Black Agenda Radio

Media Ignore Report on Extrajudicial Killings of U.S. Blacks An exhaustive report on the deaths of 110 Blacks in the United States at the hands of police, security guards and self-appointed vigilantes during the 6-month period ending June 30 “clearly indicates there is a human rights crisis in the U.S.,” said Ajamu Baraka, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. “If these numbers were coming from somewhere else, indicating that a particular population was being subjected to militarized violence from the state…many people around the world would agree that there was, in fact, a human rights issue.” Yet, even so-called progressive media “aren’t picking up on the report,” said Rosa Clemente, the Green Party’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate. Clemente and Baraka spoke on the online program Your World News, hosted by Solomon Commissiong. LIBOR Banking Fraud’s Global Impact “We’ll never know how much losses could be attributed” to the international bankers’ LIBOR interest rate fixing scheme, “because it’s literally an impossible calculation to make,” said Dr. Richard Wolff, economics professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “In terms of its social impact, it’s the biggest scandal we ever had.” Dr. Wolff predicts “all the borrowers who have a case” that they lost money from the fraud “are going to be filing legal suits to recover damages.” Black Radio Ruined by Syndications “While we celebrate Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey and Michael Baisden, they’re exactly what’s wrong with our radio and our insight and our information,” said Paul Porter, veteran broadcaster and publisher of the influential newsletterIndustry Ears. Local Black-oriented stations “don’t touch on local issues, they don’t deliver local news. The best they can do is some local traffic.” Porter estimates that Black adults are 75 times more likely to hear syndicated radio programs than adult whites. A Nursing Corps for the African Diaspora Forty-five nurses will soon graduate from a Sierra Leone school founded by the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project, the first wave of an “African nursing corps that can be deployed anywhere in the African world, said AAPDEP’s Aisha Fields. At present, one out of eight Sierra Leone women die in childbirth. Globally, “our people have been at the mercy of others, and it hasn’t ever turned out well for us,” said Fields. The nursing school must raise a $5,000 accreditation fee by July 25. Milestone for Richmond Rights Defenders The Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality, which began as an ad hoc group dealing with criminal justice issues, marked their tenth anniversary, in Richmond, Virginia. Ana Edwards, one of the founders, noted that back in 2002 other local organizations were not saying “it is capitalism that is one of the contributing factors to why we have a prison industrial system that requires that we feed it – that we put bodies in there.” The Defenders buttress their non-stop organizing work through a quarterly newspaper and weekly radio show. “We are absolutely committed to the idea that the war at home and the wars abroad are inextricably linked,” said Edwards.

Black Is Back Coalition National Conference The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations holds a national conference in Newark, New Jersey, August 18. “We will examine the role of elections in this society, the role of money in elections, and the question of how, or whether, Black people should be involved,” said Black Is Back chairman Omali Yeshitela. “The idea of voting simply for the sake of voting is not something that any rational person” advocates. Pennsylvania’s Assault on the Very Poor Seventy thousand of the state’s poorest people were given virtually no notice that they are to be removed from cash public assistance. State Rep. W. Curtis Thomas said Republicans also want to use “asset testing” to keep people off food stamps and are discussing making the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program into a loan, to be repaid when recipients gain employment. Meanwhile, corporations are getting “carte blanche access to drilling” for natural gas in the state. “So, while we are throwing people into the street on one hand, we are fattening corporate welfare at an alarming rate,” said the Philadelphia lawmaker. Canadian Police are as Racist as U.S. Cops The youth activist group Justice Is Not Colour-Blind is demanding an end to racial profiling and police raids in the Black community of Toronto, Canada. “Racial profiling is rampant in Toronto,” said Odion Fayalo, of JINCB. The police practice of arbitrarily demanding that Black males produce ID, called “carding,” is the Canadian version of stop-and-frisk. Manning Marable Got it Wrong on Malcolm X The late Dr. Manning Marable’s 2011 book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinventionattempts to “liberalize Malcolm X” and misrepresent his revolutionary nationalist politics, said Morgan State University professor Jared Ball, an editor and contributor to A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manny Marable’s Malcolm X. Marable “would have welcomed an exchange and criticism of his book,” said Dr. Ball, but “those who walk in his footsteps…will not engage in principled debate.” Malcolm X Radio to Power Up Low-power FM radio station WMXP needs $15,000 to bring the broadcast signal to full power, said Atty. Efia Nwangaza, director of the Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination, in Greenville, South Carolina. WMXP’s programming “connects the local community with the national and international Black community and provides an opportunity for political education that would not otherwise be available.”

Give the People Medicare-for-All The U.S. Supreme Court’s vetting of President Obama’s health legislation means Americans will be forced to “spend up to 9 percent of their income and still not get actual healthcare,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers, who joined other physicians in a brief on behalf of Medicare-for-All. The Obama bill amounts to “corporate welfare on steroids,” said Dr. Flowers. Jean Ross, a co-president of National Nurses United, said “No one should have to wait till they’re 65 to have the best healthcare system. We need Medicare-for-All, from the time you’re born.” Mandatory Life in Prison for Juveniles is Unconstitutional “In every area of the law we protect child status, except in the criminal justice system, where we increasingly sentence them just as if they are adults – even if they’re as young as 13 or 14,” said Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative. Under the high court’s ruling, juveniles can still be sentenced to life, but the penalty cannot be mandatory. Minorities make up about 70 percent of kids serving life terms. Arizona Immigration Decision is a Victory, But… “It is wrong to assume that Justice Roberts has a rebirth as some type of moderate,” said Shanta Driver, national chairperson of BAMN, By Any Means Necessary. Racial profiling remains embedded in U.S. immigration practice, “including the federal Secure Communities Act,” backed by the Obama administration. It’s “All Purely Race” in Jasper, Texas The Texas town where three white men chained and dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death behind their pickup truck, in 1998, recently recalled two of its Black city councilmen and fired its first African American police chief. The town’s racists “believe that they can do and say anything without anybody taking issue with them,” said Atty. David Bersen, who filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint on behalf of ex-police chief Rodney Pearson. “It’s all purely race.” Lynne Stewart Sentence Stands Human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart lost her appeal of a 10-year prison sentence for her conduct in defending a client on terror charges. Stewart, 72, is held at a medical prison near Fort Worth, Texas, where she recently underwent surgery. “They’re referring to Lynne as having disrespect for the law,” said her husband,Ralph Poynter. “My reaction is, anybody that has studied the history of American law knows it’s based in genocide, slavery and the double standard. The only things we can look up to in America that are positive are those people that followed justice rather than law.” New Orleans Katrina School Firings Illegal A federal judge ruled that local and state officials acted illegally when they fired 7,500 New Orleans public school employees to make way for charter schools, in the wake of the 2005 Katrina disaster. Seven of the former employees won cash awards ranging from $48,000 to $48,000, and the total owed to the entire class of plaintiffs could run in the tens of millions. “From the beginning it was a wrongful takeover” based on “manufactured evidence of failure,” said Willie Zanders, lawyer for the plaintiffs. “Many people saw this as an opportunity to privatize public education.” Eighty percent of New Orleans schools are now charters. POP Demonstration Marathon Passes One-Year Mark in Newark “We’ve certainly drawn attention to the issue of unemployment in our community,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), based in Newark, New Jersey. POP set out last June 27 to hold daily demonstrations, 7 days a week, to match or exceed the 381-day longevity of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott. The grassroots activists are building for a huge rally for jobs, peace, equality and justice on July 11 – with help from a coalition of 179 endorsing organizations. U.S. Enables Genocide in Congo “The United States has been an enabler” of Rwanda’s destabilization of the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, contributing to the deaths of 6 million Congolese since 1996, said Claude Gatebuke, of the African Great Lakes Network. “The U.S. is one of the largest donors to the Rwandan government in terms of funds, but also military training” to the tune of over $1 billion in the past decade, said Gatebuke. “When you give a world criminal more resources, they commit more crimes.” Buju Banton Loses Appeal A federal appeals court confirmed Jamaican musical artist Buju Banton’s 10-year sentence on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The government case against Banton, who turns 39 on July 15, relied heavily on a paid informer. “Buju’s case represents a lot of cases in America in terms of the use of confidential informants who make millions of dollars of untaxed income,” saidChris Sweeney, editor of the New Times, in Miami. Dr. Carolyn Cooper, a member of Banton’s support committee and a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica, said “There are many of us who feel that Buju’s arrest and incarceration is really an attack on the Jamaican music industry, because of the kinds of messages that some of the artists have sending out about sexual politics. So many of us in Jamaica believe that it is a set-up.”

Abolish – Don’t Tweet – Stop-and-Frisk As popular anger rises against New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s draconian policing policies, “we must avoid being sidetracked by politicians, preachers or anybody else who might want to lead it into sit-downs and negotiations with the mayor and the police commissioner,” said Carl Dix, a founder of Stop Stop-and-Frisk. “The challenge” is to reject “some surface reform, some tweets, to a racist, illegal policy,” he said. Stop-and-frisk, “a pipeline to mass incarceration,” has to go. Contemptible: Holder, Obama and the Congress “We can openly admit that this attorney general and this president are Black and the congressmen going after them are a bunch of racists,” and still “condemn abuses of power” by President Obama and Eric Holder,” said David Swanson, publisher of the influential website WarIsACrime.org. The House committee that charged Holder with contempt in a gun trafficking scheme acted “hypocritically,” said Swanson. However, “you have a president who has been claiming state secrets powers in courts…to protect himself and his predecessors and their corporate allies, far and away beyond anything Bush or Cheney ever tried.” A “Human Rights” Approach to Public Schooling “Parents and communities and students must participate in all decisions that affect the right to education,” said Ellen Raider, of ICOPE, the Independent Commission on Public Education, in New York City. High drop-out rates violate the “human right to the full development of each child, to its fullest potential. It’s the new Jim Crow, as Michelle Alexander says.” Charter schools have been “used as a wedge to separate parents in Black and Latino communities,” said Raider. Meanwhile, the Coalition for Public Education has established the Paul Robeson Freedom School, in Brooklyn, to provide “education for liberation,” said spokesman Rodney Deas. A U.S. Chapter for ILPS Twenty-eight United States organizations have become the newest country-chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle. “We cannot succeed, either as an anti-war movement or as a movement against injustice in this country, without being united with our sisters and brothers around the world,” said U.S. chapter spokesperson Bill Dores. Congo President Shares Blame for Genocide Evidence mounts of Rwandan complicity in violence that has killed six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. However, DRC President Joseph Kabila is also part of the problem, said Jacques Bahati, policy analyst for the Africa Faith and Justice Network, based in Washington. If Congo had an “efficient and effective government, they could set up an army to secure its borders,” said Bahati. Rwanda gets away with destabilizing Congo because “it has a very good army” and is a close ally of the United States. Western Heads of State, Including Obama, Guilty of High Crimes The Pan-African Solidarity Hague Committee, comprised of activists from throughout the Diaspora, delivered a petition to the International Criminal Court charging the heads of state of the U.S. and other NATO countries with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and in the “targeting and persecution of Black people in the United States,” said human rights lawyer Roger Wareham. “We have no illusions that the ICC is going to take our evidence, which is rock-solid,” said Wareham. “Of the 26 case that are before the Criminal Court, all involve Africans.” The ICC “has become a tool for the West to recolonize Africa.”

Backwards Logic: Obama’s “We Got Your Back” Black Campaign Ad The Obama 2012 campaign’s radio ad, in which a chorus of Black voices assures the president that “We got your back,” implies a “reciprocal relationship” between Blacks and Obama – “that we’re all in this together,” said Dr. Johnny Williams, professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. However, “there’s been very little that he’s done directly for Black people to show us that he’s got our back.” Why Wisconsin mobilization and Occupy movement “Faltered” The “biggest ongoing labor rally since the 1930s got shunted into electoral politics…because there wasn’t also the pursuit of independent movement building,” said Arun Gupta, co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street Journal. The problem, said Gupta, was not simply that Democratic Party and labor union “honchos” steered the movement into an unsuccessful bid to unseat Republican Scott Walker. Rather, the Wisconsin mobilization and the Occupy movement, “despite their potential, have been faltering because of…a lack of organization, a lack of discipline, and a lack of strategy.” Medicaid for All Would Have Passed Constitutional Muster President Obama could have avoided constitutional problems if he had chosen a health care plan that “most people have long supported” and which is “constitutionally safe”: Medicare for All, said political analyst and author Paul Street. “All you have to do” to create a single-payer system ”is to go into the Medicare bill and take out the clause that says its for people over 65 – and just say its for everybody.” Instead, Obama pushed a bill that guaranteed price-setting power to the drug and insurance “mafias.” The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on Obama’s health care legislation, which requires people to purchase private insurance. Obama Violates His Own Law on Congo Killings Friends of Congo is circulating a petition demanding that Washington cut off funds to nations that “destabilize” their neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Executive director Maurice Carney notes that the law was authored by Sen. Barack Obama and co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Clinton, now U.S. Secretary of State. Rwanda and Uganda are both guilty of destabilizing the DRC, “resulting in the death of millions of Congolese,” said Carney. Both Rwanda and Uganda are close allies of the U.S. No Compromise with Capitalism “You have to have, as an objective, overturning the system of capitalism, itself. And to do that, you’ve got to be organized,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, founded in 1972. Yeshitela was speaking at the national convention of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, in Philadelphia.

Black Politics Neutered by Corporate Democrats The business-friendly African American politicians that came to prominence under President Clinton “prioritized electoral politics over mass movements and grassroots politics,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, professor of African American studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. In more recent years, “a good part of the soft Black Left, the weak Black Left – they call themselves the ‘pragmatic’ Black Left – capitulated to the Obama movement,” allowing corporate politicians to achieve unchallenged leadership among Blacks. Inventing Security Threats “In the wake of 9/11, we have made policing into a business,” said Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon, speaking on Press TV. The Department of Homeland Security is mostly private contractors who are chiefly concerned with drumming up business. “It’s a growth industry,” said Dixon. “So, look out – you might be the next threat.” The U.S. government has been inventing threats to internal security “for at least 100 years,” said journalist Don DeBar, of CPRmetro.org. Servants of Empire in “Human Rights” Garb “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are, essentially, weapons in the imperial arsenal,” said BAR executive editor Glen Ford. “Who better than self-styled human rights activists to justify ‘humanitarian’ war?” Prof. Cornel West on Black Mass Incarceration “If our precious white brothers and sisters were going to jail at the intensity” that African Americans are incarcerated, “it would be a national emergency,” said Dr. Cornel West, speaking at a benefit for the Brecht Forum, at New York City’s Hunter College. “If Black middle class brothers and sisters were going to jail at the same level of intensity” as lower class Blacks, “we’d have a different kind of Black leadership.” “Liberal” Contradiction: Support for Charter Schools “Liberals” are seduced by “this virtuous narrative, that these ‘reforms’ are going to make things better for poor kids,” said journalist Liza Featherstone. She singled out Black New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a “progressive” congressional candidate who is “at the forefront of efforts to open up the public school system to private interests” – a position that is “fundamentally at odds” with the progressive agenda. The fact that there’s lots of campaign money behind charter schools expansion “doesn’t hurt,” said Featherstone. A “Human Rights” Approach to Public Education The “business model” of education holds that “the student is a product, the teacher is a production line worker, and the parent is a consumer who has ‘choices,’” said Dr. Sam Anderson, of New York's Independent Commission on Public Education, ICOPE. The business model is an attempt by hedge funders and other business interests to “exploit the trillion dollar trough of public education.” ICOPE advocates a “human rights approach to education that “promotes the intellectual development of children to their maximum capability,” with “direct parental involvement in decision making at the public school level.”

Black Colleges Without Black People “If you don’t have a Black faculty, you don’t have an HBCU,” said Jahil Issa, professor of history and Africana studies at Delaware State University. Issa warned that the school is in danger of following in the footsteps of Bluefield State College and West Virginia State University, two historically Black institutions that are now overwhelmingly white. Delaware State University’s faculty is now majority non-African American, although the student body remains predominantly Black. Prof. Issa wrote “How Black Colleges are Turning White: The Ethic Cleansing of HBCUs in the Age of Obama,” which appeared in Black Agenda Report, last year. In what he describes as retaliation, Issa is being prosecuted under charges that could send him to prison for more than two years. Florida Voter Suppression Law Struck Down A federal judge struck down provisions of a Florida law that constituted “a naked attempt to limit the electorate,” said Atty. Lee Rowland, of the Brennan Center for Justice, the lead lawyer in the case. The Florida legislation “was part of a wave of suppressive laws that hit in 2011 and 2012” that “targeted specific communities.” Wall Street Loves Democrats “The Democratic machines in our big cities are very much creatures, not just of Wall Street, but of local real estate interests,” said Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer. Newark Mayor Cory Booker received more than half a million dollars from the financial sector in his first race for City Hall, in 2002, more than $36,000 from Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old firm. Booker recently defended Wall Street’s influence in U.S. politics. Congress “Un-Declares” War with Iran Both Houses of the U.S. Congress recently passed military spending bills that included the language, “nothing in this Act shall be construed as authorizing the use of force against Iran” – words clearly chosen to prevent a president from claiming a congressional mandate for war. Kate Gould, a “peace lobbyist” with the Friends Committee on National Legislation, called the language “a remarkably sober note of caution and common sense in an otherwise dangerous and reckless piece of legislation.” She wrote an article titled, “Congress Un-Declares War With Iran.” Obama Assault on Community Control of Schools The so-called “turnaround model” of school reform pushed by the Obama administration, in which teachers and staff are fired wholesale, is part of “a corporate agenda” that results in “total destruction” of communities, said journalist Jaisal Noor, producer of the recently-aired Free Speech Radio News documentary, “Neighborhood Schools: The Fight for the Future of American Public Education.” Noor described Chicago’s system of community control of schools, implemented in the Eighties under the late Mayor Harold Washington, as “the most radical democratic experiment that’s ever been tried in the United States.” Under the “turnaround” policy, however, “Black teaches have been decimated” and community input is being destroyed. Lynching Town “Hasn’t Changed” Fourteen years after three white men chained James Byrd, Jr. to a pickup truck and dragged his body to pieces, the town of Jasper, Texas, remains racially polarized, said Ricky Jason, who produced an award-winning film on the murder. Jason doesn’t think the film will ever be shown in Byrd’s home town, where “Blacks shop on one side of the Wal-Mart, whites on the other.” He said Byrd’s gravesite is in disrepair, and has twice been vandalized with racist slurs. Pelican Bay Prison “Cruel and Unusual” The Center for Constitutional Rights launched a class action suit on behalf of over 500 prisoners who have endured solitary confinement for ten years or more at California’s Pelican Bay high security facility. Such treatment is “something international society considers torture, and is beyond the pale for any civilized nation,” said CCR president Jules Lobel.

Obama Asked to Veto a “Poison Pill” Whistleblower Bill

A bill purporting to protect whistleblowers contains a “poison pill” that would effectively abolish federal workers’ rights to access to the courts, said Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a founder of the NO FEAR Coalition and herself a noted whistleblower. The so-called Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which has passed the Senate, would allow a board of federal employees acting as judges to pass final summary judgments on workers’ discrimination complaints – a reversal of guarantees to due process provided by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, said Coleman-Adebayo. Historically, she said, the board has turned thumbs down on all but 2 percent of discrimination complaints. If the House passes the measure, Coleman-Adebayo urges President Obama to veto it. “You do not want to be the president who overturned the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”

Roots of Police Killings of Blacks in New Orleans

New Orleans has always been “a very violent city with a particularly toxic racial environment,” said Dr. Jeffrey Adler, professor of history and criminology at the University of Florida and author of “The Killer Behind the Badge: Race and Police Homicide in New Orleans, 1925-1945,” an article recently published in the prestigious Law and History Review. “The low level of training, the lack of professional standards, the corruption of politics, were more powerful and more deeply entrenched in New Orleans than in many other southern cities,” said Adler. “If police officers believed that social stability was bound up in rendering African Americans submissive and compliant, then they understood resistance as a threat…and they could shoot.”

Hunger Strike at Virginia’s Prison

A number of inmates at Virginia’s infamous Red Onion maximum security prison refused to eat in protest of harsh conditions, including mass solitary confinement. “The racial dynamic that exists there, it’s out of control,” said Max Gaskins, who spent four years behind bars at Red Onion and is a founding member of SPARC, Supporting Prisoners and Acting for Radical Change. “I saw men get their eyes shot out, me were shot in the back and paralyzed,” he said. Prison officials now claim the hunger strike has ended.

Black Middle Class “Largely Cut Ties” With Black Poor

“The African American middle class has partly been successfully integrated into the American mainstream and has, maybe to the greatest extent in its history, cut ties with the Black and working class,” said Dr. Gary Peller, a professor of law at Georgetown University, in Washington. Peller is author of the new book, Critical Race Consciousness: Rethinking American Ideologies of Racial Justice. Integrationism “helps to apologize for the basic distribution of wealth, power and prestige in American society.” Dr. Peller said “Black nationalism achieved its real pinnacle of theoretic sophistication in the late 1960s and early Seventies, with Malcolm X and his followers, the Black Panther ideologists, and others.” The Panthers, in particular, “not only had programs for Black liberation, but also had a critique of American involvement around the world.”

POP Protest in Newark Only 43 Days from Goal

The People’s Organization for Progress (POP) has passed the 338-day point in its daily demonstrations in Newark, New Jersey – just 43 days from matching the 381-day longevity of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott. Nearly 200 local organizations have endorsed POP’s marathon action for jobs, housing, education, peace and justice. “The only avenue we have is to do what POP has done, to be out there and demonstrate and let people know that we’re not satisfied,” said Jerry Owens, vice president of the local long shore workers union and president of the area’s A. Philip Randolph Institute.

Cory Booker and Obama Beholden to Vulture Capitalists

The Black Misleadership Class, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker and President Barack Obama, “must deliver the votes of their people to the campaign contributors who made their careers possible,” said Bruce Dixon, managing editor of Black Agenda Report. However, they “must pose as at least half-hearted opponents of the blood-sucking model of parasitic vulture capitalism practiced by Bain Capital, JP Morgan, Citibank and other players.” Obama’s “heart belongs to JP Morgan.”

Preventive Detention Gone Wild

“It’s come down to the point where some guy riding a bike down a street in New Delhi is a threat to the United States and we’ve got to know where he’s going, what his name is, who his family is and who his friends are, so we can round him up and put him under surveillance so that he can’t communicate with some guy who’s riding a bike in Malaysia,” said Doug Valentine, co-author of a paper, “The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detention.”

Suit Against Preventive Detention Moves Forward A federal judge ruled that plaintiffs attempting to overturn preventive detention without trial showed a “likelihood to prevail” in their suit. Former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs, said the law would allow “anyone to be swept up” by government “acts of extraordinary rendition on American soil against American citizens.” Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, said the legislation has already had a chilling effect on reporters and activists, like himself, who don’t want to wind up in a “black hole.” Father’s Day NYC March Against Stop-and-Frisk Opponents of New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices plan a Father’s Day protest march. A new study of the nearly 700,000 individual stops, last year, shows that “wherever people of color are,” in the city, “they’re going to be stopped by police,” said Candis Tolliver, of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Slain Prisoner’s Family Files Complaint The family of John Carter, who died last month when guards at the Rockview, Pennsylvania state prison entered his solitary confinement cell firing pepper-spray and electric shock weapons, is seeking criminal charges against prison staff. Brete Grote, of the Human Rights Coalition, said “We’ve documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations, many amounting to torture, in well over a dozen Pennsylvania prisons over the last five years.” Report on Prison Sexual Abuse A new study b the U.S. Justice Department shows about one in ten prison inmates is sexually assaulted during his or her term of confinement. Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Just Detention International, said the survey was more accurate than previous studies because it was conducted on former prisoners “who are no longer living with the active and acute fear of retaliation” by guards or inmates. Housing Settlement Money Diverted Troubled home owners expected that a $25 billion settlement between state attorneys general and the nation’s top banks would provide some relief from imminent foreclosure. But at least 29 of the states plan to divert at least some of their share of the money to non-housing uses. Arizona wants to spend much of it on prisons. “It’s an awful idea, and I think it’s unlawful,” said Tim Hogan, executive director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest. Alan Jenkins, executive director of Opportunity Agenda, in New York City, said the settlement funds were “intended to address a specific harm: an insult to the American dream and a violation of our belief in equal opportunity for all. New Voter Bill Democrats in the U.S. House have introduced a Voter Empowerment Act designed to “modernize voter registration,” said Nicole Austin-Hillery, of the Brennan Center for Justice. The Brennan Center helped develop parts of the legislation, such as eliminating “voter caging” – the purging of voter rolls of people whose mail is undeliverable. Robin Hood Tax Protesters mobilized by National People’s Action and the National Domestic Workers Alliance marched to the suburban, Washington DC home of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, demanding a financial transaction tax on Wall Street trading. National People’s Action spokesperson Mary Moreno said the so-called “Robin Hood tax” would “generate a lot of revenue” to fund needed social programs. “Death March” in Benton Harbor Veteran activist Rev. Edward Pinkney blames the giant Whirlpool corporation’s jobs outsourcing policies for shrinking the population of mostly Black Benton Harbor, Michigan, down from 30,000 to less than 10,000 in recent years. Pinkney will lead a “death march” through the local PGA-affiliated golf course, this week, featuring a coffin filled with the names of dead or displaced citizens. A sign will declare, “Whirlpool Commits Genocide.” It’s Expensive to the Poor Gary Rivlin, author of Broke USA, said the added costs of poverty, such as check cashing fees and appliance rentals, amount to about $2,500 a year for a typical working poor household. The extra costs represent a “poverty tax.” U.S. Veers Right as World Goes Left Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston, said “the world is moving to the left, but the U.S. is not.” Horne spoke on host Norman Richmond’s Saturday Morning Show, on Regent Radio, in Toronto, Canada. While Europe rebels against austerity, U.S. courts have drifted rightward and could conceivably rule that the remnants of America’s social safety net are unconstitutional.