The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

October 27, 2009

NJ: In Parish of Slain Pastor, Talk of Forgiveness

In Parish of Slain Pastor, Talk of Forgiveness

By MICHAEL WILSON and NATE SCHWEBER
Published: October 25, 2009
NY Times

A popular Roman Catholic priest who was stabbed to death in his rectory in Chatham, N.J., last week — as well as the man charged in the killing — were remembered fondly on Sunday.

The Rev. Edward Hinds, the pastor of St. Patrick Church, who was described as a pious man who immersed himself in helping the homeless and the needy, was stabbed 32 times on Thursday evening.

A church janitor, Jose Feliciano of Easton, Pa., confessed to the crime, the authorities said.

On Friday and Saturday, parishioners tried to absorb the news of the stabbing, and to grieve for the priest, who was known as Father Ed.

But on Sunday there was talk of forgiveness for Mr. Feliciano, 64.

He was described as a warm, friendly family man who often played with children in the parish, church members said after morning Masses on Sunday.

“We pray in a very special way for Jose, a prayer of hope and consolation,” said the Rev. Owen Moran, who celebrated the Masses. “The Father Ed we know would forgive Jose. Father Ed probably did forgive him before he died.”

Mr. Feliciano told the authorities that he killed Father Hinds, 61, during a quarrel on Thursday and left his body on the kitchen floor of the rectory, according to the Morris County prosecutor’s office. The next day, he pretended to discover the body with a church deacon and even went through the motions of performing CPR, said the prosecutor, Robert A. Bianchi.

Mr. Feliciano has been charged with first-degree murder. In a news release on Sunday, Mr. Bianchi said it was possible that the argument had been about Mr. Feliciano’s continued employment.

Mr. Feliciano was being treated at an area hospital, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Paul, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office. The authorities did not say why he had been hospitalized.

Mr. Feliciano began working at St. Patrick in 1992, after moving to the area from Puerto Rico, parishioners said. He moved to Pennsylvania some years later. In 1996, he was baptized a Catholic after completing classes in the parish. He has two children, a daughter in the eighth grade at St. Patrick School, and a son who graduated from the grammar school and is now in high school, Father Moran said. Both children were receiving grief counseling, he added.

“They have a very important place in the community of St. Patrick’s, and they always will,” he said during one Mass. “They are innocent victims of this. This is their parish.”

Parishioners left the church in tears and, outside, expressed a disbelief that seemed to be unanimous.

“This is a good man,” said Maureen Haggerty, a former trustee at the church, referring to Mr. Feliciano. “Whatever happened, maybe it will become clear someday.”

The janitor was particularly good with children, friends said.

Just last week, Mr. Feliciano was seen cheering up a teary-eyed preschool boy, playing with his hat. “He would sing, dance and fool around with the kids,” said Michele Fischer, 42. “He was a jovial soul.”

Mr. Feliciano confessed to the killing in a written affidavit, prosecutors said. He said that he and Father Hinds had been arguing in the rectory at 5 p.m. on Thursday and that he got a knife from the kitchen and stabbed the priest, according to the affidavit.

Father Hinds is believed to have called 911 at 5:27 p.m. on Thursday, asking for help, but the call was disconnected. The dispatcher called back, and Mr. Feliciano answered and said there was no emergency, the authorities said on Sunday.

Afterward, Mr. Feliciano cleaned up with rags and paper towels and took them, with Father Hinds’s cellphone, home to Easton, the police said. They later tracked the cellphone to Easton.

When Father Hinds did not show up for 8 a.m. Mass on Friday, a deacon and Mr. Feliciano went into the rectory and found him dead in the kitchen. After initiating cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Mr. Feliciano looked up and said, “There’s nothing we can do,” the police said.

Before moving to Pennsylvania, Mr. Feliciano lived close to the church; he was a regular at block parties and kept an eye on all the children as they went to and from school and church, neighbors said.

“He was a great neighbor, a great family man,” said Eileen Ruggiero, 35. “No one would have ever imagined this.”

Another parishioner, Dr. Neal T. Collins, an oncologist, said he wondered whether Mr. Feliciano had suffered some sort of head injury or brain tumor that might have triggered the attack. “He was much more than a janitor,” said Dr. Collins, 50. “He was like family.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 26, 2009, on page A17 of the New York edition.

Posted by lois at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2009

PETA Suggests Renting Prison For Chicken Empathy Museum

PETA Suggests Renting Prison For Chicken Empathy Museum

http://mystateline.com/content/fulltext/?cid=99621
Tuesday, Sep 15, 2009

(Roanoke, VA) -- PETA's executive vice president sent a letter to
Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine on Monday offering to rent a state
prison facility and turn it into America's first chicken empathy museum.

Tracy Reiman wrote on behalf of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization, suggesting the Botetourt Correctional Center in Troutville would be a perfect location for the museum when the prison closes.

Governor Kaine has order Botetourt and two other prisons closed to help reduce a one-point-three-five-billion-dollar state shortfall.

PETA's plan would feature educational displays and a restaurant that
would serve faux-chicken drumsticks and vegetarian foods.

Visitors to the museum could also wear a weighed backpack to simulate
how the upper bodies of chickens grow in proportion to their legs.

In the letter, Reiman writes that another benefit would be the jobs the museum would provide local residents.

Reiman added, quote, "the museum would convert a building that was built for the purpose of incarceration into a tribute to liberation."

(Copyright 2009 by VERTEXNews/Newsroom Solutions)

Posted by lois at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2009

Review: "When a Heart Turns Rock Solid" probes Lives of 3 Springfield MA brothers

Review: 'Rock' probes the lives of three Springfield brothers
By THE DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

"When a Heart Turns Rock Solid" (Pantheon Books), a window into the lives of three Puerto Rican brothers in Springfield slides open during their teenage years, affording readers a raw glimpse of their struggles with love, drugs and violence in a sociological study that spans nearly two decades.

We learn how Sammy Rivera does lines of coke in his sixth-grade classroom; how his older brother Fausto watches as an inmate eviscerates another with his bare hands; how the eldest brother, Julio, is the glue that holds the family together.

"When a Heart Turns Rock Solid" succeeds because author Timothy Black makes readers care about his subjects - or at least their stories - which are presented in a somewhat sympathetic light. Although Black relies heavily on dry data to explain how impoverished communities are affected by economic and political forces, the story of the three brothers remains captivating.

Despite enduring racist attitudes toward Puerto Ricans and a meager high school education, the brothers achieve varying degrees of sobriety, discipline and self-love as they grow up in Springfield, in the 1990s.

They occasionally abandon street life when they discover a sense of purpose through family, women or work.

"I know how you must feel about your teaching," Sammy tells the author as he attends culinary school, "because now I'm feeling passionate about something like you."

Julio is the most accomplished, earning accolades as a high school wrestler and football player. He becomes the first of the family to graduate from high school, and manages to build a solid street credibility. Few mess with the trained boxer and ruthless gang member.

Fausto seeks to emulate his older brother's successes, but flunking grades encouraged by a system that pushes him to the next grade level despite his near-illiteracy prevents him from joining any sports team.

However, his charisma and intellectual capacity override his shortcomings.

He is tapped at the last minute to give a speech at school, prompting his teacher to praise his poise and confidence. He also thrives at his job with the Boys Club, where his supervisor describes him as a "godsend."

But he later struggles to fill out an application to work there again, embarrassed to let anyone know he can barely read or write.

Sammy also struggles in school, and is the first to join the drug-dealing trade. He relishes how naive, pot-smoking white teens from a nearby town are impressed with him and the supposed ghetto he comes from. He takes them on a "field trip" to Springfield at their request, but upon arriving there, doesn't know what to do with them, so he takes them to his mom's house for a meal.

Humor helps them navigate from one disappointment to another, but they remain aware of their failures.

Julio manages to avoid drugs, but Fausto and Sammy fall prey to heroin. They also serve time in prison for various crimes and struggle to find normalcy after their release.

"The effects of prison you don't see 'em right away," Fausto says. "A lot of those things really break you, right, they disturb you - they disturb a part of your brain that's not meant to be disturbed."

The book has the same effect, if only by challenging your assumptions about the extent that external forces and a lack of individual responsibility and determination are to blame for the plight of marginalized communities.

Posted by lois at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2009

Better Late than Never--Henry Louis Gates Says Scholar Says Arrest Will Lead Him To Explore Race in Criminal Justice

Scholar Says Arrest Will Lead Him To Explore Race in Criminal Justice
By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has spent much of his life studying the complex history of race and culture in America, but until last week he had never had the experience that has left so many black men questioning the criminal justice system.

Gates was arrested outside his house in Cambridge, Mass., after a neighbor reported seeing two black men in the middle-class, predominantly white area pushing against the front door.

"I studied the history of racism. I know every incident in the history of racism from slavery to Jim Crow segregation," Gates told The Washington Post on Tuesday in his first interview about the episode. "I haven't even come close to being arrested. I would have said it was impossible."

Instead, in a country where one in nine young black men are in prison, where racial profiling is still practiced, the arrest of a renowned scholar on a charge of disorderly conduct in front of his house last Thursday has fueled an ongoing debate about race in America in the age of its first black president.

The charge against him was dropped Tuesday, but Gates said he plans to use the attention and turn his intellectual heft and stature to the issue of racial profiling. He now wants to create a documentary on the criminal justice system, informed by the experience of being arrested not as a famous academic but as an unrecognized black man.

Gates has come to see the incident as a modern lesson in racism and the criminal justice system. The police department views it as an "regrettable and unfortunate" incident that "should not be viewed as one that demeans the character and reputation of Prof. Gates or the character of the Cambridge Police Department."

Here is Gates's account of what happened:

After returning from a week in China researching the genealogy of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Gates found himself locked out of his house, and he and his driver began pushing against the front door. The sight of two black men forcing open a door prompted an emergency call to police.

The white officer who arrived found Gates in the house (the driver was gone) and asked him to step outside. Gates refused, and the officer followed him in. Gates showed him his ID, which included his address, then demanded that the officer identify himself. The officer did not comply, Gates said. He then followed the officer outside, saying repeatedly, "Is this how you treat a black man in America?"

The police report said that Gates was "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior" and that the officer, Sgt. James Crowley, identified himself. "We stand by whatever the officer said in his report," said Sgt. James DeFrancesco, a spokesman for the Cambridge Police Department. He would not comment on Gates's version of his arrest.

The department said that Crowley tried to calm Gates, but that the professor would not cooperate and said, "You don't know who you're messing with."

"These actions on behalf of Gates served no legitimate purpose and caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed," the report said.

Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president was "huge and important," Gates said, but "did not translate to structural change. Given the demographics of Cambridge, [the officer] probably voted for Barack. That wasn't much help to me."

He added: "I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten."

It was also a teachable moment on race and class for Gates, 58, who directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard and is a founder of the Root (http://www.theroot.com), a Web site owned by The Washington Post Co.

Billionaire media and sports entrepreneur Bob Johnson has described in interviews with The Post his experience of parking his car next to a ritzy hotel and a white woman opening the back door because she thought he was a chauffer. Coming out of another hotel, he was stopped by security -- locked in a revolving door -- because a black man had committed a mugging in the building and they were stopping all black men coming out of the building.

Charles Ogletree, Gates's friend and lawyer, who also teaches at Harvard and wrote about the relationship between minority communities and law enforcement after the Rodney King verdict, said his own experience with profiling has been similar. On a trip to his home town of Merced, Calif., a police officer stopped him in his rented Cadillac to ask what he was doing in the neighborhood.

Gates's prominence played a dual role, Ogletree said, bringing unflattering attention to Gates in the first reporting of the incident. Then, it allowed him access to well-connected friends and resources that got his case dismissed quickly.

Sitting handcuffed in the police cruiser, Gates was able to ask his secretary to "call Tree," referring to Ogletree.

"He knew: At least somebody will know where I am and what needs to be done. That is the advantage he had to know a lawyer and to call a lawyer."
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The harsher side of the experience was "deeply painful and traumatic," Gates said. "I'm outraged that this could happen to me in my own home, but I'm outraged that it could happen to any individual."

He said his documentary will ask: "How are people treated when they are arrested? How does the criminal justice system work? How many black and brown men and poor white men are the victims of police officers who are carrying racist thoughts?"

He has always said his neighborhood is the safest place in the world for him. He is often recognized on the streets, asked for autographs or to debate his latest documentary.

He has no qualms about the neighbor who called the police.

"I'm glad that someone would care enough about my property to report what they thought was some untoward invasion," Gates said. "If she saw someone tomorrow that looked like they were breaking in, I would want her to call 911. I would want the police to come. What I would not want is to be presumed to be guilty. That's what the deal was. It didn't matter how I was dressed. It didn't matter how I talked. It didn't matter how I comported myself. That man was convinced that I was guilty."

Gates has asked for a personal apology. Ogletree said it is not clear whether he will receive one.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR2009072101771.html?sid=ST2009072103463

Posted by lois at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2009

Jacqueline Berrien, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Chosen to Head E.E.O.C.

Obama Chooses an E.E.O.C. Leader
Published: July 16, 2009
NY Times
President Obama picked Jacqueline A. Berrien, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The White House made the announcement just hours before Mr. Obama addressed the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York. Ms. Berrien, a Harvard Law School graduate, has been the fund’s associate director-counsel since 2004. For three years, she was program officer in the Ford Foundation’s peace and social justice program, administering more than $13 million in grants to promote political participation by under-represented groups. She also has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/us/politics/17brfs-OBAMACHOOSES_BRF.html?scp=1&sq=Jacqueline%20Berrian&st=cse

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2009

Sotomayor for the Prosecution

Sotomayor for the Prosecution
— By James Ridgeway | Wed July 15, 2009
Mother Jones
Sonia Sotomayor's all-but-certain confirmation will be a notable victory for the Democrats, and a long-overdue victory for diversity on the nation's highest court. Whether it will be a victory for criminal justice is another question altogether--and one that seems to matter little to most of her liberal supporters.

Long before her Senate confirmation hearings began, progressive politician, lawyers, scholars, activists, and bloggers had joined together, as if in one voice, to sing Sotomayor’s praises. Beyond predictable paeans to her qualifications and her inspiring personal story, the focus of this chorus of accolades is not Judge Sotomayor’s passion for justice, her moral rectitude, or even her much-discussed “empathy.” Instead, Congressional Democrats and their allies have banded together to celebrate how thoroughly indistinguishable Sonia Sotomayor is from a Republican judge.

In their zeal to show that she is a “moderate,” Sotomayor’s liberal supporters are downplaying all her most compelling qualities, while lauding her most conservative decisions. She has rejected the majority of racial discrimination claims, they crow, and sent most immigrants packing. On criminal justice matters, she is somewhere to the right of the man she will replace, Daddy Bush appointee David Souter. The very facts that ought to make progressives cringe are instead being extolled as Sotomayor's greatest virtues, since they are the things that render her eminently "confirmable."

The most barefaced example of this rhetoric came on the eve of the hearings from New York Senator Charles Schumer, considered one of the Judiciary Committee’s most liberal members. Declaring Sotomayor a “slam dunk,” Schumer bragged:

She has agreed with Republican colleagues 95 percent of the time. She has ruled for the government in 83 percent of immigration cases, against the immigration plaintiff. She has ruled for the government in 92 percent of criminal cases. She has denied race claims in 83 percent of the cases and has split evenly on employment cases between employer and employee.

It was Schumer’s office that last month released its own study of Sotomayor’s 848 decisions in federal asylum cases, including those based on alleged violations of the Convention on Torture. Sotomayor ruled in favor of plaintiffs in these cases just 17 percent o the time. “These findings should put to rest any doubts about Judge Sotomayor’s fidelity to the rule of law,” Schumer said in a statement. “Even in immigration cases, which would most test the so-called ‘empathy factor,’ Judge Sotomayor’s record is well within the judicial mainstream.” In other words, being a Latina won’t make Sotomayor any more compassionate toward immigrants who face torture and death when we ship them back home.

On questions of criminal justice and criminal procedure, Sotomayor has a particularly substantial record—more than anyone else on the current Supreme Court, as her supporters have rightly pointed out, due to her career as a prosecutor, criminal court judge, and appellate judge. On this front, Sotomayor’s backers are promoting her as a tough-on-crime pragmatist with no soft spot for criminal defendants—even if they happen to be innocent.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal looked approvingly at Sotomayor’s record on criminal cases, in an article titled “Nominees Criminal Rulings Tilt to the Right of Souter.” The retiring Republican-appointee Souter has sometimes joined Court liberals in defending the rights of the accused and convicted—most recently in a January case concerning police searches and seizures. In a similar appellate case, Sotomayor had ruled in favor of the police. The Journal reported:

New York criminal-defense lawyers say she is surprisingly tough on crime for a Democratic-backed appointee -- a byproduct, they believe, of her tenure as a prosecutor….Following recent Supreme Court precedent, Judge Sotomayor tends to see relatively few grounds to overturn criminal convictions, says John Siffert, a New York attorney who taught an appellate advocacy class with the judge at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2006. On the trial bench, he says, "she was not viewed as a pro-defense judge."

Sotomayor had the opportunity to review many petitions for writs of habeas corpus--the basic Constitutional right to seek judicial relief from unlawful detention, which offers recourse to those who believe they have been unfairly or improperly tried or wrongly convicted. Progressives have for years attacked the Bush administration for denying habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The Alliance for Justice, a 30-year-old coalition of progressive groups, has a special project called “Defend Habeas,” which states on its web site:

Without access to due process guarantees enshrined in the Constitution, people can be imprisoned indefinitely, without any hope of a fair trial or hearing, or even an opportunity to respond to the charges against them. …

Eliminating habeas turns our back on what it means to be an American, and advances a policy that makes us less secure rather than more secure. If the United States cannot guarantee rights to the citizens of other countries, what guarantee do Americans have that their rights will be respected by the rest of the world? We live in a country of laws, not of men, and in order to stand up for that tradition, due process must be restored.

Yet for those incarcerated in U.S. prisons, the main obstacle to accessing these rights is not anything concocted during the Bush years. It is the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), introduced in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and signed into law by Bill Clinton in an election year. The AEDPA severely restricts the ability of federal judges to grant writs of habeas corpus and offer judicial relief to the convicted, even when there is substantial new evidence of their innocence.

Sonia Sotomayor rendered her appellate decisions under the restrictions imposed by AEDPA, and was subject to its tenets. But as a handful of defense lawyers have pointed out, mostly on personal blogs, she seemed more than content to abide by those restrictions. One blogger calls her a “dead bang loser for the defense.” The blog of the conservative, law-and-order Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, agreed, and praised Sotomayor on these very grounds:

[AEDPA] is bitterly resented by many federal judges....Many, many federal judges have attempted to evade it, and a few have gone so far as to declare it unconstitutional. All of the latter have been reversed [by the Supreme Court]….Throughout [Sotomayor’s] opinions, I do not see the hostility to AEDPA that I have seen in so many opinions in the lower federal courts. The statute is largely applied as written and as intended.

A more surprising affirmation of Sotomayor’s record in this area came from the Alliance for Justice, sponsors of the Defend Habeas project. In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy and ranking member Jeff Sessions, the AFJ wrote:

Judge Sotomayor’s criminal justice opinions reveal the temperament of a former prosecutor who understands the real-world demands of prosecuting crime and fundamentally respects the rule of law. When reviewing the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, Judge Sotomayor closely follows Second Circuit precedent and dispenses narrow rulings tailored to the particular facts of the case. Exhibiting a moderate and restrained approach to judicial review of trial process, she focuses on procedural issues, and she has resolved the overwhelming majority of her cases without reaching the merits of a defendant’s claim. Significantly, she frequently concludes that trial defects resulted in harmless rather than structural error. Her restrained anner is most evident in her habeas corpus decisions, in which she strictly adheres to the procedural requirements of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”), often dismissing habeas petitions as nexhausted or time-barred under AEDPA, even when faced with potentially credible—and, in one instance, ultimately proven—claims of actual innocence. While the Alliance for Justice believes that, where possible, judges should reach the merits of a defendant’s constitutional claims and recognize the damage that a trial court error inflicts on the integrity of a criminal proceeding, we nonetheless respect Judge Sotomayor’s moderate approach and commitment to preserving the delicate balance between the government’s ability to prosecute crime and an individual’s constitutional rights.

The AFJ’s report, and its upbeat press conference on Sotomayor’s criminal rulings, were widely reported, under headlines like “Liberal Group Praises Sotomayor’s Criminal Justice Record,” and “Sotomayor ‘Tough’ on Crime, Report Says.” It all begs the question of whether habeas corpus rights warrant the most fervent and absolute defense only when they are violated by Republicans, and not when they are dismissed by Democratic court nominees under laws signed by Democratic presidents.

The most powerful statement on this issue has come from Jeffrey Deskovic, who was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder at age 17, and spent 16 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. His earlier appeals had, in 1997, reached New York State’s highest appeals court, where his petition for a writ of habeas corpus was denied because his lawyer had filed it four days late (on the erroneous advice of a court clerk). The time restriction had been imposed by the then-new AEDPA.

Deskovic then appealed his case to the Federal Second Circuit, where he encountered Judge Sonia Sotomayor. As he described it in a piece on Alternet last week, his lawyer "gave three reasons why Judge Sotomayor and her colleague should overturn the procedural ruling: 1) Upholding such a ruling would cause a miscarriage of justice to continue; 2) Reversing the procedural ruling could open the door to more sophisticated DNA Testing; 3) The late petition was not my fault or my attorney's." But the judges refused to reverse the ruling. "The alleged reliance of Deskovic's attorney on verbal misinformation from the court clerk constitutes excusable neglect that does not rise to the level of an extraordinary circumstance," they wrote. "Similarly, we are not persuaded that … his situation is unique and his petition has substantive merit." A second appeal to Sotomayor's court resulted in the same decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case, so Deskovic stayed in prison for six more years before DNA proved him innocent (and convicted another man). Deskovic writes:

Judge Sotomayor will appear before the Senate next week. Given that she has been nominated to a lifetime appointment that affects all of our rights, what she did in my case -- condemning me to a life sentence based on procedure in the face of an airtight innocence claim -- should be part of the discussion. I want my case to be a part of the national discussion. I want Senators to ask Judge Sotomayor if she stands by her ruling, and whether she would rule that way in the future. If I could I would testify at the Senate confirmation hearing, about the human impact of Judge Sotomayor's putting procedure over innocence. Thus far, however, I have gotten no response from either side on Capitol Hill.

In fact, as Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, wrote to me in an email last week, Judge Sotomayor’s ruling against Deskovic would likely be seen as “a strong reason for her to be confirmed to the court since it shows she is outcome-oriented.” Wright continued:

No one cares about innocent people dying in prison, the Republicans and Democrats alike are fine with it….The courts do everything they can to avoid reaching the merits of prisoners claims and instead love to dismiss on procedural technicalities. It is the purposeful triumph of form over substance.

Indeed, it is decisions much like this one that are offered up as proof that Sotomayor is a moderate, and not an “activist” judge--which is the current term for jurists who render decisions based upon whether they actually serve the cause of justice. The fact that progressives feel they must celebrate rulings like these in order to prove their nominee is in the "mainstream" is far more a condemnation of Sotomayor's supporters than of the judge herself. It all goes to show how far to the right that mainstream now runs--and how willingly liberals have been borne along by the current.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/07/sotomayor-prosecution

Posted by lois at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2009

Job losses hit black men hardest: Some 8 percent of black men in the US have lost their jobs since November 2007

Job losses hit black men hardest: Some 8 percent of black men in the US have lost their jobs since November 2007, according to a recent study.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer/ March 15, 2009 edition
and Yvonne Zipp | Correspondent
Christian Science Monitor
At a time when America has elected its first black president, more African-American men are losing jobs than at any time since World War II.

No group has been hit harder by the downturn. Employment among black men has fallen 7.8 percent since November of 2007, according to a report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

The trend is intimately tied to education, the report’s authors say. Black women – who are twice as likely as black men to go to college – have faced no net job losses. By contrast, black men are disproportionately employed in those blue-collar jobs that have been most highly affected – think third shifts at rural manufacturing plants.

It threatens to add to the difficulties of vulnerable families in a community already beset by high incarceration rates and low graduation numbers.

Moreover, it puts renewed focus on the cultural and economic stereotypes of black women and men – mythologies and realities about the black family that remain challenging for the country, and Washington, to address.

In terms of job-loss rate for African-American men, “nothing comes close to this,” says Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies and an author of the report, noting that the job-loss rate for African-American men during the Great Depression is unknown.

Federal data indicate all demographic groups have been affected. The number of men looking for full-time work has nearly doubled in the last year, regardless of race or ethnicity, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. But the Northeastern study concludes that during the past 15 months, “the relative decline in black male employment was considerably higher than that of their male counterparts in the other three race-ethnic groups” – Asians, Hispanics, and whites.

The job-loss figures come at a time when many lower-income black homeowners are already at risk of foreclosure. “They have zero opportunity to refinance or borrow in any way to get over the rough patch of unemployment,” writes Tom Hertz, a labor economist, in an e-mail.
The employment rate among African-American men aged 20 to 24 is now just 51 percent, as opposed to 68 percent during the late 1990s. For African-American teens, it’s just 14 percent.

“A lot of family heads are being affected and a lot of the young guys,” says Professor Sum of Northeastern. “When you get a job loss of that magnitude it’s just totally destructive [to] communities.”

Unemployed black men like Anthony Gilmore aren’t surprised by the findings. Laid off five months ago from a call center, Mr. Gilmore recently interviewed for a job detailing cars. A Hispanic man got the job.

The perception among many black men like Gilmore is that the economy has merely laid bare the historic prejudices that still exist.

“There’s still very much a system that really is designed to keep people at a disadvantage,” he said while waiting Friday outside an Atlanta unemployment office.

Yet black men can be bound as much by deeper labor trends as cultural stereotypes, says Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Especially in the South, black men often pay a price for demanding workplace rights gained in the Civil Rights movement – demands for days off and being able to say no to overtime, for example. Hispanic workers, particularly, aren’t as likely to claim those rights, making them easier hires, says Professor Rachleff.

“You can call it a class thing, but I don’t think that’s what it is,” says Douglas Besharov, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “Some of it is long-term discrimination and lack of access to education, but much more in this recession it’s determined by which sector that’s suffering the most.”

From November of 2007, the month before the official start of the recession, to February of 2009, “there was no net job loss among professionals or managers,” says Sum.

Contradicting media reports that job loss has been widespread in this recession, he adds: “All the job loss has been among blue-collar jobs – construction, manufacturing, and retail.”

These are the jobs black men have long sought, settling for high-school diplomas in order to get these relatively well paid posts, suggests Terry Getter, an unemployed accountant waiting in line at the Atlanta unemployment office. But they are now feeling the consequences of not continuing their education.

African-American women have fared better in the downturn, says Sum. That may be partly because of their higher levels of education. In a departure from the trends of the past two recessions, those who have lost their jobs in this one “overwhelmingly … had 12 or less years of school,” he adds.

Correspondingly, his data suggest that, as of January, about 120 African-American women were employed for every 100 African-American men. “The current size of the overall gap in employment between black women and black men is historically unprecedented, and black Americans are the only group for whom the gender employment gap is in favor of women,” the report notes.

As a result, the onus for the community’s well-being has fallen primarily on women, adding more burdens to a group that, historically, has upheld the black family, says Sheri Parks, author of the upcoming book “Fierce Angels” about the role of strong black women in American culture.

Part of the reason, she says, is that black communities have historically protected young men and expected more of young women, particularly when it comes to schooling. “If you’re a black woman, you don’t have to convince someone that you’re strong and nurturing and able to do almost anything – it’s almost a brand,” says Ms. Parks. “The prevalent image of a black man is what we call hyper-masculine and often idealized, but not necessarily in the workplace.”

This means black women also tend to enter their job hunt with a greater sense of urgency, says Tim Ready, director of the Lewis Walker Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

“Women are more likely to take whatever jobs are necessary because they end up being the primary caretakers for kids,” he says. “They have no choice.”

At a time when Mr. Obama’s election has encouraged a debate about what race means in modern America, the job-loss figures reveal enduring problems that remain unaddressed, say some.

“When we say ‘postracial,’ we focus a lot on ideas, attitudes, and identity and not on outcomes: jobs, wages, and those things,” says Steven Pitts, a policy analyst with the Center for Labor Research and Education in Berkeley, Calif. “It’s important to look at the question of how we are passing out resources, jobs, education, wages, and wealth. That’s how you begin your analysis on postrace.”
http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/03/15/job-losses-hit-black-men-hardest/

Posted by lois at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2009

Keeping the Faith, Ignoring the History---Op-Ed on faith based initiatives and the Obama Administration

New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Keeping the Faith, Ignoring the History
By SUSAN JACOBY
Published: February 28, 2009

NEARLY everyone now takes for granted the wisdom, constitutionality and inevitability of some form of federal financing for community social services run by religious groups. Who anymore can imagine that the United States managed to exist for over 200 years without the government providing any direct aid to faith and its works?

It is truly dismaying that amid all the discussion about President Obama's version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. The debate has instead focused on whether proselytizing or religious hiring discrimination should be permitted when church groups take public money. This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton started down the slippery slope toward a constitutionally questionable form of faith-based aid when he signed a welfare reform bill that included a "charitable choice" provision allowing religious groups to compete for grants. Under President George W. Bush, a separate White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was established ‹ a significant expansion of "charitable choice." Mr. Bush, who
instituted his faith-based program through executive orders rather than trying to get a bill establishing the office through Congress, quickly put the money to political use.

The administration provided large grants for projects favored by the
Christian right, like Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries and Teen Challenge, a drug rehabilitation program that openly pushed religious conversion (even using the phrase 'completed Jews' to describe teenage converts from Judaism) as a way of overcoming addiction. John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of Mr. Bush's faith-based office, resigned after only eight months and later complained about the politicization of the
program.

Throughout Mr. Bush¹s second term, the Democratic Party's "religious left" maintained that the party needed to shed its secular image to attract more religious voters. As far as these Democrats were concerned, the only problem with faith-based programs was that most of the money was going to religious and political conservatives.

Enter Barack Obama, who spoke the language of both faith and secularism ‹ and who promised during the campaign to expand faith-based aid while, at the same time, prohibiting proselytizing and religious hiring discrimination in federally financed programs. Yet earlier this month when the president announced his new faith-based team, headed by a Pentecostal minister, Josh
DuBois, Mr. Obama left the Bush orders in place and Mr. DuBois later
announced that hiring practices would be vetted by the Justice Department "case by case."

Some have tried to justify direct, White House-administered faith-based aid by pointing to long-established practices allowing programs like Medicare and Medicaid to pay for services provided to patients in religiously affiliated hospitals. But for these hospitals, nondiscrimination in both hiring and patient admissions was always a condition of eligibility for any federal money.

It is also worth noting that Mr. Obama's compromise has drawn criticism not only from secularists and civil libertarians but from religious conservatives like R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who maintains that the unlimited right to proselytize and to hire members of their own faith is essential if churches are not to compromise their mission. As a thoroughgoing secularist, I consider Mr. Mohler much clearer-minded than Democratic faith-based advocates, who wish to believe that devout proselytizers are somehow going to stifle themselves
while providing "secular" social services.

The fact is that many people served by these projects — including children with absent fathers, addicts and prisoners — form a captive audience. It cannot be easy to say no to a proselytizer if saying yes means a warm bed in a homeless shelter, extra help for a child or more privileges while serving jail time. Embrace Jesus as your savior and, who knows, you may get early parole.

Furthermore, as Mr. Mohler points out, there is also a peril to religious independence from government in these programs. What government gives, government can take away. What happens if hard-pressed African-American churches serving poor communities — where enthusiasm for faith-based initiatives has always been high and has only intensified during the current economic crisis — come to rely on government money and the rug is pulled out from under them by a future administration?

Those who argue in favor of more religious involvement in government, and vice versa, always claim that the First Amendment does not mandate separation of church and state but simply prohibits state preference for any church. But even by that religion-infused standard, faith-based aid cannot help but favor some religions over others. For instance, nearly all non-Orthodox Jewish groups and liberal ecumenical religious organizations are opposed to government subsidy. How can it not violate the First Amendment to set up a program that even by default favors those groups eager to jump on the federal gravy train?

The other canker at the heart of faith-based initiatives is the assumption that religiously based programs work better than secular and government efforts. For the faithful, though, the efficacy of these programs is an article of faith, not a conclusion supported by objective evidence.

Back in 2003, there was a flurry of excitement surrounding a study that at first glance seemed to suggest that participants in Mr. Colson’s prison programs in Texas had been rearrested at much lower rates than other released prisoners. There was just one problem: the study excluded everyone who quit the program in prison — two-thirds of the starting group. It is as if the Department of Education were to measure the success of public schools by not counting dropouts. This ought to give pause to Mr. Obama, who has spoken so often about restoring evidence and science to public policy-making.

President Obama might also take a moment to reread the religious freedom act passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, with strong support from both Baptists and freethinkers. That law, which prohibited tax support for religious teaching in public schools, became the template for the establishment clause of the First Amendment and also helped establish our American tradition of government freedom from religious interference and religious freedom from government interference.

Yet we are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past. If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back. In place of the First Amendment, we will have a sacred cash cow.

Susan Jacoby is the author of “The Age of American Unreason.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/opinion/01jacoby.html

Posted by lois at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2009

Writing and Arts Residency Focusing on Prison Issues

*Prison Issues Residency *
Blue Mountain Center is pleased to invite you and your colleagues to apply to a special two week session, May 8-25, that will be dedicated to artists and writers who are working on material pertaining to incarceration: the system itself, the alternatives, the inmates, the stories, the data, etc. The corrosive effect of our jail and prison systems on human life and society is a primary focus of the BMC program, and we hope that providing this opportunity for artists and activists will help to advance progressive thinking on the issue.

To apply, simply submit a letter postmarked by February 23
to:

Ben Strader
Blue Mountain Center PO Box 109
Blue Mountain Lake, NY 12812-0109
or to ben@bluemountaincenter.org.

The letter should include:

(A) a brief description of what you plan to work on at BMC,
(B) your history with the issue,
(C) a list of two references who are familiar with prison issues and with your work,
(D) A short (up to 10 pages) writing sample. Artists should send 5 jpeg slides on a CD.

(If you have been a Resident at BMC previously, it is not necessary to include C or D. Three pages is ample for A and B.)

15 people will be invited to participate in the session. We welcome applications from non-fiction and fiction writers, activists, poets, filmmakers, playwrights, and artists of all kinds. There is no application fee or cost for the program. Residents will work on their individual projects as they do during the regular season; but they will also be encouraged to share their perspectives, ideas and approaches with one another. Please go to www.bluemountaincenter.org for basic information about BMC's Residency Program. This session and it's application process are distinct from our regular residency program.

And please share this call for applications with others whom you know to be working effectively on this issue.

Posted by lois at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2008

PA: Corruption a keystone of state government, prof says

Corruption a keystone of state government, prof says

By Brad Bumsted and Brian Bowling
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, December 20, 2008

HARRISBURG -- Pennsylvania is one of just a few states where corrupt government is ingrained in the culture.

That's the view of Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. Historically, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Louisiana and Pennsylvania -- states where government to varying degrees embodies "machine politics" -- have had high-profile corruption cases and a populace largely tolerant of corrupt officials, Borick said.

"It's part of the broader culture of how politics operates in these places. It's passed down from one generation to another. It's almost an expectation that 'This is the way it's done,' " Borick said. "We've seen improvements, but it is still part of the culture."

The arrest this month of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is accused of trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder, set in motion a national discussion about which state is the most corrupt.

Illinois "is certainly one hell of a competitor," Robert Grant, the special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office, said after Blagojevich's arrest for what U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called "a public corruption crime spree."

Subsequently, USA Today, the Washington Post and The New York Times tried to determine the dirtiest state, based on a recent U.S. Justice Department report showing federal convictions in public corruption cases over the past decade.

The more populous states tend to have more convictions, while smaller states lead the way on a strictly per-capita basis. Pennsylvania ranked fifth in total federal convictions -- 555 -- from 1998 through 2007, behind Florida, California, New York and Texas, according to an analysis of the report by the Tribune-Review.

USA Today discovered that the most corrupt state, based on the number of incidents per 100,000 people, is North Dakota, with Pennsylvania a distant 14th in the per-capita ranking.

"When you think of a place like North Dakota, the population is so small that with just a few cases of corruption, the rate is affected," Borick said.

"I don't think these statistics are very valid," said Bev Cigler, a political science professor at Penn State University's Harrisburg campus. "They only measure who got caught."

In fact, statistics don't measure everyone who gets caught.

That's because the Justice Department study looked only at convictions of public officials who were prosecuted by U.S. Attorneys' offices.

So, in Pennsylvania the statistics would not include convictions by county district attorneys or the state attorney general, who is investigating public corruption in the General Assembly involving suspected use of tax money for political purposes. Twelve former House Democratic officials -- including two former lawmakers -- are charged with felonies. Two former staffers have agreed to plead guilty.

Over the past decade, 10 state lawmakers faced criminal charges that in some way were related to their official duties. But no governor has gone to jail despite widespread corruption in the 1970s under late Gov. Milton Shapp, said G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College. Shapp "failed to rein in corruption in and around his administration," Madonna said.

A former attorney general, Ernie Preate, was sentenced to prison for a 1995 fundraising scheme. Former Auditor General Al Benedict was convicted of tax evasion and racketeering in 1988 related to a job-selling scandal. Former Treasurer Budd Dwyer, convicted of agreeing to take a $300,000 kickback, shot himself at a televised news conference in January 1987 the day before he was to be sentenced.

"The commonwealth has had its share of miscreant public officials over the years but it is far from the most corrupt state in the union," said Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell. "However we must always be vigilant to ensure that public servants actually serve the public and not their individual interests."

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican who immediately preceded Blagojevich, remains in federal prison on a 2006 conviction for steering state work to supporters and using state resources for political purposes.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Blagojevich is the fifth Illinois governor to be accused of a crime out of 10 who have served over the past 50 years.

Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, who famously boasted that he couldn't be defeated unless he was "caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy," was convicted in 2001 for extorting payoffs from applicants for riverboat casinos.

"I think we (Pennsylvania) are one of the worst," said Senate Majority Whip Jane Orie, a McCandless Republican and a former prosecutor. "I think when you look at the pay to play, gaming ... bonuses, we're in a culture, especially in the Legislature, where there was no reform and business as usual."

Pennsylvania in 2006 awarded a casino license to a convicted felon.

"I know of no other state that has (casino) licensing where this has occurred," said Bill Thompson, a professor of business administration at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Louis DeNaples, a prominent Scranton businessman, was convicted of felony fraud charges in 1978. He was licensed to run the Mt. Airy Casino Resort in 2006. DeNaples was charged with perjury in January, accused of lying about the extent to which he knew organized crime figures. He maintains his innocence and is awaiting a preliminary hearing.

"Ever since gambling came on board (2004) there's an open door for crime and corruption," said Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks County.

A powerful state lawmaker for three decades, former Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, is on trial in federal court for allegedly defrauding taxpayers, a nonprofit and a seaport museum of $3.5 million.

Graph at this URL
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/state/s_603889.html

Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2008

JEHT Foundation closes down due to investments with Bernad Madoff

Statement of Robert Crane, President of the JEHT Foundation, on behalf of the Foundation’s Board of Directors
Posted under General News on Monday, December 15, 2008

The JEHT Foundation, a national philanthropic organization, has stopped all grant making effective immediately and will close its doors at the end of January 2009. The funds of the donors to the Foundation, Jeanne Levy-Church and Kenneth Levy-Church, were managed by Bernard L. Madoff, a prominent financial advisor who was arrested last week for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.

The Foundation was established in 2000. Its name stands for the values it holds dear: Justice, Equality, Human dignity and Tolerance. It supported programs that promoted reform of the criminal and juvenile justice systems; ensured that the United States adhered to the international rule of law; and work to improve the voting process by enhancing fair representation, competitive elections and government transparency.

The JEHT Foundation Board deeply regrets that the important work that the Foundation has undertaken over the years is ending so abruptly. The issues the Foundation addressed received very limited philanthropic support and the loss of the foundation’s funding and leadership will cause significant pain and disruption of the work for many dedicated people and organizations. The Foundation’s programs have met with significant success in recent years – promoting change in these critical areas in partnership with government and the non-profit sector. Hopefully others will look closely at this work and consider supporting it going forward.

Contact:
Robert Crane, President and CEO
JEHT Foundation

Posted by lois at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2008

Northampton MA: Panhandling law is part of effort to sanitize the city

Panhandling law is part of effort to sanitize the city
By Daily Hampshire Gazette- Northampton, MA
Created 12/11/2008
To the editor:

If the city is seeking a solution to what some view as troublesome behavior by a handful of panhandlers - I have heard the number to be less than five - then why is the response an ordinance drafted by the police at the behest of the Office of Economic Development with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and some downtown merchants?

I view the proposed anti-panhandling ordinance as an effort by the city, acting on behalf of some in the business community, to make Northampton a place where tourists and shoppers can visit and shop unencumbered by anyone they view as disturbing. I see the ordinance as a part of an ongoing process by the mayor and others in city government to sanitize Northampton through the building of the so-called "garden" hotel in Pulaski Park and the creation of a Business Improvement District. When did downtown Northampton become the property of only stores and restaurants?

I am concerned that "ticketing" people for "unacceptable" behavior will criminalize what is not criminal. If it were, there are laws which the police could enforce. What will happen when troublesome people cannot pay their fines or when they refuse treatment programs or the programs are full, especially in this time of mental health funding cuts? Conceivably, could someone go to jail at the cost of $130 per day for failure to pay a $100 ticket for something that is not a crime? This is what is happening in other cities where police - privatized and otherwise - are ticketing people for their behavior.

I ask the City Council to reject the proposed ordinance and seek a less punitive and more constructive response. I encourage others to contact their councilors and tell them this is not the Northampton we want.

Lois Ahrens
Northampton
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/12/11/panhandling-law-part-effort-sanitize-city

Here is the editorial in the Gazette:
In Our Opinion: Protecting the public
By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Created 12/03/2008

There continue to be concerns about Northampton's proposal to discourage aggressive or threatening panhandling in the downtown but, while work remains to be done on the plan over the next few months, it still has merit and ultimately ought to be adopted at least on a trial basis.

The proposal was prompted by complaints from downtown merchants as well as local residents who say that the aggressive behavior of some panhandlers has made them feel uncomfortable or worried about their own safety. Northampton Police Chief Russell Sienkiewicz also believes aggressive panhandling has become more of a problem in recent years.

It is, indeed, a challenge to craft panhandling regulations that pass constitutional muster; some critics have suggested that any solicitation regulations are a violation of free speech rights.

The city, though, has taken a different approach by treating aggressive panhandling as a public safety issue. In addition, the plan is not an outright ban; it simply attempts to bring some order to a longstanding problem and would apply equally to charitable groups that also solicit for contributions on the city's sidewalks.

In addition to banning panhandling at night, the proposal would say where it could take place downtown, spelling out the required distance a solicitor would have to stand from certain buildings. Solicitation, for example, would be prohibited within 15 feet of any bank ATM, pay phone, parking pay box, public toilet or bus stop. It would also prohibit the use of violent or threatening behavior or language, unwanted touching or attempts to block a pedestrian's passage on the sidewalk, while also targeting fraudulent appeals for money. Fines would range from $50 for an initial offense up to $300 for fourth and subsequent offenses.

The City Council's Committee on Public Safety heard arguments for and against the proposal at a recent hearing. Afterwards, the committee asked city officials to recraft some of the wording and return with a reworked proposal that could be considered in January or February. The plan ultimately requires the City Council's approval.

As the plan works its way to the council, it would be worth adding a clause requiring a review one year after the ordinance is implemented to determine whether changes need to be made. The concerns raised by the plan's critics have been helpful in the process but, in our opinion, there's no reason not to proceed with the ordinance. Given the work done so far, it appears the city can initiate a ban on aggressive panhandling that is both constitutional and effective in protecting the public's safety and providing a welcoming atmosphere downtown.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/12/03/our-opinion-protecting-public

Posted by lois at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2008

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

December 3, 2008
College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By TAMAR LEWIN
NY Times

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

“When we come out of the recession,” Mr. Callan added, “we’re really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”

Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.

“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”

But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear.

The report, “Measuring Up 2008,” is one of the few to compare net college costs — that is, a year’s tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid — against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.

The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.

Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.

The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Mr. Callan said. “Most governors’ budgets don’t come out until January, but what we’re seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts,” he said.

In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis, but painted a different picture.

That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.

“We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we’re concerned that it won’t be, if the changes we’re seeing continue, and family income doesn’t go up,” said David Shulenburger, the group’s vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. “The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year.”

While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.

“Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that’s pretty huge,” Mr. Shulenburger said. “We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control.”

Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr. Callan’s concerns.

Mr. Shulenburger’s report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs — distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.

“There’s an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on,” he said. “If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it’s difficult to control costs in ways that don’t affect quality.”

Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states’ approach to higher-education financing.

“When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible,” he said. “When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That’s exactly the opposite of what we need.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 4, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the increasing cost of higher education gave an incorrect context for two figures: the 439 percent increase in college tuition and fees and the 147 percent increase in median family income since 1982. Those figures were not adjusted for inflation. The error was repeated for the data in an accompanying chart. A corrected chart appears at nytimes.com/national.

The article also described incorrectly the report for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that cited the figures. It is produced every other year, not annually.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?emc=eta1

Posted by lois at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2008

Gail Collins- NY Times " Time for Him to Go"

November 22, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist- NY Times
Time for Him to Go
By GAIL COLLINS

Thanksgiving is next week, and President Bush could make it a really special holiday by resigning.

Seriously. We have an economy that’s crashing and a vacuum at the top. Bush — who is currently on a trip to Peru to meet with Asian leaders who no longer care what he thinks — hasn’t got the clout, or possibly even the energy, to do anything useful. His most recent contribution to resolving the fiscal crisis was lecturing representatives of the world’s most important economies on the glories of free-market capitalism.

Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible. Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush. In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.

As a bonus, the Pelosi presidency would put a woman in the White House this year after all. On the downside, a few right-wing talk-show hosts might succumb to apoplexy. That would, of course, be terrible, but I’m afraid we might have to take the risk in the name of a greater good.

Can I see a show of hands? How many people want George W. out and Barack in?

A great many Americans have been counting the days all year on their 2008 George W. Bush Out of Office Countdown calendars. I know a lot of this has been going on because so many people congratulated me when the Feb. 1 Bush quote turned out to be from one of my old columns. (“I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth from the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.”)

This was not nearly as good as Feb. 5 (“We ought to make the pie higher”) or Feb. 21 (“I understand small business growth. I was one.”) But we do what we can.

In the past, presidents have not taken well to suggestions that they hand over the reins before the last possible minute. Senator J. William Fulbright suggested a plan along those lines when Harry Truman was coming to the end of a term in a state of deep unpopularity, and Truman called him “Halfbright” for the rest of his life. Bush might not love the idea of quitting before he has a chance to light the Christmas tree or commute the execution of one last presidential turkey. After all, he still has a couple more trips planned. And last-minute regulations to issue. (So many national parks to despoil, so many endangered species to exterminate ... .) And then there’s all the packing.

On the other hand, he might want to consider his legacy, such as it is.

In happier days, Bush may have nurtured hopes of making it into the list of America’s mediocre presidents, but somewhere between Iraq and Katrina, that goal became a mountain too high. However, he might still have a chance to avoid the absolute bottom of the barrel, a spot currently occupied by James Buchanan, at least in my opinion. Buchanan nailed down The Worst President title in the days between Abraham Lincoln’s election and inauguration, when the Southern states began seceding and Buchanan, after a little flailing about, did absolutely nothing. “Doing nothing is almost the worst thing a president can do,” said the historian Michael Beschloss.

If Bush gives up doing nothing by giving up his job, it’s possible that someday history might elevate him to the ranks of the below average. Better than Franklin Pierce! Smarter than Warren Harding! And healthier than William Henry Harrison!

The person who would like this plan least probably would be Barack Obama. Who would want to be saddled with the auto industry’s problems ahead of schedule? The heads of America’s great carmaking corporations are so dim that they couldn’t even survive hearings run by members of Congress who actually wanted to help them. Really, when somebody asks you exactly how much money you need, the answer should not be something along the line of “a whole bunch.”

An instantaneous takeover would also ruin the Obama team’s plan to have the tidiest, best-organized presidential transition in history. Cutting it short and leaping into governing would turn their measured march toward power into a mad scramble. A lot of their Cabinet picks are still working on those 62-page questionnaires.

But while there’s been no drama with Obama, we’ve been living a Technicolor version of “The Perils of Pauline.” Detroit is tied to the railroad tracks and the train is coming! California’s state government is falling into the sea! The way we’re going now, by the time the inauguration rolls around, unemployment will be at 10 percent and the Dow will be at 10.

Time for a change.

Posted by lois at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2008

The Agents of Change on Obama's Transition Team

The Agents of Change on Obama's Transition Team
David Corn, Mother Jones
eams, which, according to the office of the president-elect, will examine key departments, agencies, and commissions, as well as the White House, to provide Barack Obama and his key advisers “information needed to make strategic policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration.” As the media and most political consumers focus on who will get what senior position in the Obama administration, this group of about 130 people will do the nuts-and-bolts work of preparing the agendas for the incoming decision-makers. It’s an important band of policy wonks and government experts. Many of the positions were filled, as might be expected, by Washington players who served in the Clinton administration. For instance, Reed Hundt, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission during the Clinton years and who now works for a strategic consulting firm, is leading the team responsible for international trade and economic agencies. And Tom Donilon, a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, who was assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Clinton administration, is in charge of the group focusing on Foggy Bottom. (The bio for
Donilon released by the transition office neglected to mention his stint as general counsel and executive vice president at Fannie Mae.)

Last week, the Obama transition team announced its agency review

The transition team has its share of lobbyists--despite that Obama once vowed he was “running to tell the lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over.” But while most of the transition team members possess the conventional resumés of Washington insiders—albeit Democratic ones--there are several transition team appointments that stand out as harbingers of change. Or at least potential harbingers. These are people whose careers have been anti-Bushian in a deep and profound sense that extends beyond partisan difference. They are academics or policy advocates who have devoted much—if not all—of their adult working lives to advancing the public interest. Their presence on the review teams—even though the transition could use more of such people—enhances the prospect for change beyond the usual. Here’s a sampling:

Sarah Sewall is leading the transition’s national security team. She is the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. According to her bio, her “research focuses on U.S. national security strategy, civil-military relations, and the ethics of fighting insurgencies and terrorism.” The ethics of fighting terrorism? That’s about as non-Bush (or non-Cheney) as it gets. She also started a project to create “a military concept of operations for intervening to halt mass atrocity.” Not even Bill Clinton did that.

Clark Kent Ervin heads the Homeland Security Program at the Aspen Institute. He was the first Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security—a Bush appointee. During his tenure at DHS, he released several reports assailing mismanagement and security screw-ups. Not surprisingly, when his appointment expired, Ervin was not re-appointed by Bush. With Rand Beers, who worked on counterterrorism for the National Security Council in both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, Ervin will oversee the transition’s review of the Department of Homeland Security. His participation sends a signal: competence and diligence matter.

Thomas Perez is head of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation. He has spent years as a consumer advocate and civil rights lawyer. He’s also been a law professor specializing in poverty law and public health issues. During the Clinton years, he was a federal prosecutor in the civil rights division of the Justice Department. For the transition, he’s working on both the team in charge of justice and civil rights issues and the unit zeroing in on the Department of Health and Human Services. A Justice Department influenced by Perez will be quite different than one influenced by Monica Goodling.

Theodore Shaw is president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., a prominent civil rights law outfit. He has handled school desegregation and capital punishment cases. Shaw represented a coalition of African-American and Latino students in the historic case involving the use of affirmative action at University of Michigan for undergraduate admissions. The US Supreme Court struck down the school’s undergraduate admissions policy but ruled that race can be considered during the admissions process by a university seeking to foster diversity on its campus. Shaw is part of the transition’s Department of Justice unit.

Cruz Reynoso was the first Chicano person to serve on the California Supreme Court. There, he was a consistent liberal, often ruling in favor of environmental protection, individual liberties, and civil rights. He voted often to overturn death penalty sentences. Largely because of that, Reynoso, along with two other justices, became targets of conservatives and were ousted by the voters in 1986, under the state’s unusual judicial election system. Prior to becoming a state judge, Reynoso was director of California Rural Legal Assistance. Reynoso was a awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. For the Obama transition, he is reviewing the Commission on Civil Rights.

Spencer Overton, a professor at George Washington University law school, wrote the book, Stealing Democracy: The Politics of Voter Suppression. The book’s website says, “Voters don't choose politicians--politicians choose voters by manipulating election rules. What can we do to restore power to the people?” It continues: “While politicians spew shallow sound bites that describe a ‘free’ American people who govern themselves by selecting their representatives, in reality politicians from both parties maintain control by selecting particular voters. Incumbent politicians maintain thousands of election practices and bureaucratic hurdles that determine who votes and how votes are counted--such as the location of election district boundaries, long lines at urban polling places, and English-only ballots.” Overton is someone who has questioned the fundamentals of the voting system. He has called for “making voting easier for all Americans” and for “removing redistricting power from self-interested partisans.” He’s leading the team assessing the Election Assistance Commission.

For twenty-six years, Alan Houseman has been executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit, public interest law firm that has focused on issues affecting low-income persons. Houseman has tried to develop innovative anti-poverty strategies and to ensure that low-income Americans have access to civil legal assistance. He is the model of a non-corporate lawyer. Houseman is working on the transition team’s review of the Legal Services Corporation.

Pamela Gilbert is a former executive director of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. For two decades, she was a leading consumer advocate in Washington. She served as consumer program director at the US Public Interest Research Group and was executive director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch. At the CPSC, she helped coax a 40-percent funding boost out of Congress and the Clinton administration. Then came the Bush years, and the CPSC was hollowed out. She will be reviewing the CPSC—think dangerous toys and poisonous pet food from China--for the transition team.

Bill Corr heads the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one of the leading anti-tobacco nonprofit groups. He joined the outfit after spending 23 years working on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch. That is, he did not become a lobbyist for private interests. He is leading the evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Xavier de Souza Briggs is an associate professor at MIT. His specialty, his bio says, is “the ‘geography of opportunity’--a policy and research field concerned with the consequences of segregation by race and income and with efforts to respond, such as through ‘housing mobility’ programs that help families exit high-poverty, high-risk neighborhoods in search of better places to raise their kids.” Was there anyone in the Bush administration who had expertise in this field? Briggs is part of the transition unit looking at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Finance Board, and the Interagency Council on Homelessness. (Joining him on that team are Roberta Achtenberg, who during the Clinton years became the first openly lesbian or gay federal official who had to be confirmed by the Senate, and Bruce Katz, a longtime housing policy wonk in Washington, who now runs the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.)

With a presidential transition team led by an academic who has specialized in the ethics of fighting terrorism, it’s clear a major shift is under way in Washington. Certainly, there will be Democrat-on-Democrat policy battles ahead—during the transition and within the Obama administration. Centrist and conventional-thinking Democrats will play critical roles, especially during debates on economic matters. But the composition of Obama’s transition team shows there’s potential for significant change designed by public interest-minded people who possess deep policy expertise and are dedicated to their fields. These folks are the opposite of Michael Brown.
//www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/11/10948_obama_tranistion_team_members_change.html

Posted by lois at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House

AlterNet
This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House
By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on November 20, 2008, Printed on November 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107666/

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"

-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;

-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;

-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. foreign policy for at least four years:

Joe Biden

There was no stronger sign that Obama's foreign policy would follow the hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been written on Biden's tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq "mistaken;" Biden was actually an important facilitator of the war.

In the summer of 2002, when the United States was "debating" a potential attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts whose testimony could challenge the case for war -- Iraq's alleged WMD possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida -- Biden's hearings treated the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.'s Iraq program.

Both men say they made it clear to Biden's office that they were ready and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq's WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of Iraq -- the so-called al-Qaida connection -- and could have testified that, rather than colluding with Saddam's regime, they were in a battle against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam," von Sponeck wrote in an Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest."

With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of informed opinions, Biden's committee whitewashed Bush's lies and helped lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration's false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring on the Senate floor, "[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons."

With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest Arab states in the world.

"He's a part of the old Democratic establishment," says retired Army Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has "had a long history with foreign affairs, [but] it's not the type of foreign affairs that I want."

Rahm Emanuel

Obama's appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel's "targeted assassination" policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war candidates. "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a position," he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel "advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization like Britain's MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25."

While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama's stated foreign-policy goals.

Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."

"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"

Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," she declared. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy tactics in the past. Recalling her husband's weighing the decision of whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"

Madeleine Albright

While Obama's house is flush with Clintonian officials like former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, Director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning Greg Craig (who was officially named Obama's White House Counsel) and Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, perhaps most influential is Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State and U.N. ambassador. Albright recently served as a proxy for Obama, representing him at the G-20 summit earlier this month. Whether or not she is awarded an official role in the administration, Albright will be a major force in shaping Obama's foreign policy.

"It will take time to convince skeptics that the promotion of democracy is not a mask for imperialism or a recipe for the kind of chaos we have seen in the Persian Gulf," Albright recently wrote. "And it will take time to establish the right identity for America in a world that has grown suspicious of all who claim a monopoly on virtue and that has become reluctant to follow the lead of any one country."

Albright should know. She was one of the key architects in the dismantling of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the lead-up to the 1999 "Kosovo war," she oversaw the U.S. attempt to coerce the Yugoslav government to deny its own sovereignty in return for not being bombed. Albright demanded that the Yugoslav government sign a document that would have been unacceptable to any sovereign nation. Known as the Rambouillet Accord, it included a provision that would have guaranteed U.S. and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia -- not just Kosovo -- while also seeking to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]." Moreover, it would have granted the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years later, the Rambouillet Accord mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free-market principles."

When Yugoslavia refused to sign the document, Albright and others in the Clinton administration unleashed the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilian infrastructure. (Prior to the attack, Albright said the U.S. government felt "the Serbs need a little bombing.") She and the Clinton administration also supported the rise to power in Kosovo of a terrorist mafia that carried out its own ethnic-cleansing campaign against the province's minorities.

Perhaps Albright's most notorious moment came with her enthusiastic support of the economic war against the civilian population of Iraq. When confronted by Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” that the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of "a half-million children … more children than died in Hiroshima," Albright responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." (While defending the policy, Albright later called her choice of words "a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.")

Richard Holbrooke

Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.

According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."

Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)

Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."

Dennis Ross

Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was one of the primary authors of Obama's aforementioned speech before AIPAC this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab nations under Clinton, Ross' team acted, in the words of one U.S. official who worked under him, as "Israel's lawyer."

"The 'no surprises' policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking," wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2005. "If we couldn't put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." After the Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.

Martin Indyk

Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton's ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli government and with PNAC.

"Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country," Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as "two of the most pro-Israel officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they're seen as lifelong advocates for Israeli positions."

Anthony Lake

Clinton's former National Security Advisor was an early supporter of Obama and one of the few top Clintonites to initially back the president-elect. Lake began his foreign policy work in the U.S. Foreign Service during Vietnam, working with Henry Kissinger on the "September Group," a secret team tasked with developing a military strategy to deliver a "savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam."

Decades later, after working for various administrations, Lake "was the main force behind the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years," according to veteran journalist Allan Nairn, whose groundbreaking reporting revealed U.S. support for Haitian death squads in the 1990s. "They brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians, and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti." Clinton nominated Lake as CIA Director, but he failed to win Senate confirmation.

Lee Hamilton

Hamilton is a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of both the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission. Robert Parry, who has covered Hamilton's career extensively, recently ran a piece on Consortium News that characterized him this way: "Whenever the Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. … Hamilton's carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man."

Susan Rice

Former Assistant Secretary of Sate Susan Rice, who served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. "It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat," she said in 2002. "It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on." (After the invasion, discussing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, she said, "I don't think many informed people doubted that.")

Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with Anthony Lake, she wrote, "The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing."

John Brennan

A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama's intelligence transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as "an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity." While claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it "inconsistent with American values" and "something that should be prohibited," Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by "enhanced interrogation" techniques. "There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists," Brennan said in a 2007 interview. "It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents."

Brennan has described the CIA's extraordinary rendition program -- the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton -- as an absolutely vital tool. "I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in," he said in a December 2005 interview. "And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives."

Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain's passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)

Jami Miscik

Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama's transitional team, was the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that backed it up.

"When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein's relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics (who were later vindicated) within the CIA's Mideast analytical directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts to 'stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,' " journalist Spencer Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. "It's hard to think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama's top intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in." What's more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

John Kerry and Bill Richardson

Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. "Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try?" Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. "According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents."

Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was more progressive and far-reaching than Obama's, served as Bill Clinton's ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton's December 1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. "We think this man is a threat to the international community, and he threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations there with anthrax and VX," Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.

While Clinton's Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and won a settlement against the U.S. government.

Robert Gates

Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to the Washington Post, in the interest of a "smooth transition," Gates "has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect Barack Obama's transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring office." The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton's Secretary of the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Ivo H. Daalder

Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Iraq and beyond.

Sarah Sewall

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton administration, Sewall served as a top advisor to Obama during the campaign and is almost certain to be selected for a post in his administration. In 2007, Sewall worked with the U.S. military and Army Gen. David Petraeus, writing the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. She was criticized for this collaboration by Tom Hayden, who wrote, "the Petraeus plan draws intellectual legitimacy from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, whose director, Sarah Sewall, proudly embraces an 'unprecedented collaboration [as] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces.'”

"Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose," she wrote in the introduction. "'The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words lack meaning."

Michele Flournoy

Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama's defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: "While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of 'conditional engagement' there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy's thinking." Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.

Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon

Currently employed at Madeline Albright's consulting firm, the Albright Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn't make it onto their official bios on Obama's change.gov Web site. "Donilon was Fannie's general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company was rocked by accounting problems," reports the Wall Street Journal.

***

While many of the figures at the center of Obama's foreign policy team are well-known, two of its most important members have never held national elected office or a high-profile government position. While they cannot be characterized as Clinton-era hawks, it will be important to watch Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, co-coordinators of the Obama foreign policy team. From 2000 to 2005, McDonough served as foreign policy advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and worked extensively on the use-of-force authorizations for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which Daschle supported. From 1996 to 1999, McDonough was a professional staff member of the House International Relations Committee during the debate over the bombing of Yugoslavia. More recently, he was at the Center for American Progress working under John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and the current head of the Obama transition.

Mark Lippert is a close personal friend of Obama's. He has worked for Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He is a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and spent a year in Iraq working intelligence for the Navy SEALs. "According to those who've worked closely with Lippert," Robert Dreyfuss recently wrote in The Nation, "he is a conservative, cautious centrist who often pulled Obama to the right on Iraq, Iran and the Middle East and who has been a consistent advocate for increased military spending. 'Even before Obama announced for the presidency, Lippert wanted Obama to be seen as tough on Iran,' says a lobbyist who's worked the Iran issue on Capitol Hill, 'He's clearly more hawkish than the senator.' "

***

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. "I don't want to just end the war," he said early this year. "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." That is going to be very difficult if Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.

"Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war -- and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war -- are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions," observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy based on justice.

Obama does have a chance to change the mindset that got us into war. More significantly, he has a popular mandate to forcefully challenge the militaristic, hawkish tradition of modern U.S. foreign policy. But that work would begin by bringing on board people who would challenge this tradition, not those who have been complicit in creating it and are bound to continue advancing it.

Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's presidencies. He is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and is a frequent contributor to The Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/107666/

Posted by lois at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2008

CO: Fort Carson has sent thousands of troops into action overseas. But nine may have brought too much of the war home with them and have been linked to violent crimes.

Deadly duty for Fort Carson
Fort Carson has sent thousands of troops into action overseas. But nine may have brought too much of the war home with them and have been linked to violent crimes.
By David Olinger
The Denver Post
11/16/2008

COLORADO SPRINGS — Erica Ham was walking to a bus stop, heading for work as a nursing-home housekeeper, when a car struck her from behind.

Three men jumped out. "Get on the ground!" one with a gun ordered. Another stabbed her repeatedly, puncturing a lung and slitting her left eyelid. Police found her unconscious but alive, her cellphone at her ear.

Matthew Orrenmaa was shot as he walked to get gas for his truck, Zachary Szody as he talked with a friend in front of a Colorado Springs house. Cesar Ramirez-Ibanez and Amairany Cervantes were gunned down as they posted a garage-sale sign. Kevin Shields was shot to death on his 24th birthday, Robert James for the cash in his wallet, Jonathan Smith in an attempted robbery, Sara
Link

Sherwood by a husband who then killed himself. Judilianna Lawrence was murdered by a rapist who slit her throat. Jacqwelyn Villagomez was beaten to death.

The victims had just one thing in common: The men accused of attacking them all went to war in Iraq with the same Fort Carson unit, the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division.

In three years, nine men from that single 3,700-soldier Army brigade have been charged in 10 murders and attempted homicides, all but two in or around Colorado Springs. Some of the attacks appear frighteningly random; victims were shot and stabbed by men they had never seen before. Four of the victims — Orrenmaa, Szody, Shields and James — also served at Fort Carson.

Of the accused, one had been sent home early from Iraq with mental-health problems. Another had been hospitalized with post-traumatic stress disorder. Another had become addicted to painkillers prescribed for his wounds.

Another had been allowed to enlist despite a juvenile record of killing a 12-year-old boy with a shotgun. He was sent to a second tour in Iraq despite a head injury and a felony charge of threatening his girlfriend with a gun. Even after he was court-martialed for threatening officers, the

The string of killings has drawn the attention of the Pentagon, and an investigation has been ordered by Maj. Gen. Mark Graham at Fort Carson to determine what, if anything, the Army could have done to prevent the off-post killings and attacks.

While that is underway, soldier advocates and families of the victims are asking questions of their own.

"They're your problem"

Debra Shields, Kevin Shields' mother, wonders why the Army didn't take stronger action when one of the soldiers accused in her son's murder was discharged after making threats against officers in Iraq.

They areyour problem," she said. "Well, your problem became my problem. They killed my son."

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, contends that inadequate mental-health treatment for returning war veterans is partly to blame. He contrasts the policies of big-city police departments, which place officers involved in shootings on paid leave and refer them to counselors, with the brief mental-health questionnaires handed to soldiers returning from a war that demands split-second decisions about shooting people in raided houses and moving cars.

"This is a pattern we're starting to see around the country. This is a national problem. We consider it the tip of the iceberg of a social catastrophe caused by President Bush's
failure to plan for hundreds of thousands of physical and psychological casualties," Sullivan said.

Other Army posts have seen returning soldiers accused of murder, but "the largest cluster that we're aware of is at Fort Carson," he said. "Fort Carson is clearly the peak of the problem."

Graham has formed a task force of experts, including some from the Army surgeon general's office, to investigate whether there is any "commonality" among the homicides that could help identify warning signs and prevent future cases.

"Our hearts and condolences go out to the families of those who were lost to the soldiers. We don't train soldiers to do things like this," he said.

Graham said the Army trains soldiers to quickly discern right from wrong — when to shoot and when to hold fire. And it is striving to encourage those who have been wounded psychologically "that it's a sign of strength, not weakness, to come forward for help."

In the past three years, 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers have served in the 4th Brigade during two tours in Iraq. The vast majority have caused no trouble for police or MPs during their time at home, which will end again soon as they prepare for a spring deployment to Afghanistan, Graham said.

"We are very proud of our soldiers and our officers," he said. "They're doing wonderful things for the nation. We don't want to see the great work these soldiers have done marred by the acts of a few."

Bookings of soldiers on rise

El Paso County jail records show that bookings of service members, largely from Fort Carson, nearly tripled in three years, from 162 in 2004 to to 451 in 2007. With 516 and counting, the 2008 bookings of service members already have surpassed those from last year. Most of the cases were minor — traffic violations, disorderly conduct, DUIs — but a growing number of service members have also been arrested on assault, harassment and robbery charges, restraining-order violations and property crimes, mainly theft.

In Colorado Springs, public defenders concerned about the growing arrest numbers have been talking to legislators and a judge about setting up a "veterans court" that could intervene at the first sign of criminal trouble.

At war in Iraq, soldiers aren't allowed to drink alcohol.

"We just see them coming back and getting blackout drunk, and that's where all their criminal activity's coming out," said Deana Feist, a deputy state public defender in Colorado Springs.

Many returning soldiers don't feel comfortable without a gun and many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. "You add alcohol, and it's a pretty dangerous combination," she said.

"We've been seeing it for about 1 1/2 to 2 years now — soldiers sometimes picking up violent offenses," she said. "In a really short period of time they can pick up three or four felonies and end up in prison when they've never been in trouble before."

PTSD diagnoses increasing

The 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division — formerly the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division — has had a series of long and sometimes bloody deployments. Its soldiers had already been deployed to South Korea when they were transferred to war-ravaged Ramadi, Iraq. In 2006 they went back to Iraq for a second, 15-month deployment. During the two deployments, 113 soldiers were killed in action.

Pfc. Stephen Sherwood was the first soldier in the brigade who killed after coming home. On Aug. 3, 2005, a week after he returned from Iraq, neighbors watched him take down the American flag at his Larimer County home and remove the "Support our troops" sticker from his vehicle. Hours later, he shot his wife, Sara, five times in the face and neck, then killed himself with a single shotgun blast.

In one pocket of his jeans, a sheriff's deputy found a typewritten note from Sara explaining that she loved another man. "I love you but I'm not in love with you," she had written. In another pocket, the deputy found an Associated Press report that 30 percent of troops returning from Iraq developed mental-health problems three to four months later.

From 2003 to 2007, nearly 40,000 U.S. troops were diagnosed by the military with post-traumatic stress disorder. The number diagnosed has been growing each year, along with multiple deployments.

Anthony Marquez was the second soldier to kill out of uniform. On Oct. 22, 2006, a botched attempt to rob a marijuana dealer, Jonathan Smith, led to gunfire. Smith was shot in the chest and died.

Marquez, a wounded soldier who had met President Bush at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, was charged with murder. In a plea agreement, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

"I knew I needed help. I knew I was out of control," he said in a recent interview at the Bent County Correctional Facility. But he also feared his sergeant would say, "You're lying; you're just trying to get out of work."

Marquez had been wounded in Ramadi on June 21, 2005, after an improvised explosive device detonated under a Bradley fighting vehicle. He and other soldiers scrambled out, only to be hit by machine-gun fire. Four bullets shredded his leg. Two of his friends died. He later learned that in the smoke and confusion, he may have been shot by soldiers in the convoy behind him.

After three months and 17 surgeries at Walter Reed, Marquez came to Fort Carson, where he grew addicted to morphine and Percocet. He said he was getting 90 pills at a time of each drug.

At first he took them for pain, but "it could also make you feel really good. Take it on an empty stomach. Drink some alcohol with it," he said. "I was hooked on those pills pretty good."

When he couldn't get enough, he said he persuaded a doctor at Fort Carson to write a prescription off-base at a Walgreens pharmacy by claiming his drugs had been lost or stolen. Sometimes he and his friends shared pills.

"I started going downhill, coming to work late, not showing up, not in uniform," he said.

Of the shooting, "my mind was clouded up. I put myself in a bad situation," he said, and "I always carried a weapon."

Concerns were raised

Deana Feist was one of Marquez's defense lawyers. She described him as "your all-American kid" before he went to war — likable and polite, a high school prom king whose mother worked as a police officer.

Before Marquez was arrested, Feist said, his mother had called Fort Carson to voice concern about her son's deteriorating mental condition.

"There was enough information to raise the flags," she said, "that somebody needs to take a look at this kid and oversee, evaluate, treat."

Marquez said after he was arrested, the Army called his mother, seeking to test him for traumatic brain injuries. "She told them he's already in jail," he said. "They told her I slipped through the cracks. Well, I guess I did."

He is not the only one.

Last December, Colorado Springs police arrested three men who had served together in the 4th Brigade. The men were charged with a six-month crime spree, including the assault of Erica Ham and the murder of fellow soldier Spec. Kevin Shields.

Police accused Louis Bressler and Pfc. Bruce Bastien of murdering another soldier, Pfc. Robert James, then robbing him of $45, and attempting to murder Matthew Orrenmaa. Bastien had told police that Bressler shot Orrenmaa because Bressler's wife had complained that "some guys" were following her earlier that night.

Orrenmaa said he had run out of gas on his way home from a party. He hopped out of his truck and was walking toward a Diamond Shamrock station when he heard someone firing a gun from a car.

Then the car pulled up beside him. One of the men inside said, "Come here" — and then "something about a girl and me saying something to some girl," Orrenmaa recalled. "He pulled out a gun, shot at me once, hit me in the shoulder. I ran. He shot at me three or four more times."

Orrenmaa wracked his brain afterward, trying to figure out why the man shot him. "Maybe I talked to somebody's wife? It might have happened that week, that month, that year. I couldn't figure out why somebody would do something like that. I was married, kept to myself."

Bressler also was accused of shooting up a house. Kenneth Eastridge, a third soldier from the same brigade, admitted participating in the assault of Erica Ham and helping to cover up the murder of Kevin Shields.

Histories of violence

It wasn't the first time Eastridge had been arrested for misusing a gun. As a child in Kentucky, he killed a 12-year-old friend, Billy Bowman, with a shotgun. The shooting was treated as accidental, a conclusion Billy's father doubted. Kenneth had previously shot Billy "many times" with a BB gun, Bill Bowman said. "I told the judge, there's no doubt in my mind we'll see this boy again."

In 2006, Eastridge was accused of menacing his girlfriend by grabbing her neck and pointing a .45-caliber handgun at her head, a charge that was pending when Fort Carson sent him to a second round of war in Iraq.

Last week, Eastridge testified that his best friend, Bressler, shot and killed Kevin Shields after a night of marijuana smoking and heavy drinking at two bars — and after Bressler lost a fistfight with Shields.

Under cross-examination, Eastridge acknowledged that he had been court-martialed on nine counts during his second tour, including threatening an officer and two noncommissioned officers in Iraq and getting caught with 463 Valiums. "They sent me to Kuwait to a hard-labor camp," he said, then brought him to Colorado to discharge him.

He said he was falsely accused — by Bastien — of killing innocent people in Iraq.

He talked about the MySpace Web page he created in Iraq, where he wrote, "Killin is just what I do!!!" and that he liked violence, death, destruction, mayhem, carnage, chaos — and flowers. He had posted photos of himself standing over a dead body, holding a dead cat by the tail and brandishing a stolen AK-47.

In response to a jury question, Eastridge said he was thrown from a vehicle by an explosion during his first tour in Iraq, an injury that knocked him unconscious, afflicted his memory and injected "cerebral fluid" in his right ear. "I never left Iraq after I was wounded," he added.

Bastien, who has been sentenced to 60 years in prison, violated his plea agreement last week by refusing to testify about the murder of Kevin Shields. He too had faced domestic-violence charges after returning from Iraq. Twice in 2007, police arrested him for allegedly assaulting his wife. The second time, an officer noticed "four marks to her upper chest" from cigarette burns.

Bressler, who has pleaded not guilty, was medically retired from the Army last year, according to Fort Carson. His wife, Tira, told The Gazette in Colorado Springs that he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was taking medicine for depression.

This year, four more soldiers from the same brigade were arrested on homicide charges.

On May 5, Zachary Szody was shot twice on a residential street by someone in a passing car. On June 6, Amairany Cervantes and Cesar Ramirez- Ibanez were shot to death as they tried to post a garage-sale sign at a Colorado Springs intersection.

Police traced both shootings to the same AK-47. In August, another Iraq war veteran at Fort Carson, Pfc. Jomar Falu-Vives, was charged with two murders and an attempted murder, and Spec. Rodolfo Torres-Gandarilla as an accomplice.

Szody, a captain at Fort Carson, said he does not know the man accused of shooting him. "I was just visiting my old platoon sergeant, standing outside in front of his house," he said. "The people in the car said nothing. They just drove by, I heard shots, hit the ground — and that's when I realized I was shot." He had been shot twice, in his left hip and right knee.

Marta Vives, Falu-Vives' mother, cannot picture her son doing such things. He told her he was innocent, "and I believe him."

They were deployed in Iraq together, mother and son. She went to Baghdad as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and he enlisted to follow her. "He didn't want his mother to go to war and not be there. He wanted to be with me, protect me."

She said he had no drug or drinking problems, no criminal record, not even a tattoo. "He was a good guy. He actually did his job. He came back alive," she said.

At worst, "I truly believe Jomar got caught up in something way above his head."

Personality shift

On Labor Day this year, sheriff's deputies responding to a complaint of an argument in a San Clemente, Calif., condo found a naked 25-year-old veteran at the door and subdued him with a Taser. In the bedroom, they found a severely beaten 19-year-old woman, Jacqwelyn Villagomez. She died the next day.

John Needham became the eighth veteran of the 4th Brigade to face homicide charges.

Family members have described Needham as an easygoing young man whose personality changed dramatically in Iraq. His commanding officer there "would not allow him to seek medical help for his emotional and mental situation," said his father, Michael Needham.

In a November 2007 letter to Maj. Gen. Graham at Fort Carson, Needham complained that his son had been flown to Walter Reed for treatment of physical and mental injuries after becoming so despondent that he tried to kill himself in Iraq — and that Fort Carson officers had removed him against a psychiatrist's advice, intent on returning him to active duty.

Needham commended Graham and his staff, saying they enabled his son to continue medical treatment in his home state of California. He now believes that help came too late.

On Oct. 13, 2008, a ninth member of the 4th Brigade was arrested on murder charges.

Judilianna Lawrence, a 19-year-old woman with a learning disability, had disappeared two days earlier after communicating with a stranger on the Internet. The El Paso County Sheriff's Office concluded that stranger was Spec. Robert Marko, a soldier who declared on his MySpace page that he was becoming "a cold hearted killer and can kill without mercy or reason."

Detectives said Marko had led them to a remote wooded area, off a chained dirt access road, where Lawrence's naked body was found. Her throat had been cut.

Devastated lives

Families of the victims and alleged victims of the nine Fort Carson soldiers have no answers for whether war turned the soldiers into community dangers. But they are asking many of the same questions being addressed by Graham's task force.

In Colorado Springs, Debra Shields has been living in a hotel room during the trial of the soldier accused of shooting her son.

She mourns that Kevin's 4-year-old son "will never have a dad to throw a ball around," that the baby daughter born six months after his death "will never have a dad to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. It's really hard. Sometimes Andrew will ask when Daddy's coming home. His mom tells him, 'Daddy's not coming home, he's in heaven.'

"He thinks Daddy's still off fighting the war."

She wishes "it was mandatory that those men go through a period of psychological evaluation and counseling" after returning from war, because "if it's made mandatory, then that stigma of being weak is removed."

These men "devastated our lives. They've also devastated their own families' lives. They're putting their families through hell," she said.

"I can't imagine what it's like to have a child charged with murder, what it must feel like for them. At least they can go visit their child. I have to visit mine in a crypt."

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_10996605

Posted by lois at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2008

Malik Rahim running for Congress

After a century of politicians, it's time to elect a community organizer
After Hurricane Katrina, Malik founded Common Ground, an organization which:
* opened the first free health clinic in the city of New Orleans
* helped MLK Elementary and other schools to re-open
* gutted over 3,000 homes and provided direct services to nearly 200,000 returning residents
http://www.votemalik.com/

Posted by lois at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2008

Race is a factor in this election

Guest Column: Race is a factor in this election
Tatishe M. Nteta
Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA)
Created 10/01/2008

Last week, Senator Barack Obama, in a nationally televised interview, was asked if his race will be a detrimental factor in his presidential run.

Obama, repeating the mantra of his campaign, emphasized the minimal role that race will play with presidential vote choice saying, "Now are there gonna be some people who don't vote for me because I'm black? Of course. There are probably some African Americans who are voting for me because I'm black. Or maybe others who are just inspired by the idea of breaking new ground. And so I think all that's a wash."

Obama's view of the impact of race on presidential vote choice, although optimistic, shields just how much of an influence race may have in the 2008 presidential election. According to a recently released AP/Yahoo public opinion poll, close to 40 percent of white Americans hold negative stereotypes of African Americans that include the belief that they are lazy, unintelligent and prone to criminal behavior. Partisanship does not undermine these beliefs, as one-third of both white Democrats and independents also support these views.

Support for negative stereotypes concerning African Americans was found to significantly lower the likelihood that the respondent would vote for Obama, according to this study.

The study also found that among the nationally representative sample of Americans, that 2.5 percent of all potential voters said that they will not vote for Obama because he is an African American and that support for Obama would be six percent higher if not for continued white racial prejudice directed at African Americans.

These findings, while seemingly shocking, are in line with much of the political science literature on bi-racial electoral contests.

Over the past 25 years, political scientists have found that not only do a substantial percentage of whites on election day when faced with a minority candidate of their own party decide to cross party lines to support the white candidate, but also hide their intentions of doing so when asked by public opinion pollsters. This phenomenon popularly known as the "Bradley Effect," after former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, has plagued African American candidates of statewide or federal offices for the past half century.

The impact of race is not only confined to vote choice, but to the tenor of campaigns as well. In the post Civil Rights Era, white candidates in bi-racial elections have consistently used the "race card" to garner the support of racially conservative whites. These candidates have done so through their strict and vocal opposition to the policies of welfare and affirmative action and stringent support for state's rights and anti-crime measures. These policies have historically been associated negatively with African Americans, and researchers have found that these campaign messages activate anti-black sentiments among white voters which leads to greater electoral support for the white candidate.

Will these trends uncovered by political scientists influence the 2008 presidential election and serve to undermine Obama's electoral prospects?

Many in Obama's camp have argued that given his success in heavily populated white states such as Iowa, Utah, Idaho and Alaska, that he has in effect transcended his status as an "African American candidate" and the negative electoral consequences of this identity. Some point to the recent success that African American candidates, such as Governor Deval Patrick, have enjoyed in statewide elections and the declining incidence of the Bradley Effect in bi-racial contests around the country as further evidence that race no longer has the same grip over electoral campaigns.

This evidence has led many Obama supporters to fully believe, and sometimes chant, that race no longer matters. However, it must be noted that much of Obama's previous success has occurred in Democratic primaries, and although Obama is the first African American candidate to garner the Democratic presidential nomination, he is by no means the first African American to win a statewide Democratic primary.

The true test of the impact of race in electoral contests has always been in general elections, as the Bradley Effect and the use of the race card have historically occurred in contests between Democrats and Republicans.

Current events surrounding the campaign point to the potential for race to rear its ugly head once again in our national politics. Some argue that the Bradley Effect best explains Obama's defeat in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and is a harbinger of Election night results among white Americans of all political persuasions.

Others believe that McCain, the Republican Party and conservative political action groups have already begun to court racially conservative white Democratic and independent voters through campaign advertisements that emphasize McCain's support for state's rights, his opposition to affirmative action, and Obama's supposed support for the tenets of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In fact, Floyd G. Brown, the producer of the infamous Willie Horton ads in the 1988 presidential election, has produced a number of ads that portray Obama as soft on violent crime.

These events indicate that race will not be a "wash" in the presidential election, but may be used to ensure Obama's defeat. So what, if anything, can be done?

Recent public opinion polls that have Obama either tied or slightly ahead of McCain point to a repeat of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. However, unlike the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the results from the AP/Yahoo survey coupled with the extensive literature in political science suggest that race will be a key factor in determining the next president of the United States.

Obama, in order to ensure that race is indeed a "wash," must continue to focus on issues and ideas that unite Americans, to mobilize new voters, and emphasize his message of change in order to continue to ignite passion and interest in his vision for America among people of all races. However, at the same time, Obama must publically challenge any and all attempts by the opposition to employ the race card and hold Senator McCain to his declaration to focus on the issues and not on racial fears.

Will Obama overcome half a century's worth of scholarly work on race and campaigns? Can Obama ease the fears of white voters concerned about his racial background? Yes he can.

Tatishe M. Nteta is an assistant professor of political science at UMass Amherst.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/10/01/guest-column-race-factor-election

Posted by lois at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2008

Symposium: NYC "Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition & Creative Progress"

SLAVE ROUTES: RESISTANCE, ABOLITION & CREATIVE PROGRESS
An International Symposium in New York City
OCTOBER 9 - OCTOBER 11, 2008

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by the United States of America, New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and Africana Studies Program is hosting an international symposium entitled Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition and Creative Progress. This symposium, supported by UNESCO's Slave Routes Project, will be co-sponsored by NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Inc. and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, with additional support provided by the African Diaspora Slave Routes Organizing Committee. The symposium will be held at New York University and other sites in the New York metropolitan area October 9 - 11, 2008.

Distinguished scholars, writers, musicians, visual artists, and organizers from the international community will
convene at NYU to discuss slavery, the slave trade and its consequences, in plenary, panels, conversations,
performances and film/video screenings including:

Opening Plenary on Thursday, October 9th with Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Mary Frances Berry, Ali Mazrui and others

Aime Cesaire Tribute on Friday, October 10th with Maryse Condé, George Lamming, Jayne Cortez and others

Drums, Horns, Strings Concert on Saturday, October 11th with Randy Weston, Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Ho, Aniyikaye (Yoruba drum & voice ensemble), Denardo Coleman and the Firespitter Band, The Bill Cole Ensemble, and pianist Nat Dove

Partial List of Participants:
Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Ali Mazrui, Michael Gomez, Mary Frances Berry, Howard Dodson, Craig Calhoun, Christiane Taubira-Delannon, Manthia Diawara, Rutha M. Harris, Jayne Cortez, Ana Edwards,
Sylviane A. Diouf, Graham Russell Hodges, Edward Spriggs, Jennifer Morgan, Herman Bennett, Gloria Browne-Marshall, Robert Chrisman, G. G. Darah, Coleman Jordan, Alison Moses, Ana Lucia Araujo, Saidiya
Hartman, Simone A. James Alexander, Renee Larrier, Simon Deng, Alusine Hassan Kamara, Bakary Tandia, Lisa Aubrey, Kalamu ya Salaam, Randy Weston, Omayemi Agbayegbe, Linda Heywood, John Thornton,
Elombe Brath, Ali Hussein, Nicole C. Lee, J. Michael Dash, Debra Boyd, Maryse Condé, Clayton Eshleman, Abiola Irele, George Lamming, Ronnie Scharfman, Seret Scott, Nat Dove, Sterling Plumpp, Eugene
Redmomd, Ibrahima Seck, Howard Mandel, Guthrie Ramsey, Camille Ann Brewer, C. Daniel Dawson, Melvin Edwards, Abdoulaye Ndoye, Lawrence Guyot, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Quincy Troupe and
others.

CONTACT:
The Institute of African American Affairs
212 998-IAAA (4222)
41 East 11th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003
Free & Open to the Public, except for the concert
REGISTER at: http://africanastudies.as.nyu.edu/object/slaveroutes08

Posted by lois at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2008

In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

August 14, 2008
In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority
By SAM ROBERTS
NY Times

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

The latest figures, which are being released on Thursday, are predicated on current and historical trends, which can be thrown awry by several variables, including prospective overhauls of immigration policies and sudden increases in refugees.

A decade ago, census demographers estimated that the nation’s population, which topped 300 million in 2006, would not surpass 400 million until sometime after midcentury. Now, they are projecting that the population will top 400 million in 2039 and reach 439 million in 2050.

So-called minorities, the Census Bureau projects, will constitute a majority of the nation’s children under 18 by 2023 and of working-age Americans by 2039.

For the first time, both the number and the proportion of non-Hispanic whites, who now account for 66 percent of the population, will decline, starting around 2030. By 2050, their share will dip to 46 percent.

Higher mortality rates among older native-born white Americans and higher birthrates rates among immigrants and their children are already driving ethnic and racial disparities.

“A momentum is built into this as a result of past immigration,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, there were more Hispanic immigrants than births. This decade, there are more births than immigrants. Almost regardless of what you assume about future immigration, the country will be more Hispanic and Asian.”

With the Census Bureau forecasting even more immigrants, other demographers estimate that the proportion of foreign-born Americans, now about 12 percent, could surpass the 1910 historic high of nearly 15 percent by about 2025 and may approach 20 percent in 2050.

According to the new forecast, by 2050, the number of Hispanic people will nearly triple, to 133 million from 47 million, to account for 30 percent of Americans, compared with 15 percent today.

People who say they are Asian, with their ranks soaring to 41 million from 16 million, will make up more than 9 percent of the population, up from 5 percent.

More than three times as many people are expected to identify themselves as multiracial — 16 million, accounting for nearly 4 percent of the population.

The population of people who define themselves a black is projected to rise to 66 million from 41 million, but increase its overall share by barely two percentage points, to 15 percent.

“What’s happening now in terms of increasing diversity probably is unprecedented,” said Campbell Gibson, a retired census demographer.

Several states, including California and Texas, have already reached the point where members of minorities are in the majority.

“Within the conventional definition of race, of white, black, Asian, minority vs. non-minority, this is a big change,” said David G. Waddington, chief of the Census Bureau’s population projections branch.

All the projections are subject to changing cultural definitions. The share of Americans who identify themselves as white, regardless of their ethnicity, will remain largely unchanged, declining from less than 80 percent in 2010 to about 76 percent when the majority-minority benchmark is reached in 2042.

“The way people report race 20 or 30 years from now may be very different,” Dr. Waddington pointed out.

The Census Bureau’s projections are likely to fuel debates over immigration policy, overpopulation and the changing electorate, and recall earlier eras when the Irish, the Italians and Eastern European Jews were not universally considered as whites. As recently as the 1960s, Hispanic people were not counted separately by the census and Asian Indians were classified as white.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said that by the 2028 presidential election, racial and ethnic minorities will constitute a majority of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 for the first time.

Two years later, when all the baby boomers will have turned 65, nearly 20 percent of Americans, compared with fewer than 13 percent today, will be over 65. By 2050, about 89 million Americans will be in that group, more than double the number today.

“In 2020, the burdens of seniors to the white working-aged population become larger than the burdens of children,” Dr. Frey said.

The changes projected by the census point toward a nation in which the older population will be whiter (deaths will outnumber births among whites, beginning in the 2020s) and where black Americans will still have slightly higher rates of infant mortality and lower life expectancy.

Steven A. Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors limits on immigration, expressed concern about congestion and other issues related to population growth driven by the foreign-born.

Gregory Rodriguez, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute, argued that while “assimilation became a dirty word in the 1960s and ’70s,” America has always been evolving and becoming enriched by new cultures, whether from Europe or from South America and Asia.

Indeed, Dr. Gibson, the retired census demographer, once estimated that in 1492 about 96 percent of the inhabitants of what is now the United States were American Indian and the rest of Polynesian origin. Well before the English landed in Jamestown, the Spanish became America’s first minority.

When the first census was conducted in 1790, about 64 percent of the people counted were white, a bit more than half of whom were of English origin. By 1900, about 9 in 10 Americans were non-Hispanic white, mostly of European ancestry.

The share of Americans who can trace their roots to immigrants directly from Europe has been shrinking. The federal Office of Management and Budget now defines whites as descendants of “the original peoples of Europe, North Africa or the Middle East.” Hispanic or Latino people, according to the same government agency, are of “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture.”

“We may be using the same words 50 years from now,” said Mr. Passel, of the Pew Center, “but I feel confident in saying they’ll mean something different.”

Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2008

Racism and The Race

It is the graphic in this article that is most disheartening but not surprising.
To view it go to:
ttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/opinion/09blow.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Blow%22&st=cse&oref=slogin
and then the graphic, Whites, Race and the Election
August 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Racism and the Race
By CHARLES M. BLOW

This is supposed to be the Democrats’ year of destiny. Bush is hobbling out of office, the economy is in the toilet, voters are sick of the war and the party’s wunderkind candidate is raking in money hand over fist.

So why is the presidential race a statistical dead heat? The pundits have offered a host of reasons, but one in particular deserves more exploration: racism.

Barack Obama’s candidacy has shed some light on the extremes of racism in America — how much has dissipated (especially among younger people) and how much remains.

According to a July New York Times/CBS News poll, when whites were asked whether they would be willing to vote for a black candidate, 5 percent confessed that they would not. That’s not so bad, right? But wait. The pollsters then rephrased the question to get a more accurate portrait of the sentiment. They asked the same whites if most of the people they knew would vote for a black candidate. Nineteen percent said that those they knew would not. Depending on how many people they know and how well they know them, this universe of voters could be substantial. That’s bad.

Welcome to the murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure. As Obama gently put it in his race speech, today’s racial “resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company.” However, they can be — and possibly will be — expressed in the privacy of the voting booth.

If the percentage of white voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for a black candidate were only 15 percent, that would be more than all black voters combined. (Coincidentally, it also would be more than all voters under 24 years old.) That amounts to a racial advantage for John McCain.

And this sentiment stretched across ideological lines. Just as many white independents as Republicans said that most of the people they knew would not vote for a black candidate, and white Democrats were not far behind. Also, remember that during the Democratic primaries, up to 20 percent of white voters in some states said that the race of the candidate was important to them. Few of those people voted for the black guy.

Some might say that turnabout is fair play, citing the fact that 89 percent of blacks say they plan to vote for Obama. That level of support represents a racial advantage for him, too, right? Not necessarily. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic in the general election anyway. According to CNN exit polls John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote in 2004.

Think racism isn’t a major factor in this election? Think again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/opinion/09blow.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Blow%22&st=cse&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2008

Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye

July 29, 2008
Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye
By PATRICIA COHEN
NY Times
In the Albanian canon, a 15th-century handbook detailing the rules of revenge that is still in circulation, a man’s relatives are expected “to take their blood back” if he is shot. In Iran a death can be compensated with blood money: 100 camels in early Islam; thousands of dollars today. A girl’s life is worth only half of a boy’s. So is an eye; a tooth, one-twentieth. In Sicily there is an oral tradition describing various methods of revenge: tying a man’s feet to his neck so that when he moves, he strangles himself; handcuffing a victim to a bonfire of olive wood; throwing him into a sty with hungry pigs.

Today one can see vengeance on a mass scale embodied in the person of Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who is sitting in a Belgrade jail, charged with war crimes, including overseeing the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 at Srebrenica. At least some of those deaths were claimed by Bosnian Serb officials at the time as revenge for previous killings of Serbs.

Vengeance: it is as old as humanity, as natural as blinking. It has been examined and pondered by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, poets, playwrights and even primatologists, who have recently found that chimpanzees will punish thieves by overturning their food tables so they cannot enjoy the fruits of their crime.

Only recently, however, have economists turned their attention to vengeance and tried to measure it in the real world. In a working paper published last month on the Web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org), Naci H. Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University, gathered information on 89,000 people in 53 countries to draw a map of vengefulness. What he found was that among the most vengeful are women, older people, the poor and residents of high-crime areas.

“There was a question of whether or not we can quantify vengeful feelings in a scientific fashion,” Mr. Mocan said. “It’s the first analysis of the issue looking at actual data.”

It turns out that personal attributes — age, income, gender — as well as the characteristics of one’s culture and country contribute to a person’s desire for revenge, Mr. Mocan said. “A feeling such as vengeance,” he said, “which can be considered primal, is nonetheless influenced by the economic and social circumstances of the person and the country he or she lives in.”

For economists, Mr. Mocan’s work, while still preliminary, opens up a new area for exploration. “I think this is really important research,” said Daniel Houser, a professor at George Mason University specializing in experimental economics and emotion. “I’m not aware of any work in economics that tries to capture individual differences in vengeful feelings.”

In the last couple of decades a lot of work has shown how important trust and reciprocity are in developing efficient markets, Mr. Houser explained, and what helps to create trust is punishment. Yet punishment can also spiral out of control, and people can get stuck in a retaliatory cycle, just as in a nasty divorce or a longstanding family feud.

“How do you calibrate the proper level of punishment to promote effective market relations?” Mr. Houser asked. It may turn out, he said, that “how much you want to punish is connected to the likelihood of creating a more formal market economy.”

Mr. Mocan collected data compiled by a United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute survey from the 1990s and 2000. People were asked what would be an appropriate sentence for a 20-year-old man found guilty of stealing a color television if it was his second offense. The punishments ranged from alternatives to prison through two to six months in jail, all the way to a life sentence. Mr. Mocan tried to take account of the different values of a television in different countries, the effectiveness of the legal system and the going rate, if you will, for other crimes.

In China, Romania and Botswana, for example, nearly 40 percent of participants preferred a prison sentence of four or more years. In South Africa the rate is 25 percent; 18 to 20 percent in Egypt, Ukraine and Paraguay; 16 percent in Canada and Indonesia; 12 percent in the United States and the Philippines; about 4 percent in Norway and Slovenia; and 1 percent in Belgium and Spain.

Within a given country, people who have been victims of the same kind of crime (here, a burglary) tend to be more vengeful, but not if they have been victims of a different crime, like mugging.

Most of Mr. Mocan’s findings confirm what researchers in different disciplines have already found: that vengeful feelings are stronger in countries with low levels of income and education, a weak rule of law and those who recently experienced a war or are ethnically or linguistically fragmented. Anthropologists tend to believe that vengeful feelings were useful in binding a family or group together in early human society. They were protective devices before states were established and did the job of punishing wrongdoers.

“The results make good intuitive sense, confirming what we already suspected,” said Tyler Cowen, the author of “Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting and Motivate Your Dentist.”

What Mr. Mocan found most surprising was that women turned out to be more vengeful than men. If a woman had been a victim of burglary, she was 10 percent more likely to impose a prison sentence; for men the figure was 5 percent.

Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard who has tried to explain group hatred in terms of political economy, has written that “an economist’s definition of hatred is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others.” In healthy economies, he argues, the cost is higher, and the demand for hatred and vengeance drops.

Vengeance, of course, often defies what would appear to be rational calculations of gain and loss. In experiments using what is known as the ultimatum game, subjects were told that Player 1 would offer to share a sum of money — say, $10 — with Player 2. But if the two didn’t agree on how to split the cash, then no one would get anything.

Logically, even an offer of one cent leaves you better off than you were before. But people repeatedly rejected offers of less than 30 percent of the total, preferring to forgo any money and punish the cheapskate (and themselves), rather than accepting what they perceived to be an unfair offer. If a computer instead of a person did the split, the other player was more likely to accept a low offer.

The willingness to suffer harm yourself is often much more extreme. In Euripides’ play, Medea is so bent on wreaking vengeance on her unfaithful husband, Jason, that she murders their children.

Jared Diamond recently wrote in The New Yorker about a revenge killing in the New Guinea Highlands that took three years and involved 300 men, 30 deaths, permanent crippling and large payments to all the soldiers recruited. The reward? Psychological satisfaction and the knowledge that the avenger would be considered a hero and remembered if he were killed. That personal satisfaction is something Mr. Diamond said every human being, no matter what the culture, can identify with.

This type of vengeful passion, Mr. Mocan acknowledged, may occupy a wholly different dimension than the one he tried to capture with his research. But Mr. Mocan, who has also done research that found that the death penalty deters murders, said his findings raised the question of whether vengeance should be a legitimate aspect of the criminal justice system.

In her 2002 book, “Revenge: A Story of Hope,” Laura Blumenfeld wrote about her search for vengeance on a Palestinian terrorist who grazed her father with a bullet in Jerusalem without seriously harming him. She explored the dark alleyways of revenge, like the examples cited in the beginning of this article.

She is skeptical of the economic approach. “How do you quantify shame?” she asked. Often “punishment is irrelevant,” she said, which is why families often still want to take revenge even if the perpetrator is jailed. “It’s not about inflicting pain, it’s about honor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/arts/29veng.html?ex=1218081600&en=08a7a5fed9b99402&ei=5070

Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2008

Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region

June 5, 2008
Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region
By KEVIN SACK
NY Times

Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine.

The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place.

For instance, the widest racial gaps in mammogram rates within a state were in California and Illinois, with a difference of 12 percentage points between the white rate and the black rate. But the country’s lowest rate for blacks — 48 percent in California — was 24 percentage points below the highest rate — 72 percent in Massachusetts. The statistics were for women ages 65 to 69 who received screening in 2004 or 2005.

In all but two states, black diabetics were less likely than whites to receive annual hemoglobin testing. But blacks in Colorado (66 percent) were far less likely to be screened than those in Massachusetts (88 percent).

The study was commissioned by the nation’s largest health-related philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which on Thursday planned to announce a three-year, $300 million initiative intended to narrow health care disparities across lines of race and geography. Officials said it would be the largest effort to improve health care quality ever undertaken by a charity in the United States.

The foundation hopes to better understand and confront the causes of those regional variations by focusing its spending on 14 regions, like the city of Memphis and the state of Wisconsin.

Dr. Bruce Siegel, the George Washington University professor who will direct the program, said one community might use its grant money to study how long it takes hospitals to move heart attack patients from emergency room to catheterization laboratory. Others might work to coordinate electronic record-keeping or to provide patients with better information about taking medications after discharge.

“In my book,” Dr. Siegel said, “health care is local, just like politics, so you’re going to see a lot of differences in what communities do.”

That point is reinforced time and again in the new research conducted by the Dartmouth Atlas Project of the college’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, which has used Medicare data to document health care disparities over the last two decades. It found substantial variation in the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries who had been seen in a two-year period by a primary care physician, ranging from 86 percent in Nebraska and South Dakota to 65 percent in New Jersey. It found far higher rates of unnecessary hospitalizations in Hawaii, Utah and Washington than in Kentucky, Louisiana and West Virginia.

Disparities in the rate of leg amputations were particularly stark. The rate for blacks was about 6 per 1,000 in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, but less than 2 per 1,000 in Colorado and Nevada. The rates for whites in the three Southern states were much lower, about 1.3 per 1,000, but were still more than double the rates for whites in the two Western states.

Such variations may be partly explained by regional differences in education and poverty levels, but researchers increasingly believe that variations in medical practice and spending also are factors.

“In U.S. health care, it’s not only who you are that matters; it’s also where you live,” wrote the study’s authors, led by Dr. Elliott S. Fisher.

Dr. John R. Lumpkin, senior vice president of the foundation, said that more than a third of the $300 million would be spent to hire national experts to help regional coalitions tailor their quality improvement plans. The remainder of the money will be devoted to research, evaluation and the promotion of quality standards.

“We want to build a template in each of these communities that will teach America how to improve health care quality in a dramatic way,” Dr. Lumpkin said.

The areas selected for the grants are Cincinnati; Cleveland; Detroit; Humboldt County, Calif.; Kansas City, Mo.; Maine; Memphis; Minnesota; Seattle; south central Pennsylvania; western Michigan; western New York; Willamette Valley in Oregon; and Wisconsin.

The foundation’s endowment, now about $10 billion, was financed originally from the wealth of its namesake, who died in 1968 after building Johnson & Johnson into one of the world’s largest sellers of health and medical products. The group has been a major force in curbing tobacco use, and has more recently turned its attention to obesity, announcing a five-year, $500 million effort on that front last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/health/research/05disparities.html?sq=health%20disparities&st=nyt&scp=1&adxnnlx=1212726436-kpkBL%209L7PrSSppoSJzthQ&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2008

"The Top 100 Criminal Justice Blogs"

"The Top 100 Criminal Justice Blogs" (http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/library/the-top-100-criminal-justice-blogs.html).
(including this one)

Posted by lois at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2008

From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton

From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton
By PETER S. GOODMAN
New York Times, April 11, 2008
In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.
Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.
Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.
Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has placed on her experience in her husband’s White House.
But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level position to fight poverty.
As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated the legacy of her husband’s administration and the ideological crosscurrents of her party.
In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that “people who are more vulnerable” were going to suffer more than others as the economy turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor working mothers, and food stamps.
Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.
“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”
During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996 law. “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.”
Mr. Obama called the resulting law “an imperfect reform.” Like Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided health care, child care and job training to assist women making the transition from welfare to work — programs he says he helped expand in Illinois as a state senator.
Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”
Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at risk.
“If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we paid an awfully high price,” said Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure.
“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,” Mr. Edelman said. “It’s just not in their lens. It was predictably bad public policy.”
Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law hold up under sharp economic stress.
“We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully functioning safety net for families with children,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
In many ways, Mrs. Clinton has sought to moderate her liberal image since leaving the White House. But on welfare, she has faced the opposite problem: accusations from some liberals that she sold out their principles for a politically calculated centrism.
On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is largely focused on the middle class. Since the departure from the Democratic race of John Edwards, who had made poverty a centerpiece of his campaign, there has been little debate about social welfare policy. But in promising on Friday to establish a cabinet-rank poverty-fighting position if she is elected, Mrs. Clinton reintroduced the topic and the question of her record.
In the interview, conducted last month, Mrs. Clinton said she had followed through on her promise to address what she viewed as shortcomings in the welfare law after being elected to the Senate in 2000. She said she had pressed for legislation that would have increased financing for child care for poor mothers by up to $11 billion, seeking to expand food stamps, and allowing welfare recipients to draw cash aid while attending school.
Those provisions were blocked by the Republican leadership.
“We’ve had to mostly spend our time since President Bush came in to office preventing bad things from happening,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Many welfare advocates dispute Mrs. Clinton’s characterization. Since entering the Senate, they say, she has shown a predilection for compromise at the expense of the poor.
When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton “wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Ms. Chapin said.
Ms. Chapin, now program director of the Consumer Federation of California, posted an e-mail message to a discussion board in February accusing Mrs. Clinton of having “had a hand in devaluing motherwork in this country, and no doubt sending thousands of children and their families deeper into poverty.”
In the interview, and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton said she had serious misgivings about some of the changes proposed to the welfare system as the issue percolated through Washington in the mid-1990s.
Her husband had taken office with a pledge to dismantle the old system. He embraced time limits for cash aid and allowing states to largely decide for themselves how to spend the money. He set out to expand job training, access to health care, child care and food stamps.
When the Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections, making Newt Gingrich the House speaker, they seized the initiative. Twice, they passed bills seeking to impose time limits on welfare benefits while cutting other aid. Twice, Mr. Clinton vetoed the bills, with the encouragement of Mrs. Clinton.
In August 1996, three months before Election Day, Congress sent the White House a third bill. This one imposed time limits on cash benefits and barred most legal immigrants from receiving welfare. But it maintained guarantees for Medicaid and food stamps and increased financing for child care. This time, Mr. Clinton signed.
“I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir.
Mrs. Clinton remained troubled by parts of the bill, she wrote in her memoir, particularly the provision barring welfare for legal immigrants. But “pragmatic politics” had to be considered. “If he vetoed welfare reform a third time,” she wrote, “Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”
Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of Children’s Defense Fund, an activist group that had given Mrs. Clinton her first job, blasted the Clintons as betraying the poor, opening a rift that Mrs. Clinton called “sad and painful.” Mrs. Edelman’s husband, Peter, quit his administration post.
In the years that followed, the number of those on welfare rolls plummeted by more than 60 percent. A study last year by the Congressional Budget Office found that from 1991 to 2005, poor families with children saw their inflation-adjusted incomes climb by 35 percent, as employment climbed.
In recent years, however, low-skilled women have struggled. The percentage of poor single mothers neither working nor drawing cash assistance surged from under 20 percent before the welfare overhaul to more than 30 percent in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. During the same period, the number of children in poverty rose to 12.8 million from 11.6 million, according to census data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/politics/11welfare.html?_r=1&sq=Welfare%20Reform&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1207973026-aRYTJ6%20bU8ZfPbK3OKQNqA&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2008

Barack Obama Speech "A More Perfect Union"

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
"A More Perfect Union"
Constitution Center, March 18, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Posted by lois at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2008

NY Times: 81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track

April 4, 2008
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track
By DAVID LEONHARDT and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.

Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.

The unhappiness presents clear risks for Republicans in this year’s elections, given the continued unpopularity of President Bush. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job he was doing, a number that has barely changed since last summer. But Democrats, who have controlled the House and Senate since last year, also face the risk that unhappy voters will punish Congressional incumbents.

Mr. Bush and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have moved in recent weeks to react to the economic slowdown, first by passing a stimulus bill that will send checks of up to $1,200 to many couples this spring. They are now negotiating over proposals to overhaul financial regulations, blunt the effects of a likely wave of home foreclosures and otherwise respond to the real estate slump and related crisis on Wall Street.

The poll found that Americans blame government officials for the crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.

In assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis, Americans displayed a populist streak, favoring help for individuals but not for financial institutions. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.

“What I learned from economics is that the market is not always going to be a happy place,” Sandi Heller, who works at the University of Colorado and is also studying for a master’s degree in business there, said in a follow-up interview. If the government steps in to help out, said Ms. Heller, 43, it could encourage banks to take more foolish risks.

“There are a million and one better ways for the government to spend that money,” she said.

Respondents were considerably more open to government help for home owners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.

The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

When the presidential campaign began last year, the war in Iraq and terrorism easily topped Americans’ list of concerns. Almost 30 percent of people in a December poll said that one of those issues was the country’s most pressing problem. About half as many named the economy or jobs.

But the issues have switched places in just a few months’ time. In the latest poll, 17 percent named terrorism or the war, while 37 percent named the economy or the job market. When looking at the current state of their own finances, Americans remain relatively sanguine. More than 70 percent said their financial situation was fairly good or very good, a number that has dropped only modestly since 2006.

Yet many say they are merely managing to stay in place, rather than get ahead. This view is consistent with the income statistics of the past five years, which suggest that median household income has still not returned to the inflation-adjusted peak it hit in 1999. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, there has never been an extended economic expansion that ended without setting a new record for household income.

Economists cite a variety of factors for the sluggish income growth, including technology and globalization, and it clearly seems to have made Americans anxious about the future. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — said they expected their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do, down from 56 percent in 2005.

Respondents were more pessimistic when asked in general terms about the next generation, with only a third saying it would live better than people do today. (Polls usually find people more upbeat about their personal situation than about the state of society, but the gap is now larger than usual.)

Charles Parrish, a 56-year-old retired fireman in Evans, Ga., who now works a maintenance job for the local school system, said he was worried the country was not preparing children for the high-technology economy of the future. Instead, the government passed a stimulus package that simply sends checks to taxpayers and worsens the deficit in the process.

“Who’s going to pay back the money?” Mr. Parrish, an independent, said. “We are. They are giving me money, except I’m going to have to pay interest on it.”

Democrats have asserted recently that the lack of wage growth has made people more open to government intervention in the economy than in the past, and the poll found mixed results on this score.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would support raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 to pay for tax cuts or government programs for people making less than that amount. Only 38 percent called it a bad idea. Both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidates, have made proposals along these lines.

More broadly, 43 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer a larger government that provided more services, which is tied for the highest such number since The Times and CBS News began asking the question in 1991. But an identical 43 percent said they wanted a smaller government that provided fewer services.

And although both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have blamed trade with other countries for some of the economy’s problems, Americans say they continue to favor trade — if not quite as strongly as in the past. Fifty-eight percent called it good for the economy; 32 percent called it bad, up from 17 percent in 1996.

At the same time, 68 percent said they favored trade restrictions to protect domestic industries, instead of allowing unrestrained trade. In early 1996, 55 percent favored such restrictions.

Dalia Sussman and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/us/04poll.html?ei=5070&en=cc15d692319ccb0f&ex=1208059200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1207404014-ZjR7jiMQ5+mXbvCt+xvMUw

Posted by lois at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2008

Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation

"Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.
Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.
“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”
The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said."

March 23, 2008, NY Times
Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.

One of the researchers, Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said “the growing inequalities in life expectancy” mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death from heart disease and certain cancers.

The gaps have been increasing despite efforts by the federal government to reduce them. One of the top goals of “Healthy People 2010,” an official statement of national health objectives issued in 2000, is to “eliminate health disparities among different segments of the population,” including higher- and lower-income groups and people of different racial and ethnic background.

Dr. Singh said last week that federal officials had found “widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy” at birth and at every age level.

He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

The Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, have championed legislation to reduce such disparities, as have some Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality. There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”

Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining for people who have attained a given age.

While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:

Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.

Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.

Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.

Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.

Even among people who have insurance, many studies have documented racial disparities.

In a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that black patients “tend to receive less aggressive medical care than whites” at its hospitals and clinics, in part because doctors provide them with less information and see them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of surgery.

Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said one reason for the growing disparities might be “a very significant gap in health literacy” — what people know about diet, exercise and healthy lifestyles. Middle-class and upper-income people have greater access to the huge amounts of health information on the Internet, Mr. Moffit said.

Thomas P. Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed.

“People with more education tend to have a longer time horizon,” Mr. Miller said. “They are more likely to look at the long-term consequences of their health behavior. They are more assertive in seeking out treatments and more likely to adhere to treatment advice from physicians.”

A recent study by Ellen R. Meara, a health economist at Harvard Medical School, found that in the 1980s and 1990s, “virtually all gains in life expectancy occurred among highly educated groups.”

Trends in smoking explain a large part of the widening gap, she said in an article this month in the journal Health Affairs.

Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.

The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that heart attack survivors with higher levels of education and income were much more likely to receive cardiac rehabilitation care, which lowers the risk of future heart problems. Likewise, it said, the odds of receiving tests for colon cancer increase with a person’s education and income.

Graphs at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

NY Times Editorial: Mr. Obama's Profile in Courage

NY TIMES
March 19, 2008
EDITORIAL
Mr. Obama's Profile in Courage

There are moments - increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns - when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.
Mr. Obama had to address race and religion, the two most toxic subjects in politics. He was as powerful and frank as Mitt Romney was weak and calculating earlier this year in his attempt to persuade the religious right that his Mormonism is Christian enough for them.
It was not a moment to which Mr. Obama came easily. He hesitated uncomfortably long in dealing with the controversial remarks of his spiritual mentor and former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who denounced the United States as endemically racist, murderous and corrupt.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama drew a bright line between his religious connection with Mr. Wright, which should be none of the voters' business, and having a political connection, which would be very much their business. The distinction seems especially urgent after seven years of a president who has worked to blur the line between church and state.
Mr. Obama acknowledged his strong ties to Mr. Wright. He embraced him as the man "who helped introduce me to my Christian faith," and said that "as imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me."

Wisely, he did not claim to be unaware of Mr. Wright's radicalism or bitterness, disarming the speculation about whether he personally heard the longtime pastor of his church speak the words being played and replayed on YouTube. Mr. Obama said Mr. Wright's comments were not just potentially offensive, as politicians are apt to do, but "rightly offend white and black alike" and are wrong in their analysis of America. But, he said, many Americans "have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree."
Mr. Obama's eloquent speech should end the debate over his ties to Mr. Wright since there is nothing to suggest that he would carry religion into government. But he did not stop there. He put Mr. Wright, his beliefs and the reaction to them into the larger context of race relations with an honesty seldom heard in public life.

Mr. Obama spoke of the nation's ugly racial history, which started with slavery and Jim Crow, and continues today in racial segregation, the school achievement gap and discrimination in everything from banking services to law enforcement.
He did not hide from the often-unspoken reality that people on both sides of the color line are angry. "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation," he said, "the memories of humiliation and fear have not gone away, nor the anger and the bitterness of those years."

At the same time, many white Americans, Mr. Obama noted, do not feel privileged by their race. "In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game," he said, adding that both sides must acknowledge that the other's grievances are not imaginary.

He made the powerful point that while these feelings are not always voiced publicly, they are used in politics. "Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition," he said.

Against this backdrop, he said, he could not repudiate his pastor. "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," he said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother." That woman whom he loves deeply, he said, "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street" and more than once "uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

There have been times when we wondered what Mr. Obama meant when he talked about rising above traditional divides. This was not such a moment.
We can't know how effective Mr. Obama's words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy - he raised the discussion to a higher plane.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

If you didn't see the speech, click on the link below to watch it.
http://colorofchange.org/obama/video.html?id=2131-200043

Posted by lois at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2008

Transcript of Barack Obama's Speech on Race

March 18, 2008
Transcript
Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

Center for Uban Pedagogy Launches Making Policy Public

CUP launches Making Policy Public
1 message
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CUP Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 4:23 PM
To: info@anothercupdevelopment.org
1. MPP launch party, NY
2. MPP call for proposals
3. MPP for sale
................................................................
1. MPP launch party, NY
Please join us this Thursday at Printed Matter to celebrate the launch of Making Policy Public, CUP's new series of collaborative publications.
Making Policy Public launch party
Thursday, March 13, 5 – 7 pm
Printed Matter Inc.
195 10th Avenue
New York, NY
C/E to 23rd Street

What do you get when you put together policy wonks and cutting-edge visual thinkers? Find out on March 13 as CUP celebrates the publication of The Cargo Chain and Social Security Risk Machine. These are the first two issues of Making Policy Public, CUP’s new series of fold-out posters that uses innovative graphic design to explore and explain public policy. Each poster is the product of a commissioned collaboration between a designer and an advocate. The series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared. We hope you join us in Chelsea for a night of cross-disciplinary celebration.

The Cargo Chain is an organizing tool for longshore workers that shows the players and pressure points in today’s globalized shipping network. How do commodities get from factory to shopping mall? Who really has the power to move today’s global economy? This fold-out poster was produced through a collaboration between the Longshore Workers Coalition, Labor Notes (a quarterly journal of labor journalism and research), cartographer Bill Rankin, and the graphic design office Thumb.

Social Security Risk Machine explains the mechanics of this "social machine": how it works, why it was created, where the money comes from and where it goes. Most importantly, the publication shows the many adjustments that can be made to keep the machine running. This publication was written by Sam Stark and designed by David Reinfurt and CUP’s Damon Rich.

CUP provides Making Policy Public collaborators with a stipend, manages the project, and provides additional support. Partnering organizations receive half of the print run to use in their education and advocacy work.

Making Policy Public is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Diane Middleton Foundation, and the Brooklyn Arts Council.

2. MPP call for proposals
CUP is currently accepting proposals for the next issues of Making Policy Public. We are looking for advocates, writers, and researchers with complex policy issues that need visual explanation. Advocates chosen through the juried submission process will receive 1000 copies of the color publication to distribute directly to their constituents and an honorarium of $1000. To dowload the application, click here
http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/resources/call%20for%20proposals.pdf

3. MPP for sale
We are also happy to announce that the first two issues of Making Policy Public are available for purchase through our website. Bring the wonders of Social Security or the international shipping network home today! Click on "Project Description" and scroll down to purchase.
http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/projects/detail/54
______________________________
the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
at the Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street #B402B
Brooklyn, NY 11215
(718) 596–7721
www.anothercupdevelopment.org

Posted by lois at 07:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2008

German comic book on the Holocaust

February 27, 2008, NY Times
Abroad
No Laughs, No Thrills, and Villains All Too Real
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

BERLIN — The other morning Jens Augner, slight and owlish, a schoolteacher in his 40s, quizzed his eighth-grade class of 13- and 14-year-olds at the Humboldt Gymnasium, a local school. As part of a trial program, he has just introduced a new history textbook into the curriculum: to be exact, a comic book about the Holocaust, called “The Search.”

Among other things, the book, building on the obvious precedent of Art Spiegelman's "Maus," shows how far comics have come as a cultural medium taken seriously here, but also that the Holocaust has come a long way too, as a topic to be freshly considered by a new generation of German teenagers.

As it happens, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, just recently made headlines across Europe and elsewhere when, seemingly out of the blue, he announced that beginning next fall, French fifth graders should each study the life of one of the 11,000 French children killed during the Holocaust. (“Obscene,” responded a dumbstruck Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. He wasn’t alone in that sentiment.)

On the new comic book’s cover, a teenager named Esther sprints from a truckload of Nazi soldiers. She faces a choice in the book: a policeman will let her flee, if she wants, rather than follow her parents to the camps.

Standing before the blackboard, Mr. Augner asked the students what they might have done in Esther’s place. Hands shot up.

“Her parents would have wanted her to hide,” one girl speculated. A boy pointed out that the policeman, and not only Esther, had to make a difficult decision, because he could have been punished for letting her escape.

Many students said they would have gone after their parents. One declared that she would die for them.

At which point a quiet classmate spoke up: “It’s a question of whether you want to die alone.”

With the Second World War passing from living memory, the Holocaust remains a subject taught as a singular event and obligation here, and Germans still seem to grapple almost eagerly with their own historic guilt and shame. That said, few German schoolchildren today can go home to ask their grandparents, much less their parents, what they did while Hitler was around. The end of the war is now as distant from them in time as the end of the First World War was from the Reagan presidency.

Paradoxically, this seems to have freed young Germans — adolescent ones, anyway — to talk more openly and in new ways about Nazis and the Holocaust. Passing is the shock therapy, with its films of piled corpses, that earlier generations of schoolchildren had to endure.

In the comic Esther recounts to her grandchildren what happened to her family, and in the process facts emerge about Hitler’s rise, about deportations and concentration camps. Without excusing anyone or spreading blame, the story, rather than focusing on Hitler and geopolitics, stresses instances where ordinary individuals — farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers, prison guards, even camp inmates — faced dilemmas, acted selfishly or ambiguously: showed themselves to be human. The medium’s intimacy and immediacy help boil down a vast subject to a few lives that young readers, and old ones too, can grasp.

As for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, his education minister suggested that instead of having each school child study a specific Holocaust victim, an entire fifth-grade class might study the life of one child so as not to traumatize every 10-year-old in France. A committee is meeting now to study both proposals. Even if uncooked, the president’s original notion about personalizing and revivifying a moral turning point in modern history reflected a broad change afoot.

Ask many Germans now in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and they will describe elementary and high school history classes that virtually cudgeled them into learning about Nazis and the Holocaust. The other morning Jutta Harms recalled her class in a small town in the north of West Germany during the late 1970s. Ms. Harms now works for Reprodukt, a leading Berlin publisher of graphic novels.

“Students had to fight to talk freely about the war,” she recounted, “and, being confronted in class by the emotions of the teachers, there wasn’t any space to feel for ourselves.” The comic book, she went on, is therefore a welcome sign of change.

Mr. Augner, the schoolteacher, echoed Ms. Harms’s recollection: “Teachers with good will used to make German children feel it was somehow their fault, that they had a weight on their shoulders. The war was still a fresh wound.” This new comic book, he added, speaks to “a different generation of students.”

“It teaches the subject,” he continued, ”so that it’s no longer just about victims and perpetrators.”

When a visitor asked Mr. Augner’s students how much they identified with the Germans who fought the war, they looked blank and slightly baffled. “It was another generation,” one said with a shrug. In that response a page of history seemed to turn.

“The result, I find, is that interest in the subject is actually increasing,” Mr. Augner later commented. “These students don’t have the same discomfort we did talking about it.”

Older Germans can recall an American television mini-series, “Holocaust,” that shocked people when it was shown here in the late 1970s and helped transform public opinion, giving many permission to break the long silence about Nazi atrocities. It recounted the war from the perspectives of two families, one Jewish, the other Nazi.

“The Search” takes this approach further, beyond the realm of commercial entertainment and into much subtler territory. The Anna Frank Haus in the Netherlands put it together by joining a team of experts with Eric Heuvel, a Dutch comic artist, whose previous book about the war in the Netherlands was distributed to 200,000 schoolchildren there. Some 20 classrooms, grades 7 to 10, here in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia, are testing the new book. There are versions in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Polish and English.

“It would not have been possible as a history text 10 years ago, when people here assumed comics were only for those who couldn’t read properly,” Ms. Harms, from Reprodukt, the comics publisher, said.

The visual style of “The Search” is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. “Less is more,” Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation, acknowledging that he pilfered liberally from Tintin’s inventor, Hergé. “We spent endless hours making sure that the Nazi costumes were kept to a minimum because boys can glorify these things.”

Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, said, “There was also a lot of discussion about color.” Black-and-white, he noted, is now a cliché of art and movies about the Holocaust. Color is less melodramatic. “And you know the trees were still green at Auschwitz,” he added.

It’s a bright autumn day in the book when Esther’s parents are rounded up and sent off to die. The comic is more heartbreaking for being understated and cautious about violence. Ruud van der Rol, one of the writers, explained: “There are no piles of bodies, because we knew from experience that this could block children from dealing with the whole subject. Also — and we had endless conversations about this — we decided not to show Hitler as a beast or inhuman because the Nazis, after all, were human beings. That’s the point. Anyone can be a perpetrator or a hero. The choice is yours.”

The other afternoon Dilek Geyik, a 30-year-old schoolteacher in training, was preparing to introduce the comic to her students at another Berlin high school. The students there come mostly from working-class families, and from time to time tensions flare between immigrants and right-wing teenagers. A petite, dark-haired woman, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Ms. Geyik is accustomed to answering the question Where are you from? Unlike many of the people who ask, she was born and reared here, a native Berliner. But with a Turkish name, she’s simply presumed to be an outsider by many Germans.

“When I was taught about the Holocaust in high school, I felt I could step away from the topic in ways German students couldn’t, because it wasn’t about me,” she recalled. “History was something they were supposed to bear in silence. But now you don’t have so many witnesses, so the direct connection isn’t there for children. And also I came in time to see it myself in a larger context.”

She added: “More and more young German students do too. They are sensitive to the idea that the subject is not just about Germans and Jews. It’s about people and life.”

Posted by lois at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2008

Where candidates stand on crime, death penalty

"The two differ on crime-related issues that have a lower profile but affect many thousands of prisoners, most of them minorities - the disparity between sentences for offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, and the merits of federal mandatory-minimum sentencing laws. On both, Clinton lines up with the prosecution, Obama with the defense."

Where candidates stand on crime, death penalty
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2008

When Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her campaign for the Senate in 2000, she declared - emphatically, according to an interviewer - that she supported the death penalty.

When Barack Obama first ran for the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he said in a campaign questionnaire that he opposed capital punishment.

Their positions seemed to reflect their political roots - Clinton, the moderate "New Democrat," a term she has used to describe herself; Obama, the insurgent who got his start as a community organizer.

But times change, and so do candidates, particularly on issues that loom as potential minefields for Democrats with presidential ambitions. It's a less delicate topic for Republicans, whose leading candidates - with the exception of maverick Rep. Ron Paul - espouse time-tested, nearly identical law-and-order platforms.

With the Democratic nomination still up in the air after the Super Tuesday primaries, the evolving stances of Clinton and Obama on crime and punishment offer a point of comparison for voters in upcoming primaries, including Tuesday's votes in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

Although Clinton and Obama, both lawyers, have some important differences, their positions on two of the most politically sensitive crime issues - the death penalty and gun control - have converged.

By the time Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he was not advocating abolition of the death penalty, but was saying the system of investigating and prosecuting capital crimes was so flawed that the nation should declare a moratorium on executions, like the one imposed in Illinois by Republican Gov. George Ryan. Obama has abandoned that position as a senator, accepts the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, and calls for reforms like those he championed in Illinois to guard against wrongful convictions, such as the tape-recording of all police interrogations.

Clinton hasn't abandoned her support of capital punishment. But her campaign prefers to emphasize her work on the Innocence Protection Act, a 2004 law that set guidelines for federal prisoners' access to DNA evidence and provided funding for state DNA testing.

On gun control, Obama answered the same 1996 Illinois questionnaire by endorsing a statewide ban on handguns. He soon disavowed that position, claiming that a staffer had filled out the survey in error, but he was still calling for a national ban on carrying handguns as a U.S. Senate candidate in 2004, according to a Chicago Tribune report.

In the Senate, however, Obama has taken a measured position similar to Clinton's, advocating what he calls common-sense restrictions on guns, including a restoration of the federal ban on assault weapons, while promising to protect hunters and crack down on illegal dealers.

Both candidates acknowledged the clout of the gun lobby at a debate in Nevada last month, when Clinton backed away from a 2000 campaign pledge to support a national registry of all handgun sales, and Obama agreed that the proposal would be politically impossible.

The two differ on crime-related issues that have a lower profile but affect many thousands of prisoners, most of them minorities - the disparity between sentences for offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, and the merits of federal mandatory-minimum sentencing laws. On both, Clinton lines up with the prosecution, Obama with the defense.

Such disagreements scarcely exist on the Republican side. John McCain, Mitt Romney (who dropped out of the race Thursday) and Mike Huckabee are equally fervent in their support of the death penalty, opposition to gun control, allegiance to the war on drugs and abhorrence of liberal judges, while occasionally accusing one another of backsliding.

One note of dissent comes from Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who opposes three-strikes sentencing laws, saying they have "created a system that is overrun with people, and the cost is choking us." But the real dissident in the Republican race is Paul, the Texas libertarian, who opposes the death penalty, favors drug decriminalization and thinks the federal government has far too big a presence in law enforcement.

"All issues of life and violence and crime and murder are dealt with at the local level," Paul says on his campaign Web site. He joins other Republicans in condemning gun control and cites it as a reason to support his resolution to end U.S. membership in the United Nations, "protecting us from their efforts to tax our guns or disarm us entirely."

It's true that most crime is prosecuted locally. But any president can exert a powerful influence on crime policies by backing or blocking legislation on wiretapping, guns, corporate wrongdoing or defendants' rights; by appointing judges, the attorney general, U.S. attorneys, and members of agencies like the U.S. Sentencing Commission; and by deciding whether federal prosecutors should chiefly target gangs, drugs, pornography or securities fraud.

Crime is seldom a prominent issue in presidential primaries, largely because the front-runners in each party typically take similar positions. But the subject can explode on Democrats in a November election.

The prime example was in 1988, when Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who had led Republican Vice President George Bush in early opinion polls, came under withering attack for his support of a furlough program that allowed a convicted murderer named William Horton - dubbed "Willie" in campaign ads - to leave prison in 1986 and rape a Maryland woman.

Dukakis was also the last major-party nominee to oppose the death penalty. He was hurt politically when he responded without apparent emotion to a debate question about whether he would favor execution for someone who raped and murdered his wife.

Bill Clinton, by contrast, interrupted his 1992 presidential campaign and flew back to Arkansas for the execution of a brain-damaged killer named Rickey Ray Rector. As president, Clinton signed a 1994 crime bill that included a major expansion of the federal death penalty; according to the New York Times, first lady Hillary Clinton lobbied fellow Democrats for that provision. Bill Clinton also signed a 1996 law restricting state prisoners' ability to appeal their convictions and sentences in federal court.

The Democratic Party followed his lead, supporting the death penalty in its 1992 and 1996 platforms under Clinton and in 2000 under Al Gore before removing the plank in 2004 at the request of nominee John Kerry, according to published reports. What position the 2008 platform will take is uncertain, but of the remaining Democratic candidates, only former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel opposes capital punishment.

President Clinton also sided with law enforcement on drug policies and attacked California's 1996 medical marijuana initiative, winning a suit to shut an Oakland cannabis dispensary in a case that reached the Supreme Court.

Hillary Clinton and Obama appear to have a different perspective and have both condemned federal raids on California patients and suppliers, though they have not endorsed legalization of medical marijuana or federal immunity for patients in California and states with similar laws. The Republican candidates, except for Paul, support the federal raids.

The Democrats' clearest differences involve sentencing for drug crimes, including the disparity between terms for crack cocaine offenses, which affect mostly black prisoners, and terms for powder cocaine, which affect mostly whites.

When the Sentencing Commission voted in November to lower sentencing guidelines for crack-related crimes, and bring them closer to sentences for powder cocaine, Obama favored applying the new terms retroactively to current prisoners, while Clinton opposed it, saying the change should affect only future cases. The commission voted for retroactivity in December, allowing 19,500 federal inmates to ask judges for sentence reductions, about two years in most cases.

Clinton has also questioned Obama's proposal to scrap some of the more than 170 federal mandatory-minimum laws, which require judges to impose specified prison sentences, most commonly for drug crimes.

Noting that the laws mostly affect minorities and have had many critics, including the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Obama has attacked them as unfair to defendants and unduly restrictive on judges, but he has stopped short of calling for a wholesale repeal. Instead, he promises to review all mandatory minimums and try to eliminate those he considers too harsh.

Beyond specific issues, the two differ somewhat in their approaches, said Jesselyn McCurdy, an attorney on national legislation for the American Civil Liberties Union, which lobbies lawmakers but does not endorse candidates.

"Clinton is more in the moderate column on these crime issues than Obama," McCurdy said. She said Clinton often seems torn between her awareness of injustice and her sense that crime issues are dangerous for Democrats, while Obama, "because of his background as a community organizer, I think, is even more sensitive to concerns" about the justice system.

But the variations within each party are minor on the most important crime-related issue for a president - the judges he or she is likely to appoint - said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the prosecution-oriented Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento.

On that subject, he observed, "the difference between the parties is huge."

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/10/INU0UTBQK.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2008

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

On not winning the Nobel Prize

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in '56, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north-west Zimbabwe in the early eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa," as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, or novels with titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.

There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended, arousing the question familiar to all of us but usually in more august contexts: How is it these people behave like this when they must know everyone is watching them?

My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay him back. The pupils range from six to twenty-six, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.

As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop in shyly, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.

I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.

On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and cooked it in a great tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast: boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was still going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.

I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.

The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens.

These children here have a visit from some well known person every week, and it is in the nature of things that these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils. A visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.

As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." I am sure that anyone who has ever given a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying, there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them in this case the story of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end of term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.

Then, the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities.

"You know how it is," one of the teacher's says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."

Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention -- computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of working men's libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.

Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.

We all know this sad story.

But we do not know the end of it.

We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - and forgetting about jokes to do with over-eating - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

But we in the West are not the only people in the world. Not long ago a friend who had been in Zimbabwe told me about a village where people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.

I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grass roots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe want to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kinds of books that we in

Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like the Mayor ofCasterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.

Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now with inflation, it would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship classes - and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the language Tonga, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.

It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.

This links improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls. Saxon England for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you lived in."

But here is the difficulty, no?

Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

There is the gap. There is the difficulty.

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes, taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, with the Tradition.

I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a Black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well cared-for huts of the better off. A school - but like one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.

On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe. Not easily, not under Mugabe.

All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.

Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations there was the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.

Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire, Is she good-looking? If this is a man, charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening.

He, she, is flattered, pleased.

But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking I've heard them: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me," they say.

Some much publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to.

And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go."

My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa which I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening. How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about. Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars.

There are other memories too. A young African man, eighteen perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library." A visiting American seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"

This young man wants us to send him books from England to use as teaching guides.

"I only did four years in senior school," he says, "but they never taught me to teach."

I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six to eighteen year olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting "Two times two is ..." and so on. I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than twenty, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros, seen her teach the A B C by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.

We are witnessing here that great hunger for education in Africa, anywhere in the Third World, or whatever we call parts of the world where parents long to get an education for their children which will take them out of poverty.

I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn from a book. She is reading Anna Karenin.

She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty. He doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds. His older brother had been here holding the fort, but he had said he needed a break, had gone into town, really rather ill, because of the drought.

This man is curious. He says to the young woman, "What are you reading?"

"It is about Russia," says the girl.

"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.

The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust, "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."

The young woman resumes her reading. She wants to get to the end of the paragraph.

The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says, "Fanta makes them thirstier."

The Indian knows he shouldn't do this but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.

Now she hands him her own plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.

She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly. The paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.

"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."

This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers with pictures of girls in bikinis.

It is time for the woman to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl - going back home, with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.

Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenin here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.

A certain high official, from the United Nations as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in a bookshop before he set out on his journey to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looked around his fellow passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seat belt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear, "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man is well used to people listening when he spoke. "I always do this, travelling," he confided. "Travelling at all these days, is hard enough." And as soon as people were settling down, he opened his part of Anna Karenin, and read. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it really is the only way to travel." He knew the novel, liked it, and this original mode of reading did add spice to what was after all a well known book.

When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the air hostess, and sent the chapters back to his secretary, travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated but readable, in the back part of the plane. Altogether, this clever way of reading Anna Karenin makes an impression, and probably no one there would forget it.

Meanwhile, in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of the traditional dress of her people: her children can easily cling onto its thick folds.

She sends a thankful look to the Indian, whom she knew liked her and was sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds.

The children are past crying, and their throats are full of dust.

This was hard, oh yes, it was hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lay in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, but she was used to hardship, was she not? Her mind was on the story she had been reading. She was thinking, She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. She had not finished more than that one paragraph. Yes, she thinks, a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me.

She steps on. The can of water is heavy on her shoulders. On she goes. The children can hear the water slopping about. Half way she stops, sets down the can.

Her children are whimpering and touching it. She thinks that she cannot open it, because dust would blow in. There is no way she can open the can until she gets home.

"Wait," she tells her children, "wait."

She has to pull herself together and go on.

She thinks, My teacher said there is a library, bigger than the supermarket, a big building and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school - she said I was. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. My children will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.

You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?

It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.

On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she will give her children once home, and drink a little of herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.

We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2008

Toni Morrison Endorses Obama for President

Jan 28, 12:39 PM EST
Morrison Endorses Obama for President
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The woman who famously labeled Bill Clinton as the "first black president" is backing Barack Obama to be the second.

Author Toni Morrison said her endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate has little to do with Obama's race - he is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - but rather his personal gifts.

Writing with the touch of a poet in a letter to the Illinois senator, Morrison explained why she chose Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton for her first public presidential endorsement.

Morrison, whose acclaimed novels usually concentrate on the lives of black women, said she has admired Clinton for years because of her knowledge and mastery of politics, but then dismissed that experience in favor of Obama's vision.

"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates," Morrison wrote. "That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.

"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace - that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom," Morrison wrote.

In 1998, Morrison wrote a column for the New Yorker magazine in which she wrote of Bill Clinton: "White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

Obama responded to Morrison's endorsement with a written statement: "Toni Morrison has touched a nation with the grace and beauty of her words, and I was deeply moved and honored by the letter she wrote and the support she is giving our campaign."

Posted by lois at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2008

Center for Public Integrity: Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims

January 23, 2008
Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of claims, mostly discredited since then, linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or warning that he possessed forbidden weapons.

The Center for Public Integrity, a research group that focuses on ethics in government and public policy, designed the new Web site to allow simple searches for specific phrases, such as “mushroom cloud” or “yellowcake uranium,” in transcripts and documents totaling some 380,000 words, including remarks by President Bush and most of his top advisers in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Warnings about the need to confront Iraq, by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and two White House press secretaries, among others, can be combed line by line, and reviewed alongside detailed critiques published after the fact by official panels, historians, journalists and independent experts.

There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

The database is online at www.publicintegrity.org.

Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the research center say their work has documented “at least 935 false statements” on hundreds of occasions, particularly that Iraq had unconventional weapons, links to Al Qaeda, or both.

The database shows how even after the invasion, when a consensus emerged that the prewar intelligence assessments were flawed, administration officials occasionally suggested that the weapons might still be found.

The officials have defended many of their prewar statements as having been based on the intelligence that was available at the time — although there is now evidence that some statements contradicted even the sketchy intelligence of the time.

President Bush said in 2005 that “much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong” but that “it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Posted by lois at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2008

NY Times: Can Foundations Take the Long View Again?

The New York Times
January 6, 2008
Re:Framing
Can Foundations Take the Long View Again?
By DENISE CARUSO

AS business leaders like Ted Turner, Bill Gates and George Soros have moved vast swaths of their private wealth into the philanthropic sector, market expertise has migrated there, too. As a result, foundation directors, trustees and advisers from corporate America have taken a stance that the return on charitable dollars should be tangible and measurable, and should drive capital flow in much the same way that earnings figures do in commerce.

But a small and increasingly vocal group of foundation leaders is challenging the benefits of this approach.

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a huge push for private philanthropy to be more accountable and to spend more time being goal-driven,” said Kathleen Enright, the executive director of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, a Washington-based coalition of foundations that promotes ways to improve nonprofit results.

Advisers and trustees compelled foundations to redirect their unrestricted grants to more discrete, short-term projects — for example, distributing mosquito nets in malaria regions — that would deliver a measurable bang for the buck.

“The reason the nonprofit sector exists at all is because it can fund and invest in social issues that the for-profit market can’t touch because they can’t be measured,” said Paul Shoemaker, a former Microsoft employee and entrepreneur who is now executive director of the Seattle affiliate of Social Venture Partners International, a philanthropic network. “The nonprofit ‘market’ is not designed to be efficient in that way. Yet we’re applying the same efficiency metrics to both sectors.”

As a consequence, when foundations switched to project-based accounting, they forced grantees to sacrifice long-term effectiveness for short-term efficiency, Ms. Enright said. Nonprofits could no longer afford to focus on important strategic activities like advocacy or working for social change, which require “deep resources and the ability to change tactics overnight if the situation demands it,” she said.

In addition, critics say, project-based funding allows grantees to collect only a fraction of their real overhead costs. According to “In Search of Impact,” a 2006 study of foundation grant-making practices from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, foundation chief executives will allow a nonprofit to add only 10 to 30 percent of direct project costs for overhead. Some refuse to provide any operational costs at all.

The financial strain knocks many promising nonprofits out of business.

“Everyone is managing against the perception that nonprofits are supposed to be low-cost and low-overhead,” said Thomas Tierney, chairman and co-founder of the Bridgespan Group, a Boston-based consultancy and search firm for nonprofits that was founded at Bain & Company. The only way for nonprofits to increase their working capital is to take on more projects, which in turn keeps increasing the amount of capital they need — a “vicious cycle that perpetually starves them of capacity,” Mr. Tierney said.

The issue is not a lack of charitable capital. In 2005, grant-making foundations distributed more than $36 billion on assets of $550 billion, up from grants of $1.94 billion on assets of just over $30 billion in 1975, according to the Foundation Center, an organization based in New York that maintains a comprehensive database on the philanthropic sector in the United States.

Based on its data, the Center for Effective Philanthropy concluded that the present situation was limiting the effectiveness of those charitable dollars. After surveying nearly 20,000 grantees of 163 foundations and interviewing 79 foundation chief executives and 26 leaders of nonprofits, it recommended that to maximize the impact on grant recipients, foundations “should make larger, longer-term operating grants” of unrestricted funds that can be used to support the organization and its overall mission, not just specific projects or programs.

Two other recent publications reached the same conclusion: the “General Operating Support Action Guide” for foundations, published by the Grantmakers group in July 2007; and “Daring to Lead 2006,” a survey of nearly 2,000 nonprofit executives conducted by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation.

Their findings echo the experiences of a handful of foundations at the vanguard of the movement to provide more operating support to charities over the last 10 years. They include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Philadelphia Foundation, the Whitman Institute and organizations like Social Venture Partners.

These grant makers have successfully shown that providing nonprofits with operating support “does not mean forking over tens of thousands of dollars and relinquishing expectations for results,” the Grantmakers’ report said.

Instead, they have built due diligence and accountability measures into their agreements that go much deeper than simple project budgets and reports.

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York, for example, has created a detailed system for evaluating results of general operating support grants to organizations that work to improve the lives of low-income youths.

David Hunter, the former director of assessment at the foundation, said in an interview published in the Grantmakers’ report that agreements between the Clark foundation and its grantees include specific milestones that are clear indicators of progress. They include benefits for the youths who benefit from the nonprofit’s charitable work, not just “process milestones for the organization.”

Each of the three reports concluded that general operating support yielded better results for foundations and grantees alike, particularly as larger grants are offered over a longer period.

Yet in 2005, according to the Foundation Center, only 20 percent of grants from the largest private and community foundations were designated for general operating support. A majority of foundation leaders polled in the studies acknowledged that unrestricted operating funds were better and more effective for grantees. But they continue to focus their grant-making on project support, they said, because they prefer its clear-cut results and because their boards often mandate project support as a way to show a foundation’s prominence in a specific funding area.

WHILE this may be good for a foundation’s image, Ms. Enright said, it can turn nonprofits into glorified vendors that provide only the services the foundation requests, sapping the sector of both passion and innovation.

“The presumption is that the donor knows more about how to address a given problem than its grantees, and I think that’s usually not a correct presumption,” she said. “More operating support can shift the locus of action and ideas to the people who are closest to the problem.”

Denise Caruso is executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which studies collaborative problem-solving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/business/06frame.html?ei=5070&en=d0c154fe833571a9&ex=1200286800&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2007

Race and the nation's income gap

Race and the nation's income gap
By RHONDA SOTO

Op-ed. Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA 12/03/2007

African-Americans have broken two new barriers, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project. Almost half the children of middle-class blacks have fallen into the lowest income bracket in the last 30 years, the first generation in a century to lose so much ground. And for the first time, a majority of African-Americans polled say that blacks are responsible for their own economic situations, and that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have become more different over the last generation.

Yeah, right, it's the values. Those middle-class African-Americans whose children are now in poverty - rotten parents, every one of them. While going out to work every day, they were obviously telling their children not to do the same. The black unemployment rate in October was double the white unemployment, 8.5 percent versus 4.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employers of all races, with their superior values, no doubt rejected those black pavement-pounders because they could see the poor work ethic a mile away. The quarter million drop in the number of U.S. jobs in October, and all the offshore outsourcing of the last decade, must be "a poor black values thing."

It was poor black values that led neighborhoods of color to be targeted by predatory lenders. It wasn't the secondary mortgage industry that started the current tsunami of foreclosures now evicting people, disproportionately black and Latino - it was the homeowners' bad values. Higher interest rates charged to borrowers of color with identical credit ratings are obviously payback for their poor behavior. And the mostly white executives who made millions off discriminatory sub-prime lending? They deserved that reward for their exemplary moral character.

The drop in unionization from 20 percent to 12 percent in the last 25 years wouldn't have happened, and the American labor force would not have lost 265,000 black union workers, if those workers' values had been better. The professional union-busting consulting firms who advised companies how to illegally fire pro-union workers - they're role models of the American work ethic.

Similarly, the mostly white members of Congress increased their own paychecks over $50,000 with multiple raises since 1990 while blocking an increase in the minimum wage for a record-breaking decade. And the mostly all-white billionaires on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans who are $290 billion richer than last year - they must have the finest values of all.

Prison sentences are longer for blacks and Latinos than whites convicted of the same crime because judges can just see the difference in moral fiber between defendants of different races. And of course employers and health insurance companies are not insuring 7.2 million black people - nearly 20 percent - because their moral failings have made them too sickly.

The re-segregation of schools, and the widening gap in class sizes and per-pupil spending between mostly white and mostly black schools? The rollback of affirmative action in higher education? All due to the character flaws of African-American students.

Are values really the explanation for the racial income gap? Or do we too often assume that the American dream of equal opportunity is a reality? Do we overlook growing structural obstacles that block the path of some more than others among us?

Employed African-Americans on average work more hours per week than employed white people. Blacks are slightly less likely than whites to use illegal drugs. They are more likely to be affiliated with a religious congregation. Poll after poll shows no difference between races in attitudes toward education, paid work, or expectations for children's advancement. Where are these famous bad values?

As a former teacher I know that some young people have self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. Far more young people have talent, ambition and a work ethic that go underutilized, especially working-class youth of color in this "have and have-nots" economy.

We as people of color are used to noticing racism and putting it into words. We're less accustomed to naming classism - but it's rampant among middle-class people of color. Is this what racial progress has come to: more middle-class blacks taking up the previously white sport of blaming the victim?

Rhonda Soto is the race/class intersections project coordinator at Class Action, a national nonprofit based in Hadley.

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=69844&CSAuthResp=119
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Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2007

Pew Research Center: Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class. Optimism about Black Progress Declines

Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class
Optimism about Black Progress Declines

November 13, 2007

African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks, and nearly four-in-ten say that because of the diversity within their community, blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.

The new nationwide Pew Research Center survey also finds blacks less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983. Looking backward, just one-in-five blacks say things are better for blacks now than they were five years ago. Looking ahead, fewer than half of all blacks (44%) say they think life for blacks will get better in the future, down from the 57% who said so in a 1986 survey.

Whites have a different perspective. While they, too, have grown less sanguine about black progress, they are nearly twice as likely as blacks to see black gains in the past five years. Also, a majority of whites (56%) say life for blacks in this country will get better in the future.

Telephone interviews for this survey were conducted among a nationally representative sample of 3,086 adults from September 5-October 6, 2007. African Americans and Hispanics were over-sampled - a total of 1007 interviews were completed with blacks, and 388 with Hispanics.

Other key findings include:

* Asked whether blacks can still be thought of as a single race, given the increasing diversity within the black community, 53% of blacks say they can, but 37% of blacks say they cannot.
* Big gaps in perception between blacks and whites emerge on many topics. For example, blacks believe that anti-black discrimination is still pervasive in everyday life; whites disagree. And blacks have far less confidence than whites in the basic fairness of the criminal justice system.
* But there are also areas of agreement. For example, blacks and whites concur that there has been a convergence in the values held by blacks and whites. On the popular culture front, large majorities of both blacks and whites say that rap and hip hop have a bad influence on society.
* Blacks and whites express very little overt racial animosity. As they have for decades, about eight-in-ten members of each racial group express a favorable view about members of the other group. More than eight-in-ten adults in each group also say they know a person of a different race whom they consider a friend.
* The most newsworthy African American figure in politics today - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama - draws broadly (though not intensely felt) favorable ratings from both blacks and whites. But blacks are more inclined to say that his race will detract from his chances to be elected president; whites are more inclined to say his relative inexperience will hurt his chances.
* Three-quarters of blacks (76%) say that Obama is a good influence on the black community. Even greater numbers say this about Oprah Winfrey (87%) and Bill Cosby (85%), who are the most highly regarded by blacks from among 14 black newsmakers tested in this survey. By contrast, just 17% of blacks say that rap artist 50 Cent is a good influence.
* Over the past two decades, blacks have lost some confidence in the effectiveness of leaders within their community, including national black political figures, the clergy, and the NAACP. A sizable majority of blacks still see all of these groups as either very or somewhat effective, but the number saying "very" effective has declined since 1986.
* A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.
* On the issue of immigration, blacks and whites agree that most immigrants work harder than most blacks and most whites at low-wage jobs. Also, blacks are less inclined now than they were two decades ago to say that blacks would have more jobs if there were fewer immigrants.
http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/700/black-public-opinion graphs at this page

http://pewsocialtrends.org/assets/pdf/Race.pdf the complete report

Posted by lois at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2007

Denver Post: Path to justice unclear. Empower the tribes, or beef up the federal role? Each side has its own history of failure.

Path to justice unclear
LAST IN A SERIES: Empower the tribes, or beef up the federal role? Each side has its own history of failure.

The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 11/14/2007

BROWNING, MONT. ‹ On a bitter February morning four years ago, a well-armed federal SWAT team rolled across the cheat-grass prairie of Montana's Blackfeet reservation on a mission to re-establish order in a lawless land. They started by firing the entire tribal-run police force - such as it was. In truth, the tribe's slipshod police had long ago ceased to be much of a deterrent. Serious crimes routinely went uninvestigated. In one notorious incident, a prisoner released from jail unsupervised to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting instead went to the house of a former girlfriend, where he beat and raped her.

Promising to hire more officers, modernize the jail and enforce the rule of law, the takeover of police powers by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheered by many residents on this 1-million-acre reservation. Fast forward four years and many of those residents say the situation has, if anything, gotten worse: Under federal control, a promised force of 32 uniformed officers has fallen to just 12. The jail is still a mess. Nearly 200 criminal charges were dismissed from tribal court last year because federal police never finished an arrest report.

For anyone looking for a comprehensive solution to the public-safety crisis plaguing the country's Indian reservations, the episode is telling. To those who complain that federal authorities do a poor job and that tribes should run their own full- fledged justice systems like cities or states, skeptics can point to examples of incompetent tribal police forces or meddling by tribal leaders in the affairs of their courts and cops. To those who argue that only the feds have the resources and expertise to solve the enormous public- safety crisis in Indian Country, there is a long history of underfunding, lack of attention and the federal government's own stunning failures.

So those are the horns of the dilemma: There is little doubt that the current system, which severely limits the law-enforcement powers of American Indians on their own land and makes the federal government solely responsible for prosecuting felony crime on reservations, is badly flawed. Tribes have been complaining about it for years. And many in the federal government, including key Washington lawmakers, agree it doesn't work. "I think what's going on is appalling. ... The option of doing nothing is not an option. We have to solve this problem," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Two popular paths considered

But finding a way to do that is another matter.
Most agree it means one of two paths. Either pour in significant new federal resources to better fight reservation crime or rewrite federal Indian law to give tribes more authority to do the job themselves - allowing them to prosecute felony crime, for one; giving them jurisdiction over non-Indians, for another.

The first would mean diverting Justice Department resources from high-priority efforts such as anti-terrorism to vast and isolated Indian reservations with stunning crime problems but few voters. The second would be costly, legally complex and politically dicey.

For as bad as the status quo is, any comprehensive solution that enhances the legal authority of tribes holds risks for leaders on both sides.

Lawmakers from Western states face strong pressures from white communities that border reservations not to cede jurisdiction over their residents even on tribal land. And tribal governments' own spotty record in exercising the limited authority they have gives plenty of others pause.

In one case in New Mexico three years ago, the tribal chairwoman of the Jicarilla (hick-a-ree-ya) Apache asked for federal help to investigate corruption in the tribe's police force - including accusations of sexual assault against female prisoners - and was summarily fired by her own tribal council. In another in Washington state, the governing council of the Spokane tribe responded to claims by a federal investigator that he had uncovered a web of tribal police corruption by demanding he be transferred. The agent's bosses in Washington complied.

For their part, many tribal officials aren't eager to trade the political points easily made decrying lousy federal law enforcement for the massive task of fixing the crime problem on reservations themselves. "It's beautiful to have someone else to blame, but tribes don't necessarily want to take it on themselves," said Kevin Washburn, a Minnesota law professor and a member of the Oklahoma Chickasaw, who advocates giving tribes more criminal jurisdiction.

"I've thought that here I am, saying what I think is all these important things about Indian Country criminal justice, and people are going to rally behind everything I say. And that hasn't necessarily happened."

As those forces have slowed reform, the result has been a peculiar Washington ritual: At least once a decade for the past 30 years, a blue-ribbon commission or congressional hearings cite the breakdown of public safety on reservations, without being able to muster the political momentum necessary to solve it.

There has been some progress. Since a Clinton administration task force cited a "public safety crisis in Indian Country" in 1997, Congress has steadily increased funding for Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement programs through the Department of the Interior, more than doubling it to $201 million over 10 years. That money pays for patrol officers and tribal police investigators on most reservations.

But staffs were so low to begin with that a 2006 BIA analysis found that the number of police officers protecting reservations is still 42 percent below the minimum necessary.

New lines of authority proposed

Now, advocates for comprehensive reform believe there is a new window of opportunity. An Amnesty International report earlier this year blamed the jurisdictional maze for high rates of domestic violence and rape suffered by American Indian women. Spurred by the report, lawmakers on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee are preparing a bipartisan reform bill they hope will finally rein in the public-safety crisis roiling Indian lands.

If passed, it would reshape lines of authority on reservations for the first time in decades, giving Indians some law enforcement authority over non-Indians accused of sexual or domestic crimes on tribal lands - a major complaint of some tribes today.

"To the extent that the federal government is willing to return jurisdiction over non-Indians to Indian tribes right now, it may be because they know they're doing a bad job and are tired of getting yelled at," said Virginia Davis of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), a lobbying group for the tribes in Washington.

Some longtime observers are skeptical.

Ted Quasula, former Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement chief, was part of the previous reform effort during the Clinton administration. He remembers sitting in the same hearings a decade ago, dissecting the same problems.

The result was an administration proposal to double Justice Department funding for reservation law enforcement programs - the biggest increase in history and one that would have hired 500 more tribal police officers, 30 more FBI agents and 33 new federal prosecutors who focus solely on reservation crime.

Congress funded just 60 percent of the request in the first year. Some of the prosecutors ended up being used for other priorities, insiders say, and the number of dedicated Indian Country FBI agents has increased by just 12. Despite millions of dollars spent to build new tribal prisons, the unmet need is still $400 million, a recent analysis found.

And this year, none of four major Justice Department grant programs directed at reservations - money for prisons, police, tribal courts and youth crime prevention - are funded in President Bush's 2008 budget request. (Though Congress has restored a portion of the the programs' combined total budget of $42 million, that appropriations bill faces a veto threat.)

"For a lot of (lawmakers), it's out of sight, out of mind - it's-not-my-problem sort of thing," said Sen. John Thune, the South Dakota Republican who recently offered an amendment to provide $20 million to U.S. attorneys to boost reservation prosecutions. The amendment failed in a vote. "I'm not saying people just tune it out. There just isn't a groundswell out there," he said.

Still, Thune believes that the problems are desperate and getting worse. The rich profits from casino gambling that have poured in for some tribes over the past 10 years have created a Native American renaissance of sorts, but there are other forces - just as powerful - pulling the other way. Meth - a scourge in much of the rural West - has hit reservations especially hard, feeding a wave of crime and violence that's shaken some tribes to the bone. American Indian gangs are also on the rise.

Statistics from the Indian Health Service in 2003, the latest available, show that the chances of an Indian living on a reservation being murdered is more than double that of the average American. An adult male on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota can expect to live to just 57 years old - 17 years less than the national average.

So distant from the political calculations of Washington, tribal and federal law enforcement officials are taking things into their own hands: Small, sometimes desperate steps, those involved point out, but better than nothing.

Members of the Lummi tribe in Washington state recently burned the house of drug dealer to the ground, a ritual act of communal justice.

Many others - the San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa in North Dakota and the Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina among them - have aggressively revived the practice of banishment - forbidding tribal members or non-Indians who have broken certain laws from entering the reservation. It's a civil process not limited by the restrictions on tribal criminal courts.

Different view in Colorado

Ultimately, Colorado's top federal law-enforcement officer says, the only real solution is something much more sweeping. Troy Eid, Colorado's U.S. attorney, has turned into one of the Justice Department's most vocal advocates for jettisoning much of its current role on reservations. It's more simple than it sounds, he says. Eid has called for transferring to American Indian tribes wholesale authority for prosecuting felony crime over all suspects, Indian and non-Indian alike.

The system he envisions would be optional. Those tribes that wanted the responsibility would opt in. And in exchange, the tribes would have to upgrade their legal codes and judicial systems, agreeing to meet strict benchmarks designed to guarantee individual rights.

"I look at this issue something like the reunification of Germany," Eid said. "They used to say it was absolutely impossible for East Germany to come back into the West without massive dislocation and unthinkable cost. But you know, it's been done."

The scale of the job implied by the metaphor may be closer to the mark than Eid intends: Many tribal judges and prosecutors now at work don't have law degrees. Tribal legal codes are often out of date or incomplete. Suspects on most reservations have a right to a defense attorney only if they can pay for one.

Federal prosecutors quietly concede that weak cases that should fall under their jurisdiction are routinely sent instead through tribal court, where guilty verdicts are easier to obtain.

"The tribal council appoints the judges and the courts, and they don't have to have experience in legal matters. And as appointees, there is political sway there. Those are all problems," said Thune, who as a South Dakota senator represents not only some of the country's largest reservations but also many adjacent communities worried about the vagaries of tribal justice. And then there is the question of who would pay for it.

Davis, the NCAI lobbyist, said that as much as tribes want the kind of law enforcement powers that cities and states have, running those systems is incredibly expensive. Police forces and courts would have to be overhauled. And hundreds of millions of dollars in new prisons would have to be built. The tribes that need it the most don't have the money. Many that do believe that paying the cost is part of the trust responsibility the federal government assumed when it took Indian lands.

"Of course they're not going to pay for it," said Philip S. Deloria, director of the American Indian Law Center in Albuquerque and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux. "It may be a mandate that the Indians have been begging for, but no matter. There's your headline. 'Inconsistency discovered in Indian position,' a brand- new thing in politics."

More important, Deloria said, even with significant federal help there are only a handful of tribes that could ever muster the resources and expertise to handle felony crime. While it's a great applause line, he says, significantly expanding American Indian law enforcement authority would most likely leave the problem on most reservations untouched.

"What most people overlook is that 70 percent of tribes are 1,000 people or fewer. We're not talking about the Navajo police system, where they can afford undercover officers," he said. "We're talking about Andy and Barney. You give Andy and Barney felony jurisdiction over everyone in Mayberry, and what are they going to do?"

Small steps in Senate bill

The Indian Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate is currently drawing up a bill that takes a different approach: Combining limited expansion in tribal jurisdiction with an effort to push the feds to be more effective at pursing Indian Country crime.

Politically more viable - in part because it is less sweeping - that approach largely has the support of the NCAI, the tribes' primary lobbying group in Washington.

But even supporters concede that it represents a series of small steps in the face of what is admittedly a problem of staggering dimensions.

Jurisdictionally, a pilot program would expand the power of tribes to include misdemeanor criminal authority over non-Indians who commit domestic or sexual violence on reservation lands, an early summary of the bill indicates.

Tribes would gain no jurisdiction over felony crime. And a non-Indian convicted of rape could serve at most a year in tribal jails. But supporters say it would give tribes a powerful tool to address at least one chronic
problem: domestic violence committed by non-Indians who live on reservations.

On the federal side, the bill would create a series of benchmarks against which the performance of federal investigators and prosecutors responsible for the most serious reservation crime could be judged. And tribal prosecutors could be appointed as special assistant U.S. attorneys, allowing them to bring reservation cases in federal court.

"This is a really complicated system and there are a whole lot of different approaches you could take to fixing it, and our hope is that if you do enough of those at the same time, it will make a meaningful difference," the NCAI's Davis said.

But even the political prospects of that effort are uncertain. Any expansion of tribal authority over non-Indians is likely to be a tough sell in the Senate, and an early, more expansive jurisdictional proposal has been whittled to a pilot program.

"The only chance I've got to pass legislation is if I can put legislation together that has pretty broad support," said Dorgan, who expects a bill to be ready by February.

And while the bill could reauthorize and even increase the budgets for dozens of programs meant to bolster reservation law enforcement, that's no guarantee the money will ever leave federal coffers. Longtime observers point out that many of the best efforts in the past were authorized but never fully funded, habitual losers in Congress' Byzantine appropriations process.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Colorado's former senator, views those failures with the cynical eye of a lawmaker who, on this issue at least, was often on the losing side.

As the former head of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Campbell said he spent endless hours talking and negotiating with his fellow senators over the problem of public safety on tribal lands. He tried for years to strengthen the authority of tribal courts, always without luck. "I tried over and over," Campbell said. "But it goes back to old prejudices. 'I don't trust those Indians. I'm not going to let them try me.' "There is still a lot of latent prejudice out there just under the surface," he said. "I think it prevents any meaningful change." Always "a niche issue"

Doris Meissner, who was part of a Ford administration effort to examine the Justice Department's enforcement role on reservations long before she gained prominence as Bill Clinton's immigration chief, insists you don't need racism to explain the failures. You only need the tried-and-true math of power politics.

After months spent touring reservations, listening to the complaints of tribal authorities and crime victims, that effort in the 1970s ended with only minimal tinkering, none of it focused on the problem of criminal enforcement. The only significant change was a new section in the Justice Department to represent tribes' interest in civil litigation.

"We talked to a lot of people about the criminal side," Meissner said, "and we discussed it in our report in exactly the same way people are talking
now: There are insufficient resources available from the community itself; the FBI has lots of other demands on its time; it's not a priority for the U.S. attorneys."

But "we are a system where those voices that can be backed up by votes at the ballot box are going to be the ones that prevail, and that's never been the case with Native Americans."

"It's a little along the lines of trying to get the vote for (Washington) D.C.," she said. "No matter how compelling it is, it always ends up being a niche issue."
http://origin.denverpost.com/ci_7454999

Posted by lois at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2007

Funding Received for Musical Instruments for Prisoners

Funding Received for Musical Instruments for Prisoners

The Prisons Foundation, in conjunction with the England based Jail Guitar Doors project (http://www.jailguitardoors.org.uk/), has received funding to purchase guitars to be sent to prisons and jails in the United States where they will be utilized by prisoners. If you know of any jail or prison whose prisoners could benefit from participation in this program, please ask a representative of that institution to email Joe Shade, coordinator of the program at joeyshade@gmail.com

Posted by lois at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2007

NYC: Study Finds Disparities in Subprime Mortgages by Race

October 15, 2007
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
NY Times

Study Finds Disparities in Mortgages by Race
Home buyers in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City were more likely to get their mortgages last year from a subprime lender than home buyers in white neighborhoods with similar income levels, according to a new analysis of home loan data by researchers at New York University.

The analysis, by N.Y.U.’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, illustrates stark racial differences between the New York City neighborhoods where subprime mortgages — which can come with higher interest rates, fees and penalties — were common and those where they were rare. The 10 neighborhoods with the highest rates of mortgages from subprime lenders had black and Hispanic majorities, and the 10 areas with the lowest rates were mainly non-Hispanic white.

The analysis showed that even when median income levels were comparable, home buyers in minority neighborhoods were more likely to get a loan from a subprime lender.

In Jamaica, Queens, for example, where the majority is black and the median household income was $45,000 in 2005, 46 percent of the mortgages were issued by lenders who specialize in subprime loans, the second highest rate in the city. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which had a median income of $50,000 and is mostly white, the rate was among the lowest in the city, with 3.6 percent of home loans coming from subprime lenders.

The analysis provides only a limited picture of subprime borrowing in New York City. The data does not include details on borrowers’ assets, down payments or debt loads, all key factors in mortgage lending. And comparing neighborhoods is inexact; the typical borrower in one may differ from a typical borrower in another.

Jay Brinkmann, an economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association, said there was not enough information in the Furman Center analysis and other studies on the issue to draw conclusions about whether subprime lenders were discriminating against minority home buyers. One of the crucial missing pieces is the credit histories of individual borrowers, he said.

But the Furman Center study, a summary of which is being released today, still raises questions about the role of race in lending practices. A separate analysis of mortgage data by The New York Times shows that even at higher income levels, black borrowers in New York City were far more likely than white borrowers with similar incomes and mortgage amounts to receive a subprime loan.

“It’s almost as if subprime lenders put a circle around neighborhoods of color and say, ‘This is where we're going to do our thing,’” said Robert Stroup, a lawyer and the director of the economic justice program at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.

The New York State Division of Human Rights is investigating whether subprime lenders have been engaging in discriminatory practices by singling out minority communities.

The Furman Center analysis is based on 2006 data that lenders disclosed under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.

The study focused on mortgages issued by lenders identified by federal housing officials as subprime specialists in 2005. The list is made up of 210 companies, including major mortgage lenders like HSBC Mortgage Services and CitiFinancial, the consumer finance unit of Citigroup. But some lenders not included in the list may issue subprime loans, and not every loan made by the specialized lenders is subprime.

Even so, housing and civil rights advocates said the findings highlight lending patterns that have long troubled them.

They say minority communities whose financing needs were starved decades ago because of redlining — banks’ refusal to offer loans or other services in minority areas — are now singled out for high-cost, high-risk mortgages in a kind of reverse redlining.

Any loan that carried an interest rate more than 3 percentage points above the prevailing rate for long-term Treasury bonds was considered a subprime mortgage. In 2006, Treasury rates ranged from 4.5 to 5.3 percent. Prime mortgage interest rates averaged 6.1 to 6.8 percent, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.

Subprime loans are typically made to borrowers with credit histories that the mortgage industry considers less than prime. They can carry higher interest rates than traditional loans or adjustable rates that can make the mortgage difficult to repay once the interest rate resets. They can also carry higher fees and prepayment penalties and thus are at a high risk for foreclosure.

Kumiki Gibson, the commissioner of the State Division of Human Rights, acknowledged last week that her agency was investigating subprime lenders, but she said she could not discuss the details. “There was enough data to compel us to look into this,” Ms. Gibson said.

She said a variety of lending practices and patterns could be considered unlawful discrimination, like a mortgage broker who works only in certain neighborhoods or who offers white borrowers better rates than similarly qualified black or Hispanic customers. Many mortgages are handled by brokers who work as a liaison between borrowers and lenders and earn a fee

The N.A.A.C.P. filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles this year against 12 mortgage lenders. The lawsuit accuses the companies of steering black borrowers into subprime loans.

An analysis by The Times of the 2006 data that lenders disclosed under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act shows that in New York City, the rate of subprime lending is far higher for minorities than for whites even at higher income levels. For example, 24 percent of non-Hispanic white borrowers earning $125,000 to $150,000 took out a subprime mortgage in 2006, compared with 52 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent of non-Hispanic blacks in the same income range.

For borrowers earning $150,000 to $250,000, the rate of subprime loans was 20 percent for whites, 50 percent for Hispanics and 62 percent for blacks. That analysis looked at all mortgages reported to the federal government, not just those issued by companies identified as subprime lenders.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development also analyzed the federal mortgage data and found that last year, 58.5 percent of home loans to non-Hispanic black borrowers were high cost, compared to 15.9 percent for non-Hispanic whites. The percentage of loans to Hispanics that were high cost was 45.5.

Subprime lending, which has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, has made it possible for many New Yorkers with modest incomes and poor credit histories to buy homes. At the same time, those loans have brought some borrowers to the brink of financial ruin or cost them their homes.

Some economists and analysts said examining subprime lending by geography and race could be misleading because of the many variables not represented in the data, including the lack of banking services in some minority communities and historical differences in wealth and income among racial and ethnic groups.

“There certainly is a disgraceful element here, but how big it is, we don’t know,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, who looked at a portion of the Furman Center analysis. “Is it a few rogue lenders, or is it an extensive problem that requires a regulatory response? We don’t know yet.”

The Furman Center’s findings appear to echo recent studies from a number of local and national housing and fair-lending organizations that found racial disparities in subprime lending, high-cost mortgages and foreclosures.

A study by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group based in North Carolina, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings. A report released in March by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and other groups found that in New York, blacks were five times and Hispanics almost four times more likely to pay higher interest rates for home loans than whites.

“There’s no question that if you live in a predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhood you’re going to be paying more for your mortgage,” said Sarah Ludwig, executive director of the nonprofit Advocacy Project, which is based in New York.

The Furman Center analysis showed that subprime lending remained widespread in New York. Last year, 19.8 percent of home purchase loans in the city were from subprime lenders, a higher percentage than in San Francisco (8.4 percent), Boston (14.2 percent) and Chicago (15.9 percent). Los Angeles had a rate higher than New York’s, at 25 percent.

New York City’s subprime lending rate decreased by 3 percentage points between 2005 and 2006, but the rate was far higher than it was in 2002, when only 7 percent of loans were subprime, according to the Furman Center.

None of the predominantly white neighborhoods in the Furman Center analysis had a lending rate from subprime companies higher than the overall city rate of 19.8 percent, while numerous black and Hispanic areas did.

In the Middle Village and Ridgewood sections of Queens, both of which have white majorities and had a median income of $47,820 in 2005, 16.7 percent of the loans were issued by subprime lenders. In the Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend areas of Brooklyn, which also are mostly white and had a median income of $40,000, 10.8 percent of the mortgages were from subprime companies. Majority black and Hispanic neighborhoods with median incomes of $40,000 to $50,000 had far higher rates, including East Flatbush, where 44 percent of the loans were from subprime companies, and Queens Village (34.6 percent).

Ford Fessenden contributed reporting
Graphic at this URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/nyregion/15subprime.html?em&ex=1192593600&en=608a506e2d53dc4c&ei=5087%0A

Posted by lois at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2007

Poetry Contest

Poetry Contest...
The contest is for prisoners, ex-prisoners, family members or friends of someone in prison, any prison guards, prison volunteer, or prison worker. We are looking for poetry that describes an event, the feelings and/or the life of being involved in prison.

First Place is $250.00, Second Place: $100.00, and Third Place: $75.00.

If you would like more information about this contest please log on at: www.shotcallerpress.com And, click on the Poetry link.

If you have any further questions please feel free to contact me.
Theresa M. Huggins
CEO, Shot Caller Press, LLC
theresa@shotcallerpress.com

Posted by lois at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2007

"The House That Herman Built" opens Oct. 11th at Artist's Space in NYC

The House That Herman Built opens in the Campari Project Gallery, Artist's Space, October 10th from 5-7:30, the show will run until the the middle of December. Included in the installation is the CAD video, several drawings by Herman and Jackie, a life-sized recreation of Herman's current cell, the working blueprints by Urbanist Scott Gustafson, a timeline documenting Herman and Jackie's lives designed by Maria Hinds. and they are launching the second printing of the book, The House That Herman Built*. October 10th officially kicks off the fundraising campaign to build Herman's House in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Artist's Space has been kind enough to fly Miss Vikkie, Herman's sister up for the opening, so please come support her, and a film crew will be present- so wear your finest threads:). The exhibition is dedicated to the loving memory of Dame Anita Roddick, and to the fight for justice in Jena Louisiana.

Artist's Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10012

More information is available at www.HermansHouse.org www.artistsspace.org

For the West Coasters, currently the CAD video of Hermans House is also being screened in Palo Alto, at the " A Model Building" exhibition, Palo Alto Center for the Arts, 1313 Newell Road.

Posted by lois at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2007

Zero Tolerance - it's the American way

"The unhappiest consequence of Zero Tolerance, however, may be the rise of Generation ZT, children born beginning in the Reagan/Bush '80s, now the sacrificial lambs of Zero Tolerance and, paradoxically, as they have entered the workforce, its most loyal servants."

San Francisco Chronicle

Zero Tolerance - it's the American way
Richard Rapaport
Sunday, September 30, 2007

Does it feel like nobody listens anymore? That everyone is tuned into their own channel? That people in your daily life are working from some secret script designed to degrade and disenfranchise you? Welcome to ZT America. ZT, or Zero Tolerance, is the mind-set and rationale used these days to justify actions ranging from the expulsion of elementary school students for bringing alcohol-based mouthwash to school, to the sentencing of a Virginia mother to two years in prison for serving beer to her 16-year-old son and his classmates at a party.

Zero Tolerance has been invoked against a kaleidoscope of recent allegedly anti-social behaviors: Republican colleagues of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig clawed each other raw to declare Zero Tolerance for his alleged misdeeds in the men's room at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Zero Tolerance was on the faces of University of Florida police as they Tasered student Andrew Meyer during a speech by John Kerry. Meyer's imbecilic behavior, in fact, illustrated his own Zero Tolerance for the time and opinions of others.

ZT is in the American political bloodstream. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush declared Zero Tolerance for looters. Trying to defuse the crisis in California prisons, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced Zero Tolerance for "gang-related codes of silence." Mothers Against Drunk Driving avows to-the-death Zero Tolerance for underage drinking. The Defense Department proclaims ZT for sexual harassment.

Zero Tolerance has become a featured player in the American judicial pageant. Its tenets justify draconian overcharging and Methuselah-like jail terms. Zero Tolerance has helped transform American justice into an incarceration machine largely free from human interference or humane inference. ZT justice absolves officials from accusations of weakness on crime, while jailing people in record numbers. According to a recent Justice Department report, the United States now has the world's largest prison population and highest rate of incarceration, with 1 in 32 American adults enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

Like water hyacinth, the pestiferous houseplant invading Southern lakes and streams, Zero Tolerance is taking over the national fishpond, choking out once-treasured values like compassion, discretion and inventiveness. Over the past four decades, Zero Tolerance has metastasized from drug enforcement, to policing, into the court system, the public schools and now, perhaps worst of all, into the American social mainstream.

The institutionalization of Zero Tolerance policies signals the triumph of a bureaucratic mind-set more obstinately retrograde than the once-derided French or German models. I mean, have you been at the counter inside a Barnes & Noble, in line at the Century 20 ticket kiosk, or checking into a doctor's office, and asked for a slight bending of the house rules? Not this time, chump.

Nor does it take a genius to explain why Zero Tolerance is transforming America into "The Land Mercy Forgot." Zero Tolerance is, after all, the logical and syntactical equivalent of Total Intolerance. How unfortunate that there was no warning that we toiled under a system that has sanctioned total intolerance across the breadth of national life.

Originally culled from the engineering lexicon, Zero Tolerance first saw light in 1971, a PR slogan promulgated by New York public health officials who failed to detect tainted baby food in an upstate processing plant. In 1973, as Watergate's noose tightened, Nixon Justice Department officials appropriated Zero Tolerance as a tough-on-crime anodyne. In the early 1980s, the Navy adopted Zero Tolerance to add puissance to a purge of seagoing potheads. From there, it entered civilian drug enforcement and then spilled over into the general justice system, prospering as that ZT subspecies, Zero Tolerance for Crime, periodically trotted out to induce voters into backing law-and-order candidates.

In ZT America, God save the judge finding redemptive qualities in law-breakers. Creampuff sentencing is the Zero Tolerance equivalent of the scarlet "S," for Soft on Crime. Today, "victim's rights" organizations are twitching to replace "activist judges" with those favoring sentences that would have made Saddam Hussein blush. Having created a courtroom forum for victims and families, television now brings us a daily parade of the unmerciful, tasteless and overwrought, without seemingly a thought to the fading of John Adams' epochal instruction for "a nation of laws and not of men."

Discretion, once a tool of intelligent policing, has given way to drawn guns, takedowns and automatic arrest. Does anyone remember a time when a local cop might simply drive a tipsy taxpayer home? Not if MADD has anything to say about it. Zero Tolerance enforcement also sponsors a growing culture of entrapment that encourages the setups and stings that vacuum into the already full-to-bursting criminal justice system not the truly dangerous, but rather the merely stupid and weak.

The unhappiest consequence of Zero Tolerance, however, may be the rise of Generation ZT, children born beginning in the Reagan/Bush '80s, now the sacrificial lambs of Zero Tolerance and, paradoxically, as they have entered the workforce, its most loyal servants.

For these children of ZT, physiology is destiny: They are pudgy, raised indoors during the '90s Polly Klaas child-snatching hysteria. They are myopic, recipients of too much homework assigned too early. They walk hunched, from bulging book bags hefted after administrators sealed school lockers as potential drug magazines. Forbidden to explore local woods and instead accessories to parent-supervised play dates, they have little taste for solitude.

They are, however, anything but stupid. Beset on all sides, Generation ZT learned that a jesting lunchroom threat, a comb that looks like a switchblade, or a stick of caffeinated Jolt gum offered to a classmate could terminate Ivy League aspirations.

How much easier, then, to stifle the impulse to toilet-paper the assistant principal's car, or challenge the history teacher's lame Civil War interpretation. These days, however, any perceived act of resistance might bring the local police SWAT team charging through school's corridors. How much more practical to play it sly, pass through class without being the stuck-out nail pounded in by the hammer of Zero Tolerance. Yet, how sad to trim youthful sails to the winds of ZT at the age when gaudy mistakes are best made, the status quo mocked and hell generally raised.

Generation ZT has done few of those things. Having learned to love the subjugating rules required for success in the un-brave new world of Zero Tolerance, you can bet that their ascension up the American socio-economic ladder will mean an increasingly intolerant ZT eye cast on the often-unruly lives of the rest of us.

Richard Rapaport attempts to practice zero intolerance from his Bay Area home. E-mail him at jrap@aol.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/30/IN8OSEKD6.DTL

Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2007

San Quentin: A Prisoner With a Paintbrush, a Legacy at Risk

View the murals here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/08/17/arts/20070819_HALL_FEATURE.html

August 19, 2007
Art, NY Times 8-19-07
A Prisoner With a Paintbrush, a Legacy at Risk
By CHRISTOPHER HALL

San Quentin, Calif.

BEHIND the 150-year-old granite walls of San Quentin State Prison lies a brutal world of physical confinement and mind-numbing monotony, a place where violence constantly threatens. It is not a place where you expect to find beauty, and perhaps this best explains the dumbfounded reaction of a first-time visitor to the prison’s cavernous dining hall, where six epic murals — each measuring roughly 12 feet high by 100 feet long — depict a populist vision of California history.

V

Remarkably powerful and almost unknown to the outside world, the sepia-tone murals were created more than 50 years ago by a young Mexican-American prisoner who, after serving four years for possession of heroin, went on to a successful career as an artist. Painted mostly in a style that recalls Diego Rivera or Works Progress Administration murals from the 1930s, they almost certainly would have been protected long ago with a landmark designation if they were in a building to which the public had access. But hidden away in an overcrowded and decaying prison whose own fate is up in the air, the murals face an uncertain future.

The murals’ creator, Alfredo Santos, was 24 when he arrived at San Quentin in 1951 in the back of an ambulance. “I had a bum leg from an infection,” Mr. Santos, 80, said by telephone from San Diego, where he now lives on Social Security. “They put me in the convalescent wing, and the prison doc told me, ‘Keep quiet, kid, and I’ll let you stay here.’ ”

Mr. Santos, who had taken high school art classes until he was expelled from 10th grade for striking a teacher, remained in convalescent cells his entire prison stay. At first he read books voraciously, he said, and drew portraits of other inmates and, from photographs, their families. “I got paid a lot of cigarettes,” he recalled, referring to the standard currency behind bars. “But I also got to really focus on art. San Quentin is where I became an artist.”

In 1953, two years after he was locked up, Mr. Santos submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint a mural on one side of a dining hall partition. After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.

For two years he worked at night in the company of guards and two other inmates, who helped with the scaffold. “Sometimes I painted for a couple of hours, and sometimes I kept at it until sunrise,” he said. “They let me go at my own pace.”

The murals chronicle not only California’s history, but also the evolution of Mr. Santos’s style. The first scenes, including an Indian village and the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, are rendered in the listless fashion of a 1950s textbook illustration, with isolated vignettes surrounded by areas of blank wall. “At the beginning I wanted to be conservative, to please the prison officials,” he said.

But soon vignettes crowd the walls, playing like a crazy newsreel of random images; at one point a covered wagon rumbles westward not far from where an owlish Groucho Marx peeps over a movie screen. Unifying compositional elements — the World War II bomber that dominates the fourth mural, for example — lend a W.P.A.-era monumentality.

The fifth mural, with its oil well gushing from a huge human arm and its gargantuan hog carcasses dangling from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, feels far more hallucinatory and dreamlike. Interspersed with the grand images are small, humorous scenes, like a man with binoculars gazing at a high-rise window where a woman is undressing and a burly World War II inductee (the portrait of a much-hated prison guard) wincing as a doctor gives him a shot.

The sixth and final mural, whose style might be best described as Expressionism meets Saturday morning cartoons, depicts rodeos, fairs, football games and other public events. It fairly explodes with comical, hatchet-faced characters, from flamenco dancers at a mission fiesta to fans thronging a Hollywood premiere. “That mural is 100 percent original,” Mr. Santos said. “I wanted to give the guys something to laugh at, but I can tell you that I worked real fast on it, since my parole date was coming up. I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to keep me.”

Eduardo Pineda, a longtime community muralist, is the director of education for the Museum of the African Diaspora in nearby San Francisco and has visited the murals. “What Santos does with space and perspective is very sophisticated,” he said. “The murals are highly cinematic, with powerful narration.”

Though for decades the murals remained in excellent condition, they now are defaced in places by prisoner graffiti. “San Quentin used to be populated exclusively by long-term inmates, and respect for the murals was part of the older prison culture,” said Lt. Eric Messick, San Quentin’s public information officer. “But around 1988 we also became a reception center for newly sentenced inmates, and most of them are younger guys who just don’t have the connection with the murals. That’s when the tagging started.”

Steve Emerick, who runs the prison’s Arts in Corrections program, said that the inmates themselves could do the required restoration if they were trained or supervised by an expert. “But that requires funding we simply don’t have,” he said. Restorations were carried out in the late 1960s, when a clear protective coating was applied, and again in the 1990s.

A greater threat to the murals may be the continuing tug of war over closing all or part of San Quentin. Established in 1852, it is California’s oldest and possibly most dilapidated prison, and its 432 prime waterfront acres are coveted by developers and local governments. A 2003 preliminary redevelopment study called for preserving the murals but without indicating how or where. A current bill in the California Assembly would prohibit construction of a proposed new death row at San Quentin until the state studies moving the execution chamber elsewhere.

After his parole in 1955, Mr. Santos worked at Disneyland as a caricaturist and then opened a studio and gallery in San Diego, his hometown. But after pleading guilty to possession of marijuana, he fled to Mexico, where he owned a succession of galleries in Guadalajara, Mexico City and Acapulco. Returning to the United States in 1967, he painted, made sculptures of carved wood and found objects and ran a popular gallery and bohemian gathering spot in the Catskills village of Fleischmanns, N.Y. (An exhibition of his work is on display there through Aug. 31 at the Art et cetera gallery.) More than 20 years ago, after a divorce and a heart attack, he moved back to San Diego.

Though his San Quentin murals are among the most significant works of Mr. Santos’s career, for years even close friends knew nothing of them. “I never bragged about the murals because I was too embarrassed to tell people I’d been to prison as a young man,” he said.

In 2003 he returned to San Quentin to see the murals for the first time in nearly a half century. “Someone put a shiny varnish on them that I didn’t like,” he recalled, “but it made me happy to look at them again and to think about all the guys who might have enjoyed them over the
years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/arts/design/19hall.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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May 19, 2007

Secular Humanists Sue Over Faith Groups' Contract with Prisons Agency

Secular Humanists Sue Over Faith Groups' Contract with Prisons Agency
By David Royse
Associated Press Writer
The Christian Post
Sat, May. 19 2007 03:42 PM ET

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - State prison officials Friday denied an allegation contained in a lawsuit that agreements with two faith-based contractors to provide transitional housing for released prisoners are unconstitutional.

The Council for Secular Humanism and two private citizens filed the lawsuit Thursday in circuit court in Leon County, alleging that the Department of Corrections' contract with the two faith-based groups violates the state constitution's prohibition on state revenue going to aid "any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."

The lawsuit called for DOC contracts with Prisoners of Christ Inc. and Lamb of God Ministries to be ruled unconstitutional and be discontinued.

DOC pays Jacksonville-based Prisoners of Christ and Okeechobee-based Lamb of God to provide "faith-based substance abuse post-release transitional housing."

The prisons agency responded that the contracts weren't unconstitutional because they specifically called for the state money to be used only for secular purposes.

DOC spokesman Robby Cunningham pointed out that among the language in the contracts is a provision that the vendors must "ensure that state funds are used for the sole purpose of furthering the secular goals of criminal rehabilitation, the successful reintegration of offenders into the community, and the reduction of recidivism."

The contracts include provisions that require the organizations to not consider participants' religious beliefs or lack of them when determining admission to the program. The contracts also stipulate "the program shall not attempt to convert an offender toward a particular faith or religious practice."

But officials with the Council for Secular Humanism said Florida's constitution bars state money from going to benefit sectarian institutions, and that the organizations are clearly that. Robert Rivas, the attorney for the council, said the case could be an important test on the constitutionality of other state contracts with faith-based groups.

Officials with Prisoners of Christ and Lamb of God didn't respond to calls seeking comment.

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press.
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070519/27516_Secular_Humanists_Sue_Over_Faith_Groups'_Contract_with_Prisons_Agency.htm

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May 17, 2007

New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges

May 17, 2007
New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges
By SAM ROBERTS

With the number of nonwhite Americans above 100 million for the first time, demographers are identifying an emerging racial generation gap.

That development may portend a nation split between an older, whiter electorate and a younger overall population that is more Hispanic, black and Asian and that presses sometimes competing agendas and priorities.

“The new demographic divide has broader implications for social programs and education spending for youth,” said Mark Mather, deputy director of domestic programs for the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group.

“There’s a fairly large homogenous population 60 and older that may not be sympathetic to the needs of a diverse youthful population,” Dr. Mather said.

The Census Bureau estimated yesterday that from July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, the nation’s minority population grew to 100.7 million from 98.3 million; that is about one in three of all Americans. The new figures also suggest that many states are growing more diverse as minorities disperse.

As a result of immigration and higher birthrates among many newcomers, the number of Hispanics grew by 3.4 percent nationwide and Asians by 3.2 percent. Meanwhile, the black population rose by 1.3 percent, and that of non-Hispanic whites by 0.3 percent. (The number of American Indians and Alaska Natives increased by 1 percent, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders by 1.7 percent.)

More than 20 percent of children in the United States either are foreign-born or have a parent who was born abroad. Nearly half the children under age 5 are Hispanic, black or Asian.

Over all, the median age of Americans reached 36.6 years, another record high. It ranged from 27.4 among Hispanics to 40.5 among non-Hispanic whites.

The census counted more than 73,000 centenarians (about 14,000 men and 59,000 women) and also 78 million baby boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964), who, as they turn 60, are helping to drive the racial generation gap.

While growth rates fluctuated, many states are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse.

“Hispanics are dispersing, especially from California,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. “Texas is gaining from all racial groups, a true multicultural magnet.”

The changes have potential implications for national politics. In Nevada, where the share of whites has declined to 59 percent from 66 percent since 2000, the voting-age population has soared 25 percent, with minorities accounting for 63 percent of that increase. Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee have recorded the greatest percentage gains in their Hispanic population since 2000, with the biggest numerical gains, predictably, registered by California, Texas and Florida.

The biggest percentage increases in black residents were registered by Maine, South Dakota, New Hampshire and Idaho, and in Asian residents by Nevada, Arizona and New Hampshire.

In New York and Maryland, the departure of non-Hispanic whites has accelerated since 2005. (California has lost nearly 100,000, more than any other state). In the same period, New York and Michigan have recorded a loss in black residents. (Louisiana, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, recorded losses across the board.)

The racial generation gap, Dr. Mather said, emerged relatively recently and may turn out to be temporary as the growing proportion of Hispanics, blacks and Asians gets older.

As recently as 1980, he said, the share of minorities in each generation varied by only five percentage points or less.

According to the latest figures, 80 percent of Americans over age 60 are non-Hispanic whites, compared with only 60 percent among those in their 20s and 30s, and 58 percent among people younger than 20.

Dr. Mather said the widest racial generation gaps were found in California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. In Arizona, minorities account for more than half the people under the age of 20, but only one in six who are 60 and older.

The smallest gaps were found in Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia.

Dr. Mather said the three most homogeneous states — Maine, Vermont and West Virginia — spent the highest proportion of their gross state product on public education.

“There does seem to be a correlation,” he said.

John B. Diamond, a professor of education at Harvard, said that “there are patterns of school funding that suggest that may be a problem down the line.” But he also said the impact might be mitigated by two factors. Because of persistent residential segregation, he said, elderly white voters do not necessarily live in the same school districts as young members of minorities. And, altruism aside, older voters may be persuaded that their pensions and other benefits depend on the income and taxes generated by a better-educated work force.

The census found that fully 21 percent of the nation’s minority population lives in California, and 12 percent in Texas.

Hispanic Americans, the largest minority, accounted for nearly half the nation’s population growth in the year ended last July 1.

The nation’s black population surpassed 40 million for the first time, the Census Bureau said, and the number of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders topped one million.

Minorities constitute a majority in four states: Hawaii (75 percent), New Mexico (57 percent), California (57 percent) and Texas (52 percent).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/us/17census.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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May 11, 2007

NY Times: "In the Big House ... Just Visiting"

May 11, 2007
In the Big House ... Just Visiting
By MAURA J. CASEY, NY Times
May 11, 2007

A FEW blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a massive, crumbling building rises up like a medieval castle over blocks of modest, middle-class homes mixed with brownstones. Complete with ivy-covered walls, a tower and corner battlements, it casts a forbidding shadow over the city — as it was meant to. Built in 1829, this hulking pile of stone was Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, a cautionary landmark for nearly a century and a half, the place nobody wanted to go.

Now, people are paying to get in.

Almost 150,000 tourists passed through the forbidding gates of Eastern State last year — into a dark hallway, through a gift shop that has a subterranean feel and down dusty corridors lined by crumbling walls. With audio tour guides at their ears, they go through cellblocks; gaze at the mess halls, hospital and prison chapel; climb into a guard tower; and pace in the exercise yard. They peer into the cells of death row.

Teenagers giggle tentatively; children are subdued; adults exhibit a kind of nervous relief, never happier to be law-abiding citizens. But the paying customers keep coming. And Eastern State is just one of three dozen prisons and jails now collectively drawing millions of visitors each year around the country.

From Maui to Louisiana, crowds tread dark passages where heavy doors still slam shut with ringing finality — though most of these eerily evocative tourist attractions no longer actually house convicts. Prisons proudly display cells once inhabited by famous criminals. Some show off gallows or an electric chair.

There is even a proposal to open a museum at Sing Sing in Ossining, N.Y., though, so far, plans have been stymied by the cost and by doubts in some quarters about the wisdom of opening the grounds of a working maximum security prison.

In a handful of prisons, guests are actually paying to stay over — though in much-improved quarters. In Boston, the 1851 Charles Street Prison on Beacon Hill has been remodeled into a hotel, the Liberty, scheduled to open this summer with vestiges of jail cells in the lobby and bars on several of the windows. Abroad, buildings that have served as prisons and are now hotels can be found in Amsterdam, Istanbul and Oxford, England.

Whether called correctional institutions or the clink, prisons hold an enduring fascination. They’ve been the subject of songs, films and TV series. They inspire pity and even empathy; haven’t most of us felt imprisoned at one time or another, or longed for liberation? Still, in the beginning, the public’s interest in sampling the atmosphere of the Big House took just about everyone by surprise.

In 1971 the National Park Service opened the decaying remains of Alcatraz, the notorious maximum-security prison on an island in San Francisco Bay, to visitors under a five-year plan, on the assumption that interest would peter out. It soon became one of the biggest tourist attractions in Northern California and has remained open ever since, with boats from San Francisco carrying passengers over for tours.

The park service has just completed a major renovation, expanding Alcatraz’s exhibits and facilities to keep up with more than a million visitors a year.

Soon states and cities with their own decaying former prisons — usually fortresslike piles of stone with no obvious use — began to wonder if they could turn these burdens into moneymakers. At the same time, preservationists became advocates for saving prisons from the wrecking ball. Thus, the trend was born; prisons are now open to the curious — for the price of a ticket.

ON a cloudy Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia, several people dodged raindrops and walked through the gate at Eastern State. Most were tourists, but two lived nearby, entitled to the free membership that Eastern State offers neighbors. Their self-guided audio tour, following the pattern set at Alcatraz, included narratives from former prisoners and guards.

When it opened, the visitors were told, Eastern State was seen as a model of modernity and enlightenment. It had running water, central heat and flush toilets in individual cells — more than 20 years before the White House had modern plumbing.

Eastern State also followed an 1820s reformist theory about correction, which posited that solitude was the path to rehabilitation. All prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for their entire sentences to reflect on their crimes. To maintain the quiet, guards even put socks over their shoes to muffle their footsteps.

Although some social commentators, including Charles Dickens, thought the lack of human contact would drive most prisoners insane, Eastern State was hugely influential, and 300 prisons on five continents were built based on its model, according to museum officials.

In one of the blocks, the original cells are on display, each with a heavy oak door and a small, round window in the ceiling called “the eye of God,” through which light streams in. Each cell has its own tiny exercise yard. Ceilings curve upward like the arches of a church.

Eventually, attitudes about punishment caught up with the plumbing. After 1900, Eastern State was mostly a typical prison on the 20th-century model. It closed in 1971, and tours began in the mid-1980s.

Much has been forgiven. There, as at Alcatraz, both ex-prisoners and former guards speak on the recordings that visitors hear as they walk through the prison. The two groups even mingle at reunions.

The experiences of two former inmates suggest that even in the middle of the 20th century, life behind the walls of Eastern State was a mixture of the macabre and mundane.

Willie L. Smith, now a sprightly 80-year-old, was incarcerated at Eastern State beginning in 1947, for “20 years, 8 months and 29 days,” as he precisely recalls, for a murder he says he did not commit.

“There was always killing in there,” Mr. Smith said. “Everybody had a knife. If you wanted to do a shank you could,” he said of the inmates’ practice of making weapons.

Yet both he and Robert Moore, who served a little more than 11 years beginning in 1958 for armed robbery, remembered small triumphs. Mr. Smith recalled pitching two no-hitters on a prison team. Mr. Moore said he learned to play chess and didn’t lose a game during a four-year period before he was released. He also remembered, with satisfaction, getting up in the middle of one winter night to help work on the prison central heating system when it malfunctioned. When he was done with the repairs, “it was so hot you could heat a cup of coffee” on the prison radiators, Mr. Moore said.

Mr. Smith explained with a laugh that he helped build several dozen high-security cells, only to find himself later assigned to one for 90 days for breaking the rules.

FROM state to state, each prison tour vies for its share of attention. In Maui, there’s Hale Paahao, the “stuck in irons house, ” with its shackles and walls made of a mix of coral and stone. At the Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe, Pa., visitors can view a replica of a gallows on which four people were hanged at once. At the Authentic Old Jail Museum in St. Augustine, Fla., a doorway opens to a grim cell with no windows or mattress.

At the Crime and Punishment Museum in Ashburn, Ga., visitors can eat lunch at the Last Meal Cafe, which has, the museum’s Web site proclaims, “meals to die for.”

Escapes and escape attempts are a common theme. Alcatraz had more than its share: 34 men tried to flee during 14 escape attempts, visitors are told, including two who tried to escape twice. Six were shot, 23 were recaptured, at least 2 drowned.

Three men who broke free in 1962 were never seen again, and their elaborate jail break inspired the movie, “Escape from Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood. The prisoners left lifelike dummies in their beds, complete with human hair, the better to fool the guards. The cell they fled, with replicas of the dummies, is on the Alcatraz tour. Since there’s no record of anyone surviving the chilly waters and deadly rip currents around the Rock, as inmates called Alcatraz, it is believed that the men drowned.

At Eastern State, a display about an almost comical 1945 escape attempt by 11 men, complete with a 90-foot-long tunnel, is backed up with an archaeological dig.

Eastern State also has some other unusual details. A bronze plaque on one wall memorializes inmates who were released to serve in World War I, hauntingly listing only their numbers and not their names. And an art exhibit commemorates the 30-odd cats that lived in the building and eventually had the run of the place when the prison closed.

In just about every prison tour, there seems to be at least one poster child whose bad behavior helps bolster ticket sales, and the more notorious, the better. Al Capone is featured at Eastern State. The Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum in Laramie, Wyo., which gets 20,000 visitors a year, highlights the fact that Butch Cassidy was imprisoned there for stealing horses.

Alcatraz has a particularly star-studded roster. It housed not only Capone, but Machine Gun Kelly and Robert Stroud, the famous Birdman who, according to the tour, was far more surly and manipulative than Burt Lancaster’s character in the 1962 film “The Birdman of Alcatraz.”

People involved with the nation’s prison tours have their own theories about why they are so appealing.

“Everyone has a macabre interest in what could occur if you don’t stay on the right side of the law,” said Nicholette Phelps, director of visitor programs at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which includes Alcatraz. “We always think of what happens on the other side of that gate.”

Julie Smith, the business manager of the Old Prison Museum in Deer Lodge, Mont., which has about 45,000 visitors a year, thinks people are drawn by “the shock and horror” of the way inmates lived.

“It’s like going by a car accident,” she said. “You can’t help but look.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY (22nd Street and Fairmont Avenue, Philadelphia; 215-236-3300; www.easternstate.org) is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily from April through November and until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays in June, July and August. Admission is $9; ages 7 to 12, $4. Children under 7 are not admitted.

For information on Alcatraz, consult the Web site of the National Park Service (www.nps.gov/alca). There is no entrance fee, but tickets for the ferry there ($21.75) must be purchased through Alcatraz Cruises (415-981-7625; www.alcatrazcruises.com). The ferry leaves from Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, where there is a ticket booth, although advance purchase is strongly recommended. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/travel/escapes/11prison.1.html

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April 16, 2007

OSI $10 Million National Initiative to Close the Drug Treatment Gap

Top Addiction Expert to Lead OSI’s National Initiative to Close the Drug Treatment Gap

April 3, 2007

BALTIMORE—A top national addiction expert will head a new national initiative that the Open Society Institute is launching to help close the country’s drug addiction treatment gap, enabling more Americans who need drug addiction treatment to get it.

Victor Capoccia, who led the addiction prevention and treatment team at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and who previously ran a Massachusetts substance-abuse agency, will lead the new initiative, supported by $10 million from philanthropist George Soros to ensure that more Americans have access to drug addiction treatment.

More than 22.2 million Americans suffer from addiction or dependence to alcohol and drugs, according to the most recent national survey on drug use published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSA). More than 80 percent of Americans who need help are unable to get addiction treatment, either due to lack of health insurance, inadequate insurance or lack of treatment slots in communities.

The $10 million initiative will seek to close the treatment gap by underwriting local and regional education and advocacy efforts across the country to expand programs and health insurance for the uninsured. The goal is to expand comprehensive treatment systems and to improve the quality of treatment. The effort will borrow lessons from the highly successful treatment model in Baltimore.

“I have been encouraged by the success Baltimore has had in making treatment more widely accessible so that individuals and families can receive the help they need to lead healthy, productive lives,” said Soros, founder of the Open Society Institute. “Now we have the opportunity to address the issue nationally, to call attention to the short-sighted allocation of public funds, leading to a huge gap in the availability of drug addiction treatment for people without adequate insurance.”

Prior to joining the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2001, Capoccia was president and CEO of CAB Health and Recovery Services, Inc., a community-based provider of inpatient, residential, outpatient, prevention and related health services in the alcohol and drug addiction field. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Community-Based Drug Treatment and chairman of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment’s National Treatment Plan workgroup on Improving Treatment Systems. Capoccia previously was the director of Community Health Services for Boston’s Health and Hospitals Department. There, he directed the city health department’s expansion of prenatal outreach, emergency medical services, HIV prevention and addiction treatment efforts.

Capoccia will oversee the implementation of the new initiative, which will be based in Baltimore. OSI expects to announce later this year the process by which localities will be able to apply for grants.

The new national effort will build on Baltimore’s example, in which OSI-Baltimore has provided substantial funding to strengthen the city’s public drug addiction treatment system, managed by the quasi-public Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems (BSAS). Since 1998, Baltimore has made it a priority to build an expanded drug treatment system and has mobilized broad public support for drug treatment among city, state and private funders. As a result, the city has increased significantly the capacity of its public drug treatment system. Funding for the treatment system increased from $20.3 million in 1997 to $52.9 million in 2005, and the number of people receiving drug treatment in publicly-funded programs increased from 18,449 in 1997 to 28,672 in 2005.

Despite that expansion, thousands of Baltimore residents still need treatment, and local advocates continue their efforts to secure additional funding so that ultimately treatment on demand becomes a reality.

“We are thrilled to have someone of Victor Capoccia’s caliber launch this important initiative to make drug addiction treatment more accessible in the United States,” said Diana Morris, director of OSI-Baltimore. “He brings a vision and a network of resources to this difficult challenge.”

Capoccia has served as an associate professor in community planning and organization at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. A graduate of Boston College, he holds master's degrees in social work and city planning and a doctorate in social policy from the Florence Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare at Brandeis University.

Soros announced his $10 million commitment last June during a major conference in Baltimore about successful drug addiction treatment strategies. The conference, called “Cities on the Right Track: Building Public Drug Treatment Systems,” was sponsored by OSI-Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the City of Baltimore. Among the participants were then-Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, and Providence Mayor David Cicilline.

####

Founded by philanthropist George Soros, OSI-Baltimore is a private operating foundation that supports a grantmaking, educational and capacity-building program to expand justice and opportunity for Baltimore residents. With support from a range of investors, its current work focuses on helping Baltimore's youth succeed, reducing the social and economic costs of incarceration, tackling drug addiction, and building a corps of Community Fellows to bring innovative ideas to Baltimore's underserved communities.
Related Event

OSI Conference: Cities on the Right Track—Building Public Drug Treatment Systems
Baltimore, MD
Jun. 7, 2006
OSI-Baltimore cosponsored a conference to showcase drug addiction treatment systems that are working in cities across the United States. more

You can access this page at the following URL:
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/baltimore/news/treatment_20070403

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March 21, 2007

Living Like a Refugee: Peggy Diggs Takes a Design Problem to Prison

Go to this URL for the entire article and the pictures of what has been created.

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Through a partnership with the City of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, Diggs made arrangements to meet with a group of 15 men in maximum security at Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia. MAP had been working with these particular prisoners for some years, and when Diggs visited with them in January 2005 she found them eager to participate in her project. She obtained funding from Creative Capital Foundation to "explore notions of design and function of objects we're all familiar with - with materials and expectations we have of them, concrete problem solving and design for particular groups of users."

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March 20, 2007

A Room for the Night (Not 40 to Life)

March 18, 2007, NY Times
Square Feet | Checking In
A Room for the Night (Not 40 to Life)
By ALISON GREGOR

THE hulking granite building overlooking the Charles River housed some of this city’s most notorious criminals for more than a century, but it will soon provide luxury accommodations for some of the most well-heeled visitors.

The transformation of the Charles Street Jail, as the building was known, into the Liberty Hotel is among the largest of a growing number of hotel conversions of abandoned jails and prisons. The Liberty Hotel, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, is to open for business this summer. Room rates have not yet been set.

The $110 million reconstruction project includes a new 16-story tower adjacent to the former jail, which began operating in 1851, and the demolition of a daunting wall that separated the institution from the community since around 1940. The hotel will have 298 rooms, of which 20 will be in the old jail building.

“People are saying this will be Boston’s most captivating hotel,” said Richard L. Friedman, president and chief executive of Carpenter & Company, the developer.

The company had doggedly pursued the site because of its architectural significance. “A century and a half ago somebody sited a jail at the most prominent possible place in Boston and built a fabulous building,” Mr. Friedman said.

The old jail is near the Charles River and has views of downtown Boston. A cruciform with four wings, the structure has thick granite walls that enclose a soaring 90-foot atrium at its center — once used as an exercise yard — which is topped by a cupola. Soon, four huge chandeliers, 10 feet in diameter, will hang from winches over entrances leading to two upscale restaurants — one to be called Bread and Water — along with a 3,000-square-foot ballroom off the atrium.

“If you were building this new, you could never afford to build a space like this atrium space,” said Peter Diana, the vice president and general counsel of Carpenter & Company. “It would be prohibitively expensive and elaborate. This building just has good bones, as they say.”

Gary C. Johnson, a principal at Cambridge Seven Associates, the project’s architect along with Ann Beha Architects, agreed, but he said that making the necessary modifications to the building hadn’t been easy.

“When we first walked in here, there were pigeons flying around, holes in the roof, and it was full of debris,” Mr. Johnson said. “It had been abandoned about 12 years, and I think we were all overwhelmed by the possibilities of the space — as well as the condition of the building.”

Carpenter & Company won the right to develop the property in 2000 through a land-lease deal with Massachusetts General Hospital, which owns the land on which the jail sits. The company also developed the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, along with other prominent hotels in the area.

But the Liberty Hotel’s biggest challenge so far, Mr. Friedman said, has been the constraints on redevelopment of the building, which has been declared a national historic landmark. Carpenter & Company will receive an estimated $17 million in federal and state tax credits, contingent upon maintaining the historic nature of the jail, which was built to the latest humane standards of the mid-1800s for jailhouse construction, but had sunk into deplorable conditions by the time inmates sued in 1971. The jail closed in 1990, under a 1973 federal court order.

The jail’s storied history will be the feature of an interpretive exhibit in a corridor off the lobby. Among the more notable inmates was James Michael Curley, who served time in the early 1900s after taking the civil service exam in the name of a friend, but went on to become governor of Massachusetts. A group of suffragists was imprisoned in 1919 for protesting when President Woodrow Wilson visited Boston. “At the end of the day, we want to maintain the historic image of the jail,” Mr. Friedman said. “Guests will know it’s a jail. There will be bars on some windows. There will be old cellblocks exposed.”

Hotels built out of jails or prisons have become increasingly popular. At least three bed-and-breakfast inns are operating in former jails in small towns in the United States, including one converted from an elegant Italianate county jail built around 1869 in Preston, Minn. And numerous budget accommodations and youth hostels have been built in converted jails and prisons worldwide, including countries like Canada, Switzerland, Slovenia, South Africa and Australia.

In November 2004, the Comfort Inn Alamo Riverwalk opened in the former Bexar County Jail, built in 1878 in San Antonio.. Room rates range from $109 to $199 a night.

The building had been used to store files since it stopped functioning as a jail in the early 1960s, according to Robin Joseph, the hotel’s general manager. The jail was made into 82 rooms under strict oversight by preservationists. Some modifications, though, were necessary, like covering up a three-story chute in one corner of the hotel, which was known as the “hanging room.”

Thick concrete walls made life difficult for developers who converted the former Sultanahmet Prison in Turkey, built around 1918, into the 65-room Four Seasons Istanbul, which opened in 1996. The hotel still works hard to try to accommodate customers with uninterrupted cellphone signals, said Marcos Bekhit, a regional vice president for the Four Seasons and the general manager of the hotel.

Depicted in the 1978 film “Midnight Express,” which was not actually filmed at the prison, Sultanahmet was one of the first penal institutions to be converted into a luxury hotel. Developers found a telling bit of doggerel scratched into its walls: “All the world’s an inn — or that’s the tale, but Sultanahmet is a stinking jail.” The Four Seasons Istanbul, whose room rates range from $390 to $3,500 a night, initially tried to play down its history when it opened, according to Mr. Bekhit.

“We used to hide the fact that it’s a prison,” he said, until the owners learned that its history was a large part of what draws people to the hotel. “Now, we talk very much about the most beautiful prison in the world,” he said.

The prison, which had been used for political prisoners from the late 1970s until its closure in 1982, was a logical candidate for conversion to a hotel because it is in the old quarter of Istanbul, with the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace at its doorstep, Mr. Bekhit said. Still, he said, it has been hard to deal with the restrictions put on redevelopment by Turkey’s heritage board, which oversees redevelopment of historic buildings.

“We were not allowed to change anything, from the size and shape of the windows to the mustard paint,” he said. “We had to paint 12 tones of mustard color — the original color of the prison — and we have a lot of paint in our storage area.”

Mr. Bekhit said that although he was initially surprised that Four Seasons was willing to open a hotel in an old prison, he recognizes that the architecture has been an important factor in the hotel’s success.

The template of a jail, which developers say is easily adaptable to a hotel, attracted the British hotel chain Malmaison to Her Majesty’s Prison Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. The prison closed around 1996 and opened as a 97-room hotel, the Malmaison Oxford, in December 2005.

“I’m pleased to say we’re running at similar occupancies to when it was a prison,” said Robert B. Cook, president and chief executive of Malmaison, meaning that the hotel is often fully booked for six weeks in advance. The cost of the hotel conversion was about $42.5 million. But the hotel — which uses as its slogan, “This time, we take no prisoners” — was worth it, Mr. Cook said.

“If a prison came my way again, I’d do it,” said Mr. Cook, whose hotel company has also been involved in conversions of churches and breweries.

Back in Boston, the developers of the Liberty Hotel in Boston said they doubted that they would take on another conversion of a jail to a hotel.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” said Mr. Friedman, who struggled to finance the project after 9/11, and eventually found funding from private sources like Deutsche Bank and San Diego National Bank.

“This was fun,” he said, “but it’s a heck of a lot easier to build a hotel at a highway cloverleaf somewhere.”

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/realestate/commercial/18sqft.html?pagew

Posted by lois at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2007

Mr. 76759 Designs His Dream House

The Angola 3 website is at www.angola3.org

March 11, 2007
Architecture, NY Times
Mr. 76759 Designs His Dream House
By CHRIS COLIN

MINOR improvements still occur to him, but Herman Wallace has more or less finished his dream house. It’s got a yellow kitchen, a hobby shop and custom-made pecan cabinets. It should be noted that no actual house exists, but this is understandable. Mr. Wallace has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola for the last 34 years.

Mr. Wallace’s virtual home is the subject of a new book, “The House That Herman Built,” and an art installation with three-dimensional models of the house is on tour in Europe. The project — which walks a thin line between art and activism — is a result of a question posed to Mr. Wallace five years ago: What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6-by-9-foot cell for three decades dream of?

The woman who asked the question, and later produced the book and the installation, is Jackie Sumell, a 32-year-old white artist who at the time lived in San Francisco. Her work, often political, has been shown in galleries in San Francisco, Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. Mr. Wallace, a 65-year-old Black Panther originally imprisoned for robbery, was convicted in 1972 of murdering a prison guard. In November a state court commissioner recommended that his conviction be overturned, and a decision is pending on whether to adopt that recommendation.

In the four years it took to design the house, Ms. Sumell and Mr. Wallace developed a close rapport. Their intimacy can be glimpsed in the more than 300 letters they exchanged, many of which are included in the book. Their correspondence was initiated by Ms. Sumell after she attended a talk by an exonerated prisoner, a fellow Black Panther who had been put in solitary around the same time as Mr. Wallace. (They and a third inmate, also in solitary for decades, became known as the Angola Three.)

Nearly a year after her postal friendship with Prisoner No. 76759 began, Ms. Sumell entered the M.F.A. program at Stanford University and, in a class devoted to investigating spatial relationships and architecture, she was assigned to interview a faculty member about his home.

But she had a more interesting candidate.

Her next letter to Mr. Wallace described the assignment and asked him: What kind of house do you dream about after all these years in a cell?

Mr. Wallace’s cell is part of the 18,000-acre maximum-security prison in Angola, La. It was once a complex of plantations, named for the African country from which most of the slaves there were transported. The inmates still pick cotton and other crops in the fields.

“The house is going to need a swimming pool, with a light-green bottom and a large panther painted in the center,” Mr. Wallace wrote to Ms. Sumell.

Yet for the most part the house invented by a man in solitary confinement reflects the thoroughly ordinary existence that he lost in prison. Mr. Wallace, who grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, focused on amenities he longed for and old-fashioned building details he can remember.

The imagined house is the antithesis of Mr. Wallace’s current quarters: a suburban home of about 3,500 square feet surrounded by flowers; he specified roses, gloxinia and delphiniums. There is also a guest house, reserved for visiting activists. A second-floor master bedroom looks out over a marble patio, landscaped garden and massive oak tree.

Steel and concrete — prison materials — have no role here. Birch and pecan are everywhere, their special qualities carefully explained in Mr. Wallace’s letters.

Ms. Sumell said that Mr. Wallace, his view so abbreviated for so long, focused well on minute details — the potatoes and Tabasco sauce in the pantry, the notebooks laid out on the conference table — but had a harder time imagining open spaces.

Traces of a prison mindset crop up. When the placement of his computer meant his back would face the office door, Ms. Sumell said that he asked that a mirror be installed above, so he could see anyone entering the room. A sense of security is important to him, she explained. The master bedroom sits safely above the very center of the house. A wraparound porch adds a layer of perimeter, as does the surrounding garden. There is even a special door leading to an underground bunker, equipped with its own water supply. The goal, Ms. Sumell said, was never to feel trapped.

The time capsule of prison can be glimpsed in his preference for a 1970s aesthetic: shag carpeting flows through the three bedrooms, one decorated entirely in white. The master bedroom’s furniture is mahogany. The purple barstools were rejected: Ms. Sumell complained that she didn’t know how to draw them. In one concession to changing times, Mr. Wallace asked that the bearskin rug be made of fake fur.

As the details accumulated, Ms. Sumell added, the house became something Mr. Wallace could fully visualize and, consequently, served as a kind of escape. (Such powers of visualization are not uncommon for him after years of solitude: Ms. Sumell described a chess tournament he helped organize in which games were played by inmates calling out their moves, cell to cell.)

Though Ms. Sumell estimates that she made at least 20 trips to visit him at the prison over the four years they worked on designing the house, many of the descriptions and measurements were exchanged by mail and were subject to the prison’s censors. Once officials confiscated an elaborate floor plan Mr. Wallace had drawn; Ms. Sumell was told that it could have enabled another criminal to rob the (virtual) home.

The house would probably win no design awards. Except for the panther peering up from the pool bottom, Mr. Wallace’s ideal is resolutely plain by contemporary architectural standards. (In a telephone conversation from prison Mr. Wallace recalled photographs of some more experimental houses sent to him by Ms. Sumell: “They had houses in trees,” he said disapprovingly.)

What’s arresting about the design is the singular approach to architectural planning that brought it into being — Ms. Sumell calls herself the “tube Herman’s ideas go through” — and the emotional candor that infused the process. The letters in the book reveal excitement but also pain. In them Mr. Wallace refers to Ms. Sumell as a daughter, and at other times as a sister.

“We’re family,” she said matter of factly. “He’s my best friend.”

He gave advice on relationships and even fashion critiques. (After seeing her new mohawk, Ms. Sumell recalled, he said, “It’s not that bad.”) She discovered someone animated and thoughtful, a man who creates elaborate paper flowers in his cell.

There were surprises too. As the project neared completion, Ms. Sumell learned that her mother was dying. With the first exhibition of the house models coming up — a chance to attract attention to Mr. Wallace’s legal case — he insisted she cancel it.

“You just focus on your mom,” she said he instructed.

Is a project like this art? Or is it activism? And how significant are those questions in the context of a man spending three decades in a concrete box? Ms. Sumell says that she believes her only option is to push ahead, merging art with activism wherever possible. Her next goal is to build the actual house, right outside the prison if possible.

Mr. Wallace now has a copy of the book. (Merz and Solitude of Stuttgart, Germany, printed 800 copies, which are being sold for $20 each at the Angola3.org Web site.) Though he found it a little strange to have “people peeping inside my head,” he said, his voice sounded proud, if tentatively so.

“It expresses something different from the public perception of us prisoners,” he said. “We have dreams too.”

Mr. Wallace’s most pressing dream is another courtroom, and a chance at freedom. In the months to come the state will rule on the court commissioner’s recommendation that Wallace be released. Meanwhile, he said, he continues to think about his house.

Images of the house Herman Wallace designed are at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/arts/design/11colin.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1173624546-h+2wEwZtG5MKsh0oBR54XQ

Posted by lois at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2007

"But , They All Come Black: Facing the Challenge of Being Right All the Time"

"But , They All Come Black: Facing the Challenge of Being Right All the Time"
Publishing and Promotional Notes by the Author
"But , They All Come Black: Facing the Challenge of Being Right All the Time"

By Jerome Travesty, President, JJ 50 Shot University
Background

The Bourbon Institute is a Twelve Step, for-profit, research and miseducational organization for Ivy League educated upper class white policy people who understand the nuances of dealing with their less fortunate sisters and brothers of color. As Senior Research Fellow at the Institute, my research and recommendations actively supported and promoted the "tough on crime," approach of the late 1980's and 90's. I advocated for "broken windows," "zero tolerance" and "three strikes." Mass incarceration is the result of these enlightened public policy recommendations. At the time, we had no idea that we would also achieve the additional benefit of industrial expansion, political disenfranchisement and employment stimulus for rural economically depressed counties. As a further benefit, incarceration numbers inflate federal appropriations based upon census data.

From: The Truth [the.bookrelease@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 5:38 PM

Established in Washington, D.C., in 1865, The Bourbon Institute has promoted a "southern strategy" for the social, economic and governance problems confronting the nation. The Institute has advanced the careers of more white men (and a few white women) then we can accurately count at this time.

The Bourbon Institute disseminates its research findings through redundant, repeated, costly, very expensive, wasteful and usually unnecessary conferences funded by the Our Superior Intellect (OSI) Foundation. In this way, the limited social justice funding available for community-based organizations actually doing the work on the ground, is used instead to discuss and analyze urban problems and colored people. I am thankful to the Institute, and its Board of Directors, for publishing all of my books and research, when no one else would. As a member of the dominant privileged class in America, I thought I could have had my work published anywhere, but America has changed. White privilege just ain't what it used to be.

Preface

In the spring of 1999, U.S. Attorney General Janice Rio caught me coming out of the men's room in the U.S. Department of Justice. She noticed that I had failed to zip up my pants and mentioned it several times. This started me to thinking about how embarrassing it must be for ex-offenders on parole to be sent back to prison for simple violations, like not zipping your fly. It occurred to me, also, that the majority of those affected were Black men -hence the title of my latest and greatest book, "But .They All Come Black."
Immediately, I called Sally Turner at the Our Superior Intellect (OSI) Foundation and Rich Crank at the FRET Foundation [Rich resides in one of the richest counties in the United States and surrounds himself in African art and sculptures to reinforce his public image as a trustworthy liberal do-gooder-meanwhile, he supports the criminal justice system by granting the Kansas Department of Corrections 4.5 million dollars and calling it the key to policy reform] to request a planning grant of $300 million dollars, to convene a series of daily conferences from now until the year 2065. By that time my son-little Travesty-will have retired from his work succeeding me as the most esteemed conference giver in the world. I was worried that these grant makers would not be responsive, since their mission is to spend millions of dollars funding the ideas of people who are directly affected by the criminal justice system. However, I prevailed.

As you know, I created the term "ReEntry" to mean go back, as in re-enter. I actually took the term from Juan Irving, who first used it in his book in 1970, yet I claim full credit for creating it and have relegated Irving to a minor historical footnote so that I would not be accused of outright stealing or plagiarizing. This appropriation of intellectual property is a
major part of the way we do business at the Bourbon Institute and is the cornerstone of my career and that of my colleagues. The term "reentry" has since come to mean "recidivism," which was my original intent although no one picked up on it at the time.

In the fall of 1999, while still at the National Institute of Justice, I wrote a paper that proposed creating "reentry courts" as the new managers of the reentry-recidivism process. By creating this new entity, located in the community, to oversee all community supervision, we could easily realize all of the goals that the initial incarceration may or may not have accomplished, namely keeping prison populations at maximum capacity, foolishly spending taxpayer dollars and, of course, maintaining the economic/employment status quo at equilibrium for ourselves. I have come to believe that these functions are best lodged in the judicial branch of government, in the form of a "re-entry court." Briefly stated, there are
three outstanding reasons: (1) such a court would add another useless yet thick layer of government bureaucracy to an already over burdened court system, (2) the enormous expense created by this court will create more jobs and contracts (not to mention patronage) thus strengthening the economy and (3) the realities that such a court is totally unnecessary, a waste of time and perhaps even counterproductive to successful transition from prison to community, are all consistent with the other innovative recommendations I have made over the years. With this new alignment of responsibilities for overseeing the reentry process, we stand a better chance of promoting "real" reentry success as described above.

Introduction

The title of my book, "But .They All Come Black," reflects the fact that Blacks commit more crimes than whites. That's a fact that Joan and I discovered several years ago. Once we made this research public, at a series of weekly conferences we held from 2001 - 2003, we were both richly rewarded. Actually, I became the president of a very prestigious college
for cops and Joan became a cop. Both she and I have been acknowledged as experts ever since, even though neither of us have ever actually spoken directly to anyone in prison.

Throughout the book I use terms that I have either created, made up, formulated myself or otherwise produced. I deeply resent the many groups and individuals who have implied that the terminology I use is misleading, inaccurate and racist. I am conscious of the language. While I continue to use the term negro and colored to describe people of African descent, I
only do so because its alternative, African American, is somewhat unwieldy, particularly in written text. Occasionally (and only in private and among my very best friends) I resort to using the "n" word - but only for emphasis. Perhaps, someday our language will accommodate this complicated reality.

In choosing the title of the book, I was extremely sensitive to the idea that it would probably sell much, much more if I could manage to demonstrate, using the available research, that indeed Blacks were responsible not only for committing more crime then anyone else, but also that they planned the 9/11 attacks on our precious nation, the 2004 tsunami
in the Indian Ocean, Hurricane Katrina, created and funded Al Qaeda, Hamas and the Mafia. Also, they were responsible for the untimely demise of Manuel Noriega and the dismal failure of the War on Drugs simply by being Black and living in urban areas. I think I have been successful in making the case in what is probably the best book ever written.

While I know much of the evidence presented in the book also points to Puerto Ricans as being responsible for getting our country involved in the mess in Iraq, especially the Abu Grab prison, I have not made that assertion as part of the thesis of the book simply because it is often too difficult for my staff and I to distinguish between Puerto Ricans and Arabs. And, in any event, the drugs - mostly heroin - coming out of Afghanistan are more the result of the failure of the United States to keep pace with the demands of people wanting to get high, than to any specific action on the part of Puerto Ricans or others.

Given the inner-city realities, especially in places like New York City where 50% of the Black male population is unemployed, I have identified the best possible reentry model practice. Of all the programs we reviewed, the Unemployment Training Program, offered by CEO (Cancelled Employment Opportunities) was superior. This program provides excellent training for ex-offenders and others who almost inevitably, by racial and ethnic definition, will be unemployed forever. The program provides basic skills training in how to cope with, even enjoy, long unemployment lines, rude and disrespectful clerks, endless applications and dead end interviews. These are simple yet practical ways to use up time during the day. In addition, catering to the criminal mind, which only understands instant gratification, CEO pays drug addicts daily in order to help them steadily relapse. Its
self-esteem building component, particularly for people with no money, income, or health insurance, is perhaps the best in the country. And, the program's promise of perpetual unemployment makes sense in the context of the global economy and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. All of the research indicates that this program will have a success rate of between 97 and 100%. The originator of the program and the director of CEO, Cindy Marlow, is exceptional in her own right. First, she created what the existing data and outcome evaluations validated was a bullshit program, then she sold it to the city and state of New York for sums that were obscene but brilliant, and finally, she promoted herself in such a fabulous way that, like me and Joan, she became the expert on unemployment training.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dorrie Fuckem'all who has made a national name for herself by pimping unemployed ex-offenders. In her new capacity as executive director of the JJ 50 Shot University Pimping Reentry Institute (PRI) she is primarily responsible for wasting people's time (and other resources) by inviting them to meaningless pre-dawn forums, discussions and seminars, organized by her, to talk about nothing in particular. No one is better at this than she. In fact, to solidify her legitimacy in the field, she maintains contact with a few negroes in reentry-but only the ones who will tap-dance on demand. Dorrie made such a big splash in launching the Pimping Reentry Institute, that people hardly noticed my first act as president: terminating a white middle class Jewish ex offender. See, I'm not racist. In fact, I wanted to fire the rest of those convicts, but did not want to be accused of contagious firing at the 50 Shot University. Finally, Dorrie has the task of providing diversionary cover for me at the cops college, while I upgrade the small weapons education, improve undercover racial profiling tactics and expand the curriculum in the areas of rapid fire and reloading training.

My gratitude also goes out to Leamer (I can't pronounce or spell her last name), Executive Director of the ICARE About Myself Coalition, for her truthfulness, her willingness to be creative, her efforts not to steal other people's intellectual property and for allowing us little people to join her in her many, many, many, many victories. In fact, rumor has it that
Leamer, who works the faith-based community like you have never seen, single-handedly drafted the Ten Commandments, helping God to get his own legislative agenda sponsored and passed. She has, as a result, earned my appreciation.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to Willie Horton for all of the assistance he gave me and for the time he took from his own work to offer suggestions and criticisms. While I have a greater affinity for the late John Gotti and always valued his counsel, I owe a debt of gratitude to Osama bin Laden, who did more to improve the national security, policing, and crime fighting
capacity of this country then anyone before or since. While I have been unable to contact him directly, Mr. bin Laden provided valuable comment on the draft manuscript, particularly those sections that dealt with civil liberties, constitutional rights, privacy and law enforcement.

Posted by lois at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2007

Small towns' burden: Half of war dead have rural roots

" Diminished opportunities are one factor in higher military enlistment rates in rural areas. From 1997 to 2003, 1.5 million rural workers lost their jobs due to changes in industries like manufacturing that have traditionally employed rural workers, according to the Carsey Institute."

Small towns' burden: Half of war dead have rural roots

2/20/2007
This article ran in the Northampton MA Daily Hamsphire Gazette

MCKEESPORT, Pa. (AP) - Edward "Willie" Carman wanted a ticket out of town, and the Army provided it.

Raised in the projects by a single mother in this blighted, old industrial steel town outside Pittsburgh, the 18-year-old saw the U.S. military as an opportunity.

"I'm not doing it to you, I'm doing it for me," he told his mother, Joanna Hawthorne, after coming home from high school one day and surprising her with the news.

When Carman died in Iraq three years ago at age 27, he had money saved for college, a fiancée and two kids - including a baby son he'd never met. Neighbors in Hawthorne's mobile home park collected $400 and left it in an envelope in her door.

For a year after his death, Hawthorne took a chair to the cemetery nearly every day, sat next to his grave and talked quietly. Her vigil continues even now; the visits have slowed to once a week, but the pain sticks.

Across the nation, small towns are quietly bearing the war's burden. Nearly half of the more than 3,100 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have come from towns like McKeesport, where fewer than 25,000 people live, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. One in five hailed from hometowns of less than 5,000.

The Census Bureau said 56 percent of the population in 2005 lived in towns under 25,000 and in unincorporated areas, but it could not provide the number of people in living only in communities of less than 25,000. The 2000 census showed 16 percent of the population lived in unincorporated rural areas.

Many of the hometowns of the war dead aren't just small, they're poor. The AP analysis found that nearly three quarters of those killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.

Some are old factory towns like McKeesport, once home to U.S. Steel's National Tube Works, which employed 8,000 people in its heyday. Now, residents' average income is just 60 percent of the national average, and one in eight lives below the federal poverty line.

On a per capita basis, states with mostly rural populations have suffered the highest casualties in Iraq. Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Delaware, Montana, Louisiana and Oregon top the list, the AP found.

There's a "basic unfairness" about the number of troops dying in Iraq who are from rural areas, said William O'Hare, senior visiting fellow at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute, which examines rural issues.

Diminished opportunities are one factor in higher military enlistment rates in rural areas. From 1997 to 2003, 1.5 million rural workers lost their jobs due to changes in industries like manufacturing that have traditionally employed rural workers, according to the Carsey Institute.

Rural communities are "being asked to pay a bigger price for this military adventure, if I can use that word, than their urban counterparts," O'Hare said.

As a result, in more than a thousand small towns across the country - from Glendive, Mont., to Barnwell, S.C., to Caledonia, Miss., and from Hardwick, Vt., to Clinton, Ohio - friends and families have been left struggling to make sense of a loved one's death in Iraq. It's a struggle that hits with a special intensity in tight-knit, small towns.

"In a small community, even if you don't know somebody's name you at least know their face, you've seen them before, talked to them maybe," said Chuck Bevington, whose 22-year-old brother Allan, from Beaver Falls, Pa., died in Iraq, after volunteering for a second tour. "A small community feels it a lot tighter because they've had more contact with each other."

Even strangers come up and hug his mother, he said.

Lives and livelihoods

Death isn't the only burden the war has visited on the nation's small towns.

Entrepreneurs in many small communities have lost their businesses after deploying in the Guard and Reserves, said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. More federal dollars also are needed to ensure that returning troops have easy access to veterans health centers, he said.

"It's an issue of fairness that these folks are willing to go over and fight wars and put their lives on the line and really back this country up the way they have ... we owe it to them to live up to our obligation of benefits," Tester said.

Another fairness issue, raised by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., is the Pentagon's practice of transporting the remains of military personnel killed in Iraq only to the nearest major airport. Stupak said it "imposes a burden on the family and friends when they should instead receive our support." He has introduced legislation to require the DOD to deliver the remains to the military or civilian airport chosen by the family.

While support for the war in rural areas initially was high, there has been a sharp decline in the past three years. AP-Ipsos polls show that those in rural areas who said it was the right decision to go to war dropped from 73 percent in April 2004 to 39 percent now. In urban areas, support declined from 43 percent in 2004 to 30 percent now.

Marty Newell, chief operating officer of the Whitesburg, Ky.-based Center for Rural Strategies, said rural areas supported the war early on because so many of their young men and women were fighting it.

"The reason that support is dwindling now is the same reason that support would've been strong before, and that is that we know a lot more about it," he said. "We know what the real costs are and we know what the real story is. ... Every day there's another small town that has one of their own come home less than whole, and there are a lot of small towns like that."

As the war drags on into its fourth year, Vietnam war historian Christian Appy said the burden it has placed on smaller communities - just as it did in Vietnam - can be a very "embittering experience."

"I think people in many of those towns are deeply patriotic and want to support the country, but as time goes on, it's becoming increasingly clear to those people that their country and its security is not at stake in this war and in Vietnam," Appy said.

One who's conflicted about the U.S. role in Iraq is Marilyn Adams, 37, of Wexford, Pa. Her 3-year-old son opened the door in 2005 when an officer came to tell her of the death of her husband, Pennsylvania National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Brent Adams, 40, in Iraq.

"I'm torn," she said. "Should we finish the job? And then I go to the funerals of the local guys and I'm like, this is just stupid ... I don't think we're going to finish it there. I don't think there's a finishing point. They're getting more efficient at killing us, that's a direct quote from the president."

Long before football great Joe Namath put Beaver Falls on the map, the Pennsylvania mountain town was known for its cold-drawn steel. But like much of the Steel Belt, it's had a decline in population and jobs.

Allan Bevington, who enjoyed heavy metal music and loved to fish, talked to his older brother, Chuck, about his time in the Army, and eventually decided it was a way for him to get and education and support his country.

In his first tour in Iraq, he worked as a combat engineer dismantling roadside bombs. He believed he was saving American lives and helping the Iraq people. After returning home, he volunteered for a second deployment, only to be killed by a roadside bomb.

"He really felt what he was doing was helping the Iraqi people. He had a lot of bad experiences the first time, but he had just as many good experiences," Bevington said. "He was very proud of what he was doing. He would never tell you that to your face, but you could see it in his eyes."

Before his second deployment, Bevington purchased a 2002 cobalt blue Ford Mustang. Now, it sits in his brother's driveway because neither he nor his mother have the heart to move it.

Chuck Bevington doesn't like what he calls the politicizing of the troops.

"The last thing these men need are people second guessing what's going on," he said. "That's something for the history books to decide whether it's right or wrong."

"If they end it right now, they're going to make it worse then it ever was."

Hawthorne isn't waiting on history's verdict. She's bitter about a military she said enticed her son with promises of money, then sent him to a war based on a lie.

"When they came and told me he was gone, oh my God, it just crushed me," Hawthorne said. "There was actual pain in my heart. It felt like someone was in there just ripping it apart."

When her son's first enlistment was nearing an end, before the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, Hawthorne said he decided to re-enlist, partly because the signing bonus of more than $10,000 would help pay his bills. At the time, he was facing $600 in monthly child support payments from his failed first marriage.

When he deployed to Iraq, his sister said, he had money saved and planned to go to college when he got out of the military in 2005.

Instead, he died in Iraq in 2004 when his tank overturned.

Hawthorne said the military gave her $4,000 for his funeral, but it wasn't enough to cover the $14,000 expense. The funeral home forgave the rest, and neighbors collected $400 to help her get by.

"You don't see anyone who has money putting their children into the military," she said. "I'm all for our soldiers. Without them our country wouldn't be where we are today, but this war just doesn't seem right. Like the Vietnam one. It's not right."

Posted by lois at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2007

Valentine's Day- "Unhealthy Flowers"

Unhealthy Flowers: Why Buying Organic Should Not End With Your Food
By Jason Mark, AlterNet
Posted on February 13, 2007, Printed on February 13, 2007

In recent years conscious consumers have enjoyed a spike in the availability of socially and environmentally responsible products. Worried about sweatshop shoes? Try on a pair of Adbusters' Blackspot sneakers. Concerned that your clothes were made in a dismal factory where the workers are paid starvation wages? Go with an American Apparel T-shirt or a No Sweat hoodie. If pesticide residues on your vegetables and hormone-laced meat are your worry, then head for the organic section at the supermarket. Your morning coffee can easily be fair trade-certified, as can the bananas that you put on your cereal.

But what about the flowers on the coffee table, or the bouquet you were going to buy for Valentine's Day? Where were those stems grown, by whom and under what conditions? What are the sustainable and socially responsible options when buying flowers?

Until now, there haven't been encouraging answers to those questions. Conventionally grown cut flowers are most often raised in chemical-intensive systems that expose workers to toxins that can make them sick -- sweatshops in the greenhouses, you could say. Responsible alternatives have been difficult, if not impossible, to find.

That's about to change. This Valentine's season marks the first time that environmental- and worker-friendly flowers will be widely available to consumers in the United States. A new certification system called Veriflora has been set up to guarantee that your flowers weren't grown under abusive conditions. Most Veriflora-certified producers use organic methods; the rest are expected to provide a plan for how they are reducing chemical use and converting to organic. All must show that they are protecting the safety of their workers. Later this year, TransFairUSA -- the nonprofit agency that certifies fair trade coffee, chocolate and bananas -- is expected to release a fair trade seal for flowers.

But there is a huge obstacle facing these well-meaning efforts: Indifference. Here in the United States, there is not much public awareness of the dangers associated with cut flowers. Consequently, demand for sustainable flowers is almost nonexistent. Flower growers, retailers and activists agree that the desire for organically grown flowers is going to have to increase for the budding organic flower industry to succeed.

"There's a real gap out there in terms of thinking -- people think we should buy organic only if we are eating the product," Josh Dautoff, a sustainable flower grower in Watsonville, Calif., said. His company, Dautoff Exotics, used to be a chemically reliant operation when it was run by his parents. Now Josh, 31 years old, is converting his fields and greenhouses to organic. "It's ironic that people will pay more money for organic food for their dinner plate because they are afraid of chemicals. But then they will buy conventionally grown flowers that are covered in chemicals for the centerpiece of their dinner table. ... And those chemicals will catch up with people. Maybe not through their mouths, but through the water and air."

Greenhouse sweatshops

Cut flowers are big business. The U.S. floral market is a $20 billion-a-year industry that supplies all of our Mother's Day bouquets, condolence baskets and Valentine's roses. The vast majority of the 4 billion flower stems sold in the United States every year come from Latin America, countries such as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, whose flowers have entered the United States duty-free since the 1980s.

Eliminating import taxes on South American flowers was intended as a way to encourage farmers in those countries to grow something other than coca leaf. An unintended byproduct of the off-shoring of the flower industry has been an increase in the use of chemicals. All flowers that enter the United States are closely inspected for pests and diseases. Because growers fear the high costs of having their flowers fail inspection -- and because consumers expect for their flowers to look immaculate -- they pour on the fungicides and pesticides.

The consequences are frightening, according to research by the International Labor Rights Fund and US LEAP. For example, a survey of workers on flower plantations near Bogotá found that employees were exposed to 127 different pesticides, three of which are considered extremely toxic. One-fifth of the chemicals used in flower production in South America -- products such as DDT and methyl-bromide -- are restricted or banned in the United States and Europe. Since environmental laws in South America are either lax or not enforced, chemical runoff into waterways is common, contributing to species decline.

Workers are often sickened after applying herbicides, fungicides and pesticides without proper protection. Two-thirds of Colombian flower laborers suffer from impaired vision, respiratory and neurological problems; still births and babies born with congenital malformations are disproportionately high among women who have worked in floriculture. When workers try to organize unions to defend their interests, their efforts are typically met with harassment.

"Over the years there have been many thorough studies, which I cite in the book, looking at abuses in the flower industry," Amy Stewart, author of the new book Flower Confidential , told AlterNet. "The flower industry's response has been, 'Oh things aren't that bad. That wasn't a typical farm.' What one of the labor organizers told me is that there are good farms and bad farms, but they all need to produce the same flower."

For U.S. consumers concerned about exploitation in the flower industry, there have been few options but to boycott cut flowers altogether. But in solidarity circles, boycotts are often a controversial tactic since they are likely to harm the very people they are intended to help -- the nursery workers whose livelihoods depend on robust flower sales.

To meet flowers lovers' desire for beautiful blooms, and to do so in a way that doesn't harm people or wreck the planet, a small group of environmentally minded entrepreneurs is trying to come up with ways to sell the American public on the idea of organic flowers.

Red, white -- and green

Organic Bouquet is one of the companies leading the move toward more sustainable flower production. Launched in 2001 by Gerald Prolman, a California businessman who previously ran a successful organic food business, Organic Bouquet set out to establish a niche market for organic flowers. It was a daunting task. Prolman lacked capital, a base of suppliers and even consumer demand. Essentially, he had to create not just a business, but an entire industry, from scratch.

"We began with a series of monumental challenges," Prolman wrote in a recent email interview. "The goal was to establish the market for organic flowers where commercial supply at that time was nonexistent and consumer awareness was minimal. ... Although we were able to start up with a few local growers, we did not have sufficient supplies or the breadth of product line to adequately build the company and supply customers year-round with their floral needs."

A key problem has been convincing flower wholesalers and retails florists that if they did start offering organic flowers, consumers would purchase them. Flower grower Dautoff says making this case has not been easy.

"We've found very limited interest from wholesalers to sell our flowers as certified organic," Dautoff said. "Last summer I grew thousands of bunches of chemical-free sunflowers. And the wholesaler wouldn't even label them as such. They told me that the reason why is that people don't care."

Recent visits to floral shops in the politically progressive San Francisco Bay Area confirm this. Not a single florist said there was customer interest in organic flowers. Why? Because, all the florists agreed, people don't eat flowers.

This apparent indifference on the part of consumers represents the biggest challenge for the nascent industry: Will people buy it? If you build the supply, will the demand eventually come?

Prolman is optimistic it will.

"No market? This is exactly what traditional retailers said 17 years ago about organic produce," Prolman wrote in his email. "Natural-product shoppers today are making purchasing decisions based on concerns about personal health, social justice and environmental sustainability. ... The reality is that the demand is inherent, and I base this theory on the notion of the basic goodness of humankind."

Global or local?

Beyond the question of conventional vs. organic lies another issue for consumers to navigate -- global vs. local. For even if a Colombian flower is grown under organic conditions, is it truly sustainable if it needs to be shipped thousands of miles wrapped in gobs of packaging? Some industry observers say that the globalized flower market, dependent as it is on plastic and petroleum, contributes to larger problems such as climate change. To compound the dilemma, there is very little local or regional flower production left in the United States; after WWII, most flower growing moved to California, and, as noted earlier, in the last 20 years has been transferred overseas.

"Try to find something that's locally produced," Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), said. (As part of its Valentine's Day shopping guide, the OCA is encouraging people to shop with Organic Bouquet.) "It's really not sustainable the way the market is set up now."

John Nevado -- a young Swedish businessman whose South American organic farms, Nevado Roses, are among the primary suppliers for Organic Bouquet -- says that he doesn't believe global flower production is necessarily unsustainable. He points out that most of the flowers are shipped in the bottom of the cargo holds of planes that are making the trip anyway. And he says his company uses recycled materials in the packaging for its flowers.

"As always, you are caught between providing the customer a well-packaged, sensitive luxury product and reducing packaging to the minimum," Nevado wrote in a recent email interview. "We are still trying to find balance here. ... We try our best and work hard to run our business in the most sustainable manner."

So what's a concerned shopper to do? Whenever possible, buy organically grown flowers. And, says author Amy Stewart, make sure to clearly communicate to the florist why organic is important to you. "People should ask where flowers were grown and how they were grown," Stewart said. "Florists are under the impression that these issues don't matter."

Even better, says Ronnie Cummins, go a step further and seek out flowers grown close to your home. "Buy organic, buy fair trade, and if at all possible, buy local and buy regional."

Either way, the key is send signals to the marketplace that reflect your broader values.

"If retailers get this message from enough consumers, they will eventually make changes and demand eco-flowers from their vendors," Prolman wrote. "The product is available today, and there is no justifiable reason for them to not do it. They just need to hear it from enough people, and when they act, millions [fewer] pounds of toxic chemicals will be used in floral production."

And if your neighborhood florist is not ready to listen? Well, then there's always organic, fair trade chocolate to give your sweetie this Valentine's Day.

Jason Mark is working on his second book, "Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots," to be published fall 2007 by Polipoint Press. He co-manages Alemany Farm in San Francisco.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/47847/

Posted by lois at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2007

Springfield MA: Families need three times minimum wage to get by

Thursday, February 01, 2007
Springfield Republican
Families need three times minimum wage to get by
By MARCIA BLOMBERG
SPRINGFIELD - A single parent living in Greater Springfield with a pre-schooler and a school-age child would have to make three times the state minimum wage of $7.50 an hour in order to get by without grants, subsidies or other assistance, a report issued today said.

The Crittenton Women's Union, a Boston-based non-profit organization dedicated to helping women succeed, said in its Self-Sufficiency Standard study that at $46,573 annually - $22.50 per hour - such a wage-earning parent would be making about three times the federal poverty level of $16,600.

According to the study, the median income for single mothers with children in Massachusetts was $33,097 last year, far short of the $46,573 needed in the Springfield metropolitan statistical area.

Kathleen A. Treglia, vice president of the YMCA of Greater Springfield, said many clients of the organization's programs are single parents, and they "make significantly less than that.

"They have subsidies for housing, food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants and Children nutrition program). That's probably how they're getting by," she said.

"But they'll never be able to get out of subsidized housing, because they don't make $22 an hour. That's a $45,000-a-year salary. That's substantial," Treglia said.

"Even at $45,000, you're just paying your bills: Money in, money out. You're not going to Disney, none of that," Treglia said.

While the study has been done several times since 1998, Elisabeth D. Babcock, president and chief executive officer of the Crittenton Women's Union, said she was surprised by some of the changes since the last study in 2003.

"What shocked me was the very high escalation of child care costs," especially since it seemed the hot real estate market of recent years would likely boost housing costs most dramatically, she said.

The cost of child care in Greater Springfield went up 28 percent, to $1,207 for two children, she noted.

"It was a bit of a silent crisis for young families trying to pay for child care," Babcock said.

The cost of child care was calculated from the market rate for Greater Springfield tabulated by the state Office of Child Care, and then ratcheted back. Researchers with the Women's Union focused on developing a conservative budget, with no frills, no savings and no vacations.

A parent paying full freight at the YMCA of Greater Springfield's child care program for pre-schooler would pay about $680 a month, while the study came up with an average figure of $698 for a pre-schooler in Greater Springfield.

Treglia said the YMCA, which cares for about 1,000 children a day, covers the cost of child care for most children through vouchers and scholarships.

At its facility in Wilbraham, there are some parents who pay the full rate, but "even though people think of Wilbraham as an affluent community, there are still a lot of struggling parents," Treglia said.

The monthly cost of health insurance spiked more than 50 percent, from $209 in 2003 to $321 last year. The study presumes that the parent's employer pays 74 percent of a family insurance plan.

The study pointed out that even a single adult with no children in Springfield could not afford to live without subsidies while working at a minimum wage job.

A single adult would need to earn at least $9.64 an hour to make ends meet.

Posted by lois at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2007

Safety fears as US demonstrates crowd control heat-ray weapon

Safety fears as US demonstrates crowd control heat-ray weapon
How the wave device works

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday January 26, 2007
The Guardian

It looks like a table top stuck on a Humvee, but to the US military it is a revolutionary new weapon, a controversial heat-ray destined to change the face of conflict by dispersing mobs, protecting military bases and sorting friend from foe without inflicting injuries.

Called Silent Guardian, the prototype fires a high-intensity beam of millimetre waves, inflicting a burning sensation like a light bulb pressed against the skin. After 12 years in development it has been demonstrated in public for the first time, at Moody air force base in Georgia.

For the US defence department it marks the beginning of an era of "non-lethal, directed energy, counter-personnel" weapons, intended to cause temporary pain instead of killing or maiming. But critics yesterday raised fears that the weapon could cause serious, even life-threatening burns through accident or misuse.

During the demonstration a two-man crew used built-in rangefinders to target volunteers playing the part of angry rioters 500 metres away. Those hit by the beam jumped out of the way immediately to escape the sudden flash of heat.

The beam has a range of up to 1km, 10 times that of other non-lethal weapons such as plastic bullets or beanbag-firing guns. The waves penetrate clothing, but travel less than half a millimetre into the skin, where they cause water molecules to heat up. Within seconds, the beam heats the skin to around 50C (122F). Military officials plan to use the so-called Active Denial System to keep would-be attackers from approaching military installations or navy ships in dock, or for repelling mobs. It may also be useful in sorting combatants from bystanders, who are more likely to quickly leave the scene.

Speaking from the Pentagon yesterday, Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Maka said the device, which is not expected to be ready for deployment until 2010, was built to "stop, deter and turn back an adversary at a distance that lessens the potential for causing injury".

But Neil Davison, an expert in non-lethal weapons at the Disarmament Research Centre, Bradford, said that in tests so far volunteers had been allowed a cooling off period after being hit before being targeted again. "There's no way of guaranteeing people won't be targeted for longer in a real situation," he said.

Jürgen Altmann, an expert in military technology at Dortmund University, found that if the beam is tracked on a person for longer the skin temperature can quickly rise above 55C, and begin to burn.

"Even if they build in a mechanism that limits it to work for only a few seconds at a time, people can immediately be re-targeted," he said. "If more than 20% of their body receives second or third degree burns, it's potentially life-threatening."

According to papers released under freedom of information requests, mishaps during trials have caused blistering at least six times and one second degree burn when the beam was fired on too high a setting. According to the US military, the risk of injury is less than 0.1%.

Posted by lois at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2007

MA: Adams Museum Loans Historic Bible From Survivors of the Amistad for Deval Patrick Inauguration

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tuesday, January 2, 2006

ADAMS MUSEUM LOANS HISTORIC BIBLE FROM SURVIVORS OF THE AMISTAD FOR DEVAL PATRICK INAUGURATION
Deval Patrick will take oath of office on Bible presented to John Quincy Adams by the African captives he helped free in the Amistad 1841 Supreme Court case

BOSTON – The Patrick-Murray Inaugural Committee today announced that governor-elect Deval Patrick will take his oath of office using the Mendi Bible, a gift from the Amistad Africans given to John Quincy Adams after he secured their freedom in an historic case before the United States Supreme Court in 1841. The Bible will be on loan from the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, and will be displayed at the State House following the inauguration.

"This Bible comes from an extraordinary moment in the history of the Commonwealth, the nation and the world," said Beverly Morgan-Welch, co-chair of the Inaugural Committee. "The Amistad case was a giant step forward for the abolitionist movement and recognized the basic humanity of enslaved people in America. It is now fitting and proper that we honor it now as part of this historic inaugural."

The Amistad case dates to 1839, when a group of Africans from Mendeland near modern day Sierra Leone were kidnapped and sold illegally into the Spanish slave trade. Led by Cinque, they broke their bonds and overtook the crew of the Amistad off Cuba. Ordered to sail to Africa, captured crew members steered toward Africa during the day and turned back toward the Americas at night, eventually landing off the coast of New York.

Thus began a protracted legal battle accompanied by national media coverage and international intrigue. Spain pressured then-President Martin Van Buren to send the human cargo back to Cuba without a trial and Van Buren so feared the reactions of the pro-slavery South that he had the case appealed to the Supreme Court when a lower court ordered the 35 men and women freed.

Enter John Quincy Adams, the former president and congressman whose own father had helped found the United States on the principles of freedom. He was 73 when he took up the Africans' case and argued passionately before the court in winning their freedom. In gratitude, the freed Africans presented Adams with the Bible inscribed with a letter from Cinque and his colleagues.

Thursday's swearing in of the new governor will mark the first time the historic Mendi Bible has ever been used in an official ceremony in Massachusetts.

"One hundred sixty-six years after John Quincy Adams defended the Mendi People, T he Amistad story continues to engage generations, and compels us to look to the past as we engage in the present and formulate our vision for the future. The Amistad story is our reminder of the impact one individual can have on society and the importance of 'civic engagement.' These ideals of active citizenship, patriotism and the lifelong commitment of service to country, as celebrated at the Inauguration of Deval Patrick as Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are as relevant in 2007 as they were in l84l, and an important piece of our state's rich heritage," said Marianne Peak, Superintendent of the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy.

"The Mendi Bible is one of the most significant and moving pieces of history in the Adams family. It reflects the great determination and courage of a people who, after long suffering, were fortunate to find themselves befriended by an old man, a former President with a passionate belief in justice. We are tremendously pleased that the Mendi Bible continues to serve as a symbol of our nation's most precious and fundamental beliefs," said Benjamin Adams, president of the Adams Memorial Society and a descendant of John Quincy Adams.

The Mendi Bible is on exhibit at the Adams National Historical Park from April l9 to November 10.

Posted by lois at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2007

NY: "A Man Down, and a Stranger Makes A Choice"

January 3, 2007
A Man Down, and a Stranger Makes a Choice
By CARA BUCKLEY

It was every subway rider’s nightmare, times two.

Who has ridden along New York’s 656 miles of subway lines and not wondered: “What if I fell to the tracks as a train came in? What would I do?”

And who has not thought: “What if someone else fell? Would I jump to the rescue?”

Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker, faced both those questions in a flashing instant yesterday, and got his answers almost as quickly.

Mr. Autrey was waiting for the local at 137th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before heading to work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled a few steps to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared.

“I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, pressing him down, his heart pounding. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time.

Five cars rolled overhead before the train stopped, passing just inches from Mr. Autrey’s head, smudging his blue knit cap with grease. Mr. Autrey heard onlookers’ screams. “We’re O.K. down here,” he yelled, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s O.K.” He heard cries of wonder, and applause.

Power was cut, and workers got them out. Mr. Hollopeter, a student at the New York Film Academy, was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. He had only bumps and bruises, said his grandfather, Jeff Friedman. The police said it appeared that Mr. Hollopeter had suffered a seizure.

Mr. Autrey refused medical help, because, he said, nothing was wrong. Then he dropped off his two young daughters before heading to his night shift. “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help,” Mr. Autrey said. “I did what I felt was right.”

Posted by lois at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2006

Council of State Governments Announces New Justice Center

Council of State Governments Announces New Justice Center

The Council of State Governments (CSG) is pleased to announce the launch of its Justice Center, a national resource center on criminal justice policy. The CSG Governing Board voted December 3, 2006, to transform the Criminal Justice Program of CSG's Eastern Regional Conference into this new center dedicated to helping policymakers from any state develop nonpartisan, consensus-driven strategies that address a wide range of public safety issues.

For a copy of the full news release about the CSG Justice Center, go to: .

Posted by lois at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

Prometa Founder's Spotty Background Explored

Prometa Founder's Spotty Background Explored
November 3, 2006, Join Together Now

Some observers say they see a familiar pattern in the aggressive marketing of an unproved addiction treatment regimen called Prometa: founder Terren Peizer similarly hyped an anti-AIDS drug, Immunitin, in the 1990s, but the drug never made it to market.

MSNBC reported Nov. 1 that Peizer's Hythiam Corp. is marketing the $12,000-$15,000 Prometa regimen to governments and insurers as a treatment for methamphetamine, cocaine, and alcohol addiction. Small communities hard-hit by meth are seen as an especially ripe market.

Critics, however, say that Prometa's claimed effectiveness is backed by little other than anecdotes. "The marketing is way ahead of the science," said Lori Karan, a researcher at the Drug Dependence Research Laboratory at the University of California San Francisco. "It preys on the needs of desperate patients, sets unreasonable hopes and expectations and takes advantage of scarce economic resources."

Peter Banys, director of addiction programs at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, added, "I would never recommend that someone spend $15,000 on this with the current state of data (and) I think it's improper to spend public money on this product at this time."

The Prometa regimen consists of administration of three prescription drugs, none of which have been approved for addiction treatment by the FDA. The company is now conducting clinical research on the mix, but has gone ahead with marketing Prometa -- including with ads featuring the late comedian Chris Farley, who died of an overdose.

Study results may not be ready until 2008. "Counties don't care about double-blind placebo-controlled data," said Peizer. "What's interesting about Prometa is that out in the field -- in the counties, justice systems, private centers -- the clinical relevance is being shown daily." Hythiam claims that Prometa produces an abstinence rate of 60-80 percent among the 1,000-plus people who have undergone the treatment.

Fulton County, Ga., Pierce County, Wash., and Gary, Ind., are among the local communities that have adopted or tested Prometa. Hythiam is marketing the treatment at anti-drug conferences in communities where meth has become a major problem. Terree Schmidt-Whelan, director of the Pierce County Alliance, a nonprofit treatment center in Tacoma, Wash., called the results of Prometa with hardcore meth addicts "phenomenal."

"I've been in this field for 30 years, and to see people change their lives in a week, and so dramatically, it's just wonderful," she said.

Peizer is a former junk-bond salesman who worked for Michael Milken; his past investments included the company that makes Candie's shoes, a firm that went bankrupt after marketing a automobile tire it claimed would not go flat, and a successful computer company that bought the assets of Cray Research, the famous supercomputer company.

Peizer's past statements about Immunitin, the ill-fated anti-AIDS drug, sound similar to his claims about Prometa. "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. We have something special," he told reporters in 1998.

Peizer owns 35 percent of Hythiam, where stock prices have risen more than 60 percent in three months.

Related Articles

* NIDA and SAMHSA to Expedite Transfer of Findings from Treatment Research into Clinical Practice

* Company Seeks $40 Million to Develop Addiction Drug

* New Website on Pain Management for Healthcare Professionals

* Buprenorphine Legislation Hailed as Treatment Breakthrough

Related Resources

* Treatment Research Institute

* Medical Management Treatment Manual: A Clinical Research Guide for Medically Trained Clinicians Providing Pharmacotherapy as Part of the Treatment for Alcohol Dependence, Volume 2

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2006/prometa-founders-spotty.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=30960902

Posted by lois at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2006

Review: Prison Nation- Posters on the Prison Industrial Complex at the Watts Towers Art Center

There’s power in these posters
The use of imagery in placards advocating prison reform is on display at the Watts Towers Art Center.
By Cindy Chang
Special to The Times

April 6, 2006

The United States puts more of its citizens behind bars than any other nation, according to the International Center for Prison Studies in London. The federal government's latest count pegs the American prison population at more than 2 million, a sixfold increase since 1970.

For advocates of prison reform, these statistics underscore the need for drastic change. But for others, they are proof of how well the system is working.

Sometimes only arresting visual images, like the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, have the power to speak across ideological lines. Indeed, the prison reform movement has long used images to convey what statistics alone cannot.

Whether it's a 1960s photo of Texas prisoners picking cotton or an iconic Abu Ghraib silhouette superimposed on a takeoff of an iPod ad, an exhibition at the Watts Towers Art Center traces the use of imagery on prison-reform posters through the decades.

The show, which runs through June 4, was curated by the L.A.-based Center for the Study of Political Graphics and partially funded by the city of Los Angeles' Cultural Affairs Department.

More often than not, posters advertise countercultural points of view, and the center has sponsored many exhibits devoted to left-wing causes, including an antiwar exhibit several years ago and a just-concluded exhibit of anti-death penalty posters. Titled "Prison Nation: Posters on the Prison Industrial Complex," this show presents a take on the American prison system that is loud and clear.

Opening day in late March included a panel discussion with local prison reform organizations. A Sunday afternoon film series presented in conjunction with the exhibition is screening prison-related movies. (This weekend's program features films about juveniles in the criminal justice system.)

Some of the posters were created especially for the exhibition, but many were used to draw people to a rally or to issue a call to action with maximum effect.

"There's evidence that when a campaign has graphics and visuals to promote its mission, it has more success. You need a powerful image to convey a message, something that people can pull in with a glance. Then you can give them more information," said Mary Sutton, the center's program director and a co-curator of the exhibition.

Not surprisingly, the American flag is a common motif in the show, with the stripes often standing in for prison bars.

One poster from 1976 comments on the American bicentennial by invoking Betsy Ross' name as an ironic juxtaposition to a set of anonymous female hands sewing a flag behind cell bars. "1976 — what are we celebrating?" asks the accompanying text.

Cedomir Kostovic, a professor at Missouri State University who emigrated from Bosnia in 1990, designed another of the American flag posters after watching a television news program about the United States' high incarceration rates.

Kostovic's computer-generated image of a Stars and Stripes formed with keyholes and prison bars was the final installment of his trilogy of American flag posters. (The first was a homage to Sept. 11 victims and had stripes composed of many candles; the second, a comment on the power of American corporations, used Coca-Cola cans as stripe components.)

"I saw a magazine program about how the government can't build enough jails, how private people are building jails and it's become a big business. I was just shocked, and I thought, 'I have to say something.' I'm a visual artist, this is how I speak, so I did a poster about it," Kostovic said.

Some of the posters in the "Prison Nation" exhibition are aimed at inner-city youths. In her work at the Los Angeles-based Youth Justice Coalition, co-curator Kim McGill uses images to communicate with a generation that was raised on MTV and hip-hop and has little patience for the written word.

"You can get posters and stickers into places where you can't get any other information — schools, bus stops, in people's cells," McGill said. "We can't begin to afford the billboard space that corporations can pay for, so posters become our advertising, our way to take back public space in an environment of commercial messages."

One youth-oriented poster, from a Bay Area collective, speaks to teenagers by describing the unpleasant facts of life in prison. Written on a blackboard in white chalk is a list of the meager items issued to an inmate: three pairs of jeans, three shirts and on down the line. The simple message? "This is not a camping trip. Choose education, not incarceration."

The show also includes several posters by European artists who live in countries with low incarceration rates and who seem to be aghast at the relatively large proportion of American citizens behind bars as well as the way the United States is treating its prisoners abroad.

Amnesty International in Switzerland designed a poster showing police mug shots of the Statue of Liberty and noting in French, "Liberty and equality? It depends on for whom."

A stenciled poster by the Swedish artist Sixten looks like an advertisement for a luxury resort called Guantanamo Bay — but if the name itself isn't enough of a giveaway, barbed wire lurks in the background and a drop of blood besmears the palm-treed island.

Taken together, the 80-some posters provide an overview of the issues that have concerned prison reformers over the last half-century.

Some, like living conditions behind bars and prison guard brutality, have stayed more or less constant. Others, like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, are newer.

Because failed efforts at change are often forgotten, posters such as these can preserve an alternative take on history, which often concentrates on the movements that did take hold, organizers say.

"Usually, you get a seamless version of history — then came this and this and this. History is written by the victors," said Carol Wells, the graphics center's executive director.

"Posters are produced by people who are involved in struggles and give their point of view, which is rarely told in history books."

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-wk-gallery6apr06,0,6901186.story?coll=cl-art-top-right

Posted by lois at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2005

NY: Crime Numbers Keep Dropping Across the City

December 31, 2005

Crime Numbers Keep Dropping Across the City
By AL BAKER

Crime has fallen across New York City for the 17th consecutive year, with subway crime down by more than 5 percent from last year and the number of recorded murders virtually certain to be the fewest in any single year since 1963, new Police Department statistics show.

As of yesterday, there had been 537 killings in the city, according to the department's latest marking-period reports that are issued weekly. That is down from 566 in the same period last year. And it is down from 649 in all of 2001, when joblessness surged, anxiety from Sept. 11 was present and a budget crisis prompted a reduction in numbers of city police officers. In that year, some citizens and criminal justice experts predicted a bottoming out of the crime downturn as the police force took on new counterterrorism responsibilities.

New York reported its greatest number of murders in 1990, when 2,245 people lost their lives by violence.

In 2005, in addition to murders, numbers for rape, felony assault, burglary and grand larceny all fell, the department said.

Auto theft, which, like murder, is considered a reliable indicator of crime patterns because there is little discretion in how to classify it and little reluctance in reporting it, fell by nearly 12 percent.

"When you get eight million people together, you will have some crime," said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. "But is the city improving? And, is quality of life improving? Most believe that and believe that cops are doing a great job and crime is coming down."

New York's continuing decline is in contrast to some other cities across the nation. After years of falling crime, Boston is now experiencing a surge in homicides. Houston has seen more killings in 2005. In Philadelphia, murders are outpacing last year's rate. Some law enforcement officials have attributed rising murder rates outside of New York to use of the drug methamphetamine.

David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said, "Nobody else, anywhere, has been able to generate either the huge reductions in violent crime or sustain those reductions without reversal for 10 years, which is what New York has now done."

In the view of some critics, the overall numbers seem too good to be true. Officials in the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the main police union, charged last year that precinct commanders felt such pressure to drive down crime that they "cook the books," reducing the severity of crimes on paper to avoid recording them and reporting them to the F.B.I.

But the department has an internal auditing system, said Michael J. Farrell, the deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives. Since that system was put in place in the early 1990's, the error rate has gone to 1.5 percent from 4.4 percent, he said.

"The aspect of it that reassures us are the audits that we do, which are very substantial, in terms of the number," Mr. Farrell said. "Every precinct is audited randomly, twice a year."

Of course, on any given day in the city, the streets can feel dangerous.

Arrests for guns are up, heading into the last week of this year. Two police officers have been killed in the line of duty in recent weeks, and more officers were shot this year, 8, the highest number since 1997, when 10 were shot and one was killed. The 2005 murder tally could still increase by midnight tonight or when some 2005 deaths because of unknown causes are finally determined by the medical examiner.

Shootings, a crime statistic the department has tracked for the last 12 years, were up by 3.2 percent, to 1,508 from 1,461. And the number of victims wounded in those shootings rose to 1,808 from 1,755. The shootings, though, were concentrated in a handful of precincts, and they have now started to fall. This year could well wind up with the second-lowest number of shootings since 1993.

The precinct with the greatest number of incidents of gunfire in 2005 was the 75th Precinct, in East New York, Brooklyn, which recorded 92. The most gun arrests, 225, happened there, too.

The citywide dips in five of the major crime categories was followed by roughly proportional dips in arrests for those crimes. But the number of robberies increased, by 0.8 percent, and, consequently, robbery arrests mushroomed to nearly 11 percent as the police focused on the problem.

Or, as Mr. Farrell put it, to "re-inoculate" a new generation of criminals "who may not have gotten that vaccine."

Put in context, the rise in robberies, to 23,948 from 23,746, comes in a category of crime that is a mere shadow of its former self: their number peaked at 100,280 in 1990, said Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian and executive director of the Citizens Crime Commission, a group that monitors police policies in New York.

In all, the numbers collected, computerized and crunched by the New York Police Department reveal all manner of trends and developments.

In 2005, eight precincts in the city recorded not a single murder - vast parts of the city that included Central Park and the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where there were four murders last year, and in 1990 there were eight.

Five precincts, including one covering the Long Island City section of Queens and another, in the Fordham and Bedford Park sections of the Bronx, recorded some of the highest numbers of violent crimes this year. There were 229 robberies in the 108th Precinct in Queens, for instance. But even with those high numbers, it was those very precincts that recorded the greatest reductions when set against last year. For example, robberies in the 108th were down by 16 percent.

Perception can be as much a measure of crime as reported statistics. In 1963, as today, some sensational cases made headlines for weeks. Then, it was the so-called Career Girl murders, the double homicide of a Newsweek researcher and a teacher on the Upper East Side. There were a total of 548 homicides that year. Now, it is Peter Braunstein, a writer suspected of posing as a firefighter in an Oct. 31 sex assault in Chelsea.

Commissioner Kelly, for his part, said no floor for any crime is acceptable. The department tracks crime in "real time," he said, and maps it down to street corners.

The manpower for Operation Impact, a program started by Mr. Kelly to flood problem areas with Police Academy recruits accompanied by more experienced officers, will be doubled next month to include 1,200 officers. A strategy of splitting the most violent precincts into thirds, Operation Trident, will be put in place in the 44th and 46th Precincts, he said.

Many people, however, including Andrew Karmen, a criminologist who has analyzed the factors affecting the city's crime, have wondered just how long this trend - what Dr. Karmen calls a "crime crash" - can last.

"I think there is room for even further progress because in other large cities around the world, such as London and Tokyo, people get along even better with each other than we do," said Dr. Karmen, who wrote the book, "New York Murder Mystery" (N.Y.U. Press, 2000), about declining crime rates in the 1990's.

Dr. Karmen said that most criminologists attribute New York's falling crime rate to both criminal justice and broader societal factors, including smarter police work, tougher sentencing, improved job opportunities and the perception of an improved economy.

Mr. Kennedy said: "The controversy remains. Is it something that law enforcement did, or isn't it? My thought is, you can't explain it without a very large contribution from law enforcement."

Heading into his second term, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the record bodes well for the future.

"Every year, experts say we can't drive crime down any further, but happily the N.Y.P.D. proves them wrong and breaks another record," Mr. Bloomberg said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/nyregion/31crime.html?hp&ex=1136091600&en=10df13f49ff8773a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Posted by lois at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

Executive Order: Improving Agency Disclosure of Information--FOIAs

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 14, 2005

Executive Order: Improving Agency Disclosure of Information

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to ensure appropriate agency disclosure of information, and consistent with the goals of section 552 of title 5, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy.

(a) The effective functioning of our constitutional democracy depends upon the participation in public life of a citizenry that is well informed. For nearly four decades, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has provided an important means through which the public can obtain information regarding the activities of Federal agencies. Under the FOIA, the public can obtain records from any Federal agency, subject to the exemptions enacted by the Congress to protect information that must be held in confidence for the Government to function effectively or for other purposes.

(b) FOIA requesters are seeking a service from the Federal Government and should be treated as such. Accordingly, in responding to a FOIA request, agencies shall respond courteously and appropriately. Moreover, agencies shall provide FOIA requesters, and the public in general, with citizen-centered ways to learn about the FOIA process, about agency records that are publicly available (e.g., on the agency's website), and about the status of a person's FOIA request and appropriate information about the agency's response.

(c) Agency FOIA operations shall be both results-oriented and produce results. Accordingly, agencies shall process requests under the FOIA in an efficient and appropriate manner and achieve tangible, measurable improvements in FOIA processing. When an agency's FOIA program does not produce such results, it should be reformed, consistent with available resources appropriated by the Congress and applicable law, to increase efficiency and better reflect the policy goals and objectives of this order.

(d) A citizen-centered and results-oriented approach will improve service and performance, thereby strengthening compliance with the FOIA, and will help avoid disputes and related litigation.

Sec. 2. Agency Chief FOIA Officers.

(a) Designation. The head of each agency shall designate within 30 days of the date of this order a senior official of such agency (at the Assistant Secretary or equivalent level), to serve as the Chief FOIA Officer of that agency. The head of the agency shall promptly notify the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB Director) and the Attorney General of such designation and of any changes thereafter in such de