Organize the South

Today about 75 Nashville, Tennessee cab drivers held a press conference on the front steps of city hall demanding the mayor hold public hearings investigating driver conditions. The drivers called a 12 hour general strike of all cabs. The mayor, who had declined to meet with them for the last 7 months, agreed to meet with the drivers tomorrow. Members of SEIU L205, NAACP, the United Steelworkers, and Jobs with Justice attended in solidarity. You can find out a whole lot more about the drivers and their struggle at www.thenashvillemovement.org/taxi/.

Cab drivers in Nashville pay as much as $175 per week to taxi companies to use their company name. After paying weekly fees, inflated gas prices, airport entrance fees, insurance, and other expenses drivers barely break even. The NMTDA has done more than 300 surveys and determined that after paying expenses, drivers make about $2.07 per hour and often work 15+ hours per day.

NMTDA, a member of Mid-Tennessee Jobs with Justice and The Nashville Movement, is a membership-based organization of cab drivers in Nashville. About 350 of the 700 drivers are members of NMTDA, however, it's hard to tell exactly how many total taxi drivers are actually driving every day in the city and not just on the books of the Taxi Licensing Commission.

The NMTDA has said the conditions of drivers are equivalent to indentured servitude. "Drivers are making an average of $2.07 per hour. Can you imagine?” says Abdinasir Ismail, a Board member of the NMTDA. “How can we feed our families on that?"

According to Megan Macaraeg, Director of Mid TN Jobs with Justice, taxi companies make guaranteed super-profits regardless of how much drives struggle. “Cab companies are guaranteed to make a profit of almost $9000 a year from each employee,” says Macaraeg, “Surely this is not what we stand for as Nashvillians who believe everyone should have a fair chance to realize the American Dream."

On Wednesday, July 30 drivers from all cab companies will hold a press conference in front of the mayor's office demanding he hold public hearings investigating the conditions of cab drivers. To punctuate their demand, the NMTDA has called for a general strike of cab drivers for tomorrow.

Links to other news stories:
Nashville City Paper

Tennessean

I usually don't post stuff about Iraq since there's so much of it on the web. However, I think this essay is special. It's special because it debunks the idea the surge worked. This idea, one even Obama is starting to buy into, is driving me crazy. Please read and send around.

A Social History of the Surge

Juan Cole
www.juancole.org
Thursday, July 24, 2008

I want to weigh in as a social historian of Iraq on the controversy over whether the "surge" "worked." The NYT notes:

'Mr. McCain bristled in an interview with the "CBS Evening News" on Tuesday when asked about Mr. Obama's contention that while the added troops had helped reduce violence in Iraq, other factors had helped, including the Sunni Awakening movement, in which thousands of Sunnis were enlisted to patrol neighborhoods and fight the insurgency, and the Iraqi government's crackdown on Shiite militias.

"I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened," Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there.

"Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others," Mr. McCain said. "And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."

The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge. (No less an authority than Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, testified before Congress this spring that the Awakening "started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge.")

And Democrats noted that the sheik who helped form the Awakening, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, was assassinated in September 2007, after the troop escalation began.

The National Security Network, a liberal foreign policy group, called Mr. McCain's explanation of the surge's history "completely wrong."

But several foreign policy analysts said that if Mr. McCain got the chronology wrong, his broader point -- that the troop escalation was crucial for the Awakening movement to succeed and spread -- was right. "I would say McCain is three-quarters right in this debate," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. '

The problem with this debate is that it has few Iraqis in it.

It is also open to charges of logical fallacy. The only evidence presented for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from political violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs in the second half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That apocalyptic violence was set off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February of 2006, which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war.) What few political achievements are attributed to the troop escalation are too laughable to command real respect.

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February, 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as John McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra US troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation beginning winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.

Aside from defining what proponents mean by the "surge," all kinds of things are claimed for it that are not in evidence. The assertion depends on a possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption. Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent earthquake in China was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters. That is just superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am referring.

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.

As Think Progress quoted CNN correspondent Michael Ware: ' The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has been -- albeit tragic -- one of the key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. ... It's a very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; segregated into Sunni and Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. ... If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you.'

Of course, Gen. Petraeus took courageous and effective steps to try to stop bombings in markets and so forth. But I am skeptical that most of these techniques had macro effects. Big population movements because of militia ethnic cleansing are more likely to account for big changes in social statistics.

The way in which the escalation troops did help establish Awakening Councils is that when they got wise to the Shiite ethnic cleansing program, the US began supporting these Sunni militias, thus forestalling further expulsions.

The Shiitization of Baghdad was thus a significant cause of falling casualty rates. But it is another war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to find Shiite militiamen in their living rooms.

In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement. There were typically only 10,000 US troops in al-Anbar before 2007 as I recollect (It has a population of a million and a half or so). If the number of US troops went up to 14,000, that cannot possibly have made the difference.

The Mahdi Army militia of Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr concluded a cease-fire with US and Iraqi troops in September of 2007. Since the US had inadvertently enabled the transformation of Baghdad into a largely Shiite city, a prime aim of the Mahdi Army, they could afford to stand down. Moreover, they were being beaten militarily by the Badr Corps militia of the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and by Iraqi security forces, in Karbala, Diwaniya and elsewhere. It was prudent for them to stand down. Their doing so much reduced civilian deaths.

Badr reassertion in Basra was also important, and ultimately received backing this spring from PM Nuri al-Maliki. There were few coalition troops in Basra, mainly British, and most were moved out to the airport, so the troop escalation was obviously irrelevant to improvements in Basra. Now PM Gordon Brown seems to be signalling that most British troops will come home in 2009.

The vast increase in Iraqi oil revenues in recent years, and the cancellation of much foreign debt, has made the central government more powerful vis-a-vis the society. Al-Maliki can afford to pay, train and equip many more police and soldiers. An Iraq with an unencumbered $75 billion in oil income begins to look more like Kuwait, and to be able to afford to buy off various constituencies. It is a different game than an Iraq with $33 bn. in revenues, much of it pre-committed to debt servicing.

Senator McCain was wrong to say that US or Iraqi casualty rates were unprecedentedly low in May.

Most American commentators are so focused on the relative fall in casualties that they do not stop to consider how high the rates of violence remain. Kudos to [the Chicago Tribune's] Steve Chapman for telling it like it is.

I'd suggest some comparisons. The Sri Lankan civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils has killed an average of 233 persons a month since 1983 and is considered one of the world's major ongoing trouble spots. That is half the average monthly casualties in Iraq recently. In 2007, the conflict in Afghanistan killed an average of 550 persons a month. That is about the rate recently according to official statistics for Iraq. The death rate in 2006-2007 in Somalia was probably about 300 a month, or about half this year's average monthly rate in Iraq. Does anybody think Afghanistan or Somalia is calm? Thirty years of North Ireland troubles left about 3,000 dead, a toll still racked up in Iraq every five months on average.

All the talk of casualty rates, of course, is to some extent beside the point. The announced purpose of the troop escalation was to create secure conditions in which political compromises could be achieved.

In spring of 2007, Iraq had a national unity government. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet had members in it from the Shiite Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadr Movement, the secular Iraqi National list of Iyad Allawi, the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, the Kurdistan Alliance, and the two Shiite core partners, the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party and the Islami Supreme Council of Iraq.

Al-Maliki lost his national unity government in summer, 2007, just as casualties began to decline. The Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadrists, and the Iraqi National List are all still in the opposition. The Islamic Mission Party of al-Maliki has split, and he appears to remain in control of the smaller remnant. So although the Sunni IAF has agreed to rejoin the government, al- Maliki's ability to promote national reconciliation is actually much reduced now from 14 months ago.

There has been very little reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite. The new de-Baathification law which ostensibly aimed at improving the condition of Sunnis who had worked in the former regime was loudly denounced by the very ex-Baathists who would be affected by it. In any case, the measure has languished in oblivion and no effort has been made to implement it. Depending on how it is implemented it could easily lead to large numbers of Sunnis being fired from government ministries, and so might make things worse.

An important step was the holding of new provincial elections. Since the Sunni Arabs boycotted the last ones in Jan., 2005, their provinces have not had representative governments and in some, Shiite and Kurdish officials have wielded power over the majority Sunnis Arabs! Attempts to hold the provincial elections this fall have so far run aground on the shoals of ethnic conflict. Thus, the Shiite parties wanted to use ayatollahs' pictures in their campaigns, against the wishes of the other parties. It isn't clear what parliament will decide about that. More important is the question of whether provincial elections will be held in the disputed Kirkuk Province, which the Kurds want to annex. That dispute has caused (Kurdish) President Jalal Talabani to veto the enabling legislation for the provincial elections, which may set them back months or indefinitely.

There is also no oil law, essential to allow foreign investment in developing new fields.

So did the "surge" "work"?

The troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential. That the troops were used in new ways by Gen. Petraeus was more important. But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by accidentally turning it into a Shiite city, as Shiite as Isfahan or Tehran, and thus a terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement could not hope to fight effectively.

It is Obama who has the better argument in this debate, not Senator McCain, who knows almost nothing about Iraq and Iraqis, and overestimates what can be expected of 30,000 US troops in an enormous, complex country.

But the problem for McCain is that it does not matter very much for policy who is right in this debate. Security in Iraq is demonstrably improved, for whatever reason, and the Iraqis want the US out. If things are better, what is the rationale for keeping US troops in Iraq?

How Scores of Black Men Were Tortured Into Giving False Confessions by Chicago Police

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on July 23, 2008, Printed on July 24, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/92374/

Michael Tillman was 20, with a 3-year-old daughter and an infant son, when he was brought into the Area 2 police station on Chicago's South Side for questioning. His mother, Jean Tillman, says that although he had gotten into some trouble with the law as a youngster, he had been on the straight-and-narrow, working as a janitor and paying his bills, since he and his girlfriend had their first child. That was July 22, 1986.

He hasn't been home since.

Tillman is one of at least 24 African-American men that the People's Law Office in Chicago claims are still serving sentences for crimes they say they confessed to only after enduring hours of torture at the hands of Chicago police officers under Commander Jon Burge between 1972 and 1992. Although 10 of Burge's victims have been pardoned or given new trials after their illegally obtained confessions were exposed, the vast majority of the 100-plus cases have yet to be reviewed by the state of Illinois. Those men have either served out their sentences, died in custody or, like Tillman, continue to live their lives behind bars, hoping that one day they will have a fair trial.

According to Tillman's 1986 trial testimony, when he arrived at the Area 2 police station in the predawn hours of July 21, 1986, Detectives Ronald Boffo and Peter Dignan took him to a second-floor interrogation room and pressed him for information about the murder of 42-year-old Betty Howard, whose body was found the day prior in the apartment building Tillman oversaw. When he told the detectives that he knew nothing about the murder, he says that Boffo and Dignan, along with three other officers, became abusive. Without ever reading him his Miranda rights, he says they handcuffed him to the wall, hit him in the face and punched him in the stomach until he vomited blood. During the course of what appeared to be three days, rotating pairs of officers brought him to the railroad tracks behind the station and held a gun to his head, suffocated him repeatedly with thick plastic bags, poured soda up his nose and forced him into Dumpsters outside of the apartment building, ordering him to search through the rubbish for a murder weapon until, according to Detective John Yucaitis, Tillman confessed to the crime.

According to Tillman's mother, she, her husband and an attorney they called for counsel were all denied access to her son during his three days of interrogation.

A Brutal Crime and a Corrupt Investigation

According to the police investigation, Howard and her 2-year-old son were on their way to meet relatives for a birthday celebration when they were forced into a vacant apartment on the seventh floor of the South Side building. The boy was locked in the bathroom while his mother was bound to a radiator, raped, stabbed and killed with one bullet to the head. Her car and other valuables were stolen. Her son was found days later by detectives. He was still in the bathroom.

Three weeks after Tillman's arrest, police found two men driving Howard's stolen car, with the knife used to stab her still in the vehicle. Those men led the officers to 27-year-old Clarence Trotter, who had Howard's camera and stereo in his apartment. His fingerprints were found on a soda can at the murder scene, and evidence linked him to the gun used in her murder.

Police found no physical evidence tying Tillman to the scene, or to Trotter. Years later, in 1999, Trotter wrote a letter to People's Law Office attorney Flint Taylor. While he did not admit guilt in that letter, he did write that Tillman was "beat … into confessing a crime (he) did not commit."

Tillman's mother says that, given the evidence found linking Trotter to the crime, and the lack of physical evidence implicating her son, she thought for sure the judge would let him go. "We thought he was going to get out," she said. "Even his lawyer said that would probably happen. … But it wasn't that way."

Michael Tillman's lawyer presented physical evidence of abuse in court, including the blue jeans that Tillman wore during his interrogation, which hadn't been washed since and were still stained with blood. He also showed scars on his wrists from where the handcuffs pulled while he was being beaten. Despite this, and despite the fact that there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime scene, the jury did not believe him. On Dec. 18, 1986, Michael Tillman was found guilty of murder, aggravated criminal sexual assault, and aggravated kidnapping. He was sentenced to life in prison. The Chicago Tribune wrote the next day that "Tillman, 20, put his hand over his face and shook his head when he was found guilty."

Weeks later, after Tillman's case file was sealed, Trotter was also given a life sentence in a separate trial.

Tillman appealed the decision in 1999 and lost. The judge wrote in his decision that "a nexus was never established between defendant and either Trotter or the two individuals apprehended in possession of the victim's car." He also wrote that, even though the corroborating evidence may only be circumstantial, it "need only tend to confirm and inspire belief in the confession." "The accused's identity need not be corroborated by evidence apart from his own extrajudicial statements," he wrote. "(His) self-described involvement to police is sufficient to establish his participation in the victim's attack."

His mother says that they had a series of public defenders and lawyers they couldn't afford, and that he no longer has legal representation.

A Conspiracy of Silence

Tillman's story is not unique, nor is it particularly shocking.

By 1999, it was "common knowledge," according to U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur, "that in the early to mid-1980s, (Jon Burge) and many officers working under him regularly engaged in the physical abuse and torture of prisoners to extract confessions. Both internal police accounts and numerous lawsuits and appeals brought by suspects alleging such abuse substantiate that those beatings and other means of torture occurred as an established practice, not just on an isolated basis."

The massive scandal began to unravel in 1989, when convicted cop killer Andrew Wilson launched a very public federal civil rights suit against the Chicago Police Department. Seven years before, Wilson had been beaten, shocked in the testicles and burned on the face, chest and thigh by Area 2 detectives working under Burge. What caught the eye of Chief Medical Examiner of Cermak Medical Services John Raba, however, were the small markings on his ears that he couldn't explain away. Wilson told him the markings were from alligator clips used to electrocute him, and Raba believed him. He notified then-Superintendent of Police Richard Brzeczek, who wrote a letter to then-State's Attorney Richard M. Daley, "seeking direction" on how to proceed. Daley, who is now Chicago's mayor, never responded.

Wilson was later granted a new trial and sentenced to natural life, without his illegally obtained confession. His case, however, set off a chain of events that would eventually expose the widespread, systematic use of torture within certain South Side units of the Chicago Police Department.

In 1990, a CPD Office of Professional Standards investigation, prompted by Wilson's story and the physical evidence backing it up, found that abuse at Areas 2 and 3 "was not limited to the usual beatings, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture." "Particular command members were aware of the systematic abuse and perpetuated it, either by actively participating in some or failing to take any action to bring it to an end," the report concluded. Subsequent OPS investigations found Detectives John Byrne, Peter Dignan and John Yucaitis, all involved in Michael Tillman's interrogation, to be "players" repeatedly named as abusers in Area 2 and 3 torture allegations.

During Wilson's civil trial, his attorneys at the People's Law Office began receiving anonymous letters tipping them off to other victims of police torture. Eventually, PLO lawyers compiled testimony in 107 Burge-connected torture cases, Tillman's among them.

Nevertheless, almost 20 years later, not a single police officer has been made to face charges in the massive scandal. They were all let off the hook, first by a succession of judges and legal professionals who looked the other way, and later by a statute of limitations that expired before the Illinois state attorney considered filing charges. According to Taylor, there is no state or federal law criminalizing torture by law enforcement officers. While possible offenses for torture can include attempted murder, aggravated battery, battery, assault, assault with a dangerous weapon or hate crimes, the statute on these crimes is generally five years for federal prosecution and three years in the state of Illinois.

In fact, the only officer who has thus far suffered any consequence for his actions has been Burge himself -- and his could hardly be called punishment. In 1993, the Police Board removed him from his command and forced him into early retirement. He currently lives in Apollo Beach, Fla., on a $3,400-a-month pension, where he is known to enjoy rides on his boat, the Vigilante. Other officers involved have since advanced in the ranks, as have the assistant state's attorneys who prosecuted the cases, at times burying or ignoring clear evidence of how the confessions were obtained.

Many of the co-conspirators who helped conceal the abuse are today Chicago's political elite. They include prominent Cook County and Illinois Appellate Court judges (including one of the prosecutors in Tillman's case), Illinois State's Attorney Richard Devine and Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was the state's attorney when many of the cases were tried and would have been responsible for bringing official charges against the abusive officers, but chose instead to look the other way. Devine was Daley's first assistant when he served as a "tough-on-crime" state's attorney from 1980 to 1989, a period that saw 55 allegations of confessions elicited through torture. He later went into private practice (before assuming his current role of state's attorney), where he was paid more than $1 million by the City of Chicago for defending Burge and the other officers involved in Wilson's civil suit. He then represented Burge in proceedings before the Police Board. Later, as state's attorney of Cook County, Devine discouraged investigations of Area 2 torture and continued to uphold confessions obtained by that means. Because of this conflict of interest, in 2002, at the request of a coalition of civil rights attorneys and activists, Circuit Judge Paul Biebel transferred jurisdiction over all torture-related cases to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. They have sat idle on her desk ever since.

The 10 cases that have been resolved have been done in spite of, rather than with the help of, Madigan or Devine.

Gov. George Ryan: "The Category of Horrors Was Hard to Believe"

In 2003, after years of campaigning by Chicago-area police accountability activists, then-Gov. George Ryan pardoned four Burge victims -- Madison Hobley, Aaron Patterson, Stanley Howard and Leroy Orange -- who at the time were on death row. "The category of horrors was hard to believe," Ryan said. "If I hadn't reviewed the cases myself, I wouldn't believe it. We have evidence from four men, who did not know each other, all getting beaten and tortured and convicted on the basis of the confessions they allegedly provided. They are perfect examples of what is so terribly broken about our system."

Because of the mounting criticism of the Cook County justice system, because the four men were on death row, and because their attorneys had filed for clemency, Hobley, Patterson, Howard and Orange were pardoned. But dozens of others stayed behind, out of the limelight. "These weren't death penalty cases, so they're not nearly as sexy," explained attorney Scott Schutte, who recently represented another Burge torture victim, James Andrews, in a civil suit. "These are run-of-the-mill homicides."

Andrews is one of the few additional torture victims granted new trials or evidentiary hearings. Schutte filed a post-conviction petition in Andrews' case last year, claiming that new evidence had arisen in his case. In October, Cook County Circuit Judge Thomas Sumner vacated his 1984 conviction and in February of this year, the attorney general's office declined to file new charges. His case, then, became the first to be thrown out in Cook County on the basis of torture. Andrews was set free, after spending 24 years in jail for a murder he insisted he didn't commit. "All along, he knew he was going to ultimately prevail," said Schutte.

However, he added that while the attorney general's office did not prohibit Andrews from going free, it didn't help. The attorney general requested bail, which Sumner set at $300,000. "In the larger scheme of things, it's inconsequential," said Schutte. "But the family had to ... bail him out. They cashed out 401(k)s, savings, everything. They did everything they could collectively."

Only one other Burge-related case has moved on the basis of torture and still awaits conclusion: that of Cortez Brown, who has been in jail since 1990. Earlier this year, an appeals court ordered evidentiary hearing in his case after reconsidering his torture allegations. In all, of the 100-plus identified victims of police torture in Chicago, few have been acknowledged and dealt with accordingly. According to Julien Ball of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, that's because of a lack of "political will" in Chicago to try these cases. "We have people at the highest levels of public office who have built their careers on torture," said Ball. "The state of Illinois doesn't care about you if you're black and you're poor. That's what these cases show."

Joey Mogul, an attorney with the People's Law Office, says some of the lawyers are also to blame. "I think it's an accumulation of racism and classism, as well as a massive cover-up that has led many people to not get fair hearings," she said. "Their lawyers didn't believe them and didn't even request hearings."

Schutte took on Andrews' case pro bono, but Tillman hasn't been so lucky. He currently lacks representation, and despite two appeals, remains in jail for life. "It's just pretty outrageous because all of the physical evidence points to someone else," said Catherine Crawford, a Northwestern University professor and attorney who was on a team of lawyers representing Leroy Orange and has researched Tillman's case and attempted to find him legal counsel. "But they had gotten a confession out of him before they found the stolen car. I think it's just one of those situations where the police said, 'Well, we don't want to throw out this confession so we're just going to pursue this case based on our original theory.'"

Robyn Ziegler, spokesperson for the attorney general's office, told AlterNet that all Burge-related cases are "in various stages of the post-conviction process," and that, "Ethically, the attorney general is obligated to handle each case individually based on the facts and history of the case. No two cases are the same."

But advocates for victims of police torture contend that it shouldn't matter. "In each case, the same thing needs to happen," said Ball. "Madigan needs to order evidentiary hearings so torture victims can present evidence of torture on the way to winning new trials. Regardless of the differences in individual cases, every single torture victim deserves a new trial where 'confessions' that were electroshocked, beaten and suffocated out of them are not used against them." Zeigler claimed that the attorney general does not have the authority or power to initiate new hearings.

But on July 10, 2007, the Cook County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution urging Madigan to do just that.

On July 18 of this year, members of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, lawyers from the People's Law Office, religious and community leaders and relatives of the wrongfully imprisoned rallied in front of Madigan's office.

"Every day Lisa Madigan sits and does nothing is a day she is furthering a cover-up," said Marlene Martin, national director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. "We're here to ask her to have guts."

The group, which had been there twice already this year, delivered a letter with more than 400 signatures from organizations, religious institutions and concerned citizens, asking Madigan to take action on the cases of the Burge victims who remain behind bars. They are also seeking reparations, in the form of psychological treatment and financial compensation, particularly since the vast majority of the Burge victims and their families have little if any financial resources to assist them in their legal battles and recovery process.

Michael Tillman is currently being held at Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois, about a six-hour drive from Chicago. His mother, Jean, says she used to go down and visit him twice a month, but "with gas prices the way it is, I haven't been able to get down there." Since Tillman went to jail 24 years ago, his girlfriend, Princess, left Chicago with their two children and stopped keeping in touch with the family. "After all of this happened we stayed together for a while and then we all separated," she said. "I can't tell you why." She says the kids, who are grown now, haven't been to visit him for "about ten years."

"He's missed out on everything -- his kids, his family, just life," she said. "He was just snatched away from us. It's a dreadful experience to go through."

Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in Chicago.

Brave New Films has a bunch of propaganda films out that make for good viewing. This one though just struck me. Although I'm against the idea of filling up the jails and prisons with more people, I can live with this one.

For a while now Adolph Reed, Jr. has been sounding a cautionary note on Obama's candidacy. This essay, from Black Agenda Report, is not just good analysis of the campaign, but also gives a hint of what we can expect from an Obama presidency. The end of white supremacy in the US? Hardly. More like the end of being able to talk about it being a structural bullwark of capitalism.

BTW, I encourage everyone to check out Black Agenda Report. However, when I tried to read this on their site the layout made it impossible. It seems to be only a error on the one page though.


Where Obamaism Seems to be Going

by Adolph Reed, Jr.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
http://www.blackagendareport.com

A friend called me a few days ago from Massachusetts, astounded at a WBUR radio program featuring Glen Greenwald from Salon.com and Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, in which vanden Heuvel not only unflaggingly defended Obama's open and bald embrace of right-wing positions during the last few weeks against Greenwald's criticism, but also did it from the right herself, calling him a "progressive pragmatist." She affirmed Tom Hayden's insistence on the Progressives for Obama blog that the candidate is a progressive, but a new kind of progressive, or some such twaddle. In response to Greenwald's sharp rebuke of Obama's FISA sellout, she acknowledged that he had "missed an opportunity to lead." Defending his June 30 patriotism speech that included a gratuitous rehearsal of the right-wing line about anti-Vietnam War protesters from the "counterculture" who "blamed America for all that was wrong in the world" and the canard about antiwar activists "failing to honor" returning Vietnam veterans, which Obama asserted "remains a national shame to this day" despite the fact that is an utter lie, vanden Heuvel pointed again to Hayden's endorsement as a sign that Obama's cheap move must be okay because, after all, Hayden was a founder of SDS.

And perhaps most tellingly, despite their disagreements, Greenwald and vanden Heuvel both supported Obama's practice of going out of his way to attack black poor people, most recently in his scurrilous Father's Day speech and again before the NAACP. (And, by the way, he grew up without a father and is running for president, no?) To Greenwald, this is the "Obama we want to see more of," the one who takes positions that are "unorthodox" and "not politically safe." Since when has it been unorthodox or unsafe politically to malign black poor people in public? Who the fuck has been doing anything else for at least twenty years? Public sacrifice of black poor people has been pro forma Democratic presidential strategy since Clinton ran on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and made a burnt offering of Rickey Ray Rector, and victim-blaming based on just-so stories about supposed "behavioral pathology" has been the only frame for public discussion of poverty for at least as long. To vanden Heuvel, Obama's contretemps with Jesse Jackson, who, ironically, has his own history of making such attacks, around this issue reflects a "generational division" among black people, with Obama representing a younger generation that values "personal responsibility." She also, for good measure, asserted that Obama has been "nailed unfairly"for his cozying up to the evangelicals and promising to give them more federal social service money. In explaining that he comes out of a "community organizing" tradition based in churches in Chicago, she didn't quite say that the coloreds love their churches.

But she didn't really have to say it out loud, did she?


This is what passes for a left now in this country. It is a left that can insist, apparently, that Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after all, he could simply have followed the model of Eisenhower on the Brown decision and said that the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and his job as president would be to enforce the law) to align himself - twice, or three times -- with the Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito wing of the Supreme Court, his declaring that social problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are "too big for government" and pledging to turn over more of HHS and HUD's budgets to the Holy Rollers are both tactically necessary and consistent with his convictions. So, if those are his convictions, or for that matter what he feels he must do opportunistically to get elected, why the fuck should we vote for him?

I'd been thinking about doing a "See, I told you so" column about Obama; then, especially given the torrent of vituperation and self-righteous contumely I got after arguing that he's not what far too many nominal leftists were trying to make him out to be, I was tempted instead to do a "To hell with you, you deserve what you get" column. But the smug yuppies to whom I'd address that message -- the fan club we encounter in foundation offices, faculty meetings, soccer games and dinner parties and on MSNBC and in the Nation -- are neither the only people who've listened to Obama's siren song nor the ones who'll pay the price for their self-indulgent idiocy. (And Liza Featherstone deserves acknowledgement for having predicted early that the modal lament of the disillusioned would compare him unfavorably to Feingold.) Among other things, as I saw ever more clearly while watching Rachel Maddow talk with another of that Dem ilk about Obama and his family-- how adorable and "well-raised" or some such his kids are, etc, etc -- a few nights ago on Keith Olberman's show, an Obama presidency (maybe even just his
candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of any connection between notions of racial disparity and structurally reproduced inequality rooted in political economy, and, since even "left" discourse in this country seems capable of conceptualizing the latter as a politically significant matter only in terms of the former (or its gender or similar categorical equivalent), that could just about complete purging entirely out of legitimate political discourse the notion that economic inequality is rooted fundamentally in capitalism's political and economic dynamics.

Underclass ideology -- where left and right come together to embed a common sense around victim-blaming and punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a respectable remove from the familiar phenotypically based racial taxonomy -- will most likely be the vehicle for effecting the purge. Obama's success will embody how far we have come in realizing racial democracy, and the inequality that remains is most immediately a function of cultural -- i.e., attitudinal, and behavioral -- and moral deficits that undercut acquisition of "human (and/or "social," these interchangeable mystifications shift according to rhetorical need) capital," a message his incessant castigation of black behavior legitimizes. In this context, the "activism" appropriate for attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization and demonization of the public sector through accepting the premise that government is inefficient and stifles "creativity;" 2) values individual voluntarism and "entrepreneurship" over collective action (e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's "Brave Young Activist" award started their own designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth carries a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides enrichment experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads (the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and
4) reduces the scope of direct action politics to the "all tactics, no strategy," fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone have described as "activistism" and whose potential for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of SEIU has amply demonstrated. Obama goes a step further in deviating from Alinskyism to the right, by rejecting its "confrontationalism," which severs its rhetoric of "empowerment" from political action and contestation entirely and merges the notion into the pop- psychological, big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite discourse of self-improvement/personal responsibility.


All of the above salves the consciences of our professional-managerial class peers and coworkers who want to think of themselves as more tolerant and enlightened than their Republican relatives and neighbors, even as they insulate themselves and their families as much as possible from undesired contact with the dangerous classes and define the latter in quotidian practice through precisely the same racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the conservatives to whom they imagine themselves superior.

This hypocrisy, of course, is understood within the stratum as unavoidable accommodation to social realities, and likely to be acknowledged as an unfortunate and lamentable necessity. Yet those lamenting at the same time reject out of hand as impractical any politics that would challenge the conditions that reproduce the inequalities underlying those putative realities. Obama, in the many ways that Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and others have catalogued here, is an ideal avatar for this stratum.

He has condensed, in what political dilettantes of all stripes rush to call a "movement," the reactionary quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble With Diversity identifies in a politics of identity or multiculturalism that substitutes difference for inequality as the crucial metric of political criticism. It's apt in this connection that even elites in the Mississippi Delta, down to the level of the Cotton Museum in Lake Providence, LA, and the blues museums that dot every hamlet on US 61 in Mississippi between Greenville and Memphis, have come to appreciate the political and commercial benefits of multicultural celebration and even civil rights heritage tourism, without destabilizing the underlying relations of racialized subordination.

Indeed, Obama represents a class politics, one that promises to cement an alliance anchored in the professional-managerial class (including, perhaps especially, the interchangeable elements of which now increasingly set the policy agendas for what remains of the women's, environmentalist, public interest, civil rights and even labor movements) and the "progressive"
wing of the investor class. (See, for example, Tom Geoghagen, "All the Young Bankers," The American Prospect, June 23, 2008.) From this perspective, it is ironic in the short term -- i.e., considering that he pushed HRC out of the way -- that Obama would be the one to complete Clintonism's redefinition of liberalism as conservatism. So there's no way I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my participation, and I'm ready to tell all those liberals who will hector me about the importance of voting that it's the weakest, most passive and least consequential form of political participation, and I'm no longer going to pretend it's any more than that, or that the differences between the Dem and GOP candidates are greater than they are, just to help them feel good about not doing anything more demanding and perhaps more consequential.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that it's wrong to vote for Obama, though I do say it's wrong-headed to vote for him with any lofty expectations. I would also suggest that it's not an open and shut case that - all things considered - he's that much better than McCain.

In some ways Obama would be better for us in the short run, just as Clinton was better than the elder Bush. In some ways his presidency could be much worse in the longer term, again like Clinton. For one thing, the recent outpouring of enthusiastic support from all quarters - including on black academic and professional list serves and blogs and on op-ed pages - for his attacks on black poor people underscores the likelihood that Obama will be even more successful than Clinton at selling punitive, regressive and frankly racist social policies as humane anti-poverty initiatives. In a way, I suppose, there could be something useful about having a large strain of the black petite bourgeoisie come out as a militant racial class for itself. Maybe that could be a prelude to a good fight, but unfortunately there's no counterweight. And the black professional-managerial strata, despite their ever more blatant expressions of contempt for black poor people, continue to insist on speaking for the race as a whole.

For the rest of the article go the Black Agenda Report.

This is a letter I wrote to the AJC today. This version is the longer one with links since the AJC policy is to limit letters to 150 words. My letter is a response to Rep. Mark Burkhalter's idiotic op ed piece about restricting voting rights. If you want to send a letter to the AJC, you can access their letters page. You can also send the letter straight to Burkalter at mark.burkhalter@house.ga.gov.


Rep. Mark Burkhalter July 15 letter about alleged noncitizen voting was preposterous. His theory is so ridiculous I can only conclude that Rep. Burkhalter is a complete idiot or a shill for a republican strategy to restrict voting rights. Either possibility doesn't bode well for the representative.

Rep. Burkhalter should inform himself on a common argumentative fallacy called a non sequitur. A non sequitur is an argument where the conclusion doesn't follow the premise. Burkhalter commits this when he says noncitizens have declined to serve on juries in Georgia because they aren't citizens, so therefore "illegal aliens" are voting. This is a basic logical mistake because jury selection lists are composed of voter lists AND driver license records. Of course finding this kind of information would require the representative to take five minutes out of his day for an internet search or a phone call. Another five minutes of research would show voter fraud is practically nonexistent in Georgia. Burkhalter could have read the Department of Justice memo on the voter ID law that came to that conclusion.

It’s quite clear the national republican strategy for victory is based on emotional manipulation and voter suppression. It’s also clear Burkhalter has bought into this mess by presenting such an absurd argument. What is unclear is why Burkhalter has bought into this mess. He either has done it because he wants to suppress participation in the political process or because he's stupid and doesn't realize what he's said. Only Rep. Burkhalter can answer this question. Please, Rep. Burkhalter, can you tell us if you're evil or just stupid?

This is a letter from Bertha Lewis, ACORN executive director. My getting a copy of this letter coincides with also getting a comment about a post I wrote a couple of years back about Wade Rathke. That post dealt with Rathke's behavior toward the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, but the comment is all about how messed up ACORN is. I have been debating what to do with the comment since it references the missing funds. Getting this letter served as confirmation for me that the comment is at least within the bounds reasonableness. The New York Times article is a damning indictment of ACORN's behavior. You can read the comment from an ACORN organizer here.


9 July 2008

An article in today’s New York Times reported the misappropriation of funds eight years ago by a former ACORN employee.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of ACORN, I want to express our regret over this situation and to tell you about the measures we have already put into place to ensure this can never happen again.

First, I believe it is imperative for donors and friends of ACORN to understand that the Board of Directors acted quickly and decisively on this matter as soon as it became known to us in May 2008. Since then, the Board has made a number of decisions, some of them painful, but all of them necessary to preserve ACORN’s reputation and mission, as well as strengthen it for the future.

Our first action was to terminate the employee in question, Dale Rathke.
An agreement has been finalized to recover the remainder of the funds due under the restitution agreement. We also asked for, and received, Wade Rathke’s resignation as Chief Organizer of ACORN. We thank him for his countless contributions to ACORN, but believe it is best at this time to part ways and move ahead with new leadership.

To that end, the Board has named me Director of the Interim Management Committee. In this role, I will ensure that we continue the many actions we have already taken to strengthen our administrative, financial and accounting controls. We have brought in outside experts to investigate, report and recommend what steps should be taken to bring ACORN fully into the best practices of a large not-for-profit organization.

One of our primary goals is to achieve maximum transparency.
ACORN cannot demand transparency of government agencies and private industries if we do not practice it ourselves.

The restructuring will take some time. We will update you on what our retained experts find and what changes we make as a result.

Some of our donors and allies already are telling us that we are handling this unfortunate event in a constructive way. We hope that you agree.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you.


- Bertha Lewis

Director of Interim Management Committee, ACORN

This is from today's AJC. Could be interesting for the presidential race, but it doesn't shed any light on anything beyond that.


300,000 more Georgians sign up to vote

By RHONDA COOK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/01/08
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/07/01/voters_register.html

The number of Georgia voters has increased by 300,000 since the first of the year, with more than 4.7 million people on the active rolls for the July 15 primary, according to data released Tuesday.

Local registration officials have seen the number of people signing up to vote at a pace that picks up with each passing month.

The bump is significant, said Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political scientist. As a comparison, he pointed out that there were 500,000 names added to the active voting rolls in the three years between the presidential election in 2004 and Jan. 1 of this year. "That is more than a 20 percent increase, so more Georgians are getting themselves signed up to vote," Bullock.

In the July 15 primary, Georgia voters will select nominees for a U.S. Senate seat, several U.S. House seats, the state Legislature and various local elections.

Bullock believes, however, that some of the increase before the July voting can be attributed more to enthusiasm for the November presidential election and the presumptive nominees, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

"Obama is getting people to show up," Bullock said. "It may be people inspired by him or people who are scared of him. It could be any one of these. It could be both of these."

According to numbers released Tuesday, there were more than 4.7 million names on the state's active voter list as of June 16, the last day to register for this month's primary. That number is almost 39,000 more than it was two weeks earlier and almost 60,000 more than on May 31.

While Georgia was virtually ignored during the 2004 presidential race because the state was solidly Republican, both campaigns say it could be competitive this fall.

Obama is already running television ads, and the campaign said it has about 75 paid staffers and hundreds of volunteers in the state focusing just on voter registration and turnout. They are going door-to-door, often in their own neighborhoods, handing out mail-in voter registration applications. Their focus is on recruiting African-American and young voters.

The McCain campaign said it is working with the Georgia Republican Party to get people registered and voting. "The best way to encourage people to be involved is old-fashioned politics, friend-to-friend ... a common connection and shared values," said Ben Fry, executive director of the state GOP.

The racial makeup of the state's updated voter rolls is somewhat consistent with previous elections, and it also mirrors the state's population. More than 1.3 million African-Americans are on the active voting list; in November 2006 the number was almost 1.2 million. Then African-Americans accounted for 27 percent of the state's active voters, and now they represent 28 percent.

Both parties are predicting voter turnout in November that will top 90 percent in some counties because of enthusiasm for the presidential race.