Somehow, in the tangle of mixed economic news in the last week, this story slipped through the cracks.

“On every major measurement, [a new] Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially…. 

When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income-the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below-stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That’s a decline of 4.2 per cent.

That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

This damning report, showing that the Republican policies of the 2000’s absolutely devastated the American middle class in every measurable way, should be the final nail in the coffin for Republican policies.  We should not be listening to Republicans until they admit that they were wrong, and change their tune.  So far, the GOP is sticking to their dangerous and wrong “Tax cuts are good!  Spending is bad!” theme.

And for some reason, we’re forced to listen to blowhards like Glenn Beck and Charles Grassley.  They’re on TV all the time.  Why?  And we’re told that we need “bipartisanship.”  For some ridiculous reason, it’s not enough that we have 60 votes in the Senate and a massive majority in the House of Representatives and we have the White House, and a majority of governorships are held by Democrats.  So, what does it take to vote out Republican ideology?  When do we get to treat the Republicans like the fringe element that they are?

Some awful force keeps Americans dialed-in to the idea that building a strong social safety net – with fully universal health care – is “bad for the economy.”  I think it has to do with thinking that tax dollars shouldn’t go to help out “those people.”  And I think that a lot of Americans think that way, because Republicans have encouraged them to think that way for a long time.  That’s what we have to fight back against.  We don’t need bipartisanship.  We need to beat this wrongheaded Republican ideology – before it destroys what’s left of the middle class.

It took about six decades to build a vibrant middle class in America.  It only took Bush and the Republicans 8 years to blow it to smithereens.  Obama and the Democrats don’t have much time to turn that around.  Let’s get to work.

Oh, by the way, thanks for The Great Recession, Republicans!

California’s Department of Corrections said last month that it counted 2,245 adults and 53 children who are serving sentences in California prisons and are  currently deployed to fight the many wildfires burning across the state.

In 2008, people incarcerated in California prisons "collectively did 3.1 million hours of emergency firefighting… [for wages of] $1 an hour," according to Reuters news agency.

While California relies on this labor to fight fires, federal courts have said that California’s prisons are ridiculously overcrowded and have ordered the state to immediately release people.  Many have died as a result of the California’s cruel and unusual sentencing laws and the attendant overcrowding that results in horrific medical care and inhumane living conditions.

However, the California Fire Agency has stated that a proposed release of 27,000 "low-risk" people, as part of compliance with the federal court order, would significantly impact the state’s ability to fight fires.

Few democracies fit Weber’s description of the inexorable expansion of bureaucratic power better than postwar Japan.

For decades, the bureaucrats have held all of the real power in Japan. Pliant elected officials have usually merely signed papers and had almost no real authority at all. The last time the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (which is actually quite conservative and rather undemocratic) was forced from power, in 1993, they were easily outmaneuvered by entrenched interests and power brokers within the bureaucracy. The LDP returned to power after only a few months.

On Sunday, the LDP was swept from power again, for only the second time ever, by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The scale of the LDP’s defeat was surprising even as it was widely anticipated. The DPJ holds wide majorities in both houses of the Diet, and they will form a new government later this month.

In the past, the DPJ has been a haphazard collection of politicians from all sorts of personal and ideological backgrounds. Typically, the small and overwhelmed DPJ opportunistically took positions that ran counter to the LDP’s on any given issue, in a rather blatant attempt to get attention.

Now, though, at least some observers say that the newly victorious DPJ looks like it is capable of seriously making a run at the bureaucrats. They will need to, if they are to live up to campaign rhetoric of (clearly Obama-inspired) hope and change. The Prime Minister-elect has promised to unhinge Japan from pro-American neoliberal economic policies, to push back against globalization. He has also pledged to scale back the Japanese military buildup of the past decade. Both of these expansive and multifaceted goals have no hope in succeeding if the bureaucrats go unchallenged.

Japanese politics were extremely boring for a very long time, mainly because the election results were always the same (LDP wins), and the bureaucrats never had anything to worry about.  Policies changed little if at all from election to election.  Yawn.  That much — the unexciting nature of Japanese politics — has definitely changed.

Japan in the coming months will be very interesting to watch, not least to see whether Weber’s iron cage survives a challenge from some charismatic leadership.

Put another way, the next few months should determine to what extent Japan, or indeed any advanced industrial society, can rightly be called a democracy.  Stay tuned!

Dear Mr. President,

I write in support of a set of fully public insurance plans, to compete with insurance plans offered by private corporations. Any reform that passes the Senate without a public option will not be sufficient. The compromise currently proposed in the Senate, a "public cooperative," would not provide adequate competition with private insurers, and in the view of many economists is not an acceptable compromise for reform.

I feel very passionate about this issue, in large part because my sister is one of the millions of Americans who has a job in the wealthiest country in the world, and yet she has no access to health care. She has delayed going to the doctor for years. She lives in fear that a serious illness would bankrupt not only her, but our entire family. She would not be able to afford insurance even if a reform package offered her a subsidy to purchase an individual plan from a private insurer.

Without the competition a public option would offer against private insurers, the health insurance industry will continue to experience rapidly increasing costs. A public option would drive market-based regulatory pressures that would be more effective than any regulatory agency.  Without a public option, health insurance corporations will continue their abusive practices.

I strongly urge you to signal your intention to veto any reform package that does not include a robust public option. Thank you very much.

Erik Love

(Click here to send your own letter to the President, and equally important: click here to contact your two Senators.)

Erik Loves Technology is the internet’s first technology blog.  Well, at least the first one written by me, Erik Love.

Look, I love technology.  Gadgets, computers, calculator watches, inkjet printers – all of it.  But I’ve never had a place where I could unleash all of the amazing insights that I have on technological issues.  Until now.

I have to be honest: the new blog will be only occasionally updated.  I don’t want to be like the 500 billion other technology websites.  They all work so hard to comment on the latest trends, and they do a fantastic job of Overhype – paying a lot of attention to issues that deserve very little attention.  In the ensuing mess, the big tech blogs end up missing out on important technology that deserves attention.

So, I’ll take the long view.  I’ll find the issues that deserve your attention.  I’ll let you know about new stuff that you need to know.  I’ll have practical advice for your technologically infused lifestyle.  I’ll call out the Big Tech blogs when they lose their perspective.  Most of all, I’ll bring you pure passion – in a way that only true Love of Technology can.

Erik Loves Technology.  Bookmark and subscribe today.

So this company Spinvox is like, give us your voicemail password and your phone number, and our advanced software will listen to your voice messages and automagically convert them into text messages. Awesome, right? Turns out, what the company is actually doing is routing messages to call centers around the world, where non-computer workers (humans) transcribe your message. Apparently, the staff at one call center put some voice messages on Facebook the other day for the world to see. Sign me up, please!

[This article originally appeared at New Racial Studies]

Imagine, if you will, America in 2028.  By following the logic of Ross Douthat in his Op-Ed today, it’s easy to imagine that in just twenty years, the United States will no longer need to have a border with Canada.

America has made so much progress in this area, it’s not a hope, but an expectation that the border will cease to have any relevant meaning in 2028.  Since the enactment of NAFTA, more and more of America’s commerce is able to flow freely across the border.  And why not extend that policy to the movement of people across the border as well?  Canada has made tremendous strides in terms of economic growth.  Stopping terrorism was once a concern, but by 2028, we’ll have largely removed the need for border security.  Today many Americans still have difficulty accepting the idea of open borders, but in twenty years, that kind of ignorant thinking will be overshadowed by the changing nature of the world’s economy.

Now that you’ve wrapped your head around this patently ridiculous idea – that America’s international borders could vanish in less than one generation – go back and read Douthat’s article again.  Douthat, like a majority of Americans, believes quite strongly that race will vanish as a relevant social factor in just 20 years.  Indeed, many Americans would say they believe race is already irrelevant.

Sure, America is no longer the violent racist police state that it was before 1970.  Still, you need to have a large capacity for denial and self-delusion to believe that race has been vanishing since 1970.  Leaving aside the mountains of social science that indicate the persistence of race and racial discrimination, it’s easy to see for yourself how powerful race is in America.  Take a tour of some grade schools in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, or any major American city.  After that, visit the campuses of private schools in the suburbs.  Then, tell me with a straight face that when the students in these schools are adults, in 2028, that race won’t be a factor in their lives.

If the tour of American schools wasn’t enough to convince you, try driving down your street.  Chances are, you won’t see too many people who aren’t in the same racial group as yourself.  America is about as racially segregated today as it was in the 1950s.  Look around a neighborhood in a different part of town, and I’m guessing you’ll see that economic conditions are disturbingly correlated to the racial and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood.  Now that you’ve seen this, come back and explain to me how all of that won’t matter in 2028.  Be sure to explain how the process of getting a mortgage fits in to your answer.

Also, could you explain to me how we know that the border between the US and Canada won’t disappear in 2028?  Take the question seriously.  We know that the border will still exist because of the history of the United States and Canada – they’re durable nation-states.  The concept of Canada has been around since 1867 – that’s over 100 years.  The US has been around since 1776, over 200 years.  Those concepts – the idea of Canada and the idea of the United States, as bounded by their borders – couldn’t possibly just vanish in a quick 20 years!  Add the facts of the independent economic, political and cultural systems, and the creation of a combined US and Canada in 2028 is simply impossible to imagine, even if we devote every waking moment between now and then to making it a reality.

Now, I’m not trying to argue that the status of race in America is analogous to the relationship between the US and Canada (it’s not).  I’m just trying to point out that the reality of race – like the reality of the modern nation-state – is a powerful, meaningful, and durable reality.  Canada has been around since 1867.  White supremacy has been around since at least 1687.  White supremacy is still with us, and it will still be with us in 2028.

Social scientists have shown that today the average American white family has eight times the wealth of the average American black family.  Your life expectancy in America can be predicted by your racial group – because of racially different levels of access to health, and racially different exposures to toxic and dangerous environments.  Prisons hold one in nine young African American men.  Even the most optimistic projection would say that in twenty years, these facts will still be all too relevant.

Now, Douthat and his hero, Sandra Day O’Connor, would have you believe that even if we consider these realities, there will be no justification for affirmative action in 2028.  This is a different question, of course.  Not “will race matter in 2028?” but “will affirmative action be justifiable in 2028?”  If affirmative action really is just accepting the reality of racial discrimination, then acting in a manner consistent with that reality, then it will still be needed in 2028, just as it’s needed today.  There will still be a need to protect voting rights.  There will be a need to promote diversity in the workplace and in the schools.  There will be a need to regulate the banking industry to ensure that it doesn’t discriminate by race.  If this is “affirmative action,” then of course we’ll still need it in 2028.  We can have a debate over the ways that affirmative action should work, but we can’t have that debate unless everyone agrees that, yes, race does matter, and it will matter in the future.

When you ask just about any American about their hopes for race in the future, they’ll tell you they hope race won’t matter anymore.  It’s a noble goal.  It’s also about as realistic as hoping that money won’t matter any more.  Or hoping that we’ll be able to remove the border with Canada and Mexico.  We don’t need more denial about race.  If we want a better America in 2028, then what we need is to get real.

The point is simple – clichéd, even.  But this simple point is so often denied in the United States of 2009.  The point is that race matters.  More specifically, race matters in how we interpret the Constitution of the United States.  Debates over the constitution, especially at the Supreme Court, often willfully ignore or obscure the living and continued significance of race and racism.  The racial category you belong to plays a significant part in your life, if you’re an American, but American legal doctrine over the last several decades has refused to accept this fact.

Much as they did during the 1800s, today’s American courts allow entrenched racial discrimination to continue.  Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the courts used openly racist thinking to enforce policies like slavery, segregation, and whites-only citizenship.  Today, the courts use colorblindness to brush aside the reality of race and racism.  They overturn and restrict race-conscious policies designed to help alleviate racism faced exclusively by people who are identified as racial and ethnic minorities.  The courts can and should consider the impact of race when it deals with cases like voting rights, sentencing for drug use, law enforcement strategies that roundup random Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans, and the legality of practices and policies that drove nonwhite families into needlessly expensive “subprime” mortgages.  But instead, legal scholars (including a majority of the Supreme Court Justices) regularly disagree with the need even to recognize the mere existence of socially constructed race.

It’s not a coincidence that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court has already become contentious on the issue of race.  Sotomayor’s views on race and racism are becoming an object of public debate, thanks to coverage by national media (and thanks to well-publicized and ridiculous accusations that Sotomayor is herself “racist”).  Sotomayor’s rulings during her illustrious career show that while she’s hardly a radical, she does favor a reality-based judiciary that understands and considers the impact of race and racism.  Because of this (and in part because she is Latina), she has already faced more questions about race than any other nominee to sit on the Supreme Court than anyone else in quite a long time.  And she hasn’t even sat for confirmation hearings yet.

Before Judge Sotomayor arrives on Capitol Hill for confirmation hearings, I’d like to take a moment to consider why legal scholars argue against recognizing the existence of race in America.  And then let’s consider how the next decade in legal thought might be influenced, thanks to Sotomayor’s presence on the Court.

The legal argument for denying reality – for denying the existence of race – is rooted in the colorblindness doctrine.  My understanding is that the basic idea behind colorblindness is: only by ignoring race can we truly transcend it.  You see, if we keep talking about race, if we acknowledge it, then we allow the race concept to persist.  So, what we should do is pretend that race isn’t there.  If we adjust our thinking to a colorblind world, then in time, reality will catch up with our thinking.  This kind of thinking has been proven wrong again and again, most thoroughly by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

The colorblindness perspective didn’t come out of nowhere.  In legal circles, it gained traction in the 1970s, during the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.  The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in abolishing race conscious polices that were used to inflict “separate but equal” – but racial segregation of course was anything but equal.  The claim of the “integrationists,” as the bus boycotters the sit-in protestors are called by many legal scholars, was essentially to end separate but equal by asserting the right to be treated like everyone else.  The protestors asked for a removal of race from the laws, they asked for colorblindness, so that anyone who boarded the bus could have a seat in the front.  But after the Civil Rights Movement, this colorblind concept was twisted to support the legal basis for ignoring racist inequality.

Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, in 1952, “…I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”  Plessy (1896) was the decision which created the “separate but equal” doctrine.  The logical foundation of Plessy held that there was no inherent or automatic difference in quality of public service just because of racial segregation.  Segregation therefore wasn’t ruled to be a problem under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal treatment to each citizen regardless of race.  In other words, Plessy said that because we can imagine a world where white and nonwhite students have separate and equal educations, there is no reason to say that segregation is unconstitutional.  The actual lived reality of the students, in the court’s mind, was irrelevant.  Any inequality in reality could be dealt with in time, without the need to resort to overruling segregationist policies.  Plessy allowed the Jim Crow era to proceed, with its obviously and disastrously harmful inequality in everything from education to health to transportation for nonwhite Americans.  It’s important to note that in Plessy, the court was in denial of reality – the court refused to accept the existence of a class of people (nonwhites) that were experiencing inherently discriminatory treatment.

To move past the denials of Plessy, the court would have to be convinced to stop talking about abstract legal theory and start talking about reality.  It wasn’t until 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education that the colorblind logic of Rehnquist and his allies on the right were rejected by the Supreme Court.  This time, the court acknowledged the obvious reality that nonwhite students were not receiving an equal education in the segregated schools across the South.  The court’s opinion held that there were unrecognized consequences of racist segregation so demonstrably harmful (the court referenced a study where black children preferred white dolls to play with) that the court could not just rely on abstract theory as it did in Plessy.  In this way, Brown was groundbreaking not just because it ordered the racial integration of schools.  Brown was extraordinary because the decision said that the reality of racism could not be ignored, even if there is a theoretical, imaginary world where segregation could be equal.  The reality was that segregation was not equal.  Hence, the court now decided, there was a violation of the 14th Amendment.

With that basic realization – that race exists as a social force and causes real harms to groups of people – the state was able to craft responses that could deal with the reality of racism.  This new legal foundation allowed for the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, making discrimination in the workplace and in housing illegal.  It allowed passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which represented the first effective law that allowed many black southerners to vote.  Brown’s recognition of reality allowed the establishment of a wide range of policies that take racial understandings into account, from hate crimes laws and equal housing regulations to affirmative action in schools and the private sector.  All of these effective (albeit imperfect and insufficient) policies would have been impossible had the Supreme Court refused to take the existence of socially defined race into account.

So, this vast array of practices and policies were put in place to operate in the new, reality-based legal paradigm set up by Brown, but by the 1970s the Supreme Court changed dramatically.  Richard Nixon replaced retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren, the architect of the Brown decision, with the far more conservative (“strict constructionist”) Warren E. Burger.  Later, Nixon successfully appointed three more justices (including Plessy supporter William Rehnquist) – for a total of four Nixon justices – meaning that before he resigned in disgrace, Nixon was able to fundamentally reshape the Supreme Court for a generation.  Right away, the new court began to walk back some of the reasoning seen in Brown and similar cases.

By the late 1970s, the court had almost completely returned to the Plessy v. Ferguson colorblindness logic to deny reality and allow racial segregation to continue.  In Milliken v. Bradley (1979), the court decided that the reality of segregation in Detroit-area public schools was irrelevant.  Suburban Detroit public schools were mostly white, while Detroit city public schools were nearly all black.  Suburban schools also offered a better quality of education because of the additional resources available to them.  The district and appeals courts held that the state could institute a bussing solution that bussed students between the city and the suburbs to achieve a greater degree of equality and to combat the obvious racial segregation in and around Detroit.  The Supreme Court overturned the bussing policy, stating that in the colorblind eyes of the law, there was no way the Michigan policymakers could be race conscious.  And furthermore, “local control” of schools was the more important consideration as opposed to maintaining equality of education for all Americans, regardless of race.  Thus, the Supreme Court effectively affirmed and legitimated the practice of “white flight,” where whites left the nation’s largest cities to build suburbs for their own exclusive use, using pressure tactics and violence to deny non-whites entry.  The Milliken case definitively marked the end of the Brown era.  The return to the denial of reality – colorblindness – meant that one by one, the policies and practices that fought against racial segregation and institutional racism were struck down or significantly weakened in the 1980s and 1990s.

Over the past several years and into the present day, the Supreme Court has continued to side with colorblind reasoning very frequently.  All hope for a reality-based approach at the court is not lost, however.  Many decisions on cases involving race have been decided by thin, 5-4 margins.  Already, in 2009, the Supreme Court struck down a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a vote of 5-4.  It may still remove the most important part of that landmark legislation in a decision due very shortly.

Indeed, in the voting rights case currently before the court, the issue is very clearly whether the law should take reality into account or instead pursue a colorblind philosophy.  The question in this case is basically whether election officials working in areas of the United States with a demonstrated history of racism should have to get federal pre-approval before making any changes to their election procedures.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires these historically racist electoral districts to “pre-clear” election procedures, to help prevent trickery (like secretly moving polling places) that would depress turnout among nonwhite voters.  The court has to decide whether race matters in elections enough to warrant this race conscious policy.  During the debate on this case, Chief Justice John Roberts emerged as a critic of the Voting Rights Act, while the retiring Justice David H. Souter defended the Act’s reality based-approach, saying, “I don’t understand how you can maintain that things have radically changed. That seems to deny the empirical reality.”

And this is the Supreme Court to which President Barack Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor, to replace Justice Souter.  Already, conservatives in Congress have made plans to attack Sotomayor for her reality-based views on race.  Fortunately, the strong Democratic majority in the Senate makes blocking Sotomayor’s confirmation unlikely (although Democratic support for Sotomayor does not imply support for a reality-based worldview).  But the issue of race appears to be the issue on which conservatives will stake their claims for rejecting Sotomayor’s nomination.  The right does not want Souter’s successor to have a similar reality-based disposition.  Conservatives would prefer someone who was willing to follow the Plessy v. Ferguson colorblind logic. 

For advocates of a reality-based judiciary, Sotomayor’s confirmation is imperative.  Her influence on the court in 2009 and beyond will begin the process of restoring the Brown v. Board reality-based legal thinking.  While the five reliably colorblind rightists on the court will not immediately waver in their conviction against recognizing the impact of race, Sotomayor will affect the thinking of her colleagues on the Court, and her voice from the bench will immeasurably shape public opinion on race and anti-racist policies.  Sotomayor has been involved in nearly 100 race-related cases.  One of her notable rulings impacted voting rights (Hayden v. Pataki), where she ruled that laws disfranchising convicted felons (who are disproportionately African American) are discriminatory and illegal (under the Voting Rights Act of 1965).  And she ruled against white firefighters who were angry that their supervisors recognized the existence of race in her now famous Ricci v. DeStefano decision (a decision that might be reviewed by the Supreme Court later this year).

Sotomayor’s career has shown that she’s capable of recognizing and weighing the impact of history and reality when issuing her opinions.  Arguing that racism isn’t a reality (as a majority of the public and the nine Supreme Court justices often do) requires a rather high level of historical amnesia.  It’s easy to overlook history when you depersonalize it.  So, I’d like to end this discussion with an excerpt from a letter written in Dayton, Ohio by a man named Jourdon Anderson.  Mr. Anderson wrote this letter to his former owner.

To my old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee.

I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can….  It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee.  Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this.  I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me.  I am doing tolerably well here.  I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson, — and the children — Milly, Jane, and Grundy — go to school and are learning well…  We are kindly treated.  Sometimes we overhear others saying, ‘Them colored people were slaves’ down in Tennessee; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson.  Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master.  Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again….

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you.  This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.  I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years.  At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.  Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.  Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.  If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future….

[P.S.:] Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson.

Anderson wrote this letter in 1865, which is hardly ancient history.  It’s relatively easy to connect the dots from the eleven thousand dollar debt owed to Anderson’s family (and millions of other families) to today’s racialized wealth gap, where the average black family has less than 1/8 the wealth of the average white family in America.

It’s relatively easy to understand why black men are so often sent to death row for crimes they didn’t commit, if you consider that the ways freed slaves were dealt with (by the KKK and by the establishment of legal segregation) has never been fully repudiated.

And it’s relatively easy to understand that the average lifespan of Latino and black Americans is less than that of white Americans, if you consider that housing discrimination persists today, and it forces communities of color to live near toxic waste dumps at a disproportionate rate.

Jourdon Anderson and his family in Ohio, you see, are not a legal abstractions.  They’re not an idea or an archetype.  Jourdon and Mandy, and their children Milly, Jane, and Grundy are people.  They lived in the United States, and they had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  When we talk about race, it’s important to remember a simple fact: centuries of racism shape the present-day landscape in the United States.  Denying that just doesn’t make sense.

Special thanks to Maryam Griffin for her invaluable advice on a draft of this article.

This article originally appeared at New Racial Studies, and at Racismreview.com.

The biggest problem in the Middle East are Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

The settlements are the project of a collection of right wing extremists.  They are homes and roads protected by the mighty Israeli army, strategically placed in and around Palestinian cities, towns, villages, and farmland in such a way as to make Palestinian civilian life uncomfortable.

The settlements cause violence.  Israeli settlers frequently ambush and terrorize their Palestinian neighbors.  Palestinian homes are arbitrarily demolished to make room for settlements.  The settlements’ guardian, the Israeli army, are stationed in Palestinian cities and along Palestinian roads.  Checkpoints, where Palestinians submit to searches, ID checks, and arbitrary arrests, line the roads all along the West Bank, making travel difficult at best.  A massive security barrier snakes across the landscape, in large measure to protect the settlements.  This barrier separates children from schools, farmers from farms, and keeps families apart. 

The settlements are racist, in that they are reserved for the exclusive use of Israeli Jews (Israel’s one million non-Jewish citizens are mostly prevented from living in settlements).

The right wing groups that promote the settlements have exerted a powerful influence on Israeli politics, despite the fact that a majority of Israelis disagree with the settlement project.  The settler movement’s remarkable political power has allowed settlements to expand rapidly in the past few decades.

Despite Israeli government statements that they will curtail settlements, Israeli policy has been to allow settlements to grow.  And this policy is now, finally, under strict scrutiny in the United States.

President Obama has taken a dramatically different approach to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict than any of his predecessors.  Obama’s approach has placed Israeli settlements front and center, where they should be considering that they are the biggest obstacle to peace.

On this thorny issue, the new American president has been masterful.  Obama has managed to isolate the issue of settlements, taking a firm stance and gently but realistically pressing the right wing Israeli government to change its policies.  All the while, Obama has  gathered support for his peace initiative at home in the US and among Arabs and Muslims worldwide.  No American President has been this bold on Middle East peace in a very long time.  Let’s compare Obama with his immediate predecessors before considering the prospects that Obama’s fresh approach will lead to a durable peace.

The American Presidents Fail To Bring Peace

There is no way that George W. Bush could have made the moves that Obama is making.  Bush ignored peace for his entire first term, after giving his total, unqualified support for the right wing Israeli government of Ariel Sharon.  As the Israelis proceeded to build a security barrier in contravention of international law, cutting deep into the West Bank, Bush stood silently.  Settlements expanded in the West Bank more rapidly than ever before, and Bush stood silently. 

Belatedly, Bush attempted to make headway with yet another bloviating “peace conference” in Annapolis.  But the “road map” and other useless documents went unheeded, and Bush showed no interest in making any real progress.

Bill Clinton’s eight years were hardly better, in retrospect.  The Oslo Accords – signed on the White House lawn while Clinton looked on — left the most important disagreements out while requiring the Israelis to keep their word on giving up territory.  The plan failed miserably after only a few months.  As the right wing Israeli government continued expanding settlements, Clinton was mostly silent.  The 2000 conference at Camp David was too little, too late, and the weak draft agreement pushed by Clinton could never have been accepted by the Palestinian leadership.

The George H.W. Bush administration was the last time a US president really pressed Israel, with a threat to withhold financial support unless they attended the Madrid peace conference.  While that Madrid meeting eventually led to the failed Oslo “peace process,” Bush’s firm  directives to push the Israelis toward peace have never been followed up by an American president, until now.

Now, Obama has made a bold move to finally, finally push the Israeli government to listen to the majority of its citizens that want to make a peace deal with their Palestinian neighbors.  The Israeli government, however, is resisting Obama with all its strength.

Israeli Intransigence

The Israeli government isn’t sure what to do in the new atmosphere Obama has created.  For the first time in a very long while, the usual tricks aren’t working for the Israeli government.  How can the Israeli government continue to expand its settlements despite international insistence that they stop?  There’s usually a few simple steps that work to stay within American diplomatic cover, while allowing settlements to expand.  So far, the Israeli government has stuck to the script, while Obama has changed the American role dramatically.

First, the Israeli government tried the time-tested fake “evacuation” of an illegal settlement in the West Bank.  This is where the Israeli army invites cameras to watch as they brusquely arrest a handful of settler extremists who are camping on a hilltop in the West Bank.  The Israeli government makes a proud statement, about how this evacuation shows their seriousness in curtailing the unacceptable expansion of settlements.  But the PR stunt is never followed up with any real changes.  The evacuated settlers soon return to the hilltop.  Illegal settlement construction continues apace all across the West Bank.  Settlers continue to attack Palestinian civilians with impunity.

Second, the Israeli government in the past has excused settlement construction by claiming that any new buildings are just “natural.”  It’s only natural that as the settlers have children, they’ll need to build more houses, they say.  This pretext allows “existing” settlements to grow rapidly.

Third, the Israeli government often insists that there is no way they can prevent settlements unless the Palestinian people stop violence, or stop incitement to violence, or stop all crimes for seven days, or for twenty one days, and so on.  There is always something the Palestinians are doing that the Americans aren’t talking about enough, and that’s why settlement building can’t be stopped.  Sometimes, the Israeli government simply accuses the Palestinians of not being a real “partner for peace,” which of course means that settlements should continue to grow.

None of these usual Israeli approaches are working to blunt the Obama Peace Initiative.  Obama’s secretary of state has said that “natural” growth doesn’t count and must stop.  Obama has countered Israeli protests that the Palestinians aren’t doing enough, and then he has repeated the simple call for an end to settlement activity.

Now, the Israeli government has begun to beg and plead for Obama to stop his peace initiative.  The Israeli government protested that Obama’s demand for an end to settlement activity is “unreasonable.”  Then, when that didn’t work, the Israeli government resorted to pointing at agreements with the Bush administration, claiming that these agreements allow settlements to continue.  Obama’s people have laughed this off (and former Bush administration officials have denied the Israeli interpretation).  Today, after Obama’s remarkable speech in Cairo, the Israeli government announced that Obama’s peace initiative will undermine Israeli security (which is the opposite of the truth – the settlements represent a grave threat to Israeli security).

So, as the debate over settlements continues, the split between the American and Israeli governments grows wider than it has been in decades. 

Change for Peace

What’s next in the Obama Peace Initiative?  After finishing his trip to the Middle East, Obama will send envoys to meet directly with the Israeli government.  It’s likely that behind the scenes, Obama will make even firmer suggestions to the Israeli government to curtail settlement expansion.  But the Israeli government will certainly continue to resist, in large measure due to the remarkable political power of the settlement movement.  Who will blink first, Obama or the Israeli government?

It’s possible that Obama will eventually concede, but the crucial question is what takes place here in the United States in the next few weeks.  Will the Congress support Obama’s peace initiative, or will the Israeli government’s supporters on Capitol Hill manage to pressure Obama to lay off?

If Obama uses his popularity (and political capital) to avoid pressure from the Hill, then he might even go so far as to link American financial and diplomatic support of Israel to the settlements.  Obama’s moves to date suggest that he’s deftly leaving that leverage in reserve.  Obama is allowing the Israelis to feel the pressure now, and giving them the opportunity to respond.  Meanwhile, if the Israelis refuse to budge, Obama is building up support in the Arab world, and among Americans here at home.  Obama’s growing cache of international and domestic support should mean that the Israeli government gives up, and makes real changes on settlements, before Obama retreats.

Eventually, after winning this initial confrontation, Obama will likely use his envoys to project further demands on the Israeli government and for the Palestinian leadership.  These demands – mutual recognition, final agreement on borders, refugees, water rights – could very well lead to a durable and effective peace.  Obama recognizes that moving on these sensitive issues can’t happen overnight, but he has already created a new environment wherein actual progress (not just lip service) can be made.

The crucial support for Obama won’t come from the Middle East, however.  It’s up to us, in America, to allow Obama’s peace initiative to succeed.  If the American people support Obama’s push for peace now, there’s a real chance for a breakthrough in the near future.

It’s the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, and the beard is back!

The Red Wings are locked in a rematch of last year’s Finals, and we’re expecting a similar result.  The Penguins’ best player defected to the Wings last year, and chances are this year Mr. Hossa will be very happy to show his old team how it’s done.

Of course, for me this is a difficult series, since I’m actually surrounded by Pennsylvanians and assorted Penguins fans.  But don’t worry, folks, I’ll hold my Wings flag high.

Prediction: Wings in 4.

I’ll be recapping each game as it happens right here, so set your bookmarks.

Game 1: Saturday, May 30

The first goal — which caromed into the net off the ass of Pittsburgh goalkeeper Marc-Andre Fleury — was hilarious.  Fortunately, the Wings’ next two goals were more authoratative, especially the one where the new guy (Justin Abdelkader) gracefully snatched the puck out of the air with his hand, onto the ice, and used his stick to smack it back into the air and into the goal.  So, yeah, there were some impressive offensive fireworks.  But, as usual, it was the defense that made the difference.  One huge defensive mistake from Brad Stuart led to the Penguins’ only goal.  Other than that, the Wings’ defense was pretty flawless, with Chris Osgood turning away some 30 shots while making it look easy.  If defense wins championships, I feel even better about my prediction.  Red Wings 1 : 0 Penguins.

Game 2: Sunday, May 31

Outstanding.  Once again, the Michigan State product, Mr. Justin Abdelkader, amazed the crowd and demoralized the Penguins with an incredible feat of coordination and athleticism.  In game 1, Abdelkader knocked the puck down and then swooped it into the net from point-blank range.  This time, he was out near the blue line, 3-on-1, with two sticks bearing down on him, and he managed to twist and turn, then fire the puck right past an astonished Marc-Andre Fleury.  As it turned out, that third goal was just icing on the cake, as the Wings’ defense (led by an unflappable Chris Osgood and the Captain Nicolas Lidstrom) again was nearly flawless.  The rest of these games will be mere formalities if the Wings keep playing like this.  Red Wings 2 : 0 Penguins.

Game 3: Tuesday, June 2

Well, we can forget the “formality” statement.  The Wings actually played quite well, but this time the Penguins’ vaunted offense broke through.  An impressive performance by both teams offenses in the first period, as four goals rained down inside of about fifteen minutes.  The second period was far more cautious, with no scoring and a lot of tension.  Then, the Penguins’ game plan worked, as they poked and prodded their way to a lead, then held on for the win.  Great game — and now we have a series, folks.  Red Wings 2 : 1 Penguins.

Game 4: Thursday, June 4.

Whoa.  Now that was a punch in the gut.  The Penguins played a masterful, opportunistic game.  They had a fantastic gameplan, and they managed to stick to it.  Meanwhile, the Red Wings flailed about, and even when they (briefly) held a lead, they looked sloppy and out of sync.  The second period was full of offensive action, especially after the Wings’ goal put them up 2-1.  Within a few minutes, the Pens got the shorthanded goal, then put in another one with brilliant focus despite some decent defense from the Wings.  The Pens never looked back.  Up 4-2, they played outstanding defense, while keeping pressure on in the Wings’ zone.  Fluery (finally) was the goalie he’s billed to be: world class.  It’s a series, and for the first time, I found myself seriously considering what it would feel like if the Wings lost.  I didn’t like it.  Red Wings 2: 2 Penguins

Game 5: Saturday, June 6.

This one was just embarrassing for the Penguins.  I mean, 5-0?  Four goals given up in the second period made this one a game of role-reversal as compared to Game 4.  Sadly, the Pens disintegrated by the third period, with their great players just getting senselessly violent (and giving the Wings power plays galore).  The good news was the return of Wings star Pavel Datsyuk, who made an immediate impact with two assists.  He was so good, even injured, that you have to be amazed at the depth on the Wings, since they were still effective even without a player of Datsyuk’s caliber. Red Wings 3: 2 Pengins.

ONE WIN TO GO!

Game 6: Tuesday June 9.

Well, this one didn’t turn out as well as we’d hoped.  Pittsburgh played a tough defensive game.  Surprising after they couldn’t stop the Wings from scoring even if we’d given them a brick wall to put in front of their own net in Game 5.  Anyway, tough game.  Also a really good game, to be honest.  Very exciting hockey.  The good news is that we’re at home in Detroit for Game 7.  The bad news is that I’ll be in Pittsburgh, ironically, for Game 7 — where I’ll be watching the Tigers take on the Pirates in lovely PNC Park.  Wow.  Red Wings 3 : 3 Penguins.

Game 7: Friday, June 12, 2009

What a night.  I just returned from Pittsburgh, where I watched the Tigers play a very nice game against the Pirates.  We ended up winning that one by 2 runs.  Unfortunately, those runs couldn’t be transferred to Detroit.  The Pens fans in the crowd at PNC Park let out big cheers at two seemingly random times during the baseball game… those “random” times corresponded to the Penguins goals, of course.

So, I missed the first two periods of this decisive Game 7 in order to watch some great baseball.  Right after the baseball game, Helene and I managed to find a cozy bar in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh just before the start of the final period.  We were crowded in the back, wearing our Tigers hats, and surrounded by excited but tense Penguins fans.  The Pens were up, 2-0.

I honestly didn’t recognize the Penguins.  They looked like a masterful defensive team.  Even better than they were in Game 6.  They had an answer for everything.  Skating all over the Wings, the Pens made it look more like a basketball game than hockey, the way they had a guy right on every Wing.  It was impressive.  The Pens looked good.  The Pens looked young.

Even with that smothering defense, Lidstrom managed to get an assist over to Ericsson for a goal with about 8 minutes left.  I felt a wave of relief.  There was still some life left over there.  And it would have been so utterly humiliating to get shut out at home in a Game 7.

Still, even after we made it 2-1, my stomach was tied up in knots, and I nearly had a heart attack a few minutes later, when the Wings sent a puck slamming right into the bottom 2 centimeters of the crossbar.  Had that puck been just a half an inch lower, we’d be having a different conversation right now.

As it happened, the clock ran out after a flurry of goals stopped by a suddenly fantastic Fluery.  And that was that.

We left Pittsburgh, and even though I head a tear in my eye, I was happy for the chance to spend a very fun evening in a very beautiful city.  We’ll see yinz next year.  Penguins 4 : 3 Red Wings.