Drew Dakessian

Thanks to new to legislation signed into law by President Obama last night, nearly 3,000 crack cocaine defendants each year could get shorter sentences.

The minimum quantity of crack-cocaine required to trigger a five-year sentence used to be five grams. But with the bill’s passage, the minimum quantity required to trigger a first-time sentence has been raised to 28 grams, and the five-year mandatory minimum sentence has been eliminated.

The sentencing disparity has long been criticized because it has had a disproportionate impact on African Americans, and was based on false assumptions about crack cocaine.

“Today is a landmark day in criminal justice. But while the Fair Sentencing Act is an extremely important step, it is also an incomplete step,” said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “A sizeable sentencing gap still remains and it is time for our country to seriously re-think mandatory minimums and a one-size-fits-all approach to sentencing. We have momentum now to impose even greater change and we should not lose it.”

House members approved the legislation last Wednesday on a voice vote.

Since 1986, the minimum amount of powder cocaine required to trigger a five-year sentence was 500 grams, making it 100 times the threshold for crack. The impact of the law had a strong racial dimension because the majority of crack cocaine users are African Americans and Latinos, while its powder form tends to be used by Caucasians.

U.S. Sentencing Commission projections show that crack defendants would be sentenced to an average of one and a quarter years less time, and that the bill could lead to a net reduction of nearly 4,000 fewer inmates in the federal prison population in the next decade.

Yet not all consider this a true victory. The new law is not retroactive, and, writes political commentator Chris Weigant on The Huffington Post,

What they’ve done is change the ratio of unfairness from one-hundred-to-one (500:5) down to roughly eighteen-to-one (500:28). The penalties for crack and powder cocaine are still nowhere near parity.

Via ProPublica

Drew Dakessian

You’ve probably seen them somewhere on the Internet. An animation of a woman dancing jubilantly on an ad encouraging people to go back to school, courtesy of money made available by President Barack Obama.

However, a recent article by the investigative reporting network ProPublica has reported that online marketers are hoodwinking single moms by promising them college grants and scholarships created by the president.

Unfortunately, the report found these claims are false and evidently are an attempt to dupe women into providing their personal contact information, allowing for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University to recruit them.

Read the full story here.

Take your laughs where you can

Donald Kaul

We live in grim times, which is why you have to take your laughs where you can get them.

For example, in Washington, where Republican congresspeople keep talking about their concern for their grandchildren as an excuse for voting against…well, practically everything: economic stimulus packages, financial reform, immigration reform, etc.

They say they don’t want to hang a huge debt around the necks of their poor grandchildren, thereby robbing the tikes of a future. What a laugh.

In truth, your average Republican congressperson would feed his grandchildren to alligators if he thought it would get him enough campaign loot to put him over the top in the next election.

Thus we were presented with the delicious irony of Congress giving up on climate legislation–largely because of Republicans who say they don’t believe in global warming–just as the mercury in Washington topped 103 degrees. Oh, and by the way, it also hit 105 degrees in Moscow the other day. That may not be proof of global warming, but it’s a hint.

A good number of the Republicans said they were thinking of their grandchildren when they voted. Apparently the kids like hot weather.

Then there’s the cosmic coincidence of the BP melodrama in the Gulf reaching a pause, just as another huge oil spill plumed in China and experts monitored the million gallons of gasoline that poured into a creek and the Kalamazoo River from a ruptured pipeline as it traveled toward Lake Michigan. Gee, I thought they only happened every hundred years or so. Drill, baby, drill.

Modern Republican politicians have no interest in the future beyond the next election. With an occasional exception, they have been unanimous in opposing every Obama initiative in an effort to discredit him with the public.

And to the great shame of the American people, their strategy seems to be working. Recent polls show the public to be largely dissatisfied with the way President Obama is running things. And that’s just not the lunatic fringe talking; real people feel that way too. Amazing.

It’s as though the crowd at a fire scene blamed the firefighters for destruction of the building.

Well, as H.L. Mencken once said, democracy means giving the people what they want–good and bad. And it begins to look as though that’s exactly what we’re going to get.

If I sound a little more dispirited than usual, it’s because I am. I’ve generally supported this president. I’ve thought that he’s a good man fighting the good fight against difficult odds and making a decent job of it.

The Shirley Sherrod affair, however, gives me pause.

By now you know the story: a two-bit right-wing blogger uncovers a clip of a black employee of the Ag Department confessing that she had not done her best for a client because he was white.

Racism! And on the part of a black person! In the Obama administration! The clip flashed around the Internet and soon made appearances on Fox News, thence to respectable venues.

The White House acted with almost equal speed. In a flash and a half, the woman was called to task and fired. No racism here, the administration seemed to be saying.

Except nothing was as it seemed. The woman, far from being a racist, was a heroine of the civil rights movement and her speech, taken in the context intended, was an object lesson in the evils of discrimination no matter what the race involved.

The Obama administration, acting slower now, apologized and offered her another job, as the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” laughed out loud and congratulated itself on a job well done. It had been able, with little effort, to make Obama and his merry band of Harvard graduates look like a bunch of boobs.

The implications are ominous.

The right and its media cohort have this administration on the run. So-called liberals have taken to looking under their beds at night and sleeping with the lights on.

Obama’s people took the word of a right-wing pipsqueak of evil reputation rather than get the real story from one of their own.

That truly bodes ill for the future.

OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Nested truths, cascading problems

Tom H. Hastings

We see at least five basic truths emerging after Congress last week agreed to provide $59 billion to continue financing America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One, Barack Obama baldly lied to us when he promised in his campaign that the days of funding wars via supplemental spending bills–acting as though an ongoing war were suddenly an unpredictable emergency–those days were done. Just elect me, he promised, and you’ll never see that bait-and-switch again. We got gamed. This supplemental was voted in at his personal request.
Two, the war president and his pushbutton Senate and House war allies are committed to absolutely draining the American taxpayer of all lootable funds.

All the idiot lights on the American societal dashboard are flashing red — unemployment is worsening, housing is sliding, BP has befouled the Gulf of Mexico for the next century, militarism has penetrated even the grade schools of our coarsening country with Starbase, and we are wondering where our next energy meal is coming from — and yet these federal elected ‘leaders’ have just conspired to continue this incredible self-inflicted war financing hemorrhage.

Three, this draw from both your paycheck, and the social services available to you and yours, is done despite a whistleblower’s Wikileaks release of 91,000 documents that prove American war crimes in the conduct of the wars. The disclosures effectively show yet again that all the U.S. military is ultimately doing is aiding al-Qa’ida , the Taliban and other Islamist recruiting around the world.

Four, applying one bit of commonsense and human decency to this would result in the U.S. ending its armed occupation of Afghanistan and launching a far less expensive rebuilding program via the U.N. This would serve to dry up motivation to shoot, bomb, kidnap, stab and otherwise attack Americans. This cannot be done at gunpoint.

Rebuilding America’s image will be done by unarmed and unguarded people giving help, never by armed troops. We will do this with nonviolence–gasp!–or it will never be done. Never.

Five, the Republicans will fight tooth and nail against every single thing Obama might try to do for people on the ground. Their unity is mindlessly complete, forming a solid phalanx across access to help for the unemployed, the sick, those needing education, and simple household need for poor people. But give them a chance to vote more money for war and the bipartisan roses suddenly bloom, reddened by the blood of war victims on all sides and by the lifeblood of our culture and society.

The Ds and Rs probably couldn’t agree on whether the sun rises in the east, but they can find solidarity in war spending.

At some point the U.S. will downsize, draw in its horns from its military forward power projection wars and bases, and assume a more normal stature amongst the world nations.

The only question is, will the U.S. be worth saving at that point or will we continue this literal insanity straight over the cliff?

Tom H. Hastings directs PeaceVoice, a program of the Oregon Peace Institute.

U.S. falls behind other nations

Greg Mathis

For decades, American’s young adults obtained more college degrees than those in other countries. Today, the U.S. college graduation rate ranks 12th out of 36 developed nations.

The U.S.’s inability to produce more college graduates isn’t just a threat to the future of our young people: it could, if not remedied, weaken the country’s ability to compete in a global marketplace.

Only 40 percent of young Americans 25 to 34 have at least an associate degree, compared to 56 percent of young adults in Canada, the world leader in college graduation rates. For people of color, the college completion rate is even lower: only 30 percent of blacks and 20 percent of Latinos 25 to 34 have an associate degree or higher.

College graduates earn more over the course of their lifetime than those who only have a high school diploma. This extra money not only results in a better standard of living for degree holders but also includes a benefit for the American economy. If fewer people finish college, the result will be less revenue generated through property, income and other taxes.

Last year, President Obama announced the College Grad Initiative, which called for five million more college graduates by 2020. Strong in theory, we need to hear more on how and when this plan will be funded and implemented.

To ensure our young people travel smoothly from pre-school to college to college graduation, we need to monitor and assist them every step of the way through public, private and community partnerships.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $110 million towards improving remedial programs at community colleges to ensure those students have the support they need to complete their education. More philanthropic organizations must step up the way Gates did and work locally and nationally, at the elementary, high school and college levels, to ensure students have the academic and social tools they need to succeed in school. Additionally, the government must fully fund education support programs; an idea without dollars behind it is useless.

There has been much talk lately about investing in America. The best way to do that is to invest in our young people.

Greg Mathis is a retired Michigan District Court Judge and syndicated television judge.

Colette Cosner

On Mother’s Day, three months before Arizona’s draconian new immigration law was to go into effect, a mother of two addressed a vigil outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center.

The woman had been intercepted, without papers, on her way to work. Unable to fight back tears, she told the crowd of the months she spent in this privatized detention center, wondering if she would ever see her children again.

Arizona’s new law, which goes into effect Sunday, will legalize racial profiling by requiring officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” of being undocumented. The law has catalyzed the grassroots immigrant rights movement, driving hundreds of thousands of activists into the streets demanding comprehensive immigration reform.

However, given President Barack Obama’s recent comments, the chances of a national overhaul in immigration policy is unlikely to happen this year. And with the failure of reform at the federal level, states are taking matters into their own hands, drafting and passing cruel anti-immigrant laws that mirror Arizona’s legislation.

States are also embracing a controversial federal program that essentially lets local authorities convert police officers into de facto ICE agents. (ICE is the agency that used to be called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS.)

The Obama administration should scrap enforcement-only policies that separate families and encourage raids, deportations, border militarization, and racial profiling. To achieve sustainable immigration policies, we’ll need to consider the roots of migration. What’s pushing people to leave Latin America in the first place?

On a recent Witness for Peace Speaker’s tour, Baldemar Mendoza Jimenez, a farmer and agriculture expert from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, described how the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) undermined traditional agriculture. Unable to compete with subsidized grains imported from the States, millions of farmers were forced out of work.

“Many [farmers] could not make ends meet. They abandoned their lands, left to work in factories and emigrated to the United States.”

Jimenez’s story isn’t unique, but this perspective is largely unaccounted for in the immigration debate. In general, undocumented immigrants and their communities get blamed for the situation, rather than the ill-fated economic policies that displaced those immigrants.

Not one of the 4,130 words in Obama’s most recent speech on immigration addressed why people migrate. He didn’t address unfair trade, mention displaced farmers, or acknowledge that the immigration rate doubled after NAFTA transformed U.S.-Mexican trade.

The situation in Arizona demonstrates that we need to overhaul our immigration policies. If we want to stem or slow the flow of undocumented workers into the United States, however, we’ll also need to revamp our foreign economic policies.

Colette Cosner is a regional organizer with Witness for Peace.

Greg Mathis

We recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, a day designed to increase appreciation for – and to inspire individuals to protect – the earth and its environment.

From school yard tree planting ceremonies to corporations sharing ‘green tips’ on national news shows, America got in the green spirit and vowed to take care of Mother Earth. The government was among the loudest when it came to promising to keep the earth clean. Unfortunately, it seems that promise doesn’t extend to people of color.

Recent studies have shown that race is, by far, the most critical factor when determining how close and individual or family will live to a hazardous waste site.

A study authored by Clark Atlanta University professor Robert Bullard found that 56 percent of Americans who within two miles of a commercial hazardous waste facility are people of color. In 1987, that number was 33 percent.

A different study, conducted in 2008 University of Colorado sociologist Liam Downey, showed how little a role income played in deciding just who lives in these unhealthy areas. According to the findings, a black household with an income ranging from $50,000 to $60,000 a year had higher levels of pollution near their home than a white household with an income of less than $10,000.

When we, as African Americans, discuss justice, rarely do we discuss – or demand – environmental justice. It’s time that we do. If our children are breathing in toxic air, what good will it do for them to have access to good schools?

If our communities sit atop wastelands the government refuses to clean up, how does it benefit us to have access to community centers? A truly just community includes good schools, programs for residents, sustainable jobs and, yes, clean, safe air. We must start asking for all of these things, in totality.

Every decade brings in new and groundbreaking environmental legislation. In the 1970s, it was the Clean Air Act. In the 1980s, the government mandated that abandoned waste sites be cleaned up. The government amended the Clean Air Act in the 1990s and moved to cut vehicle and equipment emissions in the 2000s.

It’s 2010. What will the next ‘big’ environmental law be? How about one that works to eliminate environmental racism by removing waste sites and improving air quality in black neighborhoods?

There is a new head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Appointed by President Obama, Lisa Jackson understands and fights against environmental injustice. She is currently on a multi-state tour of the Congressional Black Caucus and, with them, is working with local officials and activists to find solutions.

Hopefully, she can create a groundswell of support with legislators and the general public to push for laws that will ensure race is not factor when determining how much pollution a neighborhood and its residents are exposed to.

Greg Mathis is a retired Michigan District Court Judge and syndicated television judge.

Cynthia Tucker

President Obama’s historic status as the nation’s first black president hasn’t spared him criticism from some black commentators and members of Congress, who claim that the president ought to have a bona fide “black agenda.”

Several members of the Congressional Black Caucus have chastised Obama for, they claim, doing little to address the unemployment rate among black workers, some six to seven points higher than the overall rate of just under ten percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Last month, talk show host Tavis Smiley’s annual “Black Agenda” conference included a panel which heavily criticized Obama for failing to directly address a range of difficult social problems which still plague black America. Indeed, Smiley has become a consistent critic.

Smiley has every right to score the president’s accomplishments and failures as he sees fit. But it is naive for him to expect that the nation’s first black president will champion an exclusively black “agenda,” any more than John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president, issued a “Catholic agenda.” Obama was not elected the president of black America. He’s the president of the entire country.

Still, Obama hasn’t ignored those detractors. Perhaps that’s why he met April 6 with a group of black preachers, including Atlanta’s T. DeWitt Smith, head of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Here’s hoping he took the opportunity to point out that his policies benefit black Americans, too.

According to Families USA, a health care advocacy group, 40 percent of blacks reported being uninsured during some portion of 2007-2008, compared to about 26 percent of whites. Black or white, they will be able to afford health insurance as a result of the new law, which Obama made a priority.

The president also battled entrenched interests to change the student-loan program, which freed up money to give a slight funding increase to Pell grants. Many black students will benefit from the boost in tuition assistance, just as many white and brown students will.
But the most significant assistance that Obama is providing to black students — to all students, actually — lies in his promising reform plan for elementary and secondary education. The new emphasis on charter schools and merit pay has the potential for bringing the best and brightest teachers into public school classrooms, while weeding out the incompetent and uninspired.

There are few things that the federal government can do that have a more significant effect on children than helping them to get a good education. For black kids, that’s crucial. The difference between those black Americans who have achieved mainstream success and those mired in poverty lies, for the most part, in the difference in academic achievement.

It’s true that college-educated black workers have a higher unemployment rate than college-educated white workers — a commentary on a “post-racial” America. But it’s also true that college-educated black men and women will fare much better than their less-educated counterparts.

So far, few black opinion-makers have zeroed in on Obama’s education reform plans. That reticence may stem from an ambivalence — or hostility — toward the reforms from a mainstay of the black middle-class: teachers. Teachers’ groups have not exactly rallied in support of Obama’s plans. Some teachers remain especially critical of merit pay.
Still, his emphasis on teacher accountability has the potential for doing more to shake up public education than any reforms of the last two decades. Obama may not have a plan for reducing the black-on-black homicide rate (who does?) or shoring up black marriage (other than serving as a good role model), but, if he can boost educational achievement for all children — including those who are poor and black — that would certainly qualify as progress. Let’s call that an American agenda.

Cynthia Tucker is columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Ron Daniels

The passage of the historic health insurance reform legislation creates a major opportunity for President Obama to go on the offensive with bold leadership and a strong people-oriented economic, job generating agenda.

To effectively expand this momentum, however, Obama needs to focus on the economy and jobs. He must tap into the anger and frustration that is currently being exploited by the Tea Party movement and channel the rage in a righteous direction.

This is where President Obama and his team confound me. Rather than directly focusing on the economy and jobs, the President recently announced initiatives to encourage the construction of more nuclear power plants and a limited expansion of off-shore drilling for oil. While these programs may have some job generating effects, they seem calculated to insulate the President from criticism from the Republicans/conservatives.

The talking heads on the Sunday network shows suggested that Obama is moving to the center to broaden his appeal. The last time I looked, the Republicans/conservatives/Tea Party activists were in no mood to accommodate President Obama on any level. They have their eyes set on the prize, and they are willing to stonewall/obstruct his agenda and misinform/confuse the public in order to retake the House and Senate in the mid-term elections and recapture the White House in 2012. The Republicans/conservatives are determined to make Obama a one-term President.

If the debate over health care taught the President and the Democrats anything, it is that bi-partisanship with the Grande Obstructionist Party (GOP) is not possible as long as Obama and his party are perceived as disoriented and weak.

As the election nears, there is no rational reason to believe the Republican/conservatives will change their ways. They smell blood and they intend to win big time in November. The President and the Democrats must be equally committed to repulsing the assault by using their majority in both houses to generate as much tangible progress as possible on the economy and jobs.

A place to begin in terms of harnessing and rechanneling the rage is with legislation to regulate the financial institutions on Wall Street. Just as Obama hammered the big insurance companies for their unconscionable rate increases as a way of galvanizing support for final passage of the health insurance reform bill, he must also relentlessly remind the American people that it was the reckless behavior of the bandits on Wall Street that is responsible for the pain they now feel.

Wall Street wrecked Main Street. Therefore, tough, consumer friendly legislation is imperative to ensure that the Barracudas are reined in and are never permitted to do harm to working families, the middle class and the poor ever again. The Tea Party political illiterates must not be allowed to continue to divert attention away from the real villains who ruined the economy, precipitating massive unemployment.

Most importantly, this righteous populist message must be coupled with the kind of large scale jobs program advocated by the National Urban League in its recent State of Black America Report — an additional $100 million program that would target high unemployment areas and also provide hundreds of thousands of jobs for young people this summer.

In addition, the President and Democrats must do everything possible to relieve the pain of homeowners whose mortgages are “underwater” due to the fraudulent sub-prime lending fiasco or because breadwinners have lost their jobs.

This is the kind of bold leadership which is required if the President and the Democrats are to avert the “slaughter” pundits forecast for the mid-term elections.
Obama must reset his presidency. He must move decisively to rally the base and broaden the appeal to working families, the middle class and the poor – the majority of Americans – so they will be motivated to march on ballot boxes to reject the machinations of obstructionists, parading as friends of the downtrodden!

Dr. Ron Daniels is president of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century and Distinguished Lecturer at York College City University.

Jake Thomas
jthomas@portlandobserver.com

Ray LaHood, President Barack Obama’s transportation secretary, has come under fire for announcing that the government is going to give the same consideration to walking and bicycling as it does motorized forms of transport when it comes to funding, reports the Associated Press.

The efforts from LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, are part of the Obama administration’s efforts to improve “livability” across the U.S. by bolstering infrastructure for bicycling, walking, public transit, and street cars.

These ideas might go over well in a place like, say, Portland, Ore., but industries that rely on more traditional means of getting around aren’t happy.

From the AP article:

The National Association of Manufacturers’ blog, Shopfloor.org, called the policy “dumb and irresponsible.”

“LaHood’s pedal parity is nonsensical for a modern industrial nation,” said the blog. “We don’t call it sacrilege, but radical is a fair description. It is indeed a sea change in federal transportation policy that could have profound implications for the U.S. economy and the 80 percent of freight that moves by truck.”

Another went even further:

At a recent House hearing, Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, suggested jokingly to a Transportation Department official that one explanation for the new policy is that the secretary’s thinking has been clouded by drugs.

“Is that a typo?” LaTourette asked. “If it’s not a typo, is there still mandatory drug testing at the department?”

Greg Mathis

Much has been made about the debate between two of our most respected black leaders: Tavis Smiley and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The two men, both activists in their own way, disagree on whether or not President Obama should openly pursue an ‘urban agenda’.

Smiley thinks Obama should be more aggressive in pursuing a black agenda and thinks black leaders are being too soft on him. Sharpton thinks pushing such a plan would put the President in a vulnerable position and that black leaders, not the President, should pursue a plan for urban improvement. Rev. Sharpton is correct.

Residents of urban areas, many of whom are African American, suffer disproportionately from many issues mainstream society may not: failing schools, high dropout rates, lack of access to quality and affordable healthcare, poverty, high unemployment rates and increasing incarceration rates. While we certainly want those who live in these communities to receive increased attention and governmental support, it is not realistic.

America is a country with a variety of people and variety of obstacles to overcome. It is naïve to think the President would be able to push such an agenda through Congress if it is explained as something that would primarily benefit blacks. As a people, we represent just 12 percent of the population and we don’t have the votes in Congress to get such legislation through. Pursuing a black agenda would render the President ineffective and he would not succeed.

But let’s be clear: residents in urban areas are benefiting from the President’s efforts. What Obama is doing with his employment and training legislation and what he did with healthcare and education will undoubtedly affect African Americans. While these agendas support the entire nation, they will disproportionately benefit urban residents.

Many of our leaders are quick to dismiss the President’s efforts as not being “black enough.” They should open their eyes and realize that he is delivering to the masses what he promised while also affecting changes in our community. And he’s doing it while trying to work across both political aisles.

Although the urban agenda isn’t obvious, the urban benefits are clear. We should applaud and support the President as he works and recognize that he is, in fact, President of the entire United States of America.

Greg Mathis is a retired Michigan District Court Judge and syndicated television judge.

If anyone thought the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, heralded the end of racism in America, they should look no further than the racial slogans and the mocking signs of tea party rallies. Perhaps even more troubling are the economic indicators that show how far the recession is setting back the fragile fortunes of people of color.

On the other hand, extraordinary possibilities open up for us as a nation if we succeed in coming together to embrace the strengths of the country’s growing diversity,

Before the Great Recession hit, the average family of color had a net worth of less than $30,000; the average white family’s net worth was $170,000. With the economic downturn, things got worse for almost everyone, but especially for people of color.

White unemployment rose to 9 percent, but unemployment among blacks is at a whopping 16 percent, and among Latinos it’s nearly 13 percent. The economic crisis hits blacks and Latinos in other ways, too. They were far more likely to be saddled with high-rate, subprime loans than their white counterparts with similar qualifications, and they are more likely to be facing the loss of their main asset—their home.

In spite of all this, a real post-racial society is still possible. The U.S. Census Bureau says that by mid-century, people of color will be the majority in the United States, and the political clout of these communities is bound to grow.

The movements that joined hands to elect Obama continue to unite people across race lines for economic justice and livable communities. Multiethnic music, art and culture are popular—especially among young people—and people of all ages are getting increasingly comfortable being part of mixed-race families and workplaces.

White people may feel they’re giving up long-held privileges by acknowledging our nation as a multiracial society, one in which all its inhabitants are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But an unequal society is profoundly unhealthy.

According to researcher and author Richard Wilkinson, even those at the top of an unequal society have a lower life expectancy and lower quality of life compared to those living in more egalitarian circumstances. So the privileged as well as the excluded stand to gain from a more just and inclusive society.

No matter what our race, we will all benefit from the historic journey to a fairer society. Our community life can be much richer and more authentic when every member can rely on being respected — regardless of language, religion, culture or ancestry.

If we learn to work together, we may find that the shouting and vitriol of talk shows make way for respect. As the tone of our national dialogue improves, we have a much better chance of coming together behind real answers to our national crises.

The election of Barack Obama built on centuries of struggle against injustice. It’s a milestone in the healing of a nation torn apart by contradictions—the thirst for freedom and the desire for fresh opportunities, but also the massacres of native peoples and the enslavement of African families.

The promise of a more perfect union can only be realized if we walk toward a future committed to liberty and justice—this time—for all.

Sarah van Gelder is executive editor of YES! Magazine.

Jake Thomas
jthomas@portlandobserver.com

Today, President Barack Obama announced a new initiative designed to stem the nation’s sobering drop out rate and better prepare students for college.

The Obama Administration has already committed $3.5 billion for “transformational” changes at the nation’s lowest-performing high schools. He’s also requested $900 million for school turnaround grants, and also announced a new effort to invest $100 million in a College Pathways program that aims to prepare student for college.

However, this money doesn’t come without string attached. Instead, they require states and school districts receiving the money to adopt one of four reform models, all of which require drastic changes:

Turnaround Model: Among other actions, the school district must replace the principal and at least half of the school staff, adopt a new governance structure for the school, and implement a new or revised instructional program.

Restart Model: The school district must close and reopen the school under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization or an educational management organization selected through a rigorous review process. A restart school would be required to admit, within the grades it serves, any former student who wishes to attend.

School Closure: The school district must close the failing school and enroll the students who attended that school in other, higher-achieving schools in the district.

Transformational Model: The school must address four areas of reform, including (1) developing teacher and school leader effectiveness (and replacing the principal who led the school prior to commencement of the transformational model); (2) implementing comprehensive instructional reform strategies; (3) extending learning and teacher planning time and creating community-oriented schools; and (4) providing operating flexibility and sustained support.

Pretty much any of these actions would create significant blow back if they were to be enacted in Portland, which is why it’s interesting that Mayor Sam Adams, whose made reducing the city’s dropout rate a priority, Tweeted that the announcement helps his plans for dealing with the issue.

“Our efforts to reduce high school drop out rate (http://bit.ly/b0hUA8) is helped by today’s Obama ann: http://bit.ly/9af3gI #Pdx #fb” Tweeted Adams.

Jake Thomas
jthomas@portlandobserver.com

Today First Lady Michelle Obama kicked off a campaign that has become her signature issue: fighting childhood obesity.

The “Let’s Move” campaign seeks to mobilize leaders in government, medicine and science, business, education, athletics, community organizations and more to confront the root causes of an epidemic that is costing the U.S. $147 billion per year.

The campaign seeks to get kids more active and make sure that nutritious foods are available to all.

In an accompanying campaign video, Obama mentions “food deserts,” a term that refers to residential areas, often low-income, that don’t are far removed from a grocery store. People who live in such areas often fill up on fattening and sugary substances adding to the problem.

President Barack Obama is also on board, launching a Task Force on Childhood Obesity that will evaluate resources at the federal level that could be used to meet benchmarks in fghting the epidemic.

A press release outlines some of the initiatives, like expanding farmers’ markets and making physical education a part of student’s daily routines.

However, notably absent from the plan is any call to end the subsidies to massive agro-businesses that have produced an abundance of cheap, sugary, starchy calories.

Jake Thomas
jthomas@portlandobserver.com

The National Minority Aids Council is calling the Obama administration’s plan to increase funding for anti-AIDS/HIV programs inadequate.

In a prepared statement, the council argues that these programs have been chronically short-changed by the last administration, and Obama’s proposal to up $40 million (or 1.7 percent) is laudable but not enough.

Specifically, the council wants targeted funding to minority communities that have been ravaged by HIV/AIDS:

This means ensuring that communities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic receive the funding they need. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that HIV incidence was 40% higher than previously estimated, with over 55,500 new HIV cases occurring in the U.S. annually. Of these cases, 70% were in communities of color. African Americans alone accounted for just under half of all new HIV infections, followed by Latinos, who showed a significant increase in HIV incidence at 18%. Incidence rates among Asian and Pacific Islander and Native American/Alaska Native communities showed dramatic increases as well.

It also calls on government agencies to address the factors that affect the overall health environment for minorities:

The AIDS community – and federal agencies – must look beyond HIV funding when it comes to mitigating HIV/AIDS in the U.S. We must address the socio-economic determinants that have undermined the overall health and welfare of communities heavily impacted by AIDS: lack of affordable housing; limited access to education and health care; and high rates of malnutrition, substance use, incarceration and poverty. These determinants have helped lay the foundation for HIV/AIDS in minority communities and must be addressed through the allocation of appropriate resources – and the will of the AIDS community.