Pan-African Empowerment

Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010

2011-04-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010

The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 on April 8, 2011. As in previous years, the reports are full of distortions and accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China. However, the United States turned a blind eye to its own terrible human rights situation and seldom mentioned it. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010 is prepared to urge the United States to face up to its own human rights issues.

I. On Life, Property and Personal Security

The United States reports the world's highest incidence of violent crimes, and its people's lives, properties and personal security are not duly protected.

Every year, one out of every five people is a victim of a crime in the United States. No other nation on earth has a rate that is higher. In 2009, an estimated 4.3 million violent crimes, 15.6 million property crimes and 133,000 personal thefts were committed against U.S. residents aged 12 or older, and the violent crime rate was 17.1 victimizations per 1,000 persons, according to a report published by the U.S. Department of Justice on October 13, 2010 (Criminal Victimization 2009, U.S. Department of Justice, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov). The crime rate surged in many cities in the United States. St. Louis in Missouri reported more than 2,070 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, making it the nation's most dangerous city (The Associated Press, November 22, 2010). Detroit residents experienced more than 15,000 violent crimes each year, which means the city has 1,600 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. The United States' four big cities - Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York - reported increases in murders in 2010 from the previous year (USA Today, December 5, 2010). Twenty-five murder cases occurred in Los Angeles County in a week from March 29 to April 4, 2010; and in the first half of 2010, 373 people were killed in murders in Los Angeles County (www.lapdonline.org). As of November 11, New York City saw 464 homicide cases, up 16 percent from the 400 reported at the same time last year (The Washington Post, November 12, 2010).

The United States exercised lax control on the already rampant gun ownership. Reuters reported on November 10, 2010 that the United States ranks first in the world in terms of the number of privately-owned guns. Some 90 million people own an estimated 200 million guns in the United States, which has a population of about 300 million. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled on June 28, 2010 that the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives Americans the right to bear arms that can not be violated by state and local governments, thus extending the Americans' rights to own a gun for self-defense purposes to the entire country (The Washington Post, June 29, 2010). Four U.S. states - Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia and Virginia - allow loaded guns in bars. And 18 other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol (The New York Times, October 3, 2010). Tennessee has nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders. The Washington Times reported on June 7, 2010 that in November 2008, a total of 450,000 more people in the United States purchased firearms than had bought them in November 2007. This was a more than 10-fold increase, compared with the change in sales from November 2007 over November 2006. From November 2008 to October 2009, almost 2.5 million more people bought guns than had done so in the preceding 12 months (The Washington Times, June 7, 2010). The frequent campus shootings in colleges in the United States came to the spotlight in recent years. The United Kingdom's Daily Telegraph reported on February 21, 2011 that a new law that looks certain to pass through the legislature in Texas, the United States, would allow half a million students and teachers in its 38 public colleges to carry guns on campus. It would become only the second state, after Utah, to enforce such a rule.

The United States had high incidence of gun-related blood-shed crimes. Statistics showed there were 12,000 gun murders a year in the United States (The New York Times, September 26, 2010). Figures released by the U.S. Department of Justice on October 13, 2010 showed weapons were used in 22 percent of all violent crimes in the United States in 2009, and about 47 percent of robberies were committed with arms (www.ojp.usdoj.gov, October 13, 2010). On March 30, 2010, five men killed four people and seriously injured five others in a deadly drive-by shooting (The Washington Post, April 27, 2010). In April, six separate shootings occurred overnight, leaving 16 total people shot, two fatally (www.myfoxchicago.com). On April 3, a deadly shooting at a restaurant in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, left four people dead and two others wounded (www.nbclosangeles.com, April 4, 2010). One person was killed and 21 others wounded in separate shootings around Chicago roughly between May 29 and 30 (www.chicagobreakingnews.com, May 30, 2010). In June, 52 people were shot at a weekend in Chicago (www.huffingtonpost.com, June 21, 2010). Three police officers were shot dead by assailants in the three months from May to July (Chicago Tribune, July 19, 2010). A total of 303 people were shot and 33 of them were killed in Chicago in the 31 days of July in 2010. Between November 5 and 8, four people were killed and at least five others injured in separate shootings in Oakland (World Journal, November 11, 2010). On November 30, a 15-year-old boy in Marinette County, Wisconsin, took his teacher and 24 classmates hostage at gunpoint (abcNews, November 30, 2010). On January 8, 2011, a deadly rampage critically wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Six people were killed and 12 others injured in the attack (Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2011).

II. On Civil and Political Rights

In the United States, the violation of citizens' civil and political rights by the government is severe.

Citizen' s privacy has been undermined. According to figures released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in September 2010, more than 6,600 travelers had been subject to electronic device searches between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, nearly half of them American citizens. A report on The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010, said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was sued over its policies that allegedly authorize the search and seizure of laptops, cellphones and other electronic devices without a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The policies were claimed to leave no limit on how long the DHS can keep a traveler' s devices or on the scope of private information that can be searched, copied or detained. There is no provision for judicial approval or supervision. When Colombian journalist Hollman Morris sought a U.S. student visa so he could take a fellowship for journalists at Harvard University, his application was denied on July 17, 2010, as he was ineligible under the "terrorist activities" section of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. An Arab American named Yasir Afifi, living in California, found the FBI attached an electronic GPS tracking device near the right rear wheel of his car. In August, ACLU, joined by the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian weekly, had filed a lawsuit to expedite the release of FBI records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. The San Francisco FBI office has declined to comment on the matter "because it' s still an ongoing investigation." (The Washington Post, October 13, 2010). In October 2010, the Transportation Security Administration raised the security level at U.S. airports requiring passengers to go through a full-body scanner machine or pat-downs. It also claimed that passengers can not refuse the security check based on their religious beliefs. Civil rights groups contended the more intensive screening violates civil liberties including freedom of religion, the right to privacy and the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches (AP, November 16, 2010). The ACLU and the U.S. Travel Association have been getting thousands of complaints about airport security measures (The Christian Science Monitor, November 20, 2010).

Abuse of violence and torturing suspects to get confession is serious in the U. S. law enforcement. According to a report of Associated Press on October 14, 2010, the New York Police Department (NYPD) paid about 964 million U.S. dollars to resolve claims against its officers over the past decade. Among them was a case that an unarmed man was killed in a 50-bullet police shooting on his wedding day. The three police officers were acquitted of manslaughter and the NYDP simply settled the case with money (China Press, October 15, 2010). In a country that boasts "judicial justice," what justice did the above-mentioned victims get? In June 2010, a federal jury found former Chicago police lieutenant Jon Burge guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. Burge and officers under his command shocked, suffocated and burned suspects into giving confessions in the 1970s and 1980s (The Boston Globe, November 5, 2010). According to a report on Chicago Tribune on May 12, 2010, Chicago Police was charged with arresting people without warrants, shackling them to the wall or metal benches, feeding them infrequently and holding them without bathroom breaks and giving them no bedding, which were deemed consistent with tactics of "soft torture" used to extract involuntary confessions. On March 22, a distraught homeless man was shot dead in Potland, Oregon, by four shots from a police officer (China Press, April 1, 2010). An off-duty Westminster police officer was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and raping a woman on April 3 while a corrections officer was accused of being an accessory (Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2010). On April 17 in Seattle, Washington, a gang detective and patrol officer kicked a suspect and verbally assaulted him (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 10, 2010). On March 24, Chad Holley, 15, was brutally beaten by eight police officers in Houston. The teen claimed he was face down on the ground while officers punched him in the face and kneed him in the back. After a two-month-long investigation, four officers were indicted and fired (Houston Chronicle, May 4, June 23, 2010). On August 11, three people were injured by police shooting when police officers chased a stolen van in Prince George' s County. Family members of the three injured argued why the police fired into the van when nobody on the van fired at them (The Washington Post, August 14, 2010). On September 5, 2010, a Los Angeles police officer killed a Guatemalan immigrant by two shots and triggered a large scale protest. Police clashed with protesters and arrested 22 of them (The New York Times, September 8, 2010). On November 5, 2010, a large demonstration took place in Oakland against a Los Angeles court verdict which put Johannes Mehserle, a police officer, to two years in prison as he shot and killed unarmed African American Oscar Grant two years ago. Police arrested more than 150 people in the protest (San Francisco Chronicle, November 9, 2010).

The United States has always called itself "land of freedom," but the number of inmates in the country is the world' s largest. According to a report released by the Pew Center on the States' Public Safety Performance Project in 2008, one in every 100 adults in the U.S. are in jail and the figure was one in every 400 in 1970. By 2011, America will have more than 1.7 million men and women in prison, an increase of 13 percent over that of 2006. The sharp increase will lead to overcrowding prisons. California prisons now hold 164,000 inmates, double their intended capacity (The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2010). In a New Beginnings facility for the worst juvenile offenders in Washington DC, only 60 beds are for 550 youths who in 2009 were charged with the most violent crimes. Many of them would violate the laws again without proper care or be subject to violent crimes (The Washington Post, August 28, 2010). Due to poor management and conditions, unrest frequently occurred in prisons. According to a report on Chicago Tribune on July 18, 2010, more than 20 former Cook County inmates filed suit saying they were handcuffed or shackled during labor while in the custody, leaving serious physical and psychological damage. On October 19, 2010, at least 129 inmates took part in a riot at Calipatria State Prison, leaving two dead and a dozen injured (China Press, October 20, 2010). In November, AP released a video showing an inmate, being beaten by a fellow inmate in an Idaho prison, managed to plead for help through a prison guard station window but officers looked on and no one intervened until he was knocked unconscious. The prison was dubbed "gladiator school" (China Press, December 2, 2010).

Wrongful conviction occurred quite often in the United States. In the past two decades, a total of 266 people were exonerated through DNA tests, among them 17 were on death row (Chicago Tribune, July 11, 2010). A report from The Washington Post on April 23, 2010, said Washington DC Police admitted 41 charges they raised against a 14-year-old boy, including four first-degree murders, were false and the teen never confessed to any charge. Police of Will County, Illinois, had tortured Kevin Fox to confess the killing of his three-year-old daughter and he had served eight months in prison before a DNA test exonerated him. Similar case happened in Zion, Illinois, that Jerry Hobbs were forced by the police to confess the killing of his eight-year-old daughter and had been in prison for five years before DNA tests proved his innocence. Barry Gibbs had served 19 years in prison when his conviction of killing a prostitute in 1986 was overturned in 2005 and received 9.9 million U.S. dollars from New York City government in June 2010 (The New York Times, June 4, 2010).

The U.S. regards itself as "the beacon of democracy." However, its democracy is largely based on money. According to a report from The Washington Post on October 26, 2010, U.S. House and Senate candidates shattered fundraising records for a midterm election, taking in more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars as of October 24. The midterm election, held in November 2010, finally cost 3.98 billion U.S. dollars, the most expensive in the U.S. history. Interest groups have actively spent on the election. As of October 6, 2010, the 80 million U.S. dollars spent by groups outside the Democratic and Republican parties dwarfed the 16 million U.S. dollars for the 2006 midterms. One of the biggest spenders nationwide was the American Future Fund from Iowa, which spent 7 million U.S. dollars on behalf of Republicans in more than two dozen House and Senate races. One major player the 60 Plus Association spent 7 million dollars on election related ads. The American Federation of States, County and Municipal Employees spent 103.9 million U.S. dollars on the campaigns from October 22 to 27 (The New York Times, November 1, 2010). U.S. citizens have expressed discontent at the huge cost in the elections. A New York Times/CBS poll showed nearly 8 in 10 U.S. citizens said it was important to limit the campaign expense (The New York Times, October 22, 2010).

While advocating Internet freedom, the U.S. in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace. On June 24, 2010, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which will give the federal government "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. Handing government the power to control the Internet will only be the first step towards a greatly restricted Internet system, whereby individual IDs and government permission would be required to operate a website. The United States applies double standards on Internet freedom by requesting unrestricted "Internet freedom" in other countries, which becomes an important diplomatic tool for the United States to impose pressure and seek hegemony, and imposing strict restriction within its territory. An article on BBC on February 16, 2011 noted the U.S. government wants to boost Internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as "closed" and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the U.S. government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by Wikileaks. The U.S. government might be sensitive to the impact of the free flow of electronic information on its territory for which it advocates, but it wants to practice diplomacy by other means, including the Internet, particularly the social networks.

An article on the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Magazine admitted that the U.S government's approach to the Internet remains "full of problems and contradictions" (Foreign Policy Magazine website, February 17, 2011).

III. On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The United States is the world's richest country, but Americans' economic, social and cultural rights protection is going from bad to worse.

Unemployment rate in the United States has been stubbornly high. From December 2007 to October 2010, a total of 7.5 million jobs were lost in the country (The New York Times, November 19, 2010). According to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Labor on December 3, 2010, the U.S. unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent in November 2010, and the number of unemployed persons was 15 million in November, among whom, 41.9 percent were jobless for 27 weeks and more (Data.bls.gov). The jobless rate of California in January 2010 was 12.5 percent, its worst on record. Unemployment topped 20 percent in eight California counties (The Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2010). Unemployment rate of New York State was 8.3 percent in October 2010. There were nearly 800,000 people unemployed statewide, and about 527,000 people were collecting unemployment benefits from the state (The New York Times, November 19, 2010). Employment situation for the disabled was worse. According to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Labor on August 25, 2010, the average unemployment rate for disabled workers was 14.5 percent in 2009, and nearly a third of workers with disabilities worked only part-time. The jobless rate for workers with disabilities who had at least a bachelor's degree was 8.3 percent, which was higher than the 4.5 percent rate for college-educated workers without disabilities (The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2010). The unemployment rate for those with disabilities had risen to 16.4 percent as of July 2010 (The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2010). In 2009, more than 21,000 disabled people complained to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) about their experience of employment discrimination, an increase of 10 percent and 20 percent over the numbers of 2008 and 2007 (The World Journal, September 25, 2010).

Proportion of American people living in poverty has risen to a record high. The U.S. Census Bureau reported on September 16, 2010 that a total of 44 million Americans found themselves in poverty in 2009, four million more than that of 2008. The share of residents in poverty climbed to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest level recorded since 1994 (The New York Times, September 17, 2010). In 2009, Mississippi's poverty rate was 23.1 percent (www.census.gov). Florida had a total of 2.7 million people living in poverty (The Washington Post, September 19, 2010). In New York City, 18.7 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2009, as an additional 45,000 people fell below the poverty line that year (New York Daily News, September 29, 2010).

People in hunger increased sharply. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in November 2010 showed that 14.7 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2009 (www.ers.usda.gov), an increase of almost 30 percent since 2006 (The Washington Post, November 21, 2010). About 50 million Americans experienced food shortage that year. The number of households collecting emergency food aid had increased from 3.9 million in 2007 to 5.6 million in 2009 (The China Press, November 16, 2010). The number of Americans participating in the food-stamp program increased from 26 million in May 2007 to 42 million in September 2010, approximately one in eight people was using food stamps (The Associated Press, October 22, 2010). In the past four years, 31.6 percent of American families tasted poverty for at least a couple of months (The Globe and Mail, September 17, 2010).

Number of homeless Americans increased sharply. According to a report by USA Today on June 16, 2010, the number of families in homeless shelters increased 7 percent to 170,129 from fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2009. Homeless families also were staying longer in shelters, from 30 days in 2008 to 36 in 2009, and about 800,000 American families were living with extended family, friends, or other people because of the economy. The number of homeless students in the U.S. increased 41 percent over that in the previous two years to one million (The Washington Post, September 23, 2010; USA Today, July 31, 2010). In New York City, 30 percent of homeless families in 2009 were first-time homeless (www.usatoday.com). The city's homeless people increased to 3,111, with another 38,000 people living in shelters (The New York Times, March 19, 2010). New Orleans had 12,000 homeless people (News Week, August 23, 2010). An estimated 254,000 men, women and children experienced homelessness in Los Angeles County during some part of the year. Approximately 82,000 people were homeless on any given night. African Americans made up approximately half of the Los Angeles County homeless population, 33 percent were Latino, and a high percentage, as high as 20 percent, were veterans (www.laalmanac.com). American veterans served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could become homeless one year and a half after they retired, and about 130,000 retired veterans become homeless each year in the US (homepost.kpbs.org). Statistics from the National Coalition for the Homeless showed that more than 1,000 violent offences against homeless people have occurred in the U.S. which caused 291 deaths since 1999. (The New York Times, August 18, 2010)

The number of American people without health insurance increased progressively every year. According to a report by USA Today on September 17, 2010, the number of Americans without health insurance increased from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, the ninth consecutive annual rise, which accounted for 16.7 percent of the total U.S. population. Sixty-eight adults under 65 years old died due to lack of health insurance each day on average in the US. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in November 2010 showed that 22 percent of American adults between 16 and 64 had no health insurance (Reuters, November 10, 2010). A report issued by the Center for Health Policy Research, University of California, Los Angeles indicated that 24.3 percent of adults under 65 in California State in 2009 had no health insurance, representing a population of 8.2 million, up from the 6.4 million in 2007. Proportion of children without health insurance in the state rose from 10.2 percent in 2007 to 13.4 percent in 2009 (The China Press, March 17, 2010, citing the Los Angeles Times).

IV. On Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination, deep-seated in the United States, has permeated every aspect of social life.

An Associated Press-Univision Poll, reported by the Associated Press on May 20, 2010, found that 61 percent of people overall said Hispanics face significant discrimination, compared with 52 percent who said blacks do. The New York Times reported on October 28, 2010 that more than 6 in 10 Latinos in the United States say discrimination is a "major problem" for them, a significant increase in the last three years.

Minorities do not enjoy the same political status as white people. The New York city's non-Hispanic white population is 35 percent, while more than 70 percent of the senior jobs are held by whites. Since winning a third term in November 2009, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced a parade of major appointments: bringing aboard three new deputy mayors and six commissioners. All nine are white. Of the 80 current city officials identified by the Bloomberg administration as "key members" on its Website, 79 percent are white. Of 321 people who advise the mayor or hold one of three top titles at agencies that report directly to him - commissioners, deputy commissioners and general counsels, and their equivalents - 78 percent are white. And of the 1,114 employees who must live in the city, under an executive order, because they wield the most influence over policies and day-to-day operations, 74 percent are white (The New York Times, June 29, 2010).

Minority groups confront discrimination in their employment and occupation. The black people are treated unfairly or excluded in promotion, welfare and employment (Chicago Tribune, March 12, 2010). It is reported that one-third of black people confronted discrimination at work, against which only one-sixteenth of the black people would lodge a complaint. The Washington Post reported on October 15, 2010 that about 30 black firefighters alleged systematic racial discrimination within the D.C. Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services, claiming that black employees faced harsher discipline. Shirley Sherrod, who was black, was fired by the Agricultural Department after a blogger posted her truncated comments that 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer when she was working for a nonprofit agency established to help black farmers. The U.S. Agriculture Department in February, 2010 reached a 1.25-billion-dollar settlement in a decades-long struggle by African-American farmers who had suffered from discrimination within farm loans (The Washington Post, July 23, 2010). The New York Times reported on September 23, 2010 that by September 30, 2009, Muslim workers had filed a record 803 claims of complaints over employment discrimination, up 20 percent from the previous year.

Minority groups have high unemployment rate. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in July 2010, among the population 16 to 24 years of age, 2,987,000 unemployed people were white, with unemployment rate reaching 16.2 percent; 992,000 were black or African American people, with unemployment rate of 33.4 percent; 165,000 were Asians, with unemployment rate of 21.6 percent; 884,000 belonged to Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, with unemployment rate of 22.1 percent (www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf). According to a report of the working group of experts on people of African descent to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in August 2010, unemployment was a very serious issue for the Afro-descendant community in the United States, with levels of unemployment being, proportionately, four times higher among this population than in the white community. Reference was made to a case where the New York City Fire Department was found to have discriminated against people of African descent who had applied for employment as firemen. Of the 11,000 firemen employed by the New York City Fire Department, only about 300 were of African descent, despite their being about 27 percent of the population of New York (UN document A/HRC/15/18). Nearly one-sixth of black residents in the city were unemployed in the third quarter of 2010. About 140,000 of the city's 384,000 unemployed residents, or 36 percent, were black (The New York Times, October 28, 2010).

Poverty proportion for minorities is also high in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau announced in September, 2010 that the poverty proportion of the black was 25.8 percent in 2009, and those of Hispanic origin and Asian were 25.3 percent and 12.5 percent respectively, much higher than that of the non-Hispanic white at 9.4 percent. The median household income for the black, Hispanic origin and non-Hispanic white were 32,584, 38,039 and 54,461 U.S. dollars respectively (The USA Today, September 17, 2010). A survey released by the America Association of Retired Persons on February 23, 2010 found that over the previous 12 months, a third (33 percent) of African Americans age 45+ had problems paying rent or mortgage, 44 percent had problems paying for essential items, such as food and utilities, almost one in four (23 percent) lost their employer-sponsored health insurance, more than three in ten (31 percent) had cut back on their medications, and a quarter (26 percent) prematurely withdrew funds from their retirement nest eggs to pay for living expenses. Even in the tough employment environment, 12 percent of African Americans age 65+ returned to the workforce from retirement, while nearly 20 percent of African Americans age 45 to 64 increased the number of hours worked and 12 percent took a second job (The Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2010). In 2009, there were more than 30,000 black children living in poverty in the nation's capital, almost 7,000 more than two years before. Among black children in the city, childhood poverty shot up to 43 percent, from 36 percent in 2008. In contrast, the poverty rate for Hispanic children was 13 percent, and the rate for white children was 3 percent (The Washington Post, September 29, 2010).

The U.S. minority groups face obvious inequality in education. A latest report released by America's Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University showed that 81 percent of white, 64 percent of Hispanic, and 62 percent of African-American students graduated from high schools in 2008 (The World Journal, December 2, 2010). As of 2008, among white men aged 55 to 64, the college completion rate was 43 percent, while 19 percent of Hispanics. Among white men aged 25 to 34, the completion rate was 39 percent, compared with 14 percent of Hispanics (The Washington Post, October 20, 2010). In New York City, the number of white adults with a master degree were three times more than Hispanics. According to a report released by the Sacramento State University, only 22 percent of Latino students and 26 percent African American students completed their two-year studies in the university, compared with 37 percent of white students (The San Jose Mercury News, October 20, 2010). A report released from New York City' s Department of Education in January 2010 found that 6,207 or 4.7 percent-out of a total of 130,837 disciplinary incidents reported in the City's public schools during the 2008-09 school year were bias-related with gender, race/color, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation (The China Press, January 18, 2010). The USA Today on October 14, 2010 reported that African American boys who were suspended at double and triple the rates of their white male peers. At the Christina School District in Delaware, 71 percent of black male students were suspended in a recent school year, compared to 22 percent of their white male counterparts. African-American students without disabilities were more than three times as likely to be expelled as their white peers. African-American students with disabilities were over twice as likely to be expelled or suspended as their white counterparts (USA Today, March 8, 2010).

The health care for African-American people is worrisome. Studies showed that nearly a third of ethnic minority families in the United States did not have health insurance. Life expectancy was lower and infant mortality higher than average (BBC, the social and economic position of minorities). Mortality of African American children was two to three times higher than that of their white counterparts. African American children represented 71 percent of all pediatric HIV/AIDS cases. African American women and men were 17 times and 7 times, respectively, more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than white people, and twice more likely to develop cancer.

Racial discrimination is evident in the law enforcement and judicial systems. The New York Times reported on May 13, 2010, that in 2009, African Americans and Latinos were 9 times more likely to be stopped by the police to receive stop-and-frisk searches than white people. Overall, 41 percent of the prison population was estimated to be African American. The rate of African Americans serving a life sentence was more than 10 times higher than that of whites. Males of African descent who dropped out of school had a 66 percent chance of ending up in jail or being processed by the criminal justice system (UN document A/HRC/15/18). A report said 85 percent of the people stopped in New York to receive stop-and-frisk searches over the past six years had been black or Latino (The Washington Post, November 4, 2010). According to a report of the Law School of the Michigan State University, among the 159 death row inmates in North Carolina, 86 were black, 61 were white and 12 were from other ethnic groups. During the trial process of the 159 capital cases, the number of black members taken out from the jury by prosecutors more than doubled that of non-black members. According to statistics from the Chicago Police Department, the proportion of black people being the criminals and the victims of all murder cases is the highest, reaching 76.3 and 77.6 percent respectively (portal.chicagopolice.org). The Homicide Report of the Los Angeles Times showed 2,329 homicides in Los Angeles County from January 1, 2007 to November 14, 2010, with victims of 1,600 Latinos and 997 black people (projects.latimes.com/homicide/map/).

Racial hate crimes are frequent. The FBI said in an annual report that out of 6,604 hate crimes committed in the United States in 2009, some 4,000 were racially motivated and nearly 1,600 were driven by hatred for a particular religion. Overall, some 8,300 people fell victim to hate crimes in 2009. Blacks made up around three-quarters of victims of the racially motivated hate crimes and Jews made up the same percentage of victims of anti-religious hate crimes. Two-thirds of the 6,225 known perpetrators of all U.S. hate crimes were white (AFP, November 22, 2010).

Immigrants' rights and interests are not guaranteed. Lawmakers in the Arizona Senate in April 2010 passed a bill to curb illegal immigration. The law requires state and local police to determine the status of people if there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are illegal immigrants and to arrest people who are unable to provide documentation proving they are in the country legally (The Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2010). Another proposed Arizona law, supported by Republicans of the state, would deny birth certificates to children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents (CNN U.S., June 15, 2010). A group of UN human rights experts on migrants, racism, minorities, indigenous people, education and cultural rights expressed serious concern over the laws enacted by the state of Arizona, saying that "a disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants has been established". The Arizona immigration law requires state law enforcement officers to arrest a person, without a warrant. It also makes it a crime to be in the country illegally, and specifically targets day laborers, making it a crime for an undocumented migrant to solicit work, and for any person to hire or seek to hire an undocumented migrant. The law may lead to detaining and subjecting to interrogation persons primarily on the basis of their perceived ethnic characteristics. In Arizona, persons who appear to be of Mexican, Latin American, or indigenous origin are especially at risk of being targeted under the law. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on November 19, 2010 that a large group of human rights organizations prepared to hold a vigil in South Georgia in support of suspected illegal immigrants being held in a prison in Lumpkin. As of September 17, 2010, the prison was holding 1,890 inmates. Court cases for inmates at the prison were pending for 63 days on average. With regard to immigration detainees, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants said, in a report to the Human Rights Council in April 2010, that he received reports of detainees being willfully and maliciously denied proper medical treatment, to which they are entitled by legislation, while they are in the custody of the national authorities. The Special Rapporteur observed during his country missions that irregular migrant workers are often homeless or living in crowded, unsafe and unsanitary conditions (UN document A/HRC/14/30).

V. On the rights of women and children

The situation regarding the rights of women and children in the United States is bothering.

Gender discrimination against women widely exists in the United States. According to a report released on August 11, 2010 by the Daily Mail, 90 percent of women have suffered some form of sexual discrimination in the workplace. Just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. A report by the American Association of University Women released on March 22, 2010 showed that women earned only 21 percent of doctorate degrees in computer science, around one-third of the doctorates in earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences, chemistry, and math. Women doing the same work as men often get less payment in the United States. According to a report on September 17, 2010 by the Washington Post, in nearly 50 years, the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents. The census report released on September 16, 2010 showed that working women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. The New York Times reported on April 26, 2010 that Wal-Mart was accused of systematically paying women less than men, giving them smaller raises and offering women fewer opportunities for promotion in the biggest employment discrimination case in the nation's history. The plaintiffs stressed that while 65 percent of Wal-Mart's hourly employees were women, only 33 percent of the company's managers were (The New York Times, April 26, 2010).

Women in the United States often experience sexual assault and violence. Statistics released in October 2010 by the National Institute of Justice show that some 20 million women are rape victims in the country (www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/october/10-ag-1220.html). About 60,000 female prisoners fall victims to sexual assault or violence every year. Some one fifth female students on campus are victims of sexual assault, and 60 percent of campus rape cases occurred in female students' dorms (World Journal, August 26, 2010).

According to the Human Rights Watch report released in August last year, 50 detainees in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers have been alleged victims of sexual assault since 2003. Most of these victims were women, and some of the alleged assailants, including prison guards, were not prosecuted. In one case, a guard in a Texas detention center pretended to be a doctor and sexually assaulted five women in the center's infirmary (World Journal, August 26, 2010). According to figures from Pentagon, cited by the Time magazine on March 8, 2010, nearly 3,000 female soldiers were sexually assaulted in fiscal year 2008, up 9 percent from the year before. Close to one third of the retired female soldiers said they were victims of rape or assault while they were serving.

Women are also victims of domestic violence. In the United States, some 1.3 million people fall victim to domestic violence every year, and women account for 92 percent. One in four women is a victim of domestic violence at some point during her life, and the violence kills three women each day in the United States by a current or former intimate partner (CNN, October 21, 2010). In 2008, police in the New York City received reports of more than 230,000 domestic violence cases, which equals to 600 cases per day (China Press, April 3, 2010). In all homicide cases in 2009, of the female murder victims for whom their relationships to the offenders were known, 34.6 percent were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends (www2.fbi.gov). In the Santa Clara County in California, police receive more than 4,500 domestic violence related calls every year, and more than 700 women and children live in shelters to avoid domestic violence (World Journal, October 15, 2010; China Press, October 9, 2010).

Women's health rights are not properly protected in the United States. According to the Amnesty International, more than two women die every day in the United States from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women in the past 20 years. Native American and Alaska Native women are 3.6 times, African-American women 2.6 times and Latina women 2.5 times more likely than white women to receive no or late pre-natal care (UN document A/HRC/14/NGO/13).

Children in the U.S. live in poverty. The Washington Post reported on November 21, 2010, that nearly one in four children struggles with hunger, citing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than 60 percent of public school teachers identify hunger as a problem in the classroom. Roughly the same percentage go into their own pockets to buy food for their hungry students (The Washington Post, November 21, 2010). According to figures released on Sept. 16, 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate increased for children younger than 18 to 20.7 percent in 2009, up 1.7 percentage points from that in 2008 (www.census.gov). Poverty among black children in the Washington D.C. is as high as 43 percent (The Washington Post, September 29, 2010), and some 2.7 million children in California live in impoverished families. The number of poor children in six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area has increased by 15 to 16 percent. Statistics show that at least 17 million children in the United States lived in food insecure households in 2009 (World Journal, May 8, 2010).

Violence against children is very severe. Figures from the official website of Love Our Children USA show that every year over 3 million children are victims of violence reportedly and the actual number is 3 times greater. Almost 1.8 million are abducted and nearly 600,000 children live in foster care. Every day one out of seven kids and teens are approached online by predators, and one out of four kids are bullied and 43 percent of teens and 97 percent of middle schoolers are cyberbullied. Nine out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment at school. As many as 160,000 students stay home on any given day because they' re afraid of being bullied (www.loveourchildrenusa.org). According to a report released on October 20, 2010 by the Washington Post, 17 percent of American students report being bullied two to three times a month or more within a school semester. Bullying is most prevalent in third grade, when almost 25 percent of students reported being bullied two, three or more times a month. According to a UN report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education, 20 states and hundreds of school districts in the United States still permit schools to administer corporal punishment in some form, and students with mental or physical disabilities are more likely to suffer physical punishment (UN document A/HRC/14/25/ADD.1).

Children' s physical and mental health is not ensured. More than 93,000 children are currently incarcerated in the United States, and between 75 and 93 percent of children have experienced at least one traumatic experience, including sexual abuse and neglect (The Washington Post, July 9, 2010). According to a report made by the Child Fatality Review Team from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, between 2001 and 2008, injury-related deaths among children aged one to 12 years old in the United States was 8.9 deaths per 100,000. The figure for those in the New York City was 4.2 deaths per 100,000 (China Press, July 3, 2010). Thirteen children and young adults have died at a Chicago care facility for children with severe disabilities since 2000 due to failure to take basic steps to care for them (Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2010). According to a study published on October 14, 2010 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, about half of American teens aged between 13 and 19 met the criteria for a mental disorder. Fifty-one percent of boys and 49 percent of girls aged 13 to 19 had a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder, and the disorder in 22.2 percent of teens was so severe it impaired their daily activities (World Journal, October 15, 2010). Pornographic content is rampant on the Internet and severely harms American children. Statistics show that seven in 10 children have accidentally accessed pornography on the Internet and one in three has done so intentionally. And the average age of exposure is 11 years old - some start at eight years old (The Washington Times, June 16, 2010). According to a survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of American teens have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves. (www.co.jefferson.co.us, March 23, 2010). At least 500 profit-oriented nude chat websites were set up by teens in the United States, involving tens of thousands of pornographic pictures.

Economic Hitmen

2011-02-16T20:51:00.000-08:00

How Corporations are Branding Children's Minds

2011-02-15T08:06:00.000-08:00

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Animated Film on Federal Reserve

2011-02-13T20:35:00.000-08:00

Cointelpro Documentary

2011-01-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

Cointelpro Documentary, Part 2 of 6

2011-01-23T06:54:00.002-08:00

Cointelpro Documentary, Part 3 of 6

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the tonton macoutes

2011-01-19T20:31:00.000-08:00

Dr. King and War...

2011-01-19T10:55:00.000-08:00

America's "War on Drugs": CIA- Recruited Mercenaries and Drug-Traffickers

2011-01-16T21:34:00.000-08:00

When Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1971, there were fewer than 500,000 hard-core addicts in the nation, most of whom were addicted to heroin. Three decades later, despite the expenditure of $1 trillion in tax dollars, the number of hard-core addicts is shortly expected to exceed five million. Our nation has become the supermarket of the drug world, with a wider variety and bigger supply of drugs at cheaper prices than ever before. The problem now not only affects every town on the map, but it is difficult to find a family anywhere that is not somehow affected. (pp. 158, 159)

The Chang Mai factory the CIA prevented me from destroying was the source of massive amounts of heroin being smuggled into the US in the bodies and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam. (p. 165)

My unit, the Hard Narcotics Smuggling Squad, was charged with investigating all heroin and cocaine smuggling through the Port of New York. My unit became involved in investigating every major smuggling operation known to law enforcement. We could not avoid witnessing the CIA protecting major drug dealers. Not a single important source in Southeast Asia was ever indicted by US law enforcement. This was no accident. Case after case was killed by CIA and State Department intervention and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it. CIA-owned airlines like Air America were being used to ferry drugs throughout Southeast Asia, allegedly to support our “allies.” CIA banking operations were used to launder drug money. (pp. 165, 166)

In 1972, I was assigned to assist in a major international drug case involving top Panamanian government officials who were using diplomatic passports to smuggle large quantities of heroin and other drugs into the US. The name Manuel Noriega surfaced prominently in the investigation. Surfacing right behind Noriega was the CIA to protect him from US law enforcement. As head of the CIA, Bush authorized a salary for Manuel Noriega as a CIA asset, while the dictator was listed in as many as 40 DEA computer files as a drug dealer. (pp. 166, 167)

The CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian cocaine cartels, the top levels of Mexican government, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others. Media’s duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the US; second, to divert the public’s attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to indict as though they were major “victories,” when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets. (pp. 166, 167)

On July 17, 1980, drug traffickers actually took control of a nation. Bolivia at the time [was] the source of virtually 100% of the cocaine entering the US. CIA-recruited mercenaries and drug traffickers unseated Bolivia’s democratically elected president, a leftist whom the US government didn’t want in power. Immediately after the coup, cocaine production increased massively, until it soon outstripped supply. This was the true beginning of the crack “plague.” (pp. 167, 168)

The CIA along with the State and Justice Departments had to combine forces to protect their drug-dealing assets by destroying a DEA investigation. How do I know? I was the inside source. I sat down at my desk in the American embassy and wrote the kind of letter that I never myself imagined ever writing. I detailed three pages typewritten on official US embassy stationary—enough evidence of my charges to feed a wolf pack of investigative journalists. I also expressed my willingness to be a quotable source. I addressed it directly to Strasser and Rohter, care of Newsweek. Two sleepless weeks later, I was still sitting in my embassy office staring at the phone. Three weeks later, it rang. It was DEA’s internal security. They were calling me to notify me that I was under investigation. I had been falsely accused of everything from black-marketing to having sex with a married female DEA agent. The investigation would wreak havoc with my life for the next four years. (pp. 168-171)

In one glaring case, an associate of mine was sent into Honduras to open a DEA office in Tegucigalpa. Within months he had documented as much as 50 tons of cocaine being smuggled into the US by Honduran military people who were supporting the Contras. This was enough cocaine to fill a third of US demand. What was the DEA response? They closed the office. (p. 175)

Sometime in 1990, US Customs intercepted a ton of cocaine being smuggled through Miami International Airport. A Customs and DEA investigation quickly revealed that the smugglers were the Venezuelan National Guard headed by General Guillen, a CIA “asset” who claimed that he had been operating under CIA orders and protection. The CIA soon admitted that this was true. If the CIA is good at anything, it is the complete control of American mass media. So secure are they in their ability to manipulate the mass media that they even brag about it in their own in-house memos. The New York Times had the story almost immediately in 1990 and did not print it until 1993. It finally became news that was “fit to print” when the Times learned that 60 Minutes also had the story and was actually going to run it. The highlight of the 60 Minutes piece is when the administrator of the DEA, Federal Judge Robert Bonner, tells Mike Wallace, “There is no other way to put it, Mike, [what the CIA did] is drug smuggling. It’s illegal [author's emphasis].” (pp. 188, 189)

The fact is – and you can read it yourself in the federal court records – that seven months before the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, the FBI had a paid informant, Emad Salem, who had infiltrated the bombers and had told the FBI of their plans to blow up the twin towers. Without notifying the NYPD or anyone else, an FBI supervisor “fired” Salem, who was making $500 a week for his work. After the bomb went off, the FBI hired Salem back and paid him $1.5 million to help them track down the bombers. But that’s not all the FBI missed. When they finally did catch the actual bomber, Ramzi Yousef (a man trained with CIA funds during the Russia-Afghanistan war), the FBI found information on his personal computer about plans to use hijacked American jetliners as fuel-laden missiles. The FBI ignored this information, too. (p. 191)

Michael Levine is a 25-year veteran of the DEA turned best-selling author and journalist. His articles and interviews on the drug war have been published in numerous national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Esquire.

Learn about Mr. Levine’s books and radio show at http://www.expertwitnessradio.org.

The Martin Luther King You Still Don't See on TV

2011-01-15T17:52:00.001-08:00

The Martin Luther King You Still Don't See on TV

01/14/2011 by Peter Hart

As we approach the Monday holiday, we're hearing a Pentagon lawyer suggest that Martin Luther King would support the war in Afghanistan. That makes it an ideal time to recall a 1995 column by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime associate Norman Solomon (Media Beat, 1/4/95). The full column appears below, and is archived here.

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years--his last years--are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King, Jr., stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights"--including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967--a year to the day before he was murdered--King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967--and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington--engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be--until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor"--appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it's no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Capitalism and Alienation

2011-01-15T17:36:00.001-08:00

Capitalism and alienation Capitalism creates a society that robs most people of their creative potential, says Phil Gasper
I’M SURE it’s not often that the ideas of Karl Marx are discussed in the prestigious pages of the British Journal of Dermatology, but an article published there in January 2008 attempted to throw light not just on Marx’s state of physical health, but also on its supposed consequences for his entire worldview.
According to the paper’s author, a professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia in England named Stephen Shuster, medical evidence suggests that Marx suffered from a disease known as hidradenitis suppurativa in which the apocrine sweat glands—found mainly in the armpits and groin—become blocked and inflamed. According to Shuster while Marx complained of excruciating boils, he was actually a victim of this chronic skin disease.
So far so good—a medical mystery solved, perhaps. But Shuster goes on to argue that, “In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem. This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.”
Now I’ve actually read quite a bit of Marx, and this description struck me as just a little off. It is true that Marx told Engels in 1867, “The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” But while I’ve noticed quite a lot of loathing of exploitation, oppression and poverty in Marx’s writing, I somehow must have missed the “self-loathing” that Schuster talks about. As for alienation, while Marx discusses it at length in his early writings, I personally find what he has to say illuminating and insightful—an analysis of one of the central problems of modern society that is still with us more than a century after his death.
Capitalism is a system that endlessly promises people happy and self-fulfilled lives. In the United States this vision even has a name: the American Dream. But when we look around us, reality falls far short. We see this reflected in everything from divorce rates, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, stress, mental illness, and general feelings of isolation and frustration that so many people experience.
Rather than achieving self-realization and living meaningful and fulfilling lives, many people experience some degree of alienation, and the ones that don’t are quite likely engaged in some form of self-deception, perhaps sustaining a sense of meaning and self-worth only with the help of illusions about themselves or their circumstances.
Quite a few thinkers, including existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, have argued that alienation is an unavoidable feature of the human condition, but this is not Marx’s view. Instead, Marx argues that alienation is largely a product of class society in general and of capitalism in particular, and that we could end a society characterized by pervasive alienation if we radically reorganized our economic system.
Marx’s most detailed discussion of alienation is in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which he wrote in 1844 but which were not published until the 1930s. In this work, Marx focuses on what he calls “alienated labor,” because he sees alienation at work as the central form of alienation. This is based on the assumption that the need to engage in free, creative labor is a central part of human nature. It’s precisely because capitalism systematically frustrates that need, that it is an alienating system.
One of Marx’s main claims in the 1844 Manuscripts is that for most people most of the time, work is a frustrating, unpleasant experience. That’s something that most of us would agree with. In fact it’s such a commonplace that there are endless popular songs about waiting for the weekend or Saturday night to arrive. There’s even a national restaurant chain named for the relief people feel when they get out of work at the end of the week. (By contrast, no one has opened an eatery named “TGI Monday.”)
When Marx was writing in the 1840s, he was thinking primarily of the monotonous brutality of factory labor. But what Marx wrote about blue-collar work in the mid-nineteenth century remains true of much white-collar work at the beginning of the twenty-first. In her book The Overworked American, the sociologist Juliet Schor reports the following:

Thirty percent of [American] adults say that they experience high stress nearly every day; even higher numbers report high stress once or twice a week… Americans are literally working themselves to death—as jobs contribute to heart disease, hypertension, gastric problems, depression, exhaustion, and a variety of other ailments.

Now a lot of people think that this is an unavoidable necessity, because work is intrinsically unpleasant. But Marx’s argument is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Work can be—or could be—meaningful, creative and self-expressive. And if it were like that for us all or most of the time, then our lives could be fulfilling and satisfying. The problem is that under capitalism work doesn’t have these characteristics for most people. Marx emphasizes two reasons why capitalism “robs workers of all life content.” The first is that it is an economic system that accentuates the division of labor, breaking production into a series of smaller and smaller, more specialized tasks, each performed by a different kind of worker, because this will increase profitability. As a result, “the individual laborers are appropriated by a one-sided function and annexed to it for life,” depriving them of the well-rounded variety of powers and activities that they need to be full human beings.
The second reason why capitalism generates alienation is that it is an economic system in which a small minority controls the means of production, and in which most people can survive only by selling their own labor power. Workers under capitalism have to work for someone else. As a consequence, Marx argues that work has little or no intrinsic worth for the worker —as he puts it, “it is not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself.”
More generally, we find our lives dominated by impersonal powers, from labyrinthine bureaucracies to economic forces, which we are unable to control, even though they are ultimately human creations. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe alienation as “the positing of social activity, the consolidation of our product as a real power over us, growing out of our control.” Capital describes the conditions of wage labor as “alienated from labor and confronting it independently,” and of capital as “an alienated and independent social might, which stands over against society as a thing.”
But if we could abolish capitalism and replace it with a society in which workers collectively and democratically control production, then work itself could be transformed into an activity that we would find rewarding for its own sake. It would become a way of exercising our individual creativity and talents, and of contributing to the common good— “not only a means of life but life’s prime want,” as Marx put it in Capital.
While capitalism continues, however, labor will continue to be alienated. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx discusses various aspects of this alienation. First, workers are alienated from their product. What they produce does not belong to them, and the particular characteristics of what they produce are of little concern to them. All that matters is that they get paid a wage. Second, workers under capitalism are alienated from their own productive activity. They typically have no control over that activity, and it doesn’t express their own goals or projects.
Third, workers are alienated from what Marx (following Feuerbach) calls their “species-being,” in other words from those qualities that make them distinctively human. What distinguishes humans from other species is our capacity to engage in free, conscious, and creative work. But alienated labor reduces humans to the level of animals.
Earlier philosophers had seen the distinctive characteristic of humans as our capacity for rational thought. But for Marx it is the application of rational, conscious thought to productive activity that distinguishes us from other creatures. As he says in The German Ideology, “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.”
Unlike other species, we can step back from activity we perform to remain alive (our “life activity”), consciously assess it, and improve it. As Marx says, “The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from this activity.” By contrast, a human being’s activity “is not a determination with which he immediately fuses.” Unlike other animals, “the human being makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness.”
But under capitalism, labor doesn’t get the opportunity to exercise this distinctively human ability. That’s why Marx says that “in his human functions [i.e. work], [man] is nothing more than animal.” He adds that alienated labor “estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human existence.”
The final aspect of alienated labor is that, as a consequence of these other forms of alienation, workers are alienated from each other. Marx writes: “the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means that each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from man’s essence.”
Marx believes that alienation is a feature not just of capitalism, but of all earlier societies too, even before classes emerged. Even in the earliest pre-class societies, humans were dominated by external forces, and in all class societies, the direct producers are under the control of a parasitical ruling class.
But Marx also argues that alienation is worse under capitalism. In the Grundrisse—the notebooks he kept while he was preparing to write Capital—he wrote: “At early stages of [human] development the single individual appears to be more complete, since he has not yet elaborated the abundance of his relationships, and has not established them as powers that are opposed to himself.”
However, he goes on:

It is as ridiculous to wish to return to that primitive abundance as it is to believe in the continuing necessity of its complete depletion. The bourgeois view has never got beyond opposition to this romantic outlook and thus will be accompanied by it, as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end.

So Marx rejects both the romantic view that we should retreat to a bygone era of supposed tranquility, and the bourgeois view that people by nature will always want more and will never be satisfied. He thinks that people are more alienated under capitalism because the gap between reality and potential is so much greater today than it was in earlier societies. Capitalism has created the wealth and technology that could allow everyone to lead fulfilled and meaningful lives. It offers us a glimpse of what our lives could be like, not in imagination but in reality. But at the same time it denies most people that kind of life. The solution is not to retreat to the past, which in any case is no longer possible, but to realize the potential that is now available to us by transforming society.
People typically experience alienation as an individual problem, and there is a multi-million dollar self-help industry that has emerged offering individual solutions. Even books that locate alienation and unhappiness in a broader social context, like Affluenza by the British psychologist Oliver James, end up offering the same kind of advice.
James attacks what he calls “selfish capitalism” for creating the “Affluenza Virus,” a “set of values which increases our vulnerability to emotional distress. It entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous.” But the solutions that James offers all involve lifestyle changes that are beyond the means of most people. He advises mothers who are suffering from stress, for example, to find a nanny rather than use a pre-school.
The truth is that there are no lasting individual solutions to the problem of alienation. Human happiness, wellbeing, and individuality can only be fully realized in a society free of exploitation and oppression, and achieving that kind of society requires a collective struggle to change the world. Simply being participants in that kind of struggle can start to lessen the degree of alienation in our lives, but alienation can only be completely abolished in a society in which “the free development of each” has become “the condition for the free development of all.”
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.

US War on Nicaragua

2011-01-02T06:07:00.001-08:00

Truths about Floride in Our Water Supplies...

2010-12-29T15:33:00.001-08:00

Story of Cap and Trade

2010-12-29T15:30:00.001-08:00

The Real Story of Electronics

2010-12-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

The Real Story of Bottled Water!

2010-12-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

Documentary on Old Dirty Bastard:Why was he Killed?

2010-12-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

Stop and Frisk: Example of Institutionalized Racism

2010-12-25T05:51:00.001-08:00

Death of American Dream

2010-11-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

Death of American dream, 60 million no sick leave, 132 million no dental, 59 million without medical
Share473 42
by Democrats Ramshield
Mon Nov 29, 2010 at 04:20:39 AM PST

(Written by an American expat living in the European Union).
It wasn't until I left America that I started to realize how badly the American plutocrat owned media lies to the American people through its disinformation campaign.
Well today for a span of at least this one Daily Kos diary, you will get to see what the American plutocrat owned media never wants you to see, and that is how Europe in particular and the world in general has come to see America as a country in decline, whose people are so badly misinformed by the media, they actually don't realize that America is the only major industrialized nation in the world that by right of law does not offer universal medical access, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave and paid annual leave. It just seems almost impossible to get that word out to the American people. Even diaries on that subject at the Kos top out at just over 2,000 views. Let's please remember the purpose of the plutocrat owned commercial media isn't so much to inform us but rather to sell commercial advertising space.
Therefore this diary today will try to do something different. It will show you what the European media is saying about the American dream and you will be shocked!
Democrats Ramshield's diary :: ::

Here the British Guardian newspaper says that the so-called American middle class lifestyle for most people was fake and that was financed by three decades of a debt bubble which has now gone bust. The credit ride of working class folks living a middle class lifestyle is dead and gone. Is this article stating bluntly that it's over? The only remaining question is, will it ever come back? I mean, how long can people ride a wave of endless debt before the ride is over, all while pretending to be middle class? Is that what this British Guardian newspaper article is saying? Well, to that end I offer the quote below and a link to the full article. Please read it and decide for yourself what it says.
(Guardian.co.uk) America's new poor: the end of the middle-class dream
America's middle class is disappearing. A lifestyle sustained for 30 years by rising debt is dissolving as the credit dries up. And the question beyond the crisis is: can it ever come back?
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In the midterm elections politicians have promised to "do something" for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages – and bridging the gap with credit.
And it's over.
In a free-market society the real middle class is always a minority: if your street has a gate and a security camera at the end of it then you are middle class. A real middle-class kid can afford a college education, not a web-based degree. The real middle-class family does not skip meals or find its automobiles trapped in the repair shop because of unpaid bills.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
This article below declares the American dream is withering away and talks about the use of food stamps in America which is growing. To which we should note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps to humiliate its poor in the grocery checkout line.
(International Business Times) - 'American Dream' withers as tent cities mushroom in promised land
By Jijo Jacob | November 21, 2010
The nation that once gloated over its ability to feed the entire world is seeing an explosion of poverty: The number of people surviving on food stamps is rising as biting unemployment refuses to abate, personal incomes have been falling while the debt bubble is inflating with each passing day and, in a more startling representation of the grim reality, tent cities are mushrooming as more and more people are pushed out of their ‘underwater’ homes.
http://uk.ibtimes.com/...
Did you know that while 50 million Americans go hungry, the corporatist fatcats are paying themselves ever larger salaries? Shocked Europeans looking over seeing 50 million hungry Americans, the Europeans can't understand how America could let this happen to its own people.
(Daily Mail.co.uk) - America starves as executive pay rockets:
50MILLION people go hungry while Wall Street fatcats take home millions
By Daniel Bates
16th November 2010
A record one in six American families went hungry last year because they did not have enough food, a shock survey has revealed.
Some 17.4million U.S. households - 50 million people - were classified as ‘food insecure’ which meant they regularly skipped meals even if they wanted to eat. Others went for entire days without eating and handed round smaller portion sizes to make their meagre offerings suffice.
The news comes as it is revealed that top U.S. executives saw their pay and bonuses shoot up last year in the face of the worst recession for 80 years.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
The article below is from the British Guardian newspaper which asks, why do working class Americans keep electing millionaires to represent them in the Congress, and then proposes radically 'why not elect some poor working stiffs to Congress instead? At least maybe those people could identify with their lives, needs and working class values instead of electing millionaires to Congress, who cannot identify with their working class constituent's needs, because they live in the millionaire's bubble.
(Guardian.co.uk) - US Congress aka the millionaires' club
No wonder the DC political class has a bad name – it's filthy rich. Here's a revolutionary idea: why not elect some poor people? It is one of the great moans of vast numbers of American voters: Washington politicians are just not like them. They are different. They are a breed apart, unable to understand what real life is like for tens of millions of ordinary folks.
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No wonder America's body politic can seem to be a little slow when it comes to reflecting the day-to-day concerns of many Americans. No wonder it is currently obsessed with working out a way to keep President George W Bush's tax cuts for the rich in place. No wonder it is seemingly willing to let slide vital unemployment benefits for millions of Americans who are now entering the ranks of the long-term jobless. No wonder it is keen to bail out the financial industry and keep bankers cashing their bonus cheques, even as it shrugs its shoulders at creating jobs for those outside the vaulted halls of the finance industry.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Did you know that the British Telegraph newspaper says America has the least generous unemployment system? Let's consider that in Britain, their unemployment benefits never run out. Another example is in Germany, when your unemployment benefits ran out, you get unemployment assistance called HartzIV and it also never runs out. Under HartzIV, while unemployment, their people still get medical coverage. Why do the unemployed all over the European Union get medical coverage and the unemployed in America don't? Why is that? More over, why isn't the mainstream American media telling you this? Because most people in America don't know this. I mean, why are you having to read about this on a Daily Kos blog? Is journalism in America dead?
(Telegraph.co.uk) America: the least generous unemployment system in the world
How is it that the American economy manages year-in-year-out to outperform its European neighbours in economic terms? There is no simple answer, of course, but this chart might hold some of the clues. It shows the comparative generosity of long-term unemployment benefits around the world – and guess who is right at the very bottom?
This is the carrot-and-stick method of galvanising your population: work hard and you can make millions; don’t work and you’re in real trouble. If you were after some evidence of how the US has managed to enshrine hard-working values in its citizens, this chart is probably a good place to start. And these figures matter.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/...
In my experience as an American expat living in the European Union, the uniform response of Europeans seems to be shock at the fact that Americans while unemployed have no medical insurance. This fact almost never appears in the American plutocrat owned media, except in very forgettable sound bites.
The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
Author: T.R. REID
Chapter 6 The European Social Model (p. 148 - 149)
The helping hand of the social model is particularly evident when a worker becomes unemployed. Americans on the unemployment rolls tend to get a monthly government check, together with help in buying food and paying heat and light bills. At some level, when his savings fall low enough, an American worker may also apply for free government-supplied health care through Medicaid. In Europe, by contrast, a worker is "made redundant"- that's the brutal British term for being laid off - will get a housing benefit, a heat and light benefit, a food benefit, a child care benefit, a monthly unemployment payment that is almost always higher than the American standard.
The European, of course, will have the same access as everybody else to the public health care system. The American system, in which you lose your health insurance when you lose your job, strikes Europeans as exactly backward. "I don't understand your approach to health," a junior minister in Sweden's health department told me once. "It seems to me that your country takes away the insurance when people most need it."
The chart below which the Telegraph is referring to shows America ranking last in terms of unemployment benefits.

"In the United States, the figure varies from state to state, but overall a couple with two children and an income a little below average will have about 50 percent of earnings replaced by public assistance in case of unemployment. In France, the replacement ratio for the same family is 86 percent; in Britain 83 percent; in Germany 74 percent; in Sweden and the Netherlands 90 percent."
(The United States of Europe by TR Reid, 2004; page 149)

Here the German magazine Der Spiegel says America is in decline.
(Spiegel) - A Superpower in Decline - Is the American Dream Over?
The unemployment rate in the United States is at about 10 percent. But when the people who have stopped looking for work and are not registered anywhere are included, the real number is likely to be closer to 20 percent. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans have a problem with long-term unemployment.
http://www.spiegel.de/...
Did you know that 132 million Americans have no dental insurance, whereas everyone in the European Union has access by law to some kind of dental plan.
The statistic that is being widely reported in the European press is that we have 59 million medically uninsured in America. From a country that boasts 403 billionaires, this is a scandal! While we can all be proud Americans, we don't have to be proud of the inaccessibility of the US health care system. We can do better than this.
Number of Americans without Health Insurance on the Rise
Of the 59 million who don’t happen to be covered with a health insurance, a majority of the people happen to be suffering from a lot of chronic health conditions.
http://topnews.co.uk/...

Source: http://www.cepr.net/...
After reading this quote below, ask yourself: Can America do better than this when we have 60 million people without paid sick leave?
Roughly 60 million American workers have no paid sick leave, and only a minority can draw pay if they stay home with sick children. The lack of paid leave is especially acute in this country among low-wage workers, food-service workers and part-timers, among others. Many other countries do better. According to Dr. Jody Heymann, director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University, more than 160 countries ensure that all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness.
Why don't we do what they do in Britain? Bail out the unemployed by making their unemployment benefits permanent. Instead in the British UK Progressive we see a quote from Robert Reich telling us that the new Congress is unlikely to even extend unemployment benefits. It seems that in America, the Congress only bails out Wall Street and not the working class.
Why the Lame Duck Congress Must Extend Jobless Benefits For Hard-hit Families But Not Tax Cuts For the Rich
by Robert Reich
America’s long-term unemployed — an estimated 4 million or more — constitute the single newest and biggest social problem facing America.
Now their unemployment benefits are about to run out, and the lame-duck Congress may not have the votes to extend them. (You can forget about the next Congress.) The long-term unemployed can’t get work...
http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/...
We all know that America presently has 59 million medically uninsured Americans. Here is a British newspaper called the Daily Mail that printed an alarming headline.
(Daily Mail) One in FIVE Americans is mentally ill as rising unemployment takes its toll
The 2009 mental health survey hints at the impact of record unemployment rates, which last year hit a 25-year high as struggling employers slashed jobs to cope with a weak economy. For many, lost employment meant loss of health insurance, leaving many of the nation's mentally ill unable to get treatment.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
Michael Moore interviews Tony Benn about America's indebtedness.

(Full Video Transcript)
"I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world. Far more revolutionary than socialist ideas or anybody else's idea because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community. And this idea of choice which capital talks about all the time you've got to have a choice, choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you're shackled with debt you don't have the freedom to choose. People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people who represented their interests it would be a real democratic revolution; and so they don't want it to happen so keeping people hopeless and pessimistic.
See I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralize them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern, and I think there's an element in the thinking of some people; we don't want people to be educated, healthy and confident because they would get out of control. The top 1% of the world's population owns 80% of the worlds wealth its incredible that people put up with it. But their poor, their demoralized, their frightened and therefore they think perhaps the safest thing to do is to take orders and hope for the best."
- Tony Benn, former British politician

Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T10:57:00.001-08:00

by Mike Ely

[Available as podcast.]

It is a deep thing that people still celebrate the survival of the early colonists at Plymouth — by giving thanks to the Christian God who supposedly protected and championed the European invasion. The real meaning of all that, then and now, needs to be continually excavated. The myths and lies that surround the past are constantly draped over the horrors and tortures of our present.

Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists–and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.

* * * * *

In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 exiles. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely.

The Europeans landed and built their colony called “the Plymouth Plantation” near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named Squanto had survived–he had spent the last years as a slave to the English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke the colonists’ language and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish until the first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.

These were very lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the settlers not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace.

John Winthrop, a founder of the Massahusetts Bay colony considered this wave of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”

The deadly impact of European diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag allowed the settlers to survive their first year.

In celebration of their good fortune, the colony’s governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first harvest of 1621.

How the Puritans Stole the Land

But the peace that produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on the coast. Until 1629 there were no more than 300 settlers in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements. But their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established growing Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years, boatloads of new settlers came.

And as the number of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so generous as the Wampanoags.

On arrival, the Puritans and other religious sects discussed “who legally owns all this land.” They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of farming was based on individual–not communal or tribal–ownership. This debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois “rule of law” does not mean “protect the rights of the masses of people.”

Some settlers argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor Winthrop declared the Indians had not “subdued” the land, and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law, be considered “public domain.” This meant they belonged to the king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).

The colonists embraced a line from Psalms 2:8. “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Since then, European settler states have similarly declared god their real estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing Palestine.

The European immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the inhabitants.

The Shining City on the Hill

Where did the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies of Puritan and “separatist” pilgrims come from and what were they really all about?

Governor Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts colony, said, “We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” The Mayflower Puritans had been driven out of England as subversives. The Puritans saw this religious colony as a model of a social and political order that they believed all of Europe should adopt.

The Puritan movement was part of a sweeping revolt within English society against the ruling feudal order of wealthy lords. Only a few decades after the establishment of Plymouth, the Puritan Revolution came to power in England. They killed the king, won a civil war, set up a short-lived republic, and brutally conquered the neighboring people of Ireland to create a larger national market.

The famous Puritan intolerance was part of a determined attempt to challenge the decadence and wastefulness of the rich aristocratic landlords of England. The Puritans wanted to use the power of state punishment to uproot old and still dominant ways of thinking and behaving.

The new ideas of the Puritans served the needs of merchant capitalist accumulation. The extreme discipline, thrift and modesty the Puritans demanded of each other corresponded to a new and emerging form of ownership and production. Their so-called “Protestant Ethic” was an early form of the capitalist ethic. From the beginning, the Puritan colonies intended to grow through capitalist trade–trading fish and fur with England while they traded pots, knives, axes, alcohol and other English goods with the Indians.

The New England were ruled by a government in which only the male heads of families had a voice. Women, Indians, slaves, servants, youth were neither heard nor represented. In the Puritan schoolbooks, the old law “honor thy father and thy mother” was interpreted to mean honoring “All our Superiors, whether in Family, School, Church, and Commonwealth.” And, the real truth was that the colonies were fundamentally controlled by the most powerful merchants.

The Puritan fathers believed they were the Chosen People of an infinite god and that this justified anything they did. They were Calvinists who believed that the vast majority of humanity was predestined to damnation. This meant that while they were firm in fighting for their own capitalist right to accumulate and prosper, they were quick to oppress the masses of people in Ireland, Scotland and North America, once they seized the power to set up their new bourgeois order. Those who rejected the narrow religious rules of the colonies were often simply expelled “out into the wilderness.”

The Massachusetts colony (north of Plymouth) was founded when Puritan stockholders had gotten control of an English trading company. The king had given this company the right to govern its own internal affairs, and in 1629 the stockholders simply voted to transfer the company to North American shores–making this colony literally a self-governing company of stockholders!

In U.S. schools, students are taught that the Mayflower compact of Plymouth contained the seeds of “modern democracy” and “rule of law.” But by looking at the actual history of the Puritans, we can see that this so-called “modern democracy” was (and still is) a capitalist democracy based on all kinds of oppression and serving the class interests of the ruling capitalists.

In short, the Puritan movement developed as an early revolutionary challenge to the old feudal order in England. They were the soul of primitive capitalist accumulation. And transferred to the shores of North America, they immediately revealed how heartless and oppressive that capitalist soul is.

The Birth of “The American Way of War”

In the Connecticut Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they were far from the centers of colonization. Then, in 1633, the British stole the land where the city of Hartford now sits–land which the Pequot had recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British slave raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.

The Puritan preachers said, from Romans 13:2, “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240 under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: “Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”

The colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers set the village on fire.

William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”

Mason himself wrote: “It may be demanded…Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But…sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

Three hundred and fifty years later the Puritan phrase “a shining city on the hill” became a favorite quote of conservative speechwriters.

Discovering the Profits of Slavery

This so-called “Pequot war” was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition. Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained alive and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.

Some of the war captives were given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts allies of the British. Even before the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.

The remaining captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery that served the emerging capitalist world market. And with that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the profits they made from the sale of human beings virtually paid for the cost of seizing them.

One account says that enslaving Indians quickly became a “mania with speculators.” These early merchant capitalists of Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for itself. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism.

Thanksgiving in the Manhattan Colony

In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first “scalp bounty”–his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.

A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.

The Conquest of New England

By the 1670s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United New England Colonies–6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms. With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in 1620 and probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day.

In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was killed while spying for the Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.

As Mao Tsetung says: “Where there is oppression there is resistance.” The Wampanoag went to war.

The Indians applied some military lessons they had learned: they waged a guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian populations.

When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.

In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The “Praying Indians” who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with “hostiles.” They were enslaved or killed. Other “peaceful” Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts–and were sold onto slave ships.

It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation.

After King Philip’s War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan’s New York colony: “There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts.”

In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a “day of public thanksgiving” in 1676, saying, “there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled.”

Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.

The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of Massasoit, the Pilgrim’s original protector, was sold into slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels

But even the destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian MacLeod writes: “The first `reservations’ were designed for the `wild’ Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service in Ireland under Cromwell.”

The enslaved Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks.

A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians at will, declaring it was “lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in any of the towns or roads (within specified limits), to command them under their guard and examination, or to kill them as they may or can.”

The northern colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up; Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o’clock. In 1692 Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry an African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave revolt.

Celebrate?

Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.

The ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That’s why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).

Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the “bounty of the American way of life,” while covering up the brutal nature of this society.

Available online at mikeely.wordpress.com. Send comments to: m1keely (at) yahoo.com

Published: December 2007. Feel free to reprint, distribute or quote this with attribution. This website’s contents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. License.

Thanksgiving and White Supremacy...

2010-11-24T05:30:00.001-08:00

The American Thanksgiving: Rejoicing In Genocide And White Supremacy

By Glen Ford

27 November, 2006
Black Agenda Report

"Thanksgiving as presently celebrated is an affront to civilization.”

Nobody but Americans celebrates Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity.

We should all be thankful that the time grows nearer when the almost four centuries-old abomination will be deprived of its reason for being: white supremacy. Then we may all eat and drink in peace and gratitude for the blessings of humanity’s deliverance from the rule of evil men.

“The near-erasure of Native Americans in Massachusetts was the true mission of the Pilgrim enterprise – Act One of the American Dream.”

Thanksgiving is much more than a lie – if it were that simple, an historical correction of the record of events in 1600s Massachusetts would suffice to purge the “flaw” in the national mythology. But Thanksgiving is not just a twisted fable, and the mythology it nurtures is itself inherently evil. The real-life events – subsequently revised – were perfectly understood at the time as the first, definitive triumphs of the genocidal European project in New England. The near-erasure of Native Americans in Massachusetts and, soon thereafter, from most of the remainder of the northern English colonial seaboard was the true mission of the Pilgrim enterprise – Act One of the American Dream. African Slavery commenced contemporaneously – an overlapping and ultimately inseparable Act Two.

The last Act in the American drama must be the “root and branch” eradication of all vestiges of Act One and Two – America’s seminal crimes and formative projects. Thanksgiving as presently celebrated – that is, as a national political event – is an affront to civilization.

Celebrating the unspeakable

White America embraced Thanksgiving because a majority of that population glories in the fruits, if not the unpleasant details, of genocide and slavery and feels, on the whole, good about their heritage: a cornucopia of privilege and national power. Children are taught to identify with the good fortune of the Pilgrims. It does not much matter that the Native American and African holocausts that flowed from the feast at Plymouth are hidden from the children’s version of the story – kids learn soon enough that Indians were made scarce and Africans became enslaved. But they will also never forget the core message of the holiday: that the Pilgrims were good people, who could not have purposely set such evil in motion. Just as the first Thanksgivings marked the consolidation of the English toehold in what became the United States, the core ideological content of the holiday serves to validate all that has since occurred on these shores – a national consecration of the unspeakable, a balm and benediction for the victors, a blessing of the fruits of murder and kidnapping, and an implicit obligation to continue the seamless historical project in the present day.

“The story provides the essential first frame of the American saga. It is unalloyed racist propaganda.”

The Thanksgiving story is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human. Most importantly, the Pilgrims are depicted as victims – of harsh weather and their own naïve yet wholesome visions of a new beginning. In light of this carefully nurtured fable, whatever happened to the Indians, from Plymouth to California and beyond, in the aftermath of the 1621 dinner must be considered a mistake, the result of misunderstandings – at worst, a series of lamentable tragedies. The story provides the essential first frame of the American saga. It is unalloyed racist propaganda, a tale that endures because it served the purposes of a succession of the Pilgrims’ political heirs, in much the same way that Nazi-enhanced mythology of a glorious Aryan/German past advanced another murderous, expansionist mission.

Thanksgiving is quite dangerous – as were the Pilgrims.

Rejoicing in a cemetery

The English settlers, their ostensibly religious venture backed by a trading company, were glad to discover that they had landed in a virtual cemetery in 1620. Corn still sprouted in the abandoned fields of the Wampanoags, but only a remnant of the local population remained around the fabled Rock. In a letter to England, Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop wrote, "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection."

“The Pilgrims thanked their deity for having ‘pursued’ the Indians to mass death.”

Ever diligent to claim their own advantages as God’s will, the Pilgrims thanked their deity for having “pursued” the Indians to mass death. However, it was not divine intervention that wiped out most of the natives around the village of Patuxet but, most likely, smallpox-embedded blankets planted during an English visit or slave raid. Six years before the Pilgrim landing, a ship sailed into Patuxet’s harbor, captained by none other than the famous seaman and mercenary soldier John Smith, former leader of the first successful English colony in the New World, at Jamestown, Virginia. Epidemic and slavery followed in his wake, as Debra Glidden described in IMDiversity.com:

In 1614 the Plymouth Company of England, a joint stock company, hired Captain John Smith to explore land in its behalf. Along what is now the coast of Massachusetts in the territory of the Wampanoag, Smith visited the town of Patuxet according to "The Colonial Horizon," a 1969 book edited by William Goetzinan. Smith renamed the town Plymouth in honor of his employers, but the Wampanoag who inhabited the town continued to call it Patuxet.

The following year Captain Hunt, an English slave trader, arrived at Patuxet. It was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them into slavery for 220 shillings apiece. That practice was described in a 1622 account of happenings entitled "A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia," written by Edward Waterhouse. True to the explorer tradition, Hunt kidnapped a number of Wampanoags to sell into slavery.

Another common practice among European explorers was to give "smallpox blankets" to the Indians. Since smallpox was unknown on this continent prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans did not have any natural immunity to the disease so smallpox would effectively wipe out entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. William Fenton describes how Europeans decimated Native American villages in his 1957 work "American Indian and White relations to 1830." From 1615 to 1619 smallpox ran rampant among the Wampanoags and their neighbors to the north. The Wampanoag lost 70 percent of their population to the epidemic and the Massachusetts lost 90 percent.

Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so when the Pilgrims arrived they found well-cleared fields which they claimed for their own. A Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard University's Perry Miller, praised the plague that had wiped out the Indians for it was "the wonderful preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his providence for his people's abode in the Western world."

Historians have since speculated endlessly on why the woods in the region resembled a park to the disembarking Pilgrims in 1620. The reason should have been obvious: hundreds, if not thousands, of people had lived there just five years before.

In less than three generations the settlers would turn all of New England into a charnel house for Native Americans, and fire the economic engines of slavery throughout English-speaking America. Plymouth Rock is the place where the nightmare truly began.

The uninvited?

It is not at all clear what happened at the first – and only – “integrated” Thanksgiving feast. Only two written accounts of the three-day event exist, and one of them, by Governor William Bradford, was written 20 years after the fact. Was Chief Massasoit invited to bring 90 Indians with him to dine with 52 colonists, most of them women and children? This seems unlikely. A good harvest had provided the settlers with plenty of food, according to their accounts, so the whites didn’t really need the Wampanoag’s offering of five deer. What we do know is that there had been lots of tension between the two groups that fall. John Two-Hawks, who runs the Native Circle web site, gives a sketch of the facts:

“Thanksgiving' did not begin as a great loving relationship between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett people. In fact, in October of 1621 when the pilgrim survivors of their first winter in Turtle Island sat down to share the first unofficial 'Thanksgiving' meal, the Indians who were there were not even invited! There was no turkey, squash, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. A few days before this alleged feast took place, a company of 'pilgrims' led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out!”

It is much more likely that Chief Massasoit either crashed the party, or brought enough men to ensure that he was not kidnapped or harmed by the Pilgrims. Dr. Tingba Apidta, in his “Black Folks’ Guide to Understanding Thanksgiving,” surmises that the settlers “brandished their weaponry” early and got drunk soon thereafter. He notes that “each Pilgrim drank at least a half gallon of beer a day, which they preferred even to water. This daily inebriation led their governor, William Bradford, to comment on his people's ‘notorious sin,’ which included their ‘drunkenness and uncleanliness’ and rampant ‘sodomy.’”

Soon after the feast the brutish Miles Standish “got his bloody prize,” Dr. Apidta writes:

“He went to the Indians, pretended to be a trader, then beheaded an Indian man named Wituwamat. He brought the head to Plymouth, where it was displayed on a wooden spike for many years, according to Gary B. Nash, ‘as a symbol of white power.’ Standish had the Indian man's young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure. From that time on, the whites were known to the Indians of Massachusetts by the name ‘Wotowquenange,’ which in their tongue meant cutthroats and stabbers.”

What is certain is that the first feast was not called a “Thanksgiving” at the time; no further integrated dining occasions were scheduled; and the first, official all-Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” had to wait until 1637, when the whites of New England celebrated the massacre of the Wampanoag’s southern neighbors, the Pequots.

The real Thanksgiving Day Massacre

The Pequots today own the Foxwood Casino and Hotel, in Ledyard, Connecticut, with gross gaming revenues of over $9 billion in 2000. This is truly a (very belated) miracle, since the real first Pilgrim Thanksgiving was intended as the Pequot’s epitaph. Sixteen years after the problematical Plymouth feast, the English tried mightily to erase the Pequots from the face of the Earth, and thanked God for the blessing.

Having subdued, intimidated or made mercenaries of most of the tribes of Massachusetts, the English turned their growing force southward, toward the rich Connecticut valley, the Pequot’s sphere of influence. At the point where the Mystic River meets the sea, the combined force of English and allied Indians bypassed the Pequot fort to attack and set ablaze a town full of women, children and old people.

“Many prisoners were executed, and surviving women and children sold into slavery in the West Indies.”

William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers of the 1621 feast, was also on hand for the great massacre of 1637:
"Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy."

The rest of the white folks thought so, too. “This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots," read Governor John Winthrop’s proclamation. The authentic Thanksgiving Day was born.

Most historians believe about 700 Pequots were slaughtered at Mystic. Many prisoners were executed, and surviving women and children sold into slavery in the West Indies. Pequot prisoners that escaped execution were parceled out to Indian tribes allied with the English. The Pequot were thought to have been extinguished as a people. According to IndyMedia, “The Pequot tribe numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but disease had brought their numbers down to 1,500 by 1637. The Pequot ‘War’ killed all but a handful of remaining members of the tribe.”

But there were still too many Indians around to suit the whites of New England, who bided their time while their own numbers increased to critical, murderous mass.

Guest’s head on a pole

By the 1670s the colonists, with 8,000 men under arms, felt strong enough to demand that the Pilgrims’ former dinner guests the Wampanoags disarm and submit to the authority of the Crown. After a series of settler provocations in 1675, the Wampanoag struck back, under the leadership of Chief Metacomet, son of Massasoit, called King Philip by the English. Metacomet/Philip, whose wife and son were captured and sold into West Indian slavery, wiped out 13 settlements and killed 600 adult white men before the tide of battle turned. A 1996 issue of the Revolutionary Worker provides an excellent narrative:

In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The "Praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with "hostiles." They were enslaved or killed. Other "peaceful" Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts – and were sold onto slave ships.

After King Philip's War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan's New York colony: "There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts." In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a "day of public thanksgiving" in 1676, saying, "there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled."

This is not thought to be a fit Thanksgiving tale for the children of today, but it’s the real story, well-known to the settler children of New England at the time – the white kids who saw the Wampanoag head on the pole year after year and knew for certain that God loved them best of all, and that every atrocity they might ever commit against a heathen, non-white was blessed.

There’s a good term for the process thus set in motion: nation-building.

Roots of the slave trade

The British North American colonists’ practice of enslaving Indians for labor or direct sale to the West Indies preceded the appearance of the first chained Africans at the dock in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The Jamestown colonists’ human transaction with the Dutch vessel was an unscheduled occurrence. However, once the African slave trade became commercially established, the fates of Indians and Africans in the colonies became inextricably entwined. New England, born of up-close-and-personal, burn-them-in-the-fires-of-hell genocide, led the political and commercial development of the English colonies. The region also led the nascent nation’s descent into a slavery-based society and economy.

“Once the African slave trade became commercially established, the fates of Indians and Africans in the colonies became inextricably entwined.”

Ironically, an apologist for Virginian slavery made one of the best, early cases for the indictment of New England as the engine of the American slave trade. Unreconstructed secessionist Lewis Dabney’s 1867 book “A Defense of Virginia” traced the slave trade’s origins all the way back to Plymouth Rock:

The planting of the commercial States of North America began with the colony of Puritan Independents at Plymouth, in 1620, which was subsequently enlarged into the State of Massachusetts. The other trading colonies, Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as New Hampshire (which never had an extensive shipping interest), were offshoots of Massachusetts. They partook of the same characteristics and pursuits; and hence, the example of the parent colony is taken here as a fair representation of them.

The first ship from America, which embarked in the African slave trade, was the Desire, Captain Pierce, of Salem; and this was among the first vessels ever built in the colony. The promptitude with which the "Puritan Fathers" embarked in this business may be comprehended, when it is stated that the Desire sailed upon her voyage in June, 1637. [Note: the year they massacred the Pequots.] The first feeble and dubious foothold was gained by the white man at Plymouth less than seventeen years before; and as is well known, many years were expended by the struggle of the handful of settlers for existence. So that it may be correctly said, that the commerce of New England was born of the slave trade; as its subsequent prosperity was largely founded upon it. The Desire, proceeding to the Bahamas, with a cargo of "dry fish and strong liquors, the only commodities for those parts," obtained the negroes from two British men-of-war, which had captured them from a Spanish slaver.

Thus, the trade of which the good ship Desire, of Salem, was the harbinger, grew into grand proportions; and for nearly two centuries poured a flood of wealth into New England, as well as no inconsiderable number of slaves. Meanwhile, the other maritime colonies of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and Connecticut, followed the example of their elder sister emulously; and their commercial history is but a repetition of that of Massachusetts. The towns of Providence, Newport, and New Haven became famous slave trading ports. The magnificent harbor of the second, especially, was the favorite starting-place of the slave ships; and its commerce rivaled, or even exceeded, that of the present commercial metropolis, New York. All the four original States, of course, became slaveholding.
The Revolution that exploded in 1770s New England was undertaken by men thoroughly imbued with the worldview of the Indian-killer and slave-holder. How could they not be? The “country” they claimed as their own was fathered by genocide and mothered by slavery – its true distinction among the commercial nations of the world. And these men were not ashamed, but proud, with vast ambition to spread their exceptional characteristics West and South and wherever their so-far successful project in nation-building might take them – and by the same bloody, savage methods that had served them so well in the past.

“The ‘country’ they claimed as their own was fathered by genocide and mothered by slavery.”

At the moment of deepest national crisis following the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the national fable that is far more central to the white American personality than Lincoln’s battlefield “Address.” Lincoln seized upon the 1621 feast as the historic “Thanksgiving” – bypassing the official and authentic 1637 precedent – and assigned the dateless, murky event the fourth Thursday in November.

Lincoln surveyed a broken nation, and attempted nation-rebuilding, based on the purest white myth. The same year that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he renewed the national commitment to a white manifest destiny that began at Plymouth Rock. Lincoln sought to rekindle a shared national mission that former Confederates and Unionists and white immigrants from Europe could collectively embrace. It was and remains a barbaric and racist national unifier, by definition. Only the most fantastic lies can sanitize the history of the Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts.

”Like a rock”

The Thanksgiving holiday fable is at once a window on the way that many, if not most, white Americans view the world and their place in it, and a pollutant that leaches barbarism into the modern era. The fable attempts to glorify the indefensible, to enshrine an era and mission that represent the nation’s lowest moral denominators. Thanksgiving as framed in the mythology is, consequently, a drag on that which is potentially civilizing in the national character, a crippling, atavistic deformity. Defenders of the holiday will claim that the politically-corrected children’s version promotes brotherhood, but that is an impossibility – a bald excuse to prolong the worship of colonial “forefathers” and to erase the crimes they committed. Those bastards burned the Pequot women and children, and ushered in the multinational business of slavery. These are facts. The myth is an insidious diversion – and worse.

Humanity cannot tolerate a 21st Century superpower, much of whose population perceives the world through the eyes of 17th Century land and flesh bandits. Yet that is the trick that fate has played on the globe.

“Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into ‘savages’ deserving displacement and death.”

The English arrived with criminal intent - and brought wives and children to form new societies predicated on successful plunder. To justify the murderous enterprise, Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into "savages" deserving displacement and death. The relentlessly refreshed lie of Indian savagery became a truth in the minds of white Americans, a fact to be acted upon by every succeeding generation of whites. The settlers became a singular people confronting the great "frontier" - a euphemism for centuries of genocidal campaigns against a darker, "savage" people marked for extinction.

The necessity of genocide was the operative, working assumption of the expanding American nation. "Manifest Destiny" was born at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, later to fall (to paraphrase Malcolm) like a rock on Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, etc. Little children were taught that the American project was inherently good, Godly, and that those who got in the way were "evil-doers" or just plain subhuman, to be gloriously eliminated. The lie is central to white American identity, embraced by waves of European settlers who never saw a red person.

Bloody Fruits of the First Feast

Only a century ago, American soldiers caused the deaths of possibly a million Filipinos whom they had been sent to “liberate” from Spanish rule. They didn’t even know who they were killing, and so rationalized their behavior by substituting the usual American victims. Colonel Funston, of the Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, explained what got him motivated in the Philippines:

"Our fighting blood was up and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' This shooting human beings is a 'hot game,' and beats rabbit hunting all to pieces." Another wrote that "the boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing jack-rabbits .... I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the chastening rod, good, hard, and plenty, and lay it on until they come into the reservation and promise to be good 'Injuns.'"

In 2003, President George Bush addressed the Philippine Congress in Manila. “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people,” said Bush. “Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” Bush failed to mention what every Filipino knows: immediately upon the ouster of the Spanish, the U.S. claimed the Philippines as its own colony, causing the death of a million people – Colonel Funston’s “niggers” – in the process.

At least two million Vietnamese and untold numbers of Cambodian “gooks” died as a result of U.S. aggression, two generations ago. When noted at all, these hellish consequences were often dismissed on the grounds that “Asians don’t value life the way we do.” The truth, of course, is that most white Americans don’t value Asian or other non-white lives at all, and never have.

Today, although in excess of 600,000 Iraqis are thought to have died since the U.S. invasion, the national dialogue revolves solely around the less than 3,000 American dead. Colonel Joe Anderson of the 101st Airborne Division summed up the general American attitude toward Iraqis early in the occupation. "They don't understand being nice," said Anderson. "We spent so long here working with kid gloves, but the average Iraqi guy will tell you, 'The only thing people respect here is violence…. They only understand being shot at, being killed. That's the culture.' … Nice guys do finish last here."

Col. Anderson personifies the unfitness of Americans to play a major role in the world, much less rule it. "We poured a lot of our heart and soul into trying to help the people,” he bitched, as if Americans were God’s gift to the planet. "But it can be frustrating when you hear stupid people still saying, 'You're occupiers. You want our oil. You're turning our country over to Israel.'” He cannot fathom that other people – non-whites – aspire to run their own affairs, and will kill and die to achieve that basic right.

“The Mayflower’s cultural heirs are programmed to find glory in their own depravity, and savagery in their most helpless victims.”

What does this have to do with the Mayflower? Everything. Although possibly against their wishes, the Pilgrims hosted the Wampanoag for three no doubt anxious days. The same men killed and enslaved Wampanoags immediately before and after the feast. They, their newly arrived English comrades and their children roasted hundreds of neighboring Indians alive just 16 years later, and two generations afterwards cleared nearly the whole of New England of its indigenous “savages,” while enthusiastically enriching themselves through the invention of transoceanic, sophisticated means of enslaving millions. The Mayflower’s cultural heirs are programmed to find glory in their own depravity, and savagery in their most helpless victims, who can only redeem themselves by accepting the inherent goodness of white Americans.

Thanksgiving encourages these cognitive cripples in their madness, just as it is designed to do.

In Iraq, as in the Philippines, as in U.S. occupied Haiti in 1914, we hear echoes of the words of Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop. The English had come to expropriate native land and resources, but somehow convinced themselves that their presence was benign. “So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts…have put themselves under our protection," said the Pilgrim-in-Chief.

Throughout the Middle East and in spreading regions of the globe, the U.S. invites the natives to a “feast” of “democracy” – at the point of a gun. Frustrated at native unwillingness to dine on the corpses of their own national sovereignty, the Americans threaten to punish those who demonstrate such “unthankfulness.”

In these times, we should remember the unthankful Pequot women and children roasting in the flames of their village, and the Wampanoag man, murdered by the Pilgrim saint Miles Standish, whose spiked head was displayed for years in Plymouth, the founding site of the national narrative and celebratory feast.

Things are looking up

We began this essay by saying that “the day grows nearer when the almost four centuries-old abomination [Thanksgiving] will be deprived of its reason for being: white supremacy.” We firmly believe this. The wired world works against the Bush men’s insane leap to global hegemony, while creating the material basis for (dare we say the words) brother- and sisterhood among humankind. It becomes clear that the fruits of millennia of human genius cannot be captured and packaged for the enrichment of a few for much longer – and certainly not by a cabal that cannot see beyond the bubble of its own, warped history. The dim outlines of a new and more democratic world order can be seen in the often tentative, but sometimes dramatic actions of movements and nations determined to construct a fairer way to live. As the world witnesses the brutality, stupidity and sheer incompetence of the Pirates currently at the helm of the United States, the urgency of a common, alternative human project becomes apparent to all. The “end of history” that the Bush men triumphantly announced is really the end of them, through a process they have accelerated with every deranged action and delusional strategy they have undertaken since 2001.

They are like men in quicksand. White racism as a global scourge will sink with them, and eventually whither to a mere prejudice rather than a world-threatening menace.

When that day comes, it will at last be time for a global Thanksgiving.

BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be reached at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com. Be sure to substitute @ for (at).

Torture in US Prisons

2010-11-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

November 14, 2010

Torture in US Prisons

By Stephen Lendman

Torture in US Prisons - by Stephen Lendman

In March 2005, a UK Deborah Davis Channel 4 report titled, "Torture, Inc., America's Brutal Prisons" highlighted the horrors, including prisoners savaged by dogs, brutally shocked with cattle prods, burned by toxic chemicals, harmed by stun guns, beaten, stripped naked and abused in various other ways. Sound familiar? Welcome to mainland Guantanamo.

"It's terrible to watch some of the videos," witnessing torture, at times resulting in death. Routinely, guards yell at and abuse prisoners, "ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl." If they don't "drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stomps on his back." Another man screams when a dog bit his lower leg.

One other has a broken ankle, can't crawl fast enough so gets jabbed with a stun gun on his buttocks. Hours later his whole body still shakes. Men line up across the cellblock, guards standing over them shouting, prodding, kicking, and beating, their humiliation captured on video. The images are horrifyingly brutal, reminders of Guantanamo and Baghdad's Abu Ghraib. They're as commonplace in America, but unreported except by Channel 4 UK, calling it "wholesale torture taking place inside the US prison system," uncovered by a four-month investigation, not based on rumor or suspicion. Throughout America, videos and other solid evidence confirm it, what US major media reports won't reveal.

In most states, prison regulations mandate that guards videotape "use of force operations" like cell searches, in theory to show proper procedures were used. Most often, they reveal otherwise, clear evidence of inmate abuses - "a shocking insight into the reality of life inside" US prisons. Even the best of them are harsh, the worst hellish, Davis explaining that videos are "terrible" to watch, saying:

"you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. In one horrible scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a 'restraint chair.' His hands and feet are shackled. There's a strap across his chest. His head rolls forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet."

He's being punished for having a pillowcase on his head in his cell and refusing to remove it. Why? He has a long history of schizophrenia, yet he's restrained for 16 hours. Two hours later, "he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment....We found 20 (other cases of) prisoners who've died in the past few years" after being brutally restrained, what American media won't report.

Two deaths were in Phoenix, AR county jail, run by "America's Toughest Sheriff," Joe Arpaio. "You don't want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe's jails." His toughness often ends tragically.

In one tape, nine deputies manhandle Charles Agster, a tiny man, a mentally disturbed drug user, arrested for disturbing the peace. Restrained in a chair, one deputy kneeled on his stomach, "pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists to the chair. Bending someone double for any length of time" can cause "positional asphyxia."

After 15 minutes, he's unconscious. He's already brain dead. Hospitalized, he expired three days later.

Another tape showed guards severely beating a man, Scott Norberg, including Tasering him 19 times and forcing him into a restraint chair. He suffocated.

Other inmates suffered similar abuse, including beatings causing broken bones, a broken neck, and internal injuries. One man died from septicaemia (blood poisoning) after a month in a coma.

In some tapes, sounds are as "unbearable" as images, a Florida prison one showing an inmate lying on a hospital examination table, guards ordering him to get into a wheelchair. "I can't, I can't," he shouts. "It hurts," after which he's Tasered on both hips, screams, but still can't get into the wheelchair.

Guards force him into it, bend his legs painfully, the man shrieking in agony. His lawyer said he's mentally impaired, has a back injury, can't walk, or bend his legs without intense pain. Yet guards try to make him stand and hold a walker. "He falls on the floor, crying in agony." He's Tasered again, lying there out of breath and energy, just moaning.

Other tapes show prisoners handcuffed, brutally beaten, kicked in the head, Tasered, while other guards "just stand around and watch." Photographs collected were also horrific, showing prisoners doused with pepper spray, "then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals." one image revealed a man with "a huge patch of raw skin over his hip." Another is covered in an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.

"Fire extinguisher" sized pepper spray canisters are used, at times inflicting second degree burns all over prisoners' bodies. For those targeted, "The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit," and shove cardboard in door cracks to make units air-tight.

On man on death row for killing a prison guard was brutally beaten to death. He began writing to Florida newspapers about prison brutality and corruption. "So a gang of guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen and left him to die."

Several guards later tried for murder were acquitted. The warden was promoted to head of all Florida prisons. The few guards willing to discuss what goes on have a "siege mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no matter what....it solidifies into a general climate of acceptance among the many." Even decent staff do their best under hard circumstances. Ratting means getting themselves in trouble, maybe abused or fired.

As for inmates, "the notion of rehabilitation has been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment," the harsher the better based on examples like the above. They're not the exception. They're more the rule in federal, state and local prisons.

Davis said contact was maintained with families and prisoner rights groups. As a result, "Every single day come more emails full of fresh horror stories," showing inmate treatment domestically like at Guantanamo and other torture prisons, guards brutalizing them with impunity.

"Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo - or even Texas. The prisoners and all guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar," one of many of America's dirty secrets.

America's Gulag - The World's Largest Prison Population

On December 8, 2009, US Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics reported over 2.4 million imprisoned Americans at yearend 2008. They include inmates in federal and state facilities, local jails, Indian, juvenile, and military ones, US territories, and numbers held by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In addition, another 7.3 million are under correctional supervision, and 13 million pass through US prisons and jails annually. Half are for non-violent offenses. Half of those are drug-related. In 1980, 40,000 drug offenders were imprisoned. Today, it's over 500,000 because of the "war on drugs," that's part of the war on civil liberties.

Since 1970, America's prison population grew eightfold, not for more crime, for getting "tough" on it against more people getting longer sentences under extremely harsh conditions. Recent Center for Economic Policy Research figures compare America's incarceration rate per 100,000 population with other OECD countries in 2008/2009, showing the following:

-- Iceland 44

-- Japan 63

-- Denmark 66

-- Finland 67

-- Norway 70

-- Sweden 74

-- Switzerland 76

-- Ireland 85

-- Germany 90

-- Italy 92

-- Belgium 94

-- France 96

-- South Korea 97

-- Austria 98

-- Netherland 100

-- Portugal 104

-- Greece 109

-- Canada 116

-- Australia 134

-- Slovakia 151

-- Hungary 152

-- England and Wales 153

-- Luxembourg 155

-- Turkey 161

-- Spain 162

-- New Zealand 197

-- Czech Republic 206

-- Mexico 209

-- Poland 224

-- America 753 - the highest percentage in the world, higher than Russia at 629, and a total prison population four times China's with its fourfold higher population.

Worse still, America's incarceration rate from 1880 through 1980 held steady for over 100 years. It then skyrocketed over the past 30 while crime rates stabilized or fell - a shocking indictment of a criminally unjust system, filling beds for the prison-industrial complex, around 8% in prisons-for-profit, the population comprised of two-thirds Blacks and Latinos.

They're victimized by get tough on crime policies, racist drug laws, mandatory minimums, one size fits all, three strikes and you're out, a guilty unless proved innocent mentality, being in America undocumented, and Muslims for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, or charity to the wrong recipients, those unjustly called terrorists.

Sexual Abuse and Treatment of Women

About 200,000 women are incarcerated in US federal, state, local and immigrant detention prisons, nearly 10% of America's prison population. In its Fact Sheet - Sexual Assault and Misconduct Against Women in Prison, Amnesty International (AI) explained that:

"The imbalance of power between inmates and guards involves the use of direct physical force and indirect force based on the prisoner's total dependency on officers for basic necessities and the guards' ability to withhold privileges. Some women are coerced into sex for favors such as extra food or personal hygiene products, or to avoid punishment."

Daily they're affected by:

Powerlessness and Humiliation:

Male guards and other prison officials abuse women by rape, other sexual assault, sexual extortion, and random body searches. They also watch them undress, take showers or use toilets. Women who complain face brutal recrimination.

Retaliation and Fear:

Guards use inmates' personal history files, including prior complaints, to enforce silence by threatening visitation rights, other privileges and at times punishment.

Impunity:

Abuses go unpunished by ignoring them, guilty guards and officials transferred to other facilities, or inmates relocated instead.

Blame the Victim:

Like men, women are victimized by the war on drugs, especially those of color.

Medical Neglect:

Women are denied essential resources and treatment, especially reproductive care when pregnant, or for treatable diseases. Also for chronic and degenerative ones, exacerbating them as a result. The common attitude is they're prisoners. Who cares!

In addition, few qualified staff means long delays and inferior treatment, compounded by overall indifference. Other problems include facilities charging inmates, shackling during treatment, not addressing substance abuse, and inadequate mental health services. Prisoners have no rights whatever, staff given impunity to abuse them freely.

Discrimination Based on Race:

Black women are eight or more times likely than Caucasians to be imprisoned, their numbers comprising about half the female population, mostly for drug-related or other nonviolent offenses.

Latina women experience four times the incarceration rate as whites. State and federal laws mandate minimum sentences for all drug "offenders," eliminating judicial discretion to excuse first-timers or refer others to counseling or other non-punitive programs.

Further, crack cocaine is the only illegal substance mandating prison for first time possession, disproportionately affecting Blacks, their common drug of choice.

Simple first-time powder cocaine possession is a misdemeanor, punishable at most up to one year in prison. For crack, however, it's five years, Blacks accounting for 84% of convictions in 2000, Hispanics 9% and Whites 6%.

Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation:

Juror perceptions are especially biased against gay, lesbian or transgender defendants, compounded during imprisonment when guards and officials act more abusively against a perceived lifestyle they reject.

All inmates are powerless, women most of all, making them especially vulnerable to abuse, including rape and other forms of sexual assault, despite federal and state laws criminalizing forced or nonconsensual acts. Yet they repeatedly happen, many unreported for fear of recrimination or inability to provide proof. Other times out of shame or expectation that charges will be scoffed at.

In addition, women at times reporting them are isolated, ostensibly for safety, but the effect takes a physical and emotional toll. According to Deborah Golden, staff attorney for the DC Prisoners' Project of the Washington Lawyer' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, many women don't view sex as an abuse. Most experienced sexual and other physical mistreatment before prison, reports Sarah From, Women's Prison Association public policy director.

In 2004, AI reported nearly 2,300 sexual abuse cases against men and women, the true totals far higher according to experts believing the problem is systemic and growing.

According to a 2007 Bureau of Justice Statistics report titled, "Sexual Victimization in State and Federal Prisons Reported by (male and female) Inmates," 4.5% of prisoners (108,000) reported being abused in the past year - also grossly understated because most incidents aren't reported. In addition, they're equally common against men and women, Human Right Watch saying at least 140,000 males are raped during incarceration.

In her 2006 paper titled, "Sexual abuse of women in United States prisons: a modern corollary of slavery," Brenda Smith compared the similarities, explaining that

custody is the common thread even though, unlike slaves, prisoners ostensibly have rights under Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, and US law.

Abuse, however, remains unchecked, Angela Davis calling prison rape "an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls," men, women, and children victimized. Further, they're almost never provided mental health services to handle trauma, nor are guards given proper training or mandates to prevent sex crimes in the first place. This issue was addressed by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), the first federal law regarding sexual assault on prisoners, aiming to curb it through a "zero-tolerance" policy, as well as research and information gathering.

It calls for developing national standards to prevent, detect, reduce and punish sexual assault, making data on them more available to administrators, and holding officials and guards more accountable for their actions. But laws without enforcement are hollow, prisoner rights historically America's lowest priority. Those incarcerated are society's most abused and mistreated, especially vulnerable women out of sight behind bars.

Male Rape in Prison

Against women or men, rape inflicts pain and suffering. As a result, human rights and humanitarian groups as well as international courts now recognize it as torture. Most US states define it as forced, nonconsensual sex. California's law mirrors others saying:

It's sexual intercourse carried out "against a person's will by means of force, violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the person or another." It's also when "the perpetrator threatens to use public authority to imprison, arrest, (otherwise punish), or deport the victim or another, and the victim reasonably believes the perpetrator is a public official."

This article focuses on torture against men and women, inflicted by prison guards and officials. Male rape is generally inmate-on-inmate. As a result, the topic is covered briefly, very much deserving detailed discussion in a separate article.

In April 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report titled, "No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons," citing studies showing about one in five men raped at least once during confinement. Documenting it with dozens of first-and accounts, HRW explained its long-lasting effects, including depression, PTSD, and HIV-AIDS, one victim saying:

"I remained in shock and paralyzed in thought for two days until I was able to muster the courage to report it. This is the most dreadful and horrifying experience of my life."

According to HRW, "Rape is not an inevitable consequence of prison life, but it certainly is a predictable one if little is done to prevent it and punish it." Indifference to prisoner rights perpetuates it against vulnerable men, women and children.

Prolonged Isolated Confinement

A previous article addressed it, accessed through the following link:

click here

In Supermax and other prisons, inmates compare long-term isolation to being buried alive. It also contributes to anti-social behavior and mental illness, experts saying punitive sensory deprivation changes behavior for the worst by crushing the human spirit, mind and body. Yet 80,000 or more Americans languish in isolation in US federal, state and local prisons. Over time, living in windowless cells with no human contact for 23 hours a day causes:

-- severe anxiety;

-- panic attacks;

-- lethargy;

-- insomnia;

-- nightmares;

-- dizziness;

-- irrational anger, at times uncontrollable;

-- confusion;

-- social withdrawal;

-- memory loss;

-- delusions and hallucinations;

-- mutilations;

-- profound despair and hopelessness;

-- suicidal thoughts;

-- paranoia; and

-- for many, a totally dysfunctional state and inability ever to live normally outside of confinement.

A Final Comment

An earlier article discussed "Torture As Official US Policy," accessed through the following link:

click here

It addressed post-9/11 Bush administration policies in prisons like Guantanamo and others abroad, explaining the systemic use of prohibited interrogation practices, excluding only those causing organ failure.

Legalized restraints remain ignored, permitting cruel and unusual punishment. Yet it routinely occurs domestically, out of sight and mind behind bars, many nonviolent and innocent inmates brutalized and forever affected.

The Sentencing Project.org says America's criminal justice system "fall(s) short of meeting its international human rights obligations," in accordance with established international law. Systemic prison torture is the clearest example.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/ .

Author's Bio: I was born in 1934, am a retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.

The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords

2010-11-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Black Press Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoM-3wBvXhE

The Black Press Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yteJuYsCMYA&feature=related

The Black Press Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slS7NArOrCA&feature=related

The Black Press Part 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ENyMUYwibQ&feature=related

The Black Press Part 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr5nVmINpS0&feature=related

The Black Press Part 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEKdUyaraVA&feature=related

The Black Press Part 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD78aDBLiHk&NR=1

The Black Press Part 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7giMi-y2sY&feature=related

The Black Press Part 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ntq0X4hRw&feature=related

Nigerian "Independence" 50 years later

2010-10-27T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Scramble for Africa

2010-10-25T14:25:00.001-07:00

History of Ivory Coast since "Independence"

2010-10-25T14:24:00.001-07:00

History of Congo since "Independence"

2010-10-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

History of Chad since "Independence"

2010-10-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

Gentrification in DC

2010-10-12T19:55:00.000-07:00

What the USA and others did to Haiti! (MUST WATCH!)

2010-10-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

Iran Contra Cover-Up

2010-08-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry

2010-08-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry 1 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RcQ68weq2E&feature=related

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry 2 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v-qknELklk&feature=related

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry 3 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOwERNS1KLg&feature=related

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry 4 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqzdjvq2OTk&feature=related

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry 5 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ER8I0KdTLQ&feature=related

Abuse of Black Americans by Psychiatry 6 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16wmvEGvKhs&feature=related

Disney's Nefarious Side!

2010-08-05T11:29:00.001-07:00

How Disney Magic and the Corporate Media Shape Youth Identity in the Digital Age

Wednesday 04 August 2010

by: Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

photo
(Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

While the "empire of consumption" has been around for a long time[1], American society in the last 30 years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. Youth are now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives. Under the tutelage of Disney and other megacorporations, children have become an audience captive not only to traditional forms of media such as film, television and print, but even more so to the new digital media made readily accessible through mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the Internet. The information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy disseminated by massive multimedia corporations have become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children's daily lives - all toward a lifetime of constant, unthinking consumption. Consumer culture in the United States and increasingly across the globe, does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood: it exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, "there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets."[2] But corporate-controlled culture not only exploits and distorts the hopes and desires of individuals: it is fundamentally driven toward exploiting public goods for private gain, if it does not also more boldly seek to privatize everything in the public realm. Among US multimedia megacorporations, Disney appears one of the least daunted in attempting to dominate public discourse and undermine the critical and political capacities necessary for the next generation of young people to sustain even the most basic institutions of democracy.

The impact of new electronic technologies as teaching machines can be seen in some rather astounding statistics. It is estimated that the average American spends more than six hours a day watching video-based entertainment and, by 2013, the numbers of daily hours spent watching television and videos will match the numbers of hours spent sleeping.[3] The American Medical Association reports that the combined hours "spent in front of a television or video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an American child."[4] Such statistics warrant grave concern, given that the messages provided through such programming are shaped largely by a $263-billion-dollar-a-year US advertising industry[5], which sells not only its products, but also values, images and identities largely aimed at teaching young people to be consumers. A virtual army of marketers, psychologists and corporate executives are currently engaged in what Susan Linn calls a "hostile takeover of childhood,"[6] seeking in the new media environment to take advantage of the growing economic power wielded by children and teens. Figures on direct spending by young people have dramatically increased in the last ten years to the point where it is now estimated that each year pre-teens and teenagers marshal "$200 billion in spending power."[7] And this is not all. Young people also exert a powerful influence on parental spending, offering up a market in which, according to Anap Shah, "Children (under 12) and teens influence parental purchases totaling over ... $670 billion a year."[8] Because of their value as consumers and their ability to influence spending, young people have become major targets of an advertising and marketing industry that spends over $17 billion a year on shaping children's identities and desires.[9]

Exposed to a marketing machinery eager and ready to transform them into full-fledged members of consumer society, children's time is conscripted by a commercial world defined by the Walt Disney Company and a few other corporations, and the amount of time spent in this world is as breathtaking as it is disturbing. Typical children see about "40,000 ads a year on TV alone," and by the time they enter the fourth grade, they will have "memorized 300-400 brands."[10] In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that young people are "exposed to the equivalent of 8½ hours a day of media content ... [and that] the typical 8-18 year-old lives in a home with an average of 3.6 CD or tape players, 3.5 TVs, 3.3 radios, 2.0 VCRs/DVD players, 2.1 video game consoles and 1.5 computers."[11] There was a time when a family traveling in a car might entertain itself by singing or playing games. Now, however, many kids have their own laptops or cell phones and many family vehicles come equipped with DVD players. Family members need not look to each other or the outside world for entertainment when a constant stream of media sources is at their fingertips. Today's kids have more money to spend and more electronic toys to play with, but, increasingly, they are left on their own to navigate the virtual and visual worlds created by US media corporations.

In what has become the most "consumer-oriented society in the world," Juliet Schor observes that kids and teens have taken center stage as "the epicenter of American consumer culture."[12] The tragic result is that youth now inhabit a cultural landscape in which, increasingly, they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market. Multi-billion-dollar media corporations, with a commanding role over commodity markets as well as support from the highest reaches of government, have become the primary educational and cultural force in shaping, if not hijacking, how youth define their interests, values and relations to others.

Given its powerful role among media-driven modes of communication, the Walt Disney Company exercises a highly disproportionate concentration of control over the means of producing, circulating and exchanging information, especially to kids. Once a company that catered primarily to a three- to eight-year-old crowd with its animated films, theme parks and television shows, Disney in the new millennium has been at the forefront of the multimedia conglomerates now aggressively marketing products for infants, toddlers and tweens (kids age eight to twelve).[13] Web sites, video games, computer-generated animation, Disney TV and pop music - developed around franchises like "High School Musical," "Hannah Montana" and the Jonas Brothers, and accessible online with the touch of a button - are now sustaining Disney fans into their teenage and young adult years. Allied with multimedia giant Apple, Inc. (Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney) and the cutting-edge animation studio Pixar, Disney is beyond doubt a powerful example of the new corporate media at the beginning of the 21st century.

Disney not only represents "one of the best-known symbols of capitalist consumerism,"[14] but also claims to offer consumers a stable, known quantity in its brand-name products. Understanding Disney's cultural role is neither a simple nor a trivial task. Like many other megacorporations, it focuses on popular culture and continually expands its products and services to reach every available media platform. What is unique about Disney, however, is its titanium-clad brand image - synonymous with a notion of childhood innocence and wholesome entertainment - that manages to deflect, if not completely trounce, criticism at every turn. As an icon of American culture and middle-class family values, Disney actively appeals to both conscientious parents and youthful fantasies as it works hard to transform every child into a lifetime consumer of Disney products and ideas. Put the Disney corporation under scrutiny, however, and a contradiction quickly appears between a Disney culture that presents itself as the paragon of virtue and childlike innocence and the reality of the company's cutthroat commercial ethos.

Disney, like many corporations, trades in sound bites; the result is that the choices, exclusions and values that inform its narratives about joy, pleasure, living and survival in a global world are often difficult to discern. Disney needs to be addressed within a widening circle of awareness, so we can place the history, meaning and influence of the Disney empire outside of its own narrow interpretive frameworks that often shut down critical assessments of how Disney is actually engaged in the commercial carpet bombing of children and teens. Understanding Disney in the year 2010 requires that we draw attention to the too often hidden or forgotten corporate dimension surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of Disney culture and, in so doing, equip parents, youth, educators, and others with tools that will enable them to critically mediate the ways in which they encounter Disney. In 1999, Disney was a $22 billion profit-making machine.[15] Ten years later, Disney is generating over $37.8 billion per year and quickly expanding the market for its products in countries such as China, where the latest Disney theme park - Hong Kong Disneyland - opened in 2005, and another park is slated for development in Shanghai.[16] Now a worldwide distributor of a particular kind of cultural politics, Disney is a teaching machine that not only exerts influence over young people in the United States, but also wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its political and cultural influence overseas. As global capital spreads its influence virtually unchecked by national governments and the international community, citizenship becomes increasingly privatized and youth are educated to become consuming subjects rather than civic-minded and critical citizens. If today's young people are to look ahead to a more rather than less democratic future, it has become imperative for people everywhere to develop a critical language in which notions of the public good, public issues and public life become central to overcoming the privatizing and depoliticizing language of the market.

Disney's Marketing Juggernaut

One measure of the corporate assault on kids can be seen in the reach, acceleration and effectiveness of Disney's marketing and advertising efforts to turn kids into consumers and childhood into a salable commodity. Every child, regardless of how young, is now a potential consumer ripe for being commodified and immersed in a commercial culture defined by brands. The Walt Disney Company spares little expense in generating a coherent brand image and encapsulating its many products and services within the seductive symbolism of childhood innocence and wholesome family fun. The company's approach makes Disney a particularly useful case for understanding corporate strategies directed at youth in the new media environment. At the same time as Disney represents nostalgia and tradition, it has become a global leader in transforming digital technologies into profit-making platforms and developing a consumer-centered discourse that deflects criticism away from, while it softens, what can only be called boldly commercial self-promotion. Disney, with its legion of media holdings, armies of marketers and omnipresent advertisers sets out not just to exploit children and youth for profit: it actually constructs them as commodities while promoting the very concept of childhood as a salable commodity. Childhood ideals increasingly give way to a market-driven politics in which young people are prepared for a life of objectification that will simultaneously drain them of any viable sense of moral and political agency. This is especially true in the current consumer society in which children more than ever mediate their identities and relations to others through the consumption of goods and images. No longer imagined within the language of responsibility and justice, childhood begins with what might be called the scandalous philosophy of money, that is, a corporate logic in which everything, including the worth of young people, is measured through the potentially barbaric calculations of finance, exchange value and profitability.

Disney, perhaps more than any other corporation, has created a marketing powerhouse that uses the pivotal educational force of children's culture in combination with new digital media technologies. Kids can download enormous amounts of media in seconds and carry around such information, images and videos in a device the size of a thin cigarette lighter. Moreover, "[media] technologies themselves are morphing and merging, forming an ever-expanding presence throughout our daily environment."[17] Mobile phones alone have grown "to include video game platforms, e-mail devices, digital cameras and Internet connections," making it easier for marketers and advertisers to reach young people.[18] Kids of all ages now find themselves in what the Berkeley Media Studies Group and the Center for Digital Democracy call "a new 'marketing ecosystem' that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, broadband video, instant messaging, video games and virtual three-dimensional worlds," all of which provide the knowledge and information that young people use to navigate their place in families, schools and communities.[19] Disney along with its researchers, marketing departments and purveyors of commerce largely define and control this massive virtual entertainment complex, spending vast amounts of time trying to understand the needs, desires, tastes, preferences, social relations and networks that characterize youth as a potential market.

The disconnect between market values and the ethical responsibility to care for children is on full display in Disney's almost boastful use of research to mine the inner lives and experiences of young children. That Disney's insidious strategies receive front page coverage in The New York Times and are presented without so much as a critical comment is a testament to how commercial values have numbed the public's ability to recognize the danger such values often present to children. According to The New York Times, Disney is at the forefront of finding ways to capitalize on the $50 billion dollars spent worldwide by young boys between the ages of six and 14.[20] As part of such an effort, Disney seeks the advice of educators, anthropologists and even a research consultant with "a background in the casino industry," not only to study all aspects of the culture and intimate lives of young boys, but to do so in a way that allows Disney to produce "emotional hooks" that lure young boys into the wonderful world of corporate Disney in order to turn them into enthusiastic consumers.[21] Disney's recent attempts to "figure out the boys' entertainment market" enlisted the services of Kelly Pena, described as "the kid whisperer," who attempts to uncover what makes young boys tick by using her anthropological skills to convince young boys and their parents to allow her to look into the kids' closets, go shopping with them and pay them $75 to be interviewed. Ms. Pena, with no irony intended, prides herself on the fact that "Children ... open up to her."[22] Given Disney's desire to expand into boys' culture, the company's announcement in 2009 that it had purchased Marvel Entertainment Inc. came as no surprise. Marvel's comic book empire owns the licenses to approximately 5,000 superhero characters. The Wall Street Journal remarked that by "bringing in macho types such as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, the Marvel deal would expand Disney's audience, adding properties that appeal to boys from their preteen years into young adulthood." [23]

It is even more disturbing that Disney and a growing number of marketers and advertisers now work with child psychologists and other experts, who study young people in order to better understand children's culture so as to develop marketing methods that are more camouflaged, seductive and successful. Disney claims this kind of intensive research pays off in lucrative dividends and reinforces the Disney motto that, in order to be a successful company, "You have to start with the kids themselves."[24] Several psychologists, especially Allen D. Kanner, have publicly criticized such disingenuous practices.[25] Disney's recent attempt to corner the young male market through the use of sophisticated research models, ethnographic tools and the expertise of academics indicates the degree to which the language of the market has disengaged itself from either moral considerations or the social good. It is clear that Disney's only goal is to win over the hearts and minds of young people so as to deliver them to the market as both loyal consumers and commodities. In such unscrupulous strategies, the contradiction becomes visible between Disney's public relations image as a purveyor of wholesome entertainment and the hidden reality of Disney as a political and economic power that promotes ideology conducive to its own corporate interests, thereby impoverishing the imaginative possibilities of youth and dismantling the public foundations for a thriving civic culture.

Childhood, Inc.

Corporate culture is rewriting the nature of children's culture, a trend that becomes visible in the various ways traditional boundaries once maintained between the spheres of formal education and entertainment are collapsed. According to Lawrence Grossberg, children are introduced to the world of logos, advertising and the mattering maps of consumerism long before they can speak: Capitalism targets kids as soon as they are old enough to watch commercials, even though they may not be old enough to distinguish programming from commercials or to recognize the effects of branding and product placement.[26] In fact, researchers have found that while children as young as three years old recognize brand logos, not until they are around eight years old do they understand advertising's intention to manipulate their desires.[27] But this has not stopped corporations from exposing kids from birth to adulthood to a consumer blitz of advertising, marketing, education and entertainment that has no historical precedent. There is now even a market for videos for toddlers and infants as young as three months old. Not surprisingly, this is part of a growing $4.8 billion market aimed at the youngest children - an area of multimedia culture into which Disney recently expanded.[28]

In 2000, Disney purchased the Baby Einstein Company from its founder, Julie Aigner-Clark, who had created a line of products and toys known to mesmerize these youngest television watchers by displaying, for example, vibrant moving objects while playing a soundtrack of classical music selections. The marketing of the products suggests that parents can purchase toys and videos that will not only enable their children to develop good taste in music, but also make them capable of great intellectual achievements. (Disney/Pixar's 2004 film "The Incredibles" plugs the Baby Einstein franchise shamelessly when one character exclaims, "Mozart makes babies smarter.") Despite objections against the marketing of baby videos as educational media by organizations such as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Disney persists in using clever packaging for the videos that implies they are, at best, beneficial learning tools to be used in a child's most formative years and, at worst, harmless distractions for infant audiences. And the marketing strategy works. A 2007 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 48 percent of parents believe that baby videos have "a positive effect on early childhood development."[29] The news that baby DVDs and videos actually impair infants' cognitive development broke in 2007 when the University of Washington issued a press release about a study published in the prestigious Journal of Pediatrics that concluded infants eight to 16 months old, who were exposed to one hour of viewing baby DVDs and videos per day, displayed slower language development: those children understood on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of viewing than infants who did not watch the videos.[30] Reading to a child once a day, by contrast, produced an observable increase in vocabulary.[31]

How did Disney respond to the researchers' findings? President and CEO Robert Iger demanded that the University of Washington immediately retract its statements on the grounds that the study's assessment methodology was faulty and the publication of the results was "misleading, irresponsible and derogatory."[32] Disney's main objection was that the study did not differentiate between brands when it tested the effects of baby videos on language development. Mark Emmert, president of the University of Washington, refused to comply with Iger's demand for a retraction and instead articulated a need for more "research aimed at helping parents and society enhance the lives of children."[33] While this research was clearly not enough to deter Disney from marketing its Baby Einstein wares as beneficial for babies and toddlers, other researchers have found that one of greatest costs associated with surrounding very young children with screen media is a reduction in the time they spend engaging in creative, unstructured play. In a 2007 report, the American Academy of Pediatrics lamented, "time for free play has been markedly reduced for some children."[34] Yet Disney's message to parents continues to foster the idea that parents should not only accept the ubiquitous presence screen culture in their babies' lives, but view it as an inevitable fact of life, one pointless to criticize and impossible to change.[35] In an utterly cynical gesture, the Baby Einstein web site cites a 2003 finding by the Kaiser Family Foundation that "in a typical day, 68% of all children under two use screen media."[36] This statistic is not presented as something that should alarm concerned parents and encourage different parenting practices; on the contrary, it becomes simple proof of "the reality of today's parents, families and households" and an indicator of how the American Academy of Pediatrics, which discourages television viewing for children under two years old, is simply stuck in the past.37.

Disney's marketing tactics utilize the idea that parents who want their kids to keep up in a highly competitive world must supply them with every available product that purports to nurture young minds. In 2007, Disney launched an educational web site for parents, DisneyFamily.com, which offers parenting advice "in a manner that is compelling, comprehensive, entertaining and, most importantly, objective." The web site taps into the growing parenting industry, claiming to target "the more than 32 million moms that are online in the US."[38] Given Disney's attempt to refute work by leading researchers in children's health, it is unclear what the web site intends to publish as "articles from experts in the parenting field." But if the so-called expertise is not useful to parents, they can at least download a coupon from the "Family Tool Box."[39] The web site also features the "Disney Family Learning Center," developed in collaboration with Sony Electronics and Powered, Inc., an online education provider that also happens to specialize in social marketing. Disney finds ways to promote Sony's and its own products when advising parents on child development, entertainment options and other "family-relevant information" in its online courses, such as "Traveling Light with Kids and Technology" and "Contact Management for the Busy Mom and Dad."[40]

The Internet's commercial potential is certainly not lost on Disney, as Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group, stated, "There is massive opportunity here."[41] Harnessing the power of virtual space is a strategy openly championed by CEO Robert Iger, whose stated goal is for the company to establish "clear leadership in the kids and families online virtual worlds space around the globe."[42] Disney views online media as an opportunity not so much to enhance children's lives as to make money for shareholders, enjoy low overhead costs and keep the company's film and television franchises profitable. The Disney.com site, redesigned in 2007, includes video games, social networking, customized user content and videos on demand. As of the summer of 2009, approximately 16 million users have designed customized fairy avatars that inhabit Pixie Hollow at DisneyFairies.com.[43] Internet sites offering cooperative games and social networking to children seem like a relatively innocuous option in a media culture currently exploiting every imaginable angle to populate reality television's competitive worlds of winners and losers. It is far less innocuous, however, that these web sites help Disney collect and use personal information to assail consumer groups with targeted, cross-promotional advertising. Web-based social media not only acculturate children to being constantly bombarded with advertising, but give them the illusion of control while they are actually being manipulated.

Disney's interest in capturing the attention of very young people through the Internet has also involved the acquisition of Club Penguin, a web-based virtual world, in a $700 million deal in 2007. Disney's Club Penguin targets kids ages six to fourteen and provides each user with an animated penguin avatar that interacts in a snow-covered world, chats with other users and earns virtual money to purchase items such as pets, clothing and furnishings for an igloo home. Users can play for free, but must pay $5.95 per month for access to certain features of the game. As an interactive and "immersive environment," Club Penguin enables Disney to train children in the habits of consumption - merchandise, such as stuffed penguins, is advertised on the site - while making direct contact with its global consumer base through the online network. Similarly, Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean," for children under ten years of age, lures kids into a virtual world of consumers that is predicted to include 20 million children by 2011.[44] As Brooks Barnes points out in The New York Times, these electronic malls are only superficially envisioned by developers as entertainment or educational sites. Their main purpose, she states, is to enable media conglomerates to "deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers."[45]

In order to tap further into the youth market, Disney's recent strategy has involved spending $180 million on video game development. Disney-branded online space includes the Internet's first multiplayer game for kids, "Toontown Online." As Sara Grimes points out, multiplayer online games "construct entire cultural experiences based around beloved characters, fantasy and play [but] entry into these worlds is only possible through a perpetual cycle of consumption."[46] Another product, the video game "Epic Mickey," revamps the character of Mickey Mouse in an alleged effort to make him more appealing to today's generation of youth. The mouse will no longer embody a childlike innocence and generosity, but will instead be "cantankerous and cunning" and will exhibit "selfish, destructive behavior."[47] With Mickey's popularity in decline in the United States, Disney's market-driven agenda is visible not only in its willingness to transform the hallowed icon upon which its corporate empire was built, but also in the very way it has transformed Mickey Mouse's character. Although Disney's representatives suggest that this reimagining of Mickey Mouse merely reflects what is currently popular among young people, it seems more aligned with the current ideology of a ruthless economic Darwinism (also evident in reality TV shows) that has little to do with the needs of children and a great deal to do with a survival-of-the-fittest view of the world perpetuated by market-centered culture. The recent moves by the Walt Disney Company to darken the characters it incorporates into its cultural offerings should be seen as less a demystification of the brand image of Disneyfied innocence and more a signal of the company's desire for a growing compatibility between its public pedagogy and a commercial culture's ethos of egocentric narcissism, social aggression and hypermasculinity.

The issues surrounding Disney culture as a source of identity for young people are complex. Adult existence, according to Zygmunt Bauman, involves "changing one's ego" through "an unending series of self-focused pursuits, each episode lived through as an overture to the next."[48] Whether or not this is a dramatic departure from the way life was lived in the past, it is nevertheless becoming clear that today's youth also are now caught up in negotiating shifting identities through processes that involve a constant engagement with educational sites throughout the culture. How much more challenging, then, will young people who are just embarking on the process of identity development find the navigation of a commercialized culture that appears to offer limitless choice in terms of selfhood, yet, effectively limits the choices that both children and adults can make in extending their sense of personal and collective agency?

One sign of how the Walt Disney Company seeks to intervene in children's lives by shaping their identity narratives was evident in the company's 2009 announcement that it would be redesigning its chain of 340 Disney Stores to mirror a theme park design. Based on the prototype called Imagination Park, the renovated stores will be entirely networked with interactive technology to create a multisensory recreational experience that encourages consumer participation and emphasizes community through collective activities.[49] The Disney store refurbishment project's "goal is to make children clamor to visit the stores and stay longer" and will cost approximately $1 million per store. By enabling visitors to generate a narrative for their own consumption, the stores will offer the illusion that kids are the producers of meaning and have the capacity to customize their identities through the stories that are created around Disney products and places. Such power is not necessarily false and it is undoubtedly seductive in a world of narrowing opportunities for agency and expression - perhaps even more so for children and youth for whom such opportunities are few and for whom the spectacular has not yet lost the appeal of novelty. At the same time, it confines the imagination and any corresponding sense of community to the narratives on offer, which ultimately all lead back to immersing the individual in fun, conflict-free processes of consumption designed to generate corporate profits.

It is astounding the ease with which Disney's conventional fantasy formula for young adults - recently updated and reissued in films like "High School Musical" - reduces unpleasant and contradictory lived experiences to the "trials and tribulations" of well-off kids who "just want to fit in," and can easily do so by participating in consumer culture. Elayne Rapping observes a similar thematic message in the design of Disney World, which, not unlike the world of the "High School Musical" films, is "uniform in its middle-American, asexual, uninflected sameness," all of which works to embody a "sense of classless luxury and unthreatening sameness ... a synthetic spirit of democracy" that promises a kind of belonging free from the "stress of competition."[50] The Disney celebrity factory has long been masterful at churning out clean-cut teen idols who symbolize these wholesomely bland American values. Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) is one of the latest incarnations of Disney's star-making power. According to a New York Times article, for many people, but especially for those "parents unnerved by the spectacle of the Spears family," Miley Cyrus represents a positive role model for "millions of girls still figuring out how they feel about boys."[51] Cyrus plays the character Miley Stewart in the Disney TV show "Hannah Montana" alongside her real-life father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. The show focuses on the story of a teenage girl, who wants to lead a totally normal life at home and school and, therefore, decides to keep it a secret that she is also the superstar pop singer Hannah Montana. She achieves this goal by changing her clothing and hair color. On the show, then, the lead character, Miley Stewart, has a rock-star altar ego named Hannah Montana and, in real life, Disney aggressively markets Miley Cyrus as a pop icon by producing her music CDs and funding a 2007 concert tour, called Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds. As one reporter for The New York Times commented, Disney's public relations' ingenuity ensures that consumers get "three girls for the price of one."[52] It seems that in a world increasingly defined by fragmentation and instability, "Hannah Montana" taps into the fantasy of celebrity, offering young people the lure of agency through an endless reinvention of the self. A tween girl might identify with the family dynamics depicted on the show, but need not stop there when she can also transform herself among her classmates and achieve the chic look of a rock starlet merely by purchasing "Hannah Montana" clothing at Wal-Mart. According to the Disney formula, self-expression is once again reduced to what a young person can afford to buy. And Disney is expert at reinforcing such cycles of brand promotion by generating relationships between its media offerings and consumer products. As Mike Budd explains, the company exhibits "highly developed corporate synergy in which every Disney product is both a commodity and an ad for every other Disney commodity."[53] The comment from The New York Times about Cyrus being a good role model for kids should be considered within this context of consumerism and what it teaches young girls in terms of their identities, values and aspirations. Hannah Montana is not a superhero, but merely a superstar whose only responsibility in life is to entertain her fans and make money. Miley Stewart's raison d'être is to deceive the people around her so that she can live her life unencumbered by the social responsibilities attendant on being a well-known public figure. Finally, does not Cyrus, as the real life embodiment of "three girls for the price of one," represent the most commodified of role models, severely and insidiously proscribing the imaginative possibilities for a generation of young women who are sadly being encouraged to view their bodies as objects, their identities as things to be bought and sold and their emotional and psychological health as best nurtured through "retail therapy" (shopping)?

Concepts of self and society are undoubtedly shifting as we witness the "growing interpenetration of the economic and the cultural."[54] Spaces that were once constructed through "forms of public culture," as noted by Sharon Zukin, have now become privatized, controlled and framed by corporate culture.[55] These spaces, from suburban shopping malls to tourist spots to city centers, encourage leisure while also "priming the young for consumerism."[56] While colonizing multiple cultural spaces, corporations like Disney are increasingly looking to virtual space in order to provide "enhanced" experiences for a consumer class that wants to maximize its leisure time. Developing virtual online worlds gives Disney, to a greater extent than at any previous point in history, more global corporate control over the "production of subjectivity that is not fixed in identity, but hybrid and modulating."[57] Paradoxically, though, Disney gains access to children and adults by selling the illusion of fixity. Disney not only represents "one of the best-known symbols of capitalist consumerism,"[58] but also claims to offer consumers a stable, known quantity in its brand-name products. In other words, Disney culture acts as a temporary salve to growing feelings of uncertainty and insecurity produced by economic dislocations and social instability on a national and global scale. It is no small irony that, while offering people the "swindle of fulfillment" promised by rampant consumerism[59], multinational corporations such as Disney are one of the globalizing forces largely responsible for the instabilities and upheavals facing contemporary nation states.

Indeed, the sovereignty of national governments is increasingly challenged by the power of multinational corporations and the logic of the marketplace they embody; governments are downsized and their services are privatized or gutted, corporations receive incentives in the form of huge tax breaks or bailouts with taxpayers' money, legislation is passed that further deregulates the market and democratically elected governments fail in their responsibilities to foster a just and equal society. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that individuals find comfort in the stable meanings they can ascribe to Disney and turn to consumption for even the semblance of personal agency. Multinational corporations such as Disney have become "the aristocratic articulations" of a global monopoly of power and coercion that is imposed from above and that achieves control through circuits that do not reveal themselves because they operate on the "terrain of the production and regulation of subjectivity" itself [60] - that is, in the realm of cultural production and consumption. According to Jeremy Weber, capitalism adapts to local cultures and conditions in ways that secure its profit-making power: "The market does not simply obliterate all earlier traditions. It is opportunistic. It will enhance and concentrate on those features of a society which turn a profit or change them in such a way that they will make money."[61] Consequently, everything potentially becomes a commodity, including and perhaps most especially, identity. Global capitalism manages and controls diversity by commodifying and selling different identity positions, while also encouraging self-commodification - particularly of youth - through various marketing trends and technologies that become increasingly ubiquitous in the lives of the adults, teens and the very youngest children alike.[62]

Conclusion

Children are not born with consumer habits. Their identities have to be actively directed to assume the role of consumer. If Disney had its way, kids' culture would become not merely a new market for the accumulation of capital, but a petri dish for producing new commodified subjects. As a group, young people are vulnerable to corporate giants such as Disney, which makes every effort "to expand 'inwardly' into the psyche and emotional life of the individual in order to utilize human potential" in the service of a market society.[63] Virtually every child is now vulnerable to the many advertisers and entertainment providers who diversify markets through various niches, most recently evident in the use of mobile technologies and online social media. Complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, with a global politics defined by market power, the American public offers little resistance to children's culture being expropriated and colonized by large multimedia conglomerates and Madison Avenue advertisers. Eager to enthrall kids with invented fears and lacks, corporate media culture also entices them with equally unimagined new desires, to prod them into spending money or to influence their parents to spend it in order to fill corporate coffers.

The potential for lucrative profits to be made off the spending habits and economic influence of kids has certainly not been lost on Disney and a number of other multinational corporations, which under the deregulated, privatized, no-holds-barred world of the free market have set out to embed the dynamics of commerce, exchange value and commercial transactions into every aspect of personal and daily life. Wrapping itself up in the discourse of innocence and family-oriented amusement in order to camouflage the mechanisms and deployment of corporate power, Disney uses its various entertainment platforms that cut across all forms of traditional and new media in a relentless search for young customers to incessantly bombard with a pedagogy of commerce. In the broader society, as the culture of the market displaces civic culture, children are no longer prioritized as an important social investment or viewed as a central marker for the moral life of the nation. Instead, childhood ideals linked to the protection and well-being of youth are transformed - decoupled from the "call to conscience [and] civic engagement"[64] - and redefined through what amounts to a culture of excessive individualism and the numbing of public consciousness.

Rather than participate mindlessly in the Disneyfication of culture, we all need to excavate the excluded memories and silenced voices that could challenge the uncomplicated commodified identities offered to young people by Disney in the name of the innocence and entertainment. As one of the most influential corporations in the world, Disney does more than provide entertainment: it also shapes in very powerful ways how young people understand themselves, relate to others and experience the larger society. It is not difficult to recognize tragedy in the fact that a combination of entrenched social inequality and a lack of resources means that kids disappear literally into foster care institutions, teachers are overwhelmed in overcrowded classrooms and state services are drained of funds and cannot provide basic food and shelter to growing numbers of kids and their families. Yet, corporations such as Disney have ample funds to hire a battalion of highly educated and specialized experts to infiltrate the most intimate spaces of children and family life - all the better to colonize the fears, aspirations and futures of young people.

Disney's commodification of childhood is neither innocent nor simply a function of entertainment. The values Disney produces as it attempts to commandeer children's desires and hopes may offer us one of the most important clues about the changing nature of our society and the destructive force behind the unchecked economic power wielded by massive corporations. Strategies for challenging the corporate power and the consumer culture Disney propagates in the United States and increasingly across the rest of the globe must be aligned with a vision of a democracy that is on the side of children and youth. It must enable the conditions for young people to learn and develop as engaged social actors more alive to their responsibility to future generations than those adults who have presently turned away from the challenge.

Footnotes:

1. Lizabeth Cohen, "A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America," (New York: Vintage, 2003).

2. Lawrence Grossberg, "Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America's Future," (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 264.

3. Press release on Multiplatform Video Report by Solutions Research Group, "Daily Hours Watching Video and TV to Match Sleep by 2013," Solutions Research Group, June 11, 2008.

4. Cited in Don Hazen and Julie Winokur, eds. "We the Media, "(New York: New Press, 1997), p. 64.

5. Robert Bryce, "Click and Sell," University of Texas at Austin News, August 15 - 22, 2005.

6. Susan Linn, :Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood," (New York: New Press, 2004), p. 8.

7. Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger, "Adrift: Schools in a Total Marketing Environment," Tenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2006-2007 (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2007), pp. 6-7.

8. Anup Shah, "Children as Consumers," Global Issues (January 8, 2008).

9. See Josh Golin, "Nation's Strongest School Commercialism Bill Advances Out of Committee," Common Dreams Progressive Newswire (August 1, 2007).

10. Victoria Rideout, Donald F. Roberts and Ulla G. Foehr, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds," (Washington, D. C.: The Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2005), pp. 6, 9.

11. Rideout, Roberts and Foehr, "Generation M," p. 4.

12. Juliet B. Schor, "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture," (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 9.

13. For a list of the Walt Disney Company's vast holdings, see Columbia Journalism Review, "Who Owns What," April 14, 2009.

14. Jack Lyne, "Hong Kong Disneyland Tops Out Centerpiece Structure," The Site Selection Online Insider, October 10, 2004.

15. Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence," (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 26.

16. Robert Iger, "Letter to Shareholders, Part II," in The Walt Disney Company 2008 Annual Report, Disney Investor Relations

17. Rideout, Roberts and Foehr, Generation M, p. 4.

18. Ibid.

19. Jeff Chester and Kathryn Montgomery, "Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children in the Digital Age," (Berkeley: Media Studies Group; Washington, DC: Center for Digital Democracy, 2007), p. 13

20. Brooks Barnes, "Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers," New York Times (April 14, 2009), A1.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ethan Smith and Lauren A.E. Schuker, "Disney Nabs Marvel Heroes," Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2009, A1.

24. Barnes, "Disney Expert," A14.

25. Allen D. Kanner and some of his colleagues raised the ethical issues with child psychologists helping marketers in a letter to the American Psychological Association. See Miriam H. Zoll, "Psychologists Challenge Ethics of Marketing to Children," American News Service (April 5, 2000). See also Allen D. Kanner, "The Corporatized Child," California Psychologist 39.1 (January/February 2006), pp. 1-2; and Allen D. Kanner, "Globalization and the Commercialization of Childhood," Tikkun 20:5 (September/October, 2005), pp. 49-51. Kanner's articles are online.

26. Grossberg, "Caught in the Crossfire," p. 88.

27. Paul M. Fischer et al., "Brand Logo Recognition by Children Aged 3 to 6 Years: Mickey Mouse and Old Joe the Camel," Journal of the American Medical Association 266, no. 22 (1991), pp. 3145-3148; American Psychological Association news release, "Television Advertising Leads to Unhealthy Habits in Children, Says APA Task Force," APA Online, February 23, 2004.

28. Molnar and Boninger, "Adrift," p. 9.

29. Victoria Rideout, "Parents, Children and Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey," Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2007, 7.

30. Joel Schwarz, "Baby DVDs, Videos May Hinder, Not Help, Infants' Language Development," University of Washington News, August 7, 2007.

31. See Frederick J. Zimmerman, Dimitri A. Christakis and Andrew N. Meltzoff, "Associations between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children under Age 2 Years," Journal of Pediatrics 151, no. 4 (October 2007), pp. 364-68.

32. A transcript of this letter from Robert A. Iger to Mark A. Emmert, president of the University of Washington, dated August 13, 2007, is available online. See Meg Marco, "Walt Disney Demands Retraction from University of Washington over Baby Einstein Video Press Release," The Consumerist, August 13, 2007.

33. Letter from Mark A. Emmert to Robert Iger, dated August 16, 2007, is available online. See Joel Schwarz, "UW President Rejects Disney Complaints," University of Washington News, August 16, 2007.

34. Kenneth R. Ginsburg, "The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds," Pediatrics 119, no. 1 (January 2007), 183. Available online. Additional factors affecting this loss of time include (1) pressure on parents "to produce superachieving children," which leads them to overschedule their kids' time in structured, "enrichment" activities; and (2) the restructuring of public schools to focus on academic study, which has led to decreased time for recess periods, physical education and creative-arts programming.

35. For an excellent critique of how parental fears are mobilized as part of a larger effort to professionalize parenting, see Frank Furedi, "Paranoid Parenting," 2nd ed., (New York: Continuum, 2008).

36. Victoria J. Rideout, Elizabeth A. Vandewater and Ellen A. Wartella, "Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers," Kaiser Family Foundation, Fall 2003, 5. Available online.

37. "About Baby Einstein," Disney Baby Einstein web site.

38. Powered press release, "Disney Family.com and Sony Electronics Launch Virtual Classroom for Moms," RedOrbit, May 16, 2007.

39. Disney news release, "Disney Creates One-Stop Online Resource for Parents," Walt Disney Interactive Media Group Newsroom, March 13, 2007.

40. Powered press release, "Disney Family.com."

41. Brooks Barnes, "Web Playgrounds of the Very Young," New York Times, December 31, 2007.

42. Disney news release, "The Walt Disney Company Acquires Club Penguin," Disney News Releases, August 1, 2007.

43. Disney news release, "Disney Interactive Studios Announces Disney Fairies: Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure for Nintendo DS," Financial Post, June 2, 2009.

44. Cited in Barnes, "Web Playgrounds."

45. Ibid.

46. Sara M. Grimes, "Saturday Morning Cartoons Go MMOG," Media International Australia 126 (February 2008): 120 - 31. Available online.

47. Brooks Barnes, "After Mickey's Makeover, Less Mr. Nice Guy," New York Times, (November 5, 2009).

48. Zygmunt Bauman, "Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity, 2007), 107, 109.

49. Brooks Barnes, "Disney's Retail Plan Is a Theme Park in Its Stores," New York Times, (October 13, 2009).

50. Elayne Rapping, "A Bad Ride at Disney World," The Progressive, November 1995.

51. Kelefa Sanneh, "3 Girls for the Price of One (if You Could Get a Ticket)," New York Times, December 31, 2007.

52. Ibid.

53. Mike Budd, "Introduction: Private Disney, Public Disney," in "Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions," ed. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), p. 1.

54. Alan Bryman, "The Disneyization of Society," (London: Sage, 2004), 173.

55. Sharon Zukin, "Learning from Disney World," The Cultures of Cities, (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995), p. 77.

56. Bryman, "The Disneyization of Society," p. 169.

57. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Empire," (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 331.

58. Jack Lyne, "Hong Kong Disneyland Tops Out Centerpiece Structure," The Site Selection Online Insider, October 10, 2004.

59. Ernest Bloch, cited in Anson Rabinach, "Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism," New German Critique (Spring 1977), p. 8.

60. Hardt and Negri, "Empire," pp. 314, 321.

61. Jeremy Seabrook, "Racketeers of Illusion," New Internationalist 308, (December 1998).

62. Jeff Chester and Kathryn Montgomery, "No Escape: Marketing to Kids in the Digital Age," Multinational Monitor 30, No. 1 (July/August 2008).

63. Rutherford, "Cultures of Capitalism."

64. Kiku Adatto, "Selling Out Childhood," Hedgehog Review 5: 2 (Summer 2003), p.

Opium Economics

2010-08-01T06:07:00.001-07:00

America's Racist "Justice" System

2010-07-29T20:55:00.000-07:00

14 Shocking Facts That Prove the Criminal Justice System Is Racist
By Bill Quigley, AlterNet
Posted on July 26, 2010, Printed on July 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147639/

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?

Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system -- from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.

One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.

Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.

Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.

African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.

Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.

Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.

Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial – the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, “Who wouldn’t rather do three years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn’t do?”

Eight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.

Nine. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.

Ten. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.

Eleven. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.

Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.

Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.

Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!

So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.

Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.

Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. “These people”, whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.

This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country’s police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.

What to do?

Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.

We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?

It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says “Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system.”

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147639/

Collapse, The Movie (A Must Watch NOW)

2010-07-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

COLLAPSE - (Movie Trailer)
http://www.collapsemovie.com/

Collapse ! Part 1 (The Movie)
http://www.viddler.com/explore/josephwouk/videos/52/

Collapse ! Part 2 (The Movie)
http://www.viddler.com/explore/josephwouk/videos/53/

Collapse ! Part 3 (The Movie)
http://www.viddler.com/explore/josephwouk/videos/54/

Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich

2010-07-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

Books Not Bars (The Racial Injustice of Mass Incarceration)

2010-06-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

I am Sean Bell (End Police Brutality!!)

2010-06-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

School to Prison Pipeline (END IT NOW)

2010-06-29T10:01:00.000-07:00

(Part 2) Indigenous Native American Prophecy

2010-06-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

Hopi Prophecy (Part 1)

2010-06-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

Myths in Holidays

2010-06-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

In this video message, Dr. Ray Hagins once again talks about the origins of many of the holidays we celebrate and how they have been incorporated in Christianity. Among other things he talks about:

1) the creation of Christmas and how the Bible doesn't speak of the celebration of Christmas.

2) the Bible gives no date as the birth date of Jesus.

3) the celebration of Easter being partly based on the Vernal Equinox.

4) Christmas being based partly on the Winter Solstice.

5) the fallacies of the story of the Wise Men going to see Jesus in Jerusalem, etc. They saw a star in the East (in the Orient where they were) and the Story says they followed the star but they went West (to Jerusalem) on camel back and traveled about 5,000 miles in 2 or 3 days.

6) Pay close attention to his explanation of why African people are not Gentiles from a Biblical point of view. Please review Genesis 10:2 10:6.

Most people don't know it but the Bible actually tells who the Gentiles are and they are not African people.

This video should really make you think and want to do more research.

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 1 - Dr Ray Hagins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNvoEW93qvE

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 2 - Dr Ray Hagins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr1JBAj8Eyo&feature=related

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 3 - Dr Ray Hagins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjtcMnITg0&feature=related

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 4 - Dr Ray Hagins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2LlqrDbhJM&feature=related

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 5 - Dr Ray Hagins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ps0szD6jwg&feature=related

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 6 - Dr Ray Hagins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzsx5YUsyLo&feature=related

The Subliminal Seduction of Holiday Celebrations, Part 7 - Dr Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qji7IgClhus&feature=related

African Origins of the Bible

2010-06-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Parts 1 - 14: Dr. Ray Hagins

In this lecture, Dr. Hagins provides in-depth documentation to clearly show you that the world's #1 best seller (i.e., "The Bible") is, de facto, a stolen, plagiarized, copied and represented literary works that has it's true origins in the stories, concepts, ideologies and teachings of ancient Egypt. After watching this video, any and all arguments as to the incredibility of the bible should be laid to rest.

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 1: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09w-ZFasRvE

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 2: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehDUPrpSOjk&NR=1

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 3: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1sMD3BT9uk

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 4: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEU9Z8l9k8Y

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 5: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyTDlbGtpF8

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 6: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJgBuO5gW10

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 7: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nww2toMvd78

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 8: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVZUbklzBAo

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 9: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylEUHOQ_mI

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 10: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcrwq4tQBGk

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 11: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9nIt5bfrU

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 12: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkjl8qOEk8

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 13: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC1xZoq_f_U

Egypt The Source Of The Bible - Part 14: Dr. Ray Hagins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtvKjFTcUAc

Origins of Racist Imagery in Hollywood

2010-06-17T12:33:00.001-07:00

FBI start targeting Peace Activists in the USA

2010-06-16T10:33:00.001-07:00

Comparing Place like Norway to the USA

2010-05-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

Racist Imagery in Hollywood (A Must Watch)

2010-05-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

Wealth Gap Between Blacks and Whites

2010-05-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US?

• Study finds gaping racial divide in household assets
• Economic policies blamed for growing inequality

A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent.

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984.

"We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it's escalated to $95,000," said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university's Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

"That's primarily because the whites in the sample were able to accumulate financial assets from their $22,000 all the way to $100,000 and the African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The survey does not include housing equity, because it is not readily accessible and is rarely realised as cash. But if property were included it would further widen the wealth divide.

Shapiro says the gap remains wide even between blacks and whites of similar classes and with similar jobs and incomes.

"How do we explain the wealth gap among equally-achieving African-American and white families? The same ratio holds up even among low income groups. Finding ways to accumulate financial resources for all low and moderate income families in the United States has been a huge challenge and that challenge keeps getting steeper and steeper.

"But there are greater opportunities and less challenges for low and moderate income families if they're white in comparison to if they're African-American or Hispanic," he said.

America has long lived with vast inequality, although 40 years ago the disparity was lower than in Britain.

Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The rest is divided up among middle and low income Americans. In that competition white people come out far ahead.

Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.

Shapiro says one of the most disturbing aspects of the study is that wealth among the highest-income African-Americans has actually fallen in recent years, dropping from a peak of $25,000 to about $18,000, while among white counterparts of similar class and income it has surged to around $240,000.

In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true.

"I'm a pretty jaded and cynical researcher in some way, but this was shocking, quite frankly, a really important dynamic," said Shapiro. "This represents a broken chain of achievement. In the United States context, when we are thinking about racial equality and the economy we have focused for a long time on equal opportunity.

"Equal opportunity assumes that some people who have that opportunity are going to have pretty high achievements in terms of their jobs, their work, their income, their home ownership.

"The assumption in a democracy is that merit and achievement are going to be rewarded and the rewards here are financial assets. We should see some rough parity and we don't."

The report attributes part of the cause to the "powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes," the report says.

Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

"African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die," said Shapiro.

Since the 1980s, US administrations have also geared the tax system to the advantage of the better off. Taxes on unearned income, such as shares and inheritance, fell sharply and are much lower than taxes on pay.

"The more income and wealth people had, the less it was taxable," said Shapiro.

There were also social factors, the study found. "In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we've done we know that there's more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that's not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems," said Shapiro.

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A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US?
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 19.47 BST on Monday 17 May 2010. A version appeared on p15 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Tuesday 18 May 2010.

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Feature Interview: Immortal Technique

2010-05-02T06:14:00.000-07:00

Video Feature: Wise Intelligent (Globe Holders)

2010-05-02T05:55:00.000-07:00

Chavez does what Shell and Exxon Wont!!!

2010-04-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

Chavez Fuels the South Bronx

Written by Lainie Cassel

In 2005, during a visit to the South Bronx in New York City, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a lofty promise to help active community members cope with local issues. A half-decade and a few million dollars later, Chavez’s promise has become a reality and residents from the community are reaping the benefits.

The program, which officially took off in 2007, is controlled by CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company. With a three-year agreement to provide $1 million annually, CITGO’s profits have now funded numerous social projects in what is one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States.

With over 500,000 residents and around 50% living in poverty, no one expected the modest $1 million would generate an economic recovery. However, for many start-up organizations and small nonprofits, the funds have been a vital resource especially during the economic slump.

Petro-Bronx, a coalition of resident volunteers, decides through consensus how the money will be divided annually based on proposals submitted by various groups around the South Bronx.

The groups funded are a majority community-based and built as a response to what they argue has been a decades long recession in the South Bronx. From worker-run and food cooperatives to environmental justice and women of color collectives, many of the groups are also creating new democratic alternatives in an area that has received little attention from the city.

The South Bronx and its People

“We have people with chronic problems in the world's wealthiest country. Considering all the wealth and resources which are present to solve these issues, this should not exist,” said Felix Leo Campos, an active community member and loyal Petro-Bronx representative.

Despite high unemployment and poverty, however, the South Bronx has become a hotbed of community involvement. “This is very much an activist community. If there is something that the South Bronx community members think is unjust or unfair, they will organize and attack that issue,” Sonia Pichardo told me from the Green Worker’s Cooperative warehouse.

Pichardo, like many of the activists from around the South Bronx are optimistic about the future of the area. Unlike many other low-income communities near Manhattan, the South Bronx has not faced high levels of displacement and many of the grassroots organizations are fighting to keep it that way.

One of these organizations is Green Worker’s Cooperative, which is part of a movement to create a self-sustaining community through worker ownership and environmentally friendly jobs.

In one of its programs, the Rebuilder’s Source, workers rescue surplus building materials that would otherwise get thrown into landfills. Jobs are then created by those willing to rebuild the materials and resources are brought into the community without creating waste.

Smaller organizations such as For a Better Bronx rely heavily on CITGO. According to co-founder Jaime Rivera, some 75% of the budget comes from the funds they receive through Petro-Bronx.

With only two full-time staff members, For A Better Bronx is able to run a youth collective that focuses on empowering young residents through activism and direct-action. Additionally, they lead campaigns against pollution and teach households to grow their own produce.

“We depend a lot on Petro Bronx and CITGO to understand our more radical concepts,” said Rivera. “We don’t have professional grant writers. [The agreement] allows groups like ours to get the funding we need.”

Another group funded by CITGO, the South Bronx Food Coop, sells organic goods and locally grown produce in its store. Furthermore, it has been an important education tool in mobilizing community members to become more active in their own health and in fighting diabetes and obesity.

In the 90’s, the CITGO-funded group, Mother’s on the Move began fighting for better schools and later expanded to issues of housing and environmental justice. Since then, they have been extremely active in campaigns opposing the pollution that according to surveys has caused the South Bronx to have the highest rates of asthma in the US.

The Logistics

North Star Fund, a New York City-based community foundation administers the transfer of funds directly from CITGO to the various organizations. However, the actual decision-making is left to Petro-Bronx.

The Petro-Bronx assembly meets on a monthly basis and is open to community members and representatives from groups interested in applying for grants. A smaller team of committed volunteers then takes part in sight visits and scores project ideas based on grant proposals.

From there the proposals are voted on and North Star Fund sends out the money. CITGO and the North Star Fund have little say in the direction of the money and any decisions made by CITGO are first discussed with the Petro-Bronx coalition.

While over 20 organizations have been funded with the help of Petro-Bronx, other South Bronx-based groups have received one-time grants directly from CITGO.

A Political Tool for Chavez?

The agreement with CITGO has received criticism both inside Venezuela and the United States. Some politicians are skeptical of Chavez’s interest in funding US-based organizations and Venezuelan opposition members are angry that money is being spent in a country much wealthier than there own.

Additionally, the largely popular South Bronx, New York State Congressman, José E. Serrano, has been criticized for supporting the Chavez initiative. As a result he has had to defend the South Bronx-CITGO relationship on numerous occasions. In a report from 2007, during the commencement of the grant program, he said:

“If CITGO wants to score points with my community by funding good organizations and important projects, then we would be foolish to reject their generosity. I’d be happy to have any other corporations come here and score all the political points they can afford,”

Omar Freilla, founder of Green Worker’s Cooperative said, “The reality is that you have a company that is distributing funds to the country that it is operating in. It's a pretty common practice.”

While philanthropy is customary among corporations, Rivera believes the relationship goes beyond that, “I think [Chavez’s] intentions were to connect to the community and the people. The money isn't supporting electoral campaigns or going to Wall Street, it is putting funds in our community that we have identified we need.”

In addition, the relationship between Venezuela and the South Bronx extends beyond the annual grants. In 2005, a letter was written from a dozen US-Senators asking 10 of the largest oil companies to use their record profits to help low-income families pay for home heating oil. CITGO was the only corporation to respond to the call.

Since then thousands of residents in the South Bronx have received a 40% reduction in home heating oil prices during the winter. The deal, which now extends to hundreds of thousands of households, shelters and Native American tribes around the country annually, has earned CITGO a lot of publicity.

With the success of the heating-oil and the South Bronx grant program, the Petro-Bronx team is in the process of setting up plans to travel to Venezuela. Their plan is to meet with similar community-based organizations in Caracas and personally thank Chavez for his support.

As the program nears the end of its third year and the final installment of the three-year agreement, it is still unclear if CITGO will continue sending money. However, Rivera and the others are confident in the program’s continuation. They hope that as a result of its past success it will grow in the years to come and further empower the South Bronx community.

Lainie Cassel is currently studying in New York City and can be reached at: Lainie.Cassel[at]gmail[dot]com

More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military

2010-04-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Your Tax Dollars at War: More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military

By Dave Lindorff'

April 13, 2010 "Information Clearing House" - -If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military.

The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3 trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has included the Social Security Trust Fund in the budget as a way to make the cost of America’s imperial military adventures seem smaller in comparison to the total cost of government). Meanwhile, the military share of the budget works out to about $1.6 trillion.

That figure includes the Pentagon budget request of $717 billion, plus an estimated $200 billion in supplemental funding (called “overseas contingency funding” in euphemistic White House-speak), to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some $40 billion or more in “black box” intelligence agency funding, $94 billion in non-DOD military spending (that would include stuff like military activies funded through NASA, military spending by the State Department, etc., miilitary-related activities within the Dept. of Homeland Security, etc.), $123 billion in veterans benefits and health care spending, and $400 billion in interest on debt raised to pay for prior wars and the standing military during peacetime (whatever that is!).

The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out war footing.

This military spending in all its myriad forms works out to represent 53% of total US federal spending.

It’s also a military budget that is rising at a faster pace than any other part of the budget (with the possible exception of bailing out crooked Wall Street financial firms and their managers). For the past decade, and continuing under the present administration, military budgets have been rising at a 9% annual clip, making health care inflation look tiny by comparison.

US military spending isn’t just half of the US budget, though. It is also half of the entire global spending on war and weaponry. In 2009, according to the venerable War Resisters League, US military spending accounted for 47% of all money spent globally on war, weapons and military preparedness (it's probably closer to 50% now). What makes that staggering figure particularly ridiculous is that America’s allies--countries like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan--account for another 21% of the world’s military spending. Fully 12 of the top-spenders among big military-spending nations are either allies of the US, or are friendly or completely non-threatening countries like Brazil and India. That is to say, America and its friends and allies account for more than two-thirds of all military spending worldwide.

China, in contrast, probably the closest thing to a real “threat” to American interests because of America’s treaty commitments to the island nation of Taiwan, and China’s counter claim that the island is a part of the PRC, spends only some $130 billion on its military, much of which is actually devoted to maintaining military control over the country’s own 1.3 billion people, some of whom might prefer to be independent, or to be freer, if they weren't under the military jack-boot.

The next biggest military spender, Russia, spends less than $80 billion a year on its decrepit military--about one-twentieth of what the US spends--and isn’t even technically an enemy of the America anymore. Its military is largely busy keeping restive regions from spinning off from the mother country, anyhow.

Meanwhile Iran, which the White House and Congress are portraying as America’s arch enemy, despite its not having invaded another country in hundreds of years, isn’t even on the list of the top 17 military big-spenders. Iran’s current military budget is a teensy $4.8 billion (no surprise since its economy is about equal to Finland's), about the same as the estimated $5 billion spent on the military by North Korea--America’s other “major enemy.” Each of those country’s military budgets is about one-quarter of the military budget of Australia. Combined, they add up to about two thirds of the military budget of the Netherlands.

Just to give one an idea of how small $4.8 billion is in comparison to the $1.6 trillion that the US is spending each year on war and planning for war, that number is roughly what the Pentagon plans to spend over the next year on childcare and youth programs, morale and recreation programs and commissaries on its bases! It’s about what the Pentagon will spend acquiring replacement Seahawk, Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters this year.

For the average American, what all this means is that of every dollar you send to the IRS, 53 cents will be going to pay for blowing stuff up, fattening the wallets of colonels admirals and generals, bloating the portfolios of investors in military industries, and of course funding the bonuses paid to executives of those companies, and the campaign chests and private expense accounts of the members of Congress who vote for these outlandish budgets. Your money will also be going to pay for the salaries and the bullets of those brave heroes over in Afghanistan who are executing kids, killing pregnant women (and then digging out the bullets and claiming they were stabbed by their families), and for the anti-personnel weapons that are creating legions of legless Afghani kids.

Next time you hear that the government needs to cut funds for providing medical care to the children of laid-off workers, or that supplemental unemployment funds are running out, next time you hear that federal funds that are needed to fund extra teachers at your school are being cut, or that Social Security benefits need to be cut back, or the retirement age needs to be increased to 70, next time you hear that your local post office has to be shut down for lack of funds, next time you hear that Medicare benefits need to be reduced, think about that 53% of your tax payment that is going to finance the most enormous war machine the world has ever known.

And ask yourself: Is this really necessary? Is this really where I want my money going? Is this really even making me safer or my country stronger?

Award-winning investigative reporter Dave Lindorff has been working as a journalist for 37 years. A regular columnist for CounterPunch, he also writes for Extra! and Salon magazine, as well as for Businessweek, The Nation and Treasury&Risk Magazine. Visit his website http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/

LOWKEY - OBAMA NATION (OFFICIAL VIDEO) - BANNED FROM TV

2010-04-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

Corporate Barbarians at the Gate: Wal-Mart internships at Detroit Schools

2010-04-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

Corporate Barbarians at the Gate: Wal-Mart internships at Detroit Schools
Written by Danny Weil Education Mar 6, 2010

Corporate Barbarians at the Gate: Wal-Mart ‘does Detroit’ as the privatized predators attempt to storm the gates of four Detroit High Schools

The following investigative story was compiled through the help of Donna Stern, spokesperson and organizer for ‘By Any Means Necessary’ (www.bamn.com), many brave Detroit teachers who were willing to speak out, and an 11th grade student at Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, in Detroit, Michigan, whom I will refer to in this article as ‘Jamal’, so as not to reveal his identity for fear of reprisal. I cannot thank all of them enough for their courage and willingness to allow me to share this story with you, the reader, and to fight for public education not beholden to the corporate barbarians who sell our kids for cash.

Dumping ‘The Crucible” by Arthur Miller in favor of the crucifixion by business elites

When Jamal, an 11th grade student, arrived at his English class in January of this year, he thought he would be continuing with his reading and analysis of The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. The Crucible is 11th grade reading for the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, a 6-12 high school in Detroit, Michigan . Jamal was sadly mistaken. As he took his seat in class the teacher notified all students that they would be shifting their focus, just for awhile she told them, from the reading and analysis of literature to the construction of a mock ‘resume’ or ‘job application’. The ‘resume’ or ‘job application’ the students were to produce in their class was to be based on a ‘resume template’ handed out by the English teacher, by which students would then create their own ‘applications’.

Jamal was shocked. Why would his English class shift from reading high quality works of literature to engaging in mock resume and job application constructions? Jamal, upon hearing from the teacher about the shift in curriculum, raised his hand and asked the teacher point blank, “What is this all about?” The English teacher told him, as his class mates sat silent, that the resume was the brainchild of Wal-Mart and that in conjunction with the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, the transnational corporation had thought the experience of constructing and then filling out a job application would be a good academic experience for the young 11th graders to engage in. Jamal was stumped. “What kind of resume or job application will it be”, he went on to ask his teacher. “Oh”, she responded, “it would have questions such as: ‘Do you need a job? What kind of skills do you have, Where have you worked in the past, What is your work experience, What kind of work skills do you possess”, all typical questions that would appear on an application for employment at say, Wal-Mart.

Incredulous, Jamal raised his hand once again and asked, “Is this lesson, this resume thing mandatory”. The teacher told Jamal that no, it was not mandatory and that he did not have to do it. It was a ‘voluntary lesson’, he and the class were told, and students were not required to complete the job application/resume. At this point Jamal, in open voice in front of his 11th grade class told the teacher in no uncertain terms: “I’m not doing this!” “Why don’t you want to do it”, the teacher queried as the other students sat silently in their seats.

Jamal told me, when I spoke with him on the phone in late February, that he told the teacher, in front of the 11th grade class that he would not do a resume or job application from Wal-Mart because it was insulting. He reported to me he told the class and the teacher that The Frederick Douglass Academy had a good reputation, that he and other students wanted to go to college, and that they wished to become business men, doctors, lawyers, professionals and young leaders in their community. He told the class and the teacher that he wanted to go to Harvard one day, have a career and that to be forced to fill out phony resumes for Wal-Mart was an insult to both his integrity, his right to an education and a pockmark on the school. The teacher did not reply, but while Jamal sat in silence, she handed out the resume templates to other students who then began to get to work constructing the Wal-Mart job application.

When the class terminated Jamal had a small conversation with the teacher. He told me that she seemed distressed, frightened and really did not wish to talk about the fact she had been told, evidently by the school administration, to have students engage in the Wal-Mart lesson plan at the expense of any study of The Crucible; she indicated that basically she was asked to suspend her curriculum. Jamal did say that during the conversation the teacher did state she thought Robert Bobb, the Eli Broad graduate who runs Detroit Schools as the Emergency Financial Manager was “crazy” and he said the teacher seemed embarrassed and confused by the whole episode.

According to Jamal, it seemed evident she was mandated to interrupt her literature lesson by the school administration and that in subsequent days following the event, the teacher had her students read the work of Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience. This, Jamal assumed, was to atone for the sin of allowing Wal-Mart to snake its way into the school and/or to educate the young men and really was a silent message of support the teacher was delivering to students, like Jamal, who wished to oppose the full out attack on public schools by the purveyors of privatization.

Jamal later discovered that it was not just his class that was asked to do the mock resume for Wal-Mart, but it was the whole school. The lesson, he told me, was given through English classes to all 11th grade students, and not just at Frederick Douglass Academy; the lesson had made its way to three other high schools that had been targeted by the retail chain. Western International High School was targeted, Detroit International Academy (the sister school of Frederick Douglass, an all girls schools), and Westside High School were all in the firing line. The four high schools had been selected by ‘administrators’ in conjunction with Wal-Mart and other corporate business interests. But that’s not all: the schools had also been sought out to host “internships” by Wal-Mart; eleven weeks (11) of job readiness/soft skills training that would replace the curriculum, but as an ‘elective’. All of this was, as we will see, cleverly designed by the skilled manipulators.

This was just the beginning of what would become a public circus and a public relations quandary for the retail chain, Robert Bobb and the obsequious politicians bound to turn learning into training, education into servitude.
Jamal and BAMN fight back

It was at this point that Jamal told me that he had recently contacted ‘By Any Means Necessary’ (www.bamn.com) a national civil rights group that fights for integration, an end to racism, and for public schools and against privatization. Jamal was so upset that Wal-Mart would be ushered into his school like a revolting skin eruption that he sought support to fight the giant retailer and the privatization of the curriculum. He wanted to organize parents, students and teachers to squelch the corporate swelling and secret operating plan of Robert Bobb and his corporate paymasters. For a more though expose on Bobb, his privatization history, his cultivation as an Eli Broad minion and his cronyism and transfer of public funds to private corporations please see (Weil, D. Detroit Teachers fight obsequious politicians http://dailycensored.com/2010/02/14/detroit-teachers-fight-back/).

On February 10, 2010 Jamal and one other Frederick Douglass student drafted a response to Wal-Mart’s plans to host internships at the four high schools. The statement against the insidious plan can be found at (http://dailycensored.com/2010/02/15/wal-mart-set-to-skim-off-free-labor-in-detroit-high-schools-students-fight-the-road-to-serfdom/). Here, Jamal and his cohort wrote:

The Frederick Douglass Affirmation proudly states “We are determined to get the root of success, not just the fruit of success.” When we decided to come to this school, we were deciding to make our dreams and aspirations a reality. We came here to learn and grow. We wanted our lives to have meaning, and we were going to be somebody. Frederick Douglass Academy was built to create leaders. Its purpose is to give students the opportunity to get a real education and get into schools like U of M. Frederick Douglass Academy is a beacon of hope for many Detroiters. We cannot let our hopes be trampled. We deserve MUCH more than Walmart (ibid).

Jamal indicated to me that most of the students in his school created and filled out the resume/job application lessons in their classes despite the fact he had hoped the flyer would dissuade them (he did state that few ever turned them in). He also told me they were to turn the finished ‘product’ into their English teachers when the lesson was done, who then were evidently told to quarter back the stack of student work to the administration. What would the administration do with it? Why would they want it? Whose interest would it serve?

Wal-Mart, the theatre of the insane, purveyors of the inane: “THE KICKOFF”

After the Wal-Mart resume fiasco and after Jamal’s teacher had introduced Henry David Thoreau into her class, new flyers, this time drafted by the Neighborhood Legal Services Michigan (NLSM) were distributed to the students at the four high schools targeted by the giant retailer, the flyers formerly announced what Jamal had correctly assumed; that on February 11, 2010 there would be an assembly at the four high schools chosen by Wal-Mart for internships to promote the program. The flyer, of which I have a copy, was titled: DPS HIGH SCHOOL ASSEMBLIES TO KICKOFF! I’M IN GETTING READY FOR WORK! JOB READINESS TRAINING PROGRAM AT FOUR (4) DETROIT PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS. The flyer went on to note what Jamal and his fellow students had suspected:

“Neighborhood Legal Services Michigan (NLSM), Walmart stores, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) and community/employer partners will KICKOFF the “I’m in! Getting ready for work! Job Readingess (sic)/Soft skills training program at DPS, aimed at delivering 11 weeks of job readiness/soft skills training at four (4) Detroit Public High Schools (copy of flyer from Wal-Mart” (ibid).

The “kick-offs” as they were known, according to the flyer would serve to:

“inform DPS students, staff and parents of the initiative which Wal-Mart stated would prepare DPS students for the 21st Century Workforce as students balance school and work in the pursuit of higher education” (ibid).

The flyer went on to try to excite students, faculty and staff by promoting the fiction that:

“The KICKOFFS will be fun, exciting, engaging and inclusive in sharing program goals, objectives and expectations. Information about the program and sign-up process will be provided. The KICKOFFS will include the Debut of a positive version of a “I’m in!” song written and performed by hip hop sensation Julia’n (Motor City Hits) and other DPS students” (ibid).

The flyer also mentioned that a host of ‘political and corporate dignitaries’ and ‘luminaries’ would be present at each road company ‘KICKOFF’ and the guests included such personages as judges, church representatives, city council members, Michigan State University members, Robert Bobb, the Emergency Financial Manager for DPS, Mayor of Detroit Dave Bing, Congressmen, including John Conyers, Senator Martha Scott, community leaders, employers, clergy, dancers, music, parents, students and yes, Governor Jennifer Granholm herself – the political charlatan that appointed Robert Bobb. Truly a Kabuki show.

According to the Wal-Mart flyer:

“The job readiness/soft skills training program is designed to get employable youth ready to work, teach job readiness/retention skills, help young people explore the various career opportunities that are available to them and assist them in planning for the (sic) futures accordingly. DPS students will receive eleven (11) weeks of job readiness/soft skills training, e.g.: How to Balance School and Work, How to Complete Employment Applications, Resumes, Job Searching Skills, Interviewing Skills, How do Dress of Success, Conflict Resolution, Problem Solving, Budgeting, Four (4) Keys to Success, Positive Attitudes in the Workplace” (ibid). I guess writing is not big on the list, as the flyers were poorly worded and miserably spelled.

After completion of the 11 week internships students were told those who participated would be placed in a work-school based program (low-paying, food stamp eligible jobs) where they would then work at “job-sites” that were designed to require the skills and knowledge students learned during the program. What they were not told is that they would do this for no pay, that they would not be compensated for their ‘jobs’. They would learn this later, as we shall see.

The flyer went on to rave about achieving ones’ dreams, growing up as a student, getting ready for work, inspiring students to excellence, and how, with the new Wal-Mart internships, “great things are happening in Detroit Public Schools”. Sure, like hundreds of school closures, laid off teachers, the decimation of arts and music programs, standardized testing as the great sorting machine of students and the wholesale putrid privatization plans the flyer never mentioned.

John W. Cromer, known in Orwellian language as the ‘stability officer for the Stimulus Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program at NLSM’, the main organizer for the road show stated:

“We are proud to say, “I’m in at DPS”. We lose so many high school students to the workplace before graduation. We have to prepare them for work, but first they need to now how to balance school and work! This also gives youth a sense of direction to keep them out of trouble in the first place. We can not keep stuffing “our adult issues into children shoes and expect for our children to be able to walk straight! Preparing people for work has to be the central policy behind any attempt to improve the quality of life…. Thanks to companies like Wal-Mart, Marriot, Autozone, NLSM and others who hear the call and step up to the plate for our children” (ibid). More on Cromer later.

The KICKOFFS were to be held in the auditorium for each of the four schools selected; all orchestrated for February 11, 2010 — a fantasy of fanfare. These corporate and political predators, students and their parents were told, could help our children escape from the shark-filled waters of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, fear and insecurity. Like Gilded Titans of a century ago, the ruling elite promised to stand as plutocratic monarchs, inheritors of the new age of disposability – eager to manage the public’s affairs while actually undermining the public interest.

Kicking out the “KICKOFF”

When Jamal entered the auditorium at Frederick Douglass Academy, he took a seat along with 259 students at the school and awaited the KICKOFF. It was all becoming clear why students at the four high schools had been given the job of creating a job application instead of reading “The Crucible”. Jamal began to see how under a system of traumatic dislocation, psychic delusion and perpetual disillusionment he and his fellow students sat at the feet of the capitalist masters.

Microphones had been put on stage, banners strung up and speakers from the assembled community of clergy, politicians, businesses and of course Wal-Mart lined up to speak to the positive aspects of the school-to-work program they were creating. Teachers, staff and of course the students had no choice but to be there; they were forced to herd into the killing floor of auditorium for the KICKOFF and as the speakers took the podium, Jamal and his friend, the other fellow student at Frederick Douglass Academy who had worked with Jamal to prepare the student statement against Wal-Mart, spoke out loud in front of many students about the degradation of learning and the low expectations for students at Frederick Douglass Academy, imposed by the autocratic authors of the KICKOFF program, now circumstantially and thus evidentially tied to the resume/job application they had been asked to do in their English class. According to Jamal, most students seemed to accept the KICKOFF, or otherwise remained silent at the assembly as it began. Besides, they were not allowed to speak.

Shortly after the auctioneers had given their pep talks to students, their rambling messages of work, education as training and the importance, if not the beauty of the free-market, Donna Stern from ‘By Any Means Necessary’ (BAMN) took the stage and began to address the assembled. She had been invited to speak at the assembly by John Cromer, but not as a BAMN member, but as a parent who had a child in the Detroit School system. She had been invited by Cromer, as she told me, probably due to the fact she had been an ACT tutor prep for students (ACT is one of the standardized tests students must take for college entry). It seems Cromer and his business community supporters and political hacks did not even know of Donna’s association with BAMN, nor were they aware of Jamal’s prior contact with the organization.

According to Donna Stern, she made three points when she took the microphone to address close to 300 student, teachers, staff, business elites, politicians, clergy and community members at the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Males:

“1. The young men of Frederick Douglass should be receiving college prep courses, not a Wal-Mart prep education.

2. That it is and was an outrage that the same week politicians and corporations are celebrating Wal-Mart coming into the schools, they sent out pink slips to many of the fine arts teachers, including directors of high quality, long standing programs.

3. That Frederick Douglass, himself, would be turning over in his grave if he were there to see what was being done in his name” (e-mail, February 26th, 2010 Donna Stern).

The speech by Stern was not what Cromer and his cronies had expected and they scurried to whisk Stern off the stage before she could do more harm to their insidious plan to turn the high schools into a plantation for business interests. But the real shock to the KICKOFF originators came when teachers, students and community members stood, clapped and cheered as Donna hurriedly made her way off the stage. Her statements resonated with what many if not most of the teachers and students felt — that students were going to be put on a school-to-work track, literally turning them over to private corporate cannibals like Wal-Mart. At the time Stern spoke it was unclear whether Wal-Mart was going to pay students the minimum wage of $7.25 or whether they would be able to get away paying the $4.25 per hour the Department of Labor allows for the first 90 days of employment of a minor. Of course paying the latter wage could be perceived as a money saver for Wal-Mart, already viewed by many as the epitome of capitalism-gone-amuck and dead-end culdasac to underpaid employment that qualifies one for food stamps.

The issue was clarified by an e-mail from John Cromer to a teacher at DPS asking if students would be paid for the internship. The answer was a resounding “NO”:

“No. Students are not paid for the 11 week job readiness training” (e-mail, February 27th, 2010 from John Cromer to DPS teacher).

The whole vicious child-exploitation scheme was exposed in its raw and sweltering form for what it really was: a set-up hatched by the elite and their obsequious hirelings – from the resume lesson plan to the KICKOFF itself. The whole conspiracy was planned. It was and is little more than exploitation condoned and heralded by the coin operated politicians who blessed the event and shepherded it into reality, from Governor Jennifer Granholm to to her servant in chief, Robert Bobb. Their DNA is all over the crime scene.

Mayor of Detroit Dave Bing, Robert Bobb and Governor of the state of Michigan, Granholm never did attend the KICKOFF, as they promised, at the assembly on February 11th, deciding instead to send representatives. Lucky for them. A full-court press interview with ‘representatives’ and participants had been scheduled after the KICKOFF with the corporate media, all part of a public relations gimmick, but according to Jamal the press interviews never occurred. Stern’s captivating condemnation of the program and its participants on behalf of BAMN, the students and teachers stole the show and left the job fair proponents speechless and utterly incoherent at the carnival they had organized. The corporate media cowered, now wanting to report the news of resistance as did the politicians and business interests — all in face of open defiance by teachers, students, staff and BAMN to the jobs fair program. This was certainly something they did not expect nor relish.

Jamal began to speak with students immediately after Stern’s speech, advising them they should not turn in their resumes to their teachers or the school administration. He also mingled with students and staff and told me the teachers seemed frightened, as did students, of being singled out and perhaps retaliated against by administrators or their ‘spies’. One police officer, a woman who officially attended the KICKOFF in uniform on behalf of the Detroit Police Department, suggested openly and aloud that Donna Stern should be arrested. She complained that Stern was rude, her speech inappropriate, and told Jamal, “She can’t do that she should be arrested!” Jamal confronted the officer directly and stated that it was Stern’s first amendment right to speak at the assembly but the officer would not back down, repeating that BAMN”s presence was inappropriate and that there should be police retaliation for her presence and her remarks. No arrest was made, however, this time. As we will see, this was not the first time the heavy presence of Detroit Police was seen at educational events.

When I spoke to Donna Stern she told me that after her short comments condemning the program, the microphone was taken from her by the KICKOFF backers and that she immediately left the KICKOFF stage for she intuitively knew that her remarks would upset the KICKOFF founders and could possibly put her in harms way from the police who have been continuously used by Robert Bobb and Detroit Federation of Teacher’s union boss, Keith Johnson to frighten and intimidate teachers at public forums (Weil, D. Detroit Teachers fight obsequious politicians, union bosses and privatizations planshttp://dailycensored.com/2010/02/14/detroit-teachers-fight-back/).

This KICKOFF was to be no different, as police mingled with what was now an excited and fired up crowd of both teachers and students. Although Jamal stated that Wal-Mart brochures carpet bombed the KICKOFF along with other business flyers, the assembly had been virtually destroyed by the activism and defiance displayed by Donna Stern and echoed in the vocal support for her comments by teachers, staff, community members and students.

The KICKOFF’s were not the success that Wal-Mart and the city administrators and politicians had hoped for. In fact, at this date there are no internships actually scheduled at the four high schools. Everything has been placed on hold. Jamal informed me in a phone interview that the strategy of the students was now to organize students and teachers, to create flyers denouncing the Wal-Mart business plan, to attend more BAMN meetings, grow the opposition to the Wal-Mart takeover of 11 weeks of instructional time and to organize petitions and media events denouncing the program and thus prevent Wal-Mart’s entry into Detroit Public Schools.

FOX and Friends gets involved

Shortly after the failed KICKOFF, Donna Stern told me she appeared on the morning show, FOX and Friends with none other than John Cromer. The fiasco had caused blowback and media attention and Cromer of course was there to defend the program and its adherents. Stern told me that Cromer spoke about “how students needed to stop wearing their pants low, like in prison, and begin to make themselves presentable for employment purposes”. Stern tried to point out to Cromer that the Frederick Douglass Academy had a dress code and that the male students were required to wear shirts and ties, that no students resembled the stereotype painted by Cromer. To no avail, Cromer had already stereotyped Detroit students and their families as vestiges of gangs and prisons. All of this is part of the new war on youth.

Why did Robert Bobb, John Cromer and his elite business cronies target four successful Detroit High Schools for a Wal-Mart internship?

The answer to the above question is still unknown, a mystery. The four high schools selected by the curriculum assassins were all considered well performing high schools. Frederick Douglass, according to Jamal, had been a “bad boy’s school” up to a few years ago but in 2008, he told me, 75% of the students who graduated went on to college and in 2009 the percentage of graduates who went on to college was 100%. Of course this could include phony for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix or other ‘for-profit’ ‘drive-by universities, but still, these are hardly failing schools. In fact, some of the students at these schools are doing an exceptional job, and it is not due to the help of Wal-Mart or other corporate predators that have nothing but disdain and low-expectations for minority students. The support comes from the public sector, not the money changers.

Central Michigan University has in place what is called an “Upward Bound,” program. In 2009 the Upward Bound program celebrated 10 years of service as a college preparation program that provides tutoring, academic advising, community service, early intervention methods, and many other socially enlightened programs. There are more than 800 UB programs throughout the United States that assist low-income, first- generation college students and disabled individuals from middle school through post-baccalaureate programs. CMU’s program is stationed both at The Detroit International Academy, in Detroit, and CMU’s Campus Office in Warriner Hall. The program focuses its work on high school students at the Detroit International Academy for Young Women and the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, two of the four schools put in the cross-hairs by Wal-Mart, Robert Bobb and John Cromer, and the program has been a success.

In November of 2009 Detroit freshman Alexis Bailey who was only 18, yet garners the respect of peers and elders as a first-generation college student, proudly proclaimed:

“I feel like I am an inspiration to my family and friends” (Keaton, Sherry Upward Bound celebrates 10th year of helping students academically, personally, November 23, 2009. http://www.cm-life.com/2009/11/23/upward-bound-celebrates-10th-year-of-helping-students-academically-personally/)

Before entering the program, Bailey had a 3.6 grade point average but had some troubles in school.

“Before the program I was bad. I was always smart, the program just gave me that extra push to do what I needed to do” (ibid).

After the program she had 4.0. She said she eventually wants to become a judge and hopes to make the program proud. In an interview she did with CentralMichiganLife, an online news paper Bailey said:

“I want to let them know they succeeded in helping me out (ibid).

Ask Detroit senior Fatima Sylvertooth and she will tell you what she knows about having motivation and the importance of education.

“When I was in the program it shed hope to my future helping me to understand that there is more to life than my neighborhood. I’ve learned to take responsibility in the things you value; and my education was one of them. The only limit we have in life is the one we set for ourselves, others can believe in us, but we must also believe in ourselves” (ibid).

While growing up, Sylvertooth acknowledged that she had challenges of her own and was sometimes discouraged. She had been given the message early on that her life was not equal to those more affluent and white. She had been indoctrinated with low-expectations and pounded with messages she would not succeed.

“I thought I was supposed to fail, and I didn’t understand why (UB) cared so much, the only person in my family who was my biggest encouragement was my mom” (ibid).

Getting students to believe that they are supposed to fail, that they shouldn’t be on a college track, that music and arts is not important, that literature is untenable for them is the goal of Robert Bobb, John Cromer, Wal-Mart and the rest of the privatizers. Getting poor, minority students on an early ‘vocational track’ for low-paying service jobs seems to be the priority for this morbid band of bandits and thieves. Attacking public education with work-fair projects and setting low-expectations for students while slashing and burning authentic curriculum is what Robert Bobb and his cohorts are taught at the Eli Broad Academy as you can see in the articles I reference above. After all, why teach the science and the arts to low-achieving students who will just end up working at Wal-Mart anyway, like Cromer insinuated? This is better left for the elite.

Not according to Cromer. Over a luncheon shortly before the event, John Cromer, of NLSM and Rita, Cindy and Jim, of Wal-Mart Stores talked about the need of preparing our youth for the workforce and wondered how we could get to the officials of Detroit Public School (DPS).

“We met the Emergency Financial Manager, Mr. Robert Bobb, of DPS. He approved it has a pilot program in public 4 high schools. With the success of this program we hope to be in all of the Detroit Public high schools this summer and Fall 2010”.

When Cromer was asked, “How do you respond to criticism of the program training kids to be ’subservient workers?”, Cromer replied:

“This is completely untrue. We have to start from somewhere. We are teaching transferable skills that can be applied in every line of work including the Four Keys to Success, Problem Solving Skills and Conflict Resolution. Most introductions into the workforce for our youth start at places like retail stores, fast-food restaurants, etc. This program will teach them how to build a resume, complete a job application and how to dress for success- “get their pants off the ground” for job searching activities (e-mail from Donna Stern re: Cromer comments).

When asked what the student response has been in regards to the Wal-Mart internships, Cromer crooned:

“Youth used to have paper routes, and have other means to earn money: shovel snow, cut grass, etc. Our youth today need money. Of course they are excited. They are very welcomed of the idea. We need to find a way to connect their excitement with employment, and set standards for summer employment that dictates some kind of measurement in academic achievement, attendance and conduct while in school- that leads to a summer or part time job. Our youth are just ready for someone to come along any give them a sense of direction that will keep them out of trouble in the first place” (ibid).

And as to the role of private business entering Detroit Public High Schools, Cromer had this to say:

“Government can not do it all. Our youth need to be motivated to achieve. We used to have programs in Detroit that helped to develop youth leadership skills. We are losing so many youth to the workforce or to the juvenile justice system. Thanks to the participating companies we can get them ready to complete job applications, resumes and even teach them how to dress how to dress for job searching activities. Our youth are going to these companies anyway for work. It is our responsibility as “this Village” to get them ready. We are connecting to the employers. And if we get employers and teachers to speak the same language, we can build a better and new America starting in cities that are already struggling like Detroit MI” (ibid).

Finally, when pressed as to how he should respond to criticism that the program brings private corporations into public schools and then ultimately influences curriculum, Cromer turned his privatization cards face up:

“That would be a good thing. It is important to teach transferable skills. The purpose is to prepare students for employment. Why wouldn’t employers what to have some involvement? Employers translate into business which is designed by the market, and then the economy. These are companies that are close enough to the market to know what it is going to take to compete in the global market and boost the American economy. So, we need to get our youth prepared to compete” (ibid).

John Cromer and the privatizers have shown they are simply another example of Milton Friedman’s economic wet dream – the commodification and privatization of education.

For now, the Wal-Mart internship program has been put on hold, much to the chagrin of Wal-Mart and the other ‘business partners’. You can thank Jamal, Donna Stern and Detroit teachers and the Detroit community for this.

As Donna Stern and I were finishing up a discussion by phone a few days ago, she and I mused over what is clearly emerging as the billionaire philanthropists’, corporate business elite and giant transnational corporations’ plan for Jamal and his class mates at Frederick Douglass and the other three Detroit High schools – turning public schools into vocational schools, stripping out arts, literature, music in favor of low-paying service jobs where students learn early that they are not supposed to go to college, that their lives have been predetermined by the Gods of capitalism. What they need to learn, in the eyes of the privatizers, is not to think critically about society and their place in it but to ask, “Do you want fries with that, Sir?” Like peasants on the lord’s manor they are to be treated like cattle readying for the long herd.

This is the economy these capitalist behemoths are manufacturing for the 21st century, Delirium USA, and they make no bones about it. Let us hope that Jamal, Donna, BAMN and Detroit teachers and the Detroit community are successful in letting the politicians and the corporate elites know that this is never going to be acceptable, that their children and students will not be exposed to a message that tells them they are supposed to fail and dead end service jobs at Wal-Mart is all they can accomplish in life. The message must be the opposite of that promoted by corporate America: that providing a decent, equitable public education to all students is what is needed – by any means necessary.

Economic Structural Racism in the USA

2010-01-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

REPORT FACT SHEET

State of the Dream 2010/www.faireconomy.org - Drained:
Jobless and Foreclosed in Communities of Color

The December 2009 unemployment rates for African Americans and Latinos jumped to a higher level than any annual rate in the past 27 years. Black unemployment is now 16.2% and Latino unemployment is at 12.9%, while white unemployment just fell for the second month in a row.

The 7th annual report for Martin Luther King Day contains data and analysis that shows how untargeted economic stimulus spending mostly reaches white people. African Americans and Latinos are continuing to disproportionately experience economic hardships.

Economic Rivers: Jobs and Unemployment

• Blacks earn 62 cents for every dollar of white income, and Latinos earn 68 cents for
every dollar of white income.

• Blacks and Latinos are 2.9 and 2.7 times as likely, respectively, to live in poverty than
whites.

• Black and Latino children are 3.3 and 2.9 times as likely, respectively, to live in poverty
than white children.

• In at least two states, Michigan and Ohio, African-American unemployment is expected
to exceed 20% in 2010.

• Unemployment disparities vary by region.
o In five Midwestern and Plains states, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and
Oklahoma, the unemployment rate for Blacks was at least 3 times that of whites.

- more -

o In another eight, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Colorado,
Mississippi, and New Jersey, the unemployment rate for Blacks was at least 2.5
times higher than that of whites.

o Among Latinos, the widest disparities were in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South
Dakota, Connecticut, and Iowa, states where the unemployment rate among
Latinos was at least twice as high as whites.
Economic Reservoirs: Wealth and Assets

• Whites are 34 times more likely to have a median net wealth over $3.5 million than
African-Americans, based on new analysis of Survey of Consumer Finance data.
• An estimated 3.4 million families will have experienced foreclosure in 2009.
Policy Recommendations:

• Target job creation in high-unemployment communities.

• Tracking job creation efforts / equity assessments.

• Recommit to affirmative action policies.

• An immediate moratorium on foreclosures.

• Keep families in their homes through federal loan modification programs, and
modification of bankruptcy laws.

• Strengthen financial regulation to end predatory practices.

• Expand use of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs).

• Preserve the Estate Tax.

• Tax Capital Gains and Dividends the Same as Ordinary Income.

• Strengthening the Federal Income Tax / Let Bush Tax Cuts Expire.

Move Your Money from Big Banks to Community Banks!!!

2010-01-11T16:04:00.000-08:00

Speech by IRAQ WAR Veteran (You Must Listen)

2010-01-03T18:17:00.000-08:00

Black Economic Power!! We Need to Build IT!!

2009-12-30T05:07:00.000-08:00

Non-Corporate RAP (Super Natural)

2009-12-15T09:39:00.000-08:00

The Cost of War!!!

2009-12-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

Chistopher Columbus was a Murderer!!!

2009-10-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

From Cynthia McKinney: How Did We Get From There to Here?‏

2009-09-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

I never want you to take the journey that I'm currently on. So, I want to tell you about it.

It starts on the front of the refrigerator. "The Healthiest Foods on Earth." A two-page primer from apple to watermelon, touting immunity to male fertility support. Inside the refrigerator, natural and organic foods only. On the countertop is the Jack LaLanne juicer, the Magic Bullet, the handy food chopper plus, the food saver vacuum sealer--all items familiar to us because they are constantly hawked on the midnight cable channels. Hanging from the kitchen cabinet door are plastic bags for recycling: one for plastics, the other for aluminum cans. The house and car are filled with reusable shopping bags made of recycled materials. By the way, a new car was in the works, and not because of the cash for clunkers program of the Federal Government. An American-made hybrid was preferred--keeping U.S. workers working. In the back seat of her Ford Focus is a booklet, "Living in a Healthy Body: A New Look at Health & Weight." What I'm trying to describe is someone working very hard at changing a typically indulgent "American" lifestyle into one more respectful and healthy for the body, healthy for our earth.

So, in an act of preventive medical care, my aunt Hazel went to the doctor to have a colonoscopy. We are all bombarded with television commercials advising us to have a colonoscopy. I know in the black media, those ads abound. And so, dutifully, my aunt abided by those suggestions for healthy choices and had her first colonoscopy. What the family knows is that her colon was perforated. That's when our journey took us on a wrong turn.

Unfortunately, the facility that performed the colonoscopy had told my aunt not to call before the results were published and that would take up to two weeks!!! When my aunt called them because she was feeling so bad, they told her that she'd be ok overnight and that they would call her in the morning. The hospital talked to her and her daughter. The hospital told my aunt to go to sleep overnight and they'd call her back in the morning. [mistake: double sentence] But my aunt-tee continued to deteriorate so badly that her daughter called 9-1-1 and by the morning, my aunt-tee was already in surgery at another hospital that was not too busy to care for her. This is when the perforation was discovered and repaired.

While my aunt was recovering in the second hospital, in intensive care, a letter was sent from the hospital where the colonoscopy was performed stating that they were the insured's provider and that the hospital performing the emergency surgery would not get paid. The hospital performing the mal-colostomy [mistake: I should have written colonoscopy] demanded my aunt-tee back. So, against the desires of the hospital providing the emergency surgery, my aunt, while still in intensive care, was forced to be transferred to the hospital that, in my opinion, committed a capital crime.

My aunt-tee deteriorated after the transfer, but fought like heck to live. Unfortunately, her body had been so poisoned by the doctor's failure to recognize that he had perforated her colon that her body became toxic. The third affront to my aunt-tee's health and life occurred when morphine was administered, ostensibly for pain and gave her such a blow to her vital statistics that the family objected to a second administration of morphine. But guess what!!! She was given morphine again, despite her children's complaints!!!! My aunt never recovered from that.

My aunt, a divorced mother of two, struggled to live righteously. Those of you in southern California know that she accompanied me almost everywhere I went. She was a hard-working woman, a proud homeowner in Watts, a student working on her Social Work degree, finally able to achieve her dreams after deferring them for so long in order to help her children realize theirs. She also took to the campaign trail too many times, traveling to Georgia to help my father and me realize ours. I can't even believe that she's gone--through no fault of her own--and I'm still wondering how the heck my aunt ended up in this place. Despite all the care she took of herself this is unfathomable to me. And sadly, too many families are arriving at this same place. Iraqi families devastated by U.S. occupation; Afghani families devastated by U.S. war; U.S. families also devastated by U.S. policy makers. Why?

For the last four years, I've spouted off the racial quality-of-life disparities that exist in our country. I've said it so much, it's as if no one heard me. Because even during my tenure in Congress, I gave floor speeches, but the policy change never came. I spoke at banquets and conventions about it, but the policy changes never came. Two steps forward always seemed to end with one step backward. If we got the money appropriated, in too many instances, black institutions couldn't be in charge of it, so only a trickle at best reached the community. I found that the "plantation" was alive and well in patterns of federal spending. So when Dr. David Satcher, President Clinton's Surgeon General, found in a 2005 study that over 83,000 blacks die unnecessary and premature deaths each year due to their treatment after they arrive in a doctor's office, among other factors, I added that datum to my panoply of quality-of-life stats. And now, my aunt factors in Dr. Satcher's numbers.

I have seen such betrayal and lack of principle in the current "health care" debate, I had no intention of getting into it. In our Power to the People campaign, I wrote a platform that included policy recommendations to eliminate all disparities still extant in our society, including for health care. A single-payer system is so obviously needed, it should be too politically costly for our Democratic majority in the Congress and our Democratic White House to do anything else. I recommended an end to war. I advocated public ownership of the Federal Reserve. I even anticipated the skullduggery of the bailouts and recommended that if the "powers that be" were intent on forcing Congress to give these bailouts to institutions that conducted what I would call criminal behavior, then at a minimum, a credible person like David Walker, former U.S. Comptroller, should audit all corporations and institutions receiving such funds. I suggested that Senator Obama use the power of his Senatorial pen to amend the bailout legislation to this effect. It didn't happen.

My aunt-tee had a policy of rarely voting for an incumbent. She understood that just as she was trying to change herself into a lifestyle that she could believe in, she wasn't going to get political, social, and economic change that she could believe in by voting like everyone else, for the same special interest candidates. Once she decided that it was necessary to step outside of the box of political conformity, she discovered that there were Independent, Green Party, Libertarian, and other political party candidates on her ballot that she had long ignored. She began to listen to them and learned to explore the totality of her options. It was glorious to watch my aunt-tee's liberation.

So why is she in the morgue now?

Not enough people took that journey with her. Not enough people saw her example. Not enough was done to change policy. At a time when the policy makers have never been so divorced from the reality borne by the average citizens that they govern, the American people have shown an amazing ability to accept graft, corruption, death, and destruction while continuing to believe that hope alone can produce real change. Why did Cindy Sheehan protest without thousands in front of President Obama's $50,000 a week vacation home?

I've tried to walk my talk. Just last week it came out that one "journalist" who called for my lynching was on the FBI payroll at the time of his comment. He claims to have been paid to say provocative things. I've withstood a lot--for the people. But now, I really don't know how much more walking or talking I'm able to do. I just wonder, how many more will have to experience this before more people write their own Declarations of Independence from this political disorder.

The phone just rang and it was the hospital that performed the botched colonoscopy on my aunt, that ignored her call for help, that demanded that she be transferred while she was in intensive care, that administered morphine twice, despite objections from the family and from which her vitals never recovered. They wanted to know how my aunt would rate their service. I told them poor on every count.

Thank you for reading this with empathy and I thank you all for your support. I apologize for any appointments that I've missed while I've been on the road to this place I'm in now.

P.S. My friend, David Josué, wrote a beautiful notice that I include in this message. Please click on the link at the end of his message because "dying while black" is real. My aunt is just the latest victim. The highlights are mine:

Cynthia McKinney lost a family member . . .
100,000 Unnecessary Black Deaths Per Year!

[09/01/09] It is with a heart full of sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of Cynthia's maternal aunt. Hazel was not sick and took all preventive measures to live a long life. She went to have a colonoscopy and her colon was punctured. What else went wrong during the procedure is still unknown to the family. Hazel survived Jim Crow but could not survive the health care system. Cynthia is deeply affected by this tragic event. She was very close to her aunt and Hazel loved her niece. Hazel was a fervent supporter of Cynthia's six terms in Congress and was so happy to see her niece run for President of the United States in 2008. Only last July the 4th she was in Atlanta with us while we were working around the clock to secure Cynthia's release from an Israeli jail. It is hard to accept that she is no more.

Please visit Professor Vernellia Randall's site http://www.dyingwhileblack.org/book.htm

Thank you

David Josué

--
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The Pathology of Privilege Racism & White Denial

2009-08-04T09:01:00.000-07:00