I, too, sing America

A Voice is heard out of Ramah: Robin Quivers on Race

2011-09-10T05:06:00.001-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-quivers/captain-americas-usa_b_915142.html

But that kinda stuff happened back in the 50s and 60s

2011-09-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/08/06/mississippi.hate.crime/index.html

Healthy Eating is for the Rich

2011-09-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/study-healthy-eating-privilege-rich-040251076.html

Ruby Bridges, The Problem We All Live With, and the Obama White House

2011-09-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/art-sends-rare-w-h-message-race-094000977.html

Brown v. Board of Ed lesson

2011-09-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/page.aspx?pid=742&srctid=1&erid=1556544

Photo Card

2011-07-17T18:52:00.001-07:00

Storytime Blue Baby Announcements

Customize your own unique baby announcements with Shutterfly.

View the entire collection of cards.

Do you take your U.S. citizenship for granted?

2011-07-04T04:04:00.000-07:00

Legal immigrants joining U.S. military in order to gain citizenship rights. (07-04-2011)

Slavery By Another Name

2011-07-02T05:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/

A Problem With Some Children's Literature

2011-04-18T11:35:00.001-07:00

The Rosa Parks Myth and other mythologies

The Politics of Children’s Literature: What’s Wrong with the Rosa Parks Myth
Background Reading for Teachers and High School Students – PDF. By Herbert Kohl. 6 pages.
A critical analysis of children’s books about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Issues of racism and direct confrontation between African American and European American people in the United States are usually considered too sensitive to be dealt with directly in the elementary school classroom. When African Americans and European Americans are involved in confrontation in children’s texts, the situation is routinely described as a problem between individuals that can be worked out on a personal basis. In the few cases where racism is addressed as a social problem, there has to be a happy ending.

[Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was one of the main organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.]

This is most readily apparent in the biographical treatment of Rosa Parks, one of the two names that most children associate with the Civil Rights Movement, the other being Martin Luther King Jr. The image of “Rosa Parks the Tired” exists on the level of a national cultural icon. Dozens of children’s books and textbooks present the same version of what might be called “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”

Link to Lesson Plan
Keywords: African American, European American, Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Freedom Train, U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Highlander Folk School, Tennessee, Voices of Freedom, Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer, E.D. Nixon, Women’s Political Council, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Alabama State University, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

Only Little People Pay Taxes: More on Class War in the U.S.

2011-04-18T11:30:00.001-07:00

Why a janitor ends up with a higher tax rate than a millionaire, and seven more charts that show how the richest Americans beat the IRS.

— By Dave Gilson

"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes," billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley famously (and allegedly) sniffed. She wasn't entirely correct: The superrich do still pay taxes. The wealthiest 1% of taxpayers pay 32% of all income tax collected by the federal government.

But the superrich don't pay as much as they used to—and thanks to a combination of tax cuts and preferential tax policies, their tax obligations can be less demanding than the so-called little people's. In fact, the very wealthiest Americans' tax burden has been steadily dropping for years, even as they've enjoyed astounding income growth not seen by the vast majority of Americans.

Tax rates for the wealthy have fallen substantially since they peaked in the 1940s. During the past 30 years, they have been cut at a much faster rate than middle- and low-income taxpayers'.

Just how much of a windfall are tax cuts for the wealthy? The extension of the Bush tax cuts passed last year will provide $146,000 in annual tax savings, on average, to each of the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans.

The superrich get an additional boost from relatively low tax rates on capital gains. Income from long-term investments, which makes up a larger portion of wealthier taxpayers' incomes than middle- and low-income taxpayers', is taxed at lower rates than wages.

Payroll taxes (deductions for Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance) are mostly paid by the bottom 90 percent of earners. When they're factored in on top of income tax, the gap between the tax rates at the very top and everyone else shrinks even more—so much that the effective tax rate for people earning more than $370,000 is nearly the same as for those earning between $43,000 and $69,000 a year.

Payroll taxes now make up nearly as much of federal tax revenue as individual income tax. Meanwhile, revenues from corporate taxes have decreased significantly over the past 50 years.

Corporations exploit various loopholes and tax breaks to reduce their IRS bills—perhaps none more notoriously than General Electric. Though the corporate tax rate is 35%, GE has paid nothing near that for nearly a decade.

Leona Helmsley's distaste for paying taxes eventually landed her in federal prison. But the rich have little need to break the law to avoid the tax collector. As Martin A. Sullivan of Tax.com recently calculated, a New York janitor making slightly more than $33,000 a year pays an effective tax rate of nearly 25%. And the effective tax rate for a resident of the Park Avenue building named after Helmsley, earning an average of $1.2 million annually? A cool 14.7%.

The Civil War: Teaching a Defining Conflict

2011-04-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Schools Walk Into Touchy Territory With Civil War You don’t have to look far for examples of how the Civil War stirs public debate 150 years after it began. A private “secession ball” in Charleston, S.C., pegged to the anniversary in February of the state’s declared exit from the Union, sparked a protest from the local NAACP chapter. In Virginia, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, a Republican, got into trouble last year for issuing a proclamation on Confederate History Month without ever mentioning slavery. Experts say schools can play a powerful role—and hold an important responsibility—in helping young people make sense of a complex conflict whose meaning continues to be hotly disputed in the public sphere. That debate is sure to be amplified, given the prominent attention the war is getting as the sesquicentennial begins this month. “One hundred and fifty years later, we’re still fighting with many of the same questions,” said Andrew T. Mink, the director of outreach and education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, who has administered a series of federal Teaching American History grants. “People bring a certain cultural understanding of the Civil War, of the Confederacy, of the Union. ... If teachers don’t address that, it gets addressed somewhere else.” Special Series: Civil War: Teaching a Defining Conflict Primary Sources Breathe Life Into Civil War Schools Walk Into Touchy Territory With Civil WarRecent polling suggests that Americans remain divided in their views of issues tied to the Civil War. The very idea of designating a Confederate History Month, for instance, which Gov. McDonnell’s two Democratic predecessors declined to do, split those surveyed. Just more than half of U.S. adults said they oppose such a remembrance, according to the poll by Harris Interactive. Meanwhile, 54 percent of respondents said they believe the South was mainly fighting to preserve slavery, compared with 46 percent who believe the South was mainly fighting for states’ rights. (The poll did not offer further alternatives.) Slavery’s Role To be sure, the nation has come a long way. For decades, historians say, slavery had been largely removed from the public conversation about the war and its origins, as had such topics as the role of African-Americans in fighting for the Union. Today, they get much more attention in schools, museums, and planned commemorations of the anniversary. Most mainstream historians now agree that slavery was the leading reason driving the conflict. “Slavery is the major cause of the Civil War,” said James I. Robertson, a Civil War historian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg. “There are people ... who will argue to the sky that slavery was just a byproduct, but without slavery, there was no cause for the North and the South to start killing each other.” See AlsoForum Discussion: Primary Sources in Civil War Studies Have you incorporated primary sources into your Civil War studies? How so? Which primary sources do you consider most valuable when developing a curriculum based around the Civil War? • Join the discussion. That said, Mr. Robertson and others stress that it was by no means the only factor propelling the war, which involved a web of issues, including differences in the Northern and Southern economies, and disputes over the nature of the Union, the role of the federal government, and states’ rights. History educators say one of the biggest challenges for schools in promoting an accurate and deep understanding of the conflict may well be time. At the secondary level, the topic may be part of a yearlong course that covers the full sweep of American history; a lucky teacher might get two years. “Teachers often find their time extremely limited to get in-depth with the Civil War,” said Anthony Napoli, the director of education at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, in New York City. “The biggest question is what to cover and what to leave out.” Political Ramifications A fundamental understanding of the Civil War is widely seen by historians and history educators as vital for Americans. They call it a defining moment in U.S. history that still has many ramifications and lessons a century and a half later. “So many of the crucial issues that were connected to the Civil War, its origins and consequences, are still with us today,” said Bernard E. Powers, a history professor at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. “You only have to think about the question of race.” “But it’s not just that,” he said, citing, for instance, states’ rights. “The political problem still manifests itself today,” he said, pointing to recent debates over health-care policy. “Can the federal government require people to buy health insurance?” And how schools teach the Civil War flares up from time to time. One recent example concerned a textbook on Virginia history found in many of that state’s public elementary schools. It came under fire last fall, after a parent complained about the book’s contention, widely disputed by historians, that thousands of blacks served as soldiers for the Confederacy. A review by a panel of historians of Our Virginia: Past and Present and another text from the same publisher, Five Fronds Press, led the state board of education last month to withdraw approval of both and to overhaul its textbook-review process. When asked whether current teaching on the war reveals regional biases, most history educators interviewed said that if there are differences, they are far more rare than in the past, and less pronounced. A Currier & Ives lithograph depicts the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, S.C., in 1861. —Currier & Ives/Library of Congress“I have no doubt you’re going to find pockets [of the South] where ... this ‘Lost Cause’ view is present [in the classroom], but I’ll tell you, I think it’s much too easy to draw overly simplistic regional distinctions,” said Kevin M. Levin, the history department chairman at the private St. Anne’s-Belfield School, in Charlottesville, Va., who has led workshops to help teachers with the subject. “I don’t think you can draw the same regional distinctions that were drawn a few decades ago.” “I definitely have sat in on a classroom or two that maybe shocked me with an old school, Old South version of the Civil War or the causes,” said Donald Stewart, the project director for a grant in South Carolina under the federal Teaching American History program. But he said that, in his experience, this is the rare exception. “I’m still waiting to come across the teacher ... who believes that slavery was a side issue [in the Civil War],” said Paul C. Anderson, an associate professor of history at Clemson University, in South Carolina, who also has worked with many K-12 educators. “I have the exact opposite problem. If I get a question, it’s that a teacher considers the war to be a moral crusade [by the North], and it was not that way. “You have to understand that slavery,” he added, “was sectional, but racism was national.” Meanwhile, Kimberley Warrick, a curriculum specialist for a set of Georgia school districts and a former history teacher in Montana and Ohio, said she’s encountered that mind-set. She said she has perceived some misconceptions from teachers and students who don’t live in the South, including that all whites in the antebellum South owned plantations and slaves, and that all Southern whites were, and still are, racist. “I believe some students may have these misconceptions because time typically does not allow teachers to explore many of the issues deeply,” she said. In Hartford, Vt., Jennifer Boeri-Boyce, who teaches social studies at Hartford Memorial Middle School, said she tries to help students get past the stereotypes. “This is not just ‘the North is great, the South is wrong’, but everybody was involved,” she said. “Our Northern textile mills, for example, depended on Southern cotton, and [many] slave ships were owned by Rhode Island-based companies.” Indeed, historians caution against assuming that Union soldiers were typically motivated by a desire to liberate slaves. Slavery’s prominence in causing the war “doesn’t mean the North was full of abolitionists, because it wasn’t,” Mr. Powers of the College of Charleston said. “These people were not chomping at the bit to go liberating black folks.” State Standards Analysts say textbooks generally do a reasonable job of providing a fair and accurate look at the Civil War, though that was not always so. “For the longest time, the Civil War was kind of the dividing line,” said Kyle R. Ward, the director of social studies education at St. Cloud State University, in Minnesota, who has examined U.S. history textbooks from different eras. “You could tell fairly quickly if a textbook was published for a Southern state or a Northern state.” But he doesn’t see such differences in textbooks now. “They usually do a pretty good job of laying out the arguments as to what may have caused the war, and the major issues,” Mr. Ward said. Gilbert T. Sewall, the director of the American Textbook Council, a nonprofit research group based in New York City, echoes that sentiment. “Happily, the Civil War is an area of American history that is not only covered in depth, but is covered adequately or better,” he said. State standards provide some indication of how schools teach the war, though one analyst suggests that in many places they offer little, if any, guidance. “Apart from mentioning in passing that the Civil War happened, that’s about all you get in many states, regardless of region,” said Jeremy A. Stern, a history scholar who co-wrote a recent report by the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute that graded state history standards. He sees little evidence of regional variations in the thrust of Civil War content in states that do get more specific, though he said Southern states are generally more apt to talk about the Civil War in state-history courses, given its impact there. He added: “There are a number of Southern states that are notably honest in dealing with the realities of slavery and ... the coming of the Civil War.” He cited Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia as examples. Texas Controversy But Mr. Stern singled out another former Confederate state for criticism. “In Texas, it’s not just a question of omission, but ideological distortion,” he contends. “Slavery is clearly, deliberately downplayed.” He notes, for example, that sectionalism and states’ rights are listed as causes of the war before slavery, the third item in a list in the Texas standards, which were revised last year. But Patricia Hardy, a member of the Texas state school board, insists there was no intention to downplay slavery. “If we put it first, we get criticized; if we put it last, we get criticized,” she said. “You can imagine how many people pick and parse what we say.” The Texas board, led by a block of staunch conservatives, stirred national controversy with its extensive set of changes to the state’s social studies standards. Another Civil War issue that arose concerned Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The board added new language saying students should examine Davis’ inaugural address alongside President Abraham Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses, as well as the Gettysburg Address. A lead editorial in USA Today from April 2010, before the plan was final, called the move a “politically inspired boost” to a “stout defender of slavery.” Related Blog Visit this blog.Ms. Hardy rejects that charge. “There is nothing [in the standards] to suggest an equivalency” between the ideas of Lincoln and Davis, she said. The standards, she said, urge students explicitly to “contrast” the speeches. “They were trying to make a mountain out of a molehill,” Ms. Hardy said, “because we didn’t intend it and didn’t do it.” The board’s initial proposal, though, was not to “contrast” the two figures’ speeches. When first approved in January 2010, it said students should “analyze the ideas” in Davis’ address and “Lincoln’s ideas about liberty, equality, union, and government.” The wording was further amended when the board met months later, but Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based advocacy group, said he finds the language troubling either way. “The board got a lot of heat for putting Davis in the standard,” recalled Mr. Quinn, whose group has been a sharp critic of the board. “Among the criticisms was that Davis’ inaugural address says absolutely nothing about slavery, the primary reason behind secession. His address is essentially a long diatribe against federal authority.”

It's not Socialism when the benefits go to corporations

2011-04-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

In a Sunday press release calling on wealthy individuals and corporations to pay their share, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont offered a list of what he calls "some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders."

(on Congress slashing the estate tax from 55 percent to 35 percent and exempting the first $5 million of an estate's value ($10 million for a couple)) "99.7 percent of American families will not pay one nickel in an estate tax. This is not a tax on the rich, this is a tax on the very, very, very rich."

As one of few voices in Congress calling seriously for balance between cuts and new revenues, Sanders wants to close corporate tax loopholes and get rid of tax breaks for Big Oil. He's put forth a bill that would impose a 5.4 percent surtax on household income north of $1 million, and earmark that money for deficit reduction. He estimates it would bring in $50 billion a year, whereas Congress' recent tax-cut deal will add around $700 billion to the deficit.

1) ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. [Note: Our post last April reported that ExxonMobil was owed $46 million by the IRS.]

2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.

5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.

6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.

7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.

10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

The Black History of the White House

2011-04-13T04:41:00.000-07:00

Clarence Lusane (2011)

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. (George Santayana)

Arizona: not only is SB 1070 controversial (immigration law), but HB 2281 bans schools from teaching ethnic studies courses.

p. 22 Presidents, and political leaders in general, are captives of the period and circumstances they inherit. Elected leaders have the potential to advance a politcal and policy agenda, but only within the limits of the social and broader historical constraints of their times.

(regarding Blacks in Revolutionary America) It is important to note that "free" is not the same as "equal." While a small percentage of African Americans were not held as slaves, and are commonly referred to as "free", they did not enjoy the same rights and privileges enjoyed by whites. Restrictions were placed on voting rights, business and property ownership, marriage, legal rights, education, and other areas of life and livelihood, such that the distinction between slave and freedman was not as broad as it seemed. And there was always the omnipresent threat of being kidnapped and being sold into slavery, an atrocity no white American has ever suffered [impressment though]. [Although we should not diminish the difference between slave and free, we should reconsider the difference between free white and free black in America at taht time]

p. 27 [much like Washington, Lincoln eventually permited blacks to join the army]

p. 27 "The Lincoln White House resolved the issue of slavery, but not that of racism."

p. 35 Ona "Oney" Maira Judge, the slave who, while never once reporting ever being beaten or treated poorly, escaped from slavery, her master / owners were George and Martha Washington.

remember, Washngton signs into law the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act

MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show - July, 2009: Rachel corrects, clarifies and counters the bigoted untruths about who built this country, Sotomayor's law article publication record, her Harvard law review record, and affirmative action. - snip - MADDOW: But here's the statement from my discussion with Pat that does require the most emphatic correction: BUCHANAN (VIDEO): White men were 100 percent of the people who wrote the Constitution, 100 percent of the signed the Declaration of Independence, 100 percent of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably 100 percent of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks... MADDOW: Pat joined us for this discussion from a studio in Washington D.C. that is not far from the White House, which was, of course, built by slaves, who are not white folks. The U.S. Capitol, the physical building, was built by slaves. The city of Washington D.C., where Pat has spent his entire life, was physically built in part by slave labor. It's not even possible to imagine how America could have competed for a place in the global economy in the 1800s, say, without plantation cotton and tobacco and sugar and rice and the other industries that were so thoroughly dependant on slave labor. BUCHANAN (VIDEO): This has been a country built basically by white folks... MADDOW: That statement is only true if you don't consider anyone other than white folks to be folks. Even if you only consider slave labor, even if, for example, you reimagine the railroads somehow magically building themselves without Chinese laborers. The idea that only white people built America is a fantasy and it should not have been maintained on this show as fact. As for who has died for this country in combat? More than 200,000 Black Americans fought for the Union in the Civil War. Thousands even fought for the Confederacy. 1.2 million African Americans served in World War II, and, yes, they were among those who stormed the beaches at Normandy. The Defense Department says almost 10,000 Mexican Americans fought for the Union during the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics served in the armed forces during World War II. 12 Hispanics were awarded the Medal of Honor. 24 Asian Americans received the Medal of Honor for heroism in World War II. BUCHANAN (VIDEO): This has been a country built basically by white folks. MADDOW: That's... just not true. I love white folks. I'm white folks. Yay, white folks. It's just not factually true to generalize from white experience to explain how America came to be.

p. 52 (remember the Somerset case of 1772) An alternative view regarding the driving force behind Am Rev is that contiued ties to England could lead emancipation. Preempting the Crown's abolition of slavery in the colonies became an urgent matter for the southern Colonies, and slave owners who perhaps had been hesitant at first to join the independence movement were now fully for independence, but their participation to the cause would come at a price: the perpetuation of slavery.

p. 56 (when discussing literalist interpeters of the Constitution) Conservative defenders or original intent obscure the unambiguous willingness of many of the young nation's leaders to politcally and socially continue the disenfranchisement of millions. {the Declaration, the Articles and the Constitution -- euphemisms and cautious language were often used, the words slavery and slave never appeared in these final documents but all parties involved were fully aware that slavery was being legally perpetuated. national unity, or the exigent need for such, trumped morality.)

Jefferson's slave, Richard, was in the background, tending to his master, the entire time Jefferson was holed up in the Philly house he was drafting the Declaration of Independence.

p. 85 (regarding Washington and his slave cook Hercules) "In the personal battle between refusing to particpate in human trafficking or eating well, the latter won out."

p. 96 (the president's temporary residence in Philly and the efforts to sanitize history by hiding the slave quarters section of this residence when a new Constitutional Center was being built in 2002)

The State House bell was not called the Liberty Bell until much later, and the name change came from the Abolitionists.

p. 108 James Hoban gets much praise by many historians for his building of the White House (it would seem that he built it himself), but there is no praise, in fact no mention, of the many slaves and other poor laborers who actually did the building.

"nightwalking", white many male slaves did at night, walking great distances to spend just moments with wife and other family before having to steal back in the night to their own plantation and master. The lengths many would go to to be with family.

November 6, 1860, Lincoln is elected president; December 20, 1860 South Carolina secedes; followed by, and before Lincoln took office March 4, 1861, Mississipi (January 9), Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), Louisiana (January 26), Texas (February 1). Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina (May 20) would all follow after the war begins April 12.

slavery is abolished, finally!, in Washington, D.C. April 11, 1862.

p. 181 Lincoln postpones signing Emancipation Proclamation, his hand was shaking too much? The reason? historians say he had been greeting and shaking hands all day; others think he was nervous beyond control. (also keep in mind, abolitionist sentiments often did not include a call for racial equality)

(regarding colonization efforts) Many free blacks saw their future as citizens of the United States and nowhere else.

(all before the E.P) Lincoln enraged and rescinds a military order enacted in the field by Union General John C. Fremony that freed black persons enslaved by whites who were in revolt against the Union. (August 31, 1861) Lincoln also opposed, but signed, the Confiscation Act of 1861.

keep in mind the E.P. was a presidential order; it was not an act of Congress or an Amendment, and with that limitation it had questionable long-term standing.

Andrew Johnson - openly racist, failed to intervene when black voters and activists came under attack from white terrorist groups; he advocated and gave pardonst to Confederates; ousted black employees from the Freedmen's Bureau; rescinded Sherman's order to give land to blacks; vetoed funding for the Freedmen's Bureau; vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866

Teddy Roosevelt: prior to becoming president, blacks were "the most utter under-developed" of the races; they were "suffering from laziness and shiftlessness"; "a perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the Negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else."

Oscar De Priest, first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century (1928, Illinois)

October 17, 1901, Roosevelt issued an order officially naming the president's residence "the White House."

p. 233 Cold War proves problematic for segregationists and those who accomodated them, as the Soviets and newly independent African and Caribbean nations would point to the U.S. (defender of Democracy) for its audacious racial hypocrisy.

from 1870 to 1901, 22 blacks, all Republicans, served in the Senate and House; the first black Senator in U.S. history, Hiram Rhodas, Mississippi (1870), who was elected to finish out the term of former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

Ida B. Wells: an outspoken leader against lynchings, journalist and activist, 71 years before Rosa Parks, she launched and initially won a lawsuit against a Tennessee train company that forcefully removed her from a whites-only area on one of the compnay's trains. for more on lynching, withoutsanctuary.org

Du Bois: the one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency; and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

p. 249 1911, Livemore, Kentucky, black man was snatched from a local jail, taken to the opera house, and hanged from the ceiling. Town residents paid admission to be allowed to shoot his body; NAACP sends an emergency message to President William Howard Taft to urge Congress to respond; Taft never answered.

Wagner-Van Nuys Bill finally passes the House in 1938, but after 30-day filibuster in the Senate, it was tabled and never revived. In essence, white lawmakers were granting immunity to white people to commit hate crimes, murder, terrorism. [is this similar to 2011 and Obama Admin and direction to Justice Dept. to not seek judgments regarding DOMA]

FDR, telling the NAACP why he did not push for progress on anti-lynching legislation: "I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southeners by reason of seniority rule in Congress are chairmen of occupy strategic places on omst of the committees. If Ic ome out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I JUST CAN'T TAKE THAT RISK."

p. 254 During the FDR era, Billie Holiday writes and sings "Strange Fruit"; Southern trees bear a strange fruit

it was not until 1968 that the first federal anti-lynching law was passed as part of the Civil Rights Act. and on June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate officially apologizes for its failure to enact anti-lynching bills. "Lynching is not a footnote to American historym but integral to the text."

the DAR refuse Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall (owned by the DAR) in 1939, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt immediatley arranges to have Anderson perform at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson would give an magnificent performance and the First Lady resigned from the DAR.

p. 281 in 2000, a lawsuit filed by black Secret Service agents, claiming racism on the part of the agency

Supreme Court: Boynton v. Virginia (1960) outlawed segregation in interstate travel, there was little enforcement of the policy by officials in the South.

September 15, 1963: 4 little girls (less than a month after the March on Washington; progress?); this bombing was followed by arson and shooting in other parts of Birmingham during which white racists killed two more black children.

p. 297 "The carefully cultivated and protected image of the Secret Service as a model of impeccable service and sefless professionalism was further shattered by a notorious security breakdown during the first year of the Obama administration. (November 4, 2009, first official state dinner hosted by the Obamas for Indian prime minister, and the now notorious Salahi party crashers.) While it is doubtful that a similar black (or muslim?) couple would have been able to talk their way through White House security--the fact that both as candidate and as a U.S. president Obama had reportedly received more death threats than any president in history, in part because of his race, underscores the serious of the security failure."

"In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate." (Toni Morrison) p. 304 (on the black power movement in the 60s) "These pioneering black women and men were not asking something from power; they were emenating power itself." p. 308 "due to widespread animosity toward the war, widespread urban rebellions in 67 and 68, loss of his base in the South, and the looming possibility of tens of thousands of low-income people pouring into D.C. and setting up camp, on March 31, 1968, LBJ announced that he would not seek reelection. The assassination of King four days later, and RFK on June 5 not only spelled the end of LBJ's Great Society effort, but opened the door for a law-and-order Republican to succeed him. (Shirley Chisholm, March 26, 1969, speech before House of Reps) "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war.

Race and the Vietnam War

2011-04-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Vietnam: An Antiwar Comic Book (1967)

written by Julian Bond and published in 1967, after he was expelled from the Georgia House of Representatives for opposing the war in Viet Nam. It was illustrated by T.G. Lewis. Copyright 1967 by Julian Bond.

Cesar Chavez Day and the Forgotten Asian Americans

2011-03-31T11:18:00.000-07:00

March 31, 2009 By John Delloro This Cesar Chavez Day (March 31) reminds us how forgotten stories can perpetuate stereotypes. Charlotte, an Asian American student leader at Pomona College, asked me how do we ignite people into political action and sweep away the tired public perception of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) as passive and docile. I asked her if she knew the story of Pilipino or Japanese American farm workers in the fields and she admitted she knew very little. Considering the last of the Pilipino farm workers from an earlier period died in 1997 and very little has been written in any depth, most of the students across all races I met that day shared this common amnesia. The story of Latino labor leader Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) has been widely circulated to the point of Cesar’s birthday being designated as a California state holiday and President Obama declaring public support of it becoming a national one. It is a story that has both inspired and been used to awaken the sleeping giant of Latina/o political activism. The UFW battle cry of “Si Se Puede” has been adopted by the current burgeoning immigrant rights movement and its English translation, “Yes We Can,” by Obama in his recent successful presidential run. However, the story of AAPI farm workers has been lost as well as the true face of AAPIs. Many do not know that the 1965 Delano Strike, which gave birth to the UFW, was started by Pilipinos, not Cesar Chavez and the Mexican farm workers. As the summer heat of 1965 ripened the grapes of the Delano fields, Pilipino farm workers walked off the job and struck for dignity and better working conditions. Earlier, Cesar Chavez of the mostly Mexican National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) had refused the request of Larry Itliong of the predominantly Pilipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to join the strike. A week after the strike began, Larry approached Cesar again and this time Cesar relented, with pushing from Dolores Huerta and his wife Helen Chavez, and the Mexican workers overwhelmingly voted to join the Pilipino farm workers. Both unions merged to form the UFW. Cesar became the head of the union with Larry as second in command. Dolores Huerta became First Vice President and the Pilipino farm worker leaders filled the rest of the top six leadership positions with Philip Vera Cruz as Second Vice President, Andy Imutan as Third Vice President, and Pete Velasco as Secretary Treasurer. Additionally, the strike led to large support from the Pilipino American community with an alliance forming between Pilipino farm workers and Pilipino professionals as the Filipino American Political Alliance (FAPA), the first national political Pilipino organization with Larry Itliong eventually becoming its president. By 1970, over 30 cities had active chapters. By the time of this strike, many of these Pilipino farm workers had over thirty years experience fighting and striking in the field since they arrived in the late 1920s and 1930s. Most struck within the first year on the job in the US . Even earlier, Japanese American workers actively battled in the fields. Growers thought AAPI workers were too militant and confrontational and began vigorously seeking out Mexican workers, who they saw as passive, subservient and docile. Over 40 years later, the narrative has flipped. Many perceive Latino/as as central to the revival of the US labor movement and swinging many important political elections in different places like California . Whereas, a number of people label AAPIs as culturally obsequious and compliant. Like the growers in the past who saw Mexican farm workers as submissive, many people today assume AAPIs come from a place which emphasizes obedience and passivity more than other cultures (Passivity is present in all communities). Community leader Myung Soo Seok once told me that defining Asian values as “not making waves” is an inaccurate “American” interpretation. This Cesar Chavez Day, we must restore the forgotten heritage of all people forged through struggle and remember the stories of AAPIs as a vibrant political force again. [Originally published by the Asian American Action Fund.]

Larry Itliong of the predominantly Pilipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC).

Afraid of the U.S. turning socialist? You're too late.

2011-03-25T11:09:00.001-07:00

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Published: March 24, 2011

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

In a regulatory filing just a week before the Japanese disaster put a spotlight on the company’s nuclear reactor business, G.E. reported that its tax burden was 7.4 percent of its American profits, about a third of the average reported by other American multinationals. Even those figures are overstated, because they include taxes that will be paid only if the company brings its overseas profits back to the United States. With those profits still offshore, G.E. is effectively getting money back.

Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

Yet many companies say the current level is so high it hobbles them in competing with foreign rivals. Even as the government faces a mounting budget deficit, the talk in Washington is about lower rates. President Obama has said he is considering an overhaul of the corporate tax system, with an eye to lowering the top rate, ending some tax subsidies and loopholes and generating the same amount of revenue. He has designated G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, as his liaison to the business community and as the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and it is expected to discuss corporate taxes.

“He understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Immelt, on his appointment in January, after touring a G.E. factory in upstate New York that makes turbines and generators for sale around the world.

A review of company filings and Congressional records shows that one of the most striking advantages of General Electric is its ability to lobby for, win and take advantage of tax breaks.

Over the last decade, G.E. has spent tens of millions of dollars to push for changes in tax law, from more generous depreciation schedules on jet engines to “green energy” credits for its wind turbines. But the most lucrative of these measures allows G.E. to operate a vast leasing and lending business abroad with profits that face little foreign taxes and no American taxes as long as the money remains overseas.

Company officials say that these measures are necessary for G.E. to compete against global rivals and that they are acting as responsible citizens. “G.E. is committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations,” said Anne Eisele, a spokeswoman. “We are committed to complying with tax rules and paying all legally obliged taxes. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our shareholders to legally minimize our costs.”

The assortment of tax breaks G.E. has won in Washington has provided a significant short-term gain for the company’s executives and shareholders. While the financial crisis led G.E. to post a loss in the United States in 2009, regulatory filings show that in the last five years, G.E. has accumulated $26 billion in American profits, and received a net tax benefit from the I.R.S. of $4.1 billion.

But critics say the use of so many shelters amounts to corporate welfare, allowing G.E. not just to avoid taxes on profitable overseas lending but also to amass tax credits and write-offs that can be used to reduce taxes on billions of dollars of profit from domestic manufacturing. They say that the assertive tax avoidance of multinationals like G.E. not only shortchanges the Treasury, but also harms the economy by discouraging investment and hiring in the United States.

“In a rational system, a corporation’s tax department would be there to make sure a company complied with the law,” said Len Burman, a former Treasury official who now is a scholar at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “But in our system, there are corporations that view their tax departments as a profit center, and the effects on public policy can be negative.”

The shelters are so crucial to G.E.’s bottom line that when Congress threatened to let the most lucrative one expire in 2008, the company came out in full force. G.E. officials worked with dozens of financial companies to send letters to Congress and hired a bevy of outside lobbyists.

The head of its tax team, Mr. Samuels, met with Representative Charles B. Rangel, then chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which would decide the fate of the tax break. As he sat with the committee’s staff members outside Mr. Rangel’s office, Mr. Samuels dropped to his knee and pretended to beg for the provision to be extended — a flourish made in jest, he said through a spokeswoman.

That day, Mr. Rangel reversed his opposition to the tax break, according to other Democrats on the committee.

The following month, Mr. Rangel and Mr. Immelt stood together at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem as G.E. announced that its foundation had awarded $30 million to New York City schools, including $11 million to benefit various schools in Mr. Rangel’s district. Joel I. Klein, then the schools chancellor, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who presided, said it was the largest gift ever to the city’s schools.

G.E. officials say the donation was granted solely on the merit of the project. “The foundation goes to great lengths to ensure grant decisions are not influenced by company government relations or lobbying priorities,” Ms. Eisele said.

Mr. Rangel, who was censured by Congress last year for soliciting donations from corporations and executives with business before his committee, said this month that the donation was unrelated to his official actions.

Defying Reagan’s Legacy

General Electric has been a household name for generations, with light bulbs, electric fans, refrigerators and other appliances in millions of American homes. But today the consumer appliance division accounts for less than 6 percent of revenue, while lending accounts for more than 30 percent. Industrial, commercial and medical equipment like power plant turbines and jet engines account for about 50 percent. Its industrial work includes everything from wind farms to nuclear energy projects like the troubled plant in Japan, built in the 1970s.

Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company’s profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines.

As it has evolved, the company has used, and in some cases pioneered, aggressive strategies to lower its tax bill. In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan overhauled the tax system after learning that G.E. — a company for which he had once worked as a commercial pitchman — was among dozens of corporations that had used accounting gamesmanship to avoid paying any taxes.

“I didn’t realize things had gotten that far out of line,” Mr. Reagan told the Treasury secretary, Donald T. Regan, according to Mr. Regan’s 1988 memoir. The president supported a change that closed loopholes and required G.E. to pay a far higher effective rate, up to 32.5 percent.

That pendulum began to swing back in the late 1990s. G.E. and other financial services firms won a change in tax law that would allow multinationals to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income. The change meant that if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.

Known as active financing, the tax break proved to be beneficial for investment banks, brokerage firms, auto and farm equipment companies, and lenders like GE Capital. This tax break allowed G.E. to avoid taxes on lending income from abroad, and permitted the company to amass tax credits, write-offs and depreciation. Those benefits are then used to offset taxes on its American manufacturing profits.

G.E. subsequently ramped up its lending business.

As the company expanded abroad, the portion of its profits booked in low-tax countries such as Ireland and Singapore grew far faster. From 1996 through 1998, its profits and revenue in the United States were in sync — 73 percent of the company’s total. Over the last three years, though, 46 percent of the company’s revenue was in the United States, but just 18 percent of its profits.

Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist for the trade publication Tax Analysts, said that booking such a large percentage of its profits in low-tax countries has “allowed G.E. to bring its U.S. effective tax rate to rock-bottom levels.”

G.E. officials say the disparity between American revenue and American profit is the result of ordinary business factors, such as investment in overseas markets and heavy lending losses in the United States recently. The company also says the nation’s workers benefit when G.E. profits overseas.

“We believe that winning in markets outside the United States increases U.S. exports and jobs,” Mr. Samuels said through a spokeswoman. “If U.S. companies aren’t competitive outside of their home market, it will mean fewer, not more, jobs in the United States, as the business will go to a non-U.S. competitor.”

The company does not specify how much of its global tax savings derive from active financing, but called it “significant” in its annual report. Stock analysts estimate the tax benefit to G.E. to be hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

“Cracking down on offshore profit-shifting by financial companies like G.E. was one of the important achievements of President Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice, who played a key role in those changes. “The fact that Congress was snookered into undermining that reform at the behest of companies like G.E. is an insult not just to Reagan, but to all the ordinary American taxpayers who have to foot the bill for G.E.’s rampant tax sheltering.”

A Full-Court Press

Minimizing taxes is so important at G.E. that Mr. Samuels has placed tax strategists in decision-making positions in many major manufacturing facilities and businesses around the globe. Mr. Samuels, a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Chicago Law School, declined to be interviewed for this article. Company officials acknowledged that the tax department had expanded since he joined the company in 1988, and said it now had 975 employees.

At a tax symposium in 2007, a G.E. tax official said the department’s “mission statement” consisted of 19 rules and urged employees to divide their time evenly between ensuring compliance with the law and “looking to exploit opportunities to reduce tax.”

Transforming the most creative strategies of the tax team into law is another extensive operation. G.E. spends heavily on lobbying: more than $200 million over the last decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Records filed with election officials show a significant portion of that money was devoted to tax legislation. G.E. has even turned setbacks into successes with Congressional help. After the World Trade Organization forced the United States to halt $5 billion a year in export subsidies to G.E. and other manufacturers, the company’s lawyers and lobbyists became deeply involved in rewriting a portion of the corporate tax code, according to news reports after the 2002 decision and a Congressional staff member.

By the time the measure — the American Jobs Creation Act — was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, it contained more than $13 billion a year in tax breaks for corporations, many very beneficial to G.E. One provision allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas profits from leasing planes to airlines. It was so generous — and so tailored to G.E. and a handful of other companies — that staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee publicly complained that G.E. would reap “an overwhelming percentage” of the estimated $100 million in annual tax savings.

According to its 2007 regulatory filing, the company saved more than $1 billion in American taxes because of that law in the three years after it was enacted.

By 2008, however, concern over the growing cost of overseas tax loopholes put G.E. and other corporations on the defensive. With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, momentum was building to let the active financing exception expire. Mr. Rangel of the Ways and Means Committee indicated that he favored letting it end and directing the new revenue — an estimated $4 billion a year — to other priorities.

G.E. pushed back. In addition to the $18 million allocated to its in-house lobbying department, the company spent more than $3 million in 2008 on lobbying firms assigned to the task.

Mr. Rangel dropped his opposition to the tax break. Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, said he had helped sway Mr. Rangel by arguing that the tax break would help Citigroup, a major employer in Mr. Crowley’s district.

G.E. officials say that neither Mr. Samuels nor any lobbyists working on behalf of the company discussed the possibility of a charitable donation with Mr. Rangel. The only contact was made in late 2007, a company spokesman said, when Mr. Immelt called to inform Mr. Rangel that the foundation was giving money to schools in his district.

But in 2008, when Mr. Rangel was criticized for using Congressional stationery to solicit donations for a City College of New York school being built in his honor, Mr. Rangel said he had appealed to G.E. executives to make the $30 million donation to New York City schools.

G.E. had nothing to do with the City College project, he said at a July 2008 news conference in Washington. “And I didn’t send them any letter,” Mr. Rangel said, adding that he “leaned on them to help us out in the city of New York as they have throughout the country. But my point there was that I do know that the C.E.O. there is connected with the foundation.”

In an interview this month, Mr. Rangel offered a different version of events — saying he didn’t remember ever discussing it with Mr. Immelt and was unaware of the foundation’s donation until the mayor’s office called him in June, before the announcement and after Mr. Rangel had dropped his opposition to the tax break.

Asked to explain the discrepancies between his accounts, Mr. Rangel replied, “I have no idea.”

Value to Americans?

While G.E.’s declining tax rates have bolstered profits and helped the company continue paying dividends to shareholders during the economic downturn, some tax experts question what taxpayers are getting in return. Since 2002, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States while increasing overseas employment. In that time, G.E.’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.

“That G.E. can almost set its own tax rate shows how very much we need reform,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, who has proposed closing many corporate tax shelters. “Our tax system should encourage job creation and investment in America and end these tax incentives for exporting jobs and dodging responsibility for the cost of securing our country.”

As the Obama administration and leaders in Congress consider proposals to revamp the corporate tax code, G.E. is well prepared to defend its interests. The company spent $4.1 million on outside lobbyists last year, including four boutique firms that specialize in tax policy.

“We are a diverse company, so there are a lot of issues that the government considers, that Congress considers, that affect our shareholders,” said Gary Sheffer, a G.E. spokesman. “So we want to be sure our voice is heard.”

***

Is this class war? Yes, this is class war.

2011-03-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

Michael Moore: speech delivered at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic -- and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here's what I learned: Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It's part of the Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there's lots of money to go around. LOTS. It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn't work, they've got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart -- because you -- yes, you, too! -- might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don't rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it's Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin' awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. "Here! Take our money! We don't care. We'll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!"

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois -- whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn't be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job -- their $19,000 a year job. That's how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he's stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn't have to sleep in his car between shifts at O'Hare airport. That's how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn't be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he's just another slob.

And that, my friends, is Corporate America's fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement -- a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don't understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. "Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

"There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you...?"

America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.

Marc 9, 2011

Naomi Klein on Anti-Union Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style: "This is a Frontal Assault on Democracy, a Corporate Coup D’Etat"

AMY GOODMAN: Rallies for workers’ rights are spreading across the country. In Michigan, over a thousand people rallied at the State Capitol in Lansing to oppose a measure allowing the breaking of labor contracts by placing schools and districts under emergency management. In a scene reminiscent of Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol Rotunda chanting slogans. Protests were also held against anti-union bills Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a factor in determining layoffs.

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book 'The Shock Doctrine,' which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.

Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.

Naomi Klein, welcome to Democracy Now!

NAOMI KLEIN: Hi, Amy. Great to see you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising to do.

And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, "We have no time for democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have no choice. We just have to ram it through." And we’re seeing this in 16 states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on such a huge scale.

Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it. Yesterday was International Women’s Day. This is—you know, as you pointed out on your show, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under attack: it’s healthcare, it’s education, it’s those fundamental care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if they were privatized.

AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio, more than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.

GOV. JOHN KASICH: It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look, what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate. Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be successful here.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative congressman.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, the reason why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, "We won’t pay for your crisis," that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know, "We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?" Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is finally happening.

And this attack on collective bargaining, the reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that. In the '90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And they're seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries. They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are just not that stupid. Thankfully.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does the Obama administration fit into this?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for president, saying, "If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I will be walking with you."

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the irony of this moment, and this is—it really is about democracies. Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing. Obama, on the other hand, campaigned promising to strengthen union rights. He promised, again and again, whenever he had a labor audience, that he was going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and he promised to stand with them.

And, you know, one of the things that’s so important for us to understand about why—you know, there are many reasons why the resistance is so strong in Wisconsin and why they’ve become this beacon for not just the rest of the country, but the world, and so much of it, I think—you know, my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, has written beautifully about it this week in a cover story where he talks about the rich sense of collective history, of collective memory, and the fact that people know their progressive history in Wisconsin, so they’re harder to exploit. You know, they’re not going to fall for the latest Fox News messaging, because they know their history. But, you know, this is—there’s something else that’s going on here. And, well, I mean, I’ll just let you take it from there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about Michigan.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And then we’re going to go to a break.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: About a thousand people rallied in Michigan—

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:—reminiscent of Wisconsin. Talk about the proposal there.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

AMY GOODMAN: A municipal government.

NAOMI KLEIN: A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools. You know, people in New Orleans—and you know this, Amy—warned us. They said, "What’s happening to us is going to happen to you." And I included in the book a quote saying, "Every city has their Lower Ninth Ward." And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.

NAOMI KLEIN: A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town? So—

AMY GOODMAN: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein—yes, the journalist and author. Her latest book is called Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. You can go to our Facebook page, and you can post questions there for her and just continue to participate in the dialogue. Let me ask you a question that came to us from Facebook. This is a question about the Madison protest for you, posted on our Facebook page. Kevin Williams—Kelvin Williams asks, "Are there any specific ways that Wisconsin workers can use the ideas in [your book] 'The Shock Doctrine' to go on the offensive and force true fiscal responsibility, perhaps even rolling back the compromise contract?"

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. It’s a great question. I think what’s finally starting to happen, and this is—Wisconsin has really been going from one victory after another. This started off with an attack, but people have been—have just found such incredible reserves of resolve and dignity and collective history that the ground is shifting. So, the situation under which those compromises were made, those concessions were made, it’s changed. You know, people are feeling their power and their possibility.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s amazing now. The Governor, who was just elected, Scott Walker, a few months ago, is now—his popularity has dipped to the 30s.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: And even the conservative newspapers are asking serious questions.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, he clearly made a real miscalculation. I mean, what was obvious is that he was really playing to the national stage. He’s clearly a very ambitious guy. He’s got real national political aspirations. I think that’s clear. You know, in that conversation with fake David Koch, the prank call, he compares himself to Reagan. He compares his actions to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers, that sort of "shot heard around the world" moment. That’s what he wanted, you know? And he is not getting that.

AMY GOODMAN: And then he said, first he fired the PATCO strikers, and then the Berlin Wall came down. He made that link.

NAOMI KLEIN: He said it. And it’s not a crazy link, in the sense that it was part of a frontal assault on labor and the left, and it continued for many, many years. But, you know, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and people are on to these tactics.

And I do think—you know, just coming back to that question—that it is possible. But the real key is that we have to be having the debate about where the money should be coming from. I mean, if there is a fiscal crisis—and in Wisconsin, there’s a crisis that was created by tax cuts, and this is why there’s so much outrage, because it comes back to that false claim that there’s shared sacrifice here. There isn’t shared sacrifice here. There are gifts that are being handed out to the elites. Scott Walker is governing based on this radical free market ideology that if we just create the perfect, most hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for corporations to do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will trickle down, and everyone will benefit. And that is exactly the ideology that Obama campaigned against—and won—saying we can’t keep giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down. And that was a message that really resonated with voters.

One thing I wanted to come back to that I was starting to get at earlier about why what’s happening in Wisconsin is happening in Wisconsin and what we need to take from it is that when bad things are happening, it’s helpful to have a bad guy. And Scott Walker is a good bad guy. And he has galvanized progressives. And people have, you know, an enemy to organize around and to point out these disparities. It hasn’t happened at the federal level, despite the fact that Obama is also involved in attacking labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock doctrine-style tactics, because people don’t—still don’t want to believe that Obama is doing it, too. So, when you have an easy bad guy, a Republican governor who’s obviously trying to be the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, you can mobilize the left. But it won’t just work if we are only going after the Republicans and if this is fought along just partisan lines, as opposed to being fought based on principle. No matter who is doing it, we need to be mobilizing, if it’s Obama, if it’s Scott Walker.

AMY GOODMAN: And the people that President Obama surrounds himself with, especially when it comes to the Wall Street insiders, especially as we move into the 2012 election, when it’s said Obama will raise more than a billion dollars for the presidential election?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of denial, still, about who Obama is and who he surrounds himself with. And, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit later about Tim DeChristopher, but I’ve said it many times: Obama is fundamentally a centrist. And I do think that when there is a mobilized progressive movement in the United States that is putting pressure on him, on Democrats in Congress, they will respond.

And that’s another lesson that we can take from Wisconsin. You know, I was talking, once again, to John Nichols the other day, and he said, "What’s really working here is that we have the inside-outside pincer." Right? You’ve got people in the streets, but you also have Democrat—Democratic lawmakers willing to put themselves on the line, being surprisingly courageous, leaving the state, and blocking it. So it isn’t just the people in the Rotunda. It isn’t just the protesters at the rally. It’s a kind of a partnership that’s going on. Why is that happening? Well, they looked out the window, and they saw their voters in the streets really committed and really mobilized, and that gave them courage.

And that’s something really important to remember about how—you know, so many liberal groups are involved in this gentle backroom lobbying, a token protest here and there, which says, "I’m willing to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday, but I’m not really willing to fight to win." And what’s going on in Wisconsin is something very different. It’s not just a rally on a Saturday afternoon. It is people really upending their lives for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. That sends a message to politicians who want to get re-elected that this is a big issue, a top priority. And they hear that.

Black soldiers fought for the confederacy, right?

2011-03-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

other issues to consider (lest we put too much praise on the Norht):

Why was Lincoln, just like Washington four score and seven years before him, very hesitant at first to arm black soldiers to fight for the Union cause? What factors drove Lincoln to change his mind? Were these factors similar to what drove George Washington to change his mind? Who, other than the South, still protested after Black regiments were formed? [see Benjamin Quarles for information on Blacks in the American Revolution]

from a 2 March, 2011, article by Jerry Mitchell

If you listen to some Civil War buffs and historians, as many as 90,000 black soldiers fought for the Confederacy.

A recruitment poster for freed black Americans to fight for the Union during the Civil War
“The myth of the black Confederate soldier is exactly that: a myth,” said John F. Marszalek, Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Mississippi State University. “Confederate officers often brought their slaves with them into the army, and it is also true that slaves did a lot of the entrenchment, stevedoring, etc. They were not considered soldiers.”

Proof, he said, can be found in the hostile reaction to Confederate Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s suggestion about arming slaves.

“It was only in the dying days of the Confederacy when the South decided it had no choice that a couple of units were formed,” he said. “That was about it.”

The claim of huge numbers of black soldiers “is the result of Neo-Confederates trying to prove that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery,” he said.

John David Smith, the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, called the claim of large numbers of black Confederate soldiers “politically-motivated distortion of history. To be sure, African Americans played a major role in keeping the Confederate Armies in the field — but not as armed soldiers.”

As proof he pointed to Bruce Levine’s book, Confederate Emancipation.

African Americans, however, did fight in Union armies. According to the National Archive, nearly 240,000 African Americans served in the Union army or navy during the Civil War, and 40,000 of them died during the war, many of them due to infection and-or disease.

The 1989 film, Glory, (starring Mississippi’s own Morgan Freeman) depicted the July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, S.C., in which the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers lost two thirds of their officers and half of their troops.

By the end of the war, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their valor

Wealth Distribution in America - 2011

2011-02-24T04:40:00.000-08:00

Source

This Land Is Your Land

2011-02-23T10:57:00.000-08:00

February 2011 is the 71st anniversary of "This Land is Your Land." Share the full version of Woody Guthrie's wonderful song with children. Ask why they think the verses about "private property" and the hungry people at the "relief office" are often left out.

Globalization: A View from Below

2011-02-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

Zinn Education Lesson Plan

Rethinking Schools information on Globalization

Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor

College for Everyone?

2011-02-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

The 2011 harvard study

Supporters and critics on both sides of this issue

Slavery and the White House

2011-01-26T04:00:00.001-08:00

http://zinnedproject.org/posts/564

DNA clears Texas man who spent 30 years in prison

2011-01-03T16:37:00.000-08:00

There have been many cases similar to this one.

3 January, 2011 - Prosecutors declared a Texas man innocent Monday of a rape and robbery that put him in prison for 30 years, more than any other DNA exoneree in Texas.

DNA test results that came back barely a week after Cornelius Dupree Jr. was paroled in July excluded him as the person who attacked a Dallas woman in 1979, prosecutors said Monday. Dupree was just 20 when he was sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980.

Now 51, he has spent more time wrongly imprisoned than any DNA exoneree in Texas, which has freed 41 wrongly convicted inmates through DNA since 2001 — more than any other state.

"Our Conviction Integrity Unit thoroughly reinvestigated this case, tested the biological evidence and based on the results, concluded Cornelius Dupree did not commit this crime," Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said.

Dupree is expected to have his aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon conviction overturned Tuesday at an exoneration hearing in a Dallas court.

There have been 21 DNA exonerations in Dallas since 2001, more than any other county in the nation. Only two states — Illinois and New York — have freed more of the wrongly convicted through DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal center representing Dupree that specializes in wrongful conviction cases.

Dallas' record of DNA exonerations is unmatched nationally because the county crime lab maintains biological evidence even decades after a conviction, leaving samples available to test. In addition, Watkins has cooperated with innocence groups in reviewing hundreds of requests by inmates for DNA testing. Watkins, the first black DA in Texas history, has also pointed to what he calls "a convict-at-all-costs mentality" that he says permeated the DA's office before he arrived in 2007.

Dupree's 30 years in prison will surpass James Woodard, who spent more than 27 years in a Texas prison for a murder that he was cleared of in 2008.

Nationally, there are at least two other DNA exonerees who spent more time in prison, according to the Innocence Project. James Bain was wrongly imprisoned for 35 years in Florida and Lawrence McKinney spent more than 31 years in a Tennessee prison. Phillip Bivens was locked up for more than 30 years in Mississippi, but it wasn't immediately clear whether he or Dupree were in longer.

The DNA testing in Dupree's case also excluded a second defendant, Anthony Massingill, who was subsequently convicted in another sexual assault case and sentenced to life in prison. Massingill remains in prison but maintains his innocence. DNA testing in that second case is ongoing.

Dupree was charged in 1979 with raping and robbing a 26-year-old woman and sentenced in 1980 to 75 years in prison for aggravated robbery. He was never tried on the rape charge.

According to court documents, the woman and her male companion stopped at a Dallas liquor store in November 1979 to buy cigarettes and use a payphone. As they returned to their car, two men, at least one of whom was armed, forced their way into the vehicle and ordered them to drive. They also demanded money from the two victims.

The men eventually ordered the car to the side of the road and forced the male driver out of the car. The woman attempted to flee but was pulled back inside.

The perpetrators drove the woman to a nearby park, where they raped her at gunpoint. They debated killing her but eventually let her live, keeping her rabbit-fur coat and her driver's license and warning her they would kill her if she reported the assault to police. The victim ran to the nearest highway and collapsed unconscious by the side of the road, where she was discovered.

About five days later, two men whose descriptions did not match Dupree tried to sell the rabbit-fur coat at a grocery store two miles from the liquor store, according to court documents. The car stolen from the victims was found abandoned in the parking lot.

Dupree and Massingill were arrested in December because they looked similar to two suspects being sought in another sexual assault and robbery. The 26-year-old woman picked both men out of a photo array, but her male companion did not identify either defendant in the same photo array.

Dupree was convicted and spent the next three decades appealing. The Court of Criminal Appeals turned him down three times.

The Innocence Project, which took on his case in 2006, obtained DNA testing last summer on biological evidence taken from a vaginal swab. In July, shortly after Dupree's release, the test results cleared Dupree and Massingill.

The hearing is happening now because authorities needed additional testing to confirm that the 30-year-old biological material was a DNA match to the victim.

Roberto Clemente and Martin Luther King

2010-12-31T05:38:00.000-08:00

By Dave Zirin

As we remember the 40th anniversary of that dark day of April 4th 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, it's worth recalling the reaction by Pittsburgh Pirates All-Star Roberto Clemente.

Clemente was devastated by the news of King's assassination but didn't suffer in silence. Instead, he led a charge to prevent the Pirates and Astros from opening their season on April 8th, the day before King's burial. He convinced his teammates on the Pirates, which included 11 African Americans, to stand with him. Opening Day was moved to April 10th, and Roberto Clemente had put sports in its proper perspective.

It might seem odd that Clemente, a proud Puerto Rican national, would have led such an extraordinary action. But Clemente, who had a passionate belief in social and economic justice, considered King a personal hero. He had even met face to face with Dr. King, spending a day together on Clemente's farm in Puerto Rico.

David Maraniss quotes Clemente's feelings about King in his 2005 biography of the Hall of Fame outfielder:

"When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the whole system of the American style. He put the people, the ghetto people, the people who didn't have nothing to say in those days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that nobody listened to. Now with this man, these people come down to the place where they were supposed to be but people didn't want them, and sit down there as if they were white and call attention to the whole world. Now that wasn't only the black people but the minority people. The people who didn't have anything, and they had nothing to say in those days because they didn't have any power, they started saying things and they started picketing, and that's the reason I say he changed the whole world..."

Clemente's affinity for King and the civil rights movement was rooted in his own experience with racism in the United States. Clemente played from 1954 to 1972, years that saw profound change in both Major League Baseball and U.S. society. His career spanned the entirety of the black freedom struggle from the Montgomery Bus Boycotts to the urban ghetto rebellions; from Rosa Parks to the Black Panthers. Being raised in a proud Puerto Rican household did not prepare Clemente for the racism he encountered in the U.S. Even as a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, Clemente never knew of the existence of racism before coming to the U.S. mainland. He would tell reporters that he learned that dark skin "was bad over here."

The first half of his career, the Pirates held their spring training in the still-segregated south. The Pirates' spring games were in Ft. Myers, Florida, which even by the standards of 1950s Florida was deeply segregated. Years later, Clemente's only memories of his first spring training consisted of eating on the bus with other players of color while his white teammates dined inside at both fancy restaurants and greasy spoons.

For someone who had never heard of Jim Crow, these were painful times. Clemente's friend Vic Power, a highly skilled Puerto Rican player for the Kansas City Athletics, was dragged off his team's bus one spring by the local authorities for buying a Coke from a whites-only gas station. Speaking together later, Clemente seethed at the humiliation, feeling it as if it were his own. Power tried to calm Clemente down. His approach was humor. Power liked to tell the story of a waitress telling him, "We don't serve Negroes," and responding, "That's OK. I don't eat Negroes."

But Clemente just couldn't handle it that way. In Maraniss' biography, Clemente was quoted thusly: "They say, 'Roberto, you better keep your mouth shut because they will ship you back.' [But] this is something from the first day I said to myself: I am in the minority group. I am from the poor people. I represent the poor people. I represent the common people of America. So I am going to be treated like a human being. I don't want to be treated like a Puerto Rican, or a black, or nothing like that. I want to be treated like any person."

Clemente had a profound social conscience and drive for justice, colored by a belief that he would die before his time. This came to pass when he died on December 31, 1972 after he boarded a ramshackle plane, attempting to fly to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua with 4,000 extra pounds of relief materials. His wife Vera remembered, "He always said he would die youngµ that this was his fate."

Dr. King shared this personal fatalism. On April 3, 1968 King gave a speech saying, "I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land."

We aren't yet at any kind of promised land, but Clemente and King both helped chart a path in the right direction. It's critical to remember them not as superhuman icons, but as ordinary people who sacrificed to do extraordinary things. As the Black Panther Party newspaper Panther Speaks wrote in their obituary of Clemente, "It is ironic that the profession in which he achieved 'legendry' [status] knew him the least. Roberto Clemente did not, as the Commissioner of Baseball maintained, 'Have about him a touch of royalty.' Roberto Clemente was simply a man, a man who strove to achieve his dream of peace and justice for oppressed people throughout the world."

Poverty in the U.S., 2010

2010-10-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2010 article with map

Why No One Cared When I Burned a Copy of Hesiod's Theogony

2010-10-01T19:18:00.000-07:00

Books that embrace the narrowest spectrum of political, moral, scientific, and spiritual understanding, books that, by their antiquity alone, offer us the most dilute wisdom with respect to the present, are still dogmatically thrust upon us as the final word on matters of the greatest significance. In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence." -- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

By definition, all religions have a zero tolerance policy for all other religions. Any accommodation made by one religion for another is antithetical to the tenets of the accommodating religion. If I choose to sit at the table of pluralism with my Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Norse, Olympic, Shinto, Jewish, Wicca, pagan, Jedi, or any other theist sister and brother, then I do so as a rational person of modernity, and not as a member of any religion. Religions are not accommodating, pluralistic and tolerant; people are.

If the burning of Hesiod's Theogony offends you, and it should, then let it offend you as a modern and progressive individual who questions all dogma and thinks for herself (and enjoys Classical Greek and Latin studies). Mutatis mutandis with the burning of the Quran in Florida. However, the burning of the Theogony or of the Quran cannot offend you as a Christian, since a Christian believes, must believe, that only the baptized will be saved, and all others, ALL OTHERS, will find themselves slightly south of Heaven. The problem with book burnings, such as we have today, is not religious extremism; the problem with book burnings is religion.

just sayin'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony

Census finds record gap between rich and poor

2010-09-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.

link to article