I am so mad at this. I can't even begin to write how mad I am. I will begin an email campaign. I really hope that maybe we can get a large progressive organization to hold it's debate on the same day in order to put the CBC and Fox on the spot.

Fox Sets 2 Debates With Congressional Black Caucus

In a statement accompanying the Fox announcement, chairman of the C.B.C., Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said this:
“As a leading organization dedicated to educating the public on issues of national policy, the CBC Institute is committed to presenting the presidential candidates to the broadest audience possible.”
“Our goal with each debate is to provide a platform that will allow voters to hear the positions of candidates from both political parties. Collaborating with FOX News provides an opportunity to take this presidential election to millions of households.”

According to Fox:

The first of the two debates will be among Democratic candidates and will be held on September 23rd at the Fox Theater in Detroit. The second debate will be among Republican candidates and will take place in the fall of 2007 at a location to be determined. Both debates will serve as a forum for the candidates to make their platforms known.

The CBC thinks this debate will get the GOP to talk about civil rights and issues of color. Instead it will give Foz another opportunity to run their tired old line that "Democrats take the Black vote for granted" and "How more and more Blacks are becoming Republicans" (statistics don't back this up), yada yada yada. The CBC just gave their progressive base the middle finger!

This isn’t the first time the C.B.C. has paired with Fox. It did so in 2003 as a runup to the 2004 election cycle.
The C.B.C. sent out its own release announcing the debate schedule. And it also provided toward the end, a justification perhaps, for this deal:
Fox News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour general news service covering breaking news as well as political, entertainment and business news. For five years, FNC has been the most watched cable news channel in the nation and currently presents 9 out of the top 10 programs in cable news. Owned by News Corp., FNC is available in more than 85 million homes.

Bringing back home in New Orleans. The devastated Lower 9th Ward is still beautiful to two sisters with deep roots there. They're rebuilding not just houses but their neighborhood.

Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.

It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.

And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.

To them, the "Lower 9" is still beautiful. In her mind's eye, Harris is fishing with her grandfather in Bayou Bienvenue at the end of the street where his house stood. She and her sister are sitting on his front porch "door-popping," their grandfather's term for playful gossip and people-watching.

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CULTURE

How did a sport with so much support amongst African-Americans for most of its History, come to this? Where most
inner-city schools lack funding, equipment to support baseball programs

Their coach, Marcus Rogers, would have preferred them to have been playing or practicing Saturday on a baseball diamond, like many of the rest of Shelby-Metro's top high school baseball programs.
Instead, the Fairley Bulldogs spent Saturday morning and most of the afternoon gathered near the front entrances of a Whitehaven Wal-Mart, hustling team baseball cards for $10 a pop to raise money for transportation, equipment and other key needs for the Bulldogs' 2007 baseball season.

"Man, I'm ready to be through with this stuff and to concentrate on just baseball, but it's kind of hard. You've got to have money to do this."

As Saturday's inaugural Civil Rights Game at AutoZone Park commemorating the civil rights movement and baseball's role in it approaches, Rogers, reflecting on his own team's plight and those of the other predominantly black high school baseball programs in the city, described the harsh reality that faces today's inner-city teams.

Unlike their predominantly white county school counterparts that typically clobber the Bulldogs every postseason, Fairley has no baseball booster club, leaving Rogers and his players on their own when it comes to raising money for basic team needs.

Rather than practicing or playing, the Bulldogs have spent much of the early part of this season selling $10 team baseball cards that offer discounts and benefits at area businesses.

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For Some Black Pastors, Accepting Gay Members Means Losing Others

When the Rev. Dennis Meredith of Tabernacle Baptist Church here began preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians a few years ago, he attracted some gay people who were on the brink of suicide and some who had left the Baptist faith of their childhoods but wanted badly to return.

At the same time, Tabernacle Baptist, an African-American congregation, lost many of its most loyal, generous parishioners, who could not accept a message that contradicted what they saw as the Bible’s condemnation of same-sex relations. Over the last three years, Tabernacle’s Sunday attendance shrank to 800, from 1,100.

The debate about homosexuality that has roiled predominantly white mainline churches for years has gradually seeped into African-American congregations, threatening their unity, finances and, in some cases, their existence.

In St. Paul, the Rev. Oliver White, senior minister of Grace Community Church, lost nearly all his 70 congregants after he voted in 2005 to support the blessing of same-sex unions in his denomination, the United Church of Christ.

In the Atlanta area, a hub of African-American life, only a few black churches have preached acceptance of gay men and lesbians, Mr. Meredith said. At one of those congregations, Victory Church in Stone Mountain, attendance on Sundays has fallen to 3,000 people, from about 6,000 four or five years ago, said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, the senior pastor.

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Who's gifted? Miami-Dade schools are expanding gifted programs to better represent poor and black students. In Broward, and across the state, Black and poor students are less likely to be identified as gifted.

Their high IQs are their rudders, propelling them through a challenging subject with little guidance or explanation from their teacher.

This gifted class, like others across the Broward County public school district, offers intense, advanced lessons in unique ways to teach students who need an outside-the-box, abstract approach to traditional subjects.

But identifying gifted students is inconsistent, and poor and minority students are often overlooked. Despite Broward's efforts to diversify gifted classes, the numbers show students who are poor or black are the least likely to be recognized as gifted.

Forty-one percent of Broward students are from low-income families, yet poor students make up only 19 percent of the district's gifted classes.

''There is a belief system in this society that being gifted and being a minority or being from poverty don't go together,'' said Joyce VanTassel-Baska, president of the National Association of Gifted Children.

And it may get worse.

Like many other districts, Broward and Miami-Dade allow some leeway for minority and poor students who score less than the 130 IQ score required for gifted. This is because poor students and those learning English may do well on parts of an IQ test but may not be able to score well on areas requiring strong reading and verbal skills.

''These kids really may be extremely bright, but have not had the opportunities other students have had,'' explains Beth Klein, a Weston clinical psychologist.

But Florida is poised to do away with those accommodations. To get into gifted programs, students who score lower on IQ tests will have to score high on the FCATs and other achievement tests -- ones requiring strong reading skills -- regardless of whether they are poor or learning English.

Look no further than the number of gifted students enrolled in some of the county's poorest schools to understand the disparity among gifted classes. At 33 schools where at least half the students are poor, 10 or fewer students have been identified as gifted.

At Sunland Park Elementary in Fort Lauderdale, for example, where 86

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ABC Family Takes Drama to Daring, New Heights Russell Hornsby is all over the map. He's making movies, shooting a TV drama — ABC Family's Lincoln Heights, which airs a new episode tonight at 7 pm/ET —

TVGuide.com: What do you like most about playing Eddie?
Hornsby: I like the fact that he is three-dimensional, that I get to show both sides, because there aren't many African-American dramas on television that are dealing specifically with the black man. To look at this black man as a well-rounded character and see that this is a man who has integrity, heart, humanity and a sense of soul and spirit about him, that's the most fun for me. I modeled Eddie Sutton after my two uncles who live in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts. They both work in law and government — one is a judge and the other is a constable — and they grew up in the ghetto. They went away to college, but they came back. The judge is now sending friends of his, or their sons and daughters, to jail. I sat in his courtroom and what I saw was that people had respect for him, because not only did he stay, but he was fair. My uncle who's a constable has to evict old friends and their kids from their apartments, because they haven't paid in three, four, five or six months. When you have examples to draw from, it's a much richer experience.

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POLITICS
Patrick Shaped by Father's Absence. As a child, Deval Patrick endured the painful absence of his father, Pat Patrick, a talented sax player who traveled the world with the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra.

He was 18 years old and his family was gathered in the crowded Milton Academy gymnasium on a rainy summer morning in 1974 to watch him graduate. Suddenly, his father, who had largely abandoned the family 15 years earlier and had seen his son rarely, showed up unexpectedly. Deval was not happy to see him.

Patrick's family -- his mother, grandparents, and sister -- sat though the ceremony rigid with tension, angrily eyeing Pat Patrick at the end of the row. And then as they all drove in his grandfather's Buick toward a restaurant to celebrate, his parents began to fight. They screamed at each other, and curses flew. Patrick senior, an emotional man who had opposed his son's attending the elite private school, broke into tears.

Through it all, Deval sat quietly in the front seat. When the car stopped at a light he got out, slammed the door, and stamped back to his dorm.

"It was a disaster," the governor recalled in an interview in his State House office. "I am thinking, this is supposed to be my day. . . . I just bailed."

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Why is there so much racial profiling allowed in Jury cases? St' Louis County is about 50/50 Black and White. So how do you get a jury (twice) that is so far from the demographic medium? The victims in this case were Black so it's not that the Prosecution wanted Whites to be outraged and choose the Death Penalty. It seems that many prosecutors (in my opinion) don't think Blacks are tough enough on crime. For the second time in less than a year, the Missouri Supreme Court has struck down a death sentence over concerns that St. Louis County prosecutors removed blacks from juries for "racially discriminatory reasons."

Both cases involved the same defendant, Vincent McFadden, 26, but separate death sentences were recommended by separate juries for separate murders.

Assistant Public Defender Janet M. Thompson, who argued the case, said the decision, announced Tuesday, reflects a pattern of excluding blacks.

She said her office has unsuccessfully sought data from judges on the rate at which blacks are excluded in St. Louis County juries, and is now calling for lawyers to create their own tracking system.Advertisement
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and an assistant were too busy to talk about the case, an employee said Tuesday.

Mark Bishop, who prosecuted both cases for McCulloch's office and is now in private practice, said there was no policy to exclude blacks.

"My hands are tied as far as giving my real opinion about the decision," he said. "I do want to point out that every one of McFadden's victims was African-American. Every witness was African-American. My whole focus was to get justice for these victims. It doesn't matter to me if they're African-American or not. It does not matter to me if he's African-American or not."

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ARIANNA HUFFINGTON writes a strong editorial in the L:A Times dealing with the fact that " Democratic presidential candidates crave the Latino and black vote, but ignore the Drug War's unfair toll on people of color." Her editorial is titled:
The war on drugs' war on minorities

THERE IS A subject being forgotten in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.

While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed "war on drugs" — a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.

Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them — not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson — even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.

The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.

Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.

As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community's most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.

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INTERNATIONAL
Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears

Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.

The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will take a lot, lot longer to change.”

In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.

At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.

A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.

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Zimbabwean Opposition Leader Released

The country's main opposition leader was freed after being held by police for several hours, party officials said Thursday, as southern African leaders gathered in Tanzania to discuss the crisis in Zimbabwe.

Police denied arresting Morgan Tsvangirai as he prepared to talk to reporters about a wave of political violence that left him briefly hospitalized.

State media reported that police had seized weapons and explosives at the party's headquarters during a raid.

Officials with the Movement for Democratic Change denied the allegations.

''The MDC does not have any arsenal of weapons or armed movement; the story is not credible,'' said Tsvangirai's aide, Eliphas Mukonoweshuro.

He said the opposition was not waging an armed terror campaign against the government, as authorities had claimed. Police had said they arrested a total of 35 opposition members in recent days, saying they belonged

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Uganda's Early Gains Against HIV Eroding

Students packed a grassy field at Makerere University in April 1989 for a farewell concert by singer Philly Lutaaya. This symbol of swaggering virility had grown gaunt, with splotchy skin and the fine, sparse hair of a baby. He sang hauntingly, "Today it's me, tomorrow it's somebody else."

Between songs, he warned the stunned crowd that having several sex partners was a sure way to die in the age of AIDS, echoing pleas also made by political and religious leaders of the time. When Lutaaya died that December, at age 38, the country already had begun its historic reversal of the epidemic, researchers say, because of the power of that single, terrifying message.

Despite this success story, unmatched elsewhere on this AIDS-ridden continent, no country has entirely replicated Uganda's approach. Most instead have followed a diffuse palette of other remedies pushed by Western donors -- condom promotion, abstinence training, HIV testing, drug treatment and stigma reduction -- while forgoing what research shows worked here: fear and a relentless focus on sexual fidelity.

Even in Uganda, these key ingredients have been lost as a new generation coming of age years after Lutaaya's death indulges in the same reckless behavior that first spread the disease so widely.

"We saw him. We saw him die. We abandoned the girlfriends," said Swizen Kyomuhendo, a social scientist at Makerere, who was an undergraduate when Lutaaya spoke there. "When you look at the university students now, they are not as terrified as we were then."

The percentage of sexually active men with multiple partners has more than doubled in recent years, undoing earlier declines, surveys show. Reports of sexually transmitted diseases among women, another indicator of dangerous behavior, have risen sharply as well

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Welcome to Jerusalem, Africa

Ethiopia's Orthodox Christians are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. Their hymns and prayers have been preserved and passed down over the ages. But with its numerous religious holidays, the Christian tradition also worsens the country's grinding poverty.

From the air, Lalibela looks like any other village. An ocean of corrugated iron huts, shrouded by thin columns of smoke that condense into a bluish haze below the rocky plateau. It's a familiar sight all across Ethiopia.

But Lalibela isn't just another village. It's the capital of Ethiopia's Christians, their "holy place," their "wonder of the world." And nowhere else is this clearer than at Bet Gyiorgis, the Church of St. George. The monumental structure - chiseled out of the rocks on the town's western fringes - is some 800 years old. Built in the form of a cross, it is ringed by a dry moat that helps set it apart from the 10 other rock churches, all of which are interconnected by subterranean tunnels.

The interior is dimly lit with beef-tallow lamps. A little daylight filters through the narrow windows. The smell of incense hangs in the air. Elderly, bearded men in white robes are seated along the walls, reading handwritten bibles.

A pious murmuring resounds throughout the church, softly punctuated by harp music teased by a boy from his bagana - a wooden string instrument embellished with gleaming brass plates.

Some 40 percent of the 68 million Ethiopians are Orthodox Christians. Their faith and traditions hark back some 1,600 years. According to the legend, their church was established as the unintended consequence of a kidnapping. Two Christians named Frumentios and Aidesios - both residents of Tyre - were accosted on the Red Sea and abducted to Aksum, Ethiopia's capital at the time. Being educated people, they were soon installed as private tutors to the royal family. They not only taught the king's children mathematics and Greek, but imparted the fundamentals of their Christian faith as well.

Contemporary of Genghis Khan

And they were evidently persuasive. In the middle of the 4th century, King Ezana decided to become baptized. Just a few years later Christianity was proclaimed the state religion. Despite this, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was headed for centuries by a metropolitan who was appointed by the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria. It wasn't until the middle of the past century that the Ethiopian church became autonomous and appointed its own patriarch in Addis Ababa. Alongside the 17 eparchies in Ethiopia, bishoprics in Nubia and in Jerusalem now fall under his aegis.

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EDUCATION
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Morehouse the all Male, Historically Black College in Atlanta Georgia is going through some trying times. Morehouse Searches for a Leader and a Way to Keep Making Gains

Morehouse, the only all-male historically black college in the country, has long possessed an aura of impeccability and privilege. Founded to serve newly freed slaves, it has educated generations of the black elite, counting among its graduates Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta; David Satcher, a former surgeon general; the film director Spike Lee; and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But if its place in history is secure, Morehouse’s future has often, in the past decade, seemed precarious. And it will reach a milestone this spring, when Walter E. Massey, who became president in 1995, retires. Dr. Massey has been credited with helping the college rebound from hard times. As Morehouse searches for a replacement, many students and faculty members say the stakes are high if the college is to consolidate its gains.

When Dr. Massey took over, applications were declining because the country’s top colleges had stepped up their pursuit of qualified black men. The historic campus in the heart of Atlanta was aging. The endowment, at $118 million, is still relatively tiny; Swarthmore, a smaller institution, has more than $1 billion.

This year, applications are expected to reach 3,100, up from fewer than 2,700 last year. Four new buildings have been completed, and the ground will soon be broken for a fifth, a performing arts center.

Last year, the college took custody of the papers of Dr. King, bought with $32 million raised by Atlanta’s mayor, Shirley Franklin. And the college completed its largest fund-raising effort to date, a capital campaign taking in $120 million.

Not all the news has been good. In August, Morehouse dropped in an annual ranking by Black Enterprise magazine, from the top institution for African-Americans to No. 45. Dr. Massey said this was because the magazine placed more weight on graduation rates and used data from a Morehouse class that had a particularly low one.

The college has since introduced a scholarship for upperclassmen, to help increase the graduation rate, now at 61 percent. It has also received a $500,000 grant to recruit Hispanic students.

Over the summer, four former students were charged with murdering a current student in what prosecutors say was a robbery attempt. In September, students from Spelman, Morehouse’s sister school, marched on campus in protest after rumors of multiple rapes, which later proved unfounded, by Morehouse students. The result was soul-searching throughout the campus.

“The guys just felt, you know, that the world was collapsing,” Dr. Massey said. “I tried to put it in perspective” by explaining that the timing of the episodes was coincidental.

This year, Morehouse began requiring interviews for applicants, a move that some students on campus viewed as a response to the murder indictments, but that the administration says was done to match the practices of other exclusive colleges.

Naturally the college wants a new leader who will continue to raise its profile. But alumni and students, some of whom fret over the inroads of hip-hop and gangsta cultures on campus, have also wondered whether the choice of someone like the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, would signal a renewed emphasis on moral leadership. Mr. Butts, who is also president of SUNY College at Old Westbury, is one of the many influential black pastors still minted at Morehouse.

Other frequently mentioned candidates include Michael L. Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund; Robert Franklin Jr., a professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory; and John S. Wilson, a faculty member and former executive dean at George Washington University’s Virginia campus. All are, like Dr. Massey, “Morehouse men,” or graduates of the college.

Dr. Massey, a physicist who directed the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts under President George H. W. Bush, left the post of provost of the University of California system to return to Morehouse because, he said, he thought he could have a greater impact at a small institution. He said his goal was to push Morehouse into the ranks of the country’s top liberal arts colleges. But one of his first jobs on arrival was raising money.

“We really had not had, in 20 or 30 years, a capital campaign,” he said. “There was no focused and concerted effort to generate funds and support. But the name Morehouse always resonated positively, even though people didn’t know too much about it. Some people didn’t even know it was all-male.”

Playing on, and against, the much-discussed plight of young black men, Dr. Massey tapped celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, who has given $11 million during Dr. Massey’s tenure, and Ray Charles, who gave $2 million to the capital campaign. Other contributors include David Geffen, who gave $500,000.

Dr. Massey persuaded corporations like Bank of America, Motorola and American Express to think of their contributions as substantial investments rather than token support. All three became major givers. “We’re not a charity. We’re not a poor small struggling school in the South that’s going to fail if you don’t give it money,” Dr. Massey said, recounting his sales pitch. “I also make the case that not all black men are in danger of falling off a cliff.”

A sign that the college was meeting its academic goals came in 2003, Dr. Massey said, when a study by The Wall Street Journal ranked Morehouse 29th on a list of the top 50 feeder schools for the country’s most prestigious graduate programs, ahead of Emory, Brandeis, Reed and Washington University in St. Louis.

Still, Dr. Massey points out that despite its prestige, Morehouse is poor. Its endowment breaks down to $42,000 per student, compared with $360,000 per student at nearby Emory and more than $1 million per student at the wealthiest institutions.

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MONEY
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I have very mixed emotions on this one. On one hand I can see the employers point, but also employees need to make a living and how else can they improve their credit but to make more money? I guess this why Harry Truman wanted a handed economist.Credit checks: A civil-rights issue?

Lisa Bailey worked for five months at Harvard University as a temp entering donations into a database. When the university made the job a salaried position, Bailey, who is black, saw a chance to lift herself out of dead-end jobs.

Bailey's superiors encouraged her to apply, she says, but turned her down after discovering her bad credit history.

Bailey, with her lawyer, has lodged a complaint against Harvard charging racial discrimination. The reason: Studies indicate that minorities are more likely to have bad credit, but credit problems have not been shown to negatively affect job performance.

Some privacy and minority advocates are now seeing credit as a civil-rights issue as minorities start to fight employers and insurers who base decisions on credit histories. Their effort could slow the near doubling in credit checks by employers in the past decade, which affects millions of Americans who are struggling with debt.

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WEEK IN REVIEW, March 16-23 2007


Rep. Major R. Owens the former US House Rep. for NY's 11th District. was a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee. Rep. Owens also served on the Government Reform Committee. He wrote and editorial titled The Farm Subsidy Ripoff: A Test for the CBC

8,000 dollars is the maximum TANF subsidy that a family of four fortunate enough to live in a state with humane welfare policies can expect. 265,000 dollars is the limit that was proposed for each farmer as a cap for farm crop subsidies; however, this amendment was defeated in the 109th Congress on the floor of the House and there is presently no cut-off amount for the give-away to farmers.
During the brief period when some urban grassroots agencies were awarded federal community action grants the employees were often smeared as "poverty pimps"; however, a really deeply entrenched and enduring pimping system can be found in the elaborate structure of credit committees and old boy clubs under the sponsorship of the Department of Agriculture spread throughout the South, Midwest and West.

8,000 dollars is the maximum TANF subsidy that a family of four fortunate enough to live in a state with humane welfare policies can expect. 265,000 dollars is the limit that was proposed for each farmer as a cap for farm crop subsidies; however, this amendment was defeated in the 109th Congress on the floor of the House and there is presently no cut-off amount for the give-away to farmers.
In coordination with the payoffs to their Washington protection infrastructure this tiny constituency occupying less than thirty congressional districts is now mobilized for a renewal of the gravy train authorization. Reason and justice will not prevail unless the representatives of victimized taxpayers assume a counter-attacking posture and hold the line. CBC members represent families who are twice assaulted by the agriculture-industry complex greed. The bully farm lobbyists drain vital dollars away from safety net needs and also force urban dwellers to pay higher prices for food.

Irrational and emotional rhetoric lavishly applied by the Blue Dog Coalition members should be expected by C-Span viewers. Some of Washington's most convoluted logic will be on display by this powerful group which appears to promote government frugality by demonizing children on welfare while it fiercely fights for endless free lunches for agri-business fat cats. In the last congress CBC members from several southern states felt duty bound to support subsidy farm quotas since a few minority farmsteads may benefit. A simple survey, however, will expose the fact that no significant number of Blacks or poor farmers still participates in the division of the loot.

Read the whole editorial by Major Owens.

CULTURE

Ethnic Philanthropy & the Younger Generation

The Pathways study found that there are differences in giving among ethnic groups. African Americans give more to their churches, Latinos to community-based organizations, and Asian Americans to ethnic cultural institutions. What struck me most about the study, however, is that the major difference the researchers identified is between younger and older donors. Older donors, regardless of ethnicity, focused more on their own ethnicities. Younger donors (those under 40) think more broadly about community, and are less constrained by race and ethnicity. Instead of giving to a program that provides scholarships for their particular ethnic group, for example, they are more likely to give to a program that provided educational opportunities to children across a wide spectrum.

This generation gap among ethnic donors raises important implications for fundraisers. Donors who are under 40 now will no doubt be receiving a major portion of that $41 trillion transfer of wealth, at growing levels over the next few decades. As younger donors act differently in their giving than older donors, it is in a nonprofit’s best interest to expend considerable energy on creating messages that will inspire both generations.

In their continued strong push to get more Minorities to vote for the GOP, Georgia Republicans (with a few Dixiecrats) voted to off Thursday on a plan to create a Confederate heritage month, even as legislative leaders reacted coolly to a push to apologize for the state's role in slavery.

Sen. Jeff Mullis' bill would dub April as Confederate History and Heritage Month to honor the memory of the Confederacy and "all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause of Southern Independence."
The unanimous vote by the Senate Rules committee — which sent the plan on to the full Senate for consideration — comes days after black lawmakers announced plans to ask the state to officially apologize for its role in slavery and segregation-era laws.
Mullis, a Republican, said his bill was not a response to the slavery-apology movement.
"I'm from Chickamauga, so it seemed pretty appropriate for me to do something to commemorate the War Between the States," Mullis said. His family owned land at the site of the Battle of Chickamauga, the Civil War's second-bloodiest battle and the South's last major victory.

When I grew up and went to public school, I learned about the case of Emit Till, a young Black Man beaten to death for whistling at a White Women. I didn't realize I needed teachers protected by Unions to learn that this case helped touch of the Civil Rights movement. I was wrong because this story can't be taught in certain California charter schools, where it is seen as a case of Sexual Harassment. From the LA Times

Administrators at a Los Angeles charter school forbade students from reciting a poem about civil rights icon Emmett Till during a Black History Month program recently, saying his story was unsuitable for an assembly of young children.
Teachers and students said the administration suggested that the Till case — in which the teenager was beaten to death in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman — was not fitting for a program intended to be celebratory, and that Till's actions could be viewed as sexual harassment.
The decision by Celerity Nascent Charter School leaders roiled the southwest Los Angeles campus and led to the firing of seventh-grade teacher Marisol Alba and math teacher Sean Strauss, who had signed one of several letters of protest written by the students.
The incident highlights the tenuous job security for mostly nonunion teachers in charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run. California has more than 600 charter schools, and their ranks continue to swell. According to the California Teachers Assn., staff at fewer than 10% of charter schools are represented by unions. ..Alba said that when the principal informed the class that they could not recite their poem, she gave the example of a construction worker whistling at her as she walked down the street.
"She said that she would be offended by that and that what Emmett Till did could be considered sexual harassment," said Alba. "She used the phrase a couple of times and when I objected, she said 'OK, inappropriately whistled at a woman.' "
Many parents said their children affirmed that account. Marcia Alston, mother of a seventh-grader, called the school to say she was appalled at its interpretation of history and the treatment of the teachers. She said that in the conversation, the principal used the term "rude" to describe Till's actions.
"Mr. Strauss and Ms. Alba were excellent teachers," said Alston. "The fact that they and the students had signed a letter, I thought, was good; it was something they were passionate about and it could be used as a learning tool."
Verna Hampton, whose daughter was in Alba's homeroom and signed a letter, said she was especially offended that the incident occurred during Black History Month. Hampton said her daughter told her there was nothing offensive in the letter she signed.

Mos Def led off the spring American Songbook season at the Lincoln Center his socially conscious hip hop is the best out there.

Mos Def led off the spring American Songbook season with a concert that took the series as far from the antiquarian preservationism of Jonathan Schwartz as Mos Def has taken himself from You Take the Kids. When Mos Def first began acting, playing variations on the Dickensian cliché of the devilishly cute little street tough on various series and made-for-TV movies (working then under the stage name Dante Bezé), he was already experimenting with music at home, making up his own words to records by 1980s rappers such as Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, and De La Soul. "They happened together," he later said of the dual interests he has sustained throughout his career. "I started rhyming when I was nine years old, and I caught the [acting] bug in [elementary] school, so there's no separation to the genesis of all this." As an actor, he grew up on camera in both senses of the phrase, maturing to handle better and better roles in films, including Bamboozled, Monster's Ball, and The Italian Job, as well as on Broadway, in Topdog/Underdog. As a musician, too, he has shown a drive to set new challenges and meet higher standards with each of the four CDs he has recorded since 1998.
The first, the collaboration Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star, was most striking for its cynical take on the violence and posturing in hip-hop culture, though its beats and aural textures were typical for the day. His debut solo album, Black on Both Sides, released the following year, built on Mos Def's now-established strength as a lyricist with a compelling bravura rooted not in material conquest but in racial pride. Then, in 2004, came The New Danger, Mos Def's breakthrough as a musical artist. Picking up where the black-rock movement of the 1980s left off, he constructed a hybrid of hard rock, funk, and hip-hop--power chords, dance beats, and rap. Here and there between rhymes, he did a bit of singing--crowing, more like, in a scratchy tenor, but in tune or close enough, and with a palpable exhilaration in the making of unusual music. A follow-up in this vein, True Magic, was released last December, though Mos Def was already working on a greater breakthrough, experimenting in low-profile performances with ideas that took full form at Lincoln Center in January.
* * *
That concert was held in the Allen Room, a nightclubbish theater in the cheesy mall complex that houses Jazz at Lincoln Center. The space has a stunning view of Central Park South through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall behind the stage, and the scenery served well as a diversion as the show opened with a quartet (piano, electric bass, drums, and alto sax) repeating a one-chord funk pattern for several minutes. Just as the trees and the traffic lights began to lose their interest, the sound of a New Orleansstyle brass band blurted from the back of the room, and Mos Def marched the band down the aisles toward the stage. A gimmicky entrance, probably old stuff already at the turn of the last century, it always thrills. Mos Def took the center of the stage, dressed in perfectly weathered jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie, flanked by the eight players of the brass band standing in an arc, and he began to sing--well, with fervor, to what took shape as a variation on Nina Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You."
Then things got interesting. After singing a couple of verses, Mos Def switched to rapping over "I Put a Spell on You," improvising twists on the song's original lyrics interspersed with lines of his own. The piece set the scheme for the evening, an amalgam of jazz, pop, funk, and hip-hop, with bits of rock--essentially, the history of black music in America in one night. Only Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tried something more outlandish with their number "The History of Jazz in Three Minutes," and that was meant as a novelty. Mos Def was not joking here. He is charming and good at clowning between songs--at one point, he looked behind the stage and said, "I feel like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate!"--but in his music, he tends to be serious to the brink of solemnity.
"This is the American Songbook series," he reminded the audience. "So I have to do some American songs. I know some American songs." The drummer and bassist laid a funk pattern out for him, and Mos Def started to croon "America" ("My Country, 'Tis of Thee"), singing through the line "Land where my fathers died," which he repeated several times, emphatically. He rapped a bit and drifted into "The Star-Spangled Banner," picking up the anthem with the couplet "And the rockets' red glare/The bombs bursting in air," and he repeated that--and repeated it, louder each time, as the brass band countered the phrase with a terse, dissonant riff. With a bit too heavy a hand, perhaps, Mos Def made a musical collage of images heavily loaded, in every way, to take on America of the past and the present.

All the talk about Obama has generated (finally in my opinion) a lot of talk about Immigrant Blacks. Like this one
Black immigrants, the invisible model

DO AFRICAN immigrants make the smartest Americans? If you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to back it up. In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologist John Logan at the Mumford Center, State University of New York at Albany, black immigrants from Africa average the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians.
For example, 43.8 percent of African immigrants had achieved a college degree, compared to 42.5 of Asian Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population.
That defies the usual stereotypes of Asian Americans as the only "model minority." Yet the traditional American narrative has rendered the high academic achievements of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean invisible, as if it were a taboo topic.
Instead, we should take a closer look. That was my reaction in 2004 after black Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's African-American studies department, stirred a black Harvard alumni reunion with questions about precisely where the university's new black students were coming from.
About 8 percent, or 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, they said, but somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of black undergraduates were "West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples."
If we take a closer look, I said at the time, I bet we'll find that Harvard's not alone. With all of the ink and airwaves that have been devoted to immigration these days, black immigrants remain remarkably invisible. Yet their success has long followed the patterns of other high-achieving immigrants.
As one immigrant Jamaican friend once told me, "I'm too busy working two jobs to worry about the white man's racism."

Being the child of Jamaican immigrants stories like these tend to resonate with me.

Do movie critics give Black Hollywood movies fair treatment if they don't deal with "victims of racism, gansters, or dealing with Black peoples various relationship with White people?" Hollywood Reclaimed

That's the history Bryan Barber's extraordinary musical, Idlewild, sets out to rewrite. Starring André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton (who make up the hip-hop duo OutKast), the picture, set in Depression-era Georgia, pulls as much classic American movie iconography as it can manage into its generous, loving grasp and sends it back to us with a black face. In its messy, eager fashion, Idlewild wants to create the black Hollywood glamour that never was, the first-class black musicals and gangster films and love stories no one ever made -- all in one picture. No American movie last year conveyed more joy, more life, more affection for its characters.
It's a terrible irony that a movie standing in delirious opposition to a history of ill-use should suffer the same fate. Kept on the shelf for two years by Universal, which had no idea how to sell it -- a real failure of imagination, since OutKast was becoming ever-more popular in that time -- Idlewild was finally tossed into theaters during the dead days of late August 2006, traditionally a dumping ground for the films that fall between the summer blockbusters and the autumn prestige releases. It played for a few weeks (it's now available on DVD) and garnered some of the most clueless reviews in recent memory, the worst example of the obtuseness with which American film critics have greeted the African American movies that have emerged in the last few years.

NEWS

Three police officers surrendered Monday to face charges in the shooting that killed a groom, Sean Bell on his wedding day.

The policemen, accused of firing most of the 50 shots at three young men in a car outside a nightclub, were being fingerprinted and processed Monday morning before their arraignment.
Michael Oliver, who fired 31 times, and Gescard Isnora, who fired 11 bullets, face felony manslaughter charges, according to a person close to the investigation, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the results were secret. Marc Cooper, who fired four shots, faces a misdemeanor endangerment charge, the person said.
Grand jurors declined to indict on the more serious counts of second-degree murder, and attempted murder, or the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. Two other officers involved in the shooting were not indicted.
"We are a long way from a conviction," said defense attorney Philip Karasyk, who represents Isnora.
Prosecutors have declined to discuss the grand jury's work until the findings are officially released.
The Nov. 25 shooting killed Sean Bell and severely injured two of his bachelor party guests.
Police have said the officers were involved in an undercover investigation at the nightclub when they overheard a conversation that convinced them the men were going to their car to retrieve a gun. They have said that Bell's car hit the unmarked police vehicle and that the officers believed someone in Bell's car was reaching for a gun when they opened fire. No gun was found.
While relatives of the victims waited for the Queens district attorney to unseal the indictment Monday, some were angry about reports of a lavish weekend party involving one of the indicted men.
Oliver ran up a $4,200 bill at a restaurant with supporters feasting on $180 pasta with truffles and $575 bottles of wine, the Daily News reported Monday.
"I don't really know what he was celebrating," said Denise Ford, whose son Trent Benefield was shot and seriously wounded the night Bell was killed. A third friend, Joseph Guzman, also was wounded in the shooting.

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Police shooting are always some of the most difficult cases to deal with. On one hand we all know how difficult a job cops have, we also know that because of the higher crime rate in most Urban areas Blacks are often the most likely victims of crime. But issues such as racial profiling, and the constant mentality that all young Black Men are armed and dangerous, makes their job much more difficult. It's also good to see that unlike the former Fascist Mayor of NY City, this mayor showed sympathy to the victims family.

.Two Republicans Reject Urban League Invitation

Republican presidential candidates Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney are skipping the National Urban League's annual conference this summer, and league president Marc Morial wants them to know he's not happy about it.
"We're sending notice, not just to the Republicans, but to all the candidates, that you're not going to ignore us," said Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who has led the black civil rights organization since 2003.
Speaking with The Politico to make clear his displeasure, Morial said he found it puzzling that the former New York mayor and former Massachusetts governor would not address his organization in July.
"It's an opportunity for them to speak to a very influential audience before a nonpartisan organization that has a history of being fair and balanced," Morial noted. "It sends an incredible message that you're not even going to go to the Urban League," which will convene in St. Louis.
Considered to be more moderate than its contemporary civil rights group, the NAACP, the Urban League has drawn President Bush to its annual conference three times since he was elected in 2000, including in 2004, when Bush appeared a day after his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry. An Urban League spokesperson pointed out that Bush and former Vice President Al Gore attended the conference in 1999.

Remember after several high profile police shooting and butality cases Giuliani refused to meet with ANY Black elected official from NY. Even MODERATE ones from Queens. Romney will of course have from being a Rockefeller Republican to a Jesse Helm Republican by time South Carolina rolls around....

This story is just sad! In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.’

PARIS, Texas — The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.
There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.
Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the “black” side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she’s begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself “the best small town in Texas.”
“Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston,” Cherry said. “They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s.”
There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims’ family.
There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.
And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.
The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor–a 58-year-old teacher’s aide–was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.
Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

HISTORY

In two weeks, Manhattan Beach CA, city leaders and residents plan to gather at a small park by the ocean to lift the veil from a commemorative plaque, revealing a piece of little-known local history.

"This two-block neighborhood was home to several minority families and was condemned through eminent domain proceedings commenced in 1924," the plaque reads. "Those tragic circumstances reflected the views of a different time."
After debate last summer, the City Council voted to rename the park Bruce's Beach, acknowledging the African American couple who bought the land overlooking the Pacific in 1912.
There, Charles A. and Willa Bruce created one of the few places in Southern California where black families could swim and relax along its sun-bathed shores. They ran an inn called Bruce's Lodge, a cafe and a dance hall.
By the mid-1920s, city leaders contended that the land occupied by the Bruces' resort would better serve the community as a public park. The city used its powers of condemnation to buy the land from the Bruces and other nearby residents, removing most of Manhattan Beach's African American residents and visitors.
No park was built there for three decades...The city of 30,000 remains predominantly white — 89% in the latest census. Just 0.6% of its residents are black, only a small increase since 1970.
Brigham moved to Manhattan Beach from Los Angeles in 1939 at age 12 with his middle-class parents. He recalled riding through the city by bus and wondering why two blocks of seaside land sat barren, pockmarked with weeds and empty Coca-Cola bottles.
"I said to some of the adults, 'Why is it?' " said Brigham, 79. "They would put me off, saying, 'You don't want to know,' or 'You're too young' or 'I don't know.' "
Years later, as a Cal State Fresno graduate student in history, he set out to write his master's thesis on Bruce's Beach and returned to his hometown to ask old-timers the same question. Why is that land still vacant?
"There's a kind of tension," he said, "between people who are very conscious of the history of Bruce's Beach and those who would rather forget about the whole thing."
Brigham, who taught at Mira Costa High School for 38 years, learned that Willa Bruce bought the land in 1912 and that she opened the resort with her husband. Beachgoers flocked there from fast-growing black communities in Los Angeles. A few other black families built homes nearby.
"You would take the Red Car down to the beach and spend a day on the beautiful beach or rent a room if you desired," Miriam Matthews, Los Angeles' first black librarian, said in an essay prepared for the California African American Museum. The resort hosted Sunday school gatherings and families, and "if one tired of the sand and surf, the parlor was available for listening to music or dancing."
White resentment festered.
Beachgoers would find the air let out of their car tires, Brigham wrote in his 1956 thesis. Local members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to set fire to the resort's main building. Someone burned a cross nearby. White residents roped off the sands to keep blacks away.
Eleven years after the resort opened, city officials started condemnation proceedings, and its buildings were razed in 1927. The Bruces received $14,500.

POLITICS

Rethinking the NAACP

The resignation of Bruce S. Gordon as president and chief executive of the NAACP this month portends an important and long overdue shift in black America's struggle for racial justice.
Gordon resigned after only 19 months because he disagreed with the NAACP's board on the best focus for the historic civil rights group. Gordon wanted to direct more resources toward social service programs such as wealth-building, tutoring and pregnancy counseling. The board wanted to maintain its traditional emphasis on fighting racial discrimination and advocating for social justice.
No matter where one stands in this debate, Gordon's resignation signals a critical impasse. The civil rights old guard, represented by the board, seems stuck in a 1960s mind-set that expects a particular form of response from black America -- pushing for government action to remedy the effects of discrimination. This type of response was popular, successful and necessary during the civil rights movement and, in some cases, remains a powerful form of redress.
The successes and failures of the civil rights movement, however, fundamentally changed the country's racial landscape. Of course racial discrimination remains. But we have entered what has been called a post-civil-rights age that requires an array of strategies to address the complex problems many African Americans face.
Gordon sought to extend the reach of the NAACP to include another form of African American dissent: the politics of self-empowerment. Regrettably, the NAACP was not inclined to alter its long-standing approach. Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP board, rejects even the notion that we are in a post-civil-rights period, which requires imaginative and innovative struggle for social justice. Indeed, many current civil rights leaders fetishize the form of dissent most associated with the civil rights movement. They confuse principle with tactics. They behave as though marching and petitioning the government for redress of grievances is the only principled response to the maldistribution of burdens and benefits in our democracy. And they bristle at other forms of dissent, tactics designed to reach the shared goal of equality under law for all Americans. For many, it is either the old way or no way at all.

HEALTH

Longevity gap lessens for blacks

Whites still live longer than blacks, but the gap is shrinking, mainly because death rates are dropping for causes that have historically hit African-American communities particularly hard, HIV and homicide, researchers announced yesterday.
Average life expectancy among blacks rose from 69.2 in 1993 to 72.7 in 2003, while for whites it rose from 76.3 to 78 years, according to a study of mortality statistics released yesterday by The Journal of the American Medical Association.
That reduced the difference to 5.3 years, a historic low that is almost two years less than the gap recorded 10 years earlier, researchers at McGill University in Montreal determined.
Black life expectancy rose in part because of a reduction in homicides and better therapies for those with HIV, said Sam Harper, a McGill epidemiologist who was the lead author. In addition, heart disease rates for black women dropped, he said.
Nevertheless, Harper said, heart disease appears to be the main reason for the continuing gap between blacks and whites.
Writing in the journal, the authors say that narrowing the gap further will require concerted efforts to address all of the problems with an emphasis on heart disease.
"This suggests the need to place a lot more emphasis on cardiovascular disease as the major determinant in this gap," Harper said in an interview.

Their Water Was Poisoned by Chemicals. Was Their Treatment Poisoned by Racism?

DICKSON COUNTY, Tenn. Sheila Holt-Orsted sits on the edge of a sofa in her mother's living room, digging through the large translucent plastic bins arrayed at her feet. The Holt family's fight is in there -- the contaminated water, the cancers, the allegations of racism, the lawsuit. A family's seeming devastation, documented in those bins.
Papers are everywhere, spilling onto the sofa, the floor. Holt-Orsted, 45, burrows in deep. But the document she's looking for can't be found. "It might be in my bed," she says in a voice always verging toward laughter, and she trots off to check.
...She has had cervical polyps. Another of her daughters, Holt-Orsted's sister, has had colon polyps. Three of Holt-Orsted's cousins have had cancer. Her aunt next door has had cancer. Her aunt across the street has had chemotherapy for a bone disease. Her uncle died of Hodgkin's disease. Her daughter, 12-year-old Jasmine, has a speech defect.
They believe trichloroethylene, or TCE, is to blame for it all. The carcinogen leaked from the county landfill, just 500 feet away, and contaminated the Holts' well water. That fact is undisputed. For years, the family drank that water, bathed in that water, cooked in that water -- and had no clue that it might harm them.
Potted plants from Mr. Holt's wake still fill the Holt living room. A stack of albums and CDs recorded by his gospel group, the Dynamic Dixie Travelers, sits on a bookshelf. "I Feel Like My Time Ain't Long" was his favorite song.

Todays country is Trinidad and Tobago