Justice for Pfc. Johnson

Via email from Color of Change:

LaVena Johnson was a 19 year old private in the Army, serving in Iraq, when she was raped, murdered, and her body was burned–by someone from her own military base. Despite overwhelming physical evidence, the Army called her death a suicide and has closed the case.

For three years, LaVena’s parents have been fighting for answers. At almost every turn, they’ve been met with closed doors or lies. They’ve appealed to Congress, the one body that can hold the military accountable. But, as in other cases where female soldiers have been raped and murdered and the Army has called it suicide, Congress has failed to act.

From the beginning, LaVena’s death made no sense as a suicide. She was happy and had been talking with friends and family regularly–nothing indicated she could be suicidal. And when the Johnsons received her body, they noticed signs that she had been beaten.4 That was when they started asking questions.

After two years of being denied answers and hearing explanations that made no sense, the Johnsons received a CD-ROM from someone on the inside. It contained pictures of the crime scene where LaVena died and an autopsy showing that she had suffered bruises, abrasions, a dislocated shoulder, broken teeth, and some type of sexual assault. Her body was partially burned; she had been doused in a flammable liquid, and someone had set her body on fire. A corrosive chemical had been poured in her genital area, perhaps to cover up evidence of rape.

Still the Army sticks by their story. They refuse to explain the overwhelming physical evidence that LaVena was raped and murdered and continue to claim that she killed herself.

If you’re like me, you’ve never, ever heard of this case in the MSM. Apparently it’s made some waves via Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! as well as sites like Common Dreams and Daily Kos, but not the big outlets. Apparently the murder of an African-American woman (teenager, really) and subsequent cover-up by the Army isn’t “sexy” enough for the mainstream media. Well, that’s unconscionable and wrong.

What’s even more unconscionable is that Pfc. Johnson’s rape & murder is only one of the many tales of sexual brutality experienced by women in the US military. It’s far past time for the armed forces to address this issue in a forthright way.

Please follow the link below and demand justice for Pfc. Johnson:
http://www.colorofchange.org/lavena/?id=1826-116878

Fly Me to the Moon

NASA turns 50 today.

What a difference a half-century makes. Eleven years after NASA was founded to prevent Soviet dominance of outer space, man was walking on the Moon. One might’ve thought we would continue on from there to Mars, the asteroids, and, as posited in various sci fi series from the 1960’s such as Lost in Space and Star Trek, be on our way to the stars, perhaps even by the 1990’s. Instead, we haven’t even been back to the Moon in over thirty years. All my generation has had to “inspire” us is the space shuttle.

The space shuttle is wack.

And that makes it triply cool that now NASA is planning to go back to the Moon, colonize it, and eventually send people to Mars by 2030.

The Constellation program could well be considered the most ambitious undertaking in human history, but according to a recent report on CBS’s 60 Minutes, it could be under threat by budget cutters who don’t see the point in sending people to Mars when our budget scenario is so precarious:

Constellation is a tempting target in a difficult economy. The money squeeze is the main reason why the U.S. won’t set foot on the moon until 2020. A Mars landing won’t take place until about 2030. To defray costs for the trip to Mars, NASA may need an international partner. If it’s up to Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., who tried to halt the Mars program, Americans won’t be part of any human missions to the planet. So what does he have against Mars?

“I don’t have anything against a lot of things I don’t wanna spend hundreds of billions of dollars on,” says Rep. Frank. “Sending human beings there for the sole purpose of proving that we can do it and bringing them back requires an enormous amount of money at a time when we have a serious deficit, when we are not adequately funding a lot of very important needs right here at home.”

He has something of a point. The endeavor probably isn’t, shouldn’t and won’t be something that is undertaken solely by the United States. Instead, for financing and advancement, it probably makes sense for Constellation to look to the model of the International Space Station, which started off as a purely American enterprise, but came to garner the participation of dozens of nations. Exploring space should be something that humankind undertakes together. As we attempt to write the next chapter in human history, we should have a sense of being one people looking to extend our reach beyond this fragile world.

60 Minutes video here.

More evidence the bachelor’s is the new HS diploma

I suspect that the overall consensus among post-tech boom college grads is that a bachelor’s degree is not enough. It certainly is the case in my circle of friends and classmates, which has recently become overpopulated with lawyers, although MBA’s, doctors, Ph.D.’s, and those of us pursuing other types of master’s degrees with an eye to increasing our marketability are also significantly in evidence.

So it was with little surprise that I read the Wall Street Journal’s confirmation of this conventional wisdom: since 2001, the average earnings of college graduates have stagnated in inflation-adjusted terms. More to the point:

The issue isn’t a lack of economic growth, which was solid for most of the 2000s. Rather, it’s that the fruits of growth are flowing largely to “a relatively small group of people who have a particular set of skills and assets that lots of other people don’t,” says Mr. Bernstein. And that “doesn’t necessarily have that much to do with your education.” In short, a college degree is often necessary, but not sufficient, to get a paycheck that beats inflation.

Translation: if you weren’t doing some type of financial engineering (an actual major a woman once told me she had!), you were SOL when it came to having major salary growth during this period. However, according to the article, the trick is, unless you went to a handful of elite schools, you were probably shut out of that boom. Which is not to say you were doing poorly — you still made about 75% more than a person who only has a HS diploma. That’s a massive gap that says, to me at least, that in order to achieve the middle-class existence that many of us take for granted, it’s necessary to get a four year-degree. And that means that we have to continue making college education more affordable for those who want to go, and do a better job of preparing students to succeed in that realm.

TV is even worse for your kids than you think!

A tip of the hat to one of my managers for flagging this story.

It’s always seemed common sense to me that small children shouldn’t watch television. You should be playing with them; letting them marvel at really cool mobiles; talking to them in depth about existentialism, American football, and Thundercats; reading to them, and exposing them to lots of Beethoven, Miles, Stevie Wonder and OutKast. You know — developing their minds so that your friends and frienemies can tell you, “Oh, s/he’s so SMART!” when your kid’s 7 years old and ready to learn algebra.

But you know, common sense ain’t common, and in our hectic, two-income households, it’s easy to let the television baby-sit. What’s worse is that the mass media tells us it’s OK and has created a huge market for kids’ videos that are intended to do precisely that. Sadly, it appears that plopping our babies and toddlers in front of the boob tube may be partly responsible for the MASSIVE increase in autism over the past two decades. From Slate:

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

And my statements above shouldn’t be taken as bashing parents dealing with this torturous and tragic issue — not being a parent yet myself, I only have brief peeks into the sheer amount of energy it takes to raise a child — such as the comically horrific story I was told the other day about two flu-crippled parents trying to keep track of a 2-year old.

It’s just a reminder that technology can have serious downsides. And to turn off the tv.

Chaos, Community and Opportunity

Not every project was like Cabrini-Green. Dixie Homes was a complex of two- and three-story brick buildings on grassy plots. It was, by all accounts, claustrophobic, sometimes badly maintained, and occasionally violent. But to its residents, it was, above all, a community. Every former resident I spoke to mentioned one thing: the annual Easter-egg hunt. Demonizing the high-rises has blinded some city officials to what was good and necessary about the projects, and what they ultimately have to find a way to replace: the sense of belonging, the informal economy, the easy access to social services. And for better or worse, the fact that the police had the address.

For a long time, the buzzword (phrase?) in the affordable housing community has been “moving to opportunity” — the notion that affordable housing has to be located where the jobs are. For even longer, perhaps since the spectacular results of the Gautreaux study dropped in 1991, the idea has been to “de-concentrate” poverty. I worked for a year for a non-profit affordable housing developer that was at pains to build its low-income communities in the suburbs so that the children had access to better schools and the parents had access to better jobs. Never mind that these projects were way off the bus line, and if you didn’t have a car, you were S.O.L. — the theory didn’t really interact well with the praxis.

So it was with some despair that I perused the article in The Atlantic that the above excerpt comes from — basically saying that the demolition of housing projects in mid-sized cities across the country had caused spikes in crime as the dealers and criminals followed the law-abiding people out of the ‘hood into, well, not the ‘burbs, but, as it turns out, into more diffuse, prettier ghettoes. I hear it anecdotally all the time — from a fellow co-worker at the developer describing the cesspool of crime and dysfunction at his community, or from friends back home in Northwest Indiana who complain that the element that used to live in Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor has diffused into our formerly bourghetto communities and made them more dangerous.

The researchers in the piece argue that the dispersal of low-income people under the HOPE VI program happened too rapidly, and that the allure of revitalized downtowns devoid of projects was too much for city officials — they moved too fast and failed to take into account what people needed in order to thrive in their new settings in ways they hadn’t in their old. Yea….this is still going on. And although it’s largely a matter of social services and effective policing, it’s also a matter of finding innovative — and effective — ways of breaking the cycle of poverty, such as Ruby Payne’s Bridges Out of Poverty framework (which I will probably discuss in a future post). The point, though, is to not take reports such as this and use them to scapegoat the poor or argue for the return of projects, but to improve upon the failures of the past, lest they bring down another generation.

A Vieques Post-Script

Those who follow the plight of people of color in the United States, the Americas, or the world, really, should be pretty familiar with the fight to stop the US Navy from practice bombing at Vieques, Puerto Rico. Eventually notables such as Edward James Olmos and Al Sharpton were arrested in protest, and Sharpton famously went on a hunger strike.

Humans weren’t the only victims of the bombing. It was also an environmental disaster for the island, which is why it is good to read that the decades of bombing didn’t have quite as devastating an impact as one might have expected:

Surveys show that the reefs around Vieques are actually in slightly better shape than corals protected by nearby marine parks. “It wasn’t quite what some people expected,” says Riegl, a researcher at Nova Southeastern University in Dania, Florida.

That doesn’t mean that the Vieques reefs have had it easy. As at other Caribbean islands, disease and hurricanes appear to have devastated reefs in the island’s shallower waters. But overall, such natural disturbances appear to have done more damage than past military activity, the study concludes. “Germs and storms, rather than bombs … seem to have taken the worst toll,” the authors write.

Full article here.

Of course now the bombing range is a wildlife refuge, which means that the long-term prospects for the wildlife should be pretty good.

White Flight Reverses Direction

Over the past decade to fifteen years, urban living has been widely promoted as the new ideal, displacing the detached house with the white picket fence as the ideal for many young professionals, and most major cities, from New York City to Des Moines, have begun to promote the advantages of living in the places where everything is hot and happening, and this has process has been accelerated by the housing boom that made it easier to purchase a home in the city. In addition, the promotion of mixed-income developments, wherein dense low-income housing projects were replaced with communities with far fewer units affordable to low-income households, has played a major role as well.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story in Saturday about the increasing proportion of whites in many major American cities, after several decades in which “white flight” to the suburbs, then exurbs, had turned center cities into bastions of both endemic poverty and minority (usually Black) political power. Surprisingly, the word “gentrification” appears only once in the article, despite the fact that the process known by that name is at the heart of why these cities are becoming more white.

With the long-term trend towards high gas prices and the sheer amount of housing stock that is being created in major cities, the whitening trend is one that’s unlikely to abate anytime soon. And as this trend accelerates, African-Americans are likely to lose the major base of political power that they have held in the post-Civil Rights era, the big cities. This power may shift to wealthy black suburbs, as seen in Prince George’s County, Maryland. However, what seems more likely is a diffusion of that power.

It seems that finally, developers have recognized the advantages of putting housing where people work, and of creating mixed-use developments that are attractive to higher income people, who tend not to be people of color. And perhaps what we are witnessing here is that America is reverting to the patterns that generally occur across the globe, wherein poorer people live on the outskirts, while the wealthier classes reside in the cities.

Saving Our Young Brothers — A Study and A Project

First, the study.

As a student of public policy, it’s of particular interest to see a true experimental design done on an issue as near and dear to my heart as education. As my friend Dr. Marvel tells it, they’re not cheap to do.

So it was with real excitement that I read about the results of a long-term study on the effects of career academies in the Washington Post yesterday. The key takeaway was this:

And yet, because the career academy research by the New York-based MDRC (formerly known as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.) was so detailed and professional, we have just learned that the academies accomplished something perhaps even better than higher passing rates on reading exams. They produced young men who got better-paying jobs, were more likely to live independently with children and a spouse or partner and were more likely to be married and have custody of their children.

Well, for a long time, at least in my conversations with my peers, I have been an advocate of vocational education. I think it’s narrow-minded to say that everyone has to go to college in order to be successful, when there are so many other trades and professions that are unionized, pay well, and cannot easily be outsourced. Of course, the students in the article weren’t only steered towards trades, but towards a variety of careers, and one of the key components was having all of these positive role models of success around them, even if it didn’t necessarily translate into the statistics that we normally check for. After all, it seemed to translate into the statistics that matter.

Now, the project.

Advanced manufacturing is, to me, the next wave, the next big thing, and likely one of the main engines of our future prosperity. I once was reading about a woman who became a welder, and it turned out that she wasn’t in there with a blowtorch like, say, J-Lo in that one video (worth watching, always). Instead she was doing some sort of chemical process with high-grade ceramics.

This sort of thing requires lots of math and science training, as well as precision skill; and mainly, we’re not producing a population that can do that. Folks are heading into law and finance instead of productive activities. So it’s great to see a program like the Austin Polytechnical Academy happening. The approach they’re taking could lead to, not only a renaissance for the communities in which they are working, but the recreation of the strong industrial base that has been eroding for decades in this country.

Sez the founder:

“Right now [overseas] competition has competitive advantage among unskilled workers. […] Where we still have an advantage, and even where a lot of jobs are coming back, is in making complex products. Making complex products requires an educated workforce and skilled workforce as well as a much more dynamic management and more deeply committed and creative owners,” he says. “Making complex products is the point were you have the highest convergence of public and private interests.”

Full article here.

Progress in Zimbabwe?

The NY Times, among others, is reporting that Thabo Mbeki has brokered a “memorandum of understanding” between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai to come up with some sort of power-sharing agreement. It’s a remarkable turnabout after the mayhem that ensued after the March 29 vote gave the opposition a majority in the lower house and Tsvangirai a plurality in the race for President.

Based on the story in the second link above about Mugabe’s coterie, I just don’t see how a meaningful deal can be struck. One might hope that there is a way for them to come together and start rebuilding their nation’s infrastructure and economy, but it’s totally unclear to me how they can move forward on issues such as land reform, justice for the families of murdered dissidents, and bringing down the massive inflation that has crippled the economy.

However, it is a hopeful start, and maybe Mugabe will actually be coerced into looking out for the best interests of his country — in a constructive way.

I’m back

It’s been a long while since I regularly kept up my blog postings, but I figure it’s about time to kick it back into gear.  As usual this blog will be covering a wide range of issues and thoughts, and I welcome the feedback, as well as hopefully new readers.