Category: Guest Authors

George M Cohan Was Yankee Doodle Boy

By Joe Guzzardi

George M. Cohan, the son of Irish immigrants – often described as the man who owned Broadway – dominated American theater from 1901 until 1940. During that four-decade period, the man born on the Fourth of July produced 80 Broadway shows, many of which he wrote himself, and wrote more than 1,000 songs. Although Cohan liked to describe himself as “just a song and dance man,” he was a skilled actor, playwright and a director who once advised Spencer Tracy: “Spencer, you have to act less,” counsel that guided the great screen actor to his many understated performances.

Cohan got his start as one of the four Cohans, a late 19th century vaudeville act that included his father Jere, mother Nellie, George’s sister Josie and George. First carried onto the stage when he was four months old, in 1900 George and his family left hometown Providence, R.I., and headed for Broadway’s bright lights.

Soon after, Cohan met Sam Harris who became George’s friend and partner. For decades, the team paired up for dozens of unqualified stage successes, the first of which, Little Johnny Jones, came in 1904. The play opened in Hartford, Conn., where, upon hearing Cohan sing the words:

“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy

 A Yankee Doodle do or die

 A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam’s

 Born on the Fourth of July.”

The electrified audience jumped out of their seats, applauding feverishly. The patriotically stirring, flag-waving tune reflected Cohan’s unflinching devotion to his country. Cohan had three loves: his family, the theater and the United States.

In 1905, in his play George Washington, Jr., Cohan wrote another American tribute, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” Sitting next to a Civil War veteran who had been active during Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Pa., Cohan listened as the old man, who tenderly stroked the U.S. flag he held in his lap, said, “She’s a grand old rag.” Recalling the veteran’s words, Cohan originally named his song “Grand Old Rag.” But listeners, not knowing the backstory, objected, so he changed the title. In his lyrics, however, Cohan kept the reference intact:

“You’re a grand old rag, you’re a high-flying flag

 And forever in peace may you wave

 You’re the emblem of the land I love

 The home of the free and the brave.”

At World War I’s outbreak, Cohan penned another patriotic song, “Over There,” the era’s most popular tune:

“Over there, over there

 Send the word, send the word over there,

 That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming

 The drums rum-tumming everywhere.”

In 1936, Congress awarded Cohan the Congressional Gold Medal, not only because of his songwriting and acting talent, but also because his work instilled in Americans’ hearts a loyal and patriotic spirit and projected the grandeur that the U.S. represented to people around the world.

Six years later, in 1942, Jimmy Cagney portrayed Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” his Oscar-winning, Best Actor role. The same year, surrounded by friends and family at his home, Cohan lost his battle with intestinal cancer. Cohan’s funeral, a Solemn Requiem Mass attended by thousands, was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For the first time in St. Patrick’s history, the organist played a secular song. In a slow, soft funeral march tempo, “Over There” overwhelmed mourners who sobbed uncontrollably. The funeral procession up Fifth Avenue proceeded to the Bronx where Cohan was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery with his mother, father and sister. The burial marked the last stop in the Four Cohans’ journey.

Toward the end of Cohan’s life, long-time friend George Buck reminded him that no one had ever matched George’s theatrical triumphs. “Doesn’t that make you proud?” Buck asked. Cohan replied: “No complaints, kid. No complaints.” His daughter Mary, at his bedside, said that she was certain that George M. died a happy man, a fitting final act for an artist who delighted so many for so long.

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

George M Cohan Was Yankee Doodle Boy

Students Want Tech Jobs, But Americans Need Not Apply

By Joe Guzzardi

After decades of frustration in their efforts to make major employment breakthroughs in the IT industry, black tech workers may have found a valuable ally. Nex Cubed founder and Chief Executive Officer Marlon Evans has identified tech as an industry where talented individuals affiliated with Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) might land well-paid jobs.

Nex Cubed describes itself as a global accelerator that invests in diverse founders dedicated to solving the nation’s most pressing problems. The venture firm’s website states that its goal is to provide seed capital that will empower startups and investors to develop new technologies.

Recently, Nex Cubed announced that, backed by Costco Wholesale’s $5 million financial assistance, the venture capital firm would launch the Historically Black College and University Founders Fund (HBCUFF). This $40 million accelerator will invest in startups where at least one founder is a student, alumni or faculty member of an HBCU.

Led by North Carolina A&T State University, Howard University and Spelman College, HBCUs are responsible for 25 percent of all African-American STEM graduates. With the layoffs of both directly employed and contracted tech workers, Nex Cubed sees openings for black students currently untrained, unrecruited and unemployed in their chosen field.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s data shows that big tech’s demographic mix is 68 percent white and 64 percent male, statistics that the “Stem News Chronicle” noted. A McKinsey report predicted that the gap in tech employment – the total of black IT workers compared to white – will widen over the next decade. Across all industries, technology jobs – those in data science, engineering, cybersecurity and software development – are expected to grow 14 percent by 2032, but over the same time period, the black tech workers’ percentage is expected to grow only 8 percent.

Nex Cubed understands the reason why U.S.-born tech workers struggle to get gainful employment. From its bulletin: “One of the biggest myths surrounding the [H-1B] program is that it fills labor shortages. While this was Congress’ intent for the program, the U.S. Department of Labor has botched its implementation so badly that H-1Bs are regularly used to replace U.S. workers.”

But understanding what’s going on in the tech employment market – the displacement of skilled, experienced American workers by less qualified, cheaper H-1B visa holders – and affecting a positive pro-U.S. IT employment market are two different things.

Establishing the HBCUFF and emphasizing the underutilized talent that HBCU graduates offer to tech employers are steps in the right direction. But a Net Cubed goal must be to encourage Congress to reform the H-1B visa so that American tech workers, black and white, get the first shot at filling tech jobs. Before COVID-19 and the recent layoffs, the Silicon Valley tech workforce was three-quarters foreign-born. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services-authorized-to-work nonimmigrant H-1B visa holders are doing jobs that U.S. tech workers are fully qualified to fill.

Because of tech’s mass layoffs – more than 200,000 with more firings anticipated, and possible fraud charges pending against CEOs for improprieties related to the annual H-1B visa lotteries to import H-1B foreign-born contract workers – job openings should be plentiful for HBCU graduates. The CEOs who oversee many of the second- or third-tier white-collar subcontracting firms may face federal investigation. Consequently, the firms in question, many based in India, are closing  up shop, and the executives are fleeing to the home country just ahead of federal prosecution.

Every stakeholder in the battle to put American workers first needs to enter the fray and lobby Congress for meaningful H-1B visa reforms that place U.S. tech workers at the top of the hiring line. The H-1B is the arch enemy of high-skilled but unemployed or underemployed young Americans. In the name of fairness, the visa must either be revised or, better yet, eliminated.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Biden Speaks With Forked Tongue About Migration

By Joe Guzzardi

Only the most trusting among the general population believe a single utterance from establishment Washington, D.C. In fact, an inverse relationship exists between an issue’s importance and the likelihood entrenched D.C. speaks about it honestly. The more important, the less probable that the public will hear the truth.

The best the populace can hope for is that decades after the damage has been done, architects of the ruinous policies will make half-hearted apologies. A sampling: in the mid-1990s, 20 years after 58,000 American soldiers died in Southeast Asia, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the war’s chief prosecutor, confessed, “We [President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara] were wrong, terribly wrong.” The war cost $168 billion, or adjusted for inflation, $1 trillion in today’s dollars

Then, in March 2003, speaking from the White House, President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly kept at the ready. Bush ominously added that those WMDs could “kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.” But in January 2004, David Kay, a former U.N. Weapons Inspector, told Bush that his intelligence was wrong; Iraq had no WMDs, and he resigned. Nevertheless, and largely on Bush’s bad information, the Iraq War lasted from 2003 until 2011, and cost $2 trillion. About 4,700 U.S. and allied troops were killed, as well as more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens. In 2022, Bush sheepishly admitted that the Iraq invasion was “unjustified and brutal.”

The 20-year war in Afghanistan, 2001-2021, purportedly launched to beat back the Taliban, ended in a humiliating withdrawal, but not until the Department of Defense squandered $2.3 trillion, and 243,000 U.S. soldiers, allies and citizens died, exclusive of fatalities by disease, inadequate diet, dehydration and other indirect consequences. Two decades, apparently, isn’t long enough for Presidents Bush, Obama or Trump to apologize for their collective misjudgment in sustaining the Afghan war that the nation could never have been won.

The Biden administration has kept Washington’s commitment to dishonesty alive and well, this time as it mischaracterizes the Southwest border invasion. To hear Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas describe conditions, agents have operational control of the border; asylum seekers have been thoroughly vetted, and the president’s open borders largesse reflects Americans’ generosity. The inconvenient truth is the opposite of the official narrative.

Since Biden took office, Customs and Border Protection has encountered 6.2 million illegal immigrants and releasedmore than two million of them into the interior. Another estimated 1.5 million gotaways, those who escaped CBP’s detection, are also now part of the general population. Although the official patter is that the border crossers are vetted, the statistics tell a different story. A significant portion of arriving migrants have criminal convictions for rape, assault and murder. A 2021 Department of Justice report revealed that 64 percent of federal arrests in 2018 involved illegal aliens, despite then comprising only 7 percent of the population.

Biden’s open border has lured hundreds of migrants to their deaths. For example, 38 illegal aliens were killed after a fire broke out in a Ciudad Juárez holding facility, and last year, more than 850 illegal aliens died while trying to traverse rough southwestern terrain into the U.S.

In 2022, fentanyl overdose deaths hit 110,000, a record, and are climbing daily. About 150 people O.D. every day from the drug that smugglers bring across the poorly defended Southwest Border. The administration’s welcome-the-world approach to immigration has spawned other crises – sex trafficking, migrant child labor abuse, overwhelmed school districts and hospital overcrowding.

Comparisons between the fallout from long foreign wars and today’s border crisis are not exact. But the similarity is that when a subject affects all Americans – wars and sovereignty-busting open borders – people are lied to. The border mess is still in its earliest stages; Biden has been in office 30 months with 18 months remaining, and possibly four more years if he is reinstalled for a second term. The annual taxpayer cost per the ever-mounting illegal immigrant population including its U.S.-born children is $8,766 per illegal alien. Americans oppose everything about Biden’s law-breaking immigration agenda. A quick rule of thumb: when the subject is immigration, the administration speaks in forked tongues.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has been writing about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Biden Speaks With Forked Tongue About Migration