Presidential Election Prediction & Chapter From My New Book!

By Jaime Rojas, Jr.
November 3, 2016, Book Launch - Los Angeles, CA
Chapter from "Fiscal Conservative's Pocket Constitution 2.0 aka Latino Republicans"

Predictions of the November 2016 Presidential Elections and Beyond

If I was a betting man, never in my wildest imagination would I have predicted Donald Trump to be the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee for the November 2016 elections.

In September 2015, the Republicans had over a couple dozen potential candidates for the position of President of the United States of America. These Republican candidates’ policies fell on various parts of the “conservative/right” spectrum: moderate right to “God is going to scorch your ass” beliefs. But the interesting part, many more candidates were closer to the “God is going to scorch your ass” than usual. Overall nothing to out of the ordinary, well at least for the Republican party, since the 1980’s and its hostile take-over by the Southern Conservative Christian extremist.

The Democratic Party too was going through its form of “extremism”. Once again you had the presumed Presidential Candidate and political machine, Secretary Hillary Clinton, who just eight years ago lost to a no brand name candidate from Chicago, President Obama. On the leftist spectrum, she is very moderate, some even feel more Republican than Democrat in her policies and beliefs.

Now to the extreme left you had the very popular Congressman from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, who in my humble opinion would give everything to the American people for FREE or more on the socialist ideal. But to be honest, as a former Democrat, I felt Bernie was more refreshing and “Obama” like in his philosophies (at least in the aspect of “hope”) than his counterpart of Secretary Clinton.

The stage is set and now we have both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton representing their respected parties.

I will preface my next statements by saying I am a first-generation American and the product of immigrant parents who came from Colombia to the United States over forty years ago. As many immigrant stories, they too came with no money, no network, and not speaking a lick of English. But they had the burning desire of the “American Dream” and God bless them….they achieved it! My parents, like many of yours, have a strong work ethic, have old-school beliefs, saved money and were entrepreneurs in their thinking and in their actions. They worked hard all their lives and have a retirement to show for it.

But I believe their crowning jewel above all is the success of their two American sons. Who in just one generation, attended & taught in the best universities, worked for Fortune 500 companies and in the White House, became entrepreneurs themselves and who at the end are productive American citizens.

So back to the Republican party’s nominee, El Donald Trump. As you remember over eight years ago, he just like Hillary, ran for his prospective party and lost. But back then he was a kinder and gentler Trump, who everyone remembers as the person who hobnobbed and networked with anyone who he thought would either make him richer or bring him higher TV ratings, including his friends the Clintons.

Welcome back to 2016 Presidential campaign. The “new” Trump starts off his bid for the Presidential Republican nomination by calling “Mexicans” everything under the big, blue sky and the scapegoats for all of America’s problems. They are rapist, murderers, illegals….who came to this country to basically gut it and return back to their Mother country fat and rich. He now wants to build a continuous wall on the  Mexican/American border to keep America safe. But I wonder what happed to building a wall between the Canadian/American border as well….oh yeah….those Canadian have white skin and look European.

The blame game has been played since the inception of this already great country. It all started when the Puritans were being persecuted in Europe for their religion. They decided to escape this persecution and they landed on Plymouth Rock. The American Indians for the most part welcomed them and helped them with the necessary survival skills to make it through the harsh seasonal weather….and America was born…more or less.

In return, these Europeans gave them diseases and in the long-run committed genocide through the slaughter of the native Indians of this country.

If that wasn’t enough, the agricultural revolution was in full swing, and it was very labor intensive. Due to the lack of numbers of strong European men (and the social class mentality)….slavery thus began. African men were being shipped to America in high numbers to meet the demand of tobacco, cotton and other agricultural products.

As most business-minded folks know, the highest expense any business has is human resources (aka labor), and the conservative numbers is somewhere around 50% of a business’ expenses. So how did the United States become so rich and powerful so quickly….the cost of labor = “zero”….so profits soared through the roof.

Almost forgot….so as American was born, the fore-fathers were very intelligent and forward thinkers of their time. They designed and created a government that was like no other and still is like no other. The core foundation of America are two documents: the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (luck you, this book contains copies of both).

Our founders believed passionately of the protection of its citizens from its government. But also a controlled government was necessary to protect the people and keep balance and harmony.

So now we have a Presidential Republican nominee (or more like a snake-oil salesman) that literally spews fear, hatred and racism all under the cause of the “Let’s Make America Great Again” slogan. Blaming everyone but himself for the problems of America. What’s wrong with this picture….many things!

America is currently facing a fork on the road. On one hand you have, for example, coalminers in Virginia who have seen their great paying, union jobs decline (if not almost disappear) and are not be prepared for globalization. They are undereducated, underemployed and really pissed off. On the other hand you have immigrants (I include African-Americans in this mix….they too are immigrants) who have dealt with racism, glass-ceilings, police/government brutality, scape-goating…they too are pissed off.

So what now? This is the million-dollar question.

My Presidential election prediction should not be too shocking. If we have a high voter turnout, Hillary wins in a landslide. If we have poor turnout, Trump wins a close race.

But the question all Americans should be asking, what happens after Tuesday, November 8^th? Are our problems fixable? My short answer is yes but with a hell of a lot of work.

America needs to go back to the basics. We need to begin by getting involved on the local level…that means with our families first. We need to be better parents and better children. I truly believe this is the start of the renaissance of America. Without love and structure of a strong family (traditional and non-traditional) as the foundation, American will continue in this downward spiral of fear, anger and hatred.

How American is that?

Please be a responsible Americans and vote on election day…your country is depending on it.

BUY BOOK HERE!

What the baby Bolivar boom tells us about how we used to view South America

An image from the book "Bolivar" by Marie Arana. (Simon & Schuster)

By Caitlin Fitz

    Almost 200 years ago, as the United States approached its 50th birthday, a new baby name swept the nation. It wasn’t biblical or even Anglophone. It was Bolivar. Hundreds of mothers and fathers, living in Kentucky log cabins or Illinois farmhouses, named their crying, crinkly newborns after Spanish America’s most celebrated revolutionary: Simón Bolívar of Venezuela. The baby Bolivar boom wasn’t an isolated oddity, either. Other Americans named their new towns, their boats and even their livestock Bolivar, adopting the Spanish­speaking revolutionary as one of their own. Given how much of our current election cycle has been marked by talk of border walls and racial slurs, it may seem surprising that ordinary Americans held such early affection for Latin America. A generation before the United States swallowed half of Mexico (including what turned out to be a gold­en-crusted California), visions of a harmonious republican hemisphere prevailed.

    In the 1810s and early 1820s — just a generation or two after our Revolution of 1776 — most of Latin America fought (and won) independence wars against Spain and Portugal, from Mexico and Colombia to Chile and Brazil. Those developments owed more to the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars than to the shot heard round the world, but nonetheless, U.S. patriots happily gave themselves credit for having inspired a hemisphere full of revolutionary disciples. They concluded that their founding republican ideals really were universal — that U.S. light was spreading to places thought mired in Iberian colonial darkness. Victories across Latin America thus inflamed U.S. patriotism; as a Boston newspaper trumpeted, these newfound sister republics were “flattering to our national pride.”

   The excitement was pervasive. From Chillicothe, Ohio, to Savannah, Ga., mothers dressed their daughters in feathery, broad­brimmed “Bolivar hats.” Poets wrote odes to Brazil and Peru. West Point cadets looked exuberantly south and fired ceremonial cannons. Newspapers printed long lists of toasts sent in after each Independence Day, including hundreds feting Latin American freedom. As editors nationwide approvingly observed, toasts to “the Patriots of South America” were “the favourites of the day,” along with toasts to the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and the United States itself.

    The U.S. government remained officially neutral in these revolutions, declining to do for Latin Americans what France had done for it. But people found smaller ways to chip in. In 1812, Congress voted to send $50,000 worth of provisions to help erstwhile revolutionaries in Caracas dig out after a devastating earthquake; it was a pioneering instance of U.S. foreign aid. In another groundbreaking congressional vote 10 years later, the United States became the first country to formally recognize Spanish America’s new nations as independent powers.

    Hoping to do well by doing good, merchants loaded their ships “with weapons as ballast” (as Portugal’s ambassador griped) and sold the goods to South American rebels. With similarly mixed motives, some 3,000 privateers attacked Spanish ships on the high seas until Congress outlawed the practice beginning in 1817.

    The inter­American idealism was so strong that it often transcended racial and religious differences. Everyone knew that Latin Americans were Catholics, and newspapers widely reported that Spanish Americans in particular were passing gradual antislavery laws. Black U.S. audiences were thrilled, while white observers were so excited about the anticolonial battles that they accepted the antislavery ones. As the flummoxed Portuguese ambassador wrote at the time, it was “as if every person ... was denounced as an anti­patriot, if he be not an advocate for supporting every rebellion or insurrection ... whether these self­styled patriots are white, black, or yellow.”

   Americans’ universalist optimism about human potential was endlessly contested, and their abstract talk of brotherhood wilted as slavery spread into the South and West. Inter­American ardor eventually yielded to manifest destiny, racialized chauvinism and war with Mexico. But the sanguine inclusiveness of the 1810s and early 1820s mattered nonetheless. In celebrating the decline of colonial rule to their south, Americans were defining the United States as an advocate for worldwide republican liberty — even when that liberty included Spanish­-speaking antislavery Catholics.

   This short­lived and self­congratulatory excitement for Latin American independence offers few easy answers for our own times. Hemispheric enthusiasts themselves disagreed about the particulars of inter­American trade and diplomacy. Immigration wasn’t a central issue, and when it did begin to surge later in the 1820s and 1830s, people usually were moving to Mexico, not away from it. Still, the hemispheric enthusiasm stands in striking contrast to our current political discourse about Latin America. Our early 19th century predecessors saw themselves as political kin of people with clear cultural, linguistic and sometimes racial differences. Turning south of the border, early U.S. patriots adopted internationalism as a credo.

   Two centuries later, Donald Trump offers a new credo: “Make America great again.” The power and the peril of this slogan stem from its imprecision. To which past? What elements of our history does he propose to resuscitate? To paraphrase Walt Whitman, our history is large; it contains multitudes. It teems with triumph and treachery, freedom and slavery, equality and oppression.

   But here’s one thing we might resuscitate. We could improve upon our early 19th century predecessors’ global awareness and interest, their conviction that our welfare was intertwined with that of foreigners. We could reject Trump’s belligerent isolationism in favor of international goodwill. And we might consider that such hemispheric hopefulness and inclusive cosmopolitanism are an American tradition too.


Caitlin Fitz is an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University and author of “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions.”

With Markedly Fewer Latinos at Republican Convention, Meet 3 Delegates

With Markedly Fewer Latinos at Republican Convention,Meet 3 Delegates

 by Suzanne Gamboa and Victoria DeFrancesco Soto - NBC.com

 

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Donald Trump will come to the 2016 Republican National Convention to find a shrunken Latino presence, but it will not be absent.

Even though Trump started his campaign bashing Mexicans, promising to build a wall on the border, saying those here illegally "have to go" and calling a U.S.-born federal judge Mexican while questioning the judge's competence, there are Latinos who say Trump is this election's better candidate and that they will cast their vote for him to be the party nominee.

Not all have been Trump supporters throughout. Some are part of a thus far unsuccessful movement to allow delegates to vote for the candidate they choose, an attempt to keep Trump from being the nominee. Others have switched to Trump after their first choice bowed out. Some just want to beat Hillary Clinton.

The convention begins Monday, after a week in which Trump named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate and scored a victory in preventing a rules change in the Republican platform committee that threatened his nomination.

In marked contrast to 2012, when rising Hispanic Republican stars like New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio rallied the convention delegates and put a more diverse face on the party, what is remarkable about 2016 is the few Latinos who will be there. The initial roster of speakers for this convention only included Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

A group of Latino conservatives who have been harsh and vocal critics of Trump said Monday that they are backing the presumptive GOP nominee to get a Republican administration in the White House after recent terror events and shootings. But many Hispanic elected officials and other prominent Latinos who served in previous administrations are not attending.


The convention also comes after the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal Marist poll shows the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump in four of the most diverse presidential battleground states, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.
Nonetheless, there are several Latinos excited to be at the convention and among them those who are enthusiastically supporting Trump. They recognize the diminished Latino presence but are optimistic about their party's chances for the White House and Congress.

Here are summaries of conversations from three of the delegates who talked to NBC News before arriving in Cleveland:

JESSICA FERNANDEZ, Florida delegate

Jessica Fernandez, a Donald Trump delegate from Florida to the 2016 Republican National Conveniton Florida Federation of Young Republicans

Believed to be the youngest delegate from the state of Florida, 31-year-old Jessica Fernandez comes to the convention with a sense of duty.

A Miami-Dade County resident, she is from the one county of Florida's 67 counties that Trump did not win. She had been a Marco Rubio supporter in the primary, but because she represents the state, she feels obligated to the other 66 Florida counties' preference.

"I feel as a Republican delegate I have a duty to fulfill and I want to do the correct thing and that means supporting Trump," Fernandez said. "I want to do the correct thing. I don't want to add to chaos."

The Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles, Fernandez's parents arrived to the U.S. at a young age in the late '60s and early '70s. Fernandez said her mother told her stories of life under the Castro regime and the attempt to brainwash her as a little girl into loyalty to the communist government.

"They would tell her to put her head down and pray for candy and they would open their eyes and there would be candy. Then they would say pray to the father Fidel (Castro) and pray for candy and there would be candy or a penny," she said. He mother and her mother's family arrived on one of the last Freedom Flights from Cuba.

One of her grandfathers was forced to leave the country after being told that because of his political work, if he did not, he would face a firing squad, she said.

The political activism has remained with Fernandez, who leads the Miami Young Republicans as its president and is the executive director of the Florida Federation of Young Republicans.
She worked on the Mitt Romney campaign and has worked to helped recruit Hispanics to the GOP and build Hispanic leaders in the party.

She said she expects she'll be one of the few Hispanics at the convention, but was looking forward to it nonetheless, despite the opposition among the ranks of delegates to keep Trump from getting the nomination.
"I respect that there are people who say don't want to vote for Trump," she said. "He got the nomination by the process. There will be delegates like myself who are bound to play their part to deliver the vote of their district," she said.

"The alternative is not pleasant. We have someone running on the other side who has been testifying in front of Congress, the FBI, who's been a liar," said Fernandez. "Those problems supersede a comment that would have insulted people."

"When we have someone on the other side who has behaved very questionably," she said, "I'm all Trump."

GUSTAVO PORTELA, Michigan delegate

Gustavo "Gus" Portela, a Donald Trump delegate from Michigan to the 2016 Republican National Convention. Gustavo Portela

While in high school, Gustavo "Gus" Portela would go to his local county party's meetings in Grand Rapids, Mich. He liked George W. Bush and helped in his 2004 re-election campaign by going door-to-door to drum up votes.

He went on to join the College Republicans in Grand Valley State University and today is in Washington, D.C. serving as the executive director of the College Republican National Committee.
Despite the years of history in party politics, Portela, 27, says what he likes about Trump is that he is an outsider.

Trump's success in the primaries is a continuation of elections of outsiders to Congress in previous elections, Portela said.

"I just think that he [Trump] brings a fresh perspective to the process I don't think we've ever had. I don't think we've had a Republican nominee who is an outsider," he said.

Originally from Puerto Rico, Portela and his family moved to the mainland when he was 11 because his parents "essentially were looking for a better life" and to get better educations for their children. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and those born on the island are American citizens.

In Michigan, his father worked in the Sara Lee factory and his mother, who had been a receptionist in a hair salon in Puerto Rico, was a stay-at-home mom while he was growing up.
Portela said Trump has said "controversial things" but said his statements have been taken out of context by the media, such as Trump's pledges to build a wall, which he said became declarations that Trump wants to deport everyone.

At an Iowa rally in November 2015, Trump said: "I'm tougher on illegal immigration than anybody. That's what I'm saying we have to take people that are here illegally and we have to move them out and you know what, it's going to be done, it's going to be done."

Trump has also said families would have to go but some could return through the legal process. Although he was thought to have backed off from some of that, Trump has not been clear about whether mass deportation was still a policy.

Portela said he sees Trump as wanting to establish law and order in the U.S. "He has said he wants people to come here legally," Portela said.
As far as Trump's comments on the wall, Portela said the policy is not unlike the policies of other politicians who have called for border security.

ADRYANA BOYNE, Texas delegate 

 

Adryana Boyne, a Ted Cruz delegate from Texas to the 2016 Republican National Convention Adryana Boyne

Texas delegate Adryana Boyne agrees with Trump that immigration is a serious problem that has to be addressed head on. And she does not believe that he is a racist or a nativist. However his lack of consideration for the tone of his immigration comments is what gets under her skin.

Boyne, a prominent political voice in the Texas GOP and the Hispanic Republicans of Texas, has had to struggle with Trump's comments. She likes his business sense but has been troubled by his Latino related rhetoric.

Shortly after Trump announced his candidacy, Boyne penned an opinion piece for the TexasGOPVote site where she enumerated in detail her grievances with the soon-to-be Republican candidate.
What most bothered (and still bothers) Boyne is the generalization Trump made out of the gate that Mexico was sending people that "have lots of problems…They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

For Boyne "the focus on the minority of criminal elements overshadows the tremendous contributions that Mexicans have made."

The Texas delegate's struggle with fully embracing Trump is personal. She was born and raised in the Mexican state of Puebla and became a naturalized American citizen in 1994.

"I am a first-generation immigrant and I take Mr. Trump's comments to heart - he does not differentiate," she said.

Boyne said that if she were further removed from the immigration experience she would likely not be as affected by Trump's comments. But for her, the anti-Mexican rhetoric rings too close to home.
Donald Trump is not Boyne's first choice. She is a Ted Cruz delegate because of his performance in the Texas primaries.

An attempt to stop Trump from securing the nomination by changing rules and allowing delegates to "vote their conscience" failed, so efforts to build more support for Cruz or any other candidate aren't likely.

But Boyne's distaste for Hillary Clinton is so strong that it has moved her toward supporting Trump.
In Cleveland, Boyne will be looking to see a change in tone from Trump, but ultimately, she is committed to helping her party stop Clinton from reaching the White House.

The Wasted Gift of Donald Trump

The New York Times | OP­ED COLUMNIST


JULY 8, 2015
By Frank Bruni

I keep reading that Donald Trump is wrecking the Republican Party. I keep hearing that he’s a threat to the fortunes of every other Republican presidential candidate, because he sullies the brand and puts them in an impossible position. What bunk. The truth is that he’s an opportunity for them as golden as the namesake nameplates on his phallic towers, if only they would seize it. The brand was plenty sullied before he lent his huff and his hair to the task.

And by giving his Republican rivals a perfect foil, he also gives them a perfect chance to rehabilitate and redeem the party. As it stands now, he’s using them. If they had any guts, they could use him. They could piggyback on the outsize attention that he receives, answering his unhinged tweets and idiotic utterances with something sane and smart, knowing that it, too, would get prominent notice.

They could define themselves in the starkest possible contrast to him,calling him out as the bully and bigot that he is. Then he wouldn’t own the story, because the narrative would be about cooler heads and kinder hearts in the party staring down one of its most needlessly divisive ambassadors and saying: Enough. No more. We’re serious people at the limit of our patience for provocateurs.

There was a hint of this last weekend, when Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican­American, lashed out at Trump’s broad­brush comments about Mexican immigrants crossing into America with an agenda of drugs and rape. Bush labeled those remarks “extraordinarily ugly” and “way out of the mainstream” and said that there’s “no tolerance” for them.

But he didn’t exactly volunteer that assessment. It came in response to a reporter’s question, and it came more than two weeks after Trump’s offense. Neither he nor Marco Rubio exhibited any hurry in distancing themselves from Trump, though both of them trumpet their personal biographies as proof that they’re sensitive to Latino immigrants.

On Fox Business on Tuesday, Rubio gave a pathetic master class in cowardly evasion, stammering his way though an interview in which he was asked repeatedly for an opinion about Trump. You would have thought that he was being pressed for malicious gossip about the Easter bunny. He never did manage to upbraid Trump, though he was careful to mention the “legitimate issue” of border security that Trump had raised.

As in 2012, Republicans can’t summon the courage to take on the dark heroes of the party’s lunatic fringe. As in 2012, this could cost them dearly. The Charleston, S.C., church massacre and subsequent debate over the Confederate flag afforded them an ideal moment to talk with passion and poetry about racial healing.

But the leading contenders reacted in fashions either sluggish, terse, muffled or all three. They showed more interest in fleeing the subject than in grabbing profitable hold of it. Trump’s rant about immigrants, which he has since amplified, was another squandered moment. Chris Christie could have made good on his boasts about always telling it like it is and being unconstrained by politesse.

Instead he made clear that he liked Trump and considered him a friend. That soft crunching sound you heard was the supposedly hard­charging New Jersey governor walking on eggshells.

Rand Paul claims the desire and ability to expand the party’s reach to more minorities. So where’s his takedown of Trump? Bush has said that a politician must be willing to lose the party’s nomination in order to win the general election, but that philosophy can’t end with his allegiance to the Common Core. It has to include an unblinking acknowledgment of his party’s craziness whenever and wherever it flares. Trump’s hold on voters stems largely from his lack of any filter and from his directness, traits that they don’t see in establishment candidates.

So his fellow Republicans’ filtered, indirect approach to him just gives him more power. And while he should be irrelevant, he’s becoming ever more relevant, because he’s exposing their timidity and caution. They’re wrong to try to ignore him, because the media won’t do that and because he’s probably going to qualify for the debates. Looking ahead to the first of them, the conservative pundit George Will bought into the notion of Trump as an ineradicable pest who “says something hideously inflammatory, which is all he knows how to say, and then what do the other nine people onstage do?”

Oh, please. That’s hardly an existential crisis. It’s a prompt for an overdue smidgen of valor. Without any hesitation, they tell him that he’s a disgrace. Without any hedging, they tell him that he’s absurd. It’s the truth. And for the Republican Party, it might just be transformative. Thomas L. Friedman is off today.

I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. A version of this op­ed appears in print on July 8, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Wasted Gift of The Donald.

Frank Bruni

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