In the early spring of 1991, my husband was close to a fella named Ray who was part owner of Beaver Productions out of Louisiana. They managed concert tours, mostly rock and roll, some country music too. These were multi-million dollar productions that are out on the road for months at a time.
One afternoon Ray called saying he was in a bind, they're having a show in Dallas that night and were a man short for backstage work and some security, would you help me out? My husband said "Of course!" He went, loved it, and flew to Lubbock a few weeks later to interview for a job as a tour bus driver for Roadhouse Transportation. He got the job. Not more than 2 weeks after being hired, Roadhouse called and needed him, asap, to fly from Dallas / Ft.Worth to meet a tour already in progress in Buffalo, New York. It was Clint Black's "Put Yourself in My Shoes" tour with Lori Morgan and Merle Haggard. He was to take over the audio truck as the previous driver had "moved" to take over as the personal bus driver for Lori Morgan. Just before Memorial Day, I was invited to meet up with the tour while they were recording in Nashville and then ride with my husband to the next show in Seattle, Washington. We had 6 days to travel there. We'd never been out west, never mind had the chance to drive across the country together, so we did it! It was a blast, too. I remember when we saw these signs, "Continental Divide just ahead" and we sort of knew what that meant, but when we crossed it we looked at each other with expressions of, "what now" written on our faces. I figured this is what you tell others about to impress them that you're "well traveled." After arriving, checking in, and dressing for a casual dinner at the venue, I came upon some news that floored me. I'd need blankets that night in this particular hotel because they'd already turned off the huge boilers in the basement, that supplied steamed heat for the rooms. I'm a Texan. We don't do cold very politely. I didn't cuss (very loudly) while on the phone. I finally got to make my way to the venue, found the caterers and fixed myself a plate of sliced ham, boiled potatoes, and green beans, saving room for dessert! My husband was off taking care of his truck and in walked Merle Haggard, looking much like he always did. He fixed his own plate and sat next to ME! We smiled and ate in relative silence. I was just about to get up to clear my spot when he leaned over and asked, "Ya gonna eat them green beans?" What do I DO!?! What should I say? OH MY GOSH! I needn't tell you that Merle Haggard got my green beans. Who'd deny him such a simple request? I said, "Help yourself" and he thanked me. I told my husband the story and he thought it was hilarious. After that, it was passed around between the drivers and production crew to ultimately become "Roadie Gold."
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The government has been committing usury (or guaranteeing usurious commercial bank loans) for decades and everyone sees it is a problem. Unbridled loans have indebted lower classes who thought the government was helping them out and enabled vanity-driven snobs seeking elitism. Americans became addicted to the idea of college and it got expensive. Student loans are one result of a society obsessed with pseudo-intellectualism and / or unrealistic aspirations.
This isn't about whether or not I think kids taking out loans got hosed. Of course they did. I think they were to some extent culturally pushed into making a decision they were not mature or responsible enough to make. Colleges scammed them by promising them the world and societal cheerleaders helped by telling them to follow their dreams, however asinine they may have been. I sympathize some, but my sympathy has its limits, especially with this sense of entitlement and victimhood of anyone who opted to take out massive loans. They got what they wanted. They chose to take out a loan to make a purchase. How that personal investment turned out is not my problem. I know I can't pick up the tab, and no one else should either. I have my own bills to pay and I can't take on anyone else's. I'm not opposed to people wanting an education to better themselves, though I do not think everyone should go to college. But colleges have made out really well by having an endless money fountain without any accountability while telling everyone they need to go to college. Debt forgiveness does nothing to address this, and "free college" won't either. The extreme cynic in me keeps seeing what the end game is. If loan forgiveness and free college are like anything else the Democrats do these days, expect a caste system of identity politics. If you attended a Christian institution, you will be ineligible. There will be the inevitable questionnaire about your political leanings. Are you conservative? Do you support Israel? Are you pro-life? Do you eat at Chick-fil-A? What is two plus two? And then there is the matter of government expansion. The bureau of student loan debt relief will be a nightmare. It'll chew up a massive budget and spit out propaganda. There will probably be a new czar and a website that’ll crash with the rollout. The government will hold that over your head for years. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a box to check on whether or not you received a "debt reduction or loan forgiveness" on tax forms and credit applications. And another for "Are you registered with the Democrat Socialist Party?" As a bonus, your windfall due to loan forgiveness gets taxed and you’re paying into some other nonsense program. Hey you can afford it now, right? Big Gov helped you out. Stop being stingy.
For many years, the political scene in Chicago has had a reputation as a cesspool of corruption. Mob ties, bribery, ethics violations, and other shady dealings have become business as usual for the Windy City, and most of the nation was blissfully immune to it until 2008, when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office and brought the ‘Chicago Way’ with him. Arrogantly touting his administration as “transparent” and more recently as "scandal free," he turned a corruption-infested Executive Branch over to Donald Trump in 2016, replete with a corrupt Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, and a host of other bureaucracies crawling with hard-left Democrat operatives bent on the destruction of the Trump presidency that was never supposed to be.
It is little wonder, then, that when one begins to study the real problem on our southern border, direct ties to the city of Chicago begin to surface. In order to understand how and why Chicago is directly connected to the border crisis, one must also understand the people, organizations, and history involved. The rabbit hole runs deep, but there is a common theme that runs throughout the entire journey that should cause every liberty-loving American to stop and take note of the events in Chicago, Washington D.C., and at the southern border. The Chicago Way isn’t the only bad actor in this border crisis, but it does seem to hold the lion’s share of the blame. To begin, a few of the players and their organizations lurking behind this dangerous game must be introduced. Some names will be familiar, others not. But they are all connected by a disturbing thread. The first name one needs to know is Rudy Lozano. Lozano was an activist, union organizer, and political figure in Chicago. He was murdered under mysterious (and mostly uninvestigated) circumstances on June 8, 1983. Before his death, he was a prominent figure who had lost a runoff election for a seat on the Chicago City Council by a mere seven votes. Rudy was credited with bringing Mexican and Puerto Rican voters together to back Harold Washington as Chicago’s first African-American mayor in 1983. He was also one of the founders of the Center for Autonomous Social Action (CASA), a hardline Marxist-Leninist foundation created to aid illegal immigrants living in the United States. “Rudy was doing pioneering work in the effort to bring union recognition and justice on the job to immigrant workers, including the undocumented” (peoplesworld.org 07/13/03). It was this type of socialist multicultural activism that attracted a young Barack Obama to the Chicago area, according to Rudy’s son, Rudy Lozano Jr. After Rudy’s death, his sister Emma Lozano, a pastor at Lincoln United Methodist Church in Chicago, continued to carry the torch of activism. Emma founded the Centro Sin Fronteras (Center Without Borders or CSF) and La Familia Latina Unida (LFLU) in 1987. CSF is an illegal alien advocacy group that shares the Lincoln United Methodist Church’s address along with the Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders or PSF), which is actively involved in coordinating the movement of migrant caravans to the southern U.S. border. Another interesting organization Emma Lozano is associated with is Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), an activist group that grew out of the movement to free Angela Davis, a noted member of the Communist Party USA. Emma is also staunchly anti-American, as noted in her 2003 speech: “We won't give up until we have equal rights and live a life with dignity. Legalization is not enough - we want to make a new America, one that accepts and treats all of the inhabitants of our continent as equal citizens. We ride for freedom from our oppressors and we don't say, ‘please, accept us, we are good workers,’ and make contributions, and wave the U.S. flag. We know our history - 1/2 of the entire United States was originally Mexico. We have every right to be here.” The Lozano family doesn’t stop there. Rudy Lozano has two sons, Rudy Jr. and Pepe. Pepe was a member of the Young Communist League USA, and former writer at the hard-left publication known as People’s World magazine. Rudy Jr. is a politician and Vice President in Global Philanthropy at JP Morgan Chase & Co. Both sons worked on Barack Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, both remain tied to Communist Party USA to varying degrees. Much of this information was uncovered in 2016 when large caravans of immigrants heading to the United States were falsely reported by the mainstream media to have been part of an uncoordinated grassroots movement to reach safe haven. Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center exposed the organizations that were reportedly organizing and funding these caravans in his October 14, 2018 article. The connections, however, run deeper than simply organizing the caravans and getting immigrants to the border to demand asylum. They run straight from Chicago to Washington D.C. While the press fawns over the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, all of whom carry the communist-socialist torch, another freshman congressman remains unmentioned by the media, yet poses a much larger and deeper threat to the sovereignty of our nation. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia replaced Luis Gutierrez after an unexpected 2018 announcement that Gutierrez was retiring after a 26-year run in the House of Representatives. Before we can understand the threat a lawmaker like Garcia poses, we have to look at the background of his predecessor, Gutierrez. A one-time member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and longtime friend of Emma Lozano, Gutierrez retired from Congress to work as Senior Policy Advisor for the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) coalition, which “brings together 37 pro-immigrant, pro-refugee groups in 31 states to mobilize them” to vote for anyone or anything that pushes the United States further left towards socialism. Gutierrez was also no stranger to ethics investigations during his tenure as a congressman. As recently as March 2018, Gutierrez was found in violation of House rules after paying his former Chief of Staff Douglas Scofield out of his office funds, and in November 2018 was investigated for paying his wife over $400,000 from campaign funds from 2010 - 2016. Simply put, Gutierrez was a corrupt politician with a communist background who hand-picked Garcia (another communist) to replace him in 2019. Chuy Garcia was handpicked to run for Congress to replace Gutierrez because of his similar hard-left views. He was a former Cook County commissioner who had honed his radical leftist views in college (learning from Lola Navarro, a disciple of the infamous Saul Alinsky). It was also in college where he met and befriended Rudy Lozano Sr. who, like everyone else discussed to this point, had ties to the Communist Party USA. Garcia also has a noted involvement with the Communist Party USA , and turned his precinct into a communist fiefdom by hand-picking local leftists and making sure they got elected. That is the classic Chicago Way. Garcia wasted no time joining the Congressional Progressive Caucus when he arrived in D.C., a testament to his hard-left political beliefs. One can also tie Valerie Jarrett and the Obamas, who all come from similar backgrounds, to the growing list of Chicago extremists. All three are connected in one way or another to the Communist Party USA, all three were activist with socialist leanings in the Chicago area, and all three traveled in the same group of acquaintances. All of the people and organizations mentioned in this article have something in common. They all share the belief that the U.S. / Mexico border should be wide open to allow anyone to walk across at will, unchecked, unhindered, and unaccounted for. They all share the belief that the United States is inherently evil because of “white privilege” and must embrace socialism in order to redeem itself from its perceived racism and oppression. Organizations like Pueblo Sin Fronteras, Centro Sin Fronteras, La Familia Latina Unida (LFLU) and others are committed to bringing immigrants to the U.S., not for the sake of ‘social justice,’ but to change the landscape of the electorate to push hard-left socialism. The coordinated immigrants coming to our border have been duped into leaving home and family, promised a life of ease, lied to about the immigration process, and are now being used as propaganda tools for groups like the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who parade them out during election cycles in an attempt to make conservatives look bad. But getting these people to the border requires money, which is something very few of these organizations admit to having. A little research and connecting the dots casts shadows on a few monetary resources, though. Enter the Wieboldt Foundation, a $20 million corporation whose executive director since 1994, Regina McGraw, is the former President for Communications at Voices for Illinois Children and whose president, Maureen Loughnane, is a former Director of Development with the ACLU.The Wieboldt foundation, sticking to the hard-left socialist agenda, makes social change and redistribution of wealth its main priority. They have contributed to PSF, CSF and LFLU over the years, making the funding of migrant caravans possible. Remember too that Rudy Lozano Jr. is the VP of Global Philanthropy at JP Morgan Chase bank. Is migrant caravan funding on Chase Bank’s agenda? There is no obvious evidence, but it does not take much to imagine some of those benevolence funds finding a back door into these organizations, then passing funding on to the coordinators of the caravans. Other donors appear to be the Public Welfare Foundation, and the National Immigration Forum, both hard-left organizations. On June 22, 2019, the Communist Party USA celebrated its 100th anniversary in Chicago, “...emphasizing their backing of the Green New Deal, full legalization of all immigrants, protecting voting rights, and other issues.” (peoplesworld.org). Pepe Lozano was a featured speaker. He and other speakers spelled out the party’s platform, which mysteriously aligns perfectly with many of the Democrat presidential candidates heading into the 2020 election. When one looks at the Democrats’ efforts through the lens of Marxism, the picture becomes crystal clear. The political right has not become the extremists; the left has. It is time for all conservatives, libertarians, and independents to become hyper-sensitive to the events that have been unfolding at America’s southern border and to the arguments being presented by leftists in Congress and their lapdogs in the media. There is a massive, concentrated effort to escort these supposed “asylum seekers” into the U.S. for one reason alone: To create a voting base to usher in a socialist-communist government against the will of the people. The Chicago influence is only the tip of the iceberg. Similar organizations can be found in New York, Los Angeles, and other large cities across the nation. Americans must realize that when they hear government officials and media outlets promote the Green New Deal, shame people for being white, smile with pride at their support of late-term abortions, heap scorn on Second Amendment advocates, and berate citizens for wanting border control, they are taking pages straight out of the Communist Party USA’s platform. It must also be realized that the crisis at the border is the result of the problem. The cause of the problem is the coordination and funding of certain types of immigrants to be used as political pawns by the extremist left. Trying to deal with the problem at the border is like putting a bigger bucket under a leaky pipe. The leak is still there; the bucket only buys time. The problem needs to be fixed at the source. The people and organizations coordinating and funding this intentional effort to “change the face of America” must be shut down. The future of freedom in the United States depends on it. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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