Rosa Parks. Rest in Peace

Rosa Parks, Civil Rights Pioneer, Dies at 92
By Elaine Woo
Times Staff Writer

8:09 PM PDT, October 24, 2005

Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose simple act of defiance on a segregated Montgomery bus in 1955 stirred the nonviolent protests of the modern civil rights movement and catapulted an unknown minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to international prominence, died Monday of natural causes at her home in Detroit. She was 92.

Often called the mother of the movement that led to the dismantling of institutionalized segregation in the South, Parks became a symbol of human dignity when she was jailed for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white person when she was riding home from work on the evening of Dec. 1, 1955.

Her arrest for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws galvanized Montgomery's blacks, who boycotted the city's buses for 381 days until the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.

Memorialized in poetry, dance and song, Parks was, by most accounts, both simpler and more complex than the mythology that grew around her.

She was born Feb. 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Ala., to Leona Edwards, a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter and builder. Her parents split up when she was 5, causing her mother to move Rosa and her younger brother Sylvester to live with family in Pine Level, a small town near Montgomery.

Some of her early memories were of white people who treated blacks kindly, particularly a Yankee soldier who said she was cute and "treated me like I was just another little girl, not a little black girl," Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, " Rosa Parks: My Story".

But she also remembered an old black man named Gus Vaughn who refused to work for whites. And she remembered how her grandfather kept a gun by his side to protect the family against raids by the Ku Klux Klan.

The earliest hint of the fortitude that would bolt her to a bus seat years later may have come when she 10. She had encountered on the road near home a white boy named Franklin, who uttered some offensive words and threatened to hit her. Young Rosa picked up a brick and dared him to strike. Franklin, she recalled, "thought better of the idea and went away."

Her grandmother was horrified by Rosa's behavior. You'll be lynched before you turn 20 if you keep standing up to whites, she scolded.

Parks once speculated that the urge to stand up to oppressors may have come from protecting her little brother from bullies. Whatever the cause, "I do know," she wrote, "that I had a very strong sense of what was fair."

Her mother was her only teacher until she was 11, when she was sent to the Montgomery Industrial School. Founded and staffed by whites to educate black children, the school was burned down twice by arsonists and the faculty was ostracized by the white community.

Parks took academic classes there, as well as some vocational training. But she said the most important lesson she learned "was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black."

She went to high school at a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but was forced to drop out to care for her grandmother and later for her mother. She went back to school for her degree in 1933, after she married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber.

Raymond Parks was also an activist in the local NAACP and helped raise money to defend the nine black men accused in the Scottsboro rape case, one of the most sensational racial trials of the Depression era. He was the first man aside from her grandfather with whom Parks could discuss racial conditions, and it impressed her that he was not afraid of whites.

After her marriage, Parks held a succession of jobs, from domestic worker to hospital aide. To get to work, she rode the bus, as the majority of blacks did. But black bus passengers had to follow certain rules. The first 10 seats were reserved for whites, even if no whites got on the bus. Blacks had to sit in the back rows or, if those were filled, stand up. If the white section filled up, some drivers ordered blacks to give up their seats.

The rules often varied according to the bus driver. Some drivers made black passengers board through the front door to pay their fare, then reenter through the back door to find a seat. If they were unlucky, the bus would take off before they had a chance to get back on.

One day in 1943, Parks boarded a bus to register to vote. But the back of the bus was standing room only, even on the back steps. Instead of stepping off to go to the back door after paying her fare in front, Parks just walked down the aisle.

The driver, James Blake, demanded that she disembark and reenter through the back door. Parks got off, but instead of reboarding she waited for the next bus. She swore to herself never to ride with that driver again.

But on a winter evening 12 years later, after a long day at work, Parks got on a bus to go home, forgetting to check who was behind the wheel.

She was by then an active member of the NAACP and a recent graduate of Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training ground for civil rights workers where whites served her meals and studied side by side with her as herequal.

When she got off work on that December evening. she was preoccupied with final arrangements for an upcoming NAACP workshop. She paid her fare before she noticed that the driver was Blake.

She saw an empty seat in the middle of the bus--"no man's land"-- and took it. At the next stop, the white section filled up and one white passenger was left standing. Blake turned around and said to Parks and the other three blacks in the front rows of the black section, "Let me have those front seats."

They all balked, at first. Then, after Blake ordered them up again, three complied. Parks refused to budge.

The only words she spoke were "No" when he asked her if she was going to stand up, and "You may do that" when he said he would have her arrested. The police were summoned, and she was taken away in a squad car.

She was not the first black to be arrested for defying the segregation rules; at least two other women that year had been jailed for the same offense. The NAACP wanted to challenge the law and had been on the lookout for someone who would make a good test case, but both of the first two women had something unsavory in their backgrounds which made them unsuitable plaintiffs.

Parks, however, was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. She was, as Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch noted in "Parting the Waters," an account of the early days of the civil rights movement, a "tireless worker and churchgoer, of working-class station and middle-class demeanor."

She was, in other words, the ideal plaintiff.

Several hours after her arrest she was bailed out of jail by NAACP activist E.D. Nixon, civil rights lawyer Clifford Durr and his activist-wife Virginia. That night they all gathered at Parks' home. Nixon asked if she would be willing to be the plaintiff in a test case against the bus segregation law. Although her husband feared that lending her name to the cause would get her killed, she said yes.

She had plenty of opportunity for forethought, but Parks said she never intended to get arrested.

Nor did she refuse to give up her seat because she was tired, as many in her legion of admirers told the story. She was not any more weary that day than usual.

"No," she said, "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." The little girl of 10 who refused to take guff from a white boy had grown into a 42-year-old woman who couldn't see why she should stand up so a white person could sit down. Years later, that December day when Parks said no would be remembered by "Soul on Ice" author Eldridge Cleaver as the moment when "a gear in the machinery shifted," changing race relations in America.

On Dec. 5, she was found guilty of violating the state segregation law and was fined $10 plus a $4 court fee, which Nixon paid. Civil rights activists and a group of black women laid plans to launch a bus boycott.

King, the 26-year-old minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and a newcomer to Montgomery, was chosen to run the boycott. He and the other black leaders were full of trepidation about the success of the planned action. But for blacks it was a hopeful time: Just the year before, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned school segregation in Brown vs. the Board of Education.

The Montgomery boycott succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its planners: What was planned as a one-day action stretched to a year and two weeks.

The boycott nearly bankrupted Montgomery's public transit system, which depended on black riders for as much as two-thirds of its revenues. It also sorely tested the ingenuity and tenacity of black Montgomery residents, few of whom owned cars. Those who did own them were pressed into service to power an elaborate, ad-hoc system of carpooling and private cabs; Parks, who had lost her seamstress job, served as a dispatcher.

King launched the boycott with a speech at a mass meeting held at the Holt Street Baptist Church on the night of Parks' conviction. Giving his first political address, he roused the thousands of Montgomery blacks who packed the church and jammed streets for blocks around it with fiery eloquence:

"...there comes a time," he intoned in the sonorous voice that soon would stir millions, "when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression....We are here," he said, "we are here because we are tired now...."

Over the next year, boycotters endured firebombings, hate calls, police harassment and trials for conspiracy. They convened weekly in churches for mass meetings where old hymns were turned into freedom songs. Parks received death threats. Although an icon in the budding civil rights movement, she became a notorious public enemy in the eyes of many others. She was "labeled 'nigger traitor' by half of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate from south of the Mason-Dixon line," historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in his recent biography, "Rosa Parks."

On Nov. 13, 1956, segregation on buses in Montgomery was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. The boycott ended a week later in that city, but sprang anew in Birmingham and other cities in the South. Years of tumult over equality for blacks had only just begun.

Shootings of blacks boarding buses and bombings of black churches greeted the court decision. Parks' husband was driven to what biographer Brinkley called "near-suicidal despair" by the the death threats targeting them. In 1957, Parks reluctantly left Montgomery and moved with Raymond to Detroit, where she had family.

She continued to participate in the movement, marching at Selma and in the 1963 March on Washington. Eventually, she found a job as a receptionist and case worker in the Detroit office of Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). She retired in 1988 after 14 years.

Raymond Parks died in 1977. They had no children.

In 1987, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute to help black children excel and improve their sense of self worth.

Decades after her revolt on the Montgomery bus, her name was invoked by revolutionaries across the globe, from Vaclav Havel of the former Czech republic, to Nelson Mandela of South Africa. When a lone Chinese student faced down an army tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mandela characterized it as "a Rosa Parks moment."

In her 80s, she amassed honors--a lifetime achievement award from the American Public Transit Assn., the International Freedom Conductor Award from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. In 1996 President Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom and in 1999 Congress awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal. She also was blessed by Pope John Paul II during one of his last visits to the U.S.

When she was 81, Parks was mugged in her modest, rented home in Detroit; the crime apparently was committed by a black man. Parks suffered bruises on her face and was robbed of a sum less than $10O.

The incident was discouraging to her--"So many of our children are going astray," she commented at the time--but her spirit appeared unbroken. She continued to make appearances around the country, often for the purpose of cutting the ribbon at a school or health center named in her honor.

Last year a library and museum was dedicated in her name on the very spot in Montgomery where she was arrested five decades earlier. Missouri also named a portion of Interstate 55 south of St. Louis the Rosa Parks Highway--the same stretch of highway sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan.

"There is something divine about her," the Rev. Jesse Jackson once said. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the prominent black scholar, called her "the Harriet Tubman of our time." Recognizing her contribution to humanity, she was blessed by Pope John Paul II on one of his last trips to the U.S.

But Parks never thought herself a saint. In a 1995 interview with the Washington Post, she said she was "just a person who wanted to be seated on the bus. . . .

"I want everyone to remember me as a person who wanted to be free."

Latino Leaders oppose California Props 74, 75 & 76

Nunez, Padilla, Latino Leaders Unite Against Governor’s Agenda, Urge Community to Vote No on Propositions 74, 75, 76 and 77

Monterey Park, CA – Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and L.A. City Council President Alex Padilla gathered with other California Latino elected officials and community leaders for a press conference today in order to show that they are united in opposition to the Governor’s agenda, which takes California in the wrong direction and hurts Latino families, and instead are working to support good schools, affordable health care, safe communities and a better quality of life.

“The Governor’s so-called reform agenda – which was dreamt up by Pete Wilson and his staffers who now work for Arnold – hurts our public schools, threatens quality health care and cuts funding to local law enforcement,” Speaker Núñez said. “The Governor’s people have said outright that they are counting on us to not turn out to vote. But we’re here to show the Governor that the Latino voters cannot be taken for granted, cannot be brushed aside, and cannot be silenced.”

“We are opposed to these phony reforms because they hurt our public schools, threaten quality health care and cut funding to local government and law enforcement,” said L.A. City Council President Alex Padilla. “These initiatives are designed to shift power to the Governor and make things worse for the average Californian.”

“This weekend, we will be walking precincts in East L.A. in the name of my late husband, Miguel Contreras,” said Maria Elena Durazo, UNITE/HERE Local 11 President. “I ask the Latino community and all hardworking Californians to get out there and show the Governor that we won’t be silenced, and we won’t be ignored.”

L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, a native of Los Angeles, said, “The neighborhood where I grew up in East L.A. was tough. And now the Governor is trying to cut funding from the essentail services that make our streets safer, such as the police and fire departments. I know that the Latino community will not accept the Governor’s dangerous agenda.”

“As a Latina woman, I can tell you that the Governor’s ideas are wrong for California and wrong for women,” added Assemblymember Cindy Montañez (D-San Fernando).

“His agenda is being backed by the same right-wing extremists who want to roll back Roe v. Wade and women’s rights. He may underestimate us, but Latina woman no longer trust this Governor to keep his word and we will reject his agenda on November 8th.”

Participants in the press conference, held at the East Los Angeles Community College, consisted of elected officials as well as Los Angeles community leaders, including Congresswoman Hilda Solis, State Senator Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley), Assemblymember Ron Calderon (D-Montebello), L.A. City Councilman Ed Reyes, SEIU Local 660 President Annelle Grajeda, SEIU Local 1877 President Mike Garcia, Salvadoran Legal and Education Fund executive director Carlos Vaquerano, Silvia Beltran of Homies Unidos, and President of Latino Movement USA Juan José Gutierrez.

The Alliance for a Better California is a coalition of nearly 2.5 million firefighters, nurses, teachers, police officers, and other working Californians and community members who oppose Propositions 74-78.

Tragedy in Guatemala

Se teme que haya más de 2.000 muertos en Guatemala por deslizamiento de tierras
Mientras tanto, continúan los esfuerzos de rescate al otro lado del mundo, en Guatemala, donde deslizamientos de tierra dejaron pueblos enteros sepultados por hasta seis metros de barro. Se confirmaron más de 650 muertes, pero 1.400 personas permanecen desaparecidas y se cree que fueron enterradas vivas. El gobierno considera declarar que ciertas áreas son cementerios colectivos. Un bombero dijo: “Si hubiera sido un terremoto, habría esperanzas de encontrar sobrevivientes, pero aquí en el barro, no lo creo. Podría tardar un mes en secarse”. Los habitantes de Panabaj, uno de los pueblos mas afectados, se negaron a permitir el ingreso del ejercito, debido al recuerdo de una masacre cometida por esa fuerza militar en 1990.

http://www.rigobertamenchu.org/
Devastated by Mudslides, Guatemalan Villagers Refuse Military Aid Remembering 1990 Army Massacre
Tuesday, October 11th, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/11/1453224
The death toll in Central America following Hurricane Stan is still climbing after torrential rains caused deadly floods and mudslides. We go to Guatamala City to speak with Paul Menchu, brother of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchu Tum. [includes rush transcript]


More than 650 are confirmed dead in Guatemala and 1,400 more listed as missing. At least 100 others have died in Mexico and neighboring Central American countries. In the central highlands of Guatemala, whole villages were wiped out by mudslides, burying thousands alive and displacing tens of thousands of people.
Guatemalan President Oscar Berger's government has been widely criticized for responding too slowly to the tragedy. Hardly any federal aid has arrived in Panabaj or the surrounding area, where the death toll could be as much as 1,500. On Monday rescuers gave up after five days of searching the village for bodies under the mud. Officials will likely declare the area a mass grave. Rescuers have had to use boats and helicopters to bring in food and medicine because thousands of miles of roads and dozens of bridges have been burid under mudslides.
In Panabaj, villagers were reportedly refusing to allow the Guatemalan army in because of haunting memories of a 1990 massacre by the military. At the time, 2,000 to 3,000 villagers were protesting a military raid when the army raked the the crowd, of mostly indigenous descent, with machine-gun fire. At least 11 civilians were gunned down. Much of the region remains fearful of the military after 36 years of fighting that ended in 1996. During that time more than 100,000 Guatemalans died, the majority at the hands of the Guatamalan military.

-1. Paul Menchu, Director of the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation, brother of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchu Tum.
-1. Beatrice Manz, Anthropologist and professor at the University of California Berkeley.
Related Links:
-1. Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation
-1. Madre
AMY GOODMAN: From Guatemala, we're joined by Paul Menchu. He is the brother of Rigoberta Menchu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Paul heads the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation. We are also joined on the phone from Berkeley, California, by Beatrice Manz, anthropologist and professor at UC Berkeley. Her newest book is called Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope. She, Guatemalan. First, let us turn to Paul Menchu. On the ground, what do you know has happened? (And he will be translated.)
PAUL MENCHU: [translated] Good morning. Starting with the passing of Hurricane Stan, which affected Central America and Mexico, the worst damages have been in Guatemala. Among the population, there are problems of lack of supplies, great death, and a loss of hope, because this storm hit the ground in a very populated region. This happened on the south coast and in the mountains of Guatemala, where most of the indigenous population lives. The main problem has been on the south coast where we have flooding and also mudslides and avalanches in the mountains, which have buried entire villages.
Another problem that we're facing is that we have lost a lot of our farms, and this is going to mean in the short term that we're going to have hunger problems in Guatemala. There is also the situation of health, because in some places where the dead have not been able to be removed, we're afraid of epidemics and health problems that will happen because of the lack of water. So this is a big problem for many villages who will need to be entirely reconstructed and are also having lack of food problems.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Menchu is on the line with us from Guatemala, the brother of Rigoberta Menchu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Guatemala. She spoke and -- has spoken out against the Guatemalan military for many years, against the massacres in the highlands. On the phone with us also is a Guatemalan anthropologist, professor at University of California Berkeley, Beatrice Manz. We're getting reports that people, Professor Manz, are refusing to allow the military in at Panabaj because of memories of the 1990 Santiago Atitlan massacre. Can you describe what happened then and why they’d feel this way today?
BEATRICE MANZ: Well, it shouldn't be that surprising that the people in those villages and in villages throughout Guatemala would have this kind of reaction to the presence of the military. I mean, the people are facing a natural disaster right now, but for decades they faced a human-made tragedy; and the military's responsibility in, you know, hundreds of massacres, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a genocide in that country creates, obviously, a mistrust and a very, very poor image, to say the least. I mean, the soldiers have a very bad reputation. People remember the fear, the terror that they lived through. These are the survivors, and I'm not that surprised, tragically, that people do not want to see the soldiers come in and provide aid in this instance.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you, Paul Menchu, getting these reports of these terribly afflicted victims not wanting the army in because they're afraid?
PAUL MENCHU: [translated] In the area of Santiago Atitlan there have been two communities that were lost to avalanches, and in these areas there’s a very organized indigenous population. And there is where the massacre happened in the last decade. And so these communities have resisted the soldiers coming in because there is a very strong memory of the terror that they brought to the communities in the past. So the things that have happened in the past in Guatemala and this memory of the terror has come back to the surface now.
AMY GOODMAN: [translated] We have to wrap up. But I do want to ask if people want to support, in the ways that they have Hurricane -- victims of Hurricane Katrina, where can they go? Who do they turn to if they want to support the victims in Guatemala?
PAUL MENCHU: One way is through already-organized organizations, such as the Red Cross. Another way is through NGOs that are working in the area, and in fact the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation is working in this area.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. We will certainly make the links. I want to thank Gretchen Begley for translating. Thank you, Paul Menchu for being with us, from the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation, and Beatrice Manz, author of Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope.

www.democracynow.org

Randall Robison on racism in U.S. : Haiti, and more

Randall Robinson Interview
By Amitabh Pal
October 2005 Issue of The Progressive

http://progressive.org/?q=mag_intv1005

Randall Robinson is a disillusioned man. So much so
that he decided to leave the United States in 2001 and
settle down in St. Kitts, where his wife is from. He
has written a book, Quitting America: The Departure of
a Black Man from His Native Land, explaining the
reasons for his relocation. Robinson hasn't completely
quit the United States, though. He still maintains a
home in Virginia and comes back often for visits.

A lifelong activist, Robinson is best known as the
founder of TransAfrica Forum, an organization he
established in 1977 to push U.S. policy toward Africa
and the Caribbean in a more progressive direction. He
has also been in the forefront of the reparations
debate, having written The Debt: What America Owes to
Blacks.

Robinson was born in 1941 in segregated Richmond,
Virginia. His father was a schoolteacher and coach.
After dropping out of college for a brief stint in the
army, Robinson graduated from Virginia Union University
and then got accepted into Harvard Law School. When he
finished, he went to Africa to support the liberation
movements there. Upon returning, he worked for the next
few years as a legal aid lawyer and community organizer
in Boston. In September 1977, Robinson launched
TransAfrica in Washington, D.C. Through his
organization, Robinson lobbied against the white regime
in South Africa and sought to end U.S. support for
dictatorial governments elsewhere in Africa and the
Caribbean. Among his actions: Robinson organized a
sit-in of the South African embassy, went on a hunger
strike to urge U.S. intervention to restore democracy
in Haiti, and dumped a ton of bananas on the steps of
the U.S. trade representative's office to protest U.S.
trade policy toward the Caribbean. Robinson finally
announced his retirement from TransAfrica in December
2001.

I met Robinson in February at the Hyatt Regency in
Atlanta, where he had come to participate in a
conference on the role of the religious leadership in
the African American community. We sat down at the
hotel cafe and spoke for more than an hour.

Question: Why did you decide to leave the United
States?

Randall Robinson: I was really worn down by an American
society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely
self-satisfied. I wanted to live in a place where that
wasn't always a distorting weight. Black people in
America have to, for their own protection, develop a
defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of
it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain
it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to
you. You try to steer a course in American society
that's not self-destructive. But America is a country
that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything
that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if
it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not
white in America, the affronts are virtually across the
board.

When we lived here, we accommodated ourselves to the
most extraordinary things. I just didn't think that was
the way to live. I wanted to be in another place.

We also have a daughter who was eleven at the time. We
wanted her to have a normal, fun adolescence, and it
was just undoable. When we lived here and went to a
shopping center or someplace, we'd tell our daughter,
do not get out of our line of sight. Now she's in a
place where she can walk around at night and we don't
even have to think about that sort of thing.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers
between classes--social and economic--are not
insuperable, where money is not everything all the
time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by
those who profit from the arrangements of that system.
People feel a conscious disease--a dis-ease or an
unease--but I don't think they know what causes it.
We've been taught in America that big is best. That's
why people have to believe that they must live in the
greatest country in the world, which is absolutely
idiotic.

Q: Would you offer similar advice to progressives who
feel beleaguered?

Robinson: A good many white Americans are leaving the
country, too, moving to Canada. My book provoked a lot
of mail, but it is the first time I have written a book
where at least half the mail came from white Americans.
So while the parts about race may not have resonated
with them, the diagnosis of the culture did. Something
is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs
are everywhere. I think the country is in almost
terminal descent. The business class is combined with
the evangelicals. And I think the evangelicals want to
provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the
second coming of Christ. So they are very happy about
what we're doing to Iraq--and the menace we present now
for Syria and for Iran--because they think that the
apocalypse is an important thing to get into so that
they can see vindicated their most literal
interpretation of the Bible.

Q: What do you make of the Iraq War and occupation?

Robinson: This enterprise in Iraq is coming a-cropper.
This is an unwinnable situation. I don't know of any
situation except the Brits in Malaya--when they were
fighting an insurgency that had no local support--no
other event of an insurgency in the twentieth century
that was suppressed. You cannot do it. They have
learned to fight the giants, and they do it with a
self-belief that is more important than one's life. I
don't think this country was prepared for that because
Americans don't bother to notice anybody else in the
world. It's a part of this kind of arrogance that I was
talking about, and it will cost us. Bush has done more
to create passions for what they call terror than any
other Administration in this nation's history. I get
rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world
talks to, and gets answers back from, God.

At the same time, I think the business community knows
that half the world's oil reserves are gone. All the
low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there's the
scramble for what remains, and they are willing to do
anything to take--as Henry Kissinger called it once--our
oil. What they don't talk about publicly is how they
are prepared to use up lives of white and black poor to
realize these ambitions. We are up against an
anti-democratic foe that is prepared to do anything to
preserve its position of avaricious privilege. I am not
hopeful that anything could happen one way or the other
without a good deal of tumult. And I'm aware that
because America is so powerful--with its tentacles
reaching out to the world--one doesn't escape it by
leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time
in my life.

Q: More than during Reagan's or Nixon's time?

Robinson: Those were Republicans. This is a different
animal. Reagan was conservative, but he didn't approach
global management with an unbending religious zeal.
Fear the zealots. Survival is at stake.

In an interior way, I am not as bleak as I sound. I'm a
fairly happy human being. But am I in the short term
optimistic? No. I search for reasons to be, and I'd be
interested in you telling me what some might be, but I
haven't found anything in the short term. So I'm sorry,
but I'm just not hopeful. And then there's the
collaboration or the accommodation of prominent blacks
like Dorothy Haight and Andrew Young who stood up for
Condoleezza Rice. One asks the question: Well, doesn't
one have to be something more than black to elicit your
support?

Q: What's your assessment of Rice and Powell?

Robinson: I think that they're both dangerous people.
What they did in Haiti is a good measure of it. They
destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had
been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank.
They did everything behind the scenes, including arming
the thugs that came to overrun the country. They're
frauds, every one of them. But Powell labored
relatively more successfully under the guise of charm.

Q: You personally know Aristide. In fact, you
accompanied him in his exile from the Central African
Republic to Jamaica. Has that compromised your ability
to objectively assess his record?

Robinson: I don't think so. I've always thought I had
pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list
of people I've worked with over my career with whom
I've not been able to distinguish easily between the
public persona and the real private person. [Former
Jamaican Prime Minister] Michael Manley was one case of
a man that I had an enormous personal high regard for.
I thought he was of impeccable integrity. Aristide is
another. I don't know many people I can say that about.

And I've never had any trouble opposing people I've
been close to. I've never worried about offending or
bothering people I feel strongly about. I've opposed
black regimes and white regimes, leftist regimes and
rightist regimes. I'm close to Aristide because I have
respect for him, but all that is beside the point.
There's only one point that counts: Democracy requires
that if you who don't like the outcome of elections you
have to tolerate it and then pursue your interest the
next time around. Aristide said simply that we must
learn in this nascent democracy to move from election
to election. It was as simple as that. These people
invaded and threw out 7,000 elected officials, and
replaced them with [Gerard] Latortue, who had been all
this time in Florida. A woefully unqualified fellow.
I'm not suggesting that Aristide didn't make mistakes.
But he was put in a place by the United States where it
was impossible for him to succeed. I don't know of any
situation where you're going to have an officeholder in
a country of eight million people who's cut off at the
knees by the most powerful force in this world and who
can still make it fly.

Q: So you don't buy the criticism that the 2000
elections in Haiti weren't completely free and fair.

Robinson: There were only, I think, four or five
disputed elections out of thousands, and Aristide's
party was willing to throw those out. It was a pretext.
That wasn't the issue. The issue was, the Bush people
didn't like him, and they never liked him. They didn't
like him because they don't like democracy. They like
you to have an election, but they like you to elect the
people they want you to elect.

Q: Moving on to the subject you've been most closely
associated with in the last few years: reparations for
slavery. Why do you think that's necessary?

Robinson: Let me give you some conditions that don't
get talked about. The U.S. has the largest prison
population in the world: two million people. The
country with one-twentieth of the world's population
has one-fourth of those in prison. One out of every
eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We
are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or
for benefits to communities that get to host federal
prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of
America's black community is at risk. One out of every
three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one
arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These
are the continuing consequences of slavery.

We have sustained so much psychic damage and so much
loss of memory. Every people, in order to remain
healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its
foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis--it is
protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures
are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture,
mother, father, the value of their labor--all of
that--without doing vast damage to those people. People
need their history like they need air and food. You
deprive them of that for 246 years and follow that by
100 years of de jure discrimination, and then you say
with the Voting Rights Act: It's over, you just go take
care of yourself!

Average people do not survive that. You plant twenty
coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over
there, and you water this batch and don't water that
batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive
and one will die. Of the batch you don't water,
nineteen will die and one will survive. And then we
have somebody like George Bush. I can't think of a more
mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is
a product of family advantage, and he's the worst
American President of all time.

Anyway, in my arguments for reparations, I'm not
talking about writing checks to people. The word
reparations means to repair. We've opened this gap in
society between the two races. Whites have more than
eleven times the net worth or wealth of African
Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment
rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and
who that's chewing up. Now we've got the advent of
AIDS. Fifty-four percent of new infections are
inAfrican Americans. Many infected men are coming out
of prison and infecting their women. So when I talk
about reparations, I say there has to be a material
component. It has to have a component of education that
is compensatory. It has to have a component of economic
development that's compensatory. But in the last
analysis the greater damage is here [points to his
head]. So I'm not really talking about money. And I'm
not really talking about the concerns of people who
say, "I didn't benefit from slavery." Nobody said you
did.

It's important for white America to be able to face up.
Far beyond its relations with the black community, it
is important for white Americans. It's important in
helping us in our approaches to the rest of the world,
and in being sensitive to Islam, and to look at the way
other cultures handle their management of themselves,
and to look at it with respect, with the possibility
that you even might learn something. We've got a
country that never takes any responsibility for
anything. It forgets its role and makes everybody else
forget what happened, too. And that it is not just
dangerous for the victim, but also for the perpetrator.

Q: What was the formative experience that made you
decide to become an activist?

Robinson: Segregation, surely. I never met a white
person till I was a grown man. I never went to school
with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at
Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was
searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar,
and will be with me for the rest of my life. It causes
you in terror to form reflexes of protection. It's
unnatural but necessary. So I decided a long time ago
to join the social justice movement. It was salvaging.
We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one
death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without
response is to die many deaths.

Q: Why did you turn down an honorary degree at
Georgetown in the summer of 2003?

Robinson: Well, I knew the moment I saw that George
Tenet had been given a similar honor just the day
before that I couldn't accept an honorary degree from
Georgetown. Rejecting it caused me a great degree of
discomfort. First, because the people who fought for
Georgetown to confer the degree on me were occasioned a
certain amount of discomfort by me. But I knew just no
other way out. So I explained my situation to the dean.
And if they were annoyed, they masked that. I think
they understood why I took that position. I wouldn't
have come that far to receive an honorary degree if I
didn't think that it wasn't an important thing. So I
was vastly disappointed to read about Tenet. But from
that point onward, the degree meant absolutely nothing.

Q: How involved are you with the day-to-day running of
TransAfrica?

Robinson: Not at all. Twenty-five years. I thought it
was time. I think people involved with institutions
find it harder to know the time to go than the time to
come. I thought it was time for me to go. I wanted to
do other things. I wanted to write and think. Activism
is a displacing kind of passion.

Amitabh Pal is the managing editor of The Progressive.
Source URL: http://progressive.org/mag_intv1005

_______________________________________________________

portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
discussion and debate service of the Committees of

Villaraigosa on Ballot Initiatives

LA Mayor denounces Schwarzenegger's ballot 'reforms'

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, October 6, 2005

LOS ANGELES (AP) - At a news conference to discuss his first 100 days in office, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa instead turned his attention to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday, accusing him of misusing the state's ballot initiative process to force his political agenda on the state Legislature.
During his first few months in office, Villaraigosa, a Democrat and former state Assembly speaker, has appeared eager to cultivate a cordial relationship with the Republican governor. But his pointed remarks made it clear their relationship will have its limits.

Asked about four ballot measures the governor is supporting in a special "year of reform" election he has called for next month, Villaraigosa replied: "I'm opposed to all of his initiatives."

The measures Schwarzenegger is supporting are Proposition 74, which would extend from two to five years the time teachers must work to receive tenure; Proposition 75, which would require public employee unions to seek written permission from members before using their dues for political purposes; Proposition 76, which would enact a state spending cap; and Proposition 77, which would strip lawmakers of the power to draw political districts.

"In this instance it's very clear that the initiative process is being misused," Villaraigosa said. "These are matters that could and should be addressed by the Legislature."

Todd Harris, a spokesman for Schwarzenegger's campaign, said the governor took the issues before voters because the Legislature was unwilling to work with him.

"The governor could not agree with the mayor more that the Legislature should have worked with the governor to pass these reforms," Harris said. "Instead, the Legislature focused on its own priorities, things like gay marriage and drivers licenses for illegal immigrants."

Villaraigosa's comments, while not out of keeping with his political loyalties, carry particular resonance given his position as California's most prominent Hispanic officeholder and mayor of the state's largest city.

As he pushes his ballot agenda, Schwarzenegger has been trying to rebuild his standing with Hispanic voters who helped put him in office in 2003 but whose support has eroded in recent months.

Turning more to a reflection on his first 100 days in office, Villaraigosa restated his determination to place city schools under mayor control. He said his staff is working on various proposals that could extract city schools from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"We cannot allow 50 percent of our children to drop out," he said.

During his first 100 days, Villaraigosa has also proposed plans to reduce traffic congestion, to fight crime by hiring hundreds of additional police officers and to beautify the city by planting a million trees.

He has also established himself as an irrepressible city booster and salesman, maintaining a near constant presence at city events both large and small.

"I want people in the city to know I care," he said, noting he has traveled 24,000 miles in the Los Angeles area since taking office, an average of 240 miles a day.

"I said I'd be a hands-on mayor."

New YDS Organizer

Democratic Socialists of America and it youth section, Young Democratic
Socialists are pleased to announce the appointment of Elizabeth
Rothschild as the new National Youth Organizer. She began working right
after Labor Day. We also wish to publicly acknowledge the dedicated
service of Lucas Shapiro for the last two years, who is remaining active
in a volunteer capacity and assisting in the transition. Here is an
excerpt from her first message to YDS'ers:

"I can't wait to begin working with all of you -- now let me tell you a
little bit about my background in politics:

The last two summers I have spent teaching in a program called Freedom
Schools in NYC, which is run by the Children's Defense Fund and modeled
after the Freedom Schools from the Civil Rights Movement Freedom Summer
of 1964. The program integrates reading, conflict resolution and social
action in an activity-based curriculum that promotes social, cultural,
and historical awareness. Working with the Freedom Schools has helped
me develop ways to connect large macro-level ideologies informed by my
socialist vision, to a micro-level (classroom) experience. But the
Freedom Schools were more than a classroom experience, they were about
building a movement - linking schools across the nation together,
creating an alternative educational institution, and engaging in
political struggles for progressive change (we participated in voter
registration in the community last year, protested at City Hall against
Bush's tax cuts, and worked with an ex-felon rehabilitation program
learning about the cradle-to-prison pipeline).

I have also worked with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and
did extensive Affirmative Action organizing around the Michigan case
several years ago. I recently graduated from the University of Virginia
where I majored in African American Studies and Sociology with a minor
in Politics and was involved in anti-racist organizing through both
leadership in groups such as the NAACP and Sustained Dialogue. I worked
as a liaison between many different groups and coalitions on campus as
we tried to bring structural changes to the rather minority-unfriendly
university.

I believe deeply in the importance of political education,
self-criticism and constant re-evaluation to the movement for social
justice. There is a lot of work to be done to build a stronger Left in
this country, especially towards connecting anti-racist, feminist,
labor, queer rights, environmental, community and electoral activism in
a much more meaningful and effective way. I'm definitely looking
forward to working with many of you, traveling to campuses and
communities around the country, and working to strengthen YDS and the
democratic socialist movement. Onward!"

Elizabeth Rothschild, the new YDS National Organizer, can be reached at:
elizabeth@dsausa.org or at 212-727-8610 ext. 24


HOW YOU CAN HELP A NEW GENERATION OF SOCIALISTS

With the beginning of the new semester YDS is launching a campaign to
expand and increase its presence on campuses. DSA'ers (and others),
particularly those who are campus based, can help this campaign in a
number of concrete ways.

1. Keep yourself informed about YDS and its activities by signing up
for their regular email blasts (sent every 1-2 weeks) which contain
excellent articles written by DSA and YDS members, action items, and
lots of information YDS' projects and political priorities. For
archives of the YDS email blasts and instructions on how to join the
list, visit: www.dsausa.org/ydsupdate/index.html

2. Refer student activists to YDS. Have them check out the YDS
website, (www.ydsusa.org), hand out YDS literature materials to them
(www.ydsusa.org/resources.html), and put them in touch with the YDS
National Organizer (see below).

3. Sign up as a campus contact. If you are on campus and want to
assist in developing a new chapter, mentoring an existing one, or just
to act as information resource for interested students, we need to know.


4. Organize a visit from a YDS organizer to your school or community.
You can help arrange for someone from YDS to come speak at a teach-in,
to conduct an activist training, to organize a debate, or to meet with
students interested in working with YDS.

We all believe that building a new generation of smart and effective
activists is every socialist's responsibility. To act on any of these
important items simply send an email to: yds@dsausa.org.

Visit our Web Site: WWW.DSAUSA.ORG

Mexican Army aids victims of katrina

Mexico Army Brings Aid to Katrina Victims

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:54 a.m. ET

LAREDO, Texas (AP) -- A Mexican army convoy began crossing into the United States on Thursday to bring aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Carrying water treatment plants and mobile kitchens that can feed 7,000 people daily, the convoy bound for San Antonio is the first Mexican military unit to operate on U.S. soil since 1846.

The first green tractor-trailers, with Mexican flags attached to the tops of their cabs, crossed the international bridge at Laredo at about 8:15 a.m. The rest of the 45-vehicle convoy was in a staging area on the U.S. side in about 15 minutes.

The convoy will be escorted by the U.S. Army and the Texas Department of Public Safety. It was scheduled to leave after the leader of the convoy, Gen. Francisco Ortiz Valadez, greeted the head of the U.S. Army unit in charge of the escort, Brig. Gen. F. Joseph Prasek.

Military engineers, doctors and nurses are among the 200 people headed to San Antonio.

The Mexican government was already planning another 12-vehicle aid convoy for this week. It has sent a Mexican navy ship toward the Mississippi coast with rescue vehicles and helicopters.

Mexico has sent disaster relief aid missions to other Latin American nations, but not to the United States.

In 1846, Mexican troops briefly advanced just north of the Rio Grande in Texas, which had then recently joined the United States. Mexico, however, did not then recognize the Rio Grande as the U.S. border.

The two countries quickly became mired in the Mexican-American War, which led to the loss of half of Mexico's territory in 1848.

Class and race in New Orleans

from The New York Times

September 4, 2005
What Happens to a Race Deferred
By JASON DePARLE


THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper
images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were
left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the
hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken
levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly
new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and
death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling
of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high
ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired
at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint
eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie
- had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local
boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he
denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves
slack-jawed.

"This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society -
in a literal way," said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised
images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised,
Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just an in-the-face version
of something I already knew," he said. "All the people who don't get out, or
don't have the resources, or don't believe the warning are African-American."

"It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society," Mr. Jencks
said. "But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society."

Last week it was how others saw American society, too, in images beamed across
the globe. Were it not for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the
pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have carried a Somalian dateline.
The Sri Lankan ambassador offered to help raise foreign aid.

Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger lurked behind the festive front.
Let the good times roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in every
season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the wrong direction wound up in the
city morgue.

Unusually poor ( 27.4 percent below the poverty line in 2000),
disproportionately black (over two-thirds), the Big Easy is also
disproportionately murderous - with a rate that was for years among the
country's highest.

Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades, the city has become
unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north
across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish - home of David Duke, the
one-time Klansman who ran for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the
state's white vote.

Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as a fledgling reporter, I was
dispatched to cover a cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning, half-drunk
accountant where he was from, city or suburb. "White people don't live in New
Orleans," he answered with a where-have-you-been disdain.

For those who loved it, its glories as well as its flaws, last week brought only
heartbreak. So much of New Orleans, from its music and its food to its
architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best, even as everyone knew it
was more complicated than that.

"New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and in rhetoric an
extraordinarily successful multicultural society," said Philip Carter, a
developer and retired journalist whose roots in the city extend back more at
least four generations. "But is also a multicultural society riven by race and
class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy days. The people of our
community are pitted against each other across the barricades of race and class
that six months from now may be last remaining levees in New Orleans."

No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy
swallowed the privilege and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines.

But the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car.
The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15
percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," said Craig E.
Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's
vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains."

As if to punctuate the divide, the water especially devastated the Ninth Ward,
among city's poorest and lowest lying.

"Out West, there is a saying that water flows to money," Mr. Colten said. "But
in New Orleans, water flows away from money. Those with resources who control
where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground. So the
people in the low areas were hardest hit."

Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black politicians who saw the tragedy as
a reflection of a broader neglect of American cities, and in the blogosphere.

"The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!"
wrote "myfan88" on the Flickr blog. "This is Hotel Rwanda all over again."

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a
society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as
they were by legal segregation laws?" wrote Mark Naison, director of the urban
studies program at Fordham, on another blog.

One question that could not be answered last week was whether, put to a similar
test, other cities would fracture along the same lines.

AT one level, everything about New Orleans appears sui generis, not least its
location below sea level. Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about
living in a Banana Republic. They spread them.

But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of
Chicagoans, blacks in comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates - in
part because they tended to live in greater social isolation, in depopulated
parts of town. As in New Orleans, space intertwined with race.

And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had erupted in Los Angeles in 1992,
after the acquittal of white police officers charged with beating a black man,
Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington -all burned in the race riots of the
1960's. It was for residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to feel
certain their community would be immune.

With months still to go just to pump out the water that covers the city, no one
can be sure how the social fault lines will rearrange. But with white flight a
defining element of New Orleans in the recent past, there was already the fear
in the air this week that the breached levee would leave a separated society
further apart.

``Maybe we can build the levees back," said Mr. Carter. ``But that sense of
extreme division by class and race is going to long survive the physical
reconstruction of New Orleans."

Open military bases to refugees

"They've Got to Open the Base"
By Stephen Elliott
Salon.com

Saturday 03 September 2005

Louisiana black leaders, along with Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson, want to take Katrina victims to a shuttered Air Force base instead of shelters. And I'm going with them.


People walk near a helicopter after being rescued in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans Sept. 2.
(Photo: Unknown)
Baton Rouge, LA - I got on a bus with California Rep. Maxine Waters Saturday afternoon, not sure where we were going, just knowing we were headed to New Orleans to pick up Hurricane Katrina victims. Even as television news is showing pictures of people being rescued by military helicopters and chartered buses, local and national black leaders are seething at the mismanaged evacuation, as well as the haphazard way even the rescued people are being handled. So they've come up with their own plan: to load the remaining residents on buses they've chartered and bring them to England Air Force Base, a shuttered military installation in Alexandria, La.

"My soul wouldn't let me sit and watch this on TV," says Waters, who represents South Central Los Angeles. "I'm just shocked that people have been living for five days, and dying, on the streets of this country. So I came down here, and my friend Cleo Fields came up with this wonderful possibility."

That wonderful possibility, hatched by state Sen. Cleo Fields and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, is to house the displaced residents at the Air Force base instead of shelters and sports stadiums like the Astrodome, many of which are full anyway. They haven't gotten permission to do that, but that's not stopping them. The black leaders say racism is behind both the late response to the emergency and the dispersal of rescued residents far away from New Orleans.

This morning I saw City Council President Oliver Thomas near tears at the Federal Emergency Management Agency office. He'd just heard the story of a bus of 200 refugees that had been turned away the night before, because all of the city's shelters were full. "So what if the shelters are full?" Thomas asked. "What do you mean full?"

Thomas complained that many people had been turned against New Orleans refugees because of media emphasizing stories of looting and violence, and he asked why they couldn't be housed closer to home. "Texas is being neighborly, while Louisiana is rejecting people. Why do we have to send our people to Texas?"

"The people in Jefferson Parish," Thomas continued, referring to a mostly affluent and white area to the northwest of New Orleans, "have been very clear; they don't want them here." Jefferson and other neighboring parishes were also hit hard by Katrina, and many have no electricity and little or no water pressure. But while Thomas acknowledged that Jefferson had its own problems, "they wouldn't even allow their parish to be used as a staging area."

Thomas' complaint is part of why the Legislative Black Caucus, headed by Fields and state Rep. Cedric Richmond, announced they would bring three buses to pick up those still stranded in New Orleans. The base has not been opened to admit people, but Fields says, "it's better than what they have now. People were airlifted from their homes four days ago and left on the highway. They've got to open the base to these people. It's ridiculous in America that people are sitting on a highway for four days without food and water." Fields reportedly appealed to federal officials to open the base Friday but didn't get an answer. The Rev. Jesse Jackson will also reportedly accompany the bus caravan to England Air Force Base.

I decided to get on one of the buses headed for New Orleans, even though our exact destination wasn't certain. As we left there were reports that people were still stranded along Highway 10, and I was told the intention was to go get them. But Waters was under the impression we were headed for the New Orleans convention center. After we'd driven a few miles we got word that both the highway encampment and the convention center had been evacuated, and it was decided that we'd head to the airport, where thousands of people had been moved from downtown.

"I hope to get people on this bus, and also to see for myself where people are being sent," says Waters, who's the ranking member of the subcommittee on housing of the House Financial Services Committee. "This is Labor Day weekend and it's normally time for a little R&R, but my conscience would not allow that." The feisty Waters almost sounded like she was enjoying herself, though.

But nobody could enjoy themselves once we got to the airport. We were not prepared for what we found. Though it has been touted as a solution to the squalor of the convention center and the Superdome, Louis Armstrong International Airport is on the way to re-creating it. Already there's a huge pile of stinking garbage, and thousands of people outside who can't get in. They're being promised that planes and buses will evacuate them yet again, but they're still waiting. There's no violence because police and soldiers are everywhere, but there's filth and despair.

Our buses filled up quickly, and most people aren't even asking where we're headed.

Stephen Elliott is the author of four novels, including Happy Baby.

New Orleans damage

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Bush administration funding cuts forced federal engineers to delay improvements on the levees, floodgates and pumping stations that failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday.

The former head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that handles the infrastructure of the nation's waterways, said the damage in New Orleans probably would have been much less extensive had flood-control efforts been fully funded over the years.

"Levees would have been higher, levees would have been bigger, there would have been other pumps put in," said Mike Parker, a former Mississippi congressman who headed the engineering agency from 2001 to 2002.

"I'm not saying it would have been totally alleviated but it would have been less than the damage that we have got now."

Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water after Katrina blew through with much of the flooding coming after two levees broke.

A May 2005 Corps memo said that funding levels for fiscal years 2005 and 2006 would not be enough to pay for new construction on the levees.

Agency officials said on Thursday in a conference call that delayed work was not related to the breakdown in the levee system and Parker told Reuters the funding problems could not be blamed on the Bush administration alone.

Parker said a project dating to 1965 remains unfinished and that any recent projects would not have been in place by the time the hurricane struck even if they had been fully funded.

"If we do stuff now it's not going to have an effect tomorrow," Parker said. "These projects are huge, they're expensive and they're not sexy."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration had funded flood control efforts adequately.

Tensions over funding for the New Orleans levees emerged more than a year ago when a local official asserted money had been diverted to pay for the Iraq war. In early 2002, Parker told the U.S. Congress that the war on terrorism required spending cuts elsewhere in government.

Situated below sea level, New Orleans relied on a 300-mile (483 km) network of levees, floodgates and pumps to hold back the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.

Levees were fortified after floods in 1927 and 1965, and Congress approved another ambitious upgrade after a 1995 flood killed six people.

Since 2001, the Army Corps has requested $496 million for that project but the Bush administration only budgeted $166 million, according to figures provided by the office of Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Congress ultimately approved $250 million for the project during that time period.

Another project designed to shore up defenses along Lake Pontchartrain was similarly underfunded, as the administration budgeted $22 million of the $99 million requested by the Corps between 2001 and 2005. Congress boosted spending on that project to $42.5 million, according to Landrieu's office.

"It's clear that we didn't do everything we could to safeguard ourselves from this hurricane or from a natural disaster such as Katrina but hopefully we will learn and be more prepared next time," said Landrieu spokesman Brian Richardson.

The levee defenses had been designed to withstand a milder Category Three hurricane and simply were overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina, said senior project manager Al Naomi.

"The design was not adequate to protect against a storm of this nature because we were not authorized to provide a Category Four or Five protection design," he said.

A study examining a possible upgrade is under way, he said.

© Reuters 2005. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

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Immigration advocates

The Challenged Pro-Immigration Forces

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/224

Something is clearly askew when unions, progressives, and liberals find themselves being credibly labeled as instruments for Corporate America’s cheap labor agenda.

Pro-immigration groups come to the widening immigration debate severely handicapped by their own associations, their apparent stance of defending “foreigners” against “natives,” and the difficulty they have in answering the charges that they are essentially an open borders lobby.

This charge is so powerful because it affirms the widely shared sense that a nation and its people have the right to control national borders. When immigration advocates respond to the open borders charge with arguments that don’t acknowledge the need for limits—whether to protect the U.S. workforce from oversupply, to ensure sustainable environmental development, to prevent an unsupportable demand for social services, or to manage the pace of social and cultural integration—they leave themselves vulnerable to restrictionist critiques that they don’t believe immigration flows should be controlled.

As a result, anti-immigration—and decidedly anti-immigrant—voices have succeeded in moving the immigration policy debate increasingly to the right.

Lou Dobbs’s “Broken Borders” campaign, complemented by the rhetoric of anti-immigration groups, taps the country’s deepening sense of economic insecurity and vulnerability to internal attacks. The backlash populism of the anti-immigration forces presents new challenges for those concerned about human rights, economic justice, and the rise of the politics of hate and fear.
See the entire article at the web site listed above.

Kweisi Mfume stresses anti war stand

Mfume Stressing Antiwar Stand
Senate Hopeful Seeks Contrast With Rival for Democratic Nomination
By John Wagner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 26, 2005; B01


Maryland Democrat Kweisi Mfume is making a play for the antiwar vote in his bid for the U.S. Senate with a fundraising solicitation this week that calls for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and with a major speech on the issue planned for next month.

In an e-mail solicitation, Mfume, a former congressman and NAACP leader, called the fighting in Iraq "a war without justification and apparently without end" and compared it to the Vietnam War. "It's time to get out," Mfume wrote, urging a timeframe for withdrawal.

In an interview, he said that by highlighting his views on Iraq, he is trying to draw the first in a series of contrasts with Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, another candidate for the Democratic nomination. The Baltimore area lawmaker has raised far more money than Mfume and racked up more endorsements in the race to succeed Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D), who is not seeking reelection.

Cardin voted against the 2002 resolution authorizing the war but has since voted for its continued funding and has stopped short of calling for a pullout. He contends that advertising a timeline for withdrawal would put troops in danger.

"I can understand what Kweisi's doing, but I don't think there's much of a distinction here," Cardin said. "I voted against the war. . . . I have spoken out consistently that the president has mismanaged this war. We shouldn't have been there, and I've said that since day one."

Mfume argued that their differences are significant, however.

"Ben Cardin is a friend of mine, but on this central issue of the war in Iraq, we disagree," he said. "I think it's time to be talking about an exit strategy."

Joe Trippi, a political consultant advising Mfume, argued that there is also a contrast in emphasis.

Iraq is the featured issue on Mfume's campaign Web site. Cardin's Web site presents his views on eight issues, including homeland security. But it makes no mention of the Iraq war.

Mfume's push on Iraq comes at a time of growing criticism of the Bush administration from members of both major parties. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) recently called on President Bush to bring the troops home by the end of next year. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) is among those who have compared the situation to Vietnam.

Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, said Mfume appears to be trying to capitalize on the public mood to attract white liberal voters in particular. Mfume starts with a political base of black voters in Baltimore, the area he represented in Congress, a base he needs to broaden to win.

Mfume's emphasis on the war is also reminiscent of the 2004 presidential candidacy of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who rode antiwar sentiment among primary voters to become the Democratic front-runner for a long stretch. Trippi was Dean's campaign manager for much of that period.

Mfume said that his opposition to the war is deep-rooted and that his views probably will be the centerpiece of a Sept. 12 speech reintroducing himself as a Senate candidate one year before the primary.

Cardin predicted that the war would be a much larger issue in the general election. Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, who has formed an exploratory committee for the Senate race, is widely expected to be the Republican nominee.

A spokesman declined to comment on Steele's views on Iraq. "The lieutenant governor is focused on his official duties and making a decision about whether or not this race makes sense for him and his family," Dan Ronayne said.

Besides Mfume and Cardin, community activist A. Robert Kaufman of Baltimore is a candidate for the Democratic nomination. Several other Democrats are considering entering the race as early as next week.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Uniting African Americans and Immigrants

Uniting African-Americans and Immigrants
By David Bacon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 26 August 2005

If you listen to President George Bush, the only way Mexicans can avoid
the deadly and illegal trip across the US border is to come as guest workers -
temporary contract laborers for US industry and agriculture. The 12-14 million
immigrants already living in the US without visas, he says, must become guest
workers themselves if they want to get legal documents.

While the president's proposal is the most extreme of those before
Congress (and hasn't yet been formally introduced), all the other bills that
would reform US immigration law also have some temporary contract worker
proposal attached to them. All except one.

This spring, Houston Congress member Sheila Jackson Lee introduced the
most comprehensive immigration reform proposal so far, HR 2092, "Save America
Comprehensive Immigration Act of 2005." It not only has no provision for
temporary workers - she scorns the whole idea, particularly the Bush approach,
as a "flat earth program." Jackson Lee instead proposes to legalize
undocumented people who have lived 5 years in the US, have some understanding
of English and US culture, and have no criminal record. "These are hardworking,
taxpaying individuals," she says. "My system would give them permanent legal
residency."

Bush proposes that immigrants come for three or six years, and then
leave. "But people are human," Jackson Lee explains. "They might have married,
invested, or tried to buy a house. They might have children and roots here.
It's very difficult to imagine that a person with a three-year pass would
voluntarily leave, particularly if they faced an oppressive situation where
they came from."

The Jackson Lee bill is unique for another reason. Most of its
co-sponsors are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including
California's Barbara Lee and Michigan's John Conyers. For many years, the
Caucus has been outspoken on other areas of social policy - every session, it
outlines an alternative Federal budget prioritizing social goals like
eliminating poverty, reducing military spending, and protecting social services
and benefits. This is the first time, however, that Caucus members have taken a
pro-active approach to immigration.

Jackson Lee's bill is not the only effort to find common ground between
African-Americans and immigrants. Another is a unique union proposal in the
current contract negotiations in San Francisco hotels. UNITE HERE Local 2 added
new language to its existing contract proposals on immigrant rights, and the
hotels agreed. But the Multi Employer Group didn't accept a new related
proposal asking the hotels to set up a diversity committee and hire an
ombudsman to begin increasing the percentage of African-American workers.

The proposal stems from an effort by the union to address the changing
demographics of the hotel work force. In the city's hotels, the percentage of
African-American workers is falling as employment continues to grow.
African-Americans now make up less than 6% of the San Francisco hotel work
force, a number that has declined in each of the past five years but one.

In San Francisco, this issue has a lot of history. The Sheraton Palace
Hotel was the scene of the city's most famous civil rights demonstration. In
1963, civil rights activists sat in, and were arrested, in the hotel lobby, as
they demanded that management hire Blacks into jobs in the visible
front-of-the-house locations, where the color line had kept them out. Richard
Lee Mason, an African-American banquet waiter at the St. Francis, remembers,
"African-Americans had been kept in the back of the house for far too long.
People wanted to be in the front of the house, and rightly so."

Employment prospects improved for Black workers for some years, but the
situation changed by the 1980s. Hotels hired increasing percentages of
immigrants, in a move they hoped would create a less demanding and expensive
work force.

"I suspect that because the industry had had a great struggle with
African-Americans, they thought we were too aggressive," Mason speculates. "A
lot of us had come out of the civil rights movement, and we were willing to
fight for higher wages and to make sure we were treated fairly." Steven Pitts,
an economist at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University
of California in Berkeley, says Mason's experience was not uncommon. "This
perception by employers of African-American workers is true nationwide," he
says. "Blacks aren't perceived as compliant, and therefore when many employers
make hiring decisions, they simply don't hire them."

If the hotel industry hoped their new immigrant work force would be more
compliant, however, those hopes were not realized. Immigrants proved to be as
militant as the workers who came before - all the city's big hotels were struck
in 1980, and smaller strikes took place in the following two decades. But Black
employment fell nonetheless.

Today, this economic history shapes the political terrain of cities like
San Francisco and Los Angeles. Black workers make up only 6.4% of the present LA
hotel work force, for instance. Clyde Smith, a houseman at the Wilshire Grand,
remembers that when he was hired 35 years ago, African-Americans worked in
virtually all areas. "There are significantly less today," he says, "often only
one or two in each department, and sometimes none at all."

The union has asked companies to commit to a hiring ombudsman and a
Diversity in the Workplace Taskforce, to reach out to African-American
communities that need jobs and eliminate any hiring barriers. "Some people
would try to pit one race against another, especially Blacks against Latinos,"
Smith says. "I think we shouldn't blame any race or culture."

While demanding progress toward ending this de facto color line, the
union has proposed new protections for the job rights of the immigrants who
make up a majority of the hotel industry work force. The union proposal
strengthens an important ruling won four years ago by HERE in San Francisco,
when an arbitrator held that immigrant workers couldn't be fired just because
their Social Security numbers were in question, a problem faced by many
immigrants. Then in 2003, the union organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom
Ride, a national demonstration for immigration reform joining immigrants with
Black veterans of the original 1960s freedom rides.

Both UNITE HERE and Jackson Lee envision a new civil rights movement,
geared to a changed world of globalization. The key is prohibiting
discrimination - against immigrants because of their status and vulnerability,
and against displaced workers, by enforcing job creation and affirmative action
as national policy. Both proposals also share the same assumption that unions
and high wages are the best protection against job competition.

Jackson Lee is careful to note that she doesn't want her bill viewed as
just an African-American proposal, but her voice nevertheless carries a note of
pride in referring to her co-sponsors as "the conscience of America, the
conscience of the Congress." Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum and
former education director of the AFL-CIO, rejects the idea that the changing
demographics of the US population are not a concern for African-Americans. He
recalls a time when even liberal politicians reacted to criticism by Black
political leaders who condemned the Vietnam War or widespread poverty in the
US, saying they should confine their concerns to civil rights in the South. "We
don't want to just react to demographic changes," he asserts. "As
African-Americans, we're saying that we have something to contribute to this
debate too."

Today a growing number of labor, immigrant rights and Black political
activists recognize the similarity between the denial of civil rights to
African-Americans and the second-class status of immigrants in the US. Jackson
Lee looks at the situation of immigrants and sees the historic discrimination
against people of color, especially Black people and women.

"I had the benefit of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the 1964 Civil
Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the executive order signed by
Richard Nixon on affirmative action. Without them, I would never have seen the
inside of the United States Congress," she declares, while cautioning, "the
rights of minorities in this country are still a work in progress.
Nevertheless, someone recognized that the laws of America were broken as they
related to African-Americans - that we had to fix them. Now we have to fix
other laws to end discrimination against immigrants."

The Jackson Lee bill therefore prohibits discrimination based on
immigration status and makes it an unfair labor practice for an employer to
threaten workers with deportation if they invoke their labor rights or worker
protection laws. It would also require the Secretary of Labor to conduct a
national workplace survey to determine the extent of the exploitation of
undocumented workers.

Jackson Lee opposes temporary worker programs because she believes they
inevitably result in second-class status, in which workers can't enforce labor
rights or use social benefits, if indeed they're entitled to them at all.
Fletcher agrees, and to those who assert that legislation expanding temporary
worker programs can also protect workers' rights, he answers: "maybe I'm from
Missouri - show me. If it's possible to protect their rights in real life, I
haven't seen it yet."

According to Jackson Lee, temporary status not only encourages abuse of
workers, but also has a high social cost. "Who pays for their housing and
healthcare?" she asks. "Do they pay into Social Security, or are they denied
benefits? What rights do they really have?"

The social cost of guest worker programs can also include the impact on
the jobs and wages of other workers. Here Jackson Lee and Fletcher are stepping
off into a political mine field, because of a widely held perception that Blacks
and immigrants, especially Latinos, compete for jobs. "Certainly you're made to
believe that," she says, "that one group hinders the other. That's absolutely
wrong, and I believe in fighting against it."

The heart of her bill makes a direct connection between immigration and
jobs. It would grant permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants who've
lived 5 years in the US, and have a basic understanding of English and US
culture. The money paid in application fees would fund a job creation and
training program for unemployed workers.

Creating jobs for the country's 9.4 million unemployed would require
more resources than this. But the bill recognizes that the issues of jobs and
immigration don't have to pit immigrants and native-born against each other.
Instead they can unite in a common pursuit of jobs, legal status and workplace
rights. And it recognizes that until immigrant workers have legal status and
the security to fight for better conditions and wages, all low-wage workers
will be harmed.

Last year, a study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at
Northeastern University demonstrated just how stark the current situation is -
and why native-born workers feel threatened. Between 2000 and 2004, jobs held
by immigrants rose by 2 million; the number of employed native-born workers
fell by 958,000, and of longtime resident immigrants by 352,000. According to
the report's authors, "the net growth in the nation's employed population
between 2000 and 2004 takes place among new immigrants, while the number of
native-born and established immigrant workers combined declines by more than
1.3 million."

Black unemployment nationally has grown at a catastrophic rate - from
10.8% to 11.8% in May alone. Nearly half (172,000) of the 360,000 people who
lost their jobs in June were African-American, although they're just 11% of the
work force. In New York City, only 51.8% of Black men from 16 to 65 had jobs in
2003, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For Latinos it was 65.7%,
and for whites 75.7%. June's overall unemployment rate in 2003 was 6.4%.

Very little of the rise in African-American unemployment is a result of
direct displacement by immigrants. It's caused overwhelmingly by the decline in
manufacturing and cuts in public employment. In the 2001 recession alone,
300,000 of 2,000,000 Black factory workers lost their jobs to relocation and
layoffs. Changing demographics in the workplace became a fact during a period
of massive plant closings that eliminated the jobs of hundreds of thousands of
African-American and Chicano workers in unionized industries. Through the
postwar decades, those workers had broken the color line, spent their lives in
steel mills and assembly plants, and wrested a standard of living able to
support stable families and communities. In the growing service and high tech
industries of the 80s, those displaced workers were anathema. Employers often
identified their race with pro-union militancy, according to sociologist
Patricia Fernandez Kelly.

Today, corporations in those same industries argue they need workers to
fill labor shortages to come, and promote temporary workers as the answer.
Fletcher argues "if there are people in communities destroyed because the
industry that employed them is gone, and a few miles away there are labor
shortages in other industries, then displaced people should fill the void.
Instead, now we're hearing proposals for guest workers. If African-Americans
were moving from lower to higher level jobs, there would be no reason for fear,
but that's not the case."

Giving employers the ability to bring in thousands of contract laborers,
by expanding existing temporary programs or establishing new ones, allows them
to sharpen job competition in areas and industries where workers are organizing
unions, trying to raise wages, or challenging past patterns of discrimination.

Jackson Lee's bill tries to balance these interests. For US citizens and
residents, she proposes retraining and jobs programs, while for immigrants she
proposes legalization and a ban on discrimination. Employers, she says, should
press for legalization instead of guest workers. "That would give industry a
pool of legal permanent residents or those seeking that status," she declares.
"Most work is not cyclical - restaurants don't close in the fall. They stay
open. They need people in permanent jobs, not temporary workers."

Fletcher also prizes unity across racial lines, and accuses President
Bush of playing racial and national groups off against each other to undermine
it. Bush takes his cue from large employer associations, who have been pushing
guest worker programs for years. These include the US Chamber of Commerce, the
National Retail Association (think Wal-Mart), the American Meat Institute and
the National Restaurant Association. Guest worker programs have a long record
of illegally low wages, hiring blacklists, and dangerous working conditions.
Employers particularly want to eliminate the requirement that they hire
unemployed workers before bringing in contract labor.

Immigration is not a conspiracy by employers to drive wages down.
Migration is a global phenomenon. According to Migrant Rights International,
over 130 million people today live outside the countries in which they were
born. The movement of people from developing countries to rich industrial ones
is not only happening everywhere, it is unstoppable. Poverty and war force
people to leave their homes. The deaths every year of hundreds of people trying
to cross the US/Mexico border is bitter testimony to the price paid by families
migrating north, desperate to survive.

Immigration law can't and doesn't stop people from coming, but it can
and does make people unequal here. Undocumented immigrants can't drive a car,
or collect unemployment or Social Security. The Immigration Reform and Control
Act of 1986 made the act of working itself illegal. When working becomes a
crime, workers must risk a lot to protest low wages and bad treatment, join
unions, and assert their rights.

With or without temporary programs, migration to the US and other
industrial countries is a fact of global life. The question is really whether
or not the purpose of US immigration policy should be supplying labor to
industry at a price it wants to pay.

Jackson Lee also recognizes that US foreign and trade policy often exert
great pressures on people to migrate, by spreading poverty and war. The country
should welcome the immigrants who continue to arrive, while attacking the
poverty and oppression that uproot people, she concludes: "We would do better
to build the economies of countries like Mexico, so people can live their own
dream in their own nation. If we don't help build the economy of the nations
who surround us, we will continue to have people fleeing for both economic
reasons and because they're being persecuted."

Unions have changed a great deal in the way they see immigration, and
are now part of a large national pro-legalization coalition. Fletcher
especially credits the Service Employees and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees
with changing the priority US labor gives to immigrant rights. But today, the
political strategists of those unions in Washington DC are supporting the
Kennedy/McCain bill, which would allow employers to recruit over 400,000 guest
workers each year and would strengthen employer sanctions, the provision of
immigration law that makes it a federal crime for an undocumented worker to
hold a job. Sanctions have led to the firings of thousands of immigrants in
recent years, and been a powerful tool by employers fighting unions. These
operatives argue that guest worker provisions and increased sanctions, while
violating the AFL-CIO's pro-immigrant program adopted in 1999, are necessary to
win employer support for immigration reform in a Republican-controlled Congress.

There's a disconnect, Fletcher asserts, between advocacy for immigrants
and looking at the role US policy plays in creating the poverty which makes
migration necessary. "There's very little understanding in the labor movement
about why people migrate. We don't look at the role of US foreign policy in
particular as an essential cause - the way the war in Central America forced
the migration of Salvadorans, or the Vietnam War the migration of people from
Southeast Asia. When we don't speak out on foreign policy, we don't anticipate
the human cost."

While the Jackson Lee bill doesn't address foreign or trade policy
directly, it does seek to correct some of the inequities created by an
immigration policy that often is used as an instrument of political reward or
punishment. The Congresswoman points to the huge backlog of applicants waiting
for visas in Third World countries, while many European countries can't even
fill their quotas. For Europeans, whose standard of living is often higher than
that in the US, there's very little pressure to use up their visa allotment. But
from Latin America to Africa, the poverty created by war and neoliberal economic
policies produces far more applicants than there are visas available. Jackson
Lee's approach is a diversity proposal that would take those differences into
account.

She further seeks to help refugees from two countries, Liberia and
Haiti, whose refugee status is imperiled or denied, and whose cause the Black
Caucus has championed in the past. Liberians were allowed to come as refugees a
decade ago as their country was engulfed in civil war, and her bill seeks to
give them permanent rather than temporary refuge. Haitians are victim of a
double standard that allows Cubans to become legal residents as soon as they
step onto US soil, while the Coast Guard picks up desperate refugees from
Haiti, fleeing repression in tiny boats, before they get to the Florida beach.
If they somehow reach it, they're held behind barbed wire as illegal refugees.
"There is an inequity between those fleeing from one island and those fleeing
another," the Congresswoman comments dryly.

Jackson Lee is the granddaughter of Jamaican immigrants, and sees in
their effort to build a home in the US the same daily struggle carried on by
the many immigrants in her own Houston district. But unlike her grandparents,
today's immigrants face a system she condemns as broken, and often pay a
painful price. She cites especially post-9/11 discrimination against immigrants
from the Middle East.

"Families are torn apart," Jackson Lee laments bitterly, "and we're not
adding to our security, but only to the misery of human beings who want to give
their best to this country. We have a system that's not helping anyone. It's not
helping to build the economy - it's helping to tear it down. For immigrants
here, we need an orderly system that allows them to do their jobs and build the
American economy, and allows US workers to have jobs and do likewise."

David Bacon is a west coast writer and photographer, and former factory
worker and union organizer. His book, The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
US/Mexico Border, was published last year by the University of California
Press. His photodocumentary project on immigration, Beyond Borders,
Transnational Working Communities, is due next year from ILR Press/Cornell
University Press.

This article also appeared in the Summer 2005 print edition of The Black
Scholar.

The Sandinista Revolution and education

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/major150805.html

Haiti : action needed

----- Original Message -----
From: Sasha B. Kramer
To: sash@stanford.edu
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 3:12 PM
Subject: Father Jean Juste has fallen ill in jail

Friends,

Father Jean Juste has been in prison since Thursday July 21 when he was assaulted by a mob, beaten, then illegally detained without receiving medical care. Many of you have had the honor of meeting Father Jean Juste when he came to California in January, others have no doubt been moved by his statements of behalf of the poor. Those of you who have will understand the depth of my sadness at having to share this most recent news. I just returned from a week in Haiti where the human rights situation is steadily deteriorating in the run up to the elections. Before leaving I was talking with some friends and someone posed the question...if you could have dinner with anyone in the world from all history who would it be? Father Jean Juste was the first to come to my mind. He has taught me how to see hope in the midst of tremendous suffering and showed me the power of courage. Please hold him in your thoughts and prayers.

Peace, Sasha

LETTER FROM FATHER JEAN JUSTE IN PRISON: AUGUST 16, 2005



Port au Prince Haiti - Haiti National Penitentiary

Brothers and sisters around the world, allow me to thank you for what you have done for me personally, and what you have done for the poor ones I serve and stand with, for all prisoners, especially the political prisoners of Haiti.

I know that thousands of you are advocating on my behalf. People from Haiti, from the US, from Brazil, Canada, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Nicaragua and the Netherlands have sent letters and faxes to the US Embassy and the Haitian government trying to free me and to bring democracy and human rights back to Haiti.

Hundreds of churches and organizations who are helping out - I thank you. I especially thank the 29 members of US Congress who signed a letter for me. I read the letter and you are so strong and clear. Well said! I wish our church leaders were so strong and clear.

I must tell you I am not doing well physically. I was almost dead Sunday morning. I fell unconscious for some time but was rescued when some of the other prisoners took me on their backs to the dispensary. God sends me back to you! I do not know what happened. My neck hurts, my skin is very bad and I ache a lot. I need medical attention. But I am glad to be alive and join all of you in the struggle for freedom and real democracy.

My cell is 8 by 2 and is very hot and smelly. We have a bathroom in the hall that works when there is water. There are no beds. I sleep on a one inch thick mat on the floor. Yet I am very thankful to God who allows me to wake up to another life.

I now have discovered so much support for the Haitian people and me from people all over the world. I am in awe. I add my strength to those who stand all over the world for the rights of everyone whatever color, whatever creed, whatever nationality. To Cite Soleil, to Bel-Air, Veye Yo, the 10th department, the Lavalas family, to all of you around the world, to the churches especially my own St. Clare's, I say to you "Chapo Ba!" (I tip my hat!)

There is a great fraternity in jail and with the poor. In jail we pray loudly - day and night. Our spirits are uplifted when we hear about your work for Haiti, because we hear hope coming. We hear hope coming and we know our victory for human rights and respect and democracy will be total one day.

Personally, regardless of all the hardship, I am still joining my voice to the voices of all democracy lovers to demand the return of constitutional order in Haiti, the physical return of our elected president Aristide, release of all political prisoners, respect of all human rights, and if that is done then real elections can happen.

Keep up the advocacy. Keep up the peaceful demonstrations. Keep up the prayers.

Ill and in jail, I humbly add my suffering to those of Jesus to hasten peace and justice and love for everyone.

Merci

** you can read about Father Jean Juste's arrest at: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/07/321949.shtml

To help free Father Jean Juste there are several things you can do:

1. Contact your member of Congress and urge them to join twenty-nine of their colleagues and sign the letter calling on President Bush to take action to secure Father Jean-Juste's immediate release. In Sacramento, contact Rep. Doris Matsui:
Mail: 501 I St, Suite 12-600, Sacramento, 95814
Phone: 916-498-5600
Fax: 916-444-6117
Email (through website): http://www.house.gov/matsui/


2. Sign Human Rights First's Online petition at:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/defenders/hrd_haiti/alert072705_juste.htm

3. Yesterday, Father Jean Juste's lawyer Bill Quigley delivered thousands of letters and signatures demanding freedom for Jean Juste (see below for details). Bill is looking for more letters to deliver on his next trip, you may fax them to 1-504-861-5440, or mail to c/o Professor Bill Quigley, Loyola University School of Law, Box 902, New Orleans, LA 70118.


Dear Friends:

Thanks to your help, Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans USA, a volunteer lawyer for Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti who is assisting Mario Joseph of BAI in working for the release of Fr. Jean-Juste, is hand delivering to U.S. Ambassador to Haiti:

1. 791 letters and faxes from people from 42 states and 10 countries (including Brazil, Canada, Jamaica, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Nicaragua, South Africa) calling on the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti to do everything in his power to gain the immediate release of Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste from the Haiti National Penitentiary.

2. Copy of letter signed by 29 U.S. Representatives to the U.S. Congress written to President Bush and the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti calling for the release of Fr. Jean-Juste. The letter is signed by Representatives: Maxine Waters, Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Barney Frank, Lynn Woolsey, Sherrod Brown, Maurice Hichey, Sheila jackson-Lee, Corinne Brown, Earl Blumenauer, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Edophus Brown, Melvin L. Watt, Tammy Baldwin, Kendrick B. Meek, Raul Grijalva, Donna Christensen, Al Green, Julia Carson, Carolyn
Kilpatrick, Gregory Meeks, Dennis Kucinich, Donald Payne, James P. McGovern, Robert Wexler, Major R. Owens, and Bob Filner.

3. Over 1200 names and emails of people calling for the release of Fr. Jean-Juste compiled by the US national human rights group, Human Rights First.

This is a total of over 2020 people as of 6 pm Sunday August 14, 2005. Many other letters and faxes and emails are known to be directed to the U.S. Ambassador and Haitian authorities calling for the immediate release of Fr. Jean-Juste as a result of the designation of Fr. Jean-Juste as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International.

The 791 people whose letters and faxes are being delivered are from a very broad range of university, legal, medical, religious, community, and private organizations including:

Adelante Youth Center
Adrian Dominican Sisters
Agenda for Children
American University
791 more