Sean Bell murderers acquitted

I'm simply without words. Read the story on CNN here...

Is Homeland Security Invading Your Campus?

Seven Steps to a Homeland Security CampusBy Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Nation and TomDispatch.comJanuary 17, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/73504/

Consider the ultimate gift in a homeland security country: the iTaser, a weapon with its own MP3 player and earphones that can deliver a 50,000 volt electrical charge while you catch your favorite tunes. This new Taser, on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be available, reports Richard Wray of the British Guardian, in "red, pink and even leopard print designs." Anyone carrying the iTaser will be able to make what may be the first homeland-security fashion statement in any one of the 43 states where Tasers are legal. The company that makes the weapon, Taser International, has already sold 160,000 less-stylish versions to private individuals. According to founder and company CEO Rick Smith, "Personal protection can be both fashionable and functionable."In November 2006, the Taser infamously broke into the news on campus when a student at the University of Florida, questioning Senator John Kerry harshly, was dragged off, Tased, and subdued by campus police. His plea, "Don't Tase me, Bro!," is now the stuff of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and cell phone ring tones.

Thanks largely to him and the publicity the incident got, the New Oxford Dictionary made "Tase" one of its 2007 words of the year, the Yale Book of Quotations put it at the top of its yearly list of most memorable quotes, and the rest of us got a hint that something new might be happening in America's "ivory towers."As Michael Gould-Wartofsky indicates below, that incident was just the tip of an enormous homeland-security presence on campus. Gould-Wartofsky's remarkable report -- a piece that the Nation Magazine and Tomdispatch.com are sharing -- offers real news about just how deeply the new homeland security state is settling into every aspect of our world. -- Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch---------------------------

-----------------------------Repress UHow to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven StepsBy Michael Gould-WartofskyFree speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors... Welcome to the new homeland security campusFrom Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism" -- as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name -- have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.Building a homeland-security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:1. Target dissidents: As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has increasingly become a target gallery -- with student protesters in the crosshairs. The government's number one target?

Peace and justice organizations.From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" -- from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.

FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work themselves. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Last year, protests were typically forced into "free assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka "unauthorized materials."2. Lock and load: Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of "the war on crime" only escalated with the President's Global War on Terror. Each school shooting -- most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech -- just adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities now arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams. For instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are now in the arsenal of the University of Texas campus police. Last April, City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Now, states like Nevada are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."Most of the force used on campus these days, though, comes in "less lethal" form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of torture" by the UN. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library.

Last September, a University of Florida student was Tased after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea of "Don't Tase me, bro" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus: Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally -- one that now reaches deep into the heart of the American campus. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty, and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have now found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling, and in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001.

Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.Elsewhere, it can be tricky just to find out where the cameras are and what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas, for example, battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, a camera's purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005, the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.4. Mine student records: Student records have, in recent years, been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment, or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named "Project Strike Back," the Department of Education teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year.

The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit record" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The Department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program now tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has partnered with private marketing and data mining firms, which, in turn, sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.5. Track foreign-born students, keep the undocumented out: Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in its database.The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical, and employment records -- all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of "status" at school -- or if the database thinks they have -- the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.

ICE has also done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in 20 undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college. Many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition, but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom, and the laboratory: Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, the Department of Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses over 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the U.S.

Northern Command (Northcom) and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In Fiscal Year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland security-related research. Grants correspond with 16 research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation, and a smattering of scientific advice.But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The Center is mandated to assist a National Commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system... to advance political, religious or social change."7. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining -- it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a six-fold increase over 2000.)Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent years, established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research.

The Department of Homeland Security's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.While vast sums of money are flowing in from these corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out into "strategic supplier contracts" with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers at universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives.

Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere, inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned out.Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes, such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon's TALON de-clawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the University dropped its threats of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.Yet, if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory, but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America. Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York City and a recent graduate of the new homeland security campus. He has written for the Nation Online, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson, where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has also appeared in Poets Against the War (Nation Books). He was a recipient of the New York Times James B. Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard's James Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective memory. This piece is also appearing in the latest issue of the Nation Magazine.

What are American Values?

Arizona

I'm pretty disgusted. If you read the short clip above, Arizona is trying to eliminate public funding to race based student organizations at higher ed institutions.

Lets visualize this for a second.

Imagine the University of Maryland's Black Student Union without any funding from SGA. The Pan Hellenic Council, NAACP, Black Graduate Student Association. Latino Student Union, Asian American Student Union. Literally ALL would cease to exist because they would be DENIED funding.

No program through the BSU to mentor freshmen, the Honors program could no longer fund the Black Honors Caucus or Latino Honors Caucus. We would be telling students of color that college was no longer a place where you could embrace your culture and learn about others.

If this doesn't make your stomach turn, the rationale will.

It is that these groups do not create an "inclusive America; therefore they: “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization.”

So here in lies the story of one of the most racist states this union has, rationalizing is hatred of ethnic minorities by denying us the opportunity to form communities of strength and unity on predominantly white campuses.

What happened to celebrating our diversity? What happened to remembering that American values rest in capitalism which seldom aids the rest of the world?

Righteous Minds wants to know your thoughts on this extremely important issue. What can happen in one state opens the floodgates for other states to try to pass similar laws.

Hot Topic: Controversial ABC Democratic Debate

As a result of the biased ABC Democratic Debate earlier this week, Moveon.org has created a video and petition to stop the media from taking control of the course of the election by only focusing on controversy instead of the issues. If you missed the debate, I suggest you watch it. In the meantime, below is a video the folks at Moveon.org created that pretty much sums it up:



Here's the link to the petition: Shame on ABC: Enough Distractions!" Sign it and get involved!

Hot Topic: Lou Dobbs & "Cotton Picking Minds"

Lou Dobbs recently described Black members of Congress as "cotton picking minds". Check out the clip below and speak your mind:

An Open Letter to Bob Johnson: America's Favorite Dope Boy

In the words of the great Detective Alonzo Harris a la Training Day: my nigga!

I don’t know how you accomplished such a noteworthy feat or how your accomplishments have gone with such little notoriety, but you, sir, are an American Icon. You managed to sell the potential future of an entire race to Viacom, the drug culture, and creative mediocrity for a few billion dollars and all in the chorus of the soft applause and congratulatory whispers of Black America’s elite. It’s comparable only to Denzel Washington shooting Idris Elba in broad daylight on 125th street. Truly gangsta! My nigga!

First, you changed the conversation by removing any content that had the remote chance of expanding the knowledge base of your core viewers—Black youth. BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley? Canceled 2001. Teen Summit? Canceled summer 2003. BET Nightly News? Canceled 2005. What programming do you put in its place?

Hits from the Street—two hours of comedic cooning with a guy wearing spandex, a cape, and topped off with underwear on the exterior of his outfit.

106 & Park the original and 106 and Park part deux—two hours of the same videos we’ve all seen 200 times. The prior hosted by the Predator and a women he would never have. The latter hosted by a southern belle being chased by a random simp who, like his predecessor, will never have his lady of choice. Young teens may not be properly prepared for college or have any desire to change their environment, but they can surely “superman that ho.”

College Hill—a show not about the rigors and importance of higher academia, but rather one more focused on the sexual trysts and sophomoric behaviors of young, Black college students without once noting that their experiences are no different that those of their white counterparts.

Uncut—beautiful women parading like immature girls while shaking their asses for often broke rappers who will likely never make a video that will ever play anywhere but Uncut. Black Jesus? Really? Please click here for Uncut’s best of…

And the list goes on: Access Granted; Baldwin Hills; Beef; Cita’s World; How I’m Livin’; Lil’ Kim’s Countdown to Lockdown; and Spring Bling not to mention syndication of The Parkers, The Wayans Bros., and In Living Color. Oh, my! Please, by no means, can we forget about the genius of the Bet Awards! You ripped off every crappy MTV show you could and made a shitty, Black version of it. How did you manage to completely remove any quality programming and replace it all with absolute garbage with such little resistance? You’re my idol! My nigga!

And what about your work on Debra Lee? That was beautiful! A multi-millionaire, Harvard graduate who has fallen completely in line with your tactics and continued to drive your company into the depths of social destruction. She, along with all of your other cohorts (far too many to name) have depicted Black life to be little more than music, sex, bling, drugs, and crime. How’d you pull that one off? It’s as if you did that Agent Smith thing from the Matrix—stuck your forefingers directly into their sternums and snatched their souls right from bodies. That’s some Mortal Kombat, Shang Tsung shit! My nigga!

More over, you have helped to make each and every Black citizen—be they opposed to the mediocrity of the television station that bears the name of an entire people or not—a tacit participant of your non-sense. Guilt by association—genius! Our inability—rather, our refusal—to challenge BET’s programmatic strategy is far from puzzling. Sure, most decent Blacks are bewildered by your choices and desperate for positive images, but that’s juxtaposed against the fact that a Black person has finally developed wealth. Not rim money, not diamond grill money, not blow it at the club money, not Gary Coleman “damn homey, what the f&@k happened to you” money, but legitimate wealth. You found that part of us that wants you to succeed even at our own peril. My nigga!

You are the ultimate dope boy! You exemplify the corner boy. You destroy our neighborhoods with your full out assault on our people and we allow you to do it. Partially out of fear, partially because we benefit from your practice, partially because we know we have not provided you with the base you need to do better, partially because we take joy in your success. You’re the reason we revered Marlo’s psychotic leadership and mourned Stringer Bell’s death. You’re the reason we celebrated the Nicky Barnes NYT Magazine cover. You’re our guilty pleasure that hides in the shadows of our conscience.

You deal death sir, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. You sustain the urban drug culture that daily destroys lives, engulfs entire communities, and eradicates the strength of our culture. You are the megaphone for drug lords and thus enable them to continue their trade with little community resistance by allowing the publicists of the drug kingpins (rap artists) an unregulated platform by which they may spew their self-hated consequently influencing weak-minded adults and impressionable youth. I’d do you the honor of calling you a drug kingpin, but, in reality, you are but an intermediary. Your wealth does not compare to that of the Colombian coca planters you represent or those prison industrial complex benefactors whose interests you protect. Make no mistake Robert L. Johnson you are a murder. You benefit from the death of your people in the same way as those who stand on the corner. The blood of our children are on your hands, too. Moreover, to share the wealth, you’ve helped to pour that blood on our hands as well. You’ve helped to make us all murders and thieves. We’ve stolen our own futures.

But you gotta get that gwap right! Dolla, dolla bill nigga!

My nigga!

Help Katrina Victims!

So I'm heading to New Orleans in a a couple months to fight educational inequity as a Teach For America Corp member. Since my acceptance and placement, I've been trying to educate myself on the post-Katrina situation there. I'm subscribed to ColorofChange.org's listserv and receive updates. Recently, I went to their site and noticed their campaign advocating for the victims of Katrina. Yes, two years after the tragedy, America still has not done all it can to help those displaced by the storm. Check out this video:



Go to ColorofChange.org and join the fight in telling your Senator to vote for S. 1668 to help Katrina survivors come back home. S. 1668 is the Housing Recovery Act of 2007 that would assist survivors by opening and repairing thousands public housing units. Join the fight against gentrification that is replacing those who once lived in New Orleans with the wealthy elite.

Hot Topic: Something in the water

So I guess when we're joking with our friends about the children today and we blame it on the water, we're actually telling the truth. If you haven't heard the Associated Press is reporting that there are drugs in our drinking water.

Here's an excerpt from their article, AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water:

"A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health."

Click here to read the rest. Am I the only one wondering when American's will begin to hold our government accountable? Speak your minds.

Hot Topic: America- An Apathetic Nation

My friends and I often ponder just when Americans will begin to stand up and fight for our rights and civil liberties. Maybe this video by puppetgov.com will show you what has happened over the past seven years that illustrates what happens when we don't. Check it out and then speak your mind.




Maybe these lies will make you mad. Check out this video entitled, "How to Create an Angry American," also by the people at puppetgov.com

What can we do to combat the senseless acts of violence taking place in our communities?

Eve Carson, 1985–2008
Carolina loses a special person

I don't know how wide-spread this news is, but its a big deal here in North Carolina. Last week the student body president of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was murdered. When I first heard the story was thinking, wow I wonder who would want to hurt someone like that. This young woman was pre-med and a humanitarian. Then I found out that the police are calling it a "random act of violence".

That really hit a chord with me. It scared me and made me realize how important it is to cherish the people around you. It further made me question what type of society we are living in when a person can randomly murder another person and leave the body lying in an intersection. I won't subject you all to all of the details of the crime, but if you are interested, I am including a link to a CNN news story.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/10/unc.killing/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

So now, I am posing this question to you all: what steps do you think should be taken to help prevent such random and/or senseless acts of violence from continuing to happen in our communities? Do we need tighter gun control? Harsher sentencing for criminal offenders? Better education? Any combination of these things--or something totally different? Or is there nothing that can be done?

Post your thoughts by clicking the link below.

Also, please pray for the UNC community as well as all of the people who knew and loved this young woman, Eve Carson.

Hot Topic: Zeitgeist Movie

A couple months back my friend sent me the link to the Zeitgeist Movie. It has 3 parts. The following is the 3rd part of the movie and it reveals how the american dollar is worth less and is just a piece of paper, why the american was started, the central bank, the debt and credit system, the chips that will control your freedom, the north american union, why 9/11 was staged, how this technique has been used before many times, the vietnam, world war 1, world war 2, the vietnam war , hitler, nazi, facism, where the world is heading and much more. It's long, but it is definitely an eye opener. I highly suggest you watch this movie out because it will blow your mind:

Zeitgeist - (Men Behind the Curtain) - Part 3

Hot Topic: Supreme Court dismisses spying...WITHOUT giving an explanation

This BBC news article discusses how the U.S. government has been tapping our phone calls and monitoring our emails ILLEGALLY since 9-11 when communicating internationally. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed the ACLU's arguments in favor of the government.

Read the article here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7253404.stm

Voice your opinion and leave a comment.