Western Union has a nice racket going. They allow foreign workers in the US to wire money to their families all over the world, all the while taking a nice cut. While the practice borders on exploitation, it's an economic necessity for many Latin American countries.
Which is why Tom Tancredo hates it. The congressman from the Colorado 6th district is easily the most bigoted anti-Latino legislator in the entire federal government. What Marilyn Musgrave is to gays, Tancredo is to Latinos.
So homeboy, in his never-ending quest to shit on Latino immigrants, proposed a 5 percent tax on money transfers to people in other countries. This is where the story gets interesting.
First Data - Colorado's second-largest corporation in terms of revenue and market cap - is hopping mad over the Littleton Republican's proposal to slap a 5 percent tax on money transfers to people in other countries [...]
First Data is the parent company of Western Union, which handles such money transfers worldwide. Fees from the transactions made up about $3 billion of First Data's $8 billion in revenue last year. And First Data, with 29,000 employees worldwide, is headquartered smack dab in the middle in Tancredo's congressional district - a fact he apparently was unaware of when he floated the remittance tax idea last month [...]
Tancredo, easily the most outspoken critic in Congress of U.S. immigration policy, got his dander up most recently after reading a report issued last month by the Washington, D.C-based InterAmerican Development Bank. An estimated $30 billion is transferred from the United States to Latin American countries each year - $13 billion to Mexico, the report said.
In a news release issued last month, Tancredo said, "After looking at the this data . . . I don't see how anyone can still say that illegal immigration only contributes to the U.S economy." [...]
"Shame on him if he didn't know," said First Data's Niehaus, a registered Republican who ran Gov. Roy Romer's Office of Economic Development in the late 1980s. "The fact that they have no idea that our world headquarters and thousands of our employees are located in his district is really troubling. If they're that out of touch, what do they understand about this district?
"He is as cavalier about this company and its employees and the financial stability of his district and this state as he is toward other immigration issues," Niehaus said. "Clearly he doesn't want us here and doesn't care if we're here or not. It's even more troubling to hear that it wouldn't have changed his mind if he had known we were in his district. Where is his sense of leadership and diplomacy if he doesn't consider the impact his actions have on his constituents?"
Pete Ziverts, a vice president for public affairs for First Data, said the company paid more than half a billion dollars in federal taxes last year. "But the issue is bigger than First Data," he said. "Remittance money and foreign aid are enormous sources of income for many poor countries in the world. In Mexico, remittance money is the country's second- largest source of revenue. In El Salvador, it's No. 1."
More bad news for Tancredo: The company incorporated a political action committee last month, First Data Corporation Employees for Responsible Government.
"We're going to support the candidate that best supports our interests, that can best provide leadership for this constituency," Niehaus said. "And we don't believe it's Tancredo. We're opting for change."
The problem with single-issue ideologues like Tancredo and Musgrave is that they truly have no idea what goes on in their districts. The single-issue rules all. And when a district's interests are subverted on behalf of a moral crusade, be it anti-gay rights, anti-Latino, or anti-anything else, you end up making enemies.
Tancredo has a lot of them. Democratic challenger Joanna Conti, a conservative Dem, has a real shot at this seat if she can capitalize on this sort of incompetence. She's not a dKos 8 candidate, but she'll get some turkee from me.