http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/6/civil_rights_veteran_chokwe_lumumba_elected
Category: Uncategorized
HOMELESS
By Alan Bean
Homeless, homeless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake
These old Paul Simon lyrics have been running like a soundtrack through the back of my mind for the past few days. My wife and I are homeless. We moved out of our old home late Friday night and can’t occupy our new place until Tuesday afternoon. Don’t ask how this happened. It’s a long story.
A technical and temporary kind of homelessness, to be sure. Not at all like the real homelessness some of my friends are forced to live with. We are staying in a motel that serves a hot breakfast. The Quality Inn is surround by The Highlands, a comically upscale shopping area where the muzak runs day and night and you can find an old-main-street shop hawking every imaginable kind of food and supplying every sort of consumer item.
We have two cars at our disposal, and plenty of credit cards.
We have wonderful friends who have helped with our mad dash midnight move and invited us to share fine meals in their gracious homes.
I have my father’s old classical guitar, so my musical addiction has been regularly sated.
We have H. Stephen Shoemaker’s wonderful God Stories to feed our hungry souls.
All our worldly belongings have been stuffed into a 17-foot U-Haul, a 26-foot Penske, and the garage and shed of our old home. Tomorrow, a team of movers will help us transfer this decadent haul into a lovely new home with four bedrooms, granite counter tops, and an over-the-top master bathroom.
Our real estate agent is even springing for the motel room, and most of our out-of-pocket expenses are covered during our brief time of exile.
So why do I feel so lost? Why has the mere fact that I have no home to go left me dazed and disoriented? (more…)
Boston is about us
By Alan Bean
When I recovered from the initial shock and horror of the Boston Marathon bombing, I automatically switched into advocacy mode. “Please, God,” I thought, “don’t let the perpetrators turn out to be foreigners or immigrants.”
I am not proud of this reaction, but when you care about issues like immigration reform, every news event is filtered through a partisan lens. How will this affect my cause? Is it a disaster? An opportunity? A bit of both?
The catastrophe in Boston isn’t primarily about immigration or terrorism or public safety; it’s about the hundreds of people who still can’t believe what this senseless act did to the people they love. We naturally identify with these people because we too are vulnerable to the power of chaos.
But we cannot identify with the two young men who casually deposited death-filled backpacks that would change countless lives forever. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? How could they they do it? Did they think they were furthering some noble cause when they detonated their simple-but-deadly contraptions; or did they derive a sick species of pleasure from the pain and sorrow of innocent people? (more…)
Abbott in Waco: How Low Can You Go?
By Alan Bean
Is Greg Abbott the Attorney General of Texas or is he a flak for the National Rifle Association and the GOP? He can’t be both.
If Abbott is Texas Attorney General (and in the picture to the left, he certainly looks the part) he represents and speaks for all Texans, not just those who voted for him. His public rhetoric should reflect that fact.
But on Monday night, Abbott told a partisan crowd in Waco that a group of Democrats working to turn Texas blue is “far more dangerous” than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
It’s okay for the crowd to be partisan; but Abbott came to town as a representative of the state of Texas. In theory, at least, he should be speaking for all Texans and to all Texans (unless an election in the offing). Associating the state democrats with the crackpot leader of a failed state suggests that Texans are either Republicans or they’re the enemies of all that is good and decent. This comes perilously close to denouncing the democratic system, in particular, and political pluralism in general. (more…)
Maggie and Martin
By Alan Bean
In one of those odd quirks of history, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shuffled off this mortal coil just as we were remembering the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and his great “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” delivered a half-century ago in April of 1963.
I wonder what King and Thatcher would have had to say to one another had history arranged such a meeting. I suspect they would have liked and, perhaps grudgingly respected one another, but have two people ever looked at the world through such different lenses?
Bleeding hearts like me remember Thatcher for her “families and society” comment. Let’s be fair and consider her words in full context: (more…)
Is the war on drugs a make-work project?
By Alan Bean
Ripple effects from the sequester continue to proliferate. Now it is local and regional narcotics task forces that are feeling the pinch because federal Byrne Grant funding has been ever-so-slightly reduced. The article below appeared in Stateline, a daily news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts and it is essentially a scare-piece designed to pump up concern about the sequester. But if you check out the chart a few paragraphs down the page, you will notice that Byrne Grant funding took a big hit in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis and then rebounded heroically in 2009 thanks to President Obama’s stimulus spending. That funding has retreated a bit from these record levels is hardly surprising, sequester or no sequester.
Maggie Clark’s article is significant for what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that the war on drugs is primarily a federal make-work project for hard up counties and municipalities. But it is. The Obama administration didn’t pump millions of fresh Byrne Grant money into the drug war to get drugs off the street; it was all about saving jobs and under-girding fragile rural economies that have little legitimate job-creation potential.
I have no problem with job-creation programs since I don’t think the for-profit economy, by itself, can prevent the kind of mass unemployment we have witnessed in recent years. But sending the big bucks to narcotics task forces, for-profit prisons and incredibly wasteful projects like Operation Streamline is a radically inefficient and fundamentally dishonest job-creation strategy. Why not sponsor violence reduction programs in poor communities while hiring potential gang-bangers to beautify their own neighborhoods; why not shore up a crumbling infrastructure that has become a national embarrassment? Make-work programs can make the world a better place; but the war on drugs and the booming border security industry just recycle misery. Sure, they provide some jobs and a few fat cats get fatter; but our culture is debased in the process.
I was glad to see that Clark mentions the Tulia fiasco, even if she did get most of her facts slightly askew. Tulia explains why George W. Bush (governor of Texas at the time) didn’t like the Byrne Grant program and worked hard to scale it back. Tulia embarrassed Texas and led to the virtual disappearance, at least in the Lone Star State of the kind of unaccountable and counterproductive narcotics task forces that depend on the largess of the DOJ. Drug abuse is a big problem in every sector of American life, but the drug war is fought almost exclusively in poor, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods. The real sickness is rampant poverty and unemployment, and so long as we focus exclusively on a symptom of that disease (drug abuse and drug dealing) we are tilting at windmills. (more…)
Football stadium won’t be named after for-profit prison company
By Alan Bean
It was just a matter of time before this headline appeared. First the student of Florida Atlantic University protested naming their school’s football stadium after GEO Group (the for-profit prison company) and then the tenured faculty, at the close of a contentious meeting, voted to protest the plan. Seeing the writing on the wall, GEO executives decided to withdraw their $5 million gift and let the dream die.
I still say that the student who coined the term “Owlcatraz” (in honor of the FAU fighting Owls) drove home the final coffin nail. But as this HuffPost article shows, GEO’s real problem was its well-documented record of prisoner abuse. Too many courts had tossed out too many damning quotes for reporters to leave alone. We can thank the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Mississippi ACLU for exposing the abuse at the Walnut Grove prison. (more…)
Where are the grocery stores in black neighborhoods?
Posted by Pierre Berastain
A good article on the racial politics of grocery stores. Not mentioned in the article, though still relevant, is the fact that one finds alcohol more readily available in poor black neighborhoods. Discrimination, favoritism, and privilege bleed into too often imperceptible spheres of people’s lives.
Commentary: Where Are the Grocery Stores in Black Neighborhoods?
By Kellee Terrell
When we talk about obesity in America, especially in low income, Black and Latino areas, it’s impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging the fact that mounds of studies have shown us that there is a serious lack of access to healthy whole foods, fruits, vegetables and lean meats. (more…)
ABP covers the trial of Jesus in Austin
By Alan Bean
The Associated Baptist Press (ABP) has an in-depth story on tonight’s mock trial of Jesus at First Baptist Church, Austin.
Friends of Justice 