Recent comments

  • "Whites Only After Dark": Historian James Loewen uncovers Illinois' legacy of Sundown Towns   6 hours 23 min ago
    Homer

    Interestingly enough I am from the Chicagoland area and met one of the daughter's of this Indian family at a camp in Indiana about 5 years back.  And I go to school here in Champaign.  Isn't weird that that I know exactly the family you're talking about.  Without any specifics whatsoever? Don't you think that might mean your Homer is not as diverse as you might think? You can't use oh yea I'm not racist I have a black friend logic or argument.  Just because they are there doesn't mean it might be a comfortable place for them to live at all times.  How would your town react if more latinos, blacks, indians, or other ethnic groups moved in?  Its good that you have no problem with it but not everyone thinks the same.

  • Overworked and Underpaid? Productivity Increases, But Wage Growth Declines   7 hours 37 min ago
    Can You Say, Fascism? The Political Consequences of Stagnation

    by Walden Bello

    My apologies to T. S. Eliot, but September, not April, is the cruelest month. Before 9/11/2001, there was 9/11/1973, when Gen. Pinochet toppled the Allende government in Chile and ushered in a 17-year reign of terror. More recently, on 9/15/2008, Lehman Brothers went bust and torpedoed the global economy, turning what had been a Wall Street crisis into a near-death experience for the global financial system.

    Two years later, the global economy remains very fragile. The signs of recovery that desperate policymakers claimed to have detected late in 2009 and early this year have proven to be mirages. In Europe, four million people are unemployed and the austerity programs imposed on highly indebted countries such as Greece, Spain, Italy, and Ireland will add hundreds of thousands more to the dole. Germany is an exception to the dismal rule.

    Although technically the United States isn't in recession, recovery is a distant prospect in the world's biggest economy, which contracted by 2.9 percent in 2009. This is the message of the anemic second-quarter GDP growth rate of 1.6 percent and a real unemployment above the 9.6 percent official rate if one factors in those who have given up looking for work. Firms continue to refrain from investing, banks continue not to lend, and consumers continue to refuse to spend. And the absence of a new stimulus program, as the impact of the $787 billion Washington injected into the economy in 2009 peters out, virtually ensures that the much-feared double-dip recession will become a reality.

    That the American consumer does not spend has implications not only for the U.S. economy, but for the global economy. The debt-fuelled spending of Americans was the motor of the pre-crisis globalized economy, and nobody else has stepped in to replace them since the crisis began. Consumer spending in China, fuelled by a government stimulus of $585 billion, has temporarily reversed contractionary trends in that country and East Asia. It has also had some impact in Africa and Latin America. But it has not been strong enough to pull the United States and Europe from stagnation. Moreover, in the absence of a new stimulus package in China, a relapse into low growth, stagnation, or recession is very real in East Asia.

    To Cut or to Stimulate

    Meanwhile, the debate in western policy circles has divided into two camps. One group sees the threat of government default as a bigger problem than stagnation and refuses to countenance any more stimulus spending. The other thinks stagnation is the greater threat and demands more stimulus to counter it. At the G20 meeting in Toronto in June, the two sides collided. Germany's Angela Merkel advocated tightening, pointing to the threat of a default by Germany's debt-laden satellite economies in southern Europe, particularly Greece. President Obama, on the other hand, facing an intractably high unemployment rate, wanted to continue expansionary policies, though he lacked the political clout to sustain them.

    To the pro-spending people, the anti-deficit people don't have much of an argument.  At a time when deflation is the big threat, fear of government spending stoking inflation is misplaced. The idea of burdening future generations with debt is odd since the best way to benefit tomorrow's citizens is to ensure that they inherit healthy, growing economies. Deficit spending now is the means to achieve this growth. Moreover, government default is not a real threat for countries that borrow in currencies they control, like the United States, since, as a last option, they can repay their debts simply by having their central bank print more money.

    Perhaps the most vocal pro-stimulus advocate is Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate, who has become the bête noire of many on the right. For Krugman, the problem was that the original stimulus was not big enough. Yet how big is the extra stimulus needed, and what other anti-stagnation measures can the government take? On these questions Krugman betrays some unease, perhaps realizing that traditional Keynesianism has its limits: "Nobody can be sure how well these measures would work, but it's better to try something that might not work than to make excuses while workers suffer."  The stark alternative to more aggressive deficit spending is "permanent stagnation and high unemployment," says Krugman.

    Krugman may have reason on his side, but reason has taken a backseat to ideology, interests, and politics. Despite high rates of unemployment, the anti-big government, anti-deficit forces have the initiative in three key Western countries: in Britain, where the Conservatives won on a platform of reducing government; in Germany, where the image of spendthrift Greeks and Spaniards financed with loans from hardworking Germans became the powerful horse Merkel's party rode to maintain power; and in the United States.

    The Obama Debacle

    The anti-deficit perspective has gained ascendancy in the United States despite high unemployment for a number of reasons for this. First of all, the anti-deficit stand appeals to the anti-big government sentiments of the American middle class. Second, Wall Street has opportunistically embraced anti-deficit policies to derail Washington's efforts to regulate it. Big government is the problem, it screams, not the big banks. Third and not to be underestimated is the reemergence of the ideological influence of doctrinaire neoliberals, including those who, as Martin Wolf puts it, "believe a deep slump would purge past excesses, and so lead to healthier economies and societies." Fourth, the anti-spending economics has a mass base, the tea party movement. In contrast, the stimulus position is advocated by progressive intellectuals without a base or whose potential base has become disillusioned with Obama.

    Still, the triumph of the hawks was not foreordained. According to Anatole Kaletsky, the economic commentator of the Times of London and someone not exactly sympathetic to the progressive point of view, the ascendancy of the anti-deficit forces stems from a major tactical mistake on the part of Obama coupled with the progressives' failure to offer a convincing narrative for the crisis. The blunder was Obama's taking responsibility for the crisis in a gesture of bipartisanship, in contrast to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who "refused to take any blame for the economic hardships." Reagan and Thatcher devoted "the early years of their government to convincing voters that economic disaster was entirely the responsibility of previous left-wing governments, militant unions, and liberal progressive elites."

    But even more problematic, says Kaletsky, was the Obama narrative, which was a contradictory one that put the blame on greedy bankers while maintaining that the banks were too big to fail. "With banks recovering from the crisis more profitably and quickly than voters had been led to expect," he argues in his book Capitalism 4.0,  "politicians of all parties have been branded by public sentiment as stooges of the very bankers they tried to blame." Indeed, the Democrats' finance reform package that recently passed in Congress can only reinforce this public perception of their being coopted or intimidated by the very people they denounce. It lacks provisions with teeth : a Glass-Steagall type of provision preventing commercial banks from doubling as investment banks; the banning of trading in derivatives, which Warren Buffett called "weapons of mass destruction;" a global financial transactions tax or Tobin Tax; and a strong lid on executive pay, bonuses, and stock options.

    For Kaletsky, Obama should have portrayed the economic crisis as one created "by the polarized and oversimplified philosophy of market fundamentalism, not by bankers' and regulators' personality flaws. By offering such a systemic account of the crisis, politicians could capture the public imagination with a post-crisis narrative than the lynching of greedy bankers - and ultimately more dramatic." But with aides like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, neither of whom had broken completely with neoliberalism, such a systemic account was simply not in the cards.

    Toward a Progressive Strategy

    The right wing has the momentum now and will probably win big in the U.S. elections in November. They will tie Obama and the Democrats so firmly to the crisis that people will forget it exploded during the reign of market fundamentalist George Bush. But with their primeval market economics, the fiscal hawks and tea partiers are unlikely to provide an alternative to what they have caricatured as Obama's "socialism." Allowing the economy to implode in order to be ideologically correct will invite an even greater repudiation from an economically insecure population.

    But progressives should not take comfort from the dead end offered by tea party economics. They should try to understand what has led to the failure of Obama's pallid Keynesianism. Beyond the tactical mistake of taking responsibility for the crisis and the failure to advance an aggressive anti-neoliberal narrative to explain it, the central problem that has plagued Obama and his team is their failure to offer an inspiring alternative to neoliberalism.

    The technical elements of a progressive solution to the crisis have been thrashed out by Keynesian and other progressive economists: a much bigger stimulus, tighter regulation of the banks, loose monetary policies, higher taxes on the rich, rebuilding the national infrastructure, an industrial policy promoting green industries, controls on speculative capital flows, controls on outward bound foreign investment, a global currency, and a new global central bank.

    The Obama administration has tried to enact some of these measures. But owing to its eagerness for bipartisanship, the ties of some of its prominent people to the economic elites, and the failure of key technocrats like Summers and Geithner to break with the neoliberal paradigm, it failed to present them as elements of a broader program of social reform aimed at democratizing control and management of the economy.

    For progressives, the lesson to be derived from the stalling of Obamanomics is that technocratic management is not enough. Keynesian moves must be part of a broader vision and program. This strategy must have three key thrusts: democratic decision-making at all levels of the economy, from the enterprise to macroeconomic planning; second, greater equality in the distribution of wealth and income to make up for lower growth rates dictated by economic and environmental constraints; and third, a more cooperative, as opposed to competitive ethic, in production, distribution, and consumption.

    Moreover, such a program cannot simply be dished out from above by a technocratic elite, as has been the fashion in this administration, one of whose greatest mistakes was to allow the mass movement that brought it to power to wither away. The people must be enlisted in the construction of the new economy, and here progressives have a lot to learn from the Tea Party movement that they must inevitably compete against in a life-and-death struggle for grassroots America.

    Nature Abhors a Vacuum

    Krugman predicts that the likely electoral results in November "will paralyze policy for years to come." But nature abhors a vacuum, and the common failure of both market fundamentalists and technocratic Keynesians so far to address the fears of the unemployed, the about-to-be unemployed, and the vast numbers of economically insecure people will most likely produce social forces that would tackle their fears and problems head-on.

    A failure of the left to innovatively fill this space will inevitably spawn a reinvigorated right with fewer apprehensions about state intervention, one that could combine technocratic Keynesian initiatives with a populist but reactionary social and cultural program.There is a term for such a regime: fascist. As Roger Bootle, author of The Trouble with Markets, reminds us, millions of Germans were disillusioned with the free market and capitalism during the Great Depression. But with the failure of the left to provide a viable alternative, they became vulnerable to the rhetoric of a party that, once it came to power, combined Keynesian pump-priming measures that brought unemployment down to 3 percent with a devastating counterrevolutionary social and cultural program.

    Fascism in the United States? It's not as far-fetched as you might think.

    © 2010 Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)

    Walden Bello, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of, among other books, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).

  • Overworked and Underpaid? Productivity Increases, But Wage Growth Declines   9 hours 28 min ago
    Top 10 Reasons for Higher Taxes on the Top 1%

    by Paul Buchheit

    Funding for our country's children is being cut, but we allow a hedge fund manager to make enough money to pay the salaries of every public school teacher in New York City. Most of his earnings are taxed at a rate less than that of his secretary.

    We haven't been able to do anything about it because the cry of 'socialism' from the top generates fear in the minds of average Americans. It's a meaningless cry. Here are ten reasons why the wealthiest 10% of us, and especially the richest 1%, should be paying higher taxes.

    1. Benefits to the rich (and everyone else)

    Americans with land and expensive houses have the most to lose by failing to support national security and a clean environment and infrastructure repair. And they have a lot to lose from the growing levels of crime and violence. Researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have documented numerous studies that correlate economic inequality with shorter life expectancies, increased disease and health problems, and higher rates of murder and other forms of violence.

    About their book "The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone," Wilkinson says: "We quote a prison psychiatrist who spent 25 years talking to really violent men, and he says he has yet to see an act of violence which was not caused by people feeling disrespected, humiliated, or like they've lost face. Those are the triggers to violence, and they're more intense in more unequal societies, where status competition is intensified and we're more sensitive about social judgments."

    2. Correcting the redistribution of income to the rich

    The richest 1% took $7 of every $100 of America's income in 1980. They have increased that to $20 of every $100 today. In just one generation they've TRIPLED their cut of the pie. Most of the gains by the rich were not 'earned' in the sense of production, innovation, inventiveness. They didn't work 3 times harder than everyone else as they tripled their share. They benefited from tax cuts and deregulation.

    3. Correcting the redistribution of income from the poor

    Since 1980 our country's productivity has steadily risen, with total income doubling approximately every 10 years. If the bottom 90% of America, most of whom have not been lazy, had shared in this prosperity at a level consistent with 1980 incomes, they would be making $45,000 a year instead of $35,000.

    Change to Win, a coalition of union organizations, notes that the high point for wages was in 1972 when union membership reached 28%. Workers are now "earning only 83 cents of every dollar they earned more than 35 years ago, while their productivity has increased a dramatic 80%."

    4. Outmoded tax brackets

    Our tax system is stuck at 1980s levels. As noted by The New Yorker economist James Surowiecki, "Our system sets the top bracket at three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, with a tax rate of thirty-five per cent...This means that someone making two hundred thousand dollars a year and someone making two hundred million dollars a year pay at similar tax rates. LeBron James and LeBron James's dentist: same difference."

    5. Inequality to instability

    As explained by Time's economics writer Stephen Gandel, "Consider what [money held by the very rich] is doing now. It is adding to our economic problems not helping. For the most part it is not money being spent and trickling down. Instead it just adds to that global pool of money that sloshes around our financial markets and creates all types of bubbles...it actually makes our economy prone to booms and busts, and less stable."

    6. Instability to catastrophe

    The current level of inequality is equivalent to that of the years just before the Great Depression. There is reason to suspect that this level of income inequality is dangerous to our economy. The only other year since 1913 that the wealthy claimed such a large share of national income was 1928, when the top 1% share was 23.9%. The following year, the stock market crashed, which led to the Great Depression. After peaking again in 2007, the U.S. stock market crashed in 2008, leading to what some are now calling the "Great Recession."

    7. The Tax Myth

    The belief that the "rich pay most of the taxes" is incorrect. The truth comes from the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the Internal Revenue Service. It's true that the top-earning 1% of Americans pay 23% of their incomes in federal income taxes, while the lowest-earning half of Americans pay only 3%. But top earners pay 5% of their incomes in state and local taxes (sales, property, and income taxes), while low earners pay 10%. Top earners pay 2% of their incomes toward social security, compared to 9% for low earners. Top earners pay 0% (i.e., a negligible portion) of their incomes in federal excise taxes (e.g., tobacco, alcohol and gasoline), while low earners pay 2%. Top earners save another 1% through the Bush tax cuts, while low earners see little benefit. So total taxes for top earners are 29% of their incomes. Total taxes for low earners are 24% of their incomes.

    Beyond this, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the American Gas Association concur that low-income households pay over 20% of their incomes for utilities, while high-income households pay less than 4%. As a result, total taxes and utilities for top earners consume 33% of their incomes. Total taxes and utilities for low earners consume 44% of their incomes.

    8. The Consumption Myth

    The belief that rich stimulate the economy is another myth. If anything, the poor stimulate the economy. Low-income earners have a higher "Marginal Propensity to Consume," which means that they spend a greater percentage of their overall income on consumption. High-income earners, on the other hand, will hold more in investments. A University of California study showed that from 1980 to 2003 the share of capital income (stocks, interest, dividends) owned by the richest 1% grew from 37% to 57%.

    It's not just rich individuals holding the money. The 500 largest non-financial corporations are currently sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash.

    9. Wealth with Honor

    Although our country is built on capitalism, wise American business leaders have recognized the danger of the "free hand" of unregulated open markets. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism believed that unrestricted businesses tend to engage in "conspiracy against the public." John Kenneth Galbraith said "Capitalism left to its own devices, doesn't work properly; it excludes the poor, ruins the environment, and fails to deliver enough collectively produced goods, such as roads, reservoirs, schools and hospitals."

    Teddy Roosevelt (in 1910, exactly 100 years ago) criticized the "small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power...We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used...We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community...I think we have got to face the fact that an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

    Taxes were raised on the rich shortly after Roosevelt's speech, and the United States gradually became a middle class nation.

    More recently, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have been trying to convince the rich of their responsibility to society. "Responsible Wealth," a project of United for a Fair Economy, is a network of over 700 business leaders and wealthy individuals in the top 5% of income and/or wealth in the US who advocate for fair taxes and corporate accountability.

    (10) As the Tea Party argues, there should be no new taxes. On 90% of us.

    Paul Buchheit is a faculty member in the School for New Learning at DePaul University.

  • Greg Koger Found Guilty and Currently Being Held in Cook County Jail   23 hours 10 min ago
    ACLU

    Brian, because this case involves the 1st Amendent, it may be of interest to the ACLU. I suggest filing an on-line complaint at the ACLU-Illinois website and perhaps contact the local ACLU chapter in Cook County.

    John Hilty

     

  • The Push for Social Security Cuts Ignores the Reality of the Program's Finances and Conditions of Near-Retirees   1 day 4 hours ago
    Seven Key Facts About Social Security and the Federal Budget

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    September 1, 2010
    2:25 PM

    CONTACT: CEPR
    Alan Barber, (202) 293-5380 x115

    Seven Key Facts About Social Security and the Federal Budget

    WASHINGTON - September 1 - Heading into the midterm elections, Social Security has proven to be one of the hot button issues of this cycle. Despite the fact that the program has just begun its 75th year contributing to the retirement security of millions, the relationship between Social Security and the federal budget is unclear to many Americans. A new issue brief from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) addresses seven issues about this relationship and in the process demonstrates that Social Security can continue to be a cornerstone of retirement without posing an undue burden to the budget well into the future.

    "Seven Key Facts About Social Security and the Federal Budget," functions as a primer on some of the most important topics in the Social Security debate, topics that are essential for any policymakers, reporters or anyone else concerned about the future of Social Security.

    The issue brief asks and answers:

    •  What will real annual wages be in 2040 versus today?
    • How does the 2010 Social Security Trustees Report compare to the 2009 report and what does this mean for workers?
    • What percentage of real wages would have to be used to pay for the projected shortfall in Social Security?
    • What percent of real wage gains over the last 30 years was absorbed by the increase in Social Security payroll taxes?
    • What percent of the projected long-term budget shortfall is due to the inefficiencies of the U.S. health care system?
    • How much wealth should we expect near retirees to have to support themselves in retirement?
    • What percent of older workers have jobs in which they can reasonably be expected to work at into their late 60s?

    The questions and answers in the issue brief are basics for anyone interested in Social Security and the well - being of workers and retirees. For anyone actively engaged in this policy debate, knowledge of these issues is a pre-requisite.

    ###

    The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was established in 1999 to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives. In order for citizens to effectively exercise their voices in a democracy, they should be informed about the problems and choices that they face. CEPR is committed to presenting issues in an accurate and understandable manner, so that the public is better prepared to choose among the various policy options.

    CEPR Links:
  • The Cost of War: What Is It That Defines Our Values?   1 day 6 hours ago
    A Speech for Endless War

    by Norman Solomon

    On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.

    Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of "the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq." The first sentence of the coverage described the speech as saying "that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home." The story went on to assert that Obama "used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues -- and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer."

    But the speech gave no real indication of a shift in priorities from making war to creating jobs. And the oratory "made clear" only the repetition of vague vows to "begin" disengaging from the Afghanistan war next summer. In fact, top administration officials have been signaling that only token military withdrawals are apt to occur in mid-2011, and Obama said nothing to the contrary.

    While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he'd initially disparaged as "dumb," Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war -- no matter how mendacious or horrific -- is worthy of veneration.

    Obama closed the speech with a tribute to "an unbroken line of heroes" stretching "from Khe Sanh to Kandahar -- Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own." His reference to the famous U.S. military outpost in South Vietnam was a chilling expression of affinity for another march of folly.

    With his commitment to war in Afghanistan, President Obama is not only on the wrong side of history. He is also now propagating an exculpatory view of any and all U.S. war efforts -- as if the immoral can become the magnificent by virtue of patriotic alchemy.

    A century ago, William Dean Howells wrote: "What a thing it is to have a country that can't be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!"

    During the presidency of George W. Bush, "the war on terror" served as a rationale for establishing warfare as a perennial necessity. The Obama administration may have shelved the phrase, but the basic underlying rationales are firmly in place. With American troop levels in Afghanistan near 100,000, top U.S. officials are ramping up rhetoric about "taking the fight to" the evildoers.

    The day before the Oval Office speech, presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs talked to reporters about "what this drawdown means to our national security efforts in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia and around the world as we take the fight to Al Qaeda."

    The next morning, Obama declared at Fort Bliss: "A lot of families are now being touched in Afghanistan. We've seen casualties go up because we're taking the fight to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and their allies." And, for good measure, Obama added that "now, under the command of General Petraeus, we have the troops who are there in a position to start taking the fight to the terrorists."

    If, nine years after 9/11, we are supposed to believe that U.S. forces can now "start" taking the fight to "the terrorists," this is truly war without end. And that's the idea.

    Nearly eight years ago, in November 2002, retired U.S. Army Gen. William Odom appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" program and told viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism."

    With his Aug. 31 speech, Obama became explicit about the relationship between reduced troop levels in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan. "We will disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists," he said. "And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense." This is the approach of endless war.

    While Obama was declaring that "our most urgent task is to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work," I went to a National Priorities Project webpage and looked at cost-of-war counters spinning like odometers in manic overdrive. The figures for the "Cost of War in Afghanistan" -- already above $329 billion -- are now spinning much faster than the ones for war in Iraq.

    One day in March 1969, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Our government has become preoccupied with death," George Wald said, "with the business of killing and being killed." More than four decades later, how much has really changed?

    Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is "Made Love, Got War." He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign. In California, he is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay; www.GreenNewDeal.info.

  • Mosque Mania: Anti-Muslim Fears and the Far Right   1 day 8 hours ago
    CAIR National PSA Campaign Challenges Growing Islamophobia

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    September 1, 2010
    12:20 PM

    CONTACT: Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR)
    CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper,
    202-744-7726,
    E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com;
    CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin,
    202-488-8787
    E-Mail: arubin@cair.com

    CAIR National PSA Campaign Challenges Growing Islamophobia

    Public service announcements feature Muslim 9/11 first responders, interfaith leaders

    WASHINGTON - September 1 - A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today launched a national public service announcement (PSA) campaign featuring Muslim 9/11 first responders and designed to challenge the growing anti-Muslim bigotry in American society.

    [SATELLITE FEED FOR PUBLIC SERVICE AND NEWS DIRECTORS: Feed Dates are Wednesday, September 1st, 2010, and Thursday, September 2nd, 2010. Both Feed Times: 1:00-1:30 p.m. ET (Fed in Rotation) Coordinates: Galaxy 19/C07 Slot B, FEC: 3/4/ Symbol Rate: 6.1113 / Data Rate: 8.448 / Downlink Freq: 3835.500V, Synaptic Digital Satellite Operations Trouble Line: 212-812-7134]

    CAIR's PSA campaign is also designed to offer an implicit challenge to the Florida church that plans to burn copies of the Quran, Islam's revealed text, on September 11.

    CAIR '9/11 Happened to Us All' PSA, Firefighter (30-Second)
    CAIR '9/11 Happened to Us All' PSA, Firefighter (60-Second)
    CAIR '9/11 Happened to Us All' PSA, Medical Responder (30-Second)
    CAIR 'We Have More in Common than We Think' PSA, Interfaith (30-Second)

    The PSAs are also available at: www.thenewsmarket.com/CAIR (Registration is required.)

    Two of the three PSAs, which will be distributed today and tomorrow by satellite to television stations nationwide and online through social media sites, feature Muslim first responders to the 9/11 terror attacks, with the theme "9/11 happened to us all." Copies of the PSAs will also be mailed to selected television stations, with a focus on stations in New York and Florida.

    The third PSA features Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders describing the "golden rule" as expressed by their respective faiths -- and ends with the phrase, "We have more in common than we think." That PSA is designed to show the commonalities between faiths and to challenge those who -- like the members of a Florida church who plan to burn Qurans on September 11 -- would divide America along religious lines.

    A 2005 CAIR public service announcement (PSA) rejecting terrorism and religious extremism and was seen by some 10 million television viewers nationwide. That PSA, called "Not in the Name of Islam," featured ordinary American Muslims stating "that those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam are betraying the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad."

    SEE: CAIR 2005 'Not in the Name of Islam' PSA

    Other national American Muslim organizations took part in the news conference outlined each group's individual and joint initiatives designed to promote religious freedom, challenge growing anti-Muslim bigotry in American society and to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

    The other Muslim organizations that took part in the news conference included: (in alphabetical order)

    • Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations in the Washington Area (CCMO)
    • Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)
    • MAS Freedom

    Earlier this month, CAIR released an online toolkit designed to help Muslim communities organize proactive local educational and outreach initiatives tied to events such as a "National Day of Unity and Healing" on the upcoming anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

    SEE: 'Teachable Moment Community Response Guide' Toolkit

    The toolkit, called a "Teachable Moment Community Response Guide," offers guidance, tools and resources to help Muslim communities respond to specific current events such as the end of Ramadan Eid al-Fitr holiday occurring near September 11, the upcoming "Burn a Koran Day" by a church in Florida, the anti-Muslim bigotry generated by the smear campaign against a planned Islamic community center in Manhattan, and the ongoing tension and misunderstanding surrounding the building or expansion of mosques nationwide.

    CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

    ###
  • Following AZ & FL Primaries, Experts Assess Impact of Latino Voters on 2010 Elections   2 days 6 hours ago
    Immigration Policy Gets Welcome Dose of Common Sense

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    August 31, 2010
    12:11 PM

    CONTACT: America's Voice

    Marjorie Valbrun
    202-463-8602 x305
    press@americasvoiceonline.org

    Immigration Policy Gets Welcome Dose of Common Sense

    ICE Directive Says We Shouldn’t Waste Resources Going After Soon-to-be Legal Residents

    WASHINGTON - August 31 - A recent memo from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Assistant Secretary John Morton is rooted in basic law enforcement principles, but it is already being attacked by Administration opponents as “amnesty.”  The policy applies only to a defined group of people who are in deportation proceedings, but have already applied for and are about to obtain legal immigration status.  It directs ICE to halt their deportation proceedings until a decision is made on the immigration application, freeing up resources to go after others who are not about to become legal, taxpaying residents.  In company with the ICE leader’s commitment to focus on “the worst of the worst,” this development shows that some of the agency’s enforcement priorities are changing for the benefit of community safety, common sense, the American taxpayer, and family unity.

    According to Lynn Tramonte, Deputy Director of America’s Voice, “This is a wise use of law enforcement resources and a welcome injection of common sense into ICE policies.  Instead of clogging already burdened immigration courts with people who are about to become legal residents, it allows the government to focus on dangerous criminals and people who mean our country harm.  While there are still many more changes that need to be made to immigration enforcement programs in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, this is a strong step forward.” 

    It's important to understand that this memo covers only a small fraction of immigrants in the U.S. illegally — the 17,000 who are in active deportation proceedings, have also applied for immigration status through existing laws, like the family-based immigration system, and are likely to have those cases approved.  It won’t give a benefit to anyone who doesn’t qualify for one already; it won’t prevent anyone whose application is denied from being deported in the future; it won’t apply to anyone who poses a threat to public safety; and it won’t end deportation proceedings for the majority of people who are in them.  

    Despite the common sense nature of the ICE memo, a host of Republican voices in Congress, such as Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), are clearly more concerned about opposing anything the Obama Administration does than about making wise use of taxpayer resources.  Despite Senator Grassley’s reputation as a budget hawk, he opposes this effort to improve government efficiency and reacted to the news by saying, “Unfortunately, it appears this is more evidence that the Obama administration would rather circumvent Congress and give a free pass to illegal immigrants who have already broken our law.”

    According to Tramonte, “Americans want solutions to the broken immigration system – not ‘leaders’ whose only strategy on immigration is to block progress at every turn.  Does Senator Grassley truly believe that it’s efficient or intelligent to tie up law enforcement resources going after someone who’s about to become a legal resident?  This ICE memo is a step forward, in line with the wishes of the American people.  The public also understands that we cannot fully fix the broken immigration system until we pass comprehensive immigration reform.  Instead of calling every move by the Obama Administration ‘amnesty,’ Senator Grassley should get working on real and lasting immigration reform.”

    ###
    America's Voice -- Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform. The mission of America’s Voice is to realize the promise of workable and humane comprehensive immigration reform. Our goal is to build the public support and create the political momentum for reforms that will transform a dysfunctional immigration system that does not work into a regulatory system that does.
    America's Voice Links:
  • The Cost of War: What Is It That Defines Our Values?   2 days 9 hours ago
    Is a Dream a Lie If It Don't Come True, Or Is It Something Worse

    by Christopher Cooper

    This evening, Tuesday, the last day of the month of August, 2010, our president Barack Obama will lie to us. You can be sure of it. It is a fact that all presidents lie. This particular untruth will be a big one. It will hang with us and infect our lives for years after its moment of utterance. The radio and television will return those few Americans who bother to listen to or to watch the actor read his script to regularly scheduled programming after a few minutes perhaps of reassurance from a couple of opinionators that yes, indeed, he said what he said and we are all well served and secured.

    We are warned in advance that this lie will be some variation on the one former president George Bush told us many years ago: combat operations in Iraq by United States military forces have ended.

    Smoother than G. W. Bush, slicker, and of course smarter, this lying president will not likely be goofed up in buckled and pocketed flight gear, and he will be accompanied by the mandatory American flag on a sturdy stand rather than a blatant Mission Accomplished banner. But the substance will be the same: we did it; don't worry, don't doubt, don't question. The big lie will adhere to us with a greasy butter of calming reassurance.

    Here is why this story is a lie. The singular event upon which it is hinged is that the number of men and women under arms in our name in that abused and beaten and corrupted nation has fallen below fifty thousand. Like the Dow-Jones Industrial average falling below or rising above ten thousand, there is some magic apparently attached to this number, a significance not inherent in one a thousand higher and a weight unknown to a number a hundred lower. But here's what we know, though we may prefer to not confront our knowledge: the beat goes on.

    Our fifty-thousand-scant soldiers will have guns and ammunition. They will be shot at and they will shoot. Some will die; others will be wounded, crippled, maimed, burned, ruined. They will be "trainers" and "advisers," not "combatants," and we thank you for the distinction, Mr. President.

    We will continue to keep tens of thousands of mercenaries in country. We call them "contractors."

    We will maintain many large military bases, well-equipped with bullets and bombs, in Iraq, and are even as we hear the news tonight expanding and modernizing them.

    We will run as many special operations, secret operations, undercover operations as the CIA and military intelligence types think proper. We will assassinate, we will kidnap, we will imprison and we or our agents will torture.

    We will send billions of dollars a year to Iraq for many more years. Much of this will be wasted. A good deal of it will be used to kill. Among the dead will be women and children and non-combatant men. We will not hear much about these deaths from our president or Public Radio or Fox News or CNN.

    And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. As it has so often gone before.

    We are not surprised that we are lied to. Republicans don't like this president because he is a Democrat. But they do not seem much to mind interminable wars and the business they bring to defense contractors. The truly loopy members of the Republican sect don't like him because he is a Muslim, an alien, a Fascist and a Socialist. And black, of course, too.

    Democrats like him because he is a Democrat and raises money for the party and will sign bad bills Democrats like such as the insurance companies' health care scam, and help out Wall Street even though Democrats are usually a little more discreet than Republicans about their affection for money.

    Liberals don't like being lied to, but after all it's a tough old world out there and this most Hopeful of presidents sometimes has to "fake right" before he goes left on some unspecified future day, and he can only get so much done with such terrible Republican obstructionism, and he's going in the right direction carefully and incrementally, and he's smarter than George Bush, and he's our first black president. And advising and training sounds better than combating, doesn't it?

    Possibly some readers missed the Nick Lowe reference I slipped in to my little essay a few paragraphs previous. Here's another, more direct: All men, all men, all men are liars, and that's the truth. But there are of course degrees. And there are times and places where lying does great harm. And there are those lies nobody much questions because they are crafted less to obfuscate than to cover, to contain, to patch together. Among these are the lies we tell to ourselves

    Richard Nixon lied to us early and often and without shame or regret. We do not yet know if Barack Obama is troubled by his lies. He is famous for being cool. No Drama Obama. It's a subjective line between cool and cold. Cold and unfeeling. Cold and calculating. We'll know him better in a few years when we're through with him or he with us. We'll have seen the man and the damage done.

    There is no military draft. We maintain forces of economic conscripts (the All-Volunteer Army) and "contractors" and spooks. There is no noticeable hurt put on our entertainments or diversions; we are not invaded, the stores are full of merchandise, Hollywood makes movies, China makes cell phones and GPS devices and an astonishing selection of television sets. We can borrow our way through any number of wars and still have fun on the homefront. All we need to do is to swallow the lie.

    Don't ask, don't tell. Eat it up. Make excuses. Find diversions.

    Obama owns George Bush's wars now. And tonight each of us will own a piece of Obama's lies.

     

    Once Cooper had a railroad and he made it run. Or a cheesy little newspaper column, anyhow. Now that he has none, fewer of his opinions are thrust upon the world, but from time to time he is still capable of such disgust that he says what he feels for no other reason than that he feels better for doing so. At that point some of you may as well read it. He can be reached at coop@tidewater.net, but is more likely to be digging a hole or dragging an innocent rock from one part of his property to another than to be lying around the Internet waiting for someone to argue with, so an answer may or may not follow your query. And he is, at sixty, engaged with a five-year-old who lies poorly and guiltily only about inconsequential things and whose mind and character he must help fortify against the world we have built for him to inhabit. Oh, yeah: he's a contractor, too. Hammer. No gun.
  • July 29: HELP US DEMONSTRATE AGAINST THE PERSECUTION OF UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS   3 days 9 hours ago
    Papers Please! Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.

    Proving once again that avoiding conversation under such circumstances with La Migra may be the best policy.

    And yet another Obama "change" looks more like Swiss cheese.

    by Nina Bernstein

    ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

    “Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

    When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

    He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

    The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

    The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent’s flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.

    The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.

    The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.

    But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.

    For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.

    The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate.

    “It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”

    Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.

    In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.

    “Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

    Legal scholars say the government’s border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.

    Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”

    Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.

    Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol’s costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interior enforcement to sweep up farmworkers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.

    One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor’s visa.

    Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.

    “I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.

    Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.

    Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman’s graduation from Vassar College.

    “At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you’re sitting on the train asleep and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”

    Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries. Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger’s demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.

    Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don’t mind being monitored.”

    To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.

    Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.

    “As a citizen I’m offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option.”

    Copyright 2010 The New York Times

  • Armed Racism: Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence   3 days 9 hours ago
    On the Fifth Anniversary of Katrina, Displacement Continues

    by Jordan Flaherty

    Poet Sunni Patterson is one of New Orleans' most beloved artists. She has performed in nearly every venue in the city, toured the US, and frequently appears on television and radio, from Democracy Now to Def Poetry Jam. When she performs her poems in local venues, half the crowd recites the words along with her. But, like many who grew up here, she was forced to move away from the city she loves. She left as part of a wave of displacement that began with Katrina and still continues to this day. While hers is just one story, it is emblematic of the situation of many African Americans from New Orleanians, who no longer feel welcomed in the city they were born in.

    Patterson comes from New Orleans's Ninth Ward. Her family's house was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished. Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans. But her income was not enough-her post-Katrina rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the birth of her son Jibril. "I wound up getting evicted from my apartment because we were still working on the house," she said. "In the midst of it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need to sustain a living."

    Just as the storm revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Foundation, forty-two percent of African Americans -- versus just sixteen percent of whites -- said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents -- versus eight percent of white respondents -- said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year. Housing prices in New Orleans have gone up sixty-three percent just since 2009.

    Eleven billion federal dollars went into Louisiana's Road Home program, which was meant to help the city rebuild. The payouts from this program went exclusively to homeowners, which cut out renters from the primary source of federal aid.

    Even among homeowners, the program treated different populations in different ways. US District Judge Henry Kennedy recently found that the program was racially discriminatory in the formula it used to disperse funds. By partially basing payouts on home values instead of on damage to homes, the program favored properties in wealthier -- often whiter -- neighborhoods. However, the same judge found that nothing in the law obligated the state to correct this discrimination for the 98% of applicants whose cases have been closed.

    At approximately 355,000, the city's population remains more than 100,000 lower than it's pre-Katrina number, and many counted in the current population are among the tens of thousands who moved here post-Katrina. This puts the number of New Orleanians still displaced at well over 100,000 -- perhaps 150,000 or more. A survey by the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps found that seventy-five percent of African Americans who were displaced wanted to return but were being kept out. Like Patterson, most of those surveyed said economic forces kept them from returning.

    A Changed City

    As New Orleans approaches the fifth anniversary of Katrina and begins a long recovery from the BP drilling disaster, the media has been searching for an uplifting angle. Stories of the city's rebirth are everywhere, and there are reasons to feel good about New Orleans. The Saints' Superbowl victory was a turning point for the city, and the HBO series Treme has gone a long way towards helping the story of the city's trauma and search for recovery get out to a wider audience. Music festivals like Jazz Fest and Essence Fest, which are so central to the city's tourism-based economy, have brought in some of their largest crowds in recent years.

    But despite positive developments in the city's recovery, more than 100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of most stories of the city. Many from this silenced population complain of post-Katrina decisions that placed obstacles in their path, such as the firing of nearly 7,000 public school employees and canceling of their union contract shortly after the storm, or the tearing down of nearly 5,000 public housing units -- two post-Katrina decisions that disproportionately affected Black residents.

    Advocates have also noted that among those who are not counted in the statistics on displacement are the New Orleanians who are in the city, but not home. They fall into the category that international human rights organizations call internally displaced. The guiding principles of internal displacement, as recognized by the international community, call for more than return. UN principles number 28 and 29 call for, in part, "the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration." They also state that, "They shall have the right to participate fully and equally in public affairs at all levels and have equal access to public services," as well as to have their property and possessions replaced, or receive "appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation."

    In other words, these principles call for a return that includes restoration and reparations. As civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has said, "I'm still displaced, until the conditions that caused my displacement have been alleviated. I'm still displaced as long as Charity Hospital remains closed. I'm still displaced as long as rents remain unaffordable. I'm still displaced as long as schools are in such bad shape." In the US, Katrina recovery has fallen under the Stafford Act, a law that specifically excludes many of these rights that international law guarantees.

    Among those who are back in New Orleans but still displaced are members of the city's large homeless population. In a report this week, UNITY for the Homeless estimated from 3,000 to 6,000 persons are living in the city's abandoned buildings. Seventy-five percent of these undercounted residents are Katrina survivors, most of whom had stable housing before the storm. Eighty-seven percent are disabled, and a disproportionate share are elderly.

    Cultural Resistance

    Sunni Patterson can't remember a time when she wasn't a poet. The words flow naturally and seemingly effortlessly from her. When she performs, it is like a divine presence speaking though her body. Her frame is small but she fills the room. Her voice conveys passion and love and pain and loss. Her words illuminate current events and history lessons -- her topics ranging from the Black Panthers in the Desire housing projects to domestic violence.

    You can hear Sunni Patterson's influence in the performances of many young poets in New Orleans. And in the work of Patterson, you can hear the history of community elders passed along, the chants of Mardi Gras Indians, and the knowledge and embrace of neighbors and family and friends. And Patterson is part of a large and thriving community of socially conscious culture workers. Since the late '90s, you could find spoken word poetry being performed somewhere in New Orleans almost any night of the week.  And many of these poets are also teachers, activists, and community organizers.

    Although Patterson's house had been in her family for generations, her relatives had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork for the Road Home Program -- a problem shared by many New Orleanians. "We're dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to generation," says Patterson. "The paperwork is not always available. A lot of elders are tired, they don't know what to do."

    Now, like so many other former New Orleanians, she cannot afford to live in the city she loves. "I'm in Houston," she says, seemingly stunned by her own words. "Houston. Houston. I can't say that and make it sound right. It hurts me to my heart that my child's birth certificate says Houston, Texas."

    One of the hardest aspects of leaving New Orleans has been the loss of her community. "In that same house that I grew up, my great grandmother and grandfather lived," she says. "Everybody that lived around there, you knew. It was family. In New Orleans, even if you don't know someone, you still speak and wave and say hello. In other cities, there's something wrong with you if you speak to someone you don't know."

    New Orleanians were displaced after the storm to 5,500 cities, spread across every US state. Although the vast majority of former New Orleanians are in nearby cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta, many are still living in further locales from Utah to Maine. While she is sad to be gone from the city, Patterson wants to see the positive in the loss. "The good part is that New Orleans energy and culture is now dispersed all over the world," she says. "You can't kill it. Ain't that something?  That's what I love about it.  So we still gotta give thanks, even in the midst of the atrocity, that poetry is still being created."

    Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.

    More information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org.  Floodlines will also be featured on the Community and Resistance Tour this fall. For more information on the tour, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com.

  • Armed Racism: Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence   4 days 4 hours ago
    In New Orleans, Kindness Trumped Chaos

    Lessons of dedication, solidarity, love, and recovery, five years after Katrina.

    by Rebecca Solnit

    The taxi driver called me "girlfriend" and "sweetheart" with the familiar sweetness of New Orleanians, so I figured I could ask a few personal questions. He was from the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods inundated by Katrina--a mostly poor, mostly black edge of the city isolated and imperiled by two manmade canals--and it had taken him three and a half years to return to New Orleans. He still wasn't in his neighborhood, but he was back in the city, and his family was back, and they were determined to come back all the way.

    What happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is more remarkable than almost anyone has told. More than a million volunteers came to New Orleans to gut houses, rebuild, and stand in solidarity with the people who endured not just a hurricane but a deluge of Bush Administration incompetence and institutionalized racism at all levels of government, which temporarily turned the drowned city into a prison. Supplies were not allowed in by a panicky government; people were not allowed out, and a wholly unnatural crisis ensued.

    Even so, an astounding wave of solidarity and empathy arose. At Hurricanehousing.org more than 200,000 people volunteered to shelter evacuees, often in their own homes. And then there were those legions of volunteers, many of them white, working in a city that had been two-thirds black.

    I have again and again met passionate young activists who intended to come for a week or a month and never left. In the Lower Ninth, my taxi driver's neighborhood, things looked better than even six months before. Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation now has dozens of solar-powered homes, built on stilts for the next inundation, scattered across the lowlands of the neighborhood. New businesses have opened on St. Claude Avenue, the main thoroughfare, and children play in the once-abandoned streets.

    It's hard to say that there is a recipe for solidarity across race and class lines. During crises, the official reaction from government and media is often widespread fear--based on a belief that in the absence of institutional authority people revert to Hobbesian selfishness and violence, or just feckless conduct. Scholars Lee Clarke and Karon Chess call this fear of the public, particularly the poor and nonwhite public, "elite panic." Because these "elites" shape reaction as well as opinion, their beliefs can be deadly.

    But the truth is that most people are altruistic, resourceful, and constructive during crisis. A disaster is actually threatening to elites, not because the response is selfish but because it often unfolds like a revolution, in which the status quo has evaporated.

    Civil society improvises its own systems of survival--community kitchens, clinics, neighborhood councils, and networks of volunteers and survivors--often decentralized and deeply empowering for the individuals involved. What gets called recovery can constitute the counter-revolution--the taking back of power.

    Perhaps the biggest question for a disaster like Katrina is to what extent this transformed sense of self and society lasts and matters: Can it be a foundation for a stronger civil society, more solidarity, and grassroots power? It has been so in many ways in New Orleans, with groups like the Common Ground Clinic--a free health clinic that was started days after the hurricane and is still going strong five years later.

    One important tool for future disasters, and social change in the absence of disaster, is simply knowledge of what really happened: how many people in the hours, days, weeks and months after Katrina behaved with courage, love, and creativity, and how much they constituted the majority response. Such human capacities can be an extraordinary resource not just in crisis but in realizing our dearest hopes for a stronger society and more meaningful lives.

    Katrina is hardly a happy story. More than 1,600 people died. The racism on the part of the media, the authorities ready to believe any rumor, and the vigilantes who took it upon themselves to regard any black man as a looter and to administer the death penalty for these imagined minor property crimes were a reminder of how ugly this country can be and how much remains to be done. The city used the disaster as an excuse to shut down most of the public housing even though much of it was undamaged and intact housing was desperately needed.

    Poverty continues, and so does racism; the South did not stop being the South or America America. And the BP spill menaces the region in a way that is even more ominous than Katrina. The hurricane was after all a kind of event that has come ashore for tens of thousands of years, and when it was over people could rebuild. What can be done to ameliorate the spill is still a mystery, and the coastal edge of Louisiana, with its diverse fishing and foraging cultures and its abundance of wildlife, is poisoned.

    New Orleans will never be quite the city it was. People there lost what many of us have not had for generations: deep roots in place, a strong sense of culture, and an intricate web of social ties to family and community, whether it's a church, Mardi Gras krewe, musical group, black social aid and pleasure club, or neighborhood group. Much was reclaimed; many returned, but some did not or cannot.

    The taxi driver took us to the New Orleans Convention Center, where so many people, mostly African American, had been stranded in the days after Hurricane Katrina. But that day in July, it was hosting the Essence Festival, a black music festival at which tens of thousands of people in summer splendor circulated. Among the mix of booths were several from organizations founded during the weeks and months after the storm but still going strong.

    Traveling through a vibrant New Orleans not quite five years after the city was pronounced dead means understanding what dedication, will, solidarity, and love can achieve. This year of disasters--the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the volcano in Iceland, the spill in the Gulf, the floods and heat waves and droughts and rising waters--remind all of us that we are entering an era where disaster will be common and intense. Survival will be grounded in understanding our own capacity for power and resilience, creativity, and solidarity.

    Rebecca Solnit wrote this article for A Resilient Community, the Fall 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Rebecca is the author of twelve books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and Hope in the Dark.

    YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps.

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons License

  • Letter to the Editor Responds to Kevin Hemingway Trial   4 days 6 hours ago
    Yeah, kinda of like the

    Yeah, kinda of like the origin of this thread.  Unsupported conclusion to believe he didn't commit the robbery based on a biased opinion.

  • That Mysterious Gun with a Mind of Its Own Lives On?!?   4 days 6 hours ago
    "Cops think they're here to

    "Cops think they're here to enforce the law..."  

    Wow, why would they think that?  Maybe because the profession that they are in is called "law enforcement".

  • Glenn Beck is NOT Martin Luther King Jr.!   4 days 9 hours ago
    Neo-Supremacy Chic: Beck and Palin’s Tea-Scalding of MLK

    by Pierre Tristam

    They don’t call it white supremacy for nothing.

    One of the ways this country’s reactionaries have made racism and neo-segregation chic is by co-opting the language of emancipation, equality and civil rights.

    The “tea party” broods—the richest, most pampered, most welfared generation in the history of mankind—portray themselves as the put-upon victims of high taxes, disenfranchisement and debt, though this is the same generation that since 1981, and more so since 2001, has benefited from the lowest taxes this country has known going back to the 1920s, contributed to the greatest debt it’s known, and is now profiting from the richest retirement benefits this or any other country has ever known. Rich enough, that is, to give rise to sprawls like Palm Coast, which was created to suck on that hog.

    Almost exclusively white, Catholic, Protestant and old, this most selfish generation discovered in 2008 that it was no longer the swing vote. It was outrun by younger, certainly more colored, more colorful, voters. It rebelled. It declared itself disenfranchised. Already self-segregated in communities physically gated or deed-restricted from the rabble, it was not a leap to self-segregate politically and turn imaginary disenfranchisement into discrimination.

    The minor genius of the “tea party” movement is to do so by adopting the language and methods of rebellion, albeit in slogans only: reactionaries don’t make rebellions. They crush them. By co-opting the mythology of the original tea party, today’s “tea party” broods have managed to make their over-representation at almost every level of government look like no representation because the man at the helm doesn’t look like them. They go as far as using the language of disenfranchisement, and the protest words of the 1960s.

    It is supremacy by rhetoric, the sort of supremacy that, in its cruder form, enables some fools to claim that a National Association for the Advancement of White People is no more (or no less, for good measure) racist than the NAACP. It is the supremacy of a Glenn Beck or a Sarah Palin who, as they did Aug. 28, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, posed as the nation’s new civil rights pioneers, “taking back” America and “restoring” its honor. Taking it back from whom? Restoring it from what? Don’t ask, though it isn’t the fifth-grade speech-contest skills of a Beck or a Palin that would obscure what they mean: “For too long,” Beck said today, “this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning.” Darkness. The darkies, in other words, are back.

    You don’t need to call the president a nigger to get your point across in this era of “darkness.” Especially not to a sea of whites joined on the Washington Mall by the single resentment of being led by a darkie president, and there to pay homage to Beck, who called America under Obama “The Planet of the Apes.” Some of Beck’s best friends, obviously, are black. “If we hadn’t elected a black president, do you think they would be doing this today?” the poetically named Joyce White asked a Washington Post reporter covering the event. The answer was all around, punctuated by the lie at the heart of the neo-supremacists’ movement: where the old civil rights wars were about inclusion, these “tea party” reactions are about exclusion. Where the old civil rights movement was about overcoming blood-soaked oppression, the “tea party” broods (which have no Bull Connor dogs chasing after them that I know of)  are about keeping tax rates on the richest 5 percent among them from going up a few points.

    In the “fair and balanced” reasoning behind neo-supremacy, the old master is the new victim, using the old victim’s language. The suffering and disenfranchisement of one has been replaced by the suffering and disenfranchisement of the other. It doesn’t matter that there’s no relationship between the two, that the mere suggestion of white suffering or disenfranchisement in this country, this retiree generation especially, is a supreme offense to those who have genuinely suffered and lived through decades of disenfranchisement until relatively recently. This is the United States of Amnesia, where historical memory is slight and the latest snappy slogan as good as scripture, especially when it’s cloaked in the language of god, as Beck—like a pimp wearing his obligatory crucifix and flag pin as his visas to credibility—did: “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country quite honestly I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it politically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.”

    Supposedly, the rally on the mall was not about politics but about the revival of religious virtue. But that, too, was a conceit as transparent as Beck’s camera tears. The country isn’t lacking in religious virtue, religious fervor or religious fixations. It’s drowning in it all, to its detriment: faith-based fanaticism is replacing rational analysis. It’s the sweetener of “tea party” brews: the rational and the analytical is to those brews what daylight is to Dracula. So the rally was a seizure by a master marketer of god as branding, god as divine legitimacy for what was otherwise a slow-motion stampede on the day’s iconic place in the nation’s historic calendar. It turned into the biggest “tea party” rally yet, signaling the arrival of the neo-supremacist political movement in god’s clothing.

    The day’s nightmare, of course, the supreme act of white supremacy, was the co-opting of King’s day on the Mall to the “tea party”’s uses, and abuses, under the banner of restoration, religious or otherwise. Charles Blow, a columnist for The Times, put it simply in a piece entitled “I Had a Nightmare.” Calling Beck “the anti-King,” in a wordplay too subtle for most tea drunkards to detect, he writes: “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.”

    “In fact,” Blow continued, “to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult, particularly to those who lived and suffered through it, as well as to those who live with its legacy. If Beck truly thinks these movements are comparable, I have some pictures of “strange fruit” I’d like for him to see. And yet, I’ve come to the conclusion that anger is the wrong reaction to Beck’s rally in Washington. Anger provides too low a return on investment. It consumes a tremendous amount of energy, but yields little progress. Instead, we should each take this opportunity to listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech once more, paying particular attention to how the echoes of yesterday’s struggles reverberate in our present struggles, and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.”

    So here it is.

    Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive.com, a news service in Florida.

  • That Mysterious Gun with a Mind of Its Own Lives On?!?   5 days 1 hour ago
    Whether Cops Like It Or Not

    Whether they like it or not, cops have given their word through a solemn oath, to uphold, defend, support, and obey the US Constitution. Instead, we get road blocks and raids and sniffing dogs, beatings and tasers and stun guns and case after case of police brutality. Why? Because that's their training. It's good guys against bad guys. One may remember Finney's statement refering to Kiwane as a bad guy. Cops think they're here to enforce the law, and if they have to, force behavior. What if cops were actually taught the Constitution, the importance of the oath, and that adhering to it was more important than catching some snotty-nosed black kid trying to get out of the rain in broad daylight?

  • Armed Racism: Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence   5 days 1 hour ago
    New Orleans Police Told to Shoot Looters After Katrina Struck

    by Colin Asher

    The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has been reminding the nation of what that city went through—and is still going through. It has been an occasion for the release of  new films, for articles to be written and radio shows to be produced. And now, it has become the occasion for a major revelation.

    On Tuesday, Capt. Harry Mendoza of the New Orleans police department told a Louisiana television station that he was ordered to shoot looters in the days after Katrina struck. The order, he says, came from Warren Riley, then the Deputy Superintendent of the department.

    Riley soon rose to the top spot, taking over the department four weeks after Katrina.

    According to Mendoza, the order was issued inside Harrah's Casino, which had been closed following the storm and flood. In front of a crowd of high ranking officers, Riley ordered that the police were to “shoot looters in the city of New Orleans.” When asked for clarification, Riley said. “If you can sleep with it, I'm ordering it done.”

    <!--more-->

    Not long ago, we wrote about house cleaning at the NOPD. When the new police chief came in, he fired nearly everyone in the department that mattered. This latest revelation should be evidence enough to convince any one who questioned whether he needed to take such drastic measures.

    Both Mendoza and Mike Cahn, a former officer who was also at the meeting and confirms that events happened as Mendoza relayed them, claim that they did not pass those orders on.

    Riley, for his part, issued some gibberish through a lawyer: “The former superintendent is aware of the situation and if called to testify in any trial he will answer the appropriate questions at the appropriate time.”

    The take home message: There were competing, inhuman narratives coming out of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. One claimed the storm's victims were preying on each other like savages. The other, that the police force morphed into little more than a gang, ran roughshod over the remaining population, and murdered civilians because they could.

    Time, and a little journalistic, investigative muscle, has proved one of those narratives and destroyed the other. Make sure you remember Katrina for what really happened, not what you were hearing as the storm raged.

    Colin Asher is a former social worker and award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, among many others.

    http://criminaljustice.change.org/

  • Letter to the Editor Responds to Kevin Hemingway Trial   5 days 2 hours ago
    Unsupported Conclusion

    What's really interesting is that because it wasn't printed in the N-G, you automatically assume it didn't happen.

  • Letter to the Editor Responds to Kevin Hemingway Trial   5 days 3 hours ago
    http://www.news-gazette.com/n

    http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2010-08-27/man-sentenced-38-years-champaign-robbery.html

     

    Note at this sentencing he never said he was innocent.  Interesting.

  • Glenn Beck is NOT Martin Luther King Jr.!   5 days 4 hours ago
    I Have a Scheme

    Glenn Beck wants to reclaim the civil rights movement on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

    © 2010 The Daily Show
    PS It's just creepy how Beck misappropiated the IMC logo for his regrettable TV show's screen tag.