US Senate candidate Marco Rubio's top campaign fundraiser, billionaire sugar baron Pepe Fanjul, employs an executive assistant married first to a leader of the Klu Klux Klan and now to the founder of a white-supremecist group according to a weekend report in the New York Post. Fanjul, in July, hosted a Palm Beach fundraiser for Rubio, with a ticket price of $90,400 per couple. The Palm Beach paper reported, "If paying cash, the organizers will accept only bills with pictures of Republican presidents." Rubio should return the money raised by Fanjul. Click read more, for the full story.
New York Post
Posted: 11:05 PM, October 8, 2010
Billionaire sugar baron Pepe Fanjul is refusing to fire his executive assistant, Chloe Black, despite her being married first to a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and then to the founder of a white-supremacist group.
Chloe, who has worked for the Cuban-born owner of Florida Crystals for more than 35 years, is the ex-wife of former KKK leader David Duke, and the current wife of Don Black, a former KKK grand wizard and member of the American Nazi Party. He now runs white-supremacist Web site StormFront.org.
Chloe's role with the powerful Palm Beach-based Fanjul family, which Page Six reported on in 2008, caused an outcry from civil-rights groups. Ironically, her duties include working with Fanjul's wife, Emilia, on The Glades, a Florida charter school that aims to help poor black and Latino children.
Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, told us: "Chloe Black is married to one of the most active white supremacists. We do not understand why she has not been fired by the Fanjul family. Her connections to white supremacists run so deep that it seems unthinkable that she work for a school for minority children." Chloe couldn't be reached for comment.
Reps for Fanjul yesterday confirmed Black was still working for the firm.
Paul Wilmot, spokesman for Florida Crystals, said: "While we may not agree with someone's politics, we wouldn't terminate them for that. We are a minority-owned company and enjoy a wide range of ethnic, racial, religious, lifestyle and political diversity among our thousands of employees.
"We will not discriminate against anybody, and that has been our policy forever. The rhetoric and beliefs of racial and other hate groups are abhorrent to Florida Crystals."
A source added, "This is business, it is not personal. Chloe had been with the company for 35 years when they found out about it, and she has always been a good employee. They don't agree with it, but they are not going to fire her."
11 comments:
Wasn't Democratic Senator Robert Bryd a member of the KKK? ( I think he was a Grand Kleagle) At least an executive assistant in a sugar baron's organization will be safely distanced from establishing policy for the American people. Talk about a stretch!
I guess Baron Fanjul should of denied this assistant employment based on the fact she was once married to a white supremacist. Then he could have contributed to Marco Rubio without any guilt.
Yeah, dummy, 70 years ago in the 1940s. This guy is actively running a hate site.
"I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."
-Robert C. Byrd
Maybe she divorced Duke because he wasn't radical enough?
Free Speech means just that. If Fanjul fired her over her husbands views he would be sued for sure and rightfully so.
What if Crist or Meek had a donor who had an assistant who was married to a Black Panther should she be fired?
This is ridiculous be consistent at least.
While you may disagree with the Black Panthers' political agenda, it is not a precise corollary in the comparison drawn above between the Black Panthers and the KKK. The Black Panthers position was one of armed resistance in defense of African-Americans being brutalized by the police and a generalized support of Third World independence movements and armed revolution.
The Ku Klux Klan, by contrast, are an active hate group advocating the extermination of non-whites and religious minorities. While anyone may reasonably disagree with their political program, the Black Panthers have never advocated genocide against whites. Nor do they preach the genetic inferiority of any group. The violence they have been involved in was in shootouts with police (most of which were later ruled to be under dubious circumstances) and in COINTELPRO-instigated gunfights between the organization and the US organization of Ron Karenga.
It is one thing to be radical and espouse sketchy ideas, it is another entirely to be a member of a group with a 100+-year history of actual violence against unarmed civilians and an actual legislative control or influence of multiple states for approximately 50-75 years, leading to actual discrimination against those same civilians.
I thought this was America. As long as she observes all workplace policies and procedures, and doesn't get into any legal trouble with a nexus to her employment, what does it matter who she's married to? We should be as tolerant of her (and her husband's beliefs) as we are of the beliefs of gays, Jews, Muslims, and Christians as long as they don't impinge on anyone else. She's entitled to believe what she believes and feel the way she feels just like all of us are. Just because it may be distasteful does not mean the Constitution does not protect her right to believe it. In fact, that's what the democratic republic our forfathers created was meant to do...protect the rights of the few from the vagaries of the majority. This isn't a democracy, as so many of our politicians and pundits would have us believe; it's a democratic republic. There's a big difference. In a democracy, majority rules over the rights of the minority. Do you really want to go there?
DJ Orejon you're the man!! Great comment. I love Marvin Gaye too (he/she will get it, even if the rest of you don't).
Both the Black Panthers and the KKK have a right to their beliefs what they don't have a right is to initiate violence against individuals.
DJ Orejon You can try to sugar coat the black panthers or even the Nation of Islam but they are mirror images of the KKK or Neo Naxi groups.
G.O.D. your neo-liberal streak and that of many of your sheep is just as worrisome as the bible thunmpers wingnuts on the right. You only abhor violence when its being committed by folks on the other side of the political spectrum but try to rationalize the ones on "your" side.
That said this assistant should not be fired because of her views or those of her husband, it is up to her employer and should be based on performance this is not Cuba or the former USSR where your employment required ideological support of the state party.
Have you looked into the idelogical beliefs of all those employed by donors to the Meek and Crist campaign? It would only be fair.
I'm contemplating voting for the guy who wants to end the law against sex with porcupines. A very sticky issue.
How quickly they fall from grace. Cato wasn't it just September that you were the first blog comment person who rose above all the others to become the FIRST to have an entire month of free reign on EOM blog? You did it by not taking it too seriously...I want fun Cato back. And, is David and Cato finally agreeing on something?
You can buy an essay an post it:
http://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708305.html
Excerpt:
Although the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panther Party both employed violence to obtain their objectives, few similarities exist between the two groups. The Ku Klux Klan was committed to maintaining the status quo, white supremacy, in the communities in which it operated. Their objective was to suppress the activities of people of color, whom they perceived as threats to the established order.
In contrast, the Black Panthers considered themselves revolutionaries. Their goal was to elevate the oppressed masses of African-Americans and to overthrow the existing political system. Thus, the Klan sought to restore a sense of power to whites, while the Black Panthers sought to gain a rightful share of power for blacks.
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There is a lot a Klan Vs. Panther literature on line...we aren't going to solve it here, however.
Can we get fun Cato back now?
One person's freedom fighter, patriot, or revolutionary is another's enemy of the state, rabblerouser, or terrorist. It's all in the perspective.
Pepe Fanjul is responsible for sugar being so expensive. He collects billions for himself and his family from selling overpriced sugar to Americans.
He pollutes the Everglades and then gets "his" elected officials to make the taxpayers pay for the cleanup.
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