Undernews For April 14, 2010

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
96 Maine Street #255
Brunswick ME 04011
202 423 7884
news@prorev.com

LATEST HEADLINES
RSS FEED
UNDERNEWS
ABOUT THE REVIEW
EMAIL US

RACE TO THE BOTTOM: AMERICA'S GREATEST UNDERACHIEVERS
ELIOT SPITZER SPENT $100K ON ONE CALL GIRL

VA GOVERNOR WANTS WRITING TEST BEFORE NON-VIOLENT FELON VOTINGS RIGHTS CAN BE RESTORED

MIKE HUCKABEE COMPARES GAY MARRIAGE TO INCEST

MICHELLE RHEE SCREWS UP ON SCHOOL BUDGET

STEVE JOBS TRIES TO TRADEMARK THE WORD 'PAD'

MORE

THE HIDDEN BIG TAX INCREASES OF THE HEALTHCARE LAW
THE HILL - Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 a year will pay roughly $3.9 billion more in taxes - in 2019 alone - due to healthcare reform, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress's official scorekeeper.

The new law raises $15.2 billion over 10 years by limiting the medical expense deduction, a provision widely used by taxpayers who either have a serious illness or are older.

Taxpayers can currently deduct medical expenses in excess of 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Starting in 2013, most taxpayers will only be able to deduct expenses greater than 10 percent of AGI. Older taxpayers are hit by this threshold increase in 2017.

Once the law is fully implemented in 2019, the JCT estimates the deduction limitation will affect 14.8 million taxpayers - 14.7 million of them will earn less than $200,000 a year. These taxpayers are single and joint filers, as well as heads of households.

"Loss of this deduction will mean higher taxes for 14.7 million individuals and families making under $200,000 a year in 2019," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told The Hill. "The new subsidy for health insurance would not be available to offset this tax increase for most of these households."

DESMOND TUTU ON BOYCOTTING ISRAEL
DESMOND TUTU, HUFFINGTON POST - I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle, and I write these words of encouragement for student divestment efforts cognizant that it was students who played a pioneering role in advocating equality in South Africa and promoting corporate ethical and social responsibility to end complicity in apartheid. I visited the Berkeley campus in the 1980's and was touched to find students sitting out in the baking sunshine to demonstrate for the University's divestment in companies supporting the South African regime.

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel's 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.

To those who wrongly allege unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one's own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. These students are helping to pave that path to a just peace and I heartily endorse their divestment vote, encourage them to stand firm on the side of what is right, and urge others to follow the lead of the youth.

GOVERNMENT STUDY FINDS PIRACY CLAIMS BOGUS
ARSTECHNICA - We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rights holders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA's own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.

Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?

The US doesn't think so. In a new report out yesterday, the government's own internal watchdog took a close look at "efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods." After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."

More specific studies that focus only on single industries don't fare much better because "the illicit nature of counterfeiting and piracy makes estimating the economic impact of IP infringements extremely difficult." And when it comes time to choose a substitution rate (how much of the infringing activity should be counted as a lost sale), we're left only with "assumptions. . . which can have enormous impacts on the resulting estimates."

The GAO then went on to slam three particular reports often linked to the government. They're all commonly cited, they're all bogus, and at least one is still being used officially.

Three commonly cited estimates of U.S. industry losses due to counterfeiting have been sourced to U.S. agencies, but cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.

First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated.

Second, a 2002 CBP press release contained an estimate that U.S. businesses and industries lose $200 billion a year in revenue and 750,000 jobs due to counterfeits of merchandise. However, a CBP official stated that these figures are of uncertain origin, have been discredited, and are no longer used by CBP. A March 2009 CBP internal memo was circulated to inform staff not to use the figures. However, another entity within DHS continues to use them.

Third, the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association reported an estimate that the U.S. automotive parts industry has lost $3 billion in sales due to counterfeit goods and attributed the figure to the Federal Trade Commission. The OECD has also referenced this estimate in its report on counterfeiting and piracy, citing the association report that is sourced to the FTC. However, when we contacted FTC officials to substantiate the estimate, they were unable to locate any record or source of this estimate within its reports or archives, and officials could not recall the agency ever developing or using this estimate. These estimates attributed to FBI, CBP, and FTC continue to be referenced by various industry and government sources as evidence of the significance of the counterfeiting and piracy problem to the U.S. economy.

The GAO then sets its sights on several private industry reports. The Business Software Alliance claimed a loss of $9 billion to piracy in 2008, but its study "uses assumptions that have raised concerns among experts we interviewed, including the assumption of a one-to-one rate of substitution and questions on how the results from the surveyed countries are extrapolated to non-surveyed countries."

Next up was the MPAA, which has already publicly taken its lumps for that flawed 2005 survey we mentioned above. But even when you set aside the mistaken initial conclusion about collegiate downloading, the study still shouldn't be used by lawmakers; it's a black box.

"It is difficult, based on the information provided in the study, to determine how the authors handled key assumptions such as substitution rates and extrapolation from the survey sample to the broader population," says the GAO.

SO WHAT NOW? A STANDARDIZED JUNGLE GYM TEST?
USA TODAY - Physical activity improves kids' fitness and lowers their risk of obesity. And now a government review of research shows that kids who take breaks from their class work to be physically active during the school day are often better able to concentrate on their school work and may do better on standardized tests.

In many schools, physical education classes and recess have been squeezed out because of increasing educational demands and tough financial times.

"Some short-sighted people thought that cutting back on time spent on physical education to spend more time drilling for tests would improve test scores," says Howell Wechsler, director of the Division of Adolescent and School Health for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"But in fact there are a lot of studies that show that more time for PE and other physical activity help improve academic performance."

He and colleagues reviewed 50 studies that examined the effect of school-based physical activity on academic performance. Half of the studies showed a positive impact, half showed no effect, but virtually none of the research showed any negative impact, Wechsler says.

Among the specific findings, released Wednesday:

- Recess can improve students' attention and concentration and ability to stay on task.

- Increased time in PE classes can help children's attention and concentration and achievement test scores.

- Short physical activity breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes in the classroom can improve attention span, classroom behavior and achievement tests scores.

• Participation in sports teams and physical activity clubs, often organized by the school and run outside of the regular day, can improve grade point average, school attachment, educational aspirations and the likelihood of graduation.

The government's physical activity guidelines recommend that children and teens do an hour or more of moderate-intensity to vigorous activity a day. The Institute of Medicine advises that at least 30 minutes, or about half the daily physical activity, be done during the school day.

"Only 17% of high school students are meeting the goal of 60 minutes a day," Wechsler says.

IS AIPAC ANTI-SEMITIC?
HAARETZ - Despite claims that that Israelis are wary of U.S. President Barack Obama, a new poll released on Tuesday shows that most American Jews view their leader and his dealings with Israel in a positive light.

According to the 2010 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, conducted by the American Jewish Committee, 73 percent of American Jews characterize relations between Israel and the U.S. today as "very positive" or "positive."

In addition to this, 55 percent of American Jews approve of the way the Obama administration is handling U.S.-Israel relations.

In polls quoted in a New York Times article by former American Jewish Congress national director Henry Siegman from a few months prior, Obama is supported by only between 6 to ten percent of the Israeli public.

MORNING LINE: OBAMA TIED WITH PAUL
RASMUSSEN REPORTS - A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

Obama earns 79% support from Democrats, but Paul gets just 66% of GOP votes. Voters not affiliated with either major party give Paul a 47% to 28% edge over the president.

Paul, a anti-big government libertarian who engenders unusually strong feelings among his supporters, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But he continues to have a solid following, especially in the growing Tea Party movement.

HANK WILLIAMS WINS PULITZER

HANK WILLIAMS SINGS 'COLD, COLD HEART'
CNN - The late country music icon Hank Williams was among the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners. The Pulitzer Prize Board awarded a posthumous special award to Williams, who died in 1953 at 29, for his lifetime achievement as a musician, praising the country legend for "his craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life.". .

Only a few other musicians have earned special citations in music in recent years: jazz composers Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane each received one in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and Bob Dylan captured one in 2008.

WIKIPEDIA - Though unable to read or write music to any significant degree, he came to be regarded as among the greatest country music stars of all time. Williams died at age 29; his death is widely believed to have resulted from a mixture of alcohol and drugs. He charted numerous number one hits in the country music world, and his songs have been recorded by hundreds of other artists, many of whom have also had hits with the tunes. His music was widely influential, and has been covered by performers including Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Beck Hansen, Johnny Cash, Tony Bennett, Patsy Cline, Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong. . .

On August 11, 1952, Williams was fired from the Grand Ole Opry. Told not to return until he was sober, he instead rejoined Louisiana Hayride. Soon after, the Drifting Cowboys decided to part ways with Williams. Their departure was due to Williams drinking more than a show would pay.

On January 1, 1953, Williams was due to play at a concert in Canton, Ohio, but he was unable to fly due to weather problems with snow and ice. He hired a college student, Charles Carr, to drive him to the concerts he was to perform at over the few final days of 1952 and early 1953. Upon leaving the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee, Williams apparently had been injected with some pain-killers. Also found in the Cadillac convertible were some cans of beer and the handwritten lyrics to a song yet to be recorded. According to some, Williams was carried semi-conscious to his automobile by Carr and a hotel employee, who wondered about Williams' condition, and later believed he might have been dead at that point.

In a slightly different version, Carr suspected Williams was moribund at some earlier point, but realized the great singer was dead several miles before entering the town of Oak Hill, West Virginia where he, almost in a panic, pulled up to the gas station to seek help.

Upon closer examination, it was discovered that Williams was dead. He was 29. The official cause of death was heart failure, but there is still some mystery about the circumstances. Controversy has since surrounded Williams' death, with some claiming that Williams was dead before leaving Knoxville. Other sources, speculating from the forensic evidence, claim that Williams died in his sleep while the Cadillac was being driven through Kentucky about an hour before his body was discovered in the back seat. Oak Hill is still widely known as the little town where Hank Williams "died." There is a monument dedicated to his memory across the street from the little gas station where Carr anxiously sought help for Williams. The people of Oak Hill were apparently concerned with Carr and his near-panicky condition, as they calmed him and welcomed into their homes. The Cadillac is now preserved at the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

WHAT'S NEW IN MISSILE DEFENSE?
AN AUTONOMOUS MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM

Abstract

This paper describes an independent study project at the University of Wisconsin – Platteville to design and implement an autonomous paper airplane/missile defense system. The paper airplane defense system is organized into three subsystems that detect and locate, track and target, and control a turret and shoot a compressed air gun.

This paper describes the details of design, development, integration, and calibration of the software components as well as the specification and construction of the hardware components of this system.

Introduction

Paper airplanes have become a public nuisance in some regions of the Midwest. This paper describes the design and development of an autonomous paper airplane/missile defense system using an off-the-shelf USB web cam, an air compressor, some hobby store electronic components, and a top-secret interceptor blowgun dart. . .

Via Improbable Research

RECOVERED HISTORY: THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF SNCC
WIKIPEDIA - The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was one of the principal organizations of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC workers to have a $10 a week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland.

SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. SNCC's major contribution was in its field work, organizing voter registration drives all over the South, especially in Georgia and Mississippi.

In the later 1960s, led by fiery leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, SNCC focused on "black power", and then protesting against the Vietnam War. As early as 1965, James Forman said he didn’t know "how much longer we can stay nonviolent" and in 1969, SNCC officially changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect the broadening of its strategies. It passed out of existence in the 1970s.

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, independent student-led groups began direct-action protests against segregation in dozens of southern communities. The most common action of these groups was organizing sit-ins at racially segregated lunch counters to protest the pervasiveness of Jim Crow and other forms of racism. In addition to sitting in at lunch counters, the groups also organized and carried out protests at segregated public libraries, public parks, and public swimming pools. At that time, all those public facilities financed by taxes were closed to blacks. The white response was often to close the facility, rather than integrate it.

Robert Parris Moses (also known as Robert Parris or Bob Moses) played a central role in transforming SNCC from a coordinating committee of student protest groups to an organization of organizers dedicated to building community-based political organizations of the rural poor. The voter registration project he initiated in McComb, Mississippi in 1961 became the seed for most of SNCC's activities from 1962-1966.

After the Freedom Rides, SNCC worked primarily on voter registration, along with local protests about segregated public facilities. Registering to vote was extremely difficult and dangerous, as blacks who attempted to register often lost their jobs and their homes. SNCC workers lived with local families and often the homes providing such hospitality were firebombed.

The actions of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC forced the Kennedy Administration to briefly provide federal protection to temporarily abate mob violence. Local FBI offices were usually staffed by Southern whites (there were no black FBI agents at that time) who refused to intervene to protect civil rights workers or local blacks who were attempting to register to vote.

One of the ways in which SNCC was unusual among civil rights groups was the way in which decisions were made. Instead of "top down" control, as was the case with most organizations at that time, decisions in SNCC were made by consensus. Group meetings would be convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone was in agreement with the decision. Because activities were often very dangerous and could lead to prison or death, SNCC wanted all participants to support each activity.

Mississippi Summer got national attention when three civil rights workers involved in the project, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were lynched after having been released from police custody. Their bodies were eventually found after a reluctant J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to search for them. In the process the FBI also found corpses of several other missing black Mississippians, whose disappearances had not attracted public attention outside the Delta.

SNCC also established Freedom Schools to teach children to read and to educate them to stand up for their rights. As in the struggle to desegregate public accommodations led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama the year before, the bolder attitudes of the children helped shake their parents out of the fear that had paralyzed many of them.

COREY D.B. WALKER, COUNTERPUNCH - In a moment dominated by the forces of instant gratification and immediate satisfaction, the mere mention of history is viewed as inconvenient, at best, and irrelevant, at worst. While commentators and critics often invoke the rhetoric of history – often with the sophomoric quip "history will be the judge" – it is often used as a pretense to support prefabricated opinions that are commensurate with the dictates of the status quo.

To a generation raised in such a context, the end of history is not just an idea for philosophical speculation, but the very reality of the world in which we live. Indeed, to posit the idea of the end of history does not generate substantive and informed debate, rather it stands as an apt description of the content and character of the prevailing protocols of our contemporary condition.

It is in such a moment when the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee becomes so vitally important not just for learning and understanding the past but, more importantly, for imagining and working for a more righteous future.

In his elegant and moving collection of essays Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, Vincent Harding reminds us of the rich resources and infinite hope offered by the gift of the black freedom struggle. The young people that formed SNCC five decades ago this month were heirs to and innovators of a tradition of freedom quests that sought to give birth to new expressions of our humanity.

The story of SNCC is one of rebirth and regeneration in a moment when the dominant forces of society were arrayed against the very idea of a new world. The triumphs and tragedies of the all too human efforts of SNCC to dream a new dream of freedom and work for its realization are acutely instructive for us who inhabit a world that celebrates celebrity, promotes performance, and worships at the shrine of style.

The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of SNCC affords us an opportunity to revisit a crucial moment in the ever evolving history of freedom not with a misty eyed nostalgia and sentimental romanticism, but with a critical consciousness that informs and reinforces our commitment to pursuing better possibilities for human being and belonging for the world in which we live. . .

The anniversary of the founding of SNCC reminds us of the humble yet heroic efforts of a group of people who came together to try to change the world. While the path on which they embarked was cleared by others who came before them, they opened up new directions in the evolution of freedom and human possibility for others who would come after them.

SNCC: SOME MEMORIES
SAM SMITH, MULTITUDES - There was another story that wound its way across the pages of The Idler. . . It was first expressed in a moving fashion in letters written from Mississippi in the summer of 1964 by my college roommate, ex-wrestler and ex-paratrooper Gren Whitman. From Biloxi on August 8 he wrote:
|||| Fear cannot be described, only felt. I have been frightened many times In my life in varying degrees, in varying circumstances. And courage is not the absence of fear. Fear is the essence of courage. What are your emotions now, driving with us along a lonely highway in rural Mississippi, in an integrated car? It you are frightened, you are with friends, and you are sane. If you are not afraid, you know nothing about Mississippi. You have never heard of the Freedom Rides and how they ended in Jack-son. You have never heard of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, and countless oth-ers. You have not heard of Neshoba County. You have never talked with a Mississippi Negro or a civil rights veteran.

And if your fear has overcome your convictions, you have no business with us. Go home.

Our three colored companions are profoundly aware that two whites are in the car with them and what this will mean if we are stopped for any reason. The two of us, likewise, know that though we are white, we become as black as tar once we are known to be CR types. White Mississippians make no distinctions. There is a strange and wonderful and, for you, a new bond between us, compounded of fear, and dedication and brotherhood. . .

Our final stop is a colored settlement near a planing mill owned by a Mr. Black. Most of these people are his, tenants and employees, We know that he has told them not to talk to us and that they inform him each time we come around. So we keep our visit short. We talk quickly and to the point: "Join the Freedom Party. You need It. It needs you." No one signs. Few talk. James, sensing that someone has already headed to tell 'Mr. Charlie' that we're talking to "his niggers" says "let's go" and we git. Fast. There is always the next time. Folks have seen us, some have talked, however briefly. The precious seed Is planted. The freedom seed. ||||

In January 1965, I got a chance to help plant the seed. The notorious DC Transit wanted to raise its fares and the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized to stop it. They urged citizens with cars to drive bus passengers during a one-day boycott.

I joined the volunteers. On the morning of January 24, 1966, I hauled myself out of bed, swallowed a cup of coffee, warmed up my '54 Chrysler, and made my way to Sixth and H Streets Northeast, one of the assembly points for volunteer jitneys. A boycott organizer filled my car with three high school girls and a middle- aged and rather fat woman.

A bus drove by and it was empty. "They're all empty," the woman said, It was the first bus I had seen that morning and I wondered if she was right.

If both the fat lady and her husband worked, the five cent fare increase Chalk was seeking would cost them two week's worth of groceries over the course of a year.

I let my passengers off and headed back to Sixth and H. At Florida and New York, I counted five empty or near-empty buses. It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning and the boycott was working,

"It's beautiful," the man in the slightly frayed brown overcoat said after he told me he was headed for Seventeenth Street. "It's working and it's beautiful. Hey, you see those two there. Let's try and get them."

I pulled over to the right lane by a stop where two men stood.

"Hey man, why spend thirty cents? Get in," my rider called to the pair.

"You headed downtown?"

"Yeah, get in."

"Great. It's working, huh? Great!"

At the delicatessen at Twenty-fourth and Benning, one of the assembly points, a young black who worked with SNCC greeted me: "Been waiting all morning for a car to work from here; said they were going to have one, but they didn't send it. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Thanks."

"I'm tired, man. Been up all night down at the office. We got some threats. One bunch said they were going to bomb us, but they didn't."

We got into my car and continued east on Benning. Lots of empty buses.

"We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it. I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the way I feel about it." I agreed.

"You ever worked with SNCC before?" "Nope," I said.

'Well, I'll tell you man, you hear a lot of things. But they're a good group. They stick together. You know, like if you get in trouble, you know they're going to be in there with you. If you get threatened they'll have people around you all the time. They stick together. That's good, man."

Later, I picked up a man at a downtown bus stop. The woman in the back seat asked him, "You weren't waiting for a bus, were you?"

"No. I just figured someone would come along and pick me up."

"That's good, 'cause if you were waiting for a bus I was going to bop you upside your head."

We all laughed and the man reassured her again.

"You know," the woman in back continued, "there were some of the girls at work who said they were going to ride the bus and they really made me mad. I thought I'd go get a big stick and stand at the bus stop and bop 'em one if they got on Mr. Chalk's buses. Some people just don't know how to cooperate. And you know, you don't have nothing in this world until you get people together. Hey, lookit over there, let's see if that guy's going out northeast."

People stuck together that Monday, I carried seventy-one people, only five of them white. SNCC estimated that DC Transit lost 130,000 to 150,000 fares during the boycott. Two days later, the transit commission, in a unanimous but only temporary decision, denied DC Transit the fare hike. The commission's executive director dryly told reporters that the boycott played no part in the decision. He was probably right. The commission worried about such things as cash dividends, investor's equity, rate of return, depreciated value, and company base. The boycotters worried about a nickel more a ride. And in the end, the commission was to approve the fare hike and then more; a few years later the fare was up to forty cents.

But the boycott was important, anyway. Never had so many Washingtonians done anything so irregular and contrary to official wishes. The assumption that DC residents would passively accept the injustices of their city was shattered. SNCC and the Free DC Movement had laid the groundwork for future action.

After the bus boycott, I wrote a letter to its leader congratulating him and offering to help in the future. Not long after the leader, Marion S. Barry, and his colleague, L. D. Pratt, were sitting in my living room talking about how I could help in SNCC's public relations. I readily agreed; for the first time in my life I had joined a movement.

Three years earlier Barry had quit his $5,500 a-year post teaching chemistry at Knoxville College in Tennessee and joined the SNCC. He was the group's first chair. He then showed up in Washington to head the local office. Barry early formed an improbable and ultimately nearly explosive partnership with an erstwhile farm implements manufacturer, salesman, self-styled nutrition expert, and economic theoretician named L. D. Pratt. Barry was lean, black, soft-spoken, self-contained, and given to wearing a straw plantation style hat; Pratt was husky, white, excitable, demonstrative, and covered his baldness with a felt fedora that made him appear a character out of a one-column cut in a forties edition of Time magazine.

Together they designed the boycott and a drive to win self-government for the colony of Washington. Although the life of the Free DC Movement would be measured in months, it seemed like years, for so much was crammed into its short existence. Barry and Pratt both worked themselves to the marrow and it was during those months that Barry first gained a long-lingering reputation for always being late for appointments, news conferences, and actions. "I work on CPT-- colored people's time," explained Barry. Part of my job was to stand on the street-corner and convince the press that Marion really would show up if they just waited a bit longer. The reporters would bitch, but since Barry was shaking up the city, they mostly waited anyhow.

Barry's subsequent moves in his drive for passage of right-to-vote legislation in Congress included an effort to get businessmen in downtown stores and along H Street (a black shopping area second only to downtown in commercial importance) to support the movement by displaying its sticker in their windows. Hundreds of orange and black stickers with the slogan "Free DC" below a shattered chain went up in store windows; but the threat of a business boycott led other merchants to cry blackmail, and some of the more traditional civil rights and home rule leaders began to back away from Barry's tough tactics.

In the coming months, Barry and his organization would disrupt the calm of the city with increasing frequency. A number of Free DC supporters were arrested at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. By the following fall, Barry would have been arrested three times, for failing to "move on," for disorderly conduct, and for holding a Free DC block party without official sanction.

Barry used his arrests to make points. After being arrested for failing to move on at a policeman's order, Barry said, "It is a bad law that gives policemen the sole discretion in such matters. Especially in Washington where the cops are so uneducated and awful. They use the law as a harassing device against Negroes." And he warned, less than two years before the 1968 riot, that the attitude of police might lead to an outbreak of racial violence.

While Barry was on the streets, on the tube, in court, and in jail, his associate, L. D. Pratt, was developing a reputation as the mystery man behind the operation dis-turbing the tranquility of the colonial capital.

Pratt refused to be interviewed by reporters and, although it was known that he was closely involved in designing the bus boycott, few knew who be was or what he was up to.

In fact, by the time Pratt was sixteen, he had lived in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Virginia, and Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb of DC. He worked for a bank in Maryland, selling farm implements in the mid-west and trying to pull bankrupt businesses out of hock. At the time of the bus boycott, the 39-year-old Pratt was unemployed. His wife was supporting the family along with what money L. D. could bring by running a car pool. Meanwhile, when he wasn't involved in Free DC and SNCC business, he was at the Library of Congress studying food nutrition.

Pratt was fascinated by agriculture and agricultural problems. He wanted to revise the whole system and I never saw him more excited as when he developed plans, ultimately futile, for a takeover by civil rights and antipoverty groups of the multimillion dollar Greenbelt Consumer Services, one of the nation's earliest and most financially successful cooperatives.

Pratt mixed street jargon with academic terms in a cacophonic lingo all of his own: "Look, man, those cats gotta implode their power base before they do anything." He was an activist and a thinker; a short-term planner and a long-term dreamer.

The pair belied their public images. In person. Barry, the mortal threat to peace and order, was personally a gentle and quiet individual and Pratt, the mystery man, was, out of range of the press, open and loquacious.

Marion was leading a movement, but it had some of the intensity, closeness and spirit of a rebellion. Barry enlisted into the cause anyone he could find. You would be talking on the phone and a friendly special operator would break in with an "emergency call" and it would be Barry or Pratt or someone else with the latest crisis or plan. There were black cops who had been spiritually seconded to the movement and ministers who served as a link between the radical Barry and the more moderate civil rights movement and friendly reporters who still believed there was an objective difference between justice and injustice,. And through it all was movement, excitement and hope, not even dampened by the thirtieth chorus of "We Shall Overcome" sung in a church hall while waiting for Marion finally to show up.

Pratt described his relationship with Barry this way: "I am the theoretician and Marion is the practitioner. I just give suggestions and he makes the decisions. I re-spect his opinions more than my own."

Barry and Pratt not only upset policemen and government officials; they perturbed the established civil rights and home rule leadership in the city. While a few such leaders, Walter Fauntroy prime among them, were careful not to undercut Barry and provided as much help as they felt they could, others were plainly annoyed by the upstarts.

Tensions grew when the Free DC Movement decided to take on the White House Conference on Civil Rights that had been scheduled for May 1966. Barry planned to raise the issue of home rule at the conference and, in announcing the plans, chastised the moderate Coalition for Conscience for "wavering" in its support of the plan. Two days later the Washington Post reported, "Washington civil rights leaders yesterday pondered the future of the campaign for home rule in light of the growing independence on the part of Free D.C. Movement leader Marion Barry Jr. One leader said it appears that the movement was at 'the end of its relationship with the Coalition of Conscience,' the city's loosely knit confederation of ministers and civil rights groups."

But it was not just the Free DC's militancy and independence that upset the old leaders. They also were profoundly disturbed by the rise of the black power idea; Coalition co-chairman Channing Phillips stated, "The black nationalist stand of SNCC is inconsistent with the Coalition's philosophy."

Still, while the 20-something Barry was an anathema to the white business leaders and considered a rogue by the local civil rights establishment, as early as 1966 a poll found him ranked fifth by black residents as the person who had done the most for blacks in DC.

In SNCC and elsewhere, the spirit of black nationalism was indeed awakening. Black power had its roots in the deep frustration of the civil rights movement with the progress towards some sustainable form of equality. In 1963, Howard Zinn, then a professor at Spellman College, told a SNCC conference that the ballot box would not give blacks much power. Zinn said SNCC should build up "centers of power outside the official political mechanism."

This was a time when the official symbol of the Alabama Democratic Party included a banner reading "White Supremacy -- For the Right." The SNCC-organized Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had attempted to be seated at the national Democratic convention and was rebuffed, offered only two non-voting at-large seats to represent not just Mississippi all American blacks. SNCC communications director Julian Bond twice won election to the Georgia legislature, and twice that body refused to seat him. Jerry Demuth, writing in The Idler in October 1966 asked: "After Julian Bond, Atlantic City and the Alabama Democratic Party with its proclamation of white supremacy, what is there except a Black Panther Party?"

The voices of black power of the time were varied. Two months after being replaced as SNCC chair by the more militant Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis explained:

"I support the concept of black power and I have tried repeatedly to articulate it to people in terms they can understand, so that they will know it is for civil rights, not against whites."

The National Committee of Negro Churchmen of the National Council of Churches tried to combine black power and integration in an August 1965 newspaper ad:

"A more equal sharing of power is precisely what is required as the precondition of authentic human interaction. We understand the growing demand of Negro and white youth for a more honest kind of integration: one which increases rather than decreases the capacity of the disinherited to participate with power in all the structures of our common life. Without this capacity to participate with power -- i.e. to have some organized political and economic strength to really influence people with whom one interacts -- integration is not meaningful. For the issue is not one of racial balance but of honest racial interaction."

But this was a hope far from current reality and many more blacks listened to the view of Carmichael: "Integration is an insidious subterfuge for white supremacy." He told a crowd in Greenwood, MS, "We been saying 'freedom' for six years and we ain't got nothing. What we're gonna start saying now is 'Black Power.'"

The most important white at SNCC, L. D. Pratt, continued to play a important role for some time, but his ability to work with Barry declined sharply and, and after receiving physical threats dropped out of the local scene. . .

But before it was over, Barry and Pratt had one more "good shot," as L.D. liked to call them. Hauling an odd assortment of black and white activists off to a weekend retreat, the pair organized a lecture, seminar, and planning sessions to pave the way for a massive push against slum housing. In fact, that's what it was going to be called - PUSH, People United against Slum Housing. It would be no ordinary effort. Barry theorized that the reason slumlords were invulnerable was because protests were usually directed against only a small portion of their holdings. If you could uncover the full economic interests of a slumlord, Including his commercial holdings, you could organize an effective boycott against him.

From L. D.'s theoretical charts and Marion's discourse, the action moved to strange places like a hall at a Catholic woman's college where volunteers sorted out thousands of paper slips containing important information about DC eviction cases over the past two years, and the basement of the Court of General Sessions, where a friendly judge had permitted the group space to do its research closer to the source material. The little slips of paper slowly built up information concerning slumlords, lawyers, front corporations, and their interconnections. From the long tables in the basement of the Court of General Sessions, the slips went to the Recorder of Deeds office where more volunteers began arduously sifting through official records. The project never got much beyond that. Perhaps it fell of its own weight; the task of organizing all those slips of paper without a computer was staggering, Perhaps the separate directions in which various participants were rapidly going was a factor, In any event, the days of the Free DC Movement were just about over.

And sometime later, I attended a meeting in the basemen to the SNCC office. There were only a handful of whites there. Stokely Carmichael arrived and announced that whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. My time with SNCC was over

When people would write about Marion Barry years later, they wouldn't mention the good part because they had never seen it. All they saw was the cynical, corroded shell of a man they hadn't known and thought it had been that way all along. Like an old car rusting in a pasture.

As Barry moved into politics, first on the school board, then the city council, then the mayor's office I had moved my support and enthusiasm with him, and without apologies. Once in the top job, however, his weaknesses quickly lost their constraints and whatever greatness Marion might have possessed started to disintegrate.

And yet I still think of the good years. The years in which Barry was one of a handful of people who made self-determination for DC possible, the years in which he was the voice of progress and sanity on the school board and city council. I think of a man who was willing to risk his life for the freedom of others, who was willing to go to jail on the chance it would help others gain a measure of liberty. And like Jack Burden writing of Willie Stark, "I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."

On the wall of my office is an autographed bumper sticker from Marion's first campaign for mayor. It reads: "Barry -- the way things ought to be." In his last words Willie Stark said, "It might have been all different, Jack. You got to believe that."

ROBBER BARON UPDATE
NY TIMES - In the years before its collapse, Lehman used a small company - its "alter ego," in the words of a former Lehman trader - to shift investments off its books.

The firm, called Hudson Castle, played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role at Lehman, according to an internal Lehman document and interviews with former employees. The relationship raises new questions about the extent to which Lehman obscured its financial condition before it plunged into bankruptcy.

While Hudson Castle appeared to be an independent business, it was deeply entwined with Lehman. For years, its board was controlled by Lehman, which owned a quarter of the firm. It was also stocked with former Lehman employees.

None of this was disclosed by Lehman, however.

Entities like Hudson Castle are part of a vast financial system that operates in the shadows of Wall Street, largely beyond the reach of banking regulators. These entities enable banks to exchange investments for cash to finance their operations and, at times, make their finances look stronger than they are.

Critics say that such deals helped Lehman and other banks temporarily transfer their exposure to the risky investments tied to subprime mortgages and commercial real estate. Even now, a year and a half after Lehman’s collapse, major banks still undertake such transactions with businesses whose names, like Hudson Castle’s, are rarely mentioned outside of footnotes in financial statements, if at all.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining various creative borrowing tactics used by some 20 financial companies. A Congressional panel investigating the financial crisis also plans to examine such deals at a hearing in May to focus on Lehman and Bear Stearns, according to two people knowledgeable about the panel’s plans.

Most of these deals are legal. But certain Lehman transactions crossed the line, according to the account of the bank’s demise prepared by an examiner of the bank. Hudson Castle was not mentioned in that report, released last month, which concluded that some of Lehman’s bookkeeping was "materially misleading." The report did not say that Hudson was involved in the misleading accounting.

LA TIMES - Before Washington Mutual collapsed in the largest bank failure in U.S. history, its executives knowingly created a "mortgage time bomb" by making subprime loans they knew were likely to go bad and then packaging them into risky securities, a congressional investigation has found.

In some cases, the bank took loans in which it had discovered fraudulent activity -- such as misstated income by borrowers -- and rolled them into mortgage securities sold to investors without disclosing the fraud, according to the report released Monday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The actions were driven in part by greed, according to the committee report, which pointed out that WaMu's pay practices rewarded loan officers and processors based on how many mortgages they could churn out.

The new disclosures could give a boost to efforts by President Obama and congressional Democrats to pass sweeping overhaul of financial regulations, which the Senate is set to consider this spring, said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the subcommittee's chairman.
SOLITARY WATCH - Everyone concerned with solitary confinement has been closely watching a landmark effort in the Maine state legislature to pass a bill that would have significantly limited the practice in state prisons. On Monday that effort culminated in what some advocates have called a "gutted" version of the bill–and others see as a meaningful first step toward change. The Bangor Daily News reported yesterday:

"As originally introduced, LD 1611 would have prohibited the placement of mentally ill prisoners in so-called "solitary confinement" and would have restricted prison officials' ability to isolate all but the most dangerous inmates for longer than 45 days.

"But the bill ran into staunch opposition, most notably from corrections officials and guards who predicted the new restrictions would make prisons more dangerous for both inmates and staff.

"After lengthy debate on Monday, the House tossed out the most substantive aspects of the bill and, instead, passed a resolve essentially seeking additional information on inmates housed in what the state calls its 'special management units.' The Senate later voted 18-15 to approve the same version, sending it back to the House for one last vote.

"The resolve directs corrections officials to work with a mental health and substance abuse focus group to review the due process procedures for prisoners within special management units and report back to the Legislature next year."

In the past two months, the hearings in the legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee have provided a unique public debate on solitary confinement, with testimony from Angola 3 member Robert King, who spent 29 years in solitary in Louisiana, and Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and a leading expert on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, among others. Supporters of the bill, originally introduced by Rep. James Schatz, included the Maine Council of Churches and the Maine Psychological Association, and the Maine Civil Liberties Union, as well as the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition and Mainers Against the Abuse of Solitary Confinement.

But the committee failed to reach consensus on the bill and debate moved to the State House floor, where solitary confinement became what the Bangor Daily News called "one of the hot-button issues of the legislative session."

Predictably, the strongest opposition came from Department of Corrections officials. Associate Commissioner Denise Lord said it would be "costly and difficult to implement the changes," according to Maine's Morning Sentinel. She told legislators, "More than half of our [prison] population have a mental health diagnosis." (In fact, the DOC's own data show that 63% of prisoners in the special management unit have mental illness and 48% of were prescribed psychotropic drugs for mental illness.)

At the same time, Lord also argued that the solitary confinement unit was really not such a bad place–and was getting better every day. . .

MILITARY SUICIDES OUTPACE BATTLE DEATHS
TIME - From the invasion of Afghanistan until last summer, the U.S. military had lost 761 soldiers in combat there. But a higher number in the service - 817 - had taken their own lives over the same period. The surge in suicides, which have risen five years in a row, has become a vexing problem for which the Army's highest levels of command have yet to find a solution despite deploying hundreds of mental-health experts and investing millions of dollars. And the elephant in the room in much of the formal discussion of the problem is the burden of repeated tours of combat duty on a soldier's battered psyche.

The problem is exacerbated by the manpower challenges faced by the service, because new research suggests that repeated combat deployments seem to be driving the suicide surge. The only way to apply the brakes will be to reduce the number of deployments per soldier and extend what the Army calls "dwell time" - the duration spent at home between trips to war zones. But the only way to make that possible would be to expand the Army's troop strength, or reduce the number of soldiers sent off to war.

The service's suicide rate continues to rise (it doubled between 2001 and 2006) while remaining flat in the civilian population, even when adjusted to reflect the Army's age and gender. Last year, 160 active-duty soldiers killed themselves, up from 140 in 2008 and 77 in 2003. . . .

When accounting publicly for the trend, Army commanders tend to avoid acknowledging that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be a cause. "A third of the confirmed suicides are committed by troops that had never deployed," McHugh recently told a House panel. But the other two-thirds killed themselves either in a war zone or after returning from one. "The suicide rate among soldiers who have deployed to [war zones] is higher than for soldiers who have never deployed," Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, a top Army psychiatrist, told a suicide-prevention conference in January.

ALMOST EXTINCT BREED OF HUMAN POLITICIAN FOUND IN PHILLY

HUFFINGTON POST - The vice president visited Philadelphia landmark and famous cheesesteak destination Pat's King of Steaks (or, Pat's Steaks) this afternoon with U.S. Rep. Robert A. Brady (D., 1st District PA), his wife, Debra, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. The vice president ordered his cheesesteak as "Whiz, widout" -- aka with Cheese Whiz and without onions.

[Congressman] Brady stood at the window to order sandwiches for himself and Biden. ... Brady gave him whole hot peppers on the side, which Biden did not eat. Debra Brady and Nutter watched as the congressman and veep ate. Biden scarfed down the whole sandwich. Brady gave away part of his to a kid in the crowd.

Biden remembered that as a law student at Syracuse he used to come home to Delaware. He'd buy a load of cheesesteaks, wrap them in foil, take them back to school, and sell them for "three times as much."

When asked how Obama liked his cheesesteak, Biden joked, "President Obama doesn't know steaks at all," alluding to the president's Chicago origins, while Biden's home state of Delaware neighbors Pennsylvania.

Amid a friendly crush of humanity, Biden chit-chatted with locals. He put his arm around many for cell-phone photos. One whom Biden embraced was Joe Gower, 31, of Sewell, N.J., who was having a steak sandwich a half-block away at Pat's arch-rival, Geno's. "I came over. I was hoping it was the President. But I'm happy it was the vice president." He said he couldn't linger. His steak sandwich was getting cold back at Geno's.

LOCAL HEROES: PARENTS CHALLENGING INTRUSIVE SPORTS HONOR CODE
MAINE PUBLIC BROADCASTING - The parents of a Yarmouth High School lacrosse player are challenging the constitutionality of the school's extracurricular honor code after their daughter was suspended from the team when a photo of her holding a beer can was posted on a social networking Web site. The family's attorney says the school's actions and honor code violated the 16-year-old girl's civil rights, according to the Portland Press Herald.

The school's honor code is a four-page document that students have to sign to participate in sports or other acitivites, the paper reports. Among other requirements is a pledge not to use alcohol on or off school property during, or out of, the activity's season.

The family contends that the code allows the school to monitor and discipline kids "24-7" and allows the government to reach "into our homes," the paper reports.

FREE EMAIL UPDATES
SEND US A DONATION
ABOUT THE REVIEW
UNSUBSCRIBE
NEW ARTICLES
READERS' PICKS
ALSO OF INTEREST
POCKET PARADIGMS
ESSAY ARCHIVES
SAM SMITH'S BIO
SAM SMITH'S BOOKS
SAM SMITH'S MUSIC

ENDS

© Scoop Media