From: FWD This ↘︎
Subject: Stand with Bernie!
Thanks for signing on to stand with Senator Bernie Sandres and support his bill to overturn Citizens United!
Will you help us keep up our momentum by forwarding this and asking three friends to stand with Bernie?
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The Senate is voting on the Republicans' horrendous budget which repeals Obamacare, destroys Medicare, and would deal a massive blow to the economy.
Bernie Sanders is planning to add an amendment to the bill which would begin the process for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United.
Will you support Bernie's amendment to overturn Citizens United?
25,OOO Signatures Needed Before the Vote:
http://act.endcitizensunited.org/bernie-bill
Thanks for standing up!
-EndCitizensUnited.org
End Citizens United
1050 17th Street, NW Suite 590
Washington, DC 20036
PAID FOR BY END CITIZENS UNITED ENDCITIZENSUNITED.ORG AND NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE'S COMMITTEE. |
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From: SPAN Ohio
Subject: ACTION ALERT: Trojan horse for Medicare privatization
This comes from our friends at PNHP. This bill is an assault on Medicare and will affect us all in a very negative way. Please take the time to read through and then take action.
Health care is a human right!
Dear Supporters and Activists,
I urge you to take action today to contact your members of Congress and your medical society and urge them to stop the rush to pass the "doc fix" bill in its current form.
As Dr. Don McCanne, PNHP's senior health policy fellow, noted his Quote of the Day this morning, "In the fervor to finally rid us of the flawed Sustainable Growth Rate model of setting Medicare payment rates, Congress is about to pass legislation (H.R. 1470) that includes ill-advised, misguided and detrimental policies that could cause irreparable harm to our traditional Medicare program." (Yesterday the working version of the bill became H.R. 2 and was renamed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015.)
Those harmful changes are summarized below, in the "Backgrounder on the 2015 SGR 'doc fix'" prepared by Dr. Ida Hellander, our director of health policy and programs.
To contact your representative or senator, call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121. An operator will connect you. (For detailed recommendations about needed changes to the legislation, see Dr. McCanne's comment today, which are posted below Dr. Ida Hellander's comments. You can use these as talking points.)
Time is of the essence; the vote is likely to take place tomorrow.
Needless to say, we wouldn't be facing this kind of problem if Congress had enacted single-payer legislation such as H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act.
Cordially,
Robert Zarr, M.D., M.P.H.; President; pres.zarr@pnhp.org
Backgrounder on the 2015 SGR 'doc fix'
Trojan horse for Medicare privatization
By Ida Hellander, M.D.
The bipartisan "Doc Fix" legislation (H.R. 1470, now H.R. 2) and proposed amendments will undermine traditional Medicare and advance the goal of privatization, according to Dr. Don McCanne in a series of posts to his popular health policy blog, the Quote of the Day. If enacted as it presently reads, it will:
1. Limit choice of physician in traditional Medicare. Physicians in traditional Medicare would be subject to onerous new documentation requirements for payment and financial incentives to avoid complex patients under the proposed "Merit-based Incentive Payment System." The additional paperwork burden will push physicians to stop seeing patients with traditional Medicare, retire, avoid older and sicker patients, or go to work for large organizations using "alternative payment models" (which are exempt from the requirement and more likely to have contracts with private Medicare plans).
2. Reduce access to care in traditional Medicare. Imposes a deductible that cannot be covered by Medigap insurance (starting in 2020) to encourage patients to join a private plan. The current Part B deductible is $147 annually, although that figure has been rising in recent years; 95 percent of traditional Medicare beneficiaries have supplemental insurance that covers the deductible and other cost sharing in Medicare. The only way to avoid the deductible in the future will be to join a private Medicare Advantage plan.
3. Raise Medicare's costs by driving more patients into private Medicare Advantage plans. Private plans have already cost Medicare an excess of more than $282 billion since 1985. Mandatory deductibles and reduced access to physicians in traditional Medicare will drive more patients into private Medicare Advantage plans, which are more costly than the cost of caring for patients in the traditional fee-for-service program. Although Obamacare was supposed to reduce the amount the private plans are overpaid (the "Medicare cuts" in Obamacare), these have been mostly offset by "adjustments" and "quality awards" by the Department of Health and Human Services.
4. Undermine Medicare's popular support by requiring higher income seniors to pay higher premiums (means testing). Under means-tested premiums, higher-income individuals will be required to pay larger premiums, undermining the support of this influential group for Medicare program. Although the income subject to extra premiums is high, it can always be reduced in the future.
5. Ending the SGR should cost $20 billion, not $210 billion. These drastic measures aren't even necessary. According to Bruce Vladeck, a former top administrator at Medicare, "Since the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) was implemented in 1998, total Medicare physician expenditures have exceeded the allowed amounts by only $20 billion (on a total of almost $1 trillion). To recoup that all in one year would require a 21 percent reduction in fees for one year. And those reduced fees would then become the base for payment levels in all subsequent years. In a rational world, Congress would write off the $20 billion as a relatively small policy error and establish a more realistic prospective formula. But under Congressional budget rules, the cost of doing so is not $20 billion, but $20 billion per year, compounded by inflation, times 10 years."
6. The GOP sees this bill as a step towards their longer-term goal of turning Medicare into a voucher program for private plans, shifting more costs onto patients. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., a staunch conservative, told the Washington Post he is supporting the bill because it will lead to much greater savings beyond the traditional 10-year time frame for estimating costs. Newt Gingrich stated the GOP's goal succinctly in 1996: "Now, we don't get rid of it [Medicare] in round one because we don't think that that's politically smart, and we don't think that's the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it's going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it -- voluntarily."
7. Other features:
Continues funding for safety-net programs
* Two-year extension for CHIP
* Two-year ($7.2 billion) extension for Community Health Centers
Restricts abortion, adds funds for war
* Makes Hyde Amendment permanent law. Since the ACA is a permanent statute, any amendment to any part of the ACA becomes part of U.S. Code.
* $94 billion in additional military spending in an "off-budget account."
Dr. Ida Hellander is director of health policy and programs at Physicians for a National Health Program.
Don McCanne's Recommendations:
1. Repeal SGR
2. Extend the funding of CHIP for four years
3. Extend funding for community health centers
4. Reject unproven or detrimental policies
a) Reject the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) which threatens the traditional Medicare program by creating an administratively burdensome but unproven method of replacing volume with value
b) Reject the Alternative Payment Models (APMs) as the only options for escaping MIPS since APMs also remain unproven methods of replacing volume with value
c) Reject the threat to quality care that can result from burnout of health care professionals overburdened with the administrative excesses of MIPS and APMs
d) Reject the false argument that SGR - a policy that has not been implemented for many years - must somehow be paid for by other reductions in public spending
e) Reject the political chicanery of introducing unrelated issues into the legislation such as policy positions on pregnancy termination
f) Reject the expansion of means-tested premiums in Medicare which would threaten solidarity in support of our Medicare program
g) Reject imposing deductibles under Medigap plans which would cause too many patients to delay or forgo beneficial health care services
h. Reject these unproven or detrimental policies that would reduce support of our traditional Medicare program, opening the door for those who would privatize Medicare through premium-support (voucher) proposals.
From: Michael Langenmayr, Daily Kos
Subject: It's the end of Medicare as we know it (please read)
Sign the petition from Daily Kos and a wide coalition: No Medicare vouchers!
House Republicans are trying to destroy Medicare as we know it—again.
Their "new" plan is just a rehash of the Paul Ryan plan: Turn Medicare into a voucher program that may or may not cover the health care costs of seniors.
Republicans have been trying to destroy Medicare since they took over the House after the 2010 elections. But now that Republicans have control of the House and the Senate, we need to work harder than ever to stop them.
Fight the Republican plan to destroy Medicare: Sign the petition.
From: Michael Keegan; President, People For the American Way
Subject: Shredding the social safety net
If there's one thing that grows clearer every time the GOP proposes a budget it's that the social safety net -- especially Medicare and Social Security -- will only survive for as long as there are limits on Republican power in Washington (like a Democrat is in the White House).
The right-wing extremism we're up against is not confined to bigoted attacks on gays, immigrants and women's rights, or the Tea Party's irrational, conspiracy theory-driven hatred for President Obama. It's also economic, as the latest Republican budget proposals from the House and Senate show.
The Republican fiscal agenda has gotten so radical that it now resembles -- big surprise -- the platform David Koch ran on as the Libertarian vice presidential nominee in 1980 -- a platform known, even then, for its striking extremism.
That platform called for, among other things:1
- "Repeal of federal campaign finance laws"
- "Abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs"
- "The repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system"
- And the repeal of things like minimum wage laws
Look familiar?
For the current Tea Party-dominated GOP to relent on these attacks, it's going to take us calling them out, standing up to them, and defeating them at the polls, until they have no choice but to let it go.
We are building the programs to beat them by making the overreach and extremism we're seeing now backfire on them in 2016. But we need to raise another $55,000 by March 31 to get to where we need to be.
Will you chip in today with a generous donation to help PFAW fight back against right-wing extremism -- on all fronts>>
PoliticalWire put it clearly: "GOP Budget Overhauls Medicare and Kills Obamacare"2
But that's not all! There's also:
- Steep cuts to Medicaid
- Slashed funding for student loan grants
- Massive cuts to food stamps
- Implied big cuts to Social Security
And the Medicare overhaul includes both cuts and a privatization scheme. Between Medicare, Medicaid and the end of the Affordable Care Act via the death of its subsidies, TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans would lose their healthcare.3
Paul Krugman lays it out beautifully (emphasis added):4
"You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn't. The modern G.O.P.'s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that's telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum."
He continues:
"…outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It's a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why."
Don't worry -- he knows why, and so do you:
"What you're left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts."
That's what they want alright.
The results of a right-wing Republican victory in 2016 would be devastating. That one of America's two major parties has been able to metastasize and become SO extreme is a problem that will take years to fix, but we can start now … and in the meantime, we certainly can't afford any more Election Day losses.
Please help make sure we don't come up short and we're able to raise the $55,000 more we need by the end of the month.
Chip in to help us get to our goal now>>
1 What Do the Koch Brothers Want?
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/koch-brothers
2 GOP Budget Overhauls Medicare and Kills Obamacare
http://politicalwire.com/2015/03/17/gop-budget-overhauls-medicare-and-kills-obamacare/
3 House Republican Budget Could Double The Number Of Uninsured
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/18/house-budget-uninsured_n_6892592.html
4 Trillion Dollar Fraudsters
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/opinion/paul-krugman-trillion-dollar-fraudsters.html?_r=0
From: Kristin, Elyssa, Donna, Monifa, and the entire MomsRising.org team
Subject: Hands off SNAP!
Some U.S. members of Congress are at it again: they are literally trying to take food out of the mouths of hungry children and families. This week the House of Representatives and Senate proposed their budgets and the legislation attempts to gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or food stamps).
We can't let Congress get away with this again! One in five children in the U.S. rely on SNAP for their meals, yet Congress keeps making major cuts to the program while giving bigger tax breaks to big business and billionaires! [1]
Moms and dads need to speak up and tell Congress "hands off of SNAP!":
http://action.momsrising.org/sign/ProtectSNAP/?source=mo-77404
SNAP helps real families trying to make ends meet. Families like Lorraine's: "I was a middle class hard-working professional, until my marriage ended around the same time as the recession hit. I suddenly became the unemployed single mother of two girls, ages 4 and 7. [After endless job searching and selling off many of my possessions] a close friend suggested I apply for food stamps. His family had used them. That night, thinking of my girls, I piggybacked off of the neighbors' wireless signal and Googled "how to apply for food stamps." A few weeks later, it was a huge relief to trudge up the stairs to my apartment with my happy kids, carrying bags of fresh groceries. It felt better than Christmas. These are tough times, and I learned the hard way that pride doesn't put a warm meal on the table, but that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) does."
Like Lorraine's children, one in five children rely on SNAP to put food on the table. The House budget hits SNAP with a double whammy. First it cuts the program by $140 billion over ten years. [2] And then as if that were not enough, the budget block grants SNAP, turning control over to the states by 2021. [3] This might sound fine, but what this really would mean is SNAP would be less able to respond to increased need during an economic downturn (like the one many of us are still trying to pull ourselves out of). In addition, states would be able to shift funds away from food assistance to other purposes, meaning our families struggling to put food on the table wouldn't be able to get the service we deeply need. [4] The Senate budget also includes major funding cuts that would result in less SNAP dollars for our families.
Converting SNAP to a block grant would harm the millions of low-income families who rely on it now or will need help in the future. Currently 46 million people access SNAP—how will moms and dads provide food for their families if these draconian measures are passed through Congress? [5]
We need your help in making our voices loud and clear. Write Congress TODAY and tell them "hands off of SNAP!":
http://action.momsrising.org/sign/ProtectSNAP/?source=mo-77404
Children and families shouldn't have to go hungry while big businesses and billionaires rack up more tax breaks! The Congressional budgets lower tax rates for large corporations and wealthy individuals, creating a windfall for the wealthiest few and pushing struggling families deeper into poverty. [6] The members of Congress who support this budget claim they are helping the economy, but in reality, slashing funding for food stamps only hinders our economic growth. SNAP doesn't just help individual families, it also helps our local economies. According to the USDA, SNAP is a key public benefit program, which also serves as an economic stimulus, creating an economic boost that ripples through the economy when new SNAP benefits are redeemed. [7]
So join me in calling on Congress to do the right thing and protect the funding and integrity of SNAP:
http://action.momsrising.org/sign/ProtectSNAP/?source=mo-77404
This is a real threat to a real important program, so we need all hands on deck. Once you write your members of Congress, post the action link (http://action.momsrising.org/sign/ProtectSNAP/?source=mo-77404) to Twitter and Facebook, and forward this email to your friends. We have to make sure we come together to protect SNAP for kids and families.
Thank you for being a strong voice for children and families across the country.
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1) U.S. Census Bureau. "One in Five Children Receive Food Stamps, Census Bureau Reports." January 28, 2015.
2) Bob Greenstein. "Statement by Robert Greenstein, President, On House Budget Chariman's Plan." Center on Budget an Policy Priorities, March 17, 2015.
3) John Bresnahan. "GOP budget plan: Slash spending, transform Medicare, boost military." Politico, March 17, 2015.
4) "Chairman Ryan's Baseless Attack on SNAP/Food Stamps." Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
5) Arthur Delaney. "House Republican Budget Whacks Food Stamps and Medicaid." Huffington Post, March 17, 2015.
6) Harry Stein and Anna Chu. "Congressional Republican Leaders Claim to Support the Middle Class, but Their Budgets Only Work for the Wealthy Few." Center for American Progress, March 18, 2015.
7) "The Business Case for Increasing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Participation." United States Department of Agriculture, July 25, 2013.
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From: Eric Kramer
Subject: Is political bias in the blood?
http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/17/scientists-are-beginning-to-figure-out-why-conservatives-are%E2%80%A6-conservative/
From: Cecilie Surasky, Jewish Voice for Peace
Subject: No more illusions- an Open Letter
Change in Israel Will Only Come from Outside Pressure
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent actions have caused a political earthquake here in the U.S. and I believe that we now have a unique opportunity to change the conversation about Israel in this country.
Netanyahu's attempt to undermine US diplomacy in a speech to Congress, followed by an electoral victory won through appeals to racism and rejection of Palestinian statehood, may have brought closer in a matter of days what many of us have worked toward for decades —an end to unconditional US support for Israel's endless occupation and systematic discrimination against Palestinians.
Unless we act now, the window of opportunity may pass. Let's raise our voices loudly and make visible the massive support for putting pressure on Israel. If we can get 20,000 signers on our Open Letter by the start of Passover, April 3, we will run an ad with the letter in one of the key publications for Congresspeople and staff in Washington DC.
Click here: www.Time2Choose.org and sign our Passover Open Letter now. Please share it far and wide--on Facebook and on Twitter, on email lists, and with your community leaders.
The letter says that those of us who want a lasting peace in the region now have a clear choice. We can stand on the side of democracy, equality and freedom, or we can continue to delay justice by offering only words of criticism, rather than concrete actions that could stop Israel's illegal actions and support Palestinian-led efforts for justice.
And it challenges everyone to take any and all forms of nonviolent action to press Israel to do the right thing— whether it be through lobbying the US Congress; implementing the nonviolent tactics of boycott, divestment and sanctions; advocating for the US to stop using its veto at the UN; or continuing to transform the conversation within the American Jewish community.
We need you to act now to raise your voice and encourage friends, loved ones, and community leaders who may be newly ready to speak up. The time is now.
Click here: www.Time2Choose.org and help us secure 20,000 signatures on our Open Letter, in honor of the Passover message of liberation, and share the message far and wide. If we hit our goal, we'll run an ad with the letter in one of the most influential newspapers on the Hill.
We have come so far in such a short period of time— to reach the tipping point, we must be visible.
From: Judy Burnette
Subject: FW: Just Released! 'The Business of Backlash'
The Business of Backlash
Today, IJAN is excited to release an explosive new report, The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements for Social Justice, revealing the financing behind the attacks across the United States against those who have been organizing in support of Palestine. This long awaited 120 page report, which synthesizes thousands of pages of tax returns, demonstrates that a small handful of individuals, including right-wing donors Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers, and Newton and Rochelle Becker, the Sarah Scaife foundation and the Bradley foundation are responsible for a huge portion of this funding. This report was written in conjunction with many partners in the Palestine and Palestine Solidarity movement.
"The attacks on the Palestinian community have been relentless; we have faced a highly organized campaign of intimidation, criminalization and economic coercion," said Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. "Now we know where much of the money behind these attacks is coming from. We can use this critical information to launch campaigns and connect movements to counter the outsized influence of these donors who are dedicated to fattening their pocketbooks no matter how much harm they do to people and the planet."
By following the trail of money, the report reveals that these same donors, many of whom established their wealth from or are invested in industries that profit from war and instability in the Middle East, are involved in undermining other progressive causes. These connections are essential in understanding and exposing what our movements are up against, and in forging alliances across our movements to confront our common enemies.
"We are building our power, and that is why they are attacking us," says Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a Palestinian professor who was targeted by the AMCHA Initiative. "Palestinian rights are indivisible, and we refuse to let them divide us, even with their billions of dollars."
We hope that The Business of Backlash will be used as a practical resource for strengthening the strategic defense of the Palestinian and Palestinian solidarity movements, and for broadening and deepening our alliances with other movements that are struggling for collective liberation.
The report is available in both electronic and hard copies. Click here for information on ordering a hardcopy or to directly download the executive summary and full report.
If you are interested in hosting a workshop or presentation on the content of The Business of Backlash, please write us at backlashdefense@ijan.org
PS - We are pleased to announce the launch of IJAN's new website: www.ijan.org. Thank you to our incredible designer/developer Manu Sachdeva!
From: Jo,Justin K., Josh, Erica, and the rest of the team, MoveOn.org Civic Action
Subject: Sign the petition: Obama, you can strike a blow vs. Citizens United
The New York Times just reported that "President Obama Could Unmask Big Political Donors."1 As the report explains, the president has a real opportunity to make progress on the fight to get money out of politics—and it doesn't require anything from Congress.
But to make it happen, we need to show the president how important this issue is to all of us.
The action we need is an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose their political spending. If they are going to take taxpayer dollars and then pour corporate cash into candidate campaigns and shadowy organizations, we deserve to know.
With a stroke of his pen, President Obama could strike a blow against the destructive impact of Citizens United.
This is so important that we're joining a campaign led by Public Citizen to reach 500,000 signatures by April 2, which will be a national day of action on money and politics. Together, MoveOn, Democracy for America, Daily Kos, CREDO, and other allies can hit this goal. You can help by signing onto Public Citizen's petition, addressed to the president, which says:
Take a bite out of Citizens United by issuing an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose their political spending. The American people have the right to know what corporations with lucrative, taxpayer-funded government contracts are spending to influence elections.
Sign Public Citizen's petition
How significant could this change be? Significant enough that it's attracting powerful enemies. The chief lobbyist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—which represents some of the country's biggest corporations—vowed that, in regards to this executive order, "We will fight it through any means necessary."2
If it's scaring them, that's because it's meant to. Requiring disclosure would put corporations on notice. Their contributions to right-wing think tanks and grassroots groups would no longer be hidden from the public. And who knows what we might find out in terms of the pay-to-play politics of government contracts?
But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce isn't going to make this easy, and President Obama is feeling pressure to continue with business as usual. That's why he needs to hear from us. "Business as usual" is unacceptable. Our system is broken. And if the president can take some measures to reduce the power of corporations, increase transparency, and tackle money in politics head-on, then he has a responsibility to do so.
The time is now—and our allies are planning a massive signature delivery to the White House, a signal that Americans are ready for action.
Click here to add your name to this petition—and give the president the momentum to take on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Citizens United.
Sources:
1. "President Obama Could Unmask Big Political Donors," The New York Times, March 23, 2015
http://www.moveon.org/r/?r=303668&id=110346-1195276-bYURNWx&t=1
2. "Dark Money Casts a Sinister Shadow Across the Land," The Huffington Post, March 2, 2015
http://www.moveon.org/r/?r=303655&id=110346-1195276-bYURNWx&t=2
Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 8 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Start a monthly donation here or chip in a one-time donation here.
From: Carissa Miller, Daily Kos
Subject: Munsup, sign this: President Obama can REALLY piss of the Koch Brothers with this one
With the stroke of a pen President Obama can issue an executive order that requires federal contractors to disclose campaign contributions. Sign the petition urging him to do so.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama said: The secret billionaire and big business "dark money" is pulling "our politics into the gutter."
The President can do something about it right now, and he doesn't need approval from the Boehner-McConnell Congress.
Americans deserve to know how much corporations are spending -- either backing politicians who may help them get lucrative government business -- that our tax dollars pay for or -- attacking politicians who do not.
Stand with Daily Kos and Public Citizen and sign the petition to President Obama asking him to take this one simple step right now that will shed light on the political influence of corporations that get taxpayer-funded business from the federal government.
From: Ben Betz; Online Engagement Director, People For the American Way
Subject: Corporate disclosure executive order update & day of action (in 1 week!)
Thank you for your action urging President Obama to sign an executive order requiring that federal contractors disclose their political spending!
Next Thursday, April 2 will be a national day of action against money in politics, with rallies across the country calling on President Obama to sign the executive order you already took action to support.
Will you join the rally closest to you?
If there's not one in your area, it's not too late to sign up to organize and host your own -- even something small would be incredibly important to the effort!
You can find an event near you, and sign up to attend (or host) at:
http://www.getmoneyoutaction.org/
April 2 is also the one-year anniversary of the McCutcheon decision, in which the 5-justice conservative majority on the Roberts Court eliminated important caps on individual election spending using the same rationale from Citizens United.
Along with our allies, we're looking to gather 500,000 petition signatures in support of the federal contractor executive order by next Thursday. You can also help with this effort by continuing to share the petition (http://www.pfaw.org/ExecutiveOrder).
Share it on Facebook and Twitter now:
Disclosure is, as the Washington Post put it earlier this year, "the backbone of accountability."
From: Stanley Hirtle
Subject: [#FreedomSide Dayton Hub] From Christian Century...
Stanley Hirtle posted in #FreedomSide Dayton Hub
| From Christian Century http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2015-03/selmas-long-shadow
CENTURY BLOG
Selma's long shadow
Mar 19, 2015 by Benjamin J. Dueholm
America's conversation about race has, like all of our public conversations, come to consist largely of a running commentary on viral spectacles. Recent weeks have been rife with them—the Oklahoma University SAE video chant and the dreadful scene of the double shooting of police in Ferguson; the awesome images of a sitting and a former president crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, heading a massive multiracial and multigenerational crowd; the face of University of Virginia student Martese Johnson, bloodied by Alcohol Board of Control officers.
These spectacles, because they are shareable and abstracted from any context, polarize instantly. (I don't have the heart to look for them, but I would guess that some TownHall commenters are already insisting Martese Johnson must have been violently resisting arrest.) Less shareable, though probably more important, was the Justice Department's 102-page report on its investigation of the Ferguson law enforcement system. The report's shocking conclusions were enough to prompt some conservative writers to point out how scandalous to constitutional rights this situation was—and to chide their ideological allies for not taking its findings more seriously. "No conservative on earth should feel comfortable with the way the Ferguson PD has been operating for years, even according to their own documents," says Leon Wolf at RedState.
This rare moment of ideological line-crossing only serves to highlight something deeply discouraging about the report itself, however. President Obama's speech in Selma touched stirringly on the gains in social and political equality that have been made in the 50 years since the marchers there pushed the Voting Rights Act forward, bringing large-scale African American participation in elections to some places it hadn't been seen since the terrorist-aided Redeemers brought Reconstruction to an end in 1877. And yet, Obama insisted—alluding specifically to the Ferguson report—"this nation's racial history casts its long shadow upon us."
And the report makes it clear—clearer than Obama's speech did—that racial discrimination is no mere waning holdover, incompletely overcome by people of fair minds and good will. It reveals an approach to policing aimed at milking Ferguson's black residents for fines and court fees, an approach more like debt imprisonment than any defensible notion of public safety. One notable offender, municipal judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer, imposed steep (and possibly unlawful) fines while fixing similar fees for friends—and owing some $170,000 in unpaid taxes of his own. Last week, Brockmeyer resigned from the court, maintaining his other lucrative positions as a public prosecutor and private attorney.
The scourge of profit-driven law enforcement is increasingly coming under scrutiny. But the Ferguson report goes further, explicitly connecting exorbitant fines to a deeply embedded culture of bigotry, limned in shockingly racist emails and openly hostile police interactions. Racism endures in part because it is highly profitable. It isn't simply a toxic personal quirk destined to ebb away, soon or late. It undergirds a meaningful transfer of wealth out of the black community and into the white community. It creates winners as well as losers.
American racism has always done this, going back to slavery, in which belief in racial hierarchy was created by and reinforced a system of forced labor. This continued with the large-scale expropriation of small black farmers during and after Reconstruction, the racial cleansing of cities and towns around the country, and the denial of access to credit. Racially exclusive housing policies at federal and local levels benefited white homeowners at the expense of potential black homeowners. Racially exclusive employment practices shielded white workers from competition.
The economic engines that drove the creation of 20th-century America's massive middle class were, often by design, biased against black Americans. As these policies have been painfully and unevenly rousted out, they have sometimes persisted or reappeared in formally "race-neutral" ways.
This is why—despite all the hype, pointless vitriol, and instant conclusions our public conversation urges on us—I told the students in the preaching class I taught last fall that we have to be on guard against moving to a stance of premature transcendence where race is concerned. This is a common enough tendency among well-meaning white preachers (myself very much included), one that pushes us to seek a higher ground on the gospel vision of a shared and unbroken humanity. But overcoming racial inequality requires more than acknowledging the universal humanity uniting us across historically contingent lines of race. It requires more than wanting what is best for all people, more than honestly and fully acknowledging a cruel history, more than expressing the socially and humanly acceptable kind of shock at yet another bloodied face.
It will require something more than even our most honest pundits and eloquent politicians are likely to ask: a willingness, on the part of some of us, to let go of things we would rather keep.
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End of MPEN e-Newsletter
