Harassment Campaign Aims At Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez
A Roger Stone wannabe trickster tries to make his mark.
Have you heard the one about the union-bashing Republican California consultant who’s decided he loves workers? No?
I guess in a world where the corrupt President of the United States can claim anybody who speaks against him is really the corrupt one, we owe it to ourselves to further examine this unique Golden State curiosity.
Meet Jesse Rojas, the face of “Pick Justice Action,” a social welfare 501 (c)(4) that claims to be “educating the public about the rights and interests of farm workers and general laborers.”
He’d like the world to believe that Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez and her “union boss" allies want farm workers to be second class citizens. And --surprise, surprise— he’s got a pocketful of dark money to finance this effort.
And yes, it’s that Lorena Gonzalez. The one with a union label tattooed on her psyche. The one who runs a huge diaper drive every year. The woman who walked three miles to school in San Ysidro recently to make a point about students first. (The part about it being uphill both ways and over broken glass was, I think, exaggerated)
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Jesse Rojas got his start in politics as campaign manager for Pedro Rios, who lost elections in 2012 and 2014 running as a Republican candidate for State Assembly District 32.
Simultaneously he was working as a consultant for Western Pacific Research, described in media accounts as Kern County’s premier Republican political consulting firm. The website for the company lists Congressmen Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes as part of their ‘family.’
Today Rojas is CEO of The Redd Group, LLC, which provides “labor relations, human resources consulting, public relations, and political consulting.” (Labor relations from Republican ‘consultants’ usually means union busting these days.) He is a founder of California Farm Workers & Families PAC.
Last year Rojas spent his time as President of Californians for Accountability PAC, driving a box truck shadowing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign bus to warn voters of the dangers of “Lost Jobs and Higher Taxes Ahead” should they fail to elect Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox. Alas, he failed to win over enough people to keep us from sliding down that slippery slope into becoming Venezuela.
This guy may be trying to challenge San Diego’s own Carl DeMaio for the number of groups he’ll front. He certainly is getting calls for political analysis as a GOP consultant on Central Valley TV stations.
After spending much of 2019 on efforts to defeat Assembly Bill 5, legislation aimed at codifying a California Supreme Court decision regarding just who is and isn’t a contract employee, Rojas is now campaigning to sell the idea that the bill’s sponsor, Assem. Lorena Gonzalez is the enemy of farm workers.
This claim is based on the assemblywoman’s lifetime support for the United Farm Workers. Not long ago, a three decades-long battle between the union and Gerawan Farming ended with the UFW being de-certified. It was, to say the least, a messy fight.
Gerawan Farming reached a legal settlement earlier this year, paying $3.37 million owed to 6,000 seasonal workers. It was justice that took a long time to achieve as the company doggedly fought them at every step of the way.
The two workers who filed the original underpaid wages lawsuit in 2014 claimed that Gerwan did not pay its workers minimum wages or overtime and accused the company of failing to provide paid rest breaks, all of which, they alleged, were violations of California labor laws and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Act.
Now “Pick Justice Action” has emerged, founded by a Gerwan employee. Armed with a six figure budget --from anonymous sources--they’re ready to to let Californians know about Gonzalez’ “anti-farm worker bias” and partnering with “union bosses to oppose workers’ rights.”
And the front man for this effort is--drum-roll--Jesse Rojas.
The campaign will include advertisements in television, radio, digital and print venues to “expose these legislators’ anti-worker biases and call-to-arms those who are willing to stand up for basic human and American worker rights.”
Pick Justice Action said the campaigns will continue indefinitely and additional funds will be added over time until it feels basic worker rights are afforded to farmworkers.
“For far too long Democrat Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher has prioritized labor union bosses over the workers she pretends to represent,” said Pick Justice spokesman Jesse Rojas in the release.
I’m guessing all this trash talk might have some connection with the frequent use of contract labor in agriculture. Or maybe it's about the grower-backed poison pill laden "pro-worker" legislation that keeps going nowhere in Sacramento.
Given that Lorena Gonzalez is the daughter of an immigrant farm worker and a nurse, is considered to be enemy #1 by the California Chamber of Commerce, and has a significant track record of successfully sponsoring legislation adding protections for workers, raising the minimum wage and implementing paid sick leave, the idea of her somehow being anti-any-kind-of-worker borders on ludicrous.
Lorena Gonzalez represents the 80th Assembly District, which includes much of south San Diego. It’s a deep blue, heavily Latino area, and she’s easily cruised to re-election three times, winning 75% of the vote in the last general election. Despite a public plea on their web page, County Republicans have yet to field a candidate against for the 2020 election.
Teresa Romero, President of the United Farm Workers, responded to a Rojas op ed at Times of San Diego:
Here are some facts: Lorena Gonzalez authored historic state legislation providing phased in overtime pay after eight hours a day for farm workers, ending in California their racist 81-year exclusion from federal law.
Her leadership in the legislature was essential for passing an important farm worker affordable housing bill this year and administrative action banning the child brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos. Gonzalez authored the state law banning ICE agents from courthouses.
The Assemblywoman has declared her intention to run for California Secretary of State in 2022, and it’s not hard to imagine that she has further aspirations. The Atlantic and POLITICO Magazines have both singled her out as someone to watch.
Since it’s unlikely that her political enemies, namely big business interests, will find a challenger with any chance of success of unseating Gonzalez in the legislature, it looks to me like they’re playing the long game with this current round of vilification.
In addition to her adversaries in the business sector, her support for stronger vaccination laws has attracted a vastly different set of enemies: the anti-vaxxers.
In one measure of her effectiveness, the San Diego version of Faux News, KUSI TV, never misses a chance to amplify her critics.
In July, the station posted a piece sympathetic to bubonic plague sycophant Rob Schnieder with the headline Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez insults and humiliates Californians concerned about ‘mandated vaccines’.
Now that Jesse Rojas is on the campaign trail, he got air time at KUSI with an interview posted under the title of Pick Justice Action launches campaign against Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher and in support of farmworker rights.
His campaign might be believable in a bubble where trickle down actually works, growers haven’t historically treated their field workers as less than human, and the middle class hasn’t seen its fortunes decline (in tandem with union membership) over the past four decades.
But sympathy for farm workers has nothing to do with what's really going on here. There's a term for what Rojas and his money men are doing here: ratfucking.
What once was considered college hijinks made the leap to the national stage with the re-election campaign of Richard Nixon, when Donald Segretti and other USC alumni were hired to sabotage the campaigns of Democrats running in the 1972 primaries.
What the Nixon gang was doing had nothing to do with influencing votes, just as this current campaign aimed at Assem. Gonzalez has zero chance of affecting her future possibilities for elected office.
As Trump confidant Roger Stone (who's done his fair share of questionable deeds) told POLITICO earlier this year, “What was the point? Harassment? That’s ratfucking.”
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