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Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater is Still in Charge, Deadly, Above the Law and Out of Control—On June 3, Jeremy Scahill's bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army was released in fully revised and updated paperback form. The new edition includes reporting on the now-famous Nisour Square massacre on Sept. 16 of last year, in which Blackwater mercenaries opened fire in a Baghdad neighborhood, brutally murdering 17 Iraqi civilians. The killing spree, which the U.S. Army would label a "criminal event," would reveal the extent of the lawlessnewss enjoyed by private contractors abroad and the lengths the Bush administration will go to protect its private army of choice. Antonia Juhasz caught up with Scahill on the phone the day the new edition was released. A fellow at Oil Change International and author of The Bush Agenda, Juhasz is also the author of the forthcoming book The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do to Stop It. Juhasz and Scahill discussed, among other topics, the story behind Blackwater, congressional inaction, radical privatization, Barack Obama, corporate vs. independent media, GI resistance in the age of private mercenaries, getting real about challenging corporations and the power of dissent. Alternet |
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Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates—Mortality Trends Comparable to Estimates by Those Using Other Counting Methods As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The deaths from all causes—violent and non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion..JHSPH —600,000 Iraqi dead— The estimated number of deaths in the study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University and published today in the British medical journal Lancet is at least 10 times higher than any previous estimate and suggests that nearly 1 in 40 Iraqis has died over the last 3 1/2 years as a result of the war. . . . The Johns Hopkins' findings are dramatically higher than previous estimates of Iraqi deaths, ranging from the numbers that the United Nations began to compile this year, to a death toll reported by the Internet-based Iraq Body Count (Iraq Body Count) , which is run by academics and peace activists in Britain and the United States. SFGate |
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World Oil Demand Flat, Prices Boom—As detailed in an earlier article, a conservative calculation is that at least 60% of today's $128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract. At today's price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme "leverage" of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population. . . . Washington is trying to shift blame, as always, to Arab OPEC producers. The problem is not a lack of crude oil supply. In fact the world is in over-supply now. Yet the price climbs relentlessly higher. Why? The answer lies in what are clearly deliberate US government policies that permit the unbridled oil price manipulations. Global Research |
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Harvard University Announcement—No Tuition Cost for the Poor—Harvard University announced over the weekend that from now on undergraduate students from low-income families will pay no tuition. In making the announcement, Harvard's president Lawrence H. Summers said, "When only 10 percent of the students in Elite higher education come from families in lower half of the income distribution, we are not doing enough. We are not doing enough in bringing elite higher education to the lower half of the income distribution." If you know of a family earning less than $60,000 a year with an honor student graduating from high school soon, Harvard University wants to pay the tuition. The prestigious university recently announced that from now on undergraduate students from low-income families can go to Harvard for free...no tuition and no student loans! To find out more about Harvard offering free tuition for families making less than $60,000 a year visit Harvard's financial aid website at: http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/ or call the school's financial aid office at (617) 495-1581 |
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Obama wins backing of Senate dean Robert Byrd—Byrd, 90, was one of five Democratic "superdelegates" to endorse the Illinois senator Monday and add new momentum to his drive to capture the party's presidential nomination from Hillary Clinton. The distinguished dean of the Senate went public with his endorsement despite his state of West Virginia voting overwhelmingly for the former first lady last week. Both Clinton and Obama were "extraordinary individuals," [Robert} Byrd said in a statement. But he stressed: "I believe that Barack Obama is a shining young statesman, who possesses the personal temperament and courage necessary to extricate our country from this costly misadventure in Iraq, and to lead our nation at this challenging time in history. "Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support," said Byrd, who has served in the Senate since 1959 and has long since renounced his youthful dalliance with the Ku Klux Klan, the secret, white supremacist group -- known for their distinctive white robes and pointy hats -- which has terrorized blacks and other minority groups since immediately after the US Civil War. Google Image by Charles Siler |
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No Oil, No Reconstruction—On Thursday, May 24, the US Congress voted to continue the war in Iraq. The members called it "supporting the troops." I call it stealing Iraq's oil - the second largest reserves in the world. The "benchmark," or goal, the Bush administration has been working on furiously since the US invaded Iraq is privatization of Iraq's oil. Now they have Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds. This threat could not be clearer. If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the privatization legislation, Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there. Ann Wright What Congress Really Approved: Benchmark No. 1: Privatizing Iraq's Oil for US Companies |
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National Security Agency—That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America , and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.—Sen. Frank Church, chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975 |
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The West Against the Rest?—A Buddhist Response to “The Clash of Civilizations”—The Cold War victory of the West means that capitalism now reigns unchallenged and so has been able to remove its velvet gloves. Because capitalism evolved within a Christian culture, they have been able to make peace with each other, more or less, in the contemporary West. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, we should render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and as long as we go to church on Sunday we can devote the rest of the week to this-worldly pursuits. From some other more traditional religious perspectives, however, the values of globalizing capitalism are more problematical. Buddhism, for example, emphasizes that in order for us to become happy our greed, ill will and delusion must be transformed into generosity, compassion and wisdom. Such a transformation is difficult to reconcile with an economic globalization that seems to encourage greed (producers never have enough profit, advertising ensures that consumers are never satisfied), ill will (too busy looking out for “number one”!), and delusion (the world—our mother as well as our home—de-sacralized by commodifying everything into resources for buying and selling). Buddhist Peace Fellowship |
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Inherent Powers, Ignoble History Make New Idea Anything But Innocuous—At the beginning of the last century American philosopher George Santayana famously observed: "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The U.S. House recently confirmed that Santayana's warning about the danger of repeating the history we don't, can't or won't remember applies not only to ordinary mortals in the last century but to members of Congress in this century, too. Under media radar, the Democrat-sponsored "Prevention of Violent Radicalism and Homegrown Terrorism" bill (H.R. 1955) passed the House at the end of October by a vote of 404 (including the entire Minnesota delegation) to 6. The bill was tagged as noncontroversial by the House leadership and is pending before the Senate. For those senators and citizens who remember history, the bill should be controversial, indeed. . . . According to the bill, "homegrown terrorists" can be anyone who "intimidate(s) or coerce(s) the United States government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social belief," a definition broad enough to include Americans who organize mass marches on Washington to "coerce" changes in government policy. Peter Erlinder. CommonDreams |
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Super Tuesday— Race gender divide Democratic voters—Three in 10 blacks said race was an important factor in choosing a candidate. About one in 10 whites said so. Most of those whites back Clinton, while blacks considering race overwhelmingly backed Obama, the Illinois senator. Only one in five men and a quarter of women said they considered the candidates' genders. Both groups voted predominantly for Clinton. . . . In the end Tuesday, 53 percent of both whites and females supported Clinton, along with a 63 percent of Hispanics, which helped tip the balance for her in states like California, New York and New Jersey. . . . Three in 10 Obama voters Tuesday were black, compared with one in 20 of Clinton's. He won three of the four states where at least a quarter of the voters were black, prevailing in Alabama, Delaware and Georgia but losing Tennessee. Blacks made up less than one in five voters nationally Tuesday. Clinton's strength has been among lesser-educated, lower-income Democrats, while Obama has run stronger among those with college degrees and higher earnings. The pattern plays out across race and gender, with Clinton doing better among blacks and men with less education and Obama doing better among Hispanics and women with college degrees. Yahoo.com |
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Black Male Oppression in USA Deepens --The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000. Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school. Erik Eckholm, Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn. NYTimes |
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Apology would comfort black residents, who make up 14.5 percent of New Jersey's 8.7 million residents—New Jersey had one of the largest slave populations in the Northern colonies and was the last state in the Northeast to formally abolish slavery, not doing so until 1846. The state didn't ratify the constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery until January 1866, weeks after it became law, having rejected ratification in 1865.—NJ lawmakers consider slavery apology |
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U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to tear down more than 4,600 public housing units in four complexes across the city -- while replacing them with private, mixed-income developments that will set aside only 744 apartments for low-income people. The decision to demolish these public complexes, which suffered only relatively minor damage during Hurricane Katrina, comes as rents across the city have doubled since the storm -- as has the homeless population. The activists are asking concerned citizens across the country to join the actions in New Orleans or to take action at home. According to a statement from Kali Akuno, director of the Stop the Demolition Coalition: What is at stake with the demolition of public housing in New Orleans is more than just the loss of housing units: it destroys any possibility for affordable housing in New Orleans for the foreseeable future. Without access to affordable housing, thousands of working class New Orleanians will be denied their human right to return.— Southern Studies |
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Race and the transformation of criminal justice—According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century. Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown. Glenn C. Loury. Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? |
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Two Million Homeowners Are Too Many to Fail: We Need Action—Single women, young couples, Latinos and African Americans were particular targets of aggressive mortgage brokers. The brokers didn't care if the loan made sense because they sold it off immediately to the financial houses. And they had a big incentive to hide the fees and interest rate jumps because those made the loans worth more when sold. Now new homeowners who have kept up their payments are facing foreclosure. Citibank warns that it is too big to fail, that the Treasury must act to bail out the banks. But 2 million homeowners are too many to fail; they will take down our economy if they do. So it is time to challenge the timidity and the cribbed imaginations in Washington and to demand action before the crisis brings down the entire economy. We need action to postpone all resets for those who have maintained their payments.— Jesse Jackson Sun Times. |
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Africans in Dublin, Ireland—Almost all the children who could not find elementary school places in a Dublin suburb this year were black, the government said Monday, highlighting Ireland's problems integrating its increasingly diverse population. The children will attend a new, all-black school, a prospect that educators called disheartening. . . .More than 25,000 Africans have settled in Ireland since the mid-1990s. Most arrived as asylum seekers, and many took advantage of Ireland's law — unique in Europe — of granting citizenship to parents of any Irish-born child. Voters toughened that law in a 2004 referendum. Shawn Pogatchnik. Black children left out of Irish schools. |
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Lessons from the Burmese uprising—In our day, we have perhaps become so used to seeing pro-democracy protestors toppling authoritarian governments that the difficulties involved can be underestimated. A handbook for overthrowing such governments would have to include the following factors: widespread public protests, bringing in many different social and economic groups; an opposition leadership with clear ideas around which people can rally; the ability to use the media in some form to get a message across. A mechanism for undermining the existing regime—whether by internal coup in the case of a military junta, the emergence of reformers, or the simple exhaustion of an existing government leading to its collapse External pressure from key countries able to exert influence. Experience has shown that a combination of the above is usually necessary for success.—Paul Reynolds. BBC |
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The Casualties of Iraq—Besides the deaths and injuries, the war had unleashed, according to the Financial Times, "The worst refugee crisis in the Middle East since the mass exodus of Palestinians that was part of the violent birth of the state of Israel in 1948." According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2.2 million Iraqis have fled their country, mostly to Jordan and Syria, and another 2 million have been turned into internal refugees. If one adds to that the ORB figures for deaths, it means at least 20% of Iraqi's pre-war population of 26 million has been killed, wounded, exiled, or displaced. The White House has simply ignored the refugee crisis. . . . Half of Iraq's population are children, nearly 20% of them under the age of five. Some 25% are malnourished and 10% suffer from acute malnutrition. According to a UNICEF study, 70% of Iraqi's children suffer from traumatic stress syndrome. . . .In 1258 the Mongol generals Hulagu and Guo Kan besieged and took the city of Baghdad. They murdered its inhabitants, burned its libraries, and ravished its lands. The Bush administration has done the same, but hidden it behind a smoke screen of lies and voodoo statistics. For the average Iraqi, there is little difference between the Mongols and the United States. Both have laid waste to their country. Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus |
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Harold Washington Remembered—When Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, died on Nov. 25, 1987, many of us understood that his death marked the passing of a great man. But while we lamented the negative impact of his loss, few of us had any inkling of the vast political vacuum he would leave behind. As time passes, the vacuum expands. Back then, it seemed likely that Washington’s powerful presence could propel the formation of progressive alliances across the country. However, as we grope around in the political darkness he once illuminated, it seems clear that his unique personality was a major reason for his success. . . . Washington’s initial election occurred in 1983, when progressive forces were mired in the gloom of the Reagan administration. He found mayoral success using a formula that was part campaign and part crusade. But Washington was no political neophyte, full of naïve idealism. He had already served many years as a state legislator and a member of Congress, and was well versed in the nuts and bolts of pragmatic politics. Salim Muwakkil |
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Racial Integration Has Run Its Course—The resilience of civil-rights groups is praiseworthy, but future litigation, even if successful, is not going to alter the fact that most poor children, regardless of race, are attending schools that are not meeting their educational needs. Their dire condition, and that of the schools they attend, is not solely the result of an insensitive Supreme Court majority quite ready to manipulate precedent to stifle well-intended racial-diversity plans. The plain fact is that a great many white Americans, including many with otherwise liberal views on race, do not want their offspring attending schools with more than a token number of black and Latino children. Whatever their status, they do not wish to be burdened by efforts to correct the results of racial discrimination that they do not believe they caused. Their opposition may not be as violent or as vast as it was during the early years after the Brown decision, but it is widespread, deeply felt, and if history is any indication not likely to change any time soon. Derrick Bell. Desegregations Demise. The Chronicle of Higher Education |
No Tears for Brown v Board of Education—In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation. Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children? His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.— Juan Williams Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education Education & History |
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Jimmy Carter: U.S. tortures prisoners—The U.S. tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday, adding that President Bush makes up his own definition of torture. "Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter said on CNN. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime. . . This government does not torture people." Carter said the interrogation methods cited by the Times, including "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures," constitute torture "if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored - certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated. "But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don't violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them," Carter said. Hosted AP |
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Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage—Schwerzenbach, Switzerland, Oct. 4 — The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away. “To Create Security,” the poster reads. The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country. As voters prepare to go to the polls in a general election on Oct. 21, the poster — and the party’s underlying message — have polarized a country that prides itself on peaceful consensus in politics, neutrality in foreign policy and tolerance in human relations. Suddenly the campaign has turned into a nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in one of the world’s oldest democracies, and over what it means to be Swiss. Elaine Sciolino NYTimes |
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New York opens slave burial site—New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and poet Maya Angelou attended a dedication ceremony for a monument at the site. The late 17th Century burial site was gradually built over as New York expanded, but was rediscovered during an excavation in 1991. Some 400 remains, many of children, were found during excavations. Half of the remains found at the burial site were of children under the age of 12. The entire project has cost more than $50 million (£24 million) to complete. The burial site in Manhattan was rediscovered during excavations for a federal building. . . . Now a 25ft (7.6 metre) granite monument marks the site. It was designed by Rodney Leon and is made out of stone from South Africa and from North America to symbolise the two worlds coming together. The entry to the monument is called The Door of Return - a nod to the name given to the departure points from which slaves were shipped from Africa to North America. They worked in the docks and as labourers building the fortification known as Wall Street, which protected the city against attack from Native Americans. BBC |
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White Vigilantees Killed 200 Blacks During Katrina—During the International Hurricane Katrina and Rita Tribunal we heard all sorts of testimony about white vigilantes 'hunting' down Black folks. This was in addition to the widespread police brutality. In some instances New Orleans police were seen riding with and working with white vigilantes who claimed they were protecting their neighborhoods. Former Black Panther Malik Rahim of the organization Common Ground was witness to white vigilantes who were roaming his neighborhood in Algiers which is located on the West Bank of New Orleans. This was one of the few places in the city that did not experience flooding. It was the only neighborhood in all of New Orleans that still had safe drinking water. My Space Why here in America the seeds of racism are so deeply rooted in the white people collectively, their belief that they are ‘superior’ in some way is so deeply rooted, that these things are in the national white subconsciousness. Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism until they face some test then their racism emerges in one form or another.—Malcolm X |
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The Justice that Jena Demands--Justice in Jena requires justice for all the others as well—for all those who have suffered (and some who have died) silently behind bars and for their families who have fought without benefit of TV cameras and news reporters. It requires understanding that we will not, we can not achieve racial justice in this country if we do not fight against the criminal justice system, not just in individual instances, but in its institutionalized, systemic form. If we do not understand—and understand it deeply—then this newly discovered energy, this tidal wave of outrage, this beautiful, intergenerational protesting isn't going to mean a damn thing past next week's news. Justice in Jena requires all of us across the country to rise up against the racism and exploitation of the criminal justice system in all the places where we've come to see it and grown to accept it whether that's allowing for an abysmal public defender office in your county or turning away when you see a police officer trample the rights, and perhaps the body, of a fellow citizen. We must cast off once and for all, the fundamental lie that the system has anything to do with criminals or justice or public safety. We must not back down, as so many movements have . . . Xochitl Bervera |
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Bush administration's ties to Blackwater—Oct. 2, 2007 | When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 "escalation of force incidents"; in 163 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents. On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will hold a hearing on the U.S. military's use of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the hearing last week, the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any information or testimony without its signoff. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.—Ben Van Heuvelen. Salon |
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Mychal Bell Injustice Overturned on Appeal—A state appeals court on Friday threw out the only remaining conviction against one of the black teenagers accused in the beating of a white schoolmate in the racially tense north Louisiana town of Jena. Mychal Bell, 17, should not have been tried as an adult, the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said in tossing his conviction on aggravated battery, for which he was to have been sentenced Thursday. He could have gotten 15 years in prison. His conspiracy conviction in the December beating of student Justin Barker was already thrown out by another court. Bell, who was 16 at the time of the beating, and four others were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder. Those charges brought widespread criticism that blacks were being treated more harshly than whites after racial confrontations and fights at Jena High School. Janet McConnaughey. Teen's conviction tossed in La. beating Yahoo.com 14 September 2007 |
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Simon Wooley National co-ordinator, Operation Black Vote—We need to be clear that racism still thrives in the UK, and the depiction of young black men as criminals is part of that. Black people are still seen as inferior by most people who aren't black. They are still much less likely to get a job than their white counterparts. They tend to be born into deprivation. And deprivation can breed criminality. The government has openly admitted that black people still face sustained discrimination within the criminal justice system, for example. It's the combination of racial inequality and social inequality that has brought us to our current situation. Black people are unique in suffering heavily from both. When the two combine it's a massive problem: there is an added dynamic of deprivation when it comes to race. If we're to move on from this situation, black people must be the agents of change. We have to break the cycle of exclusion and start creating opportunities. We need black people to have the same chances as everyone else in terms of getting jobs and houses. Incentivising marriage through the welfare system is a total red herring: poverty is the problem, not single-parent families. Cahal Milmo. Mandela's message to black Britain 'Scale the mountains': the call from Mandela to black leaders News Independent UK |
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Missing People in New Orleans—Its figures paint a dramatic picture of jobs and housing decline in the central city area. During the storm's aftermath, thousands of residents were evacuated from the city. Two years later, one in three households have still not returned, and the population has dropped from 455,000 to 274,000. Poor households with children are particularly likely to have stayed away, with the number of children in public schools at only 40% of its pre-Katrina level. To some extent, migrants from Mexico and Central America have replaced Afro-Americans in New Orleans, with an estimated additional 100,000 Hispanic people in the region. They have been attracted by some of the relatively well-paying jobs in construction and tourism. Looking for jobs—But overall, the News Orleasn metro area employs 113,000 fewer people than in August 2005, and the pace of job creation has slowed to a crawl. The biggest declines were in tourism jobs (down 24,500), government jobs (down 29,000) and healthcare jobs (down 23,000). And 4,000 smaller firms closed after the storm. "We apparently are at a place where the post-storm employment recovery is peaking," said demographer Elliot Stonecipher. "Those categorical drops in jobs paint a picture of a devastated economy and we have to stop acting like they didn't happen." Steve Schifferes. Two years on, New Orleans stalls News BBC
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“The audacity of the adventure of House of Nehesi Publishers”—Throughout our Caribbean Region economic activity is to a large extent externally propelled. Investment initiates from outside and the collective investors are elsewhere: tourism, insurance, banking are some of the major pinnacles of authority which determine what choices we make in exercising control over our daily lives. The Governments may govern; but they do not rule. It is against this background of an imagined sovereignty and an enforced dependence that we must measure the audacity — and there is no other word for what I mean — the audacity of those who initiated from within the adventure of House of Nehesi Publishers. Such boldness of enterprise in the area of publishing can easily collapse in five months; so the 25th anniversary of Nehesi can arguably be celebrated as though it were the 50th. And the evidence of the distinguished volumes it has produced is so abundant that the founders and their supporters are entitled to invent their own calendar for this purpose. Year 25 should be accorded the applause due a 50th anniversary in recognition of Nehesi’s capacity for digging deep in their indigenous human resource, and surviving the perils of waiting for some external force to determine your own agenda. We celebrate House of Nehesi as a symbol of what it could mean to achieve a genuine sovereignty of the imagination.—George Lamming. Editor’s Note: World-renown Barbadian novelist/scholar George Lamming recently congratulated House of Nehesi Publishers on its 25th anniversary in 2007. By May, the small press outfit had already released nine anniversary-year publications. The St. Martin publisher with a Caribbean-wide outreach has also managed to publish a list of literati from within and beyond the region, including Dr. Lamming, that belies its size and admitted limited resources. www.houseofnehesipublish.com / Offshoreediting@hotmail.com |
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Michael Baisden, Ruben Armstrong among those demanding justice for Mychal Bell.—Nationally syndicated radio personality Michael Baisden will join Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King, III on Sept. 20 at the court house in Jena, Louisiana for the 9 a.m. start of a rally dubbed, 'National March For Justice.' Gathered protesters will demand fair treatment for Mychal Bell, one of the African-American teenagers awaiting sentence in the Jena 6 Case. Sharpton was contacted by Bell's family to help bring national attention to the case and to fight for justice on behalf of the six black students involved. . . . Sharpton, who has been to Jena twice, arrived last month with Martin Luther King, III and met with local leaders, preachers and families of the students. They visited with Bell in jail and vowed to continue to fight for him and the others. . . . On Sept. 19, television talk show host Reuben Armstrong will broadcast live from Jena and also march the following day, when Bell is to be sentenced on charges of attempted murder. . . . the show will broadcast live from Jena, Louisiana in its entirety and rebroadcast on Sept. 22nd at 12 p.m. CST. You can watch and listen to this broadcast at Reuben Armstrong Show. Eurweb / Nooses and a legal lynching in Jena, Louisiana / Strange Fruit in Jena / YouTube - Jena Six |
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Liberty as Tyranny—For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush's boast that, with "new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties. It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable. Juan Cole. Bush’s Napoleonic Folly. The Nation.com |
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Oil law Doesn't Serve Iraqis—Iraq has a long labor history. Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and their puppet monarchy, organized a labor movement that was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became independent after the revolution of 1958. When Saddam Hussein came to power, though, he drove its leaders underground, killing or imprisoning the ones he could catch. When Hussein fell, Iraqi unionists came out of prison, up from underground and back from exile, determined to rebuild the labor movement. Miraculously, in the midst of war and bombings, they did. The oil workers union in the south is now one of the largest organizations in Iraq, with thousands of members on the rigs, pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union is the first national labor organization headed by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein. Together with other unions in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and factories, they've gone on strike, held elections, won wage increases and made democracy a living reality. Yet the Bush administration, and the Baghdad government it controls, has outlawed collective bargaining, continuing to enforce a decree originally issued by Hussein in 1987 banning unions in the public sector. The al-Maliki government has seized all union funds and turned its back on a wave of assassinations of union leaders. David Bacon. Why Iraqis oppose U.S.-backed oil SFGate |
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Virginia & the Board of Trade
—The
ruling class took special pains to be sure that the
people they ruled were propagandized in the moral
and legal ethos of white-supremacism. Provisions
were included for that purpose in the 1705 "Act
concerning Servants and Slaves" and in the Act of
1723 "directing the trial of Slaves . . . and for
the better government of Negroes, Mulattos, and
Indians, bond or free." For
consciousness-raising purposes (to prevent "pretense
of ignorance"), the laws mandated that parish clerks
or churchwardens, once each spring and fall at the
close of Sunday service, should read ("publish")
these laws in full to the congregants. Sheriffs were
ordered to have the same done at the courthouse door
at the June or July term of court. . . . The general
public was regularly and systematically subjected to
official white supremacist agitation. It was to be
drummed into the minds of the people that, for the
first time, no free African-American was to dare to
lift his or her hand against a "Christian, not being
a negro, mulatto or Indian"; that African-American
freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote;
that the provision of a previous enactment [1691]
was being reinforced against the mating of English
and Negroes as producing "abominable mixture" and
"spurious" issue; that, as provided in the 1723 law
for preventing freedom plots by African-American
bond-laborers, "any white person . . . found in
company with any [illegally congregated] slaves" was
to be be fined (along with free African Americans or
Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen
shillings, or to "receive, on his, her, or their
bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes
well laid on."
— |
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The privatisation of global water services—From Bolivia to Ghana to the Philippines, from the UK to the US and Canada, a rapidly consolidating for-profit water industry has been attempting to capture a household drinking water ‘market’ that, until recently, had been viewed in most parts of the world not as a cash cow for private corporations but as a public service. Multinational companies now run water systems for 7 per cent of the world’s population, and . . . could grow to 17 per cent by 2015. Private water management is estimated to be a $200 billion business, and the World Bank, which has encouraged governments to sell off their utilities to reduce public debt, projects it could be worth $1 trillion by 2021. The potential for profits is staggering: in May 2000 Fortune magazine predicted that water is about to become ‘one of the world’s great business opportunities’, and that ‘it promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th’. . . . In a world with soaring populations and declining supplies, the UN has forecast that global per capita water availability could decline by as much as one third within only two decades. Already, a fifth of the world’s population – 1 billion people – have no access to safe drinking water and only inadequate stores of water for cooking, bathing, and basic sanitation. In the cities of the developing world, antiquated, often colonial-era water systems are no match for booming populations. . . . Companies like Suez and its primary competitors Vivendi and RWE Thames Water promise to use their expertise to build infrastructure and delivery systems in exchange for guaranteed profits on their investment. Jon Luoma, The Water Thieves The Ecologist
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Who & What’s Killing Black Babies?—To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005. Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average. Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.) The overall jump in Mississippi meant that 65 more babies died in 2005 than in the previous year, for a total of 481. The toll is visible in Hollandale, a tired town in the impoverished Delta region of northwest Mississippi. Jamekia Brown, 22 and two months pregnant with her third child, lives next to the black people’s cemetery in the part of town called No Name, where multiple generations crowd into cheap clapboard houses and trailers. So it took only a minute to walk to the graves of Ms. Brown’s first two children, marked with temporary metal signs because she cannot afford tombstones. NYTimes |
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Five Years in Guantánamo— Murat Kurnaz’s Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantánamo is a straightforward account of his rendition, torture, detention and interrogation by American forces—torture that continued in Guantánamo. It even identifies a few of his tormentors, whose name tags were visible until Major General Geoffrey Miller took command and ordered all American personnel to remove anything that might identify them. Kurnaz is beginning to appear in public to promote his book, described in the June 7 issue of The Economist as "a Swiftian tale" of a man who "survived by brawn and brains." . . . As for the U.S. regime, the Bush administration's attempt to create a unitary presidency that uses war to justify executive powers never imagined by the men who negotiated our Constitution has been unmasked, and the Bush-Cheney presidency is in its last throes. When it is gone, or even before it packs up and moves on, some plaintiff will likely find legal counsel and a forum in which to litigate these issues. In such a case, Kurnaz's book and testimony will be useful. He's written a primer on rendition, incarceration and torture. It's being translated by a U.S. publisher for a January release. It's not Solzhenitsyn, but it's a gripping account of life in an American gulag. Washington Spectator |
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My Letter to Clarence Thomas—When I observe the state of 1995 America, I am reminded of another country in another time. The nation was suffering from economic problems and social despair. The Angry White Men of that nation had to blame someone for their misfortunes and suffering, and selected the Jews as the personification of their problems. The majority society claimed that the Jews were taking all of the jobs, and were responsible for poverty, moral degradation and social decline. Laws were enacted to isolate, oppress, and eventually dispose of the minority group. Some Jews, the Judenraten, participated in the oppression of their own people, perhaps in an attempt to immunize themselves from personal harm. Of course, these individuals soon learned that their attempt was in vain, that they were being utilized by the majority society, and they too would perish. Justice Thomas, if I sound harsh it is because of the harsh conditions that the Supreme Court is creating. If you are still angry about the confirmation hearings, move beyond your anger. Unlike Henry Foster, you were afforded a floor vote in the Senate. If you are angry at black people for what they call you, prove that they are wrong. Concern yourself more with how historians will judge your tenure on the Court. We are approaching the twenty-first century, yet seem to be regressing back to the nineteenth. During a time of increasing diversity in the United States, we cannot afford to return to the ignorant backwater days of Jim Crow. Moreover, we cannot allow a black man to lead the way. David A. Love The Man Who Desecrates the Legacy of Thurgood Marshall, Black Commentator |
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On to Tehran, by sea and by air— Firms that must cultivate goodwill to do business in foreign lands increasingly view the current regime in Washington as an albatross around their necks, poisoning every prospective deal and soiling the company name. But these companies are not at the heart of the ruling cabal, which is centered on finance and military-industrial capital. These non-productive sectors profit by manipulating markets to create unfair advantage—while creating nothing. They are parasites, retarding global development and standing like George Wallace in the door to prevent solution of the manifold crises that pose imminent threats to humanity. Ultimately, the parasitic class can only maintain its rule by force. Manufacturing nothing, creating no value except on paper, they must finally call upon the Armed Forces to impose their unearned advantage on the planet. Such was the logic of March, 2003. The Great Offensive failed, but the contradictions that compelled the captains of finance capital to order their political servants to wage war, remain—and are in fact more acute than four years ago. They must wage war, again, to fight their way out of the box. And so it is. It does not matter that the attack may ignite an apocalypse; the ruling parasites cannot envision a world in which they are not supreme, in any case. Why not get it over with? Glen Ford, Iran and Beyond: Total War is Still on the Horizon. Black Agenda Report
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Saving Darfur or Salvation Delusion? Pressure should be applied on rich countries to compel them to grant asylum to Darfurian refugees. Washington should be obliged to pay reparations to the people of Sudan for bombing the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998, an attack which killed perhaps “several tens of thousands,” and supporting Khartoum in the 1980s as it waged a bloody civil war that would claim over two million lives. Finally, the West cannot be allowed to continue hampering the AU forces in Darfur; these troops require full funding, a broadened mandate, and a proper opportunity to halt the violence in the region – not to be completely sidelined for the “red herring” of UN troops. The fact that these steps have not been taken is sufficient to understand Washington’s true position vis-à-vis Sudan–a reality that should not be lost on Darfur activists. Steve Fake and Kevin Funk Saving Darfur or Salvation Delusion? |
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Jerry Miller -- black and working class -- spent 24 years in prison as an alleged rapist—The improprieties that collided to ensnare the Duke students—false or inconsistent identification by the victim, prosecutorial misconduct, the withholding of potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense, a racially incendiary atmosphere—are common in wrongful convictions. The difference is that the 200 people exonerated through the work of the Innocence Project served an average of 12 years in prison. Fourteen were on death row at the time they were cleared. Earl Washington, a developmentally disabled man from Virginia who was cleared of rape and murder in 2000, was nine days from his scheduled execution. “We found that in 50 percent of our cases there was serious police or prosecutorial misconduct—that’s what you had in the Duke case,” says Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the project and one of Miller’s lawyers. . . .” It is the enduring hope—that the country will fix the systemic failings within the criminal justice system. Yet the discussion is largely absent from our tough-on-crime political conversation, because the failings harm African-Americans and other minorities most. For example, though interracial rapes are rare, constituting about 12 percent of reported sexual assaults, 66 percent of blacks who’ve been exonerated through DNA evidence had been wrongly convicted of raping white people, according to the Innocence Project. About half had been misidentified by white rape victims. Sloppy or slanted identification procedures, interrogations that elicit false confessions, faulty—even fraudulent—presentations of scientific evidence in court all play a role. A 2004 law guarantees federal convicts the right to petition for DNA testing to support a claim of innocence, but the crimes that typically involve such evidence are overwhelmingly state prosecutions. The law encourages states to seek federal funds to improve their evidence handling and post-conviction testing but, according to Neufeld, few have pursued the money. “There are plenty of prosecutors’ offices in the North, South, East and West who say, ‘Once that conviction is affirmed on appeal, that’s it,’ ” he says. Marie Cocco. When Justice Is Skin Deep Apr 26, 2007 Truthdig |
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Activists Shake Up Capitol—On one of the busiest days of the year at the state Capitol, 22 demonstrators were arrested Friday as they called for universal health care and a single-payer health system. The activists were taken into custody at various locations throughout the building, prompting the heaviest police presence at the Capitol this year. Officers were stationed in the House and Senate galleries and outside the doors of the chambers to ensure order. . . . Brian Petronella, president of Local 317 of the 11,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said he was fighting to get universal health care because many low-wage workers are forced to have their children on the state-operated HUSKY program.—Christopher Keating. 22 Arrested After Health Care Sit-Ins |
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NYC Police Brutalize Human Rights Attorney A human rights attorney known for handling cases of police brutality became a victim of police abuse "Not only as people of conscience and moral decency, but as lawyers, we said this is outrageous." They arrived and stood "more than ten feet away," he said. Mr. Warren told Sergeant Talvy they were lawyers, and told him to stop and just take the young man to the precinct. In response he said, "Talvy shouted, I don't give a f**k who you are, get the f**k back in your car!" They returned to their car, and Mr. Warren began to write down the license plate numbers of the police vehicles as they watched them put the bleeding young man in a car. "Then Talvy comes to my car and viciously attacks me, repeatedly punching me through the window. Shouting, 'Get out of the car!' He dragged me out of the car, ripping my shirt and pants. My wife, very upset, asked him why are you doing this? He then punched her in the face." Both were arrested and taken to the 77th precinct charged with obstruction, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The New York City Independent Media Center |
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Working Hard against the Environment—"We now seem more determined than ever to work harder and produce more stuff, which creates a bizarre paradox: We are proudly breaking our backs to decrease the carrying capacity of the planet," says Conrad Schmidt, an internationally known social activist and founder of the Work Less Party, a Vancouver-based initiative aimed at moving to a 32-hour work week – a radical departure from the in early, out late cycle we've grown accustomed to. "Choosing to work less is the biggest environmental issue no one's talking about." Dara Colwell, Why Working Less is Better for the Globe |
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New improved unions—Congress will soon boost the minimum wage by more than 30%, and talk of a national healthcare insurance system is in the air. Most important, the House passed the Employee Free Choice Act. President Bush has vowed to veto the legislation should it reach his desk, but if a Democrat is elected the next president and signs the bill, the first progressive reform of U.S. labor law in decades may give trade unionists a real shot at organizing millions of workers now consigned to union-free purgatory. The act would greatly diminish opportunities for managerial intimidation during organizing campaigns by allowing workers to join a union simply by signing a card. And the act would impose stiff financial penalties on anti-union employers who break the law. This "card check," as it is known, may be a viable alternative to the employer-dominated elections currently conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. The Employee Free Choice Act makes it easy to imagine a properly designed Wal-Mart on Santa Barbara's bustling State Street, with its unionized workers receiving decent wages and good healthcare benefits. And if the efficiencies inherent in the Wal-Mart system of selling groceries and merchandise at low prices put the local Ralphs out of business, well, that would be an instance of honest and respectable capitalism at work. Nelson Lichtenstein The ailing grocery workers union may benefit from a political shift to support labor LATimes |
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Strike Aimed at Mbeki—Thousands of South African workers have marched in sympathy with striking civil servants, highlighting the divide between the ruling African National Congress and its trade union allies. Central Johannesburg came to a standstill as about 15,000 union supporters chanted slogans denouncing the government of Thabo Mbeki, the president. Marchers thronged the streets of other major cities, including Cape Town, on Wednesday Many belonged to the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), allied with the ANC and the South African Communist Party. Political analysts say the public service strike, which began on June 1, has turned into a demonstration of workers' power ahead of a leadership meeting this year that could see the ANC name a successor to Mbeki. . . . Unions are pushing for a left-wing government when a new president takes office in 2009—- reflecting criticism that Mbeki's market-friendly policies have not done enough to help the black majority. Al Jazeera |
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Reverse Reparations—“A Massive Transfer of Value”—If prisons filled by disproportionately black “urban felons” have become a critical source of “economic development” in disproportionately white rural America, then they are also and at the same time a form of what might be called “reverse racial reparations.” According to the distinguished criminologist Todd Clear, the “economic relocation of resources” from black to white communities that results from racial disparities and related spatial patterns in mass incarceration are considerable. “Each prisoner represents an economic asset that has been removed from that community and placed elsewhere [emphasis added]….The removal may represent a loss of economic value to the home community, but it is a boon to the prison community.” By Clear’s estimation in the late 1990s, “each prisoner represents as much as $25,000 in income for the community in which the prison is located, not to mention the value of constructing the prison facility in the first place. This can be a massive transfer of value: A young male worth a few thousand dollars of support to children and local purchases is transformed into a $25, 000 financial asset to a rural prison community. The economy of the rural community is artificially amplified, the local city economy artificially deflated” —Paul Street Race, Place, and the Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration Z-Net 4 March 2007
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Research of the Black Youth Project—93 percent of black youth believe that sex education should be mandatory in high schools, and 76 percent think the government should stop funding only abstinence. . . . 60 percent think that abortion should be legal in some circumstances. . . .70 percent of black and Latino youth feel they "have the knowledge and skills necessary to participate in politics," more than half believe the government "cares little about them." Sixty-eight percent of black youth believe that the government would do more to cure AIDS if more white people were afflicted with the disease. . . . "these young people are very clear that in their daily lives … they perceive young black people to experience very high levels of discrimination." Almost 70 percent of black youth reported that they had been discriminated against due to their race, and large majorities of all youth believed that "on average, the police discriminate much more against black youth than they do against white youth." . . . 58 percent of black youth report listening to rap everyday, but even greater majorities (92 percent of females and 74 percent of males) think rap music videos portray black women offensively. Chelsea Ross. “Making Black Voices Heard.” |
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Black America's Real Issue with Barack Obama --Both Barack Obama's Republican opponents and the centrist Democrats who support his presidential candidacy agree on one thing. They all agree that black opinion on the senator is both uninformed and irrelevant. To hear the mainstream media, black dissatisfaction with Senator Obama is all about his black African father, his white American mother, his light complexion and his Columbia and Harvard Law degrees. The Audacity of Hope Black America was then admonished and chided by white Republicans and Democrats of all colors for not embracing Senator Obama based on some foolish standard of black authenticity. This is a racist calumny and slur of the first magnitude against all of black America. Our people have never rejected leading figures because of light complexions, immigrant parents or advanced degrees. Bruce Dixon Black Agenda Report Hypocrisy on Health Care Obama's Audacious Deference to Power |