If passed, Measure P will throw several thousand oil workers, mostly (more than 70 percent) Latino, under the bus.
The handful of well-off, white liberals who launched this move do not care about Latinos. They are out to “save the planet” (HA!) by shutting down oil production in Santa Barbara County. So if they wreck thousands of families, if they throw thousands of Latinos out of work, they can rest peacefully because they are “helping people.” If they even think about the thousands of people they are harming right here—their neighbors—you can picture them saying, “They can go back to picking strawberries.”
Harvesting nature’s underground bounty is work that offers a high wage and upward mobility to Latinos. Let’s not deny them that ladder to success in the name of some wrong-headed move to kill the oil industry.
Vote no on P!
This article appears in Oct 2-9, 2014.