Candida Pugh's Blog, page 2

Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby

See note at end of this blog.

When asked what makes America the greatest country in the world, the anchorman on cable television’s Newsroom, played by Jeff Daniels, delivers this passionate and somewhat inaccurate critique of "American Exceptionalism":

"It's not the greatest country in the world," he fumes. "We're seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports. ... So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the f* you're talking about."
Quoted on CNN

The investment of the American people in national superiority ensures that our politicians won't ever say what they really think. Complex ideas can be too easily eviscerated into negative sound bites, and negativity remains the only crime guaranteed to keep a candidate out of office.We can trace Ronald Reagan’s election to his insistence that America does everything right. He offered himself to the electorate as a cheering squad and voters happily did the "Wave" in response. Now we endure politicians on par with Mr. Rogers encouraging three-year-olds to think positive thoughts.With nothing real on the discussion menu and the truth off-limits, our candidates of necessity fall back on ad hominem attacks. The Romney/Ryan camp repeatedly insinuates that the President, as a black man, resents a strong, noble, invincible (white) America. A member of Romney's staff went so far as to declare that, by virtue of his “Anglo-Saxon heritage,” the Republican candidate understands and appreciates Europe in a way our African-American President cannot. UK TelegraphIn spite of repeated contradictions in the national press, Mitt Romney refers to Barack Obama’s putative “apologist” stance on the United States. Even the slightest hint that Mr. Obama wavers in visionless patriotism incites Mr. Romney’s base and erodes Mr. Obama's chances.On the other hand, Democrats like to remind us of Mr. Romney’s contempt for the 47%, even though every presidential candidate since Lincoln knows that 47% of the voters will not vote for him. And I suspect that, in spite of pasted-on smiles, all candidates feel hostile to that group and routinely characterize it in disparaging terms.Public relations hacks create the men who speak into the microphones, impersonating "true leaders", people the polls tell them the voters will approve. Nowadays, myopia about America's real problems constitutes the most essential qualification for president. Don’t mention the country’s falling income levels, the rising levels of imprisonment, the young black men murdering each other in the nation’s ghettos. Mum's the word. All the news is good, unless you're the contender. Then all the news is bad but will definitely get better when you take office. Because this great nation deserves you.When a good ole boy says he'll vote for the man he'd like to have a beer with, he means he'll vote for the man who makes him feel good about himself by telling him he’s part of a country envied and admired by the rest of the planet, a country he built.Bulletin: The United States is no longer number one except in dubious categories.We remain first in gross domestic product, a less than stellar accomplishment when you look at what GDP actually represents:

"Since the GDP records every monetary transaction as positive, the costs of social decay and natural disasters are tallied as economic advance. . . . Hurricane Andrew was a disaster for Southern Florida. But the GDP recorded it as a boon to the economy of well over $15 billion." Progress

Our candidates don’t tell us that. If GDP helps their campaign, they tout it. If a falling GDP helps, they brandish it while promising to boost it during their presidency.We also remain an unsurpassable first in military spending, over China by $711,000,000,000 to $143,000,000,000, over Russia, which spends approximately $72,000,000,000, and over the United Kingdom, which spends approximately $63,000,000,000.

Why do we need to spend an obscene $711bn annually on weapons? Last year, according to the GAO, taxpayers shelled out “$71 for a 4¢ metal pin, $644.75 for a . . . gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51 . . . . $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DOD [the Department of Defense] for $7.71 . . . . $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents, an increase of over 177,000 percent.”  fff.org

Such pigging out at the public trough has been around since the Civil War. War in this country has always been big business, with $640 toilet seats that should've been gold-plated and $436 hammers that should've worked without an attached carpenter. But since then, "ersatz people" (aka corporations) have been doing business as usual.)
As the Republicans insist (and Obama intends), we will increase our spending on the military. Our corporations are struggling with record profits. But, of course, these facts wouldn't reach us if we had to depend on our candidates to broadcast them. They're much too depressing.We are first as well in locking up our citizens in numbers and percentages greater than China, Cuba, Russia, or any other country you like to think of as totalitarian. America incarcerates 730 bodies for every 100,000. “According to a US Department of Justice report published in 2006, over 7.2 million people were at that time in prison, on probation, or on parole (released from prison with restrictions). That means roughly 1 in every 32 Americans are held by the justice system.”More recently, “[a]s of December 31, 2010, the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS) at King's College London estimated 2,266,832 [U.S.] prisoners from a total population of 310 million.” China imprisons approximately 1,600,000 of their people despite a population four times the size of that of the United States. Wikipedia

And we are first in spending on medical care: $2.6 trillion every year.Even so, our infants die at in numbers greater than they do in 48 other countries and territories. New York TimesFurthermore, all that spending doesn’t improve our health:

“In a 2011 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development, the United State ranked 27th in life expectancy. The report found our cancer survival rates are higher than average, but compared to other developed countries, we're more likely to die of heart disease and we have a not-good track record on treating chronic diseases such as asthma.” Mlive News

Asthma, of course, for reasons it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to conjure, plagues children living in ghetto housing.With so much money slushing around the healthcare system, nevertheless, sick Americans are far less likely to seek medical care than sick people in 29 of 34 developed countries. Mlive NewsBut we are told our healthcare system is the world's best. There will be no bad news tolerated by the emperor-citizens who inhabit this land. Here’s the New York Postresponding to the gloomy Newsroom assessment that led off this blog:

Cuba beats us, but Cuba is a dictatorship that lies about everything. I doubt [Newsroom’s producer Aaron] Sorkin would want his next child delivered in Cuba. 

Still, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia and Japan beat us. Why is that? 

Because doctors in other countries look at a premature fetus and think “medical waste.” Our doctors think, “life to be saved,” because in fact ours is the greatest country and that’s how we roll. 

Premature birth, which is the leading cause of infant mortality, is much higher in the US than in other countries — 65% higher than in Britain. The National Center for Health Statistics calls this the “primary reason” Western Europe has better numbers. 

The World Health Organization notes it is “common practice” in Western Europe not to count a delivery as a live birth until the child has survived for a set period of time. If the baby draws one breath outside the womb in the US, that’s a live birth. A lot of these babies don’t make it and drive up our mortality numbers. New York Post

So thoughtless of these infants to drive up our mortality numbers, and so unfair. We're so much better than we look on paper, eh?This would be funny if it didn't march in lockstep with our Pollyanna view of ourselves, and if that view didn’t threaten to topple our democracy.But let’s deal with the Post on the question of having a baby in Cuba. Maybe you wouldn’t want to raise your child in Cuba, but you wouldn’t object to delivering a child there, not if you knew the facts. First of all, it's free. The average hospital stay in the U.S. for a new mother is $3500, which doesn't begin to cover the costs of prenatal care. Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in the Americas at 4.9 per 100,000 births, with three provinces having achieved well under that. The U.S. has one of the highest infant mortality rates among developed nations.And let's examine the ridiculous claim that the variation in infant mortality rates unfavorable to the U.S. (bad news!) arises from differences in how infant deaths are recorded. Here’s the Congressional Research Service:

“Differences in how live births are recorded may affect international IMR comparisons; however, it is unlikely that these recording differences would entirely explain the high U.S. IMR or the variation between the U.S. IMR and those of some European countries. This is because of both the widespread use of the WHO definition of live births and the small number of births that fall outside the WHO definition. Researchers at NCHS conclude that for recording differences to completely explain the high U.S. IMR, European countries would have to misreport one-third of their infant deaths, which these researchers conclude is unlikely.” Congressional Research Service

Estimates vary wildly on the proportion of healthcare dollars spent in paperwork, but most hold that at least 30% goes to paperwork. Less than 5% goes directly to doctors. Nobody’s saying how much goes to bloat the bank accounts of overpaid CEOs. Get Better HealthIn other words, the failures of our healthcare system are no mystery. It is one of the greatest profit-making boondoggles in history.
My advice: Put your WE’RE NUMBER ONE foam finger in the basement storeroom and hope that someday you'll have a reason to take it out again.
That is, unless you want to celebrate the fact that Americans own a greater number of guns than the gun nuts of any other country in the world, at a whopping 88 weapons per 100 of our peace-loving citizens. Public Square

________________________
Here's a letter I sent in response to a federal judge with integrity. please read the NY Times article at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/us/... and, if you agree with me, send your own thank you to encourage the return of decency to our country:

The Honorable John C. Coughenour
United States Courthouse
700 Stewart Street, Suite 16229
Seattle, WA 98101-9906

Dear Judge Coughenour,

Your statement that you would not sentence a man to 50 additional lashes for "getting blood on the whip" distinguishes you in decency and intellect from the cowed mob mentality of so many Americans and, most particularly, so many of those involved in making laws, and administering and adjudicating our justice system.

Thank you for reminding us of the values we are in danger of losing forever as we place fear at the head of the table.

Sincerely,

A Disposable Life

Women are frequently reluctant to cry rape, even nowadays, but in the past, if they filed a complaint, they would have to endure a second degrading attack, this one by lawyers probing their sexual history. The intent was to show that the victim was a slut and therefore not entitled to claim rape. Prior to the final decades of the 20thCentury, for almost all Americans, a slut was any woman who had gone to bed with any man to whom she wasn’t married. Beginning in 1974, the feminist movement succeeded in forcing passage of legislation to protect rape victims from this form of slander. Almost every jurisdiction currently thwarts lawyers looking to trash the reputation of the victims. Unfortunately, given the tidal wave of misogyny currently drenching the US, these hard-won laws may fall. They are under court review in Oregon, in Arkansas, in New Jersey, and under attack almost everywhere else. If the movement to suppress women’s rights succeeds, white sexual offenders may once again look forward to enjoying a rape-at-leisure, repent-never climate.
But for the time being, in most jurisdictions, a woman’s sexual activities remain off-limit in a trial of her accused attacker.
For murdered African American boys, irrelevant details of their history and their invented history are still fair game, if not in court, at the very least in the media. The killer’s lawyers may leak information to the press that will lower public empathy for the victim.
Trayvon Martin’s parents have suffered from repeated publication of nasty rumors, some of which no doubt emanated from Zimmerman’s attorneys, some from racist supporters. These slanderous and mostly false portrayals of the boy include Martin was a drug dealer, Martin was suspended from school for swinging at a bus driver (the principal denies that violence played any role in his suspension, a fact repeated in numerous responsible publications), Martin had tattoos (!), Martin had a friend who wears gangsta clothes, Martin smoked pot, Martin was a drug dealer, Martin’s friends posted photographs of blunts on Facebook, Martin stole the ice tea and Skittles, and Martin photographed himself extending his middle finger.
If all these calumnies were true, so what? As I see it, not one of them amounts to a capital offense.
And, if you think Zimmerman screamed “Help!” as he pulled the trigger—witnesses report the shot cut off the scream—you probably think stand-your-ground is a good law.
There’s another way to look at the Trayvon Martin shooting, a way that clarifies the huge role of race in the public appraisal of Zimmerman’s actions.
Imagine Trayvon Martin as a white girl from a middle-class family, a girl who smoked a little pot now and then, cursed out a teacher, and had once been suspended from school. Imagine this blonde, blue-eyed high school kid wandering into the labyrinth of a housing development in search of a friend’s house where she had been staying. Imagine George Zimmerman as a black man who decides to follow her because she is, in his opinion, acting suspiciously, tottering up to front doors on obviously empty homes and peering into windows. Now picture this black Zimmerman shooting this white girl because, after she spotted him dogging her, she attacked him with her talon-like fingernails. “I thought she was going to blind me,” the African-American Zimmerman would say.
Trayvon Martin weighed 158 pounds. Zimmerman weighed 185 pounds. Both men were about 5’9” tall. Zimmerman was a man, Martin a boy. Zimmerman had a gun. Martin had a can of iced tea.
Here are the facts that goad many of us into wanting to see Zimmerman convicted:
Fact one: Zimmerman’s wounds following the encounter were too slight to permit anyone to infer a deadly attack from them. He did not require stitches to the back of his skull, where he claimed Trayvon Martin had wounded him by slamming his head into concrete.  Videos of Zimmerman within one-half hour of shooting Martin show no injuries to the nose and rather slight injuries to the back of his head.
Dr. Vidor Friedman, president of the Florida College of Emergency Physicians, remains unconvinced.
"If somebody had been beating his head against concrete I'd think we'd see more obvious scrapes," Friedman said. He also said he would expect to see bandages on Zimmerman's head.
More significantly for Friedman was the condition of Zimmerman's nose.
"All of the ridges in his nose are clearly defined. You would expect significant swelling in the hour or two after a break. There appears to be none. It doesn't look like his nose was broken or badly broken," Friedman said. ABC News

Washington Post copy of police photograph of Zimmerman one-half hour following the shooting. Note that the blood trickling down Zimmerman’s head in this photo does not appear to emerge from any injury. However, since it isn’t splattered, we can probably assume it isn’t Trayvon Martin’s blood. Yet, if Zimmerman shot Martin while Martin straddled him, wouldn’t his face be bloody? If he washed that blood off, why didn’t he wash the back of his head? (Note also that his nose looks intact, although the other profile shows a small cut, and he doesn’t appear to have the bruises under his eyes that normally accompany a broken nose.)
Fact two: No blood was discovered on Trayvon Martin’s hands. Fingernail scrapings from both hands revealed no DNA from George Zimmerman. (see lab report referenced below)
 Fact three: Trayvon Martin, according to DNA analysis of the gun’s grip, is excluded as a contributor to DNA on the gun’s grip. DNA profiling of the holster is inconclusive with regard to the identity of two other individuals who left traces on the holster. (see lab report referenced below)
Fact four: Zimmerman claims he shot Martin while the boy straddled him. Yet the autopsy describes the wound thus: “Direction of projectile:  Directly, front to back.” In other words, the bullet entered and followed a straight line to the heart. This has to be tough to do while lying on your back, fighting for your life.
Fact five: Although one lab report claims the gunshot residue on Zimmerman’s clothing is “consistent with a contact wound,” the autopsy describes the “stippling” as consistent with “a wound of entrance of intermediate range,” defined as between one and eighteen inches away. In short, Zimmerman’s distance from and position relative to Trayvon Martin are undetermined.
Fact six: There is no exit wound. Gun enthusiasts describe as “powerful” Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm semi-automatic pistol (often carried by police). Review of Zimmerman's Gun  I quote this not because I know what makes a bullet remain inside the body, but because I think it’s reasonable to ask how shooting a powerful gun held directly against a victim’s chest can result in a bullet lodged in the chest cavity.
Fact seven: Gun enthusiasts also describe Zimmerman’s Lugar as having “a ridiculously long double-action trigger pull.” Review of Zimmerman's Gun Recall Zimmerman’s description placing Martin atop him, pinning his hands at least part of the time, and yet somehow Zimmerman manages to get his gun out of its holster, fire it in spite of its “ridiculously long . . . pull”, and aim at Martin such that the bullet’s trajectory didn’t angle up, down, left, or right.
Fact eight: The autopsy report on Martin’s corpse records an injury to the boy’s hand inconsistent with Zimmerman’s account of Martin’s attack on him, to wit, nothing beyond “a ¼ by ¼ inch abrasion on the left fourth finger.”
The Washington Post, however, viewed that slight injury as consistent with Zimmerman’s story: “Martin’s autopsy report shows that he had a small abrasion on his left ring finger, which might support Zimmerman’s account that Martin was punching him or the idea that Martin was fighting for his life.” Washington Post
But how do you threaten someone’s life and incur only a “small abrasion” from slugging them and breaking their nose?
But perhaps Martin did strike Zimmerman in the face. Perhaps he even slammed Zimmerman’s head on the sidewalk—although his body was positioned many feet away from where Zimmerman claimed to have been hit on the sidewalk. One witness reported immediately following the shooting that, although she could not clearly see the two men, she was positive they were on the grass and not the sidewalk.
I ask again: Why should “stand your ground” apply to Zimmerman, if it does, while the law has never been considered with regard to Martin's actions. He saw Zimmerman stalking him at night for no clear reason beyond the color of his skin. According to Florida law, that would have justified anything Martin might have done to defend himself. Only the failure to appreciate the fear racism arouses in its targets in such a situation could allow someone to conceive of Zimmerman as the only one intimidated and the only one entitled to attack.
Trayvon Martin has been the victim in this case--from Zimmerman’s initial profiling of him right up to today. I fear his victimization will persist for some time.
*For all autopsy and lab information, see New York Timesrelease of Trayvon Martin Documents

Whining for Dollars

Abigail Fisher stands in the Greco-Roman splendor of the Supreme Court hallways, wringing her hands. She is 22 and reasonably attractive. The New York Times of October 9, 2012 quotes her as saying "I probably would have gotten a better job offer had I gone to U.T." If she’d graduated in the top ten percent of her Texas high school, the state would’ve guaranteed her admission to University of Texas. But she didn’t and thereon hangs a tale. Ms. Fisher is victimized by a harsh reality: She's white.
White “victims” such as Ms. Fisher have been lambasting race-based affirmative action since President Lyndon Johnson first conceived and implemented it through executive order 11246 in 1965. In 1969 President Richard Nixon expanded the order.
With the advent of affirmative action for people of color and women, the old system of race- and gender-based "affirmative action” – i.e., preferential hiring for white men — took a jab to the shoulder. Even that rather slight injury, however, proved too much for the truly entitled. Outraged white men recruited “color guards” for their cause, including Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly. The presence of dark faces among those protesting affirmative action’s so-called “discriminatory practices” reassured the racists that they couldn’t possibly be racist.
Until the Tea Party seized Congress and succeeded in brainwashing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the majority of people of good will generally agreed that African Americans had been given a raw deal from their first forced arrival in this country to lynching to urban schools better cast as prisons for bored teenagers and overwhelmed teachers. The misery inflicted by racism hasn’t abated despite the insistence of Ms. Fisher and her ilk that the playing field is now level and they should resume their place at the head of the line.
According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2010 average household income for a black family was $32,068, and for a white (non-Hispanic) family, $54,620. The poverty rate for African Americans comes in at triple that of white Americans. Other statistics, most of which I’ve published here, reveal huge disparities between white and black Americans in health and healthcare, housing, job opportunities, discriminatory lending practices, etc. In almost every measurable demographic, the majority of people of color and, most especially of African Americans, live in communities under siege—unprotected by the constitutional rights Ms. Fisher claims for herself.Following the 1996 passage of Proposition 209 banning all forms of affirmative action in California, the University of California jettisoned preferential consideration of race. Since that time, students of color in California's institutions of higher education have all but vanished. In March of this year, The California Aggie reported that “of UC’s 18,000 graduate and professional school students, 12 percent are underrepresented minorities, with African Americans making up less than 4 percent.” Here’s a chart from California Watch showing the downward trend of minority enrollment in higher education throughout the state system:
California Watch
Black and brown parents have yet to receive a tax break from the state to compensate them for their children's exclusion from a system they help pay to support.
In 1978 Alan Bakke, a medical school applicant to the University of California at Davis, appealed to the Supreme Court on the basis that his superior qualifications had been bypassed by a system mired in (the wrong) racial preference. Bakke won and was admitted, although the Court didn't strike down affirmative action—not then.
Bakke challenged racial preferences for African Americans and Latino Americans in admissions, but his lawsuit didn't challenge a privilege enjoyed almost exclusively by whites, a routine part of the admissions process at UC Davis: legacy. UC has always extended special consideration to applicants whose father or mother studied there.
Throughout the country, in more than three-quarters of universities, both public and private, legacy admissions continue to favor white males in de facto "affirmative action". Chronicle
White men have, in fact, enjoyed affirmative action’s advantages far more than minority populations or women. Here’s how:

Under affirmative action, veterans and veterans with disabilities receive preferential consideration in hiring and education. The majority of veteran are white. Yet, even without counting veterans, white men have benefited from affirmative action in unforeseen ways. 'The most significant change brought about by the EEO/AA laws was publication of job announcements. Until the mid-1960s’ passage of EEO/AA laws, the majority of mid- and upper-level job openings were not published. They were secrets, known only to insiders....virtually all of those jobs went to white men, but not all white men were considered appropriate management material. Italian, Polish, Irish, Jewish, South Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Catholic workers and the great numbers of lower-income white people were not generally part of the “in group” or “country-club set.” These people held mostly lower-pay-level jobs. However, after the EEO/AA laws forced companies to publicly advertise management positions, these groups began to learn about, apply for and move into the upper levels of employment. The implementation of EEO/AA enabled millions of these white men to apply for and get jobs, achieving upward mobility that had previously been denied.' Diversity Inc.

We Americans, almost universally, have imagined ourselves as a meritocracy. We congratulate ourselves on being a "classless" society, although recent revelations of the obscene wealth of the 1% and the .01%, together with the erosion of America's once impressive middle class, have called this notion into question for more and more of us.
Over half of our universities and colleges, more public than private, rely heavily on SAT scores for admissions qualification. Yet SAT scores reveal very little about a student's chances of success in higher education.

The SAT is a relatively poor predictor of student performance whereas admissions criteria that tap mastery of curriculum content, such as high-school grades and achievement tests, are more valid indicators of how students are likely to perform in college. . . . As an  admissions criterion, the SAT has a more adverse impact on poor and minority applicants than high-school grades, class rank and other measures of academic achievement, while admissions criteria that emphasise (sic) demonstrated achievement over potential ability are more likely to promote educational equity.   University World News

The trouble with meritocracy is defining merit. If one individual has been handed advantages while another receives none, who merits what? Americans still assert in greater numbers that those with wealth deserve it. But this endorsement comes out of delusion—the delusion that people with money earned it honestly and through hard work and against odds. We need to acknowledge that we live in a country divided by class, that some are rewarded merely for a serendipitous birth while others steal their way into riches. Mitt Romney appears to have gained wealth through both of these routes.
Some Americans would like to eliminate race as a determinant and apply affirmative action on the basis of economic status. The trouble with giving preferential treatment solely on the basis of poverty is it doesn’t begin to acknowledge the reality that it is far easier for a bright young white person to crack through the ceiling of class than for a bright young black person.
There is no meritocracy. There's luck, there's privilege, there are connections, and there's money. Strip all that away and you have your average American of color.

Deadly Force in America

When police shoot an unarmed individual, law and order supporters frequently offer as justification the assertion that an officer faces death every minute he or she is on the job.
In all of 2010, 38 police officers in the United States died from felony assaults, according to the New York Times ("Alarm Grows in Sao Paolo", October 3, 2012). For deputies, sheriffs, police, and all law enforcement officers, 2010 saw 133 deaths in total. The rate for all front-line law enforcement deaths is 18 per 100,000,000 workers.
Few of us would seek a job that gave us comparable odds of dying. Yet how do police deaths stack up against death rates in other occupations?
Garbage collectors in 2010 died at the rate of 29.8 workers per 100,000,000. For roofers, the rate is 32.4 per 100,000. Fishing for a living ranks as the single most dangerous way to pay the bills, with 116 deaths per 100,000 fishermen.

"Assaults or violent acts. . . account[ed] for about 17.7 percent of work-related deaths." Huliq

Since law enforcement deaths place last on a list of the ten most dangerous occupations, and since law enforcement deaths comprise approximately one-twelfth (or 8%) of the total workers lost on that list, if nearly 18% of deaths resulted from assaults, we have to assume some other occupation(s) must also be plagued by violent death at the hands of another. Unfortunately, the report does not specify but it's intriguing to speculate on whether the workers in question should be armed.
But let's take a look at a different segment of the population in terms of their mortality risk. (As you read these statistics, keep in mind that African Americans comprise slightly more than 12% of the US population.)

"In 1995, the national homicide rate was about 10 per 100,000; the rate for Boston gang members, mainly black and Hispanic, was 1,539 per 100,000." NY Books 

"Blacks die from assault at more than three times the U.S. average . . .. In the 2000s the average rate of death from assault in the U.S. was about 5.7 per 100,000 but for whites it was 3.6 and for blacks it was over 20. . . . And this is after a long period of decline in the death rate from assault." Crooked Timber 

The leading cause of death for black men under the age of 24 is homicide, with black males having a 1 in 27 chance of being a homicide victim, whites 1 in 205. Slideshare

Who is endangered, then? If police shootings are justifiable because of 18 per 100,000 deaths, what are black males justified in doing?
Your response to that is probably that officers are carrying out their duties while black men under 24 dying may well be involved in some dangerous occupation. But you could be wrong about that. Consider this from the site cited above:
The United States incarcerates 370 per 100,000 white males, compared to 3317 per 100,000 black males, or 10 times as many. While 75% of the nation's drug prisoners are black, 75% of the nation's drug users are white.
And what about police shootings?

"Since January 1, 2012, police and a much smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes have murdered at least 120 Black women and men." Report on Extra-Judicial Killings.

I can't attest to the accuracy of reports of 120 deaths at the hands of police, or those acting as police, because, although it's possible to obtain statistics on almost everything that happens in the United States, no one collects statistics on the number of police shootings and Congress has not asked anyone--ever--to do so.

"Looking for the number of burglaries last year in Devils Lake, N.D.? How about the increase in property crimes in Caribou, Maine? The answers (34 and 23 percent, respectively) are readily available from the FBI. . . .'We don't have a mandate to [collect data on police shootings]," said William Carr, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C. "It would take a request from Congress for us to collect that data.'" Deadly Force

Given the disproportionate numbers of black people suffering at the hands of our justice system, the fact that no one wants to know how many of them the police shot last year tells me a great deal about the danger of being black in America.

Who Pays for Free Speech?

Bill Maher says one-half of Muslims believe it’s okay to kill anyone who insults Mohammed. (See video here: Real Clear Politics) He pulls this statistic out of a place the sun never shines. Either that or Fox News took a poll of their viewers.
Jon Stewart jumps up and down with glee over the point-blank shooting of an apparently unarmed Osama bin Laden. We Americans enjoy a good extra-judicial killing.

Hank Williams, Jr., says Obama is a [M]uslim who “hates the U.S.” CBS News Right. And, remember, the President wasn’t born here either.
The Daily Mail posts a photograph of a Lebanese tot wielding an automatic weapon. You get the point. Muslims don’t care about their kids. Daily Mail

Next week New York subway stations will sport posters developed by an “active anti-Muslim group”. The ads come to commuters courtesy of our courts, which ruled unconstitutional the MTA’s attempt to ban them:

"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” Guardian UK

Last year the NYPD showed 1400 police trainees a film, “The Third Jihad,” that represents moderate Muslim groups in the United States as part of a global conspiracy to commit terrorism. In the film, the NYPD Chief of Police speaks about the dangers of Islam. Democracy Now
In October 2011 Congress questioned FBI director, Robert Mueller, about a training film used by the FBI that “equates mainstream Muslims to terrorists”. Wired
The CNN Web site shows Karachi children between the ages of 6 and 8 chanting “Death to America!” and “Punish the Blasphemer”, in response to the video, “Innocence of Muslims”—“which mocks Mohammed as a womanizer, child molester and killer.” CNN
Mitt Romney blasts the President for not touting Christian America’s freedom of speech as a response to demonstrations throughout the Arab world against “Innocence of Muslim”. Yeah. What’s wrong with the man? Doesn’t he want to see another ambassador shot? What a coward.
From the hate speech of Maher to the hate speech of Romney, we see American belligerence in action. What remains obscured are the effects of hate speech. The President tells the United Nations on September 26, 2012, that the answer to hate speech isn’t repression; it’s more speech.

Does tolerating hate speech—as President Obama claims—protect free speech?
Of course, we no longer have much free speech left. If you’re dubious about that, try speaking your mind in the airport security line.
More significantly, since the passage of the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act, our right to speak has steadily eroded. We can probably look forward to being intimidated into more silence by the (temporarily suspended) National Defense Authorization Act. The Obama Administration is zealously attempting to salvage the NDAA from a federal judge’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional in authorizing indefinite imprisonment of Americans, without counsel or specific charges. Venture into the public square and say your piece with that Damocles’ sword hovering over your neck.
Without question, however, the free speech Americans have retained is hate speech. Say any racist malarkey that makes you imagine yourself to be a superior human being, post it on the Internet or print it up and hand it out, or shout it from any podium you can devise or seize—someone somewhere may kill somebody on account of it, but you’ll have the full support of nearly every liberal, reactionary, and undecided voter in the country. The only people you can be confident will oppose your hate speech will be the objects of it.
Is it true that allowing people to drum up hatred protects the free speech of everybody else? After all, hate speech is outlawed in Canada and 26 other countries, almost every single one of which Americans look to as open societies where citizens are free to speak their minds—they simply cannot publish screeds that sanction violence against women, gays, people of color, or people whose faith other people don’t like.
Back in 1977 and 1978, when the American Nazi Party sought a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois, the American Civil Liberties Union rushed to defend the fascists’ right to march. The ACLU argued it was necessary to protect the free speech of the most heinous among us in order to ensure the free speech of us all.
Note to ACLU: You weren’t protecting speech. You were protecting action. But that’s beside the point.
The American Nazi Party chose Skokie deliberately and maliciously. In the 1970s, one of every six Skokie residents was a Holocaust survivor. Having the swastika brandished in front of their homes would not have been merely “unpleasant.” The march, had it come off, might well have forced some fragile individuals to relive the unspeakable horrors of the camps—precisely what the Nazis intended.
My point is that hate speech has consequences:

Muslims may make up fewer than one percent of the U.S. population but they were nearly 13 percent of victims of religious-based hate crimes in 2010. . . . The rise in hate crimes parallels the growing unfavorable opinions Americans hold of Muslims. A “Washington Post/ABC News” poll made in October, 2001, reported that 39 percent of Americans held unfavorable opinions of Muslims. That number rose to 46 percent in 2006 and 49 percent in 2010. (July 2nd). UK Progressive

And this:

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by 50% in 2010, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the incendiary rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York City. SPL Center

The law implicitly condones the perpetuation of two non-economic classes—one legally subject to derision. Because you can’t think of “incendiary” speech directed against Christian white male Americans. There is none.

Defending hate-filled free speech protects only those against whom no hate speech exists. Everyone else suffers the inevitable and sometimes deadly consequences.
Ignoring the government’s control over political speech while touting the preciousness of hate speech makes no sense to a reasonable person who thinks about it without consulting their twitching knee.

Hate speech is never free. Someone somewhere will pay for it.

Keystone Kops

On February 4, 1999, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo, stood at the door of his New York City Bronx apartment, key in hand, when four NYPD officers drove up and approached him. Dressed in plainclothes, the officers claimed to have yelled, “Police officers!” They testified Mr. Diallo resembled a rapist they were pursuing.
Mr. Diallo removed his wallet from his pocket, no doubt in an attempt to identify himself as requested. The four men drew their guns or perhaps already had their guns drawn. In any event, they fired a total of 41 shots, hitting Diallo 19 times. The City of New York ultimately paid three million dollars to Mr. Diallo’s family, an unprecedented figure since, by law, NY pays only for monetary loss.
What interests me about this case are not its sadly ordinary features, namely, that police gunned down an innocent black man, that police claimed the presence of a weapon when a weapon wasn’t present, or even that the officers walked in spite of shooting 41 bullets. What interests me are those 41 bullets, and more about that in a moment.
On the morning of his wedding, November 25, 2006, another 23-year-old black man, Sean Bell, left a bachelor party and got into the driver’s seat of his Nissan Altima. Before he and his friends could leave, at least three plainclothes NYPD officers approached the car. Again, they claim they identified themselves but witnesses and two of Mr. Bell’s friends, who were wounded in the attack, say they did not identify themselves. Justification for firing 50 bullets at the car—four hit and killed Mr. Bell while his friend, Joseph Guzman, in the front passenger seat, was hit 19 times and his other friend, Trent Benefield, in the back seat, was shot three times—centered on Bell’s driving the Altima into a police van. A judge acquitted the officers involved and the City of New York ultimately awarded three and a quarter million dollars to Sean Bell’s family, three million to Joseph Guzman, and $900,000 to Trent Benefield.
On November 19, 2011 Kenneth Chamberlain, 68, accidentally tripped his home alert button while sleeping. Mr. Chamberlain had a heart condition. White Plains, NY, police officers responded, in spite of the home alert company advising them that Mr. Chamberlain had contacted them and said he was all right. An hour later, Kenneth Chamberlain lay dead in his own home, the victim of a taser, a shotgun-launched beanbag to the chest, and finally a bullet that tore through his lungs, one of two fired. The second bullet went astray.
On November 21, 2006, Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old black woman, heard a ruckus outside her Atlanta, Georgia home, and got her gun. As three plainclothes officers smashed through her door, she fired once, hitting no one. The officers, wrongly believing they were entering a drug house, fired back—39 bullets, hitting Mrs. Johnston five or six times. Some of the shots hit three of the police officers. As she lay dying, police handcuffed the elderly woman and placed three bags of marijuana in the house. When the officers pled guilty to a number of charges and were sentenced, the judge ordered them to pay Mrs. Johnston’s estate $8,180, the cost of burying the woman.
On May 16, 2011, in the middle of the night, police gathered outside a house in a black neighborhood in Detroit. Neighbors gathered as well because a crew from the television drama, 48 Hours, was filming the scene. Although police claimed they had no idea any children were present, later evidence proved that the informant who gave them the address had told police a child lived inside. Police tossed a flash grenade through the door and one fired into the house. The grenade struck so close to where 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones slept on the sofa, it singed her blanket. More significantly, the bullet struck her in the neck and killed her instantly. Police claimed at first that they had not fired until entering the house and that the bullet discharged when the grandmother attempted to grab an officer’s gun. The film from the television crew, however, showed their story to be completely fabricated.

"They had time," [said] a Detroit police detective . . .. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done." Mother Jones

Officer Joseph Weekley has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. His trial has been set for late October of this year. If he does a significant amount of time (yeah, right), we can all say "Hurrah!" That is, if we're not too busy mourning the death of a child whose only crime was sleeping on a sofa.
What do all these incidents have in common besides the obvious? Trained police officers, supposedly well-practiced in hitting a target, nevertheless fired an incredible number of bullets to hit one individual with just a few of them—or, in the case of the Aiyana Stanley-Jones, managed to hit a child in the living room squarely in the neck while standing on the porch.
The racism embedded in each of these cases—and there are thousands and thousands more, unfortunately—is undeniable. But these shootings provide more than evidence that the police are given a pass to murder African Americans. They refute the stance of the NRA and the pro-gun lobby, which claim fewer crimes would result if more Americans armed themselves.
Clearly, if a trained shooter has to fire a fusillade to have any hope of getting a bullet into a target and not into everything in the vicinity,  untrained Americans wielding their weapons—at home, in the town square, in bars and at sporting events--are a fearful thing to contemplate. It makes me tremble. 

Barack Obama and Pope Pius XII

Much of this taken from Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness and September Atlantic, "Fear of a Black President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates at http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-...

In 1943 the Polish ambassador to the Vatican entered the Pope's reception area to see the Pontiff standing across the room looking annoyed. "You're not going to tell me about that same stuff again, are you?" he demanded. The Ambassador replied that he would continue to come to tell the Pope "that same stuff" until the Pope felt moved to speak out.

"That same stuff" was the Holocaust, or more specifically the slaughter of Polish Jews and Catholics, and even of non-Jewish and non-Catholic Poles. The death toll for the Church included nearly all the priests in Poland, for whom His Holiness had said he could "only pray." Pope Pius XII has been the target of criticism ever since for his failure to do anything of substance to thwart the Nazi campaign to "cleanse" Europe of "inferior races." Many suspect Pius XII of blatant anti-Semitism and there is evidence to support this accusation. The Vatican defends the Pope's inertia, in part on the basis that he was "surrounded by, first, fascists and then Nazis" and his own safety was at stake. Also, they argue, he couldn't be "positive" the rumors of atrocities were true and his repeating them would surely have alienated German Catholics.

And "other things as well," as my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard, would say. All of which reminds me of the scattershot defense offered by the man whose dog had bitten someone, his whiny arguments covering every base from "my dog doesn't bite" to "I don't own a dog."

Yet the contention that the Pope was encircled and himself at risk interests me. As a spiritual guide for the world's Catholics, he seems on shaky ground to assert (or to have asserted for him) that he could not denounce the most horrific acts of the 20th century because his own life might be at risk.

Another justification offered for his refusal to act is that he could not have made any difference, to which I say hogwash. In fact, the weak protest issued by the Pope against "compulsory euthanasia" of the "unfit", the campaign to butcher individuals with mental or physical abnormalities, resulted in that campaign being suspended. The Church insists that Hitler had already completed the work and it was for that reason the campaign halted, not because the Church had any influence.

The spurious claim that stories of Germany's human extermination machinery were only rumors are nothing short of disgusting. By 1943 virtually everyone knew the Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Catholics, and so-called "defectives" were being or had been massacred in the most brutal and vicious manner conceivable. The Pope had received and ignored testimony and pleas from bishops and priests as well as explicit descriptions of the ongoing Holocaust from the Polish Ambassador. His personal knowledge of the truth of "these rumors" was substantive.

But he chose to protect his own ass and to defend his realm, fearful that Hitler would go after the German church as well as the Vatican.

This story haunts me today partly because of its parallels to the Obama Presidency. Without implying the Holocaust was no more horrifying than drone strikes against children in the Middle East, or targeting American (and other) lives without due process, or imprisoning Americans (and others) in solitary confinement indefinitely without charges, or punishing whistleblowers in unprecedented numbers, or increasing the secrecy surrounding presidential actions, etc. etc., I see the Pope's cowardice and that of Barack Obama having something in common: Both have placed keeping power ahead of ethical constraints.

Let's be clear about a couple of things. If Barack Obama loses to Mutt and Jeff, two robber barons straight out of the early Twentieth Century, only racism will explain the President's defeat. The awful things that he has done and the road down which he has taken the country nevertheless cannot overshadow the antediluvian domestic policies the Tea Party and their ilk--with hands up the rectums of puppets Romney and Ryan--will impose on us. Let us also be clear that Mutt and Jeff will follow a foreign policy identical to that of President Obama. For the world at large, nothing will change, except foreign statesmen will once again have to entertain a buffoon as President of the United States, something most undoubtedly thought they had permanently escaped when Obama replaced Bush.

Let us also be clear about the significance of the Obama presidency. It is no small matter that African American children can now imagine themselves rising to the highest positions in the land, no matter how unrealistic this imagining sadly is in an ersatz "post-racial" America. A child's inability to perceive himself as equal to all other children represents an overwhelming obstacle to his or her blooming into a stable adulthood. All Americans need for children of color to feel they can smash through racism to a better life.

History no doubt will place President Obama among our weakest presidents. His distancing himself from the moral stances of his campaign, however, makes any assessment of his actions problematic because he cannot be compared to his white predecessors. Only twice, to my knowledge, has the President aligned himself with the oppressed who backed him. He has mentioned race far fewer times than any President since 1961 (and the word "poverty" has barely passed his lips). The two times he alluded to race made all the bile in the country flow. His first venture into the racial minefield involved the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the eminent Harvard professor seized at the door of his own home. To quell the furor, he held a "beer summit" with the arresting cop and Gates. (Note that when Obama fired USDA official Shirley Sherrod on the basis of a Tea Party altered video, she received a 5-minute phone call that was less of an apology than a justification--no beer for Shirley.)

His second attempt to mention race involved the murder of Trayvon Martin. By mentioning that his own son, if he had one, would have resembled Trayvon, Obama opened the door to bigots who twisted the comment into approval for the (imaginary) murder of a white child.

Clint Eastwood's senile riff on a conversation with the President postulated a venom-spewing, cursing Obama. Anyone who has watched the President with a less than jaundiced eye could not fathom a resemblance to the man in the skit that sent Repuglitanians into mysterious gales of laughter. The resemblance, however, is embedded in the hatred that ties these bigots into intellectual knots. These sick people don't "make it up" when they lie about Obama--they cannot see reality through the veil of their own racism. The person who despises you will always hear you say what he believes you mean to say, not what you actually do say.

So, yes, Barack Obama would have faced an ongoing onslaught of vile distortions had he followed through on his campaign promises. Even so, his failures stack high, including his Obamacare plan, an insurance industry handout pasted together in defiance of an American public that begged for single payer, the one option Obama never placed on the table. Advocates for universal healthcare predict many impoverished Americans will suffer more as a result of the passage of a plan any governor who wants to can opt out of.

The Pope and the President made their politic choices, choices shaped by fear and ambition. They won't suffer the consequences that shattered so much of the rest of the world. We will.

Even so, I have at last decided that to vote for Obama, in the absence of an organized political left, is the right thing to do. Yet, since California will undoubtedly back the President, I may be able to hold onto my righteousness and skip the voting booth that will be denied once again to so many Americans.

These things make an old lady almost glad to know she won't live long enough to see the end of our foolishness.

The Trojan Horse Campaign

When Chris Matthews tongue-lashed Rience Priebus, Chairman of the Republican Party, for their campaign's appeals to racism and their covert efforts to "other-ize" the President, the journalists sitting beside Matthews looked embarrassed.

Why does Mitt Romney crow about having been born in Michigan, Matthews demanded. What was THAT about? Why is it funny that no one has ever asked to see Mitt's birth certificate? Priebus fell back on a timeless insult: People like Matthews can never take a joke. The Left (although Matthews hardly represents the Left) has no sense of humor.

What on earth, asked Matthews, made anyone perceive Romney's assertion of citizenship as witty? Romney's sole point, he insisted, was to insinuate that the President couldn't claim to be American. Nonsense, said the other "journalists" on the panel. Romney was merely making a joke. Okay. Check it out and see if Romney's "witticism" sends you into gales of laughter--or even makes you grin:

"Now I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital, I was born at Harper Hospital. No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

Seriously, on what demented planet does naming the hospital in which you were born strike anyone as humorous? Where is the punchline? Perhaps if Romney had added, "So, given that these hospitals are nearly 10 miles apart, you can see the rumors that we were switched at birth are completely false." Not particularly amusing, I concede, but nevertheless significantly more credible as a joke. My punchline falls flat. Romney doesn't have one.

This type of joke, of course, trots out as a Trojan horse with a hidden cargo of racism. Only an uneducated bigot sees it as funny--educated bigots know the insinuation is ridiculous and irrelevant, but they're not above circulating it anyway.

Normally, a joke contains a punchline that surprises but simultaneously resonates with an individual's belief system. It is the tension excited by the contradiction between surprise and recognition that provokes laughter, a means of discharging that tension. Jokes about women drivers are funny to those who believe women incapable of navigating anything larger than an oven. Jokes about lazy Mexicans provoke guffaws from those delusionaries who think stoop labor is the equivalent of sipping mint juleps on the veranda. And jokes about a candidate's birth certificate, while lacking the element of surprise, invite bigots to scoff at Obama because he's "not like them." He isn't the candidate with whom they want to share a beer.

Nowadays the failure to read subtext passes for journalistic "objectivity." Karl Rove's ploys to turn the President into The Other play well to Romney's gullible audiences, and they pass from sleaze into hard news for TV anchormen (understandably since these blow-dried blowhards impersonate newsmen but don't play them in real life)--but such sniping also commands "respect" from print journalists. The most outrageous claims slip into their copy with the ease of oiled eels nesting in the rocks. Candidates nowadays resemble the real estate broker telling the seller "I'll get you top dollar for your home" and the buyer "I'll find you a bargain you won't believe." But chicanery doesn't register on journalism's Richter scale, instead preoccupied with Hilary Clinton's wardrobe and Barack Obama's workout routine. Every day the NY Times carries one more puff piece on somebody's faith or their work ethic inspired by the death of a parent.

Objectivity, the press responds, requires they report the news without comment. Therefore, it isn't "news" when Karl Rove manipulates American xenophobia to advance his candidate's standing.

Subtext has always been useful in politics. The same sleazy PR flack who wallpapered the networks with dangerous Willie Horton's mug now writes for Romney.

"The ads for the political action committee, Restore Our Future, are created by McCarthy Hennings Media Inc., whose president, Larry McCarthy, produced an ad during the 1988 presidential campaign linking Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, to Willie Horton, a black inmate from that state who committed armed robbery and rape after he was granted a prison furlough.

"The ad, which featured a menacing mug shot of Horton, helped Republican George H.W. Bush win the White House by portraying Dukakis as soft on crime.

"Restore Our Future is placing its ads on television through the Towson, Maryland-based firm Mentzer Media, which received more than $18 million from Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth to place ads that questioned the Vietnam War record of Kerry, who received five medals including the Silver Star for his service."

 http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-22/pro-romney-pac-uses-willie-horton-ad-maker-to-attack-rivals.html

Michael Dukakis's support for a weekend furlough program for violent offenders serving life sentences without parole strikes me as naive and certainly calls into question his judgment, but exploiting white America's obsession with the threat of a black rapist was far worse than naive. Willie Horton murdered three people. Racism in the United States takes countless lives. Many Israelis are just catching on to racism's venomous impact since the attempted lynching of a Palestinian teenager, followed by a complete lack of remorse by the would-be killers.

Since the massive attack on American bigotry during the 1960s, racists and those who would exploit them have relied on subtext. Coded phrases such as "welfare queens" and "food stamp president" link Barack Obama to the blackness he has tried to elude throughout his presidency, although not so much during his candidacy. But subtext's egregiousness doesn't stop with inciting racism. It derails the questions we should be asking.

For example, take the Republican claim that Obama will jettison the work requirement that Bill Clinton ushered into law, forever changing "welfare as we know it." The Democrat's response has been outrage at this distortion of Obama's platform. Who cares? The work requirement is nothing but an outrageous government handout to business. That should be the focus of the debate but everyone's watching instead the dog and pony show over who said what.

If the Republicans argue that Democrats are "soft on crime," the progressive response shouldn't be "no they aren't." It ought to be, "yes, and so are the Republicans, as long as the criminals wear Armani suits."

The claim that Romney will receive 100% of the racist vote may be slightly overstated. After all, many racists voted for the President the first time around simply because they were fed up with Republican politics--at least Republican presidential politics. But when it comes to voting, the attention span tends to be foreshortened. What persists is not politics but subtext. What persists above all is the racism of too many of America's white voters.

Republicans who have cut potential Obama supporters from the rolls via Draconian measures that would have heartened Dixie in 1964 (and who probably rigged voting machines to get Dubya elected) see the beauty of exacerbating racist hatred of the President. Back in my radical days, I was frequently involved in dialogues about the ruling class (euphemistically termed the 1% these days) employing bigotry to divide and weaken the working class (that is, the bulk of the public that relies on a salary to pay their bills--you know, all those Americans guzzling up entitlements that are bleeding America dry).

Because you know, don't you, what America looks like: America wears an Armani suit, drives a Porsche, flies to the Bahamas to darken fish-belly white skin, and gorges on entitlements carved from the backs of the 99%.

Dickens Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

Over the next two and a half weeks I'll be traveling. I'll try to post but all will depend on time and the strength of the WiFi connections I'm dealing with.


The New York Times of August 21, 2012 carries a front-page story on the “Carpet Capital of the World,” a stretch of Interstate 75 between Atlanta and Chattanooga that used to be densely populated with carpet mills and floor covering outlets. From June 2011 to June 2012, the carpet and flooring businesses there have “lost 4,600 jobs, or 6.9 percent.” The key reason? The failure of the housing market means that demand for carpets and other types of flooring have plummeted. And, naturally, the spiraling unemployment rate will add its downward force to the problem.
Congress approved TARP and the President signed it while the country screeched about fat cat criminals being rewarded while homeowners moved into tents. Our political representatives told us the economy made this painful "bailout" unavoidable. And as jobs evaporated, our representatives told us lower taxes on the rich lead to job creation. About TARP, they insisted the economy would crumble if these “too big to fail” banks collapsed. Here's a concise look at the success of the “job creation” move:

“Over the 12 months ending in June 2012, hires totaled 51.3 million and separations totaled 49.6 million, yielding a net employment gain of 1.8 million.” College Recruiter

This might look acceptable if you assume those nearly 2 million jobs are remunerative sufficiently to support a family. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, as Barack Obama took the oath of office there were about 2.2 million workers receiving the minimum wage or being paid even less than that. There are actually a number of exemptions to the minimum wage law and 1.9 million workers were making less than $6.55 an hour in January 2009.

The minimum wage has gone up since then, and so has the number of the lowest paid workers. At the end of 2011, there were 3.8 million Americans working for $7.25 an hour or less. The number of minimum wage workers grew 466 percent in the last three years. Those being paid less than the minimum wage grew by 18 percent. The total number of jobs in the country during this time fell by about 2 percent. Money News

Dalton, Georgia, in the carpet capital, used to be home to generations of people working in the carpet mills. Now that automation and the housing collapse have ousted nearly 5,000 of those workers, Dalton may well decline into less than genteel poverty. Their only hope for their children lies in education that will equip them to work with the computers that now hold their parents’ jobs. But . . .

In its most recent survey of college pricing, the College Board reports that a "moderate" college budget for an in-state public college for the 2011–2012 academic year averaged $21,447. College Data

That totals almost $86,000 for four years of education. The federal government, in order to finance its handouts to the top 1% of Americans, has turned to debt collectors to squeeze dollars from former students and their families, a process made urgent by Obama’s plan to forgive college debt after twenty years.

The debt collector on the other end of the phone gave Oswaldo Campos an ultimatum:
Pay $219 a month toward his more than $20,000 in defaulted student loans, or Pioneer Credit Recovery, a contractor with the U.S. Education Department, would confiscate his pay. Campos, disabled from liver disease, makes about $20,000 a year. 

“We’re not playing here,” Campos recalled the collector telling him in December. “You’re dealing with the federal government. You have no other options.” 

Campos agreed to have the money deducted each month from his bank account, even though federal student-loan rules would let him pay less and become eligible for a plan -- approved by Congress and touted by President Barack Obama -- requiring him to lay out about $50 a month. To satisfy Pioneer, Campos borrowed from friends, cut meat from his diet and stopped buying gas to drive his 82-year-old mother to doctor’s visits for her Parkinson’s Disease. 

With $67 billion of student loans in default, the Education Department is turning to an army of private debt-collection companies to put the squeeze on borrowers. Working on commissions that totaled about $1 billion last year, these government contractors face growing complaints that they are violating federal laws by insisting on stiff payments, even when borrowers’ incomes make them eligible for leniency. Bloomberg

Congress has just passed a one-year extension of the lower rate on the student loan interest rate they have doubled, from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. The climate isn’t ideal for more gouging of those struggling to pay their debts, not in an election year. But a year from now, education is likely to become even less affordable for all but the wealthiest Americans when that $86,000 incurs a penalty rate of nearly 7 percent. Current estimates have former students paying off their education debt around the time they turn 50.
Meanwhile, their parents keep losing their homes. Predictions were that help from the Homeowner Affordable Modification Plan (HAMP) to those facing homelessness would aid between 3 and 4 million financially distressed Americans. Through December 2011 only 933,327 had actually received help. Smart Money As of October 2011, the Obama Administration had spent only $2.4 billion of the $50 billion allocated for HAMP. Think Progress
 HAMP had been available only to those whose homes were 25% underwater, i.e., the value had eroded one quarter of what was owed. Also, those applying had to be current in their mortgage payments. In June 2012 the Obama Administration attempted to restructure HAMP to increase its success rate. Here are the revised qualification criteria:

You may be eligible for HAMP if you meet all of the following criteria:You obtained your mortgage on or before January 1, 2009.You owe up to $729,750 on your primary residence or single unit rental propertyYou owe up to $934,200 on a 2-unit rental property; $1,129,250 on a 3-unit rental property; or $1,403,400 on a 4-unit rental propertyThe property has not been condemnedYou have a financial hardship and are either delinquent or in danger of falling behind on your mortgage payments (non-owner occupants must be delinquent in order to qualify).You have sufficient, documented income to support a modified payment.You must not have been convicted within the last 10 years of felony larceny, theft, fraud or forgery, money laundering or tax evasion, in connection with a mortgage or real estate transaction.

In February, the Administration forged a deal with the five largest banks over their crimes in the housing market, ranging from inflating a borrower’s income to foreclosing on property to which they couldn’t show title. The agreement putatively goosed the loan modification rate, but actually gave more power to the banks. The new deal added a sweetener for the banks: the right to force a homeowner to accept an adjustable rate mortgage.
Most individuals not in crisis and applying to refinance a home—having seen the horrors attendant on ARMs—seek fixed rate loans. Those receiving a modification under the new agreement would be obliged by banks opting to do so to take an ARM at a higher interest rate to begin with, a rate that in five years could exceed the original rate being modified. Along with Holden Lewis, the source for these revelations about the February agreement, I ask, “Please let me know if you have ever heard of a bank choosing the less lucrative option.” BankrateCheck it out for more disheartening information.
But, sad to say, modification doesn't usually solve the problem. Too often, homeowners find themselves back in trouble:

. . . according to Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, a top bank regulator, more than half of the mortgages that were modified in the first three months of 2008 went delinquent again within six months. "After three months, nearly 36% of the borrowers had re-defaulted by being more than 30 days past due. After six months, the rate was nearly 53%, and after eight months, 58%," Dugan said in an early December speech. Real Estate at MSN

Even with a loan modification the amount owed doesn't decrease. In fact, the bank stands to gain handsomely if a borrower does not default. Sacramento Real Estate
Even so, four of the largest banks have an astronomical failure rate while smaller banks and credit unions see far few defaults on modified loans. Click Ritholtzfor a chart that shows smaller services have failure rates as low as 13 percent while big bank failure rates go up as high as 61.9 percent. No doubt those ubiquitous tacked-on fees treasured by bankers have something to do with the disparity.
Remember the 60s and the War on Poverty? Fast forward to 2012 and the War on Terror that breaks down into a War on People of Color, a War on Women, a War on the Poor, and a War on the Middle Class. When no one but those whose incomes range in the multimillion dollar bracket can get an education, when few can find employment and few can afford to homes, we will see the arrival of the New Great Society, one in which being poor is a criminal act.