A Reminder of Our Future a Chinese Olympics

The debate on the Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan has really exemplified how easily some Americans will throw away our core values for some semblance of reactionary comfort. As we allow our police to arrest Americans on the mere threat of expressing opposing views, make the first Amendment conditional on it being something we agree with otherwise we put it in cages and call it “Free Speech Zones.” As the press does nothing as Presidents and those running for the position are allowed to arrest Americans with T-shirts merely hinting at opposition, I wonder how soon – as it is merely a matter of time – we end up with the loose affiliation with our Bill of Rights dumping it for a false sense of security from a threat that isn’t that threatening. I think about Naomi Klein’s account of Beijing 2 years ago at this time and worry that this is our future all too soon: “As for those Chinese citizens who might go off-message during the games -- Tibetan activists, human right campaigners, malcontent bloggers -- hundreds have been thrown in jail in recent months. Anyone still harboring protest plans will no doubt be caught on one of Beijing's 300,000 surveillance cameras and promptly nabbed by a security officer; there are reportedly 100,000 of them on Olympics duty. The goal of all this central planning and spying is not to celebrate the glories of Communism, regardless of what China's governing party calls itself. It is to create the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald's happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery -- to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself. Unlike the police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, China has built a Police State 2.0, an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex. Chinese corporations financed by U.S. hedge funds, as well as some of American's most powerful corporations -- Cisco, General Electric, Honeywell, Google -- have been working hand in glove with the Chinese government to make this moment possible: networking the closed circuit cameras that peer from every other lamp pole, building the "Great Firewall" that allows for remote internet monitoring, and designing those self-censoring search engines.” If we and the Press that increasingly fails at informing us continues to allow those who would profit over the collective fear they are fomenting this testing ground pioneered by China will be our future. It is already happening spreading like a virus from the few authoritarian regimes in Asia and the Middle East to the Xenophobic Democratic societies that make up Europe to the US. We cannot allow ourselves to be scared into giving up our freedom, even as we keep electing politicians who are doing it.

You Fund Police Officers Killing Grandma

Our system of drug enforcement is forcing already strained, over worked and under educated police officers to attempt even more extreme drug busts that is leading to cases like this in Atlanta with 92 year old woman dead. Atlanta narcotics officers shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston and planted evidence in a failed attempt to frame her… This isn’t an isolated incident, the pressure to manufacture drug enforcement while focusing only on the communities with the least power to complain is leaving the Police with few options except to trump up charges, jail small time drug users and attempt more news friendly police raids that are ending in more and more Americans dead. Atlanta's police union has complained that narcotics officers are under enormous pressure to meet quotas for arrests. The easiest way to boost their numbers is to arrest low-level offenders - from people smoking marijuana on the street corner to drug mules and the homeless. Low-level offenders are plentiful and easy to catch. Arresting them pads the official reports, but does nothing to stop major traffickers or reduce the problems associated with substance abuse. While officers are booking people for drug possession, they're not patrolling neighborhoods for real criminals. And money spent prosecuting and jailing low-level offenders is money not being spent on drug treatment or education. Instead of grading narcotics taskforces on how many arrests they've made, how many warrants they've served, and how many pounds of drug they've seized, they should be graded on more informative and meaningful criteria. Is violence in the drug trade decreasing? Are drug overdoses declining? Are police officers helping or hindering needle exchange programs that reduce the spread of HIV/AID from injection drug use? Are police agencies dismantling major crime networks or just wasting time arresting low level drug offenders? These are all better measurement criteria than generalized arrest numbers.

How the Prison Industrial Complex Affects Your Vote

You may be surprised to learn that while inmates do not have the right to vote, they are often used to bolster the populations of communities with them in them. So we allow conservatives to take people from our urban centers (who are more likely to be sentenced to jail time for the same crimes as Suburbanites and rural folk) and repopulate them in their communities giving them a false sense of power. AlterNet explains this practice as New York became the second state to end it: For years New York activists called for the dismantling of prison-based gerrymandering (PBG) that allowed mostly rural counties to inflate their population numbers. This resulted in financial rewards for those communities that utilized it. Brent Staples of the NY Times colorfully described PBG when he once said, "There are many ways to hijack political power. One of them is to draw state or city legislative districts around large prisons -- and pretend that the inmates are legitimate constituents." The new change could dramatically change the state's political dynamics. PBG was an unfair practice that increased the populations of rural upstate districts with prisoners who were mostly from urban areas. According to Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative, an organization that pioneered the challenge of PBG, when legislative districts are now redrawn in 2011, 26,000 prisoners will be counted as part of their home communities in the five boroughs of NYC, instead of the prisons they are housed in. Although the state practiced PBG for many years, nothing could be done because of the powerful politics associated with incarceration -- fueled by the war on drugs. If you connected the dots you would see that PBG was tied into the prison industrial complex, money raised from the local, state and federal levels. Since 1982, 33 prisons were built in rural upstate communities, giving politicians the incentive to turn these prisons into cash cows for their respective communities.

REDLINING 2.0 The Media Narrative on the Economic Crisis is justifying Racism

Believing that the lending principle of helping a miniscule number of poor people get housing caused the economic collapse at its fundamental level is racism. It conjures the idea that if brown pigmented people could just manage money they would be less poor and thus have not collapsed our system. It is based on a racist idea that supporting Brown people owning homes has nothing to do with good economics or ending the racist practice of not giving loans to Americans of Color but liberal guilt over race. You have to be sympathetic to this world view to believe despite all the evidence otherwise that it was poor Brown and Black people who caused the economic crisis. The media did not do the simple research that easily proves this narrative to be completely false because the over privileged upper middle class people who make up its profession believe this about Black and Brown people as well. Unfortunately you don’t have to be White or even middle class to believe it, you just have to be susceptible to the racism at its heart. What is true is that very greedy people have used their money to buy politicians from both parties. They wrote laws we put in place to stop the very economic collapse that happened. The fall in home prices which were the last refuge of this failed system of Regan’s Rich Americans welfare state happened because the policies of both parties over the last 50 years systematically eroded the middle class. Americans work more, earn less, health care costs have sky rocketed out of reality, dental, energy, even entertainment to keep us sane from overwork has become too expensive. Add to that the financial burden of education and transportation costs being shifted to Americans and away from the public (ie no real public transportation system… might as well be called a desperate poor people transportation system) and you get the fall in home prices. It was a system of Rich American Welfare on the backs of middle and increasingly poor Americans that finally collapsed. But racism is always an easier answer, because discriminating based on skin pigmentation just makes so much more sense and is so easy. Big Banks to Non-Whites: No Loans for You Why would minority communities get fewer mortgages than white communities since the financial crisis? What did you say? That couldn’t be true in our post-racial America. Well think again my white friends because that isn’t what Reuters is reporting this morning: According to the study, prime lending in communities of color from 2006 when the foreclosure crisis began to 2008 — the most recent year for which data are available — decreased 60.3 percent compared to 28.4 percent in largely white areas.”The financial crisis has led to significantly reduced access to mortgage credit for all borrowers and communities,” the report states. “In neighborhoods of color, however, where the foreclosure crisis has taken an especially severe toll, access to prime, conventional mortgage loans has declined precipitously — to a much greater degree than in predominantly white neighborhoods.” The report also examines the lending patterns of America’s four top banks: Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Wells Fargo. While all four banking groups increased their prime refinance lending to white neighborhoods from 2006 to 2008, the report found that only Citigroup increased lending to minority communities — though by far less than to white areas.

An Easy Decision That Could Be One of the Most Important In Our History

There aren’t many decision that has gone purposefully un-reported by the corporate media than the fight for the Internet. The same companies NBC/Comcast (new mega company), Fox’s owner News Corp, Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T they all have an interest in making sure this moment in history goes unnoticed. The Internet, what you see when you open your Firefox or Internet Explorer is prime money opportunity. The ability to control what you see, do, consume or learn to consume is the most valuable opportunity that media giants who already control so much, have to make even more mind blowing profits. It is control over that, which is up for grabs, will we continue to be able to see and do what we want on the Internet, or will we only get websites preapproved by Verizon and Comcast. The Federal Communications Commission took the first step to protecting our freedom on the Internet, but they are wavering, the New York Times explains why: One good measure of the intensity with which phone and cable companies dislike the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to extend its regulatory oversight over access to broadband Internet is the amount of money they are spending on political contributions. Last month, 74 House Democrats sent a letter to the F.C.C.’s chairman, Julius Genachowski, warning him “not to move forward with a proposal that undermines critically important investment in broadband and the jobs that come with it.” Rather than extend its authority over telecommunications networks to broadband under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, they demanded that the F.C.C. wait for Congress to pass specific legislation. The message parroted views held by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon — the biggest broadband service providers in the country. (Comcast warned that the F.C.C.’s efforts could “chill investment and innovation.”) Their executives and political action committees have been among the top 20 campaign contributors to 58 of the 74 lawmakers in the past two election cycles. As the F.C.C. proceeds with its plan to regulate broadband access, it seems likely we can expect more of this resistance from members of Congress. Political contributions from AT&T in the current election cycle reached $2.6 million by May 16, on the way to exceeding the total in each of the last three elections. The company has contributed to the campaigns of every Republican and all but three Democrats on the subcommittee that deals with the Internet in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It has given money to more than half the members of the equivalent Senate panel. Comcast has spent more than $2 million on campaign donations; Verizon has given $1.2 million. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association — the industry’s collective lobbying group — has spent about $1 million more. And just in case that isn’t persuasive enough of the ills of government regulation, telephone and cable companies spent $20.6 million lobbying the government in the first quarter of the year. The Sunlight Foundation, which tracks industry lobbying, reported that cable and phone companies had 276 former government officials lobbying for them in the first quarter, including 18 former members of Congress and 48 former staffers of current members of Congress on committees with jurisdiction over the Internet. The list includes former staffers of at least six of the House Democrats who signed the letter to the F.C.C. To us, it seems obvious that the Federal Communications Commission should extend its oversight to broadband, the most important telecommunications network of our time, to guarantee open, nondiscriminatory and competitive access and to protect consumers’ rights. But reason is not always a match for money in Washington. The F.C.C. has a rough road ahead. Please DO SOMETHING sign up at SavetheInternet.com please, for this website, the ones you love and the millions our children have yet to create.

Budget Deficit a Media Distraction to Avoid Talking About Un-ended Economic Depression

Large government deficits for any country is a problem only if the investors and Wall Street media start to question whether the country will honor those loans. In this day and age, American credit is not questioned; we will and have capacity to pay our bill to the world. If you wonder how, strain your memory to that long ago time 2000 when we had a budget surplus which if we had kept the same level of taxation could have PAID OFF THE NATIONAL DEBT in a few years. We can and must run a deficit to get this country out of the recession we are going to dip back into. We shouldn’t do it willy nilly like we did at the beginning of the Obama administration, but do so in a thoughtful way, targeting government spending so it spurs the most economic development and supports job creation that are sustainable America middle class union jobs. Targeting construction, real spending on green jobs, transportation infrastructure, supporting state governments hiring teachers, school building and green retrofitting, an investment in science and innovation and extra money to low income wage earners. This spending would actually not be that much, think of it as a few fighter jets we could just not build, to fight an air war that probably won’t happen this century or the next. We need to spend, as FDR, LBJ and Reagan understood to get us out of a recession. As Reagan explained government deficits don’t matter when trying to end recessions, that is why he was a part of the largest expansion of government since the New Deal. Krugman explains this well: Right now, we have a severely depressed economy — and that depressed economy is inflicting long-run damage. Every year that goes by with extremely high unemployment increases the chance that many of the long-term unemployed will never come back to the work force, and become a permanent underclass. Every year that there are five times as many people seeking work as there are job openings means that hundreds of thousands of Americans graduating from school are denied the chance to get started on their working lives. And with each passing month we drift closer to a Japanese-style deflationary trap. Penny-pinching at a time like this isn’t just cruel; it endangers the nation’s future. And it doesn’t even do much to reduce our future debt burden, because stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery, and with it the hope for rising revenues. While I don’t think Obama in not even 2 years is responsible for this systemic problem of the dying middle class and further desperation of the working poor, his approach for tax cuts and corporate support first, job creation last added to a political cautiousness is not just sinking his reelection chances its failing our economy. We need real political courage to fight for the solutions to this crisis that are relatively simple and well known. Obama is failing that test miserably. Bob Herbert in an amazing column you have to read says it so well: The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, as horrible as it has been, was yet another opportunity. In his address to the nation from the Oval Office last week, President Obama could have laid out a dramatic new energy policy for the U.S., calling on every American to do his or her part to help us escape the insidious, nonstop destruction that is the result of our obsessive reliance on fossil fuels. He chose not to. As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything. …As Time reported: “Schools, health services, libraries — and the salaries that go with them — are all on the chopping block as states and cities face their worst cash squeeze since the Great Depression.” We are submitting to this debacle with the same pathetic lack of creativity and helpless mind-set that now seems to be the default position of Americans in the 21st century. We have become a nation that is good at destroying things — with wars overseas and mind-bogglingly self-destructive policies here at home — but that has lost sight of how to build and maintain a flourishing society. We’re dismantling our public school system and, incredibly, attacking our spectacularly successful system of higher education, which is the finest in the world. How is it possible that we would let this happen? We’ve got all kinds of sorry explanations for why we can’t do any of the things we need to do. The Democrats can’t get 60 votes in the Senate. Our budget deficits are too high. Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck might object. Meanwhile, the greatness of the United States, which so many have taken for granted for so long, is steadily slipping away. This is about loving this great country and the legacy left to us, too often those who are loudest in their claim of support for America are the ones who hate this great country the most.

The Seattle Police Continue Their Assault on the Black Community

Seattle is one of those pristine great American Cities that every lefty and yuppie wants to live in, as long as you don’t happen to be Black that is probably a good choice. But if you do make the mistake of being poor and Black and from Seattle, the message is very clear GET THE FUCK OUT or we will get you. It may seem an exaggeration from a far with just a police beating here and there and a shooting once in a while. Not that it is condoned, but things happen everywhere. It isn’t until you visit Seattle and sit with the community that you see this attack as real. It’s the Washington State Black Historical Center being closed down by the city, reopened in a tiny space 100th the size of the original museum and not open anytime after school hours. The original center was a hub not just for history but for the community with it open for events and after school hours so kids could wonder in and use the computer labs and meeting areas. Closed, because the city wanted to “redevelop” the space – not to improve the community, just to put in condos. You realize it as a historical Black school in a historically Black neighborhood created to foster future artists from the community is closed. Once again not because of poor performance but because most of its students made the mistake of being Black. Their school is closed, their students piled into an overcrowded high school while students just a few blocks away in a recently regentrified community have tiny classrooms and neighborhood schooling. When you understand that the trend of moving poor Blacks out and bringing in younger more “desirable” tenants, you understand why Seattle does nothing as two young Black girls are beaten for walking across the street. When I was there an 80 year old Black man who is a leader in the community was beaten and sent to the hospital for lawfully refusing to answer Police questioning in his community. To understand this: You have to understand everything else that is going on in Seattle and its unwanted Black community, because it is coming to an urban center near you.