my OP-ED: I have A Dream: and its the one Martin Luther King had. To reach the mountain together....

my thoughts today on MLK day.
Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, 'Let us make man in OUR Image, according to our likeness
                 27 So God created Man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them     .                     male and female.
In The Beginning GOD Created man and woman in His Image.  It does not say color it does not say nationality it does not state tall or short, weak or strong.  I find that It is imperative that WE the People created by our God  in His image  should take a good hard look in the mirror and at each other.  God made no mistakes, not with His creation. We have always had the opportunity to live in harmony with each other.  But somewhere around 1600  Black men where brought over from Africa as our minions. And for approximately 200 years we doubled tripled the amount of Black people to tend our farms, take care of our households. Work for no wage, no rights, to be sold at the owners whim to be used by owners as propagation  for more young slaves. Women were raped, beaten and separated from families.  Young children were taken from parents and sold to different masters.  Where did we get off enslaving people, where did we get the idea that we were better than blacks, that they had no rights, not until 1964.  And then it took years to change the minds of certain Republicans.  Be4 the segregated bathrooms, drinking fountains, seating in restaurants  churches, the idea of black congresspersons, even black mayors, governors, and not until 2008 We the People elected the first black President.  Does that change the way we look at blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Mexican. Unfortunetly no, we still look at others differently, and I believe that Martin Luther King if he was still here would be appalled by what he would be seeing.  He had a dream and we as human beings have a long way to go to get to Kings dream.  And now the 112th Congress Republicans want to change things and that scares me.


If I have any of the below information wrong please let me know and give me the right information......




The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against blacks and women, including racial segregation. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public ("public accommodations"). Powers given to enforce the act were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment and its duty to protect voting rights under theFifteenth Amendment.


The bill was called for by President John F. Kennedy in his civil rights speech of June 11, 1963,^[1] in which he asked for legislation "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments," as well as "greater protection for the right to vote."
In late November 1963 the Assassination of John F. Kennedy changed the political situation. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, utilized his experience in legislative politics and the bully pulpit he wielded as president in support of the bill. In his first address to Congress on November 27, 1963, Johnson told the legislators, "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long."^[4
On the return of Congress from the winter recess, however, it became apparent that public opinion in the North favored the bill and the petition would acquire the necessary signatures. To prevent the humiliation of the success of the petition, Chairman Smith allowed the bill to pass through the Rules Committee. The bill was brought to a vote in the House on February 10, 1964, and passed by a vote of 290 to 130, and sent to the Senate.

The bill came before the full Senate for debate on March 30, 1964 and the "Southern Bloc" of 18 southern Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator led by Richard Russell (D-GA) launched a filibuster to prevent its passage.^[6] Said Russell: "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."^[7]

The most fervent opposition to the bill came from Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC): "This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress."^[8]

On June 19, the substitute (compromise) bill passed the Senate by a vote of 71–29, and quickly passed through the House-Senate conference committee, which adopted the Senate version of the bill. The conference bill was passed by both houses of Congress, and was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.^[11]

Jobless Recoveries, Take Two

 By Kevin Drum | Mon Jan. 17, 2011 3:07 PM PST

---

Why did unemployment spike so sharply and recover so much more slowly than GDP during the current economic recovery (as well as every other recovery of the past 30 years)? I suggested this morning that part of the reason had to do with the demise of union contracts in particular and the more general social contract that followed from them: to some extent, firms in the past didn't immediately fire workers during a downturn simply because they were expected not to. Today that social contract is dead. Paul Krugman adds another guess: [1]

The key point for productivity here may be that engineering a recovery from postmodern recessions is much harder than engineering a recovery from a recession more or less deliberately inflicted by the Fed; and as a result the recoveries tend to be long flat U’s rather than the V-shaped recoveries of yore. And to the extent that firms know this, they have less reason to hoard labor; they’re not going to need those laid-off workers for a long time.

Nick Rowe adds another point: perhaps our current recovery featured outsized unemployment because it was so concentrated in the construction sector. Unlike some industries, where you want to hold onto workers because their skills might be hard to find when the economy bounces back, construction skills are easy to find: [2]

There's general human capital, which is useful at many firms, and firm-specific human capital, which is only useful at one firm. If your workers have firm-specific human capital, and you lose them, and need to hire new workers when demand returns, it will be costly to train the new workers for the particular skills they will need in your firm. So you won't want to lose your existing workers, and you will keep them on the payroll even if you don't need them right now.
But if your workers have general human capital, it doesn't matter if you lose them. You can lay off all your bricklayers in a recession, and just hire new bricklayers when demand returns. My guess is that the construction trades require a lot of general human capital and very little firm-specific human capital. Two building sites can swap bricklayers easily, with minimal re-training. "Welcome to your new job. The Porta-Potty is over there. Start laying bricks here". Am I right?

Let's combine these two observations. In the postwar period, I don't think it's quite right to say that recessions were deliberately inflicted by the Fed. Rather, they were largely inflicted by the automatic operation of Regulation Q, which imposed caps on the interest rate that banks and S&Ls could pay on deposits. When economic expansions got a little too robust, and inflationary pressures pushed market rates on treasury bills and corporate debt above Regulation Q ceilings, depositors would withdraw their funds from banks and invest them elsewhere. This loss of deposits caused an immediate shutdown in the mortgage market, which in turn caused an immediate turndown in the construction market. This cooled down the economy, and eventually market rates declined and money flowed back into banks. Next stop: recovery.
In other words, we have plenty of experience of recessions caused by a turndown in the construction market. For over 20 years, this was the primary lever by which the economy was managed, and it didn't cause long, jobless recoveries. It's true that the construction industry and organized labor didn't much care for this system, but they accepted it anyway because it so patently worked well as a countercyclical economic tool. (It's long gone, of course. Regulation Q disappeared in the 70s, a victim of inflation and financial market deregulation.)
So what's the difference between then and now? The construction sector is crucial to both eras, but the difference is that Regulation Q was so effective: it shut down the credit market at the first sign of irrational exuberance, but it also eased up at the first sign of recession. Everyone knew this, which I imagine gave firms a certain amount of confidence that postwar downturns would be sharp but short.
Our current downturn offers no similar assurance. The credit market got far, far out of hand before the 2008 crisis cut it off at its knees, and there's no longer anyone or anything that can wave a magic wand and bring the construction industry back to life. And once again, everyone knows this. Back in 2008 there was no reason to think that the construction industry was going to recover soon, and no reason to think it would fuel a more general recovery even if it did. So firms hunkered down for a long downturn and laid off as many workers as they could.
All of which is a long way of saying that I'm not sure construction holds the key to anything this time around. There was a huge collapse of credit throughout the economy in 2008, and every sector is now engaged in a long, slow process of deleveraging. Given the uncertainty surrounding this mechanism of recovery, it strikes me as unsurprising that firms are reluctant to rehire.

Putting Poverty on the Agenda

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

---

Katrina vanden Heuvel | January 16, 2011

"There is definitely a story going untold,” says Melissa Boteach, manager of Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years. “When you have 1 in 7 Americans [1] living in poverty.1 in 5 children [2] living in poverty—including 1 in 3 African-American children and Latino children—and it's not on America's radar, something’s very wrong.”
Indeed it is the shame of our nation that a record 47 million people [3] now live below the poverty line—$22,400 for a family of four—and a stunning 1 in 3 Americans are living at less than twice that threshold. And yet we hear so little about this crisis in the mainstream media and Congress, where it seems off the radar not only for the GOP, but even for some of our progressive allies.
But the grim truth is that many of the same structural problems that are making life a struggle for the middle-class—and resulted in the first “economic recovery” in 2003-2007 where productivity rose, but median income declined and poverty worsened—are also leading to record numbers of poor people. From 1980 to 2005 [4], more than 80 percent of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent. Our economy is super-sizing the wealthy, while producing large quantities of low-wage jobs, unemployment and underemployment, and services are eroding. So the work of those who are waging today’s war on poverty comes with a very different frame.
“We need to make the connection between what’s happening to lower-income Americans and the middle-class,” says Boteach. “We need to make sure that this economic recovery is different—that we’re not seeing a larger concentration of wealth, but a growing middle-class, increasing wages, and reduced poverty. That’s an economic recovery that can cut poverty in half.”
To meet that kind of ambitious and much-needed goal, antipoverty advocates must overcome a host of stereotypes and myths, including one which refuses to fade, facts be damned: we waged a War on Poverty, and poverty won.
“That’s just historically inaccurate,” says Boteach. “If you actually look at history you can see that policy interventions really do make a difference. Between 1964 and 1973, the poverty rate fell by more than 40 percent. More recently, the Recovery Act kept millions of people out of poverty.”
Indeed the Recovery Act included the largest (temporary) expansion of antipoverty programs in forty years [5]. And according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it kept more than 4.5 million people [6] out of poverty in 2009 through unemployment benefits, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the new Making Work Pay tax credit. Those provisions will be difficult to extend under the new Republican House “cut-as-you-go” [7] rule, which would require that they are offset by equivalent reductions in other mandatory spending—not, for example, by closing tax loopholes for corporations that shelter profits overseas. (In contrast, any new tax breaks for the wealthy would not have to be offset at all. If this doesn’t speak volumes about the GOP’s priorities and hypocrisy on the deficit, I don’t know what does.)
There is a mistaken notion that those who benefit from the kinds of antipoverty measures included in the Recovery Act are part of a “permanent underclass.” But poverty isn’t static—people are moving in and out of it constantly, and 1 in 3 Americans will experience poverty during their lifetime. So fighting poverty isn’t about helping “the other,” it’s about all of us. Yet seeing that common ground can be difficult in tough times like this Great Recession. Often, people understandably turn inward, doing their best simply to look after their own families. On the flip side, times like these can lead to greater empathy, an understanding that economic struggle isn’t about being lazy, or not wanting to work.
“The fact is we all have the potential to lose a job and experience economic insecurity, and we want that safety net there for us as well,” says Boteach. “People who never thought they would rely on food stamps [8] are now needing them—we hear that all the time. People who used to be the ones volunteering at soup kitchens or working at service-providing non-profits are now often forced to turn to those same services themselves.”
It was Michael Harrington’s powerful examination of poverty published in 1962, The Other America [9], that moved President Kennedy to begin taking the steps that culminated in President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Perhaps there is another Harrington out there, but for Half in Ten and the hundreds of civil rights and antipoverty groups in the coalition [10], they are focusing on the stories of people who are experiencing poverty themselves.
“I think the most effective people I’ve heard talk about poverty are low-income people,” says Boteach. “We need to lift up those voices and have them tell their stories.” State coalition partners are working hard to elevate voices and provide opportunities for storytelling—a lost art that will serve both this movement and those who cover it well.
In Minnesota [11], for example, the “Enough For All” event featured artists across the state interpreting the concept of “enough”—as in having enough resources, or having enough/being fed up—through performing arts, visual arts and spoken word poetry. (This strikes me as akin to the WPA and federal theatre project and the role it played in bringing attention to the plight of the poor and unemployed.) The Colorado [12] coalition is organizing low-wage working women to raise awareness of poverty in the state and advocate for policy solutions that will benefit low- and moderate-income people. In DC, the Making the Tax Code Work for Working Families [13] event gave people a chance to tell how the EITC and CTC impact their families.
“These tax credits make a big difference for working families, ” says Boteach. “Contrast that with the recent estate tax giveaway that conservatives demanded. [It] benefited only the wealthiest one quarter of one percentage point of families, adds to the deficit, and does virtually nothing to create jobs and grow our economy. We need to start drawing those contrasts now because we’re going to have this debate on tax policy again in two years."
More immediately, with a Republican House determined to slash 22 percent ($101 billion) from discretionary spending for fiscal year 2011, Half in Ten will focus on the looming budget battle.
“Domestic discretionary sounds very cold and stale. What that actually is—it’s childcare, Head Start, federal housing, transportation, job creation programs, job training. These are programs that not only low-income families rely on, but are really building blocks in our economy and communities,” says Boteach. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We’re slashing spending.’ Then you say what does this actually mean for communities and families? What does it mean for job-creation? And then it becomes real, it becomes human [14]. A budget is a moral document, it’s a statement of priorities.”
Antipoverty advocates are making the case that policies supporting lower- and middle-income people make fiscal and economic sense too. Economist Harry Holzer has shown that the cost of sustained childhood poverty is more than $500 billion [15] per year, or 4 percent of GDP [16], roughly evenly divided between lowered productivity, increased health care costs and increased crime-related costs.
“By making smart investments up front now in children we can actually save money in our budget later on,” says Boteach. “But that doesn’t necessarily show up in a 5 to 10 year budget window.”
As coalition members and activists write op-eds and letters to the editor, call, write and lobby their federal and state representatives and tell their stories, they will also be focused on holding elected officials responsible for creating jobs, preserving critical services and expanding the middle-class.
“There needs to be an emphasis, always, on accountability,” says Boteach. “That’s why we did an interactive poverty map [17] by Congressional district. You can see the poverty rates by race, gender, and child poverty for your district and then figure out how your member is voting on these issues.”
But growing the antipoverty movement will require the media and elected officials to start paying more attention to those who are struggling, fighting and organizing. When the US Census published record poverty numbers for 2009 our warp-speed news cycle ran the headlines and then just as quickly moved on. The 2010 data which will be released in September will likely be even worse due to the sustained unemployment over 9 percent. Half in Ten and other advocates will be ready to speak to this moral, economic, and political crisis. But it remains to be seen who will listen, and for how long.
“There are always a lot of headlines about poverty the day that the data comes out,” says Boteach. “But then those headlines fade, and the problem hasn’t gone away. What we need is a sustained focus by the media and our elected officials, and we need advocacy groups and grassroots activists to keep making that push.”
Call it a war on poverty, call it expanding the middle-class, call it promoting economic security. Call it whatever you want, but start making the connections between the plight of the middle-class and lower-income Americans, and get involved [18].

Quote of the Day: The Fourth Amendment Blues

 

— By Kevin Drum

| Mon Jan. 17, 2011 12:17 PM PST

From a Florida state appellate court, after reviewing a case in which police officers claimed that a search of a defendent's apartment in a drug case was legal because he invited them in and then cheerfully volunteered the location of his hidden stash:

The judge may have punctiliously performed the duties of his office in this case, but, when considering the large number of “consent” cases that have come before us, the finding of “consent” in so many curious circumstances is a cause for concern.

Indeed. Click the link for more. This is such an obvious case of police perjury that a Hollywood screenwriter would probably turn it down as a little too contemptuous of Southern law enforcement. Despite that, the appellate judge had no choice but to let the search stand. Lovely.

How We Got MLK Day and Who Stood in the Way

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1968: Four days after MLK is assassinated in Memphis, Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduces legislation in the House to establish a holiday in his honor.

Click here to begin this slideshow, and click here to see more Mother Jones slideshows.

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Intermittent discrimination and guaranteed enemies

January 17th, 2011

by Andrew Sabl

This morning I listened to an interview with Carole Simpson on The Madeleine Brand Show. (The podcast isn’t available as I write this, but when it is it will be here and you can subscribe.)  Summarizing from memory: Simpson said that the racism and sexism early in her career were constant and pervasive. She was called a “ni—- slut”; male colleagues would unzip her dress or plunge their hands down her blouse; when she started out, assignment editors would enjoy the “joke” of telling her to cover an event but giving her a time that was well after it was scheduled to end.
But when Brand asked whether the sexism and racism had “dissipated” over time, Simpson said no.  “Every six to nine months” until she retired, she would get an email or a call, or encounter something in person, that reminded her that in someone else’s eyes she was “just a black woman.”  Simpson’s examples made it sound as if “black” retained much more salience than woman: One colleague offered to fetch her a “collard green sandwich”; an executive, encountering her at an office party in business attire, still assumed she must be a maid.
Still, to complain about discrimination that occurred “every six to nine months” might at first hearing sound a bit bit petty.  Surely that can be laughed off? Not so fast.
Back when I taught a course on affirmative action, I remember reading an author (it might have been Glenn Loury, though I can’t lay my hands on his book at the moment) point out how such intermittent discrimination has real costs when reckoned over a career.  Consider that most people get a big break on a personal level—a boss, colleague, present or former co-worker, ex-college buddy, etc., remembers you as competent and chooses you for a job or promotion—every few years.  Now assume that those breaks happen, because of racism or sexism, once every five and a half years instead of five, because one in ten people is a little bit biased, which seems not a radical estimate.  Worse, assume that once in a few years somebody with a bit of power wishes you ill instead of well and quashes the promotion instead of facilitating it.  Multiply that by a whole career and suddenly everybody who isn’t a white guy ends up at least a level or two below where he or she would have been without bias.  This happens even if one doesn’t assume high or pervasive levels of animus and even if one doesn’t take the psychic costs of racial and sexual insult into account (though the latter seems unfair, especially since the souls of conservative white males seem acutely sensitive to the slightest accusation of racial insensitivity, and is of course not how our civil rights laws see things).
I suspect that one reason that most white males like me find this whole process hard to credit is that we don’t have a personal analogy: it seems there’s nothing in our experience that this intermittent animus closely resembles.  Actually there is, but we don’t think about it that way, and the frame of “institutional” racism obscures it: intermittent racism is like a guarantee that somebody in every workplace you experience will be a personal enemy.
Define an enemy as someone who for no good reason (as you see it, anyway) has it in for you.  Such enemies don’t intend to break your legs or kick you out of your house, but hold you to much higher standards than they hold everyone else to, as well as much higher standards than everyone else holds you to.  For most of us, if we’re fairly decent people and team players, such enemies are uncommon—call them one co-worker in a hundred—but when they appear they really rankle.  They make the workplace unpleasant; they make every meeting fraught; we remember them for years; we’ll do all we can to get rid of them (in the process becoming their enemies) and if we can’t, might well change jobs to avoid them.
Now imagine that in your workplace, one out of every fifteen or twenty colleagues is such an enemy.  Further imagine that your enemies are much more often than not more powerful than you are, since enemy-of-you, while still an uncommon descriptor among those with more power than you, is still highly correlated with having more power than you.  (Translation: most white people don’t hate have it in for blacks, but by far most people who hate have it in for blacks are white.)  This means that you probably can’t fire your enemy, but your enemy may over time be able, especially by biasing job assignments and assessments so that non-enemies come to think ill of you, to get you fired or at least not promoted. Finally, imagine that each of your enemies will have every interest in concealing that enmity, because it’s socially taboo, as well as every possibility of concealing it, because asserting the continued existence of such enmities is also socially taboo.
All this might make you want to quit your job and take another.  Unfortunately, you can pretty much guarantee that exactly the same circumstances will obtain in every job. A one-in-fifteen or -twenty rate of enmity obtains in society as a whole.
Welcome to contemporary American society—and to the grand costs of continued petty racism, even assuming that most people don’t practice it and that the way they practice is much less violent than it once was.
Update: I’ve replaced “hate” by “have it in for” to stress the non-virulent quality of the enmity at issue.

Governor to NAACP: "Kiss My Butt"

Wayne Hodges

• Topeka Democrat Examiner

• January 17th, 2011 5:45 am CT

Governor Paul LePage has a history of making tasteless remarks.

Photo: Courtesy of MassAppealNews.com

PORTLAND, Maine – Apparently, not everyone’s in the celebratory spirit. Check this out. Paul LePage, the newly elected Republican Governor of Maine and loyal Tea Party supporter, recently declined an invitation to attend the NAACP’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration for personal reasons.

When asked by a reporter to elaborate on his decision, LePage responded angrily: “Tell them to kiss my butt. They are a special interest. End of story … and I’m not going to be held hostage by special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they’d like about it.”

LePage is referring to his adopted son from Jamaica.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time the Governor has made the news for running his mouth.

While on the campaign trail last fall, LePage had the audacity to tell a group of fishermen if he’s elected “you’re going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying ‘Governor LePage tells (Barack) Obama to go to hell.’”

The speech obviously worked as LePage was subsequently voted into office. My goodness. I don’t know which is worse: LePage winning the election, or the credibility of the voters solely responsible.

As Americans, there’s no question we have grown extremely liberal when it comes to “freedom of speech” and all the intangible rights associated with it. Probably more so since President Obama took office.

However, at what point should an angry comment or threat against our Commander-in-Chief be construed as a detestable act of terrorism?

Yes, determining what constitutes a terrorist threat is indeed arbitrary. Any lawyer will tell us that. But a legislative response is still worth a shot. Especially in today’s hostile economic times.

After all, the fatal shootings in Arizona, which took the lives of several innocent people and left many more wounded, were proven to be a byproduct of hate crimes committed by a practicing white supremacist (Jared Lee Loughner).

LePage’s “Kiss my butt” remark, whether racist or not, only adds kerosene to the political fire.

Regardless the intent, this type of verbiage shouldn’t be tolerated from an elected official or anyone seeking public office for that matter.

Seriously people, we need ‘peacemakers’ in legislature. Not instigators.

I’ve had it.

I say “enough is enough.”

It’s time to re-evaluate the “Freedom of Speech” laws and consider immediate revisions. LePage is not only setting a bad example from a prestigious position of leadership, but his behavior is 100% counterproductive to Dr. King’s dream.

Furthermore, adopting a black son doesn’t classify LePage as morally exempt.

A reprimand, in my view, is still necessary.

Wayne Hodges, an MBA from St. Mary University, is the Editor-in-Chief of “Mass Appeal News.” He also serves as District Committee Delegate in Johnson County, he’s an MPA at the University of Kansas, and he’s an adjunct professor in Kansas City.

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