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Demand That Governor Granholm Declare a State Of Economic Emergency In Michigan To Stop Foreclosures, Evictions & Utility Shut-offs For The Unemployed

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 12 NOON

STATE OF MICHIGAN BUILDING, 3054 W. GRAND BLVD, DETROIT (formerly the GM building in the New Center)

According to a November 22, 2010 Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency statement, 162,000 people in Michigan have already exhausted their jobless benefits this year from January through November 2010.  181,500 more will exhaust their unemployment benefits from December 2010 through April 2011 if Congress doesn’t approve an extension of federal benefits this week. 

The loss of unemployment benefits has already led to massive foreclosures, evictions and utility shut-offs.  While the state has received $500 million in federal funds for the Helping Hardest Hit Homeowners Program to keep the unemployed in their homes, the major banks have refused to participate, and the state has failed to develop a plan for implementation despite announcing the program last July.  Less than 200 unemployed workers have received the aid they were promised.  With the federal cut-off of unemployment benefits, tens of thousands more unemployed workers will become ineligible for assistance. 

 Join us to demand that Governor Granholm declare a State of Economic Emergency for the Unemployed in Michigan, and use her executive authority under the law to place an immediate moratorium to halt foreclosures, evictions and utility shut-offs for the unemployed, while the government figures out how to insure the survival of hundreds of thousands of Michiganders.

Demand that Congress immediately pass the federal extension of unemployment benefits, and not link this program to provide minimal relief to the unemployed to providing tax breaks for the richest Americans.

MORATORIUM NOW!

COALITION TO STOP  FORECLOSURES, EVICTIONS, & UTILITY SHUT-OFFS

313-887-4344  www.moratorium-mi.org

No to Bobb/Durhal bills, demand debt moratorium

Breaking news: request  from DPS activists to attend Dec. 1 Lansing house committe meeting,

The House Education Committee is scheduled to convene on Wednesday, December 1 at 9 am.  The notice says the purpose is for whatever business may be brought before it, does not specify any bill, which is the normal routine. 

Our concern is that the Bobb/Flanagan takeover bills HB 6576-6579 will be introduced before the committee to be forwarded to the full House for a vote.

Rep. David Nathan is the only Detroit legislator on the House Education Committee. Based on a call from a trustworthy person that Nathan was supporting the bills, Russ talked to him this morning, He said that he does not support the bills in their current form but he will be meeting with Bobb later this morning to see if changes can be made to the bill. 

While this bill offers DPS up to $219 million for debt elimination using tobacco money, it still leaves the $108 million in Bobb’s debt from the last fiscal year. That amount grows daily in this fiscal year. DPS will still be kept in debt bondage to the State of Michigan (which created most of the debt) for years under this bill, with new powers to the state to control our district. This bill does not appear to be a compromise tradeoff to relieve our debt, but using debt as a means to permanently takeover DPS, while giving Bobb and Flanagan more pots of money to spend. 

We must be there to let Lansing know that we are alert to this latest attempt to undermine accountability to the voters, impose state control and that we are determined to fight it. Please respond to aurora917@gmail.com if you can go. Based on the responses, a transportation plan will be developed. Please indicate if you need transportation. Also indicate if you want your name added to a list supporting the call to lobby against this takeover legislation. 

FYI, a critique of the bill sent out earlier, with a short addition, is attached at Bobb-HB6576 arguments.  Please send out as widely as possible.

Helen Moore, Chris White, Debra Taylor, Ernest Johnson, Aurora Harris, Sandra Hines, Russ Bellant

By Diane Bukowski

DETROIT – A proposal by Detroit Public Schools (DPS) Czar Robert Bobb, embodied in four “Renaissance School District” bills sponsored by State Rep. Fred Durhal (D-Detroit), hardly constitutes “debt forgiveness” for DPS and 41 other Michigan districts with budget deficits, as these officials allege.  (See list of districts at end of article.*) 

 The plan would actually funnel $400 million from the state’s tobacco settlement funds, meant to provide for health care and other human needs, into the coffers of multinational banks to partially pay down the districts’ huge debts. Of that, $219 million would go to DPS.

 The Bank of New York Mellon and the Michigan Finance Authority already mandate that DPS set aside 87 percent of its state per-pupil aid, over $512 million, to pay off its ever-ballooning debt during this school year alone. (See chart at end of story, derived from DPS statistics.**)

 Since the tobacco funds would not completely pay off DPS debt, Detroit and other districts that opt for the plan would continue in “Renaissance School” status indefinitely.

The same banks are already bloated by multi-billion dollar bail-outs from federal tax dollars.

 Who will pay the price for this new windfall to the banks?  According to Durhal’s bills, “Renaissance” districts would have to agree to draconian concessions, including loss of local control, unilateral revisions of union contract provisions, and ramping up of massive privatization and regionalization schemes.

 “I just feel like Bobb and Durhal are looking at possibly another 1967 uprising,” said Wayne County Community College student Antonio Williams during a picket outside Durhal’s Detroit office Nov. 22. “The people of Detroit and the state are certainly not going to continue to take these cuts, and we are certainly going to win.”

 Williams was a student at Northern High School in 2007 when he was tortured by DPS and Detroit police during a protest against massive school closings outside his school. As they held him down on the hood of a police car, they aimed pepper spray directly into his face, and later would not let him wash it off. Numerous others at the protest were similarly brutalized.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers called the Nov. 22 picket after a membership meeting vote, teacher Heather Miller said.

 “They clearly want to divide our schools into sections that are wealthy and white, which get to have quality education, and sections that are poor and predominantly Black, which will not have qualified teachers, class size guarantees, and work rules for the teachers which actually are protection for our children.”

Bridgette Williams said she was fired from DPS after 30 years due to her activity in protesting the dismantling of the district.

 “A lot of people are afraid of retaliation and won’t come out now,” Williams said. “DPS is nothing but a cash cow for these corporations to get rich off privatization, and off of moving the district into charter schools. Proposal S is a catalyst for charter schools.  That $500 million bond is being used to renovate what they call ‘priority’ schools and if those schools don’t make AYP [Average Yearly Progress scores under the No Child Left Behind act”), they will become charters.”

 Bobb put Proposal S on the ballot, and it was allegedly passed in November, 2009.

 State Rep. Fred Durhal said that Bobb came to him with proposals for the bills he introduced Nov. 17, H. B. 6576 through 6579. He contended that the districts involved are in imminent danger of bankruptcy, and that his bills present a better alternative. He also urged their passage before Republican Governor-to-be Rick Snider takes office.

Asked however whether the best solution would instead be to declare a moratorium on the districts’ debt to the banks, he did not disagree.

 Such a moratorium was declared by Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy during the Depression years of the 1930’s, in order to take care of the people’s needs, and was later brought to the U.S. Congress by a Detroit Representative.

 “When the debate over direct Federal loans began in 1933 municipalities facing default were also having trouble refinancing their debts,” said Richard Flanagan, writing in Polity in 1999. “Influenced by Mayor Frank Murphy, Congressman Clarence McLeod, a Democrat from Detroit, proposed that cities with populations over 50,000 be allowed to petition the Federal courts to declare a debt moratorium for up to ten years.”

 Unions and other organizations across Europe and Asia are currently engaging in massive national strikes and other militant uprisings targeting the multinational banks which are demanding austerity measures. These protests are causing Wall Street to shake in its boots, with daily stock averages wobbling up and down.

However, Durhal maintained that he is nonetheless moving forward with the bills, which have been referred to the House Education Committee.

 The bills are an embodiment of Bobb’s “Plan A,” published in July as his “preferred” Deficit Elimination Plan (DEP).

 In that DEP, Bobb used Plan B as a hammer to enforce implementation of Plan A. Plan B would involve the closure of more than 100 schools, leaving only 52 schools left in a district that has already lost over 100 neighborhood schools as a wave of charter schools has taken over. Included in the closures would be the districts’ five career and technical education centers. Continue reading →

— Report and photo by Alan Pollock

Hateful bigots from Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., were met by protests on Nov. 18 when they visited several Michigan cities. The group is rabidly anti-gay/lesbian/bi/trans/queer and infamous wherever they travel throughout the U.S. with their message of hate. They often target the funerals of rank-and-file U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, blaming their deaths on LGBTQ people.

In Detroit about 50 counterprotesters gathered near Wayne State University. At a high school in East Lansing, Mich., some 600 overwhelmed the handful of bigots 100 to 1. The counterprotesters divided into two camps. While 450 held a church-sponsored picket several blocks away, a counterinsurgency of 150 strong rushed the WBC front line and overwhelmed the Phelps group with louder voices and strength in numbers.

The bigots were visibly shaken by the militant crowd. A threatened protest by the WBC at a GI’s funeral later that day in Marine City, Mich., did not materialize. 

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Locking Up Children Without Possibility For Release Is Unconstitutional, Says ACLU

ACLU Release Nov. 17, 2010 

DETROIT, MI – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Michigan today filed a lawsuit on behalf of nine Michigan citizens who were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were minors. The lawsuit charges that a Michigan sentencing scheme that denies the now-adult plaintiffs an opportunity for parole and a fair hearing to demonstrate their growth, maturity and rehabilitation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and violates their constitutional rights.

“These life without parole sentences ignore the very real differences between children and adults, abandoning the concepts of redemption and second chances,” said Deborah Labelle, attorney for the ACLU of Michigan’s Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative. “As a society, we believe children do not have the capacity to handle adult responsibilities, so we don’t allow them to use alcohol, join the Army, serve on a jury or vote – yet we sentence them to the harshest punishment we have in this state – to die in adult prisons.”

Michigan law requires that children as young as 14 who are charged with certain felonies be tried as adults and, if convicted, sentenced without judicial discretion to life without parole. Judges and juries are not allowed to take into account the fact that children bear less responsibility for their actions and have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation than adults.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences youth to life without parole, and Michigan incarcerates the second highest number of people serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed when they were 17 years old or younger. Currently, there are 350 individuals serving such mandatory life sentences in Michigan. This includes more than 100 individuals who were sentenced to life without parole who were present or committed a felony when a homicide was committed by someone else. Continue reading →

 

The American Tribune 

When I served time on a chain-gang ^[1]in the Old South (1963-65), snitching was practically unheard of.  The one snitch that I recall in general pop where I was at was punked out.  He gave handjobs to all comers for candy bars, and blowjobs for smokes. 

Today’s a different story.  Over 90% of convicts have either “accepted responsibility” and pled guilty for a deal, and/or “cooperated” by snitching out others (even when they had nothing; police and prosecutors would provide) for an even better deal.   

Certainly there are rational and responsible reasons for taking a plea—assuming you do so on yourself.  But snitching when you’re a player in the game?  You’re a punk.  

These realities don’t exist in a vacuum.  The prison system is a reflection of the people who create and run them.  From the top-down.      

Most cops, guards, wardens, prosecutors, judges, legislators—all the way up to the president (Obama excepted…maybe), are more or less self-selected shills for the dog-eat-dog, I-got-mine-fuck-you mental-midgets running this economy and its increasingly privatized prison gulag.      

We need to get back to some old-time principles, if in fact they ever existed.  I thought they did.     

An example of this reality is a new movie out, “Fair Game,” starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.  I’m not in a position to see it myself, but I urge you to check it out.  Should be worth the story alone.  

Coming out of the headlines, it’s about the real-life role ^[3]of Valerie Plame and her ambassador husband, Joe Wilson.  Turns out they were a real thorn to conservative, institutional bureaucrats; the kind of civil service employees who actually hold some ideals about the jobs and public they serve. 

But I gather that the movie is really about the snitch mentality that pervaded George Bush and his gang of conservative crackpots.  

In a nutshell, the ex-drunk frat-boy had Ambassador Wilson sent to Niger (Who the hell named that country?  Nathan Bedford Forrest ^[5]?) to follow up on some bogus intel that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear material.  (The Brits had already dismissed the report as fraudulent.)  

 This was all prelude to the Bush-Cheney heist of Iraq’s oil, the war, which they thought would be walkover.  They were using the 9/11 World Trade Ctr massacre as an excuse.  Continue reading →

From Diverse Blog

Cultural Currents

Dr. Pamela D. Reed navigates the often treacherous white waters of America’s ever-changing cultural landscape. Come what may, she keeps it moving-the dialogue, that is.

Mississippi Goddam: Free the Scott Sisters

by Dr. Pamela D. Reed, November 14, 2010

Nina Simone called it in 1964 with her civil rights anthem. Apparently, not much has changed since. Today, Jamie and Gladys Scott sit in a Mississippi prison, sentenced to double consecutive life sentences for a crime they have denied committing.  Neither had a previous criminal record. 

And what was the alleged crime? Robbery. Was it a violent offense? No. How much was taken?  Eleven dollars. When and where did this happen?  In 1993, outside Forest, Miss.  

On what basis were they convicted?  Two of the three teenagers who committed the robbery testified that the sisters were involved in the robbery, claiming that they lured the two men to the scene, where they were robbed, after which the women left with the robbery victims.  The two teens, who the Scotts knew beforehand, copped a plea — implicating the Scotts — and were released after two years in prison.  

The two sisters, 21 and 19 at the time of the incident, have been in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility for 16 years.  In addition to losing her vision, 38 year-old Jamie has suffered renal failure and receives dialysis three times weekly. All requests to have her moved to a private hospital for life-sparing treatment have allegedly been denied.  Reportedly, the state’s Department of Corrections will not allow for compatibility testing for a kidney transplant, without which Jamie Scott will die.

This case has attracted national attention.  Blogs and Facebook pages have sprung up lobbying for their release. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has written two columns on the case.  

The NAACP made a formal appeal to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour for a pardon or commutation. As well, the civil rights organization has launched a petition urging Barbour to act swiftly and judiciously. The petition also points out the sentencing judge’s history of racial impartiality.

“The presiding judge in their trial, Judge Marcus Gordon, has a history of racially biased rulings, including granting bail to the KKK murderer of the three civil rights workers: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner,” states the petition. Continue reading →

Eyes of the world on Philly appeals court hearing Nov. 9   

By Diane Bukowski 

To hear Mumia Abu-Jamal himself speak on his case, and the plight of all prisoners, go to: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/16/without_struggle_there_is_nothing_mumia 

This article has also been published in the San Francisco Bay View National Black newspaper at http://sfbayview.com/2010/mumia-must-live-and-be-free-end-the-racist-death-penalty/

PHILADELPHIA – Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets outside the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals here and around the world Nov. 9, demanding that Mumia Abu-Jamal must live and be free, and that the U.S. must abolish the death penalty and end racist killings and brutality by police.

The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the three-judge appeals panel hearing Abu-Jamal’s case Nov. 9 to determine whether it should re-instate his death penalty. In 2008, the panel upheld a lower court judge’s 2001 decision overturning the sentence due to flawed jury instructions. 

“We shouldn’t even be talking about whether Mumia gets the death penalty or a life sentence,” New York City Councilman Charles Barron, a member of the Freedom Party, said before the hearing. 

“People all over the world are calling for his freedom. What happened to him can happen to all of us. As Angela Davis said, ‘If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night.’ We all have the right to freedom, to self-determination, to be able to rebel against a racist system without being framed.” 

Abu-Jamal is an esteemed journalist, author and revolutionary activist popularly known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” He was president of the National Association of Black Journalists when he was arrested in 1981 for allegedly killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. 

He has been on death row for 29 years, where he has pursued his vocation relentlessly, reporting on prisons in the U.S., writing on national and international affairs, and authoring six books. Mr. Abu-Jamal began his career at the age of 14 as a reporter for the national Black Panther newspaper. 

On Nov. 9, he remained in the state prison at Waynesburg, Pennsylvania where he is housed on death row. But his words were conveyed earlier by phone from death row Oct. 23 and heard by thousands at an Oakland, California rally for justice for Oscar Grant. Grant, a young father, was shot in the back and killed by transit police officer Johannes Mehserle in 2009, as he lay prone on a train platform. 

“Oscar Grant could have happened in Richmond, LA, Roxbury or North Philly and the state’s response would have been the same—just doing their job,” Mr. Abu-Jamal said. “Only phone cameras made any difference at all, and of course, people who would not let it go, people like you. So fight on—to quote the late great Kwame Toure, organize, organize, organize.” 

French government, union and anti-death penalty officials joined members of the German Network to Free Mumia and noted leaders from across the U.S. to attend Abu-Jamal’s hearing in Philadelphia. 

Countries who are members of the European Union are required to repudiate the death penalty. 

“No human being should be able to decide who has to die, especially if there was no fair trial beforehand,” Clothilde Le Coz, a French citizen from Reporters without Borders said. “In France and throughout Europe, it is the general feeling that the U.S. still has a lot of hard work on justice to do.” 

LeCoz met with Abu-Jamal for six hours Aug. 29 in prison. (See accompanying interview.) 

Busloads of supporters from New York to Virginia, along with Philadelphians, some from the MOVE organization and the New Black Panther Party, rallied outside. They chanted, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, we’re going to free Mumia Abu-Jamal,” and “Hell no, the death penalty got to go.”  Continue reading →

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Voice of the Voiceless

Interview published on 3 September 2010

Reporters without Borders

On August 29th, 2010, Reporters Without Borders Washington DC representative, Clothilde Le Coz, visited Mumia Abu-Jamal, prisoner on death row for nearly three decades. Ms. Le Coz was accompanied by Abu-Jamal’s lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, and his legal assistant, Nicole Bryan. The meeting took place in room 17 of the State Correctional Institution (SCI) in Waynesburg, Greene county, Pennsylvania.

Reporters Without Borders: As a journalist who continues to work in prison, what are your latest reports focused on?

Mumia Abu-Jamal: The prison population in the United States is the highest in the world. Over the past year, for the first time in 38 years, the prison population declined.

Some states, like California or Michigan, are taking fewer prisoners because of overcrowding. State budgets are restrained and some prisoners are released because of the economic situation.

Prisons in America are vast and the number of prisoners is immense. It’s impressive to see how much money is spent by the US government and how invisible we are. No one knows. Most people don’t care. Some journalists report when there is a drama in prison and think they know about it. But this is not real : it is sensationalist. You can find some good writings. But they are unrealistic. My reporting is what I have seen with my eyes and what people told me. It is real. My reporting has to do with my reality. They mostly have been focusing on death row and prison. I wish it were not so. There is a spate of suicides on death row in the last year and a half. But this is invisible. I broke stories about suicide because it happened on my block.

I need to write. There are millions of stories and some wonderful people here. Among these stories, the ones I chose to write are important, moving, fragile. I decide to write them but part of the calculation is to know whether it’s helpful or not. I have to think about that. As a reporter, you have a responsability when you publish those kind of stories. Hopefully, it will change their lives for the better. Continue reading →