News leaked on Saturday that the president — determined to stuff every nook and cranny of his administration with hard-core leftists — will nominate San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro (no relation, at least by birth, to Fidel) as the next head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
He’s a perfect fit.
During a reshuffling of his cabinet, the president is transferring Sylvia Burwell from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and moving current HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan to take her place. That leaves the HUD spot open for Castro. The official announcement is expected soon.
What makes the appointment especially important is that insiders are suggesting Castro could polish his résumé sufficiently at HUD — an agency racked with scandal since its inception in 1965 — to be considered as a serious candidate for vice president in 2016. This would be especially attractive to Latino voters and indicates how Obama continues to plan two or three chess moves ahead in implementing his agenda to turn America into a socialist duplicate of countries such as Mexico.
Castro, an American of Mexican descent, has a radical twin brother, Joaquin, who has served as a U.S. representative from Texas since January 2013 and has compiled a voting record on The John Birch Society’s Freedom Index of just 25 out of 100. Translation: Brother Joaquin votes against the Constitution three-quarters of the time, and this is just his first term.
But Julian Castro’s radical background, enhanced and polished with degrees (thanks, he says, to affirmative action and unnamed financial supporters) at Stanford and Harvard, really began at his mother’s knee. Maria “Rosie” Castro, the mother of Julian and Joaquin, was a founder of the Chicano political party La Raza Unida (LRU) in the early 1970s, and took along both boys to various political meetings and public disturbances when they were eight. Julian brags, “My mother is probably the biggest reason my brother and I are in public service. Growing up, she would take us to a lot of rallies and organizational meetings.”
By the time he got to Harvard, Julian Castro was a committed socialist, claiming credit for affirmative action for getting him into a school that he was otherwise not qualified with his grades to attend:
Joaquin and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action. I scored [just] 1,210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student.
But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquin.
I’m a strong supporter of affirmative action because I’ve seen it work in my own life.
It’s helpful to review just what Julian learned at those revolutionary rallies to know how attractive a candidate he is for the latest addition to Obama’s cabinet. La Raza Unida (“the Unified Race”) was established with his mother’s help in 1970 to promote “social, economic and political self-determination for Chicanos, other minorities and the disenfranchised.”
At its first national convention in 1972, LRU was headed up by radicals such as Angel Gutierrez, Corky Gonzalez, Reyes Tijerina, and César Chávez.
At LRU’s second national convention in 1980, one Juan José Peña was elected chairman, who proclaimed that “Chicanos should vote Socialist” while the party took the position that “our struggle [is] for the Liberation of Aztlan.” Aztlan is the mythical location of the cradle of the Aztec civilization which, conveniently, happens to be north of the border in the United States. “Aztlan” still belongs to Mexico, according to LRU, despite its cession of the lands to the United States following the Mexican-American war in 1848.
Currently LRU’s platform is right out of the community activism of President Obama himself. It supports a policy of unrestricted immigration, the effective dissolution of America’s borders, and amnesty for all the millions of illegals currently residing in the United States. LRU declares:
We see no human being as “illegal.” Those who have arrived to the U.S. with heritage indigenous to the Americas, and specifically those crossing the southern border, are migrants on their own continent.
Assuming Castro is in fact nominated by the president for the position of head of HUD, and assuming further that the Senate confirms him, Castro will feel right at home. HUD has had as its mission the same as that espoused by Castro’s SA2020 for San Antonio: government funding to improve the lives of those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Although HUD’s mission is to “create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all,” its efforts have failed miserably. According to the review of HUD’s scandals by Cato’s Ted DeHaven,
A root cause of HUD scandals is that the department has a large number of costly subsidy programs, and each involves a tangled web of stakeholders. Many HUD programs divide responsibilities between federal, state, and local policymakers, and they involve private interests such as developers and financial companies.
The multiplicity of interests and the complexity of the programs create opportunities for people in the public and private sectors to take personal advantage of [its] programs.
Translation: The people primarily benefitting from the HUD transfer of wealth programs are the politicians and others on the take to whom the wealth is being transferred. Back in 1993, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros said, “HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America” rather than improving it. In 1996, Vice President Al Gore referred to various HUD projects as “crime-infested monuments to a failed policy,” while the Village Voice in 2006 called HUD “New York City’s worst landlord” and “the #1 worst in the United States.”
After reviewing scandal after scandal at HUD from 1981 through 2009, DeHaven concluded, “While government officials and advocates for housing subsidies usually paint a romanticized portrait of HUD’s programs, the truth is that federal housing intervention has often done far more damage than good.”
But Julian Castro’s winsome smile and carefully crafted articulation of his socialist new world in San Antonio under his SA2020 may wear a little thin at HUD. With its $50-billion annual budget and long history of corruption and self-dealing, he may find himself in way over his head. As William Shakespeare once said, “One may smile and smile and still be a villain.”
For the moment, however, Julian Castro appears to be the perfect fit for a president less concerned about corruption and more interested in a flashy, bright Latino who can take HUD funds and direct them into politically-correct programs to reward those working for the brave new world. And 2016 isn’t all that far off.
Photo of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro: AP Images
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
