as mayor in February, ending his tense cross-town motorcades — and things have calmed down since, said Victor Manuel Zatarain, the city police chief. He and other law enforcement officials say that cooperation and coordination between the agencies have improved, especially in emergency situations. But some experts say deep divisions still undermine efforts to thwart organized crime. When several gunmen attacked Tijuana's General Hospital in April to free a wounded ally, for example, most of them escaped, despite a supposed joint operation by state and municipal police.With the state gubernatorial campaign set to start this summer, experts say police relations are likely to become more strained. Minor incidents still flare into tense confrontations, as was evident last month when state agents detained a city cop for allegedly carrying an unlicensed weapon. When Zatarain showed up at the state police building to clear things up, he brought seven bodyguards. About two dozen other city police officers surrounded the building and blocked off streets around the area, state police said.Soon after city police took up their positions, about 50 state police reinforcements arrived, and the two heavily armed forces ended up staring each other down for about one hour outside the headquarters.

HE LIED! SHE LIED! THE OBAMA PELOSI LA RAZA HEALTHCARE PLAN - Good For Mexico! Good For Corporate Donors!

WE WERE ALL WITNESS TO A CONGRESSMAN CALLING OBAMA A LIAR FOR CLAIMING IN HIS STATE-OF-THE-UNION MESSAGE THAT ILLEGAL WERE NOT INCLUDED IN THE OBAMA PELOSI LA RAZA HEALTHCARE “REFORM”.
AS IS ALWAYS THE CASE FOR HIS HISPANDERING CORPORATE OWNED PRESIDENT, IT IS CORPORATE PROFITS FIRST, ILLEGALS SECOND, AND FUCK THE STUPID GRINGOS FROM THEN ON!
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For some, a struggle WHO THINKS ABOUT THE STRUGGLE OF THE AMERICANS?


Some illegal immigrants have used stolen Social Security numbers to qualify for health programs -- a form of medical identity theft increasingly on hospital radars. Many more scramble to pay for their medicine and doctors visits in cash, a challenge in an economy where day-laborer work has dried up.

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HOW TO BUY ILLEGALS’ ILLEGAL VOTES: free healthcare!
WHY WE ARE IN SUCH A MONEY SQUEEZE

Florida ER doctor's notes
Having spent three weeks in a hospital in Naples, Florida with my wife I couldnt help noticing what was going on in the hospital and I had a lot of time to talk to the doctors and nurses about what I had observed. Below is a commentary from an ER Doctor. Do you think this might be a big reason our health care system and our social security system are so screwed up? Do you think this might be a big reason our taxes keep going up? Who do you think these people are going to vote for?

From a Florida ER doctor:

"I live and work in a state overrun with illegals. They make more money having kids than we earn working full-time. Today I had a 25-year old with 8 kids - thats right 8; all illegal anchor babies and she had the nicest nails, cell phone, hand bag, clothing, etc. She makes about $1,500 monthly for each; you do the math. I used to say, We are the dumbest nation on earth. Now I must say and sadly admit: WE are the dumbest people on earth (that includes ME) for we elected the idiot idealogues who have passed the bills that allow this. Sorry, but we need a revolution. Vote them all out in 2010. "


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Sorting out claims about healthcare legislation
How would an overhaul really affect senior citizens? Abortion funding? Illegal immigrants?



By Noam N. Levey

August 10, 2009

Reporting from Washington — With lawmakers home for their August recess, a fierce battle has broken out over what precisely is in the mammoth healthcare bills being pushed by congressional Democrats. There has been no shortage of misinformation, much of it advanced by critics of President Obama's overhaul effort who have made sometimes outlandish claims. Here is a look at a few of the most contentious points.

Would illegal immigrants get free healthcare benefits?

Provisions in the House and Senate bills explicitly prohibit people who are "not lawfully present in the United States" from getting federal aid to help them buy health insurance in the new exchanges.

Congressional Democrats have resisted Republican efforts to put tougher documentation requirements on those applying for aid, arguing that that could discourage many poor people from signing up for health insurance.

No matter what happens with the legislation, illegal immigrants would almost certainly still be able to get care in emergency rooms, a major burden in some parts of the country.

THESE LA RAZA ENDORSED POLITICIANS, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI are well trained to speak out of both sides of their mouths!
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A lie exposed
20 July 2010
Four months after the passage of Obama’s health care legislation—hailed by most of the media and the entire liberal establishment as the most progressive social reform since the 1960s—the reactionary implications of the measure are emerging ever more clearly.
The centerpiece of the plan, the White House claimed, was the extension of coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and the containment of costs that were making medical care unaffordable for average citizens. Cost-cutting and the implementation of “efficiencies” would not affect the quality of care, the president claimed. Moreover, those already insured would be able to keep their doctors and medical plans.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained, these claims were false. The purpose of the legislation was to slash health care costs for US corporations and the government by reducing coverage and rationing care for millions of Americans.
The ruling class saw Obama’s “reform” as an opportunity for corporations to dump their employer-paid insurance plans, or, at the very least, restrict workers’ ability to choose treatments, doctors and hospitals.
The result, the WSWS warned, would be the establishment of a class-based system where workers would be given inferior care while the rich continued to enjoy the best medical treatment money could buy.
Recent news reports have confirmed this warning.
A July 18 New York Times piece, entitled “Insurers Push Plans That Limit Choice of Doctor,” reports: “As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.”
Insurance giants Aetna, Cigna, the UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint have already offered plans with “limited networks” to smaller employers in New York, San Diego and Chicago, the article notes, adding that insurers and their consultants expect that “businesses of all sizes will gravitate toward these plans in an effort to cut costs.”
“The tradeoff,” the Times writes, “is that more Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of choosing or keeping their own doctors if they are outside the new networks. That could come as a surprise to many who remember the repeated assurances from President Obama and other officials that consumers would retain a variety of health-care choices.”
In New York, for example, Aetna’s “narrow network” plan provides access to only half the doctors and two-thirds of the hospitals offered by its traditional coverage, while in San Diego, 80,000 school employees, covered by UnitedHealth, have been put in a multi-tiered health plan where their out-of-pocket expenses depend on the quality and price of the physicians they choose.
By such means, the employers stand to save 15 percent.
“Affordability is the most pressing agenda item,” Dr. Sam Ho, the chief medical officer for UnitedHealth’s medical plans, told the newspaper. That Obama’s health care “reform” was from the start about cutting costs, rather than improving coverage, is a fact of which the Times and the rest of the liberal establishment were well aware and which they assiduously concealed from the public. As the article points out, insurance executives at Cigna were sounding out CEOs about super-cheap plans even as the bill was being prepared.
“What this does is eliminate the Gucci doctors,” Peter Skoda, the controller of Haro Bicycle Corporation in Vista, California, told the newspaper. “Facing a possible 35 percent increase in its rates,” the Times notes approvingly, “Haro switched to an Aetna plan that prevents employees from seeing doctors at two medical groups affiliated with the Scripps Health system in San Diego. If employees go to one of the excluded doctors, they are responsible for paying the whole bill.”
The Times notes that the last time corporations and insurers tried to restrict access to specialists and hospitals—with the establishment of Health Management Organizations or HMOs in the 1990s—it provoked an enormous public backlash. That is why Obama, with the help of the New York Times and other media, sought to conceal the real content of his health care “reform” from the population.
Under the terms of the plan, corporations are not obliged to provide insurance at all, let alone maintain present levels of coverage. On the contrary, companies that maintain insurance plans the government deems too costly will face a punitive tax. Moreover, employers are liable to pay only a small fine—well below the cost of continuing to pay premiums—if they drop workers from their insurance coverage.
In Massachusetts—where the state government enacted a health care overhaul in 2006—hundreds of employers are opting to dump coverage and force workers to sign up for the state subsidized health care program. According to a recent Boston Globe article, under conditions of rising costs and the continued economic downturn, companies say it has become far cheaper to pay the state penalty for not covering their workers—roughly $295 annually per employee—than to pay thousands in premiums.
Similar financial incentives will kick in nationally, once the Obama plan goes into full effect.
Under the legislation, workers who are stripped of their employer-paid benefits—along with those presently uninsured—will be forced to buy coverage on so-called insurance exchanges run by the states. If they fail to do so, they will be fined.
The insurance giants, which stand to make a windfall from the influx of approximately 24 million new customers, are betting that their cut-rate plans will be popular among workers who cannot afford quality coverage, the Times reported. “We think it’s going to grow to be quite a hit over the next few years,” Ken Goulet, an executive vice president at WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest private health insurers, told the newspaper.
The New York Times led the campaign for the passage of Obama’s health plan. On March 24, in a Times article entitled “In Health Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality,” David Leonhardt wrote that the legislation was “the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.” It was, he continued, part of a “deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.”
This was a bold-faced lie, and the Times’ well-paid writers and editors knew it. In fact, Obama’s plan to gut health care was part of the unfinished business of the corporate-government offensive against the working class launched in the 1980s. This was also signaled by the Democratic president’s attack on health benefits for auto workers during last year’s forced bankruptcy and restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler.
The record of the WSWS on Obama’s health care “reform” sets us apart from all those pseudo-left organizations and middle-class liberal publications like the Nation, which promoted the anti-working class legislation.
Jerry White
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Congressman Brian Bilbray, along with 55 other Members of Congress, is urging the leaders of the United States House of Representatives to include a method of enforcement for benefits under any new plan of nationalized health care. The text of the letter follows:
September 15, 2009
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House
H-232 United States Capitol
Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable John Boehner
Office of the House Republican Leader
H-204 United States Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Madam Speaker and Republican Leader Boehner:
As discussion on health care reform continues, we urge you to include measures that will prevent illegal immigrants from receiving taxpayer-funded benefits in any health care reform bill considered by the House. While the House bill currently says illegal immigrants cannot get benefits, the statement is meaningless because the bill contains no verification mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants will not receive benefits.
The non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently issued some troubling information on the immigration-related provisions of the current health care bill, H.R. 3200. Specifically, the new CRS Report R40773, Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200, points out the following:
• CRS states that H.R. 3200 "does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently—participating in the [taxpayer-subsidized Health Insurance] Exchange."
• While section 142(a)(3) of H.R. 3200 states the responsibility of the Health Choices Commissioner to administer the "individual affordability credits under subtitle C of title II, including determination of eligibility for such credits," no specific enforcement mechanism is outlined in the bill.
• CRS also notes that "there could be instances where some family members would meet the definition of an eligible individual for purposes of the credit, while other family members would not. For example, in a family consisting of a U.S. citizen married to an unauthorized alien and a U.S. citizen child, the U.S. citizen spouse and child could meet the criteria for being a credit-eligible individual, while the unauthorized alien spouse would not meet the criteria. H.R. 3200 does not expressly address how such a situation would be treated. Therefore, it appears that the Health Choices Commissioner would be responsible for determining how the credits would be administered in the case of mixed-status families."
Our constituents find these provisions unacceptable. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that there are almost two million families in the United States where illegal immigrant parents have U.S.-born children, and even more mixed-status families exist. If H.R. 3200 becomes law in its current form, billions in taxpayer funds could go to those who are in our country illegally.
Most of our concerns could be easily addressed by requiring individuals applying for affordability credits to undergo citizenship verification using one of the existing programs used for various social service programs. We urge you to adopt language such as the Heller amendment (offered in the House Ways & Means Committee during the markup of H.R. 3200, July 16, 2009) or the Deal amendment (offered in the House Energy & Commerce Committee markup of H.R. 3200, July 31, 2009) in the final version of any health care reform legislation to close these costly, unnecessarily loopholes.
Sincerely,
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Illegals Receiving Health Care …."But....( of course there is!)"

“If you’re in this country illegally, should you be able to get health care?” CNN’s John King asked Mrs. Pelosi.


“No, illegal immigrants are not covered by this plan,” she replied.


Mrs. Pelosi’s remarks are downright deceptive, according to Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who points out that the proposed health care legislation “ contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits .”


These loopholes, Rep. Smith maintains, are “no accident.” He maintains that the proposed legislation, despite months of debate, still contains no mechanism for verifying if applicants are legal residents or not.


The Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee attempted to address this loophole by an amendment proposed by Congressman Dick Heller (R-Nevada) which would have required applicants for government provided or subsidized health care to demonstrate eligibility through the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) systems.

But, on July 29, the Heller Amendment was soundly defeated by the following 26 Majority Members of the House Ways & Means Committee: Xavier Becerra (Calif.), Shelley Berkley (Nev.), Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), Joe Crowley (N.Y.), Artur Davis (Ala.), Danny Davis (Ill.), Lloyd Doggett (Texas), Bob Etheridge (N.C.), Brian Higgins (N.Y.), Ron Kind (Wis.), John Larson (Conn.), Sander Levin (Mich.), John Lewis (Ga.), Jim McDermott (Wash.), Kendrick Meek (Fla.), Richard Neal (Mass.), Bill Pascrell (N.J.), Earl Pomeroy (N.D.), Chairman Charlie Rangel (N.Y.), Linda Sanchez (Calif.), Allyson Schwartz (Pa.), Pete Stark (Calif.), John Tanner (Tenn.), Mike Thompson (Calif.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.), and John Yarmuth (Ky.).


The Federal for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) believes the legislation is now purposefully self-contradictory in order to ensure that the millions of illegal Latinos will receive coverage. FAIR points out that while one provision of the proposed health care reform bill states illegal immigrants will not be eligible for benefits, the legislation remains without any system of verification for determining if a patient is a legal or illegal U. S. resident.

Moreover, Fair insists, the bill leaves open the possibility that if one citizen family member is eligible for benefits, then the entire family — including illegal immigrants — is also eligible for the benefits.

“At a time when the federal government is running trillion dollar deficits, and the projected costs of the proposed health care overhaul seem to grow with each passing day, the committee that writes our tax laws wants Americans to pay for the health care costs of illegal aliens,” says FAIR President Dan Stein. “Given the opportunity to close loopholes that would cost the public billions of dollars each year, Democrats on the committee unanimously rejected an amendment that would bar illegal aliens from a national health care program.”

The cost of treating illegal aliens amounts to nearly $11 billion a year, according to calculations done by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a non-profit group that opposes illegal immigration. And that cost is not expected to go away if a health insurance reform bill becomes law.

According to FAIR’s Director of Special Projects Jack Martin, illegal immigrants presently cost U. S. taxpayers $10.7 billion a year for health care. The numbers are contained in a report that FAIR plans to publish in the near future.

“The current health care bill is looking as if it is leaving a very large loophole for medical coverage being provided to illegal aliens,” Martin said.

So again, yes, the speaker of the House can say: "We've made no provision for Health Care for Illegal Aliens". But, is she in fact telling you the WHOLE truth or only half a truth. I am an independent voter and I, at this point, have my opinion. You be the judge for your own opinion.
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The politics of Healthcare Reform

from the AP -

"Immigration analyst James R. Edwards Jr. reported last week in National Review that "no health legislation on the table requires federal, state or local agencies -- or private institutions receiving federal funds -- to check the immigration status of health-program applicants, so some of the money distributed via Medicaid and tax credits inevitably would go to illegal aliens." Moreover, the Senate Finance Committee plan creates a preference for illegal aliens by exempting them from the mandate to buy insurance.

That's right. Lawabiding, uninsured Americans would be fined if they didn't submit to the ObamaCare prescription.

Lawbreaking bordercrossers and deportation fugitives would be spared.

For years, advocates of uncontrolled immigration have argued that illegals aren't getting free health care, and that even if they were, they'd not be draining government budgets. The fiscal crisis in California gives lie to those talking points. In March, the Associated Press reported that Sacramento and Contra Costa counties were slashing staff and closing clinics due to the prohibitive costs of providing nonemergency health services for illegals.

"The general situation there is being faced by nearly every health department across the country, and if not right now, shortly," Robert M. Pestronk of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told the AP."
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