RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/austins-nightmarish-escalating-crime/

On the heels of the death of George Floyd, hundreds flooded to the streets, convincing city officials that cutting the budget of our police officers would be a necessary step in “making things right.” But now, years later, we’re seeing the effect of such a campaign, which is not only hurting thousands of fellow officers, but also the cities that they desperately tried so hard to protect.

One of those cities is Austin, Texas. That’s right, one of the sparkling jewels of that great state has now fallen to a higher level of violence. It’s seen a massive increase in homicide over the past few years; and its police presence has dwindled, to the point that the city’s own Police Chief has had enough.

Thomas Villarreal, president of the Austin Police Association, recently appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the hazardous actions of city officials. He discussed how the city cut a massive $150 million from the police budget three years ago, and how the force hasn’t bounced back since.

“We just continue to have a city council that doesn’t show its police officers that [it] cares about them,” he explained.

Villarreal continued, “Back in December 2017, we had a city council vote down a police contract for the first time in the history of negotiating contracts. And, you know, we pushed forward to 2018, tried to get back under contract. Our city decided to go through what they called reimagining police oversight. And then, you know, we got back under contract.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reparations-for-everyone/

For all the blather about reparations and who owes what to whom, we ought to step back and consider who among those who reside in the United States have been aggrieved, how recently, for how long, what was the impact at the time, are there ramifications today, and what is the overall assessment?

Many ethnic and racial groups at various times throughout our history made significant contributions, which across the broad swath of today’s population, remain virtually unknown.

Focusing on the Chinese

European Jews arriving in the 1890s and again in the 1910s were kept out of every corporation of prominence, denied housing, shunned by the guilds, and kept at a distance socially by “polite” society. The Irish were once considered vermin. So, pay their descendants reparations? The Chinese workers in the 1890s along the Pacific coast – Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – were poorly treated. Pay them as well?

In the 1800s, for example, the Central Pacific Railroad in California (that hotbed of reparations proposals) employed as many as 12,000 Chinese as young as age 12. The pool of these workers represented America’s largest industrial workforce. Nine out of 10 people employed by the Central Pacific Railroad were first-generation Chinese in America – not merely of Chinese ancestry.

Precious little had been recorded or even noted about this vital workforce, while European and American workers of the same era had been described and characterized at length.

In 2012, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project assembled a massive collection of oral accounts, documents, photos, and other paraphernalia on this area of American history. This Chinese railroad workforce, it has since been determined, provided the lion’s share of the most labor-intensive tasks: cutting through granite or blasting through it when needed and effectively laying track across the far western states.