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Mass transit wins big in ballot initiatives

by MaryanneParkins Posted on November 10, 2016

In an otherwise rough election for cities, poor people, and the environment, all three got a bit of good news from state and local ballot initiatives funding mass transit. Across the country, voters approved a majority of measures to expand bus and rail lines.

Smart Growth America, the pro-transit and urbanism advocacy group, compiled a list of the biggest transit initiatives on Tuesday’s ballots. Of the 27 measures tracked, 19 passed. And of the eight that failed, five received majority support but fell short because local tax increases required a supermajority.

Among the biggest successes were a sales tax increase to build new light rail in Seattle, a property tax to pay for repairs and maintenance on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, and a slight sales tax hike to expand bus and rail services and upgrade bike lanes and sidewalks in Los Angeles County.

It wasn’t only the famously eco-friendly cities of the Left Coast that supported mass transit. Even in the South — the country’s most conservative region, with some of its most car-dependent metro areas — voters approved taxes for transit. Wake County, North Carolina, passed a half penny per dollar sales tax increase for new services, including three bus rapid transit lines and a commuter rail line. Atlanta passed two separate sales taxes for biking and walking trails, street and sidewalk improvements, and bus upgrades and rail expansions.

There were also positive results in smaller cities in the Midwest and Interior West. In Eastern Washington, the conservative side of the state, Spokane passed a 0.2 percent sales tax to fund more bus service and launch the area’s first bus rapid transit line. Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County voted for a 0.25 percent income tax to increase bus service. (The Indianapolis area has long had Republicans who support transit, such as former Mayor Greg Ballard and Carmel, Indiana, Mayor Jim Brainerd.)

The Center for Transportation Excellence, a pro-transit think tank, kept track of all transit-related ballot measures and found support for mass transit in small and mid-sized cities, too. Kansas City, Missouri, passed a 3/8-cent sales tax increase to build light rail, while Greensboro, North Carolina, voted for a transportation investment bond to fund new sidewalks.

There were also some disappointments. Measures to expand transit in Broward County, Florida, and in southeast Michigan failed. But, overall, the results were evidence that most Americans — even Trump voters — are willing to pay for greater, greener mobility.

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Mass transit wins big in ballot initiatives

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

by MiaOddo02554 Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

For the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, two exceptional new books take on the legacy and history of one of the most powerful and controversial community empowerment movements in America. One book offers a succinct but in-depth history of the party at its peak. The other scratches the itch that always surfaces around anniversaries like this, asking, “Where are they now?”

In 1968, as a student at the University of California-Berkeley, Stephen Shames befriended Bobby Seale, who became a mentor to Shames. Recognizing the importance of having someone document their revolution, Seale gave Shames unfettered access to himself and the Black Panther Party network to take pictures. It gave Shames an unparalleled, insider’s perspective on the party, from 1968 through Bobby Seale’s campaign for Oakland mayor in 1973. It’s a remarkable body of work, not just for its historical significance, but for the poignancy of the images.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther children in a classroom at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, the Black Panther school. Stephen Shames from the book Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams). Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, July 28, 1968. Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making Central Committee, talks with Los Angeles Panthers at the Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park (which the Panthers dubbed Bobby Hutton Park). Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, Shames’ new book with Seale, collects photos he shot through 1973 and pairs them with Black Panther Party ephemera and oral history. It’s an excellent introduction to a movement many people see only in a dramatically cinematic fashion. In popular culture, the Black Panthers are associated with tough dudes in cool leather jackets toting guns, fed up with racism and injustice. The truth, of course, is much more nuanced.

The book details how the Black Panthers took a proactive role in bettering poor communities that were ignored, if not outright shit on, by the powers that be. Their school breakfast program—famously reviled by J. Edgar Hoover—set a now-common standard for making sure school children don’t start the day hungry. The Black Panthers helped get old people to the grocery store and, in particularly tough neighborhoods, escorted them to cash their Social Security checks. They launched schools and newspapers, organized strikes, arranged health care for people. Such community “survival programs” were the backbone of the party. As Seale puts it, “The real heroes of the Black Panther Party were the thousands of sisters and brothers who made our survival programs work.”

Shame’s photos concentrate on the Black Panthers’ activities in Oakland and Berkeley, but he also got around, traveling across the United States in 1970 to document Panther activities in Boston, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Toledo, Ohio, among other cities. This was at the height of tension between the FBI and the Black Panthers, when the group’s headquarters around the country were being raided and bombed and fortified in anticipation of shootouts. A time when Panthers like Fred Hampton were being killed. It was a heavy time.

Shames says his photos are “aspirational,” but the tension and disquiet come through. The photos don’t capture the more controversial aspects of the Panthers, which are instead bluntly dealt with in the text by Seale and others.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther Gloria Abernethy sells papers at the Mayfair supermarket boycott, with Tamara Lacey in the rear. Abernethy now works for the state of California, and Tamara is a real estate agent. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, August 28, 1971. Party members carry George Jackson’s coffin into St. Augustine’s Church for funeral services. Jackson was killed in a San Quentin prison riot a week earlier, in which three corrections officers and two other inmates were also killed. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

August, 1970, Berkeley. Minister of Defense and Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton listens to a Bob Dylan album at home shortly after his release from prison. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, 1973. Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale campaigns for mayor on a city bus. Seale came in second out of nine candidates that year, only to lose the runoff. But the party’s 1972 voter registration drive helped Lionel Wilson became Oakland’s first black mayor in 1977. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People wraps up with Shames and Seale reflecting on the current mood in America and the legacy of the Black Panther Party, featuring photos of recent Black Lives Matter protests.

And that brings us to Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams‘ book, The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books).

While no doubt rooted in the past, Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution focuses squarely on the present, with portraits and interviews with former members today. While the authors did an excellent job of tracking down higher-ups in the party, the book smartly turns its focus to the “real heroes,” the group’s rank-and-file members, giving us a fuller picture of life as a Black Panther, and the impact those years had on people’s lives. Some of the former members are now academics. Some are solidly working class. Some are in prison. And many remain active as organizers and activists.

Shih’s simple, powerful, Richard Avedon-esque black-and-white portraits are paired with short pieces on each person: who they were then, where the Black Panther Party took them, and where they are now. Interspersed among the interviews are essays on different aspects of the Black Panthers.

Ericka Huggins was a leader of the Black Panthers Los Angeles chapter along with her husband, John Huggins, who was later killed in a shootout on the UCLA campus. She later founded the party’s New Haven chapter. A longtime director of the party’s Oakland Community School, she helped create educational and social justice programs with an emphasis on spirituality. She is also a professor of sociology and women’s studies at several California colleges and universities. (See our recent chat with Huggins here.) Bryan Shih

Phyllis Jackson grew up in Tacoma, Washington, before joining the party at its national headquarters. She served as a communications secretary and ran a voter registration campaign. She is an associate professor of art history at Pomona College, teaching arts and cinema of Africa and the African diaspora. Bryan Shih

Abdullah Majid (formerly Anthony Laborde), born in Flushing, New York, was a founding member of the Queens Chapter of the party and a full-time party member from 1968 to 1971. At the time of his death this past April, he was incarcerated in Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for his role in the shooting death of one NYPD officer and the wounding of another. Bryan Shih*

Mike Tagawa was born in 1944 at the Minidoka Relocation Camp in southern Idaho, one of the locations where Japanese were interned during World War II. He and his family moved to Seattle. He joined the Air Force and later the Black Panther Party in Seattle, where he now works as a bus driver. Bryan Shih

B. Kwaku Duren coordinated the Black Panthers’ reorganized Southern California chapter (January 1977 to March 1982). After his sister was shot and killed by the police, he helped establish the Coalition Against Police Abuse, which became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the LAPD. The lawsuit was settled for $1.8 million and led to the disbanding of the LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division. Duren worked as a paralegal and lawyer in the South Central office of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles from 1977 to 1990. Bryan Shih

Ronald “Elder” Freeman grew up in Detroit and in the early 1960s moved to California, where he became a founding member of the Southern California chapter of the party, along with his brother, Roland. He was a priest in the African Orthodox Church, was affiliated with the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association, and was a longtime prison reform advocate. Both brothers died of illness within a week of each other in October 2014, a few months after this interview was conducted. Bryan Shih

Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977, the only woman to serve in this top position. The author of two books, A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B, Brown is now executive director of the Michael Lewis (“Little B”) Legal Defense Committee and CEO of Oakland and the World Enterprises, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners create businesses—including an urban farm in West Oakland, where the party was headquartered. Bryan Shih

Taken together, the books offer a well-rounded primer on the Black Panther Party, then and now, top to bottom. You can find books out there with a more detailed history and books that go deep in the political thinking and revolutionary tactics employed by the Black Panthers. Dozens, if not hundreds of academic books parsing the party have been written. If you want to go deep on biographies, they’re out there, too. But for a solid introduction or a quick refresher, you can’t do better than this.

Shames’ photos are on exhibit at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City through October 29. Shames and Seales will be doing book signings in DC the last weekend of October, including one at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on October 30. Shih’s photos are part of the Oakland Museum of California’s impressive “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” exhibition, on display through February 12.

* Name corrected.

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

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Even More Proof That Gun Laws Work

by MonroeW02xi Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

The rates of gun violence in the 10 states with the weakest gun laws are more than 3 times higher than those in the 10 states with the strongest gun laws. That’s one of the major findings of a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) that analyzes 10 indicators of firearm violence—including suicide, murder, fatal gun accidents, and mass shootings—in all 50 states and finds a “strong” correlation between gun violence and weak gun laws.

The states with the highest levels of gun violence include Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama, which also have some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, according to CAP. States with relatively strict gun laws, such as Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, experience significantly lower levels of gun violence. While the report does not assess the impact of specific laws, it does note previous examples of how specific laws have affected gun crime. For example, when Connecticut implemented laws requiring a permit to purchase a gun and mandated background checks, gun-related homicides dropped 40 percent. In contrast, when Missouri eliminated the same requirements, its gun homicide rate increased by 25 percent.

Center for American Progress

“If you have good gun laws, the people in your state will in fact be safer, and if you have bad gun laws, people in your state—and people in other states—will be at risk,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said in a press call about the study. “In many of the cases where violence plays out in Connecticut, we discover that the gun was purchased in a state that had loopholes that we don’t have in our own state.” Since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Connecticut has mandated background checks for all gun sales, required safer gun storage, limited the types of guns that can be sold, and required that all guns in the state be licensed. “In the two completed years that have been analyzed since we passed our updated gun laws, Connecticut has seen the sharpest drop in violent crime of any of the 50 states,” Malloy, a Democrat, said.

Meanwhile, “Florida has taken the exact opposite approach to dealing with gun violence,” said Mayor Andrew Gillum of Tallahassee, Florida. In the same call with reporters, Gillum noted that in response to an attempted mass shooting at a Florida University in 2015, the state legislature introduced a proposal to allow concealed carry on college campuses. He added that the legislature and governor “have taken affirmative steps to prevent local governments like mine from trying to take action” to address gun violence.

Under Florida law, local governments cannot regulate the use of weapons. “In my very own city, we have a gun law that says you can’t fire off weapons in city parks where kids play and our families picnic,” Gillum explained. In response, Tallahassee was sued by pro-gun groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the National Rifle Association, as well as the state’s attorney general. “It’s extremely frustrating to try to work to keep our communities safe in a state when the legislature is actively working against you, and is beholden unfortunately to the powerful gun lobby,” Gillum said.

The new study builds on a growing body of research that has reached the same conclusion: Stricter gun laws are linked to lower rates of gun violence. The NRA has long rejected these findings. Speaking to the New York Times about the new report and those with similar findings that came before it, an NRA spokeswoman claimed that the research “cherry picked” evidence. As a counterpoint, she cited the work of the controversial researcher John Lott, whose widely discredited theory is summed up in the title of his best-known book: More Guns, Less Crime.

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Even More Proof That Gun Laws Work

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Bay Area Police Sex Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder

by AngleaBozeman Posted on September 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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This past Friday, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley announced that she would pursue charges against seven officers for conduct related to a sex scandal that has been roiling Bay Area law enforcement since March. The announcement came days after Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, who has compared the Oakland Police Department to a “frat house,” said she would recommend that the OPD fire one cop (three others have already resigned), suspend seven, and provide training and counseling to yet another. Officers with at least four other Bay Area agencies have been fired, reassigned, or have resigned over the scandal, which claimed three successive Oakland police chiefs in just nine days in June. Oh, and one other thing: The victim is AWOL. Here are the dirty details:

1. Crimes: Five current and former Oakland police officers, a former Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy, and a former Livermore cop are to be charged on 16 counts including oral copulation with a minor and engaging in prostitution—both felonies—and engaging in a lewd act in public. Two cops will be charged with unauthorized use of a police database: Celeste Guap, the 18-year-old at the heart of the scandal, alleged that officers gave her confidential information about her friends’ arrest histories—not to mention money, protection, and information about upcoming prostitution stings—in exchange for sex. Another officer will be charged with failure to report a crime. The DA’s investigation—which included interviews with Guap and various officers, and a review of more than 100,000 pages of social media posts and text messages—determined that two of the officers not charged with sex crimes did actually have sexual contact with Guap. But because those alleged contacts occurred outside of Alameda County, O’Malley’s office has no jurisdiction, she said Friday.

2. Punishments: An investigator with the Alameda County DA’s office who formerly worked for the OPD was fired in July. A Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy and an officer with the Livermore Police Department resigned earlier this year over their alleged connections with Guap. Two Richmond officers who were determined to have had sex with Guap when she was 18 were reassigned from positions where they regularly interacted with youth. The Livermore Police Department said on Saturday that it had concluded a criminal investigation, but several police agencies are still conducting investigations related to the scandal.

3. Complications: O’Malley’s office can’t formally charge or arrest any of the officers yet, because Guap is no longer in California. She’s in a Florida jail cell. Late last month, the alleged victim checked into a Stuart, Florida, sex-and-drug addiction program. Three days later, according to the East Bay Express, the local weekly that broke the scandal, Guap allegedly bit a security guard and was arrested, charged with aggravated battery, and jailed—bail was set at $300,000. The Richmond Police Department used victim’s compensation funds to help pay for Guap’s rehab—the Contra Costa County DA’s office told the Express that it helped process the application for the funds. Guap’s mother and attorney Pamela Price, who represents Guap, suspect a cover-up of some kind: They questioned why Guap wasn’t placed in a local program instead. This latest news has renewed calls by local activists for federal or state authorities to launch an independent investigation. On Friday, O’Malley said the Richmond police did not consult her before paying for Guap’s trip to Florida, and that she would not have approved such a trip. She can understand the public outcry over the decision, she added. The Martin County DA is expected to decide this week whether to pursue the charges against Guap.

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Bay Area Police Sex Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

by FredricSkeats Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Milwaukee’s mayor imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on Monday and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard in response to weekend rioting sparked by Saturday’s fatal police shooting of an armed black man, 23-year-old Sylville Smith. The unrest, in which protesters torched multiple businesses and police cars and at least one person was shot, was the second wave of major protests since December 2014, when a county prosecutor declined to file charges against police in the fatal shooting of another black man, Dontre Hamilton. But while anger over such police shootings may have set off the mayhem, decades of unemployment, segregated housing, substandard schools, and racist policing set the stage for Milwaukee to blow. Indeed, the city has earned itself a reputation as the worst place to be black in America. Here’s why:

Concentrated poverty: Milwaukee is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, with black residents—40 percent of the population—living almost exclusively on the city’s north side. Milwaukee is also America’s second poorest major city, in a state that in 2014 had the nation’s highest black unemployment rate. A third of its black residents live in “extreme poverty,” defined as a household with an income less than half that deemed appropriate by the federal government for a family of its size—and 40 percent live below the poverty line. This is partly because the region’s jobs are concentrated in three white suburbs that are all but inaccessible by public transportation. The WOW counties, as these suburbs are known, are at least 94 percent white, and just 1 to 2 percent black.

Failing schools: Milwaukee’s public schools are doing a poor job of educating their students. During the 2013-14 academic year, Milwaukee had the nation’s largest black-white gap in graduation rates, and K-12 test scores were abysmal.

Most black kids in Milwaukee attend highly segregated public schools. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Mark Levine, roughly three out of four attends a high-poverty institution where 90 percent of the students are black. And when those kids misbehave, schools are quick to dole out suspensions. In 2011-12, Wisconsin led the nation in suspending black high schoolers, thanks largely to excessive suspension rates in Milwaukee. (If you want to understand why suspensions are bad, and how children can be disciplined more effectively, read this piece.)

Mass incarceration: Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation. In 2013, according to UW researchers, one in eight were locked up, and by the time the men hit their 30s and 40s, more than half have served time. Two-thirds of the incarcerated men came from six of the city’s poorest zip codes, including those for Sherman Park, the neighborhood where the most recent police killing took place. Another of the zip codes (53206) has the highest black male incarceration rate in America—62 percent, according to another UW study. (A documentary on that community is due out later this year.) So many Milwaukeeans have criminal records, one ex-offender told NPR, that police routinely ask the people they pull over whether they’re on probation. Wisconsin spends more on corrections than on higher education. And to top it off, just 10 percent of black men with a criminal record in Wisconsin have a valid drivers license—which makes it tough to secure jobs and services. (The sheriff of Milwaukee County recently called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization.)

How it got this bad: Black people moved to Milwaukee in large numbers beginning in the 1960s—later than many blacks who left the South inhabited other Rust Belt cities such as Chicago and Detroit during the Great Migration. White immigrant communities in Milwaukee fiercely resisted integration in housing and schools, and when the city’s manufacturing industry collapsed shortly after blacks arrived, massive racial disparities sprang up in employment, housing, and education. Milwaukee also was hit harder by globalization and by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs than other major urban centers, an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found. Black men suffered a drop in employment during this period that was more than twice what the nation endured during the Great Depression. White residents fled to the suburbs, taking their resources with them, and little has improved since. Decades of tensions between police and the city’s black communities helped fuel this latest flareup.

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

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Vote of a Lifetime

by Myrna Posted on August 16, 2016

This Alaskan town is voting on whether to stay or go in the face of climate change. In this December 2006 photo, Nathan Weyiouanna’s abandoned house at the west end of Shishmaref, Alaska, sits on the beach after sliding off during a fall storm in 2005. Diana Haecker/AP This story was originally published by Fusion. “What’s special about Shishmaref is that we’re all family,” said Esau Sinnok, an 18-year-old climate activist from Shishmaref, a native village in western Alaska that might have to relocate because of climate change. “All 650 people there are my family and not being able to see them every day like I’m used to — if I had to move to the city — I’d be heartbroken and sad not seeing all of their faces,” he said. Shishmaref is a barrier island about 130 miles north of Nome on the Chukchi Sea. Rising seas and more ice-free months are causing erosion that is eating away at the island. Residents fear it will be completely submerged within decades. Over a dozen homes have already been relocated, and sea walls 15-feet high have been built to protect others. Faced with the potential loss of their island, residents will vote on August 16 to decide whether or not to relocate to the mainland. The cost of moving, estimated at nearly $200 million, is a major hurdle for any effort to up and move. But residents worry just as much about the cultural cost of leaving the island and the seaside setting their lifestyle depends upon. Sinnok has traveled around the world to advocate for his Inupiaq native village and others threatened by climate change in western Alaska. He became an Arctic Youth Ambassador for a program lead by the U.S. Interior and State Departments, and is currently a participant in the Sierra Club’s Fresh Tracks program. In December 2015, Sinnok attended the United Nations COP21 in Paris, France. At the conference, a global climate treaty was signed by 195 nations in an effort to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Sinnok’s village is on the front-lines of that change, and has already experienced dramatic impacts. “I remember my grandpa telling me that the ice used to freeze in October, and this past year it wasn’t safe enough to go out on the ice until late November or early December,” Sinnok said. “That puts a hold on our winter diet.” Residents of Shishmaref depend on familiar weather in order to be able to hunt seals for meat and oil, fish for food, and gather traditional plants in the summer. But warming temperatures could make the lifestyle their people have lived for thousands of years unsustainable. “My family didn’t catch any ugruts (bearded seals) this year, so we didn’t have any ugruts to eat,” Sinnok said. Longer breaks in sea ice also means that ship traffic has increased in the area, leading to pollution, said Johnson Eningowuk, president of the Shishmaref City Council. The ship traffic through the Bering Strait — including fishermen, shipping, and even cruise ships — has impacted the marine wildlife and could be why there are fewer seals and fish around, Eningowuk said. The village’s other key source of food comes from gathering plants, a practice that’s also being impacted by the drier, warmer temperatures. “We don’t get enough snow in the winter time and that really affects what grows on our mainland,” Eningowuk said. Western Alaska has seen dramatic, large-scale climate change impacts, according to Austin Ahmasuk, a marine advocate at Kawerak, an organization that advocates for Bering Strait communities like Shishmaref. “Without question our climate is dramatically warmer — we have a two month longer ice-free season which is causing region-wide erosion,” Ahmasuk said. It’s also causing marine life to move northward, including microbial species that lead to harmful algae blooms, Ahmasuk said. Trees like willows and cottonwoods are moving north to colonize new areas, and Shishmaref — which has only ever had knee-high shrubbery — is now experiencing an explosion in willow. Overall, these changes have made Shishmaref residents’ subsistence lifestyle increasingly difficult to maintain, and some of the village’s youth have decided to leave for the cities, Eningowuk said. “Our culture is really hard, we’re up here near the Arctic circle, and we enjoy it — it’s what we’re used to,” Eningowuk said. “But our children, the younger generation are the ones who are not too excited about it,” he said, adding that all of his children have moved away from Shishmaref. “Other children are also already looking for other places to live…they’re finding other professions that will keep them in the cities,” Eningowuk said. The internet and television have shown them that there are easier ways to live, Eningowuk added. “It’s hard to stay alive here, to stay alive off of the ocean,” Eningowuk said. Despite the challenges, Sinnok is determined to save his community and their way of life. He even plans to run for mayor of Shishmaref in time to lead the relocation to the mainland. “I want to run for mayor to find the available grants to relocate,” Sinnok said. Nine villages, mostly in western Alaska, have been identified by the Army Corps of Engineers to be at imminent risk because of erosion and rising seas, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). All have been recommended to relocate. Between 200 and 300 villages will be at similar risk in the coming decades, according to the Corps. The native village of Newtok, 370 miles south of Shishmaref, is the first to have agreed to move to a new location. The move will be funded by state and federal funds, according to Maria Gonoa, a spokesperson for HUD. A complete overwash of Newtok is predicted to hit as early as next year, Gonoa added. As threatening as the climate impacts are, the cultural impact of leaving the village was also hard to think about, Eningowuk said. “At my age, I hope to not relocate from here,” Eningowuk said. Eningowuk said their lifestyle — dependent on the sea — would have to change if they went to the mainland. “That’s why we’re kind of reluctant to move,” he said. Ahmasuk said that Eningowuk’s reluctance is similar to many of the other affected villages in western Alaska. “In some of these communities there are very strong ancestral connections to the place and that connection is very important,” Ahmasuk said. “That’s also another matter that the community has to decide — kind of uprooting that connection.” Ahmasuk said that even if Shishmaref residents vote to leave the island, they will have to find the money to fund the relocation. If they are unable to do so, they have to consider other options that include moving to a city like Nome where their close-knit community would likely grow distant over time. Sinnok hopes to avoid that possibility by continuing to advocate for his village and others in western Alaska threatened by climate change. He wants to help create a safe place for future generations to live together. “Back in 2007, my uncle and my dad and a few friends went out on the ice to go to the mainland to go duck and geese hunting. On the way back, my uncle fell through the ice,” Sinnok said. His uncle lost his life that day, and Sinnok said his death has been a driving force behind his activism for small villages. He wants the problems of the rural, small villages — not just the big cities — to get solutions to climate change and other pressing challenges so they can live safely and happily. Even if residents of Shishmaref are forced to relocate to the mainland, Sinnok says the community can survive as long as they stay together. “We have to move close to the island so we can still live our lifestyle,” Sinnok said. “Some things might possibly change but having the actual community of Shishmaref as a whole is what’s important.” Originally posted here: Vote of a Lifetime ; ; ;

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Vote of a Lifetime

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This Sociologist Spent Five Years on LA’s Hyper-Policed Skid Row. Here’s What He Learned.

by ImogeneSifford Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart spent five years hanging out on Los Angeles’s grittiest streets for his new book, Down, Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. (For a taste, read this short excerpt.) “I figured this was ground zero for trying to start over, for testing the American bootstraps story, and I wanted to see if and how it could work,” Stuart explains. I spoke with the young assistant professor about the things he learned amid the street people and cops.

Forrest Stuart

Mother Jones: Why did you choose Skid Row?

Forrest Stuart: I had worked with prisoner advocacy groups and in minimum-security prisons. I’d meet guys who would be released at 5 a.m. with no food, no nothing. If I were a guy who needed food or an addict who hadn’t had any treatment in prison, I would do whatever I had to do to survive, and maybe that would mean something illegal. So how do you start again? I had heard that the 50 blocks of its Skid Row was the place with the most parolees in the country, a neighborhood that is simultaneously one of the poorest and most aggressively policed locations in America. Shuttles run between Skid Row and LA’s Central Jail. I started by sitting in the courtyards, standing on the corners, hoping that people would strike up conversations. I started selling loose cigarettes, and people finally began talking to me.

MJ: What struck you during your time on the streets that might be useful to policymakers?

FS: Right away I started seeing how the police, in part just because of their numbers in Skid Row, were creating a situation I’d never seen before. Just as a guy was starting to get on his feet—for example, he had finally secured a bed at a shelter—some small infraction would cut him back.

It could be as little as getting a single ticket for loitering. For people living on dollars at day, to suddenly have to pay $150 for a sidewalk ticket is huge! If they don’t pay, they can be arrested. Not only do they have to spend time in jail, they usually lose their bed at the shelter or their room in low-rent apartments. In a lot of shelters or apartments, if someone doesn’t show up at the end of the day, the managers give away all their things. So now they’d be right back to square one. Broke, homeless, just trying to get a roof over their head. The bootstraps were cut.

For someone like you or me, you get a ticket, you pay it, it sucks. That ticket can mean we can’t have a drink tonight, or we have to cut back at the grocery store. Our interactions with police and the criminal justice system are generally just a nuisance. But once you go below a certain socioeconomic status, these seemingly trivial, mundane, momentary interactions with the police restructure everything.

The other really important complication is that some of the places that people need most—like a soup kitchen or homeless shelter—become really risky, because that’s where the police are, giving tickets and making arrests for small things like blocking the sidewalk. So people start to actively avoid those places. If the police are stopping and questioning you about, say, loitering, or not having ID, or for talking to a stranger (who happens to be the person handing out sandwiches) and you get hauled off to the station, you start to change your behavior for the worse. You start to avoid or refuse services.

MJ: So we’ve essentially made poverty illegal, and addiction, too—if you’re poor.

FS: We can can think about inequality as income and wealth. But there are a whole host of other things that you don’t see unless you are standing there watching it for a long time. When cities use misdemeanor arrests in low-income communities as a corrective, what they don’t understand is that these policies constrict every decision that someone with so few options has to make.

When I step out of my house, I think about what I might be teaching that day or what I’m going to have for dinner. In Skid Row most of the residents’ cognitive energy is directed to two things: “How do I stay off the cops’ radar” and “How do I stay safe—how do I avoid becoming a victim today?” Essentially, what people have to think about all the time is, how do I prove to police that I’m not a bad person? How can I be sure I don’t look like an addict? (Don’t pick at your clothes, don’t pick at your skin, don’t scratch your head.) It’s an incredible amount for a person to take in. It makes it really hard to concentrate on everyday things—like being a good employee if you do have a job, or pulling off a job interview.

Those of us in the middle class aren’t sitting on the sidewalk, because we don’t have to, or we have a job, or a home to go to. Plus, even if most of us did sit down on the sidewalk, or walk down the street picking at our clothes, we aren’t going to get that ticket. Those policies amount to a double criminalization of poverty.

MJ: What assumption do most people have that should be corrected?

FS: That everyone, or at least the majority of the people, have something wrong with them. Something that the rest of us don’t have—mental health problems, addiction, poor choices, work ethic. But that isn’t true. I’m 100 percent confident that if some of the stuff that happened to them had happened to me, my family or my students or my greater community could help me. There is very likely no way I’m going to end up on Skid Row, because I have so many safety nets. But take away your family and your supportive networks, and we are all one step away.

MJ: The mayor of LA says he’s serious about change. Do you agree?

FS: Mayor Eric Garcetti says “we are going to spend money” yet they don’t really have the money. That said, he has publicly committed to using the Housing First model. That should mean the administration increases transitional and permanent supportive housing. Getting people into homes has shown to work better than anything else so far. And it’s a lot better than the current system, which is to rely heavily on emergency shelters that have been turned into rehabilitation centers. If he follows through, that is a sign Garcetti might be serious.

But overall I’m scared and pessimistic because the city’s history, and Garcetti’s history, shows that whenever they increase funding for social services, they tie it to more-aggressive policing. When that happens, we start hearing city official and police officers saying things like, “There’s no excuse for you to be here, homeless, jobless, because all of you can walk across the street for social service” or “There’s something wrong with you” or “You are criminally negligent.” There are a whole lot of reasons why people don’t go into services. A lot of people see services and police as one and the same.

We need to stop treating homelessness as a policing and criminal-justice problem. We need to let the police do other stuff, and entrust social workers and helpers to address the issues. These are jobs cops don’t want to do. They don’t want to be walking around in piss and shit and dealing with mentally ill people.

MJ: In your book excerpt that accompanies this interview, you write about Jackson and Leticia, a couple who found themselves on Skid Row and addicted to drugs after LA’s aerospace industry collapsed. Have you seen them since?

FS: Last time I saw Jackson was two years ago. He was in the soup kitchen. He told me that the cops started cracking down hard on the vendors. In the hope of avoiding the the cops, the vendors had started to focus on only selling DVDs rather than an assortment of items. They amassed duffel bags full of films, thinking that it would make their sidewalk shops more discrete. But having more than 100 bootlegged DVDs means more fines and jail time. So the vendors started going away for longer periods. Almost overnight, the cops wiped out another way poor people were making ends meet. Despite cycling through jail again, Jackson had been able to stay relatively clean. Leticia was still on drugs, but the two had managed to start the application process for SSI and transitional housing. But I’m still worried for Jackson. He’s got a long, uphill climb ahead of him.

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This Sociologist Spent Five Years on LA’s Hyper-Policed Skid Row. Here’s What He Learned.

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Baltimore Mayor Replaces Debbie Wasserman Schultz at Convention Podium

by Jackie1539 Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has officially gaveled in the first day of the Democratic National Convention, replacing outgoing Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the podium.

The Sun Sentinel reports that Wasserman Schultz asked Rawlings-Blake to replace her, ending speculation about the type of reception the DNC chair would have received from delegates on the floor this afternoon, after leaked emails revealed apparent favoritism toward Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the DNC. Earlier today, Wasserman Schultz was booed during her speech at a Florida delegation breakfast.

But Wasserman Schultz’s replacement has also faced her share of criticism from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. Rawlings-Blake drew significant criticism after her controversial handling of the unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody last April. Rawlings-Blake currently serves as the secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

Wasserman Schultz, a congresswoman from Florida, announced her resignation from the DNC leadership on Sunday and will officially step down as chair after the convention ends on Thursday.

Today’s change at the podium is one of many signs that Wasserman Schultz will be a party leader in name only during this week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio will replace Wasserman Schultz as the official chair of the convention, and Donna Brazile, the DNC’s vice-chair for voter registration and participation, will serve as the interim DNC chair until a permanent replacement is named.

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Baltimore Mayor Replaces Debbie Wasserman Schultz at Convention Podium

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At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

by JaninaRomilly2 Posted on July 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update, July 17, 5:42 p.m. ET: The deceased suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, and he attacked the police on his birthday, CBS News reports.

Update, July 17, 4:49 p.m. ET: Baton Rouge law enforcement officials announced at a press conference Sunday afternoon that there is no longer an “active shooter” situation, and that the deceased suspect was likely the only shooter, according to NBC News. Police initially suspected that there were at least two other shooters at large.

Update, July 17, 3:49 p.m. ET: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards condemned the shootings. “This is an unspeakable and unjustifiable attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing,” he said.

Update, July 17, 12:39 p.m. ET: The city’s mayor and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s office have confirmed that three police officers are dead and three others were wounded in the attack. The sheriff’s office reports that at least one suspect is dead, but two others may still be at large.

At least three police officers were shot and killed and at least four other officers were injured during a gun attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday morning, according to CNN. The incident occurred just 10 days after an ambush of Dallas police killed five officers and injured nine people.

While no official link has been established, Sunday’s attack comes amid ongoing protests in the city and around the country after the death of Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge. Thousands attended Sterling’s funeral on Friday.

Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told MSNBC soon after the attack that the police officers had been responding to reports of gunfire when they were ambushed by at least one gunman. A Louisiana State Police spokesman told the network that the gunman was shot during the incident. The gunman’s condition remains unclear.

We will update this post as new details become available.

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At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

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Theresa May Poised to Become Next British Prime Minister

by NestorMcGahan69 Posted on July 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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British energy minister Andrea Leadsom—one of just two candidates in the race to replace David Cameron as the leader of the Conservative Party—announced on Monday she was quitting the race, a move that clears the way for home secretary Theresa May to become Britain’s next prime minister.

In a press conference on Monday, Leadsom said that a nine-week campaign was unnecessary when May had already secured support from 60 percent of their Conservative colleagues.

“The interests of our country are best served by the immediate appointment of a strong and well-supported prime minister,” she told reporters.

Her withdrawal from the race to succeed Cameron comes just days after she was quoted saying she was better-suited for the office because she is a mother, unlike her rival May.

“I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next,” Leadsom told the Times UK. The backlash was swift, and prompted Leadsom to personally apologize to May for the remarks.

Her decision to pull out of the race is just the latest political fallout since Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union last month. Widely seen as the frontrunner in the prime minister race, Boris Johnson—the former mayor of London and a leader of the “leave” campaign— surprised the political world late last month by announcing he would not seek the job.

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Theresa May Poised to Become Next British Prime Minister

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