Bank Exploits Latino Immigrants

Posted by Nina Jacinto at 2:00 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

A mere three weeks after news appeared about the NAACP filing lawsuits against Wells Fargo and HSBC Holdings for predatory lending against black communities, the LA Times has reported that Bank of America has been involved in similar racist practices against Latino immigrants. Tom Hamburger reports on testimonies by tellers such as Gabby Ornelas, who was ordered by her employers to utilize her own identity and Spanish speaking skills to market high fee banking services to Latinos. Bank of America denies these allegations and defends their selling practices, arguing that they offer services that they think are important for customers of all backgrounds.

Workers, some of who are coming forward against Bank of America after being fired or laid off because of the recession, are being backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). SEIU has taken on the Bank of America in the past, urging the company to fire their CEO Ken Lewis, and fighting against predatory lending practices to protect workers' families as early as 2007. If Bank of America is targeting immigrants for high interest credit advances and other services that lead to high fees and charges later on, then the company is helping to prevent people of color and low-income individuals from gaining wealth and providing their families with economic stability.

In the midst of hearing about how subprime and predatory lending has been a huge factor in the foreclosure of homes and continued economic disparities, it's a harsh reminder that there are other racist bank practices that encourage inequalities. Many immigrants and low-income individuals may not be able to even open checking or savings accounts without being targeted through systemic racism.

I will be following up on the details of this case, as news unfold and we hear a bit more from the Bank of America and its workers.

ICE Enhances Gov. Cooperation

Posted by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam at 1:11 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at further reducing gun trafficking less than two weeks after a government report criticized the agencies for poor cooperation.

The agreement calls for the agencies to share information, solve computer issues, and improve communication and coordination; it will also pave the way for inter-agency investigations and a joint working group.

"We're not going to be having two independent initiatives; we're going to have one coordinated effort to go after firearms trafficking and related violence on this side of the border and the other side of the border," said ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton.

David Ogden, a deputy attorney genearl with the Department of Justice (DoJ), said the agreement will allow for a more effective response to gun smuggling along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The ATF operates under the DOJ's auspices, whereas ICE falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security.

An ICE special agent in San Antonio, however, said his office has long been in cooperation with other agencies.

“What we've already been doing is consistent with the high points of the (agreement),” Robinette said in a telephone interview from New Mexico. “We've got an excellent working relationship with ATF."

The General Accountability Office (GAO) seemed to disagree, citing several examples of inefficiency, including: an ICE agent unwittingly surveilling an ATF agent; an ATF covert operation to deliver weapons across the border (in order to bait Mexican smugglers) of which ICE was unaware; and failure to share documentation.

This is not the first time ICE has come in for GAO criticism this year: in March, the congressional body issued a report saying that it had a subpar relationship with the Drug Enforcement Agency: "An outdated interagency agreement and long-standing disputes involving ICE's drug enforcement role and DEA's oversight ... have led to conflicts and potential duplicative efforts" the report said.

The broader backdrop for all this is the increased drug and gun-related violence plaguing Mexico, fueled in part by American drug consumption and weak gun control.

"It is simply unacceptable that the United States not only consumes the majority of the drugs flowing from Mexico, but also arms the very cartels that contribute to the daily violence that is devastating Mexico," Representative Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), who chairs the subcommittee responsible for the report, said.

The bitter and cyclical drug war ensnares youth in particular, as Mexican gangs prey on teenagers on either side of the border to fuel the business; the New York Times offered a glimpse of this process in its June 22nd article, Mexican Cartels Lure American Teens as Killers.

Louisiana: Making A HS Diploma Worthless

Posted by Aaron Tang at 1:10 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

It's a question that serious school reformers and education advocates have been tackling for years: What's the best way to reduce a drop-out rate in America that hovers around 30 percent, and that approaches 50 percent in certain low-income and communities of color?

In a maneuver that completely misunderstands the nature of the debate, Louisiana is poised to answer that question in a non-sensical fashion: by making it shockingly easy for a student to get a high school diploma. As it currently stands in the state, a student must score at the "basic" level on either the math or reading 8th grade test and at the "approaching basic" level in the other subject in order to attend and graduate from high school. Not a particularly lofty hurdle, right? Seems only logical that we would want our students to at least read and do math at or near an 8th grade level before giving them a diploma, right?

Yet Louisiana lawmakers have noticed that a large number of students are dropping out of high school. Their solution? Not to increase the quality of school programming so that students learn more, feel more engaged, feel safer, or recognize the value of a quality education. Not to increase funding for after-school and extracurricular programs that might increase student involvement in their schools. No, the legislature, by overwhelming majorities (38-0 in the state Senate and 87-10 in the house) has decided that the best way to reduce the drop out rate is to make it easier for kids to coast through high school without learning much of anything at all. The only kicker? Those students who take that track won't get a regular diploma, they'll get a "career diploma" on graduation day.

I don't even know where to begin when discussing how big of a mistake this act will be for Louisiana's future. In a day and age where we are rapidly realizing that today's children will need to master complex skills in order to succeed at the cutting edge of the 21st century economy, Louisiana's plan is tantamount to societal suicide--it gives license to educators who don't believe their students can learn and it tricks students into believing that they can succeed in the world without knowing how to read and write or do math and science at a basic level.

What Louisiana should be doing is the opposite of this bill: it should be demanding more of its schools and students, not less. Demanding more in the way of student achievement must come, of course, with providing more in the way of educational resources--finding quality teachers and paying them for their successes, ensuring adequate facilities and educational materials are present for every student, etc. But that's a trade that will do much better for Louisiana's kids than the trade Governor Bobby Jindal and state law-makers have effectively pulled: they've traded the future of their children for a short-term political gain they can cite since they will have "fixed" the drop-out rate problem.

The thing is, fixing the drop-out rate in high schools is not the end goal for our efforts to improve education. If all America needed to ensure its long term success was 100% of its 18-year-olds owning a piece of paper that says "high school diploma" on it, the federal government could solve that problem by printing out a bunch of the darn things and mailing them out to every adult in the state. That theory of education reform fundamentally fails to understand our challenges much like a basketball coach who, seeing that his players can't shoot during games, decides to lower the hoop to 5 feet and triple the circumference of the rim so that his players make every shot during practice. Yet that's exactly what Louisiana lawmakers have inflicted upon their children, with only a handful of dissenters voicing their opinions.

Friedman Supports Climate Bill. Really?

Posted by Adam Waxman at 12:00 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

Conservative New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is not my favorite pundit. I read a lot of his long-form work in college, particularly his tome about global trade, The Lexus And the Olive Tree. I tend to find his work a little too heavily focused on the everyman proving his thesis. Tom Tomorrow, who is one of my favorite artists, has a comic that lays out my objections pretty well. Also, there’s no such thing as the McDonalds Peace Theory. Just ask the Georgians.

Despite the fact that I generally don’t like Friedman’s work, he has a strong column that went up on the Times site yesterday. Friedman wrote about the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House on Friday. Friedman supports the bill, even though he thinks that it could be stronger. His reason for supporting the bill is simple:

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.

Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.

I think that progressives should generally take this attitude towards most of Obama’s major legislative initiatives. The reality is, most of Obama’s legislative projects (healthcare, cap ‘n trade, education) will be modified, watered down, and generally compromised by members of Congress with their own parochial interests at heart. Yet, it’s been so long since progressives had a real opportunity to legislate that any progress will be better than what we have now.

Yes, we will probably have to come back to each legislative initiative and tweak and reform the initial law as it is passed. Getting some points on the board, however, is worth a lot in terms of shaping the debate.

Am I Asking to Feel Bad About Racism?

Posted by Nina Jacinto at 11:44 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

Typically I write about current events or reports that pertain to racial justice - I am a racial justice blogger, after all, and I feel a sense of responbility to circulate news that I feel is worth thinking about. I was going to write about a story I ran into on a parenting blog, in which Cirila Baltazar Cruz’s new born daughter was placed immediately into foster care by authorities because her mother did not speak English and was an undocument citizien. Authorities claimed these reasons made Cruz a possible danger to her child. I read this story, and considered the ways in which racism and xenophobia play a role in tearing apart families and further endangering the well being of children, and I cried about it while I walked home from work. I'm still processing the ways in which particular injustices played out for the Cruz family.

I occasionally get into conversations with people about systemic oppression and the way it affects aspects of our lives, and feel myself shut down when I hear something along the lines of the following:

"If these things [news about racial injustice, sexism, homophobia] make you so upset and unhappy, why do you keep digging for those stories?"

Simple enough: hearing about issues of violence, hate, and injustice, sometimes even in the movies or in media, can be so upsetting or emotionally draining to process, why keep reading stories about ugly accounts of injustice, discrimination and the affects of the white racial frame everyday?

My response is typically curt: "Turning away from those stories may seem like an option to you, but it's not going to be an option for me." Avoiding reading about racism and sexism and homophobia won't help me - I see the work of those systems in my life and the lives of my loved ones. It's apparently fine to rehash the importance of global warming and the recession but when I go to alternative sources of media for news about communities whose stories often go under reported or are unfairly represented, then apparently I'm 'asking' to be upset.

And it is upsetting. It's exhausting and tiring to feel strongly about tired old stereotypes, problematic verdicts and continuing disparities across educational and economic lines. It's also exhausting to examine my own life and consider my own privileges and experiences with racism and sexism. But that's life. We have to be driven to do the work that remains important to us, and we must continue to educate ourselves, speak out, and be critical of the world around us. We must be committed allies in our day to day life. We must also take care of ourselves, our bodies and our mental health. We must seek out loved ones and find a space to speak our personal truths. And we must slowly create thick skin for ourselves, for survival.

Mosque Opens in Boston After Long Delay

Posted by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam at 7:18 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

A new mosque officially opened in the Roxbury section of Boston, Mass., on Friday, providing an unusual opportunity to find some of America’s least-examined ethnic and immigrant issues sharing the same intersection—literally.

The mosque, called the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, opened with the Muslim call to prayer on a street named after Malcolm X in a traditionally African-American neighborhood while a pro-Israel advocate led a smattering of protesters across the street.

A rare moment when the creaky cliché “Only in America” truly applies.

Between 1,800 and 2,000 Muslims attended the opening, which took place on the Muslim day of worship. They were joined by the mayor, Thomas Menino, along with some other state and city officials.

The mosque had been puttering along informally as of last September, and was previously mired for years in controversy, litigation and fundraising issues.

As I’ve noted before, The Pew Center estimates that two-thirds of Muslims are immigrants. In the mosque’s case, worshippers comprise four main groups: those of South Asian descent, Middle Eastern descent, African-Americans, and Somali immigrants.

The mosque met staunch opposition from the usual, disappointing quarters, once again affirming the trend that antipathy toward Muslims in America seems to be bound up not simply with a professed love of America (the typical cultural conservative cry), but love for Israel.

The most vociferous critic, Charles Jacobs, headed a pro-Israel advocacy group called The David Project, which led an infamous campaign to smear some Columbia professors as “anti-Semites” in 2005 for daring to dismantle pleasant fictions about Israel's policy toward the people it ethnically cleansed during its founding, a fact revealed by Israel's own historians who dug through declassified archives (1, 2, 3).

Like many who claim to have no problem with a minority group, Jacobs darkly hinted at conspiratorial “connections,” and laced his “facts” with the perennially suspicious poison of passive tense construction: “It's been estimated that 80 percent of mosques are radicalized,” Jacobs intoned in Sept. 2008, adding, “[I]t's very difficult for American citizens to speak about these things, because they don't want to be labeled as bigots or Islamophobes, so that has allowed these connections to go much unspoken and unreported.”

At the mosque’s ribbon-cutting, its supporters walked up to the protesters and, instead of participating in polemics, tried to hand them white roses, as pictured in The Boston Globe article.

The mosque is operated by the Muslim American Society of Boston. Its executive director, Bilal Kaleem, said the center is meant to institutionalize interaction: “The main point is Muslim civil engagement. The center provides a place for the Muslim community to interact, and for broader society to engage with the Muslim community.”

Engagement is precisely what's needed, particular for the younger generation of Muslims who are already more attuned to American culture.

Those opposed to mosques--if their arguments can be taken at face value--have a very jaundiced and myopic view of how radicalism develops. Stopping people from worshiping in a common place doesn't magically force radical or militant ideas to evaporate; it likely only reinforces hostility and feeds a sense of grievance and ostracization, driving ideas underground.

Conversely, a publicly visible space for Muslims to congregate, and for others to meet them for interfaith functions, programming and visits, builds a sense of commonality.

Then again, if you don't take the neoconservatives at face value, their opposition to mosques in America makes sense: after all, isn't hostility a prerequisite for the "clash of civilizations" they are hankering after to begin with?

Climate Bill Passes House -- Youth At The Table?

Posted by Adam Waxman at 4:33 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

Today, the US House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. This is the cap and trade regime mainly authored by powerful House Democrat Henry Waxman (who, I have noted, is not related to me). The vote was relatively close, with 219 Representatives voting Aye and 212 voting Nay. It was mostly along party lines, with 7 Republicans joining Democrats to support passage and 44 Democrats voting no. Most of the Republicans voting yes were moderates from places like California and Delaware; most Democrats voting no were conservatives from the South and several industrial states.

Young people have been active in this debate since the beginning, led by organizations old and new. Groups like The Energy Action Coalition and the Sierra Club have been mobilizing students and young people to get this bill passed since before Obama took office. Young people aren’t just relying on traditional lobbying visits to raise awareness – though there’s plenty of that - young people are also organizing new and innovative ways to show how important climate change is to our generation. Check out this video of a flashmob protesting inaction on global warming organized by the Avaaz Action Factory:

This climate bill is an important first step in the battle against global warming. Today’s vote is important, but by no means the end of the road. The bill faces a tough road in the Senate, where it will surely require 60 votes to beat a filibuster. I have a lot of trouble with the math that allows the bill to get 60 votes, particularly if several members of the Democratic caucus peel off or are difficult.

As the debate moves forward, one of the frustrating things that I have seen is a total lack of recognition as to the role that young people are playing in this debate. Politico, which is a major Washington, DC outlet covering the Hill, did a big story earlier this week about how Democrats could ensure the climate bill’s passage by massaging the right coalitions. Left off the radar screen was young people, despite the fact that we’re the ones who will be impacted by inaction on climate change. David Kurtz over at Talking Points Memo actually makes this point better, so I’ll just quote from his post from earlier today:

We hear a lot from global warming deniers about the "high cost" of carbon emission regulation. Of course, in absolute terms they are right. It will be expensive. But what price are the deniers willing to pay personally for the high cost of being on the wrong side of science and history? Many of today's deniers will be long dead by the time the worst effects of inaction are realized. Those who do live long enough will more than likely be insulated from the most extreme effects by their relative wealth and prosperity, compared to Bangladeshis, for instance. And in any event, there is no justice -- no democratic justice -- in punishing fools for being fools.

There are precious few fools in our generation. Today is a major victory for the climate justice movement, but we can only expect it to get harder from here on out.

What Do YOU Think About Teacher Tenure?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 3:32 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

So much happening in the school news world this past week, but I've chosen to write about a topic that I think is of interest to most people who have attended public schools in America: teacher tenure.

Before that, I just wanted to write a couple of quick notes about two SCOTUS decisions handed down today. First, in Safford Unified School District v. April Redding, the Court got the big part right easily voting 8-1 that when an Arizona school conducted a strip search on a 13 year old girl to find "contraband" ibuprofen pills, it violated the girl's 4th amendment privacy rights. The court also ruled, 7-2, on the more contentious issue of whether the individual school officials who conducted the search could be sued for their involvement. The court said no, which I think is difficult to believe (did they really think it was reasonable to strip search a middle school girl over ibuprofen??) but ultimately a decision that won't hurt too many kids. After all, most principals stop short of strip searching minor student offenses for lots of reasons other than constitutional one--and the punishment of public shame and likely firing should be sufficient.

On a second note, the Court remanded (i.e. sent back to the lower court for further fact finding) the question of whether Arizona's English Language Learner funding levels were sufficient in accordance with the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. The case is far too complex to explain here in brief, but the bottom line is the issue is far from settled.

Now to teacher tenure. Here's a cartoon to provide some context:

A new report from the Center for American Progress outlines some common sense considerations we should take into account when thinking about teacher tenure. First thing it points out is that teachers in America get tenure in a hodge podge fashion without any regard for what really matters: how much students are learning. If schools were granting tenure to teachers who were producing outstanding learning gains year-in and year-out, I don't think the complaints about the system would be quite so loud.

Second thing is that once teachers earn tenure, there is nothing wrong with providing them due process protection against arbitrary firings. If a teacher has proven their ability to produce excellent learning gains, it may actually be good for kids to stop a principal or other administrator from firing that teacher without showing good cause.

Third, tenure shouldn't be absolute--at some point if a teacher stops producing outstanding learning gains tenure should be revocable so that administrators have the freedom to move that teacher around and so that the teacher himself has incentive to keep performing at high levels.

Fourth, any discussion of tenure can't be separated from a discussion of teacher pay systems and data collection regarding objective measures of what makes a good teacher.

Anyhow, bottom line is, tenure isn't working for the benefit of children at all in the current education system, but that doesn't mean the whole idea is flawed. Good teachers, like any other good employees, should feel safe in their jobs so long as they keep performing at high levels. What remains is the policy structure to create that human capital system--specifically the data to show which teachers are "good" and which are "bad" in terms of student learning to begin with...

Little Fanfare for Nat'l Immigration Meeting

Posted by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam at 12:48 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

After repeated delays, President Obama finally convened his first bipartisan meeting on immigration yesterday, but nothing he said indicated significant political movement on the issue.

Obama met with 30 or so lawmakers in the State Dining Room, naming an immigration workgroup to liaison with Congress that will be led by Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary and former Arizona governor who supported the deployment of troops along Arizona’s border with Mexico.

Hinting at some of the more thorny issues between Democrats and Republicans, Senator John McCain said that Obama will need to convince labor unions to allow for business to expand their foreign labor pool.

“I would expect the president of the United States to put his influence on the unions in order to change their position,” Mr. McCain said. As he left the White House, he said Mr. Obama needed to show leadership, saying, “That’s why he was elected president.”

For his part, the president commended McCain, one of a handful of Republicans who tried to help push through immigration reform in 2007, for taking political risk.

But he seemed unwilling to do so himself, saying only that America’s roughly 12 million undocumented workers comprise “a group that we have to deal with in a practical, common-sense way.”

As McCain had noted, a main point of contention is foreign labor. America’s two largest unions, AFL-CIO and Change to Win, oppose any employer-led plans to attract more foreign workers.

In a frank recognition of the obvious, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said an immigration bill would not muster enough support this year. “If the votes were there,” he said, “you wouldn’t need to have the meeting.”

Nonetheless, Obama did announce that the Citizenship and Immigration Services Office will begin working closely with the White House’s chief information personnel to make the agency more efficient and transparent. USCIS will have a new website in the next three months, allowing applicants to get online updates for the first time.

The tepid progress did not stop America’s vociferous paramilitary group from holding a protest to stop “the pandering to illegal aliens” at Congressman Jerry Jewis’ office in Redland, Calif.

The immigration issue tends to draw out the core contradictions not simply between but within the political parties. Democrats need to balance the demands of labor unions with those of Hispanic groups, and Republicans must avoid alienating both employers and their populist-conservative base.

MJ: Morning's End

Posted by Jeff Chang at 8:48 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

(This post originally appeared on Zentronix)

Long before anyone could read into Michael Jackson’s cubist, etiolated face a work of performance art, the wounds of internalized racism, or the excess of boredom and wealth, all those things that would make us either look away or gawk, there was his voice.

The thing that Berry Gordy heard from the 10-year old boy was “knowingness”, he said, “feeling, inspiration, and pain". There was an early protest song, “The Young Folks”, that now seems telling. But as time went on, Gordy and his songwriters gave Michael songs in which loss loomed large, the better to exploit that glorious instrument of his. And for that voice, he lost his childhood.

Or more precisely, he gave it to us. Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, "All I Do Is Think Of You", "Ready Or Not." On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility. (On the other hand, but hardly balancing the scale, is the joyous Bronx summer break of "It’s Great To Be Here.")

If you want to wonder how ambivalent this boy-dream, this incarnation of all our notions about youth and beauty, felt about the limelight and wanting to be “normal”, listen to him sing “Got To Be There." When he sees the girl of his desire walk into the morning light, it’s as if he has transferred the shine away from himself to her, imagining a perfect love above the blood and grind of the daily celebrity-making machine. When he hits that high “me” (matched later by the word “home”), he has given all of it up to all of us.

But as an audience, we were insatiable and ruthless. Years later, after the satisfaction and ease of his 20s, after he had been broken by self-mutilation and bizarre scandal in his 30s, Michael Jackson would reveal a tragic, bathetic emptiness, pleading, “Have you seen my childhood?" By then, many of us had either turned away or turned on him. The transaction was done.

In the end, he lost even his voice, autotuned first by lawyers and other keepers of his dissipating wealth, consumed by Mickey Mouse-sounding paid-TV defenses and overproduced songs, before finally going silent forever. Time will restore the greatness of Michael Jackson’s artistry. May it also cause us some revulsion at our complicity in his fall as well.

Michael Jackson: Who's Loving You?

Posted by Adrienne Maree Brown at 8:17 AM | 1 comment | Permalink

(This post originally appeared on RaceWire)

While he lived, he was quite possibly the most listened to person alive. The most sampled and copied. The most played. The youngest person to make people move. The person most people tried to move like.

He made us move like zombies, like water, like freedom. He made us trip and fall backwards trying to moonwalk, and trip and fall forward trying to see if the lean in Smooth Criminal was possible.

He showed us his mad genius world in videos, songs, movies, TV specials.

He injected sex into our hips. He got us wearing shiny gloves and overwought leather jackets. He taught us to walk with such rhythm that we lit up the sidewalks.

There are sung phrases that are of our collective history and can incite any crowd of several generations into vicious emotion or movement…1, 2, 3; I wanna rock with you; Make that change; Billie Jean is not my lover; the way you make me feel; Sha-mo (or whatever he was saying…); Mama se Mama sa… The opening chords to Thriller and Pretty Young Thing have made us move in ways we didn’t know were possible. His young voice out of nowhere singing, “When….I, had you. I treated you bad, and wrong my dear…”

He broke race barriers in the pop world which opened doors in the political world -- he crossed over and back. He morphed.

When the signs started to become clear, that the boy wasn’t right, that he was too isolated, underdeveloped, imperfect -- we laughed, we stared, we assumed. He was our first boyfriend before he became our crazy cousin -- always family.

We didn’t see the pain, we saw the bizarre, and we are vultures for scandal.

Still, he kept producing for us. As he got lighter he brought us an image of black Egyptians. He made us scream, cry, faint, and mob.

When it became clear that the boy’s face we had loved had become the face of a man who didn’t love himself; we judged him. We tore at him and he fell apart. He was living proof of the impact of our rabid pop culture, an early sacrifice to the new mechanisms of fame which allow no privacy, no time to learn, no mistakes.

Still, he kept producing for us.

When the rumors and the truth were all too prevalent (the children, both his and others), and he wasn’t getting the psychological support and accountability he needed, we turned from him and derided him. We made the distinction of loving the child, but ridiculing the man.

How many times did his heart break before this? How many times did he experience happiness, community, belonging and love in his life, in his off-the-stage life?

My entire life is framed by his songs. I have had ecstatic moments to his music while high, while drunk, while sober, while sad, while in love, while in heartbreak. It seems silly to feel this way over a pop singer, and yet it's crucial to feel this way over an artist who reshaped how we understand music, movement and communication. He was at every good party I ever attended (which is where I have felt more release and unity with other people than just about anywhere else).

I suspect he always will be.

I don’t know if he experienced peace in this life, much less joy. When I heard the news today, I looked out the window and a rainbow stood complete from one horizon to the other. I don’t know if nature follows the news, but I hope that one was for the kid and the man, and he’s over there.

For real, rest in peace Michael Jackson. Thank you.

Study: Good Teachers Leave Black Students

Posted by Nina Jacinto at 4:10 PM | 1 comment | Permalink

Here's some troubling news: A study by Professor C. Kirabo Jackson, published last month in the Journal of Labor Economics, found that the best ranked teachers in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC school district leave when there is an influx of black students at the schools where they teach. The study was conducted around the time that the district stopped busing students between schools to encourage diversity, allowing for information to be gathered about the impact of racial makeup on teacher quality. Overall, black teachers were more likely to stay in these schools, whereas the average white teacher was no more or less likely to the transfer based on school population. But high quality teachers, who were categorized based on their years of experience and certification scores, were likely to leave when schools found an increase in black enrollment. Furthermore, teacher effectiveness was reported to decrease upon this influx.

Jackson noted that the information, "is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower-quality instruction."

Though research in the past has shown that low income public schools in cities tend to have lower quality teachers than wealthier suburban areas, this particular study raises more specific questions about teacher retention in schools. Are teachers leaving because of their socialized attitudes about black students in classrooms? Are they leaving because schools with lacking funds and overpopulated classrooms offer less career and salary opportunities for high quality teachers? Are training programs adequately preparing teachers for educating across race, class and gender lines? And how is our system of education supposed to be fixed if teachers and students of color are both being hurt by poor funding? It's a sea of questions, but they all need to be investigated. What hope can we build for black students if we cannot promise them that they will have the same access to quality teachers as white students? The achievement gap shows no signs of being closed when teachers and students are both affected by systemic inequality in the education system.

Two limitations struck me while reviewing the report. First, it would have been helpful to evaluate the relationship between race and class in the study. Socioeconomic factors shape funding and teacher quality, and need to be considered in order to create helpful policy and better education overall. Second, the study may not necessarily be applicable on a national level. More studies need to be conducted in metropolitan areas all over the country, in order to have a better idea of the relationship between students and teachers.

Obama Backtracking on War Spending?

Posted by Kerry Cardoza at 11:20 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

(This post originally appeared at Girl Talk Zine)

The Senate has recently approved a $106 billion war funding bill which is going to the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the International Monetary Fund, the Mexican drug war and other places besides the US. Remember when Obama was running for President and went on and on about ending the war in Iraq and decreased military spending? You can still read his promises verbatim on his campaign website. The site states that, "The U.S. may spend $2.7 trillion on this war and its aftermath, yet we are less safe around the globe and more divided at home." One would assume they are providing this fact to highlight the excessive amount of money spent on this war and for little good, so why pledge billions more?

Similarly, the Obama campaign claimed they would remove the majority of the troops by the summer of 2010. According to a Washington Post article from June 19, however, "the administration plans to shrink the size of the force to about 50,000 troops by the summer of 2010" in Iraq.  50,000 doesn't seem like much of a phase-out considering that that's about the current number of troops we have in Afghanistan, who we are admitting to being at war with.

This bill is a clear indication of where our government's interests lie in this so-called recession. While many of us are counting pennies and having our benefits and employment slashed, the government is spending billions on wars and misplaced foreign aid. It's a further disappointment that the bill was passed 91-5 in the Senate, another reminder that the people running this country do not place the needs of the working class first. There's not much hope in that.

Oregon's Voting Rights Victory

Posted by Adam Waxman at 2:24 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

We’re recovering here in Washington, DC from a major Metro accident (it happens to impact me as I use the line that the accident occurred on), so I’m going to focus on something progressive that happened far, far away. Oregon progressives have been celebrating a voting-rights victory this week. Both houses of the Oregon legislature have passed a new bill that will allow Oregon voters to register online. A press release from lead sponsor Representative Ben Cannon elaborates:

[the law] would model Oregon’s online voter registration system on those of Washington and Arizona, where the programs have proven extremely popular. In 2003, the first year of Arizona's Online Voter Registration program, 25 percent of all new voter registrations were done online. In 2007, that percentage jumped to 72 percent. After Washington implemented online voter registration, 1,634 online applications were recorded in the first three days and 38 percent of all Washington voter registrations in 2008 were done online.

The bill received an impressive amount of bipartisan support in the Oregon house. Only nine members voted against the bill in its final form.

Online voter registration is an important step for opening up the democratic process and ensuring that the widest possible group of people have access to the electoral process. The numbers cited by Cannon in many ways speaks for themselves -- people clearly find online voter registration convenient and use it if given to the option. The Bus Project played a large role in ensuring the perspective of young people was heard during this debate.

Ultimately, this bill is about culture change. There’s no reason why Americans shouldn’t be able to register to vote online when we can use so many other government and financial services online. Young people, particularly, need to view voting as a modern thing that is accessible -- being able to register online is an important part of ensuring that the election process keeps up with culture.

The (Reverse) Brain Drain

Posted by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam at 2:24 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

In the latter half of the 20th century, the term “brain drain” had a clearly defined meaning: it referred to the process in which the elite classes in post-colonial societies fled or sent their children abroad, either to study or work in developed countries—-the United States in particular.

This was a serious problem for developing countries, as the local top talent didn’t stick around to help build and improve the nascent national project. This flight of human capital was particularly pronounced in India and China, contributing to the well-worn stereotype of the Asian IT genius or math whiz.

In an index of how much the economic balance of forces between the U.S. and the rest of the world has changed, America itself is now facing a brain drain as the very people who immigrated here for education and jobs are encountering resistance.

A “chilly local immigration environment” combined with “a more attractive employment environment overseas and a bad local economy” are prompting foreign-born high-achievers to head for home, a Reuters article noted yesterday.

The article quoted a statistic produced from a 2007 Duke University study often cited by immigration advocates: more than half the start-ups that sprung up in Silicon Valley from 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born founder.

The professor behind that study told Reuters that 60 of the 65 foreign engineers he helped train this year are moving to India, China, and Turkey to take on business executive roles.

That trend-line is further borne out by H1-B visa numbers this year. (The H1-B visa is designed to allow U.S. companies to temporarily employ high-skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations.”) As of May of this year, only 45,500 petitions were filed-—19,500 short of the cap. By contrast, in 2007 and 2008, it took a mere two days to hit the ceiling.

As the American economy entered its steep descent, some lawmakers targeted the H1-B visa, arguing that American jobs were not going into American hands. Senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin have recently introduced a bill to place greater restrictions the number of H1-B visa holders.

Because of the hostile atmosphere and onerous restrictions—such as the ones detailed in the New York Times’ profile of a key Google engineer who’s marooned in Canada—it’s no small wonder that the American dream has become an increasingly hazy apparition for some immigrants.