FREE Marissa Alexander Petition Drive l Sign the Petition

2013-01-27 by OUR COMMON GROUND

FREE Marissa Alexander Petition Drive

Change.org Petition ALERT

Community groups remain concerned about the case of Marissa Alexander, a woman who was given quite a few years in prison for a situation in which it appeared that she had no other options. Alexander received 20 years in prison after firing warning shots at a man who she believes had come to harm her. No one was hurt, but Alexander was still sent away for a very long time.

The incident took place in 2010 and Marissa says she was simply standing her ground in the state of Florida, where standing your ground appears to be legal. But the judge said he had no choice but to give the woman 20 years in prison, even though she is the mother of three children. The length of the sentence was due to the fact that she’d fired a gun while committing a felony.

Various groups have been fighting for Marissa’s release and say that her case is part of the reason that mandatory minimums should be abolished. They argue that since no one was hurt and she was only trying to protect herself from an abusive husband, her actions were entirely justified.

The petition, which is at Change.org, says that Alexander’s sentence was excessive and exceedingly harsh.

It was also suggested by the judge in this case that Ms. Alexander “could have found some other way to flee the home,” yet the law states that “those who feel threatened, have no duty to retreat,” further lending to the ambiguity of this judgment against Ms. Alexander.

Something has to be done regarding all women who defend themselves against their abusers. Too often they receive little understanding and sympathy from the systems supposedly set up to protect them. Women who are victims of domestic violence need a voice, and it is our intent to be that voice for Marissa and any other potential victim of domestic violence or any other form of injustice.

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION

We interviewed Marissa Alexander on OUR COMMON GROUND in an exclusive from her jail in Florida, less than an hour after she was sentenced.

Listen to our interview with Marissa.

The Façade of the American Dream l Press TV Documentary l Parts 1-4

2013-01-26 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Documentary

The Façade of the American Dream

Published on Jan 15, 2013

A cross section of people discuss the fraud of the American dream and how systemic racism keeps millions of people down while offering others hope and opportunity. Executive producer Dr. Randy Short, M.div. and senior director Marzieh Hashemi’s film gives voice to those who believe That African Americans are far from achieving the American Dream in health, education, welfare, and justice.

The documentary features commentary from a number of OUR COMMON GROUND Voices, Dr. Vernellia Randall, Dr. Wilmer Leon, Rev. Graylan Haigler, Dr. Mary Scott, Dr. Charles Norman, Dr. Joseph Richardson, Glen Ford, Atty. Efia Nwangaza, and Dr. Mary Neal.

WE STILL AIN’T FREE :THE FAÇADE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

Part 1: This is Why We Have the Blues

Part 2: From School House to Jail House

Part 3: Lack of Wealth, Lack of Health

Part 4: You Aren’t Free

If you like this series, try sharing your feedback, and encourage PRESSTV to produce documentaries that tell the truth about the African Diaspora and its legacy.

It depicts how the US removed Africans from their country of origin, worked them to death as slaves and today, in schools, is brainwashing them to make believe they are inferior in many aspects.

The Façade of the American Dream Part 1

This is Why We Have the Blues

The Façade of the American Dream Part 2

From School House to Jail House

The Façade of the American Dream Part 3

Lack of Wealth, Lack of Health

The Façade of the American Dream Part 4

You Aren’t Free

ABOUT PRESS TV
PRESS TV produces more than 350 episodes of documentaries annually. PRESS TV documentaries, produced in many countries in the four corners of the world, try to reveal the truth with a different outlook to people around the world. Through these documentaries, PRESS TV presents a different point of view on current world affairs compared with the mainstream media.

The Documentary Department of PRESS TV is interested in selling the broadcasting rights of its documentaries to other television networks, websites, companies, distributors, independent buyers etc.

Check out the “Online Catalogue” to select your favorite film by clicking here!

You can watch Press TV by visiting the following websites:

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Roe v. Wade at 40: What Keeps Black Women from Going Public with Our Stories? l Ebony Magazine

2013-01-22 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Roe v. Wade at 40:
What Keeps Black Women from Going Public with Our Stories?

AS WE MARK THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE HISTORIC SUPREME COURT DECISION, DANI MCCLAIN WONDERS WHEN BLACK WOMEN WILL HAVE THE FREEDOM TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT ABORTION

ByDANI MCCLAIN

January 22nd marks 40 years since the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion. Reports from nationwide rallies celebrating the landmark decsion will inevitably include photos of women wearing “I had an abortion” t-shirts and holding signs with slogans that tie their personal to the political.

And if 2013 is anything like years past, very few of those women will be Black.

Of course we, like other women, decide not to carry our unplanned pregnancies to term. In fact, we tend to do so at higher rates because of barriers to quality birth control and accurate information about our bodies. But when we do choose abortion, few of us go on to share our experiences in online and offline spaces. We don’t purchase t-shirts or offer testimonies that open us up to having to defend our decisions.

This week, the DC-based reproductive health organization Advocates for Youth will release a book that builds on its “1 in 3” campaign. The name references the fact that one in three U.S. women will have an abortion in her lifetime. Out of the 31 moving, intimate videos posted online, four appear to feature Black women. Why so few, given our rates of choosing these procedures? As Steph Herold, an advocate who tracks abortion storytelling, has noted, middle class, young, White women are more likely to offer up their stories and have them published.

Black women have been targeted in recent anti-choice attacks,including a billboard that read “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb” and others like it that popped up in Atlanta, New York, Oakland and elsewhere beginning in 2010. Anti-choice advocates use images of Black women and girls to sell their agenda. Why the cultural gap when it comes to telling our own stories?

One reason, says Mia Herndon, is that it’s not clear how this gets us closer to securing the healthcare we need. Herndon is a reproductive justice leader and former executive director of Third Wave Foundation.

“We need leadership in terms of connecting the dots,” Herdon told me. “How does me telling my story actually change the conversation rather than get me more judgment?”

Many of us just don’t believe in putting our personal business in the street. And some of us fear blowback from family members or religious communities if word gets out. But Black women face the added burden of having our stories colored by media depictions that tell the world we’re oversexed, poor decision-makers or both.

…SOME OF US FEAR BLOWBACK FROM FAMILY MEMBERS OR RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES IF WORD GETS OUT. BUT BLACK WOMEN FACE THE ADDED BURDEN OF HAVING OUR STORIES COLORED BY MEDIA DEPICTIONS THAT TELL THE WORLD WE’RE OVERSEXED, POOR DECISION-MAKERS OR BOTH.

“Because images of Black women are so compromised, the idea of coming out and saying ‘I had an abortion’ and feeling like you can still hold your head high and be fine, that’s just not our experience,” Herndon said. “We don’t have that many experiences of being treated well publicly.”

When 28-year-old Brittany Mostiller got an abortion in 2008, talking about it with her family was hard enough. She never expected she’d be telling her story in high schools or in the Chicago neighborhoods where she now passes out condoms and information on laws related to reproductive health.

But the organization that helped pay for her procedure, Chicago Abortion Fund (CAF), invited her to join a group of women who meet regularly for peer support and to organize in their communities. Last year, CAF raised $60,000 to help 184 low-income women access second trimester abortions. Four out of five women who receive funds from CAF are of color, said its executive director, Gaylon Alcaraz.

The process of getting these women engaged takes time. After checking in to see what help they need post-abortion – from sexual health information to housing and employment referrals – the organization supports the women in building trust and friendships. That’s the necessary foundation to storytelling.

“I think that women of color want to tell their stories,” Alcaraz said. “There’s no platform. And let you be poor, or let you be fat, or let you be gay. The media is not friendly to that.”

To get around the gatekeepers, CAF creates its own media, including a monthly local TV show called “The A Word.” Mostiller, who is mother to four girls and attends college full-time, has been on the show. At the start, the host introduces herself by saying, “My name is ________, and I’ve had an abortion.”

It was difficult to speak those words on camera early on, Mostiller said. But that’s changed.

“It’s my story. It’s mine to tell,” she told me. “And it’s someone else’s truth also.”

Dani McClain is a Nation Institute fellow, reporting on reproductive health and sexuality.

The Audacity of Fluff: A Critical Reading of Obama’s Inaugural Address l The Atlantic

2013-01-22 by OUR COMMON GROUND

The Audacity of Fluff: A Critical Reading of Obama’s Inaugural Address

The president’s words elided inconvenient realities and too often lacked rigor.

Conor Friedersdorf

Reuters

President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address is unlikely to be much remembered by future generations. Its authors have a talent for “rhetorical craftsmanship,” as James Fallows astutely noted. But to what end?

Were hard truths expressed? Were complicated concepts rendered in clarifying language? Were the disagreements that divide us insightfully characterized? Was an argument advanced? No, the craftsmanship was marshaled in place of substance rather than in support of it. The president expertly associated himself with certain ideas and evoked certain impressions.

He burnished his brand rather than acting like a leader.

I don’t mean to suggest a total dearth of ideas.

The speech’s theme: As Americans, we’re in this together. That’s a fine theme. Like the vast majority of Americans, I favor a social safety net to care for those who can’t care for themselves; I grant the wisdom of funding infrastructure projects through federal and state governments; I agree that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very
well and a growing many barely make it”; and I think the present generation has some obligations to posterity.

Of course, sharing those concerns needn’t mean accepting that any one related policy proposal would be effective or desirable. I often disagree with Obama’s proposed remedies. I am hardly alone. What did the second inaugural offer an American like me? Neither a serious, reasoned attempt to persuade me of his vision nor an acknowledgement that it is deeply contested.

As he often does, Obama proceeded as if leadership is an exercise in eliding disagreements; as if defeating a straw man in argument is persuasive; and sometimes even as if pretty lies are preferable to the truth. Certain passages met a basic threshold of substance. But they were surrounded by fluff: rhetoric so light, soft, and fuzzy it ought to be beneath a historical occasion. We now expect no better of our pols. So they meet our expectations.

What follows are passages I found particularly objectionable (for a variety of reasons).

Said Obama:

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone.

Oh really?

Obama favors greater central authority in health care, energy, education, gun regulation, and occupational safety. His underlings have actively undermined state efforts to decentralize marijuana policy. And on national-security matters, he has worked to centralize authority in the executive branch. In what way has Obama’s supposed skepticism of central authority manifested itself in the last four years? I can think of no significant step he has taken to check it. This is phrased as a nod to ideological opponents, but the concession has no substance behind it.

Said Obama:

Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

That apples-and-oranges comparison at the beginning reads like a passage from a Tom Friedman column. It’s trivially true that no single person can train all the math teachers we need, or build all the research labs. But it hardly follows that we need to do all those things together, “as one nation, and one people.” Some of the math teachers can be trained by Jesuit institutions that secular Americans are uninclined to support. Some of the research labs can be built with private money to conduct research that many wouldn’t care to fund, whether due to moral objections or because they don’t appreciate its value. A great strength of America is the fact that we don’t have to do everything collectively, “as one nation, and one people.” Individuals and diverse groups work alone or in private collaboration to pursue their own notions of the good, and everyone benefits from their greatest achievements. If we’re smart, we also benefit from the science teachers and research laboratories of other peoples and nations. In a pluralistic nation, actually doing anything as one is either a vapid illusion or creeping fascism. Progressives feel that way when they’re told opposing a particular war is un-American.

Said Obama:

America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together.

Our world is not without boundaries. And America’s capacity for risk is not “endless,” thank goodness.

Said Obama:

We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.

In America, it has never been true that a little girl born into the bleakest poverty “knows” she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she has never and does not currently have the same chance. Equality of opportunity is something to which America ought to keep aspiring. So I suppose I agree with what I take to be his point. What I don’t understand is why Obama would phrase things as if, when we’ve been true to ourselves, the destitute poor enjoyed that equality. They never have (though some of them have managed to “make it” anyway).

Said Obama:

We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, reach higher.

This elides the reason for our woes. The tax code is flawed because it accommodates special interests as often as the general interest, among other reasons, not because it’s waiting for “new ideas” or “technology” to fix it. It isn’t “ideas” or “technology” that are going to fix our government or our schools either. Pretending as much is a frivolous evasion that serves no one.

Obama:

We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

Are today’s retirees “the” generation that built this country? No. Is there anyone arguing that America must choose between the binary options caring for the elderly and investing in the children?

No.

There are people suggesting that the relative amounts flowing to those groups must be re-calibrated. Obama’s words create a straw man that is marshaled to elide the fact that society must decide how much the state spends on young and on old, and that the two decisions impact one another.

Said Obama:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.

It isn’t actually clear that the United States will respond to the threat of climate change, partly because most Americans can still mostly escape the impact of wildfires, droughts, and more powerful storms. The politics are difficult precisely because the costs are borne by other people.

Said Obama:

The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries — we must claim its promise.

Actually, if Japan or Germany or Brazil invented an awesome new technology that made clean energy cheaply, without any American leadership, we’d still benefit from it, and there would be no danger of us “ceding” it, whatever that means. We’d adopt the technology, obviously. Again, Obama is trying to elide something: in this case, that “clean energy” is presently inferior, at least when you can ignore its externalities, and that the transition is being resisted for that reason. What purpose does it serve to frame controversies in a way that elides their core?

Said Obama:

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage.

Actually, America is presently engaged in a War on Terrorism, and no one, the president included, thinks it is going to end in the foreseeable future. Nor has he put forth any strategy or analytic framework under which it would end, or defined what a victory would mean. Also, there is no evidence for the belief that American soldiers are unmatched in their courage. There are almost certainly people of other nationalities as brave. Why pretend otherwise?

Said Obama, “We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law.” But the last two presidents have repeatedly broken domestic and international law in the course of fighting the War on Terrorism. He continued, “No one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation.” Actually, weaker nations have a greater stake in a peaceful world, because they’re unable to prevent violent aggressors from invading and killing their people.

“We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom,” Obama said, though neither our interests nor our conscience will cause him to support democracy in Saudi Arabia or Qatar.

Said Obama:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot
walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

But in his actions, he makes abundantly clear his belief that people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, to name three countries where he approves drone strikes, are not to be treated as if their lives are equally valuable as American lives, or as if they enjoy the very same rights and liberties. If our freedom is “inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth,” when does the invasion of North Korea begin? Or are we actually quite free despite their living in tyranny? If Obama is being guided by the stars of Selma and Stonewall he’s an awful navigator.

So many passages in Obama’s second inaugural betrayed a predictable yet disappointing lack of rigor and forthrightness. But other than all the quoted passages above, the speech was okay. I’m sure Obama’s defenders will point out that many of the shortcomings I’ve detailed are no worse than what is found in most every politician’s speech. I concede the point, but encourage everyone to stop treating that as a good reason to withhold criticism.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF – Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Celebrating the ‘complete’ Martin Luther King Jr.; unfinished work and all l Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley

2013-01-21 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Celebrating the ‘complete’ Martin Luther King Jr.; unfinished work and all

by Blair L. M. Kelley

Blair L. M. Kelley is an associate professor at North Carolina State University. Follow her on Twitter at @ProfBLMKelley

January 20, 2013 at 10:05 AM

My 9-year old daughter came home this week raving about her class and their discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr.

She declared that she loved learning about his life and that she was thankful to him because without King, no change would have been possible in America on the question of race. I am a historian of African-American history specializing in social movements, so I quickly moved to correct her. Of course change would have happened, even if King had never lived! I described to her other leaders. I reminded her that movements don’t function because of just one great man. I told her that King was not a perfect person, and that even he had come short of meeting all his goals. In the end, I even resorted to reminding her that I wrote a book on a movement that took place 35 years before King was even born.

Clearly my daughter didn’t care. She insisted that her school would not be integrated, and that her whole world would not have been the same without King’s leadership.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized that most people feel the same way about King that my daughter does. King has become the single greatest icon of the civil rights movement—his words are studied, his great marches are remembered, his name marks our boulevards; his shadow, now literally cast in stone, looms large on our national consciousness. He has become the benchmark for great leadership, so much so that nearly every leader that has emerged after him is compared to him, and found wanting.

As an icon, King is often thought of as flawless, so that we rarely reflect on his failures as a movement leader. Our collective memory of King only touches on the high points. The images we remember are the moments of his greatest triumphs as a leader: the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the Birmingham Campaign that same year, and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. Each of these efforts resulted in positive change, clear victories in the courts or in the halls of Congress.

We tend not to remember the moments when King faltered or searched for the right direction. We don’t recall the indecision about what to do next after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the challenge of the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement campaign, or his unfulfilled Poor People’s Campaign — cut short by his tragic assassination in 1968. These moments are forgotten when King is not remembered in his broader context.

Continue to Read the Full Opinion Piece

Why Mitt Romney Is Unfit to Be President l Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D. Author,”The Universe Bends Toward Justice”

2013-01-21 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D.

Author of The Universe Bends Toward Justice: the Bible, the Church and the Body Politic (Orbis, 2010)

Why Mitt Romney Is Unfit to Be President

Posted: 11/06/2012 10:12 am

Today is Election Day. In just a few hours we should know who will lead our nation for the next four years. So let me get right to the point: Mitt Romney is unfit to be president.

No qualifiers. Simply unfit.

Why? It’s not just because he has proven to be the biggest flip-flopper and the most dishonest major party presidential candidate in our lifetimes — and perhaps even in our parents’ lifetimes. It is something much more dangerous. Mitt Romney is unfit because he is a devout and bloodless financial technocrat and a dyed-in-the-wool economic elitist. That is to say that he embodies in one tortured soul 1) the social myopia and practiced insensitivity to human suffering that is typical of the dedicated corporate financial technocrat, even when he himself has caused the suffering; and 2) he also embodies the social Darwinist condescension of upper-class economic elitists toward those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. If Romney was simply one or the other (and had not been discredited as a shameless political liar) he might be a viable Oval Office occupant, for we’ve seen varying degrees of these characteristics there before. But Mitt Romney is something different. He embodies both technocratic and economic elitist sensibilities to an Olympian degree. That is a pairing with very dangerous implications for most Americans. Here is why.

Financial technocrats see the world through data. They make their decisions based on the numbers. Social issues are important to them only as they impact the bottom line. In their bloodless analyses there is no room for concern for the effects of their actions on the health and welfare of workers and their communities, for to them workers are merely pawns, faceless ciphers in their game of profit margins and corporate numbers. In fact, the most dedicated financial technocrats are fully blind to the needs and struggles of ordinary people. They don’t see folks who are elderly or sick or disabled or in need of assistance to feed their families. What technocrats see are financial liabilities, “entitlements” that must be paid — and cut out altogether whenever possible.

Mitt Romney is such a financial technocrat. For decades he crunched numbers and analyzed data in pursuit of maximum profitability for himself and his rarified clients and, like the typical technocrat that he is, counted workers as faceless ciphers. According to Romney’s Bain Capital colleagues, he never spoke to non-executive employees in the businesses he bought, sold and sometimes drove into bankruptcy; apparently, he never showed a whit of interest in whether his firm’s actions would benefit workers or devastate them. As Bart Gellman put it in TIME magazine, Romney was “matter of fact about business decisions that closed factories, crushed unions, outsourced services and threw employees of his companies out of work.”

The depth of Mitt’s technocratic mindset is reflected in his callously punitive budget proposal. It ends healthcare for 10 million Americans now covered by Obama’s Affordable Care Act, turns Medicaid into a voucher system that would burden already beleaguered seniors with thousands of dollars in additional out-of-pocket expenses, transforms Medicare into a block grant that would strip healthcare access from up to 28 million currently insured Americans, and removes more than 200,000 children from Head Start and 2 million mothers and children from programs that ensure them access to healthy food. (Conspicuously absent is the gutting of programs and entitlements that benefit America’s richest corporations and individuals.)

Yet Romney the technocrat does not see faces in the suffering his budget proposal would cause. He only sees numbers. That is why he can so easily reduce to an unproductive, faceless mass and a cold, hard number — 47 percent — the many Americans who rely on government aid: sick Americans, U.S. military veterans, elderly Americans, poor American children, proud American parents whose breadwinning has been reduced to unemployment checks. And what do technocrats do with unproductive assets? They discard them. That is what Romney’s policies promise to do: discard the programs and services that struggling Americans need most.

As for Romney’s upper class elitism, it is well attested. New Yorker magazine’s Nicholas Lemann put it this way: “Romney is a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules.” And from a former Romney aide: “[Mitt] is patrician. He just is. He has lived a charmed life … It is a big challenge that he has, connecting to folks who haven’t swum in the same rarified waters that he has.” David Brooks, a moderately conservative columnist at the New York Times, offers a more pointed assessment of Romney’s elitism. Of Mitt’s infamous “47 percent” rant he writes, “[I]t’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other.” He concludes that it “suggests that Romney does not know much about the culture of America.” Romney’s much derided attempt to make a $10,000 bet with Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a televised Republican primary election debate before a nation in which millions are struggling to make ends meet shows how little understanding and regard he has for the plight of ordinary Americans.

Romney’s 47 percent rant and his other derisive comments about the less well-off are reflective of real elitist contempt for ordinary Americans, for if those ugly indictments did not represent his true sentiments he could not have uttered them, even in error. Indeed, Romney holds the masses of the American people in such low regard that he has intentionally, repeatedly and shamelessly mislead and lied to them about any number of issues, refusing even to explain the true workings of his controversial — some have said ‘far-fetched’ — economic plans and their true consequences.

Thus the implications of the unfortunate coupling of elitist and technocratic sensibilities in Mitt Romney are as clear as day: from the first a Romney White House would not only have a built-in bias toward the richest Americans; conversely, as a matter of course it would doubly discount the interests of all those outside that fortunate few. Both tendencies are already evident in virtually every policy Romney has proposed. As for poor people, it’s almost as if Mitt sees them as a different species. Listening to his infamous pronouncement that “I’m not concerned about the poor; we have a safety net for them,” one would have thought he was speaking of nuisance pets, not human beings.

That is why Mitt Romney is unfit to be president: because his elitist policies and derisive statements demonstrate that he does not value the interests of all Americans in equal measure. A Romney presidency could well be the worst thing to happen to American workers in many years.

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D. is the author of ‘The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church and the Body Politic’ (Orbis, 2011).

This Blogger’s Books

The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church, and the Body Politic
by Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted
by Obery Hendricks

Follow Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@UniverseBends

CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE & TRAUMA IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

2013-01-20 by OUR COMMON GROUND

See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND News Board •● ☥●• The Third Eye Parenthesis

ROYAL CIRCLE FOUNDATION

PRESENTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH

BLACK PSYCHIATRISTS OF AMERICA, THE OFFICE OF MINORITY AND NATIONAL AFFAIRS

(AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSSOCIATION)

&

THE BALTIMORE BLACK MENTAL HEALTH ALLIANCE

A National Conference

CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE & TRAUMA

IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

(The Shame, The Blame & The Solutions)

MARCH 22-23, 2013

Hilton Baltimore

OUR COMMON GROUND Omnibus‘s insight:

For students, activists, scholars, parents, teachers and victims.

The Shame, The Blame & The Solutions

See on www.royal-circle.org

Busted: 91 Doctors, Nurses, Medical Professionals Charged In $430M Medicare Fraud

2013-01-18 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Busted: 91 Doctors, Nurses, Medical Professionals Charged In $430M Medicare Fraud

Added by Maria Lloyd on October 5, 2012.Tags:

Dr. Robert Kolbusz of Chicago (left) and Dr. Joseph Megwa of Dallas (right), were among those facing serious charges for medicare fraud

The U.S. Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services discovered alleged false billing schemes involving $230 million in home health services, over $100 million in mental services, and $49 million from ambulance transportation. Ninety-one people, including: doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, have been charged with committing over $430 million in Medicare fraud in seven U.S. cities. The scheme is the largest of its kind, according to Attorney General Eric Holder. The announcement marks the latest case in a concerted crackdown against Medicare fraud by an inter-agency Medicare fraud strike force.

The charges the suspects face range from healthcare fraud and conspiracy to wire fraud, kickback violations, identity theft and money laundering. In a news conference, Holder said that the case reveals an alarming trend of criminal attempts to steal billions of taxpayer dollars for personal profit. ”Today’s enforcement actions reveal an alarming and unacceptable trend of individuals attempting to exploit federal health care programs to steal billions in taxpayer dollars for personal gain,” Holder said. Assistant Attorney Lanny A. Breuer agreed, adding: “Today’s coordinated actions represent one of the largest Medicare fraud takedowns in Department of Justice history.” Breuer continued : “We have made it one of the Department’s missions to hold accountable those who abuse the Medicare program for personal profit.”

Medicare Fraud Strike Force operations targeted health care workers in seven cities – Brooklyn, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami. According to Holder, Dr. Joseph Megwa, was writing 33,000 prescriptions for some 2,000 patients between 2006 and 2011. Dr. Megwa, who practices in Dallas, allegedly signed off these documents without reviewing them, causing $103.3million in false billings. According to the Dallas Morning News, the 58-year-old’s alleged defrauding was the costliest. The doctor, who works at Raphem Medical Practice in Arlington, was indicted on conspiracy and health-fraud. The Justice Department alleges that Megwa helped patients in their homes as he travelled abroad. Two nurses, Ferguson Ikhile, and Ebolose Eghobor, were indicted along with the doctor. The three remain in federal custody.

Similarly, dermatologist Dr. Robert Kolbusz of Chicago, was charged with falsely diagnosing his patients and billing Medicare for treatments that were not given, according to the Chicago Tribune reported. Seven individuals in Houston were charged for giving kickbacks of cigarettes, coupons, and food to Medicare recipients who would in turn just watch TV or play games instead of receiving the services that were billed to Medicare. The fraud allegedly led to $158 million in fraudulent billing.

In Miami, 33 suspects were arrested and charged with fraud of more than $200 million, according to NBC Miami. Breuer said that owners and operators at one Miami psychiatric hospital gave cash kickbacks to owners of assisted living facilities in order to obtain more patients. They then billed the social insurance plan more than $67million, often for services that were never offered, or patients they never actually had. Breuer added that these 33 medical professionals then billed Medicare for the cash they used as kickbacks for their false patients. Little else is known about those charged in the city.

Holder condemned the fraud as one that “siphons precious taxpayer resources, drives up heath care costs, and jeopardizes the strength of the Medicare program.” He added: “They also victimize the most vulnerable members of society, including elderly, disabled, and impoverished Americans.” The strike force was created under the healthcare reform law as a means of curbing waste, fraud and abuse within the $590 billion Medicare program that provides healthcare benefits to approximately 50 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries.

In February of 2011, 111 medical practitioners were charged in a $225million Medicare fraud, which was the largest of its kind at that time.

Violence, Demonization, & Apocalyptic Aggression l Chip Berlet l The Spirit House Project

2013-01-14 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Violence, Demonization, & Apocalyptic Aggression

Chip Berlet
Wed Aug 22, 2012

Anders Behring Breivik, being sentenced on Friday for his 2011 terror attacks in Oslo, Norway, sees himself as a Christian Warrior. Breivik grabbed many of his Islamophobic and anti-socialist conspiracy theories off the Internet. These theories are still promulgated by right-wing groups in the United States, especially Christian Right ideologue William S. Lind, formerly director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.

The recent attacks on a Sikh Temple near Milwaukee, an Islamic Mosque in Joplin, Missouri, and the Christian Right Family Research Council in Washington, DC, illuminate a central tension within Christianity. Progressive Christian activist Ruby Sales calls this the struggle between Empire Christianity and Liberation Christianity.

The former represents an apocalyptic view built around subjugation of enemies and use of violence. The latter sees the apocalypse bringing justice and peace.

Sales wants to:

unveil the lies of White Christian Conservatives so that Black folk understand that these lesbian and gay hating folk come out the same tradition of the people who threw Emmett Till’s body in the Tallahatchie River. Their teachings birthed and fermented the hatred that poisoned the minds and spirits of the killers of Samuel Younge and Jonathan Daniels.

Most mainstream media discussions about the recent wave of violent attacks dismiss the idea that political, cultural, or economic hierarchies and tensions, when coupled to the demonization of an “Other,” can encourage violence. When the Right demonizes the Left and the Left Demonizes the Right, sometimes an individual or group decides to take action to stop the evildoers before it is too late. This type of apocalyptic aggression can be carried out by people who are legally sane or insane; and whose political ideas come from the Left or Right or somewhere outside of rational thought.

I oppose acts of violence or terrorism to achieve political goals. My analysis of vilification, demonization, and apocalyptic rhetoric in the United States today, however, compels me to conclude that it comes overwhelmingly from the Right, especially apocalyptic rhetoric from the Christian Right. Nevertheless, we need to pay more attention to the linkages of demonization, apocalyptic aggression, and violence, no matter what part of the political spectrum employs this dynamic…wittingly or unwittingly.

Apocalypse is a word common in popular culture, what with the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” and the heroics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy stopped the Apocalypse on a weekly basis in a television series from 1997-2003. (reruns are easily discovered online and off). Buffy and her team were stopping evil from taking over the world. Nothing wrong with that.

The word “apocalypse” is often misunderstood. The words apocalypse, prophecy, and revelation are all related, and in the broadest sense an “apocalypse” is an upcoming struggle between good and evil during which hidden truths will be revealed and the world dramatically reshaped forever. So an apocalypse can bring bad news—or good news. Apocalyptic rhetoric that warns of an evil plot by “Them” can be interpreted as a call to act “before it is too late.”

Vilification by demagogues anywhere on the political spectrum can lead to incidents of directed violence by individuals who adopt a superhero complex to save “Us” from “Them.” This dynamic was first thoroughly analyzed by Hannah Arendt and Gordon Allport in the 1950s. The process involves the theory of Constitutive Rhetoric in which a leader creates (interpolates) an actual constituency in society.

Almost a decade ago I was invited by Ruby Sales, founder of the Spirit House Project, to have a public conversation in Washington, DC at a forum on the demonization and scapegoating common in the Christian Right. My focus was exploring how apocalyptic demagoguery prompted not only Christian Right political activism but sometimes acts of apocalyptic aggression and violence. We were demoralized in 2004 by the second term of George W. Bush, and we felt there needed to be more analysis of how the Christian Right was pursuing a path toward theocracy frequently based on apocalyptic conspiracy theories that vilified and targeted named “Others.”

Constitutive Rhetoric prompting Directed Violence fuels the real life and death consequences we are witnessing today, and has prompted similar incidents in the past. The New Hampshire Supreme Court Society recently presented the Life and Liberty Award posthumously to slain 1960s civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels, and a very much alive U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia who is a past chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Ruby Sales accepted the award on behalf of Daniels. They and many others whose names should be better known are amongst those who put their lives on the line and are Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Another activist from the Civil Rights Movement, Ruby Sales, accepted the award on behalf of her murdered friend and colleague, Daniels.

Sheila Zakre, a disability and employment rights attorney wrote that at the ceremony Lewis and Sales “pulled no punches in warning of a rollback in the civil rights they fought to obtain. How fitting that they did so in a state whose legislature seeks to do just that.” In a column in the Concord Monitor, Zakre said:

Shouldn’t we expect our appointed representatives, both federal and state, to appreciate that history teaches us that restrictions on voting are tied to discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender and disability, and that morality teaches us that voting rights is a nonpartisan issue? The warning about history repeating itself may be hackneyed but is nonetheless true. Sadly, the lessons of the civil rights movement can be forgotten even as we venerate its heroes.

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John Lewis and Ruby Sales at the presentation of the Third Life and Liberty Award
photo credit David Wolowitz . [View event photos here].

My first encounter with Ruby Sales was over a decade ago at a lecture I gave to a class at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My topic was the challenge to equality posed by right-wing social movements. During the Q&A with students an older Black women pursued a series of questions about right-wing violence and our response as people of faith. They were sharp questions delivered with intensity but no hint of rancor. After class the professor explained the student was Ruby Sales, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, and she suggested I should learn more about her concern with apocalyptic demonization and violence.

I found out that Sales made her life altering choice to stand up against apocalyptic aggression as a teenager in the 1960s when she joined the Civil Rights Movement while a student at Tuskegee University. In 1965 the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee sent Sales with an organizing team to Lowndes County, Alabama—known among Blacks in the South as “Bloody Lowndes.” Sales was arrested with some 20 other activists protesting segregation and conducting a voter registration drive.

Released from jail, Sales and a few others were confronted by an enraged White racist wielding a shotgun. Sales witnessed her organizing colleague and friend Jonathan Daniels, a seminary student, shot to death on the street after he pushed Sales out of harm’s way. Another organizer was seriously wounded. The trauma left Sales literally speechless for seven months, but she persevered, found her voice, and carried on with her activism, eventually attending the same Episcopal Divinity School where Daniels had studied.

Apocalyptic Christian Right activists often link their plans to “take dominion” over the United States to their view of an End Times battle between good and evil; in which godly Christians must struggle against literal agents of Satan. In case it is not clear—those of us who read Talk to Action because we care about social, political, and economic justice are the agents of Satan in this Christian Right script. The overall tendency that seeks to make America a Christian nation is called “Dominionism;” and it comes in soft forms as well as hard forms that produce apocalyptic aggression against the targeted scapegoats.

Author and apocalypse scholar Lee Quinby calls these attacks “rituals of purification.” The destructive negative form of apocalyptic thinking is in part why the Christian Right blames all of the problems we face in this nation on scapegoats such as gay people, reproductive rights activists, feminists, and folks on the Left in general.

In the narrative of Liberation Christianity the Apocalypse brings an end to systems of oppression and exploitation, and let’s “justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” This quote from the book of Amos was a favorite of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. But as the Rev. R. William Carroll wrote in his essay on this theme, while Rev. King “spoke as a Christian…in so doing, he appealed to deep longings of every human being for freedom and righteousness, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for what he called the Beloved Community.” Rev. Carroll continued:

How easily do we forget that King’s vision was not limited to ending legal segregation! How easily do we forget how he confronted our nation with a shining vision of a beloved community that has not yet arrived! King’s dream was not limited to racial justice, though we should be quick to add that even here, his dream, like America’s promise, remains unfulfilled. If anything, in the last thirty years or so, we have moved backwards. King’s dream included peace and justice among nations. It also included justice and fairness for working people.

An activist for decades, Sales builds communities of compassion, commitment, liberation, and spirit. Her life was indelibly marked as a teenage college student when a friend was shot dead while they were organizing Black voters during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Now, more than four decades after this act of apocalyptic violence, Sales devotes her life to demanding justice for all of us.

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Ruby Sales, Spirit House Project

In a number of essays and interviews and activities over many years, Ruby Sales has been on the road to fulfilling the task of building the “beloved community.” Perhaps the best-known essay by Sales concerning the ongoing struggle for freedom and justice is “Empire Christianity vs. Liberation Christianity.” She wrote it following the contested election of George W. Bush as President in 2004. Conservative Christians played a key role in electing Republicans to public office nationwide that year.

Sales placed the elections in the context of a historic struggle within Christianity—between those who support “Empire Christianity” and those who support “Liberation Christianity.” Sales charged that the “Empire religion espoused by George Bush and his white Christian conservative allies is headed by a God who appears to be white supremacist, patriarchal, and upper class, one who stood on the side of enslavement and the genocide of native peoples throughout the globe, including the Americas.”

Opposed to that form of theology is Liberation Christianity, which “begins with the assertion that God is on the side of the oppressed rather than the side of the Empire,” wrote Sales, who added that “Jesus made clear the radical nature of his mission”:

to bring sight to the blind, i.e. to bring a new consciousness that freed his community and others from the false consciousness of identifying with the goals of the Roman Empire
to feed the hungry, i.e. a systemic redistribution of resources that is not charity, but systemic economic justice
to set the prisoners free, i.e. a recognition that the Empire uses law and order as tools of oppression and domination.”

Sales has a vision of Liberation Christianity that leads her to reach across many divides, not only of spiritual and ethical belief, but also race, gender, and class. She uses a wide range of tools to help prepare people for nonviolent action in pursuit of justice. Sales currently leads the Spirit House Project, “an intergenerational network of diverse people” using “the arts, research, education, action, and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic, and social justice, as well as for spiritual maturity.” Sales and Spirit House co-director Cheryl Blankenship oversee the Jonathan Daniels and Samuel Younge Institute for Justice and Nonviolence Fellows Program. This internship program is now based in Atlanta, Georgia, where the organization re-located after years in the Washington, DC area. The intern program:

Supports and prepares a new generation of peace and justice workers who want to discern a call to social justice and nonviolence; strengthens their courage, hope, resolve and reason to do this work; prepares them to play leading roles in public policy debates about issues such as poverty, prison industrial complex, militarism, and the shrinking budget for human needs, voting rights, privacy and judicial issues, and neo-conservatism; and helps grassroots communities meet their urgent need for trained and committed volunteers or staff.

Fellows of the internship program at the Spirit House Project

I have been inspired by Ruby Sales, and have written about my experience working collaboratively with her to sort out the tough issues of violence and oppression—the hallmarks of Empire Christianity in the United States that have delayed the promise of equality and democracy for too many for too long. Now in 2012 it is easy to see the forces allied in this country to barricade the path of progress trod by so many before us.

While acts of dramatic violence and the cacophony of hyperbolic election rhetoric snares our attention, Sales reminds us that there is an ongoing wave of police violence against people of color and immigrants. I will cover her views on this urgent matter in a follow-up essay here at Talk to Action.

In a book on “Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America” I wrote a chapter explaining that both Sales and I felt compelled by our spiritual beliefs to stand up and speak out in support of justice. “We all have to choose sides in an endless struggle,” I wrote:

Are we on the side of the powerful, the arrogant, the bullies who seek empire? Or are we on the side of the weak, the impoverished, the marginalized, and seek liberation for those who are suffering under the weight of oppression? Which side are you on?

Ruby Sales chose which side she was on at a young age, but it is never too late to make a commitment to justice, especially if you have spirit—no matter how you define that word.

Matt Taibbi: Geithner is ‘the architect of too big to fail’

2013-01-12 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Taibbi: Geithner is ‘the architect of too big to fail’

By Arturo Garcia
Saturday, January 12, 2013 18:03 EST

The legacy of outgoing U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be simple, said Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi on Friday — and unflattering.

“He’s the architect of “too big to fail,” Taibbi told Democracy Now hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. ” When this all blows up — and it’s going to blow up, for sure, because things can’t continue the way they are right now — people are going to look back in history, and they’re going to say, “Who was to blame for this?” And Timothy Geithner is going to be the guy who designed this entire system.”

That picture is quite different from the one President Barack Obama painted in his sendoff to Geithner on Thursday, when he said that the history books would portray him as “one of our finest secretaries of the Treasury.” Geithner will be succeeded by Obama’s chief of staff, Jack Lew, a choice Taibbi described as a signal that the White House intends to keep bailing Wall Street out.

Author and former financial regulator William Black also criticized Geithner, saying he “created crony capitalism, American style” and helped develop regulations that will not prevent further financial trouble for the country. He also scoffed atthe recent deal made by 10 major mortgage-lenders that will include $3.5 billion in payments to almost 4 million homeowners.

“The rest of the supposed $5 billion in settlement is really just what in the commercial world we call ‘troubled debt restructurings,’ which are the things you would do anyway if the government didn’t exist, because in most cases it’s better for the bank not to have the default, to instead reduce the principal slightly,” said Black. “So, none of that is actually a bailout. None of it is actually a settlement. It’s just the banks doing that which will profit maximize for the banks anyway.”

Watch Taibbi and Black discuss Geithner’s legacy and the issues behind the government’s Wall Street bailout, originally aired on January 11, 2013, below.
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1ym7E)