The DISH
Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use
Vol. 11 Issue 5…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…February 1, 2008
Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
By Marvin Gaye/James Nyx
Dah (Repeated 20 times)
Rockets, moon shots...Spend it on the have nots
Money, we make it...Fore we see it you take it
Oh, make you wanna holler
The way they do my life
Make me wanna holler
The way they do my life
This ain't livin',
This ain't livin'
No, no baby, this ain't livin'
No, no, no
Inflation no chance...To increase finance
Bills pile up sky high
Send that boy off to die
Make me wanna holler
The way they do my life
Make me wanna holler...The way they do my life
Dah (Repeat 5 times)
Hang ups, let downs...Bad breaks, set backs
Natural fact is...I can't pay my taxes
Oh, make me wanna holler
And throw up both my hands
Yea, it makes me wanna holler
And throw up both my hands
Crime is increasing...Trigger happy policing
Panic is spreading
God know where we're heading
Oh, make me wanna holler
They don't understand
Dah, dah, dah, Dah, dah, dah, Dah, dah, dah
Mother, mother
Everybody thinks we're wrong
Who are they to judge us
Simply cause we wear our hair long
Stop "Trigger Happy" Policing
Tarika Wilson is dead. Lima, Ohio police shot the 26-year-old mother and her infant son on January 4, 2008. According to news account, a SWAT team came to Wilson's rented house in the dirty Southside neighborhood of Lima to arrest Wilson's companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing. With guns drawn, the team broke down her front door, killing an unarmed Wilson, who was apparently holding her 14-month-old son; he received gunshot wounds to his hand and shoulder.
In typical police reaction to a raid gone wrong, one officer has been placed on paid administrative leave. The police department has refused to provide any details of the raid, pending an investigation. Their silence and another senseless death on top of ongoing police harassment have black residents in this poor community understandably upset. Marches and demonstrations have been held with more to come. The local branch of the NAACP is calling for the US Justice Department to conduct an investigation of the police's 'trigger happy' tactics.
Tarika Wilson's death is eerily similar to the senseless murder of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, who was killed by an Atlanta, Georgia SWAT team armed with a "no-knock" warrant in 2006. The police ostensibly went to her home in pursuit of a drug dealer; it was the wrong house and Johnston died for their mistake.
Wilson and Johnston are just two of the many deaths that have occurred as a result of overzealous policing in the war on drugs. In addition to the deaths and injuries it has caused, thousands have been incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses. It is time to end this senseless domestic warfare. Please visit http://stopthedrugwar.org for more information and sign their petition at http://stopthedrugwar.org/raidpetition calling for an end to the lethal police practices like those that claimed the lives of Tarika Wilson and Kathryn Johnston.
Edgar Daniel Nixon (1899 -1987)
"I'm from Montgomery, Alabama, a city that's known as the Cradle of the Confederacy, that had
stood still for more than ninety-three years until Rosa L. Parks was arrested and thrown in jail like
a common criminal. Fifty thousand people rose up and caught hold to the Cradle of the Confederacy
and began to rock it till the Jim Crow rockers began to reel and the segregated slats began to fall
out." Edgar Daniel Nixon - Madison Square Garden, New York
The son of a Baptist minister and a maid/cook, Edgar Daniel Nixon was born in Lowndes County, Alabama on July 12, 1899. He received little formal education. Nixon worked in the train station's baggage room, before becoming a Pullman car porter. In 1928, Nixon joined A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union. He later helped to form its Montgomery branch and served as its president for many years.
An equal rights advocate, Nixon campaigned for voting and civil rights for blacks in Montgomery, Alabama. As an unelected advocate for the black community, he helped individuals deal with biased government officials and civil servants. In 1940, he organized a march and voter registration drive. Nixon ran for a seat on the county Democratic Executive Committee in 1954. The following year, he publicly sought answers from the Democratic candidates to the Montgomery City Commission on their positions on civil rights issues.
In the early 1950's, Nixon and JoAnn Robinson, president of the Women's Political Council, decided to challenge the segregated seating practices employed by the Montgomery municipal bus company. A Montgomery segregation ordinance reserved seats in the front of buses for whites, forcing blacks paying the same fare to sit in the back. To mount a court challenge, someone had to break the law and get arrested. Nixon rejected several possible plaintiffs, an unwed mother and a young woman with an alcoholic father, before choosing Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.
On December 1, 1955, Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white male passenger. Aided by Clifford Durr, a white attorney, Nixon bailed her out of jail. With the start of the court challenge to the racist law, Nixon called on local ministers to support a bus boycott. Those he called included the young minister from Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who agreed to aid the effort.
After a list of demands for the bus company was drafted, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed and candidates for its leadership named, Nixon met with the ministers to plan the boycott. The ministers wanted to keep the boycott low key so as not to upset Montgomery's white power elite; Nixon threatened to denounce them as cowards. King stood up and stated that he was no coward. King accepted the MIA presidency and Nixon become its treasurer.
Despite fierce political opposition, police coercion and personal threats, the Montgomery bus boycott held, lasting 381 days. On February 1, 1956, a bomb exploded in front of Nixon's home. In the meantime, the court challenge reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled Montgomery's segregation policy was unlawful.
After the boycott, Nixon's relationship with the MIA grew contentious. By the late 1960's, a series of political defeats eliminated his leadership role in the MIA. He retired from the railroad in 1964 and worked as the recreation director of a public housing project. Nixon continued to work for civil rights, focusing on improving conditions at housing projects and organizing programs for black children.
In 1985, Nixon received the Walter White Award from the NAACP. He served as president of the local chapter of the NAACP, the Montgomery Welfare League, and the Montgomery Voters League. His home in Montgomery was placed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage in 1986. Edgar Daniel Nixon, the union leader and civil rights advocate that helped launch the Montgomery bus boycott, the event that propelled Dr. King to national prominence, died at age 87 on February 25, 1987. (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org, www.stanford.edu and www.answers.com)
One Bush Left Behind
By Greg Palast
Here's your question, class: In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300
million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living
in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here's your second question: The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. Okay, class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That's right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, "In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them." So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy? George Bush's alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 "Pell Grant for Kids," as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So, they'll have to wake up quickly. $20 won't cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can't buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a "rock" of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid's dream for at least 15 minutes.
Now, we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked, and desperate. Don't say, "crack vials," they're, "Democracy Rocks"!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, "I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year -- and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them."
There's an effective alternative to Mr. Bush's plan -- which won't cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let's give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there's an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.
About Me: A BBC investigative reporter, Greg Palast is the author of the N.Y. Times best-sellers "Armed Madhouse" and "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." For more about his work, log on to www.gregpalast.com.
Disgruntled says: The shoddy treatment accorded the victims of Hurricane Katrina made the USA
look like a Third World country. The images of people clinging to rooftops, wading in filthy water,
begging for help, left an ugly stain on the reputation of the world's sole superpower that is unlikely
to disappear any time soon. To increase that time horizon, the federal government announced on
Friday the approval of a Mississippi plan to divert some $600 million earmarked for housing to the
expansion of a state-owned port, a project that will surely further enrich some member of the already
wealthy elite. With thousands still living in trailers and even more unable to return home due to a
lack of housing, this diversion of funds for some rich men's pet project adds insult to the injury done
to the poor people displaced by that storm.
Disgruntled wants to know: Politicians and talking heads that claim to know how the US
economy works claim the market knows best; they worship supply and demand, as if they flawlessly
work. Recently, a congressman claimed gas prices were high because of a low supply and high
demand. He failed to mention speculation, the falling dollar and exorbitant oil company profits that
figure into the price of a barrel of oil. Contrary to their non-intervention preference, Congress is
considering a fiscal stimulus bill that George W. Bush will likely sign into law and the Federal
Reserve has been historically pro-active in lowering interest rates to shore up a faltering economy.
Question is, how does the Fed's aggressive actions in adding massive liquidity to the market,
basically bailing out banks and insurance companies that made questionable investments in risky
mortgages, exemplify the model of market capitalism?
Disgruntled feels: Conundrum! Remember when Dubai wanted to buy a US port operation? The
Lou Dobbs crowd created such a stink, the pending deal got sidetracked in no time flat. Fast forward
to the specter of financial collapse led by the nation's biggest banks and investment funds from
anywhere, including Dubai and other oil-rich Muslim countries, are welcomed. There is no outcry
about these countries making such investments and the possible threat they pose to national security.
It's a real conundrum that is explained by looking at who controls US media and its financial
services industry; they are one and the same!
Bushwhacked or 3/5 Compromised
By Dot
Statistics for the overall economy do not bode well. Unemployment is up, real incomes are
declining, food and fuel prices are increasing, home ownership is at an historic low, millions of jobs
that paid middle class wages have gone offshore, thousands more go to foreigners with H1-B visas
or illegal immigrants, foreclosure rates are ravishing some states, etc. You get the picture; the
economic pain is debilitating. Finally, the nation's political leadership has ceased its senseless
prattle about the "resilient economy" and is working on a quick fit fiscal stimulus package to
jumpstart the economy.
The proposed spending package can provide a shot in the arm, like B-12, a short term energy boost. Yet, it will do nothing to solve the nation's structural problems, which are not being addressed by the Oval Office occupant or candidates vying for the job in either political party. There seems to be a taboo forbidding them from speaking to the economic problems that plague black Americans, the group most harmed by structural unemployment.
Most of us are not born wealthy. The vast majority of Americans rely on income from employment. Since most of us live in families, the median family income is an excellent gage of how well or ill we are doing. In the US, blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts at every socioeconomic level. At the current national unemployment rate of 5%, the white unemployment rate is 4.4%. The black unemployment rate is 9.0%, more than twice the rate for whites. This disparity between black and white unemployment rates has existed since the nation began collecting the statistic. For teens, the rates are in the double digits with black teens often experiencing rates above 30%. High unemployment rates translate into low incomes.
Under the Bush administration, the state of black America grew worse from his first year in office. According to the US Census Bureau, the black median family income in 2000 was $35,653, while the white median family income was $51,814, for a black/white ratio of approximately .69. The black median family income declined; it fell to $32,499 in 2001, then $31,509, $31,460 and $31,101 for 2002, 2003 and 2004, respectively. The white median family income also fell to $49,093 in 2001, then $48,942, $48,424, and $48,218 for 2002, 2003 and 2004, respectively.
In all likelihood, conditions are far worse than the numbers suggest. Just as all black votes are not counted, so too are these numbers likely doctored. Yet, the picture they paint is one of poor economic conditions, especially relative to whites. For example, the ratio of black to white median family income fell in 2001 to .64. In 2005, the latest year compiled by the Census Bureau, the black median family income declined to $30,858, but the white median family income rose to $48,554 for a black/white ratio of .63. In case you failed to recognize it; this is the 3/5 compromise mandated in the US Constitution under Article 1, Section 2.
As he solidified the "dirty south," George W. Bush's campaign rhetoric made it clear that he would roll back gains blacks made during the previous administration. He promised to oppose affirmative action and to appoint judges that strictly construct the Constitution. He embraced the Confederate flag as a symbol of his heritage and telegraphed his intention to promote, enhance and protect white supremacy. Bush kept his promise to roll things back; the nation's historic structural inequality remains intact, blacks lost income and wealth under the Bush administration.
None of the current crop of candidates to replace Bush, neither Democrat, Republican, black, white or in-between, is talking about changing the structural problems that relegate blacks to the bottom of the socioeconomic and political ladder. And, that is unfortunate, because if there is anything that needs to be changed to make this nation a true democracy, one that lives up to its creed that all men are created equal, it is its structural unemployment and resulting income disparities between black and white families.
Network Neutrality
"Net neutrality" refers to residential broadband networks, and potentially all networks free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, that does not restrict content, sites, or platforms and where communication is not unduly degraded by other communication streams.
According to groups familiar with the topic, the threat to net neutrality is real. Corporate control of the Web would reduce your choices and stifle the spread of innovative and independent ideas that we've come to expect online. It would throw the digital revolution into reverse. Internet gatekeepers are already discriminating against Web sites and services they don't like. Examples include the Associated Press revelation in October 2007 that Comcast was blocking its users' access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. In September 2007, Verizon was caught banning pro-choice text messages. After a New York Times expose, the phone company reversed its policy, claiming it was a glitch. In August 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush.
Cable and telecommunication giants want to eliminate the Internet's open road in favor of tolls to protect their status quo while stifling new ideas and innovation. What they've planned is a threat to an open Internet. Nearly everyone who uses the net will be affected, including small businesses, innovators, startups and entrepreneurs, bloggers, Google users, Ipod listeners, online shoppers, political groups, non-profits, parents and telecommuters.
For more about the nature of the threats to net neutrality and who is likely to be affected, see http://www.savetheinternet.com/=threat. Tell the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and Congress that you support net neutrality! You can send your personal comments to the FCC and all your members of Congress at the same time. Click on the link www.usalone.com/laesch/pnum786.php or copy and paste it into your browser.
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Phone Calls
Email thgrey@yahoo.com ...You will find this quote most relevant. "A good number of our
people have "liberated" themselves from our suffering by joining the enemy in exploiting our
situation and us. Some have decided to "liberate" themselves by living in denial of our brutal
occupation, hoping that everything will be all right as if we were living in a Jimmy Cliff song. And
still others have decided to deny themselves the opportunity to join our struggle, preferring to live
the comforts and dreams of alien sweat overseas than take the challenge of their own people, their
own generation and their own time." Augustine Ambe
Email http://news.yahoo.com/ ....Nevada had top foreclosure rate in 2007...By Alex
Veiga...About 1.3 million homes received foreclosure-related warnings last year, up from 717,522
in 2006, Irvine-based RealtyTrac Inc. said. Foreclosure filings rose 75% from the previous year to
2.2 million. More than 1 percent of all US households were in some phase of the foreclosure process
last year, up from about half a percent in 2006. Nevada, Florida, Michigan and California posted
the highest rates.
Email www.consortiumnews.com...The Fight For Bush's Legacy...By Robert Parry...Instead
of doing the hard work to hold the Bushes accountable, Democrats are "leaving it to the historians."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats are turning a deaf ear to grassroots demands for
impeachment hearings against Bush and Dick Cheney over their violations of criminal laws (e.g. ban
on torture and need for warrants authorizing wiretaps), their trampling on constitutional rights, and
deceptions that led the nation into the disastrous Iraq War. Though Democrats control the House and
Senate, there doesn't appear to be a likelihood of comprehensive hearings on the lessons to be
learned from Bush's blunders in the "global war on terror."
Email http://money.cnn.com...Home ownership in record plunge...By Chris Isidore...The housing and mortgage meltdown caused the biggest one-year drop in the rate of homeownership on record, according to government figures. The Census Bureau report showed that homeowners accounted for 67.8% of occupied homes in the fourth quarter, down 1.1 points from a year earlier. It's the largest year-over-year drop recorded in the report. The ownership rate was also below the 68.2% rate in the third quarter of 2007. Homeownership rates hit a record 69.2% in 2004.
Email slavishrage@gmail.com..As a slave descendent, Senator Barack Obama does not share my heritage, even though his father was a black African. I do not hold that against him; none of the other presidential candidates I voted for shared my ancestors' and my experience in this country. I could care less that his skin is so light that he sometimes appear white; skin color does not determine one's character. Unlike the black stereotypes spread by US media about black anti-intelligence, I applaud his perseverance in acquiring an education. He speaks well and that is a gift to be applauded. I do not buy the media claim that blacks hold any of these things against Mr. Obama. I believe blacks in large numbers will do as we have done in the past; we will hold our noses and vote for Mr. Obama. In doing so, we do not expect him to address the issues that most negatively impact us. He will become the black face that represents America. Like all the white men before him, if elected president, Obama will do the bidding of those who control America. He will bend over backwards in supporting Israel, maybe even start a war or two against Muslim nations to appease his masters.