Jeremiah Wright's Full 9/11 Sermon

Since Barack Obama threw Rev. Wright under the bus, based on a short snippet where he quotes what a white U.S. ambassador said on FOX (FIXED) News. The corporate media took only that small piece of this man's sermon and ran wild with it. Now, you can hear the full sermon of what this man said and tell me where is the so-called racism and hatred. White people don't want to hear the truth, but today is the day of truth and you're going to hear it whether or not you hate hearing the truth. The truth hurts no one but the guilty.


powered by ODEO

When reflux's burn is more serious

To stop heartburn, which leads to acid reflux disease is to stop eating the foods that gives you heartburn. What good is it going to do if you keep eating the foods that causes this condition? Changes in lifestyle and diet is better than swallowing pills whose side-effects are much worse.

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
36 minutes ago


Chronic heartburn is a daily acid bath for the esophagus, and complications from it are on the rise.

New government figures show a worrisome increase in esophagus disorders from severe acid reflux. The worst one, esophageal cancer, is continuing its march as the nation's fastest-growing malignancy.

What to do if you're one of the estimated 3 million Americans whose eroded esophagus means high risk for this especially deadly cancer? More doctors are trying to zap away the worst damage, beaming radiofrequency energy down the throat to burn off precancerous cells.

While it's not yet certain that will block cancer from ever forming, the studies are promising enough that specialists have begun debating how to better find at-risk patients, people who suffer a condition called Barrett's esophagus. Ironically, a damaged esophagus may no longer feel the burn of acid reflux, keeping sufferers in the dark.

"You become desensitized. You can go a long time without knowing you have Barrett's," warns Dr. John I. Allen of the American Gastroenterological Association.

Heartburn sometimes is a temporary problem, but it also can signal gastrointestinal reflux disease, or GERD, where a loose valve allows stomach acid to regularly back up into the delicate esophagus. Millions have GERD, which is on the rise along with expanding waistlines. For most people, acid-suppressing medications are the answer.

But severe reflux over many years can cause serious problems for a fraction of people. The lining of the esophagus erodes until it bleeds, narrows to make swallowing difficult or, worse, starts to repair itself with more acid-resistant intestinal cells that happen to be more cancer-prone. That last condition is called Barrett's esophagus, and sufferers are 30 times more likely than the average person to go on to develop esophageal cancer.

Hospitalizations for all reflux-caused esophageal disorders doubled between 1998 and 2005, says a sobering new count by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

And over the past two decades, esophageal cancer has risen six-fold. About 16,470 Americans will be diagnosed with it this year, according to the American Cancer Society. Fewer than one in five survives five years, and 14,280 are predicted to die this year.

Hence a renewed focus on Barrett's patients, to try to prevent their damage from progressing to cancer.

The good news is that esophageal cancer is slow to develop, so Barrett's patients are given regular down-the-throat exams to spot precancerous changes in cells. Those termed "high-grade dysplasia" are the most dangerous — one in five of those patients will get full-blown cancer within five years.

Cutting out the esophagus has long been standard treatment to stop high-grade dysplasia from turning into cancer. Don't go straight to that extreme step, say guidelines issued last week by the American College of Gastroenterology.

Instead, the new guidelines urge a two-step process: Send a device down the throat to carefully slice off the precancerous layer and make sure it hasn't already turned into invasive cancer. Then burn away the remaining Barrett's tissue with other endoscopic techniques in hopes of getting healthy cells to grow back in its place — as long as patients stay on long-term, acid-controlling drugs, too.

There are various ways to burn away the problem areas, but specialists increasingly are turning to a device named Barrx that lets them nestle a balloon directly onto the esophagus lining and beam RF energy straight into it.

Small studies suggest Barrx can successfully treat precancerous spots in about 90 percent of patients with no return in two years and counting. Specialists are anxiously awaiting a more in-depth study, to be released later this spring, that compared 120 patients who got either Barrx or a sham procedure.

"It'll have very impressive results," promises Dr. Richard Sampliner of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, one of the 19 participating medical centers.

A big question, though, is whether precancerous cells still lurk under the new healthy cells that form, ready to grow again. So patients getting Barrx or other ablation treatments today can't yet abandon regular endoscopic exams.

"Common sense suggests if we eliminate the Barrett's segment, we're going to eliminate the cancer in people. That really will take decades to know for certain," cautions Dr. John Carroll of Georgetown University Hospital.

But Carroll is optimistic enough that this spring, Georgetown begins a study to see if it's worth doing Barrx treatment even earlier — in patients whose Barrett's esophagus hasn't yet developed precancerous spots.

___

EDITOR's NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

Partial of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 9/11 Sermon

I have mad love and respect for Rev. Wright. He only told the truth and the reality of it all is is that the truth hurts. My mother use to tell me when I was a little child that the truth hurts no one but the guilty.


powered by ODEO

Follow up on Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 9/11 Sermon

INTELLIGENTNEWZNET
INFORMING the HIP-HOP COMMUNITY INTELLIGENT
FOLLOW-UP TO Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s 9/11 Sermon

Last week we sent out a bulletin breaking down our thoughts about the thoughts, opinion, and sermons of Rev.Jeremiah Wright and all of the controversy that followed… (If you missed it you can check it out here… http://wiseintelligent. blogspot. com/)

We appreciate all the feedback and comments that you’ve sent us; all of your points of view were very well thought out and INTELLIGENT!!! A lot of you were very skeptical of the media’s portrayal of Rev. Wright’s 9/11 sermon and asked if we had the whole and complete sermon in its entirety, so you could judge for yourself the views the Reverend expressed.

Click the link below to hear Rev.Jeremiah Wright’s whole sermon in context…Listen to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 9/11 sermon (The complete version)

http://essence. typepad. com/news/2008/03/listen-to-rev-j. html

After you listen to it…Get back @ us and let us know what you think…LET’S CONTINUE TO BUILD!WISE INTELLIGENT

www. myspace. com/wiseintelligenthttp://wiseintelligent. blogspot. com/

Proper
Education
Always
Corrects
Errors

It’s NO LONGER Smart to be DUMB!

Ten Troubling Questions I Asked Obama to Answer before McCain Asks Them

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Here are ten troubling questions for Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama that he’d be wise to answer coming from me, If he’s the Democratic presidential nominee you can bank that John McCain and the GOP truth squad will ask him them. The questions were sent directly to him at his national campaign headquarters Friday, March 28. The questions are not campaign rhetoric, gossip, and partisan allegations. They are fully documented, and totally a matter of public record. If Obama won’t answer them, then the challenge is for his supporters to answer them point by point. This doesn’t mean hurling the usual cheap shot, brainless, personal invectives, name calling, personal insults, or character assassination. This is no substitute for factual answers. The Questions.

1. You stated that you were not in the Senate in October 2002 when President Bush rammed through Congress the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. But you also stated that “perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence.” This implies that you might have voted for the war if you had been in the Senate when the vote was taken.

Why then do you condemn Hillary Clinton and other Senators who voted for the war authorization resolution when you admit the possibility that if you had been in the Senate you would have done the same?

2. As chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Foreign Relations you could have held oversight hearings, called witnesses and offered alternatives to Bush’s disastrous efforts against A Qeada in Afghanistan.

Your subcommittee held none and provided no alternatives to Bush policy that you condemn, why?

3. In the Senate you have one of the poorest attendance records, and you often simply vote present on thorny issues, why?

4. Senate Legislation was proposed to require nuclear giant, Exelon to make public disclosure of its radiation leaks. You did not fully support that requirement. Exelon has been identified as your fourth biggest campaign contributor.

Why did you oppose the tougher regulatory proposal for Exelon?

5. Chicago financier Tony Rezko has been accused of numerous financial illicit dealings. You have claimed that you did no political or personal favors for Rezko. Yet as an Illinois state legislator you wrote endorsement letters to government agencies on his behalf, as well as having conducted other documented financial transactions and dealings and with him.

Why do you deny that you have no relationship with Rezko?


6. The head of your campaign finance chair is Penny Pritzker. Before taking over Obama’s campaign finances, she headed up the borderline shady and failed Superior Bank. It collapsed in 2002. The bank engaged in deceptive and faulty lending, questionable accounting practices, and charged hidden fees. It made thousands of dubious loans to mostly poor, strapped homeowners. A disproportionate number of them were minority.

Why does she still have a principal financial role in your campaign?

7. You have taken money in past campaigns from straw donors. These are donors that have taken money from tainted and dubious sources and then contribute to your campaign under their names. You have talked much about financial openness in campaigns.

Why did you take money from straw donors in the past? And do you take money from them now?

8. Following a speech by Hillary Clinton praising Lyndon Johnson for his role in helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an Obama campaign advisor privately released a four page memo urging hammering Clinton for denigrating Dr. King. Yet, you told reporters that neither you nor anyone in your campaign had made the accusation that Clinton denigrated King.

Why did you say that when clearly it was the memo from your campaign advisor that triggered the media and public assault on Clinton regarding King?

9. You have not produced a single public document that would provide the public with greater insight and knowledge about legislation, initiatives proposed, your votes on key bills, and your attendance record during your terms in the Illinois legislature.

Why?

10. You have repeatedly charged that Clinton violated a pledge not to put her name on the Michigan Democratic primary ballot. However, neither Clinton nor any other Democratic contender pledged to the DNC not to have their name on the ballot. Three other candidates had their name on the ballot in addition to Clinton.

Why do continue to make this claim that the other candidates, but especially Clinton, violated a pledge not to have their name on the Michigan ballot?

Obama’s campaign is based on the firm pillar that he represents a new, open, fresh, and transparent politics. He is the candidate that is the antithesis of the political duplicity, double dealing, evasions, lies and corruption that marred other candidates. Obama can prove it by answering these questions; questions that raise serious doubt about his contention that he represents a radical break from the political past. If he won’t answer them then will his supporters answer them for him? That’s again, before McCain asks them.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Obama Runs a Crooked Game

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Barack Obama specializes in rigging political games so that African Americans can’t win – that is, unless the African American is named Obama. So intent is Obama to retain his huge support among white males, the Senator constantly admonishes Blacks to avoid upsetting white men or their peculiar notions of American history. Obama calls for a “dialogue” between Blacks and whites, and then removes from discussion all items that might cause stress or loss of privilege to living whites. From Obama’s point of view, the worst conduct imaginable for a Black man is to exaggerate the effects of slavery on the captive Africans or the society that enslaved them. Should the one million Black prison inmates be subjects of Black-white dialogue? Nope – too upsetting to white folks.

Barack Obama thinks he’s a magician. Magicians have always been very popular, so it’s no mystery that millions of people are fascinated by the man, and especially that millions of African Americans are desperate to see him pull off the biggest trick of all – become president of the thoroughly racist United States of America.

Obama is smart, but his basic game plan is quite simple. Knowing full well the group most hostile to Black progress in the U.S. has always been white males, he aims to neutralize much of this demographic by assuring them an Obama presidency would be aggressively race-neutral. In practice, that means Obama ascribes all racial offenses to the past, where the only guilty white people are dead. The accumulated white wealth and privilege that is the result of hundreds of years of racist exploitation also was due to actions (crimes) of people now mostly dead. Obama forgives the dead racists, and has never expressed any intention of readjusting the ten to fifteen to one disparity in median white to Black household income. Yes, Obama knows perfectly well that wealth disparity, if not aggressively dealt with as a racial problem, will take centuries – if ever – to disappear. But Obama accepts the racial status quo as a fait accompli that can only be altered by methods that do not penalize living white people who benefited from their dead ancestors’ crimes. In practice, this means Obama would leave American race relationships frozen in time.

White men, the recipients of the most unearned privilege, wealth and power over the four centuries of English-speaking settlement (theft) in North American, therefore have nothing to fear from Barack Obama. Obama makes it quite clear that he not only considers white men’s riches to be sacrosanct, but he believes every word of the mythical origins of the white settlers who seized power from the British Crown. These men were “farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787,” said Obama. No mention of slaveholders or slave traders in the bunch. By dishing out a historical narrative of race in America that omits the theft of the continent and genocide of Native Americans Obama tacitly accepts the lie that most European settlers were escaping religious persecution – a fairy tale that even children’s schoolbooks seldom tell anymore – and pretends that the whites acquired Indian lands by legal means. But what’s the point of arguing about such matters, since everyone involved – especially the Indians – is dead.

Having taken “off the table,” so to speak, almost every aspect and resource of American life that over many generations created a thoroughly racist society, Obama then encourages Americans to engage each other in mutual self-help, all the while deftly avoiding any speech that might upset whites, especially males, jealous of their privileges. “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for ourchildren and our grandchildren.” What does that mean? Nothing, except that people should be nicer to each other and avoid hurting anybody’s feelings by bringing up racial privilege.

Obama’s central message for white consumption, here, is that everybody’s story is equally compelling, whether you are the grandchild of slaves or slaveholders. This is sometimes called “moral equivalence,” and is especially favored by whites of European immigrant descent who remember how hard their fathers worked at jobs that wouldn’t hire native-born, English-speaking Blacks. But hey! Everybody’s families have had problems, right? Forgetaboutit!

Obama claims his political beliefs are based on an “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people.” Of course, he never asks white people to acknowledge, let alone give up an iota of privilege in order to even the score after all these years, so we’ll have to accept the existence of this vast reservoir of decency on faith.

Even Obama can’t deny that slavery was an evil institution – although he abhors the very idea of slave descendants making claims to present day remuneration for their dead relatives’ free labor. After all, that would tend to create unnecessary tensions that might stand in the way of the quest for change. The quest for change should be calm, quiet, cost nobody anything, and allow everyone to leave with a good feeling.

Preserving good feeling requires that Black people avoid at all cost telling the truth about the United States. Euro-Americans have an absolute right to tell bald faced lies, especially at the expense of Blacks. That’s Obama’s version of democracy – the sacred right to lie, especially about dead people.

Obama’s great friend and once-mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright has gone beyond the pale, and represents a one-man threat to racial harmony in the United States. Rev. Wright went a lot farther than speaking out “against perceived injustice…They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice.” Oh, no. “Instead” Rev. Wright “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic.”

Let’s take this slowly, so as not to distort Obama’s core beliefs. He denies that racism is or has been “endemic” to American life. The MSN Encarta dictionary defines “endemic” as “characteristic of a particular place, or among a particular group, or area of interest or activity.” Since slavery was legal in every single colony that became the United States in 1776, it is safe to say that slavery was “endemic” to the original United States. Nevertheless, Obama is outraged that Rev. Wright has the nerve to “elevate what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America” – in other words, Rev. Wright is more angry about slavery than the nice things that white folks did for Blacks during and after slavery. What those nice things were, Obama doesn’t mention, so we’ll have to take that on faith, too.

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

It is at this point that I suspect Obama is playing stupid, but maybe he’s just too sophisticated for my limited understanding. It appears he’s saying that Rev. Wright and other Black complainers are responsible for divisions in the nation. If memory serves, it was white folk who extended Jim Crow and all manner of racial division to every aspect of American life, including the toilet bowl, but Barack Obama maintains Blacks have become the present day divisionists. Exactly what year that happened, he doesn’t say. However, this great division by Blacks has, according to Obama, interfered with “two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change.” Black America overwhelmingly opposed the two most recent wars; I suppose that amounts to creating divisions. Blacks haven’t blown up anything on the scale of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, but maybe our constant complaining about racism scares people into fearing we have divisive intentions. We must admit, however, that high Black unemployment and home foreclosures, as well as high infant mortality and shorter life spans, tend to clutter up the landscape with unattended Black bodies, alive and dead, a source of unnecessary divisions in society and stinking to high hell in the warming climate, for which we are also culpable. We should all thank the eloquent and wise Barack Obama for pointing out our collective failure to keep track of all these excessive, bloated Black bodies.

One has to admit, Obama worked extra hard to earn such an historically unprecedented proportion of white male votes. He admonishes us that “to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.” Obama would have us cease and desist all criticism of what might appear to be racist behavior, since there always exists a small chance that a few of us might be mistaken. Such mistakes by Blacks could cause climate warming to go entirely out of control, not to mention war with China.

Quite understandably, white males appeared to love Obama’s “race” speech. No wonder. Every conceivable mode of eliminating racial disparities has been methodically taken off the table by the Illinois Senator. We are left only with an opportunity to conduct a “dialogue” about race, as long as we do so politely and without a hint of redistributive thought or intention.

Marlin Adams seems to have figured out Obama’s complicated racial diplomacy. “Barack Obama, as the Grand Mediator, is proposing a racial settlement agreement, Black folks get acknowledgment of our historical struggles, and recognition of that legacy's impact on our condition; White society, for its willingness to listen, gets a cease and desist of the criticism of America's racial past, and full allegiance to a White ethnocentric version of the future.”

So far, I have heard nothing of facilitating the release of some of the one million Black men and women held captive behind bars on any given day in America. The subject of crime – or innocence of crime – causes great stress among many white males. Therefore, the Black American Gulag, the largest on the planet, is ineligible for dialogue.

Malcolm X, in the year before he was assassinated, found himself and other Black notables under pressure to “sit-down” (rather than stand up) and have calm deliberations about what should be presented to white authorities. Sounds very much like Obama’s admonitions that Blacks and whites engage in some meaningless “dialogue.” “They’ll have you sitting in everywhere,” said Malcolm. “It’s not so good to refer to what you’re going to do as a ‘sit-in.’ An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well you and I been sitting long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to back that up.”

But then, Malcolm was not a modern Negro like Senator Obama. Neither was the great Frederick Douglass, who had little patience for idle sitters or time-wasting dialoguers. Called upon by white “friends” in Rochester to speak on the 4th of July, 1852, Douglass delivered a speech that would have caused Barack Obama some sort of seizure:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

Clearly, Obama would conclude that Frederick Douglass specialized in unnecessary racial divisions. However, the illustrious Mr. Douglass was an efficient speaker, who did not waste words on fools, no matter how well-meaning. When whites demanded that Douglass convince them just how bad slavery was, he recoiled. “I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?”

In the same manner, what is it about pervasive racism in American life that honest people do not already understand? What does Barack Obama think is within acceptable bounds of dialogue, and what is not? Is he aware of some racial mysteries that have evaded the rest of us? To tell the truth, Obama couldn’t manage to keep his own hind parts from being singed when he tried to find some middle ground between the vicious, thieving, genocidal, slaveholding God revered by most white Americans, and the truthful Black narrative of four centuries in an American hell.

Barack Obama has literally nothing to contribute to such a conversation.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Obama’s Schemes to Tiptoe Past the Devil

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Barack Obama likes to pretend that he is a deeply spiritual man, but he failed to sneak past the white gods of retribution when it appeared Obama paid insufficient homage to the greatness of the American historical legacy. The Senator thought he could sneak his way between the National White American Gods, most of them slaveholders and Indian-killers, and the Black guardians of American’s true history of genocide, chattel slavery and constant aggressive war. Obama got caught by both sides, and wound up mumbling gibberish about holding a dialogue between irreconcilable belief systems. In fact, Obama has maneuvered himself into a position of irrelevance to both sides.

In the next weeks and months you are going to hear a great deal from Black Agenda Report and Black Agenda Radio about the various proposals for some kind of dialogue on race in the United States. Let me make it clear from the beginning: we at BAR are not interested in any kind of verbal duel with liars. There are facts, and there are lies. The most important fact relating to the history of the United States is that it was created in a centuries-long project of human extermination, and replacement of those murdered Native American millions by millions of Africans who were then classified as beasts whose only reason for living was to serve the every whim of the white winners of those two continental race wars. Now that, of course, is the truth that is celebrated as a kind of white national religion. The general belief is that God was in favor of killing 19 out of every 20 or so Native Americans, to make way for Europeans to steal two continents, and that God also favored the kidnapping of millions of Africans in order to make the European Americans extraordinarily rich. This White American God likes his people to be rich, and doesn’t much care how they go about becoming so. He blesses the fact that the U.S. spends as much money on weapons as the rest of the world, combined. U.S. imperialism, it appears, is God’s will, according to the American religion.

Barack Obama had a plan. He knew that the only way a Black man could possibly stand a chance of becoming president of the United States was to pledge allegiance to the national white historical narrative, or religion – the Big Lie that says God wanted all those Indians dead and Africans enslaved, for some higher purpose that will be worked out sometime in that sweet by-and-by. Very few Black folks buy into the Ridiculous White Lie, but Barack Obama thought that a combination of his rich backers on Wall Street and the near-universal support among Blacks would allow him to safely walk a thin line between the competing white and Black fires and brimstones of totally opposite narratives on the history and nature of the United States. The two stories cannot possibly be reconciled. One is true, and the other is a lie. Now Obama is caught in between, the mumbling man.

Does Barack Obama really want to engage in a dialogue on the facts of race in America? Of course not. That was never his plan. A real dialogue means solving real problems – problems of unearned white privilege and power. What else is there to talk about? What other change is worth having? One million Black men and women are in prison at any given moment. We have already done hundreds of studies on why African Americans are incarcerated in such huge numbers. We don’t need a dialogue about this great injustice. We need our sisters and brothers set free.

That’s the only conversation I think is worth having with Barack Obama, his supporters, or his detractors.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaRadio.com
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Hothead McCain

by ROBERT DREYFUSS

[from the March 24, 2008 issue]

If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.

You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.

And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation.

But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does."

The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."

McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.

"We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don't care what [Putin's] objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. "McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia."

Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.

More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, "There's no doubt in my mind, once [Saddam] is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw...back in 1991." When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.

Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure "victory." By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG's recommendations, a McCain aide says, "There were many encounters with the President's senior advisers and with the President on this issue." Fred Kagan, the surge's author and Robert Kagan's brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, "It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us."

In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. "Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?" he responded. "Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan." He added, "I understand your readers may think it's some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy." Conspiracy or not, it's clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran," McCain said. "The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world." He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia's consent. McCain's provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.

In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America's armed might. "He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options," says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.

"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."

We're still waiting for the "speaking softly" part. "There's going to be other wars," McCain warns. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars."

Is This the Big One?

by JEFF FAUX

[from the April 14, 2008 issue]

For more than a decade, we Americans have been living on an economic San Andreas fault--a foundation of fracturing competitiveness covered by unsustainable consumer spending with money borrowed from foreigners. A financial earthquake was inevitable. We don't know how high on the recession Richter scale the current crisis will take us, but it increasingly looks like, as they say in San Francisco, "The Big One."

Since the last Big One, the Great Depression of the 1930s, we have had eleven small to medium recessions, lasting an average of ten months. The most severe--two back-to-back downturns that began in 1979--drove price increases and the unemployment rate to double digits.

We're not at those levels yet. But the structural supports underneath our shop-till-we-drop economy are considerably weaker. For starters, we have a historic depression in the housing market. Americans' total mortgage debt now exceeds their home equity, for the first time since 1945. Housing prices have dropped 10 percent since last spring, followed by record foreclosures. Most economists expect them to drop at least another 10 percent, which could leave more than 14 million households--at least 16 percent of the total--better off if they just walked away from their homes. Prices could go even lower.

Until last year, housing prices in most places had risen rapidly since the 1990s. This enabled middle-class homeowners with stagnant wages and maxed-out credit cards to keep spending by refinancing their mortgages. The housing boom also spawned the now infamous subprime mortgage--a scheme devised by Main Street realtors and Wall Street bankers to finance home buying with loans that let the borrower buy in with little money down but carried high interest rates. The expensive payments would be made later by refinancing the mortgage as prices continued to rise. These subprimes were sold to middle-class strivers upgrading to McMansions as well as to the working poor.

The increased demand pushed housing prices further into the stratosphere--until, inevitably, they fell back to earth. When the subprime borrowers could no longer make their payments, foreclosure signs went up, lowering the value of other houses in the neighborhood. The refinancing spigot shut off, retail sales sputtered and by January the economy was shedding jobs.

But it is not the squeeze on homeowners that is giving our central bankers nightmares. It is the blowback of housing deflation on the country's massively overleveraged financial markets, which has seriously constricted the flow of credit--the lifeblood of the world's largest debtor economy.

In a typical deal, subprime mortgages were sold to investment companies, where they were commingled with prime mortgages to back up new securities that could be touted as both safe and high-yielding. This new debt paper was then peddled to investors, who used it as collateral for "margin" loans to buy yet more stocks and bonds. At each change of hands, fees and underwriting charges added to the total claims on the original shaky mortgages. The result was a frenzied bidding up of prices for a bewildering maze of arcane securities that neither buyers nor sellers could accurately value.

Giant Ponzi scheme? Not to worry, responded the Wall Street geniuses. By spreading risks among more people, the miracle of "diversity" was actually turning bad loans into good ones. Anyway, banks were buying insurance policies against default, which in turn were transformed into a set of even murkier securities called "credit default swaps" and marketed to hedge funds, pension managers and in some cases back to the banks that were being insured in the first place. At the end of 2007 the market for these swaps was estimated at $45.5 trillion--roughly twice as large as all US stock markets combined.

This huge pyramid of debt was made possible by thirty years of relentless deregulation of financial markets, culminating in the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited banks from dealing in high-risk securities. In effect, Washington regulators became passive enablers to Wall Street's financial binge drinkers. When they crashed--for example, in the savings-and-loan and junk-bond debacles of the 1980s, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse of 1998 and the Enron and dot-com crashes of the early 2000s--the government cleaned up the mess with taxpayers' money and let them go back to the bar.

So here we go again. When subprime homeowners stopped paying, the prices of the mortgage-backed securities used as collateral fell. Banks demanded that their borrowers pay up or cover their margins. Panicked selling by borrowers further lowered the securities' prices, triggering more margin calls and more defaults. Massive losses piled up at places like Citigroup, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, and cascaded back into the insurance companies. At the end of February, the huge insurer American International Group reported the largest quarterly loss, $5 billion, since the company started in 1919.

After some delay, the Federal Reserve Board last summer started lowering interest rates on loans to the banks. But in a phrase from the bank crisis of the 1930s, it was like "pushing on a string." The bankers' problem was not that money was too expensive to lend out; it was that they were afraid they wouldn't get their money back. When they did lend, they jacked up the rates to compensate for the higher perceived risks--even to solid customers. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey suddenly had to borrow money at 20 percent. The State of Pennsylvania couldn't finance its college student loan program. Fannie Mae, the fund created by the federal government to support perfectly sound middle-class housing, struggled to sell its bonds.

In mid-March, after anguished discussions between Federal Reserve officials and Wall Street moguls, the Fed agreed to provide $400 billion in new cash loans to banks and investment firms. Days later came the shock of eighty-five-year-old Bear Stearns going belly up. In an unprecedented deal, the Fed immediately lent JPMorgan Chase the money to buy Bear Stearns, taking suspect mortgage-backed paper as collateral. Bear's stockholders had already taken a hosing when the stock crashed. The big winners were the company's creditors and insurers, who were saved from the consequences of their bad business judgment.

We are now staring into the abyss. The Bear Stearns bailout has created a presumption of a safety net under any major stockbroker, in addition to any major bank. Rumors are that Lehman Brothers and Citigroup may be next. The Fed could handle a Lehman crash. But the collapse of Citigroup, the world's largest bank, would be catastrophic, bankrupting businesses, other banks and consumers and cutting off credit for state and local governments. And it could stretch the Fed to the limit of its resources.

There is a widespread assumption that there is no bottom to the pockets of the Federal Reserve. Not quite. The Fed has a finite amount of actual assets--mostly Treasury obligations backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government, which is a commitment to raise taxes if necessary to pay the debt. These assets total about $800 billion, some $400 billion of which have been obligated to back up loans. If the loans default, the Fed has to sell the Treasury notes in order to settle. If there are enough of these failures, the Fed could exhaust its assets. It would then have to resort to really "printing money"--issuing promissory notes not backed up by anything--or get bailed out by the Treasury, putting taxpayers further in the hole. Long before the Fed is down to the last of its stash of Treasury notes, more skittish domestic and foreign investors will flee the dollar. Interest rates would balloon and prices of oil and other imports would skyrocket. Credit would freeze, investment would plummet and tens of millions of Americans would be out on the street, with neither a job nor a roof over their heads.

Unlikely? Yes, still. Unthinkable? Not anymore. Estimates of Wall Street's losses already run well up to $500 billion. A 20 percent drop in housing prices would translate into a $4 trillion drop in the value of housing assets. A large chunk of that loss would destroy the value that underlies the mortgage-backed securities the Fed has now agreed to guarantee.

But well short of such a worst-case scenario, the country seems headed for major economic damage that will severely test whatever we have left of safety nets. It took five years from the time the recovery began in 1983 for the unemployment rate to return to pre-recession levels. Once we reach the bottom of this trough, it could be a very long time before American consumers, whose spending accounts for some 70 percent of our economy, crawl out of the debt hole and back into the shopping mall. The Japanese have still not recovered from their similar housing/debt crash in the early 1990s.

Virtually everyone who has studied Japan in the 1990s and the United States in the 1930s concludes that in both cases the government acted too late with too little in order to stop the debt dominoes from tumbling through the entire economy.

But the American political system seems as seized up as the credit markets. As the Federal Reserve tries desperately to put an overdosed Wall Street on life support, President Bush remains dizzily detached, periodically repeating his moronic mantra against government intervention in the free market. At a press conference that is impossible to parody, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the Administration "plan" to safeguard the nation against a future crisis. It boiled down to a hope that the finance industry would do a better job of policing itself and that individual states would see to any new laws that might be needed. In what the New York Times dryly reported were his "most extensive comments to date about the credit and market problems," Paulson, formerly co-chair of the investment firm Goldman Sachs, firmly told reporters that he was not interested in finding "scapegoats." No kidding.

In response to pressure from Democrats, the White House at the end of January did reluctantly agree to a fiscal stimulus. But Bush demanded that it be limited to the only economic policy he understands: tax cuts. Democrats caved, and the government started printing up $160 billion in a one-time rebate to consumers and businesses, which will be sent out in May. Too little, too late, and likely to be spent paying down debt and buying more Chinese imports.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid has proposed a second round of stimulus--this time through public investment, putting people to work rebuilding bridges, schools and other infrastructure. But no one is talking about a level of fiscal injection needed to counterbalance the drop in consumer and business spending.

If we use the 1979-83 experience as a guide, we'd need some $600 billion to $700 billion in deficit spending. But in those days, the United States was still a creditor nation. Thanks to three decades of trade deficits, topped by the costs of the Iraq War, we now depend on foreign lenders, increasingly worried about the value of their US bonds. As Lee Price, chief economist of the House Appropriations Committee, put it, "We need as big a stimulus as our foreign lenders will allow us to get away with."

To give some relief to those at the bottom of this tottering financial edifice, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, chairs of, respectively, the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, are proposing updated versions of a Depression-era housing rescue program. The government would furnish $300-$400 billion to buy up existing home mortgages at prices marked down to reflect the current lower values. The plan could refinance 1-2 million homes. It may not be enough, but it probably represents the outer limit of what is possible in the twilight year of a White House whose economic competence is in the twilight zone.

Given the way Washington works, the Frank/Dodd proposal would need business support. Yet despite the fact that it would bring desperately needed trust back to the system, the capos of the Wall Street mob are unenthusiastic. Being forced to acknowledge losses on their books could toss a few more of them out of their jobs at a time when the supply of golden parachutes may be getting thin. Better to hunker down and whimper for more welfare from the Fed.

Some are already getting direct bailouts from big government. But it's not coming from the US government. Foreign-government-owned "sovereign wealth funds" are now buying sizable equity shares to shore up battered firms. Citigroup, where the Saudis are already the chief stockholder, sold roughly $20 billion of itself to Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Kuwait. The Chinese just bought 10 percent of Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch sold a 9 percent stake to Singapore. With oil above $100 a barrel, more of Wall Street is certain to wind up owned in the Middle East. Some members of Congress still warn that these countries are looking for political influence in America's financial heart, rather than optimizing their rate of return. They are probably right, but the nationalist fires that flared up against Dubai ownership of US ports in 2006 have largely been banked. Beggars can't be choosers.

Another hope is that the Europeans, the Chinese, whoever, will take over our role as the world's consumer of last resort. As the recession slows US imports, countries that have grown fat on exports to us will certainly have to shift more of their growth to their own domestic market. But to expect that the leaders of other nations would put their own economies at risk by running up trade deficits in order to save us Americans from the consequences of our own folly seems stunningly naïve.

So if this is not The Big One, it is likely to be A Big One--and a long one.

We could still get lucky, of course. Republicans facing re-election might persuade Bush to support a big fiscal stimulus and housing rescue. Home prices may miraculously stabilize. Tomorrow, bankers may wake up like Scrooge on Christmas morning and just start lending. The Chinese may start importing American-made cars...

Otto von Bismarck once remarked, "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Let's hope it's still true.

Lenders should bail out consumers

By Bruce Marks | September 20, 2007

THE HUMAN SIDE of the subprime crisis is that more than 2 million homeowners are at risk of losing their homes. If immediate action is not taken, the repercussions of allowing this meltdown is likely to affect virtually every community, drive the economy into recession, and affect economies overseas. The most effective and just remedy is for the lenders and investors who created these "exotic" products to restructure the loans. This does not require taxpayer dollars to bail out an industry that has profited hugely from this scheme.

Some have portrayed this crisis as one created by "risky borrowers" taking advantage of generous lenders. These hardworking Americans did not design these "exotic" products and package them for worldwide investments. Blaming borrowers would be like a car maker designing and selling cars that suddenly go into overdrive and cause accidents, and rather than having a recall to fix the cars, the owners are penalized for being negligent drivers.

This subprime crisis is about risky and greedy lending. These "exotic" products are unique in their type and magnitude. The majority are adjustable rate mortgages, but these ARMs are unique for they do not decrease if the prime rate or other indexes go down. These are Strangulation ARMs that are structured to always increase, resulting in foreclosure or financial ruin for the majority of borrowers. Payments are initially affordable but dramatically increase over three to four years to more than 10 percent, even if the lending indexes decrease. There was no perceived subprime crisis prior to 2007 when the initial payments were affordable. But double-digit interest rates over the long term would transform anyone into an at-risk borrower.

These loans - hundreds of billions of dollars worth - have generated huge profits for the brokers who originated them, the lenders who purchased them, the rating agencies that evaluated them, and the investment bankers who packaged and sold them to investors. A New York Times investigation of Countrywide, the country's largest mortgage company, detailed how the company structured employee incentives that exploited borrowers by imposing large costs on the borrowers, and pushed many into unaffordable mortgages. Additionally, the billions of dollars in bonuses paid out last year by the investment bankers reflect the profitability of the subprime lending market.

These defective products require the restructuring of loans. Developing a borrower-focused solution, based on what the borrower can afford, is the most viable remedy. This requires lenders who service the loans to reduce the interest rate and/or reduce the outstanding mortgage balance to what the homeowner can afford. This can be determined by documenting the homeowner's net income, required debt payments, necessary expenses, with the remaining amount available for the mortgage payment.

However, lenders refuse to restructure loans, and instead demand more money while maintaining the unaffordable mortgage. Regulators must exercise their power to require lenders to restructure these loans. This remedy addresses the interests of all parties involved: the investor can obtain a reasonable return, homeowners can keep their homes, and the local tax base can be maintained.

The Neighborhood Assistance Corp., a nonprofit mortgage broker and community advocacy group, has begun this process by bringing Countrywide borrowers who need their loans restructured to the mortgage company's regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision. For uncooperative lenders, the regulators must impose "cease and desist" orders. The Neighborhood Assistance Corp. has also stepped forth with a $1 billion commitment to refinance borrowers out of their loans on the best terms available.

It is unfortunate that the solutions put forth by politicians focus on a taxpayer bailout of lenders and investors. Congress is also proposing to expand Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's lending authority. This should not occur until they commit to restructure the subprime loans in their portfolios, and require lenders who place loans with them to also restructure loans and eliminate their predatory practices. The legislation needed immediately is to allow bankruptcy judges to restructure unaffordable loans.

Everyone needs to be concerned even if they do not have a subprime loan. Neighborhoods are being devastated, and it will only get worse. Politicians and regulators have ignored the plight of over 2 million homeowners who are at risk of foreclosure. The restructuring of loans is straightforward, attainable, and can be done at no cost to the taxpayer. This puts the responsibility where it rightly belongs - with the lenders and investors who created the crisis.

Bruce Marks is founder and CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America.

Court: Mumia deserves new hearing

By KATHY MATHESON, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 16 minutes ago


A federal appeals court on Thursday said former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal cannot be executed for murdering a Philadelphia police officer without a new penalty hearing.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Abu-Jamal's conviction, but said he should get a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions. If prosecutors don't want to give him a new death penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal would be sentenced automatically to life in prison.

Prosecutors are weighing their options, Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns Jr. said Thursday.

Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, said he was glad the court did not uphold the death sentence, and said he wants a new trial.

"I've never seen a case as permeated and riddled with racism as this one," Bryan said Thursday. "I want a new trial and I want him free. His conviction was a travesty of justice."

Abu-Jamal, 53, once a radio reporter, has attracted a legion of artists and activists to his cause in a quarter-century on death row. A Philadelphia jury convicted him in 1982 of killing Officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, after the patrolman pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother in an overnight traffic stop.

He had appealed, arguing that racism by the judge and prosecutors corrupted his conviction at the hands of a mostly white jury. Prosecutors, meanwhile, had appealed a federal judge's 2001 decision to grant Abu-Jamal a new sentencing hearing because of the jury instructions.

Hundreds of people protested outside the federal building in Philadelphia where arguments were heard in May and an overflow crowd — including legal scholars, students, lawyers, the policeman's widow and Abu-Jamal's brother — filled the courtroom. Abu-Jamal's writings and taped speeches on the justice system have made him a popular figure among activists who believe he was the victim of racism. Abu-Jamal is black; Faulkner was white.

The flaw in the jury instructions related to whether jurors understood how to weigh mitigating circumstances that might keep Abu-Jamal off death row. Under the law, jurors did not have to unanimously agree on a mitigating circumstance.

"The jury instructions and the verdict form created a reasonable likelihood that the jury believed it was precluded from finding a mitigating circumstance that had not been unanimously agreed upon," the appeals court wrote.

Arguments before the 3rd Circuit focused on several constitutional issues, including whether prosecutors improperly eliminated black jurors.

Ten whites and two blacks served on the jury. Prosecutors struck 10 blacks and five whites from the pool, while accepting four blacks and 20 whites, according to Bryan, who argued that prosecutors of the day fostered "a culture of discrimination."

Burns argued in court that Abu-Jamal was raising issues on appeal that he had not raised during a lengthy 1995 review of the case.

The officer's widow, Maureen Faulkner, has kept her husband's memory alive over the years, and recently co-wrote a book about the case. The book, "Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice," written with radio talk-show host Michael Smerconish, came out in December.

___

On the Net:

Free Mumia site: http://www.mumia.org

Daniel Faulkner site: http://www.danielfaulkner.com

Mumia Abu-Jamal Contact & Other Information

Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370

MUMIA'S COLUMNS NEED TO BE PUBLISHED AS BROADLY
AS POSSIBLE TO INSPIRE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT AND
HELP CALL ATTENTION TO HIS CASE.

The campaign to kill Mumia is in full swing and we need you to
**please** contact as many publications and information outlets as
you possibly can to run Mumia's commentaries (on-line and
**especially off-line**)!! The only requirements are that you run
them *unedited*, with every word including copyright information
intact, and send a copy of the publication to Mumia and/or ICFFMAJ.
THANK YOU!!!

Keep updated by reading ACTION ALERTS!!
at http://www.mumia.org, http://www.onamove.com/ and their links.
========================================

To download Mp3's of Mumia's commentaries visit
http://www.prisonradio.org or http://www.fsrn.org
==============================================>

The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!

PLEASE CONTACT:
International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Phone - 215-476-8812/ Fax - 215-476-6180
E-mail - icffmaj@aol.com
AND OFFER YOUR SERVICES!

Whore Nation by Mumia Abu-Jamal

[col. writ. 3/14/08]
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the national media fascination over the Spitzer-Kristen scandal has come also revelation: We, all of us, are living in a nation of whores.

Doubt it?

Now, I'm not here referring to a young call girl; nor an I really talking about former N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Although, in truth, there is much more than sex that unites them; more, in fact, than that which divides them.

For, despite first reports, Kristen hails from a well-to-do New Jersey family, who- having left home -- has experienced hard times. In that sense, both she and Spitzer hail from the same (or a somewhat similar) class.

Her sense of ambition for financial security drove her to the high-end business of prostitution. Similarly, Spitzer's ambition drove him to the law, and while not for financial enhancements, his pay was the most potent drug available: power.

And both whored themselves, just for different pay.

But this is bigger than the both of them (even as she entertains million-dollar offers for shots in the buff for porn magazines -- or, just another kind of whoring -- selling her image instead of her sweat).

In America, where culture, entertainment, politics, and all fields of endeavor are under the sway of capital, the question ain't whether we're for sale, but for how much?

And what is whoring, but exploitation?

In a nation fast facing de industrialization, where manufacturing is becoming a memory, and the economy tumbles into the bin of the service industries, what is the quintessential 'service', but the world's oldest profession -- prostitution?

Sometimes movies appear that reflect great, deep social or cultural shifts. Remember the movie "Pretty Woman", the vehicle featuring actress Julia Roberts? The theme was the whore with the heart of gold, who caught the eye of a wealthy man.

What do you think that film whispered to millions of little girls (or, for that matter, little boys) sitting in the dark, lost in flickering light, dreaming about tomorrow?

And what is our daily diet on TV, under the guise of so-called "reality shows", but selling oneself -- whoring oneself -- for dollars? The more humiliating, the more dough, it seems.

But, culture -- even corporate culture -- sometimes reflects and even presages what is happening in real life. What we laugh at during the nights' entertainment, becomes dreaded drudgery in morning light. For, it seems, what we find ridiculous on the tube, we lie on the job, for both reflect the daily humiliations of survival.

In politics, in entertainment, in business, in our social lives, we sell ourselves to the highest bidder -- whores in every sense but name.

At bottom, it's about power and exploitation; the sale of the body, which in capitalism's logic, is just another commodity.

Welcome to Whore Nation.

--(c) '08 maj

Law-Maker = Law-Breaker (The Spitzer Drama) by Mumia Abu-Jamal

[col. writ. 3/11/08]
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

The rise and imminent fall of New York's Governor, Eliot Spitzer has all the drama and pathos of a TV movie.

If it weren't true, it could hardly be believed.

Spitzer, the Dick Tracy of the prosecutorial set (with his squinting blue eyes, and square jaw), has joined the peculiarly American photo op of the fallen politician, with his doleful wife dutifully standing beside him, a look in her eyes like a deer in headlights.

It is rare to see such a spectacle in Asia, Africa or Europe, where there is a certain maturity about affairs of the heart (or the loins).

But this is the U.S., not France.

While the Spitzer affair is but the latest in what seems like a seasonal event, it is different from those that came before because of the nature of the man, who built his political career on being the ruthless prosecutor, the 'clean up man' of the filthy political culture of the Empire state. It is indeed, more than the obvious: hypocrisy run wild. It is a classic case of a man 'hoisted by his own petard' (or destroyed by his own weapon).

For, inasmuch as the former state Attorney General won a trip to the Governor's Mansion in Albany because of his relentless attacks on Wall Street brokers, he also had an appetite for the doings of prostitution rings, one of which led to his own front door.

According to published and broadcast reports, Spitzer paid nearly $80,000 for his trysts with high-end call girls.

And while this still seems a peculiar American fascination and revulsion with sex, the particulars of his money-changing to secure these services suggests that he has violated federal criminal statutes -- some that have been on the books for nearly a century.

At issue is the infamous Mann Act -- a law known (particularly in the African-American community) because of its usage against the great Black boxing champ, Jack Johnson (1878-1946). The law is perhaps best known as the 'White Slavery' law, for it has been used to prosecute men charged with trafficking in the sexual services of white women.

The Mann Act, as defined by the prestigious Black's Law Dictionary, is as follows:

Federal statute (White Slave Traffic Act, 18 U.S.CA § 2421) making it a crime

to transport a woman or girl in interstate or foreign commerce for the purpose

of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose. {Black L. Dict..,

5th ed., (West Publ., 1979), p.869.}

Yet, if news reports are correct( that he essentially hired young women to cross state lines for 'immoral' purposes), it is doubtful that this high-ranking political figure will face a jail cell. For him, it might suffice to surrender his lofty office, while his loyal acolytes will fill op-ed pages with furtive prose that the public figure "has suffered enough."

In the legendary life of the first Black heavyweight boxing champ, Jack Johnson, this internationally renowned pugilist was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced for violating the Mann Act, for driving 2 white women across state lines to accompany him as he plied his trade. The government didn't claim that either of these women were prostitutes.

They were his wives! They were Etta Terry Duryea, whom he married in 1911, and after her suicide, Lucille Cameron.

The immorality? The mere fact that he, a Black man, had married white women.

After his 1913 conviction, he fled the U.S. for France to stay out of prison.

But that was the; this is now. Violations of the letter of the law don't mean the same thing when it comes to rich, powerful white men (unless they were prosecuted by Spitzer, that is)

In addition to being the most powerful political figure in the state, Spitzer wears (until his resignation) the title of super-delegate, and he has already pledged to vote for Hillary Clinton.

What does one of the nations' foremost feminists have to say about her homie, and his exploitation of women in the sex trades?

Hypocrisy, it seems, doesn't end in the Governor's Mansion.

--(c) '08 maj

{Source: Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates, eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (Concise Desk Reference) Phila., PA: Running Press, 2003), pp.481-83}

Parole Time for MOVE 9

[col. writ. 3/8/08]
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Incredibly, it's been almost 30 years - 30 years! - since 9 MOVE men and women were unjustly consigned to prisons across Pennsylvania.

Although known as the MOVE 9, there really are eight survivors of the August 8th, 1978 police assault on MOVE's West Philadelphia home and headquarters.

They are: Phil Africa, Janine Africa, Mike Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Eddie Africa, Chuck Africa and Delbert Africa. The late Merle Africa died at the women's prison in Muncy, PA (near Williamsport, PA) under quite mysterious circumstances.

All 9 MOVE men and women were convicted in one of the longest (and most contentious) trials in city history, on dubious charges of 3rd degree murder of a city cop engaged in the raid on their home, and related charges. Even if all the charges were true (and they most certainly are not), the sentence 30 to 100 years can only be termed grossly excessive. At the time of trial, 3rd degree carried a sentence of 71/2 to 15 years --so essentially the MOVE people got more than double, and indeed, quadruple the maximum of what the statute provided. Indeed, the woman got the same sentences as the men, even though none of them faced weapons charges!

There's little real doubt that they're in prison today because they're MOVE members.

Today, 30 years later, they should be entitled to their freedom--and they would be, but for the concerted campaign of cops and local media to keep them imprisoned for a century.

MOVE members continue to fight for their imprisoned brothers and sisters, and they ask that you join that struggle by supporting their parole demands. On the web, contact:

www.onamovellja@aol.com for more information (or simply Google, "onamove.com")

Or write the MOVE Organization, P.O. Box 19709, Phila, PA, 19143.

As many of you know, I covered the press conference of August 8th, 1978. Every reporter present knows that within hours of that press conference, the police department issued a written press release giving a completely revised statement of how the cop met his death. That makes sense when you consider that the cop was most likely the victim of friendly fire, for the MOVE house had become a shooting gallery, with police expending literally hundreds of rounds during the raid. Moreover, when's the last time you've seen a crime scene destroyed before nightfall, within hours of the shooting?

It happened here.

I also covered the trial, a parade of legalized injustice if ever there was one. Indeed, days after the trial, Judge Edwin S. Malmed took to the airwaves to defend his unjust rulings. On a radio talk show on WWDB-FM, I phoned him and asked him if he knew who killed the cop. He replied, live on air, "I haven't the faintest idea."

Yet, this guy sent 9 people to prison for 30-to-100 years!

--(c) '08 maj

NAFTA Democrats by Mumia Abu-Jamal

[col. writ. 3/5/08]
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Elections are always events that surprise.

That's because, like much human activity, it doesn't follow the rigors of logic, but often turns on the whims of emotion, the fires of feeling, and the vagaries of vibration.

For, by what logic does a working-class voter select one who supported the one act that, above all, decimated the nation's manufacturing sector, threw hundreds of thousands of jobs away, and made the workplace a bitter battlefield?

I speak, of course, of NAFTA (North America Free Trade agreement)

Few championed NAFTA more than William Jefferson Clinton, who promoted it as good for business, good for workers, and good for the American economy. Of course, it pleased business, for it opened up cheap labor pools in Mexico, and enabled scores of maquiladores to open up shop on the other side of the border, pay Mexicans a pittance of U.S. labor costs, ignore environmental and safety regulations, and ship finished, cheaper goods back to the U.S. Market.

Of course, the loss of manufacturing jobs also meant the loss of the best-paying jobs, and the growth of the service industry, which traditionally pays for less.

JoAnn Wypijewski of The Nation magazine, toured Ohio's working-class towns days prior to the recent primaries, and heard white workers express their political views unmediated by the corporate press.

In an all-white veterans' bar in Springfield, a middle-aged guy exclaims, "I love Hillary", repeatedly. The man explains that if Hillary didn't get the nomination, he'd support Republican nominee John McCain's campaign, even though he added, "I hate McCain."

A questioner asks, "Why not Obama?"

The man offers more an excuse than an answer, until the question is repeated, and he then answers matter of factly, "Because he's black."

Moments thereafter the debate hits pay dirt, and he loudly proclaims, "I'm not going to vote for the nigger!"*

So much for sticking to the issues.

Of course, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has surprised many by his ability to attract voting percentages in some of the whitest states in the Union (like Vermont, the one state he's won most recently, with a 97% white population), but early in the primaries few seriously gave him a shot at actually winning.

Things have changed. As his chances of winning got better, the road got steeper, and the politics got dirtier. Photos appeared of him in African garb (with its headwrap visually suggesting he was a -- gasp! -- Muslim!'). Right wing talk show hosts went on "Hussein" rants.

It's almost like, the closer he gets, the BLACKER he gets.

If we looked at this race logically, it would seem that any candidate who was, even remotely, linked to NAFTA, would be a political goner in a state as economically hard-hit as was Ohio.

But why worry about NAFTA, when it's so easy to worry about niggers?

--(c) '08 maj

[*Source: Wypijewski JoAnn, "Postcards From Ohio", The Nation (Mar. 17, 2008), p.14.]

Rapper Remy Ma is convicted of assault

By SAMUEL MAULL,
Associated Press Writer1 hour, 16 minutes ago

Grammy-nominated rapper Remy Ma was led out of a Manhattan courtroom, weeping and in handcuffs, on Thursday after her conviction for shooting a woman outside a nightclub last summer.

The defense had conceded that the entertainer fired a shot toward a friend she suspected of stealing $3,000, but said it was an accident.

The 26-year-old rapper, whose real name is Remy Smith, faces up to 25 years in prison following her conviction in state Supreme Court for assault, weapon possession and attempted coercion.
She quietly wiped away tears as the verdict was read, then wailed loudly and sobbed openly after she was outside the courtroom. Many of her supporters also cried.

Justice Rena Uviller ordered her jailed without bail while awaiting her April 23 sentencing.
Remy Ma was nominated for a Grammy as part of the Terror Squad for the 2004 hit "Lean Back." She also has appeared on recordings with Busta Rhymes and Eminem.

The rapper was acquitted of witness tampering and gang assault, charges related to a Bronx nightclub attack on the boyfriend of a witness who ultimately testified against her.

Remy Ma got into Makeda Barnes Joseph's car after a party at the Manhattan nightclub on July 14, 2007, and demanded that she dump her purse.

Assistant District Attorney Michael McIntosh said the defendant "took an illegal .45-caliber automatic and loaded it with hollow-point bullets," then used both hands to cock the weapon as she got into the car. "She took every step you had to take to shoot somebody," said the prosecutor.

Defense lawyer Ivan Fisher said the gun went off accidentally as the women struggled over the bag.

Joseph, who was shot in the abdomen, testified that she underwent three surgeries during a three-week hospital stay.

For You Boondocks Fans

Check out the video clip below for a great barrel of laughs. Uncle Ruckus gets his own reality T.V. show on the Boondocks.

U.S. human rights hypocrisy exposed

By Saeed Shabazz Staff Writer
Updated Mar 19, 2008, 01:56 am

UNITED NATIONS (FinalCall.com) - The same day President Bush decided to tell Democratic presidential nominee hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) that if he met with leaders of unfriendly nations, “It’ll give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and dignity,” a United Nations Special Rapportuer in Geneva, Switzerland told the U.S. delegation America must take immediate steps to protect the human rights of Blacks affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Special rapporteur for housing, Miloon Kothari, also said Feb. 28 the U.S. must halt ongoing evictions of Blacks from homes in New Orleans. “The authorities claim that the demolition of public housing is not intentionally discriminatory,” Mr. Kothari said, but “the lack of consultation with those affected and the disproportionate impact on poorer and predominately African American residents and former residents would result in denial of internationally recognized human rights.”

Exposing America on the world stage

Ajamu Baraka, executive director of the Atlanta-based U.S. Human Rights Network, was among witnesses to the scolding and glad to see it. His group is one of many determined to expose U.S. hypocrisy and human rights violations in the world’s greatest democracy.

The U.S. Human Rights Network led a group of some 100 people, representing American human rights watchdog organizations, that traveled to Geneva for a Feb. 21-22 session and challenged Bush administration assertions about problems with racism in the United States.

They attended a meeting of the committee that overseas the UN Convention On Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), ratified by the U.S. in 1994. CERD was adopted by the UN in 1965 and went into force in 1969. As of July 2007, 177 nations agreed to be bound by its terms. (The full text may be viewed at http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/cerd.htm.)

Every nation that signed the treaty is required to give a national report on discrimination in such areas as health care, education and prison sentencing.

Critics say the U.S. has broken a series of legal promises.

While the U.S. delegation pointed to existing laws designed to protect civil rights, the UN committee noted that the U.S. often adopts narrow legal interpretations that prevent enforcement.

The official U.S. delegation also downplayed the effects of widespread discrimination, while being questioned by the CERD committee, according to observers.

Representatives from the Departments of State, Justice, Education, Labor, the Interior and Homeland Security were part of the official delegation.

“From failing to address the chronic persistence of structural racism to even acknowledging the disparate racial impact on people of color of Hurricane Katrina, the State Department reports read like a fantasy—unfortunately a fantasy that is too often experienced as a nightmare for Americans of color,” Mr. Baraka said.

Treaty requires reporting on discrimination, racism

According to Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Constitution demands that signed treaties be honored. But since the CERD treaty was ratified U.S. reporting on compliance has been inadequate, and this year’s hearing was no exception, said ACLU officials.

“The United States can no longer deny the real problems of racial discrimination, from racial profiling to unequal access to educational opportunities, that are happening right here at home,” said Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program.

The eyes of the world were on the United States during the hearings in Geneva, he said.
“It is time for our government to address the persistent structural racism and inequality occurring in this country and to begin to look for solutions,” Mr. Parker said.

Going to Geneva ushered in a new era of proactive work, said Mr. Baraka. “It’s going to be up to activists to translate responses into local action,” he said. The human rights advocate believes an educational process that makes local governments aware of their responsibility to help the federal government uphold international treaties is at work.

“We certainly see much more interest from U.S. citizens concerning these treaties; and certainly our big task is to raise awareness in the U.S.,” said Alison Parker, deputy director of the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch.

In early February, Human Rights Watch released a 48-page report on CERD, which underlined several U.S. problem areas: “In some U.S. states, African American youth are arrested for murder at least three times more than White youth; African American and Native American students in U.S. public schools receive corporal punishment at rates higher than White students; Haitian refugees seeking admission to the U.S. are, as a matter of explicit government policy, treated less favorably than are Cuban refugees; non-citizens detained by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are denied the right to judicial review of their detention,” it noted.

“We have a major challenge ahead of us to get people to understand how the government has violated this treaty. We do see more attorneys in the U.S. using these treaty violations in their own cases. But, we must build a grassroots movement for change,” Ms. Parker told The Final Call.

Building an American human rights movement?

The ACLU was also present in Geneva. In fact, the CERD committee questioned the U.S. delegation on several issues raised in the ACLU report, “Race & Ethnicity in America: Turning a Blind Eye to Injustice.” The ACLU report examined rights violations, including events that happened after Hurricane Katrina, escalating police brutality, racial profiling, and the “school to prison pipeline”—criminal justice system funneling of students of color out of classrooms and toward incarceration.

“We are using the CERD committee report as a wake-up call here in the states,” Jamil Dakwar, director of ACLU’s Human Rights Program, explained to The Final Call. The ACLU has been fighting the Bush administration in the courts and trying to get legislators at all levels to understand their responsibilities under the human rights convention.

The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, a California-based think tank, had staffers attend the Geneva meeting.

The U.S. did not seek reports from every city, county and state to make its report complete and accurate as required by the treaty and as the CERD committee requested, according to Meikeljohn executive director Ann Fagan Ginger.

The U.S. report did not include statistics on current high unemployment rates affecting communities of color, did not include discussion of discrimination against Native Americans, nor did it discuss the connection in America between poverty and race, or the socio-economic marginalization of Blacks and Latinos, the group said.

“The Bush administration presented facts on the federal level explaining how much money was given to education and prisons in four states: Oregon, Illinois, New Mexico and South Carolina. And officials in those states who were contacted by local activists at our urging say they never received any phone calls of inquiry from government officials,” Ms. Ginger told The Final Call.
Activists should use the Berkeley, California City Council model, which was put in place in 1991.

“Whereas, the Berkeley City Council, with a view to the creations of stability and well-being, based on respect for the principle of equal rights of people, the City of Berkeley shall promote: higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development; solutions of local, economic, social, health related problems; universal respect for, and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all,” said a city resolution.
Ms. Ginger noted that lawyers must learn about these treaties and their requirements.

State Senator Bill Perkins (D-Harlem) told The Final Call of his efforts to get similar legislation passed in New York. “While I served on the New York City Council, we made an attempt around 2003 or 2004, to get lawmakers to understand how New York City was falling short on international standards, but the speaker of the council and the mayor snowballed our attempt,” explained Sen. Perkins. “I am still trying to get my colleagues on the state level to understand why it is important that our state become proactive and not reactive.”

Sen. Perkins took part in a forum Dec. 10 to mark International Human Rights Day, which exposed NYC racial disparities, and the government’s responsibility to address them.

“It has been very challenging working with the Human Rights Coalition, which has been in the lead in NYC,” Sen. Perkins said. “Citizens as they go to the polls, need to make this human rights compliance legislation a priority as they choose their next leaders.”

According to Mr. Baraka, activists will be attending a strategy meeting in Chicago, April 17-20. “We will get a better sense of where people are in challenging the government,” Mr. Baraka said.
At Final Call press time, Mr. Baraka and other activists are in Geneva awaiting the findings of the CERD committee as it relates to the U.S. human rights report. Mr. Baraka gave no indication of what action if any would be taken in Geneva after the committee’s findings are released.

FCN is a distributor (and not a publisher) of content supplied by third parties. Original content supplied by FCN and FinalCall.com News is Copyright © 2008 FCN Publishing, FinalCall.com. Content supplied by third parties are the property of their respective owners.