Writing on Shalom Rav, a website run by his rabbi, Brant Rosen, Hamer says he immediately went to the school’s principal who set up an emergency meeting where he convinced the committee to move the prom, even though it meant giving up a $3,000 deposit. The students are making up the $3,000 through fundraisers. Hamer writes:

I proceeded to relay some facts: i.e. that Congress workers made $8.80 an hour with minimal benefits while the standard is now $13.20 with significant benefits. Also, I made it clear to the committee members that having prom at the Congress would misrepresent Northside as a place where liberal thinking and cultured morals abound.

And there was the practical matter that supporters of the workers might put up a big picket line at the hotel and that the pool of teacher chaperons would immediately diminish since the teachers, who belong to the largest union in the city, probably would not cross the picket line.

Why would a teenager, whose thoughts at this time of the year turn toward graduation and senior parties, think about a group of mostly immigrant hotel workers? Here’s Hamer’s answer:

Everything in my religious spirit, my religious being, tells me that to stand by while injustice occurs would be the wrong thing to do. Thankfully, the discussion …ended with the decision that our own financial burdens should never take precedence over the daily struggles of working class families that are less fortunate than we. When I got home I said the Shema (an affirmation of Judaism and a declaration of faith in God).

Hamer also is an alumnus of Or Tzedek , the teen social justice summer program of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.  At Or Tzedek, he engaged with a variety of social justice issues, learned about organizing and gained tools to create social change. Since that summer, he has been taken on many endeavors through Or Tzedek, including the Congress strike.

Hamer’s commitment to justice comes naturally from his faith and training. Rabbi Rosen says the Jewish religious tradition is “rife with imperatives about protecting workers, paying a fair living wage and making sure workers’ rights are protected.” He adds:

It is foundational to who we are. And one tenant of our faith is worker and immigrant justice. We are well aware of our history in this country and the benefits of the union movement. Our job now is to realize that not long ago these were issues we dealt with as part of our common experience.

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A multinational oil giant may be headed for its day of reckoning in a New York City courtroom next month.

The lawsuit, Wiwa v. Shell, centers on charges of rampant human rights abuses by Royal Dutch Shell against the Ogoni people of Nigeria, including the murder of the iconic activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Litigated by EarthRights International and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the case is based on the Alien Tort Claims Act, a statute that allows international human rights violators to be tried in the United States.

According to the lawsuit, Shell conspired with the military dictatorship of Nigeria to carry out a campaign of violence and coercion to destroy the Ogoni resistance to Shell’s oil drilling activities, which are credited with devastating the environment and undermining the Ogoni’s traditional lifestyle.

The oil industry’s exploitation of the Niger Delta ties into the legacy of colonialism as well as post-colonial political fracturing across the African continent.

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Responding to the International Committee of the Red Cross report documenting the involvement of medical personnel in torture and abuse of detainees, the Times concludes:

The report underscores the need to have a full-scale investigation into these abusive practices and into who precisely participated in them. Only then will we know whether indictments or, in the case of physicians, the loss of medical licenses, are warranted.

An investigation into torture and abuse is not merely supported by both law and medical ethics, it is an imperative. The legal prohibition against torture, which includes attempt, complicity and participation, imposes the duty to investigate alleged abuse. The ethical principles enshrined in the Declaration of Tokyo, adopted by the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association, prohibits participation of physicians in torture and all forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. This includes providing “knowledge” to “facilitate the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” It also prohibits the physician’s presence when any of these practices take place.

Continued inaction by Congress, the President, health professionals and American citizens makes a mockery of the rule of law, human rights and medical ethics. As evidence mounts and calls for accountability go unheeded, the shroud of torture hangs heavy.

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AMERICAN drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people.

The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

As many as 1m people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army. In Bajaur agency entire villages have been flattened by Pakistani troops under growing American pressure to act against Al-Qaeda militants, who have made the area their base.

Kacha Garhi is one of 11 tented camps across Pakistan’s frontier province once used by Afghan refugees and now inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis made homeless in their own land.

—Thousands flee bomb attacks by US drones

I don’t know. What one hopes to accomplish by posting about something I’m not quite sure anymore…although by all means post, because once in a while a post changes everything, or more importantly, each one probably touches many people and a net of energy and wisdom is made possible. More accurately, I don’t know what I hope to do with it. I think I just need to get it out or think aloud a lot of times. Because if I’m going to be paying attention, it’s almost overwhelming. And you can’t just be absorbing energy. You have to kick it around, kick it out, give it back in some shape and form. Sometimes, too, I need to write just to say “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

When you did income taxes…honestly. Did you think of these unmanned drone planes? And our astronomical defense budget? And those “militants?” I end up wondering what that means. Those words. What does it take for the AP to call you a “foreign militant” whose life (obviously) is worth, perhaps, a speck of a real person’s life? What merits that precipitous demotion in worth? Does it mean you were killed with a blueprint to a bunker in your hand? That you are connected to people who knew the Saudi network who bombed us eight years ago? Does it mean you are caught with weapons and propaganda? Does it mean you are related by family to conspirators to people hostile to the US? Does it mean you met weekly with community members to stay cohesive and plan how to get through the time? Does it mean you lived in the wrong place? Is there a definition the AP is bound by? Or does the military just write “foreign militants” in their log book and the AP copies it in? Because a whole lot of mess is being dumped on a whole lot of people behind this word. You’d think someone would be policing the definition.

It feels weird to me that I can be so sensitized to a system…it is business as usual when millions of people die or are displaced by the direct and otherwise intended actions of our own “land” or governing body. Our people. Our military. And I can’t, I’m not. That’s why my psyche has emotional hiccups over and over, rejecting it. This chaos, violence, and displacement seems huge. It doesn’t seem at all a part of me. And…I must own a piece of it. I live and benefit from living in the sunny backyard of the empire.

But forget about the dead, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are displacing massive amounts of people. I know I could google right now and find out how many displaced. I’m sort of afraid to see the number.

For what? What is going on here? Who poses such a threat to us? That we are raining down death all over the place, uprooting entire social networks and generations of families and inflicting such terror across such huge regions? Is that what it’s really all about? Terrifying the entire part of the world that we think stung us…or wants to sting us, or that it could sting us? Ugh. If so, I guess it would make a certain kind of grim sense…if all you are concerned with is a vast, dark, battlefield. But to be part of that mission would feel dreadful in the true sense of the word. A pyrrhic victory, a million pyrrhic victories paid for in full and in absentia.

When I think about all our warring in the “Middle East” in context with the creeping of the security/detention/policing industries into everyday life and mores and the economy here in the US, as well as the violence that has sprung up in the last week or so across the nation as people feel wound too tight or stretched too thin, I think to myself there’s got to be a better way. And I mean that literally. Most of us sense, think, or feel that…which is why we elected the president who felt more like change. But that symbol obviously is not the end of it.

I think about the forces coming to bear and I think that there’s got to be a good number of us willing to be part of that better way. And to know what it is and how that way might manifest. And how we can reinforce it outside of our self as well as within. I may not be able to stop drones from firing on homes in a distant part of the world, but I can think about what actions and ways of thinking in my own life and day is like an empire’s drones firing into fragile homes. And…if that makes sense to you, maybe you can be part of that way in your own way. Let the right wing fanatics and white supremacists give in to terror and violence, twice as many of us need to begin healing our culture. In little ways, in tiny ways, in nearly invisible ways, and in the biggest ways we can manage.

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First, what is “The DREAM Act”?

The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (also called “The DREAM Act”) [is] a piece of proposed federal legislation in the United States that would provide certain immigrant students who graduate from a [U.S. high school], are of good moral character, arrived in the US as children, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency.

—Wikipedia ((23 March 2009)

Furthermore, as Kyle notes, The National Immigration Law Center has a basic information sheet (pdf).

Dreamactivist.org introduces it this way:

The federal DREAM Act (S.729 / H.R. 1751) will provide undocumented immigrant youth in the United States with conditional residency and a pathway to citizenship provided they came here before the age of 16 and maintained continuous residence for 5 years, graduate from high school or obtain a GED, attend 2 years of college or join the military and have no criminal records.

If Congress fails to act this year, another entire class of outstanding, law-abiding high school students will graduate without being able to plan for the future, and some will be removed from their homes to countries they barely know. This tragedy will cause America to lose a vital asset: an educated class of promising immigrant students who have demonstrated a commitment to hard work and a strong desire to be contributing members of our society.

Here’s a short video on the DREAM Act. And what bothers me about it is the blurred faces. It’s too perfect a metaphor for what we ask of the undocumented, of how we ask them to live. Without a face, without a self, without an identity.

A post I really recommend if you want to get a full understanding, complete with many links:

65,000 unauthorized migrant youth graduate from U.S. high schools every year. Many were brought to the U.S. before they could remember much else, and most know no other home except for the U.S. The cruel irony of their situation is made all the more apparent by contrasting it with my story. I was born in Guatemala and spent most of my life there. I was given the privilege of U.S. citizenship simply because I was born of U.S. parents. Meanwhile, DREAMers have lived most of their lives in the U.S., but are denied the privilege of U.S. citizenship because they had the misfortune of being born somewhere else.

If I had to sum up the DREAMer struggle in one sentence it would be this: DREAMers don’t even have a right to exist in the only country they know as their home. DREAMers haven’t even gotten to a point where they’re fighting against be considered equal humans, they’re fighting just to be recognized as humans. That’s a huge part of what inspires me about DREAMers. If any nation told me I didn’t have the right to exist, I would hate it, much less want to live in it. I’ve long joked that if I was a DREAMer, I would have started my own version of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement. The U.S. should be begging for talented youth like this, especially during this time of economic crisis. Astonishingly, DREAMers don’t hate the U.S., they work to better it. Where I probably would have been tearing the U.S. down, DREAMers instead fight to make the U.S. a better and more just place. They embody the essence of what it means to do good in this world.

—Citizen Orange

Actions one can take to help get this legislation passed:

1. CALL – The National Council of La Raza has a page to help you call your congressional representatives in support of the DREAM Act.
http://capwiz.com/nclr/callalert/index.tt?alertid=12988601

2. FAX – America’s Voice has a page to help you fax your congressional representatives in support of the DREAM Act.
http://americasvoiceonline.org/page/speakout/DaretoDream

3. EMAIL – Change.org has a page to help you email your congressional representatives in support of the DREAM Act.
http://www.change.org/ideas/932/view_action/ask_your_congressperson_to_support_the_dream_act

4. PETITION – Dreamactivist.org has the official petition in support of the DREAM Act.
http://dreamact2009.com/

5. TEXT – Text “Justice” (”Justicia” for Spanish) to 69866 to be the first to know when the DREAM Act is introduced. FIRM’s Mobile Action Network is an excellent way to stay connected and have maximum impact at just the right moment.
http://fairimmigration.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/action-join-the-fight-for-immigrant-rights/

—Citizen Orange

Sometimes I find it hard to advocate for things that seem common sense. I don’t know what to say to convince people that everyone should have air, or water, or love, or freedom of movement or opportunities such as this. It seems a win-win to me. Give people room to excel and contribute, give them the homeplace they already feel they belong to and do belong to, increase happiness and productivity all ’round. This can be a nation brimming with good will and joy and community. We just have to believe it is possible and make a few small steps toward that vision.

This is one.

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The justices’ ruling was unanimous.

Here is a beautiful excerpt from the decision:

Society benefits, for example, from providing samesex couples a stable framework within which to raise their children and the power to make health care and end-of-life decisions for loved ones, just as it does when that framework is provided for opposite-sex couples.

Amen.

Contrary to the homophobe propaganda, it’s not about special privileges for same-sex couples, it’s about equal privileges for all citizens (not just the straight ones). In other words, in Iowa, same-sex couples are no longer second-class citizens. In America there should be no second-class citizens. Everyone should share the same set of civil rights.

And, contrary to the homophobe propaganda, marriage is first and foremost a civil contract, above and beyond any religious recognition of such a union. Our founding fathers wrote the establishment clause into the first amendment for good reason.

And, in Iowa, reason has prevailed.

>> Read the full decision.

>> Learn more about Varnum v. Brien.

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Counting people is harder than it looks. The 2010 census is morphing from sociological project into a political one: conservatives are crowing about the dangers of tallying “illegals,” and activists are seeking policy changes to guard against undercounting.

Immigrant advocates are leveraging the threat of an undercount to press for immigration reforms, warning that aggressive crackdowns drive undocumented immigrants further underground. An estimated 3 percent of the Latino population was undercounted in the 2000 census.

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, League of United Latin American Citizens, SEIU and other groups have partnered to launched a Spanish-language outreach campaign, ¡HAGASE CONTAR! NALEO argues:

The census is taken largely through the U.S. postal system, and factors such as unlisted addresses, households with large families and high mobility rates contribute to persons being missed. The recession and large number of foreclosures in the Latino community will make enumerating this population even more difficult in 2010.

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Forty-one years ago this weekend, America was changed forever when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

  

Howard Dodson

The Crushing Tragedies of 1968

Everything came crashing down in 1968. April of 1968 to be exact. I had been on the high of highs since 1964. Took my first airplane ride that year.  Flew from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California.  Flew from 4° temperatures and snow in Philly to lovely LA and 75°.  Hating the cold as I did, I swore that I’d never live in cold weather again.

Spent three months at UCLA and a month in Puerto Rico before being shipped off to Ecuador, where I would spend two years of the most rewarding and transformative experiences of my life as a Peace Corps volunteer. New worlds, new people, new societies, new languages, new me! I had an incredibly successful tenure as a volunteer, organizing credit unions throughout coastal Ecuador. Organized 15. Twelve were still operating when I last checked a few years ago – 40 years later!!

I returned to Peace Corps headquarters in Washington in D.C. in 1966 and became one of the best Peace Corps recruiters in history.  Promoted to Director of Minority and Specialized Recruiting and Deputy Director of Peace Corps Recruiting nationally, I was at the top of my game. I had been offered jobs overseas with the Peace Corps and the USIA. My future was at its brightest. And then it happened on that memorable day on April 4, 1968. They killed Martin Luther King, Jr. and turned my life upside down.

I was running a recruiting campaign for Peace Corps in Philadelphia when I heard that King had been shot and killed. I took the first train smoking back to D.C. the next morning.

I made my way to Peace Corps Washington headquarters from Union Station. The fires and gunshots had already started and the city was in a total state of panic. The Peace Corps office was located at Connecticut and H Streets, two blocks from the White House and three blocks from “K” Street. “K” Street, a major thoroughfare and route to Virginia, had turned into a giant parking lot. Cars were parked-on the street, on the sidewalks, in the medians-engines running, doors open, passengers gone-gone walking-headed out of Washington. Smoke was seen at a distance in all directions. The crackle of gunfire, heard within earshot of the White House.

Within less than twenty-four hours, the U.S. military had occupied “Chocolate City.”  “Peacekeepers” with tanks and automatic rifles were stationed at checkpoints around the city- peacekeepers with weapons of war in the nation’s capital, trying to contain the rage and put out the fires ignited by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of peace.

I managed to make my way through the roadblocks and spend the night with my roommate and some friends in Maryland, just across the D.C. border. When I returned the following morning, the occupational force was at full strength. The fires were still burning and the guns were still crackling in random rhythms against the silence.

Wanted to help. Help in any way I could. Needed to do something to break the funk-to fill the void, the emptiness.  Needed to help make peace.

Made my way to a church that had been set up as a relief headquarters.  Emergency calls for food, clothing and sometimes medical care were being directed there. I needed to help make peace-to be of service. I volunteered again and took an assignment in the city.

Virtually everyone at the Church was white. The calls for help were coming from the black areas of the city where the fires were still smoldering and where gunshots still crackled. Someone was needed to make deliveries. I either volunteered or was drafted to run the military roadblocks and deliver food, clothing or other goods to those in need who had called. I made several runs in the white truck with the Red Cross sign on both sides.  I was stopped at several checkpoints by young, deathly scared, white National Guardsmen with weapons of war who thought I was a looter.

I made my way through the occupation and the funeral-King’s funeral-before I realized how deeply I had fallen-how much I had crashed. Trying to dig myself out, I started working on the Poor People’s Campaign and promised to join the Bobby Kennedy campaign as soon as I had finished a Peace Corps training project. The rains came and stymied the Poor Peoples Campaign. Another assassin’s bullet killed Bobby, and for all intents and purposes, my season of hope ended.

I was crushed by the accumulation of tragedies in 1968. The assassination of King, and the racial conflagration that followed it; the dashed hopes of the Poor People’s Campaign; the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the prospects of a Nixon Presidency all combined to plunge me into a deeper state of depression. At first I ran- took a flight to Hawaii to put some distance between me and the Kennedy assassination in June. A week or so on the beaches of Hawaii didn’t pull me out. I returned to Washington later in the month, still searching for a way out.

A chance encounter with a new television series started me on the path to recovery. In response to the King assassination and the turmoil that followed, CBS television sponsored a series of 120 half-hour programs on black history. Vincent Harding, a Columbia University Ph.D. history professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. and the memorable John Henrick Clarke, Harlem’s dean of lay historians of the black experience, co-produced the “Black Heritage” television series.  Even though it aired at ungodly hours in the morning (5 and 6 a.m.), I made it my business to watch every episode I could. Something about this plunge into the black past salved my psychic and spiritual wounds. I craved more.

I had been collecting copies of paperback books on black history since I started recruiting for Peace Corps in 1966. Every campus I went to, I made visits to the campus bookstores a must. Paperback books were still relatively new and cheap, especially if they were used.  I gobbled them up-books about black folk that I hadn’t known existed during my undergraduate and masters level studies. By 1968, I had a pretty good collection-most of them unread.

The television series convinced me that I might be able to find my sanity in our historic past if I immersed myself in these books. I shipped them off to Puerto Rico-over twenty boxes of them-and took off for San Juan. Spent a couple of months there and moved to the mountains in Mayaguez on the western side of the island-searching for my sanity, searching for meaning and renewed purpose in life, searching in the black past.

My unquenched quest in Puerto Rico led me to a new Ph.D. program in the History of Black People and Race Relations at the University of California at Berkeley. A “year abroad” in Atlanta, Georgia at the Institute of the Black World (in 1970-1971) transformed my sanity search into a sense of purpose and a vocation. My search for purpose and meaning of the traumas of 1968 put me on the path that would prepare me for my life’s work as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Howard Dodson, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library since 1984, is a specialist in African-American history as well as a noted lecturer and consultant.  His publications include Jubilee: The Emergence of African American Culture (National Geographic Press, 2002), In Motion: The African American Migration Experience (National Geographic Press, 2004) and Becoming American: The African American Journey (Sterling Publishing, Inc., 2009).

Learn more about the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

  

Reverend Dr. Susan Newman

The Day the Dream Died

Thursday, April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I was in the fifth grade at Adams Elementary School in Washington, D.C. The teachers began crying and screaming as they huddled together in the hallway, holding each other. We were told that Dr. King had been shot and we were sent home early.

As night fell and news of Dr. King’s death came across the radio and television, all of the clothing stores in black neighborhoods were in flames. Angry crowds of people ran up and down the streets, breaking windows of businesses-looting and running off with whatever they could carry. Black owners of barbershops, liquor stores, and other businesses spray painted “Soul Brother” on the front of their doors so the angry mobs would not steal and destroy their life’s investments.

President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the National Guard to keep peace and order in the streets. The city was under curfew. No one could be outside of their homes between 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.  This was the first time I ever remember seeing my father cry, as he and my mother sat with us on the sofa, listening to the news in tragic disbelief. Political and racial tensions in this majority black city were high. Washington was changing, and so was I.

A significant impression was made upon my heart during those days of grief, as people searched for the meaning of this tragedy. This man did something so wonderful, so meaningful with his life that everyone in the world seemed to be moved by his death.

During the days approaching his funeral, newscasters kept playing a clip from a speech Dr. King delivered the night before his assassination. He had gone to Memphis, Tennessee to support African-American sanitation workers who’d been on strike protesting unequal wages and working conditions. The look in Dr. King’s eyes, and the conviction in his voice stayed with me from that day on when he said:

“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

There was something birthed into my spirit that shaped my calling into ministry-do something that I felt so passionately about, that I was willing to live unafraid of dying.  And, thanks in large part to the unforgettable Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am.

The Reverend Dr. Susan Newman has had a 33-year career as a pastor, a community advocate, a teacher, a chaplain, and author. She is the President of Sincerely Susan Ministries, and is an Adjunct Minister of Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, DC. She is an inspirational, motivating and humorous speaker whose soul-stirring, thought-provoking insights on healthy relationships from a spiritual perspective have garnered nationwide attention and acclaim. Hailed by Ebony Magazine as one of the Top Black Women Preachers in America, She has been called “down-to-earth,” powerful,” “life-changing,” and “a reality check for the church.”

Learn more about Dr. Newman.

  

Esther Iverem

‘Bewitched’ and Bare Feet: Philadelphia Memories in Prime Time

Growing up in Philadelphia during 1968, most of my world revolved around attending Mrs. Johnson’s second-grade class at Harrison Elementary School, traveling on Sundays to my Uncle Jimmy’s church in South Jersey, riding my bike in the neighborhood and watching TV-lots of TV. So it figures that news of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King came to me while I was watching “Bewitched.”

Amid what must have been another episode about the modern-day witch Samantha and her doofus husband Darren, I remember a ribbon scrolling at the bottom of the screen that said something like, “THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING HAS BEEN SHOT AND KILLED IN MEMPHIS…” I was sitting with my older sister Elaine and I remember that we immediately jumped up and told our parents. We were ruling the TV and we had gotten the word first.

Though I was only eight years old, I was very aware that King’s death pertained to me and my blackness. I realize now that I was a sensitive child and in my young mind, racism (usually discussed in terms of “white people”) and injustice loomed large as an issue that adults talked about with knowledge and passion in homes, bars, sometimes  at church and on WDAS (AM and FM), one of two local black radio stations.

I lived in a somewhat racially-charged environment, with Frank Rizzo, the city’s police chief, always locked in controversy about the brutality of white officers in the black community. Philadelphia is a Northern city but, at that time, there were deep divisions between the city’s black community and some of its white, working class ethnic enclaves. (Two years after King’s death, not far from my home, Rizzo’s officers would conduct the infamous strip search of members of the Black Panther Party, large photos of which I saw in The Philadelphia Daily News delivered to our house.

And I had my own sense of the importance of King as a sort of royal man who was on TV speaking on these race issues of the day. I thought of him like an actual king.  He was pointed to as an example of the importance of education, reading well and speaking well.  But he was also a representative of very proper, middle class Negroes, which we were not. I remember my mother taking exception to one of his speeches we heard on the radio, when he seemed to mock preachers who were perhaps less eloquent than him and more filled with spirit in their delivery. She took his comments as a slap against more charismatic churches and denominations such as hers.

Much of what I understood about King, his death and his legacy came though the news and TV. But one lasting personal experience I will never forget after King’s death is approaching my elementary school and seeing, about a block away, a massive march of humanity spilling down the wide Girard Avenue. I ran toward it and watched from the sidewalk. My memory is that someone told me that the march was related to the Poor People’s March that occurred after King’s death, or that it was a march in remembrance of King. I remember being struck by the presence of so many white people in the March; some people were walking in their bare feet. I knew something had shifted in the world. I knew that something had changed.

Esther Iverem is a journalist and author whose most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press/De Capo). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is founder of SeeingBlack.com, a Web site for black critical voices on arts, media and politics. Iverem is a member of both the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and the Washington Area Film Critics Association. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also the author of two books of poems.

Visit www.SeeingBlack.com

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When the United States economy was more abundant, it was common for many of those who were affluent to denigrate government entitlement programs. Their contempt stemmed from two major sources: a doctrinaire commitment to an unfettered free market, and a profound objection to the expenditure of taxpayer funds for welfare, Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other programs.

Many people believe that America is the land of opportunity, where the good life is available to everyone who works hard. They also believe that those who fail do so because of personal shortcomings. The natural corollary is that those who followed the rules and succeeded should not have to forfeit a portion of their hard-earned gains to benefit the losers.

Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board

The present economic collapse has forced a reassessment of this cold-blooded ideology. Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, has been the longtime patron saint of anti-regulatory forces. In a 1994 congressional hearing on the regulation of financial derivatives, Greenspan said, “There is nothing involved in federal regulation per se which makes it superior to market regulation.”

Greenspan also refused to intervene by enacting regulations to temper the subprime mortgage problem. In April 2008, he wrote, “Bank loan officers, in my experience, know more about the risk and workings of their counterparties than do bank regulators.” While Greenspan claimed to have a feel for the financial markets, he seemed to have little understanding of the enormity of human greed.

Wealthy Americans have been concerned for some time that entitlement programs devour more than half of the budget. The mantra of the conservatives has long been to cut taxes, but they are aware that this policy is unwise without commensurate cuts in fiscal spending. Nonetheless, the costs of entitlements have proven to be intractable, and are actually projected to grow.

What was never predicted is that wealthy investors in the auto industry and financial institutions would one day be in line waiting for federal handouts to preserve their assets. Ironically, giving bailout-funded bonuses to AIG executives is sort of like allowing citizens to be on the dole. Perhaps now everyone can see that the role of government is to assure the welfare of all.

One thing to be learned is that greed has no morals. Wise regulations are necessary to hold this demon at bay. A free market system can function well only with restraints on the unfettered expression of greed.

Reprinted with permission from The Bay Street Banner, an African-American run periodical in Boston, Massachusetts.

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A test case on same-sex fairness

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Shirley Tan is a 43-year old Pacifica homemaker and mother of twin seventh-grade boys. Tan also wears an ankle bracelet assigned by immigration agents after a dawn raid on her home two months ago.

Barring a legal miracle, she faces likely deportation to the Philippines on Friday. That result would devastate her family and friends. But her case also touches off two flashpoint issues – immigration law and same-sex marriage – that are combining in a way that shows the unfairness of this country’s laws.

If she is deported, Tan will be separated from her partner Jay Mercado, who is a naturalized citizen. For straight couples, there wouldn’t be a similar problem because a citizen can sponsor a spouse for residency. But under the federal Defense of Marriage Act, this right doesn’t exist for an estimated 37,000 same-sex couples where one partner is a noncitizen.

Tan’s case also points up how ill-equipped and unfair immigration laws can be. She and her partner sought to legalize their status for years, pursuing their case through hearings and appeals with several lawyers.

But Mercado says the couple never learned of an adverse ruling in 2002, blaming the delay on a previous lawyer. Since then, the couple traveled, signed up for a real estate license and even passed a Homeland Security screening on a tourist visit to the White House. There was never a blip until the 6:30 a.m. door knock from immigration agents on Jan. 28.

There is a legal Hail Mary, a longshot chance via a rarely used power that members of Congress can use to single out individuals for a reprieve from deportation. Tan’s congresswoman, Democrat Jackie Speier, is considering her case.

But a fuller answer is needed: an overhaul of immigration law that would recognize special circumstances and also passage of the Uniting American Families Act. That measure would end the discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans and let them sponsor partners for immigration.

Keeping all families together is a goal worth achieving.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/01/EDB216Q4D8.DTL

This article appeared on page A – 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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