Top White House adviser Karl Rove traveled to Los Angeles this week to pay homage to the anti-immigration enforcement lobbying group for Latinos: the National Council of La Raza.
"La Raza" is Spanish for "The Race."
It's bad enough the White House lent its prestige to The Race's annual conference. But did you know the Bush administration has forked over millions of federal tax dollars directly to The Race?
According to GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood of Georgia, The Race snapped up $15.2 million in federal grants last year alone and more than $30 million since 1996. Undisclosed amounts went to get-out-the-vote efforts supporting La Raza political positions. The U.S. Department of Education funneled nearly $8 million in taxpayer grants to the group for a nationwide charter schools initiative.
Among The Race's most infamous government-funded charter schools is La Academia Semillas del Pueblo, the Los Angeles public school that teaches "Aztec math" (ancient dot math is the new math) and the Mexican indigenous language of "Nahuatl." The ethnic separatist principal of the school, Marcos Aguilar, told a sympathetic UCLA interviewer:
"We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain. . . . We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction."
That's the tip of the iceberg. I found dozens of other publicly subsidized charter schools sponsored by The Race and funded with our money, including:
-- Aztlan Academy in Tucson, Ariz. According to The Race, the school's success rests on "Aztlan's ability to integrate a meaningful Chicano Studies program into their lives, language, and academics, as a means of developing their intellects as well as their pride and self-esteem." The school's name -- a reference to a mythical swath of the vast Southwestern U.S. expanse, which Latino activists claim is their rightful homeland and which they seek to reconquer for Mexico -- says it all.
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