America 1982-Chapter 532 - 105: No Cubans_3

Tommy pulled over a chair and sat right in front of six television sets with his eyes glued to Rosario Kennedy as she answered questions.

The first topic was not about race but employment and the economy. This was a stratagem devised by David Kennedy to catch the other candidates off guard. Owing to the extensive lead-in publicity that spouted slogans about the Eighteenth District’s seat belonging to Cubans, at least all the candidates on stage were led to believe that racial issues were paramount. They devoted significant efforts toward it, courting the Cuban-American voters, but Rosario did not have to do so because she herself was Cuban-American.

Rosario’s remarks were not new but primarily consisted of empty, foggy rhetoric, talking about legislation and appeals. She blamed the harsh economic environment mainly on the lack of social responsibility by the big corporations who were unkind despite their wealth. She would urge Washington to increase taxes on these companies and then funnel the money into enhancing social welfare and fundamental public services in the district. She aimed to improve the business environment in the Eighteenth District, attract more companies from industries like fruit agriculture, the sugar business, and tourism to invest, and provide employment opportunities to the local populace, among other things.

Apart from Jeff, the remaining five probably had answers similar to Rosario Kennedy’s, but Rosario had the advantage of going first. This forced the subsequent candidates to immediately select alternative responses since aligning too closely with Rosario’s would hardly leave a more memorable impression on the audience than what the first speaker had already made.

The second speaker, Joanna Pepper, ingeniously mentioned her uncle, Claude Pepper, who had held the position for twenty-five years. She stated that her uncle had already been pushing the issue in Washington but had not entirely finished it. Now as his niece, she would surely resolve it. This included the use of mechanized harvesting in local plantations and orchards that had greatly damaged the Eighteenth District’s environment. Therefore, she wanted to push for the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act to ensure that these plantations, orchards, and farms continued to employ a large workforce. If the act passed, there would be at least eight thousand new seasonal agricultural jobs in the Eighteenth District. Additionally, she would further cooperation between the Environmental Protection Agency and several local agricultural fertilizer companies regarding enhanced fruit production fertilizers to ensure that plantations didn’t suffer revenue losses due to employing workers.

To Tommy, if Rosario’s speech was empty talk delivered blindly, then Joanna’s was blatant lies told with eyes wide open, merely to fool the lower strata of the district’s populace. Considering the current state of the Eighteenth District, plantation owners would not be insane enough to abandon mechanization in favor of hiring workers, especially when there were Cuban illegal immigrants everywhere. These immigrants did not require contracts, and their wages could be half or even less than that of regular workers, often settled in cash at the end of each day. Why would they hire American citizens?

Moreover, supporting cooperation between the Environmental Protection Agency and fertilizer companies on productivity-related research was as difficult as making the chief of police pledge brotherhood with a mob boss under the watchful eyes of the American public.

How could two archenemies collaborate? The Environmental Protection Agency’s hefty annual fines largely came from fertilizer or agricultural chemical companies. If the agency didn’t trouble the fertilizer companies, they would already be laughing behind their hands. To approach them for cooperation was out of imagination, and even if it was real, those few small fertilizer companies in the Eighteenth District wouldn’t dare believe it, fearing that one wrong word could shut them down.

If Joanna actually took members of the Environmental Protection Agency to meet the fertilizer companies’ bosses, the bosses might curse on the spot, "Are you the bastard who brought Huang Jun here?"

The third speaker, the African-American lawyer Gerald Richman, stated he believed that wage disparities caused by race and skin color had led to the Eighteenth District’s dire economic environment. For the same physically demanding job, the hourly wage for a white person was 19% higher than that of a black person and 55% higher than that of a Cuban-American. A white person with a stable job could easily support a family, whereas Cuban-Americans and African-Americans might have to work four jobs a day and still worry about rent. Whites believed Cuban-Americans were taking their jobs, while Cuban-Americans complained about the high earnings of whites compared to their low income. He thought changing this situation was most important by narrowing the wage gap to provide a fair employment environment. He would push to raise the salaries of people of color in the Eighteenth District to at least match those of whites. This would help the economy to circulate again. Once their income stabilized, people of color could also reach the tax bracket and take their families out on weekends for picnics, shopping, and movies, boosting the district’s consumer industry and narrowing the racial income disparity.

The approach was the same, deluding the lower class, while playing the race card to win over favorability among Cuban-American voters.

Then the host looked at Jeff, "Mr. Raven, why do you believe you can bring about change to the continually deteriorating economic environment of the Eighteenth District and provide employment opportunities for its residents? You have two minutes."

Jeff looked at the crowd with a simple, friendly smile, "I don’t know. Maybe we should all follow the lead of the Cuban smugglers entrenched in the Eighteenth District, go steal car tires, rob, sell marijuana?"

That one sentence instantly energized the audience who were already feeling sleepy after three successive, somewhat boring, and insubstantial statements. Their eyes widened in an attempt to see clearly who on stage had said that utterly earth-shattering remark!