by Marvin J. Ramirez

Marvin J. Ramirez

It’s hard to say anything when we see food prices skyrocketing to levels never seen in the world history. A loaf of bread has increase from $2 to 4.50 in less than a year? The same for milk, eggs, and most of our basic food staples.

The recent skyrocketing cost of food staples around the world is making national and international headlines, according to Catholic Relief Services.

The crisis is prompting economists, agronomists, finance ministers and heads of state to come up with immediate and long-term solutions so that more widespread price increases are averted and increasing discontent is mitigated.

“What we are seeing is unprecedented,” says Catholic Relief Services food aid expert Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw in a statement. “If immediate needs are not met, and if resources and policies supporting increased agricultural production are not put in place soon, we are heading for a cascade of hunger in the world.”

They say prices are increasing sharply in every region of the world for some of the most basic food stuffs traded on international commodity markets. The price of wheat has doubled in less than a year, while other staples such as corn, maize and soy are trading at well above their 1990s levels. Rice, which is the staple food for about 3 billion people worldwide, has tripled in cost in the last 18 months. In some countries, prices for milk and meat have more than doubled.

But we don’t need to go that far. Let’s take a look at the prices at Safeway and check the prices.

Why are big corporations such as Safeway, are way so much more expensive than small grocery stores around the corner, when Safeway buys more wholesale than these small family-owned businesses in the neighborhood? Why do we keep buying there?

Maybe the answer is in the stock market. When we enter in the stock market, I mean when we allow our food supplies to be sold in the stock market, multimillion dollar investors capitalize in buying all the food supply in the world, and then they increase the price at their will. Can you imagine that a few people might now own all the food in the world, in the name of ‘free market?’

Maybe it’s time to take a look at where free market should stop, or we are going to end up being the slaves of those who own all the food. Or maybe we already are their slaves. What are the politicians doing about it?

by the El Reportero’s staff

Tatiana Gutiérrez G.

Miss Margine Quintanilla, native of Rivas, Nicaragua, celebrate her birthdate in the beautiful city of San Francisco on June 2.

A veteran and graduated journalist, who also holds a postgrade in marketing and publicity, Quintanilla was until the end of last year, the producer of the television program from Channel 2 in Nicaragua, Primera Plana, a writer of the prestigious newspaper La Prensa, and a sociology professor at a University in Managua.

Margine Quintanilla R.

Arrived to San Francisco in the middle of March and now is going on a tour of studies and business in the state of Minnesota, wherefrom she will depart temporarily to Nicaragua.

El Reportero newspaper, and especially its, Marvin J. Ramírez, sends her warm congratulations.

­Also of Nicaragua

In the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the young woman Tatiana T. Gutierrez born in Nicaragua, celebrates her 23rd birthdate.

An English student with aspirations to graduate with a Bacherlor’s Degree in Hotel and Restaurant, Gutiérrez came to the USA nine months ago, to reside with her husband in Minneapolis.

After finishing her studies, she wants to obtain a job with the prestigious Hilton Hotel. Congratulations from the personnel of El Reportero newsaper and its editor Marvin J. Ramirez.

by Margine Quintanilla

The new building that houses the Contemporary Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind opened on Saturday June 8, 2008. Unique opening expositions will be on display. Location, Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.

History of Chicano Movement

Learn the history of the Chicano movement in the United States. Informative sessions will be held every Tuesday, beginning June 10th and will run to August 5th, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at el Cafetazo, 3087 16th Street/Mission St. also in Berkley from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. at 382 Pasillo Boalt, open to the general public. Come to one session or to all. For more information Call 415-864-1278.

‘Fondo Popular de la Mision’ opens its doors to the community

An innovative organization whose mission is to help families of low income facing immigration issues has just opened its doors to the community.

The mission of the organization is to increase access to financial services, savings and opportunities for investment as a tool for the residents of the Mission to construct a strong economic future for the individual and the community.

Information about programs available at grand opening of “Fondo Popular , will be Wednesday June 11th, from 10:00am-5:00 p.m. at the following location 1500 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 200. For more information call 415-738-2559, or visit the Internet website at www.fondopopular.org.

Health Care, Yes! Insurance Companies, NO!

Hundreds of persons of all walks of life will conduct a protest against medical insurance companies. This event will be held during the insurance companies convention in SF. It will be held Thursday June 19th at 12:00 p.m. at Moscone 4 on Howard Street in San Francisco, for more information call 415-695-7891.

by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo

Four thousand delegates at Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party’s convention have endorsed by acclamation Governor Anibal Acevedo Vilá’s bid for a second four-year term.

“Cuatro años más,” Four more years, chanted some 4,000 delegates, plus other supporters, who packed a the baseball stadium in the U.S. commonwealth’s capital of San Juan two weeks ago. (April 27) That could happen, or Acevedo Vilá could be preparing to serve as many as 20 years in federal prison.

The worst thing that happened recently to the governor was his March 27 indictment on 19 charges of corruption by a federal prosecutor. The best thing that happened to him was that the same day, Governor Dan Siegelman of Alabama was set free from prison after an appeals judge all but dismissed his conviction on similar charges.

Why the connection?

In both cases, a Republican Party-nominated prosecutor has pressed the case against a sitting governor who belongs to the “wrong” party. This is the unfortunate legacy of the long-gone Attorney General Alberto Gonzáles, who resigned in disgrace over the apparent politicizing of his office to favor Republican Party interests.

Siegelman was convicted on a list of financial irregularities with campaign funds and of listening to lobbyists who had supported him with campaign funds. They call this “pay-to-play” and it was taken to its zenith as an art form by Republicans in Washington who disguised it as the “K Street Project.”

The mixing of personal expenditures with campaign spending or of accepting money that is tainted is often more a matter of faulty accounting than malice. In the case of Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis of California, we will never  know because the Republican White House just shut down the investigation of one of their own.

These factors affect Puerto Rico. Acevedo Vilá was indicted for unreported funds when filing his income tax forms some seven years ago. But as a resident of Puerto Rico, he does not pay federal income taxes. As is well known by people who live in New Jersey but work in New York, you pay taxes on the money you make in the state where you work but that place has no claim on money you make where you reside. The federal indictment claims that the governor failed to include income made in Puerto Rico on the taxes he filed when working in Washington, D.C., as Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico. The prosecutor, a favorite of island Republicans, says that the federal courts gained jurisdiction because the governor used the internet, which crosses state lines.

Clearly, campaign fund bundlers in Philadelphia gathered money in  questionable ways from the pay-to-play culture that existed in the City of Brotherly Love. But Mayor John Street, who sat on top of this pyramid, was never found guilty of any wrongdoing, so it is hard to see how Acevedo Vilá can be blamed for anything more than sloppy accounting. The same goes for other charges to campaign used in Puerto Rico for family expenses or clothing purchases. The prosecutor wants to make a federal case out of all this – because the governor sent an email.

The governor claims that the charges have been formulated in an election year to force him off the ticket and open the way for a Republican statehooder, Louis Fortuño, who has served as the island’s non-voting representative in the U.S. Congress since 2005, to waltz into the governor’s mansion.

Acevedo Vilá, who thanked his supporters in an hour-long speech, points to his vigorous protest against the FBI’s high-handed arrest of a radical Puerto Rican leader that resulted in the man bleeding to death a few hundred feet from the agents who refused to save the life of the helpless target.

That case, as this one, concerns jurisdiction. The United States maintains that federal laws and law enforcement supersede the laws of its Puerto Rican colony even though – unlike the states – Puerto Rico has no role in making the federal laws. Acevedo Vilá has challenged that federal control and says the indictment is the price to pay.

Of course, the Puerto Rico governor could be guilty of corruption AND the United States of imperial interference. In the tangle that is Puerto Rican status politics, both sides are often wrong. Hispanic Link News Service.

(Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. Author and scholar, he serves as a member of the Pennsylvania State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights. Email him at stevensarroyo@ptd.net). ©2008­

by William I. Robinson

Draconian legislation introduced into the Senate triggered mass protests by millions of U.S. immigrants and supporters in spring 2006. Known as the Sensenbrenner bill, for the name of the sponsoring senator, it would have criminalized both undocumented immigrants and their supporters. The bill underscored the extent to which elites in the United States, as elsewhere in global society, are willing to go to maintain a super-exploitable and super-controlled army of immigrant labor for the new global economy.

The uprising in protest over the Sensenbrenner bill, however, frightened the ruling class. A mass immigrant rights movement is at the cutting edge of the struggle against transnational corporate exploitation. Granting full citizenship rights to the tens of millions of immigrants in the United States would undermine the division of the U.S. — and by extension, the global-working class into immigrants and citizens.

That division is a central component of the new class relations of global capitalism, predicated on a casualized and “flexible” mass of workers who can be hired and fired at will, are de-unionized, and face precarious work conditions, job instability, a rollback of benefits, and downward pressures on wages.The mass protests of spring 2006 helped defeat the Sensenbrenner bill but also sparked an escalation of state repression and racist nativism and fueled the neo-fascist anti-immigrant movement.

The backlash has involved, among other things, stepped-up raids on immigrant workplaces and communities, mass deportations, an increase in the number of federal immigration enforcement agents, the deputizing of local police forces as enforcement agents, the further militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, anti-immigrant hysteria in the mass media, and the introduction at local, state, and federal levels of a slew of discriminatory anti-immigrant legislative initiatives. In the face of what can only be described as a terror campaign against immigrant communities, a split occurred. In simplified terms, the more “moderate” or liberal wing of the leadership pursued a strategy of seeking allies in the halls of power and limiting mass mobilization to a pressure mechanism on elites to open up space at the table for the Latino/a establishment, while the more radical, grassroots-oriented wing insisted on building a mass movement for immigrant rights and social justice from the ground up.

The liberal camp has sought allies in Congress, among the Democrats, organized labor, and mainstream civil rights and public advocacy organizations, to negotiate more favorable immigrant reform legislation. This camp has been willing to sacrifice the interests of some immigrants in order to win concessions from mainstream allies. Sacrifices include forsaking full legalization for all immigrants in exchange for dubious “paths to citizenship,” and to compromise over such issues as “guest workers programs,” which have been condemned as indentured servitude and have been shown to place the labor movement in a more vulnerable position.

The radical grassroots camp was not against lobbying or attempting to penetrate the halls of power but insisted on prioritizing a permanent mass movement from below that subordinates alliances with liberals to the interests of the disenfranchised majority of immigrant workers and their families. This camp has also insisted on the need to link the immigrant rights movement more openly and closely with other popular, labor and resistance struggles around the world for global justice.

These distinct strategies represent, in the broader analysis, two different class projects within the multiclass community of immigrants and their supporters: the former, those middle class strata who aspire to remove racist and legal impediments to their own class condition; the latter, a mass immigrant working class that faces not just racism and legal discrimination but as well the acute labor exploitation and survival struggles imposed on them by a rapacious global capitalism.

The strategic challenge is how to achieve the hegemony of the mass worker base within the movement. The expanding crisis of global capitalism opens up grave dangers for immigrants and for all of humanity – but also opens up opportunities. It is not to the Democratic Party or to the halls of establishment power but to the mass base of this movement – the communities of poor immigrant workers and their families who swell our cities and rural towns – to whom we must turn to reverse the anti-immigrant onslaught. Hispanic Link.

(William I. Robinson is Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book, Latin America and Global Capitalism, will be published in fall 2008. Email: wrobinson@soc.ucsb.edu).