Van Tran and Taxpayer's money

State Assemblyman Van Tran is a fear politician within the Vietnamese-American in Little Saigon.  He is considered to be the "Godfather" and his "Gang of Seven" can make or break any aspiring political candidates.  His main platform within the community is that if you are not my followers, you are a pro-communist or communist.   And he means business for he has great influence over most of the major Vietnamese-American media in OC from newspapers like Nguoi Viet, Viet Bao, Viet Star and a host of radio stations.  Matter of fact, he has his own radio station that his gangs own along with Nguoi Viet newspaper empire.  In the last election when one of his gang members was behind Janet Nguyen in a supervisorial race,  Van Tran did not hesistate to send out a 2-page letter to 20,000 househoulds using his own assembly letterhead to proclaim that Janet Nguyen is a communist. 

Just like any ethnic politicians, he is known to be able to get away with many things within his community.  To mainstream, he is an anti-tax, pro-business but within his community, he promises more welfare, more medicaid, more medicare and more subsidized housing to his community.  Why, because his strongest supporters in the Vietnamese-American community are an elderly populations in the late 50s and mid 60s.

Whatever the case may be, Van Tran is not immune to the the temptation of an arrogant incumbent who knows that he can get away with abusing the taxpayer's money when they don't know or realize that they have been duped.  The OC Register wrote an interesting investigative article about Van Tran and his smart of taking advantage of the system to pocket millions of taxpayer's money in the last 6 years.

http://www.ocregister.com/news/-235056--.html#article-comments



The majority of the voters sentiment in the Vietnamese-American community is very clear so far.  This is the year of getting rid of the business-as-usual politicians who has displayed lack of concerns for not only his own community but his overall constituents.