The DISH

Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use

Vol. 14 No. 36…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…September 5, 2011

Venue for an Artist

Free and Equal Blues

By Josh White (1914 - 1969)

I went down to that St. James Infirmary,

And I saw some plasma there

I ups and asks the doctor man,

"Say was the donor dark or fair?"

The doctor laughed a great big laugh,

And he puffed it right in my face,

He said, "A molecule is a molecule, son,

And the damn thing has no race."

And that was news, yes that was news,

That was very, very, very special news.

'Cause ever since that day

We've had those free and equal blues.

"You mean you heard that doc declare

That the plasma in that test tube there could be

White man, black man, yellow man, red?"

"That's just what that doctor said."

The doc put down his doctor book

And gave me a very scientific look

And he spoke out plain and clear and rational,

He said, "Metabolism is international."

Then the doc rigged up his microscope

with some Berlin blue blood,

And, by gosh, it was the same as Chun King,

Quebechef, Chattanooga, Timbuktoo blood

Why, those men who think they're noble

Don't even know that the corpuscle is global

Trying to disunite us with their racial supremacy,

And flying in the face of old man chemistry,

Taking all the facts and trying to twist 'em,

But you can't overthrow the circulatory system.

So I stayed at that St. James Infirmary.

I couldn't leave that place, it was too interesting

But I said to the doctor,

"Give me some more of that scientific talk,"

He said, "Melt yourself down into a crucible

Pour yourself out into a test tube

and what have you got?

Thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas,

The same for the upper and lower class."

Well, I let that pass . . .

"Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces"

"You mean that goes for princes, dukes and counts?"

"Whatever you are, that's what the amounts is:

Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces; iron, 57 grains."

Not enough to keep a man in chains.

"50 ounces of phosophorus,

that's whether you're poor or prosperous."

"Say buddy, can you spare a match?"

"Sugar, 60 ordinary lumps,

free and equal rations for all nations.

Then you take 20 teaspoons of sodium chloride

(that's salt), and you add 38 quarts of H2O

(that's water), mix two ounces of lime,

a pinch of chloride of potash, a drop of magnesium,

a bit of sulfur, and a spoon of hydrochloric acid,

and you stir it all up, and what are you?"

"You're a walking drugstore."

"It's an international, metabolistic cartel."

And that was news, yes that was news,

So listen, you African and Indian and Mexican,

Mongolian, Tyrolean and Tartar,

The doctor's right behind the Atlantic Charter.

The doc's behind the new brotherhood of man,

As prescribed at San Francisco and Yalta,

Dumbarton Oaks, and at Potsdam:

Every man, everywhere is the same,

when he's got his skin off.

And that's news, yes that's news,

That's the free and equal blues!

About Me: Joshua Daniel White was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor, and civil rights activist. He also recorded under the names "Pinewood Tom" and "Tippy Barton" in the 1930s. White grew up in the Jim Crow South. During the 1920s and 30s, he became a prominent race records artist, with a prolific output of recordings across several genres, including country blues, gospel, and social protest songs. His anti-segregationist and international human rights stance in his recordings and speeches at rallies resulted in right-wing McCarthyites assuming he was a Communist. From 1947 through the mid 1960s, White was caught up in the anti-Communist Red Scare, which damaged his career. His guitar playing style influenced many artists.

Bit of History

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Born March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Joan Bader is the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader. The family nicknamed her "Kiki". They belonged to the East Midwood Jewish Center, where she took her religious confirmation seriously. At age thirteen, she acted as "camp rabbi" at a Jewish summer program at Camp Che-Na-Wah in Minerva, New York.

Bader attended James Madison High School. Her older sister died when she was very young; her mother died the day before her high school graduation.

Bader graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government on June 23, 1954. A few days after graduating from Cornell, Bader married Martin D. Ginsburg, an internationally prominent tax lawyer, and then professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. The following fall, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine women in a class of more than five hundred.

When her husband took a job in New York City, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, becoming the first woman to be on two major law reviews -- the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews. Ginsburg graduated in 1959 at the top of her class. Despite her stellar academic record, numerous New York City law firms rejected her applications for employment. She was turned down for a clerkship with US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. From 1959-1961, Ginsburg clerked for Judge Edmund Palmieri in the US District Court, Southern District of New York.

From 1961 to 1963, Ginsburg worked as a research associate and then director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. From 1962-1972, Ginsburg was a member of the faculty at Rutgers University School of Law. In 1970, she co-founded the Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women's rights.

From 1972 until 1980, she taught at Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination, Text, Cases, and Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination (1974). She also taught in Tulane University Law School's summer-abroad program. In 1977, she became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and, in 1973 she became the ACLU's General Counsel. As the chief litigator for the Women's Rights Project, she briefed and argued several landmark cases in front of the Supreme Court, such as Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), wherein the Court extended the protections of the Equal Protection Clause to women for the first time. She also argued Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973) and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636 (1975), which supported the ultimate development and application of the intermediate scrutiny Equal Protection standard of review for legal classifications based on sex. She attained a reputation as a skilled oral advocate, and her work directly led to the end of gender discrimination in many areas of the law.

Her last case as a lawyer before the Court was 1978's Duren v. Missouri, which challenged laws and practices making jury duty voluntary for women in that state. Ginsburg viewed optional jury duty as a message that women's service was unnecessary to important government functions.

President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on April 14, 1980. During her thirteen years on the DC Circuit, Ginsburg failed to hire a single black person, even though she filled 57 positions that included law clerks, interns, and secretaries. When President Bill Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on June 14, 1993 to fill the seat vacated by retiring Justice Byron White, Ginsburg, an "aggressive supporter of disparate-impact statistics as evidence of intentional discrimination," was sharply criticized for failing to hire a single black person.

The first Democratic appointee to the Court in over twenty-five years, Ginsburg received a "Well Qualified" rating from the American Bar Association. She was confirmed as the Court's 107th justice by a vote of 96 to 3.

Throughout her career, Justice Ginsburg has embraced the idea of equality and consistently stressed her belief that all three branches of government need to act together to achieve equal rights. She has criticized the Roe decision, while agreeing with its results. She has said, "The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman." One statement she made during an interview, "Frankly, I had thought at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of," was criticized by conservative commentator Michael Gerson as reflecting an "attitude . . . that abortion is economically important to a 'woman of means' and useful in reducing the number of social undesirables."

Ginsburg is generally viewed as belonging to the liberal wing of the Court. Ginsburg administered, at his request, Vice President Al Gore's oath of office to a second term during the second presidential inauguration of Clinton on January 20, 1997.

In 2009, Forbes named her among the 100 Most Powerful Women. James Madison High School's law program dedicated a courtroom in her honor. In 2009 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Willamette University, in 2010 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton University, and in 2011 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University.

Ginsburg has been twice diagnosed with cancer. With the retirement of John Paul Stevens in 2010, at 77 years of age, she is the eldest justice on the Court.

Martin and Ruth Ginsburg celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary on June 23, 2010. Martin died on June 27, 2010. The couple has two children. (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org, www.answers.com, http://judgepedia.org, and http://www.fjc.gov)

Intuit's Vibe

Eugenics Justice

"It's hard for me to accept or to understand or to even try to figure out why these kinds of atrocious acts could have been committed in this country ... and I just came here as a woman, as a mama, and as a grandmama and as governor of this state, quite frankly, to tell you it was wrong. It makes you wonder who we were as a people during those years. The state of North Carolina is a partner with you in trying to bring awareness and to redress, in some way, however we may, these awful ills ..." Those were the sentiments of North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue following testimony of eugenics victim Elaine Riddick before a five-member task force created by Gov. Perdue to identify victims of the state's sterilization program and to develop a plan to compensate them.

Between 1929 and 1974, most U.S. states had eugenics programs; more than 30 enacted laws mandating surgical sterilization for certain individuals. North Carolina sterilized more than 7,600 individuals in the name of "improving" the state's human stock. It is estimated that nationwide as many as 100,000 people were sterilized before the practice was discredited.. However, by the time it ended, most of those neutered were young, black, poor women, like Delores Elaine Riddick.

In many ways, Riddick has become the face of the movement demanding justice for the victims of the nation's experiment with eugenics. Raped at thirteen, Riddick gave birth to a son, Anthony Riddick. She awoke from labor to find her stomach wrapped in bandages. Unbeknownst to her, the North Carolina Eugenics Board had met on January 23, 1968 and signed a petition for her sterilization

Some years later, Riddick learned the truth about the bandages and was encouraged by one of her sisters to do something about what had happened to her.

In 1973, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Women's Rights Project, then under the direction of future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, filed a federal suit against the state of North Carolina on behalf of another victim of the sterilization program. They were looking for more plaintiffs to join a class action. Riddick stepped forward.

On Jan. 18, 1974, ACLU attorneys filed suit in U.S. District Court against the members of the state Eugenics Commission, local social workers and the hospital where the operation was performed. She was seeking $1 million.

It would be nine years before the suit would go to trial, and although the Eugenics Commission was formally abolished in 1977, the ACLU pressed on. In January 1983, testimony began in U.S. District Court at New Bern. The trial ended on January 19, 1983. It took the jury just 45 minutes to render its verdict against the plaintiff, finding that Riddick had not been "unlawfully or wrongfully deprived of her right to bear children as a proximate result of the actions of any of the defendants."

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it on October 1, 1984. Riddick's quest for justice appeared over until a team of Winston-Salem Journal reporters investigating the state's eugenics program learned of the lawsuit and tracked her down. When the series "Against Their Will" was published in 2002, Riddick's story was a centerpiece.

One of the series' most striking findings was the eugenics program's apparent racial and sexual bias. During the program's first decade, 79 percent of those sterilized were white; by the time Riddick's case was decided, 64 percent of the operations were being performed on black females.

Following the revelations, then-Gov. Mike Easley issued an apology to eugenics victims and their families. Victims were also offered some special health and education benefits. But the Riddicks and others pushed for monetary reparations.

In October of 2008, Riddick testified before a legislative committee, which recommended giving each victim $20,000. Running for governor, Beverly Perdue vowed to get the funding but, once elected, she ran headlong into a $4.6 billion budget gap.

In 2009, Perdue and the Senate set aside $250,000 for the newly created Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation to identify victims and develop a plan to compensate them. This March, Perdue created the five-member task force. When it held a public hearing on June 22, Riddick and her son were there.

Trembling with hurt and rage, Riddick declared, "It doesn't matter what you think I'm worth. It's what I think I'm worth. There's nothing that the state of North Carolina can do to justify what they did to me - what they did to these other victims."

Taking his mother's place at the microphone, Tony Riddick said the eugenics program was nothing short of attempted "genocide."

The task force issued its preliminary report on August 1. Its recommendations include an unspecified lump sum in financial damages and mental health services for victims. A final report is due February 1, 2012. (Sources: http://abcnews.go.com and www2.journalnow.com)

Hood Notes

US Conducted Gruesome Experiments in Guatemala

By Mike Stobbe

A presidential panel on Monday disclosed shocking new details of U.S. medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study.

The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in U.S. history, but panel members say the new information indicates that the researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.

"The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second," said Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research -- paid for by the U.S. government -- that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases.

The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.

The commission revealed Monday that only about 700 of those infected received some sort of treatment. Also, 83 people died, although it's not clear if the deaths were directly due to the experiments.

The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts. It was hidden for decades but came to light last year, after a Wellesley College medical historian discovered records among the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who led the experiments.

President Barack Obama called Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom, to apologize. He also ordered his bioethics commission to review the Guatemala experiments. That work is nearly done. Though the final report is not due until next month, commission members discussed some of the findings at a meeting Monday in Washington.

They revealed that some of the experiments were more shocking than was previously known.

For example, seven women with epilepsy, who were housed at Guatemala's Asilo de Alienados (Home for the Insane), were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, a risky procedure. Researchers thought the new infection might somehow help cure epilepsy. The women each got bacterial meningitis, probably as a result of the unsterile injections, but were treated.

Perhaps the most disturbing details involved a female syphilis patient with an undisclosed terminal illness. The researchers, curious to see the impact of an additional infection, infected her with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere. Six months later she died.

Dr. Amy Gutmann, head of the commission, described the case as "chillingly egregious."

During that time, other researchers were also using people as human guinea pigs, in some cases infecting them with illnesses. Studies weren't as regulated then, and the planning-on-the-fly feel of Cutler's work was not unique, some experts have noted.

But panel members concluded that the Guatemala research was bad even by the standards of the time. They compared the work to a 1943 experiment by Cutler and others in which prison inmates were infected with gonorrhea in Terre Haute, Ind. The inmates were volunteers who were told what was involved in the study and gave their consent. The Guatemalan participants -- or many of them -- received no such explanations and did not give informed consent, the commission said.

The commission is working on a second report examining federally funded international studies to make sure current research is being done ethically. That report is expected at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the Guatemalan government has vowed to conduct its own investigation into the Cutler study. A spokesman for Vice President Rafael Espada said the report should be done by November. (Source: www.startribune.com)

DISHing It Up Hot!

A Venus Well-Wish

By Dot

The US Open began its first round of matches this Monday. A tennis nut, who fell in love with the game as a youngster watching players on a dusty makeshift schoolyard court in the 1960s, I eagerly anticipated watching the matches, especially since my favorite women players - the Williams sisters - appeared to be healthy and in contention.

Neither Venus nor Serena has played particularly well for the past eighteen months. Serena made a comeback during the hard court season and has a chance to win an extra million dollars should she win the US Open title, but Venus has been mostly missing in action. For most of the 2011 tennis season, she suffered with hip and abdominal injuries, and she withdrew from several tournaments this season citing an unspecified virus.

On Monday, Venus won her first round match in a mere 78 minutes. Her 6-4, 6-3 victory over Vesna Dolonts made Williams appear a contender to win her third United States Open title. However, Venus proved to be a no-show for her scheduled second round match against the number 22 seed Sabine Lisicki.

Apparently, Venus has suffered with Sjogren's Syndrome for years and only recently received the autoimmune disease diagnosis to explain her debilitating fatigue, swollen joints and numbness.

According to Dr. Frederick Vivino, clinical associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and director of the Penn Sjogren's Syndrome Center, the disease is "a major women's health problem that's largely under-diagnosed and under-treated, because it causes so many symptoms, sometimes it is difficult for a specialist to get the big picture. And most of the patients do not look like they have a chronic illness. Because they look a lot better than they feel, some of our patients have been told they're hypochondriacs or they're depressed or they are experiencing these symptoms due to menopause, and they just accept that. That's why people go years before being treated for autoimmune diseases."

Williams said she received the diagnosis in August, and was relieved to finally have an explanation for her swollen hands, chronic fatigue and misshapen joints. At age 31, questions are being raised about her ability to overcome the disease and return to competitive tennis. Venus, in an interview on Good Morning America, emphatically declared she will return to tennis.

There is no cure for Sjogren's Syndrome. Venus believes, with medication to control her symptoms, she can return to competitive play next year, maybe sooner. She has vowed to do her best to make that happen. In the meantime, she has become a spokesperson for the syndrome, helping to raise awareness of the disease that affects mostly women ages 20 - 60.

An avid fan, I certainly wish her the very best and look forward to her return to center court.

Disgruntled says: The jobs report published on Friday shows the unemployment rate was unchanged for the month of August. For a country that requires more than 150,000 new jobs per month just to keep pace with population growth, this latest report is pure fiction. A more realistic depiction of the situation is provided by Kevin Drum's Chart of the Day: The Real Employment Picture at http://motherjones.com; it shows the real net job growth over the past three years has been negative. Drum suggests and I agree that something can be done. He rhetorically throws out spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure. Others have suggested jobs programs similar to those used during the Great Depression. While the nation sinks deeper into this morass, Congress and the president play politics and waits for Thursday to announce a proposal that may or may not be implemented. This lack of action to address an emergency situation is unacceptable.

Disgruntled wants to know: Segments of the US population are struggling to keep food on the table, while others are living large, particularly the super rich that do not depend on having a job for their economic welfare. Even though the most recent unemployment numbers fail to capture the true nature of the jobs situation, they illustrate the uneven economic struggle of those in the labor market. For instance, the unemployment rate for whites actually fell one-tenths of one percent from 8.1 to 8.0, while the black unemployment rate rose nearly one percent from 15.9 to 16.7 percent. In the case of men, the unemployment rate for white men fell two-tenths of one percent from 7.9 to 7.7 percent, while the rate for black men rose one percent from 17 to 18 percent. Oddly, the unemployment rate for black and white women remained unchanged at 13.4 and 7.0 percent, respectively. The rate for white teens rose six-tenths of one percent from 28.3 to 28.9 percent. However, for black teens, the rate grew significantly from 39.2 to 46.5 percent. This means that nearly half of black teens seeking work cannot find a job. For the black population, even these numbers, which significantly under-represent the situation on the ground, are not recession numbers. Does President Obama realize or care that black people are in a deep depression?

Disgruntled feels: Discarded! Over forty and unemployment people are being told not to bother applying for jobs because the few employers that are hiring want young, college-educated workers willing to take ten dollars an hour without complaints and no benefits. Even should an older worker be willing to endure such exploitation, employers are not hiring them. Everyone, including the federal government, is well aware this type of discrimination is happening, but they are treating it as an acceptable business practice. I am reminded of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis in which a family's breadwinner changes overnight into a bug, is injured by an apple thrown by a family member in fear and loathing that lodges in his back, dies without medical assistance and is discarded with the trash. The family learns it did okay without the bug's income. This is unlikely to be the outcome for the US; this nation cannot expect to prosper after having carelessly discarded so many of its most productive workers.

Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls

Email www.greenpeace.org...New clothing tests show hormone-disrupting chemicals in global brands...Beijing - Manila, 23 August 2011 - The latest research into toxic water pollution released today by Greenpeace International reveals the presence of nonylphenol ethoxylates in clothing items bearing the logos of 14 global brands, including Adidas, H&M and Abercrombie & Fitch. The chemicals, which break down to form nonylphenol - which has toxic, persistent and hormone-disrupting properties - were detected in clothes bought and manufactured in locations all over the world, demonstrating that the use and release of hazardous chemicals is a widespread and pervasive problem with serious, long-term and far-reaching consequences for people and wildlife. Visit Greenpeace to see sources for this article.

Email www.livescience.com...Mortality of US Newborns Higher than in 40 Other Nations...By Rachael...Babies in the United States have a higher risk of dying during their first month of life than do babies born in 40 other countries, according to a new report. Some of the countries that outrank the United States in terms of newborn death risk are South Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Lithuania, Poland and Israel, according to the study. Researchers at the World Health Organization estimated the number of newborn deaths and newborn mortality rates of more than 200 countries over the last 20 years. The results show that, while newborn mortality rates have decreased globally over that period, progress to lower these rates has been slow.

Email http://takingpointsmemo.com...Columnist: Registering Poor To Vote 'Like Handing Out Burglary Tools To Criminals'...By Ryan J. Reilly...Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals." "It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote," Vadum, the author of a book published by World Net Daily that attacks the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, writes in a column for the American Thinker.