A progressive Southern news report
September 28, 2004 - Issue 90 Facing South is published 40 times a year by the Institute for Southern Studies and Southern Exposure magazine. Support a progressive voice from the South -- contribute at www.southernstudies.org today! _____
INSTITUTE INDEX - Costly Mistakes DATELINE: THE SOUTH - Top Stories Around the Region PERSPECTIVE - Unnatural Disasters: Poor, Black and Left Behind INSTITUTE NEWS - Defend Democracy in Battleground North Carolina!
_____ INSTITUTE INDEX - Costly Mistakes Cost of the Iraq war to U.S. taxpayers per minute: $114,000 Amount Congress has allocated for Iraq war, in billions: $152.6 Estimated annual cost for each year U.S. stay in Iraq after 2004, in billions: $50 Number of Fortune 500 companies with yearly profits over $1.1 trillion: 275 Number of those companies that paid zero income tax at least one year between 2001 and 2003: 82 Amount that the 275 companies should have paid in taxes from 2001 to 2003, in billions: $35 Amount of net income they ended up recieving due to subsidies, breaks and rebates, in billions: $12 Estimated federal budget deficit this year, in billions: $475 Percent of deficit due to tax cuts passed by Congress and Bush Administration: 35 Sources on file at the Institute for Southern Studies. _____ DATELINE: THE SOUTH - Top Stories Around the Region FLOOD OF NEW VOTERS SIGNING UP In states across the country, including battlegrounds like Florida and Ohio, new voters are registering in record numbers. (Associated Press, 9/28) http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040928/ap_on_el_pr/n ew_voters VOTING MACHINE LAWSUIT REVIVED IN FLORIDA A federal appeals court on Monday revived a lawsuit challenging Florida's touch screen voting machines, renewing a rancorous debate over the lack of a paper trail just five weeks before the election. A spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, the Boca Raton Democrat who filed the lawsuit, called the decision "a huge win for us." (St. Petersburg Times, 9/28) http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/28/State/Ruling_revives_issue_.shtml JIMMY CARTER: FLORIDA ELECTIONS DON'T MEET INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has said Florida lacks "basic international requirements for a fair election" and that a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco "seems likely". He said reforms recommended after the recount in Florida had still not been implemented, and accused accused election officials working for Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, the president's brother, of being "highly partisan". (The Guardian, 9/28) http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1314205,00.html SUBURBAN SPRAWL LINKED TO BAD HEALTH A report released Monday found that people who live in sprawling metropolitan areas are more likely to report chronic health problems such as high blood pressure, arthritis, headaches and breathing difficulties than residents of more compact cities. Areas deemed to have the worst sprawl were Atlanta, Georgia; Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; Winston-Salem, N.C.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Bridgeport-Danbury-Stamford, Conn. (Associated Press, 9/28) http://www.newsday.com/news/health/sns-ap-sprawl-health,0,3026383.story? coll=ny-health-headlines NEW "ANTI-TERROR" BILL ADDS 23 DEATH PENALTY OFFENSES In a statement the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the "Tools to Fight Terrorism Act of 2004," now before Congress, which significantly expands federal eavedropping and enforcement authority. Among other measures, the ACLU contends, the law adds 23 offenses which can be punished with a death sentence. (ACLU, 9/9) http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=16488&c=206 HOUSTON HIGH SCHOOL GRADS NOT PREPARED FOR COLLEGE Houston high schools, touted as the model for the national "Leave No Child Behind" legislation, suffered a blow last week when it was revealed that nearly two-thirds of 2004's graduating high school seniors now enrolled in Houston-area community colleges are taking remedial classes because they weren't prepared for college. (Houston Chronicle, 9/26) http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2815219 REPORT: 10,000 WORK IN FORCED LABOR At any given time, some 10,000 people in the United States are forced to work against their will under threat of violence, a new report by human rights scholars has found. Researchers found that almost half of forced laborers work in prostitution or the sex industry, close to one-third are domestic workers, and one in 10 works in agriculture. Most are concentrated in states with large immigrant populations like California, Florida, New York and Texas. (Associated Press, 9/25) http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092704Z.shtml SOUTH CAROLINA PROTEST CASE HIGHLIGHTS RESTRICTIONS ON DISSENT A federal judge has upheld the conviction of South Carolina activist Brett Bursey, who was arrested in 2002 for protesting a visit from George W. Bush. Bursey was convicted under an arcane law that prohibited him from protesting outside of a "free speech zone" on federal property. The implications for dissent are chilling. (Slate, 9/21) http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2107012& CONFERENCE TO HIGHLIGHT RURAL JOBS CRISIS This weekend, the Center for Community Action will host a National Conference on Job Loss and Recovery in Rural America. The conference will tackle obstacles and opportunities to rural development, using as a case study Robeson County, NC, where unemployment has shot up to almost 12% in the last decade, and the area has lost over $115 million in lost manufacturing wages. (Center for Community Action) http://www.povertyeast.org/jobs _____ PERSPECTIVE - Unnatural Disasters: Poor, Black and Left Behind by Mike Davis TomDispatch.com September 24, 2004 The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath. New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group.mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't. Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome. In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures. Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population -- blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits. But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called "the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities." The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor. On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans -- structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools -- the present presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s. But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition. The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats back to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing civil rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans, it is cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of the treasons committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages. Thus the sordid spectacle -- portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 -- of white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support of the Black Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the stolen election of November 2000. The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward oblivion. No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy's run in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats' most loyal and fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a tight-lipped and constant presence at Dubya's side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed "African American" in the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in white-colonial privilege). This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal reluctance to mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about financing voter registration drives in African-American communities. Ralph Nader -- I fear -- was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that "the Democrats do not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the core of the campaign." In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America's equally ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and catastrophic plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant color, or, rather, colors: black and brown. Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color will not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments. Nor will it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan Democrats and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta. A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth. # Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities: And Other Tales as well as Ecology of Fear and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists Never See, among other books. This originally appeared in TomDispatch.com _____ INSTITUTE NEWS: Protect the Right to Vote in Battleground North Carolina! In the 2000 elections, millions of Americans were wrongfully denied their right to vote due to faulty voting machines, being turned away at the polls, and other election problems - not just in Florida, but across the country. In this tight election year, where every vote will count, this can't be allowed to happen again. Focusing on the key battleground state of North Carolina, this November the Voting Rights Project of the Institute for Southern Studies is organizing an Election Protection Program to educate 500,000 voters in target communities about their rights, and mobilize legal response teams to make sure no voters are turned away at the polls. If you'd like to help defend democracy in North Carolina, visit www.southernstudies.org or email Tara Purohit at the Voting Rights Project at tara@southernstudies.org or (919) 419-8311 x25. You can also make a contribution to help the Voting Rights Project expand its efforts to defend democracy at www.southernstudies.org today! _____ HOW DID I GET ON THIS LIST? - Either you signed up for Facing South, or a friend recommended we send it to you. If you want to be taken off the list, just let us know at facingsouth@southernstudies.org. It won't hurt our feelings. _____ JOIN THE INSTITUTE OR MAKE A CONTRIBUTION Like having a source for progressive Southern information and action? Then join the Institute for Southern Studies or make a contribution today! Three easy ways to join or contribute: 1. Visit http://www.southernstudies.org/support.asp 2. Print out the form below and mail to: ISS, P.O. Box 531, Durham, NC 27702. 3. Print out the form below and fax to (919) 419-8315 with your credit card information. 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