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Wednesday, August 11, 2010
BLACK AMERICA HAS DESCENDED INTO A CESSPOOL FROM WHICH IT MAY NEVER EMERGE! LIFERAFTS, HANDOUTS AND FREEBEES COST HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS-FAILED SCHOOLS WITH COPS AND METAL DETECTORS TRY TO KEEP ORDER! NEW PENETENTIARIES COST A BUNDLE AND PARAMILITARY COPS ARE NEEDED TO RIDE ROUGHSHOD OVER THE HERD SO THE BLOODBATH OF VIOLENCE AND LAWLESSNES IS CONTAINED! TAXPAYERS HAVE HAD ENOUGH! AMERICANS HAVE HAD ENOUGH!
90% of Black Children on Food Stamps
by Greg Plotkin November 05, 2009 06:00 AM (PT) Topics: Children In Poverty, Culture Of Poverty, Food Stamps, Government Anti-Poverty Programs, Health & Poverty, Hunger, Race And Ethnicity
In one of the most dramatic examples I've seen of the true reach of hunger in the United States, a new report released this week by Washington University in St. Louis researchers found that 90 percent of black children will be clients of the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/Food Stamps) at least once by the time they turn 20.
Although the percentage is less for white children (the only other ethnic group studied), the startling statistic here is that, at some point before their 20th birthday, 50 percent of all children in the United States will have received SNAP benefits.
More than being about access to food, the report's lead researcher says his findings represent a more important trend in the upbringing of the country's children. "Rather than being a time of security and safety, the childhood years for many American children are a time of economic turmoil, risk, and hardship," says Mark Rank, Ph.D.
Among the other interesting/disturbing statistics presented in the report:
-Nearly one-quarter of all American children will be in households that use food stamps for five or more years during childhood.
-91 percent of children with single parents will be in a household receiving food stamps, compared to 37 percent of children in married households.
-Looking at race, marital status and education simultaneously, children who are black and whose head of household is not married with less than 12 years of education have a cumulative percentage of residing in a food stamp household of 97 percent by age 10.
What this report really highlights are the drastic race, gender and socio-economic disparities in this country. And unfortunately, these disparities seem to be affecting our youth at a staggering level.
If children really are the future (as I believe they are), we as a society need to do a much better job of letting kids develop into the leaders of tomorrow, instead of being held back by the problems of today.
(Photo credit: Marco Gomes on Flickr)
Greg Plotkin currently works for Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, NY. He is dedicated to eliminating inequalities in who has access to healthy food and alleviating hunger.
http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/90_of_black_children_on_food_stamps
Crime and punishment in America
Rough justice
America locks up too many people, some for acts that should not even be criminal
Jul 22nd 2010
IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing. The original intent was to prevent Americans from, say, poaching elephants in Kenya. But it has been interpreted to mean that they must abide by every footling wildlife regulation on Earth. The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail.
America is different from the rest of the world in lots of ways, many of them good. One of the bad ones is its willingness to lock up its citizens (see our briefing). One American adult in 100 festers behind bars (with the rate rising to one in nine for young black men). Its imprisoned population, at 2.3m, exceeds that of 15 of its states. No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free. The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America’s level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan.
Tougher than thou
Related items
Trading prisoners in the Low Countries: It's a dealJul 22nd 2010
Rough justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisonersJul 22nd 2010
Some parts of America have long taken a tough, frontier attitude to justice. That tendency sharpened around four decades ago as rising crime became an emotive political issue and voters took to backing politicians who promised to stamp on it. This created a ratchet effect: lawmakers who wish to sound tough must propose laws tougher than the ones that the last chap who wanted to sound tough proposed. When the crime rate falls, tough sentences are hailed as the cause, even when demography or other factors may matter more; when the rate rises tough sentences are demanded to solve the problem. As a result, America’s incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1970.
Similar things have happened elsewhere. The incarceration rate in Britain has more than doubled, and that in Japan increased by half, over the period. But the trend has been sharper in America than in most of the rich world, and the disparity has grown. It is explained neither by a difference in criminality (the English are slightly more criminal than Americans, though less murderous), nor by the success of the policy: America’s violent-crime rate is higher than it was 40 years ago.
Conservatives and liberals will always feud about the right level of punishment. Most Americans think that dangerous criminals, which statistically usually means young men, should go to prison for long periods of time, especially for violent offences. Even by that standard, the extreme toughness of American laws, especially the ever broader classes of “criminals” affected by them, seems increasingly counterproductive.
Many states have mandatory minimum sentences, which remove judges’ discretion to show mercy, even when the circumstances of a case cry out for it. “Three strikes” laws, which were at first used to put away persistently violent criminals for life, have in several states been applied to lesser offenders. The war on drugs has led to harsh sentences not just for dealing illegal drugs, but also for selling prescription drugs illegally. Peddling a handful can lead to a 15-year sentence.
Muddle plays a large role. America imprisons people for technical violations of immigration laws, environmental standards and arcane business rules. So many federal rules carry criminal penalties that experts struggle to count them. Many are incomprehensible. Few are ever repealed, though the Supreme Court recently pared back a law against depriving the public of “the intangible right of honest services”, which prosecutors loved because they could use it against almost anyone. Still, they have plenty of other weapons. By counting each e-mail sent by a white-collar wrongdoer as a separate case of wire fraud, prosecutors can threaten him with a gargantuan sentence unless he confesses, or informs on his boss. The potential for injustice is obvious.
As a result American prisons are now packed not only with thugs and rapists but also with petty thieves, small-time drug dealers and criminals who, though scary when they were young and strong, are now too grey and arthritic to pose a threat. Some 200,000 inmates are over 50—roughly as many as there were prisoners of all ages in 1970. Prison is an excellent way to keep dangerous criminals off the streets, but the more people you lock up, the less dangerous each extra prisoner is likely to be. And since prison is expensive—$50,000 per inmate per year in California—the cost of imprisoning criminals often far exceeds the benefits, in terms of crimes averted.
Less punishment, less crime
It does not have to be this way. In the Netherlands, where the use of non-custodial sentences has grown, the prison population and the crime rate have both been falling (see article). Britain’s new government is proposing to replace jail for lesser offenders with community work. Some parts of America are bucking the national trend. New York cut its incarceration rate by 15% between 1997 and 2007, while reducing violent crime by 40%. This is welcome, but deeper reforms are required.
America needs fewer and clearer laws, so that citizens do not need a law degree to stay out of jail. Acts that can be regulated should not be criminalised. Prosecutors’ powers should be clipped: most white-collar suspects are not Al Capone, and should not be treated as if they were. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws should be repealed, or replaced with guidelines. The most dangerous criminals must be locked up, but states could try harder to reintegrate the softer cases into society, by encouraging them to study or work and by ending the pointlessly vindictive gesture of not letting them vote.
It seems odd that a country that rejoices in limiting the power of the state should give so many draconian powers to its government, yet for the past 40 years American lawmakers have generally regarded selling to voters the idea of locking up fewer people as political suicide. An era of budgetary constraint, however, is as good a time as any to try. Sooner or later American voters will realise that their incarceration policies are unjust and inefficient; politicians who point that out to them now may, in the end, get some credit.
http://www.economist.com/node/16640389?story_id=16640389
http://thugreport.com/
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/
The blasts, heard blocks away, interrupted a warm summer evening that had drawn children out onto their neighborhood blocks Wednesday.
In the 11500 block of South Perry Avenue in West Pullman, neighbors said they watched in horror as a gunman pumped bullet after bullet into a 13-year-old boy who was already down on the street.
And this morning, a stricken mother made frantic calls to loved ones, asking them to come be with her as she tried to adjust to her new world.
"I'm not going to see my baby no more," Theresa Lumpkin cried. "How soon can you get here? Try to get into Chicago."
Lumpkin's son, Robert Freeman Jr., was shot and killed Wednesday in what family and neighbors say was likely a case of mistaken identity. No one was in custody as of late Thursday afternoon.
Police sources said the boy may have been mistakenly targeted.
Although initial reports indicated that Robert, who was most recently enrolled at Oglesby Elementary School, was riding his bike Wednesday, Lumpkin said her son was standing with friends near a car when he was shot by an assailant who ran out from a gangway.
Lumpkin was already surrounded by family and friends Thursday as she remembered her son. He loved basketball and had cut his forehead just weeks ago when the backyard rim came down on him during a dunk. He liked to tinker with machines.
He spent part of the summer cutting lawns with a mower his father gave him, spending earned cash on treats like Flamin' Hot Cheetos. He was new on the block, but he had made friends and rode his bicycle constantly.
But Lumpkin kept returning to the last image she had of her son -- dying in the middle of the street.
"My baby was just lying there,'' she said, crying. "He tried to get up. He tried to fight for his mama. He tried to fight for his life.''
Neighbors, who did not want their names published, heard the shots and came to the front of their house and saw the gunman standing over Robert, shooting repeatedly.
"I was running out [of] the door to say, 'Stop shooting that baby,'" one neighbor said. The resident said he was incensed to see the young teen targeted.
"That boy's young,'' he said. "That's a baby.''
Lumpkin said doctors told her that Robert's body had 22 bullet holes. While it was not clear exactly how many times Robert was shot, the approximate number of bullet holes he suffered was confirmed by police sources.
Neighbors said Robert had a similar haircut, complexion and height as another boy in the neighborhood who they think was the target.
Police are also investigating a theory that the shooter targeted the wrong teen and that the motive for the shooting was a dispute over drugs or money, several sources said.
Robert was the fourth teen shot in the area in a week. In neighboring Roseland, a 15-year-old was shot Tuesday, a 17-year-old was shot Monday and a 14-year-old was shot Sunday. None of the injuries was life-threatening.
This latest round of gunfire sent one mother from two blocks away racing to Perry Avenue to find her own teen son.
After the resident, who did not want to be named, found her son, she took him straight home, where she tried to reassure him.
"I told him it was going to be OK," the mother said. "He said, 'You told me that before.'"
William Lee and David Elsner contributed to this report.
-- Annie Sweeney and Jeremy Gorner
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/07/teen-shot-multiple-times-on-far-south-side.html
90% of Black Children on Food Stamps
by Greg Plotkin November 05, 2009 06:00 AM (PT) Topics: Children In Poverty, Culture Of Poverty, Food Stamps, Government Anti-Poverty Programs, Health & Poverty, Hunger, Race And Ethnicity
In one of the most dramatic examples I've seen of the true reach of hunger in the United States, a new report released this week by Washington University in St. Louis researchers found that 90 percent of black children will be clients of the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/Food Stamps) at least once by the time they turn 20.
Although the percentage is less for white children (the only other ethnic group studied), the startling statistic here is that, at some point before their 20th birthday, 50 percent of all children in the United States will have received SNAP benefits.
More than being about access to food, the report's lead researcher says his findings represent a more important trend in the upbringing of the country's children. "Rather than being a time of security and safety, the childhood years for many American children are a time of economic turmoil, risk, and hardship," says Mark Rank, Ph.D.
Among the other interesting/disturbing statistics presented in the report:
-Nearly one-quarter of all American children will be in households that use food stamps for five or more years during childhood.
-91 percent of children with single parents will be in a household receiving food stamps, compared to 37 percent of children in married households.
-Looking at race, marital status and education simultaneously, children who are black and whose head of household is not married with less than 12 years of education have a cumulative percentage of residing in a food stamp household of 97 percent by age 10.
What this report really highlights are the drastic race, gender and socio-economic disparities in this country. And unfortunately, these disparities seem to be affecting our youth at a staggering level.
If children really are the future (as I believe they are), we as a society need to do a much better job of letting kids develop into the leaders of tomorrow, instead of being held back by the problems of today.
(Photo credit: Marco Gomes on Flickr)
Greg Plotkin currently works for Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, NY. He is dedicated to eliminating inequalities in who has access to healthy food and alleviating hunger.
http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/90_of_black_children_on_food_stamps
Crime and punishment in America
Rough justice
America locks up too many people, some for acts that should not even be criminal
Jul 22nd 2010
IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing. The original intent was to prevent Americans from, say, poaching elephants in Kenya. But it has been interpreted to mean that they must abide by every footling wildlife regulation on Earth. The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail.
America is different from the rest of the world in lots of ways, many of them good. One of the bad ones is its willingness to lock up its citizens (see our briefing). One American adult in 100 festers behind bars (with the rate rising to one in nine for young black men). Its imprisoned population, at 2.3m, exceeds that of 15 of its states. No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free. The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America’s level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan.
Tougher than thou
Related items
Trading prisoners in the Low Countries: It's a dealJul 22nd 2010
Rough justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisonersJul 22nd 2010
Some parts of America have long taken a tough, frontier attitude to justice. That tendency sharpened around four decades ago as rising crime became an emotive political issue and voters took to backing politicians who promised to stamp on it. This created a ratchet effect: lawmakers who wish to sound tough must propose laws tougher than the ones that the last chap who wanted to sound tough proposed. When the crime rate falls, tough sentences are hailed as the cause, even when demography or other factors may matter more; when the rate rises tough sentences are demanded to solve the problem. As a result, America’s incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1970.
Similar things have happened elsewhere. The incarceration rate in Britain has more than doubled, and that in Japan increased by half, over the period. But the trend has been sharper in America than in most of the rich world, and the disparity has grown. It is explained neither by a difference in criminality (the English are slightly more criminal than Americans, though less murderous), nor by the success of the policy: America’s violent-crime rate is higher than it was 40 years ago.
Conservatives and liberals will always feud about the right level of punishment. Most Americans think that dangerous criminals, which statistically usually means young men, should go to prison for long periods of time, especially for violent offences. Even by that standard, the extreme toughness of American laws, especially the ever broader classes of “criminals” affected by them, seems increasingly counterproductive.
Many states have mandatory minimum sentences, which remove judges’ discretion to show mercy, even when the circumstances of a case cry out for it. “Three strikes” laws, which were at first used to put away persistently violent criminals for life, have in several states been applied to lesser offenders. The war on drugs has led to harsh sentences not just for dealing illegal drugs, but also for selling prescription drugs illegally. Peddling a handful can lead to a 15-year sentence.
Muddle plays a large role. America imprisons people for technical violations of immigration laws, environmental standards and arcane business rules. So many federal rules carry criminal penalties that experts struggle to count them. Many are incomprehensible. Few are ever repealed, though the Supreme Court recently pared back a law against depriving the public of “the intangible right of honest services”, which prosecutors loved because they could use it against almost anyone. Still, they have plenty of other weapons. By counting each e-mail sent by a white-collar wrongdoer as a separate case of wire fraud, prosecutors can threaten him with a gargantuan sentence unless he confesses, or informs on his boss. The potential for injustice is obvious.
As a result American prisons are now packed not only with thugs and rapists but also with petty thieves, small-time drug dealers and criminals who, though scary when they were young and strong, are now too grey and arthritic to pose a threat. Some 200,000 inmates are over 50—roughly as many as there were prisoners of all ages in 1970. Prison is an excellent way to keep dangerous criminals off the streets, but the more people you lock up, the less dangerous each extra prisoner is likely to be. And since prison is expensive—$50,000 per inmate per year in California—the cost of imprisoning criminals often far exceeds the benefits, in terms of crimes averted.
Less punishment, less crime
It does not have to be this way. In the Netherlands, where the use of non-custodial sentences has grown, the prison population and the crime rate have both been falling (see article). Britain’s new government is proposing to replace jail for lesser offenders with community work. Some parts of America are bucking the national trend. New York cut its incarceration rate by 15% between 1997 and 2007, while reducing violent crime by 40%. This is welcome, but deeper reforms are required.
America needs fewer and clearer laws, so that citizens do not need a law degree to stay out of jail. Acts that can be regulated should not be criminalised. Prosecutors’ powers should be clipped: most white-collar suspects are not Al Capone, and should not be treated as if they were. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws should be repealed, or replaced with guidelines. The most dangerous criminals must be locked up, but states could try harder to reintegrate the softer cases into society, by encouraging them to study or work and by ending the pointlessly vindictive gesture of not letting them vote.
It seems odd that a country that rejoices in limiting the power of the state should give so many draconian powers to its government, yet for the past 40 years American lawmakers have generally regarded selling to voters the idea of locking up fewer people as political suicide. An era of budgetary constraint, however, is as good a time as any to try. Sooner or later American voters will realise that their incarceration policies are unjust and inefficient; politicians who point that out to them now may, in the end, get some credit.
http://www.economist.com/node/16640389?story_id=16640389
http://thugreport.com/
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/
The blasts, heard blocks away, interrupted a warm summer evening that had drawn children out onto their neighborhood blocks Wednesday.
In the 11500 block of South Perry Avenue in West Pullman, neighbors said they watched in horror as a gunman pumped bullet after bullet into a 13-year-old boy who was already down on the street.
And this morning, a stricken mother made frantic calls to loved ones, asking them to come be with her as she tried to adjust to her new world.
"I'm not going to see my baby no more," Theresa Lumpkin cried. "How soon can you get here? Try to get into Chicago."
Lumpkin's son, Robert Freeman Jr., was shot and killed Wednesday in what family and neighbors say was likely a case of mistaken identity. No one was in custody as of late Thursday afternoon.
Police sources said the boy may have been mistakenly targeted.
Although initial reports indicated that Robert, who was most recently enrolled at Oglesby Elementary School, was riding his bike Wednesday, Lumpkin said her son was standing with friends near a car when he was shot by an assailant who ran out from a gangway.
Lumpkin was already surrounded by family and friends Thursday as she remembered her son. He loved basketball and had cut his forehead just weeks ago when the backyard rim came down on him during a dunk. He liked to tinker with machines.
He spent part of the summer cutting lawns with a mower his father gave him, spending earned cash on treats like Flamin' Hot Cheetos. He was new on the block, but he had made friends and rode his bicycle constantly.
But Lumpkin kept returning to the last image she had of her son -- dying in the middle of the street.
"My baby was just lying there,'' she said, crying. "He tried to get up. He tried to fight for his mama. He tried to fight for his life.''
Neighbors, who did not want their names published, heard the shots and came to the front of their house and saw the gunman standing over Robert, shooting repeatedly.
"I was running out [of] the door to say, 'Stop shooting that baby,'" one neighbor said. The resident said he was incensed to see the young teen targeted.
"That boy's young,'' he said. "That's a baby.''
Lumpkin said doctors told her that Robert's body had 22 bullet holes. While it was not clear exactly how many times Robert was shot, the approximate number of bullet holes he suffered was confirmed by police sources.
Neighbors said Robert had a similar haircut, complexion and height as another boy in the neighborhood who they think was the target.
Police are also investigating a theory that the shooter targeted the wrong teen and that the motive for the shooting was a dispute over drugs or money, several sources said.
Robert was the fourth teen shot in the area in a week. In neighboring Roseland, a 15-year-old was shot Tuesday, a 17-year-old was shot Monday and a 14-year-old was shot Sunday. None of the injuries was life-threatening.
This latest round of gunfire sent one mother from two blocks away racing to Perry Avenue to find her own teen son.
After the resident, who did not want to be named, found her son, she took him straight home, where she tried to reassure him.
"I told him it was going to be OK," the mother said. "He said, 'You told me that before.'"
William Lee and David Elsner contributed to this report.
-- Annie Sweeney and Jeremy Gorner
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/07/teen-shot-multiple-times-on-far-south-side.html
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