Archive for February 2009

Lecturing a conscript conclave of Justice Department bureaucrats, Attorney General Eric Holder last week called America a “nation of cowards” for not spending more time talking about race.

Reading his speech, however, one recalls the sage counsel of Pat Moynihan to President Nixon in 1970: This whole subject might benefit from a long period of “benign neglect.”

One point Holder did allude to, without specifics, was this:

“It is not safe for this nation to assume that the unaddressed social problems in the poorest parts of the country can be isolated and will not ultimately affect the larger society.” [Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department of Justice African American History Month Program February 18, 2009]

Fair point. And what are some of those social problems?

A 70 percent illegitimacy rate in black America, an incarceration and crime rate seven times that of white America, a 50 percent dropout rate in many urban high schools, African-American graduates reading and computing on average at eighth-grade levels.

And about these problems what is the black leadership doing?

Unlike Bill Cosby, the heroic Holder was virtually mute. Rather, he is upset that “on Saturdays and Sundays” we don’t go to church or hang out together. But why are the free associations of Americans, of whatever creed or color, any of Eric Holder or Big Brother’s business?
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With soul food and gospel explosions, Whitworth is celebrating Black History Month. Certainly no one is excluded from the festivities for not being black: black history is open for appreciation and enjoyment by anyone, regardless of color or culture. However, the celebration of black history suggests what might wrongly be supposed as its antithesis: celebration of white history.

Admittedly, celebration of pale people’s history may seem ridiculous to some — likely pale people who are worried about being politically correct.

“Why celebrate white people?” some might say. Wouldn’t that be an affront to the many ethnic minorities white people have screwed over? Native Americans? Latinos? Black people?

No, such a celebration shouldn’t be offensive, but in order for this to be properly understood, some perspectives on whiteness should probably be changed.

“Whiteness” itself is a suspect way of looking at the decedents of Russians, Poles, Germans, French, Irish, Italians, Scots, Scandinavians and all the other “white people” who have wrongly been boiled, simmered and reduced to match the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant white sauce that fills much of the American melting pot. Pastiness isn’t a cultural heritage; it doesn’t mean our ethnic stories are all the same.

BSU vice president Stephaine Beans said this about white culture: “I remember talking with a student, and she said she felt that she can’t embrace her German culture because it has been clumped into the ‘white’ section, so there is not a real reason to celebrate it.”
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Student achievement gaps along racial lines persist in California, where schools attended primarily by African American and Latino students are far more likely to lack fundamental learning conditions than schools serving white and Asian students.

These findings were released today, Feb. 23, in “The California Educational Opportunity Report: The Racial Opportunity Gap,” prepared by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA) at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and the University of California All-Campus Consortium On Research for Diversity (UC/ACCORD).

The current report draws upon data from every high school in California as well as parent focus groups statewide.

California is facing “a massive educational deficit,” said John Rogers, director of IDEA and associate professor at the graduate school, speaking at a telephone press conference today. That has parents worried. “California parents are concerned about differences across schools throughout the state … and about the gap between California students and those from other states.”
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Minneapolis schools want to pull the plug on its participation in the Twin Cities’ first desegregation district, charging it isn’t succeeding in its lofty goals.

Some say such a move has the potential to cripple the two-decade effort to bring more racial balance to Twin Cities schools.

Minneapolis Superintendent Bill Green said he will present a resolution to the Minneapolis board today to end district participation in the West Metro Education Program (WMEP). Started in 1989, WMEP covers Minneapolis and 10 suburban districts that banded together to achieve more racial integration in Twin Cities schools and help narrow the achievement gulf separating middle-class white kids from low-income minority students. Minneapolis schools tend to have far higher percentages of poor kids and minority students than do most suburban schools.

WMEP features two schools — the Interdistrict Downtown School (IDDS) in Minneapolis, which is grades K-12, and the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource (FAIR) school, in Crystal, which is grades 4-8. Even though those schools are meant to be magnets, attracting minority kids to the suburbs and white kids to Minneapolis, Green said they have done little to change the racial disparity between Minneapolis and surrounding districts.
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“Banking shares began to plunge Friday morning after Senator Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the banking committee, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he was concerned the government might end up nationalizing some lenders “at least for a short time.” Several other prominent policy makers – including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – have echoed that view recently.”
~ Eric Dash, “Growing Worry on Rescue Takes a Toll on Banks,” The New York Times, February 20, 2009

How is it that Alan Greenspan, free-market lobbyist for Wall Street, recently announced that he favored nationalization of America’s banks – and indeed, mainly the biggest and most powerful? Has the old disciple of Ayn Rand gone Red in the night? Surely not.

The answer is that the rhetoric of “free markets,” “nationalization” and even “socialism” (as in “socializing the losses”) has been turned into the language of deception to help the financial sector mobilize government power to support its own special privileges. Having undermined the economy at large, Wall Street’s public relations think tanks are now dismantling the language itself.

Exactly what does “a free market” mean? Is it what the classical economists advocated – a market free from monopoly power, business fraud, political insider dealing and special privileges for vested interests – a market protected by the rise in public regulation from the Sherman Anti-Trust law of 1890 to the Glass-Steagall Act and other New Deal legislation? Or is it a market free for predators to exploit victims without public regulation or economic policemen – the kind of free-for-all market that the Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) have created over the past decade or so? It seems incredible that people should accept today’s neoliberal idea of “market freedom” in the sense of neutering government watchdogs, Alan Greenspan-style, letting Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide, Hank Greenberg at AIG, Bernie Madoff, Citibank, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers loot without hindrance or sanction, plunge the economy into crisis and then use Treasury bailout money to pay the highest salaries and bonuses in U.S. history.
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WASHINGTON – A U.S. senator has weighed in on the continuing controversy over Barack Obama’s eligibility for office by saying he has never seen proof the new president was actually born in Hawaii.

“Well, his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told constituents in Cullman County. “You have to be born in America to be president.”

Where’s the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the “natural-born American” clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 250,000 others and sign up now!

WND has reported on multiple legal challenges to Obama’s status as a “natural born citizen.” The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

Some question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama’s American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.
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A white schoolboy left for dead by a hammer-wielding gang of Asians has insisted the attack was racially motivated.

Fifteen-year-old Henry Webster was assaulted by a gang of 13 youths, one carrying a claw hammer, on a school tennis court in January 2007.

The attack, which was watched by 100 pupils and filmed on a mobile phone, was described in court as like ’something out of a Quentin Tarantino film’. It was said to be a ‘miracle’ the boy survived.

Henry Webster (L) was viciously assaulted by Wasif Khan, who used a claw hammer in the attack. Henry insists the attack was racially motivated

The attackers were sentenced to between eight months and eight years last year, but they would likely have got longer if the attack had been proven to be racist.

But only after two years of sustained pressure from Henry’s mother, Liz, have the authorities announced a serious case review.
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I wonder how the owners and controllers of Main Stream Media feel when they know in their bankers’ hearts that their intransigence on the issue of patriotic immigration reform is precipitating Page One stories such as appeared in the Washington Post on Presidents’ Day: “Homelessness: The Family Portrait: Across Region, Economy Pulls Rug From Under More and More 2-Parent Households, by Chris L. Jenkins, February 16, 2009

Probably not much—or they would change their positions and get with the vast majority of us American citizens who know the pinch, feel the pain and see the connection between homelessness and the unceasing importation of more legal and illegal aliens by the power elites who control our “play for pay” Congress.

This is the very same Congress claiming its stimulus bill will provide 4 million jobs, while allowing the importation of 138,000 legal aliens on work visas every month and arguing that illegal aliens should get benefits. The same bunch who failed in the stimulus bill to extend E-verify beyond March 6th, although it allows employers to establish rapidly the legality of new employment applicants with a 99% accurate computer data base at the US government. Why wasn’t it extended? Because the multinational companies who own our government said, “No!”

You think you live in a democracy? Don’t be silly.
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LOS ANGELES — What makes one soldier stay and fight on a brutal battlefield and another desert and flee?

That question intrigued Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, a wife-and-husband research team of economists at UCLA, who dug into the details of 41,000 Civil War soldiers’ lives for a look at the social forces shaping human behavior during conflict. The result is their new book, “Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War.”

The book’s thesis is that serving in a homogenous Army company, particularly one of volunteers recruited from the same region, reduced desertion rates in the 1860s. Patriotism played a role in keeping soldiers at the front lines, according to the book, but more important factors were sticking with buddies of similar backgrounds and avoiding a bad reputation back home.
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Eat your heart out Jack Abramoff. President Obama looks forward to a guaranteed supply of Democrat campaign money which will make the imprisoned Republican fundraiser look like the small time operator he was. And better yet, Obama’s multi-billion dollar nationwide scheme to circumvent campaign spending laws comes neatly disguised as a Hawaii-only deal for “reconciliation” and “justice”. “Campaign finance” isn’t even in the bill’s description. It is called the Akaka Bill.

Reintroduced February 4 for the 2009 Congressional session as S381 and HR862, the Akaka Bill creates a process to establish a Native Hawaiian Tribal Government. If it reaches his desk, America’s first black president has pledged to sign a bill which is justified in Hawaii as protection of the private multi-billion dollar Kamehameha Schools’ right to exclude African-American and other non-Hawaiian students. That pledge launched Obama’s climb to the Presidency at a series of meetings with Hawaii Democrats in December, 2004 — immediately after he won his Illinois Senate seat.

This week, on February 25, the US Supreme Court will be hearing Office of Hawaiian Affairs v. Housing and Community Dev. Corp. of Hawaii, which will decide whether the Hawaii Supreme Court was correct to rule that a 1993 Congressional Resolution apologizing for the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom gives native Hawaiians a claim on 1.2 million acres of Hawaii real estate known as the ‘ceded lands.’ These lands, so named because the US ‘ceded’ them back to the State upon admission in 1959, comprise 29% of the State’s total land mass and almost all of the land owned by the State of Hawaii.
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