Puppet President

from Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1045676--james-story-of-blacks-in-u-s-is-bathed-in-sugar-and-vinegar

The U.S. Census Bureau says 12.5 per cent of the general American populace lived in poverty in 2007. For blacks, the poverty rate was twice as high, and three times higher than whites, with the gap widening.

African-Americans still earn about 20 percent less in weekly wages than whites.

According to Congresswoman Maxine Waters 40 percent of young black men under the age of 30 do not have a job.

Three in four black children born in the U.S. this year will be born to a single mom household and such homes often are a life sentence to poverty. Home ownership remains a cruel dream for 56 per cent.

Unemployment, death, poverty and disease rates are higher for blacks than white Americans.

One in five African Americans has no health insurance, compared to 12 per cent of whites. Meanwhile, blacks are fatter, eating less healthy and account for nearly half the one million AIDS victims in America, while representing about 12 per cent of the population. Some 60 per cent of all women with AIDS are black.

The share of blacks with four-year college degrees remains only two-thirds the level for whites. The graduation rate for NBA college players is 56 per cent for blacks and 84 per cent for whites. 6.3 per cent of the country’s physicians are black but rates would have to double to reflect and match the population.

Some statistics show blacks are six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. In 2005, black men were 14 per cent of the U.S. population and 40 per cent of the prison population.

The growing black 'middle class' is a missed paycheque from disaster. “They have no safety net, no inherited wealth, no money in the bank so they are living from paycheque to paycheque. One third of black families have zero wealth or negative wealth. For whites it’s 10 per cent,” Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, based at Ohio State University.

“In 1963 we were un-free,” Rev. Jesse Jackson told reporters “Today, we are unequal.

Cornel West, a professor at Princeton University, in 2009 warned: "if Barack Obama ends up being another black mascot of these oligarchs we’ll be in a world of trouble.”
Since then, billions in funds for the Wall St bail-outs and ever more concessions on health and welfare reforms. Now Prof. West accuses Obama of West being a “black mascot of Wall St. oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. . ..”

'Nuff said.

The Chicago Class Divide

For most of African-American history, class divisions (forged during centuries of slavery, when slaveowners were happy to divide the loyalties of their chattel) have bedeviled attempts to unify the black community around a common strategy. In black Chicago, these tensions have smoldered for many years, flaring occasionally. The contrast between the poor West Side and the better-off South Side has become a crude geographical surrogate for black Chicago’s stark class divisions. Disadvantaged blacks have really been hard hit by changes in the economy. Meanwhile, trained and educated blacks are benefiting from changes in the economy. William Julius Wilson said in an interview on PBS’s Frontline in 1998. “Take a look at black income today. If you divide black income into quintiles, the top quintile has now secured almost 50 percent of the total black income, which is a record.” This skewed distribution of income continued throughout the 2000s

70 percent of all North Lawndale men between the ages of 18 and 45 have a criminal record, a figure almost three times higher than the national average. Sharon Dixon, the former alderman of the 24th Ward, which includes North Lawndale, says the community has the state’s highest homicide rate and the third-highest overall crime rate. his neighborhood, together with adjacent West Side communities like East and West Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and Austin, has a 52-percent youth unemployment rate—the highest in the entire nation.

“When we began the struggle for community development, we kept running into roadblocks set up by the very people who were supposed to be helping us. We began to realize that the death and destruction in our community could not have happened without the black leadership elite’s cooperation.” explains Martavius (Mark) Carter, a resident of Chicago’s distressed North Lawndale neighborhood and a founding member of the Voice of the Ex-Offender (VOTE), a group created to empower black people who were once imprisoned He declares “The black elite are playing with fire if they think they can keep fooling the masses of black people with their deceptive rhetoric. Things are getting hot out here and pretty soon that heat is going to light some fuses.” He is convinced that churches, businesses, fraternal groups, civic and social service organizations, and other established black institutions could more effectively plan strategies and marshal their collective wherewithal and resources to better serve the community. They don’t do this, he believes, because they have their own class interest at heart. The black middle-class seems to regard ex-offenders and other low-income African Americans as another race altogether. “In Africa, I suppose they would say different tribes, but here they treat us like a different race.”

Black American Poverty

We read that the wealth gap between whites and African Americans has expanded dramatically. A new study by Brandeis University in Massachusetts Institute on Assets and Social Policy reveals that income equality does not always lead to wealth equality when it comes to race. The wealth gap between black and white families and individuals being tracked in the study more than quadrupled over the course of a generation, and that the middle-income white families in the study accumulated a higher net worth than high-income African-Americans.

The escalating gap, according to the study researchers, was largely caused the fact that white families have historically had more wealth to pass down. Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

"About one in every four white families inherit money, and their average inheritance is $10,000" said Thomas Shapiro, director of the IASP and author of "The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality." "That provides a huge head start. Less than 8 percent of African-American families inherit wealth, and when they do, the average inheritance is $900. Even when African Americans do everything right - get an education and work hard at well-paying jobs - they cannot achieve the wealth of their white peers in the workforce, and that translates into very different life chances”

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000. A quarter of black families have no assets at all.Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true. "African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The report attributes part of the cause to the "powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes. African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die" said Shapiro. "In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we've done we know that there's more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that's not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems".

Class is determined, not by the size of income or colour of skin but by their ownership or non-ownership of the means of production and distribution. Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The fact that these are examples of the lower strata of working class existence should not obscure the fact that poverty, in some measure, is a problem for the entire class. The worst poverty is usually suffered by those who for some reason - unemployment, old age, sickness are unable to get a job and a decent wage. Or as this report explains , an unwelcomed legacy of discrimination and racism from the past. History will affect peoples chances in life. Chronic poverty can be passed on from generation to generation

Racism in Immigration Detention Centres

Widespread racism was exposed inside Britain's immigration removal centres last night in an official report.
The Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA) said its detainees had been called "black bastards", "donkeys" and "animals" and described the atmosphere as "distressing and turbulent" at one centre and "tense" at another.

It launched its official audit of racism - published yesterday - after a TV documentary broadcast in 2005 uncovered racist abuse at the Oakington removal centre in Cambridgeshire.

The agency found the worst racism at Harmondsworth, a large centre near Heathrow .
"Regular taunting of detainees by some officers goes unchallenged," the BIA report found. Repeated patterns of alleged racist incidents were missed by the in-house investigation process, it added. There were even "staff on staff" racial problems at Harmondsworth between colleagues

At Scotland's only centre, Dungavel in Strathaven, South Lanarkshire some residents felt they were denied access to the kitchen "as a result of bias or the racist attitude of staff".

Ex-prisoners awaiting deportation are filling many of the UK's other nine removal centres. At one, Colnbrook, which, like Harmondsworth, is near Heathrow, they told auditors they would rather be in jail than in immigration detention.

Health Racism

Emergency room doctors are prescribing strong narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities are less likely to get them than whites, a new study finds.

Even for the severe pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites. Minorities were slightly more likely than whites to get aspirin, ibuprofen and similar drugs for pain. The analysis of more than 150,000 emergency room visits over 13 years found differences in prescribing by race in both urban and rural hospitals, in all U.S. regions and for every type of pain.

Linda Simoni-Wastila of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Pharmacy said the race gap finding may reveal some doctors' suspicions that minority patients could be drug abusers lying about pain to get narcotics. The irony, she said, is that blacks are the least likely group to abuse prescription drugs.

"If anybody argues they have no social biases that sway clinical practice, they have not been thoughtful about the issue or they're not being honest with themselves," said Dr. Thomas L. Fisher, an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center

Together towards a new world

The Irish diaspora consists at the top estimate and interpretation contains over 80 million people, which is over fourteen times the population of the island of Ireland itself (5.9 million in 2006). The governement of Ireland defines it in legal terms: the Irish diaspora are those of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children also grand children in some cases ), who are Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. . Under this legal definition, the Irish diaspora is considerably smaller than popular belief - some 3 million persons, of whom 1.2 million are Irish-born emigrants.

Therefore one would think that the Irish would understand the need for others to leave their lands and seek out new shores . The i read this BBC report with interest .

Siobhan O'Donahue , director of a drop-in centre that looks after immigrants in Dublin , describes it thus :-

"We saw them essentially as units of labour. We didn't see them as people with social and community needs. "

An economic boom turned a relatively-poor, agricultural nation into a "Celtic Tiger". To fuel this growth, Ireland needed to allow in workers from the new Eastern European members of the European Union . The result is that now, more than one in seven people in Ireland was born outside the country. Ireland invited immigrants to come and work, without giving any thought to their wider impact. The planning and infrastructure wasn't put in place . Nobody has sought fit to deal with the social needs : schooling, housing, access to healthcare.

The Education Department , for instance , had belatedly realised there were not enough places for immigrants' children . They had been turned down by the local schools. The result was that they ended up in an emergency facility, one that caters almost exclusively for boys and girls of African or Arab origin.

"I would rather my children knew how Irish children live," says one mother there, disappointed to see her son going to school only with other black children.

The Herald carries an article that Scotland needs to attract 20,000 immigrants a year to counter a declining population and to save the economy from collapse over the next 30 years, a government-backed report warns . The alternative is an impoverished future, with a shrinking younger workforce supporting an ageing population. It predicts that by 2017 the country's population may fall below five million for the first time since the 1940s.

The report says "In the last few years, Scotland has recorded clear net in-migration gains. Maintaining or improving this current balance of migration could prove key to addressing the challenges posed by Scotland's ageing population and projected population decline."

Yet Scotland follows the example of Ireland .

Michael Luby, national sales manager at the Big Issue

"It's unbelievable," he said "we're seeing Romanian people come over here expecting work, only to find that they don't get access to the housing, benefits and services any other people get..."

An Edinburgh landlord has been profiting from housing over 50 Romanian migrants in squalid conditions . One of the occupants described the conditions as “misery” while others made allegations of mistreatment .

Yet the mass media choose to concentrate on perpetuating urban myths about the arrival of foreign workers , furthering divisions and mistrust . Eastern European bar staff and doormen are now among the most common victims of racial abuse and assault in Edinburgh.

In 2006 some 400,000 people left Britain, more than half of whom were UK citizens. Britain is becoming a country of revolving doors rather than overflowing floodgates .

The Roma - Europe's poor of the poor

Further to an earlier blog here , Europe's roughly 10 million Roma remain the poorest of the poor, often migrating abroad in search of work .

The Czech Republic guilty of discriminating against Roma children by placing them in special schools for the mentally handicapped. In Slovakia at least 90% of Roma children attend special schools for the mentally retarded. In Hungary, several local courts have ruled in favour of Roma children who sued the state for discrimination, for placing them in special schools. In Romania and Bulgaria up to one-third of Roma children were not in school, a proportion which reaches 80% in Bosnia-Hercegovina. A report from Amnesty International criticised shortcomings in primary education in Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia which it said "deprive Romani children of the chance of fulfilling their true potential".

"Although a lot of improvements have been made in the education system, the level of illiteracy in the Roma community is still high and 35-40% of Roma children don't have access to school," Magda Matache, executive director for Romani Criss, a Roma human rights group says

About one million Roma children "remain invisible" in South-East Europe, without documents or adequate healthcare, a Unicef report says. 50,000 Roma children live as refugees in Germany.

The Roma suffer three fold-prejudice in the UK. Firstly because they are Gypsies, secondly because they are often asylum seekers or refugees and thirdly because many are Romanian.

The Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu points out that it was the Romanians who forced the Roma into a life of misery and delinquency - by enslaving them.

"For centuries they could be bought and sold, families were torn apart, children taken from their mothers, women separated from their men. The young women were generally raped by their owners and the 'flock of crows', as they were called, was the target of general contempt and discrimination. One of the voivodes, or provincial governors, used to have them climb trees and then shot them down with arrows. He called it crow-hunting. Tied to one place and kept like animals, the gypsies multiplied more quickly in the Romanian principalities than anywhere else in Europe. Therefore we only have ourselves to blame for creating the gypsy problem. It is our historical guilt. ... We are appalled when other countries perceive us as a nation of criminals, but we see the gypsies in exactly the same way." he said

The American Dream - Whites Only

Black Americans are failing to climb the social ladder, while a worrying number born into the middle classes are now actually poorer than their parents, according to a study .

The report found blacks were missing out on a cherished American dream that their children will be economically better off.

"Children from middle- and upper middle-class black families experience a generational drop in income that is in sharp contrast to the traditional American expectation that each generation will do better than the one that came before it,"

Two out of three Americans who were children in 1968 grow up to have higher income than their parentsbut less than a third of black children born in the middle classes do better financially than their parents.
Being born into a financially secure home is no guarantee of dying in one, with blacks enjoying significantly less economic protection than white peers .

"A startling 45 percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom income quintile, while only 16 percent of white children born to parents in the middle make this descent,"

Median black family incomes in 2004 were $35,000, compared with $60,000 for whites of similar age, and almost one-quarter of blacks live below federally defined poverty lines, three times more than whites. There has been the decline in the relative economic well-being of black men , which got worse between 1974 and 2004. In fact, black men now in their 30s earn roughly 12 percent less than their fathers' generation.

"In terms of absolute, relative and integrated mobility measures, white children have substantially more upward mobility than black children of comparable incomes,"

When will it ever end ?

I have previously drawn attention to the plight of the Australian Aborigines here and celebrated one of their rare victories here . The recent racist plans from Howard left such a bad taste in my mouth that i refrained from commenting . A socialist view on them can be found at the Official SPGB Blog .

But I now read that the Australian government are now deploying troops to be stationed in the Northern Territories outback to enforce Howard's crack-down . The first soldiers will start arriving in remote desert settlements in the sparsely populated Northern Territory starting Wednesday, backed up by police, social workers, and government officials. One of the 60 communities to which troops and police reinforcements will be deployed is Mutitjulu, located in the shadow of Uluru, also called Ayers Rock.

"I fear there will be another case of Stolen Generation children because they will be taken away from their mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles," said Aborigine Barbara Swan from the Tangangera Council in Alice Springs . The Stolen Generation refers to the forced removal of Aboriginal children from remote communities so they could be brought up in white homes. The failed assimilation policy ran for decades until the late 1960s. The movie Rabbit-Proof Fence depicts true events of those legally kidnapped youngsters .

"We believe that this government is using child sexual abuse as the Trojan horse to resume total control of our lands," said Pat Turner, who represents 13 central Australian community groups

Howard said he sent soldiers to Afghanistan to save Afghans from Afghans , troops to Iraq to save Iraqis from Iraqis , now he sends the army to save Austrialian Aborigines from Australian Aborigines . It is no wonder we all question the sincerity of his motives .

The Roma

An article in The Herald reminds us that the Holocaust was not limited to the Jewish population .

An estimated 1.5 million were murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, an episode that has come to be known in the Romani language as the Porraimos (the "devouring"), or Romani holocaust.

In communist eastern Europe after the war, the state set about targeting Roma, with social policies aimed to settle them forcibly and to eradicate "anti-social traits".

The number of Roma in the whole of Europe could be between 10 million and 12 million, according to a recent EU report .

The history of the Roma in Europe is a tragic one. Migrating from northern India to Europe in the eleventh century, most Roma live today in eastern and central Europe, particularly in Romania and Bulgaria, with many large communities in other European countries. In the parts of the Ottoman empire today located in modern-day Romania, they have endured persecution and enslavement at the hands of landowners and clergy since the middle ages, being emancipated from slavery only in the mid-nineteenth century.

Despite efforts to socially engineer their assimilation, the vast majority of Roma remained marginalised and discriminated against by both state and society. Anti-Roma racism across Europe remained rampant, and some governments in western Europe organised programmes of forced sterilisation of Roma women .
In many countries, segregation in schooling and housing is still a fact of life, social attitudes towards Roma are poisonous and pogroms are not unknown. Negative social attitudes and disastrous state policies toward the Roma has resulted in the reinforcement of the very conditions that contribute to their continued marginalisation, including low literacy levels, poverty, poor housing, poor health and low life expectancy.

Throughout their history the Roma have had good reason to be mistrustful of authorities, and have survived at the absolute margins of society.

Selling the Big Issue in Scotland may not be everyones idea of escape but for those Roma seen on Scottish streets doing just that , it is may be a lot better than where they have come from .It would be nice to be minded of that and how they have suffered in the past and become the forgotten victims of Nazism .

One law for one , another law for another

Although all Black, Hispanic and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police in America , it was the blacks and Hispanics who were much more likely to be searched and arrested, a federal study found . And that the police were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter, whether at a traffic stop or elsewhere, according to the Justice Department. The conclusion is consistent with those found in a similar study of police-public contacts in 2002 .

Traffic stops are the most frequent way police interact with the public, accounting for 41 percent of all contacts. An estimated 17.8 million drivers were stopped in 2005.

Blacks (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent).

Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected to force or the threat of force by police officers. People interviewed described police hitting, kicking, pushing, grabbing, pointing a gun or spraying pepper spray at them or threatening to do so. More than four out of five felt the force used was excessive