People Before Profit blog

Reflections on the return of school segregation

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 06:41:00 +0000

On Jan. 16, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University released a 67-page report with a grim message: racial segregation has returned to U.S. schools at levels not seen for three decades. The report has implications for contemporary activists, such as those in Lewiston, Maine, who recently demonstrated against racism. Its findings are of a piece with rampant onslaughts of discrimination and division throughout the world.

The report is based on cumulative data from “virtually all” U.S. schools. One learns that: Minority students now make up 40 percent of U.S. public school students. They were 20 percent in the 1960s.

One sixth of all Black students – one fourth of the Black students in the Midwest and Northeast – attend “apartheid schools,” those with 90 to 100 percent minority students.

Since 1990, Black students attending majority white schools fell 13 percent, the lowest level since 1968.

Seventy percent of Black and Latino students attend schools with over 50 percent minority enrollment, a 10 percent increase over 10 years. 37.4 percent attend schools with at least 90 percent minority enrollment.

The average Black student now attends a school with 31 percent white students, 10 percent fewer than 10 years ago.

The average white student goes to a school with at least 90 percent white students. Only 14 percent of white students attend multi-racial schools (defined as three races, each 10 percent or more).

The data in this report suggest that poverty and segregated schools go together. In 2000, the average student attended a school where 19 percent of the white children, 50 percent of the black students, and 44 percent of the Latinos were classified as poor. In 15 percent of the predominantly white schools, but in 86 percent of the intensely segregated black schools, 50 percent or more students receive free or reduced-rate lunches. The student body in 80 percent of the schools with less than 30 percent white students contained a majority who were classified as poor.

According to the Harvard report, for 30 years public opinion polls and student surveys have demonstrated rising rates of approval for desegregated education. Integrated education has accounted both for minority students graduating from high school at increasing rates and for a narrowing of racial gaps in test scores and academic achievement. The report attributes re-segregation to changes in the racial makeup of communities and the population of children, and to a 30-year refusal by Washington officials and the courts to promote and protect school integration.

In Lewiston, 5,000 people marched against racism on Jan. 11. They were reacting to a protest the same day by a few Illinois white supremacists against 1,100 just-arrived Somali immigrants. To what extent can well-disposed, overwhelmingly white, Maine people, motivated by decency, human brotherhood, and solicitude for their state’s image, be counted upon to pitch in against the institutionalized, pervasive racism described in the Harvard report?

The task will require more than abstractions and concern about appearances. Howard Zinn hints (Progressive, Dec. 2002) at an expanded notion of equality that may serve as a tool for action. Writing about war in Iraq, he suggests that for the U.S. government, the value of Iraqi children is low. Their deaths are “worth it,” as a recent Secretary of State said.

Those children are, in effect, assigned to the category of disposable people. And by all indications, the child victims of the re-segregation of U.S. schools will be put there too.

They will join 6 million children under age 5 who die each year from easily preventable diseases, 12 million children under age 15 with HIV/AIDS, and the 12 percent of sub-Saharan children who are orphaned by the deaths of their parents from AIDS. African Americans of all ages gain a place on the list, because they die earlier and are sicker than whites. Certainly young people in Chicago, age 16 to 24, the ones interviewed by Bob Herbert, are disposable – “out of jobs, out of school, and all but out of hope” (NYT Feb. 6). He reports that there are 100,000 such expendable young people in Chicago, 200,000 in New York.

The lesson for Lewiston activists is this: disposable people serve as an important prop holding up a system based on greed and competition. For those who have gained a niche in regular society, disposable people serve as reminders of a precarious existence. Let down your guard, and disposability may be your lot. Fight the system, lose, and meet your desperate replacement, coming up from the lower depths, where you are headed. And for inflating fears and maintaining divisions, racism is the tool of choice.

In a dog-eat-dog world like this, any notion of equality must focus on the basics, what people need for survival and dignity – all people, down the street and throughout the world. Whether or not such an idea is labeled socialism – as it should be – is less important than its role as a principle for action. The Lewiston marchers could call upon a Massachusetts neighbor, Henry Thoreau, for commentary: “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary …”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a part-time pediatrician in rural Maine. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

WNBA one cent on the dollar

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 06:35:00 +0000

Forty years ago this year, the Equal Pay Act was passed. In 1963 women working full-time, year-round were making just under 60 cents to a man’s dollar. It was still legal to separate the want ads into “Help wanted, Male” – where the engineering, lawyering, medical, and scientific jobs were found – and “Help wanted, Female” where the nursing, teaching, cleaning and typing jobs were found.

The Equal Pay Act is a very simple law. It says that it is illegal to pay women less than men for doing the same job, when skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions are approximately the same. It does make exceptions for “piece rate” work, for seniority, and merit pay in most situations. On the 40th anniversary of the law this June, we will find that women are now making somewhere between 74 and 75 cents to a man’s dollar overall. Slightly more for white women, less for Black women, and a measly 53 cents for Hispanic women. Mighty slow progress.

Ten years after equal pay was enacted, another law – Title IX – went into effect. This one prohibited discrimination in school programs receiving federal funds. That meant girls had to be considered for those slots in law schools, medical schools, and engineering classes that led to the better paying jobs. It also meant girls’ sports should get a fair share of funding. It was no longer legal for schools to field six or eight boy’s teams and no teams for the girls. Because girls were given opportunities in school, at the other end of the pipe, twenty-five years later, we saw the emergence of women’s professional sports, including the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). And we saw more women’s sports represented in the Olympics, where women brought home the gold as often as the men.

So there is no question that Title IX has been a success story for women’s participation in sports. But the Equal Pay Act hasn’t delivered in near the same measure for female athletes. If you think that 74 cents for the average woman in the workaday world as compared to one dollar for the average man is lousy, consider the average WNBA salary. It is about ONE PENNY on the dollar to the average NBA player. That’s right. The women make around $46,000 per season, while the guys (even those that play only a minute or two) rake in $4.5 million on average. The situation is so bad that many of the women are forced to play a second season in Europe just to make ends meet.

The NBA and the WNBA are owned by the same folks. Management says the women can’t have more because their league is still losing money, as most startups do. No doubt the men’s side didn’t turn a profit in its early years either, but the players weren’t shortchanged. Decent salaries were considered an investment in the future of the league. Besides, the women aren’t asking for those mega-millions. They just want a raise. And one way to get it would be to adjust the money formulas. NBA players get close to 60 percent of revenues back in salaries. The women get a pathetic 15 percent, and are prohibited from the lucrative endorsement deals the men enjoy.

The National Council of Women’s Organizations, whose member groups got these laws passed in the first place, have endorsed the WNBA players’ push for better pay in its current negotiations with management. While women have entered sports arenas in record numbers, when it comes to the pocketbook, the basketball court is far from level.

Martha Burk is a political psychologist who heads the Center for Advancement of Public Policy (www.capponline.org).

Patriotism and the media

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 06:27:00 +0000

The mass media are bombarding Americans with proclamations that the global revulsion to George Bush’s policies is “anti-American.”

In a recent exchange on C-SPAN a French reporter held a copy of Le Monde, one of the world’s leading newspapers, to explain the meeting of the leaders of France, Germany and Russia in opposition to Bush’s war policy. The American commentator said he had his own paper, and pointed to the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s crude right-wing tabloid, the New York Post, showing the graves of Americans who fell at Normandy and proclaiming the French to be ingrates. The French reporter looked at him as if to say, “These are the jerks who think they can rule the world?”

In the 1930s and ’40s, Communists and their allies on the left in the United States, as part of the fight against fascism, campaigned to take the American flag out of the hands of reaction, to define the “American way” as inclusive, democratic, the struggle of the “common man” for social justice in a society based on economic and social equality. Paul Robeson singing “Ballad for Americans” and Woody Guthrie’s full version of “This Land Is Your Land” were expressions of that America, an America evolving toward higher levels of democracy, not isolating itself from the rest of the world and using the flag and the Constitution to sustain robber baron capitalism.

Today, we have got to struggle to take the flag away from the Murdoch media empire, CNN, and the endlessly recycled right-wing “pundits” (the TV word for jerk) who repeat big lies over and over in the assumption that people will passively believe them.

Americans have always understood that social and economic inequality has been the basis of war, so the media deny the increasing inequality, poverty and desperation that “globalization” and the IMF-World Bank policies have produced.

Americans have never supported colonialism or imperialism. That is why the media for half a century used the big lie that communism was no different than fascism and the Soviet Union no different than Nazi Germany. In this way, the media helped maintain support for global imperialist and counter-revolutionary policies. Communists and anti-cold-war progressives were never given any serious access to mass media to challenge such views, even though it was they who were true patriots for peace, by fighting against a World War III and what would have been an inevitable nuclear holocaust.

The American people are deeply progressive and humanistic in their views when they are given a chance to think, despite a political system that discourages popular participation and overwhelmingly favors the right through uncontrolled use of money.

Before the Civil War, the majority knew that slavery was indefensible, but they were led to hate and fear abolitionists and Blacks as enemies of “American freedom.” But abolitionists were the only ones who really wanted to implement the ideals of the American revolution and bring freedom to millions of slaves. Racism was the ideology that sustained the wealth and power of the slaveholders, who didn’t exist in the North and represented only 20 percent of the white people of the South.

Today, the majority knows that deregulated, untaxed monopoly capitalism and a militarist foreign policy are wrong. That is why those who seriously challenge and fight to end that undemocratic system – Communists and the broad left in labor and society, and the broad peace movement – are condemned as enemies of American democracy.

The Feb. 15 demonstrations, the March 5 national student strike, and the events to follow will, if we all work together, carry forward the process of making America what it was in the past, a nation to be admired and revered by the forces of liberty and democracy in the world, instead of being hated and feared as the great colonial empires were.

In this campaign, the People’s Weekly World has a vital role to play, as a real voice of the American people and its national ideals, as William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, was 160 years ago.

Norman Markowitz is a history professor in at Rutgers University. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

Depleted uranium

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 06:25:00 +0000

It’s dirty, and it’s deadly. When you coat a shell with it, it slices through armored plating as if it was cheese, turning tanks, buildings and bomb shelters into exploding incinerators. It causes cancer among people who breathe its dust, or touch it. It causes horrible birth defects among the babies of pregnant women who breathe it or touch it. It causes a host of chronic ailments and sicknesses among returning troops.

It was used by the U.S. army in Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan. The United Nations wants a worldwide ban on it. The U.S. plans to use it again, in its war on Iraq.

What is it? It’s a waste product that arises during the production of enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and reactors. It’s called depleted uranium.

It has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. This means that the cities, battlefields, and locations where depleted uranium is used will be radioactive and remain radioactive for the next 4.5 billion years.

That’s as long as the earth has existed. That’s twice as long as the entire evolution of life on Earth. Seventy times longer than the time since the dinosaurs became extinct.

Depleted uranium is extremely dense; that’s what makes it capable of slicing into heavily armored vehicles. That’s why the American military likes it.

In the Gulf War, in 1991, the U.S. army fired off a million rounds of depleted uranium, totalling 300 tons. In Baghdad, where they thought they were attacking a secret bunker, they sliced into it with depleted uranium and incinerated 800 women and children who were hiding in a shelter. Along the “highway of death,” outside Basra, in southern Iraq, they incinerated every tank, every soldier.

Along that road, the shell-holes in the blown-up tanks are 1,000 times more radioactive than the background. The desert near the vehicles is 100 times more radioactive.

Seventy percent of the uranium burns on impact, turning into a fine ceramic dust of depleted uranium oxide particles which gets blown on the wind, and washed into the groundwater. In the Basra region, there has been a 100-fold increase in uranium in the groundwater.

And then there’s the birth defects. Children born with fingers missing. Children born with legs missing. Children born with parts of their face missing. Children born with their eyes missing. Children born with grossly deformed skulls. Children born with enormous distended bellies. Children born with no hands. Children born with no genitals. Children born with no skin over their bellies. Children born with open holes in their backs.

Children born whose bodies are beyond words, in their pitiful awfulness.

There has been a ten-fold increase in such birth defects in the Basra region since 1988. I have seen the photos of these children. You can see them for yourself at www.ngwrc.org/Dulink/du_link.htm. But be warned – these photos are not for the squeamish, and may give some people nightmares.

There has also been a 17-fold increase in cancer in southern Iraq since 1988, and a sudden increase in childhood leukemia.

That was Iraq. Then there was Afghanistan.

The data is still sketchy, but tests on residents in Jalalabad have found a level of uranium in the urine of residents that is 400 to 2,000 percent higher than normal. The contamination is also present in Kabul.

A scientific team from the Uranium Medical Research Centre that went to Kabul in September 2002 found that people who had been exposed to debris from the U.S./British precision bombing were reporting pains in their joints, back and kidney pain, muscle weakness, memory problems, confusion and disorientation. Members of the team began to complain of the same symptoms. They found that 25 percent of newborn infants were suffering from congenital and post-natal health problems that appeared to be associated with uranium contamination.

So what happened to the U.S. and British troops who were exposed to the same dust? It’s hard to sort out, because the troops who served in the Gulf were exposed to a cocktail of injections and chemical and biological hazards, as well as depleted uranium. But the symptoms are telling.

There were 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf War in 1991. Fifty percent were Black or Latino. Many were women. Of the troops, 260,000 have applied for medical benefits; 159,000 have been awarded disability allowances.

Many are probably on low incomes, and cannot afford expensive medical insurance.

They call it Gulf War Syndrome; nobody in the military wants to talk about it. The returning troops are suffering from reactive airway disease; neurological damage; cataracts; kidney problems; lymphoma; skin and organ cancer; neuropsychological problems; uranium in their semen; sexual dysfunction; and birth defects in their offspring. Birth defects are turning up four times more often in the children of those who served in the Gulf than normal.

That was Afghanistan. Now a new war on Iraq looms.

A new round of death. A new nightmare.

Unless we stand together, work together, pray together, and call out together to stop it, and to outlaw depleted uranium forever, as the United Nations has recommended.

Four and a half billion years.

Guy Dauncey is editor of EcoNews and author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. He can be reached at guydauncey@earthfuture.com. This article is reprinted with permission from EcoNews.

The madness of King George and his court

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 05:40:00 +0000

The imperial obsessions of the Bush administration have come under increasing clinical examination. In the process the fog of war propaganda spread on radio and TV by journalistic courtiers is beginning to lift. For more and more, the impending war with Iraq has nothing to do with eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or promoting democracy, or fighting terrorism.

According to former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, the bulk of Iraq’s WMD have been destroyed or degraded. An extended U.S. military occupation of post war Iraq is being planned, with Turkey dictating the future of Iraqi Kurds.

Karen De Young and Peter Slevin report in the Washington Post that “Full U.S. Control Planned for Iraq” (2/21). Trudy Rubin writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer (2/23) that “the Kurds are terrified that the U.S. is giving the green light to the Turks to send tens of thousands of troop into Kurdistan ... [as] a quid pro quo for the Turkish government’s permission for U.S. troops to use Turkey as a base for the Iraq war. The Turks want to control Iraqi Kurdistan out of fear that the autonomy enjoyed by Iraqi Kurds may encourage Turkish Kurds to seek autonomy as well.”

And there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11. Indeed the only terror being planned is by the U.S. Central Command whose “shock and awe” strategy is designed to terrorize Iraqis into submission. L.A. Times reporter William Arkin writes that the U.S. is even “preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapon against Iraq” (1/25).

One of the most thorough diagnosis of the Bush administration’s imperial obsessions comes from the Research Unit of Political Economy in Bombay, India. In a special issue of its on-line journal Aspects of India’s Economy (www.rupe-india.org) the authors argue that the U.S. invasion of Iraq represents a “Military Solution to an Economic Problem” The features of this problem include: a global crisis of overproduction; mounting opposition to and diminishing returns of “globalization,” and intensifying rivalry from its imperial competitors. Specifically:

“The global crisis of overproduction is showing up the underlying weakness of the U.S. real economy, as a result U.S. trade and budget deficits are galloping. The euro now poses a credible alternative to the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency, threatening the U.S.’s crucial ability to fund its deficits by soaking up the world’s savings. The U.S. anticipates that the capture of Iraq, and whatever else it has in store for the region, will directly benefit its corporations (oil, arms, engineering, financial) even as it shuts out the corporations from other imperialist countries. Further, it intends to prevent the bulk of petroleum trade being conducted in euros, and thus maintain the dollar’s supremacy. In a broader sense, it believes that such a re-assertion of its supremacy (in military terms and in control of strategic resources) will prevent the emergence of any serious imperialist challenger such as the EU. In that sense the present campaign is in line with the Pentagon’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which called for preventing any other major power from acquiring the strength to develop into a challenger to the U.S.’s solitary supremacy.”

General Wesley Clark, a former NATO supreme commander, recently made the same point on “Meet the Press.” Clark said: “We are at a turning point in America’s history. We are about to embark on an operation that is going to put us in a colonial position in the Middle East following Britain.”

Imperial obsessions work best through sociopathic personalities – leaders who are blind to the human costs of their policies. Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, observed recently that G.W. Bush displays all the characteristics of a sociopath. As such, he is not likely to be moved by a confidential UN report that warned that 1.2 million Iraqi children under age five could die as the result of a U.S. invasion.

Nor is he likely to be overly concerned about the impact on the U.S.social budget of the $1.7 trillion price tag of an Iraqi war and occupation, nor the costs of follow on war in Syria, Iran and North Korea, which U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton recently identified as the next targets after Iraq (haaretzdaily.com).

The same indifference is likely be felt about the implications of the $1.2 trillion being sought for a missile defense program and the cumulative effects of military budget of $400-500 billion a year into the indefinite future. When requests for $1.5 trillion in tax relief primarily for the wealthy are taken into consideration it is fair to say that the fiscal priorities of the Bush administration represent a form of budgetary terrorism directed against working families and retirees throughout the country.

The author can be reached at pww@pww.org

Which way will Mississippi go?

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 05:13:00 +0000

As a young child growing up in Chicago I enjoyed the stories from my friends about their summer vacations in Mississippi. I wondered why my parents refused to let me visit there. Once I saw a story in the Chicago Defender with frightening photographs of a lynching in Mississippi. My desire to visit vanished. My first visit to Mississippi and the “New South” was in 1996.

My host, a Jackson State University English professor, lived in a beautiful ranch style home in an integrated community. We took a tour of the university, visited the downtown stores, went to a movie in a suburban mall and had dinner in a restaurant frequented by Senator Trent Lott. (A Confederate flag hung on the wall.) We also went on a historical civil rights tour to visit the home of slain NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the churches where civil rights activities took place, the site of the sit-ins and freedom rides, etc. It seemed as if Jackson, Miss., had been transformed

My second visit to Mississippi took place a few weeks ago, when I attended the AFL-CIO Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Observance. On the way from the airport I saw a Confederate flag flying from a small home visibly in need of repairs. I wondered what statement the owner was making. Jackson, the capital city with a population of 184,256, is now 70 percent African American and has just elected its first African American mayor. The African-American population of Mississippi is 36 percent, but at one time its Black-white ratio was 50:50. Mississippi now has more Black elected officials than any other state. Some psychologists believe that white residents still fear that Blacks will gain power and retaliate against them for centuries of slavery, Jim Crow and inhuman conditions. Blacks fear that whites will try to turn the clock back and take away the political, economic and social rights which they fought for and won during the last 40 years. There is no evidence to support the fears of whites but I certainly saw evidence that the fears of Blacks are realistic.

The hotel I stayed at had an integrated workforce except for maid service, which was all Black women. Workers seemed to get along well but all seemed overworked. Everyone I met was courteous regardless of race. On the elevators and in the hallways guests exhibited Southern Hospitality with cheerful greetings and eye contact, something I don’t remember in northern hotels. Some were curious about where I came from and my impressions of Jackson. But I soon noticed there seemed to be very few white union representatives from Mississippi at the observance. The only one I saw was the president of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, Robert Shaffer. He said the conference had given him a new perspective. The Black union members from the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees, MASE/CWA, went out of their way to make all the out-of-towners feel welcomed.

Both the American flag and the Confederate flag fly over the Capitol in Jackson. At a demonstration there to demand the establishment of a Department of Labor, a union leader asked, “Which way will Mississippi go? Toward democracy (pointing to the American flag) or backwards toward oppression (pointing toward the Confederate flag)? Democratic Governor Ronnie Musgrove led an effort to get rid of the Confederate emblem from the upper left-hand corner of the state’s flag but a referendum on the issue lost when 64.5 percent of the voters voted against it. Musgrove favored raising teachers’ salaries and pushed the CHIP health insurance program for uninsured children. Haley Barbour, an advisor to President Bush, will be running against Musgrove in December.

The next day at a second demonstration in front of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, I heard a former employee tell how she was fired after filing a complaint against two white nurses who threatened her and used racial slurs. The tires on her car were slashed. A high ranking security guard was also fired when he filed complaints about white workers under his supervision. Other employees at the hospital described the racial discrimination against Black patients. At a town meeting a state representative told how Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck ran as a Democrat to get the endorsement of labor and the Black voters and then switched to the Republican Party after she was elected. Mississippi Republicans are the descendents of the Dixiecrats. They use racism to divide white and Black workers in order to exploit them all. Without unity workers find it difficult to organize or belong to a union in this “right to work” state where salaries are often the lowest in the country. The median family income in 1999 was $31,000 often with two adults working full time. When will white workers wake up and vote in their best interest? Mississippi deserves a better future.

Rosita Johnson is a member of the Editorial Board of the People’s Weekly World. She can be reached at phillyrose1@earthlink.net

Lies, obfuscation and plagiarism

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 05:11:00 +0000

Lies, obfuscation, denial, hyperbole and now outright plagiarism characterize the U.S. right-wing-led push to war against the people of Iraq.

When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (in his Feb. 5 UN exhortation to war) referred to a 19-page dossier purported to be a “hot off the presses” delineation of the sins of Saddam, few knew that it was actually in part plagiarized from a Monterey, Calif., graduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi. The “intelligence dossier” was released in England the day before Powell’s performance at the UN.

England’s Channel Four News learned that “the bulk of the nineteen-page document was copied from three different articles – one written by a graduate student.” The document was published on the No. 10 Downing Street web site. Its title there is “Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation,” outlining the structure of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus as discovered by official British intelligence up to that moment. However, according to Channel Four News, paragraph after paragraph had been “copied from an article published in September 2002 in a small journal: the Middle East Review of International Affairs.” Cambridge University student Glen Rangwala noticed the document published on the No. 10 website was “familiar reading,” including al-Marashi’s grammatical errors. (To compare the two documents, go to www.channel4.com.)

Spokespersons for No. 10 Downing Street, backed into a corner, admitted to the plagiarism charge, saying it had “made a mistake.” One line of defense from No. 10 was that their plagiarism (intellectual theft) “does not throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole.” Come now, boys. The world was looking for the very latest news of what Iraq possesses in the line of “weapons of mass destruction.” Surely, an article by a doctoral candidate, written a full four and a half months ago, is not the latest in military intelligence from both Britain and the U.S. Or is it?

Some of those who crafted the report had no relation to official intelligence offices; some were staffers at the Department of Communications (headed by Alastair Campbell) at No. 12 Downing Street, others were staffers at No. 10. Among those responsible for the document’s contents were Campbell’s personal assistant, Alison Blackshaw; a junior No. 10 press officer, Murtarza Khan; one other No. 10 official; and a foreign office official. None of them experts on Iraq according to press reports.

Taking issue with another of Powell’s statements, British officials (according to the Guardian 2/07/03) refuted Powell’s claim that the murder of Stephen Oake, a special branch officer (policeman) in Manchester, England, was tied to a leading Al-Qaida operative that Iraq allegedly harbored.

Powell spoke of “terrorist cells” in western Europe that had graduated from a camp in Afghanistan run by a Jordanian who had close ties to Saddam Hussein. Unwilling to follow Powell’s bouncing ball any further, British security forces refuted Powell’s claim, with one officer characterizing it as “jumping to conclusions.”

All in all, fomenting imperialist war isn’t as easy as it used to be. The millions of people in the world who stand firm and say “no” to war and bloodshed are getting some help from the refuted lies, exposed plagiarism, and stunning disregard for the people’s intelligence that the right wing uses in place of facts. However we may laugh at the incompetence of the warmongers, we must understand how very serious and vicious they are in their determination to do whatever it takes to plunge the world into a bloodbath. But, damn, you would think they could at least write their own stuff.

Barbara Jean Hope is a reader from Philadelphia. She can be reached at Bjhope2000@cs.com

We Charge Genocide: The cry rings true 52 years later

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 05:01:00 +0000

Just over half a century ago, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson, two giants of the struggle for African-American equality, delivered to the United Nations a petition titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.”

Robeson was accompanied by signers of the petition Dec. 17, 1951, when he presented the document to a UN official in New York. The same day, Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which had drafted the petition, delivered copies to the UN delegates meeting in Paris.

“Out of the inhuman Black ghettos of American cities,” the introduction began, “out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease … ”

Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chair of the Communist Party USA, says the power of the petition was its expose of culpability in genocide by the ruling circles in the U.S. “The federal government claimed it had nothing to do with the lynchings. But this petition said: ‘You knew about it and you did nothing. You knew about the super-exploitation and inhuman hardships inflicted upon the Black people and you did nothing. Your inaction, your indifference in the face of oppression means that it was policy.’”

Among the signers were the eminent African-American historian and freedom fighter Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, George Crockett Jr., later a distinguished judge in Detroit who went on to serve many terms in the U.S. Congress, New York City Communist councilman Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Ferdinand Smith, Black leader of the National Maritime Union, Dr. Oakley C. Johnson of Louisiana, Aubrey Grossman, the labor and civil rights lawyer, and Claudia Jones, a Communist leader in Harlem later deported under the witch-hunt Walter-McCarran Act. Also signing were family members of the victims of “legal lynching”: Rosalee McGee, mother of Willie McGee, framed up on rape charges, and Josephine Grayson, whose husband, Francis Grayson, was one of the Martinsville Seven, framed and executed on false rape charges in Virginia.

In the section titled “Evidence,” hundreds of cases of lynching were documented. The petition charged that since the abolition of slavery at least 10,000 Black people had been lynched. The full number, it stated, will never be known because the murders were often unreported.

The petition exposed a conspiracy to deny Black people the right to vote through poll taxes, literacy tests and outright terrorism. It brings to mind the “vote scrubbing” of 87,000 Black voters in Florida that enabled George W. Bush to steal the 2000 election.

Strom Thurmond, then South Carolina governor, was listed in the rogues’ gallery. He had run for president on the segregationist Dixiecrat Party ticket in 1948. The petition quoted Thurmond denouncing the Fair Employment Practices Act requiring equal pay for equal work as “patterned after a Russian law written by Joseph Stalin.” Thurmond scorned a proposed law against lynching as “tyranny. What could be more un-American?”

George W. Bush and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) toasted Thurmond at his 100th birthday bash in Washington a few weeks ago. Lott told the crowd the country would have been “better off” if Thurmond had been elected president. This racist remark touched off a furor that forced Lott to step down as Senate Majority Leader, but it also laid bare the poisonous racism of the Republican Party.

Patterson, a leader of the Communist Party USA, was an eminent civil rights attorney who had defended Sacco and Vanzetti. He spearheaded defense of the Scottsboro Nine, Black youth in Alabama framed up on phony rape charges in 1932. Patterson wrote in his autobiography, The Man Who Cried Genocide, that he had just returned from Richmond, Va., where he had struggled without success to save the Martinsville Seven, also falsely accused of raping a white woman.

“To me, it seemed clear that the Charter and Conventions of the UN had to be made the property of the American people as far as possible and especially of Black America,” Patterson wrote. “It could be made the instrumentality through which the ‘Negro Question’ could be lifted to its highest dimension.”

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted Dec. 9, 1948, flowed from the determination of the world community that never again would fascism be allowed to plunge humanity into holocaust and world war. Patterson pointed out that the U.S. stubbornly refused to ratify the convention even as American officials boasted of U.S. “democracy” and lectured other nations on human rights abuses, a “do as I say, not as I do” posture. (The U.S. did not ratify the Genocide Convention until Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) finally pushed it through the U.S. Senate in 1987.)

The “prime mover” in the genocide against the African-American people “is monopoly capital,” the petition charged. “Monopoly’s immediate interest is nearly four billions of dollars in superprofits that it extracts yearly from its exploitation and oppression of the Negro people …” The racist wage differentials inflicted on Black workers drives down the wages for workers of all races, the petitition charged. Despite gains for the African-American people, that wage differential continues today to pour tens of billions in extra profits into corporate bank accounts each year.

The petition answered the argument that “genocide” refers only to physical extermination, citing the UN’s definition: “Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide.” The petition continued, “We maintain, therefore, that the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government … If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace.”

The courageous act of Robeson and Patterson ignited a firestorm with Cold Warriors slurring them as “traitors” in the service of the Soviet Union.

The attempts to silence Patterson began while he was in Paris. Packages with copies of the petition sent to London and Paris never arrived. He had brought twenty copies in his luggage and had sent 60 more to Budapest. He called Budapest and friends there expressed them back to him.

All the UN delegates received a copy. During a recess at the Palais de Chaillot where the UN was meeting, Dr. Channing Tobias, a U.S. delegate, chided Patterson for “this attack upon your government.” Patterson snapped, “It’s your government. It’s my country. I am fighting to save my country’s democratic principles.”

Later, Eleanor Roosevelt, head of the U.S. delegation, delivered a speech, attempting to answer the charges without mentioning the petition. When Patterson arrived back in the U.S., federal agents hustled him into a room and strip-searched him, the first of many acts of retaliation.

The charge of disloyalty was aimed at diverting attention from the irrefutable evidence in the petition. Yet the Cold Warriors could not hold back the rising tide of outrage against racist segregation enforced by lynch terror. The “We Charge Genocide” petition was only the opening shot. The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 inflicted a huge blow on the system of legal segregation by reversing the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal.” The high court ruled that “separate is inherently unequal.” Then came Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala., and the boycott that followed. The floodgates of the civil rights revolution were opened.

Jean Damu, chair of the California Coalition for H.R.-40, the reparations bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), wrote recently that the “We Charge Genocide” petition “may be seen as much the ideological stimulus for the civil rights movement as Brown v. Board of Education,” and “must be seen as the seminal act.” Damu points out that while the petition did not call for reparations, “here for the first time in regards to African-Americans, a crime is charged and documented, a victim is specified and a perpetrator is pinpointed.”

Robert Taylor, a spokesperson for “Millions for Reparations,” based in Brooklyn, N.Y., likewise hailed the “We Charge Genocide” petition as an antecedent of the struggles to win reparations for the African-American people for centuries of slavery, genocide and continued oppression today.

“Think of all the police killings of Black people in which the white officers were exonerated,” Taylor said, citing the case of Amadou Diallo who died in a hail of 41 bullets fired by eight white New York City cops. “All the white police officers were exonerated. Consider the Central Park jogger case where those innocent young Black men spent 13 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. Yes, things have changed, but the essence remains the same.”

The struggle against racist oppression has won many victories and made long strides toward equality. But contrary to the assertions of Bush and the ultra-right, the U.S. is far from the “color blind” oasis of “equal opportunity” they proclaim. There are more African Americans in prison than in college. A Human Rights Watch report revealed that Black men are imprisoned of drug offenses at an astounding rate of 1,146 per 100,000, thirteen times higher than the rate of 139 per 100,000 for white men. “This is nothing short of a national scandal,” the report charged.

During the past decade, an estimated 2,000 African Americans died at the hands of police, almost always white officers, the slaying invariably ruled “justifiable homicide.” The most recent is Michael Ellerbe of Uniontown, Pa., a 12-year-old Black youngster shot in the back by Pennsylvania state troopers just before Christmas. The troopers were exonerated by the State’s Attorney.

Jan. 1 was the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet African-American life expectancy is 71.8 years compared to 77.4 years for whites. Infant mortality for African Americans is 14.6 per 1,000 live births compared to 5.8 per 1,000 live births for whites. In these two vital statistics, the gap between white and Black is once again widening.

Last year, 1.3 million people fell below the poverty line. There are now 33 million poor people in the U.S., 7.8 percent white, 22.7 percent Black, and 21.4 Hispanic. Unemployment is at 6 percent and again the Black jobless rate is twice that of whites.

With his demagogic attack on affirmative action at the University of Michigan, falsely branding it “racial preferences” and “reverse discrimination,” Bush makes plain that he seeks to roll back the gains of the African-American people.

In his foreword to the 1970 edition of “We Charge Genocide,” Patterson wrote that “racism U.S.A. is an export commodity breeding aggressive wars and threatening the peace of the world … I assert that the wantonly murderous and predatory racist attacks on Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia … are inseparably related to the equally criminal murders of rebellious Black youth in Chicago … New Haven … Augusta, Georgia, and Jackson, Mississippi.”

Patterson could be writing about George W. Bush and his fanatical drive for war on Iraq. “We Charge Genocide” will continue to ring with the truth until racism is banished and the African-American people have won full equality.

The author can be reached at greenerpastures21212@yahoo.com

The January unemployment numbers

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 04:48:00 +0000

It’s been said that two swallows don’t make a spring. But that didn’t stop The New York Times writer who hailed the 0.3 percent decline in the official unemployment rate last month as the “first signs” that the labor market is “healing.”

While it is true that the official unemployment rate did decline or that unemployment among African Americans fell from 11.2 percent to 10.3 percent (It was 6.2 percent in March 2000.), other indicators contradict the Times’ rosy conclusion:

• Manufacturing industries lost 11,000 in January, bringing the total for the last two months to 100,000 and continuing a trend that has seen these industries shed jobs for 52 of the last 57 months.

• The number of workers forced to work part-time because there are no available full-time jobs by 370,000.

• The labor force grew by more than 1.7 million workers over the last year, workers over age 55 accounting for seven out of every eight of these additional workers. By contrast, the largest declines in employment were among workers between ages 35 and 44 – to say nothing of the millions of young workers who never had a job to lose.

• Almost 1.9 million unemployed workers have been out of work for at least six months, triple the number three years ago. The number of “discouraged” workers – those who have given up looking for jobs – continued to increase and, by Jan. 31, stood 121,000 above the level of Jan. 31, 2002.

Unlike pundits at The New York Times, Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) continues to speak of a “jobless economy” adding that the January numbers continue a trend that began in March 2002 with fluctuations in the month-to-month unemployment rate ranging from 5.7 to 6.0 percent.

Bernstein said one of the reasons private sector employment has contracted by 2.2 million since the recession began in March 2001 has been the weak growth in services, “a sector which typically expands fairly quickly as recoveries get underway and consumers begin to release pent-up demand.”

Bernstein compared today’s growth in service sector employment (up 1 percent in the 23 months since March 2001) with growth rates for a comparable period in six previous recessions and recoveries. Using that measure Bernstein said current growth in service sector employment “is by far” the weakest of any recession/recovery dating back to 1960. “in the absence of stronger growth in this sector,” he continued, “the economy is unlikely to turn the corner anytime soon.”

Although the millions of the unemployed and under-employed are the first victims of a crisis that sees 11 percent of the U.S. workforce under utilized, unemployment hits the living and working conditions workers who have so far managed to keep their jobs.

Persistently high unemployment has resulted in reduced wage increases for millions of workers, with only the most highly skilled among them able to keep up with increases in the cost of living.

According to EPI calculations, wages for workers in the bottom 20 percent saw their wages increase by 1.1 percent in 2002 while the cost of living increased by at least 2.2 percent.

Workers in the middle did better, with increases of 2.1 percent, but they, too, fell further behind – and these numbers fail to take into account productivity increases of nearly 5 percent last year.

The late George Meyers, long-time Labor Secretary of the Communist Party, had a very different view of the value of two swallows than does our New York Times writer. “Hell,” he would say. “Two swallows don’t even make a good drink, let alone a spring!”

The author can be reached at fgab708@aol.com

Feminist response to State of the Union address

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 06:39:00 +0000

George Bush’s State of the Union speech was the public kickoff of his taxpayer-funded public relations campaign to convince an increasingly skeptical public that all is well – or will be if we just put our faith in him and believe.

That he’s concerned about boys and girls growing up without guidance and attention – this while he’s working to require poor moms to leave their kids for an added 10 hours a week because “work is good for you” (Note to parents: all that child care you’re doing? That’s not work).

That he’s “calling corporate criminals to account,” even though his administration looks the other way – and even refused to release records of bigwig meetings with Enron, the granddaddy of corporate scandal.

That he really cares about the education of girls in Afghanistan, although their schools have been bombed and burned since the Bush administration vetoed the UN’s effort to send additional security troops into the country.

That millionaires are suffering and need huge tax cuts, while state budgets are crashing and the jobless rate continues to grow.

That preparing for a war on Iraq isn’t about oil, and a pre-emptive strike doctrine doesn’t violate basic norms of international law. That an unprovoked attack on Iraq won’t alienate U.S. allies, inflame anti-U.S. passion, and make us more susceptible than ever to terrorist attacks.

That Medicare should be privatized and no one will notice as long as it’s called “choice.” Bush says he wants to “put doctors and patients back in charge of American medicine” while pushing a plan that will herd low-income seniors into HMOs – as the price of a mediocre prescription drug benefit.

That the government should funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to “faith- based” organizations for discriminatory social service programs – Bush always conveniently fails to mention that religious organizations already can and do receive millions in federal social service dollars – but they’re not allowed to discriminate against employees or clients.

That he really wants to help stop AIDS in Africa to the tune of $15 billion, yet his administration recently fought to prevent the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS around the world. Talk about needing a reality check!

Here’s some more of what Bush would have us believe, based on his policy proposals – but avoided mentioning:

That it’s okay if Bush succeeds in packing the federal courts with right-wing ideologues in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – who needs an independent judiciary anyhow. After all, didn’t Bush promise us in the 2000 debates that there wouldn’t be a litmus test on judges?

That affirmative action for the sons of wealthy alumni is perfectly fine, but it’s an impermissible racial “quota” if it’s intended to remedy ongoing discrimination against people of color – and that Bush wasn’t race baiting when he called the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program a “quota” system.

That embryos and fetuses should have a legal status that trumps the fundamental rights of girls and women – and makes life-saving stem cell research difficult.

That federal funding for family planning clinics should be choked off while hundreds of millions of dollars are funneled to “fathers’ rights” groups that blame women for men’s abuse and irresponsible behavior.

That women and teenage girls won’t again die from illegal abortion if Bush succeeds in overturning Roe v. Wade.

George W. Bush says that this is a “time of great consequence.” We say: “Who will pay the consequences?” It’s time for a reality check.

Although Bush’s rhetoric is often reminiscent of “Opposite Day” in kindergarten, when teachers and children say just the opposite of what they really mean, the U.S. public isn’t fooled. We know Bush’s war on Iraq is wrong. We also know that Bush’s economic and tax policies are both inequitable and disastrous for the economy. We know, too, that funding for education is imperiled, that quality health care is out of reach for more and more people, and that our rights – women’s rights, civil rights and individual liberties – are under assault as they haven’t been in over a decade.

We’re not fooled and we’re fighting back. Bush’s advisors know he would lose the support of a U.S. public that knew the whole story, so NOW will continue to dissect the White House’s white lies.

Kim Gandy is President of the National Organization for Women, www.now.org.

The same thing is happening

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 05:14:00 +0000

Ryo Kumasaka, one of the 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were rounded up and forced into U.S. concentration camps during World War II, worries that history may be repeating itself.

“We were rounded up for no other reason than the fact that we were Japanese: no warrant, no charges, no trial – citizen and non-citizen alike,” he said. “And now the same thing is happening.”

The “same thing” is NSEERS, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, established under the USA/Patriot Act and administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. NSEERS expands already existing INS systems for tracking foreign nationals living in the United States.

Among its provisions is the requirement that male immigrants over 16 years of age with temporary visas who come from designated countries be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed.

“That’s what they did with us – they made us register and gave us a number,” Kumasaka said. “When people are singled out on the basis of religion and ethnicity, it’s racial profiling, pure and simple – and it’s wrong.”

Non-resident immigrants from more than 25 countries all, with the exception of North Korea, having predominately Muslim populations, must register before the end of February.

Emile Schepers, program director of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, said the interviews are “frightening and intimidating. People are required to give names of people with whom they are visiting and, for students, a list of all courses in which they are enrolled, the names of their roommates and the campus organizations to which they belong. People who are guilty of even minor visa violations can be arrested and jailed on the spot.”

According to Kit Gage, a spokeswoman for National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, more than 1,100 men and boys from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria were arrested by INS authorities when they attempted to register on December 16. The arrests set off angry demonstrations in the Muslim community in Los Angeles.

Later, a coalition of 50 human rights organizations sent a letter to the White House calling for the president to eliminate NSEERS.

“The program is hugely problematic in concept and implementation,” the letter said, adding that some law-abiding immigrants who had attempted to comply with NSEER have been detained for slight procedural infractions, such as not having all the proper paperwork.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) have written to Attorney General John Ashcroft denouncing the NSEERS program, demanding that it be suspended. The letter also asked for specific information concerning the arrests that had taken place.

In its version of the omnibus budget bill for fiscal year 2003 the Senate cut off funding for the NSEERS program. However, the version approved by the House provided full funding for the measure. Constitutional rights groups are urging a lobbying effort to win inclusion of the Senate version when a House-Senate Conference Committee in mid-February to approve the 2003 budget.

The author can be reached at fgab708@aol.com

(Some) heroes recognized at last

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:40:00 +0000

Let’s hear it for heroes. Not the fantasy “super-heroes” depicted in action movies, but real-life workaday Americans who risk their careers and reputations to take a principled stand for what’s right.

Time magazine just honored three of these folks as its “People of the Year” for 2002. One was Sharon Watkins, the midlevel Enron executive who dared to confront her top boss about the gross corruption running rampant in this avaricious corporation; second was Coleen Rowley, the FBI field agent who blew the whistle on the agency’s top brass for preventing her and other field staff from pursuing the September 11th terrorists before they struck; and third was Cynthia Cooper, WorldCom’s internal auditor who went to the board of directors with the startling discovery that top executives had engineered $4 billion in financial “irregularities.”

The extraordinary thing about these three women is that their heroism is not all that extraordinary. It rarely gets much media play, and it sure doesn’t always topple the mighty, but every day in our country there are principled people standing up to their unprincipled higher-ups... and often paying the price.

David Mihalic, for example, is a 33-year Park Service veteran who recently was forced out of the job he cherished, because he would not go along with his political bosses and the White House, who wanted to let developers ram a highway through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “What we do here,” Mihalic said of the Park Service, “we have to do for the common good.”

Eduardo Delacruz, a New York City police officer, is another example. Just before Christmas, he was suspended without pay because he refused to arrest a homeless man found sleeping in a garage. When ordered to make the arrest, Delacruz still refused, saying the man had nowhere to go and it was simply wrong to put him in jail for that.

Heroism is not glamorous ... it’s gutsy. Here’s to all the heroes who help keep America a little more ethical.

Jim Hightower is a radio talk-show host, author and a former agricultural commissioner of Texas. For more information go to: www.jimhightower.com

Bush can be defeated

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:38:00 +0000

The alleged key elements of President Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy have been recently revealed. The president apparently intends to emphasize the war against terrorism and homeland security. For many, this was no surprise since it has been clear since Sept. 11, 2001, that the war against terrorism is as much about moving a domestic right-wing political agenda as it is about fighting terrorists.

Since 9/11, Americans have been subject to a failed military strategy in Afghanistan, which has done little to destroy Al Qaeda; we face regular terror alerts that are about as helpful as knowing that someday our sun will go supernova; and finally the beating of war drums regarding Saddam Hussein, despite the failure – at least as of this writing – to reveal any concrete evidence of possession of weapons of mass destruction. Rather than feeling more secure, most of us feel less secure.

What is striking about this strategy is that it ignores the domestic situation. This is far from surprising since Mr. Bush has a failed domestic strategy, to say the least. At its clearest, the strategy is pro-corporate. The administration came into office applauding corporations and claiming that they had received a bad rap. During the first two years, however, we have borne witness to historic exposures of corruption at the highest levels of corporate America. This has been accompanied by a sluggish economy, low levels of consumer confidence, and the steady disappearance of anything approaching a social safety net.

Yet there is little discussion of this crisis. Nor is there real discussion about environmental deterioration and the growing proof of global warming, or of the healthcare crisis that continues to witness more than 40 million uninsured.

For reasons that probably have mostly to do with fear, President Bush remains popular here at home. By contrast, around the globe the level of unease is astounding.

The unilateralism and arrogance of this administration has everyone holding their breath. The fact that there is no significant international support for a U.S. attack on Iraq is illustrative. Not since the Vietnam War has the United States been more isolated. However, we have an administration that does not seem to particularly care about that.

Rather than assuming the president is unbeatable in 2004, it would be worth examining the issues that are facing us, not limited to the war against terrorism and homeland security. What is desperately needed is a compelling scenario that emphasizes two main points: (1) we are not better off today than we were prior to the Bush administration, and (2) international arrogance on the part of the United States may result in a massive backlash that could mean anything from more terrorist attacks to trade wars.

The administration’s record, rather than being impervious, is actually very vulnerable if an alternative emerges that is based on understanding the fears, angers, and hopes of the people of the United States. This means that this alternative must pay more attention to one-on-one discussions with voters than trying to outshine the administration’s television ads.

The basic lesson of politics is not only that it is local, but also that in order to win over anyone, it starts with personal discussion and connection.

As was demonstrated in the 2002 election when less than 40 percent of the electorate participated, if the people feel alienated and their views are ignored, they will vote all right … they will vote with their feet.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a long-time labor movement activist who currently serves as president of TransAfrica Forum. He can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org

Housing crisis intensifies in Windy City

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:13:00 +0000

CHICAGO – Mayor Richard M. Daley announced a new 10-year Plan to End Homelessness. The plan “focuses on moving the homeless into permanent housing as rapidly as possible, and providing additional social services to help resolve the problems that caused them to lose their homes” according to a Jan. 21 press release.

Daley said the 6,200 shelter beds have served Chicago well and “No one has to sleep on the streets in the city of Chicago.”

But a local homeless man on the city’s Southside told the World that when he has enough money he pays people to give him a place to stay “but can’t really get into a shelter” on most nights. Most of the money he has comes from cleaning car windows, which in winter is especially dangerous, and pointed to a large piece of frost bite on his cracked hands to prove it.

Daley’s plan is similar to a recent report released by National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), “How to End Homelessness in Ten Years.” The report focuses on the need to drastically increase the supply of affordable housing and livable wages as the primary cure to the unrelenting short-term homeless population and poverty. The report also strongly advocates the need for a widescale social support network for people who need mental or physical assistance.

Nationally, close to a million people are homeless each night. Figures for Chicago are not estimated by the city, although agencies like the United Way say that numbers reach up to 15,000 people a night here.

On its face Daley’s response to the rapid growth of homelessness in his tenure is appropriate. He wants to increase the availability of permanent housing by using the money spent of temporary shelters, saying it cost $1,200 a month to support a family of three in a shelter but it would be less for permanent housing with continued services. However, to date he only plans the creation of 90 additional family units, far short of the thousands of units activist say are needed.

In recent months Daley has been under attack due to his administration demolition of most public housing complexes, which have forced thousands of people to search for housing during one of Chicago’s worst winters in an already tight affordable housing markets.

The city’s plan advocates subsidized mortgages and rental units while unemployed breadwinners look for new jobs. But the plan does not include any mass job creation program.

Daley indicated that he may, in addition to the 90 family units, build 500 more Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units. But it all depends on federal and state monies. In May of 2002, Daley released a five-year plan that also planned for the same 90 family units and the 500 SRO units. None of those projects have been started.

This reporter telephoned city officials to question them about these policies, but the calls went unanswered.

Daley has also been under fire for the mass gentrification of many Chicago neighborhoods, which have left many communities with empty condos that residents cannot afford.

Protests and rallies are planned to bring attention to the growing housing crises.

The author can be reached at bkishner@pww.org

NOW blasts Bush on Title IX

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:09:00 +0000

Washington – “In the best Orwellian tradition, the Bush administration is trying to convince us that left is right, up is down, war is peace and that its so-called Commission on Opportunity in Athletics actually cares about women’s equal participation in sports,” said National Organization for Women (NOW) Membership Vice President Terry O’Neill.

George W. Bush has mounted a double-barreled assault on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that requires federally funded schools and colleges to provide equal educational opportunities to girls and women, O’Neill charged, adding, “The recommendations adopted on Jan. 30 by the group appointed to ‘review’ Title IX were not moderate, as some news reports suggested – they were an outright attack on Title IX.”

As the Reagan administration did in the 1980s, the Bush administration is now trying to reverse Title IX’s major progress for women and girls in athletics and education, O’Neill said. “But Bush knows that the vast majority of people in this country – 70 percent of adults familiar with Title IX – want it to be better enforced or left alone, and certainly not weakened, as this commission is trying to do.”

The majority leaders on Bush’s commission, “are being disingenuous about their real goal,” O’Neill said. “They say they’re for Title IX while doing everything they can to demolish it. Then they gag the minority, refusing to allow a minority report to be released. But the voices of the majority of this country will not be silenced. We call on the commission to respect the right of the minority to have its say. What are they so afraid of anyway?”

“We also deplore the unfair process by which the commission desperately tried to project an image of broad and deep support for undermining Title IX,” O’Neill said. “Such support doesn’t exist, and stacking the commission with opponents of equality, who in turn stacked their own hearings with like-minded right-wing idealogues, can’t change the fact that the people of this country want equality for women and girls in sports.”

“The National Organization for Women stands with other women’s rights groups to put the Bush Administration on notice that we won’t go back to the days women and girls were told they couldn’t play sports because it wasn’t ladylike,” O’Neill said. “My twelve-year-old daughter and her friends won’t stand for this and neither will their parents.”

Systemic discrimination in home ownership

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 06:50:00 +0000

Home ownership is often regarded as the key to the American dream, including economic security, accumulating wealth and passing wealth on to the next generation. This is shown by the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, published by the Federal Reserve Board (FRB). In 2001 the median (typical) family that owned its home had a net worth of $171,700. Those without a home had a net worth of only $4,800. Although the typical homeowner is far from wealthy, those without homes have almost nothing to fall back on.

The FRB study divides families into two categories: white non-Hispanic, and nonwhite or Hispanic. It shows a growing divide between the two.

Who Owns Homes?

Between 1992 and 2001, the percentage of white families with their own homes increased from 68.9 percent to 74.1 percent. But nonwhite family ownership rate actually declined from 48.8 percent to 47.0 percent. The typical nonwhite home was worth $92,000, or 71 percent of the typical white-owned home (worth $130,000). If owning a home is the key to the American dream and to economic security, African Americans, along with Hispanics and other people of color, are falling further behind.

Lower rates of home-ownership for nonwhites can be partly explained by lower incomes, and less chance of inheriting a home. But other forms of discrimination also contribute. For people of color, mortgages are harder to get and their fees and interest rates are higher; homeowners insurance is harder to find and costs more; and property taxes are likely to be higher.

Home Mortgages

The 1990s saw a big growth of subprime and predatory lending – mortgage loans with extra-high interest rates and exorbitant fees and conditions. The community organization ACORN showed that African Americans are four times more likely than white homebuyers to receive a subprime loan, and Latinos are twice as likely. The problem is getting worse: from 1995 to 2000, the percentage of subprime loans increased three-fold to white homebuyers, and about seven times for African-American and Latino homebuyers.

Another study showed that even Black and Hispanic homeowners with above-average incomes pay more for their mortgages than whites with comparable incomes (New York Times, May 1, 2002).

Home Insurance

Business Week (January 28, 2002) reported that insurance redlining, outlawed in 1968, “never completely went away.” Now, with profits under pressure from losses in the stock market, insurance companies are raising premiums in ways that “have aroused suspicions [of] illegal discrimination against low-income, elderly and minority customers.” In most states, according to the Inner City Press (ICP), insurance companies face very weak regulation. In the few places where information is available, ICP found clear evidence of discrimination against African Americans, even when family income levels were comparable with white homeowners.

In Connecticut, state data show that African Americans pay about 27 percent more than whites for auto insurance. The state does not provide comparable information for homeowners insurance, but there is no reason to think the situation is any better.

Taxes

African Americans are likely to pay more for taxes as well as insurance. Because corporations and wealthy individuals have deserted cities and towns with a high proportion of people of color, the costs of maintaining city services falls squarely on the backs of those remaining, and property taxes are higher.

Even within a single town or county, homes in Black neighborhoods can be taxed more heavily. A study by Robert P. Strauss of Carnegie-Mellon University looked at tax assessments in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, Pa. He found that homes in all-Black neighborhoods were assessed at over twice the rate as homes in all-white neighborhoods! It is unlikely that Allegheny County is unique.

Conclusion

In every step of the home ownership process, people of color face obstacles and added costs. It is difficult to prove discrimination in individual cases. But the pattern becomes clear in the low rate of home ownership.

We need stronger affirmative action laws with real enforcement power. Targeted aid programs should help people of color close the housing gap. Mortgage and insurance executives whose companies show a pattern of discrimination against African-American or Latino neighborhoods should be prosecuted. Increased federal funding for public education would reduce property taxes for all homeowners, with the most relief going to the present victims of discrimination.

The author can be reached at arthur.perlo@pobox.com