[col. writ. 5/15/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
As America limps toward the November elections, fatigued by the exertions of war, numb to the lofty promises of politicians, in dread of the economic dragons growling on the horizon, the role of Congress could not be more irrelevant.
That's one of the reasons that GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (R. Ariz.) has called for a change in congressional tradition, to one which allows the President to answer questions before the body.
It reminded me of the March 25, 2008 vote in the British House of Commons, where members of Parliament debated whether to open an official inquiry into the reasons for starting the war. Not surprisingly, the vote lost, largely along Party lines, as the ruling Labour members voted to protect their party, which sponsored and spearheaded the Iraq War, and avoided a formal inquiry.
Most, but not all.
A dozen Labour backbenchers bolted party ranks to express their support for an inquiry, in terms rarely heard on this side of the Atlantic.
And even though the inquiry vote failed by some 50 votes, it marked a period of questioning of the sort that should actually precede wars, not follow them. Robert Marshall-Andrews, a Labour member of parliament (MP) from Medway, brought up the infamous Downing Street memo, which told uncomfortable truths about the then coming war. Marshall-Andrews announced:"
The first is what was revealed in the Downing street memo of July 2002, reported by The Sunday (London)Times in an unusual contribution to the debate. It was recorded that at that meeting in Downing street in July 2002 Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of secret intelligence or 'C', as he was known, had reported from America to the War Cabinet,....that:
'There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. Butthe intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'"
According to the then Foreign Secretary, "Bush has made up his mind to take military action....But the case was thin."
Ultimately, of course, it didn't matter. Who needs evidence, when you can make it up?
M.P. Marshall-Andrews then spoke words that will never be heard in the U.S. Congress:
"The real point of the debate, and of any inquiry that may be held, is not to learn lessons so that we do not make mistakes again. That is one reason, but I want an inquiry to be held into the Iraq war because I want those responsible to be brought to the book and to justice. If necessary, they should be brought to international justice, but I want us to be the ones who bring them to it."
At this point, Conservative Party member, Humphrey Malins, of Woking, joined in:
"I support the honorable and learned gentleman's argument with all the strength that I can muster, but may I remind him gently that some Opposition Members at the time took the view that he is expressing? I was one of those who resigned as a shadow Minister because of the illegal war. Does he agree that, when we look back at our parliamentary lives, we may well regard the decision to go to war with Iraq as the worst and most horrible decision that this Parliament has made?"
Labourite Marshall-Andrews would heartily agree, and he would add:
"Indeed, beside that decision, all our other achievements and deficiencies -- and there have been many of both--pale into insignificance. The circumstances and repercussions of what we did then have swept well past Iraq. As Tacitus noted, one victory can create a thousand enemies, and that is precisely what happened."
These are some of just a few voices in the Parliament of the junior partner in the Iraq debacle.
When should we expect such voices in the U.S. Congress? 2025?
--(c) '08 maj
{Source: Labour & Trade Union Review, (No. 187: May 2008), pp.4-5. [http://www.ltireview.com/].]
Friday, May 23, 2008
The Politics of Ignorance & Fear
[col. writ. 5/17/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
As the presidential race inches toward November, it brings with it all
kinds of detritus, flushed from the hidden psyche of millions.
Politicians are used to representing the hopes of others: they're just as
used to dashing those hopes against the hard walls of reality.
For millions of women, the first real chance of a female president has
excited their hopes, some pending for generations. For millions of Black men
and women, the first real chance of a Black president had excited their
hopes, some deeply held for nearly a century.
For most people, however, politics is the art of unrequited hope, for
politicians promise the moon, and deliver star dust.
There is, after all, a reason why millions of Americans are so cynical
about politics, for they've learned that cynicism from the bitter well of
experience.
But consider these voices drawn from those we call the white working
class; middle-aged Al and Evelyn Landsberg; he, a lifelong Republican who
recently switched political parties, and was quoted as telling a Washington Post
reporter recently that Sen. Hillary R. Clinton (D.-N.Y.) would get his vote,
although she wasn't great. Clinton was, however, a good deal better than her
opponent, "you know, uh Embowa. He'd take this country right down the tubes."
His wife, Evelyn, cited data she gleaned from emails, saying, "From what
I can tell, if he (Embowa?} becomes president he will refuse to stand for the
Pledge of Allegiance and we will leave Iraq unprepared." She added, "I'm
not going to sit at home and let that happen."*
It's amazing to think that, several generations ago, millions of Blacks
were denied the right to vote through bogus literacy tests, while millions of
ignorant whites voted unhindered, by virtue of birthright.
Politics is often seen and interpreted as, well, 'the will of the
people.' It is often described in lofty judicial decisions and thick political
science texts as democracy in action--the People choosing their Government, and
ultimately, the American 'way of life.'
Yet, how much is simply unbridled ignorance? How much is simply blind
racial hatred? How much is just plain silliness?
And how much has this been force fed by the corporate media, which can
almost beat a dead horse back to life?
If the role of the media is merely to reinforce and buttress our
collective ignorance, what can democracy mean?
When ratings become the end-all, be-all of the corporate media, how can
it be anything but a mad dash to a mass echo chamber, where ignorance is
multiplied into mega ignorance, and wars become inevitable through rumor?
--(c) '08 maj
[*Source: Saslow, Eli, "Not Just Talking About Change: The Democrats have
registered more than a million new voters in the last seven primary states,
"Wash. Post, May 5-11, 2008 [Nat'l Wkly. Ed.], p.16]
As the presidential race inches toward November, it brings with it all
kinds of detritus, flushed from the hidden psyche of millions.
Politicians are used to representing the hopes of others: they're just as
used to dashing those hopes against the hard walls of reality.
For millions of women, the first real chance of a female president has
excited their hopes, some pending for generations. For millions of Black men
and women, the first real chance of a Black president had excited their
hopes, some deeply held for nearly a century.
For most people, however, politics is the art of unrequited hope, for
politicians promise the moon, and deliver star dust.
There is, after all, a reason why millions of Americans are so cynical
about politics, for they've learned that cynicism from the bitter well of
experience.
But consider these voices drawn from those we call the white working
class; middle-aged Al and Evelyn Landsberg; he, a lifelong Republican who
recently switched political parties, and was quoted as telling a Washington Post
reporter recently that Sen. Hillary R. Clinton (D.-N.Y.) would get his vote,
although she wasn't great. Clinton was, however, a good deal better than her
opponent, "you know, uh Embowa. He'd take this country right down the tubes."
His wife, Evelyn, cited data she gleaned from emails, saying, "From what
I can tell, if he (Embowa?} becomes president he will refuse to stand for the
Pledge of Allegiance and we will leave Iraq unprepared." She added, "I'm
not going to sit at home and let that happen."*
It's amazing to think that, several generations ago, millions of Blacks
were denied the right to vote through bogus literacy tests, while millions of
ignorant whites voted unhindered, by virtue of birthright.
Politics is often seen and interpreted as, well, 'the will of the
people.' It is often described in lofty judicial decisions and thick political
science texts as democracy in action--the People choosing their Government, and
ultimately, the American 'way of life.'
Yet, how much is simply unbridled ignorance? How much is simply blind
racial hatred? How much is just plain silliness?
And how much has this been force fed by the corporate media, which can
almost beat a dead horse back to life?
If the role of the media is merely to reinforce and buttress our
collective ignorance, what can democracy mean?
When ratings become the end-all, be-all of the corporate media, how can
it be anything but a mad dash to a mass echo chamber, where ignorance is
multiplied into mega ignorance, and wars become inevitable through rumor?
--(c) '08 maj
[*Source: Saslow, Eli, "Not Just Talking About Change: The Democrats have
registered more than a million new voters in the last seven primary states,
"Wash. Post, May 5-11, 2008 [Nat'l Wkly. Ed.], p.16]
Justice is overdue for Mumia
By SIDDIQUE ABDULLAH HASAN
SocialistWorker.org
http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/16/justice-overdue-for-mumia
May 16, 2008
Siddique Abdullah Hasan is one of the Lucasville Five, a group of men
railroaded onto death row in Ohio after a 1993 prison rebellion in which
inmates at the Lucasville prison rose up against the abuses and arbitrary
rules of prison guards and officials. Here, he looks at the recent court
ruling rejecting Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new trial.
IN LIGHT of the adverse ruling by a three-judge panel for the 3rd U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in denying Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial and an
evidentiary hearing, many of his supporters are outraged and weighing the
pros and cons of what must be done to create the circumstances for his
speedy release from captivity.
At a press conference outside the Federal Court building in Philadelphia,
Sister Pam Africa of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia
Abu-Jamal hit the nail on the head when she so forcefully said, "The power
of the people has to be unleashed, because what the court did was wrong!"
Being an activist and a revolutionary thinker, I'm totally convinced that
what she was conveying to the people--actually to the world--is that the
gloves must come off and the people must be turned loose to fight fire with
fire via the principle of "by any means necessary."
While there are many ways to unleash the power of the people, I think one
way it should be unleashed is by calling for an international economic
boycott against Hershey's and other major businesses in the state of
Pennsylvania. In order to make this boycott successful, the help of the
European Union and other countries interested in the quality of justice
should be sought.
When other countries or governments are guilty of civil, constitutional and
human rights violations against their citizens, the United States government
either selectively speaks out against these types of violations or
selectively imposes economic sanctions against the perpetrators. As the
leader of the "free world," when the United States does this, it sends a
clear and powerful message to the world that the United States will not sit
idle and allow these violations to go unchecked.
It's time for the world to stand up to the state of Pennsylvania--that is,
to Gov. Ed Rendell, to Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, to the
Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and to the appellate courts--and say
with a unified voice: "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal now! We want justice for him,
and we won't sit idle and allow you to execute this innocent man!"
Such a stand and economic boycott will serve as a supplement to the work
Mumia's lawyers and supporters are vigorously engaged in to save his life.
In a capitalistic society that prides itself on its superpower status,
economic power and military might are the only languages this imperialistic
government seems to respect and understand. Therefore, the heat must be
turned up if we are ever going to acquire justice for Mumia. Justice demands
that he be granted a new trial, or at least an evidentiary hearing to gather
and present enough evidence to prove he did not murder Philadelphia Police
Officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981.
The appellate courts have never heard the newly discovered evidence of his
actual innocence. They have always found some flimsy excuse to repress it.
In a case of actual innocence, the courts are under obligation to hear newly
discovered evidence--but such has never happened in Mumia's case. In the
absence of hearing it, the state's theory that Mumia murdered Officer
Faulkner seems very convincing to someone who doesn't know the particulars
of his case or the circumstances surrounding why the government framed Mumia
and wants him dead.
Be that as it may, justice in Mumia's case is long, long overdue. How long?
Too long! It's been 26 years, and it's now time for the world to become
morally courageous by stepping up to the plate and demanding justice for our
elder, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
SocialistWorker.org
http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/16/justice-overdue-for-mumia
May 16, 2008
Siddique Abdullah Hasan is one of the Lucasville Five, a group of men
railroaded onto death row in Ohio after a 1993 prison rebellion in which
inmates at the Lucasville prison rose up against the abuses and arbitrary
rules of prison guards and officials. Here, he looks at the recent court
ruling rejecting Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new trial.
IN LIGHT of the adverse ruling by a three-judge panel for the 3rd U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in denying Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial and an
evidentiary hearing, many of his supporters are outraged and weighing the
pros and cons of what must be done to create the circumstances for his
speedy release from captivity.
At a press conference outside the Federal Court building in Philadelphia,
Sister Pam Africa of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia
Abu-Jamal hit the nail on the head when she so forcefully said, "The power
of the people has to be unleashed, because what the court did was wrong!"
Being an activist and a revolutionary thinker, I'm totally convinced that
what she was conveying to the people--actually to the world--is that the
gloves must come off and the people must be turned loose to fight fire with
fire via the principle of "by any means necessary."
While there are many ways to unleash the power of the people, I think one
way it should be unleashed is by calling for an international economic
boycott against Hershey's and other major businesses in the state of
Pennsylvania. In order to make this boycott successful, the help of the
European Union and other countries interested in the quality of justice
should be sought.
When other countries or governments are guilty of civil, constitutional and
human rights violations against their citizens, the United States government
either selectively speaks out against these types of violations or
selectively imposes economic sanctions against the perpetrators. As the
leader of the "free world," when the United States does this, it sends a
clear and powerful message to the world that the United States will not sit
idle and allow these violations to go unchecked.
It's time for the world to stand up to the state of Pennsylvania--that is,
to Gov. Ed Rendell, to Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, to the
Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and to the appellate courts--and say
with a unified voice: "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal now! We want justice for him,
and we won't sit idle and allow you to execute this innocent man!"
Such a stand and economic boycott will serve as a supplement to the work
Mumia's lawyers and supporters are vigorously engaged in to save his life.
In a capitalistic society that prides itself on its superpower status,
economic power and military might are the only languages this imperialistic
government seems to respect and understand. Therefore, the heat must be
turned up if we are ever going to acquire justice for Mumia. Justice demands
that he be granted a new trial, or at least an evidentiary hearing to gather
and present enough evidence to prove he did not murder Philadelphia Police
Officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981.
The appellate courts have never heard the newly discovered evidence of his
actual innocence. They have always found some flimsy excuse to repress it.
In a case of actual innocence, the courts are under obligation to hear newly
discovered evidence--but such has never happened in Mumia's case. In the
absence of hearing it, the state's theory that Mumia murdered Officer
Faulkner seems very convincing to someone who doesn't know the particulars
of his case or the circumstances surrounding why the government framed Mumia
and wants him dead.
Be that as it may, justice in Mumia's case is long, long overdue. How long?
Too long! It's been 26 years, and it's now time for the world to become
morally courageous by stepping up to the plate and demanding justice for our
elder, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Expanded DNA testing could nab innocent people
By Charlene Muhammad
Staff Writer
Updated May 20, 2008, 10:16 pm
(FinalCall.com) - Civil liberties groups say plans to expand DNA collection through changes to federal and California state laws violate constitutional protections and criminalize innocent people.
Under the proposals, close relatives of arrestees in California could be asked to provide DNA evidence and under federal law any federal arrestees, either for felonies or misdemeanors, will be required to provide DNA samples.
Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey published a proposal to amend the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 and the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 in April. The change directs U.S. agencies that arrest or detain individuals, or that supervise individuals facing charges, including non-U.S. citizens, to collect DNA samples.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation will analyze and enter the samples into a federal database known as the Combined DNA Index System.
In California, the DNA of anyone closely related to a suspect that has been arrested would also be stored through the expanded testing. California Atty. Gen. Edmund Brown, Jr. announced the plan April 25, saying it will help law enforcement solve crimes committed by killers and sex offenders.
“One of our concerns about this is that if you look at the criminal justice system, obviously it’s full of racial disparities against people of color,” said Atty. Michael Risher of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
Currently state laboratories alert law enforcement when all 26 genetic markers of a suspect match. The change would result in alerts when just 15 markers match, which could mean investigations of innocent people who are simply related to suspects.
“Combining the expansion to the familial searches means that those persons, primarily males, will be logged in this database and their families, and we all know where this is not going to happen. This gives enormous discretion to police, who already have a lot of discretion whether or not to arrest someone,” Atty. Risher told The Final Call. The information stored in the databases would include private identification about one’s family, ancestry, diseases, predispositions to drug abuse, and other private information. If arrests don’t end with convictions, certified court records are required to remove the DNA data.
The ACLU worries America’s current mood, particularly after 911, seems to approve curbing of rights for the appearance of a bit more public safety or crime fighting.
Politicians are willing to sacrifice civil liberties and tax dollars in hopes of fighting crime, but look past the negative ramifications of their decisions, the ACLU said.
In 2004, California voters overwhelmingly passed the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act DNA, so they cannot entirely blame politicians. Unfortunately, advocates say, the law is growing beyond the scope voters desired. Anyone, not just criminals, can get caught up, they warn.
“I don’t think this will deter any crimes, but I think there is a place for DNA in solving crimes. It’s quite successful when applied to serious crime, but as it expands and you get more people, it becomes less useful,” Atty. Risher said.
The California plan to gather DNA in felony arrests is effective Jan. 1, 2009, but the familial or “partial match” policy took effect on May 6 during the grand opening of the Jan Bashinkski DNA Laboratory in Richmond.
According to reports, the state’s database holds more than one million DNA profiles, and more than two million samples are expected to be collected over the next five years.
At the opening ceremony, state Atty. Gen. Brown, Jr. said California’s DNA database has completed a $10 million expansion to accommodate the increased samples expected over the next 5 years as a result of changes to the law.
The public comment period for the federal rule change ends May 19, and comments may be logged via internet at www.regulations.gov.
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.
Staff Writer
Updated May 20, 2008, 10:16 pm
(FinalCall.com) - Civil liberties groups say plans to expand DNA collection through changes to federal and California state laws violate constitutional protections and criminalize innocent people.
Under the proposals, close relatives of arrestees in California could be asked to provide DNA evidence and under federal law any federal arrestees, either for felonies or misdemeanors, will be required to provide DNA samples.
Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey published a proposal to amend the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 and the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 in April. The change directs U.S. agencies that arrest or detain individuals, or that supervise individuals facing charges, including non-U.S. citizens, to collect DNA samples.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation will analyze and enter the samples into a federal database known as the Combined DNA Index System.
In California, the DNA of anyone closely related to a suspect that has been arrested would also be stored through the expanded testing. California Atty. Gen. Edmund Brown, Jr. announced the plan April 25, saying it will help law enforcement solve crimes committed by killers and sex offenders.
“One of our concerns about this is that if you look at the criminal justice system, obviously it’s full of racial disparities against people of color,” said Atty. Michael Risher of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
Currently state laboratories alert law enforcement when all 26 genetic markers of a suspect match. The change would result in alerts when just 15 markers match, which could mean investigations of innocent people who are simply related to suspects.
“Combining the expansion to the familial searches means that those persons, primarily males, will be logged in this database and their families, and we all know where this is not going to happen. This gives enormous discretion to police, who already have a lot of discretion whether or not to arrest someone,” Atty. Risher told The Final Call. The information stored in the databases would include private identification about one’s family, ancestry, diseases, predispositions to drug abuse, and other private information. If arrests don’t end with convictions, certified court records are required to remove the DNA data.
The ACLU worries America’s current mood, particularly after 911, seems to approve curbing of rights for the appearance of a bit more public safety or crime fighting.
Politicians are willing to sacrifice civil liberties and tax dollars in hopes of fighting crime, but look past the negative ramifications of their decisions, the ACLU said.
In 2004, California voters overwhelmingly passed the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act DNA, so they cannot entirely blame politicians. Unfortunately, advocates say, the law is growing beyond the scope voters desired. Anyone, not just criminals, can get caught up, they warn.
“I don’t think this will deter any crimes, but I think there is a place for DNA in solving crimes. It’s quite successful when applied to serious crime, but as it expands and you get more people, it becomes less useful,” Atty. Risher said.
The California plan to gather DNA in felony arrests is effective Jan. 1, 2009, but the familial or “partial match” policy took effect on May 6 during the grand opening of the Jan Bashinkski DNA Laboratory in Richmond.
According to reports, the state’s database holds more than one million DNA profiles, and more than two million samples are expected to be collected over the next five years.
At the opening ceremony, state Atty. Gen. Brown, Jr. said California’s DNA database has completed a $10 million expansion to accommodate the increased samples expected over the next 5 years as a result of changes to the law.
The public comment period for the federal rule change ends May 19, and comments may be logged via internet at www.regulations.gov.
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.
Urban Terrorists in America?
By Ashahed M. Muhammad and Saeed Shabazz
Updated May 20, 2008, 10:57 pm
Neighborhoods under siege? Many fear militarization of police is a sign of problems to come
Philly Cops Caught on Video (Video Clip)
SWAT teams and helicopter patrols in Chicago (FCN, 05-06-2008)
(FinalCall.com) - State Representative Ronald G. Waters of Philadelphia was disturbed by vivid video images captured by the city Fox television news affiliate. A swarming pack of White officers descended upon three Black men, yanked them from a vehicle, and kicked and beat them with fists and nightsticks for minutes without any apparent resistance from the suspects.
A review of an enhanced aerial video of the beating enabled investigators to initially identify 13 Philadelphia police officers that were involved. All of the officers have been removed from street duty while the case is investigated.
“I don’t want to see the streets of Philadelphia turn into a war zone,” said State Rep. Waters. “I (also) don’t think that arming the police officers with (high powered weapons) is necessary for them to go after the criminals,” he told The Final Call. Mr. Waters presides over a predominately Black district that has few jobs, failing education and areas of high crime and violence.
The videotaped beating that captured the Black lawmaker’s and the nation’s attention again raised questions of excessive force and brutality. Another concern was the growing militarization of police departments.
Police brutality, neighborhood crackdowns
On May 9, Mayor Michael Nutter appeared on CNN and spoke regarding the controversy that has erupted since video of the beating began airing on May 6.
“The conduct was unacceptable,” Mayor Nutter told CNN. “It did not live up to the standards we have set for the Police Department.”
The scene was reminiscent of the infamous 1991 videotaped beating of Black motorist Rodney King, who after being pursued by members of the LAPD in a high speed chase was mercilessly pounded with the nightsticks of several members of the LAPD for several minutes.
This image made from television and released by WTXF-TV Fox Philadelphia shows police officers kicking and beating suspects pulled from a car during a traffic stop on May 5, in Philadelphia. A TV helicopter taped the confrontation. Photo: AP Photo/WTXF-TV Fox PhiladelphiaRev. Al Sharpton on his May 8 radio show “Keeping It Real” said, “I’ve not seen anything like that since Rodney King, and it’s worse than Rodney King.”
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said he did not believe the incident was racial. However, he admitted “emotions are running high” as a result of 12-year veteran Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski being shot and killed May 3 attempting to apprehend suspected bank robbers. The commissioner cautioned against “making accusations from afar” that could exacerbate tensions.
“There is a history in this city of police brutality,” said student minister Rodney Muhammad of Muhammad Mosque No. 12 in Philadelphia. Mr. Muhammad said the department has been out in force and officers are “infuriated” because suspects in the bank robbery were repeat offenders with a history of violent crimes.
“My mind went back to the Minister’s press conference in Washington, D.C. in 1989,” said Mr. Muhammad. “The war that they were planning was against him, the Nation of Islam and Black people in general using Black youth as the invitation to come into the community in a war-like way,” said Mr. Muhammad, who is the host of a radio show and deeply involved with the members of Muhammad Mosque No. 12 who are trying to prevent crime and violence.
Some young Black men in Philadelphia are wearing body armor similar to what soldiers wear in war zones, Mr. Muhammad noted. Psychologically they are prepared to exchange gunfire with someone, a competitor, or perhaps even law enforcement officials, he said. A “war-like” culture has been created, fed in part through movies and music, and has become a path to self-destruction, Mr. Muhammad said.
“The streets and the jails have merged and they are one and the same in the mindset of many of these young guys. So you can’t threaten them with death because they never thought they were going to get older anyway, and you can’t threaten them with jail because that is celebrated,” he said.
“The whole thing about transforming the mind of these young people—it’s only going to come through a word that can resurrect that mind,” Mr. Muhammad said.
Getting to the root causes of violence
“The violence that politicians and law enforcement are reacting to is not about guns, as such, but about attitudes and values,” according to Conrad Worrill, of the National Black United Front. “What we are looking at, in the larger context, appears to me to be the final showdown in the criminalization of a people.”
From Washington state to Florida and in cities small and large, a growing chorus is warning Black America to stem levels of fratricidal violence, especially with summer approaching and police preparing to crackdown.
“Ninety-two percent of gun violence in our communities across the nation comes from our youth; and it is tearing our communities apart,” said student minister Don Muhammad, of Muhammad Mosque No. 11 in Boston.
The Boston Police Department, seemingly at wits end, has been trying to deploy a program that allows searching homes for guns without warrants. “The community must take ownership of this issue, not just the police, parents know when there is a gun in their home,” Don Muhammad said.
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley recently pressed parents to take responsibility for their children, but also ordered heavily armed SWAT teams and helicopter patrols into Black neighborhoods. In a three-week span, over 50 people in the city were shot. Fifteen people died.
But while many people want relief, city residents may get something much different than what they expect. Dr. Peter Kraska, a University of Eastern Kentucky professor of police studies, wrote in a study titled “Militarilizing American Police: The Rise of Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” “residents will get accustomed to cops armed to the teeth like Marines in Baghdad, which sends a message to the civilian population; you now live in an authoritarian police state.”
Dr. Joseph McNamara, a former police chief and a lecturer for the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, recently wrote “it is dangerous when you are telling cops they’re soldiers and there is an enemy out there.”
Civil liberties advocates and community groups say opening the floodgates to tighter law enforcement likely will bring more charges of brutality, more violations of rights and more stringent laws.
Art McKoy, founder of the Cleveland organization, Black on Black Crime, said law enforcement has already turned Cleveland into a police state. “Our young men have limited opportunities; and all they see is drugs and guns,” he said. “As our communities deteriorate, the politicians throw up their hands and call for martial law, as represented by these SWAT teams.”
When asked about gang prevention funding, Mr. McKoy said, Cleveland received millions of dollars in 2007 for prevention and only “one percent” flowed into the community, while “99 percent went to law enforcement.”
A coalition of community organizations in Seattle, Wash., launched a campaign in the end of March to stop Gov. Christine Gregoire from signing a bill they said encouraged racial profiling. Gov. Gregoire put her signature to HR 2712 and it became law in April.
According to a bipartisan group of legislators, the bill was in response to public concerns about gang violence.
James Bible, president of the Seattle branch of the NAACP, said the law gives police an excuse for stopping and searching young people of color. “The bill’s constitutionality is questionable,” Mr. Bible told The Final Call.
In Florida, legislators are working on an anti-gang bill that requires gang members to register and has local police work closely with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to use and maintain a gang database.
“We are very concerned about this database,” said Florida’s statewide NAACP president, Adora Obi Nweize. She believes the database is another way of pushing Black children into the criminal justice pipeline.
“We were able to stop the state legislature’s efforts to make it unlawful for our youth to wear baggy pants, but we don’t have a good feeling concerning our efforts to stop the anti-gang bill,” she said.
The New York Civil Liberties Union May 7 filed a “Walking While Black” lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, charging the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy is illegal. The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a companion class-action suit against the same NYPD practice. The suits say there is a systemic pattern of discrimination in the stops: Data shows half of those targeted were Black, while census figures show Blacks are just 25 percent of the city’s population. Blacks and Latinos were involved in 90 percent of the police stops.
The city of Springfield in Massachusetts recently announced its Street Crime Unit will return to black military-style uniforms, as part of a strategy to deal with youth violence.
“All the SWAT teams in the world are not going to solve the problem of street violence,” said Abdul Muhammad, founder of Newark, New Jersey’s Street Warriors. “The peace in the streets has been violated because of the large disconnect our youth feel, which for us has become a cultural issue,” the activist told The Final Call. “We have to teach the community how to defend itself against violence. We have lost our value system,” he said.
“The other problem? We are not dealing with this as a mental health problem,” Abdul Muhammad added.
“Why are the children so angry, is any one asking that question?” asked Dr. Joseph Strickland, Ph.D, a researcher on “Advocacy Issues that Affect Black Males” at the University of Chicago. The mayor deploys police to deal with street violence because it is seen as a youth issue, not a community issue, he said.
“Two years ago we found that we had in Chicago a 50 percent (high school) drop out rate. Students were turned off by the system—and then they were told they couldn’t make it without an education—they became angry,” said Dr. Strickland, who is also founder of MAGIC, a non-profit youth development and advocacy group.
Dr. Carl Bell, who runs a community mental health clinic on Chicago’s southside, agreed with Abdul Muhammad’s assessment. “SWAT use doesn’t make much sense to me. Being connected to the community in a positive way is the answer. That cancels out the need for violence.” Dr. Bell said.
(Fred Muhammad contributed to this article from Philadelphia.)
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.
Updated May 20, 2008, 10:57 pm
Neighborhoods under siege? Many fear militarization of police is a sign of problems to come
Philly Cops Caught on Video (Video Clip)
SWAT teams and helicopter patrols in Chicago (FCN, 05-06-2008)
(FinalCall.com) - State Representative Ronald G. Waters of Philadelphia was disturbed by vivid video images captured by the city Fox television news affiliate. A swarming pack of White officers descended upon three Black men, yanked them from a vehicle, and kicked and beat them with fists and nightsticks for minutes without any apparent resistance from the suspects.
A review of an enhanced aerial video of the beating enabled investigators to initially identify 13 Philadelphia police officers that were involved. All of the officers have been removed from street duty while the case is investigated.
“I don’t want to see the streets of Philadelphia turn into a war zone,” said State Rep. Waters. “I (also) don’t think that arming the police officers with (high powered weapons) is necessary for them to go after the criminals,” he told The Final Call. Mr. Waters presides over a predominately Black district that has few jobs, failing education and areas of high crime and violence.
The videotaped beating that captured the Black lawmaker’s and the nation’s attention again raised questions of excessive force and brutality. Another concern was the growing militarization of police departments.
Police brutality, neighborhood crackdowns
On May 9, Mayor Michael Nutter appeared on CNN and spoke regarding the controversy that has erupted since video of the beating began airing on May 6.
“The conduct was unacceptable,” Mayor Nutter told CNN. “It did not live up to the standards we have set for the Police Department.”
The scene was reminiscent of the infamous 1991 videotaped beating of Black motorist Rodney King, who after being pursued by members of the LAPD in a high speed chase was mercilessly pounded with the nightsticks of several members of the LAPD for several minutes.
This image made from television and released by WTXF-TV Fox Philadelphia shows police officers kicking and beating suspects pulled from a car during a traffic stop on May 5, in Philadelphia. A TV helicopter taped the confrontation. Photo: AP Photo/WTXF-TV Fox PhiladelphiaRev. Al Sharpton on his May 8 radio show “Keeping It Real” said, “I’ve not seen anything like that since Rodney King, and it’s worse than Rodney King.”
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said he did not believe the incident was racial. However, he admitted “emotions are running high” as a result of 12-year veteran Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski being shot and killed May 3 attempting to apprehend suspected bank robbers. The commissioner cautioned against “making accusations from afar” that could exacerbate tensions.
“There is a history in this city of police brutality,” said student minister Rodney Muhammad of Muhammad Mosque No. 12 in Philadelphia. Mr. Muhammad said the department has been out in force and officers are “infuriated” because suspects in the bank robbery were repeat offenders with a history of violent crimes.
“My mind went back to the Minister’s press conference in Washington, D.C. in 1989,” said Mr. Muhammad. “The war that they were planning was against him, the Nation of Islam and Black people in general using Black youth as the invitation to come into the community in a war-like way,” said Mr. Muhammad, who is the host of a radio show and deeply involved with the members of Muhammad Mosque No. 12 who are trying to prevent crime and violence.
Some young Black men in Philadelphia are wearing body armor similar to what soldiers wear in war zones, Mr. Muhammad noted. Psychologically they are prepared to exchange gunfire with someone, a competitor, or perhaps even law enforcement officials, he said. A “war-like” culture has been created, fed in part through movies and music, and has become a path to self-destruction, Mr. Muhammad said.
“The streets and the jails have merged and they are one and the same in the mindset of many of these young guys. So you can’t threaten them with death because they never thought they were going to get older anyway, and you can’t threaten them with jail because that is celebrated,” he said.
“The whole thing about transforming the mind of these young people—it’s only going to come through a word that can resurrect that mind,” Mr. Muhammad said.
Getting to the root causes of violence
“The violence that politicians and law enforcement are reacting to is not about guns, as such, but about attitudes and values,” according to Conrad Worrill, of the National Black United Front. “What we are looking at, in the larger context, appears to me to be the final showdown in the criminalization of a people.”
From Washington state to Florida and in cities small and large, a growing chorus is warning Black America to stem levels of fratricidal violence, especially with summer approaching and police preparing to crackdown.
“Ninety-two percent of gun violence in our communities across the nation comes from our youth; and it is tearing our communities apart,” said student minister Don Muhammad, of Muhammad Mosque No. 11 in Boston.
The Boston Police Department, seemingly at wits end, has been trying to deploy a program that allows searching homes for guns without warrants. “The community must take ownership of this issue, not just the police, parents know when there is a gun in their home,” Don Muhammad said.
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley recently pressed parents to take responsibility for their children, but also ordered heavily armed SWAT teams and helicopter patrols into Black neighborhoods. In a three-week span, over 50 people in the city were shot. Fifteen people died.
But while many people want relief, city residents may get something much different than what they expect. Dr. Peter Kraska, a University of Eastern Kentucky professor of police studies, wrote in a study titled “Militarilizing American Police: The Rise of Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” “residents will get accustomed to cops armed to the teeth like Marines in Baghdad, which sends a message to the civilian population; you now live in an authoritarian police state.”
Dr. Joseph McNamara, a former police chief and a lecturer for the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, recently wrote “it is dangerous when you are telling cops they’re soldiers and there is an enemy out there.”
Civil liberties advocates and community groups say opening the floodgates to tighter law enforcement likely will bring more charges of brutality, more violations of rights and more stringent laws.
Art McKoy, founder of the Cleveland organization, Black on Black Crime, said law enforcement has already turned Cleveland into a police state. “Our young men have limited opportunities; and all they see is drugs and guns,” he said. “As our communities deteriorate, the politicians throw up their hands and call for martial law, as represented by these SWAT teams.”
When asked about gang prevention funding, Mr. McKoy said, Cleveland received millions of dollars in 2007 for prevention and only “one percent” flowed into the community, while “99 percent went to law enforcement.”
A coalition of community organizations in Seattle, Wash., launched a campaign in the end of March to stop Gov. Christine Gregoire from signing a bill they said encouraged racial profiling. Gov. Gregoire put her signature to HR 2712 and it became law in April.
According to a bipartisan group of legislators, the bill was in response to public concerns about gang violence.
James Bible, president of the Seattle branch of the NAACP, said the law gives police an excuse for stopping and searching young people of color. “The bill’s constitutionality is questionable,” Mr. Bible told The Final Call.
In Florida, legislators are working on an anti-gang bill that requires gang members to register and has local police work closely with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to use and maintain a gang database.
“We are very concerned about this database,” said Florida’s statewide NAACP president, Adora Obi Nweize. She believes the database is another way of pushing Black children into the criminal justice pipeline.
“We were able to stop the state legislature’s efforts to make it unlawful for our youth to wear baggy pants, but we don’t have a good feeling concerning our efforts to stop the anti-gang bill,” she said.
The New York Civil Liberties Union May 7 filed a “Walking While Black” lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, charging the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy is illegal. The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a companion class-action suit against the same NYPD practice. The suits say there is a systemic pattern of discrimination in the stops: Data shows half of those targeted were Black, while census figures show Blacks are just 25 percent of the city’s population. Blacks and Latinos were involved in 90 percent of the police stops.
The city of Springfield in Massachusetts recently announced its Street Crime Unit will return to black military-style uniforms, as part of a strategy to deal with youth violence.
“All the SWAT teams in the world are not going to solve the problem of street violence,” said Abdul Muhammad, founder of Newark, New Jersey’s Street Warriors. “The peace in the streets has been violated because of the large disconnect our youth feel, which for us has become a cultural issue,” the activist told The Final Call. “We have to teach the community how to defend itself against violence. We have lost our value system,” he said.
“The other problem? We are not dealing with this as a mental health problem,” Abdul Muhammad added.
“Why are the children so angry, is any one asking that question?” asked Dr. Joseph Strickland, Ph.D, a researcher on “Advocacy Issues that Affect Black Males” at the University of Chicago. The mayor deploys police to deal with street violence because it is seen as a youth issue, not a community issue, he said.
“Two years ago we found that we had in Chicago a 50 percent (high school) drop out rate. Students were turned off by the system—and then they were told they couldn’t make it without an education—they became angry,” said Dr. Strickland, who is also founder of MAGIC, a non-profit youth development and advocacy group.
Dr. Carl Bell, who runs a community mental health clinic on Chicago’s southside, agreed with Abdul Muhammad’s assessment. “SWAT use doesn’t make much sense to me. Being connected to the community in a positive way is the answer. That cancels out the need for violence.” Dr. Bell said.
(Fred Muhammad contributed to this article from Philadelphia.)
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.
Bigoted Anti-Obama Attacks Divert Attention From Pervasive Institutional Racism
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
Do the reactions to racist attacks on Barack Obama prove that we as a nation are on the way to "transcending race"? Do racist attacks on Barack Obama, news of which are constantly recirculated in the black community, actually help solidify and validate his black support?
Do the eruptions of bigots also provide fodder for self-congratulation among Obama's white supporters, at the same time they divert attention from the real and myriad manifestations of institutional racism in American Life.
The mainstream corporate news media, upon whom we can always count to help us know what's really important and why, have recently discovered that campaign workers for Barack Obama are sometimes greeted with anything from snide racist asides to full-blown hateful screeds. When a Republican governor makes jokes about Obama ducking a bullet, and a Georgia restaurant owner sells T-shirts depicting Obama as a monkey, these occurrences dominate the news cycle for more than a week.
Corporate media's breathless focus on manifestations of individual racism feed a narrative long popular in white America, a narrative central to the Obama campaign. This narrative holds that racism is nothing more nor less than an anti-social habit practiced by backward individuals, like bad table manners or public flatulence. This narrative is of course, false and misleading.
In the real world, American racism diminishes the quality of millions of lives every day, not through up close, personal slights and bigotry, but via the impersonal everyday functioning of society's core institutions. Black mothers and babies in the US sicken and die at third world rates not because of racist insults, but as an outcome of the “normal” way that insurance and health care markets function. Black children still get inferior educations in large part due to the dependence of public education funding on local property taxes, and No Child Left Behind, both of which are race-neutral. From employment and underemployment to credit and housing markets to policing and sentencing practices, to the siting of toxic waste dumps, our nation's ostensibly color-blind laws and institutions consistently bring forth racially stratified results.
The real racism which degrades millions of nonwhite American lives, including many who seldom encounter a white person bigoted or otherwise is institutional racism, as it was first named by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Toure more than 40 years ago. Institutional racism is something quite apart from the individual words and acts of bigots. But drawing attention to, let alone ending institutional racism has seldom been on the agenda of corporate media. Likewise the Obama campaign's strategy on race toward whites is to carefully avoid telling white people anything other than what they imagine they already know. With frank discussions of race, power and privilege off the table, talk on the subject is limited to the terrain of racism as bad manners.
The toxic eruptions of bigots have also been extremely useful to the Obama campaign in rallying support among African Americans. Constantly recirculated in the black community, these racist attacks convey to Obama's candidacy a kind of black “authenticity” on the cheap, without the bother of his having to do, say or promise to do anything that might challenge pervasive institutional racism. The racist attacks then, enable black and brown voters to hunker down in solidarity around a substance-free black candidate, while they allow Obama's white supporters to wag their fingers disapprovingly at ignorant white bigots, and congratulate themselves, celebrate the evidence that their nation --- most of it anyway – has risen above and transcended race.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon.
Do the reactions to racist attacks on Barack Obama prove that we as a nation are on the way to "transcending race"? Do racist attacks on Barack Obama, news of which are constantly recirculated in the black community, actually help solidify and validate his black support?
Do the eruptions of bigots also provide fodder for self-congratulation among Obama's white supporters, at the same time they divert attention from the real and myriad manifestations of institutional racism in American Life.
The mainstream corporate news media, upon whom we can always count to help us know what's really important and why, have recently discovered that campaign workers for Barack Obama are sometimes greeted with anything from snide racist asides to full-blown hateful screeds. When a Republican governor makes jokes about Obama ducking a bullet, and a Georgia restaurant owner sells T-shirts depicting Obama as a monkey, these occurrences dominate the news cycle for more than a week.
Corporate media's breathless focus on manifestations of individual racism feed a narrative long popular in white America, a narrative central to the Obama campaign. This narrative holds that racism is nothing more nor less than an anti-social habit practiced by backward individuals, like bad table manners or public flatulence. This narrative is of course, false and misleading.
In the real world, American racism diminishes the quality of millions of lives every day, not through up close, personal slights and bigotry, but via the impersonal everyday functioning of society's core institutions. Black mothers and babies in the US sicken and die at third world rates not because of racist insults, but as an outcome of the “normal” way that insurance and health care markets function. Black children still get inferior educations in large part due to the dependence of public education funding on local property taxes, and No Child Left Behind, both of which are race-neutral. From employment and underemployment to credit and housing markets to policing and sentencing practices, to the siting of toxic waste dumps, our nation's ostensibly color-blind laws and institutions consistently bring forth racially stratified results.
The real racism which degrades millions of nonwhite American lives, including many who seldom encounter a white person bigoted or otherwise is institutional racism, as it was first named by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Toure more than 40 years ago. Institutional racism is something quite apart from the individual words and acts of bigots. But drawing attention to, let alone ending institutional racism has seldom been on the agenda of corporate media. Likewise the Obama campaign's strategy on race toward whites is to carefully avoid telling white people anything other than what they imagine they already know. With frank discussions of race, power and privilege off the table, talk on the subject is limited to the terrain of racism as bad manners.
The toxic eruptions of bigots have also been extremely useful to the Obama campaign in rallying support among African Americans. Constantly recirculated in the black community, these racist attacks convey to Obama's candidacy a kind of black “authenticity” on the cheap, without the bother of his having to do, say or promise to do anything that might challenge pervasive institutional racism. The racist attacks then, enable black and brown voters to hunker down in solidarity around a substance-free black candidate, while they allow Obama's white supporters to wag their fingers disapprovingly at ignorant white bigots, and congratulate themselves, celebrate the evidence that their nation --- most of it anyway – has risen above and transcended race.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon.
The U.N. Investigates American Racism
By Margaret Kimberley
The United Nations is sending a special observer to investigate the role that racism plays in the ordinary life of the United States. With only three weeks, the special rapporteur will have a lot of ground to cover. And the visit comes at a time when America's ordinary denial on issues of racial injustice and inequality are intensified by the presidential campaign. After all, we are the nation which is about to "transcend" race.
Doudou Diene, United Nations Special Rapporteur on racism, will visit the United States for three weeks in order to “. . . gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Diene is a Senegalese attorney and his role is mandated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. His United States visit is just one of many that he has made all over the world and will result in a report to be released to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2009.
Mr. Diene has his work cut out for him. Three weeks isn’t enough time to examine the depths of racism in this country. Diene can investigate police brutality and the deaths of people like New Yorker Sean Bell. He can investigate the increased numbers of deportations that have torn families apart. He can look into the policies that have made America the nation with the greatest percentage of its population behind bars. He can investigate why half of those incarcerated persons are black. The theft of what little wealth black people had before the subprime mortgage crisis is another subject he might want to investigate. So much injustice, and only three weeks to find it all.
It is inevitable that Diene’s visit will bring howls of protest, and not just from the usual suspects on the right wing. It is now passe to acknowledge racism or its pernicious effects. In the irony of ironies, the possible election of a black person to the presidency is partially responsible for this selective, deliberate amnesia.
America’s crimes against its own citizens must be exposed to the entire world and there is no group in this country with both the power and the willingness to take on that task. The legacy of manifest destiny and the belief in American superiority and exceptionalism have created a citizenry that is largely incapable of hearing any information about their country that is less than positive and glowing. The absence of true journalism and a compromised political system combine to promote the telling of bald faced lies. Truth tellers are marginalized and consigned to oblivion so as not to disrupt the national discourse.
Only outsiders can tell us the truth, that the United States is a rogue nation by all standards of international law and acceptable moral norms. Yes, we are becoming more and more like the countries we have traditionally thought of as being inferior. Many Americans will be angry that an African representing the United Nations has the nerve to observe anything in this country and worse, has the gall to issue a report on what he sees. It is all to the good that Diene is coming to reveal the ugly but true underside of American life.
Diene’s timing is quite auspicious. Barack Obama’s political rise has worsened the climate for frank discussions about racism. The strategy of Obama supporters, be quiet and let him win, eliminates much needed acknowledgement of the sad state of black America. The unemployment rates, incarceration rates, and high school drop out rates have already been taken off the table in an effort to give one man his dream job and fulfill the well intended but dangerous dreams of millions of others.
Black candidates who campaign in need of support from white voters have always been forced to make those voters feel comfortable. The result of that mollification is denial of the rightful demands for justice. There will be a very high price to pay if the elevation of certain individuals continues to be the sole focus of black political action.
The year of Obama’s political ascendancy is therefore a perfect time for Diene’s visit. His campaign has proven that individual political success often comes at the expense of the larger community. If Barack Obama ends up on the capitol steps with his hand on the bible, it will be precisely because he praised Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and falsely claimed that black people are “90% of the way towards equality.”
If Diene does even a mediocre job of reporting on racism in America he will prove that the 90% number is nothing more than politically inspired fantasy. So welcome to America Mr. Diene. Tell the truth, and don’t spare tender American sensibilities. There is plenty of “racism, xenophobia and related intolerance” and you won’t have to look very hard to find it.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.
The United Nations is sending a special observer to investigate the role that racism plays in the ordinary life of the United States. With only three weeks, the special rapporteur will have a lot of ground to cover. And the visit comes at a time when America's ordinary denial on issues of racial injustice and inequality are intensified by the presidential campaign. After all, we are the nation which is about to "transcend" race.
Doudou Diene, United Nations Special Rapporteur on racism, will visit the United States for three weeks in order to “. . . gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Diene is a Senegalese attorney and his role is mandated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. His United States visit is just one of many that he has made all over the world and will result in a report to be released to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2009.
Mr. Diene has his work cut out for him. Three weeks isn’t enough time to examine the depths of racism in this country. Diene can investigate police brutality and the deaths of people like New Yorker Sean Bell. He can investigate the increased numbers of deportations that have torn families apart. He can look into the policies that have made America the nation with the greatest percentage of its population behind bars. He can investigate why half of those incarcerated persons are black. The theft of what little wealth black people had before the subprime mortgage crisis is another subject he might want to investigate. So much injustice, and only three weeks to find it all.
It is inevitable that Diene’s visit will bring howls of protest, and not just from the usual suspects on the right wing. It is now passe to acknowledge racism or its pernicious effects. In the irony of ironies, the possible election of a black person to the presidency is partially responsible for this selective, deliberate amnesia.
America’s crimes against its own citizens must be exposed to the entire world and there is no group in this country with both the power and the willingness to take on that task. The legacy of manifest destiny and the belief in American superiority and exceptionalism have created a citizenry that is largely incapable of hearing any information about their country that is less than positive and glowing. The absence of true journalism and a compromised political system combine to promote the telling of bald faced lies. Truth tellers are marginalized and consigned to oblivion so as not to disrupt the national discourse.
Only outsiders can tell us the truth, that the United States is a rogue nation by all standards of international law and acceptable moral norms. Yes, we are becoming more and more like the countries we have traditionally thought of as being inferior. Many Americans will be angry that an African representing the United Nations has the nerve to observe anything in this country and worse, has the gall to issue a report on what he sees. It is all to the good that Diene is coming to reveal the ugly but true underside of American life.
Diene’s timing is quite auspicious. Barack Obama’s political rise has worsened the climate for frank discussions about racism. The strategy of Obama supporters, be quiet and let him win, eliminates much needed acknowledgement of the sad state of black America. The unemployment rates, incarceration rates, and high school drop out rates have already been taken off the table in an effort to give one man his dream job and fulfill the well intended but dangerous dreams of millions of others.
Black candidates who campaign in need of support from white voters have always been forced to make those voters feel comfortable. The result of that mollification is denial of the rightful demands for justice. There will be a very high price to pay if the elevation of certain individuals continues to be the sole focus of black political action.
The year of Obama’s political ascendancy is therefore a perfect time for Diene’s visit. His campaign has proven that individual political success often comes at the expense of the larger community. If Barack Obama ends up on the capitol steps with his hand on the bible, it will be precisely because he praised Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and falsely claimed that black people are “90% of the way towards equality.”
If Diene does even a mediocre job of reporting on racism in America he will prove that the 90% number is nothing more than politically inspired fantasy. So welcome to America Mr. Diene. Tell the truth, and don’t spare tender American sensibilities. There is plenty of “racism, xenophobia and related intolerance” and you won’t have to look very hard to find it.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
American Injustice Continues - Final Call Article
This editorial from The Final Call is right on point. Read it for yourselves and you'll see. Police in America are totally out of control. I find it amazing when you see a suspect beating the hell out of cops on camera how damning the evidence is. However, on the otherhand, when the cops are the perpetrators of terrorism and brutality, all of sudden we hear the same old bullshit of "we can't have any rushes to judgment and we're investigating." Until we, Black people start to value one another's lives, how in hell can we expect anyone in the world to do so for us. We must put an end to the killing in our community, even if it means that we have to the purging. Once we've cleaned up our house, we step to this caucasian devil and tell them that if they don't put a stop to the police terrorism and murder, then we will. Black people have the right to retaliate against the police or any mob of white people who desires and does harm to us. It is our God-given right to defend ourselves and it's about time that we start excercising that right. When the police hit us, we hit them back then negotiate a peace contract. Black people fear whitey more than God (Allah) Himself. We are nation in a nation and it's time that Black America clean up it's own house, then separate from white people and form a nation of our own. The time is now! All this marching and begging the white man to treat us as equals has gotten so tired. Enjoy the reading the article below.
America’s mindset and questions of justice
By FinalCall.com News
Updated May 6, 2008, 02:33 pm
(FinalCall.com) - The recent verdict in the Sean Bell shooting case in New York would be shocking, if American history wasn’t drenched in the blood of murdered innocents and legal verdicts that sanctioned such killings.
A young man is dead, killed in a hail of 50 bullets on the day he was to marry. Left behind are a grieving fiancée and children, heartbroken parents and loved ones and two friends who survived the incident, but bare the scars of bullet wounds.
Once again, it appears that there is no justice in America for the Black man. Justice Arthur J. Cooperman ruled the three detectives, two Black and one White, were not guilty of any crimes when 50 shots were fired. The lone White detective, Michael Oliver, fired 31 shots and had to reload during an incident in which no one returned fire on men dressed in plainclothes, outside a New York club in the wee hours of the morning.
“The trial provided some answers on why the police officers fired: They mistakenly believed there was a gun in Mr. Bell’s car. But the case did not explain how anyone could have expected him to know that he was being approached by a police officer at 4 a.m., and indeed, the judge, Arthur F. Cooperman, said that did not matter under the law. ‘It was necessary to consider the mindset of each defendant at the time and place of occurrence,’ the judge said, ‘and not the mindset of the victims,’ ” noted a New York Times report.
Did the judge acquire the ability to read minds? Did he ask the right questions, like how can it be possible that deadly force can be exerted on suspicion that someone might have a weapon? Isn’t deadly force to be used in those cases where there is a clear and present danger of loss of life or serious harm, which necessitates the taking one life to preserve another?
What has the mindset of America been when it comes to the Black man and Black people? The Black man, in particular, has always been seen as a problem, from the time shackles were placed around his neck and feet and he was dragged abroad a slave ship. He has been seen as a menace to society. Time after time, incident after incident, lost life after lost life, an unarmed Black man ends up dead. An officer cries, “I feared for my life.” A judge upholds that claim and another mother buries another son.
Police officers break into a home and shoot a grandmother to death in Atlanta, an elderly woman is shot to death on the street in New York and it doesn’t matter if we live in the New South or up North, Black lives simply don’t count for very much.
The plea is to always look at this from the officer’s point of view. Police officers have dangerous jobs and must make quick decision to save lives, consider their point of view, the system says. But how often are Whites the victims of fatal shootings or encounters during routine traffic stops? How often do we find White perpetrators mown down in a hail of bullets?
Randy Weaver, a White separatist, had a run-in with U.S. authorities in 1992. The government wanted to prosecute him for a gun crime and eventually federal agents moved into the area near his home in Ruby Ridge, Iowa. There was a clash with the agents, Mr. Weaver and his family. It resulted in the death of an agent and the deaths of Mr. Weaver’s son and wife. There was a massive investigation and huge outcry about the heavy handedness of government.
“Weaver was charged with multiple crimes relating to the Ruby Ridge incident, including the original firearms charges and murder. Attorney Gerry Spence handled Weaver’s defense, and argued successfully that Weaver’s actions were justifiable as self-defense. The jury acquitted Weaver of all charges except that of failure to appear, for which Weaver was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was credited with time served plus an additional three months, and was then released. Subsequently, the government paid $308,000 to Kevin Harris (who was acquitted of all criminal charges), $100,000 to Randall Weaver, and $1 million to each of the surviving Weaver children to settle their lawsuits against the government,” according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
The lives of Whites, even when they express anti-government views, mean something. Someone must pay a price whenever the lives of Whites are taken.
“Since we have been in America, we have been under the domination of a power that during slavery did not have to justify the murder of our fathers. They didn’t have any group of people to look at the facts. The slave master had the power of life and death on every Black person outside of the principle of justice, with no regard for the life of the Black male or female that was being put to death,” said the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, speaking last November from Mosque Maryam. His message was titled, “Justifiable Homicide, Black Youth in Peril, Part 1.”
“Therefore, every killing of a Black man or woman; every lynching of a Black man or woman was excusable. No matter what was done by White people to set Black people at naught was excusable, because anything that was done to us to maintain White supremacy was in fact an unwritten law. The killing of every Black human being during the 300 years of chattel slavery and even now, 150 years up from slavery, at the hands of White people is generally considered ‘excusable,’” Min. Farrakhan noted.
If Black life has always been expendable and there has never been any consequence for the taking of Black life, what is the mindset of police officers, judges and prosecutors? Do they see the lives of Blacks as equal with the lives of Whites? America’s history shows obviously Black lives are not equal—in the sight of Whites. If Black lives are not equal to Whites, then the American mindset can never give justice.
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.
America’s mindset and questions of justice
By FinalCall.com News
Updated May 6, 2008, 02:33 pm
(FinalCall.com) - The recent verdict in the Sean Bell shooting case in New York would be shocking, if American history wasn’t drenched in the blood of murdered innocents and legal verdicts that sanctioned such killings.
A young man is dead, killed in a hail of 50 bullets on the day he was to marry. Left behind are a grieving fiancée and children, heartbroken parents and loved ones and two friends who survived the incident, but bare the scars of bullet wounds.
Once again, it appears that there is no justice in America for the Black man. Justice Arthur J. Cooperman ruled the three detectives, two Black and one White, were not guilty of any crimes when 50 shots were fired. The lone White detective, Michael Oliver, fired 31 shots and had to reload during an incident in which no one returned fire on men dressed in plainclothes, outside a New York club in the wee hours of the morning.
“The trial provided some answers on why the police officers fired: They mistakenly believed there was a gun in Mr. Bell’s car. But the case did not explain how anyone could have expected him to know that he was being approached by a police officer at 4 a.m., and indeed, the judge, Arthur F. Cooperman, said that did not matter under the law. ‘It was necessary to consider the mindset of each defendant at the time and place of occurrence,’ the judge said, ‘and not the mindset of the victims,’ ” noted a New York Times report.
Did the judge acquire the ability to read minds? Did he ask the right questions, like how can it be possible that deadly force can be exerted on suspicion that someone might have a weapon? Isn’t deadly force to be used in those cases where there is a clear and present danger of loss of life or serious harm, which necessitates the taking one life to preserve another?
What has the mindset of America been when it comes to the Black man and Black people? The Black man, in particular, has always been seen as a problem, from the time shackles were placed around his neck and feet and he was dragged abroad a slave ship. He has been seen as a menace to society. Time after time, incident after incident, lost life after lost life, an unarmed Black man ends up dead. An officer cries, “I feared for my life.” A judge upholds that claim and another mother buries another son.
Police officers break into a home and shoot a grandmother to death in Atlanta, an elderly woman is shot to death on the street in New York and it doesn’t matter if we live in the New South or up North, Black lives simply don’t count for very much.
The plea is to always look at this from the officer’s point of view. Police officers have dangerous jobs and must make quick decision to save lives, consider their point of view, the system says. But how often are Whites the victims of fatal shootings or encounters during routine traffic stops? How often do we find White perpetrators mown down in a hail of bullets?
Randy Weaver, a White separatist, had a run-in with U.S. authorities in 1992. The government wanted to prosecute him for a gun crime and eventually federal agents moved into the area near his home in Ruby Ridge, Iowa. There was a clash with the agents, Mr. Weaver and his family. It resulted in the death of an agent and the deaths of Mr. Weaver’s son and wife. There was a massive investigation and huge outcry about the heavy handedness of government.
“Weaver was charged with multiple crimes relating to the Ruby Ridge incident, including the original firearms charges and murder. Attorney Gerry Spence handled Weaver’s defense, and argued successfully that Weaver’s actions were justifiable as self-defense. The jury acquitted Weaver of all charges except that of failure to appear, for which Weaver was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was credited with time served plus an additional three months, and was then released. Subsequently, the government paid $308,000 to Kevin Harris (who was acquitted of all criminal charges), $100,000 to Randall Weaver, and $1 million to each of the surviving Weaver children to settle their lawsuits against the government,” according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
The lives of Whites, even when they express anti-government views, mean something. Someone must pay a price whenever the lives of Whites are taken.
“Since we have been in America, we have been under the domination of a power that during slavery did not have to justify the murder of our fathers. They didn’t have any group of people to look at the facts. The slave master had the power of life and death on every Black person outside of the principle of justice, with no regard for the life of the Black male or female that was being put to death,” said the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, speaking last November from Mosque Maryam. His message was titled, “Justifiable Homicide, Black Youth in Peril, Part 1.”
“Therefore, every killing of a Black man or woman; every lynching of a Black man or woman was excusable. No matter what was done by White people to set Black people at naught was excusable, because anything that was done to us to maintain White supremacy was in fact an unwritten law. The killing of every Black human being during the 300 years of chattel slavery and even now, 150 years up from slavery, at the hands of White people is generally considered ‘excusable,’” Min. Farrakhan noted.
If Black life has always been expendable and there has never been any consequence for the taking of Black life, what is the mindset of police officers, judges and prosecutors? Do they see the lives of Blacks as equal with the lives of Whites? America’s history shows obviously Black lives are not equal—in the sight of Whites. If Black lives are not equal to Whites, then the American mindset can never give justice.
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.
Police Terror and Lawless Order
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
by Dr. Floyd W. Hayes, III
"I see a growing prison-garrison state in which urban residents will become the targets of mounting police murder and incarceration." The author's grim assessment is based on the "absolute disregard for the sanctity of Black life" that marks each era of American history, from chattel slavery to the 50-bullet New York City police barrage that killed Sean Bell. Urban police practices constitute a kind or organized terror that remains essentially unchanged even after police ranks have become integrated. "Big city police forces are infected with a culture of racism and violence that historically has sanctioned the savage and brutal treatment of Black people, other people of color, and the poor.
When three Jamaica, Queens, detectives murdered Sean Bell on November 25, 2006, they engaged in a rising tide of police-state terrorism in growing numbers of urban communities throughout the United States of America. Shooting some 50 bullets at Bell, these cops not only cut short his life, but they also precluded his wedding that day to his fiancée, Nicole Paultre. Exactly five months later, a judge declared the police perpetrators not guilty of any criminal behavior, causing shock, grief, and resentment among family and community members. I am outraged by the seemingly common and wanton practice of police violence and murder in this nation's urban communities, as well as by a judicial system that exonerates killer cops. These actions represent the absolute disregard for the sanctity of Black life. Hence, I find myself mentally rehearsing why I have come to resent cops and the (il)legal order of urban community terrorism they enforce.
Growing to manhood in Los Angeles during the 1950s, I learned to fear and hate the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). This resulted from a combination of experiences, most notably the constant stories that my father, a Los Angeles County probation officer, told me about how LA cops savagely and brutally beat Black men brought into custody on charges of violating the law. Since he worked in adult investigations, my father saw first hand the results of police assaults, as he interviewed their victims in his capacity as probation officer. He heard countless stories of racialized and excessive police violence.
One reason my father recounted these events was to keep me from loitering on Los Angeles streets and corners with my friends late at night after the curfew. Another reason was his sense of outrage and resentment that city officials tolerated, and indeed encouraged, such local-state violence against Black men. So it was that I, like so many other Black and Latino Angelinos, developed a longstanding antagonism toward the LAPD. At a relatively early age, I learned that the police, although sworn to uphold the criminal law, were often men full of lawless impulses.
Black and Latino communities in big cities across America have long complained about police brutality and repression. The 1965 Watts uprising, as well as many other urban revolts during the turbulent 1960s, resulted from the abuse of police coercive power. Yet, wealthy and middle-class white Americans ignored these charges of racialized police terrorism and tyranny until the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by LA's "gang in blue" revealed to the world how racial injustice actually is practiced in the "City of Angels." The American practice of cultural domination gives currency mainly to white perspectives of social reality while largely silencing Black points of view. However, the American culture of white supremacy, notwithstanding, there is no essential relationship between whiteness and rightness.
The order of police violence, terrorism, and murder directed at Black Americans today takes place with a systematic viciousness and savagery comparable to the dehumanizing sadism of white slave-owners, lynchers, and anti-Black rioters during the periods of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. This is because the criminalized image of the Black man as violent and threatening (along with that of his Latino brothers) is so fixed in the white American imagination - the Black man is always already guilty of something - that the most degrading and unwarranted police violence on the Black man's body is accepted as justifiable. This accounts for the unrestrained murder of Black men by "gangs in blue" across this nation.
To be sure, elite white media and policy managers also demonize Black females (and their Latina sisters), framing them as prostitutes or morally reprehensible single mothers, undeserving of any societal concern. Historically, whites have used negative representations of Blacks to rationalize the most heinous crimes against Black humanity. In his book, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 UCLA urban historian Eric Monkkonen demonstrates that as American cities emerged and as chattel slavery declined in the nineteenth century, Blacks made the transition from chattel slaves to being characterized by white elites as members of the "dangerous classes," who were subjected to the coercive power of a developing white urban police force. Since an anti-Black society places little or no value on the Black body, cries of racialized injustice largely go unheard. Therefore, in the face of societal indifference, incidents of police brutality and murder of Black men and women occur with increasing frequency.
Some years ago, the videotaped incidents of excessive police violence in Inglewood, California, Oklahoma City, and New York City demonstrated the growing regularity of anti-Black police murder and terrorism in contemporary American society. Because of Inglewood's close proximity to Los Angeles, the legal battle surrounding the police assault on sixteen year-old Donovan Jackson captured national attention for a moment. The incident reminded people of the Rodney King case a decade earlier. Additionally, what made the Inglewood situation significant was the demographic shift from the 1970s through the 1990, as South Central Los Angeles' Black population moved further west. Hence, formerly middle and working class white areas, like Westchester and Inglewood, now contain predominantly middle and working class Black populations. As with Los Angeles during the years of Mayor Thomas Bradley's regime, Inglewood's political managers are Black, but the police force remains largely white. Similar to inner city residents throughout America, large numbers of Blacks in Los Angeles and Inglewood regard cops as a violent and repressive occupying force. This reality is reminiscent of James Baldwin's comments about the New York Police Department's structure of domination in Nobody Knows My Name:
"The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive....They represent the force of the white world, and that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the Black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt....He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes."
Alternatively, when police savagely attack or murder Black people - for example, the well-known 1997 torture of Abner Louima and 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD - cops and their defenders immediately deny any racist motivation and cynically characterize each event as an "isolated incident." When Black cops are involved, as in the Inglewood assault and the murder of Sean Bell, the denial of racism's existence is even louder, as if these cops, as adherents of the police code, could not also view the Black body as possessing little value. Public officials (judges, politicians, and police) then legitimize or rationalize police misconduct. In the face of public resentment and outrage, former LAPD chief Daryl Gates - whose regime largely, but unofficially, encouraged lawless and racist police behavior - often sought to rationalize unrestrained police violence in Black communities as the actions of a few bad cops. According to him, such conduct was an aberration. This has become the common response of city officials. But how should we really view the dramatically increasing numbers of savage attacks on urban Black residents and the cops who perpetrate them - as isolated incidents or as systemic repression?
The effort to construct big city police violence against Blacks as an aberration or as the behavior of rogue cops masks the culture of racism and tyranny that historically has characterized the policing of Black and poor communities in America. Los Angeles is a prime example. Under a political regime established by LA's good government reform movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the mayor does not appoint the police chief. Rather, a mayor-appointed police commission selects the chief of police. Over the years, the police chief appropriated mounting managerial, political, and coercive power, which came to rival the mayor's authority. In the 1980s, this often conflicting dynamic became visible during the leadership of Thomas Bradley, LA's first Black mayor and a former cop himself, when police czar Daryl Gates sought to challenge his authority.
Police power and its concomitant order of violence reached their zenith under one of Daryl Gates' predecessors, Bill Parker, who in the 1960s established LA's system of police terrorism that became the model for urban police departments throughout America. As Joe Domanick reveals in his book, To Protect and Serve: The LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams, it was the iron-fisted police chief Bill Parker who built the LAPD into a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant apparatus of organized male chauvinism that, in judgment-call situations, had a license to kill. Significantly, the introduction of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in 1966 set in motion the increasing militarization of the LA police force, as Christian Parenti details in Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis.
Taking over as police commissar in 1978, Gates continued and expanded the essential Parker philosophy and practice of policing Los Angeles: Give no slack and take no shit from anyone. Confront and command. Control the streets at all times. Always be aggressive. Stop crimes before they happen. Seek them out. Shake them down. Make that arrest. Never admit that the department has done anything wrong.
As LA's cultural, racial, and class transformation occurred after the 1960s, the LAPD's code of (mis)conduct took on an increasingly militaristic, racist, and repressive character.
It is against this background that we need to view mounting incidents of police brutality and murder of urban Black residents throughout America. Significantly, the order of police violence is neither an aberration nor limited to rogue cops. As numerous videotapes have demonstrated over the years, cops do not operate alone and in isolation. Rather, they work in a largely autonomous institution that sanctions, and even encourages, racialized injustice and terrorism. Many cops in large urban centers across America are representative of the kind of decadence that often characterizes vicious police behavior; cops literally hate and fear the Blacks and Latinos inhabiting the communities they seek to control. As the videotaped incidents of vicious police assaults on Blacks have shown, cops are willing to do anything in their twisted conception of power to dehumanize Blacks and other people of color, and to deny them the equal protection of the law.
William Muir observes in Police: Streetcorner Politicians that the use of coercive power often corrupts urban cops. Big city police forces are infected with a culture of racism and violence that historically has sanctioned the savage and brutal treatment of Black people, other people of color, and the poor. In short, the increasing incidents of wanton police brutality and murder of Blacks are by no stretch of the imagination "isolated incidents." Rather, in contemporary urban America, excessive cop violence and terrorism take place with increasing regularity!
A colonial mentality, rooted in chattel slavery and imperialism, has structured the entire history of policing in urban America. That kind of thinking and practice needs to be overturned. An assortment of policy ideas has been advanced in order to reform police (mis)behavior, including community-based policing, racially balanced police forces, and more educated cops. In my judgment, these reforms, even if implemented, are pipe dreams. For a number of reasons, I am not optimistic about positive alternatives to an increasing order of police terrorism in urban America. Rather, I see a growing prison-garrison state in which urban residents will become the targets of mounting police murder and incarceration.
First, the so-called war on drugs during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the incarceration of massive numbers of young Black and Latino men and woman. Of course, largely denied was the US government's involvement in the urban drug epidemic in the first place, as Gary Webb exposed in his important book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Second, the 9/11 attack forced the American polity to realize its vulnerability to international assault, leading governmental elites to set in motion the militarization of American society. Third, the public exposure of corporate elite greed, corruption, and fraud is resulting in a crisis of confidence in America's managerial capitalist political economy. Finally, under increasing media scrutiny for past corporate corruption, failing imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and arrogant and incompetent leadership, the George W. Bush regime is being plagued by a deepening public crisis of credibility. Clearly, these dynamics do not constitute a political framework necessary for overturning the structure and practice of urban police violence and terrorism.
Therefore, how might American people respond to these developments? In the face of political and corporate decadence, nihilism and social anarchy continue to mount among the exploited and disenfranchised Americans. Fed up with increasing rates of police brutality, murder, and terrorism, angry and outraged urban residents may have no alternative but to undertake new strategies of political protest and popular resistance.
Floyd W. Hayes, III, Ph.D., is senior lecturer a the Department of Political Science and coordinator of programs and undergraduate studies at the Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. He can be contacted at fwhayes3@jhu.edu.
by Dr. Floyd W. Hayes, III
"I see a growing prison-garrison state in which urban residents will become the targets of mounting police murder and incarceration." The author's grim assessment is based on the "absolute disregard for the sanctity of Black life" that marks each era of American history, from chattel slavery to the 50-bullet New York City police barrage that killed Sean Bell. Urban police practices constitute a kind or organized terror that remains essentially unchanged even after police ranks have become integrated. "Big city police forces are infected with a culture of racism and violence that historically has sanctioned the savage and brutal treatment of Black people, other people of color, and the poor.
When three Jamaica, Queens, detectives murdered Sean Bell on November 25, 2006, they engaged in a rising tide of police-state terrorism in growing numbers of urban communities throughout the United States of America. Shooting some 50 bullets at Bell, these cops not only cut short his life, but they also precluded his wedding that day to his fiancée, Nicole Paultre. Exactly five months later, a judge declared the police perpetrators not guilty of any criminal behavior, causing shock, grief, and resentment among family and community members. I am outraged by the seemingly common and wanton practice of police violence and murder in this nation's urban communities, as well as by a judicial system that exonerates killer cops. These actions represent the absolute disregard for the sanctity of Black life. Hence, I find myself mentally rehearsing why I have come to resent cops and the (il)legal order of urban community terrorism they enforce.
Growing to manhood in Los Angeles during the 1950s, I learned to fear and hate the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). This resulted from a combination of experiences, most notably the constant stories that my father, a Los Angeles County probation officer, told me about how LA cops savagely and brutally beat Black men brought into custody on charges of violating the law. Since he worked in adult investigations, my father saw first hand the results of police assaults, as he interviewed their victims in his capacity as probation officer. He heard countless stories of racialized and excessive police violence.
One reason my father recounted these events was to keep me from loitering on Los Angeles streets and corners with my friends late at night after the curfew. Another reason was his sense of outrage and resentment that city officials tolerated, and indeed encouraged, such local-state violence against Black men. So it was that I, like so many other Black and Latino Angelinos, developed a longstanding antagonism toward the LAPD. At a relatively early age, I learned that the police, although sworn to uphold the criminal law, were often men full of lawless impulses.
Black and Latino communities in big cities across America have long complained about police brutality and repression. The 1965 Watts uprising, as well as many other urban revolts during the turbulent 1960s, resulted from the abuse of police coercive power. Yet, wealthy and middle-class white Americans ignored these charges of racialized police terrorism and tyranny until the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by LA's "gang in blue" revealed to the world how racial injustice actually is practiced in the "City of Angels." The American practice of cultural domination gives currency mainly to white perspectives of social reality while largely silencing Black points of view. However, the American culture of white supremacy, notwithstanding, there is no essential relationship between whiteness and rightness.
The order of police violence, terrorism, and murder directed at Black Americans today takes place with a systematic viciousness and savagery comparable to the dehumanizing sadism of white slave-owners, lynchers, and anti-Black rioters during the periods of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. This is because the criminalized image of the Black man as violent and threatening (along with that of his Latino brothers) is so fixed in the white American imagination - the Black man is always already guilty of something - that the most degrading and unwarranted police violence on the Black man's body is accepted as justifiable. This accounts for the unrestrained murder of Black men by "gangs in blue" across this nation.
To be sure, elite white media and policy managers also demonize Black females (and their Latina sisters), framing them as prostitutes or morally reprehensible single mothers, undeserving of any societal concern. Historically, whites have used negative representations of Blacks to rationalize the most heinous crimes against Black humanity. In his book, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 UCLA urban historian Eric Monkkonen demonstrates that as American cities emerged and as chattel slavery declined in the nineteenth century, Blacks made the transition from chattel slaves to being characterized by white elites as members of the "dangerous classes," who were subjected to the coercive power of a developing white urban police force. Since an anti-Black society places little or no value on the Black body, cries of racialized injustice largely go unheard. Therefore, in the face of societal indifference, incidents of police brutality and murder of Black men and women occur with increasing frequency.
Some years ago, the videotaped incidents of excessive police violence in Inglewood, California, Oklahoma City, and New York City demonstrated the growing regularity of anti-Black police murder and terrorism in contemporary American society. Because of Inglewood's close proximity to Los Angeles, the legal battle surrounding the police assault on sixteen year-old Donovan Jackson captured national attention for a moment. The incident reminded people of the Rodney King case a decade earlier. Additionally, what made the Inglewood situation significant was the demographic shift from the 1970s through the 1990, as South Central Los Angeles' Black population moved further west. Hence, formerly middle and working class white areas, like Westchester and Inglewood, now contain predominantly middle and working class Black populations. As with Los Angeles during the years of Mayor Thomas Bradley's regime, Inglewood's political managers are Black, but the police force remains largely white. Similar to inner city residents throughout America, large numbers of Blacks in Los Angeles and Inglewood regard cops as a violent and repressive occupying force. This reality is reminiscent of James Baldwin's comments about the New York Police Department's structure of domination in Nobody Knows My Name:
"The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive....They represent the force of the white world, and that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the Black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt....He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes."
Alternatively, when police savagely attack or murder Black people - for example, the well-known 1997 torture of Abner Louima and 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD - cops and their defenders immediately deny any racist motivation and cynically characterize each event as an "isolated incident." When Black cops are involved, as in the Inglewood assault and the murder of Sean Bell, the denial of racism's existence is even louder, as if these cops, as adherents of the police code, could not also view the Black body as possessing little value. Public officials (judges, politicians, and police) then legitimize or rationalize police misconduct. In the face of public resentment and outrage, former LAPD chief Daryl Gates - whose regime largely, but unofficially, encouraged lawless and racist police behavior - often sought to rationalize unrestrained police violence in Black communities as the actions of a few bad cops. According to him, such conduct was an aberration. This has become the common response of city officials. But how should we really view the dramatically increasing numbers of savage attacks on urban Black residents and the cops who perpetrate them - as isolated incidents or as systemic repression?
The effort to construct big city police violence against Blacks as an aberration or as the behavior of rogue cops masks the culture of racism and tyranny that historically has characterized the policing of Black and poor communities in America. Los Angeles is a prime example. Under a political regime established by LA's good government reform movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the mayor does not appoint the police chief. Rather, a mayor-appointed police commission selects the chief of police. Over the years, the police chief appropriated mounting managerial, political, and coercive power, which came to rival the mayor's authority. In the 1980s, this often conflicting dynamic became visible during the leadership of Thomas Bradley, LA's first Black mayor and a former cop himself, when police czar Daryl Gates sought to challenge his authority.
Police power and its concomitant order of violence reached their zenith under one of Daryl Gates' predecessors, Bill Parker, who in the 1960s established LA's system of police terrorism that became the model for urban police departments throughout America. As Joe Domanick reveals in his book, To Protect and Serve: The LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams, it was the iron-fisted police chief Bill Parker who built the LAPD into a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant apparatus of organized male chauvinism that, in judgment-call situations, had a license to kill. Significantly, the introduction of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in 1966 set in motion the increasing militarization of the LA police force, as Christian Parenti details in Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis.
Taking over as police commissar in 1978, Gates continued and expanded the essential Parker philosophy and practice of policing Los Angeles: Give no slack and take no shit from anyone. Confront and command. Control the streets at all times. Always be aggressive. Stop crimes before they happen. Seek them out. Shake them down. Make that arrest. Never admit that the department has done anything wrong.
As LA's cultural, racial, and class transformation occurred after the 1960s, the LAPD's code of (mis)conduct took on an increasingly militaristic, racist, and repressive character.
It is against this background that we need to view mounting incidents of police brutality and murder of urban Black residents throughout America. Significantly, the order of police violence is neither an aberration nor limited to rogue cops. As numerous videotapes have demonstrated over the years, cops do not operate alone and in isolation. Rather, they work in a largely autonomous institution that sanctions, and even encourages, racialized injustice and terrorism. Many cops in large urban centers across America are representative of the kind of decadence that often characterizes vicious police behavior; cops literally hate and fear the Blacks and Latinos inhabiting the communities they seek to control. As the videotaped incidents of vicious police assaults on Blacks have shown, cops are willing to do anything in their twisted conception of power to dehumanize Blacks and other people of color, and to deny them the equal protection of the law.
William Muir observes in Police: Streetcorner Politicians that the use of coercive power often corrupts urban cops. Big city police forces are infected with a culture of racism and violence that historically has sanctioned the savage and brutal treatment of Black people, other people of color, and the poor. In short, the increasing incidents of wanton police brutality and murder of Blacks are by no stretch of the imagination "isolated incidents." Rather, in contemporary urban America, excessive cop violence and terrorism take place with increasing regularity!
A colonial mentality, rooted in chattel slavery and imperialism, has structured the entire history of policing in urban America. That kind of thinking and practice needs to be overturned. An assortment of policy ideas has been advanced in order to reform police (mis)behavior, including community-based policing, racially balanced police forces, and more educated cops. In my judgment, these reforms, even if implemented, are pipe dreams. For a number of reasons, I am not optimistic about positive alternatives to an increasing order of police terrorism in urban America. Rather, I see a growing prison-garrison state in which urban residents will become the targets of mounting police murder and incarceration.
First, the so-called war on drugs during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the incarceration of massive numbers of young Black and Latino men and woman. Of course, largely denied was the US government's involvement in the urban drug epidemic in the first place, as Gary Webb exposed in his important book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Second, the 9/11 attack forced the American polity to realize its vulnerability to international assault, leading governmental elites to set in motion the militarization of American society. Third, the public exposure of corporate elite greed, corruption, and fraud is resulting in a crisis of confidence in America's managerial capitalist political economy. Finally, under increasing media scrutiny for past corporate corruption, failing imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and arrogant and incompetent leadership, the George W. Bush regime is being plagued by a deepening public crisis of credibility. Clearly, these dynamics do not constitute a political framework necessary for overturning the structure and practice of urban police violence and terrorism.
Therefore, how might American people respond to these developments? In the face of political and corporate decadence, nihilism and social anarchy continue to mount among the exploited and disenfranchised Americans. Fed up with increasing rates of police brutality, murder, and terrorism, angry and outraged urban residents may have no alternative but to undertake new strategies of political protest and popular resistance.
Floyd W. Hayes, III, Ph.D., is senior lecturer a the Department of Political Science and coordinator of programs and undergraduate studies at the Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. He can be contacted at fwhayes3@jhu.edu.
House Slaves, Field Slaves and the Obama Predicament
by Mark P. Fancher
How does a present day House Negro behave? Would such people recognize themselves as successors to the House Slaves of old? Could one become president of the United States? What about the political heirs to the Field Slaves? And where would one find the Big House in the modern era? "Barack Obama's efforts to enter the biggest of big houses in American politics," writes the author, "has allowed us to see in the clearest way possible that the price of access is doing whatever it takes to make white people like you." Huge numbers of African Americans agree with "every word Rev. Jeremiah Wright has uttered," while at the same time Black support for Obama is near-unanimous. Where does "house" end and "field" begin?
In his book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 - 1800, author John Thornton confirms the long-held anecdotal presumption that enslaved Africans who worked in the plantation "big house" had a better quality of life than those who worked in the fields.
Thornton states:
"The contrast between the life of a domestic servant, residing in the owner's house, perhaps well dressed and not necessarily overworked, and that of the plantation slaves and field hands is well illustrated by the case of two Brazilian domestics, Ines and Juliana. These two pampered slaves, raised among the Europeans and sharing in their lives, testified against their master, Paulo Affonso, to the Inquisition of Bahia in 1613-14, and in reprisal, their master ordered them transferred as field hands to his sugar estate at Itapianga. There, a short time later they were both dead, victims of ‘many whippings and bad life and labor.'"
It is likely that as a consequence of these and comparable incidents, many enslaved Africans who toiled and suffered in the fields recognized their limited life options, and set their sights on a place on the master's domestic staff. If the fate of Sisters Ines and Juliana is any indication, disloyalty, insolence and recalcitrance were not qualities that were tolerated in a house slave, and a slave could win a coveted position in the big house only if he or she could assure the master that there would be no efforts to slip poison into the slave owner's food, or kill him as he slept.
However, masters had no guarantee of docility. In his book Runaway Slaves, distinguished historian John Hope Franklin observed:
"Even slaves who were thought to be mild mannered and obedient sometimes reached a breaking point. Having never reacted violently, the house servant of a Louisiana woman ‘returned the blow' as she was being physically chastised by her owner, threw her mistress to the ground, and ‘beat her unmercifully, on the head and face.' The white woman's face swelled up and turned black. ‘I could not have known her, by seeing her,' a visitor at the plantation said a few weeks later, ‘poor little woman is confined to bed yet' and remains ‘dangerously ill.'"
Thus, a house slave - or an African who aspired to become a house slave - was faced with the choice of either pleasing the master at all costs in order to preserve a relatively privileged position, or, resolve that even if there were benefits to living under the master's roof, they were not worth losing the little bit of dignity and self-respect that even a slave might have if he or she was willing to fight for them.
Africans may have ultimately moved off of the plantation, but many continue to seek their place in the big house. Modern big houses may be executive positions in major corporations - or even entry level jobs. A big house might be tenure on a university faculty, or a partnership in a major law firm. The shared characteristic of all of these "big houses" is that in some way, shape or form, the aspirant must gain favor with gatekeepers. To accomplish this, Africans must frequently suppress or conceal much about themselves that connects them to their culture. Speech patterns and slang used at home give way to "corporation speak." Otherwise natural hair is relaxed. Jokes told in the board room that aren't funny to most Africans are laughed at anyway. A brother who might normally prefer to spend Saturday afternoon shooting hoops will grudgingly find himself on the golf course with his white co-workers.
Barack Obama's efforts to enter the biggest of big houses in American politics has allowed us to see in the clearest way possible that the price of access is doing whatever it takes to make white people like you. Thus, Obama has found himself in the pathetic position, of essentially trudging through rural America with hat in hand, trying to convince white people - many of them bigots - that he is "safe," and not at all like those "other blacks." Reverend Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric has been blamed for having a destructive impact on the Obama campaign. But the truth is, if the pastor had never spoken a word, in the minds of white America, Wright's mere presence would still have proclaimed: "Obama is just like all of those other Negroes!" What's more, it has been interesting to observe how so many Africans who have come to identify strongly with the Obama campaign react when Reverend Wright or anyone else actually says things that threaten to shatter the illusion of the "black man who isn't black." In one form or another, we have heard a loud chorus of: "Hush now! Don't let them white folks hear you!"
Has it really come to this? Have our people forgotten that Malcolm X, the Panthers, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Kwame Ture and countless others stood up so that we would never again have to kneel meekly before "The Man"? What happened? Have our people on a mass level adopted a house slave mentality? Not likely. After all, the Detroit Branch of the NAACP and 11,000 Africans who attended its Freedom Fund Dinner, displayed the spirit of the field slave when they welcomed Reverend Wright into their presence as an act of defiance. Not only that, there are no doubt millions of other Africans who agree with every word Reverend Wright has uttered.
No, the irony is that in many cases, the near fanatic support for Obama (notwithstanding the candidate's obsession with calming white fears) is in many cases fueled by field slave impulses. In general, those impulses drive the field slave to take that which is forbidden, to walk through doors that have been locked, and to (whenever possible) rub success in the face of the oppressor. As the field slaves watch Obama march steadily toward a position that a black man is not supposed to have until the passage of at least another generation, they can't help but get caught up.
Only time will tell whether the unrelenting beating that Obama has taken in recent weeks for no reason other than he happens to be African will be the cold slap in the face that reminds the slaves out in the field that merely becoming a resident of the big house does not transform the new occupant into the master. Although many see value - even if only sentimental or symbolic- in electing a black president, it should become increasingly apparent that if the quest for a position in the big house compels a slave to abandon his pastor, ignore his community, commit to a corporate and Zionist agenda, and pander to bigots, then it is likely that once he moves in, he will have to stay with that program if he wants to keep his job.
On the plantation, it is likely that many of the field slaves who managed to talk their way into the big house entered fully conscious of the likelihood that the humiliation they would suffer there would reach intolerable limits. Those contemporary field slaves who live vicariously through would-be President Obama, will be well advised to, like their ancestors, continue their journey toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with open eyes, and a frank realization that the presidency is not a political panacea - and possibly not even a palliative pill for the ills of America's African population. If we are to achieve genuine liberation, all political options, including revolution must not only remain open, but be pursued as though the world had never heard of Barack Obama.
Mark P. Fancher is a human rights lawyer, writer and activist. He can be contacted at mfancher@comcast.net.
How does a present day House Negro behave? Would such people recognize themselves as successors to the House Slaves of old? Could one become president of the United States? What about the political heirs to the Field Slaves? And where would one find the Big House in the modern era? "Barack Obama's efforts to enter the biggest of big houses in American politics," writes the author, "has allowed us to see in the clearest way possible that the price of access is doing whatever it takes to make white people like you." Huge numbers of African Americans agree with "every word Rev. Jeremiah Wright has uttered," while at the same time Black support for Obama is near-unanimous. Where does "house" end and "field" begin?
In his book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 - 1800, author John Thornton confirms the long-held anecdotal presumption that enslaved Africans who worked in the plantation "big house" had a better quality of life than those who worked in the fields.
Thornton states:
"The contrast between the life of a domestic servant, residing in the owner's house, perhaps well dressed and not necessarily overworked, and that of the plantation slaves and field hands is well illustrated by the case of two Brazilian domestics, Ines and Juliana. These two pampered slaves, raised among the Europeans and sharing in their lives, testified against their master, Paulo Affonso, to the Inquisition of Bahia in 1613-14, and in reprisal, their master ordered them transferred as field hands to his sugar estate at Itapianga. There, a short time later they were both dead, victims of ‘many whippings and bad life and labor.'"
It is likely that as a consequence of these and comparable incidents, many enslaved Africans who toiled and suffered in the fields recognized their limited life options, and set their sights on a place on the master's domestic staff. If the fate of Sisters Ines and Juliana is any indication, disloyalty, insolence and recalcitrance were not qualities that were tolerated in a house slave, and a slave could win a coveted position in the big house only if he or she could assure the master that there would be no efforts to slip poison into the slave owner's food, or kill him as he slept.
However, masters had no guarantee of docility. In his book Runaway Slaves, distinguished historian John Hope Franklin observed:
"Even slaves who were thought to be mild mannered and obedient sometimes reached a breaking point. Having never reacted violently, the house servant of a Louisiana woman ‘returned the blow' as she was being physically chastised by her owner, threw her mistress to the ground, and ‘beat her unmercifully, on the head and face.' The white woman's face swelled up and turned black. ‘I could not have known her, by seeing her,' a visitor at the plantation said a few weeks later, ‘poor little woman is confined to bed yet' and remains ‘dangerously ill.'"
Thus, a house slave - or an African who aspired to become a house slave - was faced with the choice of either pleasing the master at all costs in order to preserve a relatively privileged position, or, resolve that even if there were benefits to living under the master's roof, they were not worth losing the little bit of dignity and self-respect that even a slave might have if he or she was willing to fight for them.
Africans may have ultimately moved off of the plantation, but many continue to seek their place in the big house. Modern big houses may be executive positions in major corporations - or even entry level jobs. A big house might be tenure on a university faculty, or a partnership in a major law firm. The shared characteristic of all of these "big houses" is that in some way, shape or form, the aspirant must gain favor with gatekeepers. To accomplish this, Africans must frequently suppress or conceal much about themselves that connects them to their culture. Speech patterns and slang used at home give way to "corporation speak." Otherwise natural hair is relaxed. Jokes told in the board room that aren't funny to most Africans are laughed at anyway. A brother who might normally prefer to spend Saturday afternoon shooting hoops will grudgingly find himself on the golf course with his white co-workers.
Barack Obama's efforts to enter the biggest of big houses in American politics has allowed us to see in the clearest way possible that the price of access is doing whatever it takes to make white people like you. Thus, Obama has found himself in the pathetic position, of essentially trudging through rural America with hat in hand, trying to convince white people - many of them bigots - that he is "safe," and not at all like those "other blacks." Reverend Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric has been blamed for having a destructive impact on the Obama campaign. But the truth is, if the pastor had never spoken a word, in the minds of white America, Wright's mere presence would still have proclaimed: "Obama is just like all of those other Negroes!" What's more, it has been interesting to observe how so many Africans who have come to identify strongly with the Obama campaign react when Reverend Wright or anyone else actually says things that threaten to shatter the illusion of the "black man who isn't black." In one form or another, we have heard a loud chorus of: "Hush now! Don't let them white folks hear you!"
Has it really come to this? Have our people forgotten that Malcolm X, the Panthers, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Kwame Ture and countless others stood up so that we would never again have to kneel meekly before "The Man"? What happened? Have our people on a mass level adopted a house slave mentality? Not likely. After all, the Detroit Branch of the NAACP and 11,000 Africans who attended its Freedom Fund Dinner, displayed the spirit of the field slave when they welcomed Reverend Wright into their presence as an act of defiance. Not only that, there are no doubt millions of other Africans who agree with every word Reverend Wright has uttered.
No, the irony is that in many cases, the near fanatic support for Obama (notwithstanding the candidate's obsession with calming white fears) is in many cases fueled by field slave impulses. In general, those impulses drive the field slave to take that which is forbidden, to walk through doors that have been locked, and to (whenever possible) rub success in the face of the oppressor. As the field slaves watch Obama march steadily toward a position that a black man is not supposed to have until the passage of at least another generation, they can't help but get caught up.
Only time will tell whether the unrelenting beating that Obama has taken in recent weeks for no reason other than he happens to be African will be the cold slap in the face that reminds the slaves out in the field that merely becoming a resident of the big house does not transform the new occupant into the master. Although many see value - even if only sentimental or symbolic- in electing a black president, it should become increasingly apparent that if the quest for a position in the big house compels a slave to abandon his pastor, ignore his community, commit to a corporate and Zionist agenda, and pander to bigots, then it is likely that once he moves in, he will have to stay with that program if he wants to keep his job.
On the plantation, it is likely that many of the field slaves who managed to talk their way into the big house entered fully conscious of the likelihood that the humiliation they would suffer there would reach intolerable limits. Those contemporary field slaves who live vicariously through would-be President Obama, will be well advised to, like their ancestors, continue their journey toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with open eyes, and a frank realization that the presidency is not a political panacea - and possibly not even a palliative pill for the ills of America's African population. If we are to achieve genuine liberation, all political options, including revolution must not only remain open, but be pursued as though the world had never heard of Barack Obama.
Mark P. Fancher is a human rights lawyer, writer and activist. He can be contacted at mfancher@comcast.net.
Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright: Sabotage, Division, or Sedition
by Brother Bede Vincent
After his sermon at the National Press Club in April, there was renewed uproar in my parish about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, based on the belief, asserted no doubt in many other circles, that Rev. Wright was now egotistically upstaging his former parishioner. Rev. Wright was accused of selfishly chasing the media so as to effectively sabotage Senator Obama's candidacy. There was Obama working like the sorcerer's apprentice to get the Democratic nomination - remember Mickey Mouse in the Disney version - and his Christian broom had taken on a life of its own. Much to the chagrin of Obama and his supporters that attempt to counter the Muslim associations of his name by actively embracing his Christian church has now turned into a media challenge to put down that very Christian pastor who according to Obama actually drew him into the Church.
The attack on Obama, using Wright's outspokenness, did not originate with his statements to Bill Moyers or the National Press Club. For decades US Americans have been conditioned to believe that one third - and in some parts of the US one half - of the population constitute a "special interest" because of their skin color. This has perverted the country's political culture - just like the 19th century Supreme Court decision granting corporations more civil rights than ex-slaves. Rev. Wright probably would not have drawn much attention in the first place had the Right not thought his old sermons would be good ammunition against Senator Obama. He was thrust into the limelight by the campaign - not the other way around. Reverend Wright was correct to see and say that the attack on him - and, indirectly, the challenge to Obama - was not even an ad hominem but an attack on the Black Church and on African-American culture itself. In short it was an attack on the validity of the prophetic voice of the African-American religious experience in a country which itself has no political culture divorced from the Church. In a secular society like some in Europe this would be relatively unimportant. However in a country whose entire socio-political culture is church driven, to attack the validity of the Black Church (by no means a monolith) is even viler than to attack the polling stations. No white candidate would have been forced to distance himself from the obnoxious pronouncements of New York's John Cardinal O'Connor in order to establish his right to candidacy. Even when the US elected its first Catholic president, there was no serious talk of Kennedy renouncing Cardinal Cushing.
With all respect to Obama's Philadelphia speech in March - truly an excellent piece of oratory - the senator from Illinois is responsible for at least two serious weaknesses which had nothing to do with Wright: his soft-jingoism in aligning himself with Israel and disregarding the truly catastrophic consequences of US policy both for Palestine and for Muslims everywhere, and his failure to address the fact that the majority of people who are going to war for the US are the poor, a substantial number of whom are Black Americans. The same was true of the military in Reverend Wright's days, forty years ago, when US soldiers were being recruited to kill "gooks" instead of "rag-heads." These poor are being made even poorer by the wars the US has been fighting for decades against what used to be the Third World (and is now merely the lower half of an increasingly polarized economic system).
You just have to look at the current on-line recruiting material of the US Army today to see that the US armed forces still fill most of the enlisted ranks with people who are simply glad the military gave them a job or an education - an indication of just how difficult it still is to get either in civilian life if one is not deemed white and/ or rich. It ought to be a disgrace when a man or woman has to become a trained killer in order to enjoy a monthly salary and a college education. A presidential candidate who cannot or will not make the connection between the suffering in Iraq (or elsewhere) and the portion of the population who only have the military as an employment option, is irresponsible. If he cannot say that because his campaign strategy prohibits it, then he should have the courage to leave those who do not run for president to say what needs to be said.
Now even black nationalism has been resurrected as a straw man to blame Wright's vocal and independent criticism of, yes, the rich, white male rulers of the US for being "racially closed-ended and culturally closed-ended." Wright's polemic must be like a nightmare for those who currently run the US government since nearly all the top jobs of the Bush regime have been held by people who were starting their careers when King and Malcolm were assassinated. Their attempts to discredit Obama using Wright rely on pervasive media-maintained amnesia. In Philadelphia, Obama tried to cast another spell which would return his "broom" to an inert state by associating Wright's preaching with the experience of some prior angry generation: as if a disproportionate share of prison "chain gangs" today were not comprised of African-Americans, like in those bad old days. Was Obama saying that Black Americans today do not have a right to be angry? By accusing Wright of sowing division, he was calling for a return not to the spirit of Martin Luther King but to the Booker T. Washington tradition.
It is not black liberation theology or Black Nationalism that causes division in the US, but rich, white minority and corporate rule. Even Martin Luther King found that just before he was murdered there was a point at which Christian faith required speaking the truth and not only talking about justice but naming the sources of injustice. People cannot fight "injustice," they have to fight those whose actions cause or maintain it - not mythical terrorists or Saddam Hussein, but the upper ten percent of the US that controls most of the country's wealth. King was shredded for his Riverside Church sermon, especially by his middle-class supporters. Soon after that he was dead. Reverend Wright preached the sermon that should have reminded Americans of Oscar Romero, the Catholic archbishop of Salvador murdered in 1980 by people supported by the US government, of US religious workers throughout Latin America also murdered with the tacit consent of the US government in the name of their "peculiar institutions." Reverend Wright's sermons should have reminded even Senator Obama that god did not anoint the US as the divine wielders of lethal nuclear force.
However to talk today requires a different and perhaps deeper courage when confronted with so many mirages of equality. It is tempting to be confused by these oases of opportunity and forget the desert of inequality through which most people are still struggling.
For nearly thirty years now the US has had open season on Black Americans in the media - whether talk radio (most of it Right wing) or the decisions of courts and legislatures throughout the country, not to mention the executive. There was no righteous indignation and still is none when whites malign the other half of the Mayflower and Jamestown heritage. If the blood count for "negroes" had the same validity as the pedigree of the Mayflower and DAR descendants, then most African Americans would be colonial bluebloods in the US. But instead whites were imported with greater intensity after the US civil war to neutralize the impact of slavery's abolition. (Apartheid South Africa was less successful with this strategy.) These immigrants from Europe were given "letters patent" while African-Americans were still being lynched.
In a year which may make the difference between potential peace or another decade of war, a candidate who does not have the knowledge of US history to campaign for justice in your country or the courage to withstand strong opinions, will have no chance - even if elected - in suppressing the demonic forces by which the military-industrial-financial complex dominates the US.
There is nothing flattering to say about the history of the US. On the other hand, that unpleasant odor when the US sits at the table of the United Nations can only be ignored with the strongest perfume or the greatest mendacity. It strains the imagination to believe that a presidential candidate can spend a year campaigning for hope and at the same time not have the courage to speak with a passion for justice. Justice cannot come from ignorance. It behooves a polite and respectful host to ask his disagreeable guest to wash before dining with the rest of us. Or to put it another way, true humility before god means washing one's feet before prayer. That means that a presidential candidate for justice has to educate or if he cannot, then he should allow and encourage others who can.
There is no "Southern Strategy" for Obama to win over the whites who are not already on his side. He has to hope for a fair election (and after two fraudulent presidential elections that will take a lot of hope). Obama has to deliver not only an end to the trillion dollar war but a way of putting that trillion back into the living conditions of over half of the US population from which it has been robbed and which is getting poorer every day.
This is a dangerous road to follow. King and Malcolm were run off that road. But the lesson is not that somehow public speech has to be toned to flatter rich whites and their corporations. People will have to start shouting very loud to be heard over the din of lies that appear in all the mass media every day. Not only are Black Americans still getting poorer, there is going to be a steady stream of Black Americans coming back in uniform psychologically damaged if not destroyed who will find that just like King said they will have killed for a "freedom" abroad that eludes them at home.
If Obama is the great hope, then the African-American clergy and for that matter any other true patriots should be urging Obama to speak for justice and not only for hope. If people like Wright do not use their exposure to push the agenda of justice and Obama cannot, then who will? The demand for justice is divisive and culturally closed: it divides those who seek justice from the unjust. It rejects a culture that promotes individual or corporate profit at any cost.
Until white Americans have a practical, lived notion of justice, based on recognition of their country's history of systemic injustice maintained to this day by those who rule the US, how will they ever get beyond the empty phrases of that pledge each school child is supposed to take? This means naming names. It is not so long ago in the history of the US that cars could be found with bumper stickers saying, "Kill an Indian, save a walleye." Sins are not committed in the abstract and crimes are not theoretical. Jesus may have asked God to forgive his crucifiers because "they know not what they do." However, "not knowing what they do" is no excuse for the rest.
The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright is that there are too few like him who are speaking for justice and truth first, instead of branding the truth sedition. Only when there has been truth and justice can there be reconciliation. Too many people want to take the short cut. They want African-Americans to reconcile themselves to a government which does not represent them, actively disenfranchises them, destroys their homes (and whole cities if need be), imprisons their children and ships the rest off to war, and never ask why or who is responsible. This is the reconciliation "on the cheap" - cheap for white and corporate America, that is. Reverend Wright offers Obama an opportunity, it is a shame he has declared himself unwilling to take it. That is not Wright's problem. That is America's problem. It is America that is the embarrassment, not Wright, who merely points out what the country still has not deigned to admit, let alone correct.
Bede is a lay brother and former teacher, educated in the US, UK and Germany. He is associated with the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies (www.maisonneuvepress.com) and can be contacted through the Institute or at dr-wilkinson-ccll@online.de.
After his sermon at the National Press Club in April, there was renewed uproar in my parish about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, based on the belief, asserted no doubt in many other circles, that Rev. Wright was now egotistically upstaging his former parishioner. Rev. Wright was accused of selfishly chasing the media so as to effectively sabotage Senator Obama's candidacy. There was Obama working like the sorcerer's apprentice to get the Democratic nomination - remember Mickey Mouse in the Disney version - and his Christian broom had taken on a life of its own. Much to the chagrin of Obama and his supporters that attempt to counter the Muslim associations of his name by actively embracing his Christian church has now turned into a media challenge to put down that very Christian pastor who according to Obama actually drew him into the Church.
The attack on Obama, using Wright's outspokenness, did not originate with his statements to Bill Moyers or the National Press Club. For decades US Americans have been conditioned to believe that one third - and in some parts of the US one half - of the population constitute a "special interest" because of their skin color. This has perverted the country's political culture - just like the 19th century Supreme Court decision granting corporations more civil rights than ex-slaves. Rev. Wright probably would not have drawn much attention in the first place had the Right not thought his old sermons would be good ammunition against Senator Obama. He was thrust into the limelight by the campaign - not the other way around. Reverend Wright was correct to see and say that the attack on him - and, indirectly, the challenge to Obama - was not even an ad hominem but an attack on the Black Church and on African-American culture itself. In short it was an attack on the validity of the prophetic voice of the African-American religious experience in a country which itself has no political culture divorced from the Church. In a secular society like some in Europe this would be relatively unimportant. However in a country whose entire socio-political culture is church driven, to attack the validity of the Black Church (by no means a monolith) is even viler than to attack the polling stations. No white candidate would have been forced to distance himself from the obnoxious pronouncements of New York's John Cardinal O'Connor in order to establish his right to candidacy. Even when the US elected its first Catholic president, there was no serious talk of Kennedy renouncing Cardinal Cushing.
With all respect to Obama's Philadelphia speech in March - truly an excellent piece of oratory - the senator from Illinois is responsible for at least two serious weaknesses which had nothing to do with Wright: his soft-jingoism in aligning himself with Israel and disregarding the truly catastrophic consequences of US policy both for Palestine and for Muslims everywhere, and his failure to address the fact that the majority of people who are going to war for the US are the poor, a substantial number of whom are Black Americans. The same was true of the military in Reverend Wright's days, forty years ago, when US soldiers were being recruited to kill "gooks" instead of "rag-heads." These poor are being made even poorer by the wars the US has been fighting for decades against what used to be the Third World (and is now merely the lower half of an increasingly polarized economic system).
You just have to look at the current on-line recruiting material of the US Army today to see that the US armed forces still fill most of the enlisted ranks with people who are simply glad the military gave them a job or an education - an indication of just how difficult it still is to get either in civilian life if one is not deemed white and/ or rich. It ought to be a disgrace when a man or woman has to become a trained killer in order to enjoy a monthly salary and a college education. A presidential candidate who cannot or will not make the connection between the suffering in Iraq (or elsewhere) and the portion of the population who only have the military as an employment option, is irresponsible. If he cannot say that because his campaign strategy prohibits it, then he should have the courage to leave those who do not run for president to say what needs to be said.
Now even black nationalism has been resurrected as a straw man to blame Wright's vocal and independent criticism of, yes, the rich, white male rulers of the US for being "racially closed-ended and culturally closed-ended." Wright's polemic must be like a nightmare for those who currently run the US government since nearly all the top jobs of the Bush regime have been held by people who were starting their careers when King and Malcolm were assassinated. Their attempts to discredit Obama using Wright rely on pervasive media-maintained amnesia. In Philadelphia, Obama tried to cast another spell which would return his "broom" to an inert state by associating Wright's preaching with the experience of some prior angry generation: as if a disproportionate share of prison "chain gangs" today were not comprised of African-Americans, like in those bad old days. Was Obama saying that Black Americans today do not have a right to be angry? By accusing Wright of sowing division, he was calling for a return not to the spirit of Martin Luther King but to the Booker T. Washington tradition.
It is not black liberation theology or Black Nationalism that causes division in the US, but rich, white minority and corporate rule. Even Martin Luther King found that just before he was murdered there was a point at which Christian faith required speaking the truth and not only talking about justice but naming the sources of injustice. People cannot fight "injustice," they have to fight those whose actions cause or maintain it - not mythical terrorists or Saddam Hussein, but the upper ten percent of the US that controls most of the country's wealth. King was shredded for his Riverside Church sermon, especially by his middle-class supporters. Soon after that he was dead. Reverend Wright preached the sermon that should have reminded Americans of Oscar Romero, the Catholic archbishop of Salvador murdered in 1980 by people supported by the US government, of US religious workers throughout Latin America also murdered with the tacit consent of the US government in the name of their "peculiar institutions." Reverend Wright's sermons should have reminded even Senator Obama that god did not anoint the US as the divine wielders of lethal nuclear force.
However to talk today requires a different and perhaps deeper courage when confronted with so many mirages of equality. It is tempting to be confused by these oases of opportunity and forget the desert of inequality through which most people are still struggling.
For nearly thirty years now the US has had open season on Black Americans in the media - whether talk radio (most of it Right wing) or the decisions of courts and legislatures throughout the country, not to mention the executive. There was no righteous indignation and still is none when whites malign the other half of the Mayflower and Jamestown heritage. If the blood count for "negroes" had the same validity as the pedigree of the Mayflower and DAR descendants, then most African Americans would be colonial bluebloods in the US. But instead whites were imported with greater intensity after the US civil war to neutralize the impact of slavery's abolition. (Apartheid South Africa was less successful with this strategy.) These immigrants from Europe were given "letters patent" while African-Americans were still being lynched.
In a year which may make the difference between potential peace or another decade of war, a candidate who does not have the knowledge of US history to campaign for justice in your country or the courage to withstand strong opinions, will have no chance - even if elected - in suppressing the demonic forces by which the military-industrial-financial complex dominates the US.
There is nothing flattering to say about the history of the US. On the other hand, that unpleasant odor when the US sits at the table of the United Nations can only be ignored with the strongest perfume or the greatest mendacity. It strains the imagination to believe that a presidential candidate can spend a year campaigning for hope and at the same time not have the courage to speak with a passion for justice. Justice cannot come from ignorance. It behooves a polite and respectful host to ask his disagreeable guest to wash before dining with the rest of us. Or to put it another way, true humility before god means washing one's feet before prayer. That means that a presidential candidate for justice has to educate or if he cannot, then he should allow and encourage others who can.
There is no "Southern Strategy" for Obama to win over the whites who are not already on his side. He has to hope for a fair election (and after two fraudulent presidential elections that will take a lot of hope). Obama has to deliver not only an end to the trillion dollar war but a way of putting that trillion back into the living conditions of over half of the US population from which it has been robbed and which is getting poorer every day.
This is a dangerous road to follow. King and Malcolm were run off that road. But the lesson is not that somehow public speech has to be toned to flatter rich whites and their corporations. People will have to start shouting very loud to be heard over the din of lies that appear in all the mass media every day. Not only are Black Americans still getting poorer, there is going to be a steady stream of Black Americans coming back in uniform psychologically damaged if not destroyed who will find that just like King said they will have killed for a "freedom" abroad that eludes them at home.
If Obama is the great hope, then the African-American clergy and for that matter any other true patriots should be urging Obama to speak for justice and not only for hope. If people like Wright do not use their exposure to push the agenda of justice and Obama cannot, then who will? The demand for justice is divisive and culturally closed: it divides those who seek justice from the unjust. It rejects a culture that promotes individual or corporate profit at any cost.
Until white Americans have a practical, lived notion of justice, based on recognition of their country's history of systemic injustice maintained to this day by those who rule the US, how will they ever get beyond the empty phrases of that pledge each school child is supposed to take? This means naming names. It is not so long ago in the history of the US that cars could be found with bumper stickers saying, "Kill an Indian, save a walleye." Sins are not committed in the abstract and crimes are not theoretical. Jesus may have asked God to forgive his crucifiers because "they know not what they do." However, "not knowing what they do" is no excuse for the rest.
The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright is that there are too few like him who are speaking for justice and truth first, instead of branding the truth sedition. Only when there has been truth and justice can there be reconciliation. Too many people want to take the short cut. They want African-Americans to reconcile themselves to a government which does not represent them, actively disenfranchises them, destroys their homes (and whole cities if need be), imprisons their children and ships the rest off to war, and never ask why or who is responsible. This is the reconciliation "on the cheap" - cheap for white and corporate America, that is. Reverend Wright offers Obama an opportunity, it is a shame he has declared himself unwilling to take it. That is not Wright's problem. That is America's problem. It is America that is the embarrassment, not Wright, who merely points out what the country still has not deigned to admit, let alone correct.
Bede is a lay brother and former teacher, educated in the US, UK and Germany. He is associated with the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies (www.maisonneuvepress.com) and can be contacted through the Institute or at dr-wilkinson-ccll@online.de.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Racism alarms Obama backers
Candidate's foot soldiers encounter name-calling, vandalism, bomb threats
By Kevin Merida
The Washington Post
updated 3:04 a.m. ET, Tues., May. 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.
Here's the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.
"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."
For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.
Meeting cruel reaction
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"
Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."
Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive.
The campaign released this statement in response to questions about encounters with racism: "After campaigning for 15 months in nearly all 50 states, Barack Obama and our entire campaign have been nothing but impressed and encouraged by the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life. The last year has only reinforced Senator Obama's view that this country is not as divided as our politics suggest."
Campaign field work can be an exercise in confronting the fears, anxieties and prejudices of voters. Veterans of the civil rights movement know what this feels like, as do those who have been involved in battles over busing, immigration or abortion. But through the Obama campaign, some young people are having their first experience joining a cause and meeting cruel reaction.
On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.
Frederick Murrell, a black Kokomo High School senior, was not there but heard what happened. He was more disappointed than surprised. During his own canvassing for Obama, Murrell said, he had "a lot of doors slammed" in his face. But taunting teenagers on a busy commercial strip in broad daylight? "I was very shocked at first," Murrell said. "Then again, I wasn't, because we have a lot of racism here."
Vandalism, bomb threats
The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: "Hamas votes BHO" and "We don't cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright."
Ray McCormick was notified of the incident at about 2:45 a.m. A farmer and conservationist, McCormick had erected a giant billboard on a major highway on behalf of Farmers for Obama. He also was housing the Obama campaign worker manning the office. When McCormick arrived at the office, about two hours before he was due out of bed to plant corn, he grabbed his camera and wanted to alert the media. "I thought, this is a big deal." But he was told Obama campaign officials didn't want to make a big deal of the incident. McCormick took photos anyway and distributed some.
"The pictures represent what we are breaking through and overcoming," he said. As McCormick, who is white, sees it, Obama is succeeding despite these incidents. Later, there would be bomb threats to three Obama campaign offices in Indiana, including the one in Vincennes, according to campaign sources.
Obama has not spoken much about racism during this campaign. He has sought to emphasize connections among Americans rather than divisions. He shrugged off safety concerns that led to early Secret Service protection and has told black senior citizens who worry that racists will do him harm: Don't fret. Earlier in the campaign, a 68-year-old woman in Carson City, Nev., voiced concern that the country was not ready to elect an African American president.
"Will there be some folks who probably won't vote for me because I am black? Of course," Obama said, "just like there may be somebody who won't vote for Hillary because she's a woman or wouldn't vote for John Edwards because they don't like his accent. But the question is, 'Can we get a majority of the American people to give us a fair hearing?' "
Skilled at bridging divides
Obama has won 30 of 50 Democratic contests so far, the kind of nationwide electoral triumph no black candidate has ever realized. That he is on the brink of capturing the Democratic nomination, some say, is a testament to how far the country has progressed in overcoming racism and evidence of Obama's skill at bridging divides.
Obama has won five of 12 primaries in which black voters made up less than 10 percent of the electorate, and caucuses in states such as Idaho and Wyoming that are overwhelmingly white. But exit polls show he has struggled to attract white voters who didn't attend college and earn less than $50,000 a year. Today, he and Hillary Clinton square off in West Virginia, a state where she is favored and where the votes of working-class whites will again be closely watched.
For the most part, Obama campaign workers say, the 2008 election cycle has been exhilarating. On the ground, the Obama campaign is being driven by youngsters, many of whom are imbued with an optimism undeterred by racial intolerance. "We've grown up in a different world," says Danielle Ross. Field offices are staffed by 20-somethings who hold positions -- state director, regional field director, field organizer -- that are typically off limits to newcomers to presidential politics.
Gillian Bergeron, 23, was in charge of a five-county regional operation in northeastern Pennsylvania. The oldest member of her team was 27. At Scranton's annual Saint Patrick's Day parade, some of the green Obama signs distributed by staffers were burned along the parade route. That was the first signal that this wasn't exactly Obama country. There would be others.
In a letter to the editor published in a local paper, Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball explained his support of Hillary Clinton this way: "Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don't know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can't convince me that some of that didn't rub off on him.
"No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office."
Obama's campaign workers have grown wearily accustomed to the lies about the candidate's supposed radical Muslim ties and lack of patriotism. But they are sometimes astonished when public officials such as Ball or others representing the campaign of their opponent traffic in these falsehoods.
Karen Seifert, a volunteer from New York, was outside of the largest polling location in Lackawanna County, Pa., on primary day when she was pressed by a Clinton volunteer to explain her backing of Obama. "I trust him," Seifert replied. According to Seifert, the woman pointed to Obama's face on Seifert's T-shirt and said: "He's a half-breed and he's a Muslim. How can you trust that?"
Racial attitudes difficult to measure
Pollsters have found it difficult to accurately measure racial attitudes, as some voters are unwilling to acknowledge the role that race plays in their thinking. But some are not. Susan Dzimian, a Clinton supporter who owns residential properties, said outside a polling location in Kokomo that race was a factor in how she viewed Obama. "I think if it was somebody other than him, I'd accept it," she said of a black candidate. "If Colin Powell had run, I would be willing to accept him."
The previous evening, Dondra Ewing was driving the neighborhoods of Kokomo, looking to turn around voters like Dzimian. Ewing, 47, is a chain-smoking middle school guidance counselor, a black single mother of two and one of the most fiercely vigilant Obama volunteers in Kokomo, which was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. On July 4, 1923, Kokomo hosted the largest Klan gathering in history -- an estimated 200,000 followers flocked to a local park. But these are not the 1920s, and Ewing believes she can persuade anybody to back Obama. Her mother, after all, was the first African American elected at-large to the school board in a community that is 10 percent black.
Kokomo, population 46,000, is another hard-hit Midwestern industrial town stung by layoffs. Longtimers wistfully remember the glory years of Continental Steel and speak mournfully about the jobs shipped overseas. Kokomo Sanitary Pottery, which made bathroom sinks and toilets, shut down a couple of months ago and took with it 150 jobs.
Aaron Roe, 23, was mowing lawns at a local cemetery recently, lamenting his $8-an-hour job with no benefits. He had earned a community college degree as an industrial electrician, but learned there was no electrical work to be found for someone with his experience, which is to say none. Politics wasn't on his mind; frustration was. If he were to vote, it would not be for Obama, he said. "I just got a funny feeling about him," Roe said, a feeling he couldn't specify, except to say race wasn't a part of it. "Race ain't nothing," said Roe, who is white. "It's how they're going to help the country."
People with funny feelings
The Aaron Roes are exactly who Dondra Ewing was after: people with funny feelings.
At the Bradford Run Apartments, she found Robert Cox, a retiree who spent 30 years working for an electronics manufacturer making computer chips. He was in his suspenders, grilling shish kebab, which he had never eaten. "Something new," Cox said, recommended by his son who was visiting from Colorado.
Ewing was selling him hard on Obama. "There are more than two families that can run the United States of America," she said, "and their names aren't Bush and Clinton."
"Yeah, I know, I know," Cox said, remaining noncommittal.
He opened the grill and peeked at the kebabs. "It's not his race, because I got real good friends and all that," Cox continued. "If anything would keep him from getting elected, it would be his name. It might turn off some older people."
Like him?
"No, older than me," said Cox, 66.
Ewing kept talking, until finally Cox said, "Probably Obama," when asked directly how he would vote.
As she walked away, Ewing said: "I think we got him."
But truthfully, she wasn't feeling so sure.
Staff writer Peter Slevin and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24588813/
By Kevin Merida
The Washington Post
updated 3:04 a.m. ET, Tues., May. 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.
Here's the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.
"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."
For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.
Meeting cruel reaction
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"
Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."
Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive.
The campaign released this statement in response to questions about encounters with racism: "After campaigning for 15 months in nearly all 50 states, Barack Obama and our entire campaign have been nothing but impressed and encouraged by the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life. The last year has only reinforced Senator Obama's view that this country is not as divided as our politics suggest."
Campaign field work can be an exercise in confronting the fears, anxieties and prejudices of voters. Veterans of the civil rights movement know what this feels like, as do those who have been involved in battles over busing, immigration or abortion. But through the Obama campaign, some young people are having their first experience joining a cause and meeting cruel reaction.
On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.
Frederick Murrell, a black Kokomo High School senior, was not there but heard what happened. He was more disappointed than surprised. During his own canvassing for Obama, Murrell said, he had "a lot of doors slammed" in his face. But taunting teenagers on a busy commercial strip in broad daylight? "I was very shocked at first," Murrell said. "Then again, I wasn't, because we have a lot of racism here."
Vandalism, bomb threats
The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: "Hamas votes BHO" and "We don't cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright."
Ray McCormick was notified of the incident at about 2:45 a.m. A farmer and conservationist, McCormick had erected a giant billboard on a major highway on behalf of Farmers for Obama. He also was housing the Obama campaign worker manning the office. When McCormick arrived at the office, about two hours before he was due out of bed to plant corn, he grabbed his camera and wanted to alert the media. "I thought, this is a big deal." But he was told Obama campaign officials didn't want to make a big deal of the incident. McCormick took photos anyway and distributed some.
"The pictures represent what we are breaking through and overcoming," he said. As McCormick, who is white, sees it, Obama is succeeding despite these incidents. Later, there would be bomb threats to three Obama campaign offices in Indiana, including the one in Vincennes, according to campaign sources.
Obama has not spoken much about racism during this campaign. He has sought to emphasize connections among Americans rather than divisions. He shrugged off safety concerns that led to early Secret Service protection and has told black senior citizens who worry that racists will do him harm: Don't fret. Earlier in the campaign, a 68-year-old woman in Carson City, Nev., voiced concern that the country was not ready to elect an African American president.
"Will there be some folks who probably won't vote for me because I am black? Of course," Obama said, "just like there may be somebody who won't vote for Hillary because she's a woman or wouldn't vote for John Edwards because they don't like his accent. But the question is, 'Can we get a majority of the American people to give us a fair hearing?' "
Skilled at bridging divides
Obama has won 30 of 50 Democratic contests so far, the kind of nationwide electoral triumph no black candidate has ever realized. That he is on the brink of capturing the Democratic nomination, some say, is a testament to how far the country has progressed in overcoming racism and evidence of Obama's skill at bridging divides.
Obama has won five of 12 primaries in which black voters made up less than 10 percent of the electorate, and caucuses in states such as Idaho and Wyoming that are overwhelmingly white. But exit polls show he has struggled to attract white voters who didn't attend college and earn less than $50,000 a year. Today, he and Hillary Clinton square off in West Virginia, a state where she is favored and where the votes of working-class whites will again be closely watched.
For the most part, Obama campaign workers say, the 2008 election cycle has been exhilarating. On the ground, the Obama campaign is being driven by youngsters, many of whom are imbued with an optimism undeterred by racial intolerance. "We've grown up in a different world," says Danielle Ross. Field offices are staffed by 20-somethings who hold positions -- state director, regional field director, field organizer -- that are typically off limits to newcomers to presidential politics.
Gillian Bergeron, 23, was in charge of a five-county regional operation in northeastern Pennsylvania. The oldest member of her team was 27. At Scranton's annual Saint Patrick's Day parade, some of the green Obama signs distributed by staffers were burned along the parade route. That was the first signal that this wasn't exactly Obama country. There would be others.
In a letter to the editor published in a local paper, Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball explained his support of Hillary Clinton this way: "Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don't know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can't convince me that some of that didn't rub off on him.
"No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office."
Obama's campaign workers have grown wearily accustomed to the lies about the candidate's supposed radical Muslim ties and lack of patriotism. But they are sometimes astonished when public officials such as Ball or others representing the campaign of their opponent traffic in these falsehoods.
Karen Seifert, a volunteer from New York, was outside of the largest polling location in Lackawanna County, Pa., on primary day when she was pressed by a Clinton volunteer to explain her backing of Obama. "I trust him," Seifert replied. According to Seifert, the woman pointed to Obama's face on Seifert's T-shirt and said: "He's a half-breed and he's a Muslim. How can you trust that?"
Racial attitudes difficult to measure
Pollsters have found it difficult to accurately measure racial attitudes, as some voters are unwilling to acknowledge the role that race plays in their thinking. But some are not. Susan Dzimian, a Clinton supporter who owns residential properties, said outside a polling location in Kokomo that race was a factor in how she viewed Obama. "I think if it was somebody other than him, I'd accept it," she said of a black candidate. "If Colin Powell had run, I would be willing to accept him."
The previous evening, Dondra Ewing was driving the neighborhoods of Kokomo, looking to turn around voters like Dzimian. Ewing, 47, is a chain-smoking middle school guidance counselor, a black single mother of two and one of the most fiercely vigilant Obama volunteers in Kokomo, which was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. On July 4, 1923, Kokomo hosted the largest Klan gathering in history -- an estimated 200,000 followers flocked to a local park. But these are not the 1920s, and Ewing believes she can persuade anybody to back Obama. Her mother, after all, was the first African American elected at-large to the school board in a community that is 10 percent black.
Kokomo, population 46,000, is another hard-hit Midwestern industrial town stung by layoffs. Longtimers wistfully remember the glory years of Continental Steel and speak mournfully about the jobs shipped overseas. Kokomo Sanitary Pottery, which made bathroom sinks and toilets, shut down a couple of months ago and took with it 150 jobs.
Aaron Roe, 23, was mowing lawns at a local cemetery recently, lamenting his $8-an-hour job with no benefits. He had earned a community college degree as an industrial electrician, but learned there was no electrical work to be found for someone with his experience, which is to say none. Politics wasn't on his mind; frustration was. If he were to vote, it would not be for Obama, he said. "I just got a funny feeling about him," Roe said, a feeling he couldn't specify, except to say race wasn't a part of it. "Race ain't nothing," said Roe, who is white. "It's how they're going to help the country."
People with funny feelings
The Aaron Roes are exactly who Dondra Ewing was after: people with funny feelings.
At the Bradford Run Apartments, she found Robert Cox, a retiree who spent 30 years working for an electronics manufacturer making computer chips. He was in his suspenders, grilling shish kebab, which he had never eaten. "Something new," Cox said, recommended by his son who was visiting from Colorado.
Ewing was selling him hard on Obama. "There are more than two families that can run the United States of America," she said, "and their names aren't Bush and Clinton."
"Yeah, I know, I know," Cox said, remaining noncommittal.
He opened the grill and peeked at the kebabs. "It's not his race, because I got real good friends and all that," Cox continued. "If anything would keep him from getting elected, it would be his name. It might turn off some older people."
Like him?
"No, older than me," said Cox, 66.
Ewing kept talking, until finally Cox said, "Probably Obama," when asked directly how he would vote.
As she walked away, Ewing said: "I think we got him."
But truthfully, she wasn't feeling so sure.
Staff writer Peter Slevin and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24588813/
Monday, May 12, 2008
Deadly mob beating in Cleveland neighborhood
This story is absolutely heartbreaking. Black people are in one hell of a condition. We got cops killing Blacks, we got whites killing Blacks and we got niggers killing Blacks. A fellow Muslim brother and former Captain of the mosque once said that if the gangs won't stop the killing, then we have to start killing the gangs. It's bad enough that we have lawlessness from the police, but it's even worse when we have to suffer that same killing and lawlessness from our own people. It's time to start cleaning our house, our community and give our children a future. Something like the beating death of this man must be punished and should never happen again. It's time we give the gangs a final ultimatum: either stop the killing or we kill you and we have to back that up. We already see that we cannot rely on the white man to do that because they will not make the distinction as to who among us is law abiding and who is a law breaking criminal. In the minds of these caucasian devils, any ole nigger will do!
Deadly mob beating unnerves Cleveland neighborhood
By THOMAS J. SHEERAN,
Associated Press Writer 38 minutes ago
Even by tough, urban-crime standards it was a grisly attack: Up to 15 people chased a man, then kicked and beat him to death on the street. Before police arrived, one attacker urinated on the victim's head.
When the crime-hardened neighborhood awoke later that morning, two people reported a man lying on the pavement, his clothes being dragged off by his assailants.
"You got a male being assaulted by 15 other guys. He's laying on the street," one 911 caller said.
The April 27 attack on Charles Gooden Jr. happened in the most murder-ridden neighborhood in one of the nation's poorest cities. But it was also within a 10-minute drive of the city's skyscrapers, sports venues and tourist attractions.
Three suspects have been charged with aggravated murder. Police have not mentioned a motive, but they expect more arrests.
It wasn't always dangerous along East 117th Street, where the tulips bloom late because of the cool winds blowing off Lake Erie just a mile to the north.
"It used to be so quiet, and we were so blessed to live on 117th Street," said Irene Bennett, 78, who has lived there for 40 years. She is so used to gunfire and loud outbursts at night that she slept through the commotion of Gooden's slaying.
In retirement, she and her husband had hoped to enjoy simple pleasures: watching people pass by and planting flowers around their neatly kept home. But the violence in the neighborhood makes that impossible.
"You pay for your home. You work hard. You retire, and you want to enjoy, just come out on your porch and ... wait for the summertime to come," she said, shaking her head.
The attackers sent word that anyone helping police could face retribution, according to City Councilman Kevin Conwell. He described the assailants as gang members.
Conwell said the motive was based on an argument involving a woman and a threat by her cousin against Gooden, 41.
"He went to defend his malehood honor. He hit the cousin in the mouth. When that happened, the other gang members jumped on him," said Conwell, relying on information from police and neighbors.
Charged in the slaying were Latangia Anderson, 23, Johnny Brown, 20, and Paris Moore, 19, all of Cleveland. They were each jailed on $1 million bond.
None of the three defendants was able to afford an attorney. The lawyers appointed to represent them all said they could not comment on the case.
After the attack, a memorial of stuffed animals took shape outside the Bennett house because the slaying scene doesn't have a tree to anchor the display.
The display has dwindled but still has a stuffed dog with the label "Puppy love" and another with Gooden's nickname, Bud, written on it, according to Bennett, who knew Gooden when he was a youngster visiting an uncle down the street.
The uncle's house is now boarded up, along with many other neighborhood homes left dilapidated by poverty and drugs. There are a few newly renovated homes and two newer ones, one with barred windows. But in the once-lively commercial district around the corner, most stores are closed, except for a few barbershops or storefront churches.
The neighborhood is Cleveland's murder capital, according to police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho, and outsiders driving the streets risk getting pegged as people looking to buy crack cocaine.
Still, Gooden's death unnerved people here, including the 911 callers.
"They're stomping somebody and ripping their clothes off. You need to come," another caller said. "Like 15 of them beating the hell out of him."
The emergency dispatcher asked if an ambulance should be sent. "You better bring a stretcher, too," the caller replied. "Please hurry."
___
Associated Press writer M.R. Kropko contributed to this story.
Deadly mob beating unnerves Cleveland neighborhood
By THOMAS J. SHEERAN,
Associated Press Writer 38 minutes ago
Even by tough, urban-crime standards it was a grisly attack: Up to 15 people chased a man, then kicked and beat him to death on the street. Before police arrived, one attacker urinated on the victim's head.
When the crime-hardened neighborhood awoke later that morning, two people reported a man lying on the pavement, his clothes being dragged off by his assailants.
"You got a male being assaulted by 15 other guys. He's laying on the street," one 911 caller said.
The April 27 attack on Charles Gooden Jr. happened in the most murder-ridden neighborhood in one of the nation's poorest cities. But it was also within a 10-minute drive of the city's skyscrapers, sports venues and tourist attractions.
Three suspects have been charged with aggravated murder. Police have not mentioned a motive, but they expect more arrests.
It wasn't always dangerous along East 117th Street, where the tulips bloom late because of the cool winds blowing off Lake Erie just a mile to the north.
"It used to be so quiet, and we were so blessed to live on 117th Street," said Irene Bennett, 78, who has lived there for 40 years. She is so used to gunfire and loud outbursts at night that she slept through the commotion of Gooden's slaying.
In retirement, she and her husband had hoped to enjoy simple pleasures: watching people pass by and planting flowers around their neatly kept home. But the violence in the neighborhood makes that impossible.
"You pay for your home. You work hard. You retire, and you want to enjoy, just come out on your porch and ... wait for the summertime to come," she said, shaking her head.
The attackers sent word that anyone helping police could face retribution, according to City Councilman Kevin Conwell. He described the assailants as gang members.
Conwell said the motive was based on an argument involving a woman and a threat by her cousin against Gooden, 41.
"He went to defend his malehood honor. He hit the cousin in the mouth. When that happened, the other gang members jumped on him," said Conwell, relying on information from police and neighbors.
Charged in the slaying were Latangia Anderson, 23, Johnny Brown, 20, and Paris Moore, 19, all of Cleveland. They were each jailed on $1 million bond.
None of the three defendants was able to afford an attorney. The lawyers appointed to represent them all said they could not comment on the case.
After the attack, a memorial of stuffed animals took shape outside the Bennett house because the slaying scene doesn't have a tree to anchor the display.
The display has dwindled but still has a stuffed dog with the label "Puppy love" and another with Gooden's nickname, Bud, written on it, according to Bennett, who knew Gooden when he was a youngster visiting an uncle down the street.
The uncle's house is now boarded up, along with many other neighborhood homes left dilapidated by poverty and drugs. There are a few newly renovated homes and two newer ones, one with barred windows. But in the once-lively commercial district around the corner, most stores are closed, except for a few barbershops or storefront churches.
The neighborhood is Cleveland's murder capital, according to police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho, and outsiders driving the streets risk getting pegged as people looking to buy crack cocaine.
Still, Gooden's death unnerved people here, including the 911 callers.
"They're stomping somebody and ripping their clothes off. You need to come," another caller said. "Like 15 of them beating the hell out of him."
The emergency dispatcher asked if an ambulance should be sent. "You better bring a stretcher, too," the caller replied. "Please hurry."
___
Associated Press writer M.R. Kropko contributed to this story.
Sean Bell's Second Slaying
[col. writ. 4/25/08]
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
It was a classic 'Only in America' moment.
The bench trial of three killer cops in New York City, charged with firing some 50 shots into a car, killing one man, Sean Bell, and wounding two others (all unarmed).
The case rushed across America, spreading outrage in each city.
Initially, the cops moved to have the trial transferred to a site upstate, to the rural, northern tiers. This motion denied, they opted for a bench trial (or trial by a single judge), not trusting their fates to a so-called jury of"citizens" they are sworn to serve and protect.
Time, it seems, has proven that they made the right decision -- for, predictably, the judge acquitted them of all charges, arguing that the witnesses gave conflicting testimony.
By so doing, the court essentially ruled that Bell's killing was justified; no crime was committed.
The defense utilized the "bad company" argument: that Bell was shot and killed because he was among "the wrong crowd."
That such an argument swayed Supreme Court justice Arthur Cooperman (in New York state, unlike most other states, the trial court is termed the Supreme Court, and the state's highest court is their Court of Appeals.) is a measure of how devalued Black life is, and how easy Black men are to demonize and disparage.
If none of the cops knew the men, what does it matter what their backgrounds were? They could've been lawyers, basketball stars, or -- cops.
That they were Black men -- even unarmed Black men -- was deemed sufficient to unload on them, because in America, their color was crime enough.
So, 22 year old Sean Bell joins Amadou Diallo, and others guilty of the capital offense of WWB- Walking While Black.
And while millions of Black and white Americans thrill at political illusions of "post-racialism", Sean Bell's case proves how deeply deadly race can still be.
Even rumors of a weapon were enough to unleash 50 shots -- or should we say "alleged rumors", for there were no guns found in Bell's car. In the past, wallets, candy bars, keys, and packs of cigarettes were deemed sufficient to provoke such malicious responses.
Now, nothing is required.
Sean Bell was shot to death, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benerfield were seriously wounded.
Shot and killed for being 'the wrong crowd.'
--(c) '08 maj
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
It was a classic 'Only in America' moment.
The bench trial of three killer cops in New York City, charged with firing some 50 shots into a car, killing one man, Sean Bell, and wounding two others (all unarmed).
The case rushed across America, spreading outrage in each city.
Initially, the cops moved to have the trial transferred to a site upstate, to the rural, northern tiers. This motion denied, they opted for a bench trial (or trial by a single judge), not trusting their fates to a so-called jury of"citizens" they are sworn to serve and protect.
Time, it seems, has proven that they made the right decision -- for, predictably, the judge acquitted them of all charges, arguing that the witnesses gave conflicting testimony.
By so doing, the court essentially ruled that Bell's killing was justified; no crime was committed.
The defense utilized the "bad company" argument: that Bell was shot and killed because he was among "the wrong crowd."
That such an argument swayed Supreme Court justice Arthur Cooperman (in New York state, unlike most other states, the trial court is termed the Supreme Court, and the state's highest court is their Court of Appeals.) is a measure of how devalued Black life is, and how easy Black men are to demonize and disparage.
If none of the cops knew the men, what does it matter what their backgrounds were? They could've been lawyers, basketball stars, or -- cops.
That they were Black men -- even unarmed Black men -- was deemed sufficient to unload on them, because in America, their color was crime enough.
So, 22 year old Sean Bell joins Amadou Diallo, and others guilty of the capital offense of WWB- Walking While Black.
And while millions of Black and white Americans thrill at political illusions of "post-racialism", Sean Bell's case proves how deeply deadly race can still be.
Even rumors of a weapon were enough to unleash 50 shots -- or should we say "alleged rumors", for there were no guns found in Bell's car. In the past, wallets, candy bars, keys, and packs of cigarettes were deemed sufficient to provoke such malicious responses.
Now, nothing is required.
Sean Bell was shot to death, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benerfield were seriously wounded.
Shot and killed for being 'the wrong crowd.'
--(c) '08 maj
Running to the Right: Barack Obama and the DLC Strategy
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
Presidential Politics 2008 - Obama
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
The fragility of Barack Obama's DLC-inspired electoral strategy is now exposed for all to see. Obama has chosen to “reach out” to white and Republican voters while challenging none of their assumptions about America, racism or empire, at the same time, counting on on a deaf and blind black nationalism to shield him from accountability to African Americans. Republicans (and Hillary Clinton) know all they need do to counter him is prove to whites that he is not as conservative as he seems. Obama will thus be forced scramble relentlessly rightward from here on, disowning, denouncing and dishonoring any and all stirrings of black or grassroots militancy to keep white support without telling white America anything it doesn't want to know.
Back in 2003, when Obama was a candidate for the US Senate in the Illinois Democratic primary this reporter and Glen Ford challenged him on the fact of his affiliation with the Democratic Leadership Council. The right-wing, corporate-funded Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party had fervently embraced his political career, naming him one of its “100 to Watch” for 2003.
DLC endorsement is the gold standard of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma, insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement, Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat since Michale Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama's campaign has adopted the classic right wing DLC strategy.
In the DLC playbook, the road to winning elections is appealing to Republican-leaning white voters – demographic groups which pollsters and consultants in previous elections called “suburban soccer moms”, NASCAR dads,” and before that “Reagan Democrats.” Candidates do this by decrying excessive partisanship, embracing “free trade” and “conservative” values, and displays of public piety, Though Obama has no formal ties with the DLC he has assiduously followed this prescription. Till a month ago Obama led every candidate among white men, an unprecedented achievement for a Democrat.
But after less than a month of sustained and often racist attacks from the likes of Fox News, CNN, Republican pundits and Hillary Clinton supporters, Obama's support among Republican-leaning white voters has sharply eroded. Dr. Adolph Reed, a black professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania explained why an April 30 Democracy Now interview,
“...Obama opened himself to this by leaning to—on the premise that he can appeal to Republicans and to conservatives and by parading his personal faith around. And frankly—this is, I guess, the crux of my argument in The Progressive column—that this is precisely the tactic that has been the undoing of every Democratic candidate since Dukakis, and I would frankly even include (Bill) Clinton in that, were it not for the fact that Ross Perot siphoned votes away from the Republicans each time. I mean, this is what happened with Gore in 2000, it’s what happened with Kerry in 2004. You present yourself as electable because you can appeal to conservative voters, and then the Republicans attack you for not being a true conservative and can characterize you as someone who’s trying to put something over on the American people.
It worked for a while. Barack Obama followed the DLC script to the letter for the last two years, publicly scolding Democrats for their insufficient piety, liberally borrowing from Republican talking points. He advertised himself as grounded by his personal relationship with Jesus, and by the faith tradition of the Black Church. But after Obama's Philadelphia speech on race, in which he characterized his pastor as a crazy old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties, the Black Church was compelled to speak for itself. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retiring pastor at Trinity UCC made a series of speeches and appearances in which he likened US Marines to Roman soldiers, described hundreds of US bases around the world as “empire” before the National Press Club, and refused to retreat from the contention that 9-11 was a preventable consequence of US foreign policy.
To preserve his support among whites which Obama won without challenging any of their fundamental beliefs about America, empire, Obama was forced to denounce his pastor's words as “akin to hate speech” and disavow his church, and with it the prophetic tradition of Christianity and the Black Church in particular. But this, and joining a prosperity-Gospel mega-church will not be enough. From this point on, all Republicans have to do is prove to their base that Obama is not as conservative as he once appeared, which they will do by pointing to his pastor and the prophetic tradition of the Black Church in general. They can, in fact, point to any stirrings of black or grassroots outrage or militancy anywhere, which Obama will want to ignore anyway, and demand a ringing denunciation from Barack Obama. When Obama gets his way, he will be silent, sticking to content-free appeals to “unity”. And when Republicans prevail they will force him to denounce at every turn the grassroots activists he should be supporting.
By contrast, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson won white support too, but embraced the burden of challenging white American assumptions about the essential goodness of America, about empire, and race and class. If you were organizing against police brutality or farm foreclosures, organizing a union or protesting the illegal war in Central America, the campaign in many cases came to you and augmented your local efforts. The Obama must campaign avoid this kind of activism like Dracula avoids crosses, because its candidate's appeal is based on challenging none of the fake history, none of the racism, injustice and unearned privilege at the heart of American life.
The Jackson campaign, at least, was honest about the obstacles to a real politics of transformation in America.
For the 21st century's first black presidential candidate, “change” is to be accomplished through a content-free sort of “unity”. Again, Dr. Reed helps us understand what is happening.
”...the contention that the candidate can bring us all together despite our partisan differences is the same thing that the Democrats have been claiming consistently since at least, you know, Dukakis, to be post-partisan, to be post-political. And frankly, I think it appeals—it’s an appeal that gets greatest traction among people who want to take politics out of politics...”
Taking the politics out of politics, and out of black politics in particular is what Barack Obama must do to carry out his DLC strategy and retain his white base without teaching them anything they don't want to know. When the NYC police officers who pumped 51 bullets into an unarmed man and a hail of bullets into adjacent homes and a transit station were exonerated, Barack Obama could not bring himself to suggest that black life ought to be respected, that police officers should obey the law, that an Obama Justice Department would look carefully at this kind of thing, or even to feign concern for the victims and their families. His only comments where that we were “a nation of laws” and that we should “respect the verdict”. When 25,000 longshoremen on the US West Coast staged a one-day strike on May 1 against the war in Iraq, the Obama campaign said nothing about the power of people standing together to “bring change”. When US warplanes, which fire missiles and drop bombs almost daily over oil-rich Somalia killed 15 civilians last week, Obama was silent, despite having traveled in the region as recently as last year.
When he does speak, it won't be good news. Republicans are sure tol escalate their demands, insisting that Barack Obama denounce a list of black and progressive organizations, activities, beliefs and individuals to retain his share of their base. And as long as Obama is wedded to the DLC strategy, he will eagerly comply.
If there was an actual mass-based progressive movement in the US, operating on the ground and independent of political parties and campaigns, it might have a prayer of holding Barack Obama accountable. But there isn't.
Bruce Dixon is Managing Editor at Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com
Presidential Politics 2008 - Obama
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
The fragility of Barack Obama's DLC-inspired electoral strategy is now exposed for all to see. Obama has chosen to “reach out” to white and Republican voters while challenging none of their assumptions about America, racism or empire, at the same time, counting on on a deaf and blind black nationalism to shield him from accountability to African Americans. Republicans (and Hillary Clinton) know all they need do to counter him is prove to whites that he is not as conservative as he seems. Obama will thus be forced scramble relentlessly rightward from here on, disowning, denouncing and dishonoring any and all stirrings of black or grassroots militancy to keep white support without telling white America anything it doesn't want to know.
Back in 2003, when Obama was a candidate for the US Senate in the Illinois Democratic primary this reporter and Glen Ford challenged him on the fact of his affiliation with the Democratic Leadership Council. The right-wing, corporate-funded Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party had fervently embraced his political career, naming him one of its “100 to Watch” for 2003.
DLC endorsement is the gold standard of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma, insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement, Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat since Michale Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama's campaign has adopted the classic right wing DLC strategy.
In the DLC playbook, the road to winning elections is appealing to Republican-leaning white voters – demographic groups which pollsters and consultants in previous elections called “suburban soccer moms”, NASCAR dads,” and before that “Reagan Democrats.” Candidates do this by decrying excessive partisanship, embracing “free trade” and “conservative” values, and displays of public piety, Though Obama has no formal ties with the DLC he has assiduously followed this prescription. Till a month ago Obama led every candidate among white men, an unprecedented achievement for a Democrat.
But after less than a month of sustained and often racist attacks from the likes of Fox News, CNN, Republican pundits and Hillary Clinton supporters, Obama's support among Republican-leaning white voters has sharply eroded. Dr. Adolph Reed, a black professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania explained why an April 30 Democracy Now interview,
“...Obama opened himself to this by leaning to—on the premise that he can appeal to Republicans and to conservatives and by parading his personal faith around. And frankly—this is, I guess, the crux of my argument in The Progressive column—that this is precisely the tactic that has been the undoing of every Democratic candidate since Dukakis, and I would frankly even include (Bill) Clinton in that, were it not for the fact that Ross Perot siphoned votes away from the Republicans each time. I mean, this is what happened with Gore in 2000, it’s what happened with Kerry in 2004. You present yourself as electable because you can appeal to conservative voters, and then the Republicans attack you for not being a true conservative and can characterize you as someone who’s trying to put something over on the American people.
It worked for a while. Barack Obama followed the DLC script to the letter for the last two years, publicly scolding Democrats for their insufficient piety, liberally borrowing from Republican talking points. He advertised himself as grounded by his personal relationship with Jesus, and by the faith tradition of the Black Church. But after Obama's Philadelphia speech on race, in which he characterized his pastor as a crazy old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties, the Black Church was compelled to speak for itself. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retiring pastor at Trinity UCC made a series of speeches and appearances in which he likened US Marines to Roman soldiers, described hundreds of US bases around the world as “empire” before the National Press Club, and refused to retreat from the contention that 9-11 was a preventable consequence of US foreign policy.
To preserve his support among whites which Obama won without challenging any of their fundamental beliefs about America, empire, Obama was forced to denounce his pastor's words as “akin to hate speech” and disavow his church, and with it the prophetic tradition of Christianity and the Black Church in particular. But this, and joining a prosperity-Gospel mega-church will not be enough. From this point on, all Republicans have to do is prove to their base that Obama is not as conservative as he once appeared, which they will do by pointing to his pastor and the prophetic tradition of the Black Church in general. They can, in fact, point to any stirrings of black or grassroots outrage or militancy anywhere, which Obama will want to ignore anyway, and demand a ringing denunciation from Barack Obama. When Obama gets his way, he will be silent, sticking to content-free appeals to “unity”. And when Republicans prevail they will force him to denounce at every turn the grassroots activists he should be supporting.
By contrast, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson won white support too, but embraced the burden of challenging white American assumptions about the essential goodness of America, about empire, and race and class. If you were organizing against police brutality or farm foreclosures, organizing a union or protesting the illegal war in Central America, the campaign in many cases came to you and augmented your local efforts. The Obama must campaign avoid this kind of activism like Dracula avoids crosses, because its candidate's appeal is based on challenging none of the fake history, none of the racism, injustice and unearned privilege at the heart of American life.
The Jackson campaign, at least, was honest about the obstacles to a real politics of transformation in America.
For the 21st century's first black presidential candidate, “change” is to be accomplished through a content-free sort of “unity”. Again, Dr. Reed helps us understand what is happening.
”...the contention that the candidate can bring us all together despite our partisan differences is the same thing that the Democrats have been claiming consistently since at least, you know, Dukakis, to be post-partisan, to be post-political. And frankly, I think it appeals—it’s an appeal that gets greatest traction among people who want to take politics out of politics...”
Taking the politics out of politics, and out of black politics in particular is what Barack Obama must do to carry out his DLC strategy and retain his white base without teaching them anything they don't want to know. When the NYC police officers who pumped 51 bullets into an unarmed man and a hail of bullets into adjacent homes and a transit station were exonerated, Barack Obama could not bring himself to suggest that black life ought to be respected, that police officers should obey the law, that an Obama Justice Department would look carefully at this kind of thing, or even to feign concern for the victims and their families. His only comments where that we were “a nation of laws” and that we should “respect the verdict”. When 25,000 longshoremen on the US West Coast staged a one-day strike on May 1 against the war in Iraq, the Obama campaign said nothing about the power of people standing together to “bring change”. When US warplanes, which fire missiles and drop bombs almost daily over oil-rich Somalia killed 15 civilians last week, Obama was silent, despite having traveled in the region as recently as last year.
When he does speak, it won't be good news. Republicans are sure tol escalate their demands, insisting that Barack Obama denounce a list of black and progressive organizations, activities, beliefs and individuals to retain his share of their base. And as long as Obama is wedded to the DLC strategy, he will eagerly comply.
If there was an actual mass-based progressive movement in the US, operating on the ground and independent of political parties and campaigns, it might have a prayer of holding Barack Obama accountable. But there isn't.
Bruce Dixon is Managing Editor at Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com
Friday, May 09, 2008
!*"Who's Uncle is Really Crazy?" by Mumia Abu-Jamal
col. writ. 5/1/08
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
When conservative hit-shows first began raising questions about Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, the Democratic candidate essentially played down the relationship, suggesting that Wright was like the 'crazy uncle' common to many families.
Due to the pressure of the 24 hour news cycle, we have come a long way from there, to here.
While Sen. Obama no longer refers to him in this way, it's more than worthwhile to examine just what the Rev. Wright did say, which set off the belfry of mad bats who hold forth from the dark universe of right wing radio and TV commentators.
Among the Rev. Wright's "controversial" comments were these:
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens have come home to roost...Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant...An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised..."
Rev. Wright's words on how America has treated her darker citizens were also termed "controversial." These are some of them:
"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, and put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America-that's in the Bible - for killing innocent people."
On the role of the U.S. government overseas, Wright preached the following:
"Governments lie. The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment...The government lied about bombing Cambodia...The government lied about the drugs for arms Contra scheme orchestrated by Oliver North...The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9-11-01 and operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie."
I don't know about you, but I've not heard one statement that isn't categorically, historically, and absolutely true. As my good country buddy, Bro. Willie might ask, "What the problem is?"
Obama's response, served up to placate the fascistic right, sounded like an apology: "I reject outright statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue."
The problem isn't that Rev. Wright was crazy, but that he spoke the cold, sober truth. That's the problem.
The US nationalists demand that anyone who states such truths be 'denounced.'
When will a candidate emerge who will denounce imperialism, and the endless ruinous wars against much of the Third World, for the profit of corporations here?
If this election is any measure, no time soon.
Who's uncle is really crazy? Uncle Jeremiah or Uncle Sam?
--(c) '08 maj
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
When conservative hit-shows first began raising questions about Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, the Democratic candidate essentially played down the relationship, suggesting that Wright was like the 'crazy uncle' common to many families.
Due to the pressure of the 24 hour news cycle, we have come a long way from there, to here.
While Sen. Obama no longer refers to him in this way, it's more than worthwhile to examine just what the Rev. Wright did say, which set off the belfry of mad bats who hold forth from the dark universe of right wing radio and TV commentators.
Among the Rev. Wright's "controversial" comments were these:
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens have come home to roost...Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant...An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised..."
Rev. Wright's words on how America has treated her darker citizens were also termed "controversial." These are some of them:
"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, and put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America-that's in the Bible - for killing innocent people."
On the role of the U.S. government overseas, Wright preached the following:
"Governments lie. The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment...The government lied about bombing Cambodia...The government lied about the drugs for arms Contra scheme orchestrated by Oliver North...The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9-11-01 and operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie."
I don't know about you, but I've not heard one statement that isn't categorically, historically, and absolutely true. As my good country buddy, Bro. Willie might ask, "What the problem is?"
Obama's response, served up to placate the fascistic right, sounded like an apology: "I reject outright statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue."
The problem isn't that Rev. Wright was crazy, but that he spoke the cold, sober truth. That's the problem.
The US nationalists demand that anyone who states such truths be 'denounced.'
When will a candidate emerge who will denounce imperialism, and the endless ruinous wars against much of the Third World, for the profit of corporations here?
If this election is any measure, no time soon.
Who's uncle is really crazy? Uncle Jeremiah or Uncle Sam?
--(c) '08 maj
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Extreme Prosecution: In Search of Black Enemies
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The United States has always shaped its criminal justice practices to suit and satisfy the imperative to smash African American resistance. When no organized resistance can be found, the system invents it. The Bush administration has outdone the post-Civil War Black Codes, which treated all gatherings of three or more African Americans as potential "conspiracies." To justify police state structures erected in the wake of 9/11, the feds entrapped and twice unsuccessfully prosecuted seven impoverished Miami Blacks on charges of plotting to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower - and are now preparing for a third trial. In San Francisco, local and federal authorities press forward with murder charges against eight former Black Panthers, 37years after the shooting death of a policeman. The dragnet for Black villains never ends.
The rulers of the United States require Black villains - menaces to society - in order to maintain the legitimacy of their governance. If such villains do not exist, the U.S. government's organs of coercion will entrap the unwary into playing the role of public enemy. In the event that actual, serious resistance to the racist rule of the rich does arise, as with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, beginning in the late Sixties, the U.S. government does not hesitate to engage in murder and barbaric torture to reassert its authority.
The American criminal injustice system is running amuck on both coasts. In San Francisco, eight former members of the Black Panther Party face 37-year-old murder charges in the killing of a police officer. The defendants are now senior citizens. This is the government's second attempt to convict ex-Panthers in the 1971 shooting. Back in 1975, charges against three of the men were dismissed, because confessions were obtained by torture. But when it comes to the Black Panther Party, the U.S. government never forgets. Someone must play the villain, even if the objects of official hatred are all hovering around 60 years of age. The FBI seems incapable of feeling shame, and so perpetuates the persecution of aging Black Panthers long after the organization's dissolution and in the absence of any conceivable threat to the prevailing order. That's because, like a shark that will drown if it doesn't keep constantly on the move through water, the government's machinery of repression is always in search of enemies in order to justify its existence.
Throughout U.S. history, African American males have been the enemies-of-choice. Whether it's lynching parties or federal "counter intelligence" programs, the hunt is always on for...somebody, usually somebody Black. The Bush regime needed to find and punish Americans who were conspiring with Al Qaida to attack targets in the United States, in order to justify the police state under construction since 9/11. Inconveniently, no such Americans existed, so the federal police decided they'd organize the conspiracy, themselves. The feds hired Arab con men to wave wads of cash in the faces of impoverished Black men in the Liberty City ghetto of Miami. Some of the men were homeless, they had only one pistol between them, and no explosives of any kind, but the FBI claimed the Liberty City 7 were intent on blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago. After all, some of the men had sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden, in a ceremony concocted by the FBI and the Arab con man with the 50 thousand dollar bulge in his pocket.
Two trials ended in hung juries, but federal prosecutors are pit bulls when it comes to punishing Black villains - including Black villains of their own creation. After already having spent between five and eight million dollars on the Liberty City 7 case, the prosecution wants a third crack at sending the hapless Black men to prison forever. As with the San Francisco Eight, the U.S. political police have no sense of shame. They don't seem to understand that torture of the helpless, entrapment of the not-too-bright, and dogged pursuit of the elderly demeans the dignity of the state, making government power appear illegitimate. In the end, it is the prosecutors who are undermining the authority of the state.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Broadcasters desiring an MP3 copy of this commentary should visit our Black Agenda Radio archive page here.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The United States has always shaped its criminal justice practices to suit and satisfy the imperative to smash African American resistance. When no organized resistance can be found, the system invents it. The Bush administration has outdone the post-Civil War Black Codes, which treated all gatherings of three or more African Americans as potential "conspiracies." To justify police state structures erected in the wake of 9/11, the feds entrapped and twice unsuccessfully prosecuted seven impoverished Miami Blacks on charges of plotting to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower - and are now preparing for a third trial. In San Francisco, local and federal authorities press forward with murder charges against eight former Black Panthers, 37years after the shooting death of a policeman. The dragnet for Black villains never ends.
The rulers of the United States require Black villains - menaces to society - in order to maintain the legitimacy of their governance. If such villains do not exist, the U.S. government's organs of coercion will entrap the unwary into playing the role of public enemy. In the event that actual, serious resistance to the racist rule of the rich does arise, as with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, beginning in the late Sixties, the U.S. government does not hesitate to engage in murder and barbaric torture to reassert its authority.
The American criminal injustice system is running amuck on both coasts. In San Francisco, eight former members of the Black Panther Party face 37-year-old murder charges in the killing of a police officer. The defendants are now senior citizens. This is the government's second attempt to convict ex-Panthers in the 1971 shooting. Back in 1975, charges against three of the men were dismissed, because confessions were obtained by torture. But when it comes to the Black Panther Party, the U.S. government never forgets. Someone must play the villain, even if the objects of official hatred are all hovering around 60 years of age. The FBI seems incapable of feeling shame, and so perpetuates the persecution of aging Black Panthers long after the organization's dissolution and in the absence of any conceivable threat to the prevailing order. That's because, like a shark that will drown if it doesn't keep constantly on the move through water, the government's machinery of repression is always in search of enemies in order to justify its existence.
Throughout U.S. history, African American males have been the enemies-of-choice. Whether it's lynching parties or federal "counter intelligence" programs, the hunt is always on for...somebody, usually somebody Black. The Bush regime needed to find and punish Americans who were conspiring with Al Qaida to attack targets in the United States, in order to justify the police state under construction since 9/11. Inconveniently, no such Americans existed, so the federal police decided they'd organize the conspiracy, themselves. The feds hired Arab con men to wave wads of cash in the faces of impoverished Black men in the Liberty City ghetto of Miami. Some of the men were homeless, they had only one pistol between them, and no explosives of any kind, but the FBI claimed the Liberty City 7 were intent on blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago. After all, some of the men had sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden, in a ceremony concocted by the FBI and the Arab con man with the 50 thousand dollar bulge in his pocket.
Two trials ended in hung juries, but federal prosecutors are pit bulls when it comes to punishing Black villains - including Black villains of their own creation. After already having spent between five and eight million dollars on the Liberty City 7 case, the prosecution wants a third crack at sending the hapless Black men to prison forever. As with the San Francisco Eight, the U.S. political police have no sense of shame. They don't seem to understand that torture of the helpless, entrapment of the not-too-bright, and dogged pursuit of the elderly demeans the dignity of the state, making government power appear illegitimate. In the end, it is the prosecutors who are undermining the authority of the state.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Broadcasters desiring an MP3 copy of this commentary should visit our Black Agenda Radio archive page here.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Philly Cops Caught Beating Motorists on Video
Kurt NimmoInfowars
May 7, 2008
Yet another instance of cops acting like predatory pack animals. It should be obvious by now the police are out of control, a parasitical force unleashed on society at large. Cops no longer help granny across the street or respond to burglary. Cops are like the Crips, Bloods, or Mara Salvatrucha — another violent street gang, but one armed and supported by the state.
“A half-dozen police officers kicked and beat three men pulled from a car during a traffic stop as a TV helicopter taped the confrontation,” reports the Associated Press. ” The video, shot by WTXF-TV, shows three police cars stopping a car Monday, two days after a city officer was shot to death responding to a bank robbery.”
In other words, after a fellow gang member was shot and killed protecting a bank, the largest gang in Philadelphia wanted revenge and blood. Of course, that’s the real job of the cops — protect banks, not the public at large, considered the enemy.
“The tape shows about a dozen officers gathering around the vehicle. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton.”
“On the surface it certainly does not look good in terms of the amount of force that was used,” Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. “But we don’t want to rush to judgment.”
No, of course not, even though the video plainly shows there was absolutely no reason for members of the police gang to savagely beat the three hapless people pictured.
“The officers were responding to a report of a shooting nearby, police said. It was not immediately clear what preceded the confrontation.”
It does not matter “what preceded the confrontation,” as it is obvious the motorists were not a threat. Once upon a time, cops handcuffed and arrested people accused of crimes. Now they are beaten to a pulp.
“We don’t take into consideration the emotions of police officers when it comes to the discharge of their duties… Your emotional state, being tired, doesn’t justify what’s on that video,” said D.
Scott Perrine, an attorney who represents the three men seen in the video. “He said one of his clients suffered a welt on his head the size of a baseball and one of his legs was seriously injured; he didn’t know the extent of any injuries on the other two men.”
“It clearly shows a lack of any reasonable investigation before these police yank these individuals out of the car and take turns delivering blows,” he said. “This is a time for a thorough investigation to see what it is that happened here.”
Sort of like the “thorough investigation” of the cops who shot to death Sean Bell in New York. An unarmed Bell had fifty rounds pumped into him as he was leaving his bachelor party on his wedding day. Three detectives were acquitted of all charges in the case last month, thus sending a message – cops are above the law, they may shoot unarmed people with immunity.
“The defense painted the victims as drunken thugs who the officers believed were armed and dangerous. Prosecutors sought to convince the judge that the victims had been minding their own business, and that the officers were inept, trigger-happy cowboys,” reported the Associated Press.
Fact is, the cops involved are not “cowboys,” they are violent gang members, as New York has the largest cop-gang in the country.
It will only get worse. Cops are now trained to consider citizens as the enemy and the feds are arming them like paramilitaries – or maybe that should be death squads. Iraqi veterans, driven insane by multiple tours, are now filling their ranks.
“Perrine said that police told him all three men would be charged with aggravated assault,” even though it is obvious by the video here that the men did not attack the police. Increasingly, that is the MO — victims of police violence are charged with assault and resisting arrest.
Note: a better quality version of the above video may be viewed here.
WATCH ALEX JONES’ ENDGAME ONLINE NOW in its entirety. View more High quality trailers at www.endgamethemovie.com
May 7, 2008
Yet another instance of cops acting like predatory pack animals. It should be obvious by now the police are out of control, a parasitical force unleashed on society at large. Cops no longer help granny across the street or respond to burglary. Cops are like the Crips, Bloods, or Mara Salvatrucha — another violent street gang, but one armed and supported by the state.
“A half-dozen police officers kicked and beat three men pulled from a car during a traffic stop as a TV helicopter taped the confrontation,” reports the Associated Press. ” The video, shot by WTXF-TV, shows three police cars stopping a car Monday, two days after a city officer was shot to death responding to a bank robbery.”
In other words, after a fellow gang member was shot and killed protecting a bank, the largest gang in Philadelphia wanted revenge and blood. Of course, that’s the real job of the cops — protect banks, not the public at large, considered the enemy.
“The tape shows about a dozen officers gathering around the vehicle. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton.”
“On the surface it certainly does not look good in terms of the amount of force that was used,” Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. “But we don’t want to rush to judgment.”
No, of course not, even though the video plainly shows there was absolutely no reason for members of the police gang to savagely beat the three hapless people pictured.
“The officers were responding to a report of a shooting nearby, police said. It was not immediately clear what preceded the confrontation.”
It does not matter “what preceded the confrontation,” as it is obvious the motorists were not a threat. Once upon a time, cops handcuffed and arrested people accused of crimes. Now they are beaten to a pulp.
“We don’t take into consideration the emotions of police officers when it comes to the discharge of their duties… Your emotional state, being tired, doesn’t justify what’s on that video,” said D.
Scott Perrine, an attorney who represents the three men seen in the video. “He said one of his clients suffered a welt on his head the size of a baseball and one of his legs was seriously injured; he didn’t know the extent of any injuries on the other two men.”
“It clearly shows a lack of any reasonable investigation before these police yank these individuals out of the car and take turns delivering blows,” he said. “This is a time for a thorough investigation to see what it is that happened here.”
Sort of like the “thorough investigation” of the cops who shot to death Sean Bell in New York. An unarmed Bell had fifty rounds pumped into him as he was leaving his bachelor party on his wedding day. Three detectives were acquitted of all charges in the case last month, thus sending a message – cops are above the law, they may shoot unarmed people with immunity.
“The defense painted the victims as drunken thugs who the officers believed were armed and dangerous. Prosecutors sought to convince the judge that the victims had been minding their own business, and that the officers were inept, trigger-happy cowboys,” reported the Associated Press.
Fact is, the cops involved are not “cowboys,” they are violent gang members, as New York has the largest cop-gang in the country.
It will only get worse. Cops are now trained to consider citizens as the enemy and the feds are arming them like paramilitaries – or maybe that should be death squads. Iraqi veterans, driven insane by multiple tours, are now filling their ranks.
“Perrine said that police told him all three men would be charged with aggravated assault,” even though it is obvious by the video here that the men did not attack the police. Increasingly, that is the MO — victims of police violence are charged with assault and resisting arrest.
Note: a better quality version of the above video may be viewed here.
WATCH ALEX JONES’ ENDGAME ONLINE NOW in its entirety. View more High quality trailers at www.endgamethemovie.com
Police Brutality - This Time in Philly
Just hot off the despicable verdict in the Sean Bell murder case in New York, police in Philadelphia decided to celebrate their victory in the rigged court system by stomping three Black men. The video (which I will try to post in a few minutes) shows gangs of officers beating the three men. What's there to investigate. I read one news report where they said there was a confrontation with the police. WHAT??? I saw the vehicle pull over, then a gang of ravenous devil cops just snatched all three of them out the car and commenced the kicking, punching and baton wielding. There's nothing to investigate! But of course, they will find no wrongdoing by the police, while charging the suspects who did nothing with assault and any other charges they can add and make up. What will it take for Black people in this country to see? When will we stop killing one another and start killing our enemies. Whatever issues we have we better get over them quickly. No one can save us, but us.
Philly officers taken off street after videotaped beating
By PATRICK WALTERS, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 33 minutes ago
More than a dozen police officers will be taken off the street as authorities investigate a video showing three suspects being kicked, punched and beaten after they were pulled out of a car during a traffic stop, the mayor's office said.
"At a glance it does appear to be a bit beyond the pale," said Doug Oliver, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Nutter. "Officers are not allowed to operate outside of the law."
The police department believes about 15 officers were involved in Monday night's arrests in the city's Hunting Park section, where police had been investigating a triple shooting, Oliver said. Some have already been taken off the street, while others still need to be identified, he said.
The three suspects were charged with criminal conspiracy, aggravated assault, simple assault and reckless endangerment, according to court officials.
The video, shot by a WTXF-TV helicopter, shows three police cars stopping a car on the side of a road. About a dozen officers gather around the vehicle and pull three men out. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground on the driver's side. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton.
On the other side of the car, another group of officers can be seen kicking a third man who ends up on the ground.
Oliver said that, while the use of force appeared excessive, the public should withhold judgment until all the facts are known.
"We are not going to prejudge the situation based on the video," he said. "We all saw the video, but none of us was there."
Oliver initially said 15 officers had been taken off the street Wednesday. He later said about 15 officers were at the scene, but that the exact number identified and already off the street was unclear.
"One way or the other, everyone associated with this will be taken off the street," Oliver said. "The officers involved in this incident will be reassigned."
A message left with Lt. Frank Vanore, a police spokesman, was not immediately returned Wednesday morning.
The beating happened two days after the fatal shooting of a Philadelphia policeman, the third city officer slain on duty in two years.
Officer Stephen Liczbinski was shot with an assault rifle after a robbery in the city's Port Richmond section on Saturday. One man was fatally shot by police after the shooting, another was arrested Sunday and a third remains on the lam.
Philly officers taken off street after videotaped beating
By PATRICK WALTERS, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 33 minutes ago
More than a dozen police officers will be taken off the street as authorities investigate a video showing three suspects being kicked, punched and beaten after they were pulled out of a car during a traffic stop, the mayor's office said.
"At a glance it does appear to be a bit beyond the pale," said Doug Oliver, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Nutter. "Officers are not allowed to operate outside of the law."
The police department believes about 15 officers were involved in Monday night's arrests in the city's Hunting Park section, where police had been investigating a triple shooting, Oliver said. Some have already been taken off the street, while others still need to be identified, he said.
The three suspects were charged with criminal conspiracy, aggravated assault, simple assault and reckless endangerment, according to court officials.
The video, shot by a WTXF-TV helicopter, shows three police cars stopping a car on the side of a road. About a dozen officers gather around the vehicle and pull three men out. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground on the driver's side. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton.
On the other side of the car, another group of officers can be seen kicking a third man who ends up on the ground.
Oliver said that, while the use of force appeared excessive, the public should withhold judgment until all the facts are known.
"We are not going to prejudge the situation based on the video," he said. "We all saw the video, but none of us was there."
Oliver initially said 15 officers had been taken off the street Wednesday. He later said about 15 officers were at the scene, but that the exact number identified and already off the street was unclear.
"One way or the other, everyone associated with this will be taken off the street," Oliver said. "The officers involved in this incident will be reassigned."
A message left with Lt. Frank Vanore, a police spokesman, was not immediately returned Wednesday morning.
The beating happened two days after the fatal shooting of a Philadelphia policeman, the third city officer slain on duty in two years.
Officer Stephen Liczbinski was shot with an assault rifle after a robbery in the city's Port Richmond section on Saturday. One man was fatally shot by police after the shooting, another was arrested Sunday and a third remains on the lam.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The Great Depression of the 2010s
Darryl Robert Schoon
Gold Seek
May 5, 2008
Economics is not rocket science. Neither is power.
Depressions are monetary phenomena caused by central bank issuance of excessive credit. In 1913, the newly created US central bank, the Federal Reserve, began issuing credit-based money in the US. Within ten years, the central bank flow of credit ignited the 1920s US stock market bubble; and shortly thereafter, following the collapse of the bubble in 1929, the world entered its first Great Depression in 1933.
Investment banks are the undoing of central banking. While all banks, central, commercial and investment, view credit as the opportunity to exploit society’s growth and productivity, investment bank exploitation of growth and productivity exposes society to extreme risks—for investment banks use society’s savings to make their volatile and speculative bets.
The speculative risks undertaken by investment banks is done by leveraging the savings of society; and, when investment bank bets are sufficiently large enough and the bets go bad—as they inevitably do as the luck of investment bankers is due more to their proximity to credit than to their ability to foresee the future—it is society that will bear the brunt of the pain in the loss of its savings.
Inevitably, investment bankers cannot resist the temptations of excessive credit and, like the buyers of teaser-rate home mortgages, they will always overreach themselves—an overreaching that will have disastrous consequences for the society whose savings they bet.
The leveraged overreaching by investment banks in the 1920s caused the Great Depression of the 1930s and their more recent overreaching in this decade, the 2000s, is about to cause another Great Depression in the next, the 2010s.
It is the proximity of investment banks to the pools of savings that allows investment banks to profit. By their access to society’s savings, investment banks use society’s wealth as the foundation of their highly leveraged bets in financial markets; and in so doing, they have now placed all of us in harms way.
GOVERNMENT THE DEVICE BY WHICH THE FEW CONTROL THE MANY
The collapse of financial markets in the first Great Depression led to the US Congress to enact laws that would hopefully insure that such a collapse would never again happen. To that end, in 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.
Acknowledging the role that investment banks had played in the Great Depression, the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 separated investment banking and commercial banking to insure that investment bank speculation would not again destabilize commercial banks as it did during the Great Depression leading to the loss of America’s savings.
What bankers hath joined together let no man put asunder
However, in 1999, the US Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and America was once again vulnerable to the highly leveraged shenanigans of Wall Street. This time, however, it was not only the US but the entire world whose futures were to be bet and lost by Wall Street gamblers.
The globalization of financial markets had spread the dangers of US investment banking to banks, insurance companies, and pension funds around the world. Now, the savings of Europe and Asia as well as the US were to be impacted by the wagers of Wall Street who in the 2000s literally bet the house on the possibility that subprime CDOs were actually worth their AAA ratings.
Glass-Steagall, the law enacted in1933 to prevent another Great Depression was repealed at the behest of bankers. While it is true that at certain times the US government will act in the best interest of society, usually (and usually in the guise of so doing) the US government is the pawn of the special interests that benefit from the trough of government largesse and regulation. The repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was therefore a reversion to the mean.
We are today in the initial stages of another collapse that will lead to another Great Depression. The safeguards put in place to prevent such from happening were not only disassembled in 1999; but, now in 2008, the US government has moved even closer to exposing its citizenry and indeed the world to the speculative carnage and folly of investment banking excess.
THE RULE OF LAW IS A WONDROUS THING—ESPECIALLY IF YOU WRITE THEM.
Bloomberg.com April 8, 2008
As credit markets seized up, the Fed gave the 20 primary dealers in U.S. government bonds the same access to discount- window loans that had previously been reserved for banks. The central bank now auctions as much as $100 billion to lenders a month, and has cut the cost on direct loans to just a quarter- point above the overnight rate on loans between banks.
The US Federal Reserve is now underwriting, i.e. subsidizing, the commercial activities of global private investment banks. The 20 primary dealers in US government bonds include the world’s largest investment banks—BNP Paribas Securities Corp. (French), Barclays Capital Inc (British), Banc of America Securities LLC (USA), UBS Securities LLC (Swiss), Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Securities LLC (German), Daiwa Securities US Inc. (Japan) etc.
In truth, these investment banks are global entities and have no actual nationality no matter what jurisdiction in which they are legally domiciled. As such, they also have no allegiance except to their own self-interests.
QUESTION:
Why is the US government allocating public resources for the benefit of private international investment banks?
ANSWER:
US resources are subsidizing international investment banks through the Federal Reserve Bank, a quasi private entity which was given governmental powers in 1913 (some allege in violation of the US Constitution). That a quasi private bank is bailing out private banks with public monies does make sense. What doesn’t make sense is why the public allows it.
There is much discussion as to the justification and reasons for US, UK, European, and Japanese central banks bailing out private banks with public money. Issues such as moral hazard are now being raised in questioning the right and consequence of so doing.
In truth, such issues are irrelevant. Not that they are in themselves not important, but issues such as moral hazard will have no effect whatsoever on what is going to happen.
Intent is the underlying motive that explains what is about to occur. The intent of private bankers is not public stability, nor growth, nor productivity—it is the pursuit of private profit via the use of public credit and debt.
Today, most governments, especially the US and UK, are controlled by private bankers—which is why government policy continues and will continue to favor the interests of private bankers over the public good.
THE MELTDOWN OF MAMMON
I am sure that in some quarters of the Catholic Church objections were raised (perhaps even on theological grounds) about the torture used by the Church during the Spanish Inquisition; just as today, there have been objections raised by some in the US in regards to the use of torture in its “war on terror”.
Objections are always tolerated by those in power as long as the objections do not rise to the level of action. The objection to central bank credit and influence in our monetary affairs is therefore rhetorical. The influence of private bankers and central banking in our monetary affairs will not change until their influence has run its course—which is now about to happen.
The present epoch of central banking will perhaps be known as the period when bankers roamed the earth. Just as during the Jurassic Age, when dinosaurs roamed freely eating whatever and whomever they encountered, bankers did much the same in the present epoch that is now about to end—profiting by the productivity of society and the public and private debts incurred as a result of bankers’ induced credit-based spending.
Bankers achieved their immense power during this era by exploiting flaws in human nature and systemic flaws in the economic system they constructed for their own benefit. But as with all flaws, human or economic, the consequences of so doing are exposed over time. That time has now arrived.
Money is not credit, nor is money created de jure by circulating paper coupons imprinted with a government stamp stating the coupons are now legal tender to be used in the settlement of debts.
The idea that central bank coupons/paper money, sic debt, can be used to settle another debt is astounding. That we have been led to accept it is so is even more astounding. Throughout history, every experiment with paper “money” as a settlement of debt has failed. Our experiment with paper money towards that end will be no different.
The recent correction in the price of gold and silver is just that, a correction in an otherwise direct repudiation of the on-going attempt by governments and bankers to substitute paper coupons for real money.
A paper yen, a paper euro, a paper dollar, when no longer backed and convertible to gold or silver is but a paper coupon masquerading as money—a coupon with an expiration date in invisible ink.
In truth, the bankers’ real gambit is not their bet that paper money can be substituted for gold and silver or that subprime mortgages can be passed off as AAA securities. Their real gambit is that central bank issuance of debt as money and their control of governments will never be discovered by the public.
HUBRIS FOLLY AND DISASTER
The world of credit and debt and all it has created has been made possible by bankers and their debt based system of money and central banking. Its cost, however, will be born by future generations who were not present when the debts were incurred.
Those who utter in pious simplicity those wonderful words, “our children are our future”, have no idea what they have done to those very children and their future by spending today what future generations will have to earn tomorrow.
Here, in the US, an entire generation has grown up on the suspect promises of easy credit and paper money. That generation is now beginning to suspect that something is wrong, that the price of their gas, food and healthcare is rapidly rising and their dream of home ownership is a trap from which bankruptcy is increasingly their only escape.
Still, this generation has no idea of how terribly wrong it actually is and why it has happened; and their ignorance of such will give them little comfort during the Great Depression that lies directly ahead.
The chickens are coming home to roost; and they closer they come, the more they are looking like vultures.
WATCH ALEX JONES’ ENDGAME ONLINE NOW in its entirety. View more High quality trailers at www.endgamethemovie.com
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Article printed from Infowars: http://www.infowars.com
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/?p=1940
Gold Seek
May 5, 2008
Economics is not rocket science. Neither is power.
Depressions are monetary phenomena caused by central bank issuance of excessive credit. In 1913, the newly created US central bank, the Federal Reserve, began issuing credit-based money in the US. Within ten years, the central bank flow of credit ignited the 1920s US stock market bubble; and shortly thereafter, following the collapse of the bubble in 1929, the world entered its first Great Depression in 1933.
Investment banks are the undoing of central banking. While all banks, central, commercial and investment, view credit as the opportunity to exploit society’s growth and productivity, investment bank exploitation of growth and productivity exposes society to extreme risks—for investment banks use society’s savings to make their volatile and speculative bets.
The speculative risks undertaken by investment banks is done by leveraging the savings of society; and, when investment bank bets are sufficiently large enough and the bets go bad—as they inevitably do as the luck of investment bankers is due more to their proximity to credit than to their ability to foresee the future—it is society that will bear the brunt of the pain in the loss of its savings.
Inevitably, investment bankers cannot resist the temptations of excessive credit and, like the buyers of teaser-rate home mortgages, they will always overreach themselves—an overreaching that will have disastrous consequences for the society whose savings they bet.
The leveraged overreaching by investment banks in the 1920s caused the Great Depression of the 1930s and their more recent overreaching in this decade, the 2000s, is about to cause another Great Depression in the next, the 2010s.
It is the proximity of investment banks to the pools of savings that allows investment banks to profit. By their access to society’s savings, investment banks use society’s wealth as the foundation of their highly leveraged bets in financial markets; and in so doing, they have now placed all of us in harms way.
GOVERNMENT THE DEVICE BY WHICH THE FEW CONTROL THE MANY
The collapse of financial markets in the first Great Depression led to the US Congress to enact laws that would hopefully insure that such a collapse would never again happen. To that end, in 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.
Acknowledging the role that investment banks had played in the Great Depression, the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 separated investment banking and commercial banking to insure that investment bank speculation would not again destabilize commercial banks as it did during the Great Depression leading to the loss of America’s savings.
What bankers hath joined together let no man put asunder
However, in 1999, the US Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and America was once again vulnerable to the highly leveraged shenanigans of Wall Street. This time, however, it was not only the US but the entire world whose futures were to be bet and lost by Wall Street gamblers.
The globalization of financial markets had spread the dangers of US investment banking to banks, insurance companies, and pension funds around the world. Now, the savings of Europe and Asia as well as the US were to be impacted by the wagers of Wall Street who in the 2000s literally bet the house on the possibility that subprime CDOs were actually worth their AAA ratings.
Glass-Steagall, the law enacted in1933 to prevent another Great Depression was repealed at the behest of bankers. While it is true that at certain times the US government will act in the best interest of society, usually (and usually in the guise of so doing) the US government is the pawn of the special interests that benefit from the trough of government largesse and regulation. The repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was therefore a reversion to the mean.
We are today in the initial stages of another collapse that will lead to another Great Depression. The safeguards put in place to prevent such from happening were not only disassembled in 1999; but, now in 2008, the US government has moved even closer to exposing its citizenry and indeed the world to the speculative carnage and folly of investment banking excess.
THE RULE OF LAW IS A WONDROUS THING—ESPECIALLY IF YOU WRITE THEM.
Bloomberg.com April 8, 2008
As credit markets seized up, the Fed gave the 20 primary dealers in U.S. government bonds the same access to discount- window loans that had previously been reserved for banks. The central bank now auctions as much as $100 billion to lenders a month, and has cut the cost on direct loans to just a quarter- point above the overnight rate on loans between banks.
The US Federal Reserve is now underwriting, i.e. subsidizing, the commercial activities of global private investment banks. The 20 primary dealers in US government bonds include the world’s largest investment banks—BNP Paribas Securities Corp. (French), Barclays Capital Inc (British), Banc of America Securities LLC (USA), UBS Securities LLC (Swiss), Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Securities LLC (German), Daiwa Securities US Inc. (Japan) etc.
In truth, these investment banks are global entities and have no actual nationality no matter what jurisdiction in which they are legally domiciled. As such, they also have no allegiance except to their own self-interests.
QUESTION:
Why is the US government allocating public resources for the benefit of private international investment banks?
ANSWER:
US resources are subsidizing international investment banks through the Federal Reserve Bank, a quasi private entity which was given governmental powers in 1913 (some allege in violation of the US Constitution). That a quasi private bank is bailing out private banks with public monies does make sense. What doesn’t make sense is why the public allows it.
There is much discussion as to the justification and reasons for US, UK, European, and Japanese central banks bailing out private banks with public money. Issues such as moral hazard are now being raised in questioning the right and consequence of so doing.
In truth, such issues are irrelevant. Not that they are in themselves not important, but issues such as moral hazard will have no effect whatsoever on what is going to happen.
Intent is the underlying motive that explains what is about to occur. The intent of private bankers is not public stability, nor growth, nor productivity—it is the pursuit of private profit via the use of public credit and debt.
Today, most governments, especially the US and UK, are controlled by private bankers—which is why government policy continues and will continue to favor the interests of private bankers over the public good.
THE MELTDOWN OF MAMMON
I am sure that in some quarters of the Catholic Church objections were raised (perhaps even on theological grounds) about the torture used by the Church during the Spanish Inquisition; just as today, there have been objections raised by some in the US in regards to the use of torture in its “war on terror”.
Objections are always tolerated by those in power as long as the objections do not rise to the level of action. The objection to central bank credit and influence in our monetary affairs is therefore rhetorical. The influence of private bankers and central banking in our monetary affairs will not change until their influence has run its course—which is now about to happen.
The present epoch of central banking will perhaps be known as the period when bankers roamed the earth. Just as during the Jurassic Age, when dinosaurs roamed freely eating whatever and whomever they encountered, bankers did much the same in the present epoch that is now about to end—profiting by the productivity of society and the public and private debts incurred as a result of bankers’ induced credit-based spending.
Bankers achieved their immense power during this era by exploiting flaws in human nature and systemic flaws in the economic system they constructed for their own benefit. But as with all flaws, human or economic, the consequences of so doing are exposed over time. That time has now arrived.
Money is not credit, nor is money created de jure by circulating paper coupons imprinted with a government stamp stating the coupons are now legal tender to be used in the settlement of debts.
The idea that central bank coupons/paper money, sic debt, can be used to settle another debt is astounding. That we have been led to accept it is so is even more astounding. Throughout history, every experiment with paper “money” as a settlement of debt has failed. Our experiment with paper money towards that end will be no different.
The recent correction in the price of gold and silver is just that, a correction in an otherwise direct repudiation of the on-going attempt by governments and bankers to substitute paper coupons for real money.
A paper yen, a paper euro, a paper dollar, when no longer backed and convertible to gold or silver is but a paper coupon masquerading as money—a coupon with an expiration date in invisible ink.
In truth, the bankers’ real gambit is not their bet that paper money can be substituted for gold and silver or that subprime mortgages can be passed off as AAA securities. Their real gambit is that central bank issuance of debt as money and their control of governments will never be discovered by the public.
HUBRIS FOLLY AND DISASTER
The world of credit and debt and all it has created has been made possible by bankers and their debt based system of money and central banking. Its cost, however, will be born by future generations who were not present when the debts were incurred.
Those who utter in pious simplicity those wonderful words, “our children are our future”, have no idea what they have done to those very children and their future by spending today what future generations will have to earn tomorrow.
Here, in the US, an entire generation has grown up on the suspect promises of easy credit and paper money. That generation is now beginning to suspect that something is wrong, that the price of their gas, food and healthcare is rapidly rising and their dream of home ownership is a trap from which bankruptcy is increasingly their only escape.
Still, this generation has no idea of how terribly wrong it actually is and why it has happened; and their ignorance of such will give them little comfort during the Great Depression that lies directly ahead.
The chickens are coming home to roost; and they closer they come, the more they are looking like vultures.
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Friday, May 02, 2008
Americans sell prized possessions to help pay bills
By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO
Associated Press
April 30, 2008
NEW YORK — The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, such as the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out."
Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills — and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.
Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.
To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.
"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.
At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period.
Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sorts of items on the Web but said the rate of growth is "moving above the usual trend line." He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.
In Daleville, Ala., Ellona Bateman-Lee has turned to eBay and flea markets to empty her three-bedroom mobile home of DVDs, VCRs, stereos and televisions.
She said she needs the cash to help pay for soaring food and utility bills and mounting health-care expenses since her husband, Bob, suffered an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver in 2006 and is now disabled.
Heirloom goes for $6
Among her most painful sales: her grandmother's teakettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay. "My grandmother raised me, so it hurt," she said. "We've had bouts here and there, but we always got by. This time it's different."
Economists say it is difficult to compare the selling trend with other tough times because the Internet, only in wide use since the mid-1990s, has made it much easier to unload goods than, say, at pawnshops.
But clearly, cash-strapped people are selling their belongings at bargain prices, with a flood of listings for secondhand cars, clothing and furniture hitting the market in recent months, particularly since January.
Earlier this decade, people tapped their inflated home equity and credit cards to fuel a buying binge. Now, slumping home values and a credit crisis have sapped sources of cash.
Meanwhile, soaring gas and food prices haven't kept pace with meager wage growth. Gas prices have hit $4 per gallon in some places, and that could become more widespread this summer. The weakening job market is another big worry.
For-sale listings rise
Christine Hadley, a 53-year-old registered nurse from Reading, Pa., says she used to be "a clotheshorse," splurging on pricey Dooney & Bourke handbags. But her live-in boyfriend left last year, and she has had trouble finding a job.
Piles of unpaid bills forced her to sell more than 80 items, including the handbags, which went for more than $1,000 on a site called AuctionPal.com. Now, except for some artwork and threadbare furniture, her house is looking sparse.
"I need the money for essentials — to pay my bills and to eat," Hadley said.
At AuctionPal.com, which helps novices sell things online, for-sale listings rose 66 percent from February to March, much faster than the 25 percent to 30 percent average monthly pace since the company was formed in September, CEO Maureen Ellenberger said. She said she was surprised to see that most of her clients desperately needed to sell items to raise cash.
For LiveDeal.com, a classifieds and business directory site, for-sale listings for January through March rose 10 percent from the previous year.
"We can definitely detect economic stress on the part of the consumer," said John Raven, the site's chief operating officer.
On Craigslist, Buckmaster said, three of the four fastest-growing for-sale categories are tied to gas — recreational vehicles like campers and trailers, cars and trucks, and boats.
Raven noted more and more listings for furniture, particularly in areas around Miami and Las Vegas and other regions hardest hit by the housing crisis.
The trend may be hurting secondhand stores too. Donations to the Salvation Army were down 20 percent in the January-to-March period. George Hood, the charity's national community relations and development secretary, said that was probably partly because people were selling their belongings instead.
Associated Press
April 30, 2008
NEW YORK — The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, such as the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out."
Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills — and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.
Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.
To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.
"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.
At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period.
Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sorts of items on the Web but said the rate of growth is "moving above the usual trend line." He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.
In Daleville, Ala., Ellona Bateman-Lee has turned to eBay and flea markets to empty her three-bedroom mobile home of DVDs, VCRs, stereos and televisions.
She said she needs the cash to help pay for soaring food and utility bills and mounting health-care expenses since her husband, Bob, suffered an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver in 2006 and is now disabled.
Heirloom goes for $6
Among her most painful sales: her grandmother's teakettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay. "My grandmother raised me, so it hurt," she said. "We've had bouts here and there, but we always got by. This time it's different."
Economists say it is difficult to compare the selling trend with other tough times because the Internet, only in wide use since the mid-1990s, has made it much easier to unload goods than, say, at pawnshops.
But clearly, cash-strapped people are selling their belongings at bargain prices, with a flood of listings for secondhand cars, clothing and furniture hitting the market in recent months, particularly since January.
Earlier this decade, people tapped their inflated home equity and credit cards to fuel a buying binge. Now, slumping home values and a credit crisis have sapped sources of cash.
Meanwhile, soaring gas and food prices haven't kept pace with meager wage growth. Gas prices have hit $4 per gallon in some places, and that could become more widespread this summer. The weakening job market is another big worry.
For-sale listings rise
Christine Hadley, a 53-year-old registered nurse from Reading, Pa., says she used to be "a clotheshorse," splurging on pricey Dooney & Bourke handbags. But her live-in boyfriend left last year, and she has had trouble finding a job.
Piles of unpaid bills forced her to sell more than 80 items, including the handbags, which went for more than $1,000 on a site called AuctionPal.com. Now, except for some artwork and threadbare furniture, her house is looking sparse.
"I need the money for essentials — to pay my bills and to eat," Hadley said.
At AuctionPal.com, which helps novices sell things online, for-sale listings rose 66 percent from February to March, much faster than the 25 percent to 30 percent average monthly pace since the company was formed in September, CEO Maureen Ellenberger said. She said she was surprised to see that most of her clients desperately needed to sell items to raise cash.
For LiveDeal.com, a classifieds and business directory site, for-sale listings for January through March rose 10 percent from the previous year.
"We can definitely detect economic stress on the part of the consumer," said John Raven, the site's chief operating officer.
On Craigslist, Buckmaster said, three of the four fastest-growing for-sale categories are tied to gas — recreational vehicles like campers and trailers, cars and trucks, and boats.
Raven noted more and more listings for furniture, particularly in areas around Miami and Las Vegas and other regions hardest hit by the housing crisis.
The trend may be hurting secondhand stores too. Donations to the Salvation Army were down 20 percent in the January-to-March period. George Hood, the charity's national community relations and development secretary, said that was probably partly because people were selling their belongings instead.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Load Up the Pantry
R.O.I.
By Brett Arends
April 21, 2008 6:47 p.m.
I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.
No, this is not a drill.
You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.
Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.
"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)
Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.
Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.
And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.
These are trends that have been in place for some time.
And if you are hoping they will pass, here's the bad news: They may actually accelerate.
The reason? The prices of many underlying raw materials have risen much more quickly still. Wheat prices, for example, have roughly tripled in the past three years.
Sooner or later, the food companies are going to have to pass those costs on. Kraft saw its raw material costs soar by about $1.25 billion last year, squeezing profit margins. The company recently warned that higher prices are here to stay. Last month the chief executive of General Mills, Kendall Powell, made a similar point.
The main reason for rising prices, of course, is the surge in demand from China and India. Hundreds of millions of people are joining the middle class each year, and that means they want to eat more and better food.
A secondary reason has been the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel additive. That's soaking up some of the corn supply.
You can't easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.
If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it's the rosy memory of a bygone age.
The good news is that it's easier to store Cap'n Crunch or cans of Starkist in your home than it is to store lots of gasoline. Safer, too.
Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com1
By Brett Arends
April 21, 2008 6:47 p.m.
I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.
No, this is not a drill.
You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.
Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.
"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)
Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.
Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.
And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.
These are trends that have been in place for some time.
And if you are hoping they will pass, here's the bad news: They may actually accelerate.
The reason? The prices of many underlying raw materials have risen much more quickly still. Wheat prices, for example, have roughly tripled in the past three years.
Sooner or later, the food companies are going to have to pass those costs on. Kraft saw its raw material costs soar by about $1.25 billion last year, squeezing profit margins. The company recently warned that higher prices are here to stay. Last month the chief executive of General Mills, Kendall Powell, made a similar point.
The main reason for rising prices, of course, is the surge in demand from China and India. Hundreds of millions of people are joining the middle class each year, and that means they want to eat more and better food.
A secondary reason has been the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel additive. That's soaking up some of the corn supply.
You can't easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.
If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it's the rosy memory of a bygone age.
The good news is that it's easier to store Cap'n Crunch or cans of Starkist in your home than it is to store lots of gasoline. Safer, too.
Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com1
New Florida law would grant cops right to impound cars playing loud music
OhMyGov!
April 28, 2008
Sarasota, Florida - A new law, up for a final vote next month, would grant police in Sarasota the authority to impound vehicles found playing their stereos too loud and charge up to $650 in fines for repeat violators.
Not surprisingly, the law has proven controversial. On one side of argument, there’s the older residents in the community that complain about the ubiquitous culture of pimped out audio systems whose bass shakes the windows of homes as the Fast and the Furious lookalike cars drive by. They applaud the effort to get the volumes down to a reasonable level that doesn’t disturb anyone else and have called the law “long overdue.”
On the other side, there’s the younger residents, who spend thousands on car audio components to hear their music at peak volumes, showcase their financial success or to just vie for attention via thundering bass and super-chromed rims. They feel the punishment exceeds the crime and have been voicing their disgust over the law in online forums.
The concern of these “scafflaws” is joined by other citizens who feel the new law grants local police too much discretionary authority which may be used to harass or intimidate younger adults or minority groups. Under the law, police can stop drivers if they can hear the music 25 feet away.
Granting citations to residents for noise violations isn’t new to Sarasota. Last year, the police department issued 282 citations for loud stereos. Each citation costs drivers $74.50, an amount increased by up to 770 percent under the proposed law - plus any charges related to towing and impound.
If you haven’t decided by now which side of the argument you side with, consider this scenario: It’s 3 am and you’re almost home from a long drive. You’ve been visiting your family in Atlanta and are exhausted. To avoid falling asleep at the wheel, you open the windows and crank up the music volume. As you drive past the center of town, you pass a police car. You’re not speeding, but within seconds you see the flashing lights pull up behind you and you begin slowing down and pulling to the shoulder of the road.
The officer informs you that your volume is too loud. You try to explain, telling him that the reason the volume is so high is to avoid falling asleep and crashing into a small house. He curtly tells you you should’ve gotten a hotel along the way, issues you a ticket for $650 dollars, and calls a tow-truck to tow your car away. An hour later, you’re stranded on the road and forced to call a cab for a ride to the impound lot where you pay $100 to get your car back. By the time you get home, it’s 5 a.m. and you’re down $750, a night’s sleep, and notice a scratch on your bumper from the tow truck.
Granted, no one wants to be woken up by loud noise at 3 am but we’re all forced to live with such disturbances. Garbage trucks smash metal bins at 6 am, buses roll by vibrating windows and doors, sirens wail at all hours, Harley Davidson motorcycles thunder by, and kids scream at one another before the birds have begun chirping wildly. Should we fine all of them? Of course not. And even if we do selectively punish those who make a racket without serving a civic need, the punishment should fit the crime. So if a cop isn’t going to issue a $650 speeding ticket to a reckless driver, he shouldn’t have the authority to fine and confiscate the car of a music enthusiast - however vain and inconsiderate that person may be.
April 28, 2008
Sarasota, Florida - A new law, up for a final vote next month, would grant police in Sarasota the authority to impound vehicles found playing their stereos too loud and charge up to $650 in fines for repeat violators.
Not surprisingly, the law has proven controversial. On one side of argument, there’s the older residents in the community that complain about the ubiquitous culture of pimped out audio systems whose bass shakes the windows of homes as the Fast and the Furious lookalike cars drive by. They applaud the effort to get the volumes down to a reasonable level that doesn’t disturb anyone else and have called the law “long overdue.”
On the other side, there’s the younger residents, who spend thousands on car audio components to hear their music at peak volumes, showcase their financial success or to just vie for attention via thundering bass and super-chromed rims. They feel the punishment exceeds the crime and have been voicing their disgust over the law in online forums.
The concern of these “scafflaws” is joined by other citizens who feel the new law grants local police too much discretionary authority which may be used to harass or intimidate younger adults or minority groups. Under the law, police can stop drivers if they can hear the music 25 feet away.
Granting citations to residents for noise violations isn’t new to Sarasota. Last year, the police department issued 282 citations for loud stereos. Each citation costs drivers $74.50, an amount increased by up to 770 percent under the proposed law - plus any charges related to towing and impound.
If you haven’t decided by now which side of the argument you side with, consider this scenario: It’s 3 am and you’re almost home from a long drive. You’ve been visiting your family in Atlanta and are exhausted. To avoid falling asleep at the wheel, you open the windows and crank up the music volume. As you drive past the center of town, you pass a police car. You’re not speeding, but within seconds you see the flashing lights pull up behind you and you begin slowing down and pulling to the shoulder of the road.
The officer informs you that your volume is too loud. You try to explain, telling him that the reason the volume is so high is to avoid falling asleep and crashing into a small house. He curtly tells you you should’ve gotten a hotel along the way, issues you a ticket for $650 dollars, and calls a tow-truck to tow your car away. An hour later, you’re stranded on the road and forced to call a cab for a ride to the impound lot where you pay $100 to get your car back. By the time you get home, it’s 5 a.m. and you’re down $750, a night’s sleep, and notice a scratch on your bumper from the tow truck.
Granted, no one wants to be woken up by loud noise at 3 am but we’re all forced to live with such disturbances. Garbage trucks smash metal bins at 6 am, buses roll by vibrating windows and doors, sirens wail at all hours, Harley Davidson motorcycles thunder by, and kids scream at one another before the birds have begun chirping wildly. Should we fine all of them? Of course not. And even if we do selectively punish those who make a racket without serving a civic need, the punishment should fit the crime. So if a cop isn’t going to issue a $650 speeding ticket to a reckless driver, he shouldn’t have the authority to fine and confiscate the car of a music enthusiast - however vain and inconsiderate that person may be.
The End of Affordable Food
Mary Kane
The Washington Independent
April 24, 2008
A sharp spike in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other staples has sparked riots in Mexico and Egypt, marches by hungry children in Yemen and the spectre of starving people in Haiti turning to mud pies for sustenance. This growing unrest is forcing the global community to focus on the causes of higher food costs and what can be done. But it’s also raising the troubling possibility that cheap prices for food may be gone for good, an economic relic of the the past.
That scenario would be disastrous for the progress of fighting poverty in poor countries - and it would threaten to halt a long period of rising living standards in the United States tied directly to the inexpensive cost of food.
“Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column. The Economist was more strident: “The era of cheap food is over,” it declared. World Bank President Robert Zoellick, reaching back to policies created during the Great Depression for inspiration to address food inflation, is pushing a “New Deal” for global food policy, aimed at aiding impoverished countries with income support and help in producing crops.
The gloom-and-doom outlooks are prompted by rising prices for commodities, which started increasing steadily in 2001 before suddenly soaring recently. Wheat prices have gone up by 181 percent over the past three years, according to the World Bank; food prices around the globe have risen by 83 percent during the same period. In March, rice prices hit a 19-year high. Corn prices recently rose from $2.50 a bushel three years ago to $6, for the first time. Zoellick has predicted a sustained period of higher food costs, saying he expects prices to remain elevated through next year and stay above 2004 levels for at least the next seven years.
The causes are many. India and China have growing populations and are becoming more prosperous; more people can now afford to eat more meat, and the demand for animal feed has grown. In the U.S. and Europe, a boom in biofuel as alternative energy is diverting considerable amounts of corn from the market. A severe drought in Australia has contributed to a 25-year low in supplies. Some also blame speculation in the commodity markets for sharp swings in prices and availability.
While plenty of people are worried about the end of cheap food, it’s not clear yet whether that will happen, said David Orden, senior research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute. Things like the weak dollar becoming stronger, crop shortfalls easing, energy prices stabilizing and strong growth in the world economy are all factors that could affect the availability of food, he said, and no one’s sure how they will play out. “We just don’t know yet,” Orden said. “Before this bump in food prices started, people were not predicting it.”
What has become clear is that in a short time, soaring food costs have shaken some long-held assumptions about food and fuel, especially in the U.S.
Food has been cheap in America for nearly 60 years, and Americans set aside less of their incomes for food than any other country in the world, devoting just 11 percent of disposable income to it, compared to double that percentage in Europe. Keeping food costs low has been one of the great economic achievements of the last century. The low food costs, combined with rising incomes, “have been two of the primary sources of prosperity for American consumers,” said John Urbanchuck, an agriculture industry analyst for LECG, a global consulting firm.
Until now, Americans had the luxury of worrying about food due to its abundance. Concerns have centered on childhood obesity and an epidemic of diabetes. But new problems with food are already surfacing, as rising prices begin showing up at the grocery store. More expensive corn means people pay more for eggs and poultry, and still higher meat and milk prices are on the horizon. Record high oil prices are adding to price pressures, since transporting food costs more.
If prices stay high for a long time, the poor will be hit the hardest, since they spend the largest percentage of their incomes on food. Efforts to reduce hunger, like food stamps and free and reduced lunch programs, will become more costly, said Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University in Indiana. Asking taxpayers to pay more for them won’t exactly be politically popular, since food prices could also take a greater bite out of middle-class budgets. And paying more for food will mean having less to spend on things like big-screen television sets and iPods, putting a dent in the kind of consumer spending that has kept the economy growing for the past two decades.
Consumers won’t be the only ones feeling the squeeze. Hog producers in the Midwest expect to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in just the next six months due to corn price hikes, Doering said.
It could get far worse. Another “hidden issue” is the scarcity of land still available for farming, he said. In the past, the United States had plenty of farmland to provide more crops as food demands grew. But land is finite, and after all these years, we’re beginning to run short, Doering said. “For the first time in our history, we’re pushing up against the edge in terms of quality land,” Doering said. “We’re in a somewhat fixed box.”
Because of all this, Doering said it’s not clear whether the U.S. can keep food prices low. “It’s a whole new ballgame,” he stated.
The United States has endured temporary price bumps before. A spike in commodities in the early 1970s was due mainly to bad weather around the world, and to huge and secretive Russian grain purchases. In 1995-96, food inflation stemmed from a Midwestern drought, global demand for U.S. feed grains and speculation. In both cases, prices settled back down again.
This time around, the biofuel boom is also complicating the question of whether prices will revert. Some one-third of the U.S. corn crop now is devoted to ethanol production, its growth due to a combination of high oil prices and generous government subsidies. When corn prices were lower a few years ago, ethanol was seen as a popular energy alternative. Now it’s a target.
Zoellick, the World Bank president, made headlines for blaming biofuels for recent price hikes, saying earlier this month that biofuels are a major factor in the world’s added demand for food. Biofuel mania, or speculating in commodities by hedge fund and traders betting on corn prices, was also responsible for shortages and price increases, he said.
His remarks added to an already simmering debate. Last summer Foreign Affairs magazine published “How Biofuels Starve the Poor,” which reiterated that sentiment, noting that filling the 25-gallon tank of a sports utility vehicle with pure ethanol required 450 pounds of corn, or enough calories for one person for a year.
At some point, American policy-makers are going to have to decide whether they want to live with an “expensive food policy” that requires continuing to produce large percentages of corn crops for biofuel and enduring higher prices for other foods, said Bruce Babcock, an Iowa State University economist.
The food debate will eventually break down into two camps: Those who believe supply and demand are the problem, and that the world can’t produce enough to meet the needs of growing economies; and those who blame ethanol production. In the end, Babcock predicts, Washington will continue to support ethanol production in the near term, before imposing caps on its production.
But the future for food prices will still remain uncertain, because the global market is so complex. “I don’t think we’ve ever been where we are right now,” Babcock said.
Should prices stay high, the effect will be felt most keenly in developing countries, as the recent food riots have shown. Impoverished families now pay 50 percent to 80 percent of their incomes for food. Continuing high prices for oil and corn threaten to undo any gains in reducing poverty made over the past decade, Zoellick said.
Josette Sheeran, head of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told The Economist that the effects of higher food prices in poor countries will be devastating:
“For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The promise of globalization was that it could lift living standards for everyone. But if the world’s hungry still can’t be fed because food is no longer cheap, it’s an empty promise.
The Washington Independent
April 24, 2008
A sharp spike in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other staples has sparked riots in Mexico and Egypt, marches by hungry children in Yemen and the spectre of starving people in Haiti turning to mud pies for sustenance. This growing unrest is forcing the global community to focus on the causes of higher food costs and what can be done. But it’s also raising the troubling possibility that cheap prices for food may be gone for good, an economic relic of the the past.
That scenario would be disastrous for the progress of fighting poverty in poor countries - and it would threaten to halt a long period of rising living standards in the United States tied directly to the inexpensive cost of food.
“Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column. The Economist was more strident: “The era of cheap food is over,” it declared. World Bank President Robert Zoellick, reaching back to policies created during the Great Depression for inspiration to address food inflation, is pushing a “New Deal” for global food policy, aimed at aiding impoverished countries with income support and help in producing crops.
The gloom-and-doom outlooks are prompted by rising prices for commodities, which started increasing steadily in 2001 before suddenly soaring recently. Wheat prices have gone up by 181 percent over the past three years, according to the World Bank; food prices around the globe have risen by 83 percent during the same period. In March, rice prices hit a 19-year high. Corn prices recently rose from $2.50 a bushel three years ago to $6, for the first time. Zoellick has predicted a sustained period of higher food costs, saying he expects prices to remain elevated through next year and stay above 2004 levels for at least the next seven years.
The causes are many. India and China have growing populations and are becoming more prosperous; more people can now afford to eat more meat, and the demand for animal feed has grown. In the U.S. and Europe, a boom in biofuel as alternative energy is diverting considerable amounts of corn from the market. A severe drought in Australia has contributed to a 25-year low in supplies. Some also blame speculation in the commodity markets for sharp swings in prices and availability.
While plenty of people are worried about the end of cheap food, it’s not clear yet whether that will happen, said David Orden, senior research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute. Things like the weak dollar becoming stronger, crop shortfalls easing, energy prices stabilizing and strong growth in the world economy are all factors that could affect the availability of food, he said, and no one’s sure how they will play out. “We just don’t know yet,” Orden said. “Before this bump in food prices started, people were not predicting it.”
What has become clear is that in a short time, soaring food costs have shaken some long-held assumptions about food and fuel, especially in the U.S.
Food has been cheap in America for nearly 60 years, and Americans set aside less of their incomes for food than any other country in the world, devoting just 11 percent of disposable income to it, compared to double that percentage in Europe. Keeping food costs low has been one of the great economic achievements of the last century. The low food costs, combined with rising incomes, “have been two of the primary sources of prosperity for American consumers,” said John Urbanchuck, an agriculture industry analyst for LECG, a global consulting firm.
Until now, Americans had the luxury of worrying about food due to its abundance. Concerns have centered on childhood obesity and an epidemic of diabetes. But new problems with food are already surfacing, as rising prices begin showing up at the grocery store. More expensive corn means people pay more for eggs and poultry, and still higher meat and milk prices are on the horizon. Record high oil prices are adding to price pressures, since transporting food costs more.
If prices stay high for a long time, the poor will be hit the hardest, since they spend the largest percentage of their incomes on food. Efforts to reduce hunger, like food stamps and free and reduced lunch programs, will become more costly, said Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University in Indiana. Asking taxpayers to pay more for them won’t exactly be politically popular, since food prices could also take a greater bite out of middle-class budgets. And paying more for food will mean having less to spend on things like big-screen television sets and iPods, putting a dent in the kind of consumer spending that has kept the economy growing for the past two decades.
Consumers won’t be the only ones feeling the squeeze. Hog producers in the Midwest expect to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in just the next six months due to corn price hikes, Doering said.
It could get far worse. Another “hidden issue” is the scarcity of land still available for farming, he said. In the past, the United States had plenty of farmland to provide more crops as food demands grew. But land is finite, and after all these years, we’re beginning to run short, Doering said. “For the first time in our history, we’re pushing up against the edge in terms of quality land,” Doering said. “We’re in a somewhat fixed box.”
Because of all this, Doering said it’s not clear whether the U.S. can keep food prices low. “It’s a whole new ballgame,” he stated.
The United States has endured temporary price bumps before. A spike in commodities in the early 1970s was due mainly to bad weather around the world, and to huge and secretive Russian grain purchases. In 1995-96, food inflation stemmed from a Midwestern drought, global demand for U.S. feed grains and speculation. In both cases, prices settled back down again.
This time around, the biofuel boom is also complicating the question of whether prices will revert. Some one-third of the U.S. corn crop now is devoted to ethanol production, its growth due to a combination of high oil prices and generous government subsidies. When corn prices were lower a few years ago, ethanol was seen as a popular energy alternative. Now it’s a target.
Zoellick, the World Bank president, made headlines for blaming biofuels for recent price hikes, saying earlier this month that biofuels are a major factor in the world’s added demand for food. Biofuel mania, or speculating in commodities by hedge fund and traders betting on corn prices, was also responsible for shortages and price increases, he said.
His remarks added to an already simmering debate. Last summer Foreign Affairs magazine published “How Biofuels Starve the Poor,” which reiterated that sentiment, noting that filling the 25-gallon tank of a sports utility vehicle with pure ethanol required 450 pounds of corn, or enough calories for one person for a year.
At some point, American policy-makers are going to have to decide whether they want to live with an “expensive food policy” that requires continuing to produce large percentages of corn crops for biofuel and enduring higher prices for other foods, said Bruce Babcock, an Iowa State University economist.
The food debate will eventually break down into two camps: Those who believe supply and demand are the problem, and that the world can’t produce enough to meet the needs of growing economies; and those who blame ethanol production. In the end, Babcock predicts, Washington will continue to support ethanol production in the near term, before imposing caps on its production.
But the future for food prices will still remain uncertain, because the global market is so complex. “I don’t think we’ve ever been where we are right now,” Babcock said.
Should prices stay high, the effect will be felt most keenly in developing countries, as the recent food riots have shown. Impoverished families now pay 50 percent to 80 percent of their incomes for food. Continuing high prices for oil and corn threaten to undo any gains in reducing poverty made over the past decade, Zoellick said.
Josette Sheeran, head of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told The Economist that the effects of higher food prices in poor countries will be devastating:
“For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The promise of globalization was that it could lift living standards for everyone. But if the world’s hungry still can’t be fed because food is no longer cheap, it’s an empty promise.
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