HungryBlues

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By The Content of Their Character

The email, below, is the last communication I have received to date from James E Prince III concerning his demands that I remove comments posted here by one of my readers. The back story is in the post immediately preceding this one.

From: James E. Prince III <jprince at neshobademocrat dot com>
To: Benjamin Greenberg <minorjive at gmail dot com>
Date: Jun 16, 2006 9:56 AM
Subject: Re: FalseAndDefamatory


Mr. Greenberg:

The 5th Circuit is so far upholding the rights of bloggers like you to defame and slander, I am advised, although that does not prevent one from attempting to set new legal precedent. So at least for now you win on that count. But still, you are knowingly publishing false and defamatory statements, contradicting your own pledge on your website.

Is this the new liberalism, to knowingly harm another human being for sheer entertainment and attention?

I have in good faith asked you to remove statements by “Suzy Sharino” that are false and defamatory and clearly a very personal attack by a former disgruntled employee posing as a woman. No such person has ever worked for me nor do I know “her.”

Of all my experiences with The Philadelphia Coalition and the successful prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen, I am shocked most at how threatened you and the other ultraliberals are by conservatives who are willing to speak out on matters such as the civil rights murders in Neshoba County. Rather than join us at the table, you resort to smear campaigns to discredit.

Surprisingly, the resistance has not come from within Neshoba County or Mississippi. The resistance has come from the liberal left. (That’s the book in me.)

Even the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists have not stooped to the level that you have with personal attacks. Comment all you want on my written record and the facts. But let’s not resort to personal attacks.

From the outset what motivated me most in organizing the Coalition was justice along with peace and reconciliation that I have come to realize flows only from a regenerated heart. People like you make reconciliation difficult to achieve with your divisiveness and petty blog practices that serve no useful purpose other than to tear down. But in a Google age, you rule.

You are committing murder with the tongue and are no better than the band of thugs who took the lives of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.

You are a disgrace to your father’s name.

Sincerely,

Jim Prince

--
James E. Prince III
Editor and Publisher
The Neshoba Democrat
P.O. Box 30
Philadelphia, MS 39350
601-656-4000
FAX 601-656-6379
jprince at neshobademocrat dot com

Update on James Prince's Legal Threats Against Me

Early last month I posted an exchange of emails between myself and James E. Prince III, editor and publisher of the Neshoba Democrat and co-chair of the Philadelphia Coalition.

Last February, a person who identifies herself as Suzy Sharino, and who claims to be a former reporter for Prince, left a comment on HungryBlues, which enraged Mr. Prince. Sharino's comment was made in response to this post. There and elsewhere (more), I am critical of Prince and the Philadelphia Coalition, which has charged itself with "establishing a perpetual structure that will foster racial harmony and reconciliation" in Neshoba County, MS.

Prince claimed that Sharino's comments are false and defamatory. For that reason, Prince demanded that I remove them from my blog. Prince was unclear in those initial emails, which specific statements by Sharino were false and defamatory; instead, he insisted I remove the entirety of Sharino's comment and made vague threats about contacting his lawyer.

In my last email message to Prince, I explained that neither bloggers nor their ISPs are liable for comments left by third parties, like Suzy Sharino. I concluded by saying:

If you have a specific request to make of me, please make it with the appropriate rationale, so I can consider it. Be advised, however, that since the statements that you mention were made be [sic] a third party, retractions are purely a matter of my discretion. Your threats have no sway with me. You are of course welcome to make a comment on my blog to rebut any of Suzy Sharino's statements.

That was on June 4 in the afternoon. That evening, Prince wrote to me again, making specific denials by asserting that:

Among other things, my grandfather was never in the Citizens Counsel, I certainly didn’t embezzle funds from the Coalition and give them to Haley Barbour and I have never sexually harassed an employee.

Prince also denied that anyone named Suzy Sharino ever worked for him. He made an insinuation about Sharino's real identity and then amplified his previous legal threats:

You may smugly hide hide behind the “third party” assertion but it’s my reputation and I believe that I will ultimately prevail in having this post removed if we have to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

I can’t print statements in my newspapers that are knowingly false without consequences. I would not mind making a point with someone as arrogant as you and who clearly possesses such a reckless disregard for the truth. The First Amendment is not a license to mount a slanderous attack on anyone as you have allowed.

I did not respond to this, but on on June 5, Prince sent me two separate email messages that included what he believed to be evidence that he did not sexually harass a former employee, as Sharino had claimed. I did not consider Prince's evidence to be conclusive. To avoid acting or speaking impulsively, however, I took no further action and did not respond to Prince.

Having heard nothing further from me, Prince wrote to me again on June 16, saying that he is backing down from his legal threats for now. He then launched into a vicious attack, saying, among other things that I am "no better than the band of thugs who took the lives of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney."

I did not want to respond to Prince in kind, so again I remained silent.

I have at this point decided on two courses of action.

1. The one allegation by Suzy Sharino that Prince addressed substantively was that Prince sexually harassed a former employee. Therefore, as a courtesy, I am deleting that portion Suzy Sharino's comment.
2. I am publishing in its entirety Prince's last message to me. I believe it will say more than I ever can about the character of James E. Prince III.

The Atrios and Luskin Story

Bloggers and blog readers who have been around a few years will get the allusion I made in my previous post.

For those unfamiliar, here's the short version.

Also see Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and Director, The Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

More info at EFF and Chilling Effects.

Shades of Atrios and Luskin

James E. Prince III, Editor and Publisher of the Mississippi newspaper and online news source, the Neshoba Democrat, wrote an email message to me last night, at 11:19 p.m., which referenced this HungryBlues entry, which I posted last July, and said:

Mr. Greenberg:

The post by Jonathan David Jackson is false and defamatory and I ask that you remove it immediately.

Jim Prince

--
James E. Prince III
Editor and Publisher
The Neshoba Democrat
    P.O. Box 30
Philadelphia, MS 39350
601-656-4000
FAX 601-656-6379
jprince@neshobademocrat.com

Confused by this request, I wrote the following message back to Mr. Prince:

Dear Mr. Prince,

What part of Jonathan David Jackson's comment on my blog do you consider false and defamatory? Here is what he wrote, in full, in response to the post you reference:

    I love the clear, careful reasoning as you build this case against a closet (or not so closet) bigot and expose the true complexity of these issues. I also admire the primary source documents that you post on the site. This essay is definitely one of your most insightful.

    Posted by: Jonathan David Jackson | Wednesday, July 13, 2005 at 05:15 PM

Ben Greenberg

This morning James E.  Prince III replied with a clarification and a threat of legal action:

I’m speaking of the comments below apparently by Suzy Sharino then. It’s actually difficult to tell who made these slanderous comments. But they need to be gone. I don’t think either one of us wants to get my lawyers involved.

Jim Prince

Earlier this afternoon, I answered with this email:

Dear Mr. Prince,

I am surprised that you, as editor and publisher of a newspaper, would write an demand letter that is so vague. I would have assumed that you know the mechanics of demanding retractions for specific statements.

It would be less surprising to me, perhaps, if you are unaware that neither bloggers nor their ISPs are libel [sic] for comments left by third parties, such as Suzy Sharino.

If you have a specific request to make of me, please make it with the appropriate rationale, so I can consider it. Be advised, however, that since the statements that you mention were made be [sic] a third party, retractions are purely a matter of my discretion. Your threats have no sway with me. You are of course welcome to make a comment  on my blog to rebut any of Suzy Sharino's statements.

Ben Greenberg

It's nice when they like your writing, but...

Just a coincidence? Maybe, except it's at least two coincidences... Tell me what you think...

Yesterday on TalkLeft:

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/014801.html

Chicago's Abu Ghraib

Let's not forget prisoner abuse begins at home. [emphasis added --BG]

It's called Area 2. And for nearly two decades beginning in 1971, it was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.

In December on HungryBlues:

http://minorjive.typepad.com/hungryblues/2005/12/torture_begins_.html

Torture Begins At Home

US sanctioned torture is one of the pressing human rights issues of our time. I very much admire and am grateful for the moral vigilance with which some are responding to this administration's attack on democracy and human rights in its war on terror. Yet I also wish for a day when there is comparable popular awareness of and outrage about the long standing, institutionalized human rights abuses that take place within US borders. The most recent example of the latter to come my way was in Salim Muwakkil's latest article in In These Times:

The latest domestic example is Chicago, where for nearly two decades (from 1973 to 1991) the police department virtually condoned the torture of more than 100 black criminal suspects. Those illegal techniques led to the wrongful conviction of dozens of black men, and even prompted Amnesty International in 1990 to call for an inquiry into police torture in the city.

Vague And Overbroad Powers

The Black Commentator's Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency."

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.

Kimberly quotes the passage, above, from Halliburton's press release and then comments:

Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, "What immigration emergency?" If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won't stop with them.

What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.

When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of "enemy combatants" these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.

Kimberly hopes for the "best case scenario" in which "this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America," but she also entertains the more likely possibility that "our government is planning to create more [Jose] Padillas." I say "more likely" because history suggests this development is nothing less than a revival of J. Edgar Hoover's Emergency Detention Program, detailed in a 1976 Congressional report:

The development of plans during this period for emergency detention of dangerous persons and for intelligence about such persons took place entirely within the executive branch. In contrast to the employee security program, these plans were not only withheld from the public and Congress but were framed in terms which disregarded the legislation enacted by Congress. Director Hoover's decision to ignore Attorney General Biddle's 1943 directive abolishing the wartime Custodial Detention List had been an example of the inability of the Attorney General to control domestic intelligence operations. In the 1950s the FBI and the Justice Department collaborated in a decision to disregard the attempt by Congress to provide statutory direction for the Emergency Detention Program. This is not to say that the Justice Department itself was fully aware of the FBI's activities in this area. The FBI kept secret from the Department its most sweeping list of potentially dangerous persons, first called the "Communist Index" and later renamed the "Reserve Index," as well as its targeting programs for intensive investigation of "key figures" and "top functionaries" and its own detention priorities labeled "Detcom" and "Comsab"(emphasis added).

Director Hoover advised Attorney General Clark in March 1946 of the existence of its Security Index, although he did not say that it had existed since Attorney General Biddle's 1943 directive. The Index listed persons "who would be dangerous or potentially dangerous in the event of . . . serious crisis, involving the United States and the U.S.S.R." The Justice Department then prepared a memorandum concluding that the available options for action in an emergency were a declaration of martial law or suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The FBI Director recommended going to Congress to secure "statutory backing for detention" (emphasis added).

After a conference between Department and FBI officials, the FBI submitted a lengthy analysis of its standards for classifying potentially dangerous persons. The memorandum gave specific examples of "Communists and Communist sympathizers whose names appear in the Bureau's Security Index." However, the FBI did not provide any specific examples in the category "Espionage Suspects and Government Employees in Communist Underground." Assistant Director Ladd advised Director Hoover of the reason for excluding any such examples:

The Bureau has identified over 100 persons who are logically suspected of being in the Government Communist Underground; however, at the present time, the Bureau does not have evidence, whether admissible or otherwise, reflecting actual membership in the Communist Party. It is believed that for security reasons, examples of these logical suspects should not be set forth at this time. (emphasis added)

The Director noted, "I most certainly agree. There are too many leaks."

This past week there was a related revelation about a central repository of alleged terrorism suspects (via Julius Speaks):

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center - created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency - contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed.

The keeping of large lists of "suspects" is also part of the Hoover heritage. The Custodial Detention List was established in the early 1940s, abolished by Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1943, and immediately re-invented by Hoover as the Security Index, which was maintained through the early 1970s, when it was re-named as the Administrative Index. At each stage in the game, there were subsidiary indices—such as the Communist Index, the Reserve Index and the Agitator Index—less well-known to the Attorney General and Congressional oversight committees. The 1976 Congressional report states that

By early 1951, the total had increased to 13,901 names [on the Security Index] as the result of an FBI decision after the outbreak of the Korean War to broaden "the basis for inclusion in the Security Index to include alI active members of the Communist Party." The size of the Communist Index, as contrasted with the Security Index, was indicated by the figures from the New York field office which had 2,897 names on the Security Index and 42,000 names on the Communist Index. Since the Communist Index was based on "allegations of Communist activity," it was "a measure of investigations performed." If this proportion applied "throughout the field," as the FBI memorandum suggested, then the Communist Indexes in the field offices contained over 200,000 names.

The Bush administration says we should take some comfort in knowing that US citizens comprise "only a very, very small fraction" of the 325,00 names in the National Counterterrorism Center's central repository. "The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.," a Bush administration official said.

The comments of ACLU legislative counsel for privacy rights, Timothy Sparapani, are more to the point:

We have lists that are having baby lists at this point, they're spawning faster than rabbits.... If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we've got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case.

The existence of these over-swollen lists is evidence of what the new, Halliburton-built detention centers are intended for. The development of an infrastructure for mass detentions does not come out of the blue. It has long been a desired power of the federal law enforcement. Even in 1974, after many of these earlier programs came to light and the Attorney General demanded more precise "guidelines" for how security lists would be maintained, the 1976 Congressional report concluded that "the broad claims of power in the hands of the Executive branch could readily permit a return to the vague and overbroad domestic intelligence policies of the past."

And readily permit a return they have.

FURTHER READING
FOX Unleashes Vile McCarthyite Smear Campaign Against Cindy and the Peace Movement

My New Job And Other Recent Developments

After a long job search, I finally accepted a job offer on Wednesday.

On March 6, I will start working as Web Community Coordinator for Physicians for Human Rights. After over a year of job hunting, it is great to finally have a full-time job, and it is a dream come true to have an internet communications and organizing job for a human rights organization like PHR.

After my first two weeks at PHR, they will be sending me to Seattle to attend the N-TEN Nonprofit Technology Conference. This will be a cool opportunity to learn from and to network with colleagues in what is still a very new field—and to have some fun in a great city.

For the rest of this month, I'll be finishing my work as guest editor for the March/April issue of Dollars & Sense, devoted to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi since Katrina. We have some exciting interviews with and great articles by local local activists, as well as pieces by other authors, including myself. I'm in the middle of writing my longish article about my travels on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at the end of January. I spent six days in Mississippi and two days in New Orleans. I interviewed numerous storm survivors and learned a lot about the situations of some of the Gulf Coast African American communities. I've been posting some excerpts from my interviews on the Dollars & Sense blog. The magazine should be available by the end of March.

Dollars & Sense is in the process of overhauling its website. The new site is up and running and is a big improvement over what we had before. Watch for web exclusives and multimedia content in the near future. In the meantime, you should check out the online material from the Jan/Feb issue. I highly recommend former d&s intern Rebecca Parish's interview with Lani Guinier and longtime D&S Collective member John Miller's What's Good for Wal-Mart . . .

More Interview Excerpts At Dollars & Sense Blog

  DSCN1117 
  Originally uploaded by BenTG.

Last week, I posted two excerpts from my interview with Shone, about her experiences surviving Katrina in Biloxi, MS.

Shone weathered the storm with her six children and others, at her mother's home, in the neighborhood called The Point, which was among the hardest hit in Biloxi. Almost every building was destroyed or very seriously damaged.

The house Shone and her family were in filled with about five feet of water and was carried off of its foundation into a neighboring yard.

Part I: "The wind was blowin' so hard, we thought those kids was gonna get blowed out the attic."

Part II: "He was like, no, I can't see it, I don't have time."

MS Blogging At Dollars & Sense Blog

I got back from Mississippi on Monday evening and have been blogging over at the dollars & sense blog. Here are some of the recent posts:

Resources

Railroad Tracks

Gayle Tart: "you wanna say no, I can't do it, I just can't, not anything else, not another problem, not another person."

Nothing like this has ever happened in America

Alice T: "I was left there for a reason, to help out."

Miss TT

You can also go over to my flickr page to check out some of my photos from the trip.

Gulf Coast Trip - January 22-29, 2006

This town has stood up in the face of things
Lots worse than a ninety mile wind
It's not bad storms I'm afraid of today
But the greed that our leaders walk in.

I'll walk along the Boardwalk rail
And feel and hear this ninety mile gale
I can hear the ocean mourn and groan
And I wonder about ships lost out in this storm.

So come on wind and blow out your brains
Blow like a Cyclone across the flat plains
This is just an echo of our world wide storm
That's ripping away our balls and our chains.

--Woody Guthrie, "Ninety Mile Wind" (1944)

This summer, I joined the Editorial Collective of Dollars & Sense, a national popular economics magazine, which has presented progressive analysis of current economic issues and trends for over thirty years. Since September I have been guest editing the March/April issue of the magazine, which we are devoting to economic issues in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

While New Orleans caught one edge of Hurricane Katrina, the storm hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi head on, causing unfathomable destruction. Nonetheless news coverage of New Orleans has overshadowed, Mississippi. When the mainstream news media does report on Mississippi, we may hear about places like Waveland, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, and Biloxi, but we don't hear about the African Americans who live there. There are few images of Black Mississippians from the Gulf Coast and no discussion of their communities. Except for Waveland, all of these cities have African American populations that are larger than the national average of 12.3%. As of Census 2000, Pass Christian is 28.2% African American. Gulfport is 33.5% African American. In Bay St. Louis and Biloxi, the numbers are 16.6% and 19%, respectively.

As I have pursued writers who are local activists and survivors from the Gulf Coast region, I have been moved by the experiences of African American activists in Gulfport and Biloxi, whom I have had the opportunity to talk to. In Mississippi, as in New Orleans, the slow responses of FEMA and the Red Cross have harmed storm victims of many ethnicities and economic backgrounds. In both places, however, government inaction has especially harmed African Americans. At this writing, as recovery gets underway, white neighborhoods in Biloxi have been substantially cleaned up; on the other side of town, the African American neighborhood still looks like a bombed out war zone.

One of our writers for the March/April issue is an African American attorney, named Gayle. Gayle is in Gulfport, doing legal advocacy for Katrina survivors facing unfair, opportunistic evictions and other housing problems. She is also a hurricane survivor whose brother and two-year-old nephew died in the storm. Speaking with her on the phone has been overwhelming. In a number of our conversations, Gayle has connected me with other survivors who have lost loved ones or property or both and have first-hand experience of the unavailability of government disaster relief. They tell of FEMA trailers sitting unused in storage lots while survivors live in tents in winter weather; the outsourcing of jobs to corporate contractors; and price gouging on building materials.

The first time we spoke, Gayle expressed considerable gratitude that I cared enough to seek her out. There just hadn't been outside attention to the plights of people in her community, though it had been months since the storm hit. She was eager to write an article for Dollars & Sense, but she also said, urgently, "you have to come here... you just can't understand unless you see it... please come." When they heard about my conversations with Gayle and others from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, the Dollars & Sense Collective agreed that in addition to publishing Gayle, we need to respond to her request.

Dollars & Sense is sending me to Gulfport and Biloxi, and to New Orleans, for eight days, from January 22 - 29. I will document my trip with still images, audio recordings, and video clips. While I am on the Gulf Coast, I will be posting to the Dollars & Sense blog, which we have just added to the Dollars & Sense website. To the extent that time and internet connections allow, I will provide regular updates and photos from my trip. In addition to the photos that you will find in Dollars & Sense blog posts, I will post a larger selection of my photos on my flckr account.

After I return from the South, I will write a report of what I saw there for the March/April issue of Dollars & Sense, and possibly for other publications. I will also get the word out about survivors' experiences in the Gulf by presenting my audio, photographs and video through the Dollars & Sense website and live presentations. As with the March/April issue as a whole, we hope the information I gather on this trip will be useful for activists. The communities I visit will be allowed full access to the audio recordings, photos, and video that I make of them. I will also make a list of the local organizations we have been working with, and of others I may learn about on my trip, that directly address the needs of Katrina survivors; Dollars & Sense will publish the list in the March/April issue and on our website, and I will distribute it at presentations about my trip.

Dollars & Sense is a small non-profit organization on a shoe string budget. This may be the first time that Dollars & Sense has sent someone to do investigative work. If you would like to make a tax deductible donation to help us pay for the trip, you can make donations in $25 increments through our website, or send a check for any amount, with "Katrina Project" in the memo line, to Dollars & Sense, 29 Winter Street, Boston, MA 02108.

(Cross posted on the Dollars & Sense blog.)

Coalition Blast Fighter Jets At San Antonio Martin Luther King March

Jeanne D'arc posted on the Martin Luther King Day march in San Antonio, TX, slated to have military jets fly over the marchers. She juxtaposed the news with an appropriate quote from MLK, calling out the insanity of trying to connect the war effort with King's legacy. Below is a press release from the local activists, opposing the military fly over of the march.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT
Tommy Calvert, Jr.
Cell (617) 480-8385

Coalition Blast Fighter Jets At San Antonio Martin Luther King March
Group Thwarted From Rescinding Vote for Jets which Coalition Calls Inappropriate


(SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS) The highly criticized move to include fighter jets in the nation's largest Martin Luther King March has awakened a broad coalition consisting of the original creators of the San Antonio Martin Luther King March, civil and human rights groups, labor unions, peace organizations, neighborhood associations, media leaders, environmental groups, religious leaders, historians, teachers, elected officials and business leaders. The coalition has organized plans to protest the inclusion of a fighter jet by displaying signs with quotes from Dr. King against militarization and war, wearing black and gold arm bands, and releasing doves after the fighter jets pass over.

On Saturday afternoon, 150 community leaders met at Martin Luther King Academy to organize plans at the march and participate in a lecture with Joanne Bland of Selma, Alabama who marched with Dr. King for the Voting Rights Act. The group voted unanimously to provide the new Chair of the MLK Commission, the March committee chair, and Councilwoman Shelia McNeil a book about the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. because of their roles in allowing the flyover to occur and their inability to provide evidence that Dr. King, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, would support the militarization of a celebration in his honor.

In addition to misquoting and speaking with half-truths about Rev. King's principles, the new group of MLK Commission leaders have used a red-herring to justify their inclusion of the fighter jets; claiming that they wanted the march to be inclusive of the armed forces.

"Members of the military have always been welcome to the march, in fact, that's part of the brotherhood that people feel as participants" exclaimed Tommy Calvert, Jr. whose father was one of the 50 original marchers from 1978 and who has participated in the march since 1981. "However, Dr. King believed that violence and its tools were futile, useless, and called on people to lay down their arms before they came to the table of brotherhood. A fighter jet is an arm, not a soldier, and its inclusion is as ludicrous in the march as a pacifist being invited by the Army to sit before a tank at a military parade."

Kathy Clay-Little, publisher of African-American Reflections newspaper said "We are entrusted with telling the truth about our history and anytime it is misrepresented, twisted to fit an ulterior agenda, or manipulated we cannot remain silent."

The colors of the black and gold arm bands of protestors bear significance. Black represents mourning the fact that the MLK Commission is killing Dr. King's legacy. The yellow portion of the band represents hope for the return to the world and MLK Commission of King's message against violence and militarization and for his work to promote peace, love, and justice.

Esperanza Peace & Justice center director, Graciela Sanchez, affirmed the desire of the group to reclaim the original integrity and history of the march. "It's clear some people live life like King and others are new to his philosophy. And if the day is about honoring his legacy and doing the work he did, then we have to hold our own communities accountable to that legacy and do things consistent with his life."
####

"Diggin' coals so the world can run / And operators can have their fun"

I started to post Pete Seeger's rendition of Malvina Reynolds' "Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter," as a tribute to the twelve miners who died after the explosion that trapped them in the Sago Mine on Monday. But I stopped myself because I thought that it might be a stretch to apply the words of the song to this particular situation. This disaster was in West Viriginia; the Reynolds song is about Perry County, KY. This disaster is about safety violations and bad oversight; the Reynolds song is about other labor problems, like "goons on the picket line" who intimidate striking workers.

Turns out there was no reason to hesitate. In one of yesterday's Portside mailings, Jack Radey wrote:

If you really like Dramamine, the NPR reporting on the Sago Disaster was truly charming. They prattled on and on about how the news media got the story wrong, how did this happen? How were the wrong headlines printed?How were people put on this emotional roller coaster?

Then they interviewed a local pastor about the importance of accepting all this and not getting angry. They, like the rest of the media, mentioned in passing that a fight broke out where the families were waiting when the news of the dead was announced. But why were people fighting? There was even mention in one broadcast that the local SWAT team was deployed around the corner from where the families waited, in case disorder broke out. Oh, mine safety violations? Why would that be news? No doubt the families were so angry at the misleading news. Maybe about the fact that 12 of their men were killed in a mine with triple the normal (bad enough) rate of safety violations?

That the local goon squad is there to protect the mine owner and his property from the wrath of the families of the men murdered for his greed?

Oh come now, would anyone suggest that would be news? Remember why our flag (not the one on the courthouse, where no doubt those $25 fine were handed out), our flag, is the color it is?

And then it turns out the Sago Mine is owned by an Ashland, Kentucky company, known as Horizon Natural Resources (HNR). HNR had been facing bankruptcy since 2002 and was bought out in 2004 by the International Coal Group (ICG), led by New York billionaire Wilbur Ross. Ross' m.o. isn't pretty:

After the sale, six union operations previously owned by Horizon were shut down. The nonunion mines remained open.

Under the bankruptcy and reorganization plan, U.S. Federal Bankruptcy Judge William Howard in August agreed that Horizon should not be responsible for $800 million in health insurance contractual obligations to more than 3,000 active and retired United Mine Workers of America union members.

The judge threw out the contract and voided the collective bargaining agreement to make the sale of the mines more appealing to Ross and his partners.

As John Bennett, whose father James was killed in the Sago Mine, said to Matt Lauer on the Today Show (via American Rights At Work):

It’s not just the men that go down there every day that know the mines is [sic] unsafe…we have no protection for our workers. We need to get the United Mine Workers back in these coal mines, to protect [against] these safety violations, to protect these workers.

It's the same old story:

Lauer then asked Bennett “You feel as if the miners speak out they are at risk of losing their jobs?” “Yeah” Bennett answered.

Lest we forget where the rest of the responsibility for these deaths resides, David Corn explained the big picture three and a half years ago (via Jodan Barab), after another mine disaster, in Green Tree, Pa., which, fortunately, was not fatal:

That spirit, though, was not present earlier this year when the Bush administration proposed cutting the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) by $7 million. The administration defended the 6-percent reduction by noting the number of coal mines has been decreasing. Yet coal mining fatalities have gone up for three years in a row. There were 42 mining fatalities in 2001, 29 in 1998. In March, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, maintained the funding cut would cause a 25 percent reduction in the government's mine-safety inspection workforce. As of March, 612 federal mine inspectors were responsible for enforcing safety regulations in 25 states, and there were signs the system has not been functioning well.

Thus Jordan Barab concludes:

And finally, let's take one more step back and take a look at the even bigger picture. This administration has been obsessed with one thing since it took office: tax cuts and favor for its friends. What that translates into is "Shrinking government..." -- at least the part that provides protections for workers -- "to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" as Bush Administration ideolouge Grover Norquist says.

Well "government" isn't some abstract thing. Shrinking government means that agencies like OSHA and MSHA have less power to enforce the law and maintain safe working conditions. So, while drowning government in a bathtub, we're also asphyxiating workers in a coal mine.

So, then, here's Pete, in memory of the twelve men and in solidarity with the one survivor and with all of the affected families and friends. You can read the lyrics here.

The Long Cold Run

That's my friend Jesse's blog. Jesse is a friend from my neighborhood and my Jewish community who is training for his second Boston Marathon this year. As last year, Jesse is running—and fundraising!—for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Marathon Challenge Team. This year, Jesse is keeping a blog where you can follow his training through the cold weather, which includes the added challenge of his being a new dad (Baby Yonatan is about five weeks old!) and, come spring, finding kosher for Passover alternatives to powerade and gu.

Jesse is running his second marathon after overcoming years of knee problems and surgeries that left him unsure he'd ever be able to run again. For his friends who saw Jesse struggle with his injuries, periodically needing to walk with a cane, it was a miracle that he trained and ran last year and a great excitement that he is running the marathon this year, once again.

On April 6, 2005 Carolyn and I received a phone call with the news that we had lost our Uncle Chris to pancreatic cancer at age 44. Twelve days later, I ran the Boston Marathon in Chris’ memory with the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team. About 6-8 miles into the race, the cheering started to change from “Yay!” to a more focused cheer – “Go Jesse” (my name was on my arms) and "Do it for Chris!" (“For Chris” was on my shirt). I lost count somewhere between miles 8 and 10 of how many times Chris' name was yelled along the course. It was in the hundreds by that point -- with 16 miles to go! There were people thanking Dana-Farber runners for raising money that helped get them treatment, small kids running after us with cups of water or oranges, and my personal favorite -- juice pops at the turn onto Commonwealth Ave! Thanks to your help, I raised $5500 for cancer research.

This year, I am running the Boston Marathon again to raise money for the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team. The DFMC team’s goal is to raise $3.6 million to support cancer research for the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research. Since 1987, this program has helped to provide hundreds of researchers with the money to begin researching new cancer treatments. Experimental treatments such as the ones developed through the Barr Program gave Chris valuable extra time with his friends and family.

Today, you have the opportunity to help cancer patients from around the world benefit from the treatments developed at Dana-Farber. My personal fundraising goal this year is $10,000. This is almost twice the amount that I raised last year. Please take a moment to click on the DFMC link under “Sponsor Me.” By giving to DFMC, not only are you supporting my dream of running the Boston Marathon, you are supporting the opportunity for cancer patients to receive critical treatment options.

Training for the Boston Marathon in New England is always an interesting challenge. Last year there were frozen water bottles, frozen goo, and a 12 mile run with 30” of fresh snow. This year, in addition to the weather, I’ll be training with a new baby and running the Marathon during Passover! To track this year’s challenges, check back in on the Long Cold Run.

Read Jesse's blog here. Sponsor Jesse here.

Holidays Shmolidays (Merry Christmas)

This is good stuff for non-Jews (as well as Jews) to read. Aron states precisely why I, too, would much rather people just come out and say "Merry Christmas," instead of the supposedly ecumenical "Happy Holidays." The so-called war on Christmas is an utterly stupid concept, except for what it reveals about the right wingers' imagination of Jews. Feh to O'Reilly and a Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends.

Personally, I too am annoyed by the PCness of the "happy holidays" greeting. Growing up as an Orthodox Jewish kid with Eastern European parents and grandparents, Christmas had a rather ominous feel to it. That was a result of the memories passed down to me of Christmas as one of the Polish pogrom seasons, where my grandparents had to live in fear of rape and murder. Despite New York's reputation, rape and murder by rampaging goyim is not a real concern for the Jews of this great city. But the site of Christmas trees nonetheless evoked a quesy feeling in me when I was a child.

That feeling along with a sense of inferiority as a minority, induced American Jews to pump up the rather minor holiday of Hanukka into something far more important than it is. A Holy Day in the Jewish calendar - a hag - is a pilgrimage specifically to the site of the Temple in Jerusalem (in an ecumenical spirit, I remind my readers that the Muslim haj is really the same word, except the pilgramage is to Mecca). Hanukka is not a pilgrimage holiday ordained in the Bible but a holiday instituted by the Hasmonean kings, whom the Rabbis despised.

Hannuka barely gets mentioned at all in the Talmud. The source of our knowledge about the holiday is the Book of the Maccabees. Unlike the Book of Esther and its associated holiday of Purim, Maccabees was left out of the official Biblical canon - the Rabbis of the Talmud no doubt would have preferred it never got written in the first place. The Rabbis' antagonism was rooted in the fact that the descendants of Judah the Maccabee, the Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel until the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE, were in fact blood thirsty tyrants of the worst sort, who, ironically, advocated close ties to Rome and were intimately associated with the wealthy elite Sadducee establishment.

Side note: Rabbinical Judaism in its roots was an anti-establishment working class movement. Jesus probably was a leader of one of the more radical fringe groups within the overall revolutionary rabbinical movement. It was the wealthy Sadducee toadies who betrayed Jesus to their Roman masters.

Fast forward to modern day US of A, where assimilationist toadies emulating their Sadducee forbears in wanting to please their capitalist masters, had to find an equivalent Jewish shopping holiday to Christmas. Hannuka is the perfect fit in more ways than one. And they even one-upped the goyish capitalists by instituting eight days of gifts.

Considering the abysmal record of the Hasmoneans and the Sadducees, it is even more ironic that Hannuka and the Maccabees were seen as models by Zionists as a fore-runner to modern day Jewish nationalism. Hannuka is hardly as important in Israel as it is in the US, but it still is accorded far more importance than it should be....

So if you wish me a happy holiday it would take me a few minutes to even know what you are talking. The main Jewish holiday season is not December but September and October. We Jews have plenty (probably too many) holidays of our own and I for one am quite happy to concede this time of year exclusively to my Christian friends. So to all of you, Merry Christmas.

P.S. ... right-wing politics in America has long been associated with xenophobia and hatred of Jews. Intellectuals, liberals, gays, New Yorkers, Hollywood and the like, all of whom the right-wing hate so much, are used by them as code words for Jews. The neo-cons, Likudnicks and other Jews, who ally themselves with these right-wing creeps, are like their Sadducee counter-parts, stupidly aligning themselves with their true enemy. As for Bill O'Reilly, no happy holiday greetings from me to him. My fervent holiday wish for Mr. O'Reilly is that he get trapped in a store playing Christmas jingles non-stop for a full year. The horror, the horror!

I was reading Aron's blog before I even got into blogs and blogging. I rarely write about Israel/Palestine stuff here, but if you want to know where I'm at with those issues, I usually agree with Aron.

Rokhl Is Live Blogging Klezkamp

If Rokhl (or even I) piqued your interest about secular Jewish American culture, you may want to check out her blogging from Klezkamp, which is this week from Dec. 25-30. Her freylikhe Klezkamp blog is called Mit der kapelye- I'm with the Band; usually you can find her here. If Klezkamp sounds like klezmer to you, that's because klezmer classes and performances and jam sessions are a big part of what will be going on there. Interested yet? Go check it out...

(Readers who have been around for a while may remember this post, where I mention the influence of Klezcamp on my family, via my mother.)

Keeping Up With The Neo-Confederates

Edward Sebesta has a new blog, Anti-Neo-Confederate. Who are the Neo-Confederates and why should you care? Back in August, Max Blumenthal had an article in the Nation about powerful lobbyists in Washington, who are also part of an extremist takeover of Neo-Confederate groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The article closed with this telling scenario:

On Memorial Day, 2001, George W. Bush resurrected a tradition his father discontinued during his presidency: laying a wreath at the base of the Confederate monument at the Arlington National Cemetery. The White House has claimed that the practice continued from the Bush Sr. Administration through the Clinton years, yet according to Hurley, "not a single person in the Confederate community ever saw the wreath back at the Confederate memorial until Geoge W. Bush came into office." Hurley says Bush merely changed the day of the wreath's delivery, from Confederate Memorial Day--Jefferson Davis's birthday--to the US Memorial Day. Last Confederate Memorial Day, Hurley witnessed [Richard T.] Hines at the memorial leading a gathering of Washington-based conservatives, including members of the Jefferson Davis Camp 305 that met at the Mary Surratt site. Now Bush Administration officials joined the commemoration, most prominently Robert Wilkie, the former foreign policy adviser to Senator Lott who was appointed last October by Condoleezza Rice as the National Security Council's senior legislative director. Attired in all-white plantation garb and white top hat, Hines fired an artillery cannon he had carted along for the occasion. Then he and the ceremony's attendees solemnly saluted the Confederate flag.

Here is some background from Blumenthal, on Richard T. Hines:

In 1996, standing beside members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Jefferson Davis Camp 305, Hines unfurled a Confederate battle flag in downtown Richmond, Virginia, to protest the dedication of a monument to black tennis great Arthur Ashe. He called the Ashe statue "a sharp stick in the eye of those who honor the Confederate heritage."

Hines's protest reflected the brand of resentment found on the pages of America's major neo-secessionist publication, Southern Partisan, of which Hines was managing editor for nearly two decades. Southern Partisan served partly as a forum for historical revisionism that cast Lincoln as a villain; in 1984 Hines himself penned a paean to Preston Brooks, the secessionist South Carolina congressman who caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1854 for his speeches against slavery. The magazine also acted as Hines's instrument for connecting sympathetic political movers and shakers to the neo-Confederate base. Hines arranged a 1993 Partisan interview with Washington Times senior editor Wes Pruden, whose father, Wes Pruden Sr., as the chaplain of the Little Rock White Citizens Council, led resistance to the integration of Central High School in 1957 with the cry: "That's what we've gotta fight, niggers, Communists and cops." In 1997 Hines interviewed Senator Trent Lott, who as a young congressman convinced Reagan to initiate his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Klansmen had murdered three young civil rights workers in 1964. In 1998 Hines chatted with Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, who praised Hines and the Partisan for "setting the record straight," a comment that nearly doomed his nomination as Attorney General when it was dredged up during his confirmation hearings in 2001. In the year before Bush's election, Southern Partisan advertised the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with a Confederate flag shaped like a Republican Party elephant beside the phrase "Lincoln's Worst Nightmare!"

By 2000 Hines was positioned to help rescue George W. Bush's flagging presidential candidacy from the jaws of defeat with an inspired dirty-tricks campaign. When Bush arrived in South Carolina in May, he was licking his wounds from a stunning defeat in New Hampshire to John McCain. For Bush, who needed to win the South to gain the nomination, the South Carolina primary was do or die.

Hines's link to the Bush campaign was Bush's South Carolina spokesman Tucker Eskew, a local protégé of the legendary dirty-tricks master from the Palmetto State, Lee Atwater. Eskew was in constant contact with another former Atwater protégé, Karl Rove. Hines turned an unregistered political action committee called "Keep It Flying," which he created to fight the NAACP's attempts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, into a vehicle for the Bush cause. He sent out 250,000 fliers that he signed with his own name accusing McCain of "changing his tune" on the Confederate flag and describing Bush as "the [only] major candidate who refused to call the Confederate flag a racist symbol." In fact, in a January appearance on Meet the Press, McCain had called the flag "a symbol of heritage" and an issue "to be settled without interference from presidential candidates." Regardless, the tactic succeeded brilliantly. In the wake of the mailing Bush surged ahead of McCain and defeated him in the primary. Bush finally returned his debt of gratitude late last year, when he appointed Hines's wife, Patricia, to the National Committee on Libraries and Information Science.

Hines's direct-mail campaign might not have been so timely were it not for the political atmospherics that his close allies in South Carolina had generated. In January 2000, immediately after the NAACP announced a tourist boycott of South Carolina, Hines's college buddy Roger McCredie marshaled groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens at the state Capitol in Columbia to rally around the flag. Six thousand people showed up, many waving Confederate battle flags and dressed in Civil War-era battle uniforms. Compared with the 50,000 who marched through Columbia earlier that month for the flag's removal, it was a paltry turnout. Yet the rally demonstrated a residual level of vitriol toward Confederate flag opponents. State Senator Arthur Ravenel drew gales of applause when he blasted the NAACP as "the National Association of Retarded People."

Lurking in the shadow of the grandstand throughout the rally was a scraggly man oddly wearing a top hat--one of Hines's most important political allies. Kirk Lyons earned far-right celebrity status in 1988 for successfully defending white supremacist Louis Beam against a sedition charge of plotting to overthrow the government by force in order to set up an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest. Lyons's ubiquity as a legal counsel to white supremacists and a speaker at neo-Nazi events prompted the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify him in 1991 as one of the top ten "Leaders in Today's White Supremacy Movement." Lyons dreamed of resurrecting the white supremacist movement as a more sophisticated incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. "I have great respect for the Klan historically, but, sadly the Klan today is ineffective and sometimes even destructive," Lyons told a German neo-Nazi magazine in 1992. "It would be good if the Klan followed the advice of former Klansman Robert Miles: 'Become invisible. Hang the robes and hoods in the cupboard and become an underground organization.'" When Lyons discovered the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he realized he didn't have to go underground after all.

If you want to know more about this part of the right, Anti-Neo-Confederate is a good resource. The blog savvy will be frustrated that there are no permalinks or rss feeds; but it's valuable content from an authority on the subject. One of Edward's recent posts offers a who's who among the Neo-Confederate groups. Another one describes the rise of anti-Semitism in the Neo-Confederate movement—a trend in far right groups across the board, it seems. There's much, much more there, as well as links to Edward's other web pages. Of particular interest is Edward's page for tracking how political candidates do and don't align themselves with the Neo-Confederates.

UPDATE: added link to Max Blumenthal's article.

UPDATE 12/19: Edward Sebesta has moved his blog over to blogger in order to improve our access to his contnet. The new url is: http://newtknight.blogspot.com. Links have been modified, above. Some of the Anti-Neo-Confederate content mentioned, above, is still only available at Edward's old blog, which is therefore still worth visiting.

It's All Back

Typepad, the hosting service for this blog, was having some problems after some routine maintenance last night. As a result the last few days of my posts disappeared for most of the day today. Sorry for the confusion if you followed a link over here and did not find what you were looking for. Everything is all better now.

Wow. Secret Laws.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gilmore is suing the Justice Department because he does not believe the law requires him to fly with ID. What is the DOJ's defense? That there is a law requiring IDs, only it's secret and they can't tell anyone what it says.

Really. I'm not kidding.

The Bush administration...claims that the ID requirement is necessary for security but has refused to identify any actual regulation requiring it.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration's defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.

"How do we know there's an order?" Judge Thomas Nelson asked. "Because you said there was?"

....The Justice Department has said it could identify the secret law under seal, which would be available to the 9th Circuit but not necessarily Gilmore's lawyers. But any public description would not be permitted, the department said.

(Via Kevin Drum via Talk Left.)

Also see John Gilmore's website about the case and the issues involved.

Heartbreak

My writing for this blog has been lighter for a little while now. That's not the reason for my title, but in case you were wondering, these are some of the things I've been doing instead of writing lengthy posts:

• three weeks of work on that article in In These Times
• a follow up piece, currently in the works
• a contract research job
• a flurry of job applications and interviews
• shepherding a special issue of Dollars & Sense

Writing less means that though I'm still reading a lot of blogs, many things slip by that under other circumstances I'd be blogging as I saw them. One such thing was yet another amazing blog post by Clayton Cubitt, this one about going back to McKain Street in New Orleans, the spot now nestled under the I-10 highway ramp that is still home to the shotgun shack where his grandmother lived almost her whole life and where she raised his mother and his aunt. I'm not going to quote it, just go read it and check out the photograph. It's heartbreaking, but it is also gorgeously elegiac. The post is about a month old, but as far as I can see, only two other people have linked to it. It's got the timelessness of art, which means that telling you about it now is still timely.

There isn't really a neat way to write about the other kind of heartbreak my title refers to. I don't know how many people check the comments over here, but one byproduct of my urge to document underpublicized injustices is that others who are suffering similar circumstances occasionally write in with own experiences, sometimes because they are desperate for help or even just because no one else seems to care.

The single post that's gotten the most of these kinds of comments is More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison, posted at the end of September. In October, I got two comments from people who had loved ones in Orleans Parish Prison at the onset of Katrina. And then last night, I received three more comments (from two people).

It has been more frequent than not that when I've known small ways to help Katrina survivors who contact me here, it's been impossible to reach them with the information they might need. In one case, for example, Juana Bourgeois said she was looking for her friend Byron Joshua. Angela Wessels from the Southern Center for Human Rights helped me determine what prison Mr. Joshua was relocated to (turns out he is one of the Coleman 900), but I was not able to reach Juana to give her the information.

On one of my posts, about the the class action suit brought by Katrina survivors against FEMA, got this wrenching comment from JeanMarie Arend:

I was filing for disability in La. at time of hurricanes Rita and Katrina. I relocated to MN. I still haven't got any housing or financial assistance. On Nov. 2 2005 it was inperative that I have a anterior cervical dysectamy and fushion with them putting in a steel rod. The vertabra affected are c-4,c=5,c=6. I suffer from partial paralysis in my arms and hands, as well as suffer from extreme headaches. Yet I am still homeless and penniless. The medical assistance I get from the state of MN. does not cover my teeth which due to the injury are broken off and abcessed. And the state of MN. allowed me 203.00$ per month which they are now taking away as of Dec. 2005, although just the healing on the surgery will be 1 and 1/2 years. I can not work and I can not get help from anywere. And yes I am filed with FEMA. They are sending me mail with my astranged husbands number on it although I have my own FEMA number I must use to refer to my case.I call them weekly and have been told 3x now to fax certian papers in which I do and yet they never get to my file.HELP ME PLEASE DISABLED IN MN> P.S. yes I refiled here in MN for my disability.

I emailed JeanMarie back immediately, but my message bounced. I think her comment is for real, since my sitemeter showed that she was writing from Minnesota and that she found HungryBlues by googling "free disaster relief for katrina victims with disabilities." I wanted to tell her that I have a friend in Minnesota who has formed a People's Hurricane Relief Fund Solidarity Group. One of the things that PHRF Solidarity Groups do is locate evacuees in their area and help them organize and obtain resources that they need.

Last night's messages were from Anicia Chatters, who is looking for a friend of hers who was in Orleans Parish Prison before Katrina, and Sherre Boteler, whose husband has been stuck in jail for 125 days, waiting for a trial for a crime she does not believe he committed.

my husband was in orleans parish jail also on a rape charge that he didnt do.....i have evidence that he was lied on and falsely arrested and still cant get help for him.....also my husband is very ill and they knew that and still left him there to die. he was also left out in the rain on the field at hunts [info]. it is all true! he has been to 3 prisons since hurricane and has been incarcrated now for 125 days just waiting to go to court.

The heartbreak is not that Ben Greenberg feels helpless to do anything for individuals who've contacted him. Rather, it's that these glimpses of individual tragedies is most of what we get to know about the lives of those worst affected by Hurricane Katrina and that each fragment of a story that we hear can be multiplied by thousands.

Sherre Boteler gets the last word:

you know what i dont understand about our "great mayor"...lol ray nagin....he's more worried about the city having mardi gras and hearing people parting in the streets than geting help for these men and women that they left to die in the wake of a cat. 5 hurricane. what a joke he is!! who gives a damn about mardi gras? and the city rebuilding for the partiers.... we want out family members back ! i have not sen my husband in 4 months. it took me 8 days to even find out that he was still alive after the hurricane. i lived from shelter to shelter all alone for 8 weeks with not even help from fema....because they are a joke too. the entire government is a joke! the "declartion of independence" says all men and women are to created equally. DOSENT THAT COUNT FOR THE ONES IN JAIL ALSO.....THEY SAVED THE ANIMALS BUT TREATED OUR HUSBANDS, MOTHERS, FATHERS, BROTHERS, AND SISTERS WORSE. WHO IS GONNA STAND UP AND BE MEN AND SAY THEY WERE WRONG....and now they are saying it may be another 6 months to a year before anyone even sees a court room. they say they lost their evidence on the cases they had well, i have proof of my husbands innocense and they still dont care. but they gonna have mardi gras! WHAT A JOKE! "I'LL NEVER GO BACK!"

Outrage To Action

Chris Clarke, December First is "Blog Against Racism" Day:

Intentions are all well and good, but more important are the assumptions from which those intentions spring. Garbage in, garbage out: bad information times good intentions equals bad results. And those results are the most important thing of all.

David Neiwert, New Orleans: racial cleansing?

Recall, if you will, the vicious outpouring of racial hatred by New Orleans' most noted white supremacist, David Duke, and his fellow white supremacists in the wake of the disaster. Recall how much of the mainstream media coverage -- rife with images of black looters and tales (later proven false) of shootings, rapes, and multiple murders -- fed that outpouring....

As it happens, much of what white supremacists want to see happen to the city is, in fact, what is happening....

[S]ure enugh, a couple of months ago, HUD administrator Alphonso Jackson made clear that the city's demographics were indeed going to be reordered in the rebuilding:

"Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time," he said. "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

... Alphonso Jackson predicted New Orleans will slowly draw back as many as 375,000 people, but that only 35 to 40 percent of the post-Katrina population would be black.

Jackson said that's because the worst-hit areas were low-income black neighborhoods that may never fully be repopulated.

Prior to Katrina, the population was 67 percent black and 28 percent white.

People's Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition:

Hurricane Survivors Assembly & March for Human Rights

Who: Representative Gulf Coast hurricane survivors and evacuees will converge will their allies in over 50 grassroots organizations which make up The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition and The Mississippi Distress Relief Coalition. Together, they will share, heal and develop plans for organizing to move forward in their struggle for justice after Katrina.

What: The Gulf South Youth Assembly, The Gulf South National Assembly and The March for Human Rights.

Why: This will be the first assembly that provides those most negatively impacted by Katrina and its aftermath a chance to participate in developing national solutions for their own futures. A declaration of the people will be drafted and presented to Congress in an upcoming hearing sponsored by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, 11th District GA. These events will unite the movement of survivors, who continue to have their basic civil and human rights eroded away, as they build a sustainable and comprehensive plan for rebuilding their communities and lives.

Schedule:

December 8, 2005, Thursday
Business School of Jackson State University, 1300 Lynch St. Jackson, MS room 134
7-11 pm ~ Gulf Coast Youth Assembly: Youth speak out on Katrina

December 9, 2005, Friday
Anderson United Methodist Church, 6405 Hanging Moss Road
9am – 6pm ~ Survivor’s Assembly and Conference
8pm – 11pm ~ Rally and Cultural Program featuring Amira Baraka, Sonya Sanchez, Dead Prez and more

December 10, 2005, Saturday
Congo Square, North Rampart And St. Phillip Streets, New Orleans, LA
12:30 pm ~ Survivor’s March for Human Rights, Self Determination and The Right to Return.

For this story and more, please visit www.katrinainfonet.net, a project of the Katrina Information Network (KIN). KIN is an information and action clearinghouse. KIN shares expert viewpoints and action from the communities that have been devastated by Katrina, with up-to-the minute news and analysis.

Friday Random Ten

Parliament, Side Effects

M. Ward, Scene From #12

Louis Armstrong, All Of Me (Big Band)

Antony And The Johnsons, I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy

Peewee Russell / Coleman Hawkins, If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)

Billie Holiday, I Cover The Waterfront (Commodore Master Takes)

The Album Leaf, Moss Mountain Town

Charlie Christian, Poor Butterfly

Nina Simone, Backlash Blues

Paul Simon, Think Too Much (I)

Friday Random Ten

Wilco, Misunderstoond (Kicking Television - live)

Ella Fitzgerald, How Long Has This Been Going On? (w/ Ellis Larkins)

Teddy Bunn, Bachelor Blues

The Legendary K.O., George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People

Ray Charles, Rockhouse

James Brown, There Was A Time (I Got To Move)

Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham, Al., May 1963
("Keep this movement going. Keep this movement rolling. In spite of the difficulties, and we're gonna have a few more difficulties, keep climbing. Keep movin'. If you can't fly run. If you can't run walk. If you can't walk crawl. But by all means keep moving.")

Woody Guthrie, Roll On

Elliott Smith, Twilight

Budowitz, Ukraynishe Kolomeyke

"If we're so smart and have all the answers, how come the movement is so small?"

Last month, I posted about Wade Rathke's self-seving, racist attack on Curtis Muhammad, Community Labor United, and the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Though I posted Open Letter to the Labor Movement, an important response from a group of activists, I never got around to the further commentary I had promised. In the meantime, one of the signers of the Open Letter, Marsha Steinberg, has written a response of her own, much stronger than anything I could have done, in the wake of a supposed apology from Rathke to Muhammad. Immediately following Marsha's comments is the "apology" from Rathke, to which she is responding.

Marsha Steinberg to Wade Rathke:

Your apology to Curtis Muhammad again badly misses the point!

It is not personal attacks that are the most relevant although I personally doubt your explanation of "being over the top" because Chalabi was a liar and a thief, facts which I am sure you knew when you wrote the piece. It is the attack on CLU and The People's Hurricane Relief Fund ("couldn't organize a two car funeral") that deserve an apology. I personally believe that the attack was done in a personal fit over the fact that a coalition of community based, African American led, groups without staff or union money had out organized you and you felt free, as a white male, to attack them without fear of rebuke. How could they have accomplished some thing that you hadn't; specifically getting recognition in the national progressive movement here and in Europe as the legitimate voice of the poor backs of New Orleans which you think of as your personal turf. The arrogance and racism of the comments continue to send me "over the top".

As a SEIU staffer I see the same syndrome every day. White, mostly male, leadership at the top, feel free to plan for the lives of the membership of a union that is overwhelmingly poor, mostly female, people of color. They remain convinced that in every situation they know better than the members themselves and the field staff, what the members need and should care about. Only they know how to plan and build for the future. Again, what racist crap!

At some point the continued top down approach of the ACORNS and SEIUs will either have to be abandoned and genuine leadership be allowed to emerge and be nurtured with real education, training and sharing of the members resources or this country will continue it’s descent into fascism and barbarism.

I call on all white progressive activists to see this approach for what it is and understand that we must be prepared to relinquish the privilege and the right to lead that has come to us from a racist and classist country built on the labor of those without power or privilege. We must ask ourselves: if we're so smart and have all the answers, how come the movement is so small? We must accept the right of community-based groups to lead and speak for themselves. We must share our skills and resources generously. We must call racism when we see it. “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

Still today, white areas of New Orleans have electricity at least part of the day while the adjacent black areas have none. Whites are returning to the city while black males convicted of no crime are held hidden in jails throughout the South. Wade, why don't you write an over the top piece about that?

I came to labor as a long time community organizer because with a dues base, that's where all the money is. I was actually shocked to see the disregard for the members’ priorities and the 'we know what's best' attitudes.

I call on organized labor to examine its pract