Greene County Democrat

Category: Newswire

  • Obama: Black Lives Matter movement “can’t just keep on yelling”

    JASON SILVERSTEIN, NEW YORK DAILY NEW

    britain-obama

    President Obama speaking at a town meeting in Britain.

    President Obama criticized the Black Lives Matter movement during a town hall meeting in London Saturday — saying the activist group “can’t just keep on yelling” about the issues it wants to change. Obama’s comments came during day two of his visit to Europe, at a Q and A event for young people. One audience member asked Obama if he felt his administration had done enough to discourage racial profiling at airports. His answer led him to discussing social justice movements, with Obama specifically naming the Black Lives Matter movement. He said he admired such groups for being “really effective in bringing attention to problems” of racial injustice — but he also showed those movements some tough love.
    “Once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention and shined a spotlight, and elected officials or people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them,” Obama said. “And you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room.”
    Black Lives Matter did not respond to his remarks.
    Obama has openly supported the Black Lives Matter movement in the past. At a White House forum in October, he dismissed the popular “all lives matter” rebuttal to the national group, saying: “I think everybody understands all lives matter…They were suggesting was there is a specific problem that’s happening in the African-American community that’s not happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”
    Obama in February praised prominent Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson for an “outstanding” job leading the movement in Baltimore, where McKesson is now running for mayor.
    Black Lives Matter groups have consistently clashed with presidential candidates on the campaign trail.  Several members have been assaulted at Donald Trump rallies, while Hillary Clinton has had heated exchanges with protesters accusing her of racial insensitivity.

  • Boko Haram using more children as “suicide bombers”

    Written By NewsOne Staff

    Women in Nigeria

    Nigerian Women

    One in every five “suicide bomber” used by Boko Haram in the past two years has been a child, underscoring the heartless nature of the religious extremist group,
    Most of the bombers were girls, starting at the age of 8. The group’s attacks have jumped elevenfold in West Africa in the past year, writes the news outlet: Suicide bombings have spread beyond Nigeria’s borders, with an increasing number of deadly attacks carried out by children with explosives hidden under their clothes or in baskets.
    “The use of children, especially girls, as so-called suicide bombers has become a defining and alarming feature of this conflict,” Laurent Duvillier, regional spokesman for UNICEF, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday.
    There were 44 child “suicide bombings” in West Africa last year, up from four in 2014, UNICEF said, mostly in Cameroon and Nigeria.
    It has also been two years since the kidnapping of 200 young girls by Boko Haram from a school in northeast Nigeria.
    According to the US military, since Boko Haram’s six-year campaign to “set up an emirate” in northeastern Nigeria began, the group has killed around 15,000 people.

  • Napa Valley women kicked from train for ‘Laughing While Black’ settle lawsuit

    Napa Valley wine train

     Five members of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club stand together in Antioch on Aug. 24, 2015.
    Jose Carlos Fajardo /Contra Costa Times—TNS via Getty

    The group of mostly Black women who accused a Napa Valley train company of kicking them off with racial motivation have settled a lawsuit against the train operator, according to a report. The value of the settlement has not been stated publicly, according to a San Jose Mercury News report. The women originally had sued for $11 million.
    The incident occurred in August of last year when the book club composed of 11 women—10 black and one white—traveled on a Napa Valley wine train to discuss a romance novel, according to reports. The train conductor removed them for being loud.
    The story received national attention and launched a Twitter hashtag #laughingwhileblack.

  • Rainbow-colored nooses removed from tree on Tennessee campus

    By: Brendan O’Brien, Reuters

    Nooses at college campus

    Nooses hanging from a tree on Tennessee campus

    Police at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee have removed six rainbow colored nooses – widely seen as a symbol of racial hatred – hanging from a tree on campus, the school said.
    Police on Monday took down the row of nooses found near the university fine arts building on the main campus in Clarksville, Tennessee, after receiving several complaints, the school said in a statement. “This incident is deeply disturbing and is hurtful to our university community,” said university president Alisa White. “I am saddened, and I am sorry for the hurt and offense this has caused.”
    The intent of the display, especially in the multicolored style suggesting a link to the gay pride movement, was unclear.
    The noose is a symbol of racial hatred in the United States, where thousands of blacks were lynched in a dozen states including Tennessee between 1877 and 1950, according to a 2015 Equal Justice Initiative report.
    High-profile police killings of unarmed black men in the last two years have triggered waves of protest and heightened awareness of racism and discrimination in the United States.
    Speculation on social media suggested the display might be a student art project meant as to highlight the struggles facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community with suicide, given that the nooses were the same colors found in the LGBT rainbow flag.
    “Suicides in the LGBT community is an epidemic,” one Facebook poster wrote. “You have the attention of the people, that is what art is about.”
    In March, a former University of Mississippi student pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights charge, admitting to his role in draping a noose around the neck of a statue of the school’s first black student, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
    Another ex-student admitted to a similar charge last year and was sentenced to six months in prison for the 2014 incident.

  • The Panama Papers’ growing impact on Africa

    Panama papers
    While no African official has yet resigned as a result of the Panama Papers, African journalists involved in the investigation say they have given Africans a wake up call and could even lead to government action.
    The twin sister of DRC’s leader Joseph Kabila, the nephew of South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma and business people allegedly linked to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe are all named in the Panama Papers.  The Mossack Fonseca leak – the biggest data leak ever – have revealed the names and alleged financial affairs of top officials from at least 15 different sub-Saharan African countries or people linked to them have been named.
    While the practice of keeping money abroad is not illegal, the revelations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) team of about 400 journalists have made global headlines. African Union chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said the African money kept in foreign banks should be repatriated to the continent.
    At a conference last year, former South African president Thabo Mbeki noted that a report commissioned by the AU had found that Africa was losing $50 billion(43 billion euros) a year through illicit cash flows – money that could go into education, health care or investments on the continent. A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) even puts the amount at $150 billion.
    Several African governments have either remained silent or maintained that the officials were acting within their legal rights when confronted with the disclosure. African journalists who worked on the investigation believe that the Panama Papers will have a strong impact:

  • Black culture isn’t the problem – systemic inequality is

    Boots Riley via Creative Time Reports

    Clinton Crime Bill protestor

    Clinton Crime Bill
    protestor

    The idea that it is Black folks and our supposedly immoral and savage culture that creates our disproportionate rates of poverty and imprisonment is everywhere: cop shows, news media, movies set in Black neighborhoods and high-school social studies classes have all perpetuated this misconception. And some are now using this old, false idea to disparage Black Lives Matter, saying that the real problem facing Black communities isn’t police violence, racist oppression or economic exploitation but “Black-on-Black crime”.  We hear this all over the place, from news columnists to Ray Lewis to Rudy Giuliani – and, most recently, reiterated by Bill Clinton.
    It’s asinine, this argument that modern civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter should stop talking about actual problems in favor of apocryphal ones. During the civil rights movement there was much more homicide in the black community than there is now — black-on-black crime is shrinking. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics show that from 1950 to 2013 the percentage of black men who became homicide victims dropped by a third, and for black women the percentage was cut in half.
    Though murder rates were higher in the 1960s, no one in their right mind today would argue that those organizers should have put the march on Selma or the Montgomery bus boycott on the back burner to focus on black-on-black violence back then. We shouldn’t pressure today’s activists to do this either.
    Yet the myth of black-on-black crime has enormous staying power. It’s no surprise that this kind of argument is so common among the likes of conservative media, Donald Trump and the police, but false hysteria about black-on-black crime has also been absorbed by liberals and black community leaders. Even Spike Lee took this stance in his recent film Chi-Raq, showing a Chicago minister telling a huge crowd that the fight against black-on-black violence is “our Selma”.
    We’ve been duped. When black neighborhoods are compared with white neighborhoods of similar income levels, you see similar rates of crime. The fallacy of comparing white neighborhoods with black neighborhoods is in lumping together wealthy and upper-middle-class neighborhoods (categories that not many black folks are in) with middle- and low-income ones. But that’s not how the world works. Poor white people in Memphis aren’t kicking it with rich ones in Bel Air.
    Explaining crime and poverty as a result of black behavioral choice, further, disguises ways that both are caused by capitalism. Recasting systemic inequality as cultural choice suggests that black people aren’t determined enough – that it’s their own fault they remain in poverty. Out of economic deprivation comes violence – not because poor people have bad attitudes or cultural deficiencies, but because without a real economic safety net, the machinations required for survival can involve illegal business. And whereas legal business has the police to physically enforce the laws that govern it, disputes and agreements in illegal businesses are settled and enforced by the practitioners themselves.
    The argument also regurgitates the same old disproven beliefs about crime, saying that stricter gun laws would decrease violence. Calls for gun legislation are actually calls for stricter policing and more police violence in black communities: gun control laws give police more powers to arrest – and we know that these policies will be racist in their implementation. Imagine stop-and-frisk in white neighborhoods: it ain’t gonna happen. The rate of weapons arrests is multiple times higher in the black community, even though blacks are half as likely as whites to own a gun.
    The myth of black crime as cover for racist violence is nothing new. In 1906 Atlanta newspapers created a fake “Negro crime wave” which culminated in the state militia and county police going door to door in a raid of every single black home in order to confiscate guns. People were beaten and murdered along the way. In the following decades, similar media-created “Negro crime waves” in Washington, New York and other cities led to the repression of black communities that follows this kind of story.
    The only thing that will stop murders in black neighborhoods, or in any neighborhoods, is a higher standard of living, not laws that will be enforced through a racist lens. Economic improvement will happen only through a mass radical movement to create a system in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor.
    The next time you hear someone try to shame black community activists and reinforce the myth of the black criminal, remember that it’s an old story and a fake story. And it’s time for us to move on.

  • Committee urges sweeping reforms at jail where Sandra Bland died

    By: Michael McLaughlin, Reporter, Associated Press

     

    Sandra Bland
    This undated handout photo provided by the Waller County Sheriff’s Office shows Sandra Bland. The Texas Rangers are investigating the circumstances surrounding Bland’s death Monday, July 13, 2015 in a Waller County jail cell in Hempstead, Texas. The Harris County medical examiner has classified her death as suicide by hanging. She had been arrested Friday in Waller County on a charge of assaulting a public servant. (Waller County Sheriff’s Office, via AP)

    Sandra Bland died by hanging in a Texas jail cell after a controversial arrest in which a state trooper threatened to use a Taser on her.
    A committee reviewing the Texas jail where Sandra Bland died last year issued a report Tuesday calling for drastic changes, including the possibility of removing the sheriff’s department from overseeing the facility. The five-member committee, which included attorneys, a former congressman and a former judge, also recommended building a new jail in Waller County, bolstering screening for medical and mental health conditions, and outfitting officers with body cameras.
    Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith and his department came under criticism after Bland, 28, was found hanging in her cell on July 13, 2015, three days after her arrest by a state trooper during a traffic stop. Her death was ruled a suicide, but her family alleges in a wrongful death lawsuit that the sheriff’s office didn’t properly care for Bland, who told jailers she had epilepsy and had previously attempted suicide. HuffPost has found discrepancies in records about her death.
    The report said the current jail should be replaced because it falls short of safety and security standards. It also suggested using emergency medical technicians instead of deputies to screen inmates entering the jail, and having doctors remotely examine inmates and their health records. In addition, jail staff should be trained in anger management, the report said.

  • Bernie Sanders would apologize for slavery if elected President

    Written By NewsOne Staff

    Bernie Sanders

     Bernie Sanders campaigning

    Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders became known for his work during the Civil Rights Movement and was the first candidate to explicitly declare that Black Lives Matter, but would he address slavery if elected president?
    Well, yes. In fact, the Democratic candidate said Wednesday at an event in Philadelphia that he would issue a “necessary and overdue” apology about the horrific system, The Hill reports: “An American president has yet to muster up the courage to formally apologize for the 400 heinous years of rape, death and inhumanity that occurred during the enslavement of black people in this country that still impacts million of slave descendants,” an audience member told Sanders before asking whether he’d apologize for it.
    “Want the short answer?” Sanders asked in response. “Yes.”
    His response isn’t all that surprising. In July, Sanders said the nation should apologize for slavery. He later reiterated his statement, saying, “as a nation we have got to apologize for slavery, and of course the president is the leader of the nation.”

  • The wage gap: terrible for all women, even worse for women of color; Tuesday was ‘Equal Pay Day’

    By: Lydia O’Connor Reporter, The Huffington Post

    Fast Food Protests
    A woman carries a sign for equal pay as she marches with other protestors in support of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of an expanding national movement known as Fight for 15, Wednesday, April 15, 2015, in Miami. The event was part of a national protest day to coincide with the April 15 deadline for filing income taxes. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

    How much does being a woman cost over a lifetime? A lot more if she’s Latina.
    Tuesday was Equal Pay Day — the day that marks how far into the year full-time employed women have to work in order to earn what their male counterparts earned in the year prior. To mark the occasion, the National Women’s Law Center released a report showing how much the wage gap costs women over their lifetime. The findings, released earlier this month, are based on 2014 U.S. Census data showing the difference between women’s and men’s median annual earnings for full-time, year-round employees, multiplied by 40 years. The data comes from a Census study that does not take immigration status into account, meaning it doesn’t make distinctions about whether or not people are undocumented.
    We’re often reminded that women earn 79 cents for every dollar men earn, but what sometimes gets lost is that the gap is much worse for Latinas, black women and other women of color. Here are some of the NWLC’s most jarring takeaways about being a woman of color working in the U.S.:
    Women overall lose out on more than $400,000 over the course of their careers, but most women of color are shorted more than double that.
    Men out-earn women in all 50 states and in Washington D.C. For full-time, year-round employees nationwide, women earn a median annual $39,621 compared to men’s $50,383 — a yearly difference of $10,762. If a woman works for 40 years, then, that adds up to a lifetime shortfall of $430,480 as compared to a man.
    But most women of color can expect to lose out on a lot more. When compared to the earnings of white men, that wage loss figure rises to $883,040 for Native American women, $877,480 for black women and $1,007,080 for Latinas.
    The gap is smaller — though still nowhere near equitable — for Asian-American women, whose lifetime wage difference compared to white men totals $365,440. So, you know, just a third of a million dollars, instead of an actual million dollars.
    In a shocking number of states, white men earn more than twice as much as Latinas.
    There are 12 states, or about a quarter of the country, where Latinas on average earn less than half of what white men make per year. In order from greatest lifetime wage gap to least, these states are New Jersey, California, Maryland, Connecticut, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington, Illinois, Rhode Island, Utah, Georgia and Alabama.
    For black women, the above is true only in Louisiana, and for Native American women it’s only true in Delaware. There are no states where, overall, men earn twice as much per year as women, and no states where white men earn twice as much as Asian-American women.
    Our nation’s capital is setting a horrible example.
    At first glance, Washington, D.C., doesn’t look like one of the most dire environments. With lifetime wage losses for women overall totaling $288,560, it’s the seventh best state for working women.
    But when lifetime wage loss for black women and Latinas is stacked up against the lifetime earnings of white men, D.C. comes in dead last. It’s also the second worst for Asian-American women and eighth worst for Native American women.

  • Leaked UN report faults sanitation at Haiti bases at time of cholera outbreak

    By: Joe Sandler Clarke and Ed Pilkington, Guardian

    UN Peacekeepers in Haiti

    UN Peacekeepers in Haiti

    The United Nations uncovered serious sanitation failures in its Haiti peacekeeping mission just a month after a deadly cholera outbreak erupted in the country, killing thousands, a leaked report has revealed. The UN has consistently refused to accept that it is responsible for compensating victims of the disaster. But the report, which was commissioned a month into the cholera crisis in November 2010, found a series of alarming problems in several UN peacekeeping bases including sewage being dumped in the open as well as a lack of toilets and soap.
    The authors of the review alerted the UN leadership that the failure to dispose of sewage safely at a time when the cholera epidemic was raging “will potentially damage the reputation of the mission”.
    They also warned that the way the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti (Minustah) had managed waste disposal “and the poor oversight of contractors carrying out this work has left the mission vulnerable to allegations of disease propagation and environmental contamination”.
    The existence of the internal UN review, which has been seen by the Guardian, will add to pressure on the world body to face up to the role it played as the source of the cholera epidemic. The UN is currently facing a lawsuit from 1,500 Haitians who blame the world organisation for negligently allowing peacekeepers from Nepal to carry the disease into the country, months after Haiti was devastated by an earthquake.
    Until the epidemic started in October 2010, Haiti had been free of cholera for at least 150 years. Mounting evidence suggests that the Asian strain of cholera was unwittingly imported by the peacekeepers from Nepal when they were relocated to Haiti to help with emergency work in the aftermath of the earthquake.
    In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege that the UN failed to screen peacekeepers from Nepal for cholera, where the disease is common, and that a private contractor hired by the UN failed to ensure sanitary conditions and adequate infrastructure at the UN military camp in Mirebalais. They allege that this led to sewage and other waste being pumped straight into the Meille river, a tributary of Haiti’s biggest river, the Artibonite.
    Despite clear evidence, the UN continues to refuse to accept any responsibility for the disaster, claiming immunity from any claims for compensation. The former head of Minustah, Edmond Mulet, has repeatedly stated that UN peacekeepers were not responsible for the outbreak.
    The UN’s controversial position looks increasingly awkward now that the world body’s own internal review exposing dire sanitation problems at its camps has come to light. In the leaked report, UN researchers led by the former chief of special support services at the department of field support, Melva Crouch, gave their immediate assessment of the state of sanitation in the peacekeeping bases in Haiti just weeks after the epidemic broke out.
    In the most devastating finding, Crouch’s team found that a month after the cholera outbreak, more than one in 10 of the UN camps were still disposing of sewage – known as “black water” – “directly into local environment”. In addition, more than seven in 10 of the camps disposed of their “grey water” – that is water from showers and kitchens – into the “local environment”.
    Some camps were found to have open drains with “grey water” running right through them, while several camps flooded due to “inadequate drainage after rains”. “Most disposal sites” where private contractors were paid by the UN to take away the sewage and dirty water from the camps were found to be “too close to water sources and/or population centres and without adequate fencing”.
    To add insult to injury, the leaked review, titled the Minustah Environmental Health Assessment Report, notes that the UN mission owned five self-contained waste-water treatment plants that were on site in Haiti and could have been used to make sure the peacekeepers’ camps were sanitary and safe. Two of them were found to be faulty, and as for the other three “the mission had intended to install these plants in the current financial year, however due to competing priorities none of them have yet been installed”.
    A study by Médecins sans Frontières published this month in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that the official count of about 9,000 deaths from Haiti’s cholera epidemic is likely to be a gross understatement. The researchers pointed out that most of the official fatalities were recorded through hospitals and medical centers, thus ignoring thousands of deaths that occurred in rural areas miles away from any formal medical provision.
    In March, the Guardian revealed that the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, had been personally chastised by UN’s own human rights experts for the organisation’s failure to compensate Haitian victims of the cholera outbreak.
    In a letter addressed to Ban, five special rapporteurs said the UN’s handling of the cholera epidemic “undermines the reputation of the United Nations, calls into question the ethical framework within which its peace-keeping forces operate, and challenges the credibility of the organization as an entity that respects human rights”.
    The leaked report reveals the relatively tiny amount of money the UN could have spent to clean up its camps and prevent sewage disposal into the river. The officials estimated that an investment of just $3.15m would have covered most of the sanitation issues they had identified.
    Now that cholera has taken hold in Haiti, a program to eradicate the disease is estimated to cost well over $2bn.