The governor of South Dakota signed into law on Monday a ban on nearly all abortions in the state, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion in the United States.

The new law makes it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure is necessary to save a woman’s life and makes no exception for cases of rape or incest. Doctors could get up to five years in prison for performing an illegal abortion.
independent.co.uk

NEW ORLEANS – The Army Corps of Engineers seems likely to fulfill a promise by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans’s toppled flood walls to their original, pre-Katrina height by June 1, but two teams of independent experts monitoring the $1.6 billion reconstruction project say large sections of the rebuilt levee system will be substantially weaker than before the hurricane hit.

These experts say the Corps, racing to rebuild 169 miles of levees destroyed or damaged by Katrina, is taking shortcuts to compress what is usually a years-long construction process into a few weeks. They say that weak, substandard materials are being used in some levee walls, citing lab tests as evidence. And they say the Corps is deferring repairs to flood walls that survived Katrina but suffered structural damage that could cause them to topple in a future storm.

The Corps strongly disputes the assertion — by engineers from a National Science Foundation-funded panel and a Louisiana team appointed to monitor the rebuilding — that substandard materials are being used in construction. Agency officials maintain that the new levees are rigorously inspected at each step. But they acknowledge that much more work will be needed after June 1, the beginning of hurricane season, and that the finished system still will not be strong enough to withstand a storm the magnitude of Katrina.
msnbc.msn.com

By and large I count myself among those who believe that what is generally promoted as a race discussion usually ends up a waste of time. Now that we’re past Black History Month, during which columnist Clarence Page suggested that his PBS NewsHour viewers might look to the 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin for racial guidance, maybe we can also get past sepia-toned reminiscences of slavery and eulogies for Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King to the real grainy Technicolor ways folk live today, or try to. It’s an understatement that the ravishment of the Gulf Coast, destruction of a major American city and dispossession of its majority-black residents have set conditions for more than talk. But that ongoing catastrophe also demands that when we do speak, we better tell it like it is.

Whenever people say things like Hurricane Katrina “ripped the veil off racism and poverty” I am reminded of a line from a song in Craig Brewer’s film Hustle and Flow: “It might be new to you but it’s been like this for years.” In fact, the film pricked my race/class sensibilities more than anything else in the midst of the latest round of race talk.

Shot in the working-class neighborhoods of Brewer’s hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, Hustle and Flow is the story of DJay (played by Oscar nominee Terrence Howard), a pimp having a “midlife crisis.” He’s 35, the same age as his father when he died, and he fears his life will soon be over unless he changes course.

The film’s look, feel and sound are all intimately familiar. From the dirt on the walls of a shotgun house to the hot, wet, sticky red clay-tinted heat of a Southern summer and the ever-present, almost useless dirty portable fan. From the train track separating the haves from the have-nots to the get-by job that gets you to the weekend to the juke joint where anything happens. From the sound of the blues – even in rap music – right down to the neighborhood, language and attitudes, Brewer puts a face on the people that those such as Bill Cosby wish to be invisible. Some of them are even white.

Brewer’s people could be among the 35 percent of blacks currently living below the poverty line in the United States or the poorest 20 percent or so of Louisiana residents. Hustle and Flow reveals what Katrina revealed: those who’ve been left to fend for themselves. In New Orleans almost 40 percent of New Orleans’ households, nearly all of them black, earned less than $20,000 a year.

I have lived in either a predominately black or all-black neighborhood for most of my forty-nine years. It is not an endorsement of segregation; it’s just the way it is. Yet, there are a couple of things to appreciate about longstanding southern black neighborhoods. For one thing, different economic classes still live amongst one another. They intermix and interact. This social interaction is represented in the film by DJay’s relationship with Key, played by Anthony Anderson. Key, an old school friend, has become a middle-class audio technician. In addition, many of us move up and down – on and off the economic ladder throughout our lives. And most demographic data not only bear out that class intermix but also the precariousness of paycheck-to-paycheck living. Moreover, the typical black family doesn’t conform to the 2 parents, 2 kids model. Single women head 62% of black families and 67% of black children are born out of wedlock. Moreover, blacks more readily accept whites into those communities than vice versa, even poor whites, even gentrifying white “pioneers.”

Although there has been racial progress in the United States, for many African Americans life is like ice-skating up hill. According to the most recent American Housing Survey only 49 percent of blacks are homeowners as compared with 76 percent of whites. Even with comparable credit, blacks are 210 percent more likely than whites to be rejected for a mortgage. When black borrowers are fortunate enough to get a non-government home loan, a little less than a third of them will have to bear high-interest sub-prime financing, which usually doesn’t mesh well with a sub-prime car loan and/or the interest on a payday loan. No surprise, the national foreclosure rate for blacks sits right at 50 percent, and half of all African Americans live in unaffordable, inadequate or crowded housing. Among people living on the street or in their cars, 40 percent are black.

Wealth, equity, control over property – these markers of the “American dream” are largely white privileges. At the onset of the last recession, between 1999 and 2001, the net worth of Hispanic and black households fell by 27 percent. As of 2002, the Pew Hispanic Center reports, the median Hispanic household had a net worth of $7,932 and the median black family had $5,998, while the median white family had $88,651. And, almost a third of black households and more than a quarter of Hispanic ones had zero or negative net worth.

The meaning of the numbers is obvious: a sizable number of households and the individuals in them are barely getting by. And those in the middle class are seldom permanently middle class. That is not to say there are no recognizable class lines. Lots of black families lead economically stable lives and have decent credit.

Yet the majority of blacks live under conditions where any little bind affects their whole life. They are the people who lose their sub-prime loan homes, choose between car repair or insurance, gas or taxes, food or medicine, and frequently need an extension on the electric or phone bill. They rent the cheapest place they can find and try to hold on in traditional neighborhoods in the face of just about everything – from economic redlining to strict property code enforcement to urban pioneering to population disbursement or marginalization. They routinely face racial profiling and aggressive, if not brutal, law enforcement, jail and unemployability. A majority is in the South, where 54 percent of blacks still live. Others are concentrated in the ghettos although many cities have driven poor people out of the core of metropolitan areas all across the country. And then there are those holdouts who occupied the waterfront – be it the bayous, the barrier islands, along a lake or river, because that’s where their ancestors fled to – only to have that land taken by developers, or a storm, because it is waterfront.

That’s why Hustle and Flow is such a notable picture. It is not just the story of a pimp in Memphis who needs to make music. It is the story of another city on the Mississippi delta. New Orleans was built on race dating back to the day when the first Africans fled out to the bayous to be free just as a runaway Jim in Huck Finn was attempting to do. It’s that superficial sense of freedom and abandon that still draws tourists to a battered New Orleans, although the benefits of an economy based on the arts and nightlife never will trickle down to everyone. That is, unless you consider the four-man stand-up band that used to live in the Ninth Ward and is now playing and dancing in the street on a weekend night in The French Quarters for the money out-of-towners throw in the collection box as trickle down economics.
hollerif.blogspot.com

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — War. College. A better job. The answers are as numerous as the number of young black people who are deciding against a military career.

Defense Department statistics show that the number of black active-duty enlisted personnel has declined 14 percent since 2000.

The decrease is particularly acute among the troops most active in the Middle East: The number of black enlisted soldiers has dropped by 19 percent and the number of black enlisted Marines has fallen by 26 percent in the same period.

Even in this area near Fort Bragg, where serving in uniform is a family tradition, the drop in Army enlistment by blacks from 2000 to 2005 matches the national average.

Kashonda Leycock is the daughter of a soldier, and the 17-year-old has been a member of the Junior ROTC at Westover High School for more than two years.

She joined to prove to her parents and herself she could do it — not because she wants to join the military. She doesn’t. Her primary objection is the war in Iraq.

“Why are we fighting?” Leycock asked. “Nobody has really said why the war is still going on. I don’t think it should be going on because it’s not solving anything. … None of my people want to go there.”

The lack of support for the war by blacks — in uniform or not — is striking. A poll of Cumberland County residents, commissioned last year by The Fayetteville Observer, showed that 69 percent of whites said the war in Iraq was worth the costs. Only 19 percent of blacks agreed.
news14charlotte.com

Supreme Court Upholds Law on College Military Recruiting
WASHINGTON, March 6 — The Supreme Court upheld a law today that cuts federal funding from universities that do not give military recruiters the same access to students that other potential employers receive.

The court ruled that the law does not violate the free-speech rights of universities that object to the military’s exclusion of gay men and lesbians who are open about their sexual orientation.

The opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was unanimous.

It was a setback, although hardly an unexpected one, to a coalition of law schools that brought the constitutional challenge, as well as to the Association of American Law Schools, which represents nearly all accredited law schools and since 1991 has required adherence to a nondiscrimination policy on sexual orientation as a condition of membership.

Many law schools initially chose to comply with by barring military recruiters completely or by taking such steps as refusing to help the recruiters schedule appointments or relegating them to less favorable locations for meeting with students.

Congress responded with a series of increasingly punitive measures, all known as the Solomon Amendment, culminating in the 2004 statute at issue in the case. It requires access for military recruiters “that is at least equal in quality and scope” to access for other employers, on pain of forfeiting grants to the entire university from eight federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services.

With hundreds of millions of dollars potentially at stake, all but a handful of law schools yielded. Nearly three dozen banded together as the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, with the acronym FAIR, and turned to the courts.

Carl C. Monk, executive director of the Association of American Law Schools, said in an interview today that the association would continue to require its member schools to engage in “significant” activities to counter the impact of the Solomon Amendment, including organizing faculty forums.

The government suffered another defeat on its controversial ID cards bill tonight when peers voted by a sizeable majority in the Lords to ensure the planned identity cards were voluntary.

Accusing the government of introducing compulsory ID cards by “stealth” and breaking a manifesto commitment to implement a voluntary scheme, peers voted 227 to 166, a majority of 61.

Peers warned that under the new law, whenever an individual wished to renew a passport, he or she would have to enter their biometric details on the national identity register.
guardian.co.uk

Plan for new nuclear programme approaches meltdown after report
Tony Blair’s backing for nuclear power suffered a blow yesterday when the Government’s own advisory body on sustainable development came down firmly against the building of a new generation of reactors.

Despite the Prime Minister’s well-known support for the nuclear industry, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) concluded that a new nuclear programme was not the answer to the twin challenges of climate change and security of supply. In a hard-hitting report, the 15-strong Commission identified five “major disadvantages” to nuclear power:

* The lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with highly toxic nuclear waste

* Uncertainty over the cost of new nuclear stations and the risk that taxpayers would be left to pick up the tab;

* The danger that going down the nuclear route would lock the UK into a centralised system for distributing energy for the next 50 years;

* The risk a new nuclear programme would undermine efforts to improve energy efficiency;

* The threat of terrorist attacks and radiation exposure if other countries with lower safety standards also opt for nuclear.

…“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

The students seem to agree.

“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”

“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”

Off to a flying start, Vonnegut explains that this will be his “last speech for money.” He can’t remember the first one, but it was on a campus long, long ago, and this will be the end.

The students are hushed with the prospect of the final appearance of America’s greatest living novelist. Alongside Mark Twain and Ben Franklin, Will Rogers and Joseph Heller and a very short list of immortal satirists and storytellers, there stands Kurt Vonnegut, author of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and SIRENS OF TITAN, CAT’S CRADLE and GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, books these students are studying now, as did their parents, as will their children and grandchildren, with a deeply felt mixture of gratitude and awe.

Nobody tonight seems to think they were in for a detached, scholarly presentation from a disengaged academic genius coasting on his incomparable laurels

“I’m lucky enough to have known a great president, one who really cared about ALL the people, rich and poor. That was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was rich himself, and his class considered him a traitor.

“We have people in this country who are richer than whole countries,” he says. “They run everything.

“We have no Democratic Party. It’s financed by the same millionaires and billionaires as the Republicans.

“So we have no representatives in Washington. Working people have no leverage whatsoever.

“I’m trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending! It’s becoming more and more uninhabitable because of our addiction to oil.

“Bush used that line recently,” Vonnegut adds. “I should sue him for plagiarism.”

Things have gotten so bad, he says, “people are in revolt again life itself.”
commondreams.org

George Orwell remains a valuable writer, though he died in 1950. He was a man who was an active participant in his times, and since the new century appears to be going down the same road as the last one, we can still learn from him.

His essay “Politics and the English Language” ought to be read by every journalist and by everyone who reads journalists or listens to the babble on television.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“In our age, there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia,” Orwell wrote. Earlier in the essay he had said, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Our time and his time remain the same. We invade a sovereign nation based on lies, destroy its infrastructure, depose its government and kill 30,000 of its people, and we call that “spreading democracy” or “defending freedom.”

The phrase “war on terror” is a phony metaphor. We are not at war. Ninety-nine and 99/100ths percent of the American people are living the same way they’ve always lived. We have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting an insurrection that our invasions of those countries caused. They are at war – a war of their own country’s making – but the rest of us are not. Waving a flag or putting a bumper sticker on one’s car cannot be called a war effort.

The “war” is being relegated to the inside pages, and it’s a safe bet that no matter what happens in Baghdad, the Academy Awards will receive more coverage and notice than the war. In our nutty society, the choice of a comedian to emcee a Hollywood trade show is considered big, national news.
antiwar.com

Last night at the Academy Awards “Crash” took home the Oscar for best picture. The film starring Matt Dillon and Terrence Howard (Hustle and Flow) has been acredited with deconstructing the race issue in America by exposing the human frailties of its multi-racial cast of characters.

Indeed at first glance this collision course of incredible coincidence seems to push the limits by painting a provocative and ground breaking picture of race relations in the city of Los Angeles. However when everything is said and done, “Crash” is nearly as safe a flick as “Gone With The Wind.”

Just as it has been done for years in Hollywood, the roll of the black male in this movie is quickly reduced to that of weakness and ignorance. At every turn, the black man is portrayed as either powerless or out of control (Howard) while the white man gets away with murder, and more specifically in Dillon’s case, saves the day (that is, saves the life of a black women he initially harasses both racially and sexually).

Furthermore Dillon’s cop character is classic American myth!

Although it is established early on that he is deeply flawed, it is ultimately suggested that his sins are to be forgiven due to his heroics. Because Dillon’s character is never held accountable for his repugnance and moreover in the end romanticized, “Crash” does more to uphold the subconscious structures of white supremacy than destroy them.

If you have seen “Crash” and disagree with this synopsis I challenge you to watch it again and re-analyze what is so different about this movie in regards to race? It may not be as traditional an approach as the “Legend of Bagger Vance,” but it does not do much to actually test the underlying themes of racism in hollywood nor America.

In the end, acceptance and accolades for such a cinematic statement could be very harmful if left unchecked.

Think about it.
counterpunch.org

After all the outcry concerning the intolerance of the Islamic world in their impassioned response to the degrading cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed, where is the outrage in response to the silencing of Rachel Corrie by the New York Theater Workshop?

Is there a double standard in western values of free speech? You bet there is. The hypocrisy runs so deep that the vast majority of Americans does not know who Rachel Corrie is and, thanks to the self-imposed gag rule of cultural and media institutions, they never will.

In a year when Hollywood embraced such groundbreaking movies as Goodnight & Good Luck, Syriana, Trans America, Brokeback Mountain and Crash, a New York theater company cancelled a production of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie on the grounds that the public outcry would be unbearable.

The rationale is a lie on its face. As anyone in theater knows, controversy is manna from heaven. It was not public outcry that silenced the voice of a martyr; it was the censorship imposed by Israeli loyalists. It was the promise that generous public funding and contributions would suddenly come up short. It was intolerance for any view, any story, that does not portray Israel as the righteous party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Who was Rachel Corrie?

She was an all-American girl who was impassioned by the cause of the Palestinian people. In an act of civil disobedience, like the anonymous hero of Tiananmen Square, she stood before an Israeli bulldozer preparing to demolish a Palestinian neighborhood. She stood against injustice and oppression. She stood courageously for the values that all Americans cherish and she was crushed by the heavy and heartless hand of Israeli indifference.

She stood in the way of the “Road Map” to peace. She stood in the way of Ariel Sharon’s new deal for the Palestinians: let them eat dirt and suffer as we assassinate their leaders with American-made precision bombs and reduce their homes to rubble.

Rachel Corrie had the audacity to care and, beyond caring, to act on her convictions. Without regard to any judgments you may impose on the validity of her cause or means, Rachel Corrie was the essence of courage and heroism. She was what every mother’s child should endeavor to be. She chose the ground upon which she would make her stand and paid for it with her life.
dissidentvoice.org

She was crushed by an Israeli army-manned Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza.

Attempts to brand the left as anti-Jewish because of its support of Palestinian rights only make it harder to tackle genuine racism.

Variants of this theme have become common since the breakdown of the Middle East peace process, and especially since 9/11. The left is said to be in the grip of what the rightwing American columnist George Will has called an “anti-semitic chic”. Instead of declaring its hatred of Jews openly, this new antisemitism is expressed indirectly through criticism of Israel or even opposition to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. A particularly meretricious version suggests that opposition to American foreign policy, or even criticism of neoconservatives, is really a coded form of anti-semitism.
guardian.co.uk