Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

A very timely write up about how the racist policies have been overshadowed by media obsessions with racist speeches. And how dangerous that can be.

Prejudiced policy worse than racist speech
By Ethan Stanislawski

If you’ve been at this school long enough, odds are that you’ve encountered more than a few people who have absolutely no sense of humor when it comes to race. Quote Dave Chappelle or Borat, and that person will not laugh. He or she may even argue that laughing at such jokes is dangerous because there is so much racism and anti-Semitism is still present in our society; laughing at a joke that invokes racial stereotypes only serves to validate those stereotypes.

It’s true that racism is still a glaring problem in this society, but laughing at a Chapelle sketch is the least of our concerns. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen racial protest in the U.S. switch from addressing growing social problems to addressing isolated incidents of highly public displays of insensitivity. Because we’ve confused prejudice with discrimination, we’ve lost sight of where the real problems lie.

This past year we saw an unusual number of controversies surrounding slurs and comments, be it George Allen’s use of “macaca,” Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade, or Michael Richards’ screaming the N-word during a comedy club meltdown. These stories all got a lot of media coverage, but the most damaging developments in race relations and nation-wide prejudice in this country did not.

In all the talk of the “thumpin’” by Democrats in last November’s election, what got lost was that Michigan voters overwhelmingly decided to overturn affirmative action and that seven more states passed constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage. Say what you will about the effectiveness of affirmative action, but it’s one of the only tools we have to correct centuries of violence, segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans. As for same-sex marriage, the only hope for possible legal equality of gay couples has been nearly irrevocably damaged in over half the states in the Union. Compared to those developments, whatever Michael Richards or Tim Hardaway have to say seems irrelevant.

The emphasis on prejudice has been no less prominent on this campus either. Last school year, we saw a seemingly unending string of racial incidents, between the May house “straight-thuggin’” party, the Hitchcock whiteboard incident, the Muhammad cartoon in Hoover House, and the military recruiting protest in the Reynolds Club. Based on the amount of attention drawn to those incidents, you’d think black students and Jews on this campus hide in their rooms in fear.

If you want to find the real racism on this campus—don’t look within, look outside. You won’t find racism in May House; You’ll find it on the 55 and the Red Line, where this campus’s relationship with the surrounding community can be summarized in uneasy stares, awkward silences, and condescending comments. This university has historically had an absolutely shameful in relationship with the South Side, and most students’ absolute ignorance of the lives of those west of Cottage Grove or south of 61st Street only perpetuates these biases. Which do you think is a more destructive term: “straight-thuggin’” or “those people”?

Continue reading "Prejudiced policy worse than racist speech" »

Seattle Times offers a very insightful critique of race relations in the (post)modern America.

We can't address discrimination with policies that ignore color

By Kenneth Einar Himma

Many whites believe governments shouldn't consider race in making any decisions. They typically believe in colorblindness as a state policy, because they think we have solved all race problems since they don't know anyone who still believes the pernicious view that blacks are inferior.

Although attitudes about race have changed for the better, there are still serious problems of race facing us. A government policy of colorblindness not only ignores these problems, but can make them even worse.

A person can consciously believe all races are equal but still have subconscious preferences that cause discrimination. Discrimination can result from racist attitudes; but it can also result from common prejudices and preferences that people don't' even know they have.

It is common for people who reject racist ideologies to unknowingly harbor disparaging stereotypes about race that affect their behavior. This is what happens when someone immediately thinks of a young black man upon hearing about a violent crime, or when a woman reacts to a young black man's presence by clutching her purse tightly.

An important ongoing study shows that most people have automatic preferences for their own race. Project Implicit administers a series of implicit association tests (IAT) that identify and measure unconscious attitudes about persons belonging to various groups. This study shows that more than 80 percent of whites display a subconscious preference for whites over blacks. In a nation in which whites are disproportionately responsible for making hiring decisions for the most lucrative and desirable positions, this results in unfair affirmative action for whites.

Conscious racial prejudice is much more culpable than subconscious preferences. Conscious prejudice is based on false and malicious views about other races, while these subconscious preferences are the result of a common tendency to mistrust difference and gravitate toward similarity in people.

But the prevalence of such preferences among whites results in much injustice — despite the progress made over the past 50 years. Here are just a few examples of continuing race discrimination.

Continue reading "When the policies ignore color" »

"Violence against women has yet to receive the priority attention and resources needed at all levels to tackle it with the seriousness and visibility necessary."

UN Secretary-General’s in-depth study on violence against women (2006) (A/61/122/Add.1)

Before we reach another consensus on violence against women, let us examine the existing differences. For, whereas it is far easier (because it is pacifying) to share the knowledge that violence against women continues to exist, it is rather discomforting (because it is agitating) to throw lights on why it is so.

Like every year, academic and administrative reports of all kinds will be generated to commemorate March 8. After all, since we have a non-profit United Nations and we have corporate profiteers, we will eventually need to reach a consensus on issues such as violence against women. And amidst the thousands of articles and hundreds of televised tear-jerkers we will encounter in the coming month, the information overload would have done the damage, if we do not stay alert about few conditions that need addressing:

1. Suspect the Messengers: The kinds of messages about women may be misgivings. Indeed, most channels that provide news about women’s progress and violence are owned and controlled by men. Whereas it is undoubtedly true that many men are truly understanding of their gender positions and many women are too willing to play the assigned roles, it is still wise to suspect the men in the month of IWD message boards.

2. Women’s Rights are Universal Rights: Some will talk about women’s rights as a domain that applies to women only. Indeed, women’s rights are women’s prerogative only as a practice, but everyone’s concern as a scope. Just like they fool us by writing different history books for African-Americans, and the Americans as though American history does not include the minorities, it is highly suspect that women’s rights are not matter of concern for men.

3. Workplace for women vs Women for workplace: Most arguments about women’s rights focus on necessities to prepare the women for the workplace. Its like Amartya Sen saying that the question should not be if democracy is good for a country, but it should be directed towards making the country good for a democracy. Well, frankly speaking, he could be wrong. Just as JFK was while demanding that people give to the country without asking what the country can do for them. That’s the populist tone. The reality is women don’t need to be prepared for workplace. Workplaces need to be geared to serve women.

4. International Woman has a meaning: It means, women identify with each other across different boundaries. This identification has an undertone: that is, they accept the differences across cultures. To be truly international means understanding that there are differences across nations, and hence across women from different nations. There is no place for homogenization of women as one entity. So yes, White women are different from Black women are different from Asian women are different from Latina women are different from Muslim women are different from Hindu women are different from Swahili-speaking women who are different from Greek women. Women have different social locations among themselves, and hence understanding them holds the key. Let no one lead us into an essentialist notion of women’s problem. Different women face oppressions of different nature. The similarity is the most striking: that women are oppressed simply because they are women.

5. Are women human?: MacKinnon’s question is still valid. No amount of cultural excuses (from first world pornography to third world dowry) makes all women full human today. Ruling classes of the world still consider women as accessories to either their power ladder, or to their social justice tokenism. Their domestic adornment or cheap working class market value. Their television anchoring revenue system or their make-up kit industry. Just as Aishwarya Rai cannot be allowed to cry in public because Revlon will probably run into losses, Tamara MaidenName cannot challenge her greedy boss for uneven wages because he will merely retaliate.

International Women’s Day must not be allowed to promote card and gifts companies to indulge in exhibitionism of annual love to the mothers and sisters and wives and friends. It is rather a day to remind all of us in the world that a separate battle is on. This one is a battle of all. A battle that is waged by the true majority of the world, the women. A battle, that addresses the core inconsistencies of capitalism.

Damned if imprisoned. Doubly damned, if imprisoned. Thats the reality check for the current crisis that posits ethical consequences of incarceration in a country infamously holding records of sorts when it comes to imprisoning the members of minority race.

ZNet has a scholarly and detailed account:

Reverse Reparations: Race, Place, and the Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration
by Paul Street

“TOWNS PUT DREAMS IN PRISONS”
Sometimes it's the silences that speak the loudest. Consider, for example, a page-one article that appeared in the New York Times in the summer of 2001 under the title "Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies." According to this piece, non-metropolitan America was relying like never before on prison construction for jobs and economic development. Formerly, Times reporter Peter Kilborn noted, rural communities had depended for employment and economic development on agriculture, manufacturing, and/or mining. Now, however, they were counting on mass incarceration to deliver the goods. Reporting that “245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties” during the 1990s, Kilborn quoted the cheerful city manager of Sayre, Oklahoma, which had just opened a prized new maximum-security lockdown. "There's no more recession-proof form of economic development," this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because "nothing's going to stop crime."

By Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investment were possible before the prison, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry(1).

A different story on the same topic appeared under the title "Ionia Finds Stability in Prisons" in the Detroit News just 12 days before Kilborn’s piece. It told the enlightening tale of how the semi-rural Michigan town of Ionia, located halfway between Lansing and Grand Rapids, had recently become one of the state's fastest growing and "most improved" communities thanks its five thriving penitentiaries together employing 1,584 workers who collectively made $102 million a year. "The state's urban centers dump their felons," the Detroit News reported, "in prison towns and forget about them. Suburbs balk at housing felons, envisioning escapees trampling through their gardens and hiding out in their tool sheds." But "Ionia," the paper noted, "sees things from the other end of the spectrum. The prisons bring, of all things, security." According to Detroit News reporter Francis Donnelly, Ionia’s “penitentiaries, five veritable Great Lakes of cash, provide sustenance to every sector of [Ionia’s] once-dry economy: jobs for residents, customers for stores, revenue for the city government,” including “nearly $1.2 million of the city’s $3.8 million budget” (2).

A February 2001 Chicago Tribune article titled “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons” told a comparable story from Illinois. In “downstate” Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) comes to town.” “You don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s mayor told the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston. We’ve been plagued by plant closings.” The mayor, the Tribune reported, was lobbying IDOC to permit his town to host a prison so that it could enjoy some of the economic benefits that came to Ina, Illinois when the “Big Muddy” prison was constructed in 1993.

Before “Big Muddy” went up, the Tribune noted, Ina “took in just $17,000 a year in motor fuel tax revenue. Now the figure is more like $72,000. Last year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000. More than half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt. An $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money.”

Continue reading "Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration" »

A uniquely inspiring narration about the travel from the "world of religion" to the "world of reason", Infidel has been reviewed by NY Times. The book written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is poised to receive the kind of attention that Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran did. If Nafisi found inspiration in Austen and Nabakov to write about women plights in Iran, Hirsi Ali took cue from Nancy Drew mysteries to sketch emancipation of Muslim women from Somalia to Netherlands. Worth a read. At least William Grimes recommends it highly.

No Rest for a Feminist Fighting Radical Islam By WILLIAM GRIMES

Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to the attention of the wider world in an extraordinary way. In 2004 a Muslim fanatic, after shooting the filmmaker Theo van Gogh dead on an Amsterdam street, pinned a letter to Mr. van Gogh’s chest with a knife. Addressed to Ms. Hirsi Ali, the letter called for holy war against the West and, more specifically, for her death.

A Somali by birth and a recently elected member of the Dutch Parliament, Ms. Hirsi Ali had waged a personal crusade to improve the lot of Muslim women. Her warnings about the dangers posed to the Netherlands by unassimilated Muslims made her Public Enemy No. 1 for Muslim extremists, a feminist counterpart to Salman Rushdie.

The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of “Infidel,” her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author’s geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali describes a journey “from the world of faith to the world of reason,” a long, often bitter struggle to come to terms with her religion and the clan-based traditional society that defined her world and that of millions of Muslims all over.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, now 37, belongs to the Osman Mahamud subclan of the Darod clan. Its members, by tradition, are born to rule, which may explain the author’s self-possessed, imperious gaze on the cover of her book. Her mother came from a family of nomads, and Ms. Hirsi Ali grew up listening to desert folk tales narrated by her grandmother, who, like many Somalis, followed a “diluted, relaxed” version of Islam that included traditional magic spirits and genies. It also required that young girls undergo genital mutilation, which Ms. Hirsi Ali, a victim of the practice, describes in horrific detail.

Somalia’s troubled politics provided Ms. Hirsi Ali with an eventful childhood. Her father, an opponent of the country’s Soviet-backed dictator, spent years in prison. The family, living on clan charity, moved to Saudi Arabia, where Ms. Hirsi Ali recoiled at the local interpretation of Islam, and later to Ethiopia and Kenya, where Ms. Hirsi Ali added Swahili and English to her growing list of languages. Without knowing it, she was becoming a permanent outsider, a misfit wherever she traveled.

Continue reading "Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Journy of an Infidel " »

Speech codes squelching campus speech, survey shows
By Melanie Bengtson

Speech codes at America’s colleges and universities are inhibiting students’ freedom of expression, according to a recent report released by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

“The state of the First Amendment on campuses is not in good shape,” said Samantha Harris, FIRE’s director of legal and public advocacy.

The report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, compiles FIRE’s analysis of policies at more than 330 schools nationwide. The report, released Dec. 6, concluded that more than 68% of schools had policies that “clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech.”

Continue reading "Speech codes squelching campus speech" »

Just about time for someone like Christopher Edley Jr. to challenge the race-blind populist policies, for the anti-affirmative action amendments may be populist, but certainly not popular.

At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

BERKELEY, Calif.: Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the flagship law school of the University of California, learned early about racial discrimination. After all, his father, one of the few African-American graduates in Harvard Law School’s class of 1953, could not get a job in a Philadelphia law firm.

“They’d hired William T. Coleman from Harvard a couple of years earlier,” Mr. Edley recalled, referring to the former transportation secretary, and ardent defender of civil rights. “And they were waiting to see how that experiment worked out before hiring another one.”

Mr. Edley’s father went on to become a prosecutor in Philadelphia, then the first black program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund. He was never, Mr. Edley said, bitter about the obstacles in his way. But civil rights and related subjects were the topics of discussion around the dinner table. From age 5, the son wanted to be a lawyer.

Now Mr. Edley, in his third year at Boalt Hall, as the law school here is known, finds himself defending affirmative action policies intended to overcome barriers like those his father confronted.

The job is a challenge; under California law, the law school cannot use race as a factor in admissions. But tackling that challenge was an important reason he took it.

Continue reading "An alternative discourse at Berkeley Law" »

Boston Globe editorializes:
Ideally, the nation's public schools should be havens where discrimination and poverty are overcome by hard academic work. But many public schools are dragging along, starved for books, anemic from high drop out rates, and struggling to boost students to grade-level achievement.

The full article:

IN NOVEMBER, Michigan voters faced a ballot question drenched in controversy. Proposal 2 called for changing the state constitution to ban programs that discriminate against or give "preferential treatment" to people based on race, gender, ethnicity, or national origin. In other words, a constitutional ban on affirmative action.

The choice was reduced to one dimension: Either America treats everyone fairly or it doesn't.

"Vote YES . . . if you are sick and tired of handouts and unfair quotas," one blogger advised. On Election Day, 58 percent voted yes.

A blow for education

It was a hard slap for Michigan's public colleges and universities. In 2003, affirmative action survived a tough legal fight when the Supreme Court ruled in two cases that the University of Michigan could, in limited ways, consider race in its admissions processes. Notably, Sandra Day O'Connor said that, yes, race still matters, and deliberately seeking racial diversity is still a social good. But she warned that race shouldn't matter forever; in 25 years, society should have moved on.

Then Ward Connerly showed up. A former University of California regent and an African-American, he led a successful fight to end affirmative action in California. He supported Proposal 2 in Michigan. And last month, he said he would be visiting nine other states -- Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah -- to consider launching similar campaigns.

Continue reading "Affirmatively active" »

Pentagon has concerns over the judiciary. And none at all heartening. The senior official who recently expressed his dismay at nation's top law firms, is a victim of his own motives that are suspect.

Looked from another angle, here is an official who actually wants that human rights be denied to people under the country's legal system that claims to espouse freedom and justice. Is it typical of "responsible" officials at power corridors, or is he an exception? Considering that Charles Stimson is a senior Pentagon official, either of the case appears to be dangerous.

New York Times has a detailed report today:

Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

Continue reading "Pentagon Official Upset with Law Firms" »

An interesting dialogue is initiated by Inside Higher Ed that deals with who have the responsibility to teach America about race relations.

One thing is certain: Americans have strong perceptions — and misperceptions — about the meaning and significance of race. Attempting to poke holes in prejudices and provide the latest scientific and scholarly understanding of the issue, the American Anthropological Association has created an interactive educational program called RACE: Are We So Different? Also featured is a traveling museum exhibition, and project organizers are developing educational materials for teachers and organizing future conferences.

“We have taken a comprehensive look at race in America and have spent five and a half years pulling this together,” said Peggy Overbey, the program’s project director.

The project’s Web site presents quizzes, timelines and other interactive activities designed to consider questions on the history of race in America, human variation across the planet, and race as a “lived experience.”

Continue reading "To Teach America About Race" »

New York City is still languishing in poverty, and the infant mortality continues to be a matter of concern. And yet, this is one of the least spoken truth.
Helen Klein for Courier-Life decides to break a story about Brooklyn’s darkest shame, its dying babies.

A human tragedy continues to unfold in central Brooklyn.

The communities at the heart of the borough persist as an epicenter of infant mortality, due in large part to the fact that access to quality, timely health care is limited, both for mothers-to-be and their young infants.

Sadly, this situation endures despite the fact that there have been some gains made in certain areas, thanks to intensive grass-roots efforts at working with mothers-to-be in neighborhoods traditionally under-served in the arena of health.

Indeed, the risk of death is more than three times as high for a black baby in his or her first year of life as it is for that baby’s white counterpart, and more than twice as high for a Puerto Rican infant as for a Caucasian infant, according to Ngosi Moses, the executive director of the Brooklyn Perinatal Network (BPN).

The impact of this on Brooklyn residents is anything but theoretic. The borough is second to the Bronx in the rate of infant mortality (with an average of 6.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 7.1 in the Bronx), according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

In addition, Moses stressed, six of the 10 community districts in the city with the highest infant mortality rates are in Brooklyn, with five in central Brooklyn. “Some parts have had improvements, but not what we would like to see,” noted Moses.

Even more frightening, while New York City infant mortality rates have decreased overall (to 6.1 per 1,000 live births in 2004, a six percent reduction from 2003), the rate for black infants has risen, particularly in certain neighborhoods, Moses said.

“One of our big concerns is that national trends in black infant mortality went up, and it also went up in New York City,” she explained. “We have seen disparities increase from two-fold to three-fold.”

Increasing Disparity

Using DOHMH statistics from 2004, Moses pointed out that the disparity in infant mortality rate between blacks and whites, “Has been increasing over the past four years as blacks’ infant mortality rate increased by 16 percent while the white infant mortality rate declined by almost the same amount (15 percent) over the same period.”

Continue reading "Brooklyn's darkest shame: Its dying babies" »

Click on the picture to visit the irrepressible Mark Fiore's Annual "Twelve Days of Whoopsmas!" Happy New Year, 2007.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

According to the National Priorities Project, which maintains a cost-of-war counter, as of today, the disgraceful Iraqi occupation has cost us 354 billion dollars and counting. If we wanted to use the money differently, we could have medically insured 212 million children for a year, hired over 6 million public school teachers, built over 3 million additional housing units, provided over 17 million four year college scholarships for deserving youth. In today's New York Times, Michael Wines reports an all too familiar story that we regularly read, cluck our tongues while eating our breakfast cereal and promptly forget in our mad rush to keep up with the bills and our kids' extracurricular soccer schedules. So--a brief New Year's reminder of how wacked-out we all are in our priorities as individuals, as a nation, as a species.

According to the article, 10,000 children under the age of five died last year in Ethiopia alone from malnutrition-related causes. Imagine the gut-wrenching awfulness of being one of those kids' parents, let alone what's it's like to be one of the many dying children. Possibly worse, almost half of Ethiopia's children are malnourished, and most don't die. Instead, they grow up sickly, weak and physically and intellectually stunted in a land that runs on manual labor. "Their hunger is neither a temporary inconvenience nor a quick death sentence. Rather, it is a chronic, lifelong, irreversible handicap that scuttles their futures and cripples Ethiopia's hopes to join the developed world." And Ethiopia has one of the most comprehensive programs on the continent to alleviate starvation.

We can all point to profound impoverishment, slavery, sex-selective violence, religious war carnage, speciesism, global deforestation and genocide to rationalize our collective inertia: the planet earth has always been a place of pervasive suffering and a brief, hardscrabble life for most of its inhabitants since we modern homo sapiens first walked upright out of our caves a mere 150,000 years ago. In geologic time, that's a blink of an eye but more than enough time for us to screw up the planet and create such ravishingly impressive inequities among ourselves that most of the world lives still lives in misery and despair, we've killed 260 million of our own men, women and children up to and excluding the atrocities of the 20th century (according to Professor Emeritus of Political Science Rudolf Rummel of the University of Hawaii) and all of it in the equally obscene and spiritually indefensible names of organized religion and power accumulation in one form or another.

Yet we continue as a nation to blithely accept the perverted corruption that passes for policy that is our current leadership (informed as it is by our own apathy, lethargia and culture of indulgence), because we only see the world through the prism of our consumer-driven, might-makes-right, jingoistic American lens. So, Goldman Sachs financial traders rake in record bonuses (average $650,000.00 per man--almost all of them men--what do these people actually do for a living--I always forget--how do they add value commensurate with these windfalls?)--while homelessness surges, 5 million US kids don't have health insurance and the rich pols in Washington again vote down a raise in the minimum wage so working people can actually earn a "living" wage. How many children might be saved in Africa--how much civilization could we purchase internationally and domestically for the rapidly increasing $354,000,000,000.00 it's cost us so far to perpetrate an illegal war on a blameless people, killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a beautiful and ancient civilization, unleashing all holy hell in the process, minting thousands of righteously driven new terrorists and cultivating an international revulsion for our barbarous and piratical ways, and all with nary a high-level decision making, unelected rich person being held accountable. Nobody. Nothing. Oh well. Fast fade to commercial then back for more "reality" television viewing to distract us from reality.

One day--there'll be a backlash. Given our corporate media's penchant for serving its hegemonous, insatiable, unidimensional, ethically-compromised masters we can't expect the truth to make it through that US-currency-driven vetting process. Ultimately, the righteous anger of the world's dispossessed (and their conscious supporters everywhere) will move the earth to a place of less abject suffering and more true intelligence-driven-equality for all of us as well as this sorely abused old planet. It may take a cataclysm of sorts (full-blown economic depression, nuclear terrorism, global warming catastrophe, etc.) to catalyze such times but indeed it's coming. In the interim, we'd all serve our progeny if we daily asked ourselves what we can do to speak truth to power, to serve and empower the powerless, in whatever form that may take, and to question authority relentlessly with a view toward righting some fundamental wrongs, before it's too late--before we find ourselves, in the words of Bill Maher, totally screwed, blued and tattooed.

The complete story from NYT:

Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa’s Future

Continue reading "Our indifference, their malnutrition" »

The colorblind anti-affirmative action crusader is on the prowl. And this time, he aims at 9 more states to replicate what Washington, California and Michigan have done in recent past to ignore the need to consider race and gender as decisive factors in American life.

For Ward Connerly, the architect of reversal in the 1954 desegregation ruling, recent triumph in Michigan came about even as it houses 80% whiter, 14% black, 2.3% Asian American and 3.8% Latino population. And this man’s famous opening line: "It is not essential that black kid sits next to white kid. That's where we went wrong with Brown vs. Board.”

San Francisco Chronicle interviews Connerly about his wider crusade:

Connerly gearing up for wider crusade: Affirmative action foe considers launching campaigns in 9 states

Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer

Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action crusader who helped persuade voters to ban race and gender from consideration in public hiring, contracting and school admissions in California, Washington and Michigan, said Wednesday he is exploring moves into nine other states.

The former University of California regent, whose campaign first saw success in 1996 with Proposition 209 in California, seems to be following through on his often-repeated promise that he will persist until affirmative action is banned nationwide.

Connerly said he will visit Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah over the next 60 days and then decide how many campaigns to launch.

Twenty-three states have systems for putting laws directly before voters in the form of ballot initiatives.

"Three down and 20 to go," Connerly said during a conference call. "We don't need to do them all, but if we do a significant number, we will have demonstrated that race preferences are antithetical to the popular will of the American people."

Continue reading "Connerly gearing up for wider crusade" »

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Posted In: Discrimination, News, Politics, Race

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As the Brown v. Board of Education is being revisited in a manner that may lay a foundation for "discrimination" to be perceived entirely from different lenses than ever before, two major strands of opinion develop.

One hints at the positive outcome of integration that should uphold the judgments. The other categorically refutes the need of the judgments (even while being considered as noble) to sway official policies, as long as people make voluntary decisions to segregate, if one may call it thus.

But, I think both major opinions leave out a significant “other” question: Is the so-called voluntary segregation a natural outcome of human preferences as now being adjudged, or is it thus, as a result of an effete, ineffective and reactionary tradition of official policies that have alienated the racial categories of people so much as to install distrusts among themselves?

If the latter is true, its not merely that the 1954 decision needs to be upheld, but in fact, the state and its citizens through progressive public policies will do well to recognize that the socio-economic foundation of American society needs a fresh breath of radical change for the economic emancipation of peoples eventually to be developed into proactive communities, than isolated racial groups posited against plutocratic dominations.

New York Times today has an opinion piece worth a note:

Brown v. Board of Education, Second Round By ADAM LIPTAK

IF there is a sacred text in the American legal canon, it is the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It is the court’s one undisputed triumph, and no Supreme Court nominee who expressed doubt about the decision would ever be confirmed. Who can argue, after all, with the wisdom of putting an end to state-sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools?
But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.

Continue reading "Revisiting Brown v. Board: What it entails? " »

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Posted In: Discrimination, Opinion, Politics, Race

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The Contemporary Moral Problems Blog found the following article from LA Times pertinent to the ongoing discussion on Affirmative Action.

Court to Revisit Historic Brown Decision By David G. Savage (c) 2006, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- For the first time in a decade, the Supreme Court will revisit the legacy of a landmark: the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 that declared unconstitutional the racial segregation of public schools.

Separate schools for black and white children are "inherently unequal,'' Chief Justice Earl Warren said in an opinion that helped launch the civil-rights movement.

State-enforced segregation laws are long gone, but for school officials today, a key question remains: Did the historic decision commit them to a policy of seeking integrated schools, or did it tell them not to assign students to a school based on their race?

Monday, lawyers in a pair of integration cases will debate whether school boards may use racial guidelines to assign students. Both sides will rely on the Brown decision to make their case.

With the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., civil-rights lawyers believe there may be a five-member majority determined to strike down race-based integration programs.

In Seattle, the school board adopted a policy -- now suspended -- that gave "nonwhite'' students an edge if they sought to enroll in a popular, mostly white high school. In Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville, the school district said black children should make up between 15 percent and 50 percent of the enrollment at each elementary school.

In both cities, several white parents sued to have the plans declared unconstitutional after their children were barred from enrolling in the school of their choice because of their race. Although they lost in the lower courts, the Supreme Court voted in June to hear their appeals, leading many to predict the justices are poised to outlaw "racial balancing'' in the public schools.

Continue reading "Is there a need to revisit Affirmative Action policies? " »

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New York Times editorial today has lambasted President Bush’s choices for judicial nominations as “archconservative and underqualified”.

This, apart from the ideological, speaks also of the dangerous apathy being exercised by the president in wake of the recent results that clearly demonstrate popular expressions that are liberal, at the very least.

NYT says:

The four most controversial nominees that President Bush resubmitted are ideological in the extreme. William Myers III, a longtime lobbyist for mining and timber interests, would no doubt use his position on the San Francisco-based United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to gut environmental laws. William Haynes II, who helped develop the administration’s torture and “enemy combatant” policies as the top lawyer for the Pentagon, could be counted on to undermine both civil liberties and reasonable limits on executive power.

Critical takes on the four nominees Haynes, Boyle, Meyers and Wallace had been also done by the TalkLeft blog in the past.

What does the Senate minority whip’s comeback mean for the racial minorities?

Media Matters for America takes note of Trent Lott’s “numerous” racially insensitive statements, and not just the most infamous one that the mainstream media recently revisited.

Bloggers had rightly taken the credit for highlighting Lott’s statements back at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party on December 5, 2002, when Lott quipped of Thurmond's 1948 campaign: “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Quoting from Scripps Howard News Service, Media Matters outlines the racist past of Lott:

In 1982, Lott voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act, which authorizes the Justice Department to review election law changes in Mississippi and other Deep South states and to monitor elections.

In 1983, he was one of 90 House members who voted against creating a national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Six years later, Lott was one of seven senators who voted to abolish the King holiday commission, and in 1994, he was one of 28 who favored scrapping its federal funding.

Lott was one of 34 senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which reversed five Supreme Court rulings that had limited the ability of minorities to win job discrimination lawsuits and damages. After President George H. W. Bush vetoed the bill, Lott voted for a different version in 1991.

And in 2001, Lott was the only senator who opposed President George W. Bush's nomination of Roger Gregory, an African-American from Virginia, to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
[...]

In 1999, when Lott was embroiled in another racial controversy, he had only one African-American worker, a mail clerk, out of a staff of 65.

In 1981, Lott filed a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit seeking to overturn an IRS decision to deny a tax exemption to Bob Jones University because of the school's ban on interracial dating.

In 1995, Lott criticized Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) for intervening with 39 other lawmakers to get the FBI to release documents in the 1966 death of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer to Forrest County prosecutors.

In 1999, it was reported that Lott had spoken to and met with the segregationist Council of Concerned Citizens on a few occasions. Lott then condemned the group.

Last year, Lott and the other white members of the Mississippi congressional delegation refused an entreaty from former Netscape president James Barksdale to declare that they would vote in favor of a statewide referendum to remove the Confederate emblem from the state flag. The proposal lost.

CNN reports that a radio talk show host has been fired following his derogatory comment about the weight and sexuality of the Green-Rainbow party candidate running for Massachusetts governor.

WRKO-AM pulled host John DePetro from the air one day after he made the comments. "In the context of what he said and the tone with which he said it, the comments were completely inappropriate, derogatory and will not be tolerated," said Jason Wolfe, the vice president of AM programming and operations for station owner Entercom Boston.

DePetro said he had called the candidate, Grace Ross, to apologize for calling her a "fat lesbian." The host, who calls himself the "Independent Man," said he made the remark because he was exasperated that Ross and independent candidate Christy Mihos were eating up time during a debate earlier in the week that included Republican candidate Kerry Healey and Democrat Deval Patrick. He said it was then that he told listeners he wished someone would "tell the fat lesbian to shut up."

Details of the report here.

In one of the most volatile articles to have come out in recent times to deconstruct the Bush regime, Rolling Stone makes Halloween look scary for real.

"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."

Taibbi goes on:

“One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past six years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take more than ninety-three fucking days, that's for sure. But you can boil the whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of power. Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap backroom deal, finished in time for thirty-six holes of the world's best golf. And brains too stupid to be ashamed of any of it. If we have learned nothing else in the Bush years, it's that this Congress cannot be reformed. The only way to change it is to get rid of it.

Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while.”

Not sure if all of us share that optimism, even after fundamentally questioning the democracy as a failed experiment. But what the heck, a try to change the Congress is at least the first sane step towards something radical.

Workers’ share of the economy has fallen in 4 of the Group of 7 industrialized nations. And that’s not even half of the untold saga of capitalism. All the industrialized countries put together, the average wages and benefits’ share of GDP in the industrialized countries between 2000 and 2005 shows a decline percentage of -14.5!

Whereas Britain and France muster up together with just 1 point increase, the rest of all major capitalist countries have a -15.5 change in percentage points.

What does this entail? Of course the corporate media may not yet declare it as the beginning of end of the global monopolists, but trends suggests workers’ discontent is so high amidst the prevailing contradictions that things to take shape may be equally unpredictable.

Academic cluelessness:
A New York Times report runs an extensive story about the reasons why such a change might have come about, and has reached about nowhere. Of course, the economists from Princeton and MIT are quoted as having failed to understand the decline even as the steady fall in workers share has characterized market economy since as many as four decades now!

The report claims that factors such as immigration, job exports, and arrival of new technologies have caused the mismatch. And that’s what the economists are thinking, according to the report, to be “eating into the workers’ share of the pie”.

Failed observations:
Amidst the disbeliefs and shocks at the apparent decline in workers’ share, attacking the symptoms rather than the cause seems to be a fatalistic observation. Trade unions have lost all their bargaining power today as opposed to during 1929, when workers enjoyed almost half of the economic pie: That’s true. Also true are the apprehensions around new technologies, immigration and job exports. But the main question that the acclaimed economists of the industrialized countries seem to be deliberately evading is centered around their own fallacious alignment with an economic system that is supposed to produce exactly what it is producing today. In fact, modern capitalism thrives on curbing workers’ rights (and hence they even buy off the labor unions), on encouraging cheap labor imports to the country (which is why immigrants work at inhuman wages to do the kinds of jobs they are called for), and through establishing sweatshops in underdeveloped countries so that the companies back in the industrialized countries can maximize their profits (which is basically the canon of capitalism) by any means.

To discount the question of economic imperialism as an advanced stage of modern capitalism is a deliberate omission in the zeal to advocate “free market” philosophy that only works towards disempowering workers world over as seen from recent experiences of American hegemony in Latin America (through monstrous anti-farmers measures by NAFTA), in Africa (through the IMF domination in forcing the resource-rich continent to remain poverty-stricken for centuries), and in Asia (through free-trade of cheap imports and sweatshops).

The Group of 7 countries have been notorious in their own domestic front in terms of treatment of workers, which is why they extend the trait of global capital to reinforce the “cheap call centers” in India and “cheap imports” from China. It is not enough to condemn the third world countries for the economic mess in the industrialized world. In fact, the case demands for quite the contrary standpoint.

Will the economic analysts ever shun their comfortable alignment with the monopolists and think outside the box, at least now? If not, the time for atonement may be on the way, considering that workers have historically not held up for too long, or far too much.

(Following is the map of workers’ share, courtesy NYT)

"The Administration also appears to have used the war on terror as an excuse to eviscerate the basic protections afforded to us in the Constitution. There have been warrantless wiretaps of law-abiding Americans, in clear contravention of federal law, not to mention the creation of a huge unchecked database of the phone records of innocent Americans.

All the while, the Republican Congress sits idly by. Rather than performing its constitutional duty as a co-equal branch, it has chosen to stymie any and all efforts at oversight. After six long years of deceptions, attacks and yes, outright lies, I am convinced the American people have had enough." : Rep. John Conyers

Today, Conyers released the final version of his report, the "Constitution in Crisis." This report outlines 26 laws and regulations that may have been violated by Bush administration. The report, comprises 350 pages of analysis with more than 1,400 footnotes to describe how the Bush Administration has violated the law of the land.

And the best part: The report in its complete version is available now

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

The failure to increase the minimum wage in the US for the first time in a decade (it is now still $5.15 per hour--decidedly not a living wage for anyone over 18 not living with their parents), is nauseating, to say the least.

It came by design, as the Congressional Republicans tied the success of the proposed $2.10 hourly increase for struggling lower and middle class workers to an obscene permanent reduction in the estate tax for individual millionaires (the proposal was to increase the tax-exemption amount on an individual's estate to 5 million dollars by 2015 and 10 million dollars for a couple).

The raw effrontery of wealthy, elected, amoral "law makers" such as Bill Frist to bark, shill and cover for purely greedy special interests is as astounding as it is infuriating and indefensible.

San Francisco Chronicle says today:

Instead of providing a clear vote on the minimum wage, Republicans teamed it with legislation that would have cut the estate tax. Republican leaders hoped the bill would allow them to defang the Democrats' criticism that the GOP was hostile to the working poor while also achieving one of their top goals -- reducing taxes for wealthy families.

To sweeten the pot, Republican leaders threw in a host of tax provisions they hoped would appeal to individual senators, particularly Democrats whose votes were needed. So the bill contained, for example, tax breaks for coal-mining companies, aimed at Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and timber tax breaks aimed at Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

When women and children are killed, maimed, bombed and burned, leading to a world demonstrably less safe for our own kids, I tend to get a just a little bit testy. Outraged at the feral stupidity of it all.

Illustrator Charles Bragg recently described the Holy Land as That Unique Part of the World Where People of All Religions Can Get Together and Kill One Another. Yeah, baby. Keep 'em coming. The good news it, the jury just came in (they're deliberating evolution, remember?) and they decided against Intelligent Design. Let's face it, we're too staggeringly simple to have been designed by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent God. If there's a God in heaven, he'd have to be one weepy, inebriated Deity to cope with the mass carnage and pervasive self-destruction that he's wrought--all in the name of love .

The Nation's editorial this week is worth a read in this context:

The Fractured Mideast More than two weeks after Israel launched its countermilitary offensive against Lebanon, the Bush Administration continues to refuse to call for a cease-fire or to take other actions to rein in Israel's disproportionate response to Hezbollah's attack across its northern border. That attack, in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured, was a clear violation of international law. But it was not grounds for an act of war. The US position is not only morally wrong; it thwarts the goal of securing stable and lasting peace in the region, upon which American interests and Israeli security depend.

Washington's tacit blessing of the Israeli military operations, along with its expedited resupply of Israeli munitions, means that the United States will be complicit in the death and displacement of Lebanese civilians beyond the 400 already dead and at least 600,000 displaced, as well as in added destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and the deepening of a humanitarian crisis. In short, Washington will be implicated in what UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has called possible war crimes, which will breed more hatred for the United States and Israel throughout the Islamic world. Adding to the sense of impunity were the deaths of four UN observers by an Israeli precision-guided missile, despite what the UN said were repeated Israeli assurances that UN posts were not being targeted.

Continue reading "How Many Kids Would Jesus Kill?" »

What does one do with former elected representatives who have a lavish time off the peoples’ tax money, and seats of power through hypocritical speeches? Worse, what does one do with such misguided missiles who still expound their debased racist theories of merit, success and competition?

Richard ‘Dick’ Lamm who served Colorado as a Governor for three terms, is one such illustrious manipulator of reactionary words. And incidentally, each time at office, he ran as a Democrat. Yet he always believed that Blacks and Hispanics are both underclass whose cultures were not “success-producing”.

In a Denver Post column yesterday titled, Minorities must look inward, he says,

“American students generally face educational challenges, but there is every reason to specifically examine minority underperformance. Blacks and Hispanics are not succeeding in numbers great enough to keep America competitive. I am increasingly convinced the key to prosperity for black and Hispanic America lies mostly in their own hands and by their own efforts.”

‘Their’ hands and ‘their’ efforts were well said. Only that, Lamm forgets to mention about our political economy creating an ugly class society, our biased law and order system, our educational system geared to teach exclusively historical lies that often are not understood to be relevant by Blacks and Hispanics etc etc. The list could go on. But let the likes of Richard Lamm first think inward.

What’s the cost of an American citizenship? Appears like it can be more expensive than the $400 for filing N-400 form with biometrics. Or at least that is what Sang Yi Sevilla, a Korean woman and prospective American citizen, found out while she was being interviewed by a citizenship officer of Department of Homeland Security.
A recent article in Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports:

A Korean woman from Gwinnett County has filed a $5 million lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security after a citizenship officer pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her during a citizenship interview.

Sang Yi Sevilla says Officer Kelvin Renard Owens intimidated her in June 2004 by asking, "If I let you pass, what are you going to give me?" according to a suit she filed Friday in federal court in Atlanta.

Owens grabbed her breasts and asked her to meet him outside the building at 4 p.m. to find out whether she had passed the test, the claim says. Sevilla says the officer also grabbed her hands and put them on his genitals and put his hand between her legs. She says she pushed him away and contacted authorities.

Owens, of Jonesboro, pleaded guilty in federal court to sexual assault in March 2005, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. A judge ordered him to spend weekends in federal prison for six months. The judge also put Owens on probation for five years and fined him $2,500.

U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said in a statement when Owens pleaded guilty that his office takes misconduct allegations seriously.

"This case represents reprehensible conduct by a federal employee," he said then. "The victim in this case not only was making every effort to legally seek her citizenship in this country, but was brave enough to fend off an attack from one of the people she needed to help her gain her rightful citizenship."

A lawyer for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service denied any liability in an April 2006 letter to Sevilla's lawyer, saying Owens was not acting within the course or scope of his employment at the time.

Sevilla is still waiting to hear if she passed the U.S. citizenship test.

(Lead on this entry: Liberal activist law professor, Vanessa Merton)

Is homophobia the new blatant racism of 21st century America? So far, it definitely seems like it is. And our president seems to be the leader of the pack that thrives on manipulating gay marriage issue for political purpose.

Just when Bush’s approval rating fell to a historic low among voters since his reelection, one would have assumed him to have a change of heart --also considering that Laura Bush and Mary Cheney definitely urged him to rethink on the issue.

But George W. instead chose to use the politics of hate and fear—those unique selling proposition of Republicans—to seek clues. And he found it among the white evangelicals among whom his support had plunged a remarkable 22 percent! And As Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report says, “If he wants to stem his losses, he has to find something other than the war in Iraq and Katrina and gas prices and budget deficits for his voters to focus on.”

Astrid Fiano recommends a recent Rolling Stone National Affairs essay by Tim Dickinson which surveys how gay-bashing is a continuation in the historic roadmap of oppression. Dickinson quotes Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco Mayor, “The same rhetoric that’s being used today against the gay community was used then against interracial couples.”

The president's steadfast refusal to eliminate the historic oppression already has GOP candidates like Rick Santorum (R-Homophobe from PA) enjoying a field day in their homophobic strides. Santorum has described homosexual acts as part of a class of deviant sexual behavior that are “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”. And more infamously: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." And considering that this man is in fact the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the number-three job in the party leadership of the Senate, we have someone else to worry about now.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

Today’s NYT article regarding the codification of our jingoistic immigration policies is not an issue that demands isolated concern. In the larger schema of Capitalistic prison-military-industrial complex, the United States has become an epitome of everything regressive. Labor and employment issues, the plight of working women, undocumented workers, bullying, ethnocentrism, minimum-wage increase opposition, reproductive choice issues--and the shameful Israeli/American destroyer/occupation brigades, are all related to a corporate/consumer/capitalistic/amoral/ feeding frenzy--an orgy of dominion and control exercising--killing/maiming/bombing children--hello, anybody home?--wherever and whenever we want--in search of satiation of our unquenchable thirst for more control and power over the earth, other species and each other.

Please click on the play button to see how we are supporting chemical warfare targeted against children of Beirut

As the world and our capabilities expand through technological advances, we've become ever more Klingon in our evolution, or should I say devolution--becoming, first and foremost, voracious warriors with mighty brows--incapable of taming our baser instincts with our native intelligence. The crown of creation? We're Creation's Undoing. We are the perfect embodiment of The Peter Principle writ large, we've evolved to the point of perfect incapacity--like George W. Bush as leader, we occupy the highest rung on the evolutionary food chain and we're thoroughly unable to fulfill the responsibilities of the position. Perhaps we should consider stepping down--or at least aside. Things can only get better.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

Following the Washington Post coverage of the Medicare drug plans fiasco, its worth noting that there is a corrupt and rotting underbelly of NY's Medicaid system.

Billions of dollars are bilked by doctors, dentists, pharmacists and Big Pharma--and related industry businesses--on our tax dime--all under the glaucomic gaze of our legislators and law enforcement overseers, who pooh-pooh this scandal completely.

Why?

'Cause the criminals are our own physicians, dentists, accountants, friends and family members; you know--white, middle class people who we know, respect and love. People like us--people who are us. So, we'll spend billions of dollars to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate some black kid who sells a vial of cocaine to another kid who wants to get high and eat some Fritos in front of his television, but we give a complete pass to the arch criminals in our midst who rip us all off--and let our kids' educational needs and health care suffer at the felonious hands of the white collar corporate criminal, aided and abetted by our government watchdogs and our elected officials.

A New York Times report May last year sheds light on the “unscrupulous and the opportunistic” Medicaid program of New York State:

New York's Medicaid program, once a beacon of the Great Society era, has become so huge, so complex and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited. Though the program is a vital resource for 4.2 million poor people who rely on it for their health care, a yearlong investigation by The Times found that the program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste and profiteering. A computer analysis of several million records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law revealed numerous indications of fraud and abuse that the state had never looked into.

New York's Highest Court Issues a Wild and Crazy Opinion on Gay Marriage Licenses.... Queers Need Not Apply

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

"There are enough marriage licenses to go around."
-Chief Justice Judith Kaye in her Dissent.

"We really can't think of any valid reason to continue to bar same-sex couples from enjoying the many benefits of memorializing their love and commitment to each other in a legal union that consecrates their vows and provides respect, financial benefits, security and societal sanctification to the relationship. It's really the only civilized approach to take at long last.

Especially, given the plain fact, as the Court acknowledged, that same-sex couples, who must adopt or bear children by artificial means, provide, by definition, more uniformly stable home environments for kids than opposite-sex couples may, whose babies are sometimes accidentally made. In other words--committed same sex couples certainly deserve equal treatment--but--on the other hand--fuhgeddaboutit--they're fags."

With this embarrassing decision, the Court protects no one, hurts a minority class of our friends and loved ones and, once again, a panel of eminent and wise lawyers enshrine ignorance and unconsciousness upon us by stamping this shamefulness with its imprimatur of righteousness.

Therefore, the Court's thinking is flawed, medieval and intellectually dishonest. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. As Henry David Thoreau famously said, "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."

Please read Katha Pollitt in this month's The Nation for a brilliant look at today's duplicity and hypocrisy surrounding same-sex marriage. Or just read it here:

Continue reading "Court Legitimizes Discrimination against a Protected Class" »

Are Medicare and Medicaid Services designed to worsen the health needs of the older and disabled Americans who are living on low to moderate fixed incomes? Today’s Washington Post analysis dispels the myth of Medicare drug plans, as the Medicare’s new Part D prescription drug program forces seniors to fork out $2,850 each before the coverage can resume.

In the coming five months, several million Americans will find themselves unable to pay for the gap in insurance, called the “doughnut hole” thanks to the shady Medicare policy which is designed to be misunderstood.

The Post says, “Under a standard plan this first year, Medicare handles 75 percent of drug costs after a deductible until the bill reaches $2,250. It does not kick in again until those costs total $5,100.”

Campaign for America's Future , a Washington-based advocacy organization, says seniors enrolled in the program at the start of the year will, on average, reach the doughnut hole Sept. 22. As of now, there are 22.5 million people who are enrolled in this program! The organization says, “President Bush's Part D prescription drug disaster is costly, confusing and corrupt. It was written by and for big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and will cost millions of dollars in excess cost to U.S. taxpayers, seniors and disabled.”

And there are three more months to go, before we are hit by another anti-people governmental plan. Yet again.

Technorati Tag: bush medicare health

It’s too early, and entirely inaccurate to declare Rev. Gregory A. Boyd as someone who has given up conservative politics. The New York Times article “Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock”, elaborates that Mr Boyd has been preaching to politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals about how the church should steer clear of politics, and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

Whereas these could be true, they are neither sufficient nor even necessary grounds for rejoicing. The current Middle East crisis has generated some strong emotions among conservatives. Even Mel Gibson’s alleged anti-Semite sentiments have been highly publicized already. Whether the preachers are taking a stand against the Israeli state or against the Jews should be an emerging question.

We need to evaluate if the preachers give up their core worldviews, not just their temporary stands on certain world events, before hailing them as progressives. For example, in the World War II, the Vatican stoically maintained indifference during Holocaust. One credible theory pointed that it was because the Pope was inclined more to contain Communism than to hear plights of Jews.

In the current scenario, we know that Mr Boyd is still holding onto every basic tenets of conservative church. He is still anti-LGBT, and he is still against women’s rights to choice. He still says “The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

This time, he may just be getting higher approvals in the Europe by saying America is no Christian country, and probably from the Democrats for not supporting Israeli occupation. But as long as the Church continues on its path of reformisms of various kinds, what we shall see possibly will be certain change of stance depending on circumstances –for example, what should be Christianity’s role in a fight between Jews and Muslims?—which may be merely opportunistic from a critical lens, but never a whole hearted radical rebirth –for example, how about supporting LGBT communities, caring for pro-choice, and getting rid of the One-God-As-Hope theory?

Technorati Tag: church conservative boyd

President Bush emphatically declares that the world needs western democracy to ensure freedom and peace. And to that end, he curses Hezbollah, and Kofi Anon, and supports a gruesome war against women and children of Beirut.

Ceasefire in the Middle East is not required, declares Israel with due support from Bush. As a man supposed to represent the world's superpower, when he rejects the idea of peace, how many countries exactly come forward to lend him support by saying NO to ceasefire?

And the countries that say YES to peace are…

Indeed, this is the largest opposition that any country has ever faced in the world history during a war time crisis. So much for the rule by the majority..oops..democracy!

Technorati Tags: bush politics lebanon

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

Here's a guy who's so thoroughly gripless, so constitutionally indisposed to thinking--poisoned as he is by his native incapacity and incompetence, that he reverts to reflexive, boundary-less, childish actions such as massaging the shoulders of a female head of state in an unconscious bid to distract himself from his thoroughgoing inability to process the vital and important matters at hand. Is this job over his head?

Let me answer the question this way--If George W. Bush--the leader of the "free" world-- worked in the local hardware store and you walked in for the first time with your mate to purchase some light bulbs from him and he bantered about the weather while you paid him at the register, you'd leave the store and naturally quip, “he's a nice enough guy, but dumb as a rock.” So much for the virtues of our current democracy.
Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times is worth pondering:

“In two years and a few months Americans will vote again for president. I hope the long list of tragic failures by Bush & Co. prompts people to take that election more seriously than some in the past. If you were about to be lifted onto an operating table, you’d be more interested in the competence of the surgeon than in his or her personality.”

Continue reading "Gripless leader. Reflexive actor." »

One of the harshest homophobes in position of power, James E. West is no more.

As a former Mayor and a Senate Majority leader in Washington Legislature, the conservative Republican leader had etched out some nightmares for America. West was a fervent supporter of anti-gay bills that proposed to ban gays and lesbians from working in schools and day cares. He even proposed to make a law that would ban all sexual activity among persons under the age of 18.

As a Roy Cohn of modern times, most ironically West was recalled from his office over an internet gay sex scandal last year. Using the chat ID “Right-BiGuy”, he used to offer internships to young (high school graduating) gay men.

Not just his homophobic reactions to suppress freedom for LGBT communities, but also his own admission of private online relationships with young gay men worked against his reputation as a public official while he was living. After his death, one would have expected continuance of scathing criticisms of his legacy. But we find many interesting tributes paid to him in his death, including but not limited to the following:

Chris Vance, a political consultant and former Republican Party chairman, said, “Jim West was a great and well-respected member of the Legislature for 20 years.”

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, a Spokane Democrat said, “He was a powerful political force here and in the state for decades.”

Dino Rossi, a former Republican Senate budget chairman, said West was a gifted politician who gave his colleagues room to get their jobs done. “He didn't micromanage things. When I was trying to balance the deficit, he showed up in my office, I think, once and that was because I asked him to come over.”

Sen. Margarita Prentice, a Democrat from Renton, quoted West as a good friend. “I just think he was one of the finest political minds. You had to be tough in order to get past him,” she said.

West’s successor in Spokane, Mayor Dennis Hession said “Jim West did some wonderful things for the city of Spokane and the state and that's how he should be remembered.”

Although there is nothing wrong in paying glowing tributes even to man who erred grievously in life, what rather alarming here is the comfort level politicians across party lines have shared while praising one of the most powerful homophobic in the United States.

Equally insightful would be to know why the country turned hostile towards West not so much when he was intolerant towards LGBT community, as when later on, he admitted his own alternative sexual orientation. Astrid Rachelle Fiano, Esq. says such hypocrisy would not exist in the first place, only if “people minded their own business, didn't equate sexual preference with morality; and/or the government enacted stronger protections to make homophobia as socially unacceptable as blatant racism.”

"The Teen Endangerment Act" is finally passed. Otherwise known as “The Child Custody Protection Act”, this anti-human rights Act was approved by the Senate tonight with a 65-34 vote. So the law of the land now says it’s a federal crime for anyone other than a parent or legal guardian to take a minor across state lines to have an abortion.

This drastic far-rightwing development took place following the review of pending Feinstein and Boxer Amendments. Anti-choice senators defeated an amendment offered by Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, both Democrats from New Jersey, that would have funded programs to prevent teen pregnancy and help parents talk to their kids about tough topics like sex.

The letter sent by National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) to members of the US Senate yesterday was meant to apprise the Senators about the Act. In turn, it managed to pass the myths for facts:

“About 80 percent of the public favors requiring notification of or consent by a parent before an abortion can be performed on a minor daughter.”

Prevention or Punishment?
Owing to its ideological genealogy, the Act is punitive in nature, not preventive. Firstly it assumes a normal family for every teen, when it enforces a clause of compulsory parental involvement. Secondly it also assumes that teenagers will obediently disclose their dilemmas to legal or natural parents under all circumstances, or face undesirable consequences.

What the rightwing Senators Frist and Ensign and their collaborators do not seem to get is that teens are vulnerable in cases of pregnancy, not necessarily assertive, also because of the dominant patriarchal structure that has moralistic impositions related to abortion.

The moral police in the garb of Senators also preach refraining from sex until girls are married. Quite a few tragic assumptions ( that all girls are destined to marry) were made by Sen. Tom Coburn when he opined, “Abstinence is the best way to prevent teenage pregnancy."

What’s in store?
In sync with promoting self-centered individualism, the Act introduced by the ultra-conservatives, seeks to further isolate teens into forming their cocoon self, where all they have to look for, apart from television sets, would be their parents. Most teen pregnancies take place not due to lack of parental interventions, but because of existing parental neglects. To assume that already defenseless children would then go confide in their neglecting parents is grossly unjust.

Secondly and as a graver consequence, the Act will punish those who most genuinely want to help a teenager simply because the person is not “authorized” as a parent. So watch out, this Act indeed says grandmothers will go to jail if they are more trusted by girls. And this Act may also be entirely overlooking the stark reality afflicting thousands of girls who are victims of domestic child sexual abuse, often in the hands of their parents.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.



"Step on it twice, make four times what you pay, divide the labor costs and still come away with enough to play."
--Gangsta Rapper Shyne on inner city crack dealing

A Wall Street Journal story by David Armstrong entitled “Financial Ties to Industry Cloud Major Depression Study” is an over the-top expose, otherwise little known or cared about, regarding the endemic corruption pervading our country's mainstream medical establishment, or the medico-pharmaceutical complex, if you will.

Our country's most eminent leading physicians--Harvard-educated, board-sitting, regularly published doctors who tour, speak and get paid mad money to shill for the drug companies. No better than two-bit hookers selling themselves for a throw. This particular scandal involves the crème de la crème of docs recommending that women maintain their use of psychotropic meds while pregnant, lest they begin to feel a tad bummed out again--this recommendation comes notwithstanding the substantial concerns raised by independents regarding the obvious risks to the fetus. Why??

Because Pfizer and Merck, et al are paying for the research, paying for the speeches and generally buying these nickel-bag cretins so that they will sell their colleagues, as well as the duped end user, on the safety and efficacy of ingesting certain synthetic chemicals--a.k.a. drugs--that these mega-billion dollar companies have significant vested interests in promoting. Hello? Disingenuity at its finest--raw greed--unabashed criminality. And of course, apart from this latest Journal revelation--which is really old news--corporate Media is too threatened by the thought of speaking truth to these omnipotent entities to even make a peep.

And of course, none of these top docs reveal this financial connection--it's deemed unimportant--while they fence drugs to pharmacies and their colleagues. Pure corruption--capitalism at it's morally-compromised worst, money for nothing and your chicks for free. While we continue to lock up 1 vial crack sellers for up to 25 years under the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, we let these "legal" drug pushers off scot-free and super wealthy--with nary a thought--or negative comparison--or any accountability. We reward all colluders with extreme abundance. At least the one-vial crack buyer knows what she is buying and why--there's truth in advertising there--the product sells itself--the same cannot be said of the women fooled into continuing to anesthetize themselves during pregnancy at the not so gentle prodding of our most trusted experts.

So, like the women who gave birth to mutated children and then died horrible deaths from uterine cancer from the mispromoted use of DES in the 50's, we have a scandal of far greater proportion unfolding here--and this is of course, just the tip of the iceberg.

War is the greatest threat to the working class people everywhere. The ongoing war on Iraqi people naturally has ugly repercussions on the American working class. And just like any other, this war has hurt women workers the most.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which is supposed to address issues of employment injustice in the US is burdened with responsibilities it cannot fulfill in time owing to financial crunch. Systematic reduction in budget for the lead enforcement agency in the area of workplace discrimination has grown to be matter of considerable concern.

EEOC currently has far too many unfilled positions. The agency has employed 20 percent fewer staff members over the past five years because of a hiring freeze. The White House has cut next year’s proposed budget by $4 million from $23 million this year. As an instance, the EEOC call center in Lawrence, Kansas which was funded with $4.9m recently because of its poor performance is handling only 20 percent of the calls from victim workers.

As a result, EEOC has 33,562 cases filed last year as backlog in job discrimination cases alone. Only in 2005, there have been additional 22,278 retaliation complaints from workers lodged with the EEOC. Just on the ground of job discrimination (without including race, age, gender, disability or sexual orientation complaints etc), there is a chance that EEOC will need to deal with nearly 48000 discrimination cases this year.

Statistically speaking, more than 24,000 callers a month speak with EEOC-trained Customer Service Representatives (CSRs). Through its Frequently Asked Questions posted on the EEOC's web page and an Interactive Voice Response telephone system available 24 hours a day, another 15,000 customers a month are making enquiries.

Understaffed and under-resourced, and with all the significant workloads the agency has, the current result of operations sheet shows a negative balance of $24 million.

What does it entail?
Unfortunately we live in times where nukes are considered more worthy than human lives. As a result, the fact that thousands of people are being systematically discriminated against, and their human rights are abused right here in the famed workplaces across the US, is simply lost on the ruling nexus that assumes it as a secondary priority in relation to its greater need to invade foreign lands to ‘teach’ different religions some cruel lessons.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 being signed. July 2, 1964

EEOC was not founded on impulsive decisions of some war mongering politicians attacking Vietnam. Nor was it based on sudden realization of some good men of this country’s political elites. EEOC was a necessary consequence of years of struggles waged by millions of discriminated people of the US who took to streets defying the legal orders and challenged the powerful to stop awhile and reflect critically. It was implemented during the time of turbulent sixties and it became part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On June 11, 1963, President John F Kennedy spoke as the conscience of a guilt-ridden country as he became the first president to favor the Civil Rights Act and work towards implementing it:

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and it is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated . . . [O]ne hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet free from the bonds of injustice. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all of its citizens are free.
Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events of Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently ignore them. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met with repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations on the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. Next week I will ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

Or even the fact that, despite all glorious trumpets heralding the “victory” in the cold war, harassments of workers in the US workplace have only been on the rise over the years, as the country has seen less of citizens’ welfare, and more of private business freedoms.

In most times, the critical question never asks for a simplified solution in the propagandist rhetoric of “less government”. Whereas less of a rule by a draconic bunch of liars is desirable, the more pressing need at this juncture is to demand more “social responsibility” from the rulers, than absolve them of their duty by shifting focus to conservative utopia of “more corporate governance” holding any key.

With due apologies to Bryan Adams, the Summer of ’69 was the summer of Stonewall. New York City became a beacon for social justice in the otherwise hostile world when for the first time, the gays—ever oppressed as non-masculine—organized their confrontation against the American police and legal order—ever privileged as the symbol of masculinity.

In more ways than one, Stonewall rebellion is the single most valiant act of resistance of the oppressed against the oppressors in the recent history. And the many marginalized resistors of New York City stood at the helm of this progressive activism.

However, this path of defying the towering institutions of Big Apple has been strewn with many struggles. The latest one unfolded today at the court. Even as almost four decades have passed, the Summer of ’06 has exhibited how backward, how oppressive, and how conservative our law and order system still continues to be. How adamantly ignorant, and how repulsively inconsiderate the human judgments are till date proving to be.

With its legal verdict against gay marriage, New York State could not finally secure a position as the second enlightened state in the US (the only one is Massachusetts). One hoped, sincerely hoped, the city famous for peoples’ movements against the existing unjust orders, would have also acknowledged this one struggle by the people marginalized because of their sexual orientation. But that was not to be. Rather, the city, post-Stonewall, has now reverted back to conservatism of a shameful order and perhaps now has been turned into a beacon for social injustice—to declare gay marriage as illegal everywhere!

A Mockery of Justice:
Judge Robert S Smith on behalf of majority view rationalized Thursday:

“Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex. A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted.”

While opining these callous statements, Judge Smith has not brought in the slightly alternative and hugely profound perspectives that until a few decades ago, it was also an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived in any society in which human beings existed, that we had only a few elite white privileged men ruling over the majority in most inhumane manner imaginable, and it used to be considered that they were the ones to decide the definition of civilization and the barbaric. Not very long ago, everyone assumed that it was perfectly judicious to enslave people of color as it was considered that people who were not white, and people who were not men, were indeed not full humans.

Despite all trumpets that ‘Greek democracy’ exemplified, for centuries until only a few decades back, it was well taken for granted by everyone who ever lived that only a small number of ‘free men’ were qualified to conduct elections and define democracy in the world. Till then it was considered only so normal that people needed to be segregated to study in different schools basing on their skin color so that only some elite white men ended up owning all three branches of governance and left the manual works for the slaves.

So Judge Smith’s brilliant exposition to justify decision against gay marriage lacks this small authenticity of history fact-sheet.

Mockery is the norm?
On an even closer perusal, it will be well noted that Judge Smith was actually correct in his assumptions, only that the present era needed to be integrated in the historical perspective that he has taken. The fact is, its not “until a few decaded ago”, but even today under this current legal structure, we have widespread unjust social practices. White men are still being paid dozen times higher than Latina women for the same work. Poor workers are being retaliated against by their employers for bringing up harassment charges. And gay people are still being denied their basic human rights. Immigrants are being called ‘illegal aliens’ in the ‘modern’ country founded solely by immigrants. Poverty, homelessness, lack of access to basic healthcare are formidably overbearing upon the American society in 2006 Common Era.

The judgment against gay marriage in New York is a blot in the history which will be invariably questioned generations later and all of us will be held responsible for such irresponsible and apathetic sensitivity. Law is at times based on conventions, but if going by Judge Smith’s summarizations, law is solely based on conventions, then we do not need a court of justice to demarcate the norms. We only have to look at the utterly racist, sexist, homophobic society of today for solution. When the courts of justices are approached, it is done in want of judgments that are absent amidst conformism, not to seek vindication of unjust conformities that have been present “at all ages” or being practiced by “all human beings that ever lived.”

In what could be blatantly misinformed opinions, the court has passed verdicts to uphold traditional monogamous heterosexist marriages, in the following manner:

“It (the legislature) could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement - in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits - to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other. “

Some of us could be highly amused by the naivety of these thoughts, springing as they are, from prepositions that are invalid. The judgment that decries the gay marriage citing scientific evidence (“Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman”) is itself unscientific insofar as the fact remains that the world has not seen so far many cases where “child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like.” The point is not whether children without parents have done progress (which the judge dismisses as exception), but the fact is the “living models of men and women” are actually thousands or million times more outside the family than inside it. The judgment is unsound; basing as it is on unscientific claims.

What lies beneath?
If we shift from the amusement, one can note that the more serious side to this exercise lies in the systematic perpetuation of historical injustices by the oppressive class.

Sociologist and critical political theorist Frederick Engels while challenging the status quo of monogamous marriage had said (in “Origin of the Family Private property and the State”, p 218):
“What will most definitely disappear from monogamy…is all the characteristics stamped on it in consequence of its having arisen out of property relationships. These are, first, the predominance of the man, and secondly, the indissolubility of marriage..”

Engels way back in 1880 said,

“Marriage based on sex love is by its very nature monogamy. We have seen how right Bachofen was when he regarded the advance from group marriage to individual marriage chiefly as the work of the women; only the advance from pairing marriage to monogamy can be placed to the men’s account, and historically, this consisted essentially in a worsening of the position of women and in facilitating infidelity on the part of the men.” He said in a socialist economy alone, the women would have “regained the right of separation, and when the man and woman cannot get along they would prefer to part. In short, proletarian marriage is monogamian in the etymological sense of the word, but by no means in the historical sense” (ibid p. 209-210).

Alas, the judgment of the US court has acknowledged the aspect of marriage only in the historical sense. Only in the dominant historical interpretation of monogamous heterosexist marriages that prevented a) the women to refuse domestic oppression, and b) people from practicing their different sexual orientations or refusing assigned gender roles. A history that has denied self-expression to majority of people who have either not found solace in the preaching of the Church or in the actions of the elite ruling classes. A history that speaks the dominant narrative of the establishments, not of the peoples’ version of how the establishment thrived on exploitation legacies. A history that has hitherto stood by the side of the unjust conventions of war as a solution, oppression as a ruling tool, and fraud as a valid tactic of gaining powerful positions.

Although the mainstream history would be funded to picture New York City through the lens of its founding ‘fathers’, its mayors, its judges, and the owners of the ‘Statue of Liberty’; the peoples’ history of the city will not forget this day as one of shame, and of systematic sham.

For those who live in “post-race” America, its time to acknowledge the rose-colored spectacles. Racism must be well and alive in the country where even a mayor at his position of responsibility uses supremacist slurs while addressing racial minorities.
Coopertown in Tennessee has a mayor Danny Crosby who while swearing in a new police officer on Martin Luther King Day said, “Happy James Earl Ray Day” as a reference to King’s assassin. Crosby has displayed highest form of despicable behavior if the 17-page complaint against him filed by the attorney general of the district after one-sixth of the entire town brought a petition is to be believed. While making the town a “traffic trap” to earn ticket revenues, his targets are easily Hispanic drivers, who he thinks are “mostly illegal anyway”.
He has three weeks to respond to the charges.

A recent focus groups poll commissioned by National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) has found out where the public stands on the issue of trans-inclusive non-discrimination laws. A vast majority of those surveyed support trans-inclusive laws, despite being asked transphobic language in their questions by the pollsters.

“We used a trans-unfriendly language to describe what we were talking about, and we said a law that would protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity would specifically protect transgender people. Transgender people are men who identify or present themselves as women and women who identify or present themselves as men and includes transsexuals, cross dressers, and people who have had or are considering sex change operations… And now I’m going to ask you again, I’m not going to ask you about your values, I’m going to ask you do you favor a law that protects people on the basis of both sexual orientation, gender identity, one or the other or neither? And we got 59 percent said both, nine percent one or the other, 23 percent said nobody. It’s good news,” said Candy Cox, NGLTF’s communications senior strategist.

Amidst applauds during last September, the House of Representatives passed a hate crimes bill that provided protections for transgender individuals. The lead co-sponsors of the House version were Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), who is a lesbian, and Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich), Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), and gay Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.).

However, the bill went through rough weather in the Senate. US senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) and Gorden Smith (R-Ore) refused to make the Senate version of the bill trans-inclusive. They apprehended the bill with a change of language could not have even seen light of the day. Their concerns were genuine, considering past overall hostilities towards similar gay civil rights bills.

In essence, both the House and Senate versions of the legislation had called for amending an existing federal anti-hate crimes statute that authorizes federal prosecution for hate crimes based on someone’s race, religion and ethnicity. The Kennedy-Smith bill in the Senate then went ahead and added sexual orientation, gender, and disability to the categories covered under the existing law. The House version also had added the categories of sexual orientation, gender, disability and gender identity.

Not all is well:
Although the House version had added gender identity, it pertains only to the hate crimes bill, not to the employment sector. The leading co-sponsor in the House Rep. Barney Frank opposes adding transgender language to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. ENDA calls for banning employment discrimination in the private sector based on sexual orientation. Relevant to note here is the fact that ENDA itself is lying dormant in Congress since the 1970s. This has lent more apprehensions for Frank who says adding a transgender clause to ENDA would result in fewer co-sponsors.

The mainstream applied logic is that transgender clause helps prevent physical attack, and hence it should be suited for hate crimes bill. And considering that ENDA’s destiny is doomed in the Republican-controlled Congress as such, even without a transgender clause, any further alteration would harm the prospects ever greater.

What’s the real issue?
Well, few things have emerged. First off, categorizing people as LGBT would help only when they are provided with equal in-group access. In other words, the LGB people and the transgender individuals do not share the same concern, much less do they enjoy similar privileges.

As is becoming of a system of governance which has historically oppressed few groups and privileged certain others (in some unsophisticated terms, Malcolm X had alluded to this as ‘divide and rule’ policy), the current administration more so has been actively vocal about creating the distinctions more apparent. That the LGBT people do not enjoy similar rights as heterosexual people is no new knowledge. But to mar the united opposition to this systematic discrimination, the LGBT peoples themselves have been divided since some time now, in terms of the degree of their access to resources and rights.

Latest in the lowest ladder of oppression are the transgendered people, who have found absolutely no support from either the House or the Senate. If the House supports their inclusion in Hate Crimes bill, it refuses them access to ENDA. As for Senate versions, not even the Hate Crimes bill has time for the transgender.

The layers of difficulties that have been systematically in place to seclude the transgender people from the minimum safety and comfort that most heterosexual people take simply for granted poses few serious questions.

The ones that currently surface, even as the recent poll shows solidarity to causes of the transgender individuals include but are not limited to, the awareness of transgender, the privilege of the heterosexuality, and the redundant administrative hurdles.

Awareness of the transgender: It’s not just a few history textbooks filled with systematic lies for consumption of school children, its also the composite lot of media, military and industrial nexus that have refused to deal with the whole truths. As a result, heterosexuality has been taken for granted to such an extent as a religiously accurate norm, that any alternative is considered to be one non-normal group called LGBT. At this point, the dismissal of the minorities are done at the alter of celebration of the norm. Therefore, most are kept oblivious of distinguishing the nuances of gender and sexuality.

Without education of an understanding of what constitutes “gender identity” or “gender identity and expression”, we are finding resistance to their inclusion as forming the explicit language that’s needed to be there in proposed legislations. The transgendered people are absolutely accurate in their fear that the proposed laws will continue to discriminate against them, since judges may interpret the victims from a lens that’s indifferent or silent about covering them.

In the process, the politicians are acting on priority to ensure passage of the bill, and looking at the technicalities that will facilitate the process. They are in no way interested to get educated on the crucial differences between the LGB and the T communities and how non-inclusion of some languages might actually work in detriment to the transgender peoples’ right in the civil society and employment sector.

Privilege of heterosexuality: The ruling elites have always advocated the inevitability of hierarchy of oppression. And so, it is considered that sustainable reforms, not radical changes need to take place while all along posing one oppressed group against another. So different systems of oppressions such as race, sex, gender, etc are poised in a prioritized hierarchy, and not as constituents of a multi-layered complex that is exploited all at once.

To quote Audre Lorde from a chapter in “Oppression and social justice: Critical frameworks.” (5th ed., p. 51, Edited by J Andrzejewski, 1996), “Within the lesbian community, I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black.” The privilege of heterosexuality ignores the fact that heterosexuality itself is not a privilege by default any longer once one considers the oppressions of other race, class and gender variants.

Administrative hurdles: Administration poses deliberate problems because it gains from the divisive tendencies. The monopolist politicians who have thus far believed in standardized notions of the male supremacy have not stopped either at ensuring draconic laws that recognize marriage only between a man and a woman and grant them the best of civil rights, they have also countless number of times prevented progressive proposals from becoming legislations.

I am tempted to quote Lorde again, “It is not accidental that the Family Protection Act, which is virtually anti-woman and anti-Black, is also anti-gay. As a Black person, I know who my enemies are, and when the Ku Klux Klan goes to court in Detroit to try and force the Board of Education to remove books that the Klan believes “hint at homosexuality”, then I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”

That’s a serious lesson for our well-meaning politicians if they are genuinely contemplating to benefit the people thus far discriminated against. Not merely for the representatives to see their names hit the halls of fame, for passing of yet another ineffectual bill.

The city animal services department of Los Angeles had to wait till today when massive protests by activists over the last week finally changed its stance towards participating in a planned bikini contest called “Hooters for Neuters” for spaying pets.

It speaks volumes about the department’s reactionary compositions that have lent administrative helps to an organization systematically aimed at degrading women. Although, from one angle, it does appear to be natural to collaborate with the Hooters, since the department itself espouses spay and neuter as the methodical solution to welfare of animals!

However, the department has technically not backed out of the event. It has merely assured that it will not receive any money from the event. So the “Hooters for Neuters”, a conservative, anti-animal rights, sexist organization of disrepute will still continue to use the city department as its partner on all its publicity campaigns and gain legitimacy.

Under pressure, the Hooters website has undergone several changes since last week. In the beginning the official poster had a bikini clad woman supporting animal sterilization.

After severe protests from many feminist organizations, the city Controller Laura Chick responded in support of the activists. “Are we going backward here? We are a city with all kinds of progressive programs that empower women and end discrimination in the workplace, and now we're being connected with a Hooters bikini contest. It isn't right.”

Animal Services General Manager Ed Boks finally got convinced that the poster was at least degrading to women, and the poster accordingly changed on Hooters restaurant chain website, replacing the woman with a dog wearing a T-shirt that says “Hooters for Neuters”!

And now after more forced introspections, Boks has released a press note saying that the department will bow out of the July 13 fundraiser at the Hollywood nightclub hosted by the Hooters restaurant chain.

However, the Hooters on their part still mention the LA Animal Services department on their new amended poster.

In the meantime, according to reports, Councilwoman Jan Perry said the department's attempt to be creative in telling pet owners to sterilize their animals “crosses the line.” And animal activist Judy Cairns of San Pedro said she could live with the bikini contest on the condition that city officials — namely the men — also show some skin. “I want to see Mayor Villaraigosa's legs,” Cairns said.

A Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene investigation has found the state public health officer for Washington County William Christoffel as a violator of the state sexual harassment policy.

The allegations first published by The (Hagerstown) Herald-Mail Sunday said that health officer Christoffel who has been on administrative leave since June 9, had made sexually explicit comments, played with condoms and hugged a worker.

Today the officer has denied that he made any offensive comments to his staff and said he would contest any action taken against him as a result of the findings.

According to a separate Associate Press report, the complaints of sexual harassment were originally made by Sandra C. Hoffman, assistant director of Johns Hopkins University's George W. Comstock Center for Public Health Research and Prevention in Hagerstown.

In the report prepared by investigator Hilda J. Davis based on interviewes of 13 witnesses from the Comstock Center and the health department, Christoffel had already admitted to seven offenses, including making sexually explicit statements, using condoms as a joke, hugging an employee publicly and referring to a school teacher who attended a school board meeting as "good eye candy."

Trade unions in the country during recent times have been operating on templates. At least half of all labor unions in New York city have decided to challenge this practice, where the city negotiates a deal with one union and then uses that contract as a sort of template for other negotiations.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks “one size fits all” will not fit any one since the coalition is formed by 20 labor unions that have different work rules and hence it might not be served by working together.

Refuting the Mayor’s apprehensions and calling the move a “milestone” for city municipal unions, in a statement, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said, “With working people losing their pensions and health care, and the erosion of the middle class, many of us realize that the issues that bind us are far greater than the ones that divide us.”

Currently 20 labor unions coalition will bargain on behalf of about 175,000 city workers. The association, yet unnamed, includes civilian and uniformed unions and brings together members of both the AFL-CIO and the neophyte Change to Win coalition.

The ones who have not agreed to take part include the police, firefighters unions, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union District Council 37, the city’s largest public-employee union.

Let’s do a reality check. No woman has ever led the presidential ticket of a major political party in the United States. Only one—Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984—has been nominated for vice president by either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Earlier, Shirley Chisholm as the first black woman ever to run for President of the United States made an unsuccessful bid even for the 1972 Democratic nomination.

Today an AP report focuses on how US lags behind in female political representation. Yet, the report would not mention how the country could learn from others that have implemented radical quota systems to ensure women participation in the legislation. In fact the report attributes some unnamed experts as saying that factors helping female politicians outside the U.S. include financial support, women-focused reforms within individual political parties, and an organized effort by the media and the general public to champion political parity.

Whereas all these factors might be valid, the fact that countries like Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Chile, Liberia, apart from Israel and UK have had absolute success in electing women politicians to the highest office does not much support the thesis of financial support and media reforms. In addition, a concerted effort to prevent women from joining the highest political battlefield can only be overcome through an equally passionate effort at ensuring participation, not by merely opening the platform to unfair competition.

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) is a misnomer. It is deliberately misleading so as to hijack the spirit of civil rights movement by naming itself similarly. At its best, it’s a right wing effort (funded by businessmen like Ward Connerly) to sabotage the ongoing demands to implement affirmative action more proactively. At its worst, it’s a highly reactionary movement aimed at systematically promote discrimination at workplaces.

This fall, Michigan voters are going to decide on the fate of use of affirmative action policies in the state. It’s especially alarming because the MCRI is proposing to outlaw race, gender and other personal demographic data as criteria for public institutions including Michigan's public universities to use in furtherance of civil rights initiative. Only in 1997, University of Michigan spearheaded the movement of affirmative action to be applicable in colleges, but over the last many years, continues to be the prime target.

The irony is that MCRI is not a new initiative by the right-wingers. Indeed, President Bush has echoed similar sentiments before. On January 15, 2003, the President said,

"..the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes perspective students, based solely on their race. So, tomorrow my administration will file a brief with the court arguing that the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which award students a significant number of extra points based solely on their race, and establishes numerical targets for incoming minority students, are unconstitutional."

However, after a week, the President’s pleas also did not bear fruits for the reactionaries. In its first ruling on affirmative action in higher education admissions in 25 years, the Supreme Court justices voted 5-4 to uphold the University of Michigan's law school affirmative action policy by ruling that race can indeed be used in university admission decisions.

Detroit Free Press today runs two columns to provide voice to both schools of thoughts. Whereas Roger Clegg finds Affirmative Action an ambiguous term to deal with, Paul Hillegonds says we will roll back to the 60’s again if reactionaries had their way.

Black historian and author Lawrence Otis Graham says US Senate displays some of the same racist attitudes it displayed a century ago. His new book, “The Senator and The Socialite” (HarperCollins), surveys the internal racial hiring practices of the US Senate offices, which he thinks is pathetically below mark.

Graham says, “It is outrageous enough that this nation will only elect one black person to the U.S. Senate, but it is a true disgrace that the Senators, themselves, are unwilling to hire blacks and other minorities to run or assist in their offices.” He cites a study which shows that 94% of the Senate employees are white and not a single one of the 100 Senators has a black person in a chief of staff leadership post.

In a press release today, Graham says, “Nothing has changed on the Senate side of the Capitol building since 1874 when Senator Blanche Bruce became the first black elected to a full Senate term. There was 1 black in the Senate then, and there's still only 1 black there today. And none of the Senators seem to really care about that level of racial exclusion.”

One of New York State’s largest gay and lesbian advocacy groups, Empire State Pride Agenda, has endorsed Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in the race for governor. Spitzer has said he supports same-sex marriage and he would work to implement a bill legalizing such unions to the Legislature if he's elected governor.

Spitzer has won an early endorsement of the Working Families Party, community group ACORN and labor unions, including those that broke from the AFL-CIO to form the Change To Win Federation.

Cleo Kirk, a sitting Shelby County Commissioner of District 3 in Tennessee is in the spotlight. A former administrator Calvin Williams named him as the person who is going to face a federal sexual harassment complaint. This one is going to be an interesting political battle actually, since Williams himself is going to face trial for having been charged with bribing in order to influence “business transactions” of the County.
Williams disclosing Kirk’s name to the media may seem little odd. In fact, he says, “I'm going to say it, because that is the truth, and he'll have to answer the best way he (Kirk) can”.

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