And Then There Were None

By David Tatosian on Apr 13, 07


Testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee on June 20, 2002, Sherri Buffkin, former Supervisor at the Smithfield Packing Company in Tar Heel, North Carolina, stated (in part): “Management hired a special outside consultant from California to run the anti-union campaign in Spanish for the Latinos who were seen as easy targets of manipulation because they could be threatened with immigration issues. The word was that black workers were going to be replaced with Latino workers because blacks were more favorable toward unions.”



Smithfield’s Tar Heel Plant is the biggest hog slaughter and processing plant in the world. In 1997, as in 1994, Smithfield was trying its best to discourage employees from joining the United Food and Commercial Workers union.


Human rights watch states: “The status of immigrant workers was also a key factor in workers’ organizing efforts at Smithfield Foods’ North Carolina hog processing plant. At the time of the union election in the Tar Heel plant in 1997, UFCW organizers estimated that 20 percent of the workers were immigrant Hispanic workers. “We never asked, and we tried to tell them it didn’t matter, but the truth is that most of them were probably undocumented,” said union representative Jeff Greene.”


Today, 60% of Smithfield’s employees are Hispanic and 30% are Black Americans.
According to 2005 census figures, the percentage of Hispanics living in Bladen and the surrounding counties, from which the Smithfield employees would have to come from, is approximately 6.8%


The percentage of Blacks from the same area is approximately 30%.


The disproportionately high number of Hispanic hires indicates Smithfield carried out their promise to replace Black American workers with those ‘easily manipulated’ Hispanic workers.


And if, as Mr. Greene states above, 20% of the immigrant Hispanic workers “were probably undocumented” in 1997, how many more illegal aliens does Smithfield now employ?


Republican Senators Richard Burr and Elizabeth Dole seem unconcerned with the illegal activities of Smithfield, the UFCW or the destruction wrought by growing numbers of illegal aliens in their home state of North Carolina.


Democratic Congressman Mike McIntyre, a member of the Congressional “Blue Dog Coalition” who has served the district in which the Smithfield plant operates since 1996, was awarded the National Association of Development Organization’s 2007 NADO National Leadership Award on April 2nd. (NADO describes itself as “the national voice of regional development organizations primarily serving small metropolitan and rural America.”)


Presenting the award, NADO President Dan Bollinger explained, “Congressman McIntyre is a true leader who has displayed an unwavering commitment to providing new economic opportunities for our nation’s local communities, especially in his district in southeast North Carolina.”


Rep. McIntyre seems to display an unwavering commitment to providing economic opportunities for Smithfield’s illegal alien employees.


My question is: where is the “Black Leadership” in all this?


The Smithfield situation has all the elements of a media driven three ring circus: a white owned company openly displacing Black Americans with Hispanic immigrant workers, a significant number of whom are illegal aliens, and white politicians aiding and abetting that displacement.


The silence of the “Black Leadership” in Smithfield is puzzling.


The silence of the Black Leadership on another issue is equally puzzling.


Specifically: Gregory Kane, in a commentary at blackamericaweb.com, states, “Black Americans are engaged in a race war, but it’s not the one you think it is. And you can bet our traditional “misleaders”—the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus and Julian Bond and Bruce Gordon of the NAACP—won’t ever talk about this race war.”


The race war Mr. Kane is referring to is what LA County Sheriff Lee Baca (in a Washington Post article) calls the, “daily ‘brown on black’ violence” occurring inside California’s penitentiaries.


Referring to the Washington Post article, Mr. Kane asks if, “investigators said they traced the riot to Aryan Brotherhood gang leaders, who they said ‘greenlighted’ white jail inmates to attack blacks. Do you think we’d have heard from Jesse, Al, Julian, Bruce and our illustrious CBC then? Of course we would have...But when it comes to “brown on black” violence, we don’t get so much as a grunt from our misleaders.”


In the L A Times, Tanya K. Hernandez supports Mr. Kane’s brown on black race war observation.


In fact, Miss Hernandez refers to the murder of 14-year-old Cheryl Green at the hands of Hispanic gang members as, “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods” and refers to a trial of four Hispanic gang members during which, “prosecutors demonstrated that African American residents (with no gang ties at all) were being terrorized in an effort to force them out of a neighborhood now perceived as Latino.”


Miss. Hernandez states, “as the violence grows, the “diasporic” origins of the anti-black sentiment — the entrenched anti-black prejudice among Latinos that exists not just in the United States but across the Americas — will need to be directly confronted.”


I can’t disagree with Mr. Kane’s disparaging assessment of Black “misleaders”.
I agree there is a war going on in this country. I also believe Kane and Hernandez’s concerns are legitimate, but they are mistaken in referring to that war as a brown on black race war. The war they describe has produced devastating consequences that go far beyond the Black community.


This war is a brown against non-brown war with thousands of reinforcements streaming across our southern border every day. It is a war encouraged and supported by “Blue Dogs” like Rep. McIntyre who allow operations like Smithfield to flourish. It is a brown against non-brown war that has already destroyed American communities, American culture and American citizens. It is a war like the jihad, where the ultimate victory is the destruction or enslavement of the American people.


Hernandez cites the need to directly confront entrenched prejudice, but American citizens are doing just that from coast to coast. She should look to her fellow citizens for relief and support.


Simply put: united we stand, divided we fall. Our survival depends on it.


David Tatosian


Sources:

http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=7865_0_1_0_M