Facing South

World Aids Day: Advocates highlight challenges and urge governments to increase the fight against HIV/AIDS

2008-12-01T19:52:21Z

More than 25 million men, women and children have died around the world from HIV/AIDS since 1981. Some 20 years after the first World AIDS day shone a spotlight on the virus, some 33 million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the World Bank.

Today, Dec. 1st, is World AIDS Day and across the world, and here in the Southern United States, we take the moment to remember how far we have come and how far we have left to go to fight the epidemic.

Organizers of World AIDS Day -- built around the themes of leadership, self-responsibility and activism -- are calling on governments to follow through on promises of universal treatment, prevention, care and support, reports the AFP. Developing countries and impoverished people across the world still lack access to affordable and effective HIV/AIDS treatment. Last week UNAIDS released a report urging countries to adopt flexible policies that reflect how and why the latest HIV infections are transmitted. The report also recommends targeting the highest-risk populations, such as injection drug users and men who have sex with men.

Advocates argue that the advice given to countries around the world is advice we also need to adhere to here in the United States. In the United States HIV/AIDS has become a Southern epidemic and one that is continually rising in minority communities.

As Facing South has previously reported, the epidemic among African-Americans in some parts of the United States is as severe as in parts of Africa. AIDS is the leading cause of death among black women between ages 25 and 34. In the South, more adults and youth live with and die from AIDS than elsewhere in the nation, creating a health disaster in the region. The South not only leads the nation in AIDS cases and rates in cities of all sizes, but more than half of the African-Americans living with AIDS and more than half of the new AIDS cases reported among blacks occurred in the South.

Kate Whetton, Director of Duke Global Health Institute's Center for Health Policy, Kate Whetten has studied infectious diseases in both the Deep South and in impoverished communities around the world and concluded that there are many more similarities than differences in these communities when it comes to diseases like HIV /AIDS. Listen to her audio interview with North Carolina Public Radio here.

Yet, while the epidemic continues to grow in the Deep South, federal funding has not followed and has instead been channeled to wealthier parts of the nation with fewer cases and death rates. The Southern AIDS Coalition, a nonprofit partnership of government and private-sector programs based in Birmingham, has reported that there is a lack adequate federal response and funding in dealing with the growing crisis of HIV/AIDS in communities ofcolor and in the South, and calls for a "fundamental rethinking of AIDS policy."

The Black AIDS Institute is also calling for better domestic policies in the United States and for international agencies to hold the U.S. government accountable for failure to address HIV/AIDS epidemic in its own country.

BET.com News reports:

While AIDS remains the world's No. 1 health threat, in the United States it poses a particular grave risk to Black Americans. As Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, puts it, "AIDS in America is a Black disease...about half of the just over 1 million Americans living with HIV or AIDS are Black."

The Institute is asking the Obama administration to set up the same type of domestic funding program for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and research programs in America as President Bush did through the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in international communities

Election 2008: Minority and youth voting surged in the 2008 election, according to a new Project Vote analysis

2008-12-01T18:50:52Z

The United States saw dramatic increases in the number of ballots cast by traditionally underrepresented groups, according to an analysis released last week by Project Vote.

In The Demographics of Voters in America's 2008 General Election: A Preliminary Assessment, Project Vote offers a preliminary assessment that 2008 saw a huge surge minority and youth voting. Votes cast by minorities in 2008 increased 21 percent from 2004 while votes cast by whites declined slightly. Votes cast in 2008 by young Americans, ages 18-29, increased by 9 percent from 2004.

From the Project Vote Blog:

Countering the conventional wisdom that voter turnout on November 4 did not change as dramatically as predicted, Project Vote's new analysis demonstrates that African-Americans, Latinos, and young voters cast millions more ballots in 2008 than in 2004.

"The analysis estimated that about 5.8 million more minorities voted in this year's presidential election than in 2004, while nearly 1.2 million fewer whites went to the polls," wrote Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers. "The figures appear to reflect the success of Project Vote and other liberal voter registration groups in registering millions of young, poor, elderly and minority Americans to vote in recent election cycles."

According to study, African-Americans cast nearly three million more ballots nationwide in 2008 than in 2004--an increase of 21 percent. The total votes cast by Latinos went up by sixteen percent--more than 1.5 million--and young Americans aged 18-29 cast 1.8 million more votes, a nine percent increase. That the overall number of ballots cast did not increase significantly compared to 2004 was in part due to a decrease in voting by white voters.

According to the analysis:

In most cases these increases were met with decreases in total ballots cast by white voters, and in the case where total ballots cast for white voters did increase, the gains in ballots cast by non-white voters increased at a much higher rate. Florida is the only state in our analysis where the increase in ballots cast by white voters from 2004 to 2008 was higher than the increase in ballots cast by non-white voters. That said, the rate of growth of the white vote in Florida is half that for non-white voters. While total ballots cast by new voters increased by 3 percent in the U.S., so did the growth rate for those who have voted previously. Of the states in this analysis, only in Nevada and New Mexico did new voters cast significantly more ballots than people who have voted previously.

New Obama policy chief led push to expand bi-lingual voting

2008-12-01T15:24:44Z

President-elect Barack Obama has drawn considerable heat from critics on his political left like David Sirota for choices about who will lead his new administration. In contrast to his message of change, they argue, Obama's Cabinet and other staff picks have had a decidedly centrist and establishment cast, from keeping Robert Gates at the Department of Defense to installing Timothy Geithner at the Treasury Department.

But Obama has made one pick that progressives are solidly behind: Melody Barnes, who will lead Obama's Domestic Policy Council. Barnes has Southern roots, growing up in Richmond, Va. and getting her college degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From the 1990s onwards, Barnes' resume reads like a Who's Who of the D.C. progressive circuit, having ties to the American Civil Liberties Union, Emily's List, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and most prominently as a lead staffer at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank which many in D.C. jokingly called the "Democratic Administration in Waiting" (in addition to Barnes, CAP's president John Podesta has led Obama's transition team).

One of the most interesting items on Barnes' resume is her leadership in 1992 to expand the Voting Rights Act to ensure bi-lingual voting options in heavily immigrant precincts as the assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights.

Although most bios of Barnes refer to it as the Voting Rights Improvement Act, it actually passed as the Voting Rights Language Assistance Act -- something the Obama administration may not be wanting to draw attention to with immigration remaining a hot political issue.

The 1992 Act built on an amendment to the Voting Rights Act already passed in 1975, which prohibited voting discrimination based on language. The 1975 amendment guaranteed bi-lingual voting materials in areas where 5% or more of the population spoke a language other than English.

But the 1975 reform had a flaw: A growing number of precincts -- especially in major cities -- had large numbers of language minorities that fell below the 5% threshold. The 1992 Act, led by Barnes, guaranteed that in areas with 5% of voters or 10,000 voting-age citizens of a language minority, voting material would be made available in the second language.

As Rep. Louis Stokes (D-OH) argued on the House floor in support of the 1992 Act:

[The 1975 expansion of the Voting Rights Act] has helped break down many of the barriers to full participation in the electoral process encountered by Hispanic Americans, Asian-Americans, native Americans and Alaskan Americans of native American descent. The right to vote is a fundamental right guaranteed under the Constitution. Unfortunately, millions of potential voters have been unfairly excluded from exercising this right, due in part to prohibitive language barriers which exist in our electoral process.

The Act enjoyed bi-partisan political support, something hard to imagine today. The measure passed the House 237-125 and the Senate 75-20. It was signed into law by the first President Bush on August 26, 1992.

But the Act has been under attack ever since. This year, Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) introduced a bill to repeal the language amendments to the Voting Rights Act. The House defeated another English-only bill in 2006. These are part of a wider English-only movement that has grown since the 1990s: For example, in January 2009 voters in Nashville, Tenn. will vote on an "English Only" bill that would require all government services be conducted in English, with a few exceptions for public safety.

POWER POLITICS HEAT UP GEORGIA SENATE RUNOFF

2008-12-01T13:50:00Z

Georgia will be on the minds of many this week as its citizens prepare to vote in Tuesday's runoff election between incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (left photo) and his Democratic challenger, longtime state lawmaker Jim Martin (right).

The outcome of the contest will help determine whether Senate Democrats get the filibuster-proof super majority they need to move legislation over Republican objections. They are now just two seats shy of the 60 required, with a recount still underway in the close Minnesota race between incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger, comedian Al Franken.

Consequently, Georgia's Senate race has drawn political powerhouses to the state for campaigning. Sen. John McCain and his former running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hit the trail for Chambliss, while former President Bill Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore made the case for Martin. Though President-elect Barack Obama reportedly has no plans to visit the state where McCain took 52 percent of the vote, he took time out from his transition work to record a radio ad and robo-call for his party mate.

Also weighing in on the race: former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia. The conservative Democrat crossed party lines to endorse Chambliss, saying he "could well be the last man standing between a far-left liberal agenda sailing through the United States Senate." Chambliss also got the endorsements of former Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.

But the race still remains too close to call. A recent poll conducted for Politico.com shows Chambliss with a narrow 3-point lead over Martin -- with a 4-point margin of error.

Giuliani Visit Underscores Chambliss's Big Energy Connections

Giuliani's visit to Georgia last week on Chambliss's behalf spotlighted another kind of power politics operating in the Georgia Senate contest but largely behind the scenes: the campaign giving of the big energy companies. Those companies have a great deal at stake under the new leadership in Washington, with both Democratic lawmakers and the Obama administration promising to craft new policies on climate and energy.

The former New York mayor's lobbying firm -- the Texas-based Bracewell & Giuliani -- is considered one of the most powerful energy law firms in the nation, representing the legal and lobbying interests of energy giants including Houston-based Dynegy and the Southern Company, an Atlanta-based public utility holding company whose electricity-producing subsidiaries -- fueled mostly by coal -- serve 4.3 million customers in Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi.

The Southern Company also happens to be Chambliss's top campaign contributor, giving the Senator a total of $125,200 over the course of his career -- $75,700 of that in the latest election cycle alone, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Meanwhile, Chambliss has pursued policies that have benefited The Southern Co. and other coal-based electricity producers. For example, he voted against addressing U.S. carbon emissions without first considering India's and China's, against implementing the Kyoto climate treaty, and against providing tax incentives for energy conservation. He also voted for the Bush energy policy, which among other things kept the question of global warming away from the Environmental Protection Agency to avoid regulation of greenhouse gas pollution.

In fact, Chambliss's environmental voting record has earned him a lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters of just 5 percent. The LCV and the Sierra Club have instead endorsed Martin, who has called for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, stricter energy-efficiency standards, and requiring public utilities to generate more energy from renewable sources.

Energy Watch: A Kentucky victory in the fight against dirty coal

2008-11-26T16:25:58Z

A proposed power plant in Kentucky has become the latest coal-burning facility rejected over concerns about climate-disrupting pollution.

The Kentucky State Office of Administrative Hearings sided this week with the Sierra Club and state regulators by nixing a 600-megawatt plant proposed by Kentucky Mountain Power, a subsidiary of Virginia-based EnviroPower. KMP wanted to build a coal plant in eastern Kentucky's Knott County using a permit that did not require modern pollution controls.

Besides emitting harmful levels of mercury and asthma-causing air pollution, the KMP plant also had no plans to capture carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

"This is a victory for clean air and clean energy," said Wallace McMullen, energy chair of the Sierra Club Cumberland Chapter. "We can all breathe a little easier and get to work building the clean energy future that will put us on the path to a good economy in the 21st century."

The proposed KMP plant is the fourth such U.S. facility rejected this month; the others were in Illinois, Utah and Wisconsin. National, more than 70 proposed coal plants have been defeated or abandoned, and the Sierra Club and its allies are fighting more than 60 other projects.

Voting Rights: DOJ takes McCain's place in Va. military ballot lawsuit

2008-11-26T14:00:00Z

Earlier this month, John McCain's presidential campaign filed a federal lawsuit that sought to force Virginia to count thousands of overseas absentee ballots that arrived after the deadline.

While the lawsuit remains under consideration, a judge has removed McCain as the plaintiff, saying he does not have standing to sue. His replacement? The U.S. Department of Justice.

The Washington Post reports:

However U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams decides the case, it probably will not alter the outcome of any of the Nov. 4 contests. But the ruling will provide an opportunity for every voter to be heard, according to attorneys who filed a lawsuit seeking to mandate the count.

Some absentee ballots were printed late and not mailed out in time to be returned by the deadline. Justice Department attorneys argued at a hearing last week that the judge should force the state to count the late ballots so elections officials will be more careful in the future.

An attorney for the State Board of Election said voters who received their ballots late could have used write-in ballots instead, but the plaintiffs' attorneys noted that write-in ballots are supposed to be for emergencies only and are hard to find in war zones.

The McCain campaign has estimated the number of absentee ballots received late at about 5,000. The only race close enough that the late ballots could make a difference is in Virginia's 5th Congressional District, where incumbent Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (R) was upset by Democratic challenger Tom S. Perriello by 745 votes. Goode has requested a recount.

Another hearing on the lawsuit has been scheduled for U.S. District Court in Richmond on Dec. 8.

Study finds that Katrina kids are the sickest children in the U.S.

2008-11-25T20:16:36Z

Hurricane Katrina's youngest survivors are now the sickest children in the United States, according to a report released Monday by the New York-based Children's Health Fund and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Many infants and toddlers living in a Louisiana's biggest FEMA trailer park have been found to be anemic because of poor diets, at a rate that health experts said was four times the national average, according to the report. The report reviewed medical records of 261 children who lived in a federally funded Baton Rouge trailer park called Renaissance Village. This is the first in-depth review of Katrina child survivors' medical and mental health since the 2005 hurricanes. An estimated 163,000 children were displaced after the Gulf Coast storms of 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than half of the children were from Louisiana, mostly from New Orleans Parish, and they also were disproportionately black and poor, reports the New York Daily News.

Some other key findings from the study:

41% of children treated at the clinic who were younger than age four had iron deficiency anemia;
55% of elementary-school-aged children had a behavior or learning problem;
42% of children had hay fever, and/or upper respiratory infections;
24% had a cluster of upper respiratory, allergic and skin ailments;
One-third of the children had impaired hearing or vision;
55% of elementary-school-aged children had a behavior or learning problem;

Iron deficiency anemia can cause skin diseases, fatigue and attention-deficit disorder, and other learning problems. Severe deficiency in very young children can delay growth and development and even cause heart murmurs, reports the Associated Press.

"The recovery from Katrina was actually handled far worse even than the initial response," study author Irwin Redlener, a professor at Columbia's School of Public Health told the New York Daily News. "It's just disappeared from public view with an assumption that whatever was done is over."

The "unending bureaucratic haggling" at federal and state levels over how to provide services and rebuild health centers for the Gulf's poor has made a bad situation much worse, Redlener told Newsweek.

The children in the Children's Health Fund study are probably some of the sickest of the estimated 30,000 children living in trailers and temporary housing in the region, Redlener told USA Today. Redlener said that thousands of other displaced children could be experiencing the same health problems. "This is the first wave of data, and it's extremely alarming. Who knows what's happening to kids we're not seeing?" Redlener asked. Redlener said it was imperative that state leaders on the Gulf Coast realize there is a crisis and make fixing it a priority. He suggested creating a "child health task force" to track down the scattered Katrina kids, monitor their health and provide them with critical medical care.

According to the report, some kids may end up with permanent developmental and cognitive delays, but many can still be helped, but the first step will be finding them. FEMA was supposed to provide Louisiana with contact information for the families that moved out of the trailers; it has not done so. The agency's case-management program also "has yet to provide any services for thousands of families," according to the report.

As Facing South has reported, FEMA trailers were found to have high levels of formaldehyde. Many of the children's illnesses could be directly related to formaldehyde poisoning. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to initiate a long-term study focusing on children living in federal-funded trailers and mobile homes in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Journalist Tom Gish, "conscience of the mountains," dies at 82

2008-11-25T20:15:00Z

As the longtime publisher of The Mountain Eagle newspaper in Whitesburg, Ky., Tom Gish was a fearless crusader on behalf of the public interest.

When local officials tried to shut the paper out of meetings, Gish launched a fight that led to the state's first open-meetings law. When he took on the state's powerful coal industry, he faced a boycott by advertisers and was shunned by his neighbors. When he wrote stories critical of the local police, his office was firebombed.

Yet Gish -- who died last week at the age of 82 -- refused to back down. His son Ben Gish, who continues to run the newspaper today, called his father "the most honest and brave man I ever knew."

When Tom Gish and his wife, Pat, first bought The Mountain Eagle in 1957, its motto was "A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday." The Gishes came up with a new motto: "It Screams."

After the paper's 1974 firebombing -- perpetrated by arsonists hired by a Whitesburg cop angry over editorials about police harassment of local teens -- the Gishes continued publishing from the still-intact front porch but updated the motto: "It Still Screams."

The Gishes were instrumental in drawing the nation's attention to Appalachian poverty. As Bill Bishop at The Daily Yonder remembers:

Tom and Pat wrote some of the first stories about the poverty that came with the post-war depression in the coalfields. Other reporters followed the Eagle's reporting. They would read a story in the Whitesburg paper and then trek down to Eastern Kentucky to see things for themselves. Invariably they'd wind up in Whitesburg and following Tom on a personally guided tour of the region. The War on Poverty began with stories coming from Eastern Kentucky. In reality, Lyndon Johnson's attention to the nation's poorest people was directed by reporting done by Tom and Pat Gish.

Gish was born in Seco, a Kentucky coal camp named for the South East Coal Co. where his father was a superintendent. After college he worked for a time as a wire service bureau chief in Frankfort, Ky., before he and Pat -- also a reporter based in Kentucky -- returned to Letcher County, the place of his birth, and bought the newspaper he grew up reading.

In 2004, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky created the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. The first recipients were, not surprisingly, Tom and Pat Gish.

(Photo of Tom Gish from the website of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues)

Candidate for RNC chair belonged to a whites-only country club

2008-11-25T19:05:17Z

Katon Dawson, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, has entered the race to lead the Republican National Committee -- but his bid could be complicated by his longtime membership in a country club that excludes blacks.

In September, Dawson -- president of his family's auto parts distribution company -- resigned his 12-year membership in the Forest Lake Club in Columbia, S.C. The 80-year-old institution's deed has a whites-only restriction.

His resignation came while The State newspaper was working on a story about his membership and his role in an internal effort to admit African Americans.

Dawson wrote a letter asking club leaders to change their policy on Aug. 20 -- just 11 days before the Republican convention. It was during the convention that Dawson's interest in leading the RNC became public.

The timing of Dawson's protest raised some eyebrows, The State reported:

"It's something that would have a cleansing effect just in case (Sen. John) McCain would choose him to be head of the Republican National Committee," said political scientist and GOP activist Neal Thigpen, who has been active in Republican politics for 40 years.

Forest Lake landed in the news two decades ago when Robert Solomon -- then the commanding general at Fort Jackson -- was denied a complimentary membership because he was Jewish. The club now admits Jewish members.

The Republican Party is currently struggling with the issue of how to appeal to a more diverse membership following an election in which 95% of blacks voted for Democratic President-elect Barack Obama.

Among those also running for RNC chair are Michigan Republican Party Chair Saul Anuzis; Chip Saltsman, the campaign manager for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; and Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland. If Steele were to win, he would become the first black to head the organization.

Mike Duncan, the current RNC chair, is still undecided on whether he will seek a second term.

(Photo of Katon Dawson from the Anderson County (S.C.) Republican Party website)

HUD gives Mississippi the go-ahead to divert funds from housing to port expansion

2008-11-25T18:23:40Z

Last week the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) approved Mississippi's plan to expand the Port of Gulfport, which the state hopes to begin work on next month, reported the Mississippi SunHerald. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced that the Mississippi Development Authority has allocated $570 million to rebuild the port.

Facing South has been covering the controversy surrounding Mississippi's move to divert emergency federal funding from a housing program created to help low-income homeowners to expand the State Port at Gulfport.

Affordable housing remains a formidable barrier to rebuilding along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Housing advocates have rallied against the State of Mississippi's decision to divert this funding away from critical housing needs. As we previously reported, advocates point out that thousands of Mississippians remain displaced nearly three years after the storms. Reilly Morse, senior attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice, has twice testified before Congressional committees regarding the use of CDBG funds for purposes other than the adequate restoration of safe, affordable housing for low and moderate-income residents.

"HUD has abdicated its oversight role -- it has failed to ensure that housing needs of thousands of low- and moderate-income families decimated by Katrina come first," Reilly Morse, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice, told the SunHerald. "We have been concerned HUD would take this action and we will pursue all available options to ensure the promise of housing recovery for all is kept."

Last month the STEPS Coalition, an alliance of Mississippi nonproﬁt groups promoting affordable housing and human rights, also issued a statement on the state spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand the Port of Gulfport.

In an open letter sent to the media last month, the STEPS Coalition explained their position:

The Mississippi Port Authority's ambitious proposal to expand their facility in Gulfport is ultimately the wrong plan at the wrong time. Residents of South Mississippi still are not fully recovered from Katrina. The seed money for this project is $570 million dollars that congress awarded in good faith to help fund hurricane housing recovery efforts. Because we still have neighbors living in FEMA trailers, unrepaired homes, and with relatives, this funding should be applied to housing needs first. If there were no other problems with the proposal, we would have to object for this reason alone.

There are other problems, however. The State Port expects us to approve a conceptual plan-and to do so quickly-that leaves many questions unanswered. Will the land in North Gulfport be purchased for a transportation terminal, endangering wetlands and the adjacent, largely lower-income African-American neighborhood? Is there a plan to prevent the increase in air pollution caused by the added ships, trains, and trucks? The Coast already has high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases exacerbated by chemical pollutants and is on the verge of non-compliance for smog-causing ozone. What will the true costs of the project be and how will it be funded? In this worsening economy, it is too risky to put a $570 million down payment on a plan that will require hundreds of millions of dollars more in public or private funds to accomplish. If the money runs out before completion, we will lose jobs and housing both. It is better to target something within our reach- doors into permanent housing for our fellow citizens.

In trouble over illegal weapons shipments, Blackwater sets its sights on pirates

2008-11-25T17:31:38Z

Blackwater Worldwide, the North Carolina-based private military contractor, is facing a multimillion-dollar fine from the State Department for shipping hundreds of automatic weapons to Iraq without the required permits.

But that hasn't stopped the controversial company from recruiting mercenaries for its newest service: protecting merchant ships from pirates operating off the coast of Africa.

"Billions of dollars of goods move through the Gulf of Aden each year," Bill Matthews, the company's executive vice president, said in a recent statement [pdf]. "We have been contacted by ship owners who say they need our help in making sure those goods get to their destination safely."

Blackwater plans to use its specially modified 183-foot ship, the McArthur, for the task. The company says having its ship and helicopters escort vessels is a safer option than arming merchant crews.

Earlier this month, McClatchy Newspapers reported that the State Department is preparing to levy a fine on Blackwater for illegally shipping hundreds of automatic weapons to Iraq, where some of the arms are believed to have ended up on the black market.

Also this month, U.S. officials informed 172 private firms providing security in Iraq -- including Blackwater -- that their personnel will lose immunity from prosecution under a new U.S.-Iraq security agreement set to take effect in January. There has been a growing push by Iraqis to life immunity since an incident last September in which Blackwater guards escorting a diplomatic convoy through Baghdad opened fire, killing 17 Iraqi civilians. A civil lawsuit has been filed over that incident by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Blackwater is the State Department's largest personal security contractor and has received $1.2 billion in federal contracts, according to the website fedspending.org.

The hands behind the turkey

2008-11-25T16:20:04Z

Before you slice that ham or carve that turkey this Thanksgiving, take a moment to reflect on the hidden costs of bringing that food to your table.

Throughout the South, in rural areas along the hog belt and poultry belt, thousands of workers labor in poultry and meatpacking plants, sorting, cleaning, pulling, deboning, gutting, cutting, slicing and packaging turkeys, chickens, and hogs every day. Whether for Virginia-based Smithfield Foods or Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, these workers perform some of the most dangerous factory jobs in the nation and are subjected to repeated injury and inhumane treatment. Yet their plight is often overlooked. These workers have very few rights in an industry that has been allowed to exploit its workforce due to a lax regulation and enforcement.

Moreover, many of the workers doing the dangerous work of meatpacking are immigrants, often undocumented, and thus more exploitable. Companies have increasingly come to rely on an immigrant workforce that may not complain about harsh conditions for fear of being fired or deported.

The changing demographics of the rural South are key to supplying this booming industry. For instance, North Carolina, the second largest turkey-producing state and the second-largest swine-producing state, has the fastest growing Latino population in the country. According to the U.S. Census, the Latino population in North Carolina grew from some 76,000 in 1990 to almost half a million today.

Agribusiness in the South today is rapidly consolidating and growing on the backs of cheap, increasingly undocumented immigrant labor. At the very top are large multibillion-dollar companies who make profit by underreporting injuries, ignoring regulations, and busting unions.

Life in the Fast Line: 30 Turkeys Every Minute

During the 1900s, the harsh and deplorable conditions facing immigrant workers inside Northern meatpacking plants were adeptly chronicled by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. Muckraking exposés like The Jungle and immigrant unionization would go on to advance better federal regulation and oversight, as well as better conditions and higher wages.

Even during the 1980s, meatpacking plants in the Northern cities saw high levels of regulation and unionization. Then the companies began to migrate to the rural South in search of cheaper labor and states hostile to unions. Conditions and wages plummeted, and unions loss influence.

The poultry belt now extends from the Southeast to the Deep South -- North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas -- where agribusiness-friendly lawmakers encourage deep levels of investment with promises of low wages and lax regulation.

Earlier this year, The Charlotte Observer published findings from their 22-month investigation into the poultry industry in the Carolinas, uncovering the way workers -- many of them here illegally -- are being routinely mistreated, and how policies set in place by state and federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are tilted in favor of protecting businesses and industry, not protecting workers. For instance, state inspections and fines at poultry plants have dropped to their lowest point in 15 years, reports the Observer.

Injury has become endemic to the industry. With rapid line speeds, poultry workers handle as many as 30 turkeys a minute. Furthermore, in these poultry plants, workers are surrounded by dangerous machines and toxic chemicals, and they're often required to make thousands of cuts with sharp knives each day, according to the Observer. Making more than 20,000 cutting motions a shift, workers can end up with lacerations, debilitating nerve and muscle problems, or missing fingers.

As the Observer reports:

The government does as little as possible to protect poultry workers from mangled hands, severed digits or crippling musculoskeletal disorders. It leaves it to poultry plants to police themselves, and gets involved only when companies report problems. Workers who have no way to speak out pay the price in pain and in injuries that leave them disfigured and unable to do simple tasks.

One company that the Observer investigated was the House of Raeford, a poultry processor in eastern North Carolina that has been cited for 130 serious workplace safety violations since 2000 -- among the most of any U.S. poultry company. The Raeford-based company is one of the nation's top chicken and turkey producers, with about 6,000 employees and eight processing plants in the Carolinas and Louisiana. The Observer found that the company has ignored, intimidated or fired workers who were hurt on the job, and masked the extent of injuries and broke state law by failing to record injuries on state logs.

Last month, a House of Raeford chicken-processing plant in Greenville, S.C. was raided by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. ICE officials arrested 331 workers in the largest immigration raid ever conducted in the Carolinas. The Greenville raid was the latest in a series of immigration crackdowns in the South. In August, ICE officials arrested 600 suspected illegal immigrants at a Mississippi electrical transformer factory -- the largest single workplace immigration raid in U.S. history.

Six minors were among 331 workers arrested at the Greenville raid, a fact that has re-focused attention to child labor in the meat-processing industry. The Observer found that than 20 former and current workers at three House of Raeford plants -- in Greenville, West Columbia, S.C., and Raeford, N.C. - frequently hired underage workers.

Yet enforcement of child labor laws has decreased, and U.S. Department of Labor investigations have dropped by nearly half since fiscal year 2000, the paper reports.

The Long Battle at Smithfield Foods

Over the years Facing South has reported on the ongoing struggle to unionize Smithfield Foods' meat-processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.

Tar Heel meatpackers, the majority of whom are Black and Latino, have been trying to organize a union with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) for almost 15 years. Tar Heel's Smithfield Packing Plant is the largest pork-processing plant in the world and has roughly 5,000 workers who slaughter up to 32,000 hogs a day.

Last month Smithfield Foods and the UFCW finally reached a settlement. Smithfield agreed to allow a union election and to drop racketeering charges against the UFCW. (Smithfield filed suit against UFCW when the union launched an aggressive campaign in June 2006 that included calls for boycotts and other actions Smithfield deemed extortion.) As part of the settlement, the UFCW agreed to drop its "Justice at Smithfield" international campaign. The secret-ballot election is scheduled for Dec. 10 and 11.

Smithfield has a notorious history of labor rights abuses at its Tar Heel plant and is known for using fear and intimidation to keep workers in line. Workers labor under poor conditions and at unsafe production line speeds, leading to scores of injuries. Workers are routinely denied worker's comp for job-related injuries. Sometimes they're fired even for asking for compensation. The dangerous working conditions and mistreatment of workers led Human Rights Watch to single out Smithfield as a poster child of labor rights violations.

Smithfield has also pulled out its heavy union-busting arsenal over the past decade. In this hostile climate, Tar Heel plant workers tried twice in the 1990s to organize. Smithfield responded with illegal union-busting tactics to intimidate workers and to interfere with the vote -- including worker surveillance, deportation threats, sexual harassment, intimidation and violence.

In May 2006 a federal court found Smithfield in violation of labor laws and ordered the mega-agribusiness to stop its anti-union tactics and its "intense and widespread coercion," which also included retaliatory firings and beatings by plant security.

Two years ago this month the nation witnessed a historic walk-out of workers at the Tar Heel plant. More than 1,000 workers participated in a wildcat action to protest labor abuse and unfair mass firings of workers at the plant. The company had been using Social Security "no match" letters as a reason to fire a growing number of workers.

While the Tar Heel story has become a nationwide symbol of labor abuse and union busting, it has also come to represent the struggles workers in the South have found in confronting agribusinesses that had gone largely unregulated for years.

All the Waste That's Left Behind

These mega-agribusinesses often seek out Southern states where environmental regulations and pollution control measures are lax or non-existent, often locating their factory farms in poor rural communities and communities of color.

The growth in hog and poultry production over the last decade has wrought one of the greatest environmental crises in the South, posing tremendous risks to public health and ruining the quality of life in many communities, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC).

For example, factory hog farms in eastern North Carolina produce 19 million tons of waste each year -- far more than the coastal ecosystem can absorb, according to SELC. Untreated hog excrement is poured into "lagoons" that can and do overflow, polluting nearby waterways and land. According to the watchdog nonprofit Food & Water Watch, millions of gallons of waste from Smithfield's lagoons have contaminated North Carolina's rivers and creeks, threatening the health and livelihoods of people living nearby.

So this holiday season, remember that most of the food that crosses our dinner plates has a troublesome history rooted in the changing dynamics of the South and a renegade industry in need of better regulation and reform.

(Photos by UFCW)

Obama's big test: Will he stand for human rights in Colombia?

2008-11-25T16:18:00Z

In a parting shot, outgoing President Bush and lame-duck Congressional Republicans are pushing to have the $25 billion bailout of the U.S. auto industry tied to passage of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. The looming battle will be the first big test of President-elect Obama's vaunted commitment to "fair trade," which has been thrown into question after he tapped economic advisors firmly in the free trader camp.

Democrats in Congress didn't seem interested in taking up the contentious issue, but it's gaining some momentum: Even the New York Times clambered aboard, starting an editorial with, "We don't say it all that often, but President Bush is right: Congress should pass the Colombian free-trade agreement now."

But human rights say this would be a disaster. For years, the Colombian government has been widely condemned for colluding with far-right paramilitary groups guilty of horrific abuses, especially against workers who try to organize unions. The Times minimized this history in its editorial drawing this response from the Economic Policy Institute:

The Times stated that Colombian assassination of trade unionists "is still too high, but has dropped sharply." The Times is woefully misinformed. The latest report from the authoritative Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS, National Union School) disputes the claim that assassinations of Colombian trade unionists are declining. According to the ENS, there were 32 assassinations of unionists in 2007, and 41 assassinations of unionists in the first eight months of 2008. This is the continuation of a dismal human rights record that has seen 2,683 unionists assassinated in the past 22 years.

One of the most notorious U.S. companies in Colombia is Alabama-based Drummond Coal, which was the target of a protest by human rights activists in Birmingham last week. Last year, Drummond -- a powerful utility company in Alabama -- was sued by the family of three unionists who were assassinated for asking for better food and mine conditions for workers.

The suit was the first attempt to use the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to sue a multinational company for human rights abuses. The families lost in a jury trial last December and have appealed.

But the South's and the country's complicity in Colombia's human rights abuses goes well beyond Drummond. As Sister Iris Ann Leden of the Catholic Diocese in Lexington, Kentucky recently pointed out:

Our government has over the past eight years poured billions of dollars into Colombia to aid the military. According to Witness for Peace, Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid. The U.S. government has trained over 10,000 Colombian military troops at the School of the Americas now known as the Western Hemisphere [Institute for Security Cooperation].

The role of U.S. trainees in Colombia's deadly record is a leading reason the Western Hemisphere Institute -- which is headquartered at Fort Benning, Georgia -- was the site of a 20,000-strong protest by human rights leaders last week, led by Father Roy Bourgeois.

As Human Rights Watch argued in a recent letter to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), passing the Colombian FTA now would give Colombia and U.S. corporations a green light to stay on their current course -- and cause the U.S. to lose leverage for pushing for human rights reform:

Human Rights Watch noted that, were it not for Congress's decision to delay consideration of the trade agreement, Colombia would probably never have taken even the limited steps it has to address the issue. Human Rights Watch urged Congress to continue postponing consideration of the deal until Colombia shows concrete and sustained results in addressing its serious human and labor rights problems.

"Under US pressure related to the FTA, Colombia has started to take some positive steps on impunity for anti-union violence," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in the letter. "But those steps are limited and incomplete, and in other areas (such as the rate of violence), Colombia has been sliding back this year."

Gulf Watch: Calling federal recovery system "broken," Texas governor launches hurricane commission

2008-11-24T20:39:19Z

Blasting the federal government for failing to help his state's citizens, Texas Gov. Rick Perry last week announced the formation of the Disaster Recovery and Renewal Commission. The state advisory panel will draw up a plan to help communities recover from a devastating storm season that brought three hurricanes to Texas within a three-month period, resulting in the unprecedented federal designation of all its coastal counties as disaster areas.

"Two months after Ike's landfall, Texans are still sleeping in cars or tents outside of padlocked trailers," Perry said. "Mounds of debris are piled up in coastal communities creating health hazards while Washington remains mum about whether it will provide the same level of resources it did for Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. These situations clearly demonstrate that the federal government's recovery system is broken."

The commission's immediate task will be to address the housing shortages in coastal communities, where thousands of residents have been left homeless and FEMA has been slow to offer temporary alternatives. More than 1,200 Texas Gulf Coast families are living in agency-supplied mobile homes -- fewer than one-tenth the number of mobile homes occupied by Katrina and Rita evacuees two months after the 2005 Gulf disasters, the Houston Chronicle reports.

The mobile homes are bigger and more comfortable than the temporary travel trailers FEMA previously relied on, but that makes them more complicated to distribute and install. Their appearance also makes them unpopular in some communities. For example, Galveston county officials recently delayed a decision on creating a mobile home park for residents left homeless by Ike, with one commissioner arguing that it "does not give the appearance of rebuilding."

FEMA has declined to distribute the smaller travel trailers used widely after Katrina because of concerns over formaldehyde contamination. In fact, the agency recently announced plans to begin scrapping those units.

Another pressing issue facing Perry's commission is storm debris removal. The governor has directed the state Department of Transportation to begin helping remove debris in Southeast Texas, but his requests for 100% federal reimbursement -- what Louisiana got after Katrina -- have gone unanswered for the past month.

"The notion that Texas should use its hard-earned surplus dollars to cover costs that fall under the federal government's responsibility is outrageous," Perry said. "The idea that Washington would shower 700 billion taxpayer dollars on mismanaged Wall Street firms, then penalize a state that has exercised tough fiscal discipline by leaving it to cover the bill of the costliest disaster in its history is preposterous."

The commission will also develop "processes, protocols and standards" to prepare for future disasters and rebuild affected communities, according to Perry. The findings will be shared in a report due to the state by June 30, 2009.

Former Harris County Judge Robert Eckels will chair the commission. In the coming weeks Perry will name the 31 members, drawing from the private sector, foundations, and local and state government. Judges from 21 Texas counties will also serve ex officio.

Election 2008: Why North Carolina will continue to be a battleground

2008-11-24T17:58:01Z

The Democrats' election victories in North Carolina this year -- including president, U.S. Senate and the governorship -- have many talking about how the state "turned blue," and whether it's going to stay a battleground state.

But as Rob Christenson points out in the Raleigh News & Observer today, North Carolina has been a battleground for many years:

North Carolina is the toughest political neighborhood in the South -- in fact, in the whole country.
In the 1980s, only Minnesota had more close top races for president, governor and U.S. Senate. In the 1990s, North Carolina had the closest top races in the country. In this decade, only Minnesota, Missouri and Florida have had closer elections for the top offices.
North Carolina was polarized before polarization was cool.

By way of showing the import of the 2008 elections, many point to the fact that no Democratic president had won in NC since 1976. A more telling observation might be that only six years separated the retirement of Sen. Jesse Helms and the election of Barack Obama in North Carolina.

These realities reveal that North Carolina is a deeply contested state, and not just Democratic vs. Republican: It's Old South vs. "New" South; urban vs. rural; rich vs. poor; old race relations vs. a new multi-racial future -- issues which don't line up along party lines the way they do in other states.

On balance, it appears trends in the state -- urbanization, growing racial diversity, even advances in election reform -- favor the Democrats.

But the "deep history" of the state ensures it will be a reliably hard-fought state for years to come -- and at the top of any national list of key battlegrounds.