Happily Natural Day

Ukadiche modak, steamed modak, sweet dumplings, ganesh chaturthi, festival recipes

Team Red, Black & Green — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:00:58 PDT

Ukadiche modak, steamed modak or sweet dumplings are made for the ganesh chaturthi festival.

Drumstick Soup Recipe

Team Red, Black & Green — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:00:57 PDT

Drumsticks are also known as Sahijan(hindi), murungai(tamil), shevagyachya shenga(marathi), nuggekai(kannada). Moringa oleifera is the botanical name for

Ancient Nubia Had Antibiotics

Team Red, Black & Green — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:00:29 PDT

Ancient Nubia Had Antibiotics

Did the ancient Nubians invent antibiotics? New research shows that they did. Read about it here.

Ancient Nubians took antibiotics in their beer almost 1,500 years ago

By Daily Mail Reporter

The ancient Nubians consumed large quantities of antibiotics that were produced in their beer almost 1,500 years ago, new research suggests.
Chemical analysis of bones shows that the people were taking large doses of tetracycline which was produced as a by-product in the beer that they made from grain.
And scientists believe that the production of the antibiotic was intentional.

Analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. It was spotted in this photo as a green product on the bones under UV light

The ancient Nubian kingdom was located in present-day Sudan, south of ancient Egypt.
The discovery, by anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
‘We tend to associate drugs that cure diseases with modern medicine,’ Armelagos said.
‘But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this prehistoric population was using empirical evidence to develop therapeutic agents. I have no doubt that they knew what they were doing.’

The ancient Nubians were a race with no written language

Tetracycline latches on to calcium and is deposited in bones so it can be detected in fossils.
In 1980, Armelagoa discovered what appeared to be traces of tetracycline in human bones from Nubia dated between A.D. 350 and 550, populations that left no written record. Armelagos and his fellow researchers later tied the source of the antibiotic to the Nubian beer.
The grain used to make the fermented gruel contained the soil bacteria streptomyces, which produces tetracycline.
Mr Nelson said: ‘The bones of these ancient people were saturated with tetracycline, showing that they had been taking it for a long time.
‘I’m convinced that they had the science of fermentation under control and were purposely producing the drug.’
Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline, suggesting that they were giving high doses to the child to try and cure him of illness, Nelson says.
The first of the modern day tetracyclines was discovered in 1948. It was given the name auereomycin, after the Latin word ‘aerous,’ which means containing gold.
‘Streptomyces produce a golden colony of bacteria, and if it was floating on a batch of beer, it must have look pretty impressive to ancient people who revered gold,’ Nelson said.
The ancient Egyptians and Jordanians also used beer to treat gum disease and other ailments.
The team now intends to try and work out exactly when the knowledge of the antibiotic properties of the beer was lost to history.
Alexander Fleming is credited with discovering the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928.

Originially posted on Life Abundantly

Communities of color are ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of economic crisis

amun ra — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:01:09 PDT

Communities of color are ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of economic crisis

$350 billion loss of wealth requires strong action to update Community Reinvestment Act

Los Angeles – In testimony Aug. 17 before a Los Angeles hearing convened by the Federal Reserve system and other federal financial agencies, the Greenlining Institute called for strong action to modernize the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), first passed in 1977. “In a sense, communities of color have become the canaries in the coal mine of the economic crisis,” Greenlining Community Reinvestment Director Preeti Vissa told the hearing. “While the nation has experienced a recession, too many in our communities have experienced a depression.” Vissa’s full testimony is available online at greenlining.org.

Black businesses are top job creators in Black communities – but only if they can borrow money to operate. When Black banks were allowed to flourish, all the businesses in Black neighborhoods were Black-owned, not just the barber shops.

Vissa spoke during a day-long hearing called by the Fed to consider updates to rules implementing CRA, passed to encourage banks and other financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the communities they serve. Vissa noted that foreclosures have drained $350 billion in assets from communities of color and Small Business Administration lending to minority-owned businesses has cratered, contributing to a growing racial wealth gap. “For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, an African American or Latino family owns just 16 cents,” Vissa noted, adding that many Asian American families are doing nearly as badly, but exact patterns are harder to determine because current statistics lump all Asian ethnicities together.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed to encourage banks and other financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the communities they serve.

“As it is written today, CRA lacks the power to address the inequities that are contributing to the growing racial wealth gap,” Vissa told the hearing. She called for a series of reforms, including:

1) Place diversity front and center. Although the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has called on financial institutions to diversify their boards and staffs, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans combined held only 9.3 percent of senior positions in the financial services industry in 2008.

2) Add minority business contracting to the CRA evaluation process. Minority-led businesses are top job creators in low-income communities. The California Public Utilities Commission’s supplier diversity program represents a successful model that financial regulators could easily adopt.

3) Adapt the CRA rating system to incentivize innovation. The current rating system fails to adequately reward outstanding efforts and sometimes excessively rewards mediocre performance. More grade levels should be added, along with a “community development” test that would reward lending to and investment in community health clinics, community-based loan funds, green affordable housing construction, etc.

4) Expand CRA to include all industries that provide financial products. The financial services industry has transformed radically since 1977, and the law must adjust. A modernized CRA should include investment banks, insurers, hedge funds and other financial institutions not presently covered.

5) Make CRA matter again. Weak enforcement has left community groups such as Greenlining to try to enforce the law from the outside. In addition to a modern ratings system, CRA needs tougher penalties for non-compliance and systematic opportunities for consumers to comment on the performance of banks.

Small Business Administration lending to minority-owned businesses has cratered, contributing to a growing racial wealth gap.

“The world has changed since CRA was enacted in 1977, and CRA’s failure to keep up has diminished its effectiveness,” Vissa said. “We can make CRA matter again.”

The Greenlining Institute is located at 1918 University Ave., Second Floor, Berkeley, CA 94704, www.greenlining.org.

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After Katrina, New Orleans cops were told they could shoot looters

amun ra — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:00:37 PDT

After Katrina, New Orleans cops were told they could shoot looters

by Sabrina Shankman and Tom Jennings of Frontline, Brendan McCarthy and Laura Maggi of The New Orleans Times-Picayune and A.C. Thompson of ProPublica

Whether or not New Orleans police were told to shoot looters, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco did order 300 National Guard troopers to open fire on “hoodlums,’’ AFP reported on Sept. 2, 2005. “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets,’’ Blanco said. “They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.”

In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department.

It’s not clear how broadly the order was communicated. Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

The accounts of orders to “shoot looters,” “take back the city” or “do what you have to do” are fragmentary. It remains unclear who originated them or whether they were heard by any of the officers involved in shooting 11 civilians in the days after Katrina. Thus far, no officers implicated in shootings have used the order as an explanation for their actions. Only one of the people shot by police – Henry Glover – was allegedly stealing goods at the time he was shot.

Still, current and former officers said the police orders – taken together with tough talk from top public officials broadcast over the airwaves – contributed to an atmosphere of confusion about how much force could be used to combat looting.

In one instance captured on a grainy videotape shot by a member of the force, a police captain relayed the instructions at morning roll call to cops preparing for the day’s patrols.

“We have authority by martial law to shoot looters,” Capt. James Scott told a few dozen officers in a portion of the tape viewed by reporters. Scott, then the commander of the 1st District, is now captain of the special operations division.

Another police captain, Harry Mendoza, told federal prosecutors last month that he was ordered by Warren Riley, then the department’s second-in-command, to “take the city back and shoot looters.” A lieutenant who worked for Mendoza, Mike Cahn III, said he remembered the scene similarly and would testify about it under oath if asked.

Mendoza and Cahn said in separate interviews that Riley made the remarks at a meeting at Harrah’s casino, where police had established a command post. Mendoza quoted Riley as saying: “If you can sleep with it, do it,” according to a document prepared by prosecutors and provided to lawyers defending police officers recently charged with federal offenses.

Riley categorically denied telling officers they could shoot looters. “I didn’t say anything like that. I heard rumors that someone else said that. But I certainly didn’t say that, no.”

“I may have said we need to take control of the city,” Riley said. “That may have happened.”

Riley also questioned the credibility of Mendoza, whom he fired in 2006 for alleged neglect of duties. Mendoza has since been reinstated; Riley has retired.

Scott declined comment but said through his attorney that a fuller version of the videotape places his remarks in a different context. But he would not disclose what else he said that day or characterize more completely what he meant.

The officer who shot the video, Lt. Sandra Simpson, would not permit reporters to see the complete recording. New Orleans police officials have said that they do not consider the tape a public record and that it is thus up to Simpson whether to allow the tape to be viewed.

Scott’s address came at a moment of widespread confusion over whether authorities had imposed martial law, a phrase used by then-Mayor Ray Nagin on the radio. In fact, martial law does not exist under Louisiana’s constitution. But experts in police training said the use of those words by politicians and in news reports may have fueled perceptions that the rules had changed.

In recent months, a team of reporters from The Times-Picayune, PBS Frontline and ProPublica have examined department leaders’ conduct as part of a broader look at police shootings after Hurricane Katrina. “Law & Disorder,” a documentary drawn from that work, aired Aug. 25 on Frontline and can be watched online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/.

As thousands were stranded across New Orleans, dying of thirst, abandoned on roofs and at the convention center and Superdome, police were pulled from rescue operations to combat looting. – Photo: MCT

The confusion over whether martial law had been declared was widely reported at the time. But until now, it was not known that some within the police force interpreted it to authorize shooting of looters who posed no direct threat.

New Orleans police came under unprecedented pressures after the city flooded. Many of the department’s police stations were submerged in water. The command structure broke down as the radio system and computerized communications failed. Officers went for days without sleep as they rescued trapped residents from rooftops. Commanders relied on sporadic face-to-face meetings to direct operations.

“During the Katrina days, we weren’t living in the real world, we were living in a holocaust,” said former police Lt. David Benelli, who was assigned to the Superdome and has since retired. “We were living in a situation that no other police department ever had to endure.”

*****

A mix of rumor and reality fueled concerns about the breakdown of civil order.

Nagin, the mayor, said in a televised interview days after the storm that there had been rapes and murders among the people taking shelter in the Superdome, a claim that turned out to be untrue. Police Supt. Eddie Compass made similar statements.

On Aug. 30, 2005, Riley told the mayor he had heard an officer say on the radio: “I need more ammo. We need more ammo.”

Sally Forman, the mayor’s communications chief at the time, said this report – which, it later emerged, did not come from NOPD – had immediate impact.

Nagin, she recalled, directed Riley to “stop search and rescue and bring our force back to controlling the streets.”

“The mayor said, ‘Let’s stop the looting, let’s stop the lawlessness and let’s put our police officers on the streets so that our citizens are protected,’” Forman said.

Nagin had one more message for the deputy superintendent, in Forman’s recollection: “Let’s stop this crap now.”

“We will do that,” responded Riley, according to Forman.

That same day, Nagin learned that a police officer, Kevin Thomas, had been shot in the head. Forman said “it made the mayor furious.’’

“And that’s when he said we need to declare martial law.’’

Soon after, Nagin gave a radio interview in which he said he had called for martial law, adding to the confusion about the rules of engagement. Nagin declined to be interviewed.

*****

Accounts vary of the meeting outside Harrah’s at which Riley delivered his remarks. Some recall Riley speaking to a small group of senior officers; others remember it as a larger gathering.

Cahn, who reported to Mendoza during the storm, said the order was delivered on Aug. 31, the day after officer Thomas was wounded. Mendoza thought the instructions were given either Aug. 31 or Sept. 1.

Cahn, who is still a reserve lieutenant, said: “It was in Harrah’s parking lot. We were having our morning meeting – the captains and their lieutenants were there. And Riley said, “It’s time to take the city back. I’m giving you instructions to tell your men to shoot all looters.”

“It was such an almost ridiculous order that Mendoza and I said there was no way that we were going to tell our guys that. You can’t just decide arbitrarily that you’re going to start shooting people for stealing things.

“For a commanding officer to tell you that I’m giving you this order – it’s easy to think that officers would have taken that and run with it.”

Mendoza, who is now in charge of the police academy, said he described the meeting at Harrah’s to a group of federal prosecutors studying the department’s training programs.

“‘Anybody who is caught looting in the city of New Orleans will go directly to Angola,’ one of the U.S.’s most notorious prisons,” Mayor Ray Nagin ranted after Katrina, according to Workers Vanguard. “The authorities wasted no time in constructing a prison camp in the parking lot of the Greyhound bus station – the notorious ‘Camp Greyhound’ – using Angola prison labor.”

In an interview, Mendoza expanded on his statement to prosecutors. He said Riley arrived in the morning and asked all the police operating from Harrah’s to gather beneath the casino’s canopy. He estimated that 30 to 50 people were present.

Mendoza said he was “shocked” by the order to shoot looters and believed it might have confused less experienced officers. The remarks, he said, “could have easily damaged their understanding and ability to clearly recognize their responsibilities and follow state law.”

Two current officers and one former officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, also remember Riley telling officers at Harrah’s that they could shoot looters.

All quote Riley as speaking of the need to “take the city back.” Like Mendoza and Cahn, they say they decided not to pass on the order.

Riley strongly denied issuing such an edict. “I absolutely deny it; it absolutely never happened,” he said. As for Mendoza, he said: “I despise that guy. I fired him. I don’t know where he’s getting that foolishness from.”

Kevin Diel, a former officer, said he saw Riley address a group of 40 to 50 officers at Harrah’s on Sept. 2 or Sept. 3. Riley “walked up in a pair of blue jeans, his uniform shirt and a ball cap, and really just starting giving a pep speech, you know, kind of a morale-booster, saying that we were not gonna allow the looters to take the city,” Diel recalled. “We were going to more or less protect the borders of it and march through downtown and take the city back.”

Diel did not recall Riley explicitly saying that officers could shoot looters. After Riley left, Diel said, cops began analyzing the orders, and some wondered aloud whether the deputy superintendent expected officers to “go through the streets, you know, shooting looters?”

*****

Experts said that even instructing officers to “take back the city” – the order Riley acknowledges giving – was dangerously ambiguous.

“Just sending out a general order, general statement about ‘take back the city’ with no specific guidelines is an invitation to disaster,” said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and author of 13 books on police, civil liberties, and criminal justice. “What do the officers think? We can do anything?”

Under standards set by the U.S. Supreme Court, Louisiana law and police department guidelines, officers are allowed to use deadly force when they have a reasonable belief there is a threat of “great bodily harm” to either the officer or another person.

“A statement, explicit or implied, that you take back the city and do whatever needs to be done is absolutely wrong, [a] complete invitation to disaster,” he said.

It remains unclear whether the orders have any direct link to the shootings of civilians.

On Sept. 3, 2005, a 1st District officer shot Matt McDonald in the back, killing the man. The officer said McDonald, a 41-year-old drifter, ignored orders to let go of a white plastic bag containing a handgun, which he allegedly brandished at police. McDonald’s relatives are skeptical of the account.

Bryant Wininger, the narcotics squad lieutenant who shot McDonald, has since retired. He declined to respond to questions or to address whether he was present for Scott’s statements about martial law and the shooting of looters.

*****

It’s also unclear what role the orders to shoot looters might play in the federal trials against officers accused of shooting unarmed civilians.

The lawyer for David Warren, the police officer who shot Henry Glover, said Warren had not heard the order.

But the lawyer, Michael Ellis, said the order was emblematic of the chaos of that time frame. When Warren fired his .223 rifle at Glover, he had just spent the night standing guard over a man charged with attacking Kevin Thomas, his fellow officer.

“He was guarding the defendant who had shot Kevin,’’ Ellis said. “He looked through the window and could see that Oakwood Shopping Center was in flames and being looted by vandals, and all that goes into the equation of his mindset of the moment that he fired his weapon.”

Defense attorneys representing two of the officers charged in the shooting of six civilians at the Danziger Bridge said their defenses will largely center on the contention that the shootings were justified – that officers believed they were under fire.

“They weren’t shooting looters. They were shooting at people who they thought were shooting at them,” said Lindsay Larson III, one of the attorneys representing former officer Robert Faulcon.

Frank DeSalvo, attorney for Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, also accused of shooting people on the eastern side of the bridge, agreed. “Certainly, no one’s defense is that martial law had been declared and we should shoot looters. They did what they did based upon what they were faced with at the time they arrived at the bridge,” he said.

But DeSalvo left open the possibility that he would use Mendoza’s statement, perhaps as a way to explain the environment in which officers were forced to make decisions.

“That is part of the information that they had with respect to the lawlessness in the city. People being shot and being raped. Supposed armed gangs of people running around shooting people,” DeSalvo said. “It is relevant with how the fear was running through the department that a chief would say that. When he says we have to take our streets back, that is what we are talking about. The streets had been taken away by armed gangs.”

This report was co-published by ProPublica and The New Orleans Times-Picayune. ProPublica’s Lisa Schwartz, Sheelagh McNeill and Nicholas Kusnetz contributed.

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Interview with Speech and Montsho Eshe of Arrested Development: "Bringing balance back to hip-hop"

amun ra — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:00:06 PDT

Interview with Speech and Montsho Eshe of Arrested Development: "Bringing balance back to hip-hop"

(The two-time Grammy award winning hip-hop group Arrested Development, are true trailblazers bringing balance to hip-hop. Since 1991 they’ve championed advancement, equality and spreading unique hip-hop around the world. They brought much needed attention to the plight of the homeless through their hit song “Mr. Wendal”, and celebrated cultural diversity in the dance smash, “People Everyday”. Like myself, I am sure you wondered what happened to the group all of these years. They came back on the scene this year with the album “Strong” to bring balance back to hip-hop. I went one-on-one with group members Speech and Montsho Eshe about their hiatus, the new album, the present state of hip hop and more. This is Part 1)

Brother Jesse Muhammad (BJ): First of all, I’d like to say that I am honored to do this interview. I wanted to start off with basic background information for the sake of our readers. Talk about growing up in Milwaukee and how your upbringing influenced the type of music you would eventually produce as an artist.

Speech (SP): Well, growing up in Milwaukee was very much a polar existence because Milwaukee is very segregated in a sense. Most of the black people in Milwaukee live in poverty and most of the blacks that are middle class and above live in white neighborhoods. So, for me, growing up, I saw both sides of the fence because my parents moved from out of the ghetto when I was a little kid and moved into the suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee but my parents business and all of our activities as a family was right in the middle of the city, in the innercity. So, I grew up seeing a lot of polar opposites. My mom owns a newspaper called the Milwaukee Community Journal. It’s been 35 years of reporting of various things going on in the black community. So, growing up, every morning at the breakfast, or wherever, we would hear issues discussed and various solutions to the issues, talking about the community and these things would be ingrained in me as a young child. That’s basically my up bringing.

The reason that , I think , the topics that Arrested Development started talking about when we came together were still so burnt into my heart because of growing up in that environment, talking about the solutions and talking about the issues going on in the community.

BJ: Now, the group Arrested Development had its short tremendous success in the early 90’s and then took a brief hiatus, as I read on your website. Fans like myself were wondering what happened. Would you mind sharing, what happened to break the group up?

SP: Well, a number of things happened. One is, having that big success on your first album for a group like us was very overwhelming because, we obviously wanted the record to do well but we never knew that it would do that well. So, a lot of infrastructure issues were having to be dealt with while we were touring, while I was the producer of the group / lead vocalist of the group. There were a lot of business decisions, managers, lawyers, publishing, agents, booking agents, things that were very new to us. Our learning curve was extremely huge and the pace was extremely fast. If you can remember, back in those days, our group, thank God, was very much on the fast track. We were winning many different awards, many different award show performances, many different tours nationally and internationally.

Many different things were expected of us on a very rushed sequence. So, us being such an organic group and coming from a grassroots place, that was very unexpected and it did take a toll on the personalities of our group and by the time we did Zingalamaduni , which was our second album, we were tired. We were starting to have internal conflict which I honestly think could have been resolved much easier if we had just taken a little break. But, instead of us taking a break, the label wanted us to put out music immediately and I think, all of that took a toll on the group so by the time it was asked of us to do a third album, we declined. We just said we didn’t want to do it. We just took a break for about five years.

BJ: Now, I also read, in your bio, that you didn’t stop working, you really more so started to focus on your solo work. Please talk about some of things you were able to accomplish within that time period.

SP: In 1996, the group stopped recording albums and I still was creating music and I didn’t know what to do with it. So, in essence, I just played some music, some experimental music, for my record label and they liked it and they released it as a solo album called Speech. It was very experimental. I was starting to sing, a lot . Going though the various emotional roller coasters that I was explaining earlier, me singing started to feel more soothing to my conscious and to my spirit. At the same time, that type of style was, to some extent sort of the rebirth of neo soul. But, the label was sort of starting to self destruct. EMI was starting to go through a bunch of changes and, long story short, it didn’t do well in the United States. So, I was left basically with trying to determine what should I do with my newfound, in a sense, career and what should happen but God really blessed me in that the same album that didn’t do well in the States was doing extremely well in Japan. It was the number record for about seven weeks straight and I decided , of course, to go over there and start to tour, start to see what was going on. When I got there, it was just an amazing reception. That became ‘home” for me, musically, not physically for about five years that would follow and I would have Number 1 hit records or Top Ten hit records for the next four records that I produced.

BJ: Eshe, what were you doing or working on when the group was not together?

Montsho Eshe (ME): I actually got into artist management. I had an artist, Yum Yum Girl, who was on LaFace. She did a couple of records like collabs with people but she never came out due to a lot of label switching. It was crazy because a lot of artist get caught up in that, the whole corporate hustle and bustle thing. Then, I also started doing choreography for a lot of artists, teaching. I’ve always taught dance but I did a lot of teaching during that season. Also, I found out a lot of gifts which I never knew about myself. I started writing more, writing songs and singing more and just teaching myself a lot of thing; studying a lot of people. That’s what I did during that season. Just really took time to kind of…..I was still in the business but just in a different aspect and from another perspective, you see things in a whole other way. So, I got a chance to work with my artist. On LaFace she worked with Rodney Jerkins and Babyface, all these different producers and it was interesting just to see how they worked. You know, by Arrested Development being a more kind of organic type of group, it’s a whole ‘nother world when you go to that R&B side. It was interesting to see the differences and the different dynamics of the work in that area. During that time, I also took time to get myself together as well , on a spiritual level and all that kind of stuff. So, yea. I stayed busy.

BJ: Was reuniting with the group always in the back of your mind as you worked as a solo artist?

SP: Honestly, I would always be fine with doing it but no, it wasn’t a huge thought. At the time, even though I was doing my solo stuff, me and some of the members were going through lawsuits with each other. It was a lot of internal drama between me and some of the members so I just wasn’t thinking of it. It wasn’t on my heart. And thank God for Eshe. About 5 years after I started my solo career, she called me and said we should do more group stuff and she presented it so that I started to have a real vision for it as well. She really helped to bring the group back together.

ME: Awwwww….You gonna make me cry.

BJ: Now, let’s get into talking about Hip Hop. If we look at groups like Arrested Development, A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, taken out of the equation of hip hop over these last, let’s say 15 years or so. I know this question is always put out there but I would love to hear your vantage point. What is the state or condition of Hip Hop? More people seem to focus on the bling, the exploitation of women, the content in the delivery is poor, everything is ‘shortcut culture’. Nothing empowering, a lot of people would say. So, what is the state of hip hop and what is missing, or has been missing, that Arrested Development is bringing back to the airwaves?

SP: Okay. Honestly, I feel like there’s a number of things missing. First of all, we’re missing balance. There’s always gonna be artists who want to speak on various things but right now you don’t even have any mainstream artist that’s speaking on any consciousness, any advancement, any solutions. So, what that does is make other artists who are in the hampers, who aren’t out yet, they just wanting to get on. It makes them copy the people who they see as being successful and it just continues to recreate the same type of ‘poison’ lyric content for our children and so and so forth.

But, also, I see commercialism that swept our nation. A materialism and commercialism that responded to the early 90’s and late 80’s consciousness that was sweeping the nation that to me was a new trend. It was a new trend to talk about private jets. It was a trend to talk about your money as your importance. It was a trend to talk about being a mogul or a CEO. These things weren’t talked about in the early 90’s. These things weren’t spoken of in the late 80’s. It was not fashionable to have a commercial promoting some corporate product. These things were actually unfashionable. I remember when Arrested Development got offered to promote Coca Cola. It was a seven figure contract deal. We turned it down.

MC Hammer was one of the first hip hop artist ever to promote a corporate product and he was slammed for it. He promoted, I think it was popcorn chicken or popcorn shrimp from KFC and he was slammed for it. Then, all of a sudden, in response to that, in the mid 90’s, you got P. Diddy. You got this whole movement of ‘everything’s about cash’. and we followed the trend. I feel like, and I address this in a song in our new album ”Strong”, that these trends tend to master us. And we shouldn’t let it master us. That we have to have direction as a people and we determine what trends fit our life or fit our objectives as opposed to allowing trends to determine our fate. So, that’s sort of a long but short version of what I feel.

ME: Well, I definitely agree with what Speech was saying on a lot of things. We really need balance. There’s a lack of balance right now. Just as Speech was saying, back in the early 90’s, when we came out, a lot of stuff that people are “allowed” to do now, it was taboo and they would say you were a sell out and just all those things. And, it’s just amazing how seasons change and times change, what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. I think that people now see that, just like athletes do it , it’s lucrative for artists, and honestly nowadays, that’s how a lot of artists, a large amount of artists really, make their money off of sponsorship or promoting a product because the game has changed so much,. You know. with the economy and everything, so a lot of artists they have clothing lines and they’re promoting deodorants and colognes or whatever. It’s a lot of different things to make a living. It’s just interesting how times have changes because no artist, if you wanted to be considered legitimate or have street cred or all that type of stuff, you couldn’t do that in the 90’s at all. You couldn’t. They would slam you, for real. I just think we’re missing balance. There are a lot of great artists but you don’t hear about them as far as, you know, mainstream. To me, it’s just one type of music that you hear and of course, me being a female, I’m really missing people like Lyte and Lauryn Hill and Queen Latifah and Moni Love; those types of female artists, I’m really missing them.

BJ: Hey, I hear you. What is this album “Strong” bringing to the table that you all would say is missing?

SP: Well, I think, that issue that I started to address about following trends, we talk about that in this album and I feel like we give a fair shake or vision of what has happened to us as a people over the last twenty years and what we should be doing to correct it. I also think that, like songs like Bloody, talk about this marriage that now has happened between corporations and hip hop artists. This marriage wasn’t always there. Like Eshe said, the whole diversifying your talents to go into, like perfumes and clothing lines and so on and so forth, it’s admirable from one perspective. If you think of it from just a business perspective, it’s admirable but when you start to think of it in a historical perspective and what we’re trying to accomplish as a people, in allowing yourself to marry with corporations that have no interest in your advancement, no interest in what we, as a people, deserve to get and have been striving to get for generations, then, you start to see it as not so admirable but as against what we are trying to accomplish. So, I feel like we’ve been addressing that on this album and I feel like we bring a refreshing viewpoint. To all the various viewpoints that are already existing, we bring a very refreshing viewpoint. I think that that is what Arrested Development always have strived to do and I believe that that’s what we’ve done , over the years. It could become like a soundtrack to the life of a person who’s striving to break from this matrix of trends and corporate lead visions for our people. I think that it could be a soundtrack.

ME: I definitely feel, like Speech was saying, it’s refreshing, we also had some fun songs on there. And of course, thought provoking and also songs that will ignite your spirit and make you want to do something with yourself, with your community, in the world. The album, to me, has a ‘world’ feel to it. We have this song called Africa in which we’re just talking about how much we thank Africa for being an influence in our lives and around the world. Whether you want to admit it or not, you’re going to be influenced by Africa. Whether it be the music, the drums, the culture, something.

Also, I want to weigh in on what Speech was saying; It’s cool to have sponsorship from corporations or do whatever but let it not taint your integrity. If you’re going to promote something, let it be something that you’re going to be proud about, that’s going ot help you and your people advance. Something that your kids-kids-kids can be proud of it and you can hold your head up high because not all of it is bad. But, it’s when that’s your motivation that it gets scary because then at that point, you’re like “I’ll do whatever to make a dollar”.

(In Part 2, we go deeper into the songs on the album “Strong”, their international tour, social justice issues, and why we won’t see a repeat of their break up. Until then check out two of their videos below! Visit their website @ http://www.arresteddevelopmentmusic.com/)

“Greener”

“The World Is Changing”

(You’re welcome to follow Brother Jesse Muhammad further on Twitter, become a friend on Facebook, or visit his award-winning site Brother Jesse Blog)

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Willie Brown Academy, BVHP’s only middle school, to close

amun ra — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:01:57 PDT

Willie Brown Academy, BVHP’s only middle school, to close

Critical parent meeting on Monday, Oct. 4, 5:30-7:30 p.m., in the Bayview YMCA conference room on Quesada and Lane Street

by Valerie Higgins

Students bring in the harvest from their school garden at Willie Brown Academy.

Parents for Public Schools is a network of parents working together to build quality schools for all children in San Francisco and we are growing our network. All parents are welcome to join and get involved. Improving the schools is a charge that we are all collectively responsible for and here at Parents for Public Schools, while we are a small organization with part-time staff, we all do our best to inform and activate parents across ethnic and geographic boundaries.

Changes are happening in the San Francisco Unified School District constantly and it is our charge to share the most up to date information. As a part of these changes, I want to briefly mention that the new Student Assignment System, which is now called the Student Placement Policy, is changing and students will no longer have choice in their middle school placement. They will be placed into middle schools based on the elementary schools they attend. For more information and a list of community meetings, please visit www.sfusd.edu/Enroll.

Another important decision is the closure of Willie Brown. The SFUSD publicly announced on July 2 in a press release: “Willie Brown Jr. Academic College Preparatory School is closing by the end of school year 2010-2011 in order to rebuild a state of the art facility. The school is eligible for up to $50,000 for closure and, if granted, funding will go to support a parent/community outreach coordinator to assist families in transitioning to new schools.”

A parent commented on this, saying, “I don’t see where they are going to get the funds to rebuild Willie Brown when the school budget is operating at a deficit. Building a new school is not the answer. We need to learn how to work with what we have first and improve that before we try to build new facilities, because the facilities do not make one bit of difference if the teachers and parents are not doing their jobs. Building community and resources is what is needed, not new facilities. So I am extremely skeptical as to when the new building will actually appear,” said Daphina Marshall, a parent and a resident of the Bayview Hunters Point community

Other parents from this community have expressed their concern with the safety of their children having to travel across town to get to school on public transportation due to SFUSD transportation cuts. Since Willie Brown is the only middle school in the Bayview Hunters Point community and the middle school feeder patterns proposed to the Board of Education exclude Willie Brown, students would have to travel across town to get to school.

There are many things happening in education. In order to stay involved, you should come to our parent meetings and join our network. There will be a critical parent meeting on Monday, Oct. 4, 5:30-7:30 p.m., at the Bayview YMCA in the conference room on Quesada and Lane Street. We have limited resources as do most non-profits during these times, but if we work together, we can truly create quality schools for all children.

Remember to tell your neighbor to enroll their child or grandchild into kindergarten the year before school starts. Enrollment season starts in November with the SFUSD school fair Nov. 13. For more information about our organization, please contact Ellie Rossiter at Ellie@ppssf.org or Vicki at Vicki@ppssf.org. For more information on how you can get involved and stay in the loop, please contact African-American Outreach Coordinator Valerie Higgins, at Valerie@ppssf.org.

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Banana Nutty with Dried Figs Muffins

Team Red, Black & Green — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:00:19 PDT

Add to: Recipe Box | Grocery List | Meal Planner

Recipe submitted by Flamekart2, 09/06/10

Banana Nutty with Dried Figs Muffins

Ingredients (use vegan versions):

1 cup wholewheat flour
1 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder ( double acting type )
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/3 cup unrefined (raw) sugar
1/2 teaspoon powdered egg replacer + 1 1/2 tablespoon of water (like Emerg-c)
1/3 cup canola oil
2/3 cup soymilk
2 bananas, mashed
1/3 cup mixed dried figs and walnuts, chopped

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2) Add all dry ingredients together, mix well.

3) Add wet ingredients, with egg replacer mix first, followed by mashed bananas, oil and lastly soymilk. M…

Republican candidates ignore the Black vote while the Democrats continue to take it for granted

amun ra — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:03:37 PDT

Republican candidates ignore the Black vote while the Democrats continue to take it for granted

Statewide candidates ignore Black media in favor of courting the white and Latino vote

by Jasmyne A. Cannick

Barbara Boxer

Carly Fiorina

Meg Whitman

Jerry Brown

With a little over two months left until the Nov. 2 general election, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate nominees are wasting no time in blanketing the airwaves statewide in an effort to reach out to potential voters. However, noticeably absent from these campaigns is any significant or meaningful “wooing” of Black voters – begging the question are California Republicans outright ignoring the Black vote while the Democrats continue to take it for granted?

To date, very little if any advertising has been done in Black newspapers or with Black radio stations in an attempt to reach Black voters via the Black media – the exception being Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for attorney general. Harris, who is Black, no surprise, did advertise in some Black media. And for the sake of conversation, Black owned media is just that, Black owned. Radio stations and newspapers that boast a Black audience but are not Black owned do not fall into this category. Sorry, Clear Channel.

Years past have seen candidates for statewide office making staged appearances with popular Black elected officials in the pulpits of Black churches and placing ads with Black owned media outlets in an effort to reach African-American voters, but not this time around.

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s campaign has chosen to focus monies on reaching out to Latino voters with new Spanish-language TV ads meant to portray her as a “Latino-friendly” Republican. These ads aired during World Cup games and other programs targeted towards California’s growing Latino population. Not to be outdone, California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s campaign seems to have adopted the strategy of following the placement of the Whitman campaigns ads with their own ads, slamming her and painting her as running for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s third term.

It’s a well known fact that a highly contentious election season between two well funded campaigns is what advertising account executives dreams are made of. In some circumstances, the advertising revenue from just one race can make up for a year of down sales, let alone multiple races all trying to reach the same audience. For struggling Black owned radio stations and newspapers, it can mean the difference between adding or subtracting programming and going from a weekly to a monthly publication.

So is the Black media being snubbed and more importantly have Blacks lost their political swag.

It’s true that Blacks constitute only 6 percent of the state’s population and electorate, but the November vote is shaping up to be extremely close, and holding onto key constituencies, even relatively small ones, could end up making the difference on Election Day.

According to the Census, the Los Angeles metropolitan area houses the largest number of Blacks in California, followed by Oakland and the Inland Empire. San Jose and San Francisco have the smallest Black populations.

In Los Angeles, where Blacks make up 10 percent of the population, are overwhelmingly Democratic and live in a city where radio rules, KJLH 102.3 FM has been the flagship Black owned radio station for over two decades. Owned by Motown icon Stevie Wonder and home of the Steve Harney Morning Show and the award-winning Front Page talk show, Black Los Angeles’ early morning communications drum, KJLH’s listeners are mostly Black adults 25-54 who are educated, contribute billions of dollars into the Los Angeles market, and are high propensity voters. The same can be said of the readership of California’s Black owned newspapers.

But it’s not just the slight from the candidates in advertising revenue that the Black media is facing.

Multiple invitations to both the Whitman and Brown campaigns for interview requests with the Black media, to date, have been ignored. This includes invitations to appear on Los Angeles’ only daily talk show geared towards Blacks as well as interviews with syndicated Black journalists. But it gets worse.

While Black journalists’ interview requests went unanswered, they found themselves suddenly inundated with press releases from the same campaigns, who had taken the liberty of adding their email to their press list but not to respond to their request.

Nevertheless, the Black media had watched candidates continue to crisscross the state of California, appearing on various mainstream morning shows including Spanish-language media.

The cold shoulder and attitudes of the campaigns towards the Black media is eerily reminiscent of 2008, when opponents of California’s gay marriage ban Prop. 8, who were largely white Democrats, relied on a poorly conceived campaign strategy predicated on an outdated civil rights model and the assumption that Blacks would support gay marriage because, after all, it was a civil rights issue.

Very little advertising was done in Black newspapers or with Black radio stations. And on the day after the election, while Blacks were celebrating the election of the first Black president, gay marriage supporters awakened to the sad truth that it takes more than an assumption and a few buzz words to get the Black vote.

I’m not sure which is worse – the Democrats’ continued assumption of the Black vote or the Republicans’ refusal to even acknowledge the passage of the 15th Amendment granting Blacks the right to vote.

I think that for far too long, Black voters have just supported the Democratic Party because we were told to by Black elected officials and made to believe that the Democrats cared more about Black people than the Republican Party. I’ve said before and I’ll and say it again, the Democratic Party needs to be challenged by Blacks. It’s not enough to have a few Black Democrats in Sacramento and Washington. Nor is it fair to assume that because the president is Black that Blacks will just fall into line and vote Democratic.

One look at the Democratic Party’s organizational leadership and it’s clear to see that Black faces are far and few between when it comes to leadership. California’s own Democratic Party is a perfect example of this, as there is only one African-American who is a party officer.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is just as bad when it comes to their relationship with Blacks. It’s gotten to the point where apparently it’s not even worth having the appearance of going after the Black vote and so Republican candidates have chosen to bypass Blacks altogether in favor of the Latino vote by investing millions of dollars into Spanish-language media.

This year Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer actually finds herself having to run a campaign to keep her seat. And even though Boxer is facing a formidable challenge, neither Boxer nor her Republican opponent, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, has made any significant outreach to Blacks by way of the Black media and advertising.

Like Spanish-language media caters to an audience of Latinos, Black newspapers and radio stations have established a legacy of trust built by honestly and accurately telling the stories of Black America from the Black perspective.

Simply put, the Black press are the gatekeepers to the Black community and the glue that connects Blacks in Los Angeles with Blacks in New York and Blacks throughout America with Blacks around the world. Their power and influence is unmatched, unchallenged and unquestioned.

Candidates who ignore the Black press and take their advertising dollars elsewhere or choose to wait to the last minute to throw a few unspent crumbs to the Black press are sending a strong message that the Black vote is not as important as the white or Latino vote. A message that Black voters would do well to remember when these same candidates pop up at their churches with those popular Black elected officials and, more importantly, when headed to the polls on Nov. 2.

Jasmyne Cannick

Based in Los Angeles, Jasmyne A. Cannick has worked on all three levels of government, including as a press secretary in the California State Assembly and House of Representatives. Today she works as a political communications consultant and writes a syndicated column read in over 200 newspapers. She can be reached at www.www.jasmynecannick.com.

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Good Americans: The dark side of the Pullman Porters Union

amun ra — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:50:33 PDT

Good Americans: The dark side of the Pullman Porters Union

by Jean Damu

A. Philip Randolph, founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, left, and his colleague, Bayard Rustin, testify before the Senate Government Operations Subcommittee on Dec. 5, 1966. – Photo: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Recently Black Radio Report circulated an article reminding us that the 85th anniversary of the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is currently underway.

Those of us on the West Coast also should remember African American rail workers were instrumental in organizing not only the sleeping and chair car porters – chair car porters are never mentioned in this conversation – but the dining car workers as well.

I salute all the tributes and accolades conferred upon our first mostly Black union – Filipinos were also members, as well as women, so, so much for “brotherhood.” However, as a former member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters who worked in the Colorado Division of the Santa Fe Railroad out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I have to admit it gets a little tiresome reading constant and continual incorrect references to the Pullman Porters Union and never any holistic political assessment to the political stances of A. Philip Randolph and the acolyte who sat at his right hand, Bayard Rustin.

George Pullman, the founder of the Pullman Car Co., was a racist who sent his agents throughout the post-bellum South hiring formerly enslaved Blacks to work on his Pullman cars. Ingeniously, he made a specialty of hiring the darkest skinned Blacks available. He wanted the class distinctions to be as stark as possible and thought the darkest Blacks would be the most grateful for the job and cause the fewest labor problems. His thinking proved accurate for a time.

He then leased the cars along with the brainwashed Black workers, whom he encouraged to kowtow to the white customers, to the various railroad companies as complete packages. But there were other Black workers throughout the trains and these workers completed the membership of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Additionally, and almost completely ignored by history is the role of Ishmael Flory, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate, who almost single handedly and working out of Oakland organized the cooks and waiters on the railroads. Later his union moved him to Chicago, where for the remainder of his life he led radical causes.

I particularly mention Ishmael Flory because his skills and politics as an organizer were at least equal to those of Rustin. However, because Flory never accepted right wing social democracy, historians have diminished his role and pumped up the legacy of Randolph and Rustin.

What am I talking about here?

When it came to domestic politics, Randolph and Rustin were on the mark most of the time, fighting for equal rights, civil rights and most of all jobs – but they only conducted these struggles within the parameters of being perceived as good Americans. Beyond the borders and shores of America, they were virulent defenders of colonialism and capitalism.

The motto of Oakland’s C.L. Dellums, uncle of Mayor Ron Dellums, who succeeded A. Philip Randolph as president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1968, was “Fight or be slaves!” He was also president of the Oakland NAACP and supported the 1946 Oakland General Strike.

That is why Randolph and Rustin kept the “Brotherhood” securely within the confines of the old AFL (American Federal of Labor), the bedrock pillar of white supremacy within the U.S. labor movement. Someone once asked C.L Dellums, an executive of the Brotherhood, “Why does the old man (Randolph) keep us in the AFL. Why don’t we join (the more progressive) CIO?” “I wish I knew,” Dellums said.

Well, today the answer is quite obvious. The CIO admitted communists to their ranks and encouraged leftism. Despite being former radicals themselves, Randolph and Rustin had had the fear of God injected into them when they realized the government might attempt to put them in prison or worse foreclose, especially in Randolph’s case, on their comfortable lifetstyle.

Predictably they became devout right wing social democrats willing, no eager, to throw people like Ish Flory, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and all their other former comrades under the bus of “good Americanism.” (As long as I’m in the mood to trash revered Black icons, let me add that it was just these kinds of anti-leftist sentiments that convinced Thurgood Marshall he should become an informant for the FBI, that it was his duty to let the Feds know what the Reds were up to.)

At no point did Randolph or Rustin ever denounce the war in Viet Nam. In the mid-1970s I was at a breakfast of labor leaders at the old Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco. Even though I was just a worker at the hotel, I hung around to hear what keynote speaker Rustin had to say.

Black Pullman porters began settling in Oakland, the western terminus of the trans-continental railroad, not long after 1867, becoming a major factor in making Oakland a Chocolate City. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ West Coast headquarters was established at Fifth and Wood Streets in West Oakland. This book, filled with photos, was published by Arcadia in 2007.

The salient points of his talk that morning were a spirited defense of Israel and a pooh-poohing of the liberation movements in Africa and especially of the, in his mind, quixotic notion of freedom in South Africa. Oh, apartheid should end, but any possibility of it happening in our lifetime, forget it, he told his appreciative audience.

Ishmael Flory, on the other hand, and other of his generational and political comrades, including Claude Lightfoot and Roscoe Procter, were traveling the country, speaking at campuses telling Black students it was “their duty” to help fund and ARM the liberation movements. No wonder most have never heard of these long forgotten warriors.

Shamefully, many on the Left were disrespectful as well. When the 1973 Sixth Pan Africa conference was organized in Tanzania, mostly by African Americans, African American organizers conspired and did their damnedest to prevent Ish and his young protégé, Tony Monteiro, from attending or receiving credentials to the conference. The woman who headed the credential committee bragged about her role in the pages of the Black Scholar magazine not long ago. Pitiful, just pitiful.

But despite the darkness surrounding the union leadership, I have to say that pound for pound my job on the railroads and with the union was one of the best paying jobs I ever had. The union was forced to accept segregation where it existed. For instance, if we worked from New Mexico to Dodge City, Kansas, the white workers on the crew spent the night in the Kit Carson Hotel, the bill for which the company paid. No such luck for us Blacks. Our luck allowed us to enjoy the luxury of the basement of the train station, with its one electric light bulb. The Santa Fe allowed us to take sheets and blankets off the train for the old rusty bunks we slept on and got upset if we forgot to return them.

But let’s not forget that Randolph, Rustin and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters did much to help create a Black middle class in the U.S. and for that they are owed much credit. But I’m never one for sweeping the dark side under the rug.

Jean Damu is the former western regional representative for N’COBRA, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, and a former member of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, taught Black Studies at the University of New Mexico, has traveled and written extensively in Cuba and Africa and currently serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Email him at jdamu2@yahoo.com.

Documentary marks 85th anniversary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

From the time Blacks were first hired by Pullman in about 1867 until 1937, when they won their first union contract, porters worked 20-hour days for, in the 1930s, only $67.50 a month, forcing them to kowtow to passengers in order to garner enough in tips to support their families.

“Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle” is the title of a one hour documentary film honoring the porters and being released for home video on this 85th anniversary of the founding of the Brotherhood. The film is based on interviews with eight porters and is narrated by Rosina Tucker, the 100-year-old wife of a porter.

The New York Times wrote of the film, winner of four regional Emmy Awards, “One hundred years of history is spanned in an enlightening portrait of admirable dignity.” The film is available from Paul Wagner Films, www.paulwagnerfilms.com.

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On the fifth anniversary of Katrina, displacement continues

amun ra — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:54:18 PDT

On the fifth anniversary of Katrina, displacement continues

by Jordan Flaherty

Sunni Patterson, whose poems and songs voice the soul of New Orleans, was pushed out the city she loves by the racially discriminatory Road Home program that has prevented her from rebuilding the home her family lived in for generations and, as a tenant, by the cost of housing that has risen 63 percent just this year. Now in Houston, she longs to return home, echoing the longing of 75 percent of Black New Orleanians who remain displaced five years after the flood.

Poet Sunni Patterson is one of New Orleans’ most beloved artists. She has performed in nearly every venue in the city, toured the U.S., and frequently appears on television and radio, from Democracy Now to Def Poetry Jam. When she performs her poems in local venues, half the crowd recites the words along with her.

But, like many who grew up here, she was forced to move away from the city she loves. She left as part of a wave of displacement that began with Katrina and still continues to this day. While hers is just one story, it is emblematic of the situation of many African American New Orleanians who no longer feel welcome in the city they were born in.

Patterson comes from New Orleans’s 9th Ward. Her family’s house was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished. Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans.

But her income was not enough – her post-Katrina rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the birth of her son Jibril. “I wound up getting evicted from my apartment because we were still working on the house,” she said. “In the midst of it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need to sustain a living.”

Who could forget the TV images of thousands stranded for many days after Katrina without food, water or decent shelter, dying from dehydration and police bullets, stopped at gunpoint from leaving the city even on foot, as police and soldiers “contained” them but gave them no help?

Just as the storm revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Foundation, 42 percent of African Americans – versus just 16 percent of whites – said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents – versus 8 percent of white respondents – said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year. Housing prices in New Orleans have gone up 63 percent just since 2009.

Eleven billion federal dollars went into Louisiana’s Road Home program, which was meant to help the city rebuild. The payouts from this program went exclusively to homeowners, which cut out renters from the primary source of federal aid.

Even among homeowners, the program treated different populations in different ways. U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy recently found that the program was racially discriminatory in the formula it used to disperse funds. By partially basing payouts on home values instead of on damage to homes, the program favored properties in wealthier – often whiter – neighborhoods. However, the same judge found that nothing in the law obligated the state to correct this discrimination for the 98 percent of applicants whose cases have been closed.

At approximately 355,000, the city’s population remains more than 100,000 lower than its pre-Katrina number, and many counted in the current population are among the tens of thousands who moved here post-Katrina. This puts the number of New Orleanians still displaced at well over 100,000 – perhaps 150,000 or more.

Day after day, in the hot New Orleans sun, thousands waited outside the Superdome for buses that were promised but seemed to take forever to arrive. – Photo: AP

A survey by the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps found that 75 percent of African Americans who were displaced wanted to return but were being kept out. Like Patterson, most of those surveyed said economic forces kept them from returning.

A changed city

As New Orleans marks the fifth anniversary of Katrina and begins a long recovery from the BP drilling disaster, the media has been searching for an uplifting angle. Stories of the city’s rebirth are everywhere, and there are reasons to feel good about New Orleans.

The Saints’ Superbowl victory was a turning point for the city, and the HBO series “Treme” has gone a long way towards helping the story of the city’s trauma and search for recovery get out to a wider audience. Music festivals like Jazz Fest and Essence Fest, which are so central to the city’s tourism-based economy, have brought in some of their largest crowds in recent years.

But despite positive developments in the city’s recovery, more than 100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of most stories of the city.

Many from this silenced population complain of post-Katrina decisions that placed obstacles in their path, such as the firing of nearly 7,000 public school employees and canceling of their union contract shortly after the storm, or the tearing down of nearly 5,000 public housing units – two post-Katrina decisions that disproportionately affected Black residents.

When buses finally came, families were split up and forced onto buses and planes without knowing where they were headed. The many New Orleans families with relatives and friends in Baton Rouge and other cities the buses passed through were not allowed to get off there and were displaced instead to 5,500 cities and towns across the country – at least 100,000 still unable to return. – Photo: AP

Advocates have also noted that among those who are not counted in the statistics on displacement are the New Orleanians who are in the city, but not home. They fall into the category that international human rights organizations call internally displaced. The guiding principles of internal displacement, as recognized by the international community, call for more than return.

U.N. principles number 28 and 29 call for, in part, “the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration.” They also state, “They shall have the right to participate fully and equally in public affairs at all levels and have equal access to public services,” as well as to have their property and possessions replaced or receive “appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.”

In other words, these principles call for a return that includes restoration and reparations. As civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has said: “I’m still displaced until the conditions that caused my displacement have been alleviated. I’m still displaced as long as Charity Hospital remains closed. I’m still displaced as long as rents remain unaffordable. I’m still displaced as long as schools are in such bad shape.” In the U.S., Katrina recovery has fallen under the Stafford Act, a law that specifically excludes many of these rights that international law guarantees.

Among those who are back in New Orleans but still displaced are members of the city’s large homeless population. In a report this week, UNITY for the Homeless estimated from 3,000 to 6,000 persons are living in the city’s abandoned buildings. Seventy-five percent of these undercounted residents are Katrina survivors, most of whom had stable housing before the storm. Eighty-seven percent are disabled, and a disproportionate share are elderly.

Cultural Resistance

Sunni Patterson can’t remember a time when she wasn’t a poet. The words flow naturally and seemingly effortlessly from her. When she performs, it is like a divine presence speaking though her body. Her frame is small but she fills the room.

Her voice conveys passion and love and pain and loss. Her words illuminate current events and history lessons – her topics ranging from the Black Panthers in the Desire housing projects to domestic violence.

You can hear Sunni Patterson’s influence in the performances of many young poets in New Orleans. And in the work of Patterson, you can hear the history of community elders passed along, the chants of Mardi Gras Indians, and the knowledge and embrace of neighbors and family and friends.

And Patterson is part of a large and thriving community of socially conscious culture workers. Since the late ‘90s, you could find spoken word poetry being performed somewhere in New Orleans almost any night of the week. And many of these poets are also teachers, activists and community organizers.

Although Patterson’s house had been in her family for generations, her relatives had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork for the Road Home program – a problem shared by many New Orleanians. “We’re dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to generation,” says Patterson. “The paperwork is not always available. A lot of elders are tired. They don’t know what to do.”

Since Katrina, in an apparent deliberate effort to prevent poor Black people from returning home, New Orleans has demolished 4,500 apartments in some of America’s sturdiest public housing complexes that had sustained minimal damage or none at all. Other affordable housing, much of it livable or easily repairable has been destroyed as well and more is threatened. The grassroots organizing to educate the public and fight back has been heroic.

Now, like so many other former New Orleanians, she cannot afford to live in the city she loves. “I’m in Houston,” she says, seemingly stunned by her own words. “Houston. Houston. I can’t say that and make it sound right. It hurts me to my heart that my child’s birth certificate says Houston, Texas.”

One of the hardest aspects of leaving New Orleans has been the loss of her community. “In that same house that I grew up, my great grandmother and grandfather lived,” she says. “Everybody that lived around there, you knew. It was family. In New Orleans, even if you don’t know someone, you still speak and wave and say hello. In other cities, there’s something wrong with you if you speak to someone you don’t know.”

New Orleanians were displaced after the storm to 5,500 cities, spread across every U.S. state. Although the vast majority of former New Orleanians are in nearby cities like Houston, Dallas or Atlanta, many are still living in further locales, from Utah to Maine.

While she is sad to be gone from the city, Patterson wants to see the positive in the loss. “The good part is that New Orleans energy and culture is now dispersed all over the world,” she says. “You can’t kill it. Ain’t that something? That’s what I love about it. So we still gotta give thanks, even in the midst of the atrocity, that poetry is still being created.”

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazineand a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets, including the New York Times, Mother Jones and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360 and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new book, “FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six.” He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. More information about “Floodlines” can be found at floodlines.org. “Floodlines” will also be featured on the Community and Resistance Tour this fall. For more information on the tour, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com.

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Wanda in Haiti: Pain, protest, planning for the future

amun ra — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:00:19 PDT

Wanda in Haiti: Pain, protest, planning for the future

by Wanda Sabir

Little children make the best of growing up in a makeshift, post-earthquake camp in the huge city of Port au Prince, where nearly 2 million people have no real homes to live in. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Daddy died this weekend – Saturday, Aug. 14, the anniversary of the Haitian revolution, Bwa Kayiman – and here I am in Delmas now with Rea Dol, principal of Sopudep School, and her family. I am so happy she picked me up first before she ran her errands. Her house is almost finished outside and inside it is a mansion – oh my goodness! I was sleeping on concrete at BAI (the human rights law office Bureau des Avocats Internationaux) for two days before Chris, an intern, let me sleep on his air mattress last night, and today I am in bed with a mosquito net – I have arrived!

We went to check on Rea’s account with a building supplier – Arnold Azolin, a Black man who lets the savvy business woman buy on credit when she doesn’t have the money up front. She is preparing to open the Sopudep School II site for the older kids in temporary classrooms made from bamboo this October and keep the younger children at the old site where some people are still living since the earthquake because of the shortage of shelter. Her family members, the larger two families, have their own places now and some of the younger people who were also camping here do as well.

Rea Dol, principal of Sopudep School, and her husband, Bataille, right, talk with Arnold Azolin, the owner of a construction supply business who generously gives them credit. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Rea is getting ready to adopt another child – a girl whose parents died during the earthquake. Her neighbor who has been keeping the child can’t feed her. The community also wants her to adopt an infant, but with her busy schedule, that would be rather impossible. Rea is also taking care of a neighbor who is so weak she can’t stand – she showed me a photo of the woman. Her legs are a thin as twigs. After taking her to the doctor, Rea said the diagnosis is starvation, the women just needs to eat, so Rea takes food by the neighbor’s house for the children to cook. One child dropped by the house this evening.

We stopped off at another supplier, a woman from whom Rea purchases beans and rice to feed the hungry children in the neighborhood where Sopudep I is. After she found out why Rea was buying beans and rice, she told her she would extend credit to her as well. Rea stopped by to pay her, and the woman didn’t want to take her money. I love the cooperative economics employed here – dollars circulating in the Black community, turning over again and again: Ujamaa at work!

The last stop was the grocery store where we got sodas and water. The bill was 129.00 gouds I thought, but I paid with two 500.00 goud notes. The change was 200.00. Yes. I am confused. I have to figure out what that means in Haitian dollars.

Today was a long one. I visited three Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps this morning and afternoon. Chris, intern at the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and interpreter, and I walked downtown with Gisele, one of the camp leaders, who introduced us to women who’d all suffered sexual violence – from the young girls barely out of their teens to their mothers and grandmothers, who often suffered such violence as well.

When one thinks about generational traits, rape is not one that comes to mind, yet those women who speak up like Malya A. Villard, secretary of KOFAVIV, and Marie Eramithe, two women I met who lead KOFAVIV: Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim, and young girls and other women are targeted because they don’t have anyone to protect them, which is certainly the case in many of these women’s lives since the earthquake in January. Rape is becoming normalized. Visit http://ijdh.org/projects/rapp.

Women have been beaten and raped, often brutally, sometimes by multiple attackers, as a warning to stop being politically active. In many cases, women become pregnant and, as abortion is illegal and women can be incarcerated, these women are left with a living breathing reminder of the trauma. Most women cannot hold a job if they are the leaders and they need protection getting to and from their tents.

Women have been beaten and raped, often brutally, sometimes by multiple attackers, as a warning to stop being politically active.

BAI offers this kind of support and there is even an advocate on board, Jocie Philistin, who is also an evangelist, prison and human rights advocate and coordinator of YAHVE RAPHA Foundation and herself a victim of rape by Haitian military. Philistin and Villard’s stories show how rape as a weapon of war is not recent – however, the recent events post-earthquake have highlighted a renewal of these crimes against women and girls – Villard raped again this year.

Both Mrs. Villard and Mrs. Eramithe have children, two sons at university. One son writes:

“I’m Saint Quitte Yvens, the son of Mary Delva Eramithe, a victim who has been raped since 1992 by armed police had entered the door of his house with his force power and violated fight my father. After this incident, my father suffers from a disease that eats away at his body and caused his death in 1999.

“My mother has seven children and I am the eldest of the family. I am in second year Computer Science, third year this year. To achieve this level, I really suffer. My father was everything to the family, my mother does nothing [does not have a job]. After the death of my father, I thought there was no life for my family because I do not see how we were eating, housed and educated. My mother has no economic means, but thanks to [her] intelligence, [her] courage and determination, she did everything she could to educate his children.

“I finished my classical studies since 2005, lack of economic means, my mother could not help me to attend a university. I was forced to spend three years doing nothing. About the year 2007, my mother collected everything she had and ready to make some friends specially for my university studies, she had to spend a whole year to see how she could send me to university in 2008.

Buildings that collapsed during the earthquake haven’t been removed and more are still collapsing eight months later. A building collapsed while I was in Haiti. Luckily, no one was injured. Much of the debris has yet to be cleared away and cleaned up. Yet the people still conduct business to survive. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

“In Haiti, education is very expensive. To pay for a university it costs a lot. Mom did everything she could to pay the two years previous shows, this year the money is really difficult and even impossible for him. I may lose this year because she cannot do anything for me.

“I would like continue my studies, because it is the only way that could give me the same opportunity to help myself and my family. I said thanks for your assistance in helping young scholars to continue his studies and I never cease to thank you for everything you [can do] for me.” To reach the mothers and find out how you can assist Saint Quitte and Mrs. Villard’s university enrolled sons, contact Jocie Philistin at pjocie@hotmail.com. I suggest going through the organization BAI.

BAI intern Christopher Eves, who is completing a masters in social work in Chicago, translated for me and filled in missing information when requested Saturday, Aug. 14, as we visited the camps. Afterwards, I wanted to visit the National Museum, so we took a taptap downtown, but it was closed – it has been closed since January. So we’re strolling towards an artist marketplace and Chris runs into a friend who invited us to visit his home across from the French Embassy, which is gated. We could see the official looking building from afar.

These IDPs seemed to have a better situation than those I’d met in the morning, who are mostly women – all the ones I met victims of sexual violence. At Place des Artistes, where artist Jude Jean Pierre, Chris’s friend, stays, men patrol the camp and even resolve disputes, which I witnessed as we were departing. Jude pulled one of the young men away from the other. There is a camp director, a position Williams James Marc Else fell into after the earthquake when so many people found themselves displaced.

I guess the similarities and differences in camps can be equated with degrees of heat in hell – Dante’s inferno. One woman in the second camp had a tin roof, so at the time we visited it was almost unbearably hot, the roof cooking the interior, but there were no leaks so unlike others nearby, when it rained the family didn’t have to awaken drenched and then stay wet the rest of the night. The rugs which covered a dirt surface below, however, would get wet – clothes, bedding – and if unable to adequately dry would get molded.

Mario Joseph, director of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), is the hub of human rights defense in Haiti. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Williams and Jude are both members of the organization that meets at BAI. It seemed that if anything was happening in Port au Prince around policies or policy development, it was connected to Mario Joseph’s BAI. It was great to be situated in the progressive nexus – too bad I didn’t fully comprehend the extent of all the activities like the eight of so men and women who filed down the hall into human rights attorney and BAI director Mario Joseph’s office to change as I was leaving Aug. 14. Several well-dressed men came back with Mario from a funeral – I presume of an important person in the community. Delourdes mentioned she was attending a funeral and Mario hadn’t seen her, so it must have been huge.

All of the IDP camps in the capital are called collectively Champ de Mars. One doesn’t wander through the camp unescorted – it is a “gated community” (smile). Unfortunately, the resources don’t seem able to get into each of the sites equally. Chris said the camp dwellers don’t control who gets the mobile health unit, which one has a school, who has childcare or preschool. But in Pétion – the camp right behind the Palace with a fountain which used to work – the space is densely populated with not much room to move around – tents and people literally on top of one another.

I wish I’d had a before and after image of the earthquake damaged areas.

It’s sort of how people feel about New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, now pre- and post-BP spill. The polluted shoreline, the displaced and destroyed natural habitats and their inhabitants – birds, fishes, plant life and of course human beings – the cultural decimation is irreplaceable, its cumulative impact impossible to calculate.

It is the same here in Haiti. With the timing of the election and the vote just two months away, one wonders what is in store for this tiny country with major karma in opposition to the lives and well-being of people, African people who just want to be left alone to live – really live.

Maafa Hurricane Katrina’s Fifth Anniversary

Speaking of Katrina and the fifth anniversary, Sunday, Aug. 29, also the birthday of the late Michael Jackson. Listen to Wanda’s Picks Special on Katrina Five Years Later: www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks. I interview Ms. Diane Evans, who with her grandson is about to be evicted from her home this month, September. She needs $1,900 to stay. Call her at (415) 786-4773 or email dianeevans504@gmail.com.

Maafa Awareness Month is next month. The 14th Annual Maafa Ritual is Sunday, Oct. 10, 2010, predawn. Visit www.maafasfbayarea.com for the specifics, also for related events and activities, or call (641) 715-3900, ext. 36800#.

Intensifying the pain in Haiti

There was high unemployment for Haitians, those educated with skills and the unskilled as well, prior to the earthquake. For a government official to tell a BAI representative that withholding food was a way to motivate lazy people looking for a handout to get to work is a gross misread of the problem. Since when is physical hunger a motivation when hunger is not anything new to Haitians who have had to deal with food insecurity for as long as President Aristide’s programs were effectively shut down?

For a government official to tell a BAI representative that withholding food was a way to motivate lazy people looking for a handout to get to work is a gross misread of the problem.

Although Wyclef Jean doesn’t have a clue on how to run a country, some feel that he is interesting Haitian youth in the electoral process for the first time because of his interest in running for president. It’s great he is proud of his Haitian heritage but it’s like a person who has been passing for white all of a sudden claiming his or her African ancestry for an associated perk.

I don’t see any evidence of relief for any of those people I met who spoke to me Saturday in the camps. One young mother said she was happy to see visitors but although many people come through, nothing follows.

Can you imagine being homeless in a displaced persons’ camp? Kind of hard, right? Definitely, but I met a grandmother who doesn’t have a bed and sometimes when she wakes up she can barely move. I knew exactly what she meant, having spent two days on the ground myself. I also met a woman who has several children who also needs a place for her children. Gisele, who was our tour guide, had to send her children away because it was too dangerous for them at the camp – their mother with a contract on her head.

A temporary camp dwelling, studier than most, is decorated with a drawing of Tupac. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Women wore their badges with whistles attached. I asked one woman to let me hear it. When blown a certain way, help comes – if it is within earshot.

Jude is also an artist – a painter – and when I met him he’d made some brew – green with ginger sediment at the bottom of a glass bottle the size of a fifth. He explained that there were different flavors which had certain properties when ingested. Chris and I walked through an artists’ village area, which reminded me of the Ashby Flea Market, just fewer items and variety. An artist wanted to sell me a painting on a canvas for just 500 goud, but I wasn’t feeling it. None of the art spoke to me; it was “I Love Haiti” key chains and bracelets and necklaces.

I saw a couple of elderly women begging and a clearly deranged man – he was so dirty his skin looked like it was covered in charcoal. If I wasn’t feeling so skittish, I would have given the women and the man an offering, but I didn’t have the money in my pocket ready to pull out. With the money belt under my top around my waist tucked into my waist band – my passport getting a steam bath daily as I heated up, my waist pack on the outside with less money inside a baggie, my tape recorder, FLIP inside, my glasses case hooked to the fanny pack, and then my camera around my neck. I even had my TJ (Trader Joe’s) bag full of kids’ supplies.

However, when I saw the older women and the man who looked like he needed a medical intervention – well, to reach the money would have been a major task. On Sunday at a fast food restaurant, I was able to give a mother standing in the rain with a babe in arms and one standing next to her a little something. Rea had picked up Pastor Wilbur Blanc, now living in Oregon, with a friend of his. Pastor Blanc hadn’t been to Haiti since the earthquake and he wanted a tour.

Comic books and leaflets explaining people’s rights were passed out at the protest march Aug. 12. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

When I arrived in Haiti a few days earlier, it was raining hard. This wet weather is new for this time of year, Rea said, just a sign of the natural environment’s instability since the earthquake. I’d been traveling for two days: left San Francisco Tuesday early (12:30 a.m.), an hour late, and subsequently missed my flight from Miami to Port au Prince (PAP).

The day after I arrived, the organization where I was staying, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), was preparing for two demonstrations: one to protest the eviction of Internally Displaced Persons and the other the third anniversary of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine’s disappearance. Visit http://ijdh.org/. Lovinsky founded the Fondasyon Trant Septanm (September 30th Foundation) that works with the victims of the coup d’états of 1991 and 2004. Visit http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_18_7/2_18_7.html.

The march commemorating human rights champion Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, missing for three years now, and the Internally Displaced Persons camp dwellers march come together at the capitol. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

So when things are as dismal as they seem, what can one do? Thanks to more than a few friends who sent money to me for this trip, I was able to leave money with one mother for her son’s university fees for a month and pay for a child’s visit to a private doctor to address a terrible skin rash that was eating him alive – I wired some more money to the child’s family once I got home for the medicine. I left money for another woman’s heart medication. She could only afford two of three prescriptions. I left my tent and sleeping bags for a displaced family.

My friend Kamau Amen Ra is going to sponsor a young woman’s college tuition for four years. Another friend, Makulla Godwin, is purchasing an air mattress for a grandmother who doesn’t have a bed and is finding it hard to sleep on the ground. I also had lots of baby clothes and men and women’s clothes and sturdy and attractive women’s and men’s shoes. My daughter bought children’s toys and coloring books, pipe cleaners, action figures, stickers and miniature cars and another friend sent crayons and felt pens, paper, water color paints, a calligraphy set and lots of paper. I couldn’t carry it all. I also had medical supplies which I had to leave here. As it was, my suitcases were too heavy and I had to take items out, make friends in the screening line and hope no one would enforce the carry-on limit (smile).

The wall around the new school, Sopudep II, is finished and classrooms framed with bamboo are under construction. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Hopefully the Haitian government will start looking at relocating people to permanent housing. I didn’t see any rebuilding going on anywhere. I wonder where all the Internally Displaced Persons came from and how much, family by family, would it cost to rebuild their homes so they could return to a normal life? Like Habitat for Humanity, if the government allowed multinationals to come in and rebuild, that is, gave land at cost, slowly we could help Haiti rebuild in an economically and environmentally sound way. This would provide jobs to the unemployed and skill development to youth, as we could encourage community development and leadership in the process after the land and the resources were identified.

If several American corporations adopted a region in Haiti hit by the earthquake for this task, it wouldn’t cost as much to actually make this happen – I don’t think. I learned of college professors in San Diego who are paying for afternoon and weekend English language classes for women victims of sexual assault at BAI. In Palo Alto, a class raised $10,000 to help rebuild Rea’s school. College students visited Rea recently this summer to help complete the wall around the new school, which she is getting ready for fall semester. They are working on the temporary bamboo walls now.

Linda sits with her newborn, Ricarlindo, and her sister-in-law as Rea Dol’s son, Padre, watches the baby. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

She just told me that she started making micro-loans to women and is planning to help more women start businesses. See http://www.sopudep.org. One woman during the tour talked about Haitian women as the backbone of their nation. I think women are the backbone of any nation – they are the providers and primary nurturers. Men provide protection and when all is working well additional support such as wages and balancing the energy in the home and community. However, throughout the world Black men are being targeted or allowing themselves to be duped and then disillusioned by golden calves which are just gold plated bovine that don’t even produce edible milk.

Rea introduced me to another neighbor, a young couple who’d just had their fourth child, Ricardo and Linda. The husband works for an organization that does youth leadership training throughout Haiti – and his wife is actually a Haitian American citizen, born here and raised in Haiti. It is a difficult tale, which ultimately boils down to America’s biased and racist immigration policies towards Haitian nationals, even those born here, even after the Jan. 12 earthquake. We took by some of the baby clothes I’d brought with me.

That we’re still here – alive and ALIVE … if not as well as we’d like … despite our ancestors’ unwilling transport to this region hundreds of years ago through legal slave trafficking, is encouraging. There is a lot of work and one problem isn’t more important or compelling than another. All the work is necessary whether we’re in Haiti or Dakar or East Oakland. It’s cyclical and similar. The enemy is the same and the fight is the same as well, just more urgent on some fronts than others, like Haiti and New Orleans and the Gulf Region. In the U.S. we have laws that are supposed to prevent such catastrophes as the British Petroleum spill, but how is that possible when people – plant and animal life – are placed second to monetary gain?

I went to a part of Haiti I hadn’t visited before, Kenscoff, located in the mountains near Port au Prince. Jean Yvon Kernizan is working in an afterschool program with young leaders and teachers to get rural development programs off the ground. The world’s interest in Haiti post-earthquake is waning and humanitarians like Kernizan are scrambling to continue programs. He and his wife have opened a restaurant to provide income for the afterschool programs they support.

Wanda enjoys the children of Pou Soléy Leve. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

At Pou Soléy Leve (For a Rising Sun), the kids have agriculture projects where they learn to grow food; they also have a strong art program. The children get a free hot meal daily, which for some is their only meal for the day. When I spoke to the children and asked them about career goals, most of them wanted to be doctors and nurses. I suggested they open a hospital in the community given their shared goals.

Yvon and I were there on a Friday, the Muslim holy day. It was also the first Juma during the Month of Ramadan. On our way down the mountain we run into a Muslim from Senegal on his way to Juma prayer. We give him a lift to the masjid. Yvon was in a rush, so I couldn’t go inside, but next time. I was happy to have seen Muslims the first week of the Blessed Month of Ramadan. Visit http://www.pousoleilleve.org/.

People do not make the world go round and this is why, if we aren’t careful, there will not be a world left to profit from. In the meantime, we can’t wait for the governments to get their stuff together; there is much that can happen under the radar in the midst of chaos, from sponsoring a college student in Haiti and the Dominican Republic – even the U.S. – to providing health care and food to helping get small businesses off the ground with micro lending programs.

Jean Yvon, center, the director, and teachers at Pou Soley Leve take a break. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Under the gaze of the great generals Dessalines and Pétion and Christophe sit their people in abject misery. The fountain which once gave respite to the weary traveler and thirsty bird lies fallow filled with scum bordered on all sides by tents and other temporary shelter so tightly packed one can barely walk between them if at all. The largest camp is in the foothills where I believe Rea said there are 30,000 displaced persons, maybe more.

One sees the blue tarps dotting the landscape from afar as we drove through Pétionville, a suburb of Port au Prince, separate from the city itself on the northern hills of the Massif de la Selle. It was named after Alexandre Sabès Pétion (1770–1818), the Haitian general and president later recognized as one of the country’s four founding fathers. The district is primarily a residential and tourist area. Pétionville is part of the city’s metropolitan area, one of the most affluent areas of the city, where the majority of tourist activity takes place, and one of the wealthiest parts of the country. Many diplomats, foreign businessmen, and a large number of wealthy citizens do business and reside within Pétionville, according to Wikipedia. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake.

I met the former mayor of Pétionvville, Sully Guerrier, in April. He is a civil engineer and, as I mentioned in other writings, is consulting with Rea on the new school site she is building to make sure it is seismically sound. Rea told me that he leased her the property where her first school site resides. The lease is up in 2011 at the former Duvalier regime torture site. Sopudep school’s presence there and its positive impact on the community has been a way to change the karma of the place from negative to positive. See http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/8_8_8/8_8_8.html.

A people’s band keeps spirits high at the Aug. 12 protest march. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Where is the glory of a nation, the first Black nation, the most celebrated and popularized in the Western Hemisphere – buried under debris? The Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake is not the first earthquake; it’s just the most tangible evidence of the major and minor tremors occurring in this country for the past 200 years – military dictatorships followed by more coup d’états and then U.S. occupation, followed by democratically elected presidents René Préval and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Aristide kidnapped, exiled and Préval’s banning of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party’s participation in the November 2010 presidential elections. The saga continues with classicism in the camps – one camp’s residents bumping or evicting the residents of another camp – the displaced displacing others who are lower on the food chain hierarchy. This is also what the Aug. 12, 2010, protest was about.

Paul, who was working with Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL), a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting soil resources, empowering communities and transforming wastes into resources in Haiti, came by Rea’s home the evening before I left (http://www.oursoil.org). It was good to see him. He is working for the Haitian government overseeing the water sanitation in some of the larger camps. He spoke of the various agencies in charge of water, waste management, food supplies and other areas of concern in the camps. It’s unfortunate that the government agencies are not cross referencing yet. The situation in the camps is dismal all around. It was good though to hear the government hasn’t completely dropped the ball.

I was just musing to myself as I fly home how when I go on vacation it’s to work. I return tired and overwhelmed and jump back into the fast paced day to day movement that is my life and can barely find time to complete all my tasks let alone add new tasks to the ones left to complete as the fall 2010 semester begins. But it is the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s birthday and I purposely chose his day to return.

Time doesn’t move any faster or slower … it moves the same.

Last morning in Haiti

On Garvey’s birthday, I wake up at 3 a.m. It’s 5 a.m. now and the barnyard choruses now compete with the early morning crickets and mosquitoes – roosters singing solos, while the dogs carry the bass lines, goats filling in the melody. I like this time of morning. I woke up at 5 a.m. yesterday. It’s time to get ready to go home.

Bay View Arts Editor Wanda Sabir can be reached at wsab1@aol.com. Visit her website at www.wandaspicks.com throughout the month for updates to Wanda’s Picks, her blog, photos and Wanda’s Picks Radio. Her shows are streamed live Wednesdays at 6-7:30 or 8 a.m. and Fridays at 8-10 a.m., can be heard by phone at (347) 237-4610 and are archived on the Afrikan Sistahs’ Media Network.

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Ani Phyo Raw Food on San Diego FOX news

Team Red, Black & Green — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:00:41 PDT

	Ani Phyo Raw Food on San Diego FOX news www.AniPhyo.com – My guest appearance on FOX in San Diego on Sept 3, 2010. I'm promoting Sambazon's Warrior Up campaign, which highlights activists giving back to our world and local communities. I show Raoul Martinez how easy it is to make Acai smoothies using almond butter, banana, and cacao powder. For more recipes, videos, info on Ani's Raw Food Essentials, visit www.AniPhyo.com For my favorite ingredients, superfoods, and kitchen tools, visit www.GoSuperLife.com	From: aniphyo Views: 95 6 ratings
	Time: 05:43	More in Howto & Style

Why Medication Can Be Dangerous to Your Health

Team Red, Black & Green — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:00:17 PDT

Why Medication Can Be Dangerous to Your Health

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said it simply: “…there is no healing in drugs…” The Saviour threw away the medications of the Believers. He threw it away for them, because they did not have the sense to do it for themselves. Where the idea came from that there is some cure for life’s problems in a chemical pill, the devil only knows. Why you still believe that, only you know. Before you pop that next pill, whatever it may be, read this article.

Why Medication Can Be Dangerous to Your Health

Dr. Leo Galland

That about three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the U.S. because of adverse drug reactions, according to the CDC? (2)

That the number of medication-related deaths in the U.S. is estimated at over 200,000 a year, making medications the third or fourth leading cause of death in this country? (3)

That even common pain relievers called NSAIDs, examples of which include Advil, Motrin, Aleve and aspirin, account for an estimated 7,600 deaths and 76,000 hospitalizations in the U. S. every year? (4)

It sounds like the cure could be worse than the disease in far too many cases.

Thankfully, there is an option, an innovative approach to healing that seeks to restore balance and healthy function, instead of simply treating symptoms with drugs and suffering the side effects. I call it integrated medicine, and it is a powerful and effective way to address chronic illness… more on that in a moment.

Inhibiting Vital Functions

But first, let me explain in brief why the everyday medications Americans rely upon can be hazardous to your health.

The reason is simple and based upon the basic nature of modern drug therapy.

Most drugs used today are intended to act like biochemical strait jackets. They suppress cellular functions that appear to be overactive.

You can see this by looking at the names given to categories or classes of drugs. Almost all include “blocker,” “inhibitor,” or “anti-” in the description: beta-blockers, calcium blockers, ACE inhibitors, proton pump inhibitors, anti-histamines and anti-inflammatory drugs. These drugs are developed to treat disease by interfering with the biochemical processes involved in illness.

But they also interfere with the natural and healthy functions of the body.

It’s like throwing a wrench into a sophisticated machine in an effort to fix it.

Furthermore, the biochemical processes they inhibit are rarely the cause of the illness. They are just part of the many changes in the body that accompany disease. Outside the setting of disease these biochemical processes all play important roles in normal cellular function.

It’s no wonder that many of these drugs have side effects that are a direct extension of their therapeutic actions. (5) They are not restoring normal cellular function; they are merely inhibiting cellular hyperactivity.

Pitfalls of Pain Relief

NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) are an excellent example and include common over the counter drugs such as aspirin (Bayer, Bufferin and Excedrin), ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin and Nuprin), and naproxen (Aleve). They relieve pain and inflammation by blocking an enzyme called cyclo-oxygenase (COX).

Although COX activity contributes to pain and inflammation, this enzyme also performs important functions such as:

protecting the stomach from the corrosive effects of its own acid,

regulating circulation of blood to the kidneys,

modulating the activity of the immune system.

It naturally follows that NSAID use can have severe side effects, which are a direct result of COX enzyme inhibition. The side effects of chronic NSAID use have been well documented in the scientific literature, for example in the American Medical Association’s journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

Side effects of chronic NSAID use include: stomach ulcers, (6)intestinal bleeding, (7)kidney failure, (8)high blood pressure, (9)aggravation of immune system disorders like asthma, (10) psoriasis, (11) and colitis. (12)

So if you take an NSAID, let’s say for a headache, you could just be trading one problem for another.

The search for a safer type of NSAID led to the development of drugs called selective COX inhibitors. As their name suggests, they’re selective in their effect, designed to inhibit only the so-called “bad” COX enzyme, without inhibiting the so-called “good” COX enzyme.

This approach created one of the most highly anticipated drug releases in the history of medicine: Vioxx.

Vioxx was a disaster; it increased the death rate from heart attacks and strokes and was withdrawn from the market.

What the scientists behind Vioxx failed to recognize is that all forms of the COX enzyme are important for health. (13)

So instead of giving us a safer drug therapy, it was like tossing a different type of wrench into the machine.

The idea that there are “bad” enzymes and “good” enzymes or “bad” hormones and “good” hormones is a total misrepresentation of how the body works.

But the pharmacology underlying conventional medical treatments is based upon that misrepresentation.

Working in Harmony with the Body is the Solution

Fortunately there is another way of looking at health and healthcare that addresses the underlying causes of illness: integrated medicine.

The great value of integrated medicine is that it provides alternative strategies for healing, based upon enhancing normal physiological balance instead of merely attempting to suppress the hyperactive biochemistry involved in disease.

A powerful strategy in integrated medicine is the therapeutic use of nutrition. Nutritional therapy, when properly used, can achieve results that drugs cannot, because nutrients are essential components of the cellular information network. An excellent example is omega-3 fatty acids.

Superimmunity for Kids and, Power Healing, Use the New Integrated Medicine to Cure Yourself.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish, flax seed, walnuts, sea vegetables and leafy greens. The most potent omega-3’s, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) are used by the cells of your body to make powerful chemicals that help to maintain normal cell function under conditions of stress. (14) The so-called “bad” COX enzyme, in fact, converts DHA to substances called resolvins and neuroprotectins, which play a vital role in controlling inflammation (15) and helping brain cells survive injury. (16) This is one reason the inhibition of any of the COX enzymes can be bad for your health.

A Natural Approach to Reducing Inflammation

Knowledge of the benefits of omega-3 fats provides an alternative strategy for controlling inflammation that is both natural and potent. The basic idea is to increase your body’s levels of DHA, the omega-3 fatty acid your body uses to make these beneficial chemicals.

Remarkable results in reducing inflammation can be accomplished by dietary changes and nutritional supplementation. Increase consumption of foods that contain omega-3 fats (mentioned above) and decrease consumption of foods that interfere with the anti-inflammatory effects of omega-3 fats, such meat, and oils, spreads and dressings made from corn, sunflower, soybean, safflower or cottonseed oil, substituting olive oil and flax oil instead. This simple approach had allowed people in research studies with severe rheumatoid arthritis to decrease their use of anti-inflammatory drugs. (17,18) For more information about fighting inflammation with nutrition, and free recipes, visit my website fatresistancediet.com

A vast amount of scientific research has been published in prestigious medical journals on the therapeutic use of nutrition. Now it is time to put all of that essential knowledge to work.

Making nutrition a cornerstone of everyone’s healthcare has been my longstanding goal and is the first step in real healthcare reform. Moving from a system based on treating symptoms to a system for achieving optimal health will enable healthcare to achieve its true potential.

The solution is integrated medicine–the future of healthcare, today.

Originially posted on Life Abundantly

Power & Poverty: Dr. King responds to Glenn Beck

amun ra — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:29:00 PDT

Power & Poverty: Dr. King responds to Glenn Beck

I was waiting for this.

I was in New Orleans covering the 5th anniversary of Katrina. On August 28, before hitting the streets, I sat in my hotel watching clips of the two marches in Washington led by Rev. Al Sharpton and Glenn Beck.

I shook my head at both marches.

I think Beck successfully pulled off his publicity stunt and may have finally positioned himself to be Sarah Palin’s running mate in 2012. What do you think? Hey, if McCain took an outrageous chance on her, wouldn’t it be even more entertaining with Palin and Beck on the ticket? Just a thought. It’s the American way.

As for the march hosted by Sharpton, many young people I talked to say they didn’t even feel like that march represented the spirit of Dr. King. So they felt it was a competition which took away from the true focus. What do you think? I believe George Curry made some excellent points in his “Open Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.“

Now, Pittsburgh Hip Hop artists Jasiri X weighs in with his latest video “Dr. King’s Nightmare.”

In an email he says “this was part of a song Me and Paradise the Arkitech had intended to do as coverage of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, as well as Al Sharpton’s “Reclaim the Dream” rally. The plan was to spit a rhyme from both perspectives then end with a verse from Dr. King himself. We eventually decided to scrap the idea and concentrate on our next video. However, a article by Legendary Hip-Hop Journalist Davey D inspired me to record my Dr. King verse to Kayne’s Power and create a video around it.”

Written from the perspective of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jasiri X responds to Glenn Beck’s rally and the growing racial and economic divide in America. From the police’s brutal beating of Jordan Miles in Pittsburgh and murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, the increasing poverty and joblessness, to the ever expanding racial division lead by the rhetoric of those like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin…Dr. King’s dream has turned into a nightmare.

Watch below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxOP-s5QI8c

If you don’t think there is still a need to fight poverty in this country, please check out the videos emailed to me by Brother Kaazim Muhammad of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. These videos were recently posted by Antoinette Harrell about the poverty conditions in Palmer Crossing, Mississippi….sad.

(You’re welcome to follow Brother Jesse Muhammad further on Twitter or become a friend on Facebook)

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Rwanda: How to circumvent twin evils of majority dominance and minority autocracy

amun ra — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:19:39 PDT

Rwanda: How to circumvent twin evils of majority dominance and minority autocracy

by Didas Gasana

Didas Gasana

One unique element in Rwanda that has for centuries driven and still drives the political agenda in the tiny central African nation is ethnic bi-polarity. This agenda has all the time led to a cycle of repression and brutal violence.

Before the recently leaked damning U.N. report, many believed the apex of this self-destruction was the 1994 genocide, but fresh investigations indicate the Rwanda Patriotic Front-led government also committed genocide against the Hutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At the inception of the Rwanda Patriotic Front far back in 1987 and the beginning of the Rwanda Patriotic Army’s “liberation” war, one of the core objectives of the RPF was to bring national unity and reconciliation to an ethnically fragmented nation.

Today, President Kagame publicly says Rwandans have reconciled, but he consciously knows the reality is the opposite.

Kagame knows there is such a deep seated acrimony among the Hutu majority that he can’t allow fully fledged democracy.

Kagame shares this thinking with some of his fellow Tutsis. This is the dilemma Rwanda’s democratization process faces, although it is publicly suppressed in favor of the reconciliation rhetoric.

In “Rwanda government critics in fear as election approaches” (The Guardian of London, Aug. 6, 2010), Xan Rice asks one Western diplomat based in Kigali if Kagame can trust the voters not to vote along ethnic lines. “I don’t think he can” was his reply.

This was the subject of my recent conversation with a U.S.-based human rights researcher who happened to sympathize with Kagame and his fellow Tutsi group. And the researcher is not alone in this thinking. Many believe the Tutsi have an existential threat – a fear of the unknown – and sympathize with them.

Yet this simple deduction manifests acute intellectual poverty. First, it ignores why this fear is there in the first instance. Second, it doesn’t provide a way forward. Third, this sympathy only provides Kagame with moral ammunition to hold on to power, at the sacrifice of the tenets of democracy.

To understand ethnic politics and how they drive the political agenda in Rwanda, one needs to understand that the nation’s history has been characterized by one ethnic group dominating the other, in alternation.

This is why Kagame’s most prominent PR point while he was waging the war was to bring an end to this cycle of ethnic dominance, agitating for national unity and reconciliation.

It is here that those who hold this misguided assessment forget Kagame’s responsibility in entrenching this ethnic bi-polarity.

During the war and after Kagame captured power, it is no longer a secret that he killed quite a good number of Hutus – both defenseless civilians and political opponents. Now, how he massacred Hutus in DRC has also been exposed.

How he has excluded the Hutus in administration by appointing Hutus in positions of power, but without executive power, is a glaring reality.

It doesn’t need a political scientist to realize how Kagame has ridden on the fallacy of collective guilt and vague genocide laws to silence and imprison the Hutus.

By this, Kagame has himself created resentment within the Hutu group. By prosecuting the Hutus for genocide when none of his forces has been seriously prosecuted for war crimes against the Hutus, Kagame is only fueling this ethnic hatred.

The only way to avoid this fear of majority dominance, and a probable cycle of violence, would have been for Kagame to create conditions favoring genuine reconciliation – tenets that embody the rule of law. These include, inter alia, justice for all, inclusive politics, respect for human rights, separation of powers, strong institutions, meritocracy and, later, surrendering power to the people to decide how they wish to be governed.

By prosecuting the Hutus for genocide when none of his forces has been seriously prosecuted for war crimes against the Hutus, Kagame is only fueling this ethnic hatred.

With this foundation, there is no reason his group would be worried about having a Hutu president after 16 years. Most importantly, there is no reason why the majority he fears would not vote for him or any other Tutsi president because fears of minority rule harbored by the majority would also be quashed.

However, unnoticed by many, what we have in Rwanda now is not minority autocracy but rather Kagame’s authoritarianism that has killed and repressed both Tutsis and Hutus alike. But the solution to this remains the same.

Kagame’s authoritarianism has killed and repressed both Tutsis and Hutus alike.

Most dangerously, Kagame’s authoritarianism not only cannot be sustainable but will also erode with greater repercussions. The only hope is that he has seven years to change the course of history. Unfortunately, there is no sign that he will. Over to you, Mr. President

Didas Gasana is the Deputy Managing Editor of The Newsline, where this commentary first appeared. He can be reached by email at didas@newslineea.com or by cell phone at (+250) 788305549.

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Dick Gregory – Code Red: Crisis In AmeriKKKa, What CNN Won’t Tell You – Sept 18th

Reality Speaks — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:17:15 PDT

To purchase tickets CLICK HERE.

Where has the love of San Francisco gone?

amun ra — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:07:46 PDT

Where has the love of San Francisco gone?

by Nyese Joshua, candidate for San Francisco District 10 Supervisor

Nyese Joshua, your No. 1 Supervisor Candidate for District 10

Thank you to everyone who came out Saturday and joined the kickoff of this historic campaign. This campaign is historic because it is genuinely for the people, from the people and it goes to the people. The endorsements that will support this campaign will be the voters who go to the polls and turn in their ballots marking Nyese (Knee-see) Joshua their No. 1 choice for Supervisor in District 10.

To make your voice heard in this monumental moment for District 10, your name and current address must be on the voter rolls. Registering to vote and updating your registration if your address or name has changed is critical.

This campaign is historic because the people want something dramatically different from past years, but the belief that that can actually happen is almost decimated in their hearts. We are here to say if District 10 stands up for itself in this pivotal time, together we can demand health, human rights, economic opportunity, respect for families and so much more.

The question for the community living around the Hunters Point Shipyard is really becoming who does not have asthma, rather than who does? Knocking on doors in this community is heartwarming and heart wrenching.

We love this community but we will have to work to restore it to all its splendid capacity. And that does not happen with wholesale removal of the current population. I drove downtown to meet with James Keys, leading candidate in District 6, on Sixth Street and I was astonished at what looks to be a poverty pipeline.

With hope-filled hearts, people from around District 10 flocked to the kickoff on Saturday, Aug. 28, of Nyese Joshua’s campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Nyese has earned the trust of the people for her years of leadership in the struggle for environmental justice in Bayview Hunters Point. When she filed for office after months of urging, she immediately shot to the top of the long list of contenders as the People’s Candidate. After the rally, dozens went door-knocking to talk to their neighbors about the brighter future we can look forward to with Nyese on the Board of Supervisors. Gathering around Nyese with heartfelt support are, in back from left, Ron Stutz, mesha Monge-Irizarry, Lynne Brown and Vivian Donahue; in front, Nyese Joshua, the People’s Candidate, and Shardae Bard with her little cousin.

With this campaign we have to fight to plug the mass leak of people systemically pressed into nearly abject poverty. It is like watching the death of the spirit of a city that the world depends upon to be the one place where right is right and fair is fair.

So what’s really going on, San Francisco? Where has the love of San Francisco gone? It is looking more and more like the policies of our city are driving its populace, its neighborhoods and its political choices to a strange place.

With this campaign we have to fight to plug the mass leak of people systemically pressed into nearly abject poverty. It is like watching the death of the spirit of a city that the world depends upon to be the one place where right is right and fair is fair.

This campaign aims to root out the problems of neglect and to press for what could work to revive the spirit of District 10 and San Francisco. My expectations for San Francisco’s capacity to bring back the heart are high and hopeful. I am in this fight because I believe that the unabated energy that I bring to the table will move the mountains that this historic campaign must face.

If you are interested in organizing campaign home conversations with your friends and family, if you would like to request a window poster and/or be direct emailed for events, please email me at nyesej@gmail.com. Visit my campaign website, www.NoMorePoliticsAsUsual.org. And become a friend on Facebook: Nyese Joshua.

I am grateful for your support, concerns and the exchange of positive ideas. Together we can bring back the love to San Francisco for all its people.

Nyese Joshua, your No. 1 Supervisor Candidate for District 10

Register to vote

To vote on Nov. 2, you must be registered by Oct. 18. For help with registering or updating your voter registration, call the San Francisco Elections Department at (415) 554-4411 or call the Bay View at (415) 671-0789. To confirm that you are registered to vote, call Elections at (415) 554-4411 or go online to http://www.sfelections.org/VoterRegStatus/index.html.

In order to qualify as a registered voter in San Francisco:

• You must be a citizen of the United States

• You must be a resident of San Francisco

• You must be at least 18 years of age or older on or before the next election

• You must not have been judged by a court to be mentally incompetent to register and vote

• You must not be in prison or on parole for the conviction of a felony; however, prisoners in county jail who have not been convicted of a felony and are otherwise eligible may vote and should register. Your vote is needed.

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Born too small … Born too soon

amun ra — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:29:06 PDT

Born too small … Born too soon

by Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, M.D.

“We are only now beginning to understand the lifelong impact that being born too small and too early has on the individuals and their families.” – William Callaghan, M.D., MPH, Acting Chief, Maternal and Infant Health, Centers for Disease Control

Describing this photo of her family, Dr. Sumchai says: “I was 5 years old. We were living in Potrero Hill housing projects at 27 Dakota St.: George Donald Porter, Mildred Porter, Terry Porter and Roger Porter is the baby.”

I was a 5-pound baby with a perfectly round, perfectly bald head at birth, according to my cousin Ellen Shipp. Like many small for gestational age (SGA) and premature infants, my tiny head was not deformed when I passed through the birth canal of my mother, Mildred Porter. I was lucky. I was a healthy baby – but always ended up being one of the smallest pupils in a given classroom … all the way through medical school!

Many babies born too small and too soon are at higher risk for sepsis, pneumonia, hypoglycemia, temperature instability, feeding difficulties, brain damage, seizures and apnea compared to babies born full term.

According to Dr. William Callaghan, the senior scientist of the Centers for Disease Control’s Maternal and Infant Health Branch, in testimony before the congressional subcommittee on health, “The question of why African American mothers are more likely to have a preterm birth, even when socioeconomic and other factors are controlled for, is one of the ‘Holy Grails’ of perinatal medicine.” Many scientists are looking at the role caesarian sections and early induction of labor is having on the rising incidence of preterm births in our countries.

Some of you have heard horror stories about women whose labor was induced because it was in some way convenient for family or health care providers for her to give birth more quickly. The health of the mother and the health of the baby are the only driving considerations in the decision to induce an early labor and delivery.

By now most of you know that African American women have the highest infant mortality rates in Bayview Hunters Point, a statistic that is also borne out in national studies. Recent evidence suggests that infant mortality in Black women is linked to a low incidence of breast feeding. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding as the best nutritional option for all babies.

The preterm birth rate in the U.S. jumped 20 percent between 1990 and 2006. A July 2010 article in Contemporary Pediatrics reports the 2006 Federal Preemies Act authorized an expansion of federal work to prevent preterm birth. It is up for reauthorization next year. Preemies and SGA infants cost about $26 billion to care for in 2005.

Catherine Spong, M.D., of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development testified before a recent congressional hearing before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to promote legislation on preterm birth and infant death. An analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics found that in 2005, 37 percent of all infant deaths can be attributed to preterm risk factors. Preterm infants are at higher risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and have higher rates of neurological and developmental disabilities in childhood.

The rising tide of the AIDS epidemic among African American women has changed the face of child health in the U.S. Twenty years ago pediatric doctors were skilled in caring for children with bacterial infections that are now preventable in the developing world by vaccines. Today, antiretroviral therapy given to HIV infected women during pregnancy and to their infected newborns can help to eliminate mother to child transmission of an infection that in the 1980’s killed most congenitally infected babies by the time they reached age 5. An infection that continues to kill HIV infected children in the developing nations of the world.

The most significant health care disparity we face in the United States and locally in San Francisco’s southeast sector remains the unforgivable rates of infant death seen in the African American community. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, health care providers who reduce racial and ethnic health disparities in patients can receive incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful interventions that reduce those disparities.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, health care providers who reduce racial and ethnic health disparities, such as the high rates of infant death in Bayview Hunters Point, can receive incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful interventions that reduce those disparities.

The first step involves the collection of data on race, ethnicity and language using an electronic health record system. Using the electronic health record to evaluate and monitor specific disparities can lead to eliminating differences in health care access and outcomes according to the Health Information Technology Policy Committee.

Bay View Health and Environmental Science Editor Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai can be reached at (415) 835-4763 or asumchai@sfbayview.com.

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Tofu Nacho Cheese Dip

Team Red, Black & Green — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:00:38 PDT

Add to: Recipe Box | Grocery List | Meal Planner

Recipe submitted by jenibenni, 09/02/10

Tofu Nacho Cheese Dip

Ingredients (use vegan versions):

1 block extra firm tofu, drained
Small handful canned jalapenos
2 tablespoons juice from canned jalapenos
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
4 tablespoons salsa (Emerald Valley is the best)
garlic powder to taste
garlic salt to taste (or sea salt)
1/4 cup water

Directions:

Drain as much water out of the tofu as possible, although you don't have to squeeze or press it dry. Combine all ingredients in blender except water. Blend until smooth, add water as needed. The amount of water will vary, some people like it runny, others like it thick. This recipe is …

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