So, let us pop open a bottle of champagne and celebrate.

I suppose that if you are one of those billion-dollar hedge fund managers, this piece of information could actually mean something to you. However, if you are one of those struggling souls in that Dickens novel known as twenty-first century America, it means little or nothing to you.

That anyone can actually utter the words “the recession is over” at a time of mass unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness and general despair tells you all you need to know about America. The nation actually exists as two nations: the few that have, and the many who don’t. The former group does not depend on the well-being of the latter in order to thrive, and arguably thrives on its misfortunes. Ultimately, the American dream is exactly that — a dream. And as millions of people are waking up to stark realities, they long to resume their slumber.

Currently, as the Census Bureau reported, 43.6 million people, or 14.3 percent of the U.S. population live in poverty. For people of color it is even worse. While 9.4 percent of whites are in poverty, 25.3 percent of Latinos and 25.8 percent of blacks are poor. And childhood poverty has risen to an alarming 20.7 percent. To be sure, it hasn’t been this bad since the 1960s. Some people say that all we need to do to alleviate poverty is to grow the economy. But what good will creating a larger pie do for us, with the top 1 percent still taking the lion’s share of the pie?

Establishment conservatives are so transparent in their greed that their only solution is to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans making over $250,000. Meanwhile, the Tea Party gangsters are so heartless that their extremist solutions — to abolish unemployment insurance and reduce dependence on government — would amount to pouring salt in an open wound.

Amidst all of the suffering we’re witnessing during this recent crisis in the world’s largest economy, this awkwardly named land of opportunity, the number of billionaires has soared. The gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else hasn’t been this large since the 1920s. The top 1 percent claim 33.8 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half of Americans own a negligible 2.5 percent of the economic pie. Real average earnings have not increased in half a century, and the last two decades were great, if you were a CEO, that is.

The fact is that Republican tax policies have widened the gulf between rich and poor, with the rich paying less and less in taxes. Despite the longstanding, folkloric national rhetoric regarding opportunity — or perhaps even because of it — the fact is that it is harder to make it in America than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Upward economic mobility is far more elusive in the U.S. than in those so-called evil socialist nations of Scandinavia and the rest of Western Europe. If you are poor in the “land of the free,” chances are that you will stay that way. But unlike those Europeans, at least you’ll have your guns to protect you, right? Yeah, right.

The Obama administration is at a crossroads with the selection of Elizabeth Warren to get the consumer protection agency up and running. Even some of the most diehard fans of this president were losing faith, with the daily parade of white male Wall Street front men advising Obama into the abyss of one-term presidential status. They have served him poorly, and would do for the U.S. economy what they already have done for the U.S. economy, which is to wreck it further and collect their spoils.

But perhaps now, there is a chance that the people might win for a change. The middle class has been hollowed out and wiped out, while the poor is even more entrenched than ever. And yet one gets the sense that it cannot remain like this. Something’s gotta give, one way or another. The question is how we will let this all play out as a country — with widespread destitution, social unrest and uprisings, or with responsive government action that seeks to bring about equity and justice to the many. Call it a new New Deal, call it socialism, call it democracy, call it what you will. But one thing is clear: American-style capitalism is eating the people alive, and now is the time to put it in check.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

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Just about everyone knows about the problems facing Bishop Eddie Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Specifically, there are the four young men who allege that the prominent Atlanta-area pastor coerced them into a sexual relationship, and possibly more waiting in the wings. They claim that Long used his status to seduce them with money, clothes, bling, cars, foreign trips, access to celebrities and the like. The men allege that they called Long “dad” or “daddy,” which sounds awfully cultish. One of the plaintiffs even claims that he was 14 when his relationship with Long started, which brings up issues of child abuse and statutory rape.

These accusations will be addressed in court, and who knows, maybe there will be a quiet out-of-court settlement. To be sure, this is not the first religious leader to face accusations of sexual and professional misconduct and abuse of authority, nor the last. Similarly, the Bishop is not the first homophobic preacher to be outed as a gay man.

But Bishop Long’s sexual orientation ultimately is not the subject of this commentary, although it provides some valuable context. Now, if these accusations are true, then Bishop Long is at least guilty of hypocrisy and self-hatred. And if the charges are not true, he is still an anti-gay minister who has damaged many people. Either way, he is a prosperity preacher who preys on the black community and shames the legacy of the civil rights movement. And that’s most of what we need to know.

When the Southern Poverty Law Center decides to write an intelligence report about you, you know you’ve done something wrong. SPLC calls Bishop Long “one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement.” In one sermon, he says to gays and lesbians, “God says you deserve death!” The message of “hate the sin and the sinner” are strong words in a religion that is supposed to teach love, healing and redemption.

Long believes that homosexuality is spiritual abortion, “a manifestation of a fallen man.” He believes that if black gays and lesbians feel alienated and abandoned by the black church, the problem is not intolerance against them but their own sins. But before these people go to Hell as he contends they are, Long is trying to cure gays and lesbians (except himself, we can assume). And his church bookstore sells the works of authors such as the homophobic James Dobson of Focus on the Family — no friend of the black community.

And Long’s misappropriation of the King legacy is shameful. Coretta Scott King’s funeral was held at New Birth in 2006 rather than at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King family’s church. Civil rights giants Harry Belafonte and then-NAACP-chair Julian Bond were so mortified by this fact that they boycotted the funeral. After all, Mrs. King was a supporter of gay marriage, and she called it a civil rights issue. The late Yolanda King, the oldest child, took after her mother in that regard, but Bernice King, the youngest child in the King family, called Long her “new father” and symbolically passed a torch to him.

To add to the insult, Bernice King and Long participated in a march to Dr. King’s gravesite to support a national constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. In 2004, Long and others successfully pushed for a similar amendment to the Georgia state constitution. And it should be noted that Alveda King, Dr. King’s niece, is herself a homophobic minister who exploited her uncle’s name at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, an event replete with aggrieved white supremacists, Obama-haters and gun-enthusiasts. “Homosexuality cannot be elevated to the civil rights issue,” Alveda King said in a 1998 speech. “The civil rights movement was born from the Bible. God hates homosexuality.”

Bishop Eddie Long is a prosperity-oriented minister, adhering to a theology that essentially says God will financially hook up the believers. Some would call it a false gospel, given Jesus’ targeting of the money changers, and his proclamation that it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Others would call it pimping.

Long’s New Birth megachurch has a membership of about 25,000 and sits on 240 acres in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, Georgia. The nonprofit religious “charity” he started in 1997 has served him well — a $1.4-million, 20-acre home with nine bathrooms, a $350,000 Bentley, and a $3 million salary over three years, not to mention all of the expensive jewelry. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) launched an investigation into the finances and tax-exempt status of six megachurches, including New Birth, and Creflo Dollar’s World Changers International Church. Due to the recession, New Birth had to cut back on its $250,000 Easter Sunday service last year, and that is not a misprint. Tithes and membership dropped 20 percent, given that it is hard to be about prosperity when you are poor and hurting, and black folks have been hit harder than most in this recession.

And as Wall Street bankers, megachurch preachers and other prosperity pimps live like lottery winners, people in America are suffering. The Census Bureau recently reported that poverty is higher than it was 10 years ago, with nearly 15 percent of Americans in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has tripled in three decades, and is the highest it has been since the 1920s. Meanwhile, unemployment is entrenched and not going anywhere anytime soon.

Surely, Bishop Long and his supporters would maintain that his reputation is being dragged through the mud. But his reputation was already muddied via his homophobia and corrupt bling theology. Rather, Long should worry far more about what Dr. King would say about him.

Although King fought against and even disobeyed unjust laws, Long supports them. Dr. King decried the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism, and called for a radical revolution of values, from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. Figures such as King and Malcolm X walked the talk by fighting for the people — and for causes greater than their personal bank account — through great personal sacrifice and a modest existence. Remember that Dr. King donated all of his $54,000 Nobel Peace Prize money to the civil rights movement. I dare say it would be hard to find many leaders today — black or otherwise — who would follow in the footsteps of this great man. How many of them would lift a finger to help the downtrodden?

Meanwhile, Bishop Eddie Long just wants to get paid and beat the case.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

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Now, I suppose it is conceivable that white supremacists and the private prison industry could join forces in support of a good piece of legislation. After all, anything is possible.

But it sure isn’t likely.

This is the situation we are seeing in Arizona with the passage of S.B. 1070, the anti-immigrant law that allows police to stop and arrest suspected undocumented aliens. Essentially, this law makes it a crime under state law to be in the U.S. illegally. The law allows police to stop anyone with a “reasonable suspicion” of being undocumented, and demand proof of citizenship. Those who cannot produce the documentation face arrest, a $2,500 fine, and 6 months in jail.

One must ask, where do they find these laws? Better yet, where do they find the people to write such laws? In searching for an answer, I turn to a colleague, the late Al Lewis. Yes, Grandpa from the Munsters. I knew him as a political activist and a radio show host when I worked at Pacifica Radio station WBAI ten years ago as a producer for Democracy Now! Al defined a law as “that which is bought and paid for.” It was one of the most simple, yet profound statements I had heard. And it definitely applies to Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

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It is now no secret that two top level staffers in Gov. Jan Brewer’s administration — Paul Senseman and Chuck Coughlin — have financial ties to the private prison industry, and stand to benefit personally from S.B. 1070. After all, private prisons lock up the immigration detainees in that state — and they would like to run all of the prisons in Arizona, including death row — so the new law is good for business. Senseman, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, is a former lobbyist for Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA. And his wife presently is a lobbyist for the company. Meanwhile, Chuck Coughlin is one of the governor’s policy advisers and her campaign chairman. Coughlin’s firm, HighGround Public Affairs Consultants, currently lobbies for CCA. CCA and rival prison company Geo Group are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, where they ensured passage of the insidious bill.

But it gets better, or worse depending on your point of view. State Senator Russell Pearce, who introduced S.B. 1070, has extensive financial ties to the private prison industry. He also has friendships with neo-Nazis such as J.T. Ready of the National Alliance, who calls Jews parasites, and hunts and kidnaps people on the border with Mexico. Ready once said “The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in.” And he once told a neo-Nazi rally that “This is a white, European homeland. That’s how it should be preserved if we want to keep it clean, safe, and pure.”

Senator Pearce has built his career on the backs of the Latino immigrant communities he has so fervently scapegoated. He has supported Nuremberg-style legislation that would prohibit hospitals from issuing birth certificates to children born of undocumented immigrants, and a law that would not allow people to marry without providing proof of U.S. citizenship and social security numbers. That would make it illegal for citizens to marry non-citizens! Pearce wants to eliminate the Fourteenth Amendment. And he supported the bill that has eliminated ethnic studies in Arizona public schools and colleges and universities.

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And Senator Pearce has ties to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). S.B. 1070 was written by Kris Kobach, a former Bush administration lawyer who now works for FAIR’s legal arm. The organization has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. FAIR was founded by the nativist trailblazer John Tanton, who warned of the dangers of the “Latin onslaught” in America, and declared “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And the group received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a racist eugenics foundation that funds studies linking race, genetics and intelligence.

For all of you conspiracy theorists out there, this is raw meat to be sure. But there’s nothing theoretical about this conspiratorial scenario. Klannish hate groups and prison companies worked together to pass an atrocious, twisted and unconstitutional law. The former hates Latinos and thinks they are inferior, and would love nothing more than to throw them all behind bars for good. Meanwhile, the latter wants to profit from locking up as many immigrant detainees as possible. Just to top it off, both groups collaborated with their tools in the Arizona legislature and that horrid governor’s office to make it all happen. This is Juan Crow in action. And sadly, it smells all too much like American history.

In fact, this reminds me of the days of Jim Crow, after slavery, when segregationist state and local governments enacted laws to maintain blacks in a state of virtual bondage. Laws targeted African-Americans specifically by going after offenses for which freedmen were presumed more likely to be charged, such as petty theft, vagrancy, burglary and bigamy. Under the convict lease system, an overwhelmingly black prison population provided free labor to the plantations, railroads and mining companies. “These companies assume charge of the convicts, work them as cheap labor and pay the states a handsome revenue for their labor…. The details of vice, cruelty and death thus fostered by the states whose treasuries are enriched thereby, equals anything from Siberia,” said Frederick Douglass. “Every Negro so sentenced not only means able-bodied men to swell the state’s number of slaves, but every Negro so convicted is thereby disfranchised.” Of course, the ideological justification for the Jim Crow legal regime was that black people were inferior, and posed a racial, sexual, criminal, political and economic threat to whites.

And today, there is profit in prisons, with whole industries that make their bread and butter over the warehousing of warm bodies -including some of the prisons themselves. Roughly 70 percent of America’s prisoners are black and brown because laws target communities of color. Yet, America’s legal profession is among the nation’s least diverse: Over 90 percent of the judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys are white. And law enforcement wages a racially-motivated war on drugs in poor black and Latino neighborhoods, with a financial incentive to maximize the arrests and convictions they win.

When racial scapegoats are conjured up–whether the black “crack babies” and “welfare queens” of the 1980s, or the Mexican “illegal aliens” and “anchor babies” of today–laws are created to legitimize the crimes that the state is about to commit against these groups, ostensibly in the name of the public good, but really for private profit. Sadly, in the land of the jobless and the hopeless, boogeymen are in great demand these days. And in Arizona, a group of greedy, unscrupulous folks got together with professional racists to criminalize the Latino community and make a buck at the same time.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’

s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

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The media manufactured spectacle that is and was the Shirley Sherrod incident tells us all we need to know about Andrew Brietbart, Fox “News” and the dangers of extremist hack media– unregulated, irresponsible and unethical– run amok.

Of course, I speak of the firing of the U.S. Department of Agriculture official based on a heavily edited video of a speech she gave at an NAACP event in Georgia. Ms. Sherrod is the wife of a SNCC cofounder, and she became a civil rights activist after her father, a black farmer, was lynched by a white farmer. Ms. Sherrod described how she overcame her reluctance to give her all in helping a white farmer who acted superior towards her. In the end, she helped him. She realized that the issue was not as much about race as it was about poor whites and poor blacks finding themselves in the same situation. And good for her.

But the doctored up video, brought to us by conservative blogger and hatchet man Andrew Breitbart, made Sherrod appear as if she denied assistance to the white farmer, end of story. And Breitbart has lots of practice at this sort of thing, fraud, that is, as the “person” who introduced to us via Fox News the fabricated ACORN pimp video that brought down the nonprofit organization.

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It’s not as if we should have been surprised this time around, yet some people were. Many reporters were snookered. The NAACP was hoodwinked. And most of all, the seemingly invertebrate Obama administration was so fooled, or scared, or both, that they fired the woman without due process. I’m sorry, even worse, they forced Ms. Sherrod to pull over the car and type her resignation on her blackberry. And as a wise man once said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

To watch the lambasting of Shirley Sherrod on Fox News before the facts were known was unbearable. At the same time, one should not depend on Fox for actual news. You could conceivably drink a tall glass of soy sauce with dinner and pretend it is a beverage, but it wasn’t intended for that purpose.

It is safe to say that Fox News, like its movie and television divisions, is pure entertainment, that is, if you get your entertainment from a lynchmob.

And lynchings in this country once were considered a form of entertainment by some, believe it or not. Often the victim– typically a black man accused of insulting a white woman, or perhaps a black man having the nerve to wear his army uniform, or just any black man walking–was beaten, burned, stabbed or hanged. Often, torture and castration was involved, and various unspeakable body parts were cut off as souvenirs. White women and young children were on hand with picnic baskets to observe in the family-like atmosphere. Railroad agents even sold tickets to the events. And frequently among the instigators and participants were not only lowlife good ol’ boys, but the community’s business and political leadership.

In today’s polarizing political climate with declining journalistic standards, sloppy fact checking and faltering government oversight, Fox News serves as the ticket agent to the lynching. They even handle the promotion and advertising. They participate in a high-tech media lynching of sorts, somewhat akin to what Justice Clarence Thomas described at his confirmation hearings, except that he was (and still is) full of it.

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Like the politicized Bush Justice Department under the guidance of Karl Rove, Fox News and other conservative media decide on a narrative beforehand, and lie and fabricate to fit that narrative. The Bush DOJ, stacked with an army of televangelist law school graduates, pursued imaginary cases of voter fraud, anti-white voter intimidation and discrimination against Christians. Those prosecutors who did not comply were fired.

Similarly, Fox is filled with vacuous news models who dutifully read the scripts prepared for them. The hot topic these days among the conservative movement is the myth of rampant black racism against whites, and the truth be damned. This narrative serves an important purpose for Republicans, which is to energize the Tea Party base, and kick out the Democrats in the midterms and in 2012. Then once they impeach Obama, they’ll finish off the job of ruining the country through a supply-side nightmare that Bush came close to fulfilling. It’s that deep, and yet that simple.

Don’t get me wrong, freedom of speech is a beautiful thing. As a writer, I appreciate the ability to speak and write freely about this or any other issue. But inciting a lynchmob is quite another matter. What we’re witnessing is the use of the media specifically to spread lies, defame, and hurt groups of people, in this case based on race, solely for political gain. And that’s downright dangerous and antidemocratic. Why, that’s the type of thing you would expect from one of those fascist and communist governments that the ultra-conservatives so vocally decry, guilty as they are of psychological projection.

Propagandists without shame, the folks at Fox and others of their ilk would have done well for themselves under the employ of a repressive regime. Surely they would have used their media manipulation skills to publicly dehumanize unpopular groups. Certainly they would have shaped public opinion by scapegoating defenseless minorities, thereby paving the way for laws to make them disappear. And I can’t help but think that someone such as Glenn Beck, or the troubled, attention-craving, perpetually angry Breitbart, would have felt at home in a Rwandan radio station in 1994, inciting violence by encouraging Hutus to exterminate the Tutsi “cockroaches”.

Harsh words? No, harsh people. There’s no telling what they’d do if given half the chance.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

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When golf giant Tiger Woods made his public apology recently, he said he let a lot of people down. Personally, I cared very little about his personal dalliances and extracurricular activities. With an economic and political crisis afoot in this crumbling empire, it seems that this salacious celebrity gossip is nothing more than that–a media-created distraction to help us forget how bad things really are in America. This is a sideshow, like the gladiator games in Rome, or feeding the Christians to the lions.

A personal matter, the subject of Tiger’s apology really was not intended for the general public, though it was made before an audience of millions. Rather, his plastic, controlled, manufactured pseudo-press conference, no doubt the creation of some well-paid public relations firm, was intended for the people closest to him. And more importantly, it was meant for his corporate sponsors who have backed out and bailed out on him, or those who are fixin’ to do so. This is about dollars.

So, Tiger didn’t owe me an apology, because I had no expectations of him. But Tiger did disappoint me in one regard. He failed to apologize for his failure to put human rights and human dignity ahead of his profits. To be more specific, plans are still in motion for Tiger Woods Dubai, an expansive Woods-designed golf course and luxury home development in Dubai. The $100 million project is being built in Dubailand, the adult playground of the Mideast. Mansions and villas in the 580-acre resort are reportedly selling for $12 million to $23 million, and Woods plans to build a 16,500-square-foot mansion overlooking his course.

The problem is, Dubai is built on slave labor, and Tiger has had nothing to say about it. And I don’t mean slavery as in hundreds of years ago. I mean slavery as in over the past thirty years, including now. The home of the world’s tallest skyscraper, Dubai is a sparkling city of excess built by slave labor from the Third World, including the nations of the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and Africa. Companies lure these workers with a promise of making a ton of money, and in the end steal their passports and their money as well. Migrant workers work 12 hours a day, six days a week in hot temperatures. And they earn an average of $175 a month, with no minimum wage, and some making as little as $8 a day, according to Human Rights Watch. I know, how dare I spoil other people’s fun, and stand in their way as they try to earn a dishonest living on the backs of slaves, as dictated by the free market.

And you’d think that your average high-profile celebrity athlete or entertainer, often in tune with social and political causes, might have a low threshold of tolerance when it comes to slavery, much less people who profit from the practice of slavery. Never mind looking at it from the glaringly obvious moral perspective, just look at it from a PR point of view for a minute. But when that high-profile person is himself a descendant of slaves, the expectations are even higher. So the question that we must ask Tiger is, exactly how much money do you need, man? Were there no black history lessons in your childhood? Did all of those African-American heroes before you make their sacrifices, and endure the racial taunts, the hostility, the beatings, and the threats to life and livelihood, for this?

A person who would take money from people who have used slave labor, look the other way and not ask questions is truly a slave–a slave to his riches and to his corporate masters. Such a person is a billion-dollar monster, created by a mixture of extraordinary talent, excessive media hype and unprecedented corporate promotion.

But then again, maybe Tiger’s statement about his devotion to the Buddhist faith is more than mere empty rhetoric. Perhaps he will see the light and make a correction to this previously unaddressed character flaw. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

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I don’t know about you, but after watching the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, I was given the distinct impression that Thurgood Marshall was being subjected to a criminal trial, post-mortem, by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The late great Supreme Court justice—and the first African-American to sit on the high court—was mentioned no fewer than 35 times the first day.  Meanwhile, President Obama was mentioned only 14 times.

Elena Kagan has the nerve to actually admire such a man as Marshall, a civil rights giant who served as lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and served as a jurist of high distinction.  She even served as a law clerk to the man.  How dare she!  Didn’t the White House people properly vet this candidate, so as to discover such disturbing, and potentially deal-breaking, information in her past?

Each time a Supreme Court nominee comes before the Senate, we should expect the same thing: one group of lawmakers will ask thoughtful, probing questions in an attempt to determine the candidate’s suitability for the nation’s top judicial body.  But the other group, generally a contingent of dour white-male, pro-corporate, segregationist holdovers, are charged with the task of disrespecting any nominee that does not subscribe to their narrow and flawed worldview.  And it is this second group—which never passes up the opportunity to portray themselves as the twenty-first century reincarnation of Senators Strom Thurmond, Theodore Bilbo and James Eastland— that tells you all you need to know about the nature and purpose of these hearings.

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And these Republicans spent valuable time sullying the name of a man who accomplished more for this country than they could ever dream in a thousand lifetimes, and whose shoes they are unworthy to fill collectively, much less shine.

Harsh words, perhaps, but the unsolicited commentary those senators provided that day was harsh, and was said in the presence of Justice Marshall’s son.  The common theme was that liberal activist judges are evil, whatever “activist” means, with particular attention paid to Marshall’s view that “you do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”  Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) condemned Kagan for praising Marshall for believing that “it was the role of the courts in interpreting the Constitution to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government.”  Kyl also said that Marshall’s judicial philosophy “is not what I would consider to be mainstream,” and slammed Marshall for “his unshakable determination to protect the underdog.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said of Kagan’s purported “liberal” political leanings, “And if at the end of the day, you think more like Justice Marshall than Justice Rehnquist, so be it.”  Well, one would hope that Kagan does not think like the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, who once defended the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, and began his legal career working for Operation Eagle Eye, a Republican project to intimidate, harass and exclude black and Latino voters.  He also fought the passage of a Phoenix, Arizona ordinance allowing blacks to enter stores and restaurants.

In his opening statement, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) reminded us that Elena Kagan “clerked for Judge [Abner] Mikva and Justice Marshall, each a well-known liberal activist judge.”  Yes, she clerked for a Jew and a black, and we know what happens when you get those Jewish and black civil rights-loving activist types together.  Surely this thinly-veiled racist point was not missed by the Tea Party base for which Sessions’ troubling message was intended, provided their mental capacity allowed them to catch it.

And Sessions is not one to be in judgment of anyone, yet he remains on the Senate Judiciary committee.  This is the man who was rejected by the Senate for the federal bench because he opposed the Voting Rights Act.  As a U.S. attorney in Alabama, he called a black assistant U.S. Attorney “boy” and warned him to “be careful what you say to white folks.”  He said the NAACP and the ACLU were “un-American and Communist inspired” groups that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”  As a federal prosecutor, Sessions engaged in a voter-fraud witch-hunt against three Black civil rights workers, including a former aide to Dr. King.  Moreover, during a 1981 KKK murder investigation, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.”

RELATED: Kagan Supreme Court Hearings Begin

Race was a fixture of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings, and apparently race is a big part of the Kagan hearings, even though Kagan is not a person of color.  That’s because the ultra-Right Republicans can’t let it go.  Race-baiting is their crack, if you will, and they refuse to get treatment for their affliction.  The race card won them many an election.  And though their base of good ol’ boys is dwindling, they refuse to divest themselves of a strategy that is doomed to failure in light of changing demographics.

The Kagan hearings, or any Supreme Court hearings for that matter, are part of the war to win over the hearts and minds of America, to determine what kind of country we want this to become.  Conservatives will decry the rise of the liberal activist judges who legislate from the bench.  But activism is in the eye of the beholder.  I cannot think of any greater examples of activism than the gems promulgated by the current court, such as the Citizens United decision, which gives corporations free rein to influence the political process.  And another great example is the court’s new interpretation of Second Amendment, in which the language regarding “a well regulated militia” is misconstrued as a fundamental right of personal gun ownership under federal and state and local law.  This, in a nation with 30,000 gun murders a year.

In the end, the real question is whether we want the Dred Scott court and the Plessy court, or the court that gave us the Brown decision.  It’s for the people with power or its power for the people.  And that’s what these hearings are all about.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book,States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

The Texas Republican Party, that bastion of tolerance, goodwill and forward thinking, just released its policy platform.  I can’t say I was surprised by the contents therein, but nevertheless, I was taken aback by the stunning absurdity emanating from a “mainstream” political party.  And they run the state!  Of course, these were the folks who gave us the revamped Texas Board of Education, with its textbook whitewashing of the slave trade, and its crimes against truth and reason masquerading as legitimate curriculum changes.

So, in its 25-page manifesto, the Texas GOP really provides a clear sense of its convictions.  Some of the positions in the platform are mundane and without distinction, but the devil is in the details.  And for people who claim to be Christians, there’s little Christ and a lot of devilishness in there.

With regard to government power, the platform calls for the elimination of all executive orders, and the repeal of all previous executive orders.  It strongly rejects D.C. statehood and “adding unconstitutional voting Congressional members,” and supports nonparticipation in the census.  Further, the Texas GOP platform opposes affirmative action and reparations based on “discriminatory criteria.”  And the party is against nationalization of land for protecting endangered species or conservation.

In the area of voting rights and elections, the party advocates for the repeal of motor voter laws, re-registering voters every four years, and felon disenfranchisement—a Jim Crow remnant.

Not surprisingly, the Texas GOP supports public displays of the Ten Commandments, and penalties for desecrating the American flag, and the restoration of some Confederate plaque that was removed from the state’s Supreme Court building.

RELATED: Texas Set To Whitewash History In Textbooks

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Now here is where it gets really interesting, and talibanic, dare I say, as if what you’ve already heard was not sufficiently out of pocket.  On the issue of family values, whatever that means, the Republican’s policy paper condemns homosexuality and opposes the legalization of sodomy and supports a prohibition on all pornography and strip clubs.  Further, they would make it a felony to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, or for a civil official to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony.  Of course, the platform is solidly anti-abortion and anti-reproductive rights for women.  And it supports lifting the bureaucratic restrictions on corporal discipline for foster children, because foster kids really need more beatings in their life.

Social security would be eliminated under the Texas GOP plan, as would what they euphemistically call “ObamaCare.”

Apparently, sex education is a no no, other than the teaching of abstinence before marriage.  And the teaching of multiculturalism is out because Martin Luther King, Jr., a Republican, would have wanted it that way.

To round out an astonishing set of policy positions, the Texas Republicans are against any regulations on gun ownership.  Oh yeah, and they declare that this is a Judeo-Christian nation.  And there should be capital punishment for rape convictions (like the good old days).  Deep water oil drilling should resume in the Gulf of Mexico, employers should be able to discriminate, and the minimum wage law should be repealed, they say.  No more birthright citizenship—citizenship by birth would be limited to those born to a U.S. citizen.  Finally, the Texas GOP assert that the U.S. should get out of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, one of the standard bearers of the Texas conservatives, Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), recently created some controversy when he apologized to BP for Obama hooking up that $20 billion fund to pay for damages related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.  In fact, Barton called the fund a “shameful…shakedown.” Other Republicans such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Tea Party poster boy Rand Paul expressed their opposition to the fund.

Barton and the Texas Republican Party appear to have a great deal of compassion for the plight of poor behemoth oil companies who wreck the Earth, with oil spills of biblical proportions through corporate malfeasance.  Ultra-conservatives reserve their outrage for the times when they believe the rights of large corporations are infringed.  And they seek to criminalize homosexuality and those who are different.  Yet the Lone Star GOP is not outraged by the crimes committed against the environment, against God’s creation, about which these so-called Christians seem to care jack.

RELATED: OPINION: The GOP’s War On “Ethnic” History

This policy paper represents the culmination of bad political decisions that have turned the Republican Party into the hot mess it has become.  The Texas case is just an extreme example of the problem.  Nationally, the Republicans hitched their wagon to a Southern Strategy that depended on the scapegoating of black people and manipulating white fears for votes.  Fundamentalist Christian conservatives and the religious police were a part of the mix, as were pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation right-wingers.  Moderate whites fled the party, as did all but a few token people of color.  So what remains of the base— for the most part— is a dwindling coalition of white nationalists, the morality police and the exceptionally greedy.

Texas—good barbecue, hot weather, and a brutal history of racial violence.  We can add to that one of the most egregious public policy documents in recent memory.  Blue Texans, as you know, your work is cut out for you.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book,States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

In the study, three psychologists tested 133 students in the 4 to 5 and 9 to 10 age ranges. Eight schools were involved, half from Georgia, and half from the New York metropolitan area. The study was designed to simulate the Kenneth and Mamie Clark study used in the Brown case, in which African-American children were asked whether they preferred a white doll or a black doll. Having expressed an overwhelming preference for the white doll, they demonstrated the negative effects of segregation on “ego development and self-awareness in Negro children.”

Curiously, the results were about the same six decades later. In the recent study, the researchers asked the 4 and 5 year olds a series of questions and had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark. The 9 and 10 year olds were given the same questions and cartoons, but were also asked questions concerning a bar chart showing light to dark skin tones.

Essentially, white children responded with a high degree of “white bias,” meaning that they viewed their own skin tone positively, they associated darker skin with negative characteristics, and they were far more stereotypic in their racial attitudes, beliefs and preferences. There was no difference between age groups. And black children also had a bias towards whiteness, although not nearly as great as white children did.

The lesson that I take from these results is clear:

1) parents, teach your kids well, but better than you’re doing now, and

2) this is a nation that still upholds whiteness and denigrates blackness.

To be sure, black self-esteem is a lingering, unresolved issue in a racist nation that cannot grapple with the whole race thing – even with a black president of biracial parentage named Barack Obama. But that white children are internalizing white skin superiority and negative black stereotypes so intensely should tell you that they are not learning the right things at home when it comes to diversity, tolerance and inclusion, if they are learning anything at all. Unfortunately, that is how white-skin privilege works. As the self-proclaimed standard bearers, white Americans often may not feel as if they have to worry about talking to their children about such matters. Parents of color, however, don’t have that luxury. And in a nation where the color of your skin can determine where you live, your livelihood and even your life or death, parents of color may feel the need to help their children navigate through a color-coded society fraught with obstacles and pitfalls.

And in this environment screaming for racial understanding, states such as Texas and Arizona would further exacerbate things by whitewashing their public school curricula and eliminating ethnic studies courses.

The negative labels assigned to blackness and all things black are readily apparent in the English language. And the badges of slavery and Jim Crow remain, even as those dreaded institutions are supposedly a thing of the past. Lynchings in this country have a shameful history, and typically they were committed upon a rumor that a black man raped a white woman. Black equals poverty, inferiority, laziness and all the horrible and distasteful things one can conjure up. Black man equals all of those dreadful things plus criminality. (Apparently, a black man with the title of President of the United States equals Nazi-Communist-Kenyan-Muslim-black-radical terrorist.)

So, when Charles Stewart, a white man in Boston, murdered his pregnant wife in 1989, he said a black man did it. And everyone believed it. When a white woman named Susan Smith murdered her two young sons in South Carolina in 1994, she said that she had been carjacked by a black man, who drove away with her children. And everyone believed it, even though Smith said the man wore a knit ski cap. As an aside, I’ve never seen any of my South Carolinian relatives wear a knit ski cap. And typically when this sort of thing occurs, the police will wage ultimate war on the chocolate side of town, rounding up all the brothers just for the hell of it.

And just the other day, a white Philly cop shot himself and claimed it was the work of a black man with cornrows and a tattoo. Why do they keep doing it? Obviously because they know, or at least think they can get away with it, in a nation that tells you that these are the acts expected of darker-skinned folks. With negative stereotypes in the media, and black and brown inmates filling up to 70 percent of the nation’s prison beds, why not?

This problem is far greater than one study can solve, but the CNN report is instructive. Consequently, we need to remind ourselves that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This reality must be unsettling for those who risked life and limb to build a better society. It tells you the work ain’t over, and it would serve us well to reach the children.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

When Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the infamous anti-immigrant bill into law, it was clear that people in that state lost their minds. But apparently that was not enough. Now, the governor just signed a bill into law on Tuesday that bans ethnic studies programs in the schools. Really?

The new law prohibits classes that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Schools that fail to comply will lose their state funding.

A group of six UN human rights experts denounced the law on the grounds that people have the right to learn about their own culture and language. Meanwhile, the Arizona Department of Education has also announced that it will no longer allow teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents to teach English. As the last state in the Union to recognize the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Arizona suffers from a poor track record on tolerance.

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RELATED: U.N. Human Rights Experts Condemn Arizona Ethnic Studies Ban

The real target of the Arizona law is the Tucson School District, which offers coursework focusing on African-American, Native-American and Mexican-American studies, and the contributions of these groups in history and literature. Tom Horne, the head of the Arizona schools and Republican candidate for attorney general, supports the ban. Horne condemned ethnic studies as “ethnic chauvinism” and “high treason.”

Claiming that such programs encourage public school students to hate white people, Horne said “It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it.” Horne is right that it is just like the old South, but he’s getting it twisted. Rather, the anti-ethnic studies bill–along with the anti-immigrant bill–makes Arizona look like those racist Jim Crow states that resisted civil rights for blacks and the desegregation of the public schools in the 1950s and 1960s.

Back then, white Southern segregationists fought against the rights of African-Americans to vote, go where they pleased, and enjoy the same quality education as whites. It was a fear of a black planet, so to speak. Today, racist conservative whites are carrying on the tradition of their Jim Crow predecessors. They are afraid they are losing their “way of life” to darker-skinned people and Spanish-speaking immigrants, even though brown people were here first. With a population that is 40 percent minority, and with more Latino babies born than white babies, Arizona is set to become a majority-minority state by 2015. Texas, Hawaii, New Mexico and California already reached that threshold.

Similarly, in March the Texas Board of Education approved a curriculum change that essentially mandates a conservative, white-Christian bias in the teaching of social science. This has resulted in a wholesale removal of brown and black people from the textbooks. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and civil rights groups such as LULAC and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund were stricken from the books, although Justice Thurgood Marshall was allowed to remain. And conservatives unsuccessfully attempted to erase all references to hip-hop music from the history texts and replace it with country music. Conservatives defeated attempts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures in the curriculum, in that heavily Latino state. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” said board member Mary Helen Berlanga. “They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she added. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

RELATED: Arizona Bans Ethnic Studies, Bars Teachers With Accents From English Classes

Now, this is where ethnic studies really fits into the equation: A legacy of the civil rights movement, the ethnic studies movement came about in the 1960s and early 1970s at a time of empowerment for racial and ethnic minority groups. When Harvard students demanded black studies in 1968, faculty who were protectors of the status quo predicted the end of Harvard and of civilization. Ethnic studies serves a valuable purpose, which is to challenge the Eurocentric teaching of history, the social sciences and the humanities on college campuses. When youth know that their people were a part of American history, they will excel in their studies. And we all benefit when we learn about the heritage of all groups, and their contributions to the world. This is a matter of pride, not resentment.

As a high school exchange student in Japan, who later became an East Asian Studies major as an undergrad, I benefited from ethnic studies. While in college, I learned about the richness of Asian history and culture, and the Asian immigrant’s contribution to the American experience. After graduating from college, I worked for a bank and an advertising agency in Tokyo, and later on did human rights work and studied international human rights law in the U.K. My exposure to the teachings of other cultures and societies allowed me to better appreciate the diversity of the U.S. It also made me an effective world citizen who can operate across cultures.

At a time when we should increase our diversity efforts and teach our children to live together and understand one another, Arizona is sending the wrong message. This is not, as Pat Buchanan once claimed, “a country built basically by white folks.” By removing ethnic studies, Arizona spits in the face of the civil rights legacy, and tells people of color they don’t count, that their culture doesn’t matter.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

Can’t we just call them what they really are? I speak of the Tea Party crowd who hates Obama and thinks he’s a socialist, fascist, communist Muslim who was born in Kenya and pals around with terrorists. They have allies in the Republican Party, and enablers on Fox News and rightwing talk radio. And I also refer to those white domestic terror groups — anti-government, anti-tax, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, racist, homophobic, gun worshipers, whatever — who would take matters into their own hands.

I call them all Klan. And why not? They also happen to be the radicalized base of the GOP, those barrel scrapings that call themselves the ultra-right these days. Back to the barrel scraping in a moment.

Some of you may conclude I’m painting in awfully broad brushstrokes here. You’re entitled to your opinion, but I have my reasons, if you just listen.

First of all, the recent images of the unwashed Tea Party faithful threatening members of Congress — of spitting at African-American lawmakers and calling them n*gger, calling a gay lawmaker a f*ggot, and so on — are shocking, although not entirely surprising. Since the 2008 election, empowered by the McCain-Palin rallies, these folks have been on a rampage. They came with their racist placards and Obama monkey dolls complete with nooses. Some arrived with their loaded weapons. Under the banner of “taking our country back,” these people were and still are angry, to be sure.

Those of you who remember the televised images of angry white protestors in the 1950s and 1960s know that this is nothing new. Whenever a black child tried to integrate a school in the Jim Crow South, the teabaggers of their day were out there to show their outrage. Whenever African Americans tried to register to vote or sit at a segregated lunch counter, the same crowd was out there. They came with their fists, their vulgarity, threats of violence and spitting. They, too, wanted to take their country back, and for the same reasons as their twenty-first century heirs. While some of these hotheads limited their protest to the usual rabble rousing, others went the extra mile and engaged in lynching, bombing and other acts of terror.

Meanwhile, the Dixiecrat lawmakers of the day, hoping to curry favor with their Southern Democratic base, gave a wink and a nod to the racial violence. And so, Southern politicians signed the Southern Manifesto and filibustered civil rights legislation. They vowed to fight to preserve segregation, and stood on the schoolhouse steps to defy the federal authorities, in an expression of white Christian nationalism and skin-tone solidarity. The white-collar Klan was on the same page with the down-and-dirty Klan, not to mention the everyday racist on the streets. They all read from the same game plan, and they all knew what to do, a distinct role cut out for each. Some did the dirty work, while others appeared stately, as if to remain above the fray. But the overall goal was to stop black people from becoming full citizens.

Although times are rather different now, the comparisons between the days of the civil rights movement and today are compelling. Amidst the increasing acts of violence, threats of violence and polluted discourse that we are witnessing, Republican leaders are for the most part silent about the hate emanating from their base. Sometimes they are too busy justifying the violence their base represents, if not actively fomenting it. Cynical politicians that they are, they want to harness the Teabagger, Birther and militia hate. This is their ticket to electoral victory, they believe.

And RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Rep. Eric Cantor (R, VA), a black and a Jew, should be ashamed for their participation in this blatant exercise in extremist intolerance called the Republican Party. These two men appear to be among the last vestiges of diversity in the once Grand Old Party, the party that once boasted 1,500 black political officeholders during Reconstruction. Michael Steele claims he is facing scrutiny from the party because of his race, and perhaps he is correct. But as a person of color, Steele cannot cry racism. He cannot claim victimization when he has willingly cast his lot with those who revel in their white skin privilege, and depend on the race card for their bread and butter. In other words, he knowingly assumed the risk.

And exactly why is the Republican base so angry these days? What do they want? Is this really all about taxes and the size of government? And why were they so eager to protect the interests of health insurance companies, who on a daily basis commit grand larceny against the struggling schlubs of America? Corporate lobbyists bankrolled the Teabaggers because low information voters (a.k.a. the ignorant and uneducated) have a propensity to act against their economic self interests. For years, poor whites sided with the wealthy to maintain an economic system that rendered their labor superfluous. And they refused to join forces with workers of color in a collective effort to unionize and raise everyone’s standard of living. They were poor and dumb, but at least they weren’t black, so they thought.

In 2010, the Tea Party anger is depicted in the media as a legitimate beef with the government. But when you look below the surface, they’re really just racist. They want their country returned to them, from the hands of a black boogeyman President Obama. They want the immigrants expelled. Surely they are concerned that over half of the babies born in the U.S. are of color. When the right fringe gains control of school boards, as is the case with Texas, they literally erase all the color from the history books and “can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.” And they oppose taxes and government programs such as health care because they think that blacks and Latinos are the beneficiaries. Rush Limbaugh said himself that health care reform is a civil rights bill, reparations for slavery. This attitude reflects a natural progression of the GOP since the 1960s, when aggrieved racists formed white Christian “segregation academies,” and fled the Democratic Party to make a home in the GOP.

The GOP benefited from a “Southern Strategy” that exploited white opposition to the civil rights movement, and antipathy towards black folks. One of the chief practitioners of that strategy was the late Lee Atwater. He described the Southern Strategy this way:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

This strategy served the GOP very well in past elections, but now demographics are catching up with the party. In a browning America, their base is shrinking. With every race-baiting campaign, more reasonable moderate and liberal whites fled the Republican Party until there were virtually none left. What remains now, for the most part, is a regionalized, ultra-right core, many of whom are racist. And apparently some are violent as well.

Embracing the fringe, the GOP is scraping the bottom of the barrel and courting the troubling and troubled byproducts they find. They do so at their own peril, as now some violent anti-government “Guardians” have sent death threats to Republican and Democratic governors. The recent incarnations of the angry mob have many brand new names, but they’re still the old Klan to me.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

The hopeless level of poverty in Haiti has been longstanding. And as the oldest black republic in the Western hemisphere, this island nation has been suffering for a long time to suffer. Haiti never had a chance to develop a thriving middle class. Exploited and neglected, the country was occupied by the United States. Uncle Sam propped up its corrupt, banana republic dictators, and supported its ruthless death squads. And as recently as 2004, the U.S. apparently participated in a coup that removed Haiti’s then democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from power. A neglected stepchild, Haiti has not fared well in America’s racist immigration policy, with the separate and unequal treatment of Haitian and Cuban refugees. Haitians fought with the colonists in the American Revolution, but America never repaid the favor.

Natural disasters shed light on the disaster of poverty. Such is also the case with New Orleans, another of America’s neglected stepchildren. For years, that city served as America’s playground. But when Hurricane Katrina hit, people around the world were exposed to images of the African-American citizens of New Orleans — poverty-stricken, disenfranchised, disregarded, and left to fend for themselves.

Haiti and New Orleans have a great deal in common, including cultural ties. After all, historically, Haitian immigrants helped to build New Orleans. But they have more in common than that. Both are the victims of policies that callously ignored them, and failed to deal with the consequences of intractable poverty. Americans glued to the TV screen are witnessing the horrific images of human suffering amidst the rubble in Port-au-Prince, and the deprivation made only worse by the rubble of the earthquake. And they are touched and they want to help, and rightly so. Without doubt, whether they are moved or not, many Americans believe that they are far removed from the poverty they witnessed in Port-au-prince, or the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans for that matter. Yet, they are mistaken.

America ranks 30th in the world in infant mortality. The infant mortality rate in some parts of the U.S., and among some groups such as African Americans, is as high as some Third World nations. Further, childhood poverty is at 20 percent. One in eight Americans, and one of every four children in America depends on food stamps. About half of American children, and 90 percent of black children, will live in a household that depends on food stamps at some point before they turn 20. And 63 percent of teachers buy food for hungry students with their own money.

The Great Recession — combined with years of regressive economic policies that favored the wealthy and corporations — is resulting in the erosion of the middle class, as more people are plunging into poverty and homelessness. The mortgage and foreclosure crisis is responsible for an unprecedented evaporation of wealth, particularly in the black and Latino communities.

According to a new report from United for a Fair Economy, unemployment rates among people of color are the highest in 27 years. Bad economic times have widened the racial wealth and income disparities. African-Americans and Latinos are nearly three times as likely to live in poverty as whites. And while blacks earn 62 cents for every dollar of white income, Latinos earn 68 cents for every white dollar.

The report also notes that around 3.4 million families experienced a foreclosure in 2009. Initially driven by costly subprime lending (which comprised over half of the mortgages to black folks in recent years), nearly 60 percent of mortgage defaults last year were due to unemployment. “The Obama Administration missed opportunities in 2009 to stop foreclosures, stabilize the economy, and start rebuilding wealth in the communities that the predatory mortgage industry targeted,” according to the report.

And poverty in America, like poverty in Haiti or anywhere for that matter, will only exacerbate unless decisive action is taken now. When we decry the sorry state of human existence in other nations, we must also acknowledge the deplorable conditions of people in our own midst and within our own so-called “land of plenty.” And we must understand the ways in which poverty in Port-au-Prince is related to poverty in New Orleans, or Detroit, or Philadelphia.

As the effort to rebuild Haiti begins, there is now talk in the international financial community of forgiving Haiti’s $1 billion debt. That is a good thing. But we should not wait for a catastrophe to deal with issues of poverty, economic inequality and justice. We must deal with the silent catastrophe that is occurring right before our very eyes.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

As we enter this holiday season, Jews around the world will celebrate Hanukah. And the global Jewish community is a diverse one, a multicultural and multiracial assemblage, by no means monolithic, representing millions of people throughout the world. Jews in China look like other Chinese, while Jews in India resemble other Indians, as is the case with the Igbo Jews of Nigeria and the Lemba of Southern Africa, and so on. They differ in their religious and cultural expression. For example, some may not know about glatt kosher, but still observe traditional dietary laws. And in some places only women can become a mohel (the person who performs circumcisions on baby boys).

But like a faulty census that leaves out people and portrays an inaccurate picture of what is happening, the Jewish Diaspora is not counting all of its members. Part of the reason is that Jews of color are often held in suspicion, not viewed as real or authentic. The reality is that black and brown Jews always existed, and for thousands of years. Given the places where the stories in the ancient scriptures took place, what else could you expect? Yet, media images – including Charlton Heston’s portrayal of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Moses in The Ten Commandments – only serve to create confusion concerning race and Judaism.

“Jews of color have been like Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a bird trying to reintegrate itself into its flock, but looks so different that the flock would turn itself on the painted bird, pecking on the painted bird until it falls to the ground,” said Rabbi Capers Funnye, head rabbi of the predominantly African-American Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago. The congregation was founded in 1918 by a rabbi from Bombay, India.

Rabbi Funnye converted to Judaism, but his introduction to Judaism was through the lens of Africa. His congregation combines the usual Jewish prayers with gospel music and the beat of the drum. But that is ok, because that is what culture is all about. “Jewish practices are based on cultural adaptations, where people found themselves,” the rabbi notes. Although he is a rabbi with extensive knowledge and undeniable passion, Rabbi Funnye is asked if he is really a Jew. “For a Jew who don’t look like you, that question is offensive,” he responds.

Rabbi Funnye – who is also a member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, and the cousin of First Lady Michelle Obama – recently gave the keynote speech at a symposium on race and Judaism at Temple University. The symposium was convened by Professor Lewis Gordon of Temple’s Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, and had participation from the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based group which encourages ethnic, racial and cultural inclusion in the Jewish community.

The conference was refreshing in that it invited a discussion on subjects usually not covered in academia or the mainstream Jewish community. For example, there was a discussion on Rabbi Alysa Stanton, the first African-American woman ordained as a rabbi, and the first black rabbi to lead a majority white congregation. Stanton, whose congregation is in Greenville, NC, received death threats and required a police escort the day she was installed as rabbi.

Another topic of discussion was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, that mythic symbol of black-Jewish cooperation who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. Rabbi Heschel is a great source of pride for the Jewish community, yet he was marginalized during his life, and regarded as an oddball. Other rabbis advised him to stay away from the rabble-rouser King. And today, Heschel’s anti-racist, social justice message is defanged.

Further, there was an examination of black-Jewish relations and the civil rights coalition, and the manner in which Jews benefited from civil rights in ways blacks could not; the focus by organizations such as the ADL on issues of Jewish authenticity and Minister Louis Farrakhan, when there are genocides taking place around the world; concepts of whiteness and blackness, and the ways in which the Jewish communities have negotiated race. Participants also tackled such weighty issues as black power, and the attempts to equate it with anti-Semitism; the disproportionate representation of neoconservative Jewish voices in American political discourse, and the use of white Ashkenazi Jewish voices as the authoritative voice against affirmative action.

Included in the symposium was the inevitable discussion of Israel, and the ways in which some immigrants become “white” when they arrive in Israel, although they were not considered as such in their home countries. And of course, there is Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Rabbi Funnye, who works with the Palestinian-American community in Chicago, believes that Israel must do a better job of showing its own diversity. He also shed some light on African-American perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Black people don’t say anything because they see the Palestinians as David, and Israel as Goliath,” Funnye concluded. “They don’t want to be called anti-Semites.”

These are tough issues, to be sure, and the conversations must continue at Temple University and throughout the country and the world. A culture benefits when its diverse voices are allowed to express themselves. This is how a culture sustains itself and grows. Jews of color have much to contribute, and much to say. And they must be heard.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

As you probably heard, the Values Voters Summit was recently held in Washington, DC. What exactly is a values voter, and who exactly decides on the definition of a values voter?

In the Orwellian world of conservative-Republican-Christian-fringe doublespeak, the goal is to confuse, obfuscate, distort and deceive. Concepts are intentionally misnamed to suggest a completely opposite meaning. So, universal health care is characterized as “fascism”. Disdain for women’s reproductive rights is called “pro-life”. Denial of rights to same-sex couples becomes “the protection of marriage”. And rejection of evolution and the teaching of creationism in public schools fall under “religious liberty”. Given these twisted definitions of reality coming from the Far Right, it stands to reason that I am skeptical of their definition of values – presumably “family” values – or values voters for that matter.

The list of confirmed and invited guest speakers at the summit reads like a who’s who of the usual tea partying suspects: opportunistic, empty-suit G.O.P. politicians, and washed-up and recycled “rising stars” holding their finger to the wind; secessionist sympathizers and bellicose, blowhard news entertainers; immigrant haters and Obama haters; homophobic ex-beauty pageant contestants and the Bible-thumping, self-righteous moralizers and demonizers, and the like.

And who made Carrie Prejean and Mike Huckabee the experts on values? What can Sen. Jim DeMint, Bill O’Reilly or Rep. Michele Bachmann teach me on the subject of values, or anything of any importance for that matter? I’m not sure. I shall search elsewhere for my values, thank you very much.

One person I will consult is Martin Luther King. The angry mobs of his day labeled him a communist. He talked about the need for a revolution of values. Specifically, he said:

…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

In today’s post-bubble reality called the Great Recession, Dr. King’s words resonate more than ever. As a rabbi reminded me recently in her Rosh Hashanah sermon, these days we have been forced to live with less, to make our lives fuller with less. For many Americans, it was a summer of stay-at-home vacations. People now have to dig deep within, to give more of themselves to their communities and the institutions that matter to them.

Yet during the times of plenty, although many more people were happy, empty values were allowed to thrive. Before the recession hit, Gordon Gekko and his philosophy of “greed is good” were provided a safe haven. The people who could steal the most were hailed as heroes – the best and the brightest, standard-bearers of the American Dream, the people we wanted to become. And surely, someone out there believed that they needed a fifth mansion, yacht or car to make them even happier than their first four.

Yet, in those times of empty economic calories, of massive profits extracted through paper shuffling and smoke and mirrors, there were multitudes who did not share in the wealth. These silent suffering people had been rendered invisible. The prevailing values had dictated that the wealthy few should take all of the economic spoils. The poor are as they always have been – poor and becoming even poorer. And the middle class is, at best, like the proverbial hamster on the treadmill, spinning wheels yet gaining no ground. In a worst case scenario, the people in the middle are joining the ranks of the poor, and there is no middle left. In a society that values property rights over people, families are thrown into the streets for the sake of predatory corporate profit. Everyday people must choose between paying for food, rent and health care. The sick are allowed to die because they could not afford to get sick in the first place. Young people are saddled with obscene levels of college debt, yet cannot find jobs to pay off their mortgage-sized tuition loans.

Then there’s the environment. After thousands of years of respecting the land and acting in concert with it, something has gone awry. A few weeks ago I was invited to attend the International Energy Conference at the United Nations. There was a lot of good values talk there – about green jobs, the need for sustainable sources of energy, and empowering poor communities and developing nations through renewable energy technologies. The production-consumption model of economic growth has run its course. Taking, making and wasting for the needs of 1 billion people – at the expense of the remaining 5 billion – has damaged the Earth’s ecosystems, depleted its natural resources, and fueled political instability around the globe. “Oh, mercy mercy me. Oh, things ain’t what they used to be” as Marvin Gaye used to sing. “Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas. Fish full of mercury.”

I can guarantee that the participants in the Values Voters Summit did not hold these family values in high regard–of social, economic or environmental justice — even though they claim to be religious and know God personally.

Apparently, there are many types of values out there, or at least they are packaged and promoted as such. To be sure, no one should claim a monopoly on them. But in the end, we must decide which values are meaningful to us, and which values should guide our government and our society. We can find values anywhere, including a down-and-dirty, anti-Obama tea party, or at the white-collar, business suit version that just took place in Washington. That does not mean we want to claim them as our own.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

When the Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) disrupted the President’s healthcare address before a joint session of Congress, it was not the first time that a president from Illinois had trouble from a South Carolina lawmaker.

The first time, of course, was when the Palmetto State became the first to secede from the Union. South Carolina politicians such as John C. Calhoun and Preston Brooks stirred the pot and inflamed passions with talk of states’ rights, limited government, nullification, and slavery. The other Southern states followed suit, forming the Confederate States of America and resulting in a Civil War that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

During the Civil War, which I will call Secesh 1.0, the issue was whether White Southerners had a right to kidnap Black people and keep them chained in their backyard. (Secesh means Secessionists, as in, “Colonel, we’re gonna whup the Secesh!”) The South lost, but was a sore loser. And President Lincoln was assassinated by a disgruntled fan of the losing team. Since that time, the losing side has continued its quest to shape the nation in its ignorant, regressive and repressively racist image.

Secesh 2.0 was Jim Crow segregation and the days of the civil rights movement. That was the era of conservative White resistance to equality and Black aspirations, under threat of violence and death. At issue was whether states had a right to treat “their” Black folk as they pleased. The federal government was the enemy, as were outside agitators and carpetbaggers, civil rights workers, sympathetic Whites and uppity Blacks, Jews from up North, anyone from up North, Communists and other troublemakers.

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And the white-collar Klan, represented by the White Citizens’ Council and Democratic politicians, kept up the segregationist rhetoric to make the voter base happy. Meanwhile, the unwashed, down-and-dirty real-deal Klan mobilized in the streets and backwoods, with a regime of terror and murder against African Americans and proponents of constitutional democracy. Lynchings, church burnings, prison, and voter intimidation were some of the weapons of choice.

For Billy Bob, Bubba Lee and Skeeter (substitute your name of choice), the issue was whether there was a right to keep their children free from integrated classrooms and high school proms, and prevent young Black men from race-mixing with their daughters. For that “genteel” old white dude from In The Heat of the Night who slapped Mr. Tibbs in the face, the issue was whether he had a right to lynch Tibbs after Tibbs slapped him back- just like the good ol’ days.

Well, now we’re living under Secesh 3.0. The crazy and sometimes armed right-wing fringe groups of the 1990s-the militias, conspiracy theorists, domestic terrorists, and the like-became racialized in the 2000s. So now, these groups are crazy, armed and also racist. Whether they are militias, birthers, anti-immigration Minutemen, White nationalists, tea baggers, or others, they are united in their hatred of the government-and their hatred of a Black president they believe is foreign and illegitimate. They also believe he is a fascist, communist, terrorist, Kenyan citizen, Muslim, and so on.

The Republican Party’s Southern Strategy-a raw appeal to racist White voters in order to win elections-led to a gradual party shift for the Dixiecrats. The White Citizens’ Council changed its affiliation from Democratic to Republican, but the sentiment remained. And the extremist G.O.P. base that remains is now mostly an uneducated and ignorant regional party, led and fed by paranoia, jingoism and bigotry. The South helped the Republicans win elections, and the South (minus the red states that Obama turned blue) is nearly all they have left.

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Under the current release, Secesh 3.0, some people say they want their country back. The issue for them is whether the states have a right to be free from Black rule in the form of Barack Obama. This includes real or symbolic rejection of the stimulus money; calls for secession from the U.S.; states’ rejection of healthcare reform, a.k.a. “socialized medicine” or “Obamacare”, and calls for investigations into the President’s citizenship. And in this effort, a seamless coalition, a dangerous coalition has formed, consisting of: Republican lawmakers; corporate lobbyists; fringe groups and nut jobs off the street; right-wing talk radio hosts and mainstream cable news entertainers. Their efforts began with displays of racism at last year’s McCain-Palin rallies and this year’s tea parties and disruptions at the healthcare town hall meetings. And it has culminated in the recent “Million Moron March” on Washington, and Rep. Wilson’s interruption of Obama’s address by shouting “you lie!”

It is appropriate that Rep. Wilson-whose outburst has energized support for his Democratic opponent, Rob Miller-is the poster child for Secesh 3.0. After all, Wilson is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a radical White supremacist group that has been well-documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The slackers and the grannies have been purged from our ranks,” as Kirk Lyons, an SCV operative announced, in a move to turn the group into “a modern, 21st century Christian war machine capable of uniting the Confederate community and leading it to ultimate victory.”

As a state legislator, Wilson was one of seven Republicans to vote to keep the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state capitol. Moreover, he was forced to apologize to Essie Mae Washington-Williams- the African American daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond and his Black maid- after she publicly revealed her father’s identity. Thurmond was, of course, the legendary segregationist and originator of the 1956 “Southern Manifesto”, a declaration against the 1954 Brown desegregation ruling. Calling Ms. Washington’s revelation an “unseemly” act that served to “diminish” one of his “heroes”, the former Thurmond page said “It’s a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina.” And no one had even questioned Washington’s veracity, as Thurmond’s family acknowledged her, and she had received financial support from him for years.

So, the question that arises is, where is all of this foolishness leading us? To be sure, as in past releases, we are entering dangerous territory. One side won the 2008 election, while the other side has turned its radical fringe into the mainstream. And the ones who are crying fascism these days seem like the real fascists. In a sobering report, Homeland Security had already sounded the alarm on the rise of violent right-wing extremist groups. Now is the time to watch your back, and someone else’s if you are able. And don’t forget to sleep with at least one eye open.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

James Baldwin warned: “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

These poignant words come to mind when I think about that freak show, that hot mess that has passed for a dialogue on healthcare reform this past summer. On the one hand, the Obama administration – overlearning from the heavy-handed mistakes the Clintons made on health care reform – wasted time and lost control of the narrative. Seemingly unsure of what it wanted in terms of policy, this White House stood on the sidelines and allowed Congress to draft the legislation and create a huge mess. Fixing the health care system was the cornerstone of the President’s election campaign. Nonetheless, he has appeared too lackadaisical and too indifferent – too eager to compromise with Republicans too early in the game, and for little or nothing in return. In the end, Obama’s team came off looking like amateurs, the high school debate team, or student body president.

On the other hand, with a vacuum of leadership created by Obama, the health insurance lobby was given the opportunity to spread their street money and run amok.  Over three-quarters of the American people want a public option, that is, a choice between private health insurance and a government-run insurance plan that would create competition and lower costs. But the lawmakers who were purchased by the insurance companies – Democrats and Republicans – say there will be no public option. These senators and representatives get their money from one group and their votes from another. We know which group really counts. We’re not talking about democracy, but rather American-style capitalism. Money talks, and, well, you know the rest.

And the insurance companies have tapped into the anger of the unwashed fringes, and harnessed their rage at the town hall meetings – the tea-baggers and the militias, the birthers and the white nationalists, the jingoists and the secessionists. These folks don’t know the first thing about health care, but they do know that they hate government, they hate Obama, and they believe he is a foreigner and an illegitimate leader. And a communist Nazi Muslim terrorist. They won’t allow a black man to indoctrinate their children, nor will they allow one of them to take over their country.

Once again, moneyed interests use regular common folk – suckers that they are – to act against their own best interests. Rich Southerners had poor whites fight and die to maintain a system of slavery that rendered their labor unnecessary. During the struggles of the labor movement, corporations hired hooligans to beat up and shoot workers who attempted to organize. Appeals to white-skin privilege kept white workers from organizing with workers of color to better everyone’s station in life. And today, particularly in states with the lowest educational and health standards, working class people who constitute the Republican party “base” fight alongside the corporations to keep health care expensive and inaccessible. Billy Bob is as dumb as bricks, and proud of it.

The mobilization against health care reform has taught us several things:

First of all, the Republican Party is, collectively, coo coo for cocoa puffs. The moderates, the reasonable people, the intelligent ones who are fond of book-learnin’, and those free of mental defect bolted from the GOP. The Southern Strategy (a raw political appeal to white racist voters, which was perfected by the late GOP operative Lee Atwater) turned a reliable election-winning formula into a liability when Obama came on the scene. The base of the party is now mostly white, Southern, Christian fundamentalist and uneducated, and apparently delusional and unstable. A shrinking demographic, there aren’t enough of them to win a national election. Yet, the Republicans cling to their base. Rather than repudiate the people who believe Obama is a foreign citizen and an illegitimate leader who should be stopped if not killed (yes I said it), the Republicans encourage these gun-toting thugs, these brown shirts with their threats of violence. The decisive issue for them didn’t necessarily have to be health care, but health care did the trick. The main point is that for the radical conservatives, government is the enemy they treat with utter contempt. And they hate government so much that they try to destroy the country whenever they get into office. Enactment of real health reform will further marginalize the GOP, and render them irrelevant for generations.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

Much has been said about Michael Vick’s return to the NFL after serving 18 months in a federal prison for dog fighting.  And I don’t have too much more to add to the discussion.  As a pet owner, I cringe at the thought of someone torturing puppies.  At the same time, there are many people in this world that are not treated as well as dogs.  And not so long ago, this country used dogs as a weapon to torture other people.

I’d imagine that Vick has had more than ample time to ponder over his poor life choices, and the stupidity and cruelty that cost him a $130 million contract with the Atlanta Falcons.  The Philadelphia Eagles are giving him a second chance, and I guess that’s their decision.

But there are thousands, no, millions, of everyday people who have served their time and paid their debt to society, yet they can’t get a minimum wage job flipping burgers.  They need a second chance just to survive.

This army of lost men and women is unable to support their families and become productive members of society because society will not let them.  They wear a scarlet “F” for felon on their shirt.  And they are punished not only for the crimes they committed.  They receive extra punishment above and beyond their sentence, in the form of life, career and educational opportunities from which they are forever barred.  A person with a criminal record cannot work in certain occupations, is ineligible for certain college tuition loans, and may not qualify for public housing and other public welfare benefits.  That is the sign of a society built on vengeance and retribution, rather than rehabilitation.  It is what some observers call a public banishment or civil death.  Society has cast out the individual in a sense- unable to fully participate in a free society after regaining freedom, remaining a virtual prisoner even after the bars are removed.

And what has all of this punishment for punishment’s sake actually done for America?  The tough on crime approach has helped the careers of some politicians, but surely it hasn’t made us any safer.  I suppose there are some crimes that merit prison time, and people must be held accountable for the harm they do.  But there are few creative, constructive forms of alternative punishment that make the community whole and make the prisoner a better individual.

At the same time, the U.S. has an overdependence on incarceration, if not an addiction to it.  The nation uses prison bars as its primary method of social control, and as a way to earn profits, too.  The so-called “land of the free” has the most prisoners- in absolute numbers and per capita-in the world.  One in four of the world’s prisoners are locked up in a nation with only 5% of the world’s population.  Brutal dictatorships and repressive communist regimes don’t even come close.

Broken schools, poor healthcare and early childhood development, and the disappearance of jobs prepare many poor children for little else than a cradle-to-prison pipeline.  Prison walls do not create nurturing environments, but more proficient criminals, who during their lives walk through a revolving prison door.  Many are imprisoned for nonviolent, drug-related offenses for longer and longer periods of time.  Three-strikes laws and other draconian sentencing schemes are way out of proportion to the crimes committed.

The consequences of over-punishment are seen across the country, as states in need of cash cannot afford their ballooning prison budgets.  In California, a federal court has ordered the state to reduce its overcrowded prison population by 40,000 inmates.  If so many inmates are to be released, it makes you realize that many of them probably shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.

America’s reliance on punishment only serves to break up families and communities, rarely helping to rebuild them or those who have served their time.  Many would be surprised to know that the right to vote, a cherished right of citizenship, is denied to 5.3 million Americans with felony convictions.  These felony disenfranchisement laws are a holdover from the Jim Crow era, a time filled with all sorts of bad intentions.  This madness must stop, and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced legislation to restore voting rights in federal elections to millions of disenfranchised people.  How do you expect ex-felons to become productive citizens when they can’t find a job, can’t afford to better themselves through education, and can’t even vote?

Some are behind bars for the crimes they have committed.  Others are there for crimes they did not commit.  Either way, when they return to the street, the punishment continues.  Punishment on top of punishment does not work, and we have to build up the formerly incarcerated so they do not fall down again.  We have to ensure that they have the opportunity to contribute as full-fledged members of society.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

If the ruckus over healthcare reform has taught us one thing, it is that bipartisanship is a dream that never will be fulfilled.  And so what if it isn’t?

We must admit, President Obama gave it his best.  He went to Washington with an olive branch, with a desire to find common ground with people of different political persuasions, to include everyone in the process.  But what he has learned, hopefully, is that bipartisanship is but a means to an end.  And in the end, you cannot broker or negotiate with people who have no intent to negotiate, and who really aim to bring you down and destroy you.

Such is the case with healthcare reform, the jewel in the crown for the Obama administration.  The president made this the centerpiece of his agenda of change and bold leadership.  If done the right way, the nation would succeed in putting the health insurance companies in check, cut the cost of healthcare dramatically, and make healthcare a universal right, like all of those “socialist” countries (the rest of the industrialized world, that is).  If the American system of healthcare delivery is so great, why do we have 47 million uninsured people?  Why does the U.S. have a higher rate of infant mortality than 28 other countries?  Why did 1,500 people recently wait in long lines in Los Angeles for free dental care, eye exams and medical exams?

Of course, the best way of achieving insurance reform is a single-payer system, which would eliminate the intermediary insurance companies entirely.  This measure would save the country around $400 billion per year in administrative costs, in other words, all the money they’ve been stealing from us.  If you don’t do that right away, the next best thing is a public option, which would allow for a cheaper government-run health plan that people could choose instead of costly private insurance.

Now, when you propose to stop the thieves from stealing your money, the thieves will do whatever they can to maintain their ability to steal.  This is natural and expected.  The Republican Party and the health insurance industry (with the help of right-wing media) have utilized the militias, the Patriots, the Birthers and the other Obama-haters in order to stop the train of reform.  These are the people who have disrupted healthcare town hall meetings-and in some cases brought pistols and semiautomatic assault rifles to presidential events-because they hate government and they want their country back (translated: no more Black presidents).

The response from the Obama administration has been all-too gentlemanly at best, naïve at worst, as if we’re all just playing a friendly game of dominoes at the family cookout.  Obama was far too willing to compromise too early, to sell the house to try to gain a few Republican votes that never would materialize.  The GOP and their allies have no interest in bipartisanship.  Their only goal is to bring down any healthcare reform legislation, and bring down the Obama presidency with it.  Of course, it doesn’t help any when you have moderate and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats standing in the way, their only distinction being that they took more of the insurance lobbyist money than other Democrats.

With Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the White House, exactly when would we achieve universal healthcare, if not now?  This moment is important not only because of the immediate matter at hand, but because it will define the rest of this administration, and its ability to get anything done.  You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and you don’t bring pork chops to a knife fight.

Obama must succeed.  If he loses this battle, we all lose.  He is poised to become one of the great presidents, and already has achieved more than many of them.  But if he cannot succeed on his cornerstone issue of national healthcare-or at best ends up with a phony reform package with no teeth- he will be unable to achieve much else.  He will do what average presidents do, such as give medals to boy scouts or something, host Easter egg hunts on the White House lawn, and receive foreign heads of state for photo ops.  And that is not what millions of people voted for in November 2008.

At the same time, if we’ve learned anything else, it is that politics is not a spectator sport.  Government requires active participation from the public, and vocal demands that certain things get done.  The election should have provided more than enough evidence that people want change.  But in a nation that is used to pimping whatever it can to make a buck, change is hard to get.  It looks like it is time to take to the streets.  Obama must get tough, but supporters of a progressive agenda must do so as well.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing.  But inciting a riot with corporate underwriting and support of the mainstream media is a completely different thing.  Add to that the endorsement of a major political party, and what you have is a danger to our democracy.

That is what comes to mind when I look at this crazy Birther movement, those people who refuse to believe that President Obama is a U.S. citizen, and demand that he produce his “real” birth certificate that shows he is Kenyan, or Arab, or Martian, or whatever.  At the same time, there is the unwashed, thuggish opposition to healthcare reform- the angry people who are disrupting town hall meetings throughout the nation, hanging lawmakers in effigy and threatening the safety and lives of members of Congress.

These two groups are cut from the same cloth-a white sheet, that is.  They are among the right-wing hate groups that were the subject of a report by the Department of Homeland Security called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” The report warned that the current recession and the election of a Black president have provided recruitment opportunities for White supremacist and radical right-wing groups.  The current environment could lead to confrontations between these extremists and government authorities, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and other examples of domestic terrorism in the 1990s.

These right-wing, anti-government groups are united by their hatred of immigration and Latinos, their hostility towards gun control legislation, and their racial resentment towards President Obama.  Those sentiments were on full display at the McCain-Palin campaign rallies in 2008, in which crowd participants called Obama a terrorist and a traitor, carried around Obama monkey dolls and called for his death.  And the sentiments were on display at the tea parties, with their abundance of racist, anti-Obama signs.  It is no accident that hate crimes and hate groups have increased in recent times, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.  James Von Brunn, the White supremacist who opened fire and killed a security officer at the National Holocaust Museum was part of the Birther movement, which itself has racist and anti-Semitic roots.  And the President receives 30 death threats a day, posing a challenge to the Secret Service charged with protecting him.

The tea parties were an example of “astroturfing”: top-down, corporate-sponsored activities disguised as a grassroots movement.  Two of the lobbying organizations that orchestrated the tea parties include FreedomWorks (a conservative action group led by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey), and the free-market group Americans For Prosperity.  Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, these two entities are also involved in the orchestrated fringe opposition to healthcare.  They provide the loud protestors who disrupt healthcare town hall meetings for the sole purpose of shutting off debate.  Americans For Prosperity, for example, operates under the front group Patients United Now.  And another anti-healthcare reform group, Conservatives For Patients’ Rights (CPR), has claimed responsibility for recruiting Tea Party activists and other third parties to disrupt the town hall meetings.  CPR operates in conjunction with the people who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign.  CPR is operated by George W. Bush business partner and private healthcare executive Rick Scott, who was forced to pay an unprecedented $1.7 billion settlement for defrauding taxpayers.

These activities should be denounced, but instead have earned the blessings of the Republican Party.  Consorting with Birthers, tea-baggers, fringe hate groups and angry mobs is the way of the new GOP.  And the new GOP is actually the old GOP on steroids.  A party that thrived for years on the Southern Strategy-appealing to White racism for votes-the Republicans have little else but a Southern Strategy left.  Divested of any real ideas and lacking broad-based support, the GOP lost a presidential election, holds a minority in both houses of Congress, and is facing long-term minority party status.  They appeal to their shrinking Neanderthal base by displaying their disdain for Latinos and Latino judges, in the face of rapidly shifting demographics.  Their base cannot undo the election that placed Obama in office, and they cannot keep back the winds of change that have swept through Washington and the country.  Their only alternative is to hate the man for what he is, to question his American-ness, and to stop his administration and its agenda of universal healthcare.

Trying to fight progress, the GOP base is now reduced to playing the role of Bubba, that character from 1950s central casting who was always on hand to beat up a civil rights worker at the segregated lunch counter.

And mainstream media court jesters-cable TV entertainers such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck of Fox News- use the airwaves to legitimize the hate groups, with the apparent support of their respective corporate networks.  Dobbs expressed his support for the Birther movement, and Beck charged that Obama hates White people.  We would expect nothing else from Fox.  But CNN-which touts its journalistic professionalism-cannot claim to be the network of “Black In America”, “Latino In America” or “Generation Islam” while also harboring and enabling an extremist sympathizer such as Dobbs.  The Southern Poverty Law Center called on CNN to oust Dobbs for his racism and questioning of Obama’s citizenship, but he remains on the network.

Protest and dissent have played an invaluable role in American history.  However, so too has the extralegal presence of the lynchmob.  What is passing as the current public “discourse” regarding healthcare reform has only served to elevate the lynchmob.  Fortunately, the Democrats have caught on.  Hopefully it is not too late.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

I don’t have to tell you that it’s tough out there. I’m talking about the recession, of course. In the end, the bursting of America’s economic bubble is the worst financial news since the Great Depression. And ultimately, it is clear that the deleterious effects of U.S. capitalism know no race, ethnicity or class. Titans of industry are reduced to pauper status, working families are out of work, food, healthcare and a home, and people of all backgrounds are watching their life’s work eviscerate before their very eyes. We are all bit players in the casino, and with a few exceptions such as the lucky bailout winners, most of us have crapped out, the way the casino operators intended it to work.

But at the same time, it’s a little more complicated than that. While “official” unemployment nationwide is high at around 10 percent (far more when you factor in all of those people who are underemployed or have given up all hope of finding a job), unemployment is and always has been much higher in Black and Latino communities. But the gap has widened during this recession. In fact, Black unemployment is nearly double that of Whites, while Latinos are unemployed at a rate one-third higher than their White counterparts. The situation is particularly chronic in New York City, where there are 80,000 more unemployed Blacks than Whites, even though there are about 1.5 million more Whites than Blacks in that city.

One explanation is that people of color are the folks last hired and first fired, or that their communities have a lower level of entrepreneurship. Some people will be quick to attribute the difference in employment levels to differences in education levels. Their argument is that people of color are lazy and not so smart, and don’t apply themselves. But among those with a college education, as the Economic Policy Institute reported, Black unemployment in recent months has doubled that of Whites.

Perhaps institutional racism can explain some of the difference in unemployment levels. As James Koch, an economics professor at Old Dominion University noted, “When the economy is at or near full employment, employers don’t have any choice. They have to hire the people that are available. Right now, employers can be fairly choosy. They may well choose not to hire African Americans.”

This notion is worth exploring, at a time when civil rights foes have pushed back against the age of Obama. In the name of “reverse discrimination”, they have declared that affirmative action and other diversity programs are a thing of the past. The unqualified minorities are taking all of the good jobs from the ever-qualified and ever-capable White men, they say. Blacks have the White House, after all, so what more do they want?

These malcontents yearn for the day when people of color were relegated to captive labor, or migrant labor, out of sight and out of mind, and nothing more. They point to the Supreme Court ruling in Ricci v. Stefano. In Ricci, the court found in favor of 17 aggrieved White New Haven firefighters (and one Latino) who claimed they were discriminated against in promotions after they passed a promotional exam. When no Black firefighters passed that exam, in a city where people of color are 60% of the population, the city discarded the results.

Little is said, however, of the recent ruling by a federal judge that New York City discriminates against people of color in the hiring of its firefighters. Specifically, New York City, which is over 60% of color, has a fire department which is over 90% White (and nearly all male), a statistic that stands in marked contrast to other major cities. Blacks and Latinos disproportionately failed the recruitment exams, and those who did pass were placed further down the list than White candidates. The judge determined that “the city did not take sufficient measures to ensure that better performers on its examinations would actually be better firefighters.” He added that “when an employment test is not adequately related to the job for which it tests – and when the test adversely affects minority groups – we may not fall back on the notion that better test takers make better employees.”

In a majority-minority city such as New York, African Americans and Latinos are seldom found as firefighters, and some professions apparently are the functional equivalent of a family business. It seems more than mere coincidence that unemployment among people of color has skyrocketed.

Some people will always point to the scores, but the truth is that intelligence, achievement and merit cannot be reduced to a single score. But gatekeepers in education and the professions have long used standardized testing as a tool to keep racial, ethnic, class and gender diversity from entering the gate. The tests and the racism always went hand in hand. As anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban points out in Race and Racism: An Introduction, standardized intelligence testing was born of the eugenics movement and the IQ tests. These pseudo-scientific tests were first used to prove that immigrant groups, “certain undesirable non-Anglo-Saxons – especially Jews, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, and Italians – ‘were mentally defective.’” What worked as a tool of class and ethnic discrimination against European immigrants was then utilized to prove the racial inferiority of “Negro, Mexican and Spanish-Indian children.” And according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “IQ tests are nothing more than a type of achievement test which primarily measures knowledge of standard English and exposure to the cultural experiences of middle class whites.” Yet, society still relies on these exams, commonly known today as the SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, GMAT, LSAT, and bar exam, among others.

Society’s gatekeepers have a lot of power. They decide who gets the job and why. They determine who is a team player, who is a good fit, who is fit to lead and who is not. They decide who is too much of this or not enough of that, who is qualified, underqualified, or overqualified. They decide if an applicant’s name sounds too “Black” or “Latino”, whatever that means. They determine whose hair looks too Black. Gatekeepers create the reality, however subjective, flawed or biased the methodology. They choose the images in Hollywood and on TV, and which people will portray criminals or upstanding citizens, or nothing at all. Gatekeepers make the policies that create a mostly Black and Brown prison population, and a mostly White legal profession. They decide to fill the special education classes and foster care systems with children of color, who will, in turn, fill the prisons. Gatekeepers decide to have a panel discussion on a cable news program, and the topic is the nation’s first Latina Supreme Court justice, yet none of the panelists are Latinas.

And gatekeepers lack diversity, in a nation that is becoming more and more diverse by the day. Often, their goal is to maintain a system where everyone looks the same, like the good ol’ days. That is why steps are needed to ensure that the game is not rigged, as it has been for so long, so that we do not revert to the nation’s default settings of power and privilege.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates – who had a less than positive experience with the Cambridge police department of late – said it best in his commencement address to Berea College in 2008:

For me, no matter how intelligent I may or may not be, for me to have been one of those six black boys who graduated from Yale in 1966, affirmative action was a class escalator. As far as I’m concerned, ladies and gentlemen, no one in the American academy has benefited more from affirmative action than I have. And that’s why I will go to my grave as an ardent and passionate defender of affirmative action. For me to become so successful in America, and for me to become a gatekeeper of American society and stand at the gate and protest affirmative action to keep out women or people of color would make me a hypocrite as big as Justice Clarence Thomas, and I’m not that kind of person. We need more affirmative action in this country, not less affirmative action. I don’t care what the White House says, and I don’t care what the minority on the Supreme Court says, and that’s the subject of my address this afternoon.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

Did the music die? The recent passing of Michael Jackson made me ask that question.

Recently I started thinking about the songs of my childhood, actually the soundtrack of my youth growing up in Southeast Queens, New York. I have fond memories of listening to LPs with my father on his old but reliable stereo set, with the hand-crafted turntable, and sand-filled wooden speakers that gave an earthy, real-life sound. Here are some of the songs that come to mind from that day:

• “I Stand Accused” by Isaac Hayes
• Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”
• Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
• “Harvest For The World” by the Isley Brothers
• “Ooh Child” by the Five Stairsteps
• Stevie Wonder’s “If You Really Love Me”
• “Get The Funk Out Of My Face” by the Brothers Johnson
• “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5
• “Ball Of Confusion” by the Temptations, and
• “Midnight Train To Georgia” by Gladys Knight and the Pips

Now, that was music! And it raises an important question in my mind, and possibly yours as well: Will music ever sound that good, ever again? Twenty or thirty years from now, will we remember the songs that are coming out today?

It seems that something went wrong along the way. Popular music, but specifically Black music, which dominates America’s and the world’s music scene, used to reflect the complexity of the human life experience, our emotions, our troubled times and our hopes and joys. In the music, there were the ever-present echoes of the drum rhythms and the storytelling griots of West Africa, of the Negro spirituals growing out of the experience of slavery in America, and of course the Blues. The cultural history was built into the music, and listening to it, at its best, is a religious and spiritual experience. And yet, the music always refined and redefined itself, through Jazz and Hip-hop and other incarnations. But all the while, the music reflected the aspirations and the full spectrum of what was going on in the community, the good and the bad, whether sitting on the street corner with friends, lamenting a lost love, or decrying injustice.

Then money entered the process. Don’t get me wrong, music has been a commercial venture for years. But it is worth noting that as the industry became more lucrative for its participants, or at least its owners, the music became more cookie-cutter, with more of the same and fewer options. Particularly in the past decade – when society was fed a steady dose of materialism and market growth – much of the music which was promoted reflected the materialism and hedonism of the times. Empty calories with little substance. There was much pain out there, to be sure, because after all the vast majority of people cannot afford a seaside mansion, a Hummer, diamonds, or a thousand-dollar bottle of whatever, and most common folk were slipping further as the moneyed few were getting fatter. But the music doesn’t reflect that reality, or at least the songs that get on the air do not. It seems almost fitting that the music industry is suffering financially, with a product no one is buying, just as the economy itself is suffering from systemic problems and is in need of big changes.

Part of the problem is that many talented musicians do not receive the exposure they deserve and we deserve. There are great artists out there, but they don’t get the air time. But on another level, society does not value musicians. Just look at the slashing of music and art education programs in public schools throughout the nation, as more focus is placed on teaching merely what appears on standardized tests. Music education is important to children’s lives as a part of a well-rounded education. Music develops creativity, self-expression, character and a sense of community. And it builds self-esteem, analytical and language capabilities, and innovation. I say this as someone who benefited from music programs throughout my childhood, and was introduced to the tenor saxophone as a sixth grader. Organizations such as the VH1 Save The Music Foundation and websites such as SupportMusic.com and Keep Music In Public Schools! are dedicated to restoring music programs in the schools.

So did the music die? Well, if it did, we need to make sure that we bring it back. We have the power to do it.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

On July 7, 2009, Roxroy Salmon- a Jamaican immigrant, activist and Brooklyn, New York resident- appeared before an immigration judge to determine his future in this country.  In a worst case scenario, Salmon, a longtime resident of the U.S. with deep roots here, was ordered deported.

What is his crime, you might ask?  Two decades ago, he pleaded guilty to two minor drug charges, and served no time.  But that doesn’t matter under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA), an unjust federal law which allows for the mandatory deportation of immigrants for past offenses, no matter how minor the offense, or how long ago it was committed.

The threat of deportation is bad enough for Salmon, 53, who came to the U.S. in 1977, undocumented, to better himself and get an education.  He also has a family in America.  This is a man who has lived the so-called American dream- he has worked hard and raised four girls with his wife, and also has a granddaughter, all of whom are U.S. citizens.  And Roxroy’s mother, also a U.S. citizen, petitioned for U.S. citizenship for her son.  But his minor drug charges from over a generation ago stood in his way.  He applied for deferred action from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the hopes that the government will not enforce his deportation and separate him from his family.

“I’m asking Congressman [Ed] Towns and Senator [Charles] Schumer to please save me and my family and other families that are in the same situation,” Mr. Salmon said as he left his hearing at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.  ”Because we have children – here are my children – we need to stay together. Don’t put me in exile!”

Roxroy Salmon’s case is by no means unique.  The group Families For Freedom notes that nearly 10% of American families are of mixed immigration status, that is, with at least one parent who is a non-citizen, and one child who is a citizen.  And 3.1 million children who are U.S. citizens have at least one undocumented parent.  In the end, 200,000 non-citizens are deported every year and separated from their families, even if the judge believes they should stay.  As Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report, 72% of noncitizens who were deported had committed nonviolent offenses such as drug possession or traffic offenses.  Of those legal noncitizens who were deported, 77 percent were thrown out for nonviolent offenses, meaning that only 23 percent had committed violent acts.  As a result of this misguided policy of criminalizing immigration status, at least 1 million children and spouses have been separated from their family members.

Human Rights Watch concludes that U.S. deportation law fails to safeguard human rights, and “is far out of step with international human rights standards and the practices of other nations, particularly nations that it considers to be its peers”-the law lacks proportionality (after all, deportation is a severe penalty for petty infractions, including the charges to which Mr. Salmon pleaded guilty); disregards the importance of family unity (deprives one of the right to live with close family members, including minor children); fails to consider the individual’s ties to the U.S., and gives no consideration to the threat to the deportee’s life or freedom if he or she is deported to the country of origin.  The report makes it plain:

Deportation, though not technically recognized under US law as a form of punishment, is a coercive exercise of state power that can cause a person to lose her ability to live with close family members in a country she may reasonably view as “home.” Most deportees are barred, either for decades or in many cases for the rest of their lives, from ever reentering the United States. A governmental decision to deprive a person of connection to the place she considers home raises serious human rights concerns. Human rights law at a minimum requires that the decision to deport be carefully considered, with all relevant impacts and potential rights violations weighed by an independent decision maker. Unfortunately, the US fails to do this on a daily basis.

Civil rights practitioners and immigrant rights advocates agree.  “The United States’ immigration policies and practices that aggressively seek to deport individuals, especially based on convictions where the sentences have been long ago been served, are draconian and unjust,” says Su Ming Yeh, a staff attorney at the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, an organization that represents indigent prisoners and detainees whose rights have been violated.  “Frequently, the ones who suffer the most are the family members and children left behind.  Immigration judges should, at a minimum, be permitted discretion to consider the best interests of the children and the overall contributions of the immigrant.”

In a nation that claims to uphold family values, this legalized separation of families boggles the mind.  And in a nation of immigrants- excluding indigenous peoples and descendants of kidnapped Africans, of course-immigrants have a history of being scapegoated, hated, discriminated against, and otherwise singled out and targeted for ridicule, abuse, humiliation and degradation.  And very often, the law played a fundamental role in the oppression of immigrants.

At first, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, some European immigrant groups were viewed as inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and often competed with African Americans to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.  In those days, it was not uncommon to see signs such as “Irish Need Not Apply” or “No Irish or Dogs Allowed” or “No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans” for that matter.  Jewish Americans faced discrimination, rigid quotas in college admissions, and in the case of Leo Frank, lynching.  Then there were the laws, regulations and ordinances targeting Asian immigrants, especially Chinese and Japanese Americans.  This was a manifestation of xenophobic and racist sentiment and a White fear of the “Yellow Peril”, which culminated in the internment of Japanese Americans on U.S. soil during World War II.

And today, many immigrants come from the so-called Third World, from the nations of the South, places with warm, tropical climates, and people with brown or black skin, very often Caribbean and Latin American people, and many Spanish-speaking people.  The current anti-immigrant fervor- complete with anti-Latino violence and calls for building a giant fence on the U.S.-Mexico border-must be understood within the context of changing demographics and resistance to the browning of America. Throw in the color-coded war on drugs, and the implications of the war on terror, and you get the immigration mess in which we find ourselves today.

For those who are threatened with deportation, there is hope on the horizon.  New York Congressman José Serrano has introduced the Child Citizen Protection Act (HR182), which would allow immigration judges to consider the best interests of U.S. citizen children in deportation cases.  The law would essentially allow children to be heard before their parents are taken away from them.  The New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City and Families for Freedom, members of Mr. Salmon’s defense committee, support the immediate passage of HR182 by Congress.

And as for Roxroy Salmon, his fate is in the hands of ICE Field Office Director Chris Shanahan, who can be reached at (212) 264-2413.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

With his speech at Cairo University, President Obama has laid the groundwork, potentially, for a new era of peace in the Mideast. Israeli officials are now realizing that they will have to accept a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile, there is an indication that the President’s speech is paving the way for waning animosity towards America in the Muslim world, which would undercut the activities of extremist groups that benefit from continued violence, hostility and death in that region of the world.

Well, it is about time. The past administration, whose name I dare not utter for fear it will reappear, paid nothing but lip service to the Mideast. The former president gave a rubber stamp to the status quo, and endorsed Israeli incursions and military strong-arming in the name of the war on terror. That rightwing faux fundamentalist Christian occupant of the White House from 2001 until this past January-and his constituency for that matter-really cared very little about Jewish people. Little that is, except under the fundamentalist concept of the so-called rapture, or end times, in which Jesus returns and Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will supposedly perish, or so the mythology goes. And that is the nonsense that governed Mideast policy for a decade. But I digress…

The Obama speech was a game changer because he accomplished a number of things: he presented a humbler and more contrite America, one which comes to the Muslim world with respect. With that respect, however, came a stern message. Obama discussed the long history of persecution of the Jewish people. Centuries of anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust, including the network of death camps-including Buchenwald, which Obama recently visited-that murdered 6 million Jews. “Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve,” the President emphasized.

Addressing Israel, Obama declared that the growth of the settlements in the West Bank must end. To the Palestinians, he acknowledged their “intolerable” suffering, but suggested that violence will not work. Borrowing from the African American and South African experience, he noted that things changed for Black people not through violence, but fighting for and demanding their rights:

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now, Obama is what some folks would call a real mensch, which is Yiddish for a man of integrity and honor. He laid it out on the table, seemingly without attachments to the way things were done in the past. Surely, he realizes that U.S. policy towards the Mideast must change, and the country must exert some positive leadership. (Whether Obama decides to resist the urge for a Bush-lite policy with empire building in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains to be seen.)

Palestinians cannot sustain any more of an occupation that crushes the spirit and any sense of civil society, and Israelis can no longer pretend that they will ever feel safe, secure and free as long as they subjugate another people with Bantustans, checkpoints and identity cards. The hardliners, the base of Netanyahu’s coalition government, want nothing less than to keep building the settlements. Will the parties come to their senses and come to the table? Time will tell. “Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed,” as Obama said. “All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear.”

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

If I learned one thing from the recent rebellions in Iran, it is this: the Iranian people have a lot of heart. These are folks you would want with you when times get tough. Strong folks, to be sure, particularly the women. They have endured beatings from the Ayatollah’s paramilitary motorcycle gang, the Basij. And some took bullets for the cause for which they were fighting. The graphic videotaped killing of a young woman, 26-year old Neda Soltan, by sniper fire became a painful symbol of the struggle for democracy in that country.

The masses fighting against the military in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities knew what to do when their rights were at stake. It was an appropriate reaction by an outraged public to a stolen election, in which incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was fraudulently reselected by the religious rulers to another term of office. Despite the groundswell of support for reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the regime informed the people that Ahmadinejad won in a landslide. But it is really about more than that now, as this is a part of a resistance movement which was years in the making. And in that regard the people’s democratic tendencies and thirst for human rights provide a spectacular model for all of us to follow.

Iran’s citizens exist in a regressive theocracy that has carved out a paltry window for democracy in the form of these sham elections. They decided they were tired of living in a repressive society, a nation-as-prison branded as an international pariah and a sponsor of terrorism. They decided they grew weary of living in a place in which people are disrespected and disregarded, where women are second or third class citizens who are beaten in the streets with sticks like dogs, and brownshirt thugs mete out street justice on behalf of the religious elite.

But in the U.S., a putative democracy, when elections are stolen, the people retreat into a world of escapism and multimedia diversions, of celebrity gossip and reality television, of mindless consumerism (at least before the recession hit), and become sidetracked by issues of little or no concern. In November 2008, however, they appeared to take back their democracy, although the jury is still out.

The Iranian theocratic establishment responded to their people’s cries with brutality through the barrel of the gun. Unprepared for the first ever revolution conducted through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, through text messaging, cell phones and camera phones, the regime of Ayatollah Khameini cracked down on political dissidents. It imprisoned reform leaders and journalists, jammed the phone lines, and waged a media blackout on coverage of the protests. And demonstrators were threatened with the death penalty. But what we all soon learned was that the world is one big network. You cannot hide the truth in a technological world with a 24-hour news cycle. Independent citizen-journalists still got the word out to the greater global community.

Iran’s religious rulers have a problem: their moral bankruptcy, corruption and illegitimacy have been revealed for all the world to see. They are trapped in the 1979 revolution which unseated the Shah – Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a puppet monarch installed by the Americans and the British – from power. And oddly, the current regime remains fixated with a revolutionary mindset in which the U.S. is the great Satan, and the U.S., Britain and the European nations are to blame for the current unrest.

Now granted, the U.S. and Britain have to shoulder much blame for what has happened in Iran over the years. In 1953, the CIA and British SIS staged a coup d’état, in which Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratically-elected prime minister of that country, was overthrown (Mossadeq was a nationalist who was committed to nationalizing the country’s British owned petroleum industry). Installed by his Western puppet masters, the Shah – with his personal opulence, autocratic rule, suppression of political dissent, and regime of violence – paved the way for the Islamic revolution that overthrew him and cast him into exile. The protests against the Shah in the streets in 1979 mirror the protests against the rule of the mullahs today in 2009. And as Malcolm X would say, chickens came home to roost.

But it would seem that blaming the U.S. and others can only go but so far. And those in the streets who want relations with America apparently are not buying that worn out message. The Iranian revolutionary government suffers from the same disease that infects many other revolutionary regimes, and it harkens back to a theme in George Orwell’s book, Animal Farm – revolutions can produce governments that are just as oppressive as, if not more malicious and loathsome than, the regimes they replaced. Throw off one yoke of oppression, and replace it with another, only under a different name or shape or color. Oddly, the Iranian constitution provides for a number of freedoms, including the protection of human dignity, equality before the law for men and women, freedom of belief, freedom of the press, of association and assembly, a ban against torture, and no arrests without due process. But you would not know this these days, as rhetoric and reality have parted ways, and staying in power is more important than following the will of the people, and even their own laws.

President Obama, whose Cairo speech surely provided a catalyst for the Iranian protests that followed, issued the following statement:

“The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”

Applying Dr. King’s message of human rights to the streets of Tehran, Obama’s message is a cautionary one, yet a hopeful one. No one knows what will happen next, and this is for Iranians to decide. But surely, repressive regimes everywhere are observing the Twitter revolution taking place in Iran, where brutality and injustice can no longer take place in dark, secret, hidden dungeons like the old days. Those were the days when the law was the law because the angry and sadistic old crackpot at the top said it was so, and everyone else be damned.

But now, the people beg to differ.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

I was hoping they would cancel Father’s Day this year, mostly because my son Ezra Malik died.

He was my baby boy, and he died the day before he was born, in a hospital in August of last year.  He was a beautiful baby with a full head of hair and flat little feet, and I only got to hold him once.  I cannot describe the intense feeling of joy over meeting and holding and kissing my son, and the excruciating pain over seeing him lifeless.  His mother and I read him a bedtime story before we put him in the ground, to be with his ancestors.  And now I am left lamenting over the birthdays, the graduations and other life events that will never happen, over the laughs and memories of bicycle rides, amusement parks, and ice cream-experiences of seeing him grow up which I will never see because it wasn’t meant to be.

Losing my child was the most traumatic experience of my life.  Nothing else comes close.  It was like crashing into a brick wall, or having my heart yanked out of my chest.  To those who have not had the experience, I pray you will never know the feeling.  What makes it particularly difficult is that parents are supposed to protect their children and keep them away from harm, and now we feel as if we’ve failed.

This membership organization is a secret society of sorts, whose members often suffer in silence because society doesn’t care to listen.  To be sure, there are many parents in this secret society, many fathers such as myself, those who have that strong fatherhood feeling, who love their child without question. But we are not viewed as fathers in the regular sense because our child died.  Maybe there should be a special Father’s Day just for us.

Think of the countless children in this world that die every year from one of any number of causes, whether disease or famine, or homicide or suicide or war, or causes unknown.  For example, every year in the U.S., 5,000 children die from gun violence, and African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately affected.  Homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American males between ages 15-34, the second leading cause of death for Blacks ages 10-14, and the third leading cause of death for the 5-9 age range, with guns accounting for 90%, 70% and 34% of these deaths, respectively.  That’s a lot of children.  That’s a lot of mourning parents, and an army of grieving fathers, often at war with their emotions, and shunned by a society that doesn’t support them through their painful journey.

This is a society where value is placed on looking good rather than feeling good.  People ask “how are you feeling?” without really caring about your response.  In a society that does not deal well with death, particularly the death of children- and wants people to just “get over it” and feel better, mistakenly believing that simply forgetting the loss will make the pain go away- parents of lost children have a rough time of it.

Mothers who grieve over a lost child tend to have a more supportive network than fathers to help them through their pain, not that they always receive the support that they need.  Men are told to buck up, walk it off and “be a man”.  After all, we are told, it is hardest on the mothers.

As a result, fathers of lost children are lost in the wilderness.  We must grapple with the fact that our child has died, yet often we are ill-equipped to do so.  Many men have been conditioned to hide and deny their emotions, their pain and their sorrow, with unhealthy consequences.  Think of all of the people-especially men- who are behind bars because they could not deal with what was on their mind.  Unable to manage their emotions, they cracked up, and perhaps even hurt those around them.  Maybe they were unaware of the counseling and support services available to them (two online support groups for babylost parents are MISS Foundation and Glow In The Woods).  Or they were reluctant to seek those services because of the social stigma of being labeled weak, unstable or crazy.

As for those of us who are coping with the loss of a child, the pain will never go away.  It might get easier to live with, but that is not the point.  The stages of grief don’t always progress in a straight line.  Years after our child’s death, the bad days may still sneak up on us and assault us out of the blue.  Hopefully, healing will come, and we can find ways to incorporate the loss into our daily lives.  But the bar has been lowered on the highest level of joy that we are able to experience.

So, finally, to those fathers who can physically hold your child on Father’s Day, I tell you to hold them tight and don’t let go.  Do not take your child for granted.  To those fathers whose children remain with you in spirit, I say hold them tight in your heart, in your memories, and in your daily life, and don’t let go.

But if you are someone who knows a daddy of a lost child, don’t hesitate to go up to him and feel free to acknowledge his loss.  Bringing up the tragedy won’t make him feel worse, because he is already living the hell that is the most traumatic experience of his life.  But when others pretend that he is not a suffering father, that will almost certainly make him feel worse.  We grieving fathers need to know we are not alone this Father’s Day.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

In Philadelphia, it is time for a new district attorney. The current D.A. Lynne Abraham is retiring, and none too soon- after 18 years in the position, she has been called “America’s deadliest D.A.” for her exceptionally voracious appetite in seeking the death penalty. Without question, most of the people sentenced to death were African American.

A report by the Death Penalty Information Center noted that Amnesty International characterized Pennsylvania’s death penalty as one the most racist in America. Philadelphia, with 14% of Pennsylvania’s population, has accounted for more than half of the state’s death sentences. Further, Blacks in Philadelphia were far more likely to get the death penalty than similarly situated defendants-3.9 times to be exact. The report also said the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s death row prisoners are Black, and 84% of death row inmates from Philadelphia are Black.

Yet, despite the complaints about Abraham over the years, someone voted her back into office, election after election, didn’t they?

Seth Williams recently won the Democratic primary for the D.A.’s race, which means he stands a better than good chance of becoming Philadelphia’s next prosecutor in this heavily Democratic city. If he wins, he will have lots of power. But will he use those powers for good? His platform looks promising, including dealing with violent rather than nonviolent crime, employing preventative measures, and most of all, reducing the number of plea bargains.

A plea bargain is an agreement in a criminal case where the defendant pleads guilty to a crime-usually to a lesser crime than the original charge-and waives his or her right to a jury trial, and the right against self-incrimination. At its worst, I view plea bargaining as a shortcut to justice, sometimes an injustice in and of itself. A plea bargain is to justice what fast food is to gourmet cooking. Quicker doesn’t necessarily mean better, and 90% of criminal cases end up in plea bargains. It gives the impression that justice is a deal that can be bartered. Perhaps these plea bargains are the grease that helps to lubricate an often frustratingly slow and overburdened justice system. Or perhaps they are the grease that clogs up the arteries of the justice system, and makes that system hardened, calcified, inelastic and diseased- unable to allow justice to flow.

Perhaps some plea agreements serve a legitimate purpose. But what happens when the defendant didn’t commit a crime at all, and is pressured into taking the deal by his or her defense lawyer or coerced by the D.A.? What if the crime should not have been prosecuted at all, such as the case of marijuana possession, or a good kid with no prior offenses? A criminal record-in most cases secured as a result of a plea bargain, whether or not the defendant actually did the crime-can mean prison time, social stigma, and a bar to many educational and employment opportunities. Prosecutors have a lot of power, and they have a lot of discretion in deciding who gets prosecuted and for what offenses. They may choose not to prosecute a nonviolent, victimless crime, or choose not to seek punishment that serves no legitimate social purpose. And as they say, you can indict a ham sandwich.

The fact of the matter is that many prosecutors build their careers on the backs of the prosecuted. The number of convictions one racks up become notches in the belt of one’s political career, rungs in the ladder of success. And whether those people actually committed crimes is secondary in importance, if important at all.

The American Bar Association (ABA) Rules of Professional Conduct, as well as the Pennsylvania rules, say the following about the role of a prosecutor:

Rule 3.8 Special Responsibilities Of A Prosecutor

The prosecutor in a criminal case shall:

(a) refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause;

(b) make reasonable efforts to assure that the accused has been advised of the right to, and the procedure for obtaining, counsel and has been given reasonable opportunity to obtain counsel;

(c) not seek to obtain from an unrepresented accused a waiver of important pretrial rights, such as the right to a preliminary hearing;

(d) make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense, and, in connection with sentencing, disclose to the defense and to the tribunal all unprivileged mitigating information known to the prosecutor, except when the prosecutor is relieved of this responsibility by a protective order of the tribunal.

The realities of how some prosecutors behave fly in the face of these sensible rules- rules which assume that the ultimate goal is getting to the truth, rather than the personal aggrandizement of the lawyers and others who oversee the criminal justice system.

Consider the town of Tenaha, Texas, where the D.A. and the police are being sued for, literally, highway robbery: A federal class-action lawsuit alleges that cops have been illegally stopping hundreds of mostly out-of-town, Black and Latino motorists, and giving them the choice of taking a felony charge, or handing over their money and valuables. A black grandmother from Akron, Ohio was forced to give up $4,000 after Tenaha police pulled her over. Meanwhile, an interracial couple from Houston surrendered over $6,000 to police, who had threatened to take their children and place them in foster care. Between 2006 and 2008, the town has seized around $3 million under this perverse use of Texas’ forfeiture law, which requires such seized money to be used for law enforcement purposes. But in Tenaha, proceeds from these illegal seizures went to a church and a little league baseball team, and one officer received a $10,000 check. “We try to enforce the law here,” George Bowers, the town’s mayor said. “We’re not doing this to raise money.”

And consider the town of Tulia, Texas (there seems to be a pattern with these Texas towns), where a racially-motivated drug sting led to the arrest of 46 people, nearly all African American, on bogus drug charges. No drugs, money or weapons were seized because no crimes had been committed. Yet, some of these people were sentenced to very hard time, 99 years in one case. Fourteen of the defendants took pleas and were sent to prison. Prosecutors relied on the testimony of a sketchy undercover narcotics agent with a checkered past. The regional, 26-county drug task force that masterminded the sting was allowed to play by its own rules. They received federal money, and were funded based on the number of arrests and convictions they helped win. Such disasters cannot occur without the participation of sheriff’s departments, disreputable police officers and unscrupulous district attorney’s offices that are looking to make that big score.

And society participates in the madness by putting profit into imprisonment, and by endorsing public officials who thrive on a “tough on crime”, “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” stance.

Two judges in Luzerne County, PA were looking for that big score when they collected $2.6 million in kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers. In return, the judges helped the centers secure their contracts, and filled the centers with over 5,000 children, many first-time offenders who committed minor offenses. The judges denied many of these juveniles access to an attorney. Like the law enforcement agent or the prosecutor who racks up arrests or convictions for personal advancement, it is amazing what happens when dollars are at stake.

When justice is reduced to a hustle or a deal-not unlike the economic system that the justice system has undergirded for so long-we all become cheapened in the process. And all you have left is a fast food justice system, a McJustice system.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

When a person commits a crime, everyone has an answer as to what punishment should or should not be meted out. But what do you do when a law is a crime unto itself, and society is committing the crime?

I asked myself that question when I recently saw the film The Lemon Tree. A fictional account based on real-life stories, it centers around Salma Zidane, Palestinian woman who owns a lemon grove on the West Bank-Israel border. Zidane’s neighbor, the new Israeli defense minister, builds an upscale home near the lemon trees and the secret service declares the grove a security threat. The military erects a watchtower, and bars her from entering her lemon grove and tending to it. As the minister and his family take some of the lemons for their own use, Zidane is met with physical force, at gunpoint, when she climbs the wire fence in an attempt to enter her own grove. The minister orders the trees uprooted pursuant to military law, and Zidane, who rejects the government’s offer to compensate her, fights the decision all the way up to the Israeli high court.

The Lemon Tree makes a statement about the dysfunctional state of affairs in the Mideast, and a struggle of people who are fighting for their rights. Central to the film, in my view, is the law which allowed for the destruction and confiscation of Palestinian property on the grounds of “military necessity” (translated: Palestinian terrorist threat).

People do not think much about laws, and they question not how and why they are promulgated. In a previous commentary, I argued that a law is that which is bought and paid for. I would like to add to that definition with a secondary definition: a law endorses and legitimizes the oppressive tendencies of a given society. In order to justify an injustice, simply write it into law and legalize it. Rubber stamp it. You don’t have to justify the abhorrent practice on its merits, you simply back into it. It is now the law, so it is lawful. And the nation’s legal apparatus will bring force to bear and uphold the law.

A law can also reveal a narrative, a story that a given society wants to tell about itself, its values, and the way it deals with certain conduct. So in The Lemon Tree, the law that Salma Zidane challenges provides us with a story about Israeli-Palestinian relations: In Israel, Palestinians are second-class citizens – better yet, non-citizens – who have no rights, including the right to own land in a country that is not their own, even though this is the only home they have known. They are bad people and considered dangerous, whether men, women or children, and should be viewed as potential if not actual terrorists. That is why they are subjected to a regime of ID cards, unreasonable checkpoints and curfews. These security precautions must be taken, the argument goes, to protect Israeli families and their homes from these terrorists (Palestinians).

In the United States, we have seen recent examples of unjust laws. A nation that has all but forsaken the notion of rehabilitation in its criminal justice system, America chooses to punish people – whether through incarceration, fine, sanction, etc. – not only for the crime for which they are convicted. Rather, there are laws that add collateral punishment to a prison sentence by denying a convicted felon access to student loans for college, or by barring that person employment and licensure in many professions, access to public assistance and public housing. Yet, that person is likely expected to find employment in order to pay restitution, as a term of his or her probation or parole. As a result, people with a criminal record are unable to provide for their families and become productive members of society. Such laws articulate the narrative of a country that has decided to write off certain members of society, to banish them from participation in daily life, and pronounce them dead in a civil sense.

Another example is the Bush administration’s endorsement of torture of terror suspects. The Bush cronies started with the blatantly false assumption that torture is acceptable – although domestic and international law clearly says the practice is illegal. Hack lawyers working for former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney provided the legal cover by engaging in professional misconduct – writing memos with faulty legal reasoning declaring that torture is legal. They essentially backed into the legalization of torture by declaring torture is legal because the memos say it is legal.

Wherever you find unjust laws and a legal system that serves as the commission of a crime on society, you will find lawyers and judges as willing participants in the injustice. In the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa, not only were racism, racial discrimination and oppression accepted, they were the law. And there were legal tacticians who were willing and able to prop up those systems of injustice. Segregation, disenfranchisement, miscegenation laws, curfews, capital punishment and prison farms were part of a legal framework to kill Black aspirations of empowerment and self-determination.

In a similar vein, the Nuremberg laws devised by Nazi Germany sanctioned the oppression and ultimately the annihilation of European Jews, with the enforcement of these laws by sham kangaroo courts. The Nazi legal regime received their cues from the American South, with racial integrity laws that defined a Jew in ways that echoed the “one-drop rule” for Blacks under Jim Crow. The discriminatory laws disenfranchised Jews; kept them segregated and contained in ghettos; stripped them of their German citizenship; prohibited them from engaging in a profession or working in a government job; barred Jews from intermarrying and having sexual relations with Germans; excluded them from receiving social welfare and attending public schools and universities, and prohibited them from holding driver’s licenses. Jews were banned from resorts, beaches and swimming pools, barred from sleeping and dining cars on trains, and made to register for forced labor. And they were forbidden to walk in certain places at certain times of the day. All of these measures were passed under German law, under penalty of hard labor (like Jim Crow), for the sake of maintaining the purity of German blood. Nazi law defined children as “persons who are not Jews.” Being Jewish, in essence, became illegal.

Dr. Martin Luther King had much to say about unjust laws. In his April 16, 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, he said that unjust laws are made to be broken:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust…. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’…. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

In our daily lives, wherever we may find ourselves in the world, we must fight the temptation to endorse unjust laws. We should resist participating in the oppression of others through the use of the law. After all, when you have blood on your hands, it is very hard to wipe them clean.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

The education bubble is going to burst. It has to happen. On a daily basis, we hear about the bursting of the housing bubble. Housing values were over inflated. Millions of people found themselves with mortgages they could not afford to pay-whether through hard times and job loss, racial profiling and predatory lending by unscrupulous, avaricious banking institutions, or other reasons.

But neither can many Americans pay their college loans. Few people really talk about the unholy alliance made between institutions of higher learning and educational lenders to create a travesty in American education-that hot mess known as the student loan hustle.

Here is yet another reason why American capitalism is the scourge of the global community.

Colleges, grad schools and professional schools have become profit centers, cash cows and vocational processing plants, rather than places to expand one’s mind and understanding of the world.

And each year, the cost of a college education increases far in excess of the rate of inflation, twice the rate of inflation to be exact. Private law school tuition increased nearly three times the rate of consumer prices between 1990 and 2003. In this time of economic gloom, parents-financially straightjacketed, perhaps unemployed or underemployed, no savings, or their investment portfolios eviscerated- cannot afford to send their children to school.

According to the College Board, the average cost of four years at a private college is $136,000, $57,000 at a public university. Meanwhile, the student loan industry makes $85 billion a year. Federal loans are at $544 billion, up $42 billion from 2008. And students borrowed a record $17.3 billion in private student loans in 2005-6, a 913% increase from a decade earlier. In 2008, according to FinAid.org, there was nearly $131 billion in outstanding private student loans. These private loans, the fastest segment of the student loan market, often have exorbitant and variable interest rates, highly punitive late fees and charges, and are based on the borrower’s credit rating rather than his or her need. Thanks to the power of the student loan industry- and hack politicians who believe we must leave no corporation behind-these loans, unlike mortgage foreclosures, are not covered by bankruptcy protection.

And then there are those unscrupulous and unduly influenced university officials who accept kickbacks, gifts, trips, revenue sharing agreements and other goodies from the lenders (who are eager to earn even more profits on the backs of students), in exchange for access to students. Andrew Cuomo, New York State attorney general, uncovered much of this scandal in a 2007 investigation. For example, the financial aid director at the University of Southern California owned 1,500 shares of Education Lending Group, parent company of the university’s preferred lender, Student Loan Xpress. In addition, the financial aid directors at Columbia University and University of Texas owned stock in that company, with the former selling his shares at a $100,000 profit. All three officers were terminated by their respective universities. The director of student financial services at Johns Hopkins University resigned after Cuomo’s probe revealed that she had received $65,000 from Student Loan Xpress, giving the impression that she was an employee of the lending company rather than of the university. And Matteo Montana, a Bush Department of Education official, held at least 10,500 shares (at least $100,000) of the company’s stock, and he was supposed to be overseeing that lender, as well as others who participated in the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP).

When greed rules the student loan process-not unlike financial deregulation and the Wall Street meltdown, the Madoff scandal, and the subprime mortgage mess- no one is looking out for the interests of ordinary students. The result is that students get shafted, and the banks and their enablers get rich. People of meager or modest means, just hoping for education as a way up and a way out, are crushed under the weight of loans they cannot afford to pay when they graduate. They emerge no better, or even worse off, than the previous generation, with six-figure, mortgage-sized indebtedness, and monthly payments that exceed all other expenses, if not their entire paycheck. Some young people must forego homeownership because they cannot afford a mortgage, or must live with their parents until things get better, if they ever get better.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

With the recent announcement that Justice David Souter will retire from the U.S. Supreme Court, President Obama must now find a replacement. And over the next four years – eight years if there is a second Obama term – the president has the opportunity to shape the federal courts to reflect 21st century realities. Much damage has been done in the judiciary under the Bush administration. In his attempts to create an enduring legacy of radical conservatism on the bench, the previous occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue stacked the federal courts with corporate shills, Christian Taliban and torture enablers.

With only one woman on the Supreme Court, seven White men, and a Black justice who is the functional equivalent of a conservative White man, the high court does not look like modern-day America. Now with the winds of change blowing, there is a fighting chance that diversity – of backgrounds and life experiences, of gender, of ethnicity, of opinion, of law schools, and the like – will be a factor in the shaping of the court. Times must change. As someone who clerked for two African-American judges in the federal courts, I can appreciate the value of diversity on the bench, of having more than the usual “suspects” wielding the gavel.

But it seems unlikely that the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions (R-Alabama), feels the same way. Sessions, it should be noted, was nominated by Reagan in 1985 to a federal judgeship, but was dinged by the Senate. Sessions was a critic of the Voting Rights Act. He had called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” groups that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” In addition, as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, he reportedly called a Black assistant U.S. attorney “boy”, and told him to “be careful what you say to white folks.” As a federal prosecutor, Sessions engaged in a voter-fraud witch-hunt against three Black civil rights workers, including a former aide to Dr. King. Moreover, during a 1981 KKK murder investigation, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.”

As a senator, Sessions voted against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. Based on his voting record, he has a 0% rating from the Human Rights Campaign (he is anti-gay rights), a 7% rating from the NAACP (he is anti-affirmative action), and a 20% rating from the ACLU (he is anti-civil rights). And this is the person the Republicans have entrusted in a position of leadership in this important committee in the Senate. It speaks volumes about the GOP and the statement they are making here, particularly when one considers Sessions’ association with anti-immigration, White nationalist groups.

A lawmaker with a solid anti-immigration record, Sessions is criticized by immigrants’ rights groups for his anti-immigration rhetoric, and for his close associations with three organizations: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has designated FAIR as a hate group, notes that all of these organizations “were founded and funded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who operates a racist publishing company and has written that to maintain American culture, ‘a European-American majority’ is required.” He has published writings by John Vinson, head of Tanton’s American Immigration Control Foundation, and a devout White supremacist. Vinson has called for the secession of the former Confederate states in order to racially and economically protect Whites.

Tanton has been a driving force in the White nationalist and anti-immigration movements for years. His organizations and associates have affiliations with skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, the modern-day reincarnation of the White Citizens’ Councils, the “white-collar Klan” of the Jim Crow era. And with financial support from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund – also designated a hate group whose members believe that Black people have smaller brains and lower intelligence than Whites – Tanton has been able to infiltrate, and unfortunately shape, the mainstream dialogue on immigration reform. And sadly, the mainstream media have helped to legitimize his organizations.

Senator Sessions often quotes Tanton’s groups and their sham reports, appears at their press conferences, and has received recognition and campaign contributions from them. And this individual will be sitting in judgment of nominees to the federal bench, including African Americans, Latinos and other judges of color? In recent years, the Republican Party has been reduced to a regional extremist party – all-White, Christian fundamentalist, uneducated and racist. And apparently, on judicial and criminal justice matters, Sessions is their standard bearer, the end product of a thorough barrel-scraping process. This is not surprising, but one must wonder what’s really going on here.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

In a recent online town hall meeting at the White House, President Obama was asked by the online audience whether he thought legalizing marijuana would create jobs and help the economy. It was the most popular question asked at the meeting. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Obama remarked, then adding, “No, I don’t think this would be a good strategy.” He seemed to give a little chuckle, as did the extras who were cast as audience members in the background behind the president.

But this is no laughing matter, and America’s failed war on drugs is serious business. Dead serious, in a literal sense. The United States has a voracious appetite for drugs, this is without question. Over the years – in a move tinged partly with greed, partly with boneheadedness and shortsightedness, and partly with racism – the nation has treated drugs as an issue of morality and criminal justice. As a result of this war on drugs, poor communities and communities of color have been decimated. Rather than target the places where most of the drugs are consumed – in the White suburbs, middle-class areas and wealthy enclaves – law enforcement targets the areas where drug sales and drug use are most conspicuous: the inner city. As a result, 1 in 99 adults is behind bars, including 1 in 36 Latino adults, 1 in 15 Black adults, and 1 in 9 African Americans between the ages of 20 and 34. Yes, I said 1 in 9. Generations are spending their most formidable years in prison over drugs, sometimes most of their lives, when they should be raising their families, contributing to society, getting an education, what have you. Like the effects of the Vietnam War, the damage visited upon these communities by the drug war is irreparable. America has become the most incarcerated nation, with a rate of imprisonment five times higher than the rest of the world.

The effects of these harsh punitive policies, and the criminalization of drugs, have implications beyond the borders of this country. Mexican drug cartels, meeting America’s drug demand, are wreaking havoc on Mexico. That country is in trouble, big trouble. Over 1,100 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico so far this year (6,200 in 2008), due in no small measure to the use of American firearms. Decapitations, kidnappings, torture, the use of hand grenades, and murders with military-style assault weapons are standard fare. And this crisis is spilling over into the United States.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

There’s a story out of Philadelphia that’s enough to break your heart.

On April 21, a man shot his girlfriend to death in front of her 11-year old daughter, then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. Aleen Ali, 45, a supervisor at the city’s Department of Human Services (DHS), walked up to the car of Angela Jeffreys, 34, who was about to take her daughter to school, and stood silently as he started firing. Jeffreys, a clerk at the Criminal Justice Center, was a single mother who also had two other children – one in high school and another in college. Ali left a wife, also an administrator at DHS, and an 18-month-old baby. Jeffreys’ daughter was taken to the local police station, still wearing her school uniform. The police found eight shell casings.

So now, after this senseless loss of two lives, four children have lost a parent. And for what? I am sure that at this point, someone reading this commentary will recite the usual gun rights drivel, that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, that although this was a tragedy, nothing could be done. Most of all, I just love the argument that the second amendment gives us a constitutional right to own as many guns as we please, and that we need more guns to protect us from the “criminals”. Well, I disagree. Many people are pretending they are unaware that more of these deadly incidents are occurring these days.

In Pittsburgh, there was the racist man who killed three police officers. He hated Obama, and said he would defend himself if anyone tried to take his guns. In Binghamton, NY, there was the Vietnamese immigrant who killed 13 people at an immigrant services center, and then committed suicide. And in California, an unemployed hospital technician shot his five children and wife to death before taking his own life.

And it all seems to point back to the same thing: this country has too many guns, over 200 million privately-owned weapons to be exact. That includes handguns, rifles, and shotguns, and millions more are added to that amount each year. In my humble opinion, the existence of so many guns seems to be particularly hazardous in a pathologically unstable nation such as the United States. This nation boasts an alarming combination of systemic chronic unemployment and a lack of opportunity, with substantial segments of the population with low levels of education and no marketable skills, and inadequate methods of conflict resolution. Throw in widespread undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, and a rise in activity among right-wing extremist hate groups, and you have a recipe for disaster. Plus, to make things worse, we are exporting our violence to Mexico with a drug war fueled by American weapons.

Not wanting to go off half-cocked without looking at the destruction caused by guns in America each year, I decided to consult the statistics. And I must say, the statistics are sobering.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

As the song goes, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, it’s up to you, New York, New York.” The problem is that if you are counting on making it in New York City, you could be setting yourself up for disappointment.

A recent report by The Center for an Urban Future, a public policy organization dedicated to dealing with the problems facing low-income and working-class neighborhoods in New York City, suggests that the Big Apple is too expensive for most people to live. The report, called Reviving the City of Aspiration: A study of the challenges facing New York City’s middle class, confirms what many New Yorkers already knew anecdotally – with an ever-widening gap between earning power and expenses, New York is unable to sustain a middle class. In a city where even many upper middle class families are stretched to their limits, the cost of living is beyond the reach of most working families. The city lost more than its fair share of blue collar manufacturing jobs over the years. There are no new jobs to create or sustain a middle-class lifestyle, and there is little hope of upward mobility. New York City never was cheap, but it was once perceived as a city of aspiration, a place where people could live, work, scratch their way up the ladder, and raise a family. But people are leaving, and the path from poverty to the middle class is proving far more elusive.

These days, the city is losing a number of demographic groups, including people with a bachelor’s degree, families, immigrants, municipal workers, and the Black community of Eastern Queens, one of the country’s largest African American middle class populations.

Meanwhile, the ranks of the poor are rising. In 2005, 46% of New Yorkers living in poverty held regular jobs, a 17 point increase from 1990. And 31% of New Yorkers over age 18 work in low wage jobs.

There are a number of challenges facing working families. First and foremost, of course, is the high cost of living, particularly exorbitant housing costs. In addition, the price New Yorkers pay for electricity, phone service, auto insurance, parking, milk, home heating oil and state and local taxes are among the highest in the nation. While most families require two working parents to make ends meet, child care is prohibitively expensive, averaging $13,000 to $25,000 per year, per child. Then there are the inferior quality schools and the long, uncomfortable commutes on public transportation for people who live outside Manhattan, in one of the outer boroughs. And there was the housing boom which led to haphazard construction, diminishing the aesthetic qualities of many New York City neighborhoods, and straining the infrastructure of many communities.

Just to understand how bad things are, consider this: in Manhattan, the nation’s most expensive urban area, it takes an annual salary of $123,322 to enjoy the same standard of living as someone making $50,000 in Houston. In San Francisco, the nation’s second most expensive place, you would need $95,489 to live like that person in Houston. In Queens, NY (the fifth most expensive area in the nation) $85,918. In Nassau County, NY, $83,168. In Los Angeles, $80,583. In Boston, $72,772. What about Philadelphia? You would require $69,196. Chicago, $63,421. In Atlanta, only $53,630.

As for those who are leaving New York, where are they going? Well, it should be no surprise that they are moving to places such as Philadelphia. I’m not surprised because I am a New Yorker who moved to Philadelphia. I was born and raised in New York, and although I had lived in a number of places – as diverse as Boston, Detroit and Tokyo – I was a New Yorker. You can never really get the New York out of your system, even if you try, and you probably wouldn’t want to do it in any case. A New York community activist and journalist, I came to Philly for law school, where I met my wife, a Philadelphian turned New York activist. We had grand ideas of moving to Brooklyn after law school. But we were pulled back to Philadelphia, in no small measure, because we had expensive college and law school education, but with public interest careers with modest salaries serving underserved communities. You do the math. And besides, Philadelphia is a great city with a distinctive, down-to-earth character, a thriving arts community and public parks, and a sizable progressive community, albeit with its problems and challenges like any other city.

Meanwhile, New York, the capital of American capitalism and global capitalism, has become a city that only AIG executives, hedge fund managers, art dealers, and hotshot corporate lawyers can afford. The rest are poor, strangled and struggling. This is a scenario that would make Dickens blush. Yet, this was in the works for years before the economic crisis, in a city and a nation that has witnessed the dramatically widening gap between rich and poor, via public policy. And how telling that the titans of capitalism – who have brought down Wall Street through their own unchecked greed, and have no qualms about taking their corporate stimulus welfare payments – are now fighting vigorously to kill the Employee Free Choice Act and other initiatives that would help average working New Yorkers earn a living and raise their families.

As the report notes, there are a number of things that should be done to save New York: better-paying jobs, upgrades to infrastructure, diversifying the economy to include green jobs, and utilizing community college as a path to upward mobility. And there is the need to move away from the construction of luxury developments and sports stadiums, towards building affordable homes for everyday families, people with middle incomes, and professionals.

In the end, New York City provides a reality-based cautionary tale about the future of America, mired in poverty, about its priorities, what it has become and what it can become. This city that never sleeps, and other cities as well, will experience economic and social death without a vibrant middle class and viable opportunities to earn a living.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

On May 26, 2009, a potentially historic human rights trial will take place in a federal court in New York. At issue: What did Royal Dutch/Shell, the multinational oil giant, do in Nigeria?

The case is over a decade in the making. The suit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and EarthRights International, claims that Shell Oil and Brian Anderson—who was the managing director of Shell Nigeria—were complicit in the commission of human rights violations in that country. Specifically, the suit seeks to hold Shell accountable for summary executions, crimes against humanity, torture, inhuman treatment and the arbitrary arrest and detention of Nigerians. The plaintiffs in the case allege that the corporation had a hand in the November 1995 hangings of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other human rights activists by Nigeria’s then-ruling military junta. These leaders were non-violently protesting against Shell’s abusive practices in the Ogoni region in the Niger River Delta, including the trail of environmental devastation the corporation has left in its wake. They are known collectively as the Ogoni Nine.

Saro-Wiwa, who with the other activists was convicted and hanged on trumped-up murder charges, demanded a cleanup of Shell’s hundreds of oil spills throughout the region. In addition, and perhaps more poignantly—because wherever there is oil there are monied interests to protect and poor people to potentially exploit—they were pushing for a greater share of oil revenues to the Ogoni people. Presently, nearly 85% of the oil revenues are in the hands of a mere 1% of the Nigerian population, in a country where, according to the African Development Bank, over 70% of people live on less than US$1 a day.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

The tea parties that recently took place around the country were billed as a grassroots, bottom-up groundswell against taxes, big government and bailouts. Fox News, apparently promoting itself as the official teabag network, hopes to grab ratings by embracing the pseudo-populist protests as their own.

Republican politicians tried to hitch onto the mean-spirited tea party bandwagon, replete with anti-Obama and racist protest signs. That the GOP wants to associate itself with extremist groups tells you the political party has officially fallen off the deep end. White supremacists, militias, secessionists, conspiracy theorists and wingnuts—the subjects of a new Department of Homeland Security report— apparently have a seat at the table of the Republican Party. With the moderates and even the reasonable, book learning-oriented conservatives driven from the GOP, the extremists are now the base, the mainstream conservatives. They are all that is left of a party in tatters, of what is now a regional political organization— Southern, Christian and almost exclusively white.

No more of this going through the motions about diversity, about the big tent. And I think that is fine, because there is no love lost. Many political observers always looked at their overtures to people of color with a jaundiced eye. But the Republicans are playing with fire now as they court the angry lynch mob. And we have been down this road before.

I speak of a time, during Jim Crow segregation, when opportunistic politicians— the White Citizens Council, or the white-collar Klan— appealed to their unwashed racist brethren by standing against desegregation and voting against civil rights. The white-collar Klan gave a good talk. They stood in front of the schoolhouse door to block the Black students from attending class, but they kept their hands clean. Meanwhile, the angry mob, Klansmen and other domestic terrorists, did the dirty work. They acted with a wink and a nod from the respectable White-collar Klan, and took matters into their own hands by burning crosses, lynching civil rights workers, and bombing Black churches. And this is the arrangement that the GOP appears to be establishing with their base today.

From an organizational point of view, the tea parties are a prime example of “astroturfing”, top-down machinations operating under the guise of a faux grassroots movement—like a phony, conservative version of MoveOn.org, but operated by a corporate puppetmaster. In this case, as was reported in The Atlantic and ThinkProgress, they are being led by corporate lobbyist-run, Republican-affiliated front groups and think-tanks: FreedomWorks, a conservative action group led by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey; the free-market group Americans For Prosperity, and the online-oriented, free-market group DontGo Movement, which was born out of last year’s offshore drilling debate in Congress. These organizations are writing the press releases and talking points, thinking up the ideas for the signs, setting up the conference calls, you name it.

Americans For Prosperity operates through the generosity of philanthropies such as the ultra-conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (which bankrolled Ward Connerly’s anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, and The Bell Curve author Charles Murray), and the pro-oil drilling Koch Family foundations.

In accordance with the interests of Armey’s client base, FreedomWorks has lobbied for the privatization of Social Security, and the deregulation of the life insurance industry. It supports the status quo in America’s use of fossil fuels, and has lobbied against healthcare reform. Further, FreedomWorks has received funding from telephone giants Verizon and AT&T, and has opposed net neutrality legislation that would keep the Internet democratic and open. One FreedomWorks funder is the Scaife Foundation, from Richard Mellon Scaife, key patron of the American Right.

So, these are the White-collar interests behind the tea parties. But what of the angry, disgruntled masses, the violent ones that’ll “git ‘er done”? Well, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just issued a report called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” According to the report, the current economic downturn and the election of an African American president have provided recruitment opportunities for White supremacist and radical right-wing groups. As the report warns, “the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.”

The current situation is not unlike the 1990s, when angst over a recession fed paranoia, and conspiracy theories about the end times, martial law and the suspension of the U.S. Constitution. The environment led to the targeting of government buildings and law enforcement, and resulted in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It was the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil before September 11, 2001, in which a bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building claimed 168 lives and left over 800 people injured.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2008 there were 926 hate groups in the U.S.— more than a 4 percent increase from 888 groups in 2007, and an over 50 percent increase since 2000, when 602 groups were active.

The DHS report notes that disgruntled veterans from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are recruited by white supremacist groups, exploited for the training and skills they acquire in the military. Let’s not forget that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a veteran of Operation Desert Storm in 1990-1991.

These right-wing groups are united by their hatred of immigration and a frustration over perceived government inaction on the issue, and they perpetrate hate crimes against Latinos. And in their hostility towards gun control legislation—such as assault weapons bans and proposed universal handgun registration—they stockpile weapons and ammunition, and engage in paramilitary training.

These extremist organizations are also united by their concern over the election of President Obama, which has translated into new recruits. Can we forget the blood-lust at the McCain-Palin rallies, in which crowd participants called Obama a terrorist and a traitor, carried around Obama monkey dolls and called for his death? During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Obama received more threats than any other candidate in recent memory, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Moreover, several white supremacists were arrested for plotting to assassinate him or threatening to do so.

And the tea parties represent another venue, another outlet for racist and extremist sentiment, all funded by right-wing corporate interests. Consider some of the signs that were held by teabag protestors:

· At a Madison, Wisconsin teabag rally: “Obama is the anti-Christ!” “Obama’s Plan – White Slavery.”

· In Chicago: “The American Taxpayers Are The Jews For Obama’s Ovens.”

· Philadelphia: “Barack Hussein Obama – The New Face of Hitler.”

· Fresno, California: “Impeach Osama Obama a.k.a. Hussein.”

· In Columbia, S.C., an elderly man held a large sign which read “Barack Obama supports Abortion, Sodomy, Socialism and The New World Order.”

· At a Washington, DC protest, one man held a sign which read “Stand idly by while some Kenyan tries to destroy America? WAP!! I don’t think so!!! Homey don’t play dat!!!”

Sadly, under this economic and political climate, some elected officials try to tap into this extremist and racist anger with calls for secession and states’ rights, time-tested racist code words for the suppression of civil rights of African Americans. And the half-baked rejection of the stimulus money by some Republican governors, particularly in Southern states with considerable poverty and large populations of color, smacks of traditional conservative opposition to social programs on the grounds that they’ll help Black and Brown people. It’s funny until somebody gets hurt, as they always say.

So, the white-collar Klan and the regular Klan have entered the 21st century, and what the government intends to do about it this time around remains to be seen. But it is certain that we can’t sleep on this one.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

At its worst, America’s criminal justice system represents the place where racism, greed and corruption intersect. At its best, it is inherently flawed, unjust, and unreliable, and little better than its worst.

The engine that drives this injustice system is known as the prison industrial complex. It is the theater in which the nation’s foremost method of social control-and a failed method at that-plays itself out to the detriment of society. Recent events help to underscore just how bad things are:

* First, two Pennsylvania judges were recently convicted for receiving $2.6 million in cash to send 5,000 juveniles, many first-time offenders, to two private detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the companies, while the other judge filled up the facilities with warm bodies.

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* Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, is in a heap of trouble. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. Now for a state such as Texas, whose justice system boasts an already pitifully low standard of integrity, with defense attorneys allowed to fall asleep during their client’s trial, this is no small potatoes. What did this self-described pro-prosecution judge do? Well, she refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment (lethal injection). The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed.

Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim. “We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” Judge Keller said. “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can’t come back later and change their minds.”
* Finally, a three-judge federal panel recently ruled that California’s state prisons must reduce their inmate population by one-third, or about 57,000 prisoners. The judges found that the level of overcrowding in the state institutions deprives the inmates of adequate healthcare and is unconstitutional.

By itself, any one of these stories shocks the conscience. We would hope that these sordid tales are the exception to the rule. However, these cases reflect a dysfunctional system that is functioning as designed by a dysfunctional society. Allow me to demystify the prison industrial complex and identify the threads that connect the crooked judges in Pennsylvania and Texas, and overcrowded prisons in California.

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Click here to read a REVIEW of American Violet

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a lawyer and journalist based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

Gordon Gecko had a long run of it, but now the party is over. I’m talking, of course, about the character in the film Wall Street, that conniving titan of finance who would sell his mother for a buck and a quarter, and there is scant evidence that he had not already accomplished that goal. “Greed is good,” he declared.

Gecko began to have his heyday in the Reagan era. That’s when the “conventional wisdom,” fueled by greed, began to call for a supply-side economic policy in which financial benefits would be bestowed upon the wealthy and businesses in the form of tax cuts. And as the theory goes, the benefits would “trickle down” to the common folk. In reality, the result was more like “trickle on”.

Another hallmark of the Reagan era, which was perfected in the Clinton and Bush years, was the deregulation of the financial markets and other industries. Over the years, these policies were bought and paid for to the tune of $5 billion in contributions, given by Wall Street to Democratic and Republican politicians alike, to keep the government out of the gambling casinos, I mean financial markets. This led to the proliferation of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, which have turned out to be a little more than a high-tech, blue chip hustle. Unregulated, unmonitored, and getting their money’s worth, the banks were able to engage in predatory lending, sucking homeowners – particularly homeowners of color – into unconscionable subprime mortgages. When applied to the environment and food and safety standards, deregulation has resulted in salmonella- and rat-infested peanuts, E-coli tainted beef and climate change.

Meanwhile, as the media – deregulated, conglomerated and with fewer diverse voices (thank you, President Clinton) – provided us with empty calories for our entertainment, many of us did not realize what was taking place right under our noses: the most dramatic upward redistribution of wealth in history, and a level of income inequality which makes democracy unsustainable. The land of opportunity became the most unequal, top-heavy society in the West.

Since the 1980s, when much of the New Deal regulatory framework has given way to the best unbridled capitalism money could buy, society has steered its best and brightest into the whole Wall Street thing. As the nation’s infrastructure began to crumble and its students fell behind the rest of the developed world in math and science, everyone, including yours truly in a former life, wanted a job shuffling paper and moving numbers around but not creating anything tangible, not building anything of much use to society.

With the adoration of the rich and famous, and the glorification of wealth as a virtue, came the vilification of the poor and the stigmatization of poverty. This gave birth to the concept of the welfare queen, the fictional Black woman on welfare who has six children, wears a mink coat and drives a Cadillac. The typical welfare recipient is White, but never mind. What a worthy scapegoat, no doubt created in some conservative think tank. And what better justification for taking from the poor (unworthy as they are, living off the government dole), and giving to the rich (needy as they are, and unable to live the American dream)? It was “reverse Robin Hood”, as Jesse Jackson aptly described it, which culminated in the passage of welfare reform by President Clinton and a Republican Congress.

A Dickensian treatment of the poor was in full fashion. Poverty became a moral failing, an issue of genetics. “Are there no debtors’ prisons? No poor houses?” Well, given that American capitalism never was meant to employ everyone (for more information, see slavery), and given that many of the good blue collar and even white collar jobs have been sent overseas, what do you do with that surplus population, as Dickens called it? It seems no accident that the prison boom, the war on drugs, and draconian prison sentencing came at a time when there were no jobs to be found in the inner cities. The “land of the free” has the world’s largest prison population, even more than China, which is a police state and has over four times the population of the U.S. Prisons are one of America’s primary forms of social control, and there is profit in the warehousing of Black, Brown, and poor bodies.

And as all of this was going on, the people at the top were having a big party at our expense. There has been very little mention of the plight of the poor, although their ranks rose under Bush. In America, over 41 million people were poor as of 2005. Further, 18 percent of children live in poverty, and 1 in 50 children is homeless. With the collapse of the financial system, how can you scapegoat the poor when everyone is either poor or has real potential to join its ranks? This time around, the anger is directed towards the real culprits: the people who, like the robber barons of old, actually stole the money and brought us to where we are today.

It is cathartic to watch the spectacle of bank executives hauled before Congress to explain themselves. What got these people in trouble was not merely their obscenely immense wealth or the manner in which they earned or stole that wealth. Rather, in the midst of all the destruction they left in their path, the broken lives and stolen futures, these individuals still wanted to be rewarded for their failure, for being the special people they think they are. With their pernicious sense of entitlement, the robber barons looked at the rest of society with contempt, as if they are superior to the regular everyday chumps at the bottom of the pyramid scheme.

In a moment of clarity, everyday people have identified the real problem – unfettered capitalism. The robber barons have replaced the welfare queens, and so we have come full circle. This time around, the public refused to fall for the okeedoke and allow themselves to be distracted by some straw man or scapegoat. The Right’s early contention – that Black and Latino homeowners brought the financial system down with mortgages they could not afford – did not hold water. So, is this a sign of political maturity for the common folk, a new populism? Perhaps, but it is too early to tell. The test will come in how society responds to the crisis, learns the lessons of history, and constructs an economic system that seeks fairness, equity and justice. Heaven forbid we become more like those so-called “socialist” Europeans, with their universal healthcare, lower levels of inequality, lower poverty rates and higher educational standards. In the meantime, it will probably get worse before it gets better. But no one said it would be a pretty sight.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a lawyer and journalist based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.