Left I on the News

...are not limited to governments:

Hovering above a busy Berkeley intersection is a billboard that reads "No Racist Amnesty." It was placed by a group called Vietnamese for Fair Immigration, whose leaders say they feel illegal immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants, are to blame for the long waits their family members face to come here from Vietnam.

But the group may not be entirely what it seems.

The Lompoc-based group, which has endorsed political candidates, written letters to the editors of newspapers and posted its views on Web sites, was co-founded by a white, Southern California cycle-maker who is also a member of one of the state's most prominent immigration-control organizations.

In fact, the group's self-proclaimed Vietnamese-American spokesman, who wrote at least one of the letters and has espoused the group's views on several Web sites, is the group's white co-founder using a Vietnamese surname, his wife said.

The spokesman, who called himself Tim Binh, initially denied that he was the cycle-maker from Lompoc, Tim Brummer. But after a reporter told him his wife had identified him as Brummer, he said it was her idea.

Divide and conquer - pitting one section of the working class against another - is one of the longest-standing techniques by which the ruling class (and those who are sucked in to its ideology) maintains itself in power.

One of the minor scourges of society is the frequent use of quotation marks and apostrophes in places they don't belong. However, there are perhaps just as many places where they really belong but where they are omitted. "Vietnamese" for Fair Immigration indeed. Sorry, make that "Vietnamese" for "Fair Immigration."