EFTA01142796.pdf

From: Gregory Brown <[email protected]> To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 08/25/2013 Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 07:01:21 +0000 Attachments: Moment_of_Truthiness_Paul_Krugman_NYT_August_15„2013.pdf; How economies_have fared since their_pre- recession_peaks_The_gconornist_kug_16th_2013.pdf; Where_languages_are_spoken_in_the_U.S._Dan_Keaton_&_Darla_Cameron_TWP- Aug._17,2013.pdf; Overseas_Americans„Time_to_Say2Bye_to_Uncle_Sam_Laura_Saunders_&_Liam_Pleve n_WSJ_08_19_2013.pdf; Republicans_increasingly_eager_to_get_the_word_o_ut_lu2014_en_EspatI_Ed_OKeefe_ TWP_August_ I 8„2013.pdf; The_Magical_World_Where_McDonald's_Pays_$15_an_Hour„It's_Australiajordan_Weiss mann_The_Alantic_August_5„2013.pdf; For_retailersjow_wages_aren't_working_o_=? WINDOWS-1252?Q?ut=5FHarold_Meyerson=5FTWP=5FAugust_20,2013.pdf?=; PPP- GOP_Louisiana-poll-August-2013.pdf; ALBERT_MURRAY_DIES_AT_97_NY_TIMES_8_19_13.pdf; Martin_Luther_King's_Speech_August_28„1963.pdf; Colin Powell slams_NC's new_voting_law_in_speech_at_Raleigh_CEOforum_John_Mur awski_Newsoiserver.com:Aug._22,_2013.pdf; THE_POLICE_bion 08_25_2013.pdf Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png DEAR FRIEND.... Albert Murray, Essayist Who Challenged the Conventional, Dies at 97 EFTA01142796 For those of you who have never heard of him or know his work, Albert Murray, (May 12, 1916 — August 19, 2013), an influential essayist, critic and novelist who found literary inspiration in his Alabama roots and saw black culture and American culture as inextricably entwined, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was a national treasure and 97 years old at the time of his death. Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray's estate, confirmed the death. With a freewheeling prose style influenced by jazz and the blues, Mr. Murray challenged conventional assumptions about art, race and American identity in books like the essay collection "Stomping the Blues" and the memoir "South to a Very Old Place." He also gave expression to those views in a series of autobiographical novels, starting with "Train Whistle Guitar" in 1974. Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled "The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture. " The book constituted an attack on black separatism, a movement supported by the Black Panthers and others that was gathering force in the late 196os, particularly among alienated young blacks. "The United States is not a nation of black and white people," Mr. Murray, a fervent integrationist, wrote. "Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black." America, he maintained, "even in its most rigidly segregated precincts," was a "nation of multicolored people," or Omni-Americans: "part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro." The book also challenged what Mr. Murray called the "social science fiction" pronouncements of writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who he said had exaggerated racial and ethnic differences in postulating a pathology of black life. As Mr. Murray put it, they had simply countered "the folklore of white supremacy" with "the fakelore of black pathology." The novelist Walker Percy called "The Omni-Americans" "the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture," published in his generation. But it had fierce detractors. Writing in The New York Times, the black-studies scholar and author J. Saunders EFTA01142797 Redding called the essays contradictory, Mr. Murray's theories "nonsense" and his "rhetoric" a "dense mixture of pseudo-scientific academic jargon, camp idiom and verbal play." For many years Mr. Murray and the novelist Ralph Ellison, who met in college, were close friends and literary kindred spirits. In "King of Cats," a 1996 profile of Mr. Murray in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that the friendship between the two men "seemed a focal point of black literary culture." "Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art," Mr. Gates wrote. "In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica — amusing perhaps, but eminently dispensable. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture — something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation." Like Ellison, Mr. Murray proposed an inclusive theory of "the American Negro presence." (He disdained the use of the term "black" and later spurned "African-American" — "I am not an African," he said, "I am an American.") Mr. Murray contended that American identity "is best defined in terms of culture." And for him, American culture was a "composite," or "mulatto," culture that owed much of its richness and diversity to blacks. Yet Mr. Murray was not always sure that whites understood this shared legacy when they embraced black artists; he could be suspicious of them, asking whether whites, even in their applause, nonetheless continued to regard black culture, in Mr. Gates's words, "as so much exotica." Thus Mr. Murray asked whether the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Toni Morrison in 1993 was not "tainted with do-goodism," and whether the poet Maya Angelou's readings at President Bill Clinton's first inaugural echoed a song-and-dance tradition in which blacks entertained whites. What Mr. Murray called Negro culture was, he wrote, not apart or different from American culture but inseparable from it. Much of American culture, he believed, derives from the vigorous embrace of a "blues aesthetic," which he found permeating the works of musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, artists like Romare Bearden and writers like Ellison. "For him, blues music, with its demands for improvisation, resilience and creativity, is at the heart of American identity," Laura Ciolkowski, a professor of literature now at Columbia University, wrote of Mr. Murray in The New York Times Book Review in 2002. To him, she wrote, the blues were "the genuine legacy of slavery." Mr. Murray himself wrote: "When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which Andre Malraux describes as la condition humaine." Albert Lee Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Ala., to middle-class parents who soon gave him up for adoption to Hugh Murray, a laborer, and his wife, Matty. "It's just like the prince left among the paupers," said Mr. Murray, who learned of his adoption when he was about 11. The Murrays moved to Mobile, where Albert grew up in a neighborhood known as Magazine Point. In "Train Whistle Guitar," his largely autobiographical first novel, he called it Gasoline Point. Through the novel's protagonist, Scooter, his fictional alter ego, Mr. Murray evoked an unharrowed childhood enriched by music, legends, jiving and jesting, and the fancy talk of pulpit orators and storefront storytellers. As rendered in Mr. Murray's inventive prose, the adolescent Scooter and his friend Buddy Marshall could imagine themselves as "explorers and discoverers and Indian scouts as well as sea pirates and cowboys and African spear fighters not to mention the two schemingest gamblers and back alley ramblers this side of Philmayork." EFTA01142798 After graduating from the Mobile County Training School, where he earned letters in three sports and was voted the best all-around student, Mr. Murray enrolled at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered literature and immersed himself in Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Mann. He met Ralph Ellison, an upperclassman, as well as another student, Mozelle Menefee, who became his wife in 1941. She survives him, as does their daughter, Michele Murray, who became a dancer with the Alvin Ailey company. Mr. Murray received a bachelor of science degree in education in 1939 and began graduate study at the University of Michigan. But the following year, he returned to Tuskegee to teach literature and composition. He enlisted in the military in 1943 and spent the last two years of World War II in the Anny Air Corps. After the war, the Murrays moved to New York City, where he used the G.I. Bill to earn a master's degree from N.Y.U. and renew his friendship with Ellison. In 1951, a year before Ellison published his classic work, "Invisible Man," Mr. Murray rejoined the military, entering the Air Force. He served in the military, peripatetically, for 11 years — teaching courses in geopolitics in the Air Force R.O.T.C. program at Tuskegee in the 1950s, taking assignments in North Africa and studying at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Paris. After retiring from the Air Force as a major in 1962, he returned to New York with his family and settled in an apartment in the Lenox Terrace complex in Harlem. He began writing essays for literary journals and articles for Life and The New Leader, some of which were included in "The Omni- Americans." He also became a familiar figure on campuses, holding visiting professorships at the University of Massachusetts, Barnard, Columbia, Emory, Colgate and other schools. And he resumed exploring the streets and nightclubs of Harlem with Mr. Ellison. From 1970 to the mid-1990s, as if compensating for his slow start, Mr. Murray published nine books. His second, "South to a Very Old Place" (1971), recounted his return to his Southern homeland. The book later became part of the Modern Library. In "The Hero and the Blues" (1973), a collection of essays based on a series of lectures, Mr. Murray criticized naturalism and protest fiction, which he said subjugated individual actions to social circumstances. In "Stomping the Blues" (1976), he argued that the essence of the blues was the tension between the woe expressed in its lyrics and the joy found in its melodies. He saw the blues, and jazz, as an uplifting response to misery. "The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people," Mr. Murray said years later. "It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people." He next began a long collaboration with Count Basie on his autobiography, "Good Morning Blues," which was published in 1985, a year after Basie's death. Along with the writer Stanley Crouch and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Murray was actively involved in the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the institution's first permanent jazz program. In 1991 he returned to his fictional alter ego, Scooter, depicting his college years at Tuskegee in the novel "The Spyglass Tree." Four years later, as he neared 80, Mr. Murray published two books: "The Seven League Boots," the third volume of his Scooter cycle, and "The Blue Devils of Nada," another essay collection. Still another collection, "From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity," which explored in part the "existential implications of the blues," was published in 2001. Mr. Murray published the fourth and last novel in his Scooter cycle, "The Magic Keys," in 2005. The book, which received tepid reviews (it "feels plotted rather than lived," John Leland wrote in The Times), brings its narrator, whose real name is never learned, to graduate school in Manhattan, where he befriends a thinly disguised Ralph Ellison and Romare Bearden. Mainstream recognition was slow EFTA01142799 to come for Mr. Murray. But by the mid-199os, the critic Warren J. Carson had called him "African America's undiscovered national treasure," and in 1997 the Book Critics Circle gave Mr. Murray its award for lifetime achievement. The next year he received the inaugural Harper Lee Award as Alabama's most distinguished writer. In 2000, Mr. Murray published "Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray," which he edited with John F. Callahan. That same year he appeared as a commentator in Ken Burn's multipart PBS documentary "Jazz." The critic Tony Scherman wrote of Mr. Murray in American Heritage, "His views add up to a cohesive, elegant whole, malting him a rarity in today's attenuated intellectual world: a system builder, a visionary in the grand manner." He could also write on a personal scale: his first book of poems, "Conjugations and Reiterations," appeared in 2001. And he was candid in writing about advanced age. "I'm doing more than ever," he wrote in an Op-Ed essay in The Times in 1998, two years after undergoing spinal surgery, "but it's harder now. I'm in constant pain. At home I use a four-pronged aluminum stick to get around. I need a stroller when I'm on the street. At receptions and in airports I need a wheelchair to get down the long aisles. "But nothing hurts quite like the loss of old friends. There are ways to cope at the time they die. But weeks and months later you realize you can't phone them and talk: Duke Ellington, Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, Alfred Kazin, Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Mitchell. It's hard to believe they're all gone " My friend Rudy reminded of me of the time while shooting the movie Sugarhill starring Wesley Snipes we made a pilgrimage to the great man's home in Harlem which served as inspiration for all of us to keep it real.... ******* \-TUNISIA Mediterranean Sea ziAgair. * Tripoli .A.K....., Al EA , ;A. .C.artian GAArpAn. A i rata ` A I We' • .1 Jbruc NAM . 8-3- ?WO 117- ;`3 ,ro' . Al B3701 . 0 ,703P1 .s ert Gulf of 'Si nawin S•dra .0.,idsoira . solo An til isfabriaoi• .Asser Gruipestme AI Jigriti0b. NA364111• Ilariaah. "Am ran "beat ALGERIA .842k •Alcit4In• Ada'. EGYPT Avrtlan. S31)". .Ze. LIBYA pan., . Tar 4rbu 'Al thrallNH • VA. al K.itair .Gnat AICIA;r(O• Ja,arr.. Al Jtrof * Bele 7 43it ft a l? 266 m) NIGER SUDAN CHAD 0 I$Qkm EFTA01142800 As many of you may know, I am a huge fan of the new leadership in Libya as the country has entered into a new chapter of its history. Looking next door to Egypt, the transition is unlikely to be easy and the emergence of a western-style democracy by no means a given. But, should such a thing come to pass, Libya's economic potential is enormous. Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world and its production, before the revolt against Qaddafi began, was 1.6 million barrels a day. Its proximity to Europe and its low cost of production— only $1.00 a barrel in some fields—make it highly attractive for new exploration, and two-thirds of Libya has yet to be fully explored for oil. Because Libya's population is only 6.4 million, it can be a low-tax state, thanks to oil, and still build the infrastructure a modern economy needs. And the population is well-educated. Libya has the highest HDI (Human Development Index) in Africa, a UN metric that measures life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living. At 0.755, it is a little higher than Mexico's. With political stability and the rule of law, it could easily develop modern light industries to supply European markets, as it already has the human capital needed to do so. with the largest crude oil reserves and second largest natural gas reserves on the African Continent, as well as more than US$ioo billion in cash and assets residing outside of the country. With a small population of approximately six million people, together with huge crude oil and national gas reserves, the World Bank defines Libya as an 'Upper Middle Income Economy' and in the 1980s its GDP per capita was higher than Italy, Singapore, South Korea, Spain and New Zealand. Therefore, with prudent management and financial responsibility, there is no reason that Libya can't return to its position as the #1 GDP per capita economy on the African Continent and one of the strongest in the world. Economists say that Libya's GDP should grow 15% annually over the next 5 to lo years, making it one of the most attractive places to invest in the planet and a potential Singapore, Qatar, Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong. And its tourist potential is unparalleled. Libya is an easy flight from anywhere in western Europe. Its winter climate is mild and it has great beaches, some of the longest on the Mediterranean and a pristine coastline of moo miles. The Sahara Desert, which covers much of the country, has prehistoric rock carvings and paintings and magnificent scenery (think David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia). It has some of the most impressive Roman ruins to be found anywhere in Leptis Magna, one of the great cities of the Roman Empire, and birth place of the Emperor Septimius Severus, who lavished the wealth of the empire upon it. If Libya can develop a modern, reasonably democratic political system, it could quickly develop into a first-world country. That, of course, is a very big if indeed with the history of kleptocratic government EFTA01142801 in the Arab world. But South Korea did it in the late loth century. South Korea was far poorer in 1960 than Libya is now and had been devastated by war in the previous decade. It, too, had been saddled with a miserable government. It had no oil to provide easy capital and needed to maintain a vast military establishment to defend against North Korea. But today, South Korea is a modern, prosperous state. Libya can be also—and soon. The nonprofit ocean-protection group Oceana genetically tested 1,215 samples from across the United States and genetically tested them in order to bring us the following astonishing facts: • 59% of the fish labeled "tuna" sold at restaurants and grocery stores in the US is not tuna. • Sushi restaurants were far more likely to mislabel their fish than grocery stores or other restaurants. Mislabeling by Retail Outlet 800 700 18% mislabeled 600 U correctly labeled 500 Number of Fish 400 300 200 38% 74% 100 0 Grocery Stores Restaurants Sushi Venues In Chicago, Austin, New York, and Washington DC, every single sushi restaurant sampled sold mislabeled tuna. • 84% of fish samples labeled "white tuna" were actually escolar, a fish that can cause prolonged, uncontrollable, oily anal leakage. • The only fish more likely to be misrepresented than tuna was snapper, which was mislabeled 87% of the time, and was in actuality any of six different species. EFTA01142802 If you've ever wondered why the sushi in the display case is so affordable, given the dire state of the world's tuna supply, well, now you know, and if you are a sushi lover like me this might be of interest to you too. ***** We are a nation in denial as there has been five serious gun incidents in American schools since the Sandy Hook rampage that killed 26 people (20 children) on December 20, 2013 in Newtown, Connecticut, and this week a 20 year old Michael Bandon Hill went into an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia with an assault rifle and more than goo rounds of ammunition threaten/endangering the lives of 80o students. Luckily the school's bookkeeper, Antoinette Tuff, was able to talk him into putting down his weapon and giving himself up to the police. Miraculously, no one was injured and Tuff is being hailed as a hero for possibly saving the lives of more than 800 students at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy. "[I saw]a young man ready to kill anybody that he could and take any lives he wanted to," Tuff told ABC. She asked the gunman his name in an attempt to keep him calm and at first he wouldn't tell her. "He told me he was sorryfor what he was doing. He was willing to die," Tuff said. She remembered him loading his gun in front of her and the rest of the staff. "I just started telling him stories," she said, saying things like, "You don't have to die today." See ABC's interview with Ms. Tuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=MelCICCImDD8&noredirect=1#t=141 Tuff told him about the tragedies she had endured in her own life, like her divorce, and was eventually able to convince him to surrender to the police. "I told him, 'OK, we all have situations in our lives," she said. "It was going to be OK. If I could recover, he could, too." The gunman's brother, Timothy Hill, told NBC News that Hill "was bipolar and sufferedfrom ADD." Hill exchanged fire with police and took several school employees -- including Tuff -- hostage in the front office. Hill has been charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, terroristic threats and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. EFTA01142803 We have to ask ourselves why do we submit every passenger boarding a plane in America to take off their shoes because one deranged terrorist unsuccessfully tried to ignite a bomb in his shoes and we do nothing to curtail assess to assault weapons by potential deranged gunmen. The NRA is wrong and America's efforts to protect our young is bankrupt. Thank God for Americans like Ms. Antoinette Tuff. ****** According to a Public Policy Polling survey, 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans say President Obama is more to blame for the botched executive branch response to Hurricane Katrina while just 28 percent blamed George W. Bush. A plurality of 44 percent said they were unsure who was more responsible, even though Hurricane Katrina occurred over three years before Obama entered the presidency when he was still a freshman Senator. When the Hurricane hit in 2005, Bush was slammed by both parties for errors pre- and post-Katrina. Later, a congressional report determined that a lack of presidential leadership failed the people of New Orleans. But Bush praised the federal response at the time, saying FEMA director Michael Brown was doing "a heckuva job." Since Obama took office, he has directed federal funding to rebuilding New Orleans hospitals. President Obama received some better reviews for at least one storm that actually occurred while he leads the executive branch. After Hurricane Sandy storm hit the East Coast, Republican governors Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, praised federal efforts. Even Brown's criticism of Obama during Sandy came across as a compliment, because the disgraced FEMA director slammed Obama for responding "so quickly" to the oncoming storm. We have to asked why Republicans blame President Obama for everything bad, even when there is no way he could have helped or hurt. And if you are trouble coming up with an answer, let me help you. It is because he is a Black Democrat. Attached please find the results of the PPP survey. ****** One of the favorite sports in politics is bashing government agencies and employees. The federal workforce has been used as a political football for decades. Feds know the drill: A politician from either party needs to win points with the folks back home on the issue of cuffing government. S/he makes sweeping over-generalizations about federal pay, federal employee performance or competence, unions or any one of a hundred other issues, and neatly avoids any admission of complicity in the problem. The "unelected nameless,faceless bureaucrats" are always to blame. If only they could be forced to work and the bad ones fired, our government's problems would vanish, the sun would shine and there would be peace in the world. The fed-bashing has risen to unprecedented levels in recent years. Let's take an inventory. It has been 43 months (January 2010) since federal employees have received a general pay raise. Just this week the House voted to allow senior executives to be suspended without pay when accused of wrongdoing. Not found guilty of wrongdoing — just accused. They voted to allow anyone to record any conversation with a federal employee without the employee's consent. It isn't just one party either. A bipartisan majority voted to pass the "Stop Playing on Citizen's Cash Act" to restrict conference spending. Other bills are pending to cripple federal unions, deny feds' bonuses for outstanding performance, cut federal retirement benefits and more. While that kind of rhetoric may be useful in politics, it is destructive for governance and the people who make up our government. These are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats. They are people. They have names. They have faces. They have families, feelings, hopes and dreams. They also have vital skills the government needs to operate effectively. More important for the government as an employer — they have choices and are free to leave. How long will it take before we crush the federal workforce? What happens if we do? A recent study suggests that it takes two years to crush and employee as a EFTA01142804 result of disillusionment caused by the constant barrage, job insecurity and a belief that whatever they do it is not being appreciated. The damage has started already. Federal retirements are up and continuing to rise. Employee responses to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey are showing increasing unhappiness. Virtually every question related to morale and engagement showed a decline from 2O11 to 2012. Every chief human capital officer I've spoken with believes the numbers will be lower — much lower — in the next round of the survey. As a result government agencies are reporting more difficulty in recruiting and hiring talent. Think about it — How easy is it to recruit a new star employee when all you can offer as a motivator is the opportunity to serve and do interesting work? No pay raises and constant bashing by politicians are not exactly strong recruiting incentives. The potential damage is compounded by the fact that morale-induced turnover tends to drive the highest performers out of organizations. They are typically the most marketable and most able to take advantage of new opportunities. Even if you believe government is too big and federal employees are overpaid, is this a good approach to reducing its size? I have never found a credible leader who believes employee abuse is a legitimate management tool. 2012 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey website: http://www. fedview.opm.gov/20 12/Definitions/ Study after study shows the corrosive effects of poor morale in the workplace. Productivity goes down, leave use goes up, discretionary effort goes down, and attention to detail is often non-existent. In her book "Good Company," author Laurie Bassi says, "The trademark of a worthy employer is the ability to masterfully manage the tension between employees as costs and employees as assets." I think that is a great standard — one that the federal government is failing to meet. The political battles today completely disregard the employees as assets and go beyond treating them as costs to the point where they are pawns in a political chess game. If we truly want to have a government that functions efficiently and effectively, it is time for the fed bashing to stop. Have the debates regarding the power and reach of government, but stop treating the federal workforce as though they are the problem. They are not, and they can only take so much before their spirit, dedication and willingness to serve are crushed beyond repair. Last Monday Michigan Republican Rep. Kerry Bentivolio shared his fantasy scenario with a crowd that it would be a "dream come true" to submit articles of impeachment against President Obama. He further explained, "I stood 12feet awayfrom the guy and listened to him. I couldn't stand being there, but because he is president I have to respect the office. That's my job, as a congressman, I respect the office." And the only thing stopping his "dream" from becoming a reality sooner? Bentivolio says he has no concrete evidence of Obama's impeachment-worthy schemes... yet. Answering a question from an attendee about what Congress is doing to stop Obama "from everything he's doing against our Constitution," Bentivolio said, "You know if I could write an (impeachment] bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true...." "I went to my office and I've had lawyers come in," Bentivolio continued. "These are lawyers, PhDs in history and I said 'tell me how I can impeach the President of the United States." But they advised him that he would first need some evidence. "Until we have evidence," Bentivolio said, "you're going to become a laughing stock if you've submitted the bill to impeach the president because number one, you've got to convince the press. There are some people out there no matter what Obama does, he's still the greatest president that they have ever had. That's what you'refighting." With delusions like this, Bentivolio seems well on his way to becoming that laughing stock' he mentioned... On a serious note, there is a real similarity here between Bentivolio's excuse for not impeaching Obama and Ted Cruz's excuse: Both of them blame their political circumstance. Bentivolio says he's not impeaching Obama because he's afraid of mockery from the press; Cruz says he's not pushing for impeachment because Republicans wouldn't win the impeachment trial. At least Bentivolio utters the word "evidence," but neither of them have the guts to tell their constituents that the real reason EFTA01142805 Republicans aren't impeaching President Obama is that President Obama hasn't committed an impeachable offense, or anything close to it. I'm pretty sure both of them understand this, but the fact that even these are guys are too scared of their base to tell them the truth is a pretty good example of just how dysfunctional things have gotten within the GOP. Both of these wachos are one of the reasons why Washington is so dysfunctional.... And should not be tolerated.... A Great Day In Harlem 1994 Film complete Video Website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkFDOUYuF4A and Interactive Website: httplAvww.a- great-dav-in-harlem.corn/ A Great Day in Harlem or Harlem 1958 is a 1958 black and white group portrait of 57 notable jazz musicians photographed in front of a Brownstone in Harlem, New York City. The photo has remained an important object in the study of the history of jazz. Art Kane, a freelance photographer working for Esquire Magazine, took the picture around 10 a.m. on August 12 in the summer of 1958. The musicians had gathered at 17 east 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Harlem. Esquire published the photo in its January 1959 issue. Kane calls it "the greatest picture of that era of musicians ever taken." Musicians include Hilton Jefferson, Benny Golson, Art Farmer, Wilbur Ware, Art Blakey, Chubby Jackson, Johnny Griffin, Dickie Wells, Buck Clayton, Taft Jordan, Zutty Singleton, Red Allen, Tyree Glenn, Miff Molo, Sonny Greer, Jay C. Higginbotham, Jimmy Jones, Charles Mingus, Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, Max Kaminsky, George Wettling, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, Ernie Wilkins, Buster Bailey, Osie Johnson, Gigi Gryce, Hank Jones, Eddie Locke, Horace Silver, Luckey Roberts, Maxine Sullivan, Jimmy Rushing, Joe Thomas Scoville Browne, Stuff Smith, Bill Crump, Coleman Hawkins, Rudy Powell, Oscar Pettiford, Sahib Shihab, Marian McPartland, Sonny Rollins, Lawrence Brown, Mary Lou EFTA01142806 Williams, Emmett Berry, Thelonius Monk, Vic Dickenson, Milt Hinton, Lester Young, Rex Stewart, J.C. Heard, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldgridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. ****** Shame on the US Supreme Court for gutting the Voting Rights Act and here is another reason why. Earlier this month, Gov. Pat McCrory signed what many have dubbed "the nation's worst voter suppression law." The new bill requires photo ID at polls, cuts down on early voting and eliminates other measures that were meant to empower voters. And on Thursday night Rachel Maddow tackled voter suppression in North Carolina focusing on one town's "dangerous, million-step process, newly instituted for you to exercise a right that used to be really easy." The segment focused on the town of Boone in Watauga County, Maddow highlighted the challenges now facing students who want to vote. Weblink: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/23/rachel-maddow-north-carol_n_3801705.html In the video dip above, Maddow reveals the obstacle course thousands of Boone residents will now have to conquer in order to vote. As Maddow explained, although the county just barely voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, the Boone precincts containing Appalachian State University voted strongly for President Barack Obama. Last week, the Republican-controlled county board of elections announced plans to eliminate two of the three Boone precincts, including on-campus voting. As Appalachian State University professor Renee Scherlen argued, "Our students make a large part of what Boone and Watauga county are, and to deny them the right to participate in politics here is unconscionable." If Gov. Pat McCory and the GOP don't want people to vote, then they should be honest and publicly say what we all know to be true.... they no longer want or believe in democracy. ****** EFTA01142807 Every so often there is a thought provoking movie and over the past two weekend, I saw two. The first is acclaimed director Lee Daniels' THE BUTLER, starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey and featuring an ensemble cast. Inspired by the real-life account of Eugene Allen, the film stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, an African-American who eyewitnesses notable events of the loth century during his 34-year tenure serving as a White House butler and in many ways a masterly work of art. But the real magic of this film is that couched in a bio-op is a searing look at the struggle of economic and racial equality from the mid-195os to the election of our first Black President. As someone whose mother was a maid for 5o years and as a kid did the opposite, when early on I realized that if I made myself conspicuous and entertained my mother's bosses and their friends I could move from the kitchen to the living room. But Cecil Gaines, chose to not do this, as he was trained to know 'his place', yet his quiet demeanor, discipline, strength and resolve may have helped the Presidents whom he served see the struggle for equality in a more empathetic way. From some, this argument will be a stretch. For others it is a provocative proposition, powerfully and at times disjointedly. At its core, The Butler is an attempt to alter the way that domestic workers have historically figured into the black cultural imagination. Rather than following in the classic Hollywood tradition of representing black domestic workers (particularly butlers, maids, and cooks) as clownish, one-dimensional caricatures whose sole purpose is to aid in the moral enlightenment of white people -- Daniels presents us with Cecil Gaines: a hardworking, family man whose subservient labor arguably constitutes a form of "quiet" protest. Based on the life of former White House Butler Eugene Allen, Gaines is depicted as neither an apolitical, happy-darky (in an early dinner-table scene, he objects to his wife's claim that life for black folks in Washington, D.C. is "better" than in the south by reminding her that blacks are also "treated badly" in the north) nor is he portrayed as a larger- than-life hero. Instead, Gaines is figured as a multidimensional human being who is doing the best that he can to feed a family, maintain a job, and live with a modicum of dignity. But the real brilliance of the film is that it plays straight man to the the many facets and factions of the Civil Rights Movement, making it accessible to people who would have never entertain going to film centered around the subject. EFTA01142808 As someone who has lived almost all of his life in two worlds, the film show how Forest Whitaker's character, Cecil Ganes navigates through live maintaining "twofaces"; the friendly, nonthreatening face that must be worn when entering the white man's public sphere, as well as the more authentic, humane, and multidimensional face that must be worn at "home" in the presence of other black folks. uninhibited manner at home with his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), and among his friends and his black colleagues at the White House, is altogether different from the near-robotic repression of his service demeanor. In juxtaposition to those people of color who tried to survive by not rocking the boat, the film also shows how the sacrifice and dedication by freedom activists pushed the White House to finally support the civil rights movement. I saw the film at a Saturday afternoon screening in North Hollywood, California with an audience that was almost all-white and older, who universally came out of the cinema (as I heard a number of conversations), feeling that they better understood the plight of the civil rights movement, from both the point of those in the struggle and the quiet majority of people of color like Cecil Gaines who were just trying to provide a better life for themselves and their families. I grew up around men like Cecil Gaines who had to live as if they were happy with their lot in life, (civil service workers, shop stewards, low-level managers) and whom my generation couldn't understand why they weren't upset about their second-class station in life. With this said and on the week of the Both anniversary of the 1963 March On Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech , I emphatically urge everyone to see THE BUTLER directed by Lee Daniels, as it is much more than a movie about a butler, Presidents, the White House, Dr. Martin Luther King or the Black Panthers. The other film that I saw last weekend with FRUITVALE STATION, a new film by Ryan Coogler, which tells the story of Oscar Grant: a young, 22 year old black Oakland man who was shot and killed on a train platform by a Bay Area Regional Transit police officer coming home with friends from celebrating New Years 2009 in San Francisco. The film opens with phone footage of the actual incident at the Fruitvale train station in Oakland, California. From here, however, the film winds back. It gives us the last 24 hours in Oscar's life, together with an elegant flashback to his time in prison. The drama idles deceptively, lulling us with a whirl of domestic routines in verdant, blue-collar EFTA01142809 suburbia. Yet all the while that final destination keeps clanging in the memory, like a train driver's announcement. We know where this is leading, whether we want it to or not. III/ 11;111 ill CIISIt III flit( MIMI I' 'GNU li lt. Stift l tuttlE .1 atilt% lilt 1/tIC(t FRUITVALE STATION See Trailer: http://youtu.be/ZxUJwJfcQaQ Michael B Jordan (as Wallace in The Wire) plays Oscar, a cocksure charmer who loves his mother (Octavia Spencer), dotes on his daughter and attempts, by and large, to stay true to his girlfriend (Melonie Diaz), as much as any would be player can. He's the sort of guy who is happy to help with the groceries or lend a hand to a pregnant woman in search of a bathroom. And yet Oscar is also wired, jumpy, easily frustrated, as things are not going his way. Like many young men of his age who society has been allowed to slip through the cracks, he has too much energy and no reliable outlet. "Calm down, Oscar!" his mother hisses — and her steely, unblinking stare suggests that she has had to talk him down from this ledge before. EFTA01142810 We lmow that one way or another Oscar is destined to run aground, either as a result of his hair-trigger temper, a trigger-happy cop or some grisly combination thereof. But Coogler's skill is in showing how he gets there, how life is precarious and how disaster can blow in almost out of nowhere, surprising even the perpetrator himself. But in light of the killing of Trayvon Martin, FRUITVALE STATION, is a sobering reminder how easy it is for a young black male in America to be killed because of someone else's reckless act or mistake with little consequence. Although memories fade, anger dissipates and one alleged miscarriage of justice is overtaken by others. It's a sharp, earthy, convincing film about a true-life case; a heartfelt memorial to every innocent young man of color who died unnecessarily, especially since FRUITVALE STATION opened in the US the same weekend that George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the Trayvon Martin case. Again, I strongly urge everyone to see this wonderful and poignant film. THIS WEEK's READINGS EFTA01142811 This week on August 28 is the Sot ` anniversary of the 1963 march and rally at which King delivered the indelible "I Have a Dream" speech. That event — one of the watershed moments of loth-century America — was officially called the "March on Washingtonfor Jobs and Freedom." Meaningful employment was a front-and-center demand. The idea and impetus for the march came from A. Philip Randolph, one of the most important labor leaders in the nation's history. Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union that demanded and won decent pay and better working conditions for thousands of railroad employees, most of them African American. By 1963, Randolph had become a vice president of the AFL-CIO labor federation. King and his fellow civil rights leaders understood the importance of good jobs that paid a living wage — and the social and economic mobility such jobs provide — in forging a nation that honors its promise of fairness and equality. If he and Randolph were alive today, given the devastating blows that poor and working-class Americans have suffered, I'm confident they'd be planning a "March on Washingtonfor Jobs and Freedom IL" As an African American old enough to have lived through malignant racism in the North and experienced Jim Crow segregation in the South, I'm amazed at the progress toward racial justice. And despite the fact that we are light-years from those years and we have a Black President, we are still nowhere close to a truly benign multi-cultural society. King was a passionate advocate for economic justice, speaking not just for African Americans but for all Americans seeking to pull themselves out of poverty and dysfunction. On this score as Eugene Robinson recently wrote ,"we haven't justfailed to make sufficient progress. We've stopped trying." With real unemployment above 8 percent and more than 45 million Americans living on the edge of hunger, much of Dr. King's dream is still yet to be realized. As an alternative to Dr. King's vision of a more just society whereby the core principle is equalized the playing field for all Americans. Instead, for the past three decades government and business policies have favored those at the top on the theory that wealth would trickle-down to the masses. In the process they gutted union and worker protection, as well as programs targeted to help the poor, elderly, children and disadvantaged. EFTA01142812 So it's no coincidence that this massive transfer of wealth — from workers to investors — took place at a time when union membership was in steep decline. In 1983, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union. In 2010, only 11.9 percent were union members. The result? In 2010, the median weekly pay of a male worker over 25 who belonged to a union was $982, according to the BLS. The comparable figure for a worker not represented by a union was $846. Instead of focusing on needs of workers and ways to put people back to work, our politicians are obsessed with deficit-reduction measures that, if applied in the short term, would destroy jobs rather than create them. King was assassinated in Memphis, where he was supporting the demands of sanitation workers for more pay, better working conditions and the right to unionize. The civil rights leader was increasingly focused on the economic dimension of the freedom struggle and was planning a massive Poor People's Campaign at the time of his death. The fact that Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech still resonates is because much of his dream is still out of reach for tens of millions of Americans. We have 49 million Americans who rely on food assistance programs to feed their families and themselves. We have an public education system that dysfunctional and a higher education system that has saddled the last two generations of Americans with more than $1 trillion in student debt. We have a Republican opposition whose #1 priority is to kill Obamacare, wit