The State of Opportunity

The US Promises to Rehabilitate Prisoners, but Continues to Confine Them at Higher Rates

• The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog has posted a New York Times article stating that nearly "one in every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release at the end of last year."  The article continues with the findings of a new Department of Justice report:

An estimated 2.38 million people were incarcerated in state and federal facilities, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2005, while a record 5 million people were on parole or probation, an increase of 1.8 percent. Immigration detention facilities had the greatest growth rate last year. The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent, to 14,482 from 10,104.

The data reflect deep racial disparities in the nation’s correctional institutions, with a record 905,600 African-American inmates in prisons and state and local jails. In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites. In Iowa, for example, blacks were imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, according to an analysis of the data by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

These statistics of mass incarceration and racial disparities highlight the fact that our government policies are failing to offer a second chance to citizens and immigrants alike.  Instead of spending millions of dollars to confine millions of people, we should invest in their personal development. In human rights law, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides that “the penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation” -- and the United States has pledged to uphold the values in this United Nations treaty.

• Over at The Huffington Post, Mike Garibaldi Frick has posted an interview with street artist and free speech activist Robert Lederman.  Lederman "was arrested over 40 times by the Rudy Giuliani administration for exercising his free speech and sued the city of New York to strike down permit requirements for artists in public spaces." The post discusses the way government restrictions on public spaces interfere with our constitutional rights -- and human rights -- to self-expression, a cornerstone of our democracy.

Though American democracy promotes "freedom of expression," regular citizens are effectively blocked from creative and free speech public space uses unless they have considerable financial or political influence.

Opposition groups, nascent movements, students, artists and all citizens need safe, free public space in which to communicate and develop. Planned events, spontaneous gatherings and ongoing meeting places that are autonomous from entrenched government and corporate interests are vital to a free public speech. The health and well-being of a true democracy requires free access to open public forums.

The post also includes a YouTube video of the interview with Lederman:

• MigraMatters has done a series of posts on the framing of the immigration debate. In "Illegal" is Never a Noun, blogger Duke1676 features a piece by Eric Haas of The Rockridge Institute called Losing Our Minds Over Immigration as well as an opinion by Roberto Lovato of New America Media entitled Anti-Immigrant Rage Dehumanizes the Undocumented. 

• Most recently, Migra Matters posted The Democrats' New Immigration Strategy...Sort Of.   Duke1676 makes a valid point about the uselessness of criticizing the Republican stance without offering another vision of immigration reform:

The Democratic Party finally released what appears to be their official strategy/talking points intended to counter the Republican immigration wedge.

The strategy in essence revolves around a few key concepts:

• The Republicans are using the immigration issue for political gain


• The Republicans had plenty of time to fix immigration and didn't


• The Republicans have been unable to secure the border


• The Republicans are using fear and bigotry to scapegoat immigrants


• The scapegoating isn't working

Of course there's one glaring omission in this strategy …. there isn't any sort of a alternative plan proposed.

Nowhere is there a word about what in fact the Democrats are going to do about immigration. Not even the usual vague call for "comprehensive reform that secures our border while providing a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants." And you can just forget about specifics.

In the absence of this vision, Migra Matters proposes its own strategies:

There have to be other, more complex, and comprehensive ways of controlling immigration:

• Things like adjusting free trade agreements so they don't foster poverty in sender nations.

• Things like working with foreign governments in sender nations to ensure that they not only respect human rights, but worker rights and economic justice.

• Things like examining and reforming our immigration codes to make them more practical, fair, and reflective of economic realities.

• Things like fixing our immigration bureaucracy so it can efficiently and humanely process the flow of immigrants in a timely and effective manner.

And these are but just a few of the things that should be talked about. There are many, many more.

 

Heartland Forum Highlights Support for Community Values

• As mentioned previously, this Saturday saw the Heartland Presidential Forum in Des Moines, Iowa, an opportunity to talk with candidates about 'real issues facing real people in our communities' with attention to our values and policies of interconnection. You can watch a webcast of the forum on the Center for Community Change's Movement Vision Lab blog. Additionally, The Huffington Post linked to a Des Moines Register article on the event, and Adam Bink over at Open Left liveblogged summaries of statements made by each of the participating candidates: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Dodd, and Kucinich.

• The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog has reposted a Texas Observer article about the challenges faced in the expansion of drug courts in Texas.  While courts geared towards rehabilitation and redemption (rather than simply inflicting prison time) are much more effective than traditional courts in helping people overcome addiction, court practices vary widely according to the judge on the stand.

"Bennett and Leon Grizzard are the two judges who oversee Travis County's drug diversion court. They steer addicts into a court-supervised treatment program instead of prison. In the past decade, drug courts like the one in Travis County have successfully handled nonviolent defendants with drug and alcohol addictions—if success is defined as increasing public safety at the least cost to the taxpayer. People who complete drug-court programs rarely tumble back into substance abuse. According to four drug-court judges surveyed, about 10 percent of program graduates commit new crimes—a recidivism rate roughly one-fifth that of traditional probation routines. That means drug courts can ease the strain on overcrowded prisons and save taxpayer money. A study of the Dallas drug court by Southern Methodist University showed that every government dollar spent on diversion courts saved taxpayers more than $9.

Though criminal justice reform groups have advocated drug courts for years, Texas until recently lagged behind the rest of the country.

...

But as drug courts become more widespread, it appears that—like the narcotics they were created to fight—the courts can be abused. State and federal governments have instituted few regulations and set up no oversight. Judges have wide latitude to decide people's fates. In the hands of the right judges, the drug court model performs marvelously. Other judges appear to have trouble reconciling their punitive role with this new therapeutic one. The U.S. Department of Justice designed a set of guidelines and best practices—but they're the criminal justice equivalent of blueprints without building codes. The guidelines suggest that judges receive ongoing training and partner with treatment programs and community groups.

Because drug courts grow mostly from the local level, there is little standardization. Texas law broadly defines a drug court, but places hardly any restrictions on what judges can do. There is no oversight specifically for the drug courts. A recent case in Houston demonstrates the potential risks behind the courts' expansion. Judge K. Michael Mayes of Montgomery County is facing a federal lawsuit by a defendant who claims his treatment in Mayes' drug court was arbitrary and violated his rights to due process."

• Firedoglake has written a post on a bill under consideration in the Senate known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.  This Democratically-authored legislation, which has already passed the House by a large margin, has many progressives questioning its vague definition of 'ideologically-based violence,' arguing that this law would be a step towards a fascist state in which citizens can by prosecuted for 'thought crimes.' We must remember that democracy in America is dependent upon our ability to raise our voices, on our rights to free speech and fair elections.  Any law that seeks to contradict our capacity to participate fully in our communities is a violation of our human rights.

• In a related story, the Latina Lista blog has been the subject of a recent spam attack, bad enough that the site's commenting feature has temporarily been disabled.  Offering "Anything and Everything from a Latina Perspective," the blog often discusses issues of immigration, American history and culture.

Framing the Immigration Debate

• The ImmigrationProf Blog has revisited a 2006 essay by George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson about the language we use when discussing immigration.  Here's the abstract on the Rockridge Institute's website:

"Framing is at the center of the recent immigration debate. Simply framing it as about “immigration” has shaped its politics, defining what count as “problems” and constraining the debate to a narrow set of issues. The language is telling. The linguistic framing is remarkable: frames for illegal immigrant, illegal alien, illegals, undocumented workers, undocumented immigrants, guest workers, temporary workers, amnesty, and border security. These linguistic expressions are anything but neutral. Each framing defines the problem in its own way, and hence constrains the solutions needed to address that problem. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we will analyze the framing used in the public debate. Second, we suggest some alternative framing to highlight important concerns left out of the current debate. Our point is to show that the relevant issues go far beyond what is being discussed, and that acceptance of the current framing impoverishes the discussion."

• In other immigration news, Burger King is under fire for its refusal to join McDonald's and Taco Bell in an agreement to pay historically-underpaid migrant workers in Florida an extra penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Also, a federal court in Canada ruled in favor of a lawsuit challenging the Safe Third Country Agreement, which had designated the US as a "safe third country" for asylum-seekers, meaning "if they make it to the U.S. before entering Canada can be returned there."  The court found that "the United States fails to comply with Convention on Torture or Article 33 of the Refugee Convention and [therefore] the U.S./Canada safe third country agreement was flawed as there was no ongoing meaningful review mechanism."

• The DMI Blog points to this week's New York Times coverage of the successes of a re-entry program in Brooklyn which offers counseling, drug testing, and work and training programs to former inmates.  Re-entry programs not only support the value of redemption, or the right to a second chance, but they are also effective in helping people reintegrate into the community and remain there.  According to a recent study of the comAlert program,

"ComAlert graduates are less likely be re-arrested after leaving prison and much more likely to be employed than either program dropouts or members of the control group. Participants who complete the Doe Fund work-training component do even better. They have an employment rate of about 90 percent, somewhat higher than the ComAlert graduates generally and several times higher than the control group."

• Finally, Jack and Jill Politics offers further analysis of inequities in Wednesday's CNN/YouTube Republican debate, as compared with its Democratic counterpart:

Of 34 total questions aired, 24 were from white men (including 2 cartoon versions) in the GOP debate. That's 71%. For the Dem debate, counting was a little more challenging since one video aired combined video submissions from several people. Still I'd estimate 22 of 38 questions aired were from white men (I did not count the snowman as white because snow does not have an ethnicity) or 58%.

Further, there were 8 questions shown that featured African-Americans during the Democratic debate and a measly 2 in the GOP debate. Hmm.

Also, strikingly -- astonishingly, no questions whatsoever during the GOP debate on:

Healthcare in America
Katrina
Climate Change or Environment
Darfur
Iraq Troop Withdrawal
Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Resurgence of the Taliban
Racial Profiling
Voting Machines and Voting Rights
The Failure to Capture Osama bin Laden

As Elections Near, We Need to Hear Candidates Debate Community Values

• The Huffington Post offers an introduction to last night's CNN/YouTube debate for Republican presidential candidates, noting that "people from across the country submitted more than 3,500 videos posing questions" to the candidates, of which 40 were selected to be broadcast during the debates.  The Opportunity Agenda was among those submitting questions, with four videos created for the purposes of promoting community values in our nation's political debate.  Mike Connery has written two posts about the debate over at Future Majority, the first offering a comprehensive summary of the event and the second publicizing the fact that CNN did not coordinate with YouTube at all in order to select the forty questions that were aired.  By single-handedly shaping the content of the debate, CNN was able to bypass the debate's original intention, that of providing a voice to a diverse group of Americans.
  

• In other event news, the Heartland Presidential Form will be held this Saturday December 1 in Des Moines, Iowa, only weeks before the Iowa caucus.  Five of the Democratic presidential candidates will be in attendance at the forum, the focus of which will not be on specific issues but on progressive vision and values.  According to the website:

The Iowa Heartland Presidential Forum is part of a new nationwide Campaign for Community Values Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, the Center for Community Change is - and hundreds of grassroots partner groups - are coordinating this groundbreaking effort to challenge the "go it alone" mentality that has dominated politics and build a new politics for the common good.

• In preparation for the Heartland Forum, The Opportunity Agenda collaborated with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement to write an opinion piece which was published in today's Des Moines Register.  Entitled 'Activist: We need to hear candidates debate community values,' the piece begins:

'Tis the season for presidential politics, and with it, the debate over what values propel voters to the ballot box.

A recent debate in Florida claimed to represent and display the interests of so-called "values voters." The dissection of the nation's "moral values" took up a good bit of ink following the 2004 elections. And we're all familiar with the "family values" that guided policy throughout the '80s and '90s. But in all this talk of values, why are so many core American values consistently missing?

Instead of concentrating on people's individual moral decisions, or their family life, we should focus on our collective values, the ways we can move forward together and the policies that work toward the common good. We need to reintroduce to the debate the ideals of equality, opportunity and fairness. And we need to acknowledge that our individual stories and circumstances add up to a national community best positioned to solve our problems together. In short, we should be talking about our community values.

The Katrina of Public Health

• The Huffington Post published an opinion piece yesterday on health equity entitled The Katrina of Public Health. Author Jayne Lyn Stahl begins:

Some alarming, awe-inspiring, news today out of Washington, D.C., and no, it's not Trent Lott's resignation. The results of a study, the first of its kind, of HIV cases in the nation's capital are out, and they show that AIDS has reached "epidemic" proportions in D.C. (WaPo)

In the five-year test period in question, ending in 2006, while African-Americans comprise roughly 60 percent of the city's population, they account for more than 80 percent of the more than 3,000 HIV cases that have been identified. Ninety percent of women residents who tested positive for the disease are African-American. And, nearly 40 percent of reported cases were among heterosexuals showing, in the words of a District administrator, that "HIV is everybody's disease" in D.C.

The presence of an epidemic of this magnitude so close to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can't help but make one wonder if federal policy, or non-policy is at the nucleus of this health catastrophe. Yet, where is the public outrage that a campaign of misinformation, disinformation, or information/education blockade should claim the same demographic casualties as that of Hurricane Katrina.

Stahl continues to cite the government policies that have contributed to DC's epidemic, public health negligence compounded by the absence of needle exchange programs in the area:

On this administration's watch, more than $100 million in grants have been allocated for abstinence-only education programs. The president pressured the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to eliminate, from its Web site, anything that might promote the efficacy of using condoms to prevent STDs, and AIDS. Roughly 90 percent of the $15 billion set aside for fighting HIV globally has been made available to domestic groups for use in their ongoing worldwide campaign to promote abstinence, and to discourage the use of condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

• The Republic of T has highlighted a recent decision by Florida's Palm Beach Community College to provide health insurance coverage for employees' pets but not their domestic partners.  With the rationale that “Your pet is a member of your family — his quality of life is important to you,” the college trustees have provided employees with a 5 percent discount and group rates on a range of health insurance plans for their pets, covering "wellness care, vaccinations, X-rays, surgery and hospitalization (although pre-existing conditions may not be covered)." Yet in August the college opted not to extend the same affordable benefits to same-sex partners of their employees, despite the fact that it would not have cost them anything to do so.

• Immigration News Daily discussed a new trend in which foreign consulates have begun providing health care services for immigrants in the US without medical insurance. Both the Salvador and Mexican consulates in Washington, DC are offering medical services, and are expanding the health programming around the country in collaboration with the Hispanic Institute for Blindness Prevention.

• Immigration News Daily has also reported on a new initiative by Latino organizations in the US to register one million new Latino voters before the 2008 elections.  The coalition is hoping that current affairs such as the health care, education, the Iraq war and immigration will drive many voters to the polls for the first time.
  

• Latina Lista has posted about Mexican TV network Azteca America's decision to produce and include English classes in its US programming.  The Spanish-language network does not intend to imply support for an English-only America but to recognize the benefits of a multilingual society. According to Luis J. Echarte, chairman of Fundación Azteca America and the Azteca America network:

Spanish-language television is often a first-stop and point-of-reference for information for recently arrived immigrants. Our community looks to us for guidance on immigration, legal changes, and natural disasters, to name a few examples.

There’s no doubt that our community can better assimilate themselves and increase their economic and political power with increased linguistic skills.

US Military Asking Wounded Soldiers to Return Signing Bonuses

• Mirror on America reports that the US military has been asking soldiers wounded in combat to return the signing bonuses they received upon joining the armed forces. As the military is exhausting those Americans who are willing to sign up for duty, it has begun offering up to $30,000 in signing bonuses which it has then asked to be refunded when soldiers who have lost limbs, hearing or eyesight are no longer able to serve out their commitments.  In the case where America's foreign policies are proving responsible for the destruction of its own citizens, our country should honor and respect these sacrifices with additional support from the community, not less.

• Ezekiel Edwards at the DMI Blog has written about a client and personal friend who was able to triumph over a drug and alcohol addiction that had brought her into contact with the criminal justice system.  Edwards uses her example to illustrate the difficulties people face when they are trying to make a new start:

It took her a number of months to find any sort of work. The road to employment is difficult enough as a poor African-American woman with little formal education, currently taking GED classes, but with a criminal record, it becomes outright impassable. She finally found a part-time job working four hours a day, five days a week, at $9 an hour. She arrived 20 minutes early every day. After six weeks, she was fired without explanation. Now she is looking for work again.

She cannot afford her rent, and is looking for public housing, but, again, her criminal record (all for nonviolent offenses) limits her options. She is trying to do the right thing, trying to become gainfully employed, trying to further her education, trying to find affordable housing, trying to spend time with her daughter, and, most of all, trying not to drown herself in the bottle by remaining in her program, but society is not making it easy, or even somewhere in between easy and frighteningly difficult, to move forward. Even after all she has gone through, there is no relief in sight.

• The Pro Inmigrant blog has posted about a new coalition between the American Jewish Committee and a group of Mexican-American advocates to fight discrimination and demand comprehensive immigration reform in the US. Working with the idea that Jewish Americans who have successfully assimilated can and should help today's immigrant populations, the AJC just co-sponsored a three-day workshop with Mexico's Institute for Mexicans Abroad. According to Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhán, whose grandfather came to Mexico from Armenia,

"Now, more than ever, we must underscore a self-evident truth: Migrants are not a threat to the security of the US...They are important actors in the fabric of what makes America great."

• Along this same theme, the ImmigrationProf Blog has linked to a new report by UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri which found that "high immigration cities experienced higher wage and housing price growth. Immigration had a positive productivity effect on natives overall, but important distributional effects. Highly educated natives enjoyed the largest benefits while the less educated did not gain (but did not lose much either)."

• The 'Just News' blog quotes an AP article discussing the fact that a serious backlog in the processing of citizenship applications may prevent thousands of residents from voting in the 2008 presidential elections. Hopefully this media attention will encourage immigration authorities to expedite the process so that all Americans will have a voice in electing our national leaders.

A Real Values Debate

• Alan Jenkins' newest piece is live on TomPaine.com. Entitled 'A Real Values Debate,' the opinion begins:

"Progressives have long been criticized for talking issues and constituencies at the expense of vision and values. Linguist George Lakoff has argued for years that progressives have ceded the moral high ground to their detriment. And Thomas Frank has documented how conservatives tell a larger story that connects with working people at a values level, even while undermining their economic interests.

That critique has never been fully accurate. The continuing human rights movements led by people of color, women, gay people, and immigrants have always been rooted in the values of freedom, equality, dignity and opportunity. As Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has said, "there's a reason why Martin Luther King Jr.'s greatest speech was not called 'I have a complaint.'" The modern environmental movement, too, speaks not only of our individual interests but also of our moral responsibility as stewards of the earth and its inhabitants.

But it is also true that progressive political discourse has increasingly moved away from a discussion of shared national values and toward a patchwork of issues and narrow policy fixes. That dynamic has certainly played out this presidential election season, with last month's "Values Voters Summit" priming candidates' commitment to conservative values while progressives largely haggled over the details of policy proposals.

But that's about to change. On December 1, a coalition of Iowa social justice groups will host the Heartland Presidential Forum: Community Values in Action, in Des Moines, Iowa. Just four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, it will be a presidential forum focused not on specific issues, but on progressive vision and values."

• Two other upcoming events are worthy of mention. The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is hosting a conference next week in Columbus, Ohio called Toward a Transformative Agenda Around Race. There's also a Ten-Mile Human Rights Walk happening in San Jose, California, on Sunday December 9th.

• The Inteligenta Indiĝena Indigenismo Novaĵoservo blog has reposted a Crooks and Liars piece about a Washington state assisted living facility that is evicting its residents that are on Medicaid.  Unlike other states, Washington does not have a law to protect its vulnerable senior citizens against such decisions by profit-minded nursing home corporations.
  

• Prometheus 6 has posted about a New York Times article on the increasing presence of international medical crews providing health services in the US to the 47 million people without medical insurance, or 15 percent of the American population. One such service known as Remote Area Medical, or RAM, works most often in "Guyana,  India,  Tanzania  and Haiti," but has been noted for their expeditions in rural Virginia, where members of the community have begun lining up at 3am in order to be seen by medical workers.

• In election news, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is proposing a plan to make community colleges free of cost for American high school graduates, a move that would greatly increase opportunities for many of our young people.  Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has indicated his support for a 'virtual' border fence run by high tech surveillance, a policy which would not address the need for more comprehensive reform of our immigration and trade policies.

• Finally, Jane Smiley has a great piece on the Huffington Post entitled 'Why Human Rights are More Important than National Security.' Referring to recent commentary by Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, Smiley asserts that human rights are historically American values:

"Human rights are defined, most notably in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They are defined because the Founding Fathers realized that if they were not defined, they would be more likely to be abrogated or lost entirely. The Founding Fathers understood the temptation on the part of governments to give and remove human rights arbitrarily, because they had experienced such things before the Revolutionary War -- in the Stamp Act, in the quartering of British soldiers on American households, and in illegal searches and seizures, in no taxation without representation. They recognized that although British Law customarily acknowledged various human rights, it was essential to name, codify, and write them down to make it less likely that they could be taken away."

All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time

• Alan Jenkins and Brian Smedley are the editors of the newly-released book "All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time," also mentioned by the ACS Blog.  Jenkins explained their work in this week's TomPaine article on "The Vision Thing":

"One year from now, our country will choose a new president. And while the candidates have debated extensively on individual issues like health care, the war, the economy, and the environment, they have offered far less in terms of a positive, overarching vision for our country that both addresses and transcends individual issues.

While candidates' positions on the issues of the day are crucially important, it's equally important to take their measure on what George H. W. Bush called "the vision thing": the clarity of ideals, values, and principles that inspire and shape a president's approach to a broad range of issues, including ones that no one could have anticipated on the day he or she was elected.

A new book by The Opportunity Agenda offers such a vision on the domestic front; one to which we hope the presidential contenders of both parties will respond. Not surprisingly, that vision centers on opportunity, the idea that everyone deserves a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential. In the book "All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time," a dozen leading thinkers paint a picture of what opportunity means in our society, where we are falling short, and what must be done to instigate opportunity for all. Their vision bridges myriad issues—education, employment, housing, criminal justice, immigration, health care, human rights—and disciplines—public health, economics, criminology, law, sociology, psychology, education, social work. The authors provide a clear and hopeful path to the future, a wake-up call to our nation's current and future leaders, and concrete solutions that promise to carry us forward.

As I've written before in this column, opportunity is not just a set of national conditions, but a body of national values: economic security, mobility, a voice in decisions that affect us, a chance to start over after missteps or misfortune, and a shared sense of responsibility for each other-as members of a common society. Analyzing their own and others' research through the lens of those values, the authors of All Things Being Equal warn that opportunity is increasingly at risk for all Americans and, therefore, for our country as a whole. They find that many communities are facing multiple barriers to opportunity that cannot be overcome through personal effort alone. But, most importantly, they find that we have it in our power as a country to turn those trends around."

• The Immigration Equality blog has posted about yesterday's confirmation of Michael Mukasey as US Attorney General, after a long struggle in the Senate Judiciary Committee over his unwillingness to label waterboarding as illegal and torturous. The blog also notes that his position on the matter is being interpreted by some as a way of insulating the Department of Justice from future lawsuits or charges against government officials for human rights violations.



• The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog reposted a recent New York Times article on the Surge Seen in Number of Homeless Veterans.  While many veterans have ended up the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder which often correlates with homelessness, it's unusual that veterans would show up in shelters as soon after deployment as have the most recent batch after duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Sexual abuse is another factor which correlates with homelessness -- the article states that "roughly 40 percent of the hundreds of homeless female veterans of recent wars have said they were sexually assaulted by American soldiers while in the military."


• Finally, the Too Sense blog posted a graph of the racial diversity in campaign staff among the top 2008 presidential candidates.  While Clinton's staff is the most diverse, Giuliani's staff is 100% white.

Writers Guild Fighting for Fair Pay While TV Networks Threaten To Cut Jobs

• There has been a lot of discussion on The Huffington Post about the Writers Guild of America strike that started on Monday, as TV networks and screenwriters failed to reach an agreement before the end of their previous contract. Union members are essentially demanding that networks begin to distribute profits from new media airings of their work, but have made little headway in negotiations on the issue. In a move that will endanger the financial security of many Americans, some networks are now threatening large-scale firings of their employees. According to an opinion in the LA Times:

"A day after Hollywood's writers went out on strike, the major studios are hitting back with plans to suspend scores of long-term deals with television production companies, jeopardizing the jobs of hundreds of rank-and-file employees whose names never appear in the credits.

Assistants, development executives and production managers will soon be out of work, joining their better-paid bosses who opted to sacrifice paychecks as members of the Writers Guild of America. At some studios, the first wave of letters are going out today, hitting writer-producers whose companies don't currently have shows in production."

• Migra Matters has done an interesting post on the results of yesterday's election in Virginia, where the Republican party had chosen to make an immigration crackdown its biggest campaign selling point.  Curiously, the Democrats appear to have gained control of the state Senate, leading the author to advise us with respect to upcoming national elections: "If the Republicans were looking at immigrant-bashing as a silver bullet to stem the national tide against them, surely tonight's results in Virginia will should give them second thoughts."

• The House of Representatives has begun debate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a measure to extend federal workplace protections to those targeted for their sexual orientation.  Pam's House Blend discusses the fact that a coalition of civil and gay rights organizations announced their support yesterday for the current version of the bill which does not include the same protections for transgender individuals, thus leaving the LGBT community divided.

• The Sentencing Law and Policy blog featured an editorial in today's New York Times about the Second Chance Act, a bill which has had bipartisan support in Congress since 2004 but has yet to move through the legislature. The Times describes the need for the government policies to support redemption, or the idea that we all deserve a second chance:

"If past patterns hold true, more than half of the 650,000 prisoners released this year will be back behind bars by 2010. With the prison population exploding and the price of incarceration now topping $60 billion a year, states are rightly focusing on ways to reduce recidivism. Congress can give these efforts a boost by passing the Second Chance Act, which would provide crucial help to people who have paid their debts to society....

The Second Chance Act would add to what the country knows about the re-entry process by establishing a federal re-entry task force, along with a national resource center to collect and disseminate information about proven programs....  The programs necessary to help former prisoners find a place in society do not exist in most communities. The Second Chance Act would help to create those programs by providing money, training, technical assistance — and a Congressional stamp of approval."

• Last up, blogger Sudy is working on a video project to "feature, support, and highlight the work done by feminists of color."  She's included a preview of the video on her site which has been cross-posted by Vox et Machina.

The Whole Story on Race

• A few days late, but TomPaine.com has posted Alan Jenkins' newest piece, The Whole Story on Race. Alan begins:

Opportunity in America is a two-way street. Each of us has a responsibility to do our best, pursuing whatever pathways to success are available to us. And our society has a responsibility to keep those pathways open and accessible to everyone, irrespective of race, gender, or other aspects of what we look like or where we come from.

That balance of personal responsibility and self-help on one hand, while demanding fairness and equity on the other, has always been crucial to the African-American quest for opportunity. That's why Malcolm X and the Million Man March continue to occupy such important places in the black consciousness, and why civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League continue to promote educational and self-help programs along with advocacy and anti-discrimination efforts.

Given that reality, it's disappointing that the media coverage of Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's new book, Come on, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, seems to be telling only half the story when it comes to the state of black America.

• Rachel's Tavern has brought our attention to a recent New York Times article which discusses the recent string of noose incidents in the New York metropolitan area. The article includes quotes by blog author and sociology professor Rachel Sullivan and by Carmen of Racialicious and New Demographic.

• There has been a good amount of discussion in the past couple weeks about the election of Piyush "Bobby" Jindal as the next governor of Louisiana, as Jindal is not only the first governor of color since Reconstruction but is the child of Indian Immigrants.  While blogs such as RaceWire have asked valid questions about Jindal's politics, arguing that his policies are culturally self-effacing and will prove damaging to people of color, other immigration blogs such as the Immigrants in USA Blog have praised Jindal's election as a sign of progress in the process of accepting and integrating immigrants into our communities, as well as demonstrating the opportunities for success in our country. Jindal is quoted by ABC News as saying: "My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana."

• The Border Line and LA Times report that presidential candidate Bill Richardson recently spoke on the need to change our policies towards Latin America. As a Latino and former ambassador the the UN, Richardson advocated for both improved diplomatic relations and comprehensive immigration reform that will allow for a pathway to citizenship in order to enable the same sort of mobility that provided Bobby Jindal to opportunity to assume the Louisiana governorship.  Along the same topic, Migra Matters has just published a piece on the need to examine how our trade policies such as NAFTA are driving the very migration into the United States that many Americans are fighting.