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From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 3/08/2015 Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2015 08:18:59 +0000 DEAR FRIEND Robert Reich: America is headed full speed back to the 19th century I recently ran across an article in Salon Magazine by Former labor secretary Robert Reich — America is headed full speed back to the 19th century — on the dangers of on-demand jobs and our growing intolerance for labor unions. The growth of on-demand jobs like Uber is making life less predictable and secure for workers. The problem is that these new jobs are low-paying with much less security. On the other side, a Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only "when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made." So if the new jobs are minimum wage and irregular, too bad. As Robert Reich points out that much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged "freedom of contract." Any deal between employers and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it. It was an era when many workers were "happy" to toil twelve- hour days in sweat shops for lack of any better alternative. It was also a time of great wealth for a few and squalor for many. And of corruption, as the lackeys of robber barons deposited sacks of cash on the desks of pliant legislators. Finally, after decades of labor strife and political tumult, the twentieth century brought an understanding that capitalism requires minimum standards of decency and fairness — workplace safety, a minimum wage, maximum hours (and time-and-a-half for overtime), and a ban on child labor. We also learned that capitalism needs a fair balance of power between big corporations and workers. We achieved that through antitrust laws that reduced the capacity of giant corporations to impose their will, and labor laws that allowed workers to organize and bargain collectively. By the 195os, when 35 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a labor union, they were able to negotiate higher wages and better working conditions than employers would otherwise have been "happy" to provide. And as Robert Reich points out again.... now we seem to be heading back to nineteenth century. Corporations are shifting full-time work onto temps, free-lancers, and contract workers who fall outside the labor protections established decades ago. The nation's biggest corporations and Wall EFTA00862567 Street banks are larger and more potent than ever. And labor union membership has shrunk to less than 6 percent of the private-sector workforce. So it's not surprising we're once again hearing that workers are worth no more than what they can get in the market. But as we should have learned a century ago, markets don't exist in nature. They're created by human beings. The real question is how they're organized and for whose benefit. In the late nineteenth century they were organized for the benefit of a few at the top. But by the middle of the twentieth century they were organized for the vast majority. During the thirty years after the end of World War II, as the economy doubled in size, so did the wages of most Americans — along with improved hours and working conditions. Yet since around 1980, even though the economy has doubled once again (the Great Recession notwithstanding), the wages most Americans have stagnated. And their benefits and working conditions have deteriorated. This isn't because most Americans are worth less. In fact, worker productivity is higher than ever. It's because big corporations, Wall Street, and some enormously rich individuals have gained political power to organize the market in ways that have enhanced their wealth while leaving most Americans behind. That includes trade agreements protecting the intellectual property of large corporations and Wall Street's financial assets, but not American jobs and wages. Bailouts of big Wall Street banks and their executives and shareholders when they can't pay what they owe, but not of homeowners who can't meet their mortgage payments. Bankruptcy protection for big corporations, allowing them to shed their debts, including labor contracts. But no bankruptcy protection for college graduates over- burdened with student debts. Antitrust leniency toward a vast swathe of American industry — including Big Cable (Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner), Big Tech (Amazon, Google), Big Pharma, the largest Wall Street banks, and giant retailers (Walmart). With less tolerance toward labor unions — as workers trying to form unions are fired with impunity, and more states adopt so-called `Sight-to-work" laws that undermine unions. We seem to be heading full speed back to the late nineteenth century. Robert Reich, "So what will be the galvanizingforcefor change this time?" 25 years ago a month from today, the New York Times ran its first profile of Barack Obama P,Inline image 1 Twenty-five years ago last month, the New York Times ran its first profile of Barack Obama. On February 6, 1990, it announced (in a headline that's now pretty dated), "First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review," and explained that the 28-year-old's new role was considered the "highest student position" at the school. Of course, no one was using the term back them, but Obama went out of his way to make clear that his election shouldn't be interpreted as ushering in a post-racial EFTA00862568 era on the law review staff or in the country. "Thefact that I've been elected shows a lot ofprogress," he told the Times. "It's encouraging." But, he added, "it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance." "In IMPORTANT THATSTORIES LIKE MINE ARENT USED TO SAY THAT EVERYTHING IS O.K. FOR BLACKS." Barack Obama There's a hint in the piece that the news was fraught with tension over whether Obama truly deserved his new role. The Times quotes former law review president Peter Yu, who says Obama's election "was a choke on the merits, but others may read something into it" For anyone who was around in 2008, that should sound familiar. And although a lot has change, in many ways little has changed. In America we are yet to live in a post-racial society and almost every person of color will agree with me. Attached please find the original New York Times article if it is difficult to read the above graphic. Defending the Crusades Inlinc image I In a recent article in The New Republic, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig pointed out the newest lunacy of the Right -- After President Barack Obama noted during the last National Prayer Breakfast that Christians have committed acts of violence in the name of Christianity, there are a lot of directions conservatives could have gone. The sanest direction would have been to accept that Christians have done terrible things under the banner of faith — even religions we find familiar and comforting can be contorted under the right conditions. This was undoubtedly the point the president was attempting to EFTA00862569 make, in an effort to maintain some semblance of fairness as he addressed the problem of Islamic terrorism. Instead, a number of conservatives tried to defend the Crusades herein lies the lunacy.... At National Review Online, a popular conservative blogging platform, Jonah Goldberg argued that the Crusades were essentially justified in the context of what he identifies as Muslim aggression. "For starters,"Goldberg writes, "the Crusades—despite their terrible organized cruelties — were a defensive war."Note that the plural "Crusades" transforms by the end of the sentence into the singular "a ... war": Goldberg was closer to the mark at the start of the sentence than at the end, as there were multiple Crusades, and each of them were distinct affairs. Some, for example, were initiated by the papacy; others were initiated by kings against the wishes of the Church, and some, like the Children's Crusade, now appear to be at least somewhat mythological. More slippery is the tantalizingly italicized word "defensive,"which conservatives also periodically apply to the Civil War with similar intentions of historical whitewashing. As David Perry points out at The Guardian, a host of other conservative defenses of the Crusades have accompanied Goldberg's: from spirited justifications to softer arguments. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's claim, for instance, was that the Crusades happened so long ago as to be irrelevant in all modern contexts, and that the time spent discussing them in Obama's speech could have been put to better use combatting ISIS. One could interpret these bizarre defenses as evidence that, for a certain brand of Christian, the fact that Christians can and do pervert religion in the service of evil deeds is literally unbelievable. But this would seem a remarkable stretch, given that even Judas Iscariot has a place in the Christian economy of salvation. In other words, Christians can usually fathom, when thinking rationally, the idea that terrible things are a part of our collective history. Perhaps conservatives merely found the criticisms of the Crusades cynical, given that their historical distance makes any genuinely felt implication on the president's behalf unlikely. In this case, the defense of the Crusades reads as a reflexive measure, meant to press Obama into more compromising territory, where he might have the courage to remark on a Christian atrocity he himself feels guilty about. Yet it seems unlikely that offering examples of more recent Christian evils — such as racism and slavery, the conquest of the Americas, the Bosnian War, or complicity in the Rwandan Genocide — would have won Obama any points for sincerity. Each would most likely be respectively dismissed as race baiting, as anti-American, as arguably legitimate, and as irrelevant. It's likeliest that the conservative defense of the Crusades is directly related to their status as a touchstone of American civic religion. When the Crusades are represented in American culture now, they are a symbol of Christian gusto, whether positive or negative. They resonate with the idea of a robust, aggressive Christianity, a faith with the masculine energy to face Islam head-on. This is why the Crusades occupy a special place in the conservative id, and it is why conservatives appear willing to defend them on general principle, with little regard for historicity. It is also why criticizing the Crusades is presented by some conservatives as an alternative to fighting ISIS, as though if Obama had simply omitted that remark from his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Islamic terror group would now be vanquished. Of course, no remark made at that breakfast, or any other breakfast, will be sufficient to undo the brutality ISIS has already inflicted upon innocent people. Nor will feverish dreaming about a mythological Christian military history rooted in EFTA00862570 contemporary American appropriations of the past advance that goal. Obama's remark was meant to cool interfaith hostilities by pointing out no religion has perfect adherents; his political opponents have instead decided to double down on the misuse of Christian sentiment the president intended to point out, which, if nothing else, is proof of the worthiness of his remark. And claiming that the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Slavery and Jim Crow are defensible is the height of hypocrisy ****** Deadly Force, in Black and White Inline image 1 If you want to know why African Americans are upset across the country over the deaths of Michael Brown, Antonio Martin, Tamir Rice, Cameron Tillman, VonDerrit Myers, Akai Gurley, John Crawford III and scores of other is because according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts — 21 times greater. The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police. One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring —185, more than one per week. ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population. Their examination involved detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides stretching from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report. The data, annually self-reported by hundreds of police departments across the country, confirms some assumptions, runs counter to others, and adds nuance to a wide range of questions about the use of deadly police force. As a result the data is incomplete because a vast number of the country's 17,000 police departments don't file fatal police shooting reports at all, and many have filed reports for some years but not others. Florida departments haven't filed reports since 1997 and New York City last reported in 2007. EFTA00862571 Who Gets Killed? Inline image 2 The finding that young black men are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police is drawn from reports filed for the years 2010 to 2012, the three most recent years for which FBI numbers are available. The black boys killed can be disturbingly young. There were 41 teens 14 years or younger reported killed by police from 1980 to 2012. 27 of them were black iii; 8 were white; 4 were Hispanic and 1 was Asian. That's not to say officers weren't killing white people. Indeed, some 44 percent of all those killed by police across the 33 years were white. White or black, though, those slain by police tended to be roughly the same age. The average age of blacks killed by police was 30. The average age of whites was 35. Who is killing all those black men and boys? Mostly white officers. But in hundreds of instances, black officers, too. Black officers account for a little more than 10 percent of all fatal police shootings. Of those they kill, though, 78 percent were black. White officers, given their great numbers in so many of the country's police departments, are well represented in all categories of police killings. White officers killed 91 percent of the whites who died at the hands of police. And they were responsible for 68 percent of the people of color killed. Those people of color represented 46 percent of all those killed by white officers. What were the circumstances surrounding all these fatal encounters? There were 151 instances in which police noted that teens they had shot dead had been fleeing or resisting arrest at the time of the encounter. 67 percent of those killed in such circumstances were black. That disparity was even starker in the last couple of years: of the 15 teens shot fleeing arrest from 2010 to 2012,14 were black. The problem with these numbers is that police don't always list the EFTA00862572 circumstances of the killings because there were many deadly shooting where the circumstances were listed as "undetermined." 77 percent of those killed in such instances were black. Certainly, there were instances where police truly feared for their lives. As the data shows that police reported that as the cause of their actions in far greater numbers after the 1985 Supreme Court decision that said police could only justify using deadly force if the suspects posed a threat to the officer or others. From 1980 to 1984, "officer under attack"was listed as the cause for 33 percent of the deadly shootings. Twenty years later, looking at data from 2005 to 2009, "officer under attack" was cited in 62 percent of police killings. Another disturbing trend is that the data shows police are increasingly using something other than a standard handgun with the Los Angeles Police Department standing out in its use of shotguns. Most police killings involve officers firing handguns. But from 1980 to 2012, 714 involved the use of a shotgun. The Los Angeles Police Department has a special claim on that category. It accounted for 47 cases in which an officer used a shotgun. The next highest total came from the Dallas Police Department: 14. So if you want to know why the African American community is upset when young Black men are killed by Police is because it happensfar too often.... Wine image I Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves as he steps to the lectern prior to speaking before a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 3, 2013. House Speaker John Buchner of Ohio, left, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) applaud. Over the past almost 3o years I have traveled the world extensively, first, as a United States Marine and then later as a private businessman. On numerous occasions, especially while traveling through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, I have had multiple heated arguments over the years with people regarding the actions and policies of the United States government. Whether it was Pres. Bill Clinton, George W Bush or Barack Obama, whether I supported the respective policy or not, I constantly defended the actions and policies of my government and pushed back against any foreigner criticizing the leader of my country. It did not matter if the person was a private citizen on the street, a diplomat, a government official or a Head of State, there was no way I could ever allow an "Outsider" to criticize or insult my government without getting both barrels from me. I've always believed that as EFTA00862573 Americans we don't air our dirty laundry in public. We can debate these issues amongst ourselves privately and respectfully. But we must show a united front to the world. Don't ask me why I'm this way, I just am. What I witnessed today inside the US Congress was anathema to all I believe. Shameful in fact. Allowing the leader of a foreign country to openly criticize our president's foreign policy in front of our Congress is an open insult to all Americans and not just Pres. Obama. I place this dishonorable act squarely on the shoulders of our congressional legislators many of whom I know to be honorable people. As Americans we should expect and demand better from our elected leaders. The eyes of the world are upon us and we should conduct ourselves accordingly. Thomas Coleman - March 4, uns Like Thomas Coleman and many other Americans, I was appalled this week at the reception that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received by the Republicans when he spoke in front of a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. As Chris Mathews bluntly said, "This was a takeover attempt by Netanyahu with his complying American partners to take Americanforeign policy out of the hands of the president." Chris Matthews, HARDBALL host: Well, that's -- you know, I'll get to the heart of this speech now. This man from a foreign government walked into the United States legislative chamber and tried to take over U.S. foreign policy. He said, 'You should trust me, not your president on this. I am the man you should trust, I'm your true leader on this question of U.S. geopolitics. To protect yourself you must listen to me and not this president' Let's be honest here Netanyahu is not interested in peace. He is not interested in peace with Iran and he is not interested in peace with the Palestinians. This is the same person who along with the necons pushed America into an unprovoked war in Iraq, claiming that Saddam Hussein was destine to use Weapons of Mass Destruction (which he knew was not true because Mossad interrogated Saddam son-in-law who had run the program and defected to Jordan before returning back to Iraq where he was killed) to destroy Israel and the West and by taking him out of power would add to the stability of the entire Middle East. What a crock.... And although he was born in Tel Vivi he was raised in Pennsylvania, yet he has push the expansion of Jewish settlements (mostly European immigrants) in the West Bank displacing Palestinian families who have been living there for hundreds if not thousands of years. Netanyahu doesn't believe in a two-state solution. Remember that this is the same person who started an unnecessary war in Gaza last summer that killed over 2000 Palestinians, including over 500 innocent children. He is a bully with 200 nuclear weapons himself, telling a country that he has threaten to overthrow that they shouldn't also have a bomb. This is a person who doesn't try to hide that it might be a good thing to bomb Iran even though they are not a threat to America. Hey, if I was Iran I would be trying to develop a bomb too because Netanyahu is a war monger who is hellbent to destroy your country's leadership. And on Tuesday he asked that the American people trust him instead of their President. And the Republicans in Congress applauded him Wow.... EFTA00862574 As Chris Mathews said, nowhere in the world would this have happened. Definitely not in China or Russia but also not in the UK, France or Germany either. In many countries it would be called sedition. But in their zeal to discredit America's first President who is a Person of Color, the Republican opposition invited a foreign leader with the goal of demeaning the President's foreign policy and undermine his administration's attempts to negotiate a treaty with Iran that would keep them for pursuing a nuclear weapon for at least ten years. It would be one thing if Netanyahu a solution other than don't trust your President and you definitely can't trust the Iranians. But he has no solution.... Other than war.... And do we really want to be part of another unnecessary war in the Middle East? Chris Matthews, Thomas Coleman and I are not alone as 170 former military officials and intelligence officials, including 6 decorated generals who publicly excoriated Netanyahu for giving the speech, emboldening Iran and poisoning the relationship between Israel and the United States. And this response is not limited to the United States, as yesterday tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv Square under the banner "Israel wants change" and calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be replaced in March 17 national elections. Saturday night's rally at Rabin Square is the highest profile demonstration yet in the run-up to the election. It is organized by a non-profit organization seeking to change Israel's priorities and refocus on health, education, housing and the country's cost of living. The rally's keynote speaker is former Mossad chief Meir Dagan who recently slammed Netanyahu's conduct and called him "the person who has caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel." While many of Netanyahu's opponents were quick to stress that they share his views on the nuclear deal with Iran currently on the table, critics denounced the prime minister's speech as a political stunt meant to bolster his election chances. "Is the speech, as Netanyahu insists, truly and solely about an Iranian atomic bomb?" asked Bradley Burston in an op-ed called "A Special Place In Hell" for the left-wing newspaper Haaretz. "The speech is intended to be a game changer. But the game in question increasingly appears to be that of helping Netanyahu to re-election in 2015." "Bibi is there speaking while we're here winning," former justice minister Tzipi Livni tweeted, according to a translation by Jeremy Pressman. Isaac Herzog, the leader of the Zionist Union Party and Netanyahu's main challenger in the upcoming election, told a crowd of supporters on 'Tuesday that while he understands Netanyahu's fears about a nuclear Iran, he was "here, not in Washington," according to The Times of Israel. Herzog also criticized Netanyahu's tactics, arguing that while "there is no doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows how to deliver a speech, it will not stop the Iranian nuclear agreement," Ynet News reports. Echoing comments by U.S. President Barack Obama, some in Israel argued that Netanyahu's speech repeated a number of familiar accusations against Iran and denunciations of the nuclear agreement, but offered few practical solutions. Michael Oren, Israel's former ambassador to the U.S., said on a televised panel Tuesday that Netanyahu "did not offer any new ideas." In the weeks leading up to the speech, several Israeli politicians had warned that Netanyahu's presence in Washington could damage the alliance between Israel and the United States. Eitan Cabel, a member of the Knesset for the Zionist Union party, reiterated those concerns on Tuesday, calling the speech an act of "political pyromania." Cabel argued that Netanyahu "has EFTA00862575 introduced an undeniable rift between Washington and Jerusalem, and this has only strengthened Teheran hand." But as Chris Matthews said, it's a remarkable day when the leaders of the opposition in Congress allowed this to happen. Think it through. Again.... what country in the world would let a foreign leader come in and attempt to wrest from the president control of U.S. foreign policy? And that's what the applause was about. That was what the battle of applauses was about -- to take power away from the president. It may succeed and we may see that there's going to be a lot more legislative intent here in terms of any treaty, a stronger push by Congress to insist on a vote, up or down on any treaty. But clearly that was what was going on here. Again, this was a takeover attempt by Netanyahu with his compliant American partners to take American foreign policy out of the hands of the president. And this is my rant of the week WEEK's READINGS Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Inline image 1 Inmates at the S ule Creek State Prison interact in a gymnasium that was modifieiI to house prisoners due to overcrowding in 2007 in lone, California. Consider the following facts: • With only 4.4% of the world's population, the U.S. has 22% of the world's prison population — that makes us the world's largest jailer. • Since 1970, our prison population has risen 700%. • One in 99 adults are living behind bars in the U.S. This marks the highest rate of imprisonment in American history. EFTA00862576  • One in 31 adults are under some form of correctional control, counting prison, jail, parole and probation populations. • The U.S. incarcerates more people — in absolute numbers and per capita — than any other nation in the world, including the far more populous China (which rates 2nd) and Russia (which rates 3rd). • Incarceration and related costs have quadrupled over the past 20 years and now account for a staggering 1 out of every 15 state discretionary fund dollars. • We incarcerate young African American men at a rate of 1 in 9 — higher than any other group of Americans. • We incarcerate Latinos at almost twice the rate of their white counterparts. • If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. The incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Imprisonment of America's 2.3 million prisoners, costing $24,000 per inmate per year, and $5.1 billion in new prison construction, consumes $60.3 billion in budget expenditures. The dramatic, unprecedented rise in incarceration rates should be a source of great concern to all Americans, because today our country is less free — and more locked down — than at any point in American history. In the 198os, the rising number of people incarcerated as a result of the War on Drugs and the wave of privatization that occurred under the Reagan Administration saw the emergence of the for-profit prison industry. Prior to the 1980s, private prisons did not exist in the US. In a 2011 report by the ACLU, it is claimed that the rise of the for-profit prison industry is a "major contributor" to mass incarceration, along with bloated state budgets. Louisiana, for example, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world with the majority of its prisoners being housed in privatized, for-profit facilities. Such institutions could face bankruptcy without a steady influx of prisoners. A 2013 Bloomberg report states that in the past decade the number of inmates in for-profit prisons throughout the U.S. rose 44 percent. Corporations who operate prisons, such as the Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group, spend significant amounts of money lobbying the federal government along with state governments. The two aforementioned companies, the largest in the industry, have been contributors to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies for policies that would increase incarceration, such as three-strike laws and "truth-in-sentencing" legislation. Prison companies also sign contracts with states that guarantee at least 90 percent of prison beds be filled. If these "lockup quotas" aren't met, the state must reimburse the prison company for the unused beds. Prison companies use the profits to expand and put pressure on lawmakers to incarcerate a certain number of people. This influence on the government by the private prison industry has been referred to as the Prison—industrial complex. The "War on Drugs" is a policy that was initiated by Richard Nixon with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and vigorously pursued by Ronald Reagan. By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,00o in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans. EFTA00862577 After the passage of Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased. The Act imposed the same five-year mandatory sentence on users of crack as on those possessing 100 times as much powder cocaine. This had a disproportionate effect on low- level street dealers and users of crack, who were more commonly poor blacks, Latinos, the young, and women. Courts were given more discretion in sentencing by the Kimbrough v. United States (2007) decision, and the disparity was decreased to 18:1 by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes. As of 2008, 90.7% of federal prisoners, or 165,457 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent offenses. By 2003, 58% of all women in federal prison were convicted of drug offenses. Women of color are disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs. African American women's incarceration rates for all crimes, largely driven by drug convictions, have increased by 800% since 1986, compared to an increase of 400% for women of other races. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, "Even when women have minimal or no involvement in the drug trade, they are increasingly caught in the ever-widening net cast by current drug laws, through provisions of the criminal law such as those involving conspiracy, accomplice liability, and constructive possession that expand criminal liability to reach partners, relatives and bystanders." These new policies also disproportionately affect African-American women. According to Dorothy E. Roberts, the explanation is that poor women, who are disproportionately black, are more likely to be placed under constant supervision by the State in order to receive social services. They are then more likely to be caught by officials who are instructed to look specifically for drug offenses. Roberts argues that the criminal justice system's creation of new crimes has a direct effect on the number of women, especially black women, who then become incarcerated. Increasingly long prison sentences, which have been adopted by many states over the past 20 years, have had a negligible effect on reducing crime rates. More importantly there is little evidence that higher incarceration rates result in lower crime rates in the first place. More than half of all people released from prison return within three years. One reason for this is that imprisonment, especially for lengthy sentences, destabilizes individuals, families and entire communities, which can create a dangerous recipe for higher crime rates. On top of this, upon release most convicts return to society without sufficient skills and training enabling them to secure meaningful employment. Even though white Americans constitute the majority of the population and commit crimes at comparable rates to that of people of color, African Americans and Latinos overwhelming and disproportionately bear the brunt of mass incarceration. The result is that people of color constitute 60% of our prison population while remaining a distinct minority of our general population. Sadly, our criminal justice system perpetuates racial and economic divisions. If our children see minorities treated unfairly and nothing being done about it, stereotyping and injustice are carried into future generations. Prisons should be the last resort. We must strengthen proven alternatives to prison, especially for low- level and non-violent drug offenses. Incarceration should be eliminated as a penalty for certain classes of low-level, nonviolent offenses. We must distinguish between those in prison who are ready to re- enter society and those who continue to pose threats to public safety. Cost-effective alternatives to incarceration and drug treatment programs must be strengthened, and regular, systemic evaluations of our criminal justice systems should be required. And we need to incorporate education so that when convicts are released they have meaningful skills and trades. EFTA00862578 In America, our criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly, regardless of the color of their skin or the size of their bank account. In order for our system to do a good job, it must be cost-effective by using our taxpayer dollars and public resources wisely, in an evidence-based rather than fear-based manner. But our criminal justice system is not doing a good job. It has failed on every count: public safety, fairness and cost-effectiveness. For another prospective feel free to look at the attached Slate article by Leon Neyfakh — Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? ****** Breaking Down President Obama's Point About Christian Crusades and Islamic Extremism The conservative Twitterverse is all riled up because at Thursday's (Feb. 5) National Prayer Breakfast (an event founded and run by the secretive Christian organization known as The Fellowship), President Obama said that Christians, as well as Muslims, have at times committed atrocities. His words: Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. This would seem to be Religious History um, but it was nonetheless met with shock and awe. "Hey, American Christians-Obama just threw you under the bus in order to defend Islam," wrote shock jock Michael Graham. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., called the comments "dangerously irresponsible." The Catholic League's Bill Donohue said: "Obama's ignorance is astounding and his comparison is pernicious. The Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen of the Middle Ages." More thoughtfully, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama's comments about Christianity EFTA00862579 an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison... The evil actions that he mentioned were dearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians. Really? 1. The Crusades The Crusades lasted almost 200 years, from 1095 to 1291. The initial spark came from Pope Urban II, who urged Christians to recapture the Holy Land (and especially the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem) from Muslim rule. Like the promise of eternal life given to Muslim martyrs, Crusaders were promised absolution from sin and eternal glory. Militarily, the Crusades were at first successful, capturing Jerusalem in 1099, but eventually a disaster; Jersualem fell in 1187. Successive Crusades set far more modest goals, but eventually failed to achieve even them. The last Crusader-ruled city in the Holy Land, Acre, fell in 1291. Along the way, the Crusaders massacred. To take but one example, the Rhineland Massacres of 1096 are remembered to this day as some of the most horrific examples of anti-Semitic violence prior to the Holocaust. (Why go to the Holy Land to fight nonbelievers, many wondered, when they live right among us?) The Jewish communities of Cologne, Speyer, Worms, and Mainz were decimated. There were more than 5,000 victims. And that was only one example. Tens of thousands of people (both soldiers and civilians) were killed in the conquest of Jerusalem. The Crusaders themselves suffered; historians estimate that only one in 20 survived to even reach the Holy Land. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died in total. And this is all at a time in which the world population was approximately 300 million -- less than 5 percent its current total. Muslim extremists would have to kill 34 million people (Muslim and non- Muslim alike) to equal that death toll today. As horrific as the Islamic States brutal reign of terror has been, its death toll is estimated at around 20,000. 2. The Inquisition While most of us regard "The Inquisition" as a particular event, it actually refers to a set of institutions within the Roman Catholic Church that operated from the mid-13th century until the 19th century. One actually still survives, now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was directed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before his 2005 election as Pope Benedict XVI. These institutions were charged with prosecuting heresy -- and prosecute they did, executing and torturing thousands of suspected witches, converts from Judaism (many of whom had been forced to convert), Protestants, and all manner of suspected heretics, particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries. Historians estimate that 150,000 people were put on trial by the Inquisition, with 3,000 executed. Arguably, the Islamic State's methods of execution -- including crucifixion, beheading, and, most recently, burning a prisoner alive -- are as gruesome as the Inquistion's, with its infamous hangings EFTA00862580 and burnings at the stake. ISIS is also committing systematic rape, which the Inquisition did not, and enslaving children. As for torture, however, it's hard to do worse than the Inquisition, which used torture as a method of extracting confessions. Methods included starvation, burning victims' bodies with hot coals, forced over-consumption of water, hanging by straps, thumbscrews, metal pincers, and of course, the rack. Believe it or not, all of this was meant to be for the victim's own good: better to confess heresy in this life, even under duress, than to be punished for it in the next. Contrary to Moore's statement, the Inquisition was not "outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and ... met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians." Though Moore may distinguish between 'Christianity' and the Roman Catholic Church, for all intents and purposes the Roman Catholic Church WAS Christianity at the time, or at least claimed to be. 3. Slavery and ,Jim Crow "Slaves, obey your masters," the New Testament says -- three times. And indeed, Christian teaching was cited on both sides of the slavery debate, with both slaveholders and abolitionists using it to justify their actions. Segregationists also looked to the "Curse of Ham," from the story of Noah, and the notion that God had separated the races on different continents. The effects were world-historic in scope: Nearly 12 million people were forced on the "Middle Passage" from Africa to the Americas. More recently, though the vast majority of Christians abhor it, the Ku Klux Klan, to the present day, still insists that it is a "Christian organization." There's a reason the Klan burned crosses alongside its lynchings and acts of arson, after all. Of course, there was also organized Christian opposition to slavery and to Jim Crow, and Christianity is at least as much the property of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as of the segregationists and slaveholders of the Old South. But this was precisely Obama's point: All religions have their hateful extremists, and their prophets of justice. What about popularity? Do more Muslims support the Islamic State today than Christians supported Jim Crow in the past? No. At the height of the ICICK's popularity in the 1920s, approximately 15 percent of white male Americans were members. That number is eerily similar to the 12 percent of Muslims worldwide who support terrorism today. In other words, not only is Obama factually correct that Christian extremism across history has been at least as bloody as Muslim extremism today, it is also factually true that such extremisms have been equally popular. True, as Rush Limbaugh points out, the Crusades were "a thousand years ago," the Inquisition ended 200 years ago, and Jim Crow legally ended in the 196os. But the president specifically noted that "humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history." EFTA00862581 Which is the real point. There are two narratives about radical Islamists, and indeed about enemies of any sort, that coexist in American culture. According to one, they are different from us -- Muslims, Palestinians, Israelis, Communists, you name it. Thus, in the battle against Islamic extremism, Islam is, in part at least, the enemy. The other narrative is that all peoples, all creeds, all nations contain elements of moderation and extremism. Thankfully, racist Christian extremists are today a tiny minority within American Christianity. But only 100 years ago, they were as popular among American Christians as the Islamic State is among Muslims today. Thus, in the battle against Islamic extremism, it is extremism that is the enemy. Hysterical commentary notwithstanding, no one is suggesting that Christians are just like the Islamic State. But Obama did suggest that Christianity is like Islam; both faiths have the capacity to be exploited by extremists. Christians should not be insulted by the facts of history. Rather, all of us should be inspired by them to recognize the dangers of extremism -- wherever they lie. Jay Michaelson — 02/07/2015 — Religion News Service ****** Reverse Home Mortgages — good or not? Inline image 2 If you watch commercial television like I do you have obviously seen the many ads promoting Reverse Home Mortgages. These commercials often show an older white couple in some sort of casual activity basking in the sunshine. And although these ads suggest a passive sell, the repetition makes them among the hardest selling products being touted on television. So seeing a Pros and Cons Guide disguising an ad, I thought that I would try to figure out exactly what Reverse Mortgage are.... Wikipedia: A reverse mortgage is a home loan that provides cash payments based on home equity. Homeowners normally "defer payment of the loan until they die, sell, or moue out of the home." EFTA00862582  Upon the death of homeowners, their heirs either give up ownership to the home or must refinance the home to purchase the title from the reverse mortgage company. Specific rules for reverse mortgage transactions vary depending on the laws of the jurisdiction. I would describe Reverse Mortgages a little different. They are credit facility that enables homeowners to pawn their homes. And it does it in a way that the borrower doesn't sense the accruing debt, which are monthly interest payments that continue to grow until death. Generally Reverse Mortgages are cap at 50% of the equity in the home and limited to $625,500. In a Reverse Mortgage, your actual loan amount is determined by a calculation that uses the appraised value of your home, the amount of money you owe on the home, your age and current interest rates. A Reverse Mortgage is a mortgage in reverse. With a traditional mortgage you borrow money up front and pay down the loan down over time. A Reverse Mortgage is the opposite — you accumulate the loan over time and pay it all back when you are no longer living in the home. The borrower remains entirely responsible for the property. This includes physical maintenance. In addition, some programs require that the property is periodically revalued. Eligibility requirements vary by lender. To qualify for a reverse mortgage the borrower has to be over a certain age, usually 60 or 65 years of age; if the mortgage has more than one borrower, the youngest borrower must meet the age requirement and the borrower must own the property, or the existing mortgage balance must be low enough that it will be paid off with the reverse mortgage proceeds. The money from a reverse mortgage can be distributed in several different ways: • as a lump sum, in cash, at settlement • as an annuity, with a cash payment at regular intervals • as a line of credit, similar to a home equity line of credit • as a combination of these. A reverse mortgage comes due — the loan plus interest must be repaid — when the borrower dies, sells the property, moves out of the house, or breaches the contract in some way. Depending on the terms some Reverse Loans can be repaid but the borrower may incur penalties or fees. Important: "Some providers offer a 'no negative equity guarantee'. This means that if the balance of the loan exceeds the proceeds of sale of the property, no claim for this excess will be made against the estate or other beneficiaries of the borrower." Lenders say that with Reverse Mortgage you will never owe more than your home's value at the time the loan is repaid, even if the Reverse Mortgage lenders have paid you more money than the value of the home. Obviously this is an advantage if you secure a Reverse Mortgage and then home price declines. But one has to always look at t