Hi. I just read this and am passing it on without permission, but assuming the family and Ross Altman won't mind. As you might imagine, Frank was a lifelong activist for Black liberation and causes. Today's essay is appropriate. -Ed
Dear Ed, I spoke with Jo Wilkinson today and asked her about the LA Times, assuming they were boycotting the story from them, rather than the Times lack of interest. Neither was the case: It will in fact be in thursday's paper, though it took some effort on Jo and Donna's part. Jo conveyed this story to me about Donna's last moments with Frank: She looked into his eyes and told him that he was about to go "on a great field trip--even better than your usual tours of the fifty states." A lovely image for a lovely man. There will be a service at Holman's Methodist Church, 3320 W. Adams Bl., Saturday, 1/28 at 2:00 PM. Warmest wishes, Ross *** CounterPunch - Dec 30, 2005 http://www.counterpunch.org/hutchinson12302005.html Environmental Racism The Toxic Air in Black America By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON Environmentalists hit the roof in 2002 when President Bush announced his Clean Sky Initiative. The initiative would not clean the skies but dirty them further. It would allow corporations to dump tons more toxic pollutants in the air, delay or exempt enforcement of smog and soot pollution standards, and gut EPA pollution enforcement powers. Though the initiative is stalled in Congress, Bush did an end around and used an administrative order to weaken enforcement. That virtually assures that blacks, especially poor blacks, will breather dirtier air. This has had dire health consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly warned that blacks are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher air pollution levels and suffer higher rates of respiratory and blood ailments than whites, and suffer more deaths. The Bush administration defends its contempt for the lungs of the poor by saying that race should not be as issue in the battle against toxic pollution, and that it will protect all groups against environmental damage. The Bush record shows that it has done just the opposite. A recent Associated Press survey of government data found that in 19 states blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where pollution posed a severe health hazard. Despite the severe health risks that toxic damage poses in these neighborhoods, the residents have gotten very little attention or support from environmental groups. But the fight against environmental racism is a civil rights battle, and a fight to save black lives. That battle should fully engage civil rights and environmental groups. Black residents in some cities have screamed just as loudly as white, middle class homeowners and urban conservationists about hacked up parkland, toxic dump sites, waste incinerators, garbage dumps, recycling centers, contaminated sewage sites, and power plants in their backyard. They label this racially-warped policy, "PIBBY" or, put it in blacks backyard. In 1979, Houston city officials tried to dump yet another toxic waste site in a black neighborhood. This time the homeowners and residents fought back. They filed and won the first major lawsuit against the dumping of a waste facility in an urban neighborhood. Their action transformed the fight for environmental justice into a health and a civil rights issue. Since then blacks have marched, demonstrated, filed lawsuits, been jailed, and held local and national conferences, to denounce environmental degradation of their neighborhoods. In a milestone report on race and toxic wastes in 1987, the Commission for Racial Justice, a church-based civil rights advocacy group, revealed that blacks are far more likely than whites to live near abandoned toxic waste sites, waste landfills, and sewer treatment plants. They prodded former President Clinton in 1994 to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to intensify efforts to determine the harm toxic waste plants and sites wreak on urban communities. A decade later, the Government Accounting Office found that all of the offsite hazardous waste landfills in nine Southern states were situated in or in close proximity to black neighborhoods. This environmental racism outraged black environmental activists. Meanwhile, Bush has done everything he could to scrap the Clinton rules, and corporations and public officials have dutifully taken their cue and tossed more pollutants into the air and water. The courts haven't helped. Residents in poor, highly toxic neighborhoods can sue polluters under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but they must prove intentional discrimination. This is virtually impossible to prove. The Supreme Court has ruled that private citizens can't sue to enforce federal environmental regulations that ban discrimination. The EPA has moved with glacial speed to investigate complaints of environmental pollution, and has been even more reluctant to take strong action against polluters. In one two-year stretch from 2001 to 2003, the EPA settled only two cases against corporate polluters. There's little evidence that the agency's settlement scorecard has gotten much better since then. The damage from official neglect of the problem has been profound. Toxic eyesores disfigure black neighborhoods, degrade property values, and discourage public and private investment in those neighborhoods, and that in addition to the grave health risks that toxic pollution poses to the residents. Corporate and industrial polluters get away with their toxic assault on low-income, black neighborhoods by skillfully twisting the jobs versus environment issue. They claim that the choice is between creating more jobs and business growth and economic stagnation. Their economic black mail works since few politicians will risk being tagged as anti-business. They gamble that poor, blacks and Latinos, many of whom do not own their homes, and vote in far smaller numbers, are less likely than politically connected white, middle-class homeowners to squawk at putting a hazardous plant or toxic waste site in their neighborhood. Many officials will eagerly waive requirements for environmental reports, provide special tax breaks, and even alter zoning and land use requirements to allow them to set up shop in these underserved neighborhoods. They'll get it with the full blessing of the Bush administration, but let's hope not with Congress. [Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, an author and political analyst.] *** http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/opinion/02herbert.html?th&emc=th The Machete Budget By BOB HERBERT NY Times Op-Ed: January 2, 2006 If Congress were merely useless, the country would be better off. But it's worse than useless. In the iron grip of a Republican Party that is almost slavishly devoted to the Bush administration, it's downright destructive, especially to the interests of poor and working people. Consider the budget that will soon be sent to the president for his signature. Members of the House and Senate have agreed on legislation that achieves something approaching $40 billion in savings over five years primarily by hammering the sick, the poor, the elderly and college students and their families. This is the same Congress that genuflects each time the president asks for yet another gift-wrapped tax cut for the wealthiest among us. The textbooks tell us that the U.S. is a representative democracy, but only the upper strata are truly represented. The nearly 800-page budget bill would allow states to jack up the premiums and co-payments of millions of low-income Medicaid recipients. It would also allow some Medicaid benefits to be rolled back. One of worst aspects of the Medicaid provisions is that large numbers of poor people, faced with the higher premiums and co-payments, will inevitably decide to take a pass on the health care they need. Some will die. "The Congressional Budget Office," wrote Kevin Freking of The Associated Press, "has concluded that such increases would lead many poor people to forgo health care or not to enroll in Medicaid at all - contributing to some of the $4.8 billion in Medicaid savings envisioned over the next five years." (I listened the other day to a story about a woman who had repeatedly postponed a visit to the doctor because she was broke and had no health insurance. It turned out she had breast cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread through much of her body. The prognosis for this woman is not good, and it should not be the policy of the United States government to encourage this kind of situation.) You would think that a conservative, family-values, Republican-dominated Congress would, at the very least, go to the mat on behalf of child support payments. Think again. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has closely studied the budget agreement, noted that "its reductions in child support enforcement funding would, according to the C.B.O., mean that $2.9 billion in child support that otherwise would be collected over the next five years - and $8.4 billion that otherwise would be collected over the next 10 years - would go uncollected instead." As the center noted: "The conference agreement also includes provisions that would delay certain [Supplemental Security Income] payments for up to a year for many poor individuals with disabilities who are found eligible for S.S.I. In addition, the bill cuts federal foster care aid in a way that will make it much more difficult for states to provide federally funded foster care benefits to certain relatives who are raising children because the children's parents are unable or unfit to do so." This is ugly stuff: mean-spirited legislators hacking like wild men with machetes at the already ragged safety net. Poor children, the very sick and the disabled are among those most likely to tumble into the abyss. The largest chunk of "savings" in the budget bill would come from student aid. With the special interests driving up in 18-wheelers to haul away our tax dollars, Congress and the administration apparently felt that mugging college students would be a good way to recoup a bit of those losses. "This is the biggest cut in the history of the federal student loan program," said David Ward, who heads the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for public and private colleges. Republican leaders in Congress, working in tandem with the Bush administration on this issue, tried to throw up the usual smoke screen. As The Times reported: "Republican negotiators said virtually all the cuts in student aid would be borne by banks and other lenders, an assertion sharply disputed by Democrats and college administrators, who said that two-thirds of the savings would be at the expense of students and their families." Because of some minor, last-minute changes that have to be dealt with, the House will have one more crack at this bill before it goes to the president. It would be an opportunity for some Republican "moderates," who should be appalled at what is happening, to step up and be heard. Don't hold your breath. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Clean water saves lives. 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