CAPA21 PAC

As long-time activists and CAPA21 supporters, we are reaching out to ask you to join us in a fundraising campaign to help make a difference in the 2020 races which will be pivotal in the direction of our country for our lifetimes.  We think that our friends are as outraged by Trump as we are and want to do something, but may not want to do the research as to where to send their money.

As you may know, CAPA21 is a PAC whose roots go back over 30 years when many of us became more active politically in response to anti-Asian issues and candidates in California.  Our focus then was mainly for the AAPI community in California but now our plan is to raise enough money to donate to defeat Trump and take back the White House and Congress.

Last year we raised $100,000 which helped swing 8 seats in the 2018 General Election to turn Congress back to blue.  This year, Glen S. Fukushima, CAPA21’s Chair, pledged $125,000 toward matching funds, inspiring fellow NAPABA members Hoyt Zia, Clement Kong, Joan Haratani, Raymond L. Ocampo Jr., and Don Tamaki to commit $10,000 each.  David Louie, Colbert Matsumoto, Kei-on and Sonia Chan, Louise Ing and Dale Minami pledged $5,000 each. Mona Lisa Yuchengco gave $3,000 and Maeley Tom and Ginger Lew pledged $1,000 each–for a total matching amount of $77,000.

If leaders like you join us this effort, we believe it will inspire many other who will help  magnify the voice of Asian Pacific Americans in this battle for our future.  If you could pledge $1000 or more, we can increase the Matching Grant Goal and reach a higher figure.  And if you can share this email with your mailing list and ask those folks to share, or on Facebook or Twitter, we can amplify our reach! Will you join us?

Donations can be made on this link:
https://capa21.com/takeitback2020/

By showing that skin in this game, we will make an “ask” of our other political soul-mates to join us, with a goal of reaching $250,000.  After we reach $250,000, the plan is to do a mass mailer to 5,000 people in our network, urging them to make matching donations, however big or small, with the hope of raising even more money.

So please let us know if you will help lead this fight.  We know our future as a country depends on not giving up hope, taking action and not allowing silence to become complicity.

Donations can be made on this link:
https://capa21.com/takeitback2020/

With great appreciation,

Dale Minami
Glen S. Fukushima
Hoyt Zia
Don Tamaki
Maeley Tom
Joan Haratani
Louise Ing
Clement Kong
Colbert Matsumoto
Ginger Lew
Raymond L. Ocampo Jr.

Prof. Peter Irons, in a recent piece on NBCNews.com, argues that Trump’s proven pattern of racism should be the basis for Trump’s impeachment inquiry and draws parallels to the impeachment indictment of President Andrew Johnson as a template.

Irons is professor of political science emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of “A People’s History of the Supreme Court.” He was the attorney who initiated the coram nobis cases of Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, and Fred Korematsu through his discovery of original documents that proved a fraud on the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944 cases that were later overturned by teams of lawyers, including Irons.

Given Trump’s lifelong pattern of racist speech and behavior, I think an impeachment inquiry is required by the Constitution, for an obvious (at least to me) reason: By definition, an overtly racist president cannot obey his (or her) constitutional oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Presidents are free to oppose and criticize laws passed by Congress, even over their vetoes, but not to frustrate or block their execution for reasons of racial animus.

Irons shares how racism was the basis for President Johnson’s impeachment in 1868:

Johnson’s deep-rooted racism, along with his verbal excoriation of his congressional foes as “treasonous” — something our current president has also done — led to his impeachment in 1868. Article 10 of his impeachment indictment provides a legal basis and historical precedent for making a president’s racist speech an impeachable offense, by itself, as evidence of unfitness to hold the highest and most powerful office in the land.

Article 10 provides this basis by making clear that speaking contemptuously about Congress and its members, with “intemperate” and “inflammatory” attacks based on racial animus — as both Johnson and Trump did on multiple occasions — brings the presidency into “contempt, ridicule and disgrace.”

The House of Representatives would have a more solid and easily provable case for Trump’s impeachment if it immediately opened proceedings along these lines rather than continue to weigh the more complicated and legally fraught obstruction issue.

Read the full piece here.

The President’s “go back to your own country” tweets bring back bad memories of the racist schoolyard taunts that we grew up with. That these remarks are coming not from a schoolyard bully, but from the Office of the President, marks an enormously distressing shift in the culture intended to redefine what it is to be an “American.”

That directive is an insult meant to demean and delegitimize our presence in this country and perpetuates the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype about our race. It arises from a white supremacist sense of privilege and ownership. And it is deeply hurtful.

We belong here. We helped build this country and, despite the century of discrimination and racism we have encountered, we are not going away.

Let it be remembered that when 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were incarcerated in internment camps by their own country, the United States of America, it was done by labeling them as “enemy aliens.” Let’s also remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:  “… In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Let’s not be silent.

~ Glen S. Fukushima (Chair), Dale Minami (President), Donald K. Tamaki