Maat's Feather - Front Page

10.2.10 - Pushing Back Against our Training

Shanikka — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 02:27:37 GMT

On Thursday morning, California time, my youngest daughter and I are boarding a plane. We are leaving what are supposed to be the highly sunny, highly warm shores of California (warm for one of the few times ever this year - I know that global warming folks always focus on extreme weather events and overall heating trends but they have ignored that it has been blooding FREEZING in California this year and I am convinced it is related!). We are coming to Washington, D.C. A place where I have lots of relatives and friends, even as I won't have time to see them since we'll be there for just over 45 hours.

We - my baby that is ½ foot taller than I and likes to lay her elbow on my head as a way of trying to equalize our status -- are coming to march.

On the appointed day, 10.2.10 (which I hope is not rainy or too cold, but I'll be there either way), my baby and I will be marching along with I'm not sure how many others. Who knows? To hear the media tell it, there isn't anything special going on in Washington on 10.2.10.

But I know better.
Now, this will not be my first time marching on Washington. I attended, of course, the March for Women's Lives. Before that, I was at the original March on Washington (although only 2 years old at the time and completely clueless as a result.) So I have some experience with this, although I'm older and have bad ankles and a really low tolerance for fatigue due to health issues these days. I'm certainly not going to be alone, I do know that. For example, a number of diarists here have taken the time to share why they are going to march on Washington on 10.2.10. People like Aaraujo, War on Error and DiegoUK have made sure that even when it seemed that 10.2.10 might be forgotten even before it happened, that it remained on the radar and that we knew that they, too, would be there. It will be an honor to march with them, even if I never meet them (and I hope I do.) Each of them has at one time or another eloquently stated their reasons why they will be in DC on 10.2.10. For what it's worth, I figured I'd share mine.

I am a regular participant in political activity, I admit this. I have been at one level or another since I was a young woman. Yet increasingly I am turned off completely by politics, including electoral politics. It is because I have yet to see politics pay off for those most like those who I grew up with. Politics is supposed to be a means to an end. It is not THE end. Yet we treat the political game as if it were so. As if the mere election of a particular individual, and more importantly the preservation of that individual's power, truly accomplishes change.

When, sad but true, most true social change does not emerge from Washington or its politics. It does not emerge from most state houses, either. It never has.

It has almost always emerged at the local level, from the grassroots. A grassroots who historically has not shied away from asking for change not with a whimper, but with a roar, when the stakes were high enough.

Today, the stakes are about as high as they can get for most folks who did not inherit their wealth without having to rename America the latest banana republic.

Yet despite this hour of crisis for those who cannot count on tomorrow because their house, their job, their security can be gone at any moment - for as trite a reason as, for example, shoring up a year-end corporate balance sheet - today we as Americans have been silenced into whispers. Retrained to beg, not demand. Taught to hide our angst and fear and anger about where our country is going and definitely not to speculate publicly too much about the "why" behind those whispers, because to do anything else, especially publicly, displeases those who have the lion's share of the money, and the power - and who therefore now truly control much of the average American's life. Much the way a dog is taught not to bark as a means of general communication because it displeases its masters, we are taught that the only change we are entitled to expect as individual Americans may be asked for only politely, incrementally and with great respect for the existing system that creates our need in the first place. And we are taught that, even when we do all the right things, like vote for those who say they are on our side, most of it is entirely dependent upon the largesse and self-interest in those who either control or outright own the means to our survival: those who write our paychecks, hold the mortgages on our homes, issue our student loans to finance our education and decide whether our life's mistakes might cost us both our freedom and our franchise.

Several years ago, after we first learned of Bush's spying program (and I first began seeing the justifying reactions to it, as opposed to the mass arrests and folks going to jail as I'd originally assumed) I first theorized the possibility of a New America. At that time, the country was being actively enslaved by the regime that was Dubbya and his sidekick from hell, Richard B. Cheney. At that time, I wrote:

In New America, nothing -- other than money, power and those who own both - is sacred. Those in control have proven that they are willing to let one of America's cultural crown jewels die an internationally-viewed and ignoble death if saving it takes a buck that Bush wants given to someone else. They are willing to drag their feet on warming the cold, or feeding the hungry; sheltering the homeless or healing the sick; and they will never feel shame for systematically transferring the wealth and power which made America's middle class great from the hands of the working class and electorate to a select class: those who needed nothing from America they didn't already have (at least economically), but still want more anyway.
All of it excused, because of the Executive Branch snatch and grab job commonly known as "Funding The War on Terror".

Today, Bush is Gone. Cheney is Mostly Gone. And we have a President who I genuinely believe cares, wants to do the right thing, and has tried to do the right thing. I would never attempt to compare President Obama to President Bush (who I fondly referred to as our resident fascist-in-training) and feel that anyone who does is simply engaging in baseless hyperbole. Yet it is also true that President Obama is not 180% away from President Bush's approach to solving what he views as Americans' problems either - particularly as it relates to the Great Recession. From where I sit, the trouble seems to be that the President has been trained to believe what Dubbya believed, and what the rest of us are being trained to believe: that it is the free market, industry, business, capital and wealth (all today in the hands of a tiny elite group of people) that are the foundation, the engine, the backbone, and therefore the savior, of the American dream. Rather than its working people. Thus, President Obama's vision has been limited by, IMO, as much by these limitations in his own thinking when it comes to what was wrong with America and needed to be made right as every other politician.

The fact that one has to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to get re-elected, usually from the very folks who are trying to retrain Americans while they purchase America, plays a role, I am sure, in that.

Nonetheless, I was wrong, 5 years ago, to blame what was happening to us as a nation entirely on The War on Terra.

And no, I don't blame President Obama. At least, I don't blame him for any more than his limited role in the current situation deserves. He didn't create our nation's financial crisis, and I do believe he is fighting to get the country out of it.

But he doesn't escape blame for himself subscribing to the very same false narratives about what, and who, are important when it comes to righting this country.

[This is the defensive part - the last year on DailyKOS has made it, unfortunately, necessary to say. Make no mistake, those of you who skim but do not read thoroughly before going off intro histrionics: I am definitely not going to Washington on 10.2.10 to protest against President Obama. Even as I recognize that had we not been first softened up as a country through 8 years of Dubbya, more in the grassroots that elected him might reject much of President Obama's approach to some things based on an evaluation of their objective merits rather than reject people who are still pointing out that "Yes, Houston, we have a Problem" because of their legitimate concern that he is being judged by unfair, and at times, racist standards that we all recognize from our own lives.

I'll paraphrase what I said, for those who remain unclear. There is nothing to protest about this President, per se. He's done a decent job so far having inherited the most miserable economic and political situation left to any President in recent memory, if not worse than ever (yes, even FDR - because nobody questioned FDR's being an American or qualified for the job.) For those things he has done right, President Obama deserves thanks credit - credit that too often is not forthcoming - even as there is legitimate room for discussion and disagreement for those things that could and should have been done differently, and should be seen differently, for the sake of the grassroots of America.]

So there is still plenty to protest about where this country is heading, even with President Obama's efforts (good faith effort or no - and I have no reason to doubt his good faith.)

What requires protesting against is the systematic effort of those in power, in America, to retrain America into accepting the crumbs of our own society - crumbs falling from the laden dining table that our labor and our sacrifices set -- with a whimper than fight back and go out, if necessary, with a roar demanding the equal place at the table of success this country seemed to call for just 23 months ago. And yes, we have a right to demand it, not beg for it as it seems we are being trained to believe. We have a right as Americans to demand, secure in the knowledge that without us as the majority of Regular Americans, those who right now have their boots on the necks of those who might envision a more just and equitable America - including, I believe deep down, President Obama himself -- would otherwise be fucked.

I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years observing, and asking myself, how did this happen - that the majority would be trained to seeing its strengths as weakness? And I've come to at least a tentative conclusion: The instrument of our training has been conditioning our very survival on being willing to whimper, rather than to yell, for what we want. To sit, to roll over and, yes, to play dead if necessary to get our daily bread. For fear that our lives will be steamrolled over from their foundation if we do not. In a nation where employment is at will, there is no social safety net, millions are permanently unemployed, millions are poor, hungry, homeless or all three, we incarcerate more people than any other nation on earth, most people still believe that those who have nothing deserve everything they have, increasing rates of suicide and murder-suicide by those who have lost it all through no fault of their own is no longer a big enough deal to report in the newspaper, and yet we spend billions on fighting over who should represent us in Washington each year I believe most Americans are well aware of our New Deal, in our New America: buy in, suck it up, and be happy -- or be forced off the grid, forever.

Thanks to Horatio Alger, nothing terrifies Americans so much as that they might be deemed a "failure", when so many were able to "make it" in this country.

That is fertile ground for housebreaking us, as pets, in New America.

So, IMO we as Americans are being retrained in terms of our expectations from our country. Retrained about what is "normal." Retrained in terms of how we think about power and wealth, and definitely in terms of how we think about the stark disparities in both between Americans which IMO lie is the heart of our country's current level of dysfunction. It is the shifts in our perception of what should be acceptable in America that have IMO hamstrung Americans, in terms of action, from thinking about or imposing bold solutions that at least in theory could rain down success on the many instead of trickle them to a few only on terms acceptable to the financial elite of this country.

And we're falling for it - too many of us. Especially on the Left. This has led to many folks contending (pretending) that 1 in 7 Americans being below a poverty line that almost guarantees homelessness and hunger is less important news than the fact that an average of 50,000 non-farm private sector jobs got added in each of the past 8 months in a country that requires 150,000/month just to be at parity and there are nearly than 15,000,000 people in this country who we officially count as "out of work." We pretend that leading indicators actually mean anything in terms of whether the Great Recession is over when the number of completed foreclosures continues to rise and our government admits that the reason the official unemployment rate is remaining stable is because Americans are just giving up and dropping out of the work force. We rhetorically spin credit card company charge-offs into consumers having "less debt"; an increase in new housing starts into the recovery of the housing industry even while ½ million homes in REO status sit (until they are pillaged for their raw materials, anyway, as folks in hard-hit neighborhoods like Vegas, Detroit and St. Louis can confirm), with millions more (on a yearly basis) on the verge of being foreclosed -- with never a mention of what has happened to the millions of families displaced from them, btw. We shrug off 1.5 million Americans who have exhausted nearly 2 years of unemployment insurance benefits, and the continuing decrease in workforce participation ratios, and accept with a sigh the jettisoning of the idea that one isn't supposed to retire until around age 65-70. All while cheering on the increase in the number of folks who can find a job - as temps (and we all know what that means -- no benefits, no status, no job security.)

There are a number of examples in American discourse over the past few years that have lead me to feel this way, and which led to my conclusion that me being in DC on 10.2.10 was important as a way to show that not everyone is, in fact, falling for it. To show that there is a critical mass of people who know the truth, yet still believe in an American dream that does not require accepting the status quo of inequality, unfairness, and economic security that we are rapidly coming to accept as normal in New America. So, here's just a couple of the non-obvious ones: others have written eloquently about the virulent propaganda fomented by Fox, News Corporation and its scion Rupert Murdoch, and the Right Wing Noise Machine. I don't need to repeat their efforts - I just encourage people to read them, wherever you find them. But the examples in this diary bug me because I think they are good examples of what I see as the problem that must be fought back against - the retraining that is teaching Americans to think rhetorically only in the terms favored by the masters of global capital, at the expense of the thinking of the wo(man) on the street - if we don't want to truly write the last chapters of the Great American experiment's demise.

My examples first focus on the retraining that has taken place when it comes to how we view the question of employment, including unemployment. There was a time, once, when one of the things we celebrated about America was the idea that we were a country where a person who was willing to work hard could ensure her family a decent living. Reasonable stability. Wealth was not what most people aspired to - it was far more modest standards like owning a home, sending one's children to college, being able to take a vacation.

But no more.

The first example has to do with the use of layoffs, stealth and otherwise, to manage worker expectations. Any of us, at any time, who works for someone else can be subject to a layoff. Even at a large company. Whether because a company is truly hurting and it is either shed jobs or close the doors - or just because an acknowledged profit still isn't quite high enough for the stockholders and the corporate managers whose annual bonuses depend upon it. Indeed, there are people who are handsomely rewarded if they can manage to shave a few (or a lot) of jobs each year - often somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas. (Talk about Christmas spirit, huh?) With almost no consideration of the serious ethical/moral questions raised by the practice of canning people just to make an extra buck. We all know this - yet we have been trained to accept it as just a part of "doing business." There are lots of individual anecdotes about layoffs and anyone who wants to pretend that things are all right in Denmark need only spend 1/2 hour a day sampling them anywhere on the Internets to get bitch-slapped right back into reality. But we don't talk much about the numbers of the desperate unemployed which those layoffs we hear about generate - perhaps because we don't like to talk about still throwing people out of work even though the Recession. Is. Over. (And has been for more than a year to hear economists tell it!)

The numbers matter - because they appear to be either stagnant or deteriorating no matter how many "private sector" jobs are being reported as created now that the Great Recession is officially over. Although the definitions vary state by state, "mass layoffs" are generally defined in two categories: (1) A regular mass layoff (just called "mass layoff" by BLS, go figure) occurs when at least 50 initial claims are filed against an establishment during a consecutive 5-week period. (2) An extended mass layoff occurs when at least 50 initial claims are filed against an establishment during a consecutive 5-week period and at least 50 workers have been separated from jobs for more than 30 days.

In August 2010 in America, 150,192 people lost their jobs through a mass layoff. That's more than 2x the number of private sector jobs than the number of jobs created by the private sector, estimated at 67,000, in the same month.

Now, of course, you can't actually go to the publicly-funded government website at BLS and find out WHICH employers have had mass layoffs, either itty-bitty or extended, so you can try and avoid their phantom ads in HotJobs or Yahoo or wherever else online you're searching for a job. That's because the federal government refuses to tell you, even though it knows. Nyah. So there.

There will be no outing of those who are engaged in stealth layoffs too small to make the news. Perhaps because layoffs are too often associated with a pay raise for the CEOs who decide to make them happen?

Yet, even as mass layoffs are on the rise, lo and behold some of the biggest perpetrators of the mass layoff are now hiring! Hiring by the thousands! Hallelujah! Thank the Lord!

Or not.

You might want to check out the fine print, first:

It's obviously good news for workers that some firms are cautiously hiring, while layoffs abate elsewhere. Companies cut so aggressively during the recession that layoffs are now at a 10-year low, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The catch is that companies are hiring much differently than they did before, forcing workers to make uncomfortable adjustments. Companies that need to staff up are taking their time to hire, to make sure they match worker skills with long-term business strategy. They're hiring more temps and project workers and fewer full-timers, even at professional levels. And with lots of applicants for most jobs, companies can offer lower pay than they once did.

It's a miracle.

Before those of the majority here at DailyKOS who make a comfortable, professional, living, conclude "yeah but" you should consider another, quiet example, in a profession previously considered to be a good indicator of whether big business was thriving: the current state of the elite commercial law firm.

You see, if what is going on in my firm and others is an indication, it is true that the AmLaw 200 is again indeed hiring. They are hiring partners. Lateral partners. Very expensive partners. Firms in a growth mode are fighting over partners like red meat at a shark banquet. Why? On paper it is because they say they have a robust book of business and are rainmakers who at least theoretically bring in new business. To date, about 25% of them have. The rest? Well, the theory has been very shaky lately - so there have been a lot of de-equitizings, loud and quiet. You add that to the fact that most serious elite law firm clients haven't been presented with a bill that did not have not have write-offs or "most favored client" discounts in 2 years and that even those clients who get discounts are trailing, depending on the firm, somewhere between 180 and 240 days before paying at all and you begin to see why leverage matters a lot.

What is leverage? Why, leverage is how a single human being can nonetheless be credited with a few million in business generation each year (the basis upon which partner compensation is decided.) Since there are only so many hours a day, one can either bill clients or drum up business, but even the best lawyer can't dedicate more than 2,500 hours/year or so to doing that without being at risk of alcoholism or a coronary - and that number of work hours times the hourly rate that a client is willing to pay couldn't pay the guaranteed annual draw of the partner (at the low end somewhere between $450,000 and well over $1 million for senior partners), let alone the share of costs for the other workers necessary to do the job. Thus in elite-law-firm speak, leverage is the structure of an elite law firm that has at least 2 associates (wage earning lawyers) for every partner (equity/profit earning lawyer). In most commercial law firms, leverage has been either 3:1 or higher in the past 15 years.

But thanks to the Great Recession, thousands of associates were summarily fired from the crème-de-la-crème (the AmLaw 200) during the past 2 years. No matter how good they thought they were. And now, the firms aren't by and large hiring many associates, the attorneys that create the fundamental "leverage" that underlies the economy of a large law firm. Even though most of them brought in very few summer associates or made permanent offers to any since 2008. Even though nearly 5,000 lawyers were laid off in 2009 alone - those not stealthed, anyhow. And, now that work is picking up? Instead of hiring more associates, bringing in all those that firms already made offers to then deferred because of the economy, or even bringing back those mostly talented who were laid off last year, firms are now hiring "contract attorneys." By the bushel.

That sounds like that's OK on the surface after all, hiring is hiring? Maybe. Scratch the surface and you find the same thing you are finding more generally in the workplace when it comes to debasing and devaluing hard work. At elite law firms, contract lawyers make between 1/3 and ½ of what "associates" (who themselves make no more than ½ of equity partners ) make. Contract attorneys do not get benefits. Contract attorneys do not get perks. Contract attorneys do not get 36 months severance and an office to job search from when they are let go so that nobody knows. Indeed, in the east coast elite law firms that first perfected the use of "contract attorneys" several years ago, some contract lawyers don't even get windows, pee rights, or freedom from cockroaches. All they get is placed under the supervision of junior associates who get their rocks off practicing their "I'm the man/woman" authoritarian streak on attorneys who are usually senior to them in terms of experience and skill. With zero authority. Zero chance of advancement. And zero respect. All because they were unfortunate enough to have needed a job, badly. So who cares that you can't pay your law school loans on $16,000 - $40,000/year these days? (Or about outsourcing and offshoring, officially endorsed as A-OK by no less than the American Bar Association itself?)

By the way, these same firms with millions to spend on lateral partners are not hiring the lower status workers either - and some firms are still laying them off. There are no new paralegals. No new IT people. No new legal secretaries (our firm has a 5-1 ratio right now). Even management positions are being consolidated, streamlined, eliminated.

We're celebrating stories like this right now. I can think of no rational reason - but see it as evidence that Americans have been retrained about what it means when a business "creates jobs". We are being taught that job creation is willingness to accept a marked deterioration in the conditions of that job - especially pay - based not upon a negotiation between a willing worker and a willing employer, but solely upon the emotional whim of the employer. Which might change at any given moment.

Another example relates to our nation's apparent acceptance of the systematic undoing two of the largest unions left in the United States: auto workers, and teachers.

In the case of auto workers, America is currently celebrating the "return of the Big Three," as part of celebrating the End of the Great Recession. Stories abound highlighting, in particular how their renewal has "saved jobs." Even here on the Left, the predominant narrative is joy over the return of GM, Ford and Chrysler to profitability. Yet we celebrate with little recognition that in doing so, we may be celebrating symptoms of our country's demise, when it comes to being a leader in establishing what is, or is not, an acceptable standard of living - one previously envied by many throughout the world.

Nobody appears to have taken a serious look at what it cost to effectuate this miracle "turn around" at our nation's auto makers - and certainly has not studied closely the relinquishment of power, and resources, that were necessary. Nobody focuses on the transfer of wealth that was required to accomplish this "turn around" either. Yet the miracle of the birth of the Big Three is grounded firmly in what can only be described as a national phenomena: the transfer of wealth laid squarely on the backs of workers, and consumers, rather than the wallets of those who undeniably were making a killing even when the companies were going bankrupt and still are today.

If you want to confirm whether what I say about the transfer of wealth is true, one need only spend just a few minutes of spare time perusing one of my newly-favorite websites, courtesy of the AFL-CIO, Executive Pay Watch. Click on any of these publicly-traded companies and hold onto your hat. And, while you do, remember that this is just a list of public companies. The privately held companies, the vast majority of American business, have to answer to no one - and thus have to disclose their CEO pay to no one.

This now-touted "success", where the Big Three are again "profitable", overlooks that a key component in the "recovery" was the forced deterioration of wages earned by those in the American auto industry. But it appears that nobody cares, left or right, other than the union. Not that it seems to matter: despite the central role of unions in creating the middle class in this country, Americans have been retrained to ignore (if not recoil against) anything said by a union about what is right ever since Reagan busted the union of those charged with making sure they did so safely - but who cares that for the past 2 years that industry has been BEGGING for new blood, but only at a Congressionally-enforced 30% pay cut, as the scabs hired to replace the striking air traffic controllers fired in the 1980's are now themselves aging out of their jobs?) Since we have been retrained starting nearly 30 years Reagan's anti-union power play to increasingly ignore anything that begins with the word "union" and ends with the words "rights", it is easy to understand the success of the constant drum beat that Americans were fed about why, allegedly, GM, Ford and Chrysler became unprofitable to begin with - and thus what was necessary to save them. That drum beat was repeated so often with so little non-union push back that IMO its message became subliminal, which eventually caused Americans to gladly acquiesce to - and repeat with glee -- a complete falsehood.

The falsehood was that our Big Three could not compete primarily because auto workers made "too much" compared to their Asian counterparts. We were told - and sold -- that if only greedy and corrupt unionized auto workers wouldn't be so greedy, things would change. Not that American auto manufacturers were uncompetitive because they continued to cling to old ideas in everything from computer engineering to aesthetic design - to the point where one of the Big Three made it its mission more than 10 years ago to remove the first truly viable electric car (its own product!) from the marketplace by whatever means was necessary. Not because Japan was (despite its equal whining) already implementing the necessary reality of oil efficiency and clean emissions while our auto makers did nothing more than double down fighting for the preservation of poor fuel cleanliness and gas mileage standards as if they were fighting for the last ice cream cone for sale on a 105-degree day in Sacramento (or worse, Washington DC in August). We were told that the primary reason American car companies were in trouble was that American auto workers made more than $75 an hour on average while Toyota and company needed to pay just over ½ that to build their cars.

We were told that the future of our nation's flagship industry, automobile manufacturer, lie in the unions and their members that had to sacrifice, had to change, or be blamed for the death of the entire sector.

Well, lo and behold, they have changed. The unions did (reluctantly) agree. The Big Three are profitable again.

Of course, it's largely thanks to the unions being forced to accept concessions so big that the average hourly wage of an entry-level auto worker is now $14.00 - $16/hour. What we were not told was that this new hourly average wage for an entry level auto worker at the Big Three is approximately 20% below what Asian companies were paying Americans for the same work three years ago. (For example, Toyota's base entry level wage for workers in the United States was approximately $18 in 2007.) We were not told was that the constantly harped-upon figures of $71 to $75/hour for auto workers included the retirement pensions of each and every worker that ever became eligible (aka the "legacy workers") for the entire life of these companies.

Nor that, post bankruptcy, the CEOs of the Big Three would soon thereafter once again be riding tall in the salary saddle. (Except this time, they were very careful not to take most of it in cash.)

We weren't told any of this. Indeed even now you can still hear the myth of the overpaid American auto worker to this day no matter who tries to tell us differently. Including the Big Three themselves.

But hey, at least they've won the race to the bottom when it comes to American jobs - and what made them different than jobs elsewhere.

Now they are attacking the teachers unions.

We are at our crossroads of identity, when it comes to education. With the systematic national rollout of Waiting for Superman and the lining up of the MSM behind it (thanks for being objective, Oprah - NOT), the country as a whole is now being asked to accept as gospel that public and publicly-funded school education has "failed" - primarily because its teachers have failed. Now, more than ever, when it comes to the future of public education we as Americans are being asked to choose what we will BE in the future- through being asked to decide how this nation will educate American children. I believe that the powers that be, from Washington on down, are counting on American acquiescence to the retraining of our psyches when it comes to what Americans should expect from education - whether in our work life or our personal lives -- that has been ongoing ever since Ronald Reagan was unleashed upon the country and sowed the first serious seeds of our New America when his administration advocated saving money in the nation's subsidized school lunch programs by reclassifying ketchup as a vegetable.

(BTW, this is one area where I do hold President Obama just as accountable as anyone else - for believing the corporate free-market hype about education, and putting demagogues and "free market" thinkers with no damned experience actually teaching in charge, knowing his own daughters are completely secure, either way their experiments pan out for largely poor and minority children.)

In case you didn't know, this administration has put in charge of the nation's education policy putting a man who referred to himself as a CEO, whose only professional legacies were playing Australian basketball and running a charter school -- while not having spent not a day in the classroom as a teacher. A man who despite his lack of experience holds the gate key to hundreds of millions of dollars of federal education money. But that's part of our retraining - accepting a free market incompetent's word for what is best for our kids - no matter that this person could not get hired in any truly free market world based on actual job experience. Those that are in power are, I believe, are counting on the masses accepting the scapegoating rantings that blame teachers first, teachers last, and teachers only. Such as those of the woman who is the heroine of Waiting for Superman. A bloviating bully who can't even properly plan her own wedding without being tacky and didn't have the good sense to take the hint and go low key when her mentor got tossed out on his privatizing ear recently for similar tone-deafness. In other words, an underqualified camera hog who after a stint with Teach for America nonetheless managed to be put in charge of educating tens of thousands of minority children and to become the face of "education reform" despite having spent almost no time actually teaching children. They are counting on us to follow the prescriptions of a "CEO" who had what can only be described as mixed results with the Chicago Public Schools as his primary qualification for his job. Prescriptions grounded in a now decade-long national experiment grounded in disempowering teachers and families through the funding - or withholding thereof - for education. An experiment called "No Child Left Behind" as it existed his Republican predecessor (based upon the "Texas Miracle" now widely recognized for the fraud that it was - even as folks are still trying to just tweak it around the edges rather than throw it in the trash) or "Race to the Top" or it's kinder, gentler, version, "Promise Neighborhoods" now.

For those who may not know, both Race to the Top and Promise Neighborhoods - the latter an envisioned expansion of the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) and its visionary, Geoffrey Canada, who originally undertook his work for all the right reasons yet quickly found out that his truly-comprehensive program's success is absolutely conditioned on the willingness of private investor capital to play ball ("investors" provide 2/3 of the funding for the admittedly wonderful programs within the HCZ) - are the Obama Administration's versions of NCLB. An honest assessment of both programs might lead a cynic to conclude that both programs amount to federal economic blackmail -- conditioned on busting teacher unions, because no matter how you slice it, a public school district can't get money to undertake "innovative education programs" from this Administration unless it agrees in advance to undertake one of 4 different approaches to "reforming" failing schools, all of which have at their center firing/demoting teachers and administrators as a core element and, where possible, taking the school itself quasi-private, i.e. charter. All of the methods endorsed by this Administration are grounded in a willingness to jettison union teachers as the primary method for "innovation" if test scores aren't high enough. Without regard to whether there is ANY objective data to support this approach grounded in test scores, and at least some data to contradict it as appropriate. Each and every education initiative in this Administration requires a virtually complete overhauling of a local or state public education system through "incentives" (and punishments) designed to force the conversion of public schools to charters as a condition of getting financial help - starting with the gutting of the teachers despite the classroom having been systematically starved to death in terms of curriculum diversity and teacher supports for at least the last 20 years.

It's all part of the retraining too. This time, we are being retrained into accepting that what is truly best for American children to effectively jettison the idea of a public education system guaranteeing for ALL children an education, and definitely the idea of a teacher's union -- in favor of a system that has no worker protections and no guarantee of a quality education for all but those children who can survive the gamut of charter schools paid for largely by "business philanthropists," (as if that type of private wealthy largesse is permanent, as opposed being completely, utterly dependent upon those doing the paying getting what they want from education, when they want it, with no regard to what anyone but themselves think.)

I could go on with many other examples of how we are being rhetorically reshaped and retrained into accepting a bargain basement America where working people are concerned, complete with the complicity of those which insist on celebrating mediocre news and and push back against those who voice misgivings about a so-called "economic recovery" that structurally has eliminated almost 10% of the workforce from consideration. For what looks like permanently, if I believe the public rhetoric about "structural unemployment" resulting from American workers' need to retrain for the "skills of the future" -- as opposed to the truth.

These are just some of the are reasons that I am planning to be in DC on 10.2.10, even if the only people who show up are my daughter and I. I refuse to be retrained. I refuse to believe that unions being busted, jobs being offshored, and professionals being reduced to windowless rooms with cockroaches after having spent $100K for an education are signs of a healthy, successful, America.

But, more fundamentally, I refuse to believe in an America where I've been retrained by NewSpeak into believing that down is up, and wrong is right. I refuse to acquiesce to a narrative where a political campaign to destroy what is left of the country's theory of income fairness can be waged by (if I believe Rachel Maddow) three billionaires falsely described in the media as "disparate business, nonprofit and interest groups"

I do agree with Karl Rove, scion of the Bush Apocalypse, about one thing though:

We are at an "American Crossroads."

I am going to DC on 10.2.10 to show that I am prepared to fight against the privatization of America itself. Fight against the idea that the ideals of America are forever hence forth, for sale. Sale to the highest bidder, on that bidder's terms. Whether it be sale of education. Sale of health care. Sale of housing. Or even sale of subsistence. Whether at the federal or state level.

Because when only 3 out of 403 people apparently can afford to, and are permitted to, try and buy (and therefore set) the official narrative on what is best for America for the rest of the 335,000,000 of us Americans, we are no longer America.

We are instead truly approaching the end of our retraining, having been taught en masse that the cost of any meaningful refusal to acquiesce to the institutionalization of wage slavery on the terms of those who "own capital;" refusal to buy the idea that working more hours for the same pay in the name of "increased productivity" is a net positive; refusal celebrate the jettisoning of tens of millions of people from the work force just so that we can personally stay employed; and refusal to accept wages far below those which a job is worth; is being cast off entirely in favor of those more "eager to work" or "with a better attitude."

The desperate. The undocumented. The un-degreed. And the just plain old frightened.

None of who have any money and thus, in New America, appear no longer to count.

Just in case you still don't see what I'm concerned enough about to get to DC for, and why you should if at all possible hightail your tochis there on 10.2.10 as well, maybe this little nugget that's been sitting in my archives for a couple of months, begging for a diary, will convince you:

Many Democrats say the economy needs more stimulus. Business lobbyists and their Republican allies say it needs less regulation and lower taxes.
But here in the heartland of America, senior executives say neither side's assessment fits.

Wait a minute. Hold the phone. Since when did "senior executives" become the equivalent of "the Heartland" of America?

Since they finished paying the down payment on it, it seems to me.

I am going to show that, even if I am just a middle-aged fat Black bisexual woman who worries every day that today is the day the system will jettison me, because I refuse to be retrained into believing that executives are "the heartland", wrong is right, down is up, or that self-interest is altruism. There IS strength in numbers, if we just recognize it.

I don't know whether numbers will actually show up on 10.2.10, particularly now that there is "entertainment" scheduled for 10.30.10 in the form of another march. A march which claims to be to "restore sanity", introduced to the world as follows:

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Who among us has not wanted to open their window and shout that at the top of their lungs?
Seriously, who?
Because we're looking for those people. We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat. . .
Ours is a rally for the people who've been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) -- not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence... we couldn't. That's sort of the point.
Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we'll be actively not throwing our feces at Tila Tequila.

In other words, there is going to be a rally for those Americans who may have seen hell, but don't raise hell. Who, indeed, appear to look down on those who raise hell.

Isn't being willing to NOT to raise hell, in the face of living hell, the epitome of retrained? Where survival is an instinct, not an idea, how else do you explain the comparative silence of America's streets?

And yet we don't fight back. Those in the worker class our corporate masters seek to emulate fight, though. Workers in damned near every other nation, those privileged, those not, know when it is time to stand up and be heard. Not just in Japan or China. But in Canada, fighting against the unilateral destruction of public worker benefits. In England, fighting against the privatization of the mails if it meant a reduction in worker security. In Germany, against the very same behemoth we now celebrate the "renewal" of, conveniently forgetting both its gutting of former worker protections and breach of faith with its formerly loyal customers as an inherent part of that renewal. But yet somehow we, American workers, do not. We are worried about how we will be seen. Perceived. Judged.

Or at least, that's what we used to be worried about. Now, I think, what we're really worried about is homelessness and starvation.

But why protest what has happened, why demand, why scream when you can just be entertained?

After all, entertainment is what keeps them Paid.

(And no, one of them deciding to testify on behalf of migrant workers the other day does not make it OK to me.)

Finally, I admit that my decision to go to 10.2.10 was made for two other, deeply personal, reasons. The first is to to demonstrate to a certain segment of our non-white blogging demographic who I shall not name that, no, the NAACP (a key convener of 10.2.10) and other Black organizations are not "irrelevant" to our future success as a people in America. Neither are the unions, of which Black Americans are a sizeable part. Neither is in-the-streets activism, Old School. The work of change done by all these has not been replaced by Twitter, Facebook blogging or appearing as an "also special guest" at convenings like Netroots Nation. No matter how imperfect each of them has been at times, and no doubt will be again. All of the blogging fame in the world has done very little for those of us in the 'Hood and I was extremely irritated a few months ago to hear folks actually contend that somehow they are doing more for us collectively by blogging than organizations that have existed for our benefit for more than 100 years. That is the type of youthful delusion that will be the death of us collectively if it spreads. So I'm going to show that, in part, young brothers and sisters who realize this, have the right of it- we need each other to not just be heard and read, but be seen. I am not holding my breath on how many of the Important Black People will be there - those brothers and sisters who seem to think that their pontificating on a blog has more impact on Black lives than their being in the streets.

The second is for my children. My children, despite many ups and downs including economic, have been children of comparative privilege. They have never been hungry, like their mother. They have never sat in the dark after ConEd turned off the lights for non-payment, like their mother. They have never worried about roaches, rats, holes in the ceiling or the furnace man not delivering to the ghetto in the wintertime. They all are progressives, all interested in politics - but not activists. (They worked on President Obama's campaign, and nothing since.) I am going to show at least one of them that it is never too late to put one's boots on the ground for what one believes in. And to show them if an old fart with bad ankles and fatigue like their mom can do it, so can they. Particularly if they believe in the power of people and in strength in numbers, no matter how worried those numbers are about a job, about tomorrow, about their future. Their forever.

Why? Because, otherwise, if we don't stand up now, in the end (to quote a dear, blogging friend who I have sadly not been in touch with for nearly two years - entirely my fault, not hers):

We. Are. Fucked.

I hope to see some of you there, at the Lincoln Monument, on Saturday, 10.2.10. Bright and early. With your game face on. Because even if I don't know you, and never will one-on-one, I will still recognize brothers and sisters participating in what I increasingly believe is the last great struggle for the soul of our country.

We Won't Win the Stupak-Pitts War With Same Old, Same Old

Shanikka — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:56:24 GMT

Call me angry, call me sad, call me depressed. Call me all those things, upon waking up Sunday and hearing what I already knew when I went to bed on Saturday: that the Health Care Reform bill cleared the House on the narrowest of votes - but only because abortion access was sharply limited as part of the bill. For that, call me not at all surprised about Stupak-Pitts not only being introduced, but passing by a higher margin than the ultimate health care reform bill itself.

Why wasn't I surprised?

I wasn't surprised because Stupak-Pitts is merely an extension of that age-old American value, "fuck the poor." An extension to those very folks who threw poor women, largely of color, under the bus 32 years ago (with benign neglect each year the appropriations bill comes up ever since) by not fighting tooth and nail to defeat the Hyde Amendment.
"Fuck the poor" is a long-standing American value which the majority of Americans, including women, have always accepted as part of our national identity without any meaningful push back. Even on the Left, often all you have to do is raise the spectre of undeserving folks, usually subconsciously viewed as people of color although few admit that, getting "something for nothing" and people's so-liberal principles fold up like a cheap suit. Because their "hard earned tax dollars" can't possibly be "squandered" on encouraging what they decide are "bad" or "irresponsible" or "ignorant" people. It's all about judging the poor, overtly and covertly, even on the Left, as responsible for their own condition. Oh, folks say all the right things about caring, but they do, for the most part, Jack Shit.

Including women who claim to be fighting for "women's rights" when it comes to abortion.

Maybe now is the time to stop fighting for just for women's "equality" as measured by abortion and start fighting for some broader notion of women's human rights? In this case, the human right at issue is the human rights of women as it relates to their reproduction. For the purposes of politics, however, human rights for women has too often been defined by the politically active Left, including the most visible women's organizations, in the United States as ONLY the right to abortion services. Full stop.

IMO this self-serving tunnelvision about what the problem is leads directly to the "shock and dismay" which always comes up when completely predictable attacks on abortion like Stupak-Pitts are undertaken by politicians. Indeed, folks lose their ever loving minds as if they had never heretofore seen an attack on anyone's rights of such a magnitude. So, this weekend, as is always the case I got to watch folks engage in the usual blind rage and "mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" finger pointing at "those people" which always happens when the Left is caught flat-footed on an issue politically which it should have seen coming, and definitely as it relates to abortion. In a nutshell, it sounds like this:

Fuck the fucking fuckers who voted for Stupak-Pitts: they all just hate and want to oppress women. They are all just deluded misogynist religious zealots. They don't care if we die. It's all about the patriarchy. And did I mention they hate women?

The other nauseatingly-common response is the dulcet reassurance that despite a betrayal of human rights, such as the ones at issue with Stupak-Pitts, in the name of political compromise and "advancing the ball", there is really nothing to worry about, in the long run. I saw a bunch of that too, this weekend, that mirror image tunnelvision. It sort of sounds to something like this:

Remain calm. All is well. Yes, Stupak Pitts is very disturbing. But you have to look at The Big Picture. The Big Picture (health care reform) was achieved. Stupak-Pitts was a "necessary compromise". And, besides, the Senate will not go for this so it will all be excised in committee anyway. And it's probably unconstitutional, anyhow.

The latter behavior is well meaning, but just flat out wrong (not to mention insulting at times), as I'll demonstrate below. But the former behavior troubles me more. It troubles me more because it is a political response which repeats itself ad infinitum, but does not ever learn from the past. It never appears to cause any meaningful shift in perspective about what the problem really is. It's just the same old repetition, with a new villain. And a new excuse.

Those are the things that make ME really mad. I get mad because it feels like riding the same ride over and over again. Despite my anger, though, each time I keep hoping that the necessary venting, the necessary reassurance, the necessary parsing, will actually lead to some expansion of thought and ideas - and, most importantly, strategy.

Yet it never seems to, where the battle to preserve legal abortion is concerned.

I believe it is because politically active folks on the Left continue to look at the problem through our national prism of "fuck the poor." In fact, fuck anyone who isn't like Us, which in the context of the politically active left is generally white middle and upper class people. This is why I feel that if there is any hope of dealing with this in committee, the progressive left needs to look honestly at what Stupak-Pitts and all similar types of legislative maneuvers do, and what they don't do, and attack that instead of continuing to parrot the way-too-easy narratives, i.e. "they hate women" or "it's a necessary compromise" or demand that folks "prove" that they believe in "women's equality" as the equivalent of abortion rights. Hopefully this diary will explain why I feel that way, and maybe even persuade someone to try something new.

The rest of this diary, albeit long (and folks can stop if they don't want to read, but I'm not a politician who does soundbites) attempts to show why, and to talk about why our past political approach to the abortion question has utterly failed women's rights.

The Stupak-Pitts Amendment which passed the House of Representatives 240 to 194 on Saturday reads as follows:

No funds authorized by this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the cost of any health plan that includes coverage for abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

(Some other diary can, and probably already has given how long I've been working on this diary, demonstrate how a lawyer or judge could make hay with this language and expand it far far beyond what it looks like superficially.)

IMO this language expands our country's already-existing approval of the deprivation of human rights to poor women (and poor everyone's, in other contexts) to those women who are working and middle class yet cannot effectuate their own rights without third party assistance, in this case a "government-subsidized" health insurance policy.

IMO the story of how this happened, and an honest assessment of the likelihood that women's abortion access will be permanently saddled with that travesty of a bill unless an entirely new game plan is developed does not begin with the fight for legal abortion. This story begins with abandoned, and therefore lost even though we here at DailyKOS regularly pat ourselves on the bat about how great we (Democrats, liberals) are when it comes to taking care of the needy, fight to secure human dignity for the poor.

To me, the modern era of that failure - and a philosophical foundation of Stupak-Pitts -- begins with a case called Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970). In Dandridge, a class action was brought on behalf of large-family recipients of what was then called welfare (AFDC) in the state of Maryland challenging the state's $250 absolute limit on welfare benefits. It was conceded that the $250 cap meant that the state's own calculated "standard of need" for these purposes of AFDC was higher than the maximum amount which the families could receive under the grant. (In simple English, that means that it was conceded the families could not survive on it.)

The lower court agreed with the plaintiffs that the $250 cap violated the Equal Protection Clause, in part because, it was found, AFDC recipients with large families were forced to "farm out" some of their children to other relatives who had fewer children if they were to receive enough in benefits to survive. They were forced to break up their families, a fundamental violation of their constitutional and human right to parent their own children. Yet this argument was utterly rejected by the Supreme Court despite the known fact of how it played out on the ground to separate families. It was rejected, with language that today, the day after the Stupak-Pitts was successfully added to the health care bill in the House on the grounds that it was a "necessary compromise" to save the entire bill:

The strong policy of the statute in favor of preserving family units does not prevent a State from sustaining as many families as it can, and providing the largest families somewhat less than their ascertained per capita standard of need. . .
. . .
Although a State may adopt a maximum grant system in allocating its funds available for AFDC payments without violating the Act, it may not, of course, impose a regime of invidious discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Maryland says that its maximum grant regulation is wholly free of any invidiously discriminatory purpose or effect, and that the regulation is rationally supportable on at least four entirely valid grounds. . . The District Court, while apparently recognizing the validity of at least some of these state concerns, nonetheless held that the regulation "is invalid on its face for overreaching," 297 F.Supp. at 468 -- that it violates the Equal Protection Clause
[b]ecause it cuts too broad a swath on an indiscriminate basis as applied to the entire group of AFDC eligibles to which it purports to apply. . . .

But the concept of "overreaching" has no place in this case. For here we deal with state regulation in the social and economic field, not affecting freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and claimed to violate the Fourteenth Amendment only because the regulation results in some disparity in grants of welfare payments to the largest AFDC families. . . . In the area of economics and social welfare, a State does not violate the Equal Protection Clause merely because the classifications made by its laws are imperfect. If the classification has some "reasonable basis," it does not offend the Constitution simply because the classification "is not made with mathematical nicety or because in practice it results in some inequality." . . .
The problems of government are practical ones, and may justify, if they do not require, rough accommodations -- illogical, it may be, and unscientific.

Under this long-established meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, it is clear that the Maryland maximum grant regulation is constitutionally valid. We need not explore all the reasons that the State advances in justification of the regulation.. . . .[T]he Equal Protection Clause does not require that a State must choose between attacking every aspect of a problem or not attacking the problem at all. . . It is enough that the State's action be rationally based and free from invidious discrimination.

Shortly after Dandridge v. Williams was decided, still almost 40 years ago, in a case not really known outside the community of folks who advocate for the poor including (b) the human right (recognised virtually everywhere in the world but America, of the poor to access decent housing. This particular human rights travesty began with a US Supreme Court decision called James v. Valtierra, 402 U.S. 137 (1971). In Valtierra, the Supreme Court was confronted with Article 34 of the California Constitution, which prohibits any city from agreeing to permit the construction of any "low rent housing project" within its boundaries unless and until a voter referendum at either a special or general election confirms the desire of the municipality's citizens that the housing be sited within its boundaries.

(Admit it, California liberals/progressives - most of you didn't even know this legalized discrimination against the poor, based solely on the will of the electorate, has been the law in that great blue state of California for more than 50 years, did you?)

A "low rent housing project" under California's Article 34 is defined as a project 'being built for "low income people" which is "financed in whole or in part" by the federal government or a state governmental body, or one to which the federal or state government "lends assistance". James v. Valtierra was brought by legal aid lawyers on behalf of residents of San Jose and San Mateo County (who most Californians recognize as being part of that bastion of progressivism, the San Francisco Bay Area) whose cities had defeated Article 34 referendums, thus preventing the construction of affordable housing within their boundaries.

The United States Supreme Court made very short work of upholding Article 34. The key language from the Supreme Court opinion:

[Housing advocates for the poor] suggest that the mandatory nature of the Article XXXIV referendum constitutes unconstitutional discrimination because it hampers persons desiring public housing from achieving their objective when no such roadblock faces other groups seeking to influence other public decisions to their advantage. But of course a lawmaking procedure that 'disadvantages' a particular group does not always deny equal protection.

The people of California have also decided by their own vote to require referendum approval of low-rent public housing projects. This procedure ensures that all the people of a community will have a voice in a decision which may lead to large expenditures of local governmental funds for increased public services and to lower tax revenues. It gives them a voice in decisions that will affect the future development of their own community. This procedure for democratic decision making does not violate the constitutional command that no State shall deny to any person 'the equal protection of the laws.

The state specifically argued before the Supreme Court that even if the majority of folks affected adversely were Black or Hispanic it did not matter for constitutional purposes because the law was neutral on its face and because the state had its own legitimate interests which outweighed the interests of these groups: in fiscal stability and the fact that "low rent housing, per se, may be 'bad'" (my personal favorite - not.) (You can listen to this morally offensive 39-year old argument yourself in this wonderful media tool provided to us courtesy of Oyez.) The advocates for the poor, on oral argument before the Supreme Court, put directly at issue the constitutional question of whether Article 34 was invidious discrimination against the poor and "for the most part in practice" against racial minorities, who are protected from discrimination including that which flows from disparate impact.

They still lost.

Again, in James v. Valtierra the factual record underlying what was going on at the time was clear: the vast majority of the low-income persons who needed this housing and were disproportionately affected by the decision were members of a suspect class under the Fourteenth Amendment; they were Black people and, at that time to a lesser extent, Latino. They were members of constitutionally protected groups for which government action adversely affecting them normally demands strict scrutiny.

Despite that reality, Valtierra was, as all economic cases are, was decided under a "rational basis" test: did the government have an articulable state interest in the legislation. Because the right at issue - to the construction of decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing -- was not seen as a right that was not being restricted because of race, but because of income. The status of those seeking the housing as "poor people" was constitutionally irrelevant once it was affirmed that the legislature/people had a legitimate state interest in protecting "the public fisc" from in any way encouraging services that the representative body (in this case, the electorate) did not favor or support for reasons having to do with its "political viewpoint."

I would argue that this balancing of "the political will" against "human rights" is the same legal calculus that underlies Stupak-Pitts.

Nonsense, you say. Stupak-Pitts is an attack on women's humanity and equality. This is Different.

Well, yes, it is. But how is it any different from this attack on women's humanity and equality, that even as we speak women's advocates, progressives, liberals and even the President of the United States himself are reaffirming as perfectly OK as a benchmark for abortion rights -- just as they have for the past 32 years (proven through the benign neglect of so-called women's advocates)?

SEC. 507. (a) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated under this Act, shall be expended for any abortion.
(b) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are
appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion.
(c) The term 'health benefits coverage' means the package of services covered by a managed care provider or organization pursuant to a contract or other arrangement.
SEC. 508. (a) The limitation established in the preceding section shall not apply to an abortion-
(1) if the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest; or
(2) in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed.
. . .
(d) (1) None of the funds made available in this Act may be made available to a Federal agency or program, or to a State or local government, if such agency, program, or government subjects any institutional or individual health care entity to discriminate on the basis that the health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.

In case folks didn't know, the above blockquote is excerpts from the current text of what is commonly known as the Hyde Amendment - originally passed 32 years ago. A law which has had no serious challenge since its original version was upheld by the Courts in case called Harris v. McCrae.

Anyone who wants to understand the reasoning behind, and likely constitutionality of, Stupak-Pitts need only read McCrae, which addressed the original version of the Hyde Amendment and its refusal to fund medically necessary abortions:

In Maher v. Roe, 432 U.S. 464, 97 S.Ct. 2376, 53 L.Ed.2d 484, the Court was presented with the question whether the scope of personal constitutional freedom recognized in Roe v. Wade included an entitlement to Medicaid payments for abortions that are not medically necessary. . .
But the constitutional freedom recognized in Wade and its progeny, the Maher Court explained, did not prevent Connecticut from making "a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion, and . . . implement[ing] that judgment by the allocation of public funds." . . .As the Court elaborated:
"The Connecticut regulation places no obstacles absolute or otherwise in the pregnant woman's path to an abortion. . . The State may have made childbirth a more attractive alternative, thereby influencing the woman's decision, but it has imposed no restriction on access to abortions that was not already there. The indigency that may make it difficult and in some cases, perhaps, impossible for some women to have abortions is neither created nor in any way affected by the Connecticut regulation."

. . .In explaining why the constitutional principle recognized in Wade and later cases protecting a woman's freedom of choice did not translate into a constitutional obligation of Connecticut to subsidize abortions, the Court cited the "basic difference between direct state interference with a protected activity and state encouragement of an alternative activity consonant with legislative policy. . . .
The Hyde Amendment, like the Connecticut welfare regulation at issue in Maher, places no governmental obstacle in the path of a woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy, but rather, by means of unequal subsidization of abortion and other medical services, encourages alternative activity deemed in the public interest. The present case does differ factually from Maher insofar as that case involved a failure to fund nontherapeutic abortions, whereas the Hyde Amendment withholds funding of certain medically necessary abortions. Accordingly, the appellees argue that because the Hyde Amendment affects a significant interest not present or asserted in Maher. . . the interest of a woman in protecting her health during pregnancy and because that interest lies at the core of the personal constitutional freedom recognized in Wade, the present case is constitutionally different from Maher.
. . .Because even the compelling interest of the State in protecting potential life after fetal viability was held to be insufficient to outweigh a woman's decision to protect her life or health, it could be argued that the freedom of a woman to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy for health reasons does in fact lie at the core of the constitutional liberty identified in Wade.
But, regardless of whether the freedom of a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy for health reasons lies at the core or the periphery of the due process liberty recognized in Wade, it simply does not follow that a woman's freedom of choice carries with it a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices. . . .Although Congress has opted to subsidize medically necessary services generally, but not certain medically necessary abortions, the fact remains that the Hyde Amendment leaves an indigent woman with at least the same range of choice in deciding whether to obtain a medically necessary abortion as she would have had if Congress had chosen to subsidize no health care costs at all. We are thus not persuaded that the Hyde Amendment impinges on the constitutionally protected freedom of choice recognized in Wade.
The appellees argue that the Hyde Amendment is unconstitutional because it "penalizes" the exercise of a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy by abortion. . . This argument falls short of the mark. . . . A refusal to fund protected activity, without more, cannot be equated with the imposition of a "penalty" on that activity.

(Perhaps some day a decision will come out that overturns this hateful decision. But I doubt that anytime soon will be the day, since after all this decision was written at a time where we did not have a 5-4 right wing majority on the high court.)

McCrae (and its predecessor, Maher), make plain that the Stupak-Pitts folks knew exactly what they were doing when they proposed the amendment.

Yet I question whether anyone who was supposedly watching for just type of thing really knew. I question it because nobody gives a damn about the ongoing existence of the Hyde Amendment and the ongoing danger to women's lives that it continues to represent. They have chosen far more important poster children to fight for, which I believe reflects their choice despite all rhetoric which claims to care about what will happen to low income women if abortion rights are "restricted", to fight for those women with far more options economically. Those for whom emotional issues and convenience are far more important practical impediments to accessing the abortion right.

For example, everyone in the mainstream Left knows the name Becky Bell. Rebecca Bell was a teenager who got pregnant and did not want to tell her parents she was pregnant because she was afraid to disappoint them (there has never been any evidence that anything else motivated her; there is no evidence that she was abused, or mistreated, or even would have been rejected by her family). And she did not want to go to court for a judicial bypass, for similar reasons. So, Becky Bell got an illegal back-alley abortion - and died, tragically. The hue and cry over her death was legitimately huge and, to this day, mainstream pro-choice advocates fight virulently in her name against a viewpoint that the overwhelming majority of Americans (as in 80%) hold as confirmed by countless polls: that parents have a right to know if their minor child is pregnant and/or has an abortion. And, thanks to their advocacy, everyone knows the name of Becky Bell, if you're all involved in pro-choice issues.

But how many know the name Rosie Jimenez?

Three months after the Hyde Amendment was passed, 27-year old Rosaura Jimenez became the first women to die because she could not pay for a legal abortion following the Hyde Amendment. Nobody knows how many women have died since, because it wasn't too long after this that the government stopped requiring health care providers to keep track of such things as the number of women coming in presenting symptoms indicating that they were suffering the effects of a botched abortion procedure.

I haven't heard a lot about the specter of women dying in connection with their abortion rights except as a potential future which mainstream advocates say will come to pass if abortions are unduly restricted, have you? I certainly have not seen a whole lot of mainstream noise or discussion on the left about the question of how poor women can possibly exercise a right they can't even pay for. Even though those advocates get the opportunity each and every year, because the Hyde Amendment is reaffirmed every year since it is an appropriations statute and therefore part of the budget process. Other than the Abortion Access Project, I don't see any routine invocation of Rosie Jimenez in the fight about legal abortion.

If one doesn't study, it is easy to feel that Rosie Jimenez' death didn't really happen. But then again, she was just another poor woman of color, who already had a 5 year old she could barely afford to take care (and, although most pro-choice sites don't mention this, two previous abortions which had been funded on public assistance). Oh well, at least she wasn't a welfare queen.

No matter what else you think of Stupak-Pitts, you have to admit that it was a very smart political gambit. The amendment does not, on its face, attempt to restrict abortion. It does not attempt to restrict insurance coverage for abortion. All it does is say that if an insurance plan in any way is subsidized or supported by public funds (i.e. part of the Exchange), that insurance cannot pay for abortions.

And indeed, if people are honest with themselves they'd admit that's really why folks are screaming bloody murder as if there is something special about Stupak-Pitts: the bill's prohibition on the use of a "workaround", i.e. the expenditure of private funds to avoid the intent of the bill to further a specific public policy (disfavoring abortion.)

But if folks are indeed honest with themselves, they'd realize that Stupak-Pitts is basically a case of what being good for the gander being equally good for the goose. This type of restriction has also been largely acquiesced to by the Left before - and again on the backs of the poor. This restriction has existed in the area of federally funded legal services for the poor for 14 years now, in the form of what is called the "program integrity" regulations that were passed in 1996 (we all know the Republican president that was in office then: his name was William Jefferson Clinton:)

1610.4 Authorized use of non-LSC funds.
(c) A recipient may receive private funds and use them in accordance with the purposes for which they were provided, provided that the funds are not used for any activity prohibited by the LSC Act or prohibited or inconsistent with Section 504.

This attack on legal services was a brainchild of Reagan, to be sure, but not fully effectuated until the Clinton administration. I repeat: the LSC Regulations not only prohibit the federal funding which goes to LSC from being used for certain purposes, they also prohibit the use of any privately-acquired funds for any of the purposes for which you cannot spend the federal money.. There are lots of nefarious types of work which are considered "activities prohibited by the LSC Act" or "prohibited or inconsistent with Section 504", but I just want to highlight two of them:

Abortions and Abortion litigation

There is, however, one key difference between the program integrity regulations of the LSC Corporation and the Hyde Amendment:

There has been NO let up on the legal challenges to the constitutionality of the LSC regulations by the public interest bar: they have fought the good fight on all fronts to overturn this law, bringing repeated lawsuits, ever since it was passed.

The result? Slowly, but surely, these provisions of the LSC Act are being chipped away. Yes, there have been more losses than wins, in the courts. But there have been wins, too - and upon the election of President Obama, the community mobilized quickly and is currently aggressively advocating for the complete overturning of these regulations and enabling limitations in the LSC Act outright as the travesty of justice - the trammeling on human rights - they represent.

I haven't yet got my notice about the similar effort to overturn Hyde.

But I've had 16 e-mails in the past 72 hours about the horrors of Stupak-Pitts as "an attack on women, "especially" "low income women."

(Who do these folks think they are kidding? Why now all of a sudden are folks screaming about poor women when nothing in Stupak-Pitts makes matters any worse for poor women than it already has been for 3 decades? I HATE when folks on the Left use people they could care less about as their poster children because they are afraid to make an honest case on their own merits.)

Yes, the impact of Stupak-Pitts is indeed far broader than the limits imposed upon the abortion rights of the poor under the Hyde Amendment. Because instead of just prohibiting those poor stereotypical welfare mothers from getting an abortion paid for (and 30+ years provides that nobody really cares about them anyway) it prohibits use of a subsidized health insurance policy from being used for one. That merely restricted government funding support for abortion, without proscribing the right itself. Remember the language from the cases I've mentioned above, which reflect two clear legal principles. First, at least under existing law, the government has a legitimate state interest in encouraging childbirth (established without any doubt by Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 when it overruled Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health and Thornburg v. College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and reduced the judicial review standard established by those cases for abortion restrictions from the heightened scrutiny first established by Roe v. Wade to "undue burden", even as Casey continues to stand for the proposition that the government cannot completely ban access to abortion services before viability.

Second, and this is the reason I feel that the odds are just as good that Stupak-Pitts will remain in the health care bill as it will be deleted from it, the law has never wavered that the government has no duty to make it easier for someone to access a right, even one of constitutional dimension - and definitely not if a government funding mechanism is involved. (Now hopefully people understand why I started this abortion diary, my second ever, with a discussion not of abortion, but of Dandridge and Valtierra above.) Justice O'Connor's plurality opinion in Casey itself confirmed this is the law even as it relates to abortion:

Consistent with other constitutional norms, legislatures may draw lines which appear arbitrary without the necessity of offering a justification. . . .As our jurisprudence relating to all liberties save perhaps abortion has recognized, not every law which makes a right more difficult to exercise is, ipso facto, an infringement of that right. An example clarifies the point. We have held that not every ballot access limitation amounts to an infringement of the right to vote. Rather, the States are granted substantial flexibility in establishing the framework within which voters choose the candidates for whom they wish to vote. . .
The abortion right is similar. Numerous forms of state regulation might have the incidental effect of increasing the cost or decreasing the availability of medical care, whether for abortion or any other medical procedure. The fact that a law which serves a valid purpose, one not designed to strike at the right itself, has the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion cannot be enough to invalidate it. Only where state regulation imposes an undue burden on a woman's ability to make this decision does the power of the State reach into the heart of the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause.

Remember, this language was written by a WOMAN who knew that the restrictions and limitations on the abortion right being established through a declaration that the state's interest in pregnancy commences not at viability, but at conception, equal to a woman's from the moment of conception, did so knowing that the disproportionately affected group, women, were not going to get better all by themselves: she'd already seen enough cases to know that by then. It didn't matter.

When it came to the "fundamental right" to an abortion, it was just another right that could be deemed completely conditional upon the ability to actually pay for exercising it.

Fundamentally, IMO the fight over abortion rights in the United States has always been about the American idea that rights may legitimately be conditioned on wealth, and limited to the "deserving", which this country has always defined based on wealth. It has been as much a fight about our country's moral judgment about class, race and economic standing as a proxy for "rights", not over the issue of womanhood and women's human equality per se. Of course, gender is a valuable proxy for these things, since it is women, particularly women of color and immigrant color, who are more economically vulnerable within the operation of the patriarchy.

I put this idea forth for consideration not to dismiss the validity of the idea that misogyny may also play a role. I say this because for thousands of years, one can document the clear operation of the patriarchy, yet it is only the last 150 years or so, right around the rise of immigration and the Industrial Revolution, that you see systematic efforts to legally prevent women from terminating their pregnancies in this country. This reality of the history of abortion in the United States undercuts the argument that it has all about controlling and oppressing women. (As does the reality that many of the earliest women's equality advocates were anti-abortion.)

IMO, this fight about abortion rights is fundamentally, an argument about the values our country elevates: values that protect "rights" only for those who have, not those who don't. Including the "right" to an abortion. Who was the most strident advocate of anti-abortion laws, initially? Doctors. Doctors who pushed against "unregulated midwives" and "dangerous abortions" at the same time. Is it really arguable, then, that the history of anti-abortion in THIS country is about protecting economic bottom lines?. Yes, it is indeed a fight about women, too, but only because this particular economic fight involves a biological function that only women possess - the ability to become pregnant. But it is not clear to me that it has ever been motivated by any generalized need to attack and control women across the board, those few Neanderthals who feel that way accepted.

And if you still don't believe me when I say this fight is about money as a proxy for human value, ask yourself this:

Where in the Health Care reform bill does it guarantee the constitutional right to access birth control services through their health insurance? Indeed, where in the Health Care reform bill does it even mandate that "health insurance" be affordable? Let alone "health care?"

Let me know when you find those provisions in our "historic" health care reform bill.

You won't find them, because neither Congress nor the courts have ever blinked when it has come to enacting fiscal legislation (and that's what health care reform is, at bottom, since nothing in the bill even attempts to guarantee a generalized right to health care) that cuts out some people at the expense of some others. Our country, including many on the Left has continued to support that with nary a whimper. Our own side of the political aisle on abortion has supported that through benign neglect.

So now middle class and upper class women have reaped the whirlwind of their failure to show they give a damn about the poor (instead of just saying they do), when it came to not only how they were going to access the "right" to abortion that supposedly was guaranteed to them by the Constitution, but how to help them when for individual reasons they didn't want to exercise that right.

Given that, I would argue that anyone who keeps reducing the analysis of why abortion rights are being eroded to that simplistic idea (they don't trust/hate/want to control/want to punish women) is missing the forest for the trees. I am not speaking about what occurs in other countries - those countries have a different history than ours, and different cultures than ours, so their abortion fight may or may not be more directly tied to cultural control over women than here. But in this country, it's been a cultural calculus based on economic standing that determines who is "worthy" to have their reproductive and other rights protected by government - including through Health Care reform - and whose rights are deemed less valuable and, thus, expendable in the name of politics.

Until we change the narrative, and shift the strategy for securing abortion rights from a narrative that focuses only on abortions to a more frontal attack the foundations of our cultural consensus about the relationship between poverty and parenting, race and "normalcy", "choice" and "rights"; until we start tearing down all laws which use money and economic status to determine access to human rights of all kinds (starting with the Hyde Amendment but also those that deprive folks of their human right to decent housing and to subsistence as a condition of citizenry), with the same zero tolerance rhetoric with which we we attack laws that continue to reduce a woman's theoretical abortion right to practical nothingness, I am afraid we will continue to see precisely what we are seeing.

Through Stupak-Pitts, the Overton Window got moved just a little bit. Now, it is no longer those lazy welfare recipients and crack heads that shouldn't be out there fucking and running the risk of babies "they can't afford." It's the working class and middle class women that don't have $500 just lying around if and when they get pregnant, because they no longer can count on access to affordable insurance benefits to help ease the economic burden. We are rapidly coming full-circle, where it is only the wealthy and well connected women who get the benefits of the human right first eloquently articulated in Eisenstadt v. Baird:

If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.

It is reproductive justice, not abortion, that matters most. Abortion is just one part of the equation. Reproductive justice for women cannot be achieved by demanding orthodoxy when it comes to our uteruses, whether in terms of our beliefs or our behavior (and the last 30 years have proven conclusively that no such orthodoxy of thought is possible, not at this time in this country.) Thus, reproductive justice, including the right to legal and safe abortion, is achievable only when we insist that law, including Health Care reform, ensure that we as human beings can access the full panoply of our reproductive human rights without worrying about how to pay for them. Contraception, Childbirth, Childrearing, and Termination of Pregnancy through legal and safe abortion.

But here's the political reality which must be confronted. Despite all arguments about the right to "choice", when it comes to the majority of Americans, most support some limits on the abortion right just as they have ever since Roe v. Wade was decided, unless it involves the life of a mother. We can continue to piss in the wind and expend all our political energy arguing with vigor why this particular abortion viewpoint is rationally "wrong", or "bad" or "misogynist". I predict we'll keep losing if we do.

Or, we can shift strategy to developing arguments that justify maintaining access to legal abortion for women that do not depend on trying to make people change their minds about the ethics or morality of the millions of abortions which occur which are inarguably not medically necessary.

What are some of those arguments? That would make about 10 more diaries and I am going to called out for the length of this diary as it is. But most of the ones that I believe will ultimately win this fight for women and which have been given short shrift by the pro-choice left, which continues to elevate what Dorothy Roberts refers to as individual "negative liberty" (i.e. the right to be left alone) over the other principles at the heart of the abortion fight politically, are grounded in the idea of Reproductive Justice:

Reproductive Justice is the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being of women and girls, and will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.

Notice that the word "choice" is nowhere to be found. That's not likely accidental. The rhetoric of "choice" simply has proven not to resonate with Americans in a way that ensures they will protect access to legal abortion for all women, which everyone with any sense must concede is necessary and a human right even if we as individuals differ in our opinions about the justifications or parameters for that access.

Even now, the rhetoric of "choice" continues to be utilized most often by the mainstream women's movement, whose leadership remains largely white and largely middle class despite all efforts by feminist groups comprised of women of color over the last 3 decades to build a successful coalition and advance a different perspective on the problem. It has been the constant rallying cry. Yet IMO you never get to see either the Hyde Amendment 32 years ago or to Stupak-Pitts today enshrined in law if the rhetoric of choice had been successful.

It hasn't. It has largely failed, if I judge by the accelerating erosion of abortion rights since Roe and by the sense of Deja-Vu I get reading Stupak-Pitts.

There has been some study about how we got to this place. I personally find this explanation by women's historian Rickie Solinger to be one of the most compelling:

I have thought a lot about the limitations of "choice" as women's special guarantee. I worry about the consequences of this: the promise that women can decide for themselves whether and when to become mothers is expressed by the individualistic, market-place term, "choice." How can users of such a term avoid distinguishing, in consumer-culture fashion, between a woman who can and a woman who can't afford to make a choice? I worry about what aspects of "rights" are masked or lost when the language of choice replaces the language of rights at the heart of women's special guarantee.
I use the term "rights" to refer to the privilege or benefits of being a human - and specifically a woman- in the United States. "Rights" usually refers to privileges and benefits that a person can exercise without access to any special resources, such as money. . .
But "choice" has come to be associated with possessing resources. Many Americans believe that women who exercise choice are supposed to be legitimate consumers, women with money. This is true even when the choices they exercise, such as the choice to be a mother or the choice to end a pregnancy, might be considered a very fundamental issue of rights.
Distinctions between women of color and white women, between poor and middle-class women, have been underscored in the "era of choice" partly by defining some women (rich and middle class) as good choice-makers and other women (the ones in the reviled categories) as bad choice-makers. During a time when babies - and pregnancy itself- have become ever more commodified, only "good" choice-makers have a "legitimate" relationship to babies and motherhood. The other woman is "illegitimate" mothers because without resources, they are illegitimate consumers.
The use of the concept "choice"- focusing on what a given, individual woman decides to do, reproductively- encourages us to ignore the social and economic context in which women are fertile. We look at the individual woman and her choices while we ignore the content and the consequences of public policies, and the impacts of racism and very low minimum wage rates on the lives of women who may become mothers. These factors arguably have a lot more to do with the quality of any given woman's mothering than her own "choices."
We say that women who can't give their children all the advantages and have babies anyway are selfish, and they are bad choice-makers. We say that motherhood should be a privilege reserved for middle-class women, the ones who can afford to be proper mothers. And suddenly we have backed ourselves into a corner. Suddenly we are supporting an economic test for motherhood in America.

If you close your eyes and head to your quiet space, perhaps you can hear echoes of discussions about abortion you have had in the past, where everyone seems to be in agreement about how some women are "stupid" for not having an abortion when they get pregnant whether because they have no money, no education, no "plan." You can certainly hear the many arguments about why it is "best" to have an abortion under some circumstances. I've made them myself. And you can perhaps hear our own side's defense of laws that started creeping on the books beginning in the 1990's that essentially made women guarantors of their pregnancies: the "anticrack baby" laws, the laws authorizing covert drug testing of women, the ones that increasingly allowed the choice of motherhood to be taken away on the grounds of "neglect." Or at least we should hear them. And we should be unflinching in admitting honestly that most of this didn't bother the Left too much. After all, all this stuff was affecting only women who really "should have just had an abortion", anyway.

I wrote a diary four years ago, now, about what I perceived as the nexus between the failure of the mainstream women's movement to fight against all of these types of laws - that specific diary was about the laws which sent (usually) Black women to prison for "murder" or "child abuse" for behavior while they were pregnant -- and the failing fight to secure legal abortion. But certainly, I'm not the first person to have raised the issue. Women of color who were reproductive rights activists have been screaming at the top of their lungs about this for decades - and being completely ignored by the left and certainly by the abortion rights movement.

Many of these scholars concluded long ago that the narratives most utilized by many of those who are the most strident when it comes to advocating for the right to a legal abortion carry with them highly classist (and at times racist) assumptions about motherhood and about what women are, or are not, worthy. (Talk about patriarchy - yet I'm hard pressed to find a whole lot of discussion about it.)

Hopefully, anyone who feels as much sadness, anger and despair as I do about Stupak-Pitts will now think seriously about trying to do something different to secure abortion rights - since hopefully we all know what the definition of insanity is. Something different and radical: take abortion rights out of the center of their analysis and adopt an unwavering holistic viewpoint of what the problem to be solved really is: reproductive justice for women. One can start by taking good, long, and most importantly open-minded gander at the unwaveringlypro-choice arguments formulated in works like the following:

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, and everything else written by lawyer and professor Dorothy Roberts for the past 25 years. To me, Roberts is the starting place for anyone who is committed to securing abortion rights access and REALLY wants to understand in earnest why liberals and women find ourselves where we are today in terms of the increasing legal tenuousness of the right. Yes, this particular book is about Black women. However, as I've noted in previous diaries and comments, much of the law and social policy which allows the country to now try and jettison working class and middle class' women's right to an abortion was built on the uteruses of Black women and societal attempts to control their reproduction, with nary a whimper by those groups that were supposedly out there protecting women, including most liberals.

Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Jael Stillman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Guitierrez. A foundational work.

Pregnancy and Power, and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Abortion, Adoption and Welfare in the United States, both by Rickie Solinger. Solinger is the best source for analysis of the weaknesses in the narrative of "consumer choice" advanced by mainstream feminism and of how it has been used as a vehicle through which women's reproductive rights are systematically being limited.

Anyone who is serious should also learn about Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, the organization that wrote the defintiion above; SisterSong, the successor umbrella organization to what was one of the earliest coalitions of Black pro-choice advocates - the earliest to recognize the political limitations of, and reject, the 'choice' narrative as grounded in classism and racism; and the website of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization founded by a simply BADASS woman named Lynn Paltrow, who figured out at least 2 decades ago what the mainstream women's rights movement seems to simply refuse to hear: the political fight over abortion has been used as a diversion tactic - to further a far larger agenda which diverts societal resources and wealth to a narrow class of beneficiaries by keeping those who actually should be in coalition fighting over abortion in a vacuum.

For me, I also think that it is important to listen to those who you might otherwise deem "the enemy", because it is only by listening to them that you begin to understand how rhetoric/marketing matters to the debate over abortion. I'm not advocating parking one's self at the doorsteps of the National Right to Life Foundation or Concerned Women of America and asking for a pow-wow. I'm suggesting that advocates look into coalitions with groups like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, a pro-choice group also made up primarily of people of color, which has ever since Roe v. Wade worked with those with moral misgiving based on their understanding of religion when it came to abortion; and have developed very effective arguments which put God at the center of the analysis (necessary if you're actually going to even try to persuade a person whose objection is religious) through their "Prayerfully Pro Choice" campaign.

If we don't shift tactics, if we don't shift rhetoric, if we continue the same old same old as if it's just a matter of people not hearing the arguments the first 1,000 times (instead of the truth, which is that they heard them just fine, they just weren't persuaded!) I am highly pessimistic that the Senate will do anything about Stupak-Pitts in reconciliation unless their literal political lives are on the line. The Senate is already responsible for the watered down health bill as it is - because of its commitment to seeing that the health insurance industry would be protected financially, and its refusal to approve any of the plans and amendments put forth that would have guaranteed access to health care by providing some meaningful type of public option (meaningful in the sense that something more than 10% of Americans would have access to it.) This amendment reduces the cost of overall health care, while at the same time in no way legally restricting access to abortion. For those Democrats who believe they cannot win in their districts and be seen as too "pro choice", you couldn't have asked for a better Christmas present - they can truthfully say in the usual 30 second soundbyte that Stupak-Pitts in no way ends our our country's commitment to ensuring access to abortion for women.

If you can pay for it, that is.

And if you can't? Well, as a wise commenter in one of the many Stupak-Pitts diaries put it this past Sunday, who questioned (largely to crickets; folks are so good here at ignoring what makes them uncomfortable!) why all the handwringing now when some version of Hyde has been on the books for 30 years and is renewed each and every year?

Welcome to equality.

I'll end the diary with some words from a couple of pro-choice activists, women who know (or knew) what is at stake and were not so selfish as to think that somehow their upper and middle classes uteruses and a desire to keep a baby out of them were any more important than the rights of other women to control their own, including through having their babies.

First, Lynn Paltrow, who as I mention above is about as badass a pro-woman advocate as you are ever going to find, who just happens to be white and middle class but Gets It, nonetheless:

I started my career defending a woman's right to choose abortion and now run National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization that works on behalf of pregnant women and families. No, I haven't had a political or religious conversion. What I have had is the opportunity to see how the abortion issue distracts us from shared political and family values. While politics and media like to divide the world into neat bundles of opposites-pro choice vs. pro life-the reality of women's lives simply doesn't fit these patterns. For example, it is widely known that women who profoundly oppose abortions still sometimes have abortions. What is rarely discussed is the fact that most women who have abortions are already or will someday become mothers. . .
The abortion issue divides us and distracts us from common threats and threads. . . . Birthing rights activists and abortion rights activists, pro-choice and pro-life, Republicans and Democrats all need to work to change the conversation. We will continue to disagree about abortion, but together we must acknowledge that anti-abortion laws are being used to hurt women who want to carry their pregnancies to term and that all of us are harmed by an overriding U.S. policy that fails to value mothers and families.

Nobody, however, IMO can top the prescience of Lucinda Cisler, who wrote this 40 years ago, a fact which should haunt the Left and mainstream women's groups right now as they struggle to find a way to eradicate Stupak-Pitts (knowing it's likely to be upheld if it stays in the final heaslth care reform package, because the Democrats in Congress know that with the economy not being dramatically recovered come next November, the electorate is likely to start throwing people out on their ears take no prisoners, so that ANYTHING they can tout as "health care reform" simply MUST pass this year). Lucinda Cisler made the problem plain. She warned of the risk inherent in selling some women down the river to secure abortion rights for others. And, she did it before Roe, before Hyde, before Stupak-Pitts, and before each and every attack on abortion that has led the right to legal abortion down the slippery slope towards extinction for the past 30 years:

One of the few things that everyone in the women's movement seems to agree on is that we have to get rid of the abortion laws and make sure that any woman who wants an abortion can get one. We all recognize how basic this demand is; it sounds like a pretty clear and simple demand, too-hard to achieve, of course, but obviously a fundamental right just like any other method of birth control.
But just because it sounds so simple and obvious and is such a great point of unity, a lot of us haven't really looked below the surface of the abortion fight and seen how complicated it may be to get what we want. The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice women's right to abortion.
Everyone recognizes the cruder forms of opposition to abortion traditionally used by the forces of sexism and religious reaction. But a feminist philosophy must be able to deal with all the stumbling blocks that keep us from reaching our goal, and must develop a consciousness about the far more subtle dangers we face from many who honestly believe they are our friends.
In our disgust with the extreme oppression women experience under the present abortion laws, many of us are understandably tempted to accept insulting token changes that we would angrily shout down if they were offered to us in any other field of the struggle for women's liberation. . .
The abortion issue is one of the very few issues vital to the women's movement that well-meaning people outside of the movement were dealing with on an organized basis even before the new feminism began to explode a couple of years ago. Whatever we may like to think, there is quite definitely an abortion movement that is distinct from the feminist movement, and the good intentions of most of the people in it can turn out to be either a tremendous source of support for our goals or the most tragic barrier to our ever achieving them. The choice is up to us: we must subject every proposal for change and every tactic to the clearest feminist scrutiny, demand only what is good for all women, and not let some of us be bought off at the expense of the rest.

Are the mainstream folks who are screaming from the rooftops over Stupak Pitts in the name of for "women's equality" going to accept being bought off, yet again? If so, do me a favor: don't complain when this battle to keep abortion safe and legal is still being fought, 40 more years from now.

It will be just same old, same old.

Video Don't Lie - Or Does It?

Shanikka — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:26:36 GMT

In today's news.

From the Associated Press:

ACORN Workers Fight to Save Abused Prostitute and 13 Sex Slaves from the El Salvadorean Mafia
Volunteers at 5 offices of the nation's largest advocacy organization for the poor, ACORN, were filmed today in their efforts to help an abused young woman and her boyfriend buy a safe house to free her from the pimp who had abused her and imported thirteen El Salvadorian children to the U.S. as sex slaves.

(Story continues after the fold.)

In New York, Baltimore, Washington, San Diego and San Bernadino, ACORN workers gave advice to Hannah Giles, 19, and the man who rescued her, James O'Keefe, age 26, about how to get a mortgage to buy a house where Giles and the girls would no longer be abused and exploited by "Sonny", a pimp with ties to the Mafia known for his violent physical abuse. Giles, isolated from her family, said that all previous efforts to get help had been rebuffed by mainstream lenders who had discriminated against her because merely she was a prostitute. O'Keefe, a law student and aspiring politician, said that he came forward because he needed to ensure that Hannah and the girls were safe. ACORN workers gave the couple school advice, tax advice and urged Giles and O'Keefe to reach out to family and friends for help while evaluating their current choices. "We are not going to judge these young people in their efforts to save themselves", said a spokesperson for ACORN. "They are poor, they need help, and it is our mission to help them since it was made clear that no one else would. We are confident that with just a little help and guidance, Giles will be able to leave the Life behind someday thanks to O'Keefe promising future and commitment to Giles. Certainly, they have shown through their insistence that they free other young girls from sex slavery from the same pimp that abused Giles that they are worthy of help.

I've sort of exhausted myself this past two weeks here defending in the comments section of numerous diaries (most of which, to be fair, were trying to help folks understand what really was happening with this story) the reputation and importance of the largest community organizing group in the United States, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), against what has been a plethora of claims about its being a "corrupt criminal enterprise" that "turns a blind eye to prostitution." And against claims that ACORN is unimportant to the Left because "it raises no serious money" and "has no vital constituency" and should be thrown overboard post-haste for political cover.

But I hadn't seriously defended the alleged conduct of that handful of employees/volunteers out of the 400,000 nationwide who had supposedly been "caught". I had not raised any serious challenge to the narrative. I merely assumed without actual close study that the ACORN employees had indeed done what they are repeatedly being accused of having done, a fair summary of which is this:

Advise James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles on how to set up a brothel at which underage immigrant prostitutes would be kept by buying a house using illegal means while evading income taxes.

The thing that detracted me from it was, of course, is existence of videotapes. How could ACORN defend against what was shown in them? After all, everyone could see with their own eyes ACORN doing all the horrible things it was accused of doing.

Videotape doesn't lie.

Or does it?

I would suggest that in this case, it does.

Anyone who hasn't yet done so needs to step back and go read what in my business is called "the cold record": the transcripts of the interviews that were done in ACORN offices and ultimately released on videotape:

Baltimore, Maryland (undated from what I can see.)

Brooklyn, New York (allegedly shot August 4, 2009.)

San Bernadino (allegedly shot August 14, 2009.)

San Diego (allegedly shot August 15, 2009.)

Washington, D.C. (date obscured in videotapes.)

(I list these alphabetically only because that makes sense in this context. However, a key fact that is going to come out some day in litigation is the sequential order of these videos. Given some of the things whispered between Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, and the contents of the Baltimore video in particular, I suspect that the worst videos were created only after Giles and O'Keefe had been to a number of ACORN offices and discovered that the only chance they had for an effective smearing of ACORN was to keep "upping the ante" with these largely uneducated people, to entrap ACORN's independent, local workers into making the incriminating statements with which the far more savvy national organization is now being drawn and quartered.)

I believe that anyone who does read the transcripts with an open mind, unpolluted by the visual cues in the videotape, will conclude that anyone who believed all of what was being said about what occurred owes all but one of these ACORN workers (a receptionist in Baltimore) -- and the national organization to whom each of these local affiliates was connected -- an enormous apology. So does everyone else who actually took at face value what they saw and heard (or at least, thought they saw and heard) on You-Tube, Fox News, Glenn Beck and everywhere else those videotapes have floated.

IMO, most of the conclusions which have been drawn from what is actually seen and heard in these five ACORN "sting videotapes" are a living example of the failings of eyewitness recollection. Science tells us that most people who see an unusual event, often recall not what actually occurred, but what their biases and prior experiences tell them occurred. The more unexpected the event, the more bias about the facts that are seen, and the more misleading and inaccurate information that is heard about the event after the event, the more likelihood that what people remember seeing as eyewitnesses is just flat out wrong.

The reasons the Right is experiencing "recollection bias" and up in arms about what is on these videotapes are obvious: the Right has been gunning for ACORN for its voter registration activities in earnest since at least 2004 and the rest of its advocacy work for decades.

Yet that does not explain why the same "recollection errors" are made by viewers from the Left, particularly our elected officials. There is another explanation, I believe. A selfish explanation, born and living in the never-ending refusal of the Left to stand by "those people" (Black and/or Latino, and definitely poor), in the face of political attacks on them. Born from the subconscious, ongoing belief that these "inferior people" are a political liability if they are embraced too closely, and not worth fighting for. This is why I believe that ACORN is currently being destroyed is just as much because the Democratic Party and its allies continue to run from any association with the colored and uneducated poor in order to keep ties with the constituency they most value: middle and upper-class white voters, a constituency that has not delivered a majority of its votes to any Democratic presidential candidate for the past 45 years.

So this diary is going to go over all the claims set forth in my summary of accusations against ACORN (for want of a better term) above, in reverse order. But as you read what I write, please don't watch the video. At least for now, stick with "the cold record."

The Claim That ACORN helped with Tax Evasion/Tax Fraud

I first decided to look at these transcripts in detail because, despite the "oooh" factor of the prostitution angle taking up much of folks' initial angst, it was the tax issue that concerned me the most. Reasonable minds can differ on prostitution but only nutcases and upper-class Republicans differ on whether folks are legally required to pay their income taxes.

So, was ACORN really trying to help Giles and O'Keefe avoid paying taxes on their (phantom) illegal income?

Hell no. Quite the opposite.

In the most incriminating ACORN interview, the Baltimore case, there are at 11 pages in which absolutely nothing is said by the ACORN worker that is remotely illegal or immoral - quite the opposite, this worker is not taking the bait of their innuendo. She asks nothing more than questions any tax accountant would ask ANY legitimate business person. It is only when James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles note between themsevles that they have to "bring it up a notch" and "talk about doing illegal things with the taxes" (Page 12) that we get to the heart of the matter. Tonya (the ACORN worker) is going to "make this like a legal business." Why? Because they don't want Kenya (aka Hannah Giles) to get in trouble.

So what does Tonya do? She actually looks, because unlike a whole lot of people she is not judgmental, for a legitimate income tax code with which Giles can report income without disclosing its source. (See Page 14.)

Why on earth would anyone do this?

Well, perhaps it's because one has the same legal duty to pay income taxes if one's income is illegal as one does if the income is legal.

(It may also be for another reason, discussed below in the section involving the prostitution claims.)

IRS Publication 525
. . .
Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

All of the ACORN workers clearly advised Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe to comply with the law and file returns and pay taxes This advice makes sense if you're truly trying to help someone. The legal consequences for failing to file income tax returns and pay taxes make the legal penalties for prostitution look like a picnic in the park. (See 26 U.S.C. sections 7201 et. seq.) Moreover, since there is a Fifth Amendment right NOT to have to disclose that you are breaking the law (lest we forget that little detail) in any investigation (Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U.S. 547 (1892)), the IRS cannot demand to know the source of your income if you don't list one on your return. And the IRS cannot report you to the police even if you do disclose the income as illegally obtained on your return (which if you speak to a tax lawyer, they would categorically tell you to NOT do, since if you are independently investigated, then voila you have waived your 5th Amendment rights in your return.)

These are the types of "tradeoffs" the tax laws regularly make when confronted with folks who earn their living through less than legal means - they would rather get the taxes than bust the person who is paying them. A similar calculus exists when it comes the absolute duty of the undocumented to pay taxes on their earnings even though none of them are supposed to be working at all because it is clearly against the law. The IRS cannot report the millions of returns filed with only a TIN number to immigration for investigation any more than it can report the tax returns of those working in "the Life."

But the IRS can and regularly does drop the hammer on those who don't report all their income from illegal activity and pay taxes on that income (see Al Capone.)

Given this, I have no idea whatsoever what the hell folks are referencing when they parrot the mantra "ACORN helped commit tax fraud". I've been following the media and blog stories closely and eventually someone will explain to me how telling someone to "pay your taxes" manages to end up on the news (parroted without any thought whatsoever) as "offering extensive advice on how to evade federal taxes," and "coach[ing] them on how to commit Federal tax fraud. In addition to advising these individuals to underreport their income to the IRS. . ."

The law required Giles to report her prostitution income, and that's what she was told by ACORN she had to do, if she had any hope of buying the house she said she desperately needed. Each ACORN that discussed taxes with Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe told them that they she had to file tax returns and pay taxes and that she could not borrow money to buy a house without proof she had done that for at least two years. (Washington Tr. P. 6, New York Tr. PP. 5-6, Baltimore Tr. P 16.) They tell them that Hannah Giles MUST file tax returns. They tell them that IF they want to buy the house, Hannah cannot do it, but James must do it because it's HER illegal acts, not his.

This perfectly legal tax advice never wavered.

There is also a claim that ACORN San Bernadino improperly advised him to set up a 501(c)(3) to hide their income. We are left to imply, without it ever actually being said, that this advice to set up a non-profit organization was for the purposes of evading taxes on prostitution income.

It wasn't.

Indeed, nowhere in the transcript of the only ACORN interview where this came up (ACORN San Bernadino) is there any discussion of taxes or tax returns. However, in the edited video released by O'Keefe, there is a claim that one of the San Bernadino ACORN employees advised them to evade taxes by setting up a 501(c)(3). Notably, however, there is no videotape of that statement that has been released - all that is included in the published edited version is a still shot of the employee's head, his name, and a voiceover.

(There is, I believe, a not-innocent reason for this.)

There is also the salacious detail that in Baltimore and New York, Giles and O'Keefe were advised that they could declare the "girls" as dependents on their income returns. Well, that might have had something to do with the fact that ACORN was told that the "girls" were going to live full-time with Hannah Giles and be dependent on Hannah Giles. As I understand the tax code, this would (but for the fact of their presumably undocumented immigration status) in fact make them eligible for for treatment as "qualifying relatives" on Giles' tax returns. (Baltimore Tr. PP. 19-20) But as soon the Baltimore ACORN tax advisor finds out that "the girls" were not, in fact, documented immigrants, she immediately tells Giles and O'Keefe that the girls cannot in fact be put on the tax returns. (Baltimore Tr. P. 23.)

Eventually I hope that someone will tell me how that this equates to tax evasion - because of course the fewer dependents list on your tax return, the more taxes you have to pay.

I can't find anywhere in these transcripts any effort on the part of ACORN to help these people EVADE their taxes. The closest you get is ACORN advising them to be less than honest by (1) reporting the income from prostitution on the tax returns and application for a mortgage as coming from another source, i.e. "entertainment" or "performance art" or "hospitality", so as not to send up a red flag about the fact that Hannah Giles' income was going to be coming from a brothel (not that the word brothel was ever used - it wasn't) and (2) not trying to claiming too many dependents on their return, no matter how girls were actually dependent on them. Now, that's not really kosher tax advice, but I'm not sure it's illegal advice, either. I genuinely don't know, and have to yield to a tax professional for the answer.

Whatever the answer is, I feel that the angst here on the Left about the tax issue not only reflects surburban sensibilities that often miss the forest for the trees, and reflect a deep-seated hypocrisy. Indeed, I can't understand why the entire ACORN tax controversy is not a "No, Duh" moment. It should be, in light of other issues near and dear to the hearts of liberals that do not result in similar finger-wagging. For example, with all the drug legalization advocates we have here at DailyKOS, ask yourself this: how many times have you read here anyone advising a drug dealer to honestly report the true source of their income when asked by the police? The bank? How about on their tax returns?
How many times here have ACORN's detractors on the Left read a diary even taking these positions? How many times have they written one?

That's a diary I can't wait to see, given the countless number of times the fact that drug dealing is illegal and in many circumstances exploitative is dismissed out of hand by the Left as represented by DailyKOS.

(There is another area in which the finger-wagging reactions on the Left indicate a deep-seated hypocrisy when it comes to judging poor people, particularly people of color, but I will discuss it later in this diary in connection with O'Keefe's prior work before he and Hannah Giles set their smear machine in motion against ACORN.)

The Claim that ACORN Advised Committing Fraud to Get a Mortgage

IMO the most incriminating part, legally, of what happened is the least discussed in the media and blogosphere: that ACORN was willing to try and help Giles and O'Keefe get a conventional mortgage knowing that the source of their income was illegal and that the property would be used as a brothel. This is likely the least sexy part of the hue and cry against ACORN because, of course, no actual mortgage applications were ever filled out by anyone at ACORN (no tax returns, either) and there was no property purchased with one. But nonetheless, Giles and O'Keefe were repeatedly encouraged to begin the homebuying process for first time homebuyers, even after they made the "bombshell disclosures" about the nature of their income in 3 of the 5 offices. And, most importantly, they were not told by ACORN that the Uniform Residential Loan Application aka FNMA Form 1003 requires a representation under oath that the property for which the mortgage is being obtained will not be used for illegal purposes. A misrepresentation that at least some ACORN workers knew that Giles would be risking fines and/or federal prison if she made it. (See 18 U.S.C. s. 1001)

Why did ACORN workers not simply say "We can't get you any mortgage so Go Away?" At least one reason may be that ACORN workers did not want Giles and O'Keefe to fall prey to predatory lenders, something mentioned in both Baltimore and New York. After all, predatory mortgage lending is a scourge that ACORN has been successfully battling nationally for the past decade beginning long long LONG before anyone in the mainsteam middle-class Left other than a precious few lawyers (like me, hooray!) really understood what was going on and began trying to fight it in earnest about 2 years ago.

I can easily see the moral calculus in a low income community organizer that concludes that it is better to tell a lie on a mortgage application about the nature of their work and illegal activities which will occur in the future than turn away someone who claims to be desperate to obtain a house for reasons having to do with fleeing abuse and exploitation. But then again, I've seen a lot of mortgage applications from "squeaky clean" people who had no excuse to lie as badly as they did trying to get a loan, either.

I do want to clear up the one misconception. Several folks have repeated the mantra that ACORN broke the law merely by advising Giles and O'Keefe how to get a mortgage when the source of the income was illegal. Given that both racist redlining and subprime and predatory lending have historically been two areas in which ACORN has been a serious (and VERY successful) thorn in the side of the financial services industry, this needs to be squashed for the non-issue that it is.

There is no law that prohibits one from buying a house based on the source of one's income. There is no law that prohibits buying a house if the proceeds used to get the house are from illegal activity.

If there was, the Mafia, high-end madams, drug kingpins and money launderers would all be renters.

Most importantly, there is also no law prohibiting advising someone to make a misrepresentation on a Form 1003 where no mortgage application is ever actually submitted to a lender. The applicable fraud statute only applies to "claims [to the government] for payment". (18 U.S.C. 1001(c)). IF ACORN employees had actually assisted Giles and O'Keefe in completing and submitting a conventional mortgage application insured by Fannie Mae to a lender, they WOULD have been breaking the law.

But they didn't.

Admittedly, here is where I most empathize with those ACORN critics who say "But it doesn't matter - they clearly were trying to advise someone to break the law." It's not an unreasonable viewpoint.

But is it a fair one?

My answer to that question that leads me to now ask you to put on your human hats, and remember why these ACORN workers were put in a position to give Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe bad advice to begin with.

The Claim that ACORN Turned a Blind Eye to Prostitution, Including of Underage Immigrant Girls

We finally get to the reason, in my mind, why for the first time the unrelenting efforts by the Right on ACORN since at least 2004 have finally succeeded (but only thanks to the knee-jerk judgmentalism of too many on the Left when it comes to the poor and people of color who don't "behave", especially Black people - unless they need to legitimize that "misbehavior" to prop up a political cause THEY prioritize, like legalizing drugs or decriminalizing teenage sex with adults.) This tempest in a teapot is almost entirely because of the claim that ACORN is systematically helping prostitution, including underage prostitution.

Now is a good time to ask y'all something that's really been bugging me.

What planet do you folks live on that you think most of the people staffing ACORN offices (poor, uneducated, living in neighborhoods where petty criminality is just that - petty) actually BELIEVED that James O'Keefe was a pimp? After all, unless I missed it somewhere in the transcripts (I might have, so please show it to me) at no time did James O'Keefe identify himself as a pimp. Despite his outlandish get up, which was given so much credibility by both the Left and the Right that I can only presume (a) none of y'all have ever met, seen, or interacted with a real pimp since the early 1980's and (b) folks have either an addiction to Blaxploitation flicks or (like myself) an addiction to one of the most side-splitting send-ups ever filmed, Attack of the Killer Street Pimps from that 1980's classic, Hollywood Shuffle.

Certainly, we have some indication that that every ACORN worker did not take the visual bait of O'Keefe's ridiculous get-up. In San Bernadino there are multiple indicia that the ACORN worker was playing Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe harder than they were playing her - her statement at one point that she is taking them to meet the 73-year old guy across the street for advice even though she "just met him a few days ago" and "he likes young women" because she "doesn't want to waste ACORN's time" since it would not have "anything to do with this" (San Bernadino TR. P. 37.)

But even if we didn't, repeating that ACORN was supporting prostitution ad nauseum doesn't make it true.

Let's take the easiest part of this claim first - the accusation that ACORN workers supported prostitution in the abstract. Even if it were true, so what? Reasonable minds on both the Right and the Left have regularly differed about whether prostitution should be legal. (I myself find it an exploitative, sad, business, that few people get into without finding themselves with no other options.) But read the ACORN "sting" transcripts closely. Do you see any ACORN worker (other than the lady in San Bernadino) advocating for prostitution to be legal? Or dismissing its harms?

No, you don't.

Clear references to Hannah Giles' status as a (fake) prostitution were made in each ACORN office. Yet there is no serious statement of support for her choice of work in any of them. The closest you have is (a) when the San Diego interview itself has pretty much ended and Mr. Vera asks Hannah Giles how much she charges and whether she would work for him, only to immediately apologize when O'Keefe reminds him that Giles is his girlfriend and (b) the provocative statements of Teresa, in San Bernadino, who not only claims Heidi Fleiss as her hero, but surmises that both President Obama and the Kennedy's have benefitted from illegal income; and (c) assurances that ACORN is not going to harshly judge Giles just because she's a prostitute in Baltimore and Washington DC.

You also have almost every single ACORN worker at some point urging Hannah Giles to think about her future and to consider a different line of work, for her sake and O'Keefe's.

Let's face it though - the part that is causing a meltdown is not just prostitution; it is the allegations of trafficking in juvenile sex slaves.

There is no evidence that in either New York City or Washington DC that any ACORN employee knowingly assisted in any way in the trafficking of underage prostitutes. In neither of those interviews is there a clear reference to what the "girls" would be doing once they were freed from the abusive pimp, other than living with Hannah Giles and "working". There is nothing but innuendo.

I will pay money, personally, if you can find any statement in the Washington DC ACORN interview that underage girls would be doing at all. All that is stated is that 13 (at one point 10) El Salvadorian "girls" were "involved".

Still sounds really bad, I think we would all agree?

Well, not necessarily, if you know a little about prostitution. Or know any prostitutes. Or watched the classic underground documentary about The Life. Or even the Melanie Griffith/Sigourney Weaver classic. Any of those data sources confirms that one of the most common venacular names for a prostitute is?

Working girl.

At least as it relates to what happened in New York and Washington DC, folks who believe those offices encouraged underage prostitution appear to have heard the word "girl" and imputed onto that word an incorrect assumption: that "girl" meant "child." Considering the venacular of this business it is highly unlikely that that was what was ACORN workers (themselves from the mean streets) automatically assumed, especially given that the entire context of the conversation was that James O'Keefe was attempting to help Hannah Giles herself flee from exploitation by a pimp. O'Keefe even tries at one point to get the ACORN worker to say she helped underage girls with prostitution (NY Tran. P. 27)- yet no such statement is ever made or even suggested by the ACORN worker. And the one time in D.C. that James O'Keefe tries to talk in detail about WHAT they want the house for, the ACORN worker says bluntly: "I can't touch that." (DC Tr. p. 9)

Unfortunately, as anyone who has checked out either You Tube or FOX News this week knows, there were direct references to underage girls being brought to the United States for the purposes of prostitution is in the Baltimore, San Diego and San Bernadino interviews. Both times, the reference is that a violent pimp associated with the underworld is bringing 12-15 year old girls into the country to traffic them. Both Giles and O'Keefe make numerous references to this being the reason they need a house so badly - they are taking in "girls" to protect them from abuse.

In San Diego, ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera has said that he was purposefully misled into believing that he was saving Hannah Giles and the girls from a dangerous pimp. Which makes sense, since that is precisely what he was told. (San Diego TR. P. 4.)

Mr. Vera is extremely believable, especially since we know that he notified the police.

But he was fired anyway on the strength of the second of two videotapes released. Even though the video clearly discloses that Mr. Vera's first language is not English - you can see (and read) the confusion throughout. Perhaps it is because ACORN couldn't see on the carefully-edited videos what the transcript clearly discloses: that that the very first thing that Mr. Vera did, when told that the situation involves prostitution of underage girls, was leave. For 5 minutes. (San Diego Tr. V1 p. 4.) After he returned, Mr. Vera told Giles and O'Keefe very little, except about the first time homebuyers program and the seminar they should attend, that ACORN worked with lawyers (and prosecutors), and about the need to have tax returns and proof of income to buy a house. All of the suggestions about "performance art", all of the discussion about underage prostitution, everything is said not by Mr. Vera (who is largely reduced to "Okay" and "Yeah" the entire time) but by O'Keefe himself.

The transcript discloses, however, is Mr. Vera's repeated attempts to get Giles and O'Keefe to leave -- but not without leaving a telephone number or address of some kind, such as an e-mail address. He insists repeatedly that he needs to give his advice later, no matter how many outrageous things O'Keefe and Giles (and ONLY those two, look at the transcript yourself) say. He even tries to persuade them to take the girls to Tijuana instead, because Vera has a lot of contacts there. And Vera took numerous pictures of both Giles and O'Keefe and their car/license plate when they left (San Diego Tr. II, p. 8.)

This is not exactly the behavior of someone who "doesn't care about underage prostitution", or someone who was giving "human smuggling advice", is it?

In San Bernadino (the interview where there are hints that ACORN employees are pulling the leg of Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, especially at the end where 2 of the workers say they need to end the discussion and go "play" elsewhere because they are very busy (San Bernadino TR. P. 56), ACORN has been accused of advising misuse of the non-profit tax law to hide their brothel income. But review of the transcript discloses the worker's advice to establish a 501(c)(3) occurs ONLY in the midst of what is nearly ten pages of transcript in which ACORN workers are constantly advising Giles and O'Keefe that what they want to do (set up a brothel to "protect" underage prostitutes) is (a) illegal and (b) a stupid idea and (c) not the correct way to do what they claim - help these mythical El Salvadorean teenagers escape sexual exploitation by the mythical abusive pimp. The 501(c)(3) reference occurs during a discussion about setting up a school for the girls to help them as a viable alternative. (San Bernadino TR. P. 48-54).

Finally, there is Baltimore, the most damning of all of the videotapes. Nowhere in the Baltimore transcript do O'Keefe and Giles say directly that underage El Salvadorean "girls" will be working as prostitutes. Which is why at some point, when it turns to a discussion of whether these girls will have social security numbers for the 1 year that they will be with Giles before returning to El Salvador, the ACORN tax worker Tonya says bluntly "You don't have to worry about it because they not old enough." And later, she tells them quite clearly that it is illegal for these girls to be working at all. (Baltimore Tr. P. 17.)

Even the other Baltimore worker, Shira -- the only ACORN worker for whom there is no question that she gave not only bad advice, but intended to assist in violating the law -- then tells Hannah Giles to make sure that the girls coming from El Salvador go to school, and even recommends that an older woman be brought in to both shield Hannah Giles from going to prison and to take care of the younger girls and make sure that they get an education. (Baltimore Tr. 37-38.) There is no excuse for most of her statements outside Tonya's presence, and I won't try to make any. I will only note, sadly, that in the moral calculus sometimes engaged in by people who are used to folks who make an illegal living all the time, including those well under the age of 18, it may have seemed a far less horrible situation to have these underage girls living under the control of a madam instead of an abusive man (the absent pimp OR James O'Keefe.) After all, this is their reality of street-level prostitution, seen day to day by many of the folks who end up working for ACORN. Even if it is not our reality since they sit where, but for the Grace, go us.

So, let's sum up what is CLEALY disclosed by the transcripts, as opposed to the innuendo which the words combined with deliberately provocative visual imagery to those who are sheltered from Real Life in the 'Hood leads to:

Each and every ACORN employee was told that this situation was created because Hannah Giles was trying to free herself and others from a dangerous and abusive pimp.

Each and every ACORN employee was told that James O'Keefe was trying to help Hannah Giles escape.

Each and every ACORN employee was told that a house was desperately needed so that Hannah Giles could have a place for the girls to live when the pimp who was exploiting them and abusing and stalking Hannah Giles brought them to the country.

Each and every ACORN employee advised either Hannah Giles, or James O'Keefe, or both, that what they were doing could have repercussions for their futures and that they should both think about they were doing and be careful.

Each and every ACORN employee told Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, directly or indirectly, that they needed to re-evaluate their stated activities in light of their futures, even as they insisted they were not judging them.

Be honest: this is not exactly the behavior of employees in a "corrupt criminal enterprise", is it?

Don't forget: we have seen only partial videos and, possibly, partial transcripts. James O'Keefe and his patron refuse to release the unedited videotapes for any of the 5 cities (New York, Baltimore, Washington DC, San Diego and San Bernadino) where he and Hannah Giles undertook this "sting." They also have refused to date to produce the videotapes from Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, none of which we have seen, yet all of which were part of this national "sting" effort. That refusal is going to be short-term in terms of real time, now that ACORN has sued the participants in Maryland for violating the state's wiretapping law, but long down the road when it comes to the memories of the media and the pundits and, yes, bloggers it is going to matter, I suspect.

And if it turns out that ACORN has been unfairly portrayed, as the transcripts suggest in a way that the videos do not, I want ACORNs fair weather friends on the Left to remember that:

(a) In San Bernadino, whether or not you believe that the "stung" employee was merrily leading Giles and O'Keefe down the primrose path, according to the "stung" employee she said point blank that she wanted nothing to do with prostitution and that the management of the San Bernadino ACORN office would REJECT what she was saying. (San Bernadino Tr. P. 14-15.)

(b) In San Diego, the police were notified by the "stung" employee and an investigation into human trafficking was begun.

(c) In Philadelphia (whose videotape we have not yet seen; I wonder why?), the police were immediately notified - and James O'Keefe outright LIED about what occurred there.

(d) In Baltimore, in response to the only statement which left no room for interpretation, they were told point blank by the tax advisor "I can't touch that" in response to a statement about setting up a house of prostitution.

(e) In New York, Hannah Giles was given advice about how to protect herself from James O'Keefe and "Sonny" by putting utilities in her name and going to talk to Legal Aid so he can't just put her on the street someday when it suits him (New York Tr. P. 10); urged, over O'Keefe's objections, to turn to her mother, her father, any other family to get protection from the absent abusive pimp she claims to be running away from (New York Tr. PP 20-21); told she'd better start thinking about how to protect herself and her money in the event that she is found and abused again (New York Tr. P. 24); and repeatedly told to reach out to her mother, and if necessary help take her mother "off the road" - help her get off drugs - what Hannah is the reason she cannot reach out to her to begin with. (New York Tr. P. 25)

(f) In Los Angeles (whose videotape we have not yet seen, I wonder why?) the "stung" ACORN worker tried to get Hannah Giles to go to a women's shelter after she said she had been beaten by her pimp.

(g) In Miami (whose videotape we have not yet seen, I wonder why?), ACORN gave Hannah Giles phone numbers for both women's shelters and Legal Aid so that she could get help.

And in EVERY ONE of these "stung" ACORN offices, none of the discussion over which ACORN is now being crucified would have occurred at all had the employees not been told, repeatedly, that a safe house was needed was to save both Hannah Giles and the immigrant girls from an abusive, dangerous, pimp who planned to exploit all of them.

I have seen very few of these issues highlighted in the Left's response to the ACORN scandal, even when the Leftist speaking is trying to defend ACORN rather than sacrifice it for political expediency. While there have been brilliant defenses of ACORN's worth, merit and importance, there has been little substantive discussion about the fact that, on the cold record at least, nobody at ACORN who is in these videos has committed a crime; nobody in ACORN in these videos expressed support for underage prostitution; and everyone in these videos was coming from a place where they were trying to help not an exploitative financial criminal, but vulnerable women and the man who said that he was in love with one of them and trying to save her.

This leads me to think about another, sad, reason that the Left has not risen to ACORNs defense. Since, in the Left's moral outrage over ACORN, it has acquiesced to our party's House and Senate majorities passing the Defund ACORN Act of 2009 (a bill quite similar to that which Rep. Michelle Bachmann, aka Ms. Batshit Fucking Crazy second only to Birther Queen Orly Taitz, tried but failed to get anyone to take seriously in June, 2009 and the Protect America from ACORN Act of 2009 because of ACORN's so-called "voter fraud" in the 2008 election). Without regard to the fact that, without funding, ACORN cannot continue to help the millions of poor, largely minority, people they help each year of their advocacy. A brutal and blind punishment which at its core punishes not only the communities ACORN servces, but 400,000 dedicated employees and volunteers for the questionable judgment (but, so far as I can tell, not illegal acts) of just a handful.

Talk about punishment disproportionate to the crime.

Speaking of crimes........I've seen plenty of demands that, as tit for tat, Congress defund Xe Corporation f/k/a Blackwater. But I have seen precious few DEMANDS that James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and anyone that conspired with them to do this to ACORN unfairly be prosecuted in the multiple states where they admit to having had committed multiple felonies.

Since clandestine recording without the consent of all parties to a communication is a felony in California. (CA Penal Code 632). As it is in Maryland (see Maryland Cts. & Jud. Proc 10-402(b).) And, just in case you didn't know, in New York, too (see
New York Penal Code 250.00. (Just to up the ante a little, because of the express intent with which O'Keefe made these videotapes (to damage ACORN's reputation), they've also managed to get on the wrong side of the federal wiretapping law, which deems their behavior a felony, too. (19 U.S.C. 2511).) Additional felonies were committed when O'Keefe disseminated those clandestine recordings with tortious/injurious intent (i.e. the purpose of harming ACORN.) (See CA Penal Code 632, New York Penal Code 250.00; MD Cts. & Jud. Proc. 10-402, ; DC St. 23-542(a) and (b)(3); and 19 U.S.C. 2511)

Not that the Democratic party politicians have any cojones to do anything about this, them having hastily passed a Defund ACORN bill that either is an answer to Leftist's prayers or anathema to the Constitution depending on your perspective.

What motivated this lengthy diary, more than anything else, were the thousands of anti-ACORN comments written by so-called liberals that have been spewed across the pages of Daily KOS since this story first broke 2 weeks ago. There has been the usual backpedaling by many as facts actually leak out, but the first days of this scandal and the things that were said were just foul. Ignorant of ACORN, it's critical importance to the nation's progressive work, and ignorant of the fact that they were validating Karl Rove by helping along a key mission of his political agenda long before anyone ever heard of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles - to destroy ACORN by any means necessary. Why? I think the words of James O'Keefe, the latest right-wing protege and hero, describe it best:

Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization. . .

If you know anything about ACORN, you'd know that this is just ONE of the things that this remarkable grassroots organization has succeeded at in the past 40 years. Indeed, ACORN's work is remarkable considering how little money it has to spend compared to far less effective programs claiming to help the poor.

I can't say what side YOU'D rather be on, when it comes to judging the other 355 ACORN affiliates based on the actions of these 5. I know which side I'D rather be on.

Because when the cold record -- which is only a partial record, remember (we have not yet seen the unedited videotape but you can bet your last dollars there is nothing worse in them given the motivations of the man who shot it) -- is as ambiguous as this one is, I'm not prepared to jettison the organization that tried to save this country from predatory lending a decade before anyone else expressed worries about it; and is primarily responsible for living wage ordinances, and fights exploitation of migrant workers, and a plethora of other activities which have benefitted those without in this country far more than Democratic party politicians have had the balls to fight for ever since the New Deal.

Previously, the Washington Post had included a claim that O'Keefe targeted ACORN for the "same reasons" as other conservative organizations - their success in registering Blacks and Latinos to vote. However, there is now a teensy tiny disclaimer at the top of the article saying that O'Keefe didn't specifically mention Blacks and Latinos. Notably, the body of the article is not changed despite the disclaimer, suggesting that O'Keefe said SOMETHING that led the author to his conclusion, but nonetheless managed to toe the politically correct line of not specifically mentioning race. Since, of course, we will never know for sure, I have not chosen to accuse James O'Keefe of having said this.

Even though when SHE was asked by Glenn Beck why she decided that she wanted to "sting" ACORN, Hannah Giles made her racism-in-the-name-of-Jesus crystal clear:

"I saw them as a thug organization getting my tax dollars"

Nonetheless, I am more than happy to accuse James O'Keefe of being a new-school white racist pig, given his role in the publication of a college-based reactionary rag at Rutgers University after he was expelled from his dormitory for calling his housemates niggers (a story diaried by O'Keefe yet now scrubbed from the 'Net); his ridiculous (yet successful) campaign to equate the serving of Lucky Charms cereal to racism against the Irish; his conducting a so-called "affirmative action" bake sale ; and his attempt to paint the modern-day Planned Parenthood as an organization that is more than happy to accept money to abort Black babies that might someday be beneficiaries of affirmative action in competition with O'Keefe's own offspring. (I say modern day because the record is pretty clear that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger was a patriarchal racist despite her good intentions and believed in "negative eugenics" as a key way of helping what she perceived as a "lesser" population (even as those who accuse her of having a racist genocidal mindset are simply outright wrong.)

However, I don't include the fact that O'Keefe also targeted Planned Parenthood with video stings, and accused them of refusing to report statutory rape in this list.

Did you know about that? I didn't either, until I started researching this story. Yet it bears discussion because it is another reason I am so upset about the Leftists who are willing to abandon ACORN.

Yet there was not a single diary here at DailyKOS about the need for the Left to distance itself from Planned Parenthood merely because, on seven separate occasions, employees/volunteers at Planned Parenthood affiliates broke the law by telling what they believed to be a victim of statutory rape to lie about her age so that she could get an abortion at Planned Parenthood without getting her adult boyfriend in trouble.

So, to those of you here who swallowed the visual bait and subsequently tarred and feathered ACORN on a dime based on FOX News propaganda: Maybe my search skills suck, but I looked and could not find even ONE diary here at DailyKOS about this Planned Parenthood "sting" which has taken place over the past few months. It is a "non-story" as far as we so-called liberals are concerned. I certainly didn't find a single diary or comment anywhere here at DailyKOS advocating that Planned Parenthood be immediately stripped of federal funding to do its work in the fields of sex education and research, or decrying their "corrupt" nature or claiming that they "raise no serious money" and "have no vital constituency" when this story broke just six months ago. Indeed, this story has been such a "non-story" that you are hard pressed to find ANY media stories or even blog posts about it outside of the right-to-life community that predate the current "ACORN expose."

Unlike the situation presented in the ACORN videos, there actually IS a legal duty for a health care provider to report statutory rape, one of the very few exceptions to the rule that private citizens have no duty to report crimes to law enforcement, except a personal moral one, and there is no question that the duped Planned Parenthood workers violated in every state that the Mona Lisa Project (led by O'Keefe and another woman, Lila Rose) targeted a Planned Parenthood office: in Alabama, Arizona, Tennessee, California, New Mexico and Indiana. Once Lila Rose -- O'Keefe's partner in crime -- made calls stated that she was under that particular state's age of consent and claimed that she was pregnant by a 31 year old man, there was no grey area, not legally at least, when it came to the legal duty of the Planned Parenthood employee/volunteer. None whatsoever.

I am not writing about this to tar and feather Planned Parenthood, by any means; I myself donate to its work which is desperately needed. I am writing it to point out the racist hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to our allies who are Black and Brown.

Going by the comparative silence, it seems a totally fair conclusion that on the Left have no problem with what favored white liberal organizations do, even when clearly illegal, if it is justified by a higher moral principle those leftists believe in. Such as drug dealing. Such as failure to report statutory rape. Yet those same leftists are more than happy to handwring and moralize about a far less-clear legal situation when it's uneducated people of color, particularly Black ones, making a similar moral type of calculus.

But it's even more egregious than that. Planned Parenthood only had to threaten to sue and managed to get (at least initially, until the ACORN videos came out) video and audiotape of these Mona Lisa sting interviews taken down from YouTube and get the story completely squashed. Yet when the national management of ACORN (including its Black president) went to the courts to stand up for their right not to be abused by right-wing propagandists? Oh my. There were diaries and comments here at Daily KOS, and elsewhere on the Left, all decrying that ACORN was "stupid" for filing suit against O'Keefe, Giles and their right-wing funders. Claiming that it would have been better for ACORN to just lie back and take it from O'Keefe, Giles, Breitbart, FOX News and the rest of the conservative noise machine rather than exercise their own right to seek justice in the courts.

Why would any rational person feel this way?

Because of their own unstated/unrecognized racist and classist presumptions - unconscious, but still racist and classist - that some other types of "illegality" or "improprieties" would necessarily be uncovered.

Fortunately for the poor, if there is one thing that ACORN is NOT known for, it's just lying back and taking it from those in power.

So, why is the ACORN "story" so much more important to the Left than the Planned Parenthood "story?" I would submit that it is indeed because of the "eyewitness bias" I mentioned at the beginning of this diary. What we "see" when we see ACORN is, for the most part, stereotypically Black and visually lower-class uneducated workers who talk in the venacular, and who identify themselves as folks who are willing to turn "the system" on its head by skirting laws about which reasonable people can differ if necessary to do justice.

We hypocritically embrace them when the Left needs their political help, but run from them like the plague the second they do something "strange."

It is the same type of bias against non-conformist people of color (especially Black people) that folks demonstrated when they justified the administration's throwing Van Jones overboard through its refusal to publicly defend his signing a 9-11 petition that didn't say what too many on the the Left insisted it said (with no mention that DailyKOS heroine Janeane Garofalo ALSO signed that petition.) Or the President's dissing his own minister because of statements that he never made about hating America. Or leads to the remaking of the First Lady when she says that she is proud of America, just because she implied that at times she was not proud of America.

IMO, this type of disloyalty is the functional equivalent of Stephen Colbert's Blackwashing, except wrought by the Left on it's allies:

The Left only wants to be seen with non-white allies who walk, talk and think as if they were raised by white people.
Except at election time, when all bets are off.

Fortunately for all of us, but especially the poor, ACORN makes clear that its membership is, despite their lack of education and poverty, a genuine and relentless threat to the status quo that condemns the poor in this country. The status quo that exists both on the Right (who does not lie about its intentions) and the Left (who does not realize its own ongoing anti-color, anti-poor biases when it comes to how it treats people of color who "embarrass" them.) This is why even as we speak you have the "liberal media" (NY Times and WaPo, at the top of the list) presently beating itself up for having "not covered" ACORNs "corruption", yet but saying nothing about their failure to report Planned Parenthood's virtually-identical behavior (trying to help someone perceived as being in trouble despite the law). Of course, the media has covered ACORN's bad acts so effectively in the past few years that it has missed the facts early and often.

That is why everyone has now seen all the headlines about ACORN that have saturated the past 10 news cycles, give or take a few. I don't need to repeat them.

But now I'd like you to imagine a different headline.

One that looks more like the one I began this diary with.

One that recognizes that when it comes to questions of justice and morality, often there are no "right answers." That truly understands the conundrum of what to do in a situation such as that faced by the 5 ACORN employees is not as easy as the Left makes it out to be - indeed entire college level classes are taught over the complex ethical questions raised by this type of situation, in which there is no outcome that is free from harm. But the employees at ACORN are not college-educated people, and thus have not had the benefit of such classes. They are from the streets, the forgotten poor, the ones that we on the Left happily judge for everything from participating in the underground economy to eating junk food. Since they don't live up to our standards yet manage to survive anyway, their calculus about the 'greater harm" does not take into account political standing. Nor should it, if it means limiting its mission to help the poor and those who all of the mainstream has deemed unfit to care about. Of all the diaries that were written about what this really means, on the ground this one is the best, so I am linking to it here since BooMan said it better than I can:

My Experience with ACORN

Right now, I feel that we are essentially sitting on our hands watching with a whimper and a shiver and a mere whisper of "unfair" while the Right SUCCEEDS at destroying an organization which has been in its crosshairs for nearly 40 years all while having not yet said Word One (except in a frightened whisper, or to take down a target white politicians REALLY care about, like Dick Cheney or Blackwater). Whil ignoring that there are two people who have committed multiple felonies each when they purposefully misled the victims into believing that they were helping young girls in trouble by taking the less-evil choice between the Devil (a woman who claimed to be trying to save them from an evil man) and the Deep Blue Sea (an overseas pimp involved with the Mafia who was going to traffic the girls here to exploit them.) Two people who played the media like a fiddle, now gone largely into hiding since the holes in their effort to take down ACORN started coming out in earnest.

After you re-read this wonderful diary, please ask yourself: "What would Jesus Do?" Folks here at DailyKOS (too glibly and sarcastically sometimes, I admit to my dismay) are always asking the question here.

So, indeed, What Would Jesus do?

Well, considering that my personal Lord and Savior embraced more than one prostitute as a child of God rather than judge them, I think the answer to what Jesus would do in this situation involving ACORN's workers trying to help a prostitute and the man who claimed to love her enough to try and save her (not to mention other girls, as well) is clear.

Especially since today is Sunday (three days and about 12 cumulative of work since I started writing this diary, which is why I rarely get to do it anymore.)

Judging poor people for "doing what they gotta do" is a funny, funny thing. It can snare both those one sees as not worth fighting for (like ACORN, for many here) and those who one would go to the mat for (like Planned Parenthood's underage abortion clients who have adult lovers.) So perhaps we should learn from ACORNs example, next time, when deciding who to judge?

Many rightfully point out that few of my diaries have an action plan. Well, here's an action plan:

Write and call your congresscritters, and the President, and immediately demand reconsideration of both the Defund ACORN Act and Protect America from ACORN acts, based upon the constitutional directive that we are all innocent until proven guilty -- even poor and minority people and their political advocates.

Blast the media and the blogs with the backstory of James O'Keefe and and DEMAND that he and Hannah Giles be arrested and prosecuted for their admitted multiple violations of state and federal wiretapping law (you can probably use the same letters the Left wrote when the wiretappers were the telephone and internet companies acting on behalf of the Bush administration, with just a few minor changes. . .)

Write to the National ACORN offices and let them know that you are a staunch ally of their work and support their efforts to educate their workers and volunteers in a way that will protect them from inadvertently becoming victims while they are trying to help

Keep ACORN (which already had closed up to 40% of its local affiliates due to the economy) alive and operating in as many cities as possible, despite it this past week having to shut down even more of its offices as federal and state governments continue to race to strip needed funding from it, as if ACORN has the Black Death (and I guess rhetorically, from a political perspective it does since of course its national spokespeople are almost all Black and Latino) alive by making a personal contribution in support of its work and in honor of its history as the nation's most loyal and effective advocate for the least of us.

If Not Now, When?

Shanikka — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:29:20 GMT

An open letter to our Beloved President Obama:

Dear Mr. President:

I was going to write today about the latest brilliant idea that Wall Street has come up with to bottom-feed profits now that predatory mortgage lending has dried up, and talk about how this relates to the stonewalling that health care reform is facing. I was also going to reflect on the ideas of reasonable money, fair and balanced capital markets, and the possibility of "humane profit". I was going to ponder whether such things ideas are necessarily oxymorons, as some would perhaps argue, or whether in an ideal world, guided by a wise hand at the helm (hint, hint), America could enter into its Next Phase with a new American Dream, having clearly failed at the last Dream if the overall condition of the Average American (and neither your nor I fit that bill, let's be clear about that -- as Black Americans privileged by education, profession and the resultant access to at least some power, although far more in your case than mine.)

Alas, that diary is going to have to await another day.
Because today, I need to talk to you, constituent to President, contributor to former candidate, Black woman to Black man from the same age group (hell, the same month of birth, literally), the same educational background, even as I was born and raised by Black people in a Black neighborhood and you were not (some argue that is a core reason why what I need to school you about today keeps happening, but hey, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, largely because of Michelle I admit.)

Sir, if you cannot stand behind your talented, loyal and faithful to you Black brothers and sisters at some point (and that includes all the "unwashed masses" who turned out 95% of their votes for you), no matter what the right wing and the racist and the just plain old Leftist fearful to be On the Outs throw at you, then you are no good to Black people where you sit. You'd have been better off staying in Chicago or, at best, the United States Senate.

In other words, I am sick and tired of waking up and reading in the newspaper about yet another Black politician or preacher or just plain old philosopher that you don't fight for and defend, but happily throw under the bus. Just because some white folks get upset.

Today, that Black person who has your treadmarks on his back is Van Jones.

Obviously you know all about Bro. Jones, since of course you set him on high in charge of your Green Initiatives. He deserved it. Anyone from the San Francisco Bay Area that spends 45 seconds bothering to learn something about Oakland knows all about him. About how he championed the cause of the poor and Black. About environmental justice. About the Ella Baker Center, a national model for local community action.

Yet you let them run him out of town. Your boy. Just because like many folk he is not convinced that George Bush and his administration wasn't in some way complicit in what happened on 9-11. No, the brother did NOT say that Bush and Company imploded any buildings. Any more than Sister Souljah said "We should kill white people", or Lani Guinier said "We have to have quotas for elected officials." Or your wife said "The Revolution Will Not be Televised - So bring it ON 'cause damn I'm MAD!"

(We progressive Black folk are truly grateful that Michelle is married to you and has brought the blessing of 2 beautiful young sisters to your life; Lord knows what you'd have done when folks started false carping about her thesis otherwise.)

Unfortunately, it didn't matter that Van Jones didn't say anything that truly could be considered crazy when it came to 9-11, any more that it mattered that Sister Souljah didn't say it, Lani Guinier didn't say it. Michelle didn't either. When it was time for the obligatory "resignation" after the noise machine reached its fever pitch, all that mattered is that yet again a politician threw a Black person publicly under the bus (in your case, accepting a resignation that did not need to happen but to please folks you ain't never going to please anyway) rather than push back against the unfairness.

When Clinton did it, though, we had something we could point to as a reason he Didn't Get It.

What is your excuse, Brother?

That's IMO been my biggest beef with you, during the campaign, and since you won. When it comes to defending your own people, individually or reputationally, you are nowhere to be found. You always manage to push back, to fight, for everyone and everything but your own. The only time we hear anything about us it's about the same racist lecturing that we get from every other pundit, except they had the excuse of not actually having known better because they had never really been around any of us except on the Day Tour. If anything, when we come up it's just to get another reminder about "Turning off the Nintendo" (as if our children's problems with education have anything to do with an unwillingness to work hard) or "Black fathers step up and take care of your children" (as if the studies aren't clear that Black single fathers are MORE likely to be involved with their children than any other demographic.)

But you know what, Mr. President?

It's getting Old.

So, today, you've lost one of the brightest stars of your green agenda and managed to cede power to the greedy right all at the same time:

As I explained previously on Fox Forum, the push for "green jobs" has everything to do with funding the far-left political activities that Van Jones so adamantly believed in. Green jobs are not economic jobs but political jobs, designed to funnel vast sums of taxpayer money to left-wing labor unions, environmental groups, and social justice community organizers.

Congratulations. Too much worrying on your part about those Fair and Balanced has again led you to put another piece of your progressive cred out to pasture.

Now, admittedly you were not likely raised around language that I am about to use. But I'm sure Michelle, beloved as she is, was. She can break it down for you. And admittedly, what I am about to say will no doubt cost me my dream of being an Article III judge someday, since of course I would have to disclose this piece, and my blog and other things in response to the question "Have you ever done or said anything that might cause the President embarassment?"

It's depressing, but I figured I wasn't political enough to get picked anyway, even if you excused away my being married thrice and once having unpaid tax liens (yes, they are now all paid.) Even though I think I'd be good at the job, what I am about to say would probably tear it.

/Deep Breath

You, Barack Hussein Obama aka Mr. President, aka Sir, are the motherfucking President of the motherfucking United States. (Much love to Samuel L. Jackson, another supporter of yours who I know must be shaking his head over this Van Jones BS.) The majority of white folks did not vote to put you in the White House. Even though millions fought and campaigned and worked their asses off for you, and I'm grateful for them just as you should be, if only they'd gone to the polls on November 4, your Black ass would still be sitting in your office at 455 Dirksen (aka the United States Senate Building.)

We did.

(With the help of 2 million Latino and 600,000 Asian brothers and sisters who came to the polls having not done so in 2004 either - this is where we say Much Love and Thank You to them, too.)

We came, some hobbled, some having to sit in chairs at polling places for hours to do it, to the tune that Black voters represented 13 percent of ALL votes cast on Election Day 2008.

I'm assuming you know that this is almost at parity with our percentage in the population as a whole, a previously unimagined turnout for us Black folk.

I reiterate that 95% of all Black people voting on November 4, a record turnout and a record percentage given to one candidate by our loyal Democratic demographic (since previously about 11% of us voted Republican), put you in charge of what used to be (before Dubbya, anyhow) the most powerful nation on Earth.

You, therefore, are the HNIC.

The Head Nigger in Charge.

You have, as FDR would say, the Bully Pulpit.

But I do prefer HNIC. It's more Us.

It's time to start acting a bit more like it.

If anyone in these United States of America can get this country to finally respect Black people collectively and stop demanding that we behave in accordance with white folks' wishes all the time as a condition of legitimacy, it is you.

So when in the name of the Father are you going to use it to actually HELP your own people's collective cause? Or at least not make our cred worse every time you don't stand up and say "this is some racist BULLSHIT so just STOP IT?"

(I don't expect you to actually say the word "bullshit" - but as eloquent as you are, fine too, I know you can say it without actually cussing.)

I am not talking about reparations advocacy, you painting the White House Black, wearing a tam or African garb insted of a suit, or even declaring that Malcolm X (whose teaching you admitted you respected) had it right when it comes to what we as Black folks -- second class citizens in the land of our birth -- should rationally expect from the majority.

Hell, you can even keep that ridiculous flag pin.

I am talking about simply having the back of the folks who had yours. Whether we are talking about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who brought you to Christ, married you, baptized your children, and until you first pushed him away by pretending you weren't actually listening during service for the last 20 years, loyal to you. Like Henry Louis Gates, who has been steadfastly your friend and did not deserve to have you apologizing and actually sitting down to socialize with the loose cannon racist cop (and therefore symbolically with loose cannon racist police all over America, thus indvertently legitimizing in your wake the newest crime of HWB, aka Home While Black) who arrested him in his own home for doing what you and I both know we'd have done if we were sick, and tired, not to mention sick and tired. Like Van Jones, who through Color of Change has thrown down hard and is successfully taking out the traitor who literally is propangandizing white folks into wanting to KILL you, Brother (you may not take it seriously, but I sure as hell do.) Or even, yes, like our Beloved First Lady, who couldn't disappear so was forced to be "remade" just because she pointed out something that you, she, me and probably every other Black person who goes to an elite college knows deep in their truly honest heart: that attendance at these institutions tend to be connected with a disturbing willingness to distance from our own people.

Black folks in the 'Hood (the majority, as opposed to those off at Martha's Vineyard) were none too happy when The First Black President threw Sister Souljah under the bus because of something she didn't even say about the Rodney King Riots (i.e. we should kill whitey. And definitely weren't happy when Lani Guinier under the wheels for the same craptastic reason; giving credence to outright lies whose sole purpose was to frighten the white majority as payback for Robert Bork. So far, you've had a major pass from most of Us on this issue of not Having Our Back. Originally, it was all about Eyes on the Prize, with the unstated collected assumption that once the Prize was won, you'd be the first President in American history to actually make sure that everyone knew that Black people and our progressive ideas were not just good for us, but good for the nation, so no reason to keep pretending we aren't important except as votes to be counted by the Democratic Party on election day. Sort of a nonviolent Spook who Sat by the Door, I guess. (I know that's what kept me going sometimes.)

But how long do you think that pass will last when it seems so easy to spook you when it comes to the White Wing (no that isn't a typo) noise machine whinging about anything a "controversial Negro" you value enough to bring into your inner circle says or does, however (almost always) inaccurately reported?

Not as long as you'd like. So, please think about it. Again, nobody is asking you to Go Militant. Just to please show some Pride, for God's sake.

Please? For the love of God.

Your constituent from the 'Hood out here in Cali (where you are always welcome, you know),

Shanikka

P.S. For those who would say that he is just "doing what he gotta do", please ask yourself some questions before you do:

a) If the reason he can't is because he wouldn't get re-elected, what is the reason you are worried about him being re-elected when he has not shown that he can get something done to help us, aka what has he done so far to deserve re-election at this point? (Hint: it isn't 1) end the war; (2) fight for a decent health care bill; (3) combat the nightmarish unemployment rate faced by our community; (4) throw the book at the financial industry for having used us as the guinea pigs starting 15 years ago for predatory lending practices that now have taken down not only our historic neighborhoods, but danged near the whole country -- despite having claimed to care about this issue while a Senator; or (5) even say a kind word of condolence personally instead of sending a lackey to publicly damn with faint praise one of our own, Michael Jackson -- whose music you know you listened to and grew up on just like the rest of us Black folks did -- passed.

b) For those that worry that if he followed my advice and behaved just a bit more like he was proud of his own people he might be at physical risk, do you see any evidence that his current path has made him less at risk? I mean for the love of Mike, he has had more risk than any President in the history of the country, and the subtle drum beat to take him out is getting louder and louder every day if you go by what is being said by the Birthers, the Beckers, and Teabaggers just short of saying "This nigra has go to GO or America is finished!"

c) Where is our pride that we continue, even with a Black president, to put ignoring Black people as a political strategy in the realm of "do what he gotta do?" We had our heart's prayer, our symbolic moment, on November 4 and January 20, and yes I cried like a baby, too. But now, it's time to get back to work and actually transform the symbol into something with some real benefits. (For those who don't realize that this, especially our young folks who seem to think that they don't have to keep fighting today and that any "racial" concerns are destructive when I refer you to the following words from Malcolm X, who tried to teach us 46 years ago -- and for all that is Holy please don't get hung up on the words "Black nationalist" when you read this. They don't mean "Kill Whitey." They don't even mean "Hate Whitey."

The political philosophy of Black nationalism only means that the Black man should control the politics and the politicians in our community. The time when white people can come into our community so we can vote for them and they can tell us what to do and what NOT to do is long gone. By the same token, the time when that same white man knowing your eyes are too wide open, can send another Negro into the community and get you and me to support him so that he can lead us astray, those days are long gone too...
The political philosophy of Black nationalism only means that if you and I are going to live in a Black community -- and that's where we're going to live because as soon as you move out of the Black community into their community, it's mixed for a period of time but then they're gone and you are right back by yourself all over again. We must understand the politics of our community. And we must know what politics is supposed to produce. We must know what part politics play in our lives. And until we become politically mature we will always be misled or led astray, or deceived or maneuvered into supporting someone politically who doesn't have the good of our community at heart. So the political philosophy of Black nationalism only means we wll have to carry on a political program of re-education. To open our people's eyes. To help our people become more politically conscious and politically mature. And then when we can get ready to cast our ballot, the ballot will be cast for a man of the ocmmunity who has the good of the community at heart.

These words were spoken 45 years ago - and just in case they don't persuade you, then ask yourself this. Every other ethnic constituency of seriousness in America -- Jews and Latinos in particular -- are permitted to articulate political goals that are tied to their ethnic status without pushback. They are allowed to be prideful, to put themselves first. Yet when we try, we get pushback. Including the worst cut of pushback - that of dissing and lecturing about why we are collectively fucked up and have no serious problems that America caused and is responsible for helping to fix, with no pride to balance it whatsoever. The same Blame the Victim racist mentality, except now from the man that 95% of us put in his position. Now, I have my suspicions about he talks that way, but he won't own the "Black nationalist" label that telling us to stop looking to the Man and do for self has historically had on it. Because Lord knows he can't actually be proud of us, publicly. Or embrace us too closely, publicly. That would be almost as if he himself was calling for the Revolution, right?

What "Leading Indicators" Don't Tell You: The Center is Not Holding, Damnit!!

Shanikka — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:21:19 GMT

I find it almost amusing, the restrained yet increasingly celebratory nature of the news -- media and blog -- that "the bottom is being reached" and that the economy is slowly "on the mend." I find it amusing because it seems that, despite America hovering at the edge of the Second Great Depression (or being deep within it; economists and pundits continue to argue about this point), America and Americans are still judging whether all is right in our version of Denmark primarily by the trappings of those who Have. Whether the Haves can again put their spare change in stocks and make a profit. Whether they can buy a new house. Whether new houses are being built for them. Whether nearly a quarter million people can invest in a car loan of around $10,000-$15,000 (on average, if not a cash transaction) for the promise of a $3,500-$4,500 "clunker" trade-in to buy a brand new car.

It is only "almost" amusing because I was taught to measure whether things were right in the world not by the behavior and lifestyle choices of those who Have, but instead by the quality of life being experienced by the vast majority of Americans, those who Don't Have, even when they do an honest day's work for a living.
Right now, those who Don't Have -- protected in the aggregate by the local and state governments (who are responsible for most of the safety nets however pitiful that exist to keep them just on the edge of the abyss instead of over it) -- are in serious fucking trouble.

That's not amusing, at all.

Today, there were not one, but two recommended diaries here at DailyKOS about the South: one calling for an end of indiscriminate South bashing, the other reveling in it. Of course, neither of those discussed what to me was the most telling news about the South, today:

The largest county in Alabama's economy is today furloughing 2/3 of its entire civil service work force because it is dead busted broke.

Yes, there is plenty of blame, and blaming, to go around. And the New York Times is more than happy to let us know that - citing the problems with a tax that was declared illegal yet represented 25% of Jefferson County's general fund (i.e. the backbone of its budget) and corruption/malfeasance on a public works project as major factors. But all of that completely misses the boat when it comes to talking about those who Don't Have in Jefferson County.

Last week, the director of the Jefferson County public nursing home was told that the county could no longer afford to bury indigent patients.
Across town at the juvenile detention center, the man in charge was trying to figure out how to feed the 28 children in his custody when the entire cafeteria staff is let go. The tax collector warned local school districts to expect a six-month delay to get their share of property taxes. In family court, administrators plan to delay child support, custody and child abuse cases, leaving some children in the hands of the state indefinitely.

But hey....The economy is shrinking by only 1% a year instead of 6.4. The Dow is back over 9,000. Case-Shiller (home prices index) is going down only 17.1% instead of 18.1 year to year. AND the 4-week moving average for new unemployment claims plummeted (from a truly frightening 567,000 people per week down to a far more reassuring number of just 559,000.

By God...the stimulus is working -- at least for now!

Well, Hallelujah Day. Sing Hallelujah. Or, if you are not the religious type, just sing instead the glib ditty used by the New York Times, In with Recession, Out with Depression".

(If for no other reason than to keep one's mind off the fact that Wall Street, having fleeced the public fisc for a nearly trillion dollars is still handing out million-dollar bonuses to its employees for having utterly FAILED the American economy and the American people, all while insisting that industry and business refusing to lend to or hire normal people -- the Don't Haves -- is still necessary to Save America.)

Of course, knowing us liberals no doubt the response to the Jefferson County situation is likely dismissal as an anomaly, or, more likely, celebration of the whirlwind repeated by "stupid" Southerners enslaved by Republican politics. Who If Only they voted like we do things would be alright.

But those arguments themselves are stupid. Because they miss the point it's not about how politicians vote, it's about how we let them vote.

One only need look at the great Blue State of California to know that.

Since California is on the financial verge of finally falling into the sea.

I could write a lot about the state and state budget, but others have done so better. So I won't try. However, few have written about the impact that the state's near-bankruptcy is having on the Don't Haves. This is troubling, since as we all know (or should know) all politics is local. Even or perhaps most importantly economic politics. Despite those who insist that America's economy is improving just because, Thank the Lord, all the "leading indicators" are on the rise, so Help is on the Way and folks just need to be patient. The same song sung by the Trickle Downers, just coming as much from the Left this time, I guess since we have a Miracle President in office. All of them singing this song knowing full well that for the foreseeable future, any recovery is just another "jobless recovery" aka another fundamental shift in the ownership of wealth and capital in this country, from those whose work still produces wealth for others despite their continuing descent into penury to those who can afford to celebrate "leading indicators" like the stock market because it means another profitable return on their investments, i.e. on money they don't actualy NEED. (Whether stocks or a vacation home or gold bars, it's still an investment if you don't need the money those represent to keep your lights on and food in your belly, you know.)

But back to California, the soon-to-be bankrupt Blue State.

In my little deep Hood, East Palo Alto, California, we are going to lose the equivalent of 25% of our city budget ($4 out of $16 million) this year just to keep the Golden State afloat. (Not by choice, since Lord knows we have our own problems like deteriorating streets, a failed local school system, 10% of our single family homes lost to foreclosure, another 20% at risk of foreclosure and 50% of the remainder under water, including my own home). The so-called budget miracle comes only at the cost of decimating counties and cities.

If you are a Californian you can check how deep a hit your own city is going to take using the chart, above. But be forewarned - it ain't pretty. If you closely check out who the State stole from to save its own budget, you'll see that it is the poorer cities (in terms of average income from residents) with the greatest unmet local needs (largely trying to be solved through redevelopment) that are paying disproportionately to keep California afloat a tiny bit longer. As for my little city? Well, between this State financial boondoggle and the ongoing virulent, greedy and predatory tactics of our city's largest landlord against not just tenants, but the City itself despite its herculean efforts to preserve itself as the last place the Don't Haves can live on the mid-Peninsula can actually live and thrive (all while claiming to the state, as it drains our coffers through constant lawsuits that its properties should be taken from our legal sphere of influence because we "can't provide necessary services"), we've got a good chance of municipal bankruptcy.

Even with the robber-baron Miracle on Capitol Mall, California (which jeopardizes the credit and bond rating of every city in the state whose redevelopment agency was pilfered) still had to stop to providing subsidized medical insurance to almost 1,000,000 children in working class families; gutting the state college system -- the primary higher education vehicle available to middle income and working class kids here (those campuses other than Berkeley, UCLA and Davis, anyhow, which are for the educational elite); hand out worthless IOUs to both contractor and taxpayer alike and close down the courts once a month just to make ends meet.

Yes, I know all about the 2/3 majority rule and Proposition 13. But I also know plenty of Democrats in Sacramento and statewide who have not drawn the necessary line in the sand over either - just continued to bleat about those mean old Republicans while taking cover, i.e. by not telling the truth that a hell of a lot of Haves got to have because of taxation policies which favored them, such that now there is nothing left for those who Don't Have. Which is, of course, most of California's population just like it is most of Alabama's.

We won't even mention Detroit, and definitely not Michigan as whole. Others are far more eloquent than me in describing that state's current condition.

What inspired my first diary in a long time today was the first stanza from the poem which inspired its title:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (1919)

To me, the line that resonates the most for me right now is the last one. IMO, it expresses succinctly the reality of the complete disconnect that those on the Right and the Left who tell the Don't Haves to "Remain Calm! All Is Well!!" have from tens of millions of Americans who have been visited by a financial bloodbath - with no end in sight.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Knowing that I am posting this on a left-wing blog, I can almost predict how many will focus on the easy political analogy of Yeats' words (i.e. the Democrats are right but weak from lack of conviction, the Republicans are evil but unified in their determination to succeed politically). It's a fair reading, I guess. But to me it is not the most important one, if (as I hope) folks reading this diary truly care something not just about the Haves (which, let's be blunt, all surveys done here have shown are the majority of DailyKOS readers and left-wing bloggers generally) but also the Don't Haves. When placed back in the center of analysis, it is easy to see that in Yeats' viewpoint -- at the end of World War I, to be sure, but history has a bad habit of repeating itself where politics are concerned -- it is not just the ascention and dominance of a "left" wing or "right" ring politically that is the problem. It's America itself that is at risk because of the failings of both, when it comes to sacrificing the center. With the result is that the "everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." And "mere anarchy is loosed on the world."

Don't believe me? Do us all a favor then: put down the mouse, get off the Internet and spend some quality time with those who Don't Have and Haven't Had for as long as they can remember. Ask them what they feel about America and their chances in it. Whether they any longer care about America's rules of the game, or "right from wrong", or bootstraps. Ask them if they are still prepared to sacrifice a lifetime of labor for the mere promise that someday they might be able to have an apartment of their own? (Many don't even fantasize about being able to pay ALL their bills on time, anymore...)

And definitely be sure to ask them how they feel about the Masters of the Universe, aka the investors and the economists and the traders and the wheelers and dealers on Wall Street.

Spend some time doing this, and you'll come to a better understanding of the utter hopelessness and utter pragmatism that led to the popular urban phrase "Get Rich, or Die Trying." Not to mention the continuing increase in lottery revenues.

Since it seems that this is all America has given a damn about for the past 30 years: those that Have. They have become the weathervane of everything. Whether the economy is good or bad. Whether we're in recession or depression. And whether things are improving, or getting worse. This singular focus on this group occurs both on the right, where it is obvious self-interest, and on the left, where our pundits and economists continue to pretend that "leading indicators" are some sort of objective measure about the true health of the American economy (i.e. how the majority of Americans, those who Don't Have - but not for lack of trying - are doing day by day) when all they measure is how much money is moving through the economy, even if only 10 people are spending it. And they continue to pretend that a "leading indicator" is some guarantee about the conditions that follow it, when in fact it's at best a tea leaf to be read.

Leading indicators certainly should be no real cause for determing whether there really is cause for celebration about our country's economic condition, when those that follow them can't even (or won't even) tie them to the present condition of the average Joe Blow in the street.

The average American.

From where I sit, even as we celebrate "Recession, not Depression" the "ceremony of innocence", i.e. American dream (The dream that hard work and honesty in America would guarantee at least something above peonage and debt/wage slavery for most) is dying, for most Americans. Slowly, yet I fear permanently. No matter how much money folks like me, or folks like most of those who are denizens of political blogs, might happen to make in the stock market or elsewhere in the so-called recovering economy (as long as we still have a job, anyway.)

Who will stand up for the Don't Haves and, in their name, stand up for what used to be the best of our country, refuse to focus only on the superficial rewards reserved for the Haves be the belwether for whether America is on the mend, and demand that the Have Nots -- the lower and middle classes whose labor is truly responsible for America's wealth -- It certainly won't be our politicians -- they've proven that, from our beloved President on down.

Will it be us? And, if so, when?

Deepak Chopra wrote a few years ago that:

When the center doesn't hold, it's not just the fault of extremists and reactionaries, though. In the same poem Yeats wrote that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." America's best are its centrists, progressives, and liberals. They have been responsible for countering reactionary tendencies and standing for the common man and woman. Now the average citizen is standing idly by as if passivity is a viable option. Power doesn't work that way. A hollow center is as dangerous for us as for the Iraqis. Without a center, they won't survive. Without a center, we will survive, but the future could bring about an America few of us will recognize.

It does America no good if all there are only a few Haves. Compared to the teeming masses of Don't Haves. With nobody else - i.e. the working and middle class -- in between. Economically and, thus, politically, it is to our nation's peril that there is no center in America, anymore -- politically or economically.

Unless of course you are one of those that truly believe that "leading indicators" are more relevant than the continued rise in joblessness and hunger and homelessless -- tent cities (including in such urban jungles as the town formerly known as Providence, Rhode Island) -- all across the country when it comes to assessing whether America's economy is "on the mend.

If you are, I truly feel sorry for you. And urge you to actually get out more and spend some time with some Don't Haves, which are not the invisible minority you want to pretend they are but instead are tens of millions -- soon to be hundreds of millions if something revolutionary doesn't happen soon in terms of our political and economic strategies.

Go spend time with them. They used to be our country's Center.

And, no matter what the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and all those other economists aka theorists aka investors aka Haves tell you, they -- our country's Center -- are not holding, and thus neither are you. Despite the increase in your stock portfolios.

Facts Belie Scapegoating Blacks for Proposition 8

Shanikka — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:09:43 GMT

I am working too hard. I have no time to write diaries. Yet between yesterday afternoon, when I'd finally read one hateful racist fingerpoint from a white gay person too many here and elsewhere on the internet, I'd had enough. I therefore blew off work that needed to get done and still needs to get done to try and put to rest, once and for all, this virulently racist idea that Black people are to blame for the passage of Proposition 8 here in California. It is an idea grounded in utter myth, a complete lack of knowledge about anything related to Black people's presence in California, and just plain old scapegoating.

Hoepfully, this diary will help put all that to rest, and we can get back to work trying to beat back the hateful results of Tuesday's vote.
(And, in the case of some of the worst anti-Black offenders here on this site since Tuesday, I admit that I hope that whe confronted with the facts they will just shut the fuck up -- and hopefully undo some of their hateful damage. I was at a conference today in San Francisco and heard from more than one of my white gay and lesbian colleagues that they had received e-mails with some rather disburbing -- and racist -- rhetoric on this issue yesterday from other members of the local gay community).

Those white gay persons who have engaged in hateful, racist rhetoric and scapegoating here at DailyKOS may feel that they no longer need or want Black people, and if so, they can feel free not to read this. But before they do, ponder this: their Black gay and lesbian brothers and sisters do need them. As much as they also need Black people. And I can only imagine, what the rhetoric has been doing to tear the very heart out of Black gay and lesbian people this past couple of days.

I know what it has done to mine, as a Black bisexual poly that nonetheless doesn't have to "deal" because I am in a heterosexual monogamous marriage.

This diary is organized around the myths that necessarily underlie the scurrilous claim that "Black people are to blame." If you're not a statistics person, you might want to read this other diary here, which says in far less technical language what I am trying to say here.

Factually Unsupported Myth #1: CNN's 10% Black exit poll sample accurately reflects the actual distribution of voters on Proposition 8.

Each and every argument I've read since Proposition 8 passed that lays blame on Black people --- whether only like the worst of the haters or even primarily -- for the passage of Proposition 8 starts with CNN's exit poll statistics about Proposition 8 at its foundation. Yet anyone who knows anything about the demographics of the State of California - or anyone who spent ½ as much time looking up actual data as ranting all over the free world about what "Black people" did "to gay people" (as if those groups are wholly separate, telling you a lot about the racism that underlies the argument) would know that 10% simply defies reality, unless a million or so Black folks snuck into the state just before the election so they could say they cast their vote for Barack Obama on sunny California shores.

But even if you are not like me, not an actual resident of the state and willing to do my homework before spouting off, it did not take any study to figure out what was the problem. Indeed, if you read CNN's own explanation of its exit polling/projection process, it is clear that CNN makes no claim that the distribution of folks which it exit polled about Proposition 8 was necessarily reflective of the actual racial percentages of the California electorate who voted, not even in those places that CNN actually exit-polled in. From CNN's own website about its methodology:

The process of projecting races begins by creating a sample of precincts. The precincts are selected by random chance, like a lottery, and every precinct in the state has an equal chance to be in the sample. They are not bellwether precincts or "key" precincts. Each one does not mirror the vote in a state but the sample collectively does.
The first indication of the vote comes from the exit polls conducted by EMR. On the day of the election, EMR interviewers stand outside of precincts in a given state. They count the people coming out after they have voted and are instructed to interview every third person or every fifth person, for example, throughout the voting day. The rate of selection depends on the number of voters expected at the polling place that day. They do this from the time the polling place opens until shortly before it closes.

What's missing from this picture?

CNN has left us without a critical piece of information necessary to establish the validity of its sampling on Proposition 8: precisely where the network exit polled in California. It simply says that "the aggregate sample is accurate" but has not provided they key piece of information necessary to actually prove it.

This matters for a reason. Specifically, in a state where different demographic populations are reasonably-evenly spread throughout a state, which does not also have dramatic divergences in political ideology which depend on where you live within the state, CNN's methodology might permit it to make a truly accurate statement about the percentage of voters in total who voted on a measure state-wide.

That, however, is not an accurate description of the state of California, as anyone who lives here knows.

In California, virtually all of this state's Black folks live in just 9 of the state's 58 counties:

Alameda County (13.7% Black)

Sacramento County (10.5% Black)

Los Angeles County (9.6% Black)

Contra Costa County (9.5% Black)

San Joaquin County (8.0% Black)

San Francisco County (7.2% Black - although this number has plummeted and will plummet more after redevelopment of the last "Black neighborhood", Hunters' Point)

Riverside County (6.6% Black)

Kern County (6.3% Black)

and

San Diego County (5.5% Black).

The vast majority of the counties in this state have a percentage of Black residents of between 1 and 2% (and several have far have less than 1%).

When you know that about California, you know that CNN's "random selection of precinct" method doesn't seem to make a lot of sense if what you're trying to do is actually know what Black voters are doing at the polls.

Frankly, in a state whose political leanings of the state are quite red/conservative except for a few pockets of population (which state unleashed Ronald Reagan on the nation again? Any guesses?), choosing precincts to exit poll "by random selection", and then selecting targets by simply counting either 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 5 - with no attempt to ensure that you are getting an accurate correlate by race -- is a recipe for statistical disaster if what you are trying to do is make a claim about not only how many Black people actually voted, but what those Black voters did, or did not do, on a particular matter.

(In this case, the disaster has in fact occurred and unleashed hateful anti-Black rhetoric from white gay bloggers and others that is going to set the cause of gay people back a long fucking time in the Black community if it doesn't get in check.)

Finally, when was the last time you heard of an exit poll that measured voters by mail? In another state and in another election, not including votes by mail might not matter so much. But in California? In this election? It is a huge omission of data. Since an estimated 4,000,000 voters in California are registered as "permanent absentee voters.". It is estimated by the No on 8 Campaign that 3,000,000 absentee votes were cast in California for Tuesday's election. We are not even going to discuss early voters, since I cannot find a statistic on them right now other than to note that a lot of California voters cast their votes before Election Day. So who knows how those two groups cast their votes on Proposition 8, their racial makeup, or anything else?

I don't. Neither do you.

Factually Unsupported Myth #2: There were enough Black people in California to have created, all by themselves, the 510,000 margin (as of tonight) of passage for Proposition 8.

(Yesterday, the measure was winning in the AM by only 400,000 and last night by 504,000 votes. Today's numbers indicate that as absentee ballots continue to be counted the "Yes" votes are outstripping the "No" ones. Sadly. Depressingly.)

Let's now discuss the bottom line fact from which all of the seemingly never-ending "Black voters are the reason Proposition 8 passed" must necesarily flow: the number of Black voters in California. Exactly how many Black voters are there in California? Let's try and find out.

This is the math part.

As of the 2000 census, 6.7% of California's population was Black - 2,one time 6.depending on whether you go with the 2000 Census. However, the more up-to-date ACS estimates indicate that in 2006, only approximately 2.26 million Black people lived in the state. Just 6.2% of the entire state's population.

(This, attentive people will note, is far, far, below our national presence of around 13%.)

I'm going to repeat this for those who are twisting in the wind and keep repeating the false idea of a 10% Black electorate statistic like an emotional life raft in their grief over Proposition 8.

There are only 2.26 million Black people in the entire State of California. We are just 6.2% of the entire population in this state.

Black people are the smallest minority in California other than Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, which come in at just under 7/10ths of 1% and 3/10ths of 1% respectively.

(We used to have lots more Black folks here -- as is evident in even the differene between the 2000 Census and 2006 ACS data, but there has been a reverse migration of African-Americans out of California for the past 15 years or so, the bulk of which has been in the past 5 years. We are the only demographic in California whose population estimates are going down, not up, each year. Rapidly going down, at that, due to the economic difficulties that poor and working class people have had surviving in this state since the dot-com boom. Unfortunately, it's just going to get worse thanks to the California foreclosure crisis, which has devastated Black and Latino communities throughout the state, but it is too early to know new numbers just yet; the 2010 census will be telling.)

It is here that I note for the record that, in contrast to the 6.2% of California that is Black, non-Hispanic whites constitute 43.1% of the California population, Latinos 35.9% and Asians, 12.4%. (There is a 1.2% overlap, mostly between Blacks and Latinos since of course there are a bunch of Latino Black people although you'd never know it sometimes listening to the rhetoric.)

That means:

There are 7 times as many white people in California as Blacks.
There are nearly 6 times as many Latino people in California as Blacks.
And there are double the number of Asian people as Blacks.

Be sure to keep these numbers in mind when thinking about CA registered voters, and Proposition 8.

For the purposes of trying to set the record straight here on DailyKOS and elsewhere on Proposition 8, even though the Black population has declined between 2006 and 2008 and the 2010 Census will almost certainly show it is no longer accurate, let's use the 2.26 million figure for the purposes of the rest of this diary.

Factually Unsupported Myth #3: All Black people in California are old enough to vote.

It seems obvious, but at times when folks are writing diaries blaming "Black people" or "Blacks" or "Black women", without any qualification, for Proposition 8 - even though 1/3 of us voted against it by CNN's own poll -- and when folks make choice comments such as 'Dad, I'm no longer a nigger lover!" (which earned my only troll rating of the entire two days), I guess it needs to be said: Black folks are not hatched fully grown. And, as we all know, in this country until one is 18 years old, one cannot vote.

Of the 2.26 million Black people living in the glorious state of California, just around 700,000 (691,313 of them in 2003, the last number I could find) are under the age of 18, going by the census data. Deducting those Black people leaves only 1.56 million Black adults in the state. The maximum number of eligible voters taking into account no other factors, if every last one of us Black folk in California were registered voters.

(Those of you who have looked at these numbers and know that Proposition 8 lost by 510,000 votes know why I'm taking what will be 5+ hours to write this diary, since you can already see where we're heading numerically even if we stopped here. This diary is not intended to educate you, because your racism doesn't cloud your judgment or common sense. This diary is for those other folks.)

Alas, not all of those 1.56 million Black folks can vote.

Factually Unsupported Myth #4: All adult Black people in California are eligible to vote.

California is one of 47 states that strips voting rights from convicted felons, whether they are incarcerated felons or on parole supervision. Rights are not automatically restored in this state when supervision ends: one must apply for restoration (thank all those "victims' rights" and "tough on crime" propositions that keep turning up on California ballots if you want to blame someone.) The impact of this on the electorate is not evenly distributed. Instead, it disproportionately impacts Black people - a racist justice system yields racist fruit.

As a result, approximately 13% of all Black men are ineligible to vote nationwide. And approximately 114,305 Black adults in Cali are felony disenfranchised 7.6% of all Black adults in this state. (Hold your cursor over the state of California and the statistics will come up to the right of the map). Whether or not they are in custody.

Importantly, that number does not include the additional who are in county jails who are not disenfranchised because they are serving misdemeanor sentences, awaiting trial, or awaiting transfer to state prison. That number is large, but impossible to calculate quickly because it must be done county-by-county. However, in Los Angeles County alone, jail inmates are 21,000 people, 1/3 of who are Black (6,300). No one can argue with the reality that (a) most folks in jail do not make voting their priority since survival tends to take up much of their bandwidth; and (b) not a lot of jail (or prison for that matter) personnel make telling eligible folks in jail that they can still vote, or helping them do so, a priority. Presently, 1 out of every 12 Black men in California is incarcerated. Contrary to our progressive image, California is one of the nation's leaders in locking up Black (and Latino) people, but that's another diary for another time.

But for the purposes of this diary, even though it defies all rational sense, let's pretend that the locked up Black folks who aren't legally disenfranchised somehow managed to cast a vote on Tuesday anyway, OK? It probably will make some of the haters who want to pin Proposition 8 on Black people feel better. And I do want them to feel better.

I just don't want them to scapegoat my people while you do it.

So our 1.56 million adults are now down to 1,445,700 or so as the maximum number of Black eligible voters in California on Tuesday. If 100% of them were actually registered to vote.

Which they weren't.

Factually Unsupported Myth #5: Virtually every adult, non-disqualified Black person was registered to vote on Election Day.

It is not in dispute that Black voters have historically usually been represented in the electorate in reasonable parity with our share of the population. There was nothing in advance of the election to indicate this had changed, and considering that voter registration was up for everyone, there is no evidence to say that our increases in registration could make up the difference between the 6% of the electorate we would normally represent and the 10% folks are assuming from misreading CNN's exit polling.

Black voters are presently also estimated to be about 6.2% of the registered voters in California, in relative parity with our representation in the general population, unlike Asians and Latinos who are both underrepresented in the electorate. (Whites are dramatically overrepresented in the California electorate, 63% of it or so).

On election day, there were 17,304,091 registered voters in the State of California.

Black folks, assuming they were in fact 6.2% of the electorate this year, in parity, would be only 1,072,653 of those voters. This number would be not to far off what one might have guessed knowing only that in this country, approximately 61% and 69%, respectively, of Black adults in the US were registered to vote in 2004 and 2006. Using the high percentage of 69% would normally yield 997,553 Black registered voters in California if normal trends held.

We can agree, however, that even though there were still a quite few (8 million, just under 1/3 of our entire eligible Black population) unregistered Black voters just a couple of months before the election -- and that includes in California too -- this was not the year for normal trends, even in California. Every demographic had higher registration for this election, but it seems none more so than Black people. For obvious reasons. Not all states keep track of this, but as was noted on sites like 538.com, in some states required to keep track of it for Voting Rights Act reasons, the increase was huge. For example, in Georgia the Black electorate increased from 1,226,246 in January 2008 to
1,556,225 in November, 2008 - an increase of 26.9%. However, that large increase was in a state where Black voters were historically well under parity in the voting population before this year. Since California Black voters have always been registered in parity with their status in the population, let's say that because of the unique circumstances of this election (221 years in the making Hallelujah!) the number went up to 80% of all Black Californians were registered to vote. (Only the Census numbers issued next year will tell us if our assumption is right.)

Applying the 80% registered figure to our population of 1,445,700 gets us 1,156,560 Black California registered voters. (A figure I have no actual factual basis for, but am using because in the end it both responds to arguments about extra Black folks voting and is just on the high end of reason -- since at 80% registration, Blacks would be well above the percentage of white voter registration!) Max.

This alone should give anyone spouting off about that CNN poll serious pause. Since, of course, if Black folks were really 10% of the electorate, we would have contributed 1,730,409 registered voters to the pool. This is a number which with 5 minutes of demographic research any of the haters spewing "Black people are the Reason!" would have realized exceeds the entire Black adult population in the state by more than 300,000 people, and the entire eligible Black electorate using generous assumptions about eligibility by 400,000, and the entire Black registered population even this historic year by 1/2 million souls.

(Which is why I said earlier that the only way that "Black people" alone could have been responsible for Proposition 8 is if a million of us Negroes snuck into the state just so we could claim to have voted for "Our President" (which someone in one thread actually seemed to argue through saying "Now they got theirs" to describe the election of Barack Obama on Tuesday, as if he felt folks gave "us" reparations or something they didn't want and need for themselves) on California soil.)

In other words, anyone who claims that Black folks were 10% of the vote on Tuesday is on crack. Or something more hallucinogenic - mushrooms perhaps (very popular in this state.) CNN at the top of the list, which did not make clear as it had a duty to do that the 10% figure it's posted on it's site represents only the percentage of folks exit polled through a random selection process that it tells you straight off may not have actually targeted where Black voters actually lived in California. and did not measure any votes that were not actually cast at a polling place on Election Day.

Repeating for the slow on the uptake: for African Americans to have been 10% of the California vote PERIOD they would have had to turnout in percentages not just dramatically disproportionate to their normal turnout - to the point of virtually 100% turnout; not just their percentage of the electorate, but nearly double it; and disproportionate to the actual turnouts everywhere we actually live in this state.

That only happens one way: if the 16,000,000 white, Latino and Asian folks who were most of the rest of the electorate on Tuesday decided to stay home in large numbers.

Now, does ANYONE really believe that, even you white gay haters who have polluted this site with your anti-Black racism in the past 48 hours despite your legitimate grief over Proposition 8? Was there some memo about white, Latino and Asian folks not being safe at the polls on "Our Day" that I that caused all of y'all to not turn out at the polls to the point where the smallest minority in California other than Pacific Islanders could almost double its normal impact on the vote? I didn't get it, if there was. My husband, who is white as a sheet, didn't get it either.

(Maybe 'cause he's an immigrant who has not chosen to be an American citizen and therefore can't vote - I dunno.)

Thus, stretching the truth as far in favor as those who need to blame Black Californian votes for Proposition 8 about as far as it can go, there were at the absolute outside 1,156,560 available Black votes in California to be cast on Proposition 8 - whether for or against, on Election Day.

But that number of 1,156,560 doesn't take into account one small thing: the actual turnout on Election Day.

Factually Unsupported Myth #6: There Were Enough "Black Votes" to be the "Deciding Factor" for Proposition 8.

Figures are obviously not final for turnout in California. There is no evidence that anyone has found or cited that Black people actually voted disproportionately to the general registered voter population on Tuesday in California - the only attempt to claim differently is based on CNN's 10% exit poll sample, which as noted above has serious methodological problems when applied to California's unique Black population distribution.

However, we do know that there are, so far, 10,325,615 total votes on Proposition 8, nearly 80,000 less than the total votes for the main event. For Black people to have been 10% of that vote, they would have had to cast 1,032,561 votes on the measure, whether for or against. In other words, Black Californians would have had to both had an electoral turnout at the polls of almost 90% AND have all voted on Proposition 8 (i.e, NONE could have been amongst the 80,000 who just skipped the Proposition on the ballot) to reach that number of votes.

Now, I am the first to concede that Black folks did indeed turn out in heavy numbers on Election Day. It was a thing of beauty. I cried when I got to the polls that day and saw lines I had not seen in decades. Honest I did. The first of many sets of tears I have shed over the election, including those shed when I learned that Proposition 8 had passed, and those shed since as I have watched the white racist vitriol and scapegoating that has taken place here at DailyKOS - where folks claim to be liberal - ever since.

But only a fool would believe that 90% of any voting demographic turned out on Election Day. Such a thing has never happened in our history. And it never will, since even in a country that has mandatory voting like Australia (i.e. you can actually go to jail if you don't vote long enough) they don't get more than 95%.

And it did not happen on Tuesday, either, when only 60.9% of the entire California electorate bothered to cast a ballot.

I can already hear folks saying: But Black people turned out more than other voters!

Maybe that's true. But not likely true. You can confirm that merely by looking at the turnout in cities where Black people actually live in California (anyone who lives here knows that there aren't that many of them and for any who didn't, I've linked the numbers above.)

Just for fun, let's start my own little tiny hood, the City of East Palo Alto, the only place in San Mateo County where Black people live in any meaningful numbers at all. We have 21% African-American population here (down from 69.7% when I moved here nearly 30 years ago.) Our population is approximately 31,000 people. In our city, we have just 10,034 registered voters.
Of which only 3,563 turned out to the polls - a turnout of just 35.5%.

How about Alameda County, as noted above the place where the largest percentage of Black people live in California? It did a lot better than my little city - but still had a turnout of just 55.86% on Election Day.

Well, what about Sacramento, you ask? (Let's just travel through the lyrics of Dr. Dre's and Tupac's California Love while we do this shall we?) Another big turnout there - of 58.79% of the electorate.

How about San Joaquin County - Stockton and Tracy, where many of us fled during the dot-com boom, driven financially out of the Bay Area proper from the cost of living? Even better: a 63.3% turnout.

Since I don't have time to do every county I've listed above, how about we end with Los Angeles County, which previously had more Black people in it than anywhere else in California (but now are down to just 9.6% of the county population since they're all being run out now - something about being targeted for racial violence in an increasing turf war and the police and liberals being so scared of the implications that they pretend the problem doesn't exist might have something to do with that)

(In the City.....of LA....Long Beach in the House.....In the City.....of good old Watts. Even Hollywood trying to get a piece of this.....In the City....City of Compton.......Pasadena? Pasadena, where you at? Inglewood....Inglewood always up to no good? South Central!)

(OK I'm trying to make myself smile while I write this because I've been in so much pain over what I've read all over the 'Net, particularly here at DailyKOS, I don't know what else to do. But this shit ain't even funny.)

Los Angeles County had just 65.57% turnout on Tuesday. (You have to scroll down very close to the bottom to view the total) as of yesterday, reduced to 62.7%.

Now, these are counties where, as I have shown above, huge numbers of Black people (huge for a state that doesn't really have many, anyhow) live. And yet the best turnout in any of them was 62.7% of the electorate.

As an aside, I wouldn't be me if I didn't note that someone here at DailyKOS, in discussing Negroes and Proposition 8, reached to the realm of the surreal and actually mentioned the increase of Black folks living in Imperial County as perhaps additional evidence that Black folks hurt the effort against Proposition 8's passage. In Imperial County, the most recent estimate is that Black people indeed have started moving there - such that instead of the 3.95% of the county they used to be Black folks now constitute (approximately) a whopping 4.2% of all Imperial County residents. All 161,867 of them. By my math, that means that approximately 6,799 Black people live there. Of that number, only 4,744 of them are old enough to vote, since if I go by the public estimates approximately 31.4% of Imperial County residents are under the age of 18.

It's clear to any rational person when you look at these numbers that Black people moving to Imperial County was indeed a major nail in the 504,000 vote coffin of Proposition 8. You simply can't overlook the power of 3,321 votes(70% of 4,744) Black folks to sway an entire city's electorate. I don't see why we didn't all know that.

Maybe we didn't know that because Proposition 8 lost by 11,573 votes in Imperial County - more than double the entire Black voting-age population of the county. and more than 3 times the number of votes that would have been cast by Black voters if the 70-30% CNN estimate was accurate.

I didn't know we niggers had that much pull. Wish someone had told me years ago. We'd have had a Black president long before 221 years of nationhood and 389 years of internal colonization and genocide had passed on these shores, I bet you that, if only we'd known. Or at least have had a nominee......

So to sum up. Let's be even more generous to folks wanting to blame Black folks, since again the point of this exercise is to show that mathematically, you cannot lay blame for Proposition 8 at the feet of Black people alone. Let's say that throughout the state, Black people turned out in as high a percentage as Los Angeles voters generally - 62.7%. (Unless you're contending that less of everyone else turned out?)

That means that out of our deeply inflated pool of 1,156,560 Black voters in California, if I bump up the turnout to the highest level where we actually live, at most 720,536 Black people actually made it to the polls or cast a ballot.

Even though we know that number was not that high in the place where more of us live than any other Alameda County (which, by the way, defeated Proposition 8.)

It is only with these puffed-up numbers you even come close to supporting the claim that Black people are to blame. And even then, under our hypothetical, and giving full credence to CNN's 70-30 exit poll split, at most 504,000 Black votes were cast for Proposition 8, versus 216,000 against it. (378,000 of those votes, if I believe CNN, would have been cast by women, with only 126,000 cast by Black men - a 3 to 1 ratio on this issue which nobody who knows any actual Black people would believe in a million years - but which a lot of folks here on DailyKOS and the 'Net just repeated the few times Black women were pontificated about separate from Black people generally.)

Right now, as of 7:00 PM on November 6, with still more than 2,000,000 votes to be counted, Proposition 8 is already 510,000 votes ahead - 110,000 more votes than it was yesterday morning.

Utterly Supported Fact #1: There Were So Many More White, Latino and Asian Votes in Favor of Proposition 8 That Blaming Black Folks is Both Bad Math and Racist Scapegoating of the Highest Order

I'm going to end by doing one other thing: showing you the number of votes that non-Black people cast on Election Day in favor of Proposition 8, if I believe CNN's exit polls (which as I noted when I began, is the foundation for each and every anti-Black argument I've read on this site in the past 2 days.) You compare those numbers to the TOTAL maximum number of Black votes -- women AND men -- in this state if I give the racist haters every benefit of the doubt as I have done mathematically above -- of 504,000 votes. And then you make the argument to me that our segment of electorate is more to blame for an outcome in which we contributed -- even under the hateful math, only 4.9% of the votes. Please.

Non-Black Votes in Favor of Proposition 8:
White Men: 51% of 31% of 10,325,615 votes: 1,632,480 Yes
White Women: 47% of 32% of 10,325,615 votes: 1,552,972 Yes
Latino Men: 54% of 8% of 10,325,615 votes: 446,067 Yes
Latino Women: 52% of 11% of 10,325,615 votes: 592,170 Yes
Asian/Native: 51% of 9% of 10,325,615 votes: 473,946 Yes
Total: 4,697,635 (9.3 times the maximum TOTAL number of Black votes in California.)

Now who did all y'all say was at fault, again? Answer - it wasn't us, unless you were contending that even if we went against Proposition 8 in the same proportions as everyone else it would have failed.

BTW, it wouldn't have:

Black Votes if We'd Voted Like Other People Did:
Black Women Voting Like White Women:: 47% of 6% of 10,325,615: 291,182 Yes (a reduction of only 86,816 votes for Proposition 8 from our hypothetical maximum of Black votes cast)
Black Men Voting Like White Men:: 51% of 4% of 10,325,615: 210,643 Yes (an INCREASE, if you believe CNN's poll even though Black men were reduced to a pitiful "N/A", of 84,643 votes, almost cancelling out the change in Black women entirely)
Black People Voting Like Asians/Natives: 49% of 10% of 10,325,615: 505,955 Yes

Adding the "enlightened" Black vote to the exising totals above for everyone else we get 5,203,590 Yes votes.

Out of 10,325,615 votes.

In other words, Proposition 8 would have still passed by 81,565 votes, if Black voters had done no more than reflect the rest of the state's will on the matter.

Now. With this out of the way, can we now please redirect our energies to actually putting the "blame" somewhere it makes sense to put it and, more importantly, mobilizing together to defeat this hateful thing in the courts, and can those that have been going to the anti-Black well over this thing just shut the fuck up? (I don't expect you to be man enough to apologize.)

The End of America as We Know It

Shanikka — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:35:23 GMT

If I go by the whinging coming from the Republican side of the political aisle, if the electorate does what it is now predicted by every major poll to do today (elect Senator Barack Obama, a Black man, as President of the United States aka "Leader of the Free World"), it will be the end of America as we know it. Probably the end of the world as we know it.

I think they are right.
I will start with my usual disclaimers. I have donated to, canvassed for, and have been for 48 hours now phoning to the point where my hand is cramped up on behalf of, Barack Obama for President. I am scheduled to do so for hours today. In addition to donating time to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights mobilization of attorneys throughout this country to protect the franchise. In addition to donating a couple of hours time to try and use my tiny voice as a religious person of color to beat back Proposition 8, one of the most hateful ideas I've seen in my voting life.

I have done all these things despite many misgivings that I have about Barack Obama, both in terms of some of his specific political positions and his campaign strategy developed and managed by whites, which I felt systematically pandered and exploited white unconscious racist sensibilities about what an acceptable Black man is supposed to be (which thus reinforces racism) at the expense of allowing racist and white supremacist myths about Black people generally held by huge swaths of the Right and the Left of all colors to continue largely unchallenged. So take that for what it's worth.

Despite this, I am one who believes strongly, as the editor of Black Commentator believes, that

I believe that it is completely legitimate to hold reservations, including significant reservations, regarding an Obama presidency while at the same time recognizing that it is essential for us to vote for him.

IMO it is impossible for any Black person who deeply loves our people and believes in them fundamentally despite our country's white supremacist narrative of who we are collectively not to be on the verge of keeling over right now. On the verge of being disembodied, almost, about to have our souls rise up out of these mere feet of clay that are our earthly bodies. Walking arould almost high, deprived of oxygen at the historic possibility -- no, the historic likelihood of today. As Eugene Robinson said so simply this morning, "African Americans' love of country is deep, intense and abiding, but necessarily complicated."

And it is our love of country as much as love of our people, and the man who is our brother, who when he gives interviews in quiet places calls us brother and sister, that is driving Black people to the polls today in what is expected to be the largest numbers -- with the most lopsided partisan vote -- in United States history.

Because we have come to put our trust in earnest in the political process again for the first time in 40 years, as Black voters in a country whose wealth we largely built for free. To take a chance that our vote really will matter, this time.

But even if it doesn't matter at the end of the day, it matters at the most foundational level of our collective unconsciousness, I believe, in ways that are too hard to explain when all you have is words to explain them. And that's all I have, other than my tears, which I shed this morning when I got to our little city hall and saw folks spilling in the parking lot. Waiting. Holding our breath, it seemed, collectively.

As a great writer once said in another context, waiting to exhale.

You have to have spent time with Black folks emotionally overwhelmed this past few weeks, in our hair shops and barbershops and places of worship and grocery stores and you name it to have any true sense of the magnitude of the feelings that so many Black Americans have today, to understand the collectivity of our experience today even though we have as many political opinions (40 million or so) as we have people who Identify. Why are we doing this? Why are we giving, depending on whose polls you believe, 93-97% of our votes to a single candidate - something which has NEVER been done in Black electoral history?

As uncomfortable as it may make some; no matter how much the official campaign rhetoric runs away from this narrative, frightened because in our country the idea of mass action by Blacks is indeed frightening at a level we don't even think consciously about, and nobody would want to spook the opposition into getting out to vote at the last minute like they did in that silly movie with Chris Rock, it cannot be avoided -- and should not be avoided that this is the reason:

Because Barack Obama is Black and qualified, Black and liberal, Black and can be elected the first Black president in the United States.

Whether you have loved every word Barack Obama has uttered on the campaign trail or, like me, occasionally cringed with pain at yet another diss -- inadvertent or strategic -- of the beauty and strength, hard work, survival, resourcefulness, faith and LOVE that has largely been the character of the Black diaspora in America for hundreds of years both in bondage and without, unless you are simply too young to know what is happening (and I put that at somewhere around age 4 or 5 this year) it is very hard to not feel as this young brother writing on Black Commentator feels at this moment in our people's American history:

We've heard all about the expectation that next Tuesday will be the "Mother of all turnouts." There are caveats, of course, like rain, long lines, running out of ballots and the types of things that historically happen when low voter turnout communities suddenly show up. Voter suppression, as a strategy, is real. It is not incumbent on anybody else to make your voting experience convenient or pleasurable. You have to look at this like an escape from slavery, a hard, long walk that you cannot allow to fail. For those who escaped from slavery, failure wasn't an option. For those who were fighting in the civil rights movement for their right to vote, turning back wasn't an option. In the words of the old civil rights hymnal, "Can't let nobody turn you around..." Not this day. Not this time. This is the day for which black America prayed over three hundred years, to become a full partner in the political process. Finally, America is willing to let one of us drive the car. Our votes will be the gas that fuels this car.

(Emphasis mine.)

And this car, at least if what I saw in my beloved East Palo Alto this morning when I arrived at the polls at 7:00 AM is any indication, will be hitting the road with a V8 engine and the pedal to the metal - due to the largest turnout in our little city's history since we incorporated this progressive, once Black now fully multicultural city 25 years ago.

Others, all across the America that all of us love or we wouldn't be fighting so hard to wrest it back from the clutches of those who have been trying to destroy everything good America stood for over the past 8 years, have reported the same. A mass of people, all standing for one cause.

But the experience, the atmosphere, in many Black neighborhoods today is likely to be far beyond just the fierce commitment and determination that those of all races who have worked so hard have felt as they committed to elect Barack Obama president today, or die trying. The mood is, and this is the only word my swirling emotions can come up with right now to describe it, likely to be hot buttered SOUL. I know that everyone I've talked to, the hard core lefties like me to the centrists to the conservative Black folks, are all on fire today. Burning up inside with the spirit, at the idea that maybe -- just maybe -- America will let us (us being represented in a single Black man) drive the car. Just this once.

That the idea itself is not scoffed at today is one way we know that are facing today the end of America as we know it. Even if nobody is talking very much, just smiling, and making sure that the elderly have chairs to sit on while they wait to vote, some of whom came from dawn prayer meetings today -- feeling you can never have too much insurance. Afraid to jinx it, I guess.

I think it's important to note that none of this is happening in Black communities today because any large number of Black folks needed to be "shown" that "we can be anything we want to be" through Barack Obama's candidacy. Frankly, as any Black person over a certain age can tell you, we've always known that we were a people capable of anything, but especially greatness in the face of adversity. It was never about us needing a role model, at least not for more than a few of us who are misguided and misled, having abandoned the collective vision that sustained us for hundreds of years in favor of an "I got mine get yours" mentality that has led to some utter foolishness in Black communities, frankly. The idea that Black people didn't know that we were just as capable of running the whole show as those who insisted on running it is one that began suffering in Black communities only recently, when a generation that didn't have to struggle because their parents and grandparents struggled for them, decided that race no longer mattered in America so much and that they could self-actualize their way "me, myself, and I" -- all while making sure that they never actually thought about their exceptionalism not being an exception at all, but the ongoing rule necessary to slow down permanent justice and equality.

So to me, the importance of Barack Obama was never about giving Black people a role model; we've had plenty even if the youth often refuses to acknowledge them today thinking they know better (some things never change, of course). Instead it was about the nation's majority being a role model for us. About it role modeling that we were good enough, to them, so that it would take a chance on one of Us. (You know the Us I'm talking about -- the Us that still can't get a cab to stop for us in Manhattan a lot of the time.) About the country and our party role modeling that it, collectively, had changed enough to hitch its wagon to one of the largely dismissed and collectively disrespected -- even by the party to whom we have been loyal with our votes for 40 years. To "We Who are Dark". Voluntarily, despite the political narrative in our own party that has claimed that the reason we have been out of power is precisely because the party had hitched its wagon to us in the 1960's.

There are those -- many media, many not -- who need emotionally to believe that today's election of Barack Obama will mean that this country's ongoing legacy of white privilege and racism is at an end. It is a narrative that has flowered and taken hold, as well-meaning folks on the Left, largely white, desperately try to "disprove" the existence of electoral racism, such as the Bradley Effect, even as they forget that we don't even need to talk about Bradley when the best polling our candidate is doing still indicates that only a minority of American whites will vote for Barack Obama today - just as it has been since the last presidential election held before the 1965 Civil Rights Act was passed. (As if the passage of that Act and the fact that the best qualified man running today for the job of President can't get the majority of the majority of voters in this country are somehow rationally not connected when they are in fact deeply intertwined.) It is a strong likelihood that, if you go by the polls, "If [today's] election were confined to white America. . .Barack Obama would lose."

But a "strong likelihood" that Barack Obama would lose if not for the votes of Black and other non-white voters is not the same thing as an "absolute certainty". And in a country, which was built largely on the exploitation and dehumanization of Black slave labor; where we have never before nominated a Black man as a party's candidate for President; and where even now we will have a Senate without any Blacks in it if we elect Barack Obama today, the difference in those 2 ideas -- "strong likelihood" versus "absolute certainty" is a difference as wide as the Sahara. That even a respectable minority of whites -- far more than ever before -- have been willing to canvass, call, door knock and stand in line for hours to try and place a Black man in charge of this country's entire destiny -- and thus their destiny -- for at least the next four years is even more proof of the end of America as we know it.

There will be a lot of folks, no doubt, quoting from Dr. King's speech at the March for Jobs and Freedom about the content of character and little children sitting down together for a meal today, emotionally moved by the power of colorblind myth. As if the act of electing a Black man president is enough to do that in a world where we still see, each and every day, evidence of the white supremacist character, the sense of entitlement, of this country. I can't get moved by myth. I am, however, nonetheless moved when I think of Dr. King's words on August 28, 1963 (words I personally heard but were too young to remember, being just a baby when my parents took me to Washington that day), words that Barack Obama himself regularly borrowed each time he urged folks to consider the "fierce urgency of now":

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
We cannot walk alone.

It is the idea embodied in those last few words of the excerpted words from Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech above -- that the freedom of whites in America is inextricably tied to ours as Blacks -- that a critical mass appears to have taken to heart today as we stand in interminable lines all throughout America's hoods, and farming towns and suburbs, patiently waiting to cast our votes for Barack Obama.

And that is the real reason why I believe that America as we know it will indeed end today. Because today, for the first time, I believe that for the first time a critical mass of the majority of the electorate, no matter what their reasons (and some are good reasons and others are not) feel that their freedom is inextricably tied to the success of the Black man running for President today. They see him as their best, greatest hope, not just for their locality, or county, or state, but for the entire nation.

We, us Black folks, are not walking alone today, with only a few exceptional folks at our side. We are walking with, if not a majority, a huge minority of whites by our side. Walking politically with one vision for the future, based on hope. For the first time in Black history.

No -- for the first time in American history. Since today is a history that all of us have made, together. No matter what the outcomes.

Never forget this: This is happening today in a country that was built on the assumption that all we were good for working ourselves to death for free for whites as their divine right, while being grateful for the privilege. In a country where today you still cannot be guaranteed that if you do everything right in this life that you will live a single day without someone's assumption of your inferiority merely because of your skin.

This was not possible in the America we all knew.

It is for that profound change in American politics that I am more than willing to sacrifice the idea of America as we know it. Sacrifice it for the possibility of a new America, as so many have always hoped it. Particularly those who are Black that do not have the same strategically political duty as Michelle Obama to pretend for political consumption that we have ever been as proud of our country before as we are today.

There are already a million emotions that I've felt since I awoke before dawn this morning. A million more that I will feel throughout the day, and a million more in the period that time will move in infinitesimal increments between when the polls close and our new President is announced. I am certain that I am not alone in that either -- if today's 1/2 hour on the 1/2 hour ability to update your emotional state on a tickertape is any indication.

But no matter what happens, tomorrow America will be different. Because of the return of Black engagement in the electoral process, where once again we are willing to vest our hope and faith in the ballot box despite disappointment. The ballot or the bullet, as it were. Because we had a chance to vote for someone who looks like us, the value of which is not our need to believe that we were capable of being President -- most of us who have pride in our people have always known that -- but the reality that those who we believed would never let it happen actualy were willing to stand with us, to set aside their own conscious and unconscious biases and let us drive the car. America as we have known it has always been a place where interracial coalition was both an anxiety fraught and risky business, where the connections were ephemeral and . Yet Malcolm once said, just a month before his death, that

I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin.

It is funny that so many malign Malcolm when he himself called this day, a day where for what we believe to be the nation's survival we have coalesced with blurrier racial lines than ever before in history, a collective of the oppressed from the past 28 years of Reagan Republicanism, to say collectively that we want freedom, justice and equality for everyone. But as I've always said, Dr. King and Malcolm were a lot closer than folks like to believe.

Today, as the daughter of a mother and father who were each the grandchildren of slaves in Alabama and South Carolina, and as the mother of biracial Black children whose hearts are bursting with joy today as much as mine is, I can embrace those that need to believe in the reality of a utopian vision of racial equality that does not exist today and will not exist tomorrow as the reason as the result of them voting for Barack Obama. As I hope they embrace me, someone for whom the fight for Black equality and justice in America didn't begin with Barack Obama's campaign and won't end tomorrow. For me, I think of all those who did not live to see this day -- from my mother who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to my grandparents to their parents all but one of whom were born into slavery. I think of and salute the shoulders of giants who Barack Obama's candidacy stands, even as he too often distances himself from them as a campaign strategy. I cry that they could not have been here with us today. Even as they are with us today, because the ancestors have never left us, not really.

I need to stop now because my head is too full of things to say and none of them make much sense other than the occasional "Thank You God, for letting me and my father live to see this day" and the bars of Lift Every Voice and Sing that I keep hearing and which keep blurring the words I've been trying to type somewhat incoherently on this screen for an hour:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the glistening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun
Of a new day begun
Let us march on, till victory is won.

Someday, I hope that all of us, no matter our race or economic standing or social standing, can as a nation can sing this together, loudly, proudly with the same reverence as we sing America the Beautiful, my favorite patriotic song (perhaps because it exhorts us to "crown [our] good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea", an idea not inconsistent with any of those I've written here, if you think about it.)

Who knows? Maybe we can have choir rehearsal in time for Inauguration Day, 2009.

Let our votes today be the gas that drives the car.

(Finally, as my little contribution to inspiration and and as a hat tip to my husband's homeland (he is a proud Australian and not an American citizen and therefore not voting today), I can't help but note that if this election were being held Down Under today, Barack Obama would win every single state in a supermajority landslide:

The Australian Electoral Map

Not bad for a country whose "White Australia Policy" was the law of the land until 1971! So get out there today, wherever you are, and let's see if we can color in the map of our beloved country -- America -- to look as much like this 100% blue Aussie one as possible, OK?

Please?

A Sense of Direction

Sana — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:04:11 GMT

This morning when I turned my computer on there was an article about a thirteen year old Somalian girl (Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow) being stoned to death while a thousand witnesses watched in an auditorium. Her crime was saying that she had been raped. She was charged with adultery (apparently she somehow managed to commit it alone, since she was stoned alone).
I read the Quran, I read the Bible, I read about Ma'at, I'm obsessed with a kind of balanced justice and I talk very strongly sometimes.
The article made me angry, on so many different levels, for how that situation came to be, for the Aisha herself,and for even the people who watched, here and there.
It also made me feel a chill of fear. Usually I am so strongly protesting this or that, I don't want a world where my thirteen year old daughter is dragged out alone to face stones.
So alone, so powerless, no one to stand up for her, to say that she was sincere, confused, too young, but honest and brave. I wished I could have been there for her, I would have stood in front of the whole auditorium of people and even if I was stoned too, every person would have heard about real justice, about balance and how it wasn't in attacking a little girl alone. (I'm a fool, one of these days I'm going to get killed because I'm the type of person that stands alone in front of a group of Hell's Angels and yammers out "oh, no you don't, that isn't right.)
I feel like I need a sense of direction, a sense of where I want to go and why, because I'm so often angry about injustice for one reason or another, but I don't want to exchange one kind of injustice for another.
One of my aunts got into tracing our family tree through genetics and records and found that we're not nearly as diluted as I might have thought, apparently from my mother's side, we're from somewhere in the midnorthernparts of Africa. It makes sense,a lot of the older philosophy really connects with how I think.
My mother spent some time in Africa and I thought it would be a good experience and go there for awhile (we have some second cousins living there now)instead of just reading things. I haven't done it yet.
I feel a huge sense of repressed anger about everything that I hear about in this country, I want to lash out but I bite my tongue, then I read something like that, and I feel violent too.
Reading about these things (like Aisha) and I feel a sense of fear of being caught between a rock and a hard place, with injustice on every side, coming from every color; like an attack dog on a short leash and every child is ready to hit me with a stick, and I don't really know who my enemy is, or if its truly anyone but only injustice itself; but I feel the desire to bite so badly I can barely contain it. Where is the justice, where is the balance in this world? Who is abiding by Ma'at? (in a manner of speaking)
According to one book I have, it says the Pharoahs (who were god-kings) said that if even they were not "beloved of Ma'at" that first they would lose themselves, then they would lose Egypt, and THEN even the whole world would move towards destruction of order; when I see the lack of justice, order, and balance, the pain it brings in the human world, and the catastrophe it brings in the natural world, I would have to say it sounds like the Priesthood of ancient Egypt was exactly right. What direction will lead me to that balance, justice, and order?

My Dad, God, and Proposition 8

Shanikka — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:32:00 GMT

I haven't posted a diary in a very, very long time, but wanted to contribute my voice to the many bloggers who are screaming, loud and clear, "NO" on Proposition 8.

Some folks might feel that I have no real dog in this hunt. After all, I am married, heterosexually so, for much of the last 28 years. I'm also emotionally (but not physically) polyamorous, but that is a different diary for a different time.

Yet my sexual orientation is not heterosexual. I am bisexual. I was, during a year-long period in my teens when you couldn't be bi, a lesbian. Back then, you had to either be straight or gay, because otherwise you were just either a ho or too chicken to come out, depending on whether you were talking to someone gay or straight. And, since I was what I thought was irretrievably in love with the woman of my dreams, I concluded that I must be a lesbian -- the boy down the street a mere distraction from my "true nature." That was the product of the sexual rhetoric at the time, and it was only through a lot of hard lessons and tears and just not being able to "pick a side" that I realized that I am genuinely sexually and emotionally capable of loving men and women equally.
(Some might feel that the fact that I haven't been in a real relationship with a woman for nearly 30 years now makes me a poser and that I'm just a straight chick trapped in an overly sexual body. I have learned to accept those judgments even if they aren't true - it's easier than arguing when you can't point to who I sleep with as "evidence" of my sexuality.)

But even if I wasn't bi, Proposition 8 still affects me personally, even if I am already married.

It affects me because my youngest daughter, who is only 18 years old and is unmarried, is even more bisexual than I am. She was fully out before she was in the 11th grade and has disappointed many a youngblood trying to get with her by making clear that no, she isn't just "experimenting" when she's thrown them over for a girl. And vice-versa.

Someday, I hope she marries. Because I believe in marriage. And I want that special type of love and joy and companionship for her, as most mothers want it for their children.

And I want her to be able to marry whoever she wants to. So I'd be against Proposition 8 under any and all circumstances, for self-interest even before looking at any other reason.

But, this diary is not about me and why I am against Proposition 8. It's even not about my daughter, and why she's against it, and looking forward very much to Tuesday when she can as a newly minted member of the California electorate cast her vote not only for the next President, Barack Obama, but also against the hatefulness of Proposition 8.

This diary is about my 78-year old, raised in the South and in the church, not formally educated but quite smart, Dad. And what, unless he's lying to me (which he has never done), will be his vote against Proposition 8 on Tuesday. And the discussion we had about it yesterday, which gives me hope that if only enough of us try and talk this thing out taking head on the religious concerns, we can beat back this hateful proposition and all the others like it whenever and wherever they come up.

(BTW, If you are a religion-hater, or one of those folks that consider us religious people "deluded", "crazy" or whatever, and like pointing it out at every opportunity, just skip the rest of this diary since this diary is not about people like you.)

Occasionally, fate intervenes just when you need it to. I had a doctor's appointment yesterday and actually managed, as a result, to get home early, hours before usual. Just as I was settling in for some websurfing and a well-deserved, long-missed Everquest session, the telephone rang and a person whose voice I didn't recognize asking to speak to "John", saying they were from a "national research organization." John's my dad. I figured it was a poll, of course quite common right about now. I almost said he wasn't home, since anyone who knows my dad knows that my father hates talking on the phone. If you can't say it in 2 minutes generally speaking you'd better say it in person because he'll be maneuvering to get you to stop talking. This is true even for his "friend" that calls him religiously every Sunday at 1:00 from New York, perhaps hoping he'll move back some day and marry her. But, it wasn't my call, it was his, so I just handed it to him with a "Daddy, some person on the phone wants your opinion about something."

Within 2 minutes, it became clear after my father was overheard saying "I was married but my wife has passed", and "No, I haven't been to church in a while" and "I don't know, I don't think much about that." My father was being called about Proposition 8. Since I am not an eavesdropper, it was everything I had to try and guess what was being said, fearful that there were some "Yes on 8" people trying to give him their hateful lying propaganda.

I realized that I needed to say something. I could not run the risk that a member of our family was going to cast a "Yes on 8" vote on Tuesday - and he is indeed going to the polls, as he has every election except the one he was hospitalized for in 2004 and so out of it that I had to break the news to him that Bush had won -- again. He is leading the charge of voters in our little house in the 'Hood who will be going to City Hall together to cast our votes for Barack Obama, since this is a day that, as a Black man growing up in South Carolina during the Depression with its overt racism and living in New York City with its covert racism, he never believed he would see (neither did I, but that's another discussion for another time, too!). He simply could not become one of the estimated 58% of Black voters in California (in addition to the majority of Latino voters) that have expressed their intent to vote "Yes" on Proposition 8.

Normally, I do not get in my father's business any more than my father gets in mine (this is how our family is; grown people don't get into the business of other grown people unless invited). But I got in it anyway.

"Daddy, who was that on the phone?"

"Oh just some people trying to talk to me about how I was going to vote."

"Were they asking you about something called "Proposition 8?"

"Yeah I think that is what it's called."

"About gay people getting married?"
"Yeah that was it."

"Did they they try and tell you how you should vote?"

"They said something like that." The panic meter was starting to go off in the back of my head.

I said "Daddy, you can't vote Yes on 8. You just can't. It's not our business to be getting in the way of people who want to get married."

"Alright, alright, if you say so", he said. My father has always given me anything I want even though he talks shit about it since he can't ruin his rep as a "stern dad." He also clearly had been talked out by the people on the phone - he hates the phone. He hates a lot of talking. So I thought "Whew," and started heading back to my computer to log into EQ - it has been a long week.

"But wait a minute now, [Shanikka], you explain something to me, then....."

Uh oh.

"You tell me this, then: Now, when God created man, he saw that was lonely, right?"

Now, if I believe my what my late mother always told me (I miss you, Mommy!) my father hasn't regularly attended church in almost 50 years, having walked out of a Sunday service in a huff after they'd taken up the collection, counted it, declared it "not enough" and sent the collection plate around again. Thus, except for rare occasions the only time you'll see my dad in a church is a wedding or a funeral. But that doesn't matter. Like most of his generation he was raised in the church, in the deep South. So he may not be a thumper, but his religious beliefs are just as important to him as they were to my mother, for whom her faith was far more central day-to-day. So even though to me Proposition 8 is a political, not religious, question, my father's quesiton made clear to me that he and I couldn't go straight into the politics. We first had to get through The Religion.

"Yes, that's what the Bible teaches us."

"And he created woman from his rib so that he would have a companion, right?"

"That's what it says, yes Daddy."

"So then how is any other way? I don't understand it."

I took a deep breath. IME "I don't understand" is the old school response you always get (or, at least, what you always used to get) when talking about gay people with the older generation of Black folks -- although who knows now, with our churches in the past 10 years having jumped on the noisy nasty shunning and hatred bandwagon of the past decade and caused white liberals en masse to associate homophobia disproportionately with Black churches as if white folks haven't been most of the ones actually killing gay people for being gay.

"Well, you agree with me that God don't make mistakes, right?"

"Yes of course."

"And that's what you taught me all my life, you and Mommy, right?" (Yes, for the record I'm nearly 50 years old and my parents are still mommy and daddy. Sue me ;)).

"So why did God make what some people think are nearly 1 out of 10 of people gay or lesbian? That's not a mistake, right?"

"Well, but how I do know they don't have a choice?"

"Daddy. You know how many gay people, again?"

"I know a lot of guys and gals (yes, he's old) who are 'like that.'"

"And they are your friends, right?"

"Yeah, that doesn't have anything to do with me being friends with them. I'm friends with everybody."

"Now, how many do YOU know that you think actually chose to be gay?"

"I don't know whether they choose to be that way or not....."

"Daddy, seriously now. Can you think of a single person that would voluntarily put up with all the shit that gay people have to put up with?"

"That's fair. No I can't imagine someone would do that on purpose if they had a choice."

"So God made them this way, right?"

"I guess so."

"And if God made them this way it wasn't a mistake, right?"

"Right."

"Why would God condemn millions of people that He made?"

"Can't think of a reason. But that doesn't mean that it's OK for them to get married. I don't know if it is or not."

"And Jesus said that if we could not be like Him, and be celibate, that we were to marry, right?"

"Yes."

"Jesus didn't say "everybody except for you gay people" when he said that, did he?"

"I don't know. I haven't read my Bible in a while."

"Well, He didn't. I'll show you."

"You probably don't even have a Bible around here."

Oh I have one, alright.

So off we go to Matthew and Mark. And sure enough, there is bupkis.

"See? Not a word. Wouldn't you think that if God had a really strong opinion about it he'd have said something, or had Jesus say something? I mean, it's not in the 10 Commandments. And Jesus made a point of talking to the Pharisees about marriage, right?"

"Fair enough."

"I mean, even hearing the preacher tell it the only time gay people come up in the Bible at all after Jesus came is just 4 times, and that's stretching it: Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9, Timothy 1:10, and Jude 7. The only one that even references gay sex is Romans, the same Roman that says 3 passages later that disobedient children are just as bad as all these sexual people. See?"

"Well, 1/2 the time preachers don't know what they are talking about anyway."

Nod, and my dad reads the Scripture out loud. So far, so good.

"Now I've been disobedient all my life, right?"

"You aren't a bad girl."

"Daddy I jumped out of my high chair when I was 2 and split my head open on the oven door handle after you told me to sit still like mommy said; put [my brother] up to take apart your $250 Bulova watch after you told me 3 times not to bother it or I'd get a spanking; got drunk enough to throw up all over the couch when I was 15 after I told you I'd just been out rollerskating; and came home at 6:30 in the morning from graduation night when you clearly told me when giving me permission to stay out after 11 that I'd better have my ass home by 2:00 AM if I knew what's good for me."

"Oh, right. Well, you got a spanking for at least one of those if I remember correctly."

"Yeah, but whuppin' wasn't enough. You were supposed to kill me."

"Who said?"

"If you go by the Bible, God said."

"Well, I don't believe anything says that God said to kill bad kids."

"Well, somebody thought He did. See?"

Off we go to Deuteronomy 21.

"See? Whuppins don't count. It's stoned to death."

"Now you know I only spanked you 3 or 4 times your whole life."

"Yes Daddy and I remember each one of them like it was yesterday, believe you me. But that isn't the point. You see it says it here, right? No disobedient kids - kill 'em all. And in fact in Romans it says that disobedient kids are just as bad as all these folks having "unnatural sex" in Paul's opinion. Actually worse, since disobedient kids are actually listed as "depraved" whereas when Paul was talking about the "gay people" part he didn't call those folks depraved, he just said they "didn't know God." It's right here in Romans, see? In Timothy, too!"

"Well that's what it says, I guess."

"But Daddy, here's the thing: was Paul Jesus?"

"Of course not."

"And Paul didn't even meet Jesus, right?"

"I don't know - did he?"

"Nope."

"I did not know that."

"That's OK, lot of folks assume that Paul knew something because Jesus told him when Paul didn't even know the man. But hear me out: Even Paul tried to make clear when he said what God wanted, as opposed to when Paul was just speaking for himself, right?"

"I don't know. Was he?"

"He sure was, especially when it came to the question of marriage."

So off we go to some 1 Corinthians with Paul's regular use of the phrase "I, not the Lord" amongst other hedging of bets phrases that Paul used when he was just making shit up, as opposed to "The Lord, not I, command" when he actually knew what the hell he was talking about.

"See? Even Paul knows that his opinion isn't anything more than Paul's opinion. When he is saying something that God wanted him to say, he said "Not I, but the Lord", or "The Lord, not I". He did, see? I mean he even says lots of times that things he says are just him talking, not what God commanded him to say or Jesus taught, right? So, I mean, if Jesus didn't say anything, and God didn't say anything, who is Paul to say something but Paul? I mean you leave it up to him and you and me shouldn't even be having this conversation since I'm just a girl and I am assumed to be too stupid to even know God's word for myself. And I'm definitely not supposed to be talking about it to a man like I know something."

"You always did talk a lot."

"I know but you still have to admit that Jesus didn't say anything about gay people, let alone about whether they should get married?"

"You're right, he didn't."

"Not even in the Sermon on the Mount, where he made clear that God's one true command was to love Him as no other, and love our brother as we love Him."

"OK you have a point, but....."

"He's the thing though, Daddy: John, Matthew and Luke and Mark didn't say anything either, though. Now, you'd think that Mark and Matthew definitely would have said something, especially Mark is supposed to have gotten his accounts of Jesus and what he said and did straight from Peter who was actually there. Now, if gay people and whether they should get married or not was a huge issue for God, wouldn't you think that even ONE of them would also mentioned Jesus talking about it somewhere? I mean, Lord knows He managed to talk about everything else that God thought was important and he was clear that Love is the highest law -- even Paul admits that. But NOBODY other than Paul had a single thing to say about gay people and love. Or gay people and marriage. Why is that?"

"I don't know, maybe because they were busy."

"They weren't too busy to talk about marriage, that's for sure."

"Right"

"And especially weren't too busy to say 'God doesn't like divorce', right?"

"Well, I never got divorced." (Nope - but he and my mother were separated 95% of the time after I was 12, except for a brief period of time when they tried to reconcile. And yet when my mother died on November 4, 2005, he was the last person she laid eyes on, and he was with her until nearly the very end, separated or not. 47 years after they were married.)

"But I did, right? More than once."

"You did, yes. I'm sorry you felt like you had to."

"I am too. But now, Daddy, here's the thing. If this Proposition 8 passes, there's all these people who have already gotten married because they love each other - fulfilling the highest law, according to the Bible, to love, and stating that love publicly by getting married. About 25,000 people in California this year alone. Now God's been reasonably clear about the divorce issue. He's also been clear that when it comes to marriage "What God has brought together let no man put asunder". Right?" They're not supposed to get divorced and they probably aren't going to get divorced, but certainly the law can't divorce them when they don't want to be, right? So they are going to stay married. Yet if God was against gay people being married in the first place, he wouldn't have made a situation where the law might say that married folks couldn't stay married, right? He definitely doesn't like married people splitting up except for adultery - Jesus was crystal clear about that, no getting around it. But all these folks screaming about gay people getting married being "wrong" can't point to a single thing Jesus said, and most just make excuses for the "no divorce" thing all the time, right up there with the kill the disobedient children thing. So why is it our place to get in the way of gay people getting married just everyone else? Especially since if you're literal about it Jesus said that in the ideal world everyone would just be celibate anyway?"

"He said that?"

"Ayup." I love my Bible. No highlights but I remember where that stuff is.

"Well, He said let them marry."

"Indeed he did. With no exceptions that I can find in my Bible. Now you take that, and the command that we are to love and treat our brother just as we want to be treated, and how do you get to something like Proposition 8? You may get there, but it isn't anything God said that got you there, right?"

"You may be right."

"And that's before we even talk about the fact that if you look at how some of these folks read their Bible, I couldn't even have gotten married to [my first husband] until 30 years ago, since you know Black folks and white folks couldn't get married. And those folks were saying that was God's plan too, for us to be slaves and that if God wanted us to marry he'd have put us all on the same continent."

Therein was a long pause. My marriage to a white man was something that broke my father's heart, especially since I'd not even told my parents I was married for 6 months out of fear of what they would say. Contrary to myth, it's not just white people who think that someone else's people are "not good enough" for their children to marry. And it took him years to get over it, and come to embrace not just my first white husband, but the next one, too, as family. Since white people weren't family - they were the source of pain, and disappointment, and disrespect for most of his life, to be largely avoided, until I married one.

With the quiet, I got scared I'd hit a nerve and just undid the past 20 minutes. But I hadn't.

"You couldn't have married in some places."

"When you were young, Daddy, I couldn't have in ALL places, at least in this country. You know that. You know what they said. They'd have taken the kids away too, until right around 1950 even here in California."

"That ain't right, taking away people's kids."

"It isn't. But they'd have done it anyway. And some of these folks would have quoted the Bible at you - hell, some of them still quote the Bible when saying why they don't like it."

"That ain't right."

"And it's not right to take anyone's rights away either is it?"

"No I don't go for that."

"Well, that's what Prop 8 is going to do. Gay people already have the right to get married. That's what the law says, here, and in Massachussets and in Connecticut and other places too. This thing is trying to take that away. Next thing you know they'll be coming after ours too again, knowing some of these folks."

"OK, I hear what you're saying. I agree with you - you can't take away folks rights once they already have them."

"So you agree with me that you have to vote against this Prop. 8, right?"

"Looks like I do. It's not up to me to say. It's up to God to say, and he hasn't said they can't."

"Daddy, please don't vote for this hateful thing."

He looked at me. Just looked.

"OK, OK. I won't. I promise."

Whew.

"I still don't understand it, though."

And that's where it ended. With my father not understanding it, but now being a member of the "No on 8" club, anyhow. With luck, if it comes up he'll spread the word - since while he doesn't like talking much, if anything can get him talking it's politics.

And despite not being a churchgoer, he trusts his Bible. Not interpreted by the preacher, but as we Baptists are taught, read for ourselves.

In the end, even if my dad doesn't "get it", even if he passes to the next life and he still "don't understand", if a simple "Daddy, please don't vote for this hateful thing" is enough to cause this 78 year old man to cast his ballot against Proposition 8 on Tuesday -- and given the look on his face when I, the daughter who he has never refused, said just that to him, I'm pretty sure that it is -- then its still all good. Because he hasn't stood in the way, and the part of him that knows with certainty, even before I said a single word to him about Proposition 8 that "It ain't right to take anybody's rights away" won out over the "not understanding."

Between that and my (despite all my teaching, him knowing full well I'm bi, and me thumping him routinely over the head) "man's man" homophobic son asking me "Are you crazy?!?" when I accused him of planning to secretly vote Yes on 8 and putting a No on 8 bumper sticker on his car at the request of his sister and his roommate who gave him one the other day (It's like the one I have from Cafe Press, which says "Jesus didn't teach hate. Please vote No on 8.", maybe, if there are enough folks like me willing to speak to the religious in language that they understand and accept, to reach one, things will be OK. I sure hope so.

No, I pray so.

No on Hate. No on 8.

The American Stain

Maryscott O'Connor — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:13:53 GMT

Punishment in a forced labor camp
Georgia -- 1930s

Determined to bring to a blessed end my three day journey into the painful miasma explored by Douglas A. Blackmon in his extraordinary Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II, I chose sleep deprivation last night and read long past dawn.

I passed over not a word -- not even the Ibids in the extensive footnotes and bibliography section. Even that ostensibly dry and academic denouement had its horrors, however. I encountered citation upon citation of Congressional and federal records marking the infuriating inaction of the risibly defined protectors and defenders of the Constitution that exposed the Emancipation Proclamation (and subsequent Amendments to the Constitution regarding slavery and the role of African Americans in the United States) as the cruel joke it turned out to be for nearly a century after the ostensible "freeing of the slaves."

Nothing related to race, African Americans, American history, political "facts" or sociological issues in America will ever be the same again for me.

Perhaps I should rejoice in the fact that I am capable of being educated and instructed, of absorbing wholly new information at my advanced age of 40...

But I feel a weight upon me just now, so heavy it seems it will never be lifted; and perhaps that's as it should be. Self-congratulation for finally having attempted to learn something I ought to have sought out long ago wouldn't simply be unseemly; it would only be mildly less grotesque than that same attitude expressed by innumerable whites who still see nothing solecistic in claiming "We" fought the Civil War to end slavery, freed Europe from Hitler, defeated communism, marched for civil rights and so on.

I used to assure myself, privately, that despite the obvious shared ancestral shame of so many white Americans, my ancestors had nothing to do with that ugliness. After all, they were Irish and Scots -- northerners all, poor or working class until my mother's generation. Aside from the admittedly insidious and long-lived spectre of inveterate racism in their attitudes (which persists to this day, albeit in a milder and assuredly less overt form, in some of my mother's brothers and cousins), what evil deeds could they -- shunned and discriminated against themselves -- have perpetrated, after all? Surely my relatives and I share only the merest, microscopic percentage of the collective taint befouling all whites in America born second generation or earlier?

I don't know how many Americans are as ignorant as I have heretofore been about the true nature of American post-Civil War racism and the catastrophic effects of its systemic nature in the century that followed the war between the States. On reading Blackmon's account of his encounters with the very descendants of the victims whose stories he tells and of their profound ignorance of their recent ancestors' stories, however, I am inclined to believe the vast majority of the American public knows virtually nothing of its own recent history as pertains to African Americans and the all-pervasive white supremacist attitudes responsible for their persistent subjugation well into the latter half of the 20th century.

With that in mind, a lengthy excerpt from Douglas A. Blackmon's work should make a good beginning for the uninitiated:

(I've inserted photographs from Blackmon's book and his website.)

INTRODUCTION
The Bricks We Stand On

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner-fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses-Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North-U.S. Steel Corporation-the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12-one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners- many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama-even a child of slaves-could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke-the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.
Steel's production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.
I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.

Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron-all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.
A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific record of the internments survived, but mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African Americans nearby confirmed that most of the cemetery's inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial field, where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried.

The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then "leased" by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3 Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery-a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point said to me: "I guess it's really no surprise." The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some way-partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation's most conservative daily newspaper-supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.
As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn't be determined. Official accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged, because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources-southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal-and tainted-local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the collective effect of the decisions by hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large-seemingly unavoidable-social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and resources.
Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events.
In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks-changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity- or loud talk-with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South-operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible forces of tradition and history.

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace-often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina-where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.

It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to flourish in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories and mines in the 1850s were also the first to employ forced African American labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves, and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment employed against "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against "slaves" in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that suffocated the aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of his life.

Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the rising southern white assault on black independence-even as black leaders increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.-the vast majority of white Americans, exhausted from the long debates over the role of blacks in U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have to accept the end of freedom.
On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have him. . . . He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case 12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.
A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man-even a black child-was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged.
Millions of blacks lived in that shadow-as forced laborers or their family members, or African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the first time since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior to the Civil War.
That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a birth in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.
That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book- especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that steeped the place and era of Green Cottenham's birth; of the obliterating forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single, anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's most authentic and compelling dimension.

Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the boundaries of the burial field, considering even without benefit of his words the stifled horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that Cottenham belonged as the central figure of this narrative. The slavery that survived long past emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation, perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this book.

Thanks to Blackmon's exhaustive accounting of this sordid, shameful history and his references to historical documents as well as writings by others who have in the past attempted to tell the truth about American history, we now have no excuse for ignorance. Slavery by Another Name's extensive bibliography lists a plethora of books, articles and documents available to those who would know still more.

(I am particularly interested in finding W. E. B. Dubois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and John Spivak's Georgia Nigger. Both men chose to use fiction to depict the horrors of the re-enslavement of African Americans in the south, and Blackmon's excerpts and descriptions of those two novels intimate a deep and powerful experience for readers who choose to continue their education.)

I am tempted now to apply my not-inconsiderable talents in the art of outraged invective to communicate further the cataclysmic destruction wrought upon African Americans (to this very day, I might add) by the sheer evils of the southern states' deliberate re-enslavement of the vast majority of blacks after the Civil War ostensibly conferred on them their "freedom" from bondage. I think, however, that to do so would be the height of self-indulgence; no amount of righteous indignation on my part can adequately convey the monumentality of what Blackmon exposes. I also see no need to add more than my desultory description and reactions; the excerpt provides more than ample evidence of what awaits readers.

I would, however, like to touch on a subject -- the often proposed and equally as often dismissed topic of Reparations -- to which Blackmon chooses to give only cursory attention... Though perhaps wisely so; perhaps it would require a preternatural fortitude of imagination, if not intellectual capacity, to ask of newcomers to this overwhelmingly difficult task -- of learning about and accepting this radically different history than they've heretofore been taught -- that they immediately assent to the essential morality of at least contemplating what reparations ought to be made to the people whose present circumstances are a direct result of that history.

Having doled out a mere taste of that history here, however, I feel no such compunctions. The topic of reparation must arise as a natural consequence of having one's blinders stripped away and coming to grips with the stark realities:

It is inarguable fact that if not for the enslavement of tens of thousands of African Americans between 1865 and 1945, the United States (and the southern states in particular) would never have accumulated the wealth and power it came to hold by the time of its entry onto the world stage as a "super-power." To the involuntary labour of those thousands the United States owes the construction of railroads, the emergence and eventual dominance of the steel and coal industries -- and, to wit, its rapid rise in the Industrial age.

So, too, do the wealthiest of families and corporations in existence this very day; the accumulation of wealth and power by countless prominent, powerful and obscenely wealthy American families was steeped in the blood of the post-Civil War slaves they conscripted into their businesses.

in my experience, the invariable and unvarying argument against reparations appeals to the unfairness of asking payment or penance from those who did not commit the actual sins. How is it fair, they demand, to force the descendants of the sinners to pay the penalty for those sinners?

Never once have I heard the appropriate and logical response: Where is the fairness in demanding that the descendants of the victims simply accept the bitter, enduring price of those sins? Opponents of reparations decry what they view as penalising the blameless to heal wounds perpetrated long before they were alive. But inevitably they disregard completely the other side of that tarnished coin. They also ignore completely the fact that were it not for the crimes of the ancestors, the wealth of this nation and its pre-eminent upper class citizens would not exist anyway.

I'll leave it to better minds than mine to argue the particulars, to formulate suggestions that would provide the morally and ethically necessary solutions to the virulent inequities suffered to this day by the recent descendants of the enslaved African Americans of the late 19th and early 20th century. Unschooled as I am in even the rudimentary aspects of this vastly complex and bedeviling issue, I am not arrogant enough to claim insight into the possibilities.

I am, however, ashamed, appalled and sufficiently aware of just how much I and my white family tree have benefitted -- directly -- from the sins of my American heritage. The degrees may vary, but assigning those degrees amounts to counting angels on pinheads; the undeniable reality is that every element of this country's economic and educational progress is inextricably linked to the herculean sacrifice of thousands of enslaved, tortured, maimed and murdered African Americans -- and that the bulk of said progress has benefitted the progeny of the very criminals who exacted that sacrifice.

So though I do not venture the ways and means that reparation ought take, I now believe, emphatically and passionately, that reparations must be made.

Politically, the timing of this revelation of mine couldn't be worse. Given what I now know of the widespread hatred of black Americans that existed and was given widespread and often legal quarter until very recently, I cannot any longer deny that racism and bigotry of that strength must still flourish throughout American society. I now better understand the particularly entrenched racism of the South, whose citizens are re-infected with it generation after generation.

Long as I may to believe that only vestigial traces remain, eyes once opened cannot again close. One has only to visit some of the hate sites that pock the Internet and read the abhorrent hate-speech on them to know that Senator Barack Obama's nomination and campaign for the Presidency of this country have already emboldened the vilest and most subtle of racists alike.

Fear of providing the monstrous in our midst yet another conceptual bludgeon to pass amongst themselves may tempt many to silently hope this historic and barrier-shattering moment in our national experience may take as its model the quiet, nonthreatening Model Negro route.

Perhaps there is some validity to the suggestion that such epochal events must necessarily come in on little cat feet; not for nothing is the name of Booker T. Washington far better recognised in white society than that of his more "militant," "uppity" and "arrogant" counterpart, the aforementioned W. E. B. Dubois, or the achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. more widely acknowledged, accepted and praised than those of Malcolm X (though in his defense and to his eternal credit, King himself had far more in common with Malcolm X and Dubois than whites today, let alone of his era, would like to remember. His legacy has fallen prey to the Model Negro Myth in spite of evidence that, were he alive today and saying exactly what he said in the civil rights era, King would likely be as vilified as the much-maligned Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been today -- and, indeed, King was so vilified in his day).

I would argue, however, that although this campaign season is probably not a good time to begin agitating for reparations for African Americans, the days of practicing the time-honoured tradition of keeping our heads down and waiting for change to come to us has long since passed.

Further, the same resolute commitment to demanding change from the bigoted few and dragging them into the age of enlightenment must also be applied to the issue of gay civil rights. When the issue of equal marriage rights finally comes before the Supreme Court of the United States of America, we must be prepared for a morally pusillanimous -- if not outright deliberately praetorian -- version of another Plessy V. Ferguson manoeuvre. Should today's Court attempt to enshrine in this country's federal statutes the "gay marriage" equivalent of that 1896 Court's contemptible appeasement of its era's bigotry, we will be morally obligated to refuse to legitimise such venality in the guise of legal wisdom.

"Justice delayed is justice denied." Not until this morning did I ever have even an approximate comprehension of the depth and breadth of truth in that statement.

And In Today's Utterly Unsurprising News

Shanikka — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:07:05 GMT

The NYPD officers who riddled Sean Bell with 50 bullets on the eve of his wedding have been acquitted of all charges following a bench trial. A bench trial in which the judge said, pretty much point blank in comments that were uncalled for and evince a certain mindset in a so-called objective judicial officer, that the prosecution witnesses were simply "not believable."

The most surprising part is how utterly unsurprising the verdict was. And how utterly unsurprising the majority of reactions at NYTimes.com reader's comment page have been, so far - aka Sean Bell got what was coming to him. They mirror the mindset of the judge, truthfully.

Since we all know that Black folks don't get murdered by the police, no matter what color hte police are. Never. No matter what.

I know differently, having now lived a long time. Black men's lives in America continue to be worth not the spit that the cops drop when they blow them away. I wish that we'd just own up to it, frankly - because I grow weary of pretending that there will ever be an unjustified killing of a black person by police in the US where someone actually goes to jail.

And yet folks still appear clueless about why so many of us are so damned angry, all the time.

Things that Make you go Hmmm......Barack as Tom and/or Doug?

Shanikka — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:27:11 GMT

I noticed a depressingly-interesting trend when I was going over results from SuperDuperWhooper Tuesday and previously at the Election Center run by cnn.com:
Barack Obama handily won all state primaries where there were disproportionately high numbers of African-American residents. (When I say "disproportionate", I mean numbers that exceed our 12-13% representation in the general population.) In some case, he took 95% of those votes (which I find unhealthy, bluntly, and not in the best interests of African-Americans given some of Barack Obama's positions, which he needs his feet to the fire held over, but that's a discussion for another time.)

Unfortunately, had Black folks not rolled, Obama would have lost in every one of those Southern states. That is because in each of those states, he lost the white Democratic vote. Before folks get waxing rhapsodic on how it's the "old folks" who are responsible for this outcome: other than in Georgia, where he won the 18-29 age group according to exit polls, Obama lost the white vote in all age groups. Reviewing exit poll data on CNN confirms the undeniable reality (at least right now) in the South: Barack Obama won South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia (all states with more than 25% Black population) because of an incredible turnout of Black voters who threw virtually all of their votes to him (I saw nothing less than 81%).

That's not the depressingly interesting part, to me. I already knew that was going to happen.

But before folks start hating on the South and Southern racism, this also appears to have been true in Delaware (where 21% of the population is Black, we are 35% of the registered Democrats, and were more than 25% of the voters on SuperDuperAssWhooper Tuesday giving Obama a stunning *90% of our votes.) While Delaware did not attempt in its exit polls to measure the impact of race, taking into account that only 11,000 votes separated Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton in Delaware it would be foolish to overlook the significant impact of Black voters, their very large turn out (25% of all votes cast in Delaware), and the lopsided weight those votes gave to Barack Obama's side of the ledger. In other words, even without the overt exit polls, it doesn't take more than basic mathematics to come to the conclusion that that if whites had given Obama the majority of their votes in Delaware, given what Black voters did the race would have been a complete blowout for him, instead of him winning by only 11,000 votes.

Of course, the obvious response (obvious in the sense that it's the first thing people say when the issue of racism and Barack Obama's candidacy comes up) is that "But Obama won in states don't have hardly any Black voters, so there!" That is indeed true. However, the truth of that appears to be masking something very important, which it would behoove Barack Obama and his ground game to think about and plan to attack - because there is something not so obvious afoot that can only hurt him in the general election.

Barack Obama won virtually all of the state caucuses/primaries where the state in question has a disproportionately low (in most cases, less than 5%) number of Black people actually living within it.

Thus, Obama won handsomely in Alaska (only 3.7% Black).
In Colorado. (4.1% Black.)
And in Idaho (0.7% Black).
In Iowa (2.5% Black)
And Kansas (6.0% Black).
Minnesota (4.5% Black).
Oklahoma (7.8% Black).
North Dakota. (0.8% Black)

Even, saints be praised, Utah (1% Black; I didn't know the Jazz had that much pull ;)).

Unfortunately, it is that data which first tipped me off to the depressingly-interesting part of the returns to date, because it is that data that caused me to ask the question:

If Barack kicked so much ass in these states where we just ain't and where (for the most part) Republicans/Reagan Democrats were/are king, how on EARTH could he have lost in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California - liberal states; progressive states, big ole BLUE states??????

Trying to get an answer to that question, being the anal-retentive bunny rabbit that I am, I looked at the only data we have: exit polls. Unfortunately, it was pondering those that led me to discover the depressingly-interesting part of all this:

Other than Barack Obama's home state of Illinois (which if he hadn't won, would have been truly horrifying for any candidate of any race or gender) Barack Obama has not yet won the popular vote in any state where whites and Blacks reside in fairly diverse circumstances; i.e. where the percentage of Black residents is commensurate with their presence in the general population, neither "too high" OR "too low".

In those states, Hillary Clinton won the primary; thanks to white, Latino (and, in the case of California) Asian voters, all of who gave her either a majority (whites) or, a de-jure supermajority (Latinos and, in CA, Asians) of their primary votes.

(Please feel free to look at the numbers, before you knee-jerk dismiss and/or naysay this. I'm not writing this diary as a Hillary supporter - I'm writing this diary as an Obama supporter, because I think questions about why Super Tuesday went down the way it did are critical for the general election, in which I am almost certain we will face a McCain/Huckabee ticket. I too, want Barack Obama to win.)

There are only three outliers to this trend, of Obama taking only those majority-white states where the Black population was disproportionately low, that I can see: Arizona, New Mexico, and Connecticut, and all have unique demographics that appear to explain the result.

In Arizona (3.8% Black), you have an enormous Latino presence and, as has been diaried over and over, Latinos broke all over disproportionately for Hillary Clinton. That's a no brainer, and I think explains what happened in Arizona where Latinos are 30% of the vote and nationally heavily favored Hillary Clinton (for whatever reasons).

New Mexico is similar to Arizona, with Latinos making up 34% of the electorate there. This is obviously just from eyeballing, but it seems that the percentage of Latino voters with a preference for Hillary Clinton combined with the fact that Richardson was still on the ballot and got a large percentage of Latino votes despite his withdrawal to cancel out the majority of white voters who voted for Obama. Since these separate majorities became, for all intents and purposes, a 'wash', the fact that Latinos in New Mexico did vote for Barack Obama in quite respectable numbers simply couldn't overcome the mathematical advantage that whites voting for Hillary Clinton had, in terms of population. This theory may not be far fetched: after all, there was only a 1,100 difference between Barack and Hillary in New Mexico.

Connecticut, which has a 10.2% Black population is distinguished both by its high wealth compared to the rest of the country and very high post-secondary education levels. While, as northeastern states go, Connecticut had a somewhat rocky history race-relations wise (it was one of the last northeastern states to abolish slavery, doing so only in 1848) these two population characteristics tend to suggest, given how successfully Barack Obama has campaigned with "the elite" (and before folks start hatin', I put myself in that category too at least as far as income and education go, even though you'll still find me the whist table and cutting a rug just like I did before I got bougy), that these race-neutral probably cancelled out the "race effect", right?

Depressingly, yet interestingly, wrong.

From what I can tell (which is not just based on a guess from the seat of my pants; see below) Barack Obama didn't win the white vote in Connecticut either. That means that Connecticut is not necessarily the outlier it seems at first, when compared to the trend of other states which have disproportionately low numbers of Black Americans within their borders. Mathematically, any other explanation other than Black voters throwing a superduperwhooper majority of their votes to Barack Obama on Super Tuesday in numbers large enough to carry the day seems hard to find (although obviously I'm not a statistician). Hard, at least, if what was reported by the exit polls is true:

**Total Votes Cast in Connecticut - 350,588**
Barack Obama	179,342
Hillary Clinton	164,831
John Edwards	3,408
Uncommitted	3,007

Using CNN's exit poll data for Connecticut (which leaves a lot to be desired) one can at least try to estimate the demographics of the total voter pool. So let's try and do that:

**Est. Breakdown of Total Votes- 350,588**
Segment	% of Total	Est. Votes
White - Under 30	8% of electorate)	28,047
White - 31 to 44	17% of electorate	59,560
White - 45-59	31% of electorate	108,682
White - Over 60	26% of electorate	91,553
Black Voters	9% of electorate	31,552
Latino Voters	7% of electorate	24,541
All Others	3% of electorate	10,518

(CNN's percentages actually come out to 101% but I've done this quick and dirty so bear with me!) From that quick and dirty calculation, one can look a little more deeply at where Barack Obama's majority share of votes came from (IF the exit polls are an accurate reflection of what actually happened).

Let's start with the only exit poll data that they bothered to collect/report out there where race was concered in Connecticut - exit polls for white voters. Using the percentages which CNN has reported, this is how white votes theoretically broke down on Super Tuesday in Connecticut:

**Obama's Share of White Votes in Connecticut (Est.)**
Percentage of Votes	Est. Vote Count
54% of White Under 30	15,145
45% of White 31-44	26,802
45% of White 45-59	51,081
45% of White 60 & Over	44,645

Total Votes	137,673

Recognizing that this is truly an imperfect calculation wrought from imperfect data (so no need to holler too much about that as a means of deflecting from the uncomfortableness of the idea that Barack Obama is not presently winning the majority white votes anywhere in America where white folks and Black folks rub shoulders in proportionate numbers)) is already winning the white voting majorities majority white votes everywhere meme; I'd be all for an actual calculation if it's available since this is as important to me as it probably is to you and would love to have my hunch proven wrong on this - you have no idea), this means that taking into account all of his white voters in Connecticut, Barack Obama got 41,669 votes in that state that were not cast by white people.

Although the remaining vote numbers get even more ephemeral, one can still try to guess where those came from. IF (and this is indeed speculation) Latino voters gave Hillary the 55% percent or more of their votes they have given her everywhere else in the country (and I haven't seen a percentage any lower than that anywhere), Barack Obama likely got, at most, 11,044 votes from that source. Unfortunately, that would have still left him needing to pick up 30,655 votes from somewhere.. So, to be fair, let's give him 50%/ ½ of all "Other" voters (for the record, I do not in any way support the media's lumping Asians, Native Americans and all those in between into "Other"): another 5,259 votes.
If those assumptions are true (and I admit that since Connnecticut did not exit poll enough non-white people to have any data, we'll never know for sure) that means that, in all likelihood, 25,396 out of the estimated 31,552-strong pool of Black voters went out into their precincts in Connecticut and voted for Barack Hussein Obama (hey, I like his middle name!). I feel some confidence in this, because this figure would have given him around 80.1% of the vote (the minimum number of Black votes that Barack Obama appears to have garnered everywhere he has ran).
I've been trying to find articles about whether Black turn out in Connecticut was higher or lower than average, with no luck so far.

When you play with these numbers as I have, it seems that yet again, Black voters were the margin of victory for him in that state: same as they were in the Southern states. Same as in Delaware, discussed above.

If what I am seeing is a fair read of the data indicating a true trend/pattern, rather than race paranoia and/or "race baiting" (a word getting misused beyond belief in this campaign), I don't see how Barack Obama's campaign doesn't take account of going forward, and affirmatively strategize around it. This assumes that the campaign strategists are not, like far too many of the campaign's supporters who haunt the blogs, busy denying any and all concerns having to do with Barack Obama's electability in the name of "Obamamania" (silly silly name, that!) aka the historical destiny of choosing Barack Obama as our party's nominee. And a frenzy Obamamania has indeed become for the most faithful. (For the rest? A depressing but increasingly likely inevitability, since no realist can erase Hillary's strong potential to bring out the worst of the rabid right in opposition to the idea of her presidency in the general election -- even though it really is through no fault of her own, their hatred of her -- no matter what goes down in the primary season. Obama has has momentum, and far fewer knee-jerk negatives with the other party members voting in November other than possibly race - and everyone knows it. Thus, it is very likely than not that Barack Obama will become our nominee.

Given this, we need to think long and hard about what will shift about the nature of the race when Hillary Clinton and all the other Democrats are no longer in this race, and the only choice the electorate faces in November is between electing a Black man for President and electing a white one, all qualifications for the job aside.

(I used to believe in the idea of the "best qualifications to be President" determining who became President; but then I lived through 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 and got realness slapped upside my now-greying head.)

One of the things that, IMO, must be carefully strategized through just like a military general is the possibility of the Bradley/Wilder effect, writ large on the entire country for the first time. It is something that only a fool can ignore, when you know the numbers. At least, only a fool that does not want to WIN ignores it. So I do hope someone other than myself who is working to help Barack Obama successfully navigate this latest chapter in Black History (and, since I voted for him yesterday, I do indeed want him to navigate it successfully; no party line crossing for me, thanks!) notices this trending. Because I'm not that smart, and if I noticed this trending just looking at the exit polls that actually tried to measure the impact of race (some states have so few Black folks they didn't even bother to ask these questions), and feel that it is a huge potential problem if/when John McCain gets the Republican nomination (and an even bigger one if McCain picks someone other than Mike Huckabee aka someone who will not galvanize Democrats to vote to prevent his insanity from running the country the same way that Hillary may galvanize Republicans to come out to defeat her) surely someone else must see it too.

I'll end by saying that someone the other day asked if I enjoyed being "provocative" when it comes to discussions of race. I originally took that question as asking me whether I enjoy stirring up racial shit for the sake of stirring up shit. For the record, I don't, but if what I write provokes thought, I'm all for it.

Someone else, in a different discussion, lamented that I don't write very much about solutions. That's a legitimate criticism, to me. I do think there are solutions to the potential problems - I also think they will require Barack Obama to reexamine aspects of his platform. Since this diary is long enough already, I'll write about those next time.

---------------------------

Ed Note: The results in Nebraska, Louisiana and Washington State from Saturday 2/9 -- all of which went for Barack Obama - confirm that this theory is not as crazy as some have said. He took all those states, handily.

Louisiana: 31.7 Black
Washington: 3.6% Black
Nebraska: 4.4% Black

And, sure enough, CNN Exit Polls show that Barack Obama lost the white vote in Louisiana even as he won a decisive overall victory there.

I add this data only because of the irrational reactions I saw from folks about the very idea that this was occuring (one particularly bright person suggested that the problem was with the Southern Baptist vote, as if somehow they'd all taken over NY, NJ and MA without anyone noticing.) I'd rather acknowledge it and fight it, myself.

Why I Voted for Barack Obama

Shanikka — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:18:17 GMT

Through devotion
Blessed are the children
Praise the teacher
That brings true love to many
Your devotion
Opens all life's treasures
And deliverance from the fruits of evil.
-----------------------------------
Evil, runnin' through our brain,
we and evil's about the same.
Bad blood, through our body flows,
Where's the love? Nobody knows.
Beauty in our face you see,
tryin' to hide all our misery, but
Evil, runnin' through my brain,
Me and evil are about the same.
Evil... in our life
Evil... causin' strife

Lookin for a place to gild a little light
in our souls and minds
Maybe if we learn to pray
life would lend us sunshiny days.
And evil, runnnin' thru our brains
will turn to love, and won't be the blame.
"Ima", she said (25 years into this mother-daughter dance, I know when she wants me to pay attention, because I'm not "Mom", or "Mommy" anymore. I'm "Ima", a made up word for "the most wonderous beloved female parental unit in the whole world whose lap I'd sit on right except I have a big butt now".) "Ima, what did you tell me about what to do if I had the chance to vote for a Black person for President?".

As We Go Down to the Wire - Actual Positions to Compare

Shanikka — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:09:36 GMT

For those voters who are particularly concerned with the issues that disproportionately affect Black folks in America, knowing exactly where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stand is crucial. Debates do not serve that function well - personal charisma and our innate biases towards how folks look (instead of towards what they say) mesh with the 30-second soundbite and make it very hard to think things through.

Fortunately, the NAACP - that lamented organization that really could do with a history reminder - has made it a bit easier.
It has published the answers of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to it's 2007 survey, which is called The NAACP 2008 Presidential Candidate Civil Rights Questionnaire. While I wish to all heaven that they had published all the responses before the race had been reduced to two candidates, nonetheless we do have something a bit less ephemeral to work with, particularly for those of us who have serious issues with both remaining Democratic party contenders.

This is a reassuring document, frankly. While clearly it benefits from the advance preparation that all these types of things do, nonetheless they also have the advantage of staking positions out far more clearly that the currently wigglies. This is a good thing, for voters.

And reviewing these, there is certainly something for everyone to love or hate. So take a look see.

(Hat tip to Prometheus6 for posting this on his site!)

Happy Black People's Month!!!!!

Shanikka — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:41:51 GMT

OK, technically, it's called "Black History Month" but since you cannot cover the history of our people in a month, and since all our of children are going to get spoonfed the biographies of the same 5-10 people in school yet again, I figured it really needed a new name.

I'm still actively preparing for trial and thus still not blogging. But I could not let the day pass without honoring the great Carter G. Woodson, father of Negro History, and the idea -- even if not the current methods of execution -- of a time to celebrate Black history.
So I'm already off to work at 6:30 AM (trials are a bitch) but want to take some of his wisdom, which I first heard as a freshman in college, into the day, and began committing myself to social change for the benefit of our people. So I'll take some of Dr. Woodson's words into the day. No, on second thought -- into the month:

Here we find that the Negro has failed to re- cover from his slavish habit of berating his own and worshipping others as perfect beings.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.

Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (1933)