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I am teaching in
my Violence in the Community course that violent crime is a function of the
power imbalance implicit in our capitalist culture. Therefore, though
African Americans are over-represented in the prison system (they are 12% of the
general population and about 50% of the inmate population), it is not the
black people who are the cause of crime, but instead
the power imbalance; the insensitivity
of the "American personality", the culture of fear
perpetuated by the media, and access to
guns that make us the most lethally violent country of all
advanced capitalist nations. I have Barbara Chasin's book "Inequality and
Violence in America: Casualties of Capitalism" to thank for facilitating the
teaching of this lesson so beautifully to my junior and senior students who are
absorbing the information most eagerly.
To Bill Bennett, my class would say: it is not
black babies that must be aborted to lower the crime rate, but instead the
system that ever widens the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Sarah Murray
William Paterson U of NJ
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2005 2:14
PM
Subject: TEACHSOC: Re: Get this: [Y]ou
could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go
down"
This could be a good opportunity to explain the difference
between the crime rate and arrest rate.
1. The highest clearance be
arrest is around 60% for homicide. The others are down around 20 to
10%. Thus there is no way to know the race of those who would be
suspects of reported crime.
2. The number of those arrested who are
convicted is small. And we know from the innocence project that a number
of them are based on DNA wrongly convicted.
Bennet in TV interviews
claimed use of social science. I have heard sociologists defend racial
crime rates but do not think it can be done even for reported crime as so few
are cleared by arrest.
Del
Andi Stepnick wrote:
Un-Freakin-believable. I didn't believe it until I heard
the clip. You can listen below and read along! For those of us
talking about race, ways of knowing, data, assumptions, stereotypes, etc.
this is a powerful piece to deconstruct!!
Andi
From
Media Matters for America.
----->>>>>>TO HEAR IT GO TO http://mediamatters.org/items/200509280006
The following message was included:
OMG!
Bill Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this
country, and your crime rate would go down"
Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people
who have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve
Social Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration
Secretary of Education Bill
Bennett dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations" by
declaring that if "you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole
purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime
rate would go down." Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American
babies "would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing
to do," then added again, "but the crime rate would go down."
Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized
abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William
Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and
Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up
poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more
likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based
argument.
From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill
Bennett's Morning in America:
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about
the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social
Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here,
that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost
revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something
years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just
doesn't -- never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it
would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too.
I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women?
No.
CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are,
yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue
for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean,
it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book
Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you
know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is
down is that abortion is up. Well --
CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either,
because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I
do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if
that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this
country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible,
ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate
would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive
extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
Bill
Bennett's Morning in America airs on approximately 115 radio
stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners.
A.S.
Posted to the web on Wednesday September 28, 2005 at 3:09 PM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To:
Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:53:29 -0400
Subject: [smwg01]
anti-sweatshop sign-on statement
Bob Ross is doing some
really good public sociology/activist intellectual stuff.
STeve
Dear Colleagues,
Early this year I was privileged to
witness an historic decision: United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS),
the premier national social justice advocate on American college campuses,
began the construction of a campaign to combat sweatshops by strengthening
unions around the world.
Faculty members from many campuses
are joining with USAS to support this campaign.
Below is a
statement that we are asking faculty members across the country to sign,
indicating their support for this important effort. (The statement and the
list of faculty signatories will be published later this year in the
Chronicle of Higher Education).
USAS has available material,
including Frequently Asked Questions, that they or I will be pleased to
send you upon request. Briefly, the students will ask that university
licensees reserve an escalating portion of their production for union
factories that pay a living wage - unions from anywhere as long as they
are truly workers' democratic choices.
I am asking you to
join us in signing this statement. To do so, simply email USAS campaign
organizer Zack Knorr at [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and please copy
me) with your name, school, department, and a line saying that you are in
support. Also, please feel free to forward this email, with your own
personal comments, to other colleagues you think will be sympathetic and
lend their support to this important effort.
At the end of
my work on sweatshops in the apparel industry I argued that there were
three pillars of decency for workers by the middle of the 290th century:
their own associations and self -defense, usually in the form of unions;
successful alliance with reformers and consumers (usually from the middle
classes); and together, sympathetic public policy. This campaign can help
erect once again the first pillar decency
In Solidarity,
Robert J.S. "Bob" Ross
Statement in Support of
United Students Against Sweatshops' Sweat-Free Campus Campaign
It is now more than five years since colleges and
universities began adopting anti-sweatshop codes of conduct. Not enough
has changed in factories producing collegiate apparel. Apparel workers
around the world too often face abusive treatment, excessive working
hours, wages that are woefully inadequate to meet basic needs, and the
denial of universally acknowledged associational rights when they organize
for improvements. Apparel brands put tremendous pressure on their supplier
factories to cut costs and these pressures make broad, deep and
sustainable improvements in wages and working conditions effectively
impossible. The gains we have seen at individual factories have been too
limited and too fragile.
In light of these conditions, we,
the undersigned, strongly support United Students Against Sweatshops'
(USAS) new sweat-free campus proposal. Under this proposal, campus logo
apparel would be produced in designated supplier factories where workers
are able to enforce their rights through union representation and are paid
a living wage. The goal of this proposal is to supply these factories with
steady orders from university licensees at prices adequate to allow full
respect for workers' rights.
We realize this proposal
challenges current practices, but we believe it is fully achievable. The
new sweat-free campus proposal strengthens existing initiatives in order
to bring us closer to the day when university apparel is truly made under
dignified working conditions.
Robert J.S. Ross, PhD
Chair, 2005-6, Section on Political Economy of the
World-System, American Sociological Association
Professor of Sociology
Director, International Studies Stream
Clark University
950
Main Street
Worcester, MA 01610
508 793 7376
fax: 508 793 8816
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Boyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:17:51 -0400
Subject: Re: [smwg01] Peak
Oil and Energy talks
Hi Dana!
Go for it..I know that
Mathew Simmons is coming to speak down there..we have
quite a peak oil
group up here too. One friend set up the
www.peakoil.org a few months ago and
very quickly was getting up to 4000 hits a
day. The Colin Campbell,
the British predictor of global production
peaking at about 2010
(and in End of Suburbia and a more recent dvd), called my
friend and
asked to buy the legal rights to his website. Jim turned
him down so
we're still cranking.
So what comes first..peak oil or the
"peaking" of the dollar? Please tell
everyone that Robert Williams ,
the Guilford economist, will speak up
here Friday, Oct 21 at 7:30pm on
his new book on global finance "The
Moneychangers", Zed Press,
forthcoming). His talk "Will the Dollar Crash?"
goes after the
Bush policies of maintaining a weak dollar and heavy deficit
spending.
Robert says it's really not if but when the dollar will
spiral
downward in global currency markets.. and now that we just borrow for for
Katrina and ,of course, the war etc..it's really scary.
If
people can't make it for the evening event, I'll also have him in a
classroom
at 2pm.
Take care!
Jeff
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Following up on Gerald Cecil's talk last Wednesday on
peak oil, I wanted to
> forward the schedule of upcoming
talks at Duke this semester on oil and
> energy issues. For the
full listing, go to:
> <http://www.physics.unc.edu/about/robertsonseminars
>
> I also highly recommend the documentary "The End
of Suburbia" for those who
> haven't yet seen it!
>
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--
Andi
Every object, every being,
Is a jar of delight.
Be a connoisseur.
~Rumi~
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our
existence into
something beautiful, or debase
it into ugliness. It's in our hands.
~Cathy Better~
Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of
things which matter
least.
~Johann von
Goethe~
----------------
Dr. Andi Stepnick
Associate Professor of Sociology
314 Wheeler Humanities Building
Belmont University
Nashville TN 37212-3757
Direct Line: (615) 460-6249
Office Manager: (615) 460-5505
Sociology Fax: (615) 460-6997
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