Vic Aljouny’s Strategy and The Silent Majority

During the heated Little Saigon debate that lasted for 8 months, one of the main arguments that put forth by council members and Mayor Reed was the majority of the people in District 7 really did not want the name Little Saigon. From their “private conversations”, there is a silent large majority who opposes the name Little Saigon while supports Madison Nguyen.

With the mayor himself personally involved in the fund raising efforts along with his senior budget advisor, Nguyen raised over $103,000 with most of the money came from wealthy real estate developers like $2,500 from Mark Faulkner of Fairfield Residential in San Diego, $2,500 from Core Homes in San Jose, $1,000 from ROEM Development in Santa Clara. She also received money from business owners of far flung places like Concord (Dana Foods – $3,500) and mysterious entity like China Town LLC ($2,500). She also received over $25,000 from well known political players and lobbyists like Dustin DeRollo, Tom Saggau and Chris Neale.

This is to the contrast of the Recall Committee where they received most of the funding from a mix of white collar and blue collar working families in San Jose. More than 400 people donated about $43,000 to date.

Without big donors and limited resources, the Recall Committee has to rely on a grass root movement. By law, they have 120 days from start to gather a minimum of 3,200 signatures to have the recall initiative on the ballot. With only 3 more weeks left, the Recall Committee looks forward to achieving their goal. Their goal is 5,000 or more signatures. The conventional wisdom is that they will attain about 4,000 signatures.

Privately, Nguyen and her consultant, Vic Aljouny, decide to save their war chest for the recall ballot election for they know that the recall committee will attain the required signatures. Memo from the mayor’s office showed that the mayor has already asked the city clerk to look into a recall ballot similar to the Kathy Coles recall. They feel very confident that with powerful political machines like Labor, the Democratic Party, a cadre of influential lobbyists and consultants and a boat load of money, they will crush the recall team.

Little Saigon Inside does not believe in recalling elected official for making unpopular decision. Nevertheless in California, there have been precedents for such recall and the latest one is with the Gray Davis recall.

However in Nguyen recall, it is more than an unpopular decision. Unless Nguyen can make an honest case for herself – justify the reason for her back-door dealing with the real estate developer to name the area with a name preferred by the developer two months before a public vote – and the silent majority speaks up, the grass root movement will continue to gain momentum


As voters and taxpayers, people should be quite angry at the way the situation was dragged on for 8 months without resolution and now it will end up costing the taxpayer at least $400,000 because their city council member lied and tried to cover up a quid pro quo favor for a wealthy developer. Nguyen clearly violated ethics in her action. She admitted to the Mercury News but shrugged it off and said that nothing happened since the city attorney stopped it when he found out from the RDA, for it was also illegal.

And voters should be very mad with the way their city council members violated the Brown Act to collude behind close door in naming the area against the masses. This is serious matter for it is the corner stone of fair and ethical government.

As the Mercury News commentator Scott Herhold mentioned in his recent video blog about Little Saigon: “In many ways, Madison Nguyen brought this upon herself.”

The Case of Missing Lawn Signs

Last Sunday, July 27, two police reports were filed regarding two incidents of destroyed property – “Recall Madison Nguyen” signs – on the busy street of King, the very border of Councilmember Nguyen’s District 7.

In one incident, the victim, an old man of 70, was able to partially witness the incident. According to his statement, at about 4:30 AM, while he was reading in his living room, he heard two very loud noises coming from the street. He ran out and saw that the recall sign was gone, while a car parked at the curb nearby zoomed away. Unfortunately, he was too late to be able to see the car’s license plate.

What is so special about the incident? And why does it take two loud impacts to remove a simple campaign sign?

The Recall Madison Nguyen on the old man’s house was not just set on a simple wire frame like the campaign signs you normally see on people’s lawns. According to the victim, he did have a simple sign like that at first, and it had been quickly stolen. After that, he put in a considerable amount of effort to make sure it could not be stolen again – well, at least that was what he thought at the time! The sign was permanently screwed on to a sturdy rectangular wood frame that was bolted to the brick fence around his house. He even pulled out a picture he took to show his work.

Not to be deterred, our valiant sign thief, with two hard punches through the wood frame, was able to remove the Recall sign – while leaving the frame intact. Well, one thing the old man can be proud of, I suppose, is that his wood-work did withstand the violence!

When asked if he is going to put up a third “Recall Madison Nguyen” sign, the old man sadly shook his head and said: “I am not sure, probably not. If you heard the noise this morning as I did, you would be able to feel the considerable amount of force that these people had to use, to remove the sign. And that thought scares me. I don’t know what would be next. Smashing the windshield on my children’s car? Throwing a brick through my living room window? Can my grandchildren safely play in the front yard? I would like to think that the violence would stop with the recall sign, but look at the faked petition submitted to the City Council with 92 forged business owners’ signatures. I don’t think these people have much respect for the law. And that scares me.”

Recall vs. No Recall

We are at the mid-point of the signature collecting campaign for the recall ballot. If successful, San Jose City Councilmember Madison Nguyen would have the dubious honor of being the first Vietnamese-American elected in San Jose as well as the first Vietnamese-American official to be forced out of office by her expatriates that voted her in.

The Recall Committee is directed by an ad hoc committee made up mostly by professional people who work in the hi-tech and medical fields. The No Recall Committee of course is headed by Councilmember Nguyen and her chief of staff - Louansee Moua. Behind the scene providing the strategy and playing the advisorial role is a controversial political consultant from Omaha, Nebraska and a close advisor to Mayor Reed - Vic Aljouny. Vic Aljouny two years ago was asked by Mayor Reed to help his handpicked candidate, Hon Lien, in a city council race. She was defeated by Kansen Chu and his Vietnamese-American supporters who opposed her close business relationship with the communist government.

So far, the No Recall Committee has raised a little more than $10,000 with the majority of the donation came from 2 American real estate developers. The Recall Committee has until July 31 to submit their finances to the city clerk but Little Saigon Inside has learned that unofficially they have raised about $23,000.

With a team of 40 some people, the Recall Committee is well run and extremely dedicated. Every weekend, they have 2 booths set up for walk-in while 3 dozen people or more canvassing the precincts for signatures. They have 120 days to gather 3,200 signatures for the recall referendum to be on a ballot. The committee has not revealed how many signatures collected to date but the conventional wisdom is that they are aiming for 4,000 signatures or more.

A flyer from the Recall Committee was sent to District 7 voters to emphasize their reasons for recalling Nguyen. It is a direct challenge to Nguyen's integrity and the tenents of Mayor Reed's Reform & Ethics - "No cheating, no lying, no stealing and the special interest groups, the lobbyists, the influence peddlers, and the fixers will not run city hall. "



To counter, Nguyen has surrounded herself with the supports of some of the biggest names in San Jose politics - US Congressman Mike Honda, former Mayor Norman Mineta and most of the city councilmembers.

This promise to be a battle with repercussion beyond Nguyen's political career. With the Brown Act lawsuit granted by the Superior Court Judge James Emerson despite the objection of the city attorney, more details on the involvement of Nguyen and the developer Tang Lap as well as the Mayor's office will be revealed to the public.

How high is the stake? Mayor Reed asked his budget director and one time chief of staff to directly help Nguyen and of course the return of Reed's close advisor Vic Aljouny from exile after the Hon Lien debacle is no coincidence.

Christ the Light

The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland will be consecrated and dedicated on September 25, 2008. This is the second most expensive cathedral ever built in the America. At $191 million, it costs $40 million less than the Los Angeles archdiocese’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which opened in 2002. The cathedral locates across from Lake Merritt will serve as the seat of the Diocese of Oakland and the home of the Oakland Bishop - The Most Reverend Allen H. Vigneron. This is one of the most diversed dioceses in the country with Masses celebrated in 17 languages.


The 135-foot-tall concrete, glass and Douglas fir structure with 1,425 seats for worshipers, designed by San Francisco architect Craig Hartman, will replace the St. Francis de Sales Cathedral, which was irreparably damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The new cathedral center will include a public plaza, a cafe, a bookstore, chancery offices, a 500-seat conference center, a 200-car garage, and residence for the cathedral rector Father Quang Minh Dong. The recently formed Cathedral Parish of Christ The Light is the home parish for about 700 families. Father Quang, 48, came to the Bay Area from Vietnam in 1980 as a boat people. He was ordained in May 1990 after graduated from St. Patrick's Seminary and University in Menlo Park.


The cathedral was originally planned in 2000 under the direction of Bishop John Cummins and broken ground on May 21, 2001 with $65 million donation from the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation. Wayne Valley was the founder of Citation Builders, one of the largest homebuilders in California. So far the Catholic Cathedral Corporation of the East Bay (the nonprofit organization that owns the cathedral) has raised over $100 million for the building of the cathedral. One of the cathedral's grandest features will be its Omega Wall, which will let in light through 94,000 pinpoints forming an image of Christ. The cathedral also has a mausoleum located at the lower level beneath the church. Operated by the Catholic Cemeteries division of the Diocese, the mausoleum will have approximately 1,300 spaces for crypts and 1,450 niches for cremated remains. There are 12 crypts reserved for the past, present and future Bishops of Oakland. The first Bishop of Oakland, the Most Reverend Floyd Begin, will be re-interred in the mausoleum at a special service after the cathedral is dedicated in 2008.

Miss Universe in July

For the next two weeks, a magnificent stretch of white sand beaches and emerald sea in central Vietnam will be the host for some of the world's most beautiful women as they show off their looks and talents to compete for Donald Trump's coveted Miss Universe title.

The quaint small town of Nha Trang is well known in Vietnam for its pure white sands. In the late 1990s, with the economic transformation in full throttle, a few overseas Vietnamese with entrepeneurial spirit returned with money and a real estate development dream. Pham Nhat Vuong, who made his fortune as a retailer of consumer goods in Ukraine, built a resort named Vina Pearl on a small island off the coast of Nha Trang. Now it has become the most well known resort in Vietnam with suites renting out at $1,200 a night for the Miss Universe event. The event is expected to draw 10,000 or more people and there is simply not enough accomdation for that many tourists and the press entourage. The solution, a luxury cruise liner anchors right off the beach overlooking the Crown Convention Center where the show is taken place.

Not to be outdone, next year, Miss World, the European version of Miss Universe, will also be in Nha Trang in July. Earlier in the week at Ho chi Minh city, some of the girls tried on the ao dai, the traditional Vietnamese dress. One of the well known fashion designers commented: " The girls fitted in the ao dai beautifully since they all have gorgeous body measurement."

WANTEDLIST

In 2006, Time Magazine did a full page feature on Tila Tequila, a phenom of Myspace.com. "..........Tila clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many ceos weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer's Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It's hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It's not clear that even Tila knows. But she knows why it works. "There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet. There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you.", she said......."

By 2008, Tila Tequila is already into her second season of her own MTV reality show - A Shot At Love II. Her Myspace.com friends have double to over 3 millions. Her on line hit singles are played a total of 102 millions times. She even has her own hotline for her fans to call in. So far 431 thousands people have done so. But not somebody who is resting on her laurel, she is branding herself into the movie industry also. Not too bad for a 27 years-old California blond who as the Time put it : "Vietnamese by heritage and blond by choice"



In 2001, Anh Tran and his friend Danny Ting founded an adult movies-by-mail while having lunch in SF Chinatown. In typical Silicon Valley entrepeneurial fashion, the two young men drew up their plan on a napkin. WantedList is now the largest player in the rental porn-by-mail niche. It is the NetFlix of the porn video world. The two founders now have a drastic change of lifestyle. Instead of a cubicle life in front of the computer, they can be seen hobnobing and flirting with hottest porn stars and throwing lavish parties at AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. Not too bad for a couple of tech geeks who used to work as consultants for Arthur Andersen with clients like Intel. No word yet on what kind of marketing synergy that Tila and WantedList could create with each other.

Strange Bedfellows

As Madison Nguyen recall effort is in full swing, the Viet politics in San Jose is heating up just in time for the summer. The recall team, after the first 4 weeks relying on recall stations at strategic locations to obtain signatures, now adopts the standard get out the vote tactic of precinct canvassing with precinct captains and door to door visit. Meanwhile, Madison Nguyen is relying on a myriad of elected officials sending out anti-recall messages at public events and letters to show soliditary behind her.

Mayor Chuck Reed has been her most ardent supporter. At the recent Vietnamese Armed Forces Day, Madison Nguyen showed up with him to let everybody knows that she has the support of the mayor and the entire city council against the recall. Mayor Chuck Reed was an Air Force pilot stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War. His daughter is also an Air Force pilot and a Gulf War heroine.

In early March of this year, at the city council hearing, after listening for 5 hours of hundreds of Vietnamese-Americans expressing their wish for the name Little Saigon while some implying that he and Madison Nguyen are pro-communist, the mayor could not resist but to lash back at the community: " I resent the people who called me pro-communist or even a communist for that matter. I served my country against the communist during the Vietnam War. I saw many of my friends never returned from their missions. I have never spoken to the communist government, dealt with or ever want to deal with them or have anything to do with them, period." Of course, the mayor would later vote against the name Little Saigon. It took another month of intense drama before the city council decided to temporarily give in to the masses.

It was rather a strange decision for a man who once was the most popular politician in the community. He established his relationships with the community in earnest at the beginning of his political career in San Jose. As city councilmember , he spent a lot his time courting the community to a point that his personal assistant would note that Chuck Reed never seemed to miss a Vietnamese-American event no matter how trivial. Even when he decided to support an unqualified Vietnamese-American candidate (Hon Lien, the woman in the brown dress) who has a multimillion dollar seafood processing factory and seafood export business in Vietnam to replace his vacant council seat, the community still gave him the benefit of the doubt. Hon Lien in the primary beat out another Vietnamese-American candidate, Bryan Do, but lost to a Tawainese-American candidate in the run-off. However, with the Little Saigon fiasco and his unequivocal support of Madison Nguyen, many people in the community are questioning his intention.

Unlike Chuck Reed, the former mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown was never well received by the community. He does not bother to hide his close relationship with the communist government and its consulate in SF. In the picture, he was giving a toast at a New Year's celebration organized by the consulate with the former Consulate General Tran Tuan Anh (The guy with the mustache) looking on. Because of the formal sister city relation between San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City, the mayor opposed the Freedom Flag resolution which recognizes the old flag of the now nonexisted Republic of South Vietnam as the official flag of the Vietnamese-American community living in SF. He would not be caught dead associating himself with this anti-communist symbolism.

And yet it was he who approved the naming a 12 blocks area on Larkin Street, a stone throw away from the city hall as Little Saigon. And of course, the community just broke ground on June 19, 2008 for the gates to welcome tourists to Little Saigon of San Francisco. Best of all, most of the construction cost is paid for by the city.

In politics, a lot of time, it is not what you see is what you get. The true measure of political loyalty and commitment that the community has yet to learn is about "which is my piece of the pie?" and not empty gestures to pull the Freedom Flag over their eyes.