The right wing's legislative laboratory

Published at Socialistworker.org.

THE GROUNDSWELL of anger and protest following the murder of Trayvon Martin has forced the discussion of racism onto the center stage of national politics after years when it was consigned to the margins.

One part of that discussion has been the spread--and the consequences--of supposed self-defense laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which was the excuse used by police and prosecutors for not charging George Zimmerman with Trayvon's murder for a month and a half.
The questioning of the "Stand Your Ground" law has, in turn, cast a spotlight on the legislative laboratory that produced it--a shadowy, conservative non-profit organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Think of a right-wing legislative initiative at any level of government, and there's a chance ALEC had a hand in it. In spite of its innocuous-sounding name, ALEC represents a fusion of corporate money, super-rich reactionaries and right-wing politicians behind the spread of not only "Stand Your Ground"-style laws, but a whole host of other issues.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the more than 800 model bills and resolutions promoted by ALEC:

reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Only by seeing the depth and breadth and language of the bills can one fully understand the power and sweep of corporate influence behind the scenes on bills affecting the rights and future of every American in every single state.

According to the Center, ALEC's membership includes approximately 2,000 legislators, almost all Republicans, as well as over 300 corporations. The organization is dedicated to promoting model pieces of legislation to serve as templates for bills introduced at the local, state and federal level.

Almost all of the organization's funding comes from corporate sources, but the most notorious funders of all are the billionaire Koch brothers. With their help, ALEC was essential in developing the strategy behind the attack on public-sector unions following the Republicans' 2010 election victory, with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leading the charge.

But as ALEC faces growing scrutiny, we're learning that all this was the tip of the iceberg.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ALEC WAS instrumental in pushing for Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which authorizes the use of deadly force by those who "reasonably [believe] that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm." Those who use deadly force in these circumstances don't have a "duty to retreat."

"Stand Your Ground" laws are a particularly extreme version of the "Castle doctrine," which is on the books in various forms in most U.S. states. These laws authorize deadly force when confronted with a threat in one's home. But the "Stand Your Ground" law in Florida and other states applies "in any other place where he or she has a right to be."

Since the law went into effect in Florida in 2005, there has been a spike in killings labeled "justifiable homicides." According to an analysis of law enforcement data by the Sun Sentinel newspaper, between 2007 and 2010, "388 killings in Florida were ruled justifiable homicides. Over the previous seven years, there had been only 237 such cases."

According to Sun Sentinel, half of the victims of "justifiable homicides" committed by civilians were Black, though African Americans are only about 17 percent of the state's population. Florida police committed 60 percent of the "justifiable homicides" during this time.

These facts, as well as similar experiences in other states--like Wisconsin, where an unarmed Black 20-year-old was killed by a white homeowner who won't be charged because of the state's Castle doctrine--have caused many people to wonder whether such laws mean that, in the words of one writer, it's "open season on Black youths."

The racist character of these supposedly "colorblind" laws is highlighted by the case of Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old Black mother of three who faces up to 20 years in prison in Florida for firing a warning shot into the ceiling of her home in an attempt to ward off her abusive husband. A judge dismissed the "Stand Your Ground" defense in her case.

But not-so-veiled racism is familiar territory for ALEC. The group was a major force behind "voter ID" legislation introduced in a majority of states last year. Sponsored by ALEC's Republican lackeys, the bills would require a photo ID to vote, disproportionately denying the franchise to people of color, the poor and college students, groups more likely to vote for Democrats.

A Democratic Party-backed effort from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Color of Change and Credo Action is using public outrage about the Voter ID and Stand Your Ground bills to pressure major corporations and foundations to stop funding ALEC.

As of April 19, a dozen corporations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, PepsiCo and Blue Cross Blue Shield, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have pulled funding for ALEC.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ALEC--WHOSE website banner proclaims "Limited Government, Free Markets, Federalism"--came into being in 1973 as a part of the corporate-backed effort to challenge the gains of civil rights movement, and of the struggles it inspired for economic justice, rights for other oppressed groups, a clean environment and more.

ALEC's founders included Illinois Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, sponsor of the amendment bearing his name that since 1976 has banned federal funding for abortion--the first of many efforts to restrict working class and poor women's access to abortion.

Since then, ALEC has had a hand in some of the most atrocious policy initiatives imaginable, benefitting its super-rich sponsors at the expense of almost everyone and everything else--working people, their unions, people of color, women, the poor and the environment, to name a few.

Before the "Stand Your Ground" push, ALEC played a role in promoting "tough on crime" legislation central to the rise of the modern system of mass incarceration--what author Michelle Alexander has dubbed the "New Jim Crow." This system, with its labeling of Black men as "criminals," provided the context for George Zimmerman to view Trayvon Martin as a threat.
According to Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, writing in the Nation, "ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders, "three strikes" laws and "truth in sentencing" laws."

As Elk and Sloan point out, having helped engineer the unprecedented growth in the prison population, ALEC helpfully came up with legislation to legalize the use of prison labor in the private sector--at wages as low as 20 cents an hour:

ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona's state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona's notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country's massive prison population.

ALEC's latest proposal for the mass incarceration industry? Privatize the parole system. As Mike Elk told Democracy Now! last August:

[W]hat ALEC wants to do now is reform the parole system in this country, privatize it. So now prisoners have to put up bond, with private bail bond companies that are owned by big Wall Street firms, where they have to pay outrageous fees in order to get out of prison.

Before the latest scandals, ALEC got unwanted public attention last year during the uprising in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting legislation targeting public-sector workers. Walker's candidacy for governor was backed to the hilt by ALEC funders David and Charles Koch, the ultra-right wing billionaires who wanted Walker's Wisconsin used as a laboratory for anti-labor legislation.

As for the environment, ALEC--which has received immense sums from energy companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Texaco and Chevron, and other notorious polluters like Monsanto and Dow Chemical--has pushed a litany of policies to allow corporations to destroy the planet unimpeded by any constraints on profits.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC's anti-environmental measures include: blocking limits on pesticide use, making it easier to build nuclear power plants, preventing opposition to genetically modified crops, eliminating zoning regulations, "privatizing water and sewer systems" and "protecting polluting corporations from civil and criminal liability."

And those are just some of the lowlights. ALEC has written and lobbied for a staggering variety of legislation--from cutting taxes on the wealthy, to undermining the government's Medicare and Medicaid health programs, to limiting corporate liability from consumer lawsuits, to busting unions through "right-to-work" legislation, to eliminating minimum wage guarantees, to privatizing anything and everything in the hands of the state.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE EFFORT to expose ALEC for its many crimes is backed by the Democratic Party, for obvious reasons. As its "Voter ID" initiative shows, ALEC is part of a network of corporate-backed entities that promote the Republican Party at the expense of the Democrats.

But anyone who thinks the Democrats are wholly on the right side about ALEC should look more closely at the link between the two when it comes to the attack on public education. The truth is that the Obama administration's education policy is in line with "reforms" pioneered by ALEC.

Take the Obama administration's Race To The Top funding scheme, which dangles the possibility of additional educational funding in front of state governments, but only if they pass laws allowing the wholesale expansion of charter schools and imposing merit-pay schemes on teachers.

This takes several pages out of the ALEC playbook. As early as 1983, the right-wing group was pushing for policies such as school vouchers, merit pay and "higher standards"--all key components of the now bipartisan attack on public education and teachers' unions.

This likewise explains why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was, until very recently, an ALEC funder. Though Bill Gates likes to drape his efforts to deform public education with the language of the civil rights movement, he, like the Democrats, is a proponent of the same anti-union education "reforms" that ALEC has long supported.

The same areas of agreement between ALEC and the Democrats exist on other issues.

The Democrats opposed efforts by Scott Walker and other Republicans to completely gut public-sector unions, whose get-out-the-vote efforts are critical for Democrats at election time. But leading Democrats--from mayors like Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, to governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York and Jerry Brown in California, to Barack Obama in the White House--are carrying out similar attacks on public-sector workers' jobs, wages and benefits.

Likewise, ALEC and the Republicans weren't alone in causing the growth of the racist system of mass incarceration. The U.S. prison population increased more under Democratic President Bill Clinton than under any other administration--and Barack Obama has continued a war on drugs that has swept millions of Black and Brown men into a lifetime of second-class citizenship.

These areas of overlap shouldn't be that surprising. After all, the same corporations that bankroll ALEC and the Republican Party also fund the Democrats.

For example, AT&T, which sits on ALEC's board, has given millions to both parties in recent election cycles. As for contributions to individual candidates for the 2012 election, only Republican House Speaker John Boehner ($99,200) has gotten more from the telecommunications giant than President Obama ($37,069).

To take another of many examples, Comcast, the corporate co-chair of ALEC in four states, is the 12th-largest overall donor for the 2012 election cycle to this point. Of the $2.35 million it has spent so far, nearly two-thirds has gone to Democrats. The breakdown for ALEC member Microsoft is similar. And the list goes on and on.

ALEC is repellant, but it is not the source of the disease. It is best understood as one component in big business' multi-pronged approach to ensuring its interests are served, no matter which of the two parties, Republican or Democratic, hold office at the local, state or federal levels.

It's a good thing that ALEC's sleazy record is being exposed to the light of day. But no one who wants to see political and social change in this country should rely on the Democrats to counter the right-wing, pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda that ALEC stands for.

The "Buffett Rule" charade

Published in Socialist Worker.

WITH TAX Day approaching and the Republican Party seemingly settled on nominating a super-rich parasite as its presidential candidate, Barack Obama gave us a taste of the coming general election campaign this month with a lot of talk about making the tax system fairer so the rich "pay their share."
Specifically, Obama and the Democrats are pushing the so-called "Buffett Rule." Named after multi-billionaire speculator Warren Buffett, the Buffett Rule would set a goal of getting those earning more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes--something closer to the rate at which middle-income households pay.

But don't expect the IRS to start sticking it to the super-rich any time soon. The Buffett Rule doesn't stand a chance of becoming law before the 2012 election--not with a Republican-controlled House and GOP senators willing to block any such measure in their chamber, as they did on April 16. So this is really a campaign maneuver, not anything that's expected to become law.

Moreover, even if the Buffett Rule became law--and its fairly vague "guidelines" translated into real enforcement--the U.S. tax system would remain overwhelmingly favorable to corporations and the rich, and tilted against working people. That's no surprise, since the politicians who oversee the tax system--Republican and Democrats alike--are committed to serving the interests of the 1 percent, at our expense.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WARREN BUFFETT, one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of $44 billion, has famously pointed out that he pays taxes at a much lower rate than his secretary and other employees. Buffett says he supports modest increases in taxes on the wealthy to end this disparity--or at least make it less grotesque.

The government's own statistics back up Buffett's point--even when looking just at the federal income tax, and leaving aside the range of other regressive taxes, like the sales tax, that by definition take a bigger bite out of the earnings of lower-income people than higher-income people. According to the Internal Revenue Service, in 2007, the wealthiest 400 households in the U.S. made an average of $345 million for the year and paid federal income taxes at an average rate of 16.62 percent. That's the same rate paid in 2007 by a single person earning $42,676 for the year.

So the super wealthy can make more than 8,000 times what you do and still pay the same federal income tax rate. How? One of the main reasons is that taxes on capital gains--income from investments in stocks, bonds, real estate and the like--are set at 15 percent, whereas income from wages and salaries is taxed as high as 35 percent for the highest bracket of income. Rich people make disproportionately more from capital gains than salaries, so the tax code has a huge built-in advantage for them.

The Buffett Rule to raise the overall tax rate on millionaires to 30 percent was introduced as legislation in February as the "Paying a Fair Share Act." However, everyone in Washington knew the Republicans in the Senate would block the measure when it came up for discussion--and the House Republican leaders wouldn't even let it come up.

Rather than signaling a shift towards a "fair" economic policy, as Obama has claimed in recent speeches, the proposal is best understood as a campaign move. Thus, on BarackObama.com, the Obama campaign's website, there is a "Pass the Buffett Rule" calculator that invites users to see their tax rate in comparison to Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney--and then see what how much Romney would supposedly pay if the Buffett Rule were passed.

Romney, of course, has taken full advantage of the tax system over the years. In 2010, he reported income of $21.6 million and paid less than 14 percent in taxes. His "success" in business comes from founding Bain Capital, a financial firm that specializes in corporate buyouts, so he's always gotten most of his income from capital gains. Naturally, he firmly opposes any proposal to raise the tax rate on capital gains.

Romney is a parasite, and any tax increase on him and his ilk would be more than welcomed by the vast majority of the population.

But anyone who thinks Obama and the Democrats are serious about the Buffett Rule should remember that this is an election year, when Democrats always shift to the left rhetorically and pay lip service to the interests of working people and unions in order to win votes.

Those who would take Obama at his word that he intends to make the rich pay their fair share and use the revenues to fund jobs programs and education should remember the promises that Obama made--and broke--in 2008.

On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama pledged to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to join unions. Once elected, with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, the legislation was left to die. Obama also promised to "put on comfortable shoes" and walk the picket line if workers' collective bargaining rights were under attack. Yet when public-sector workers stood up to Republican Gov. Scott Walker's attack last February in Wisconsin, Obama was nowhere to be seen.

Most relevant of all is Obama's capitulation on his promise to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire when they came up for renewal at the end of 2010. This was hardly a radical proposal--taxes on income over $250,000 a year would have gone up slightly, to where the rates that existed during the Clinton years.

But the Democrats put off a vote on letting the tax cuts expire--until after the Republicans won a sweeping victory in the 2010 congressional elections. Obama said he would negotiate with the Republican leaders--and the "compromise" he made extended all of the Bush tax cuts for two years. The cost for maintaining lower tax rates for the top 2 percent of highest-earning Americans was around $120 billion over two years.

Even if the Buffett Rule were implemented, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to this ongoing giveaway to the super-rich.

According to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation, the Buffett Rule would bring in around $47 billion in revenues over the next 10 years. That's about one-third of what the wealthy are saving this year and next as a result of the extention of the Bush tax cuts.

And according to some analysts, the Democrats' proposal to implement the Buffett Rule as a replacement for the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is expected to net over $1 trillion over the next decade, could reduce tax revenues overall.

To call this "fair" is laughable. It brings to mind Malcolm X's point that "you can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches and call it progress"--although in this case, it's more like pulling it out a half an inch, if that.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ANY DISCUSSION about a fairer tax policy today ought to take into account how we got here.
Over the past several decades, income and wealth inequality has increased dramatically. The top 1 percent now own over 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and their share of national income increased from 9 percent in 1976 to 24 percent in 2007.

Meanwhile, the tax burden has shifted in exactly the opposite direction--first, from corporations onto individuals, and second, from the wealthiest individuals onto everyone else.

As left-wing economist Richard Wolff points out, in 1943, U.S. corporations paid nearly $1.50 in taxes for every $1 paid by individuals. By 1960, this amount had already fallen to just over 50 cents in corporate taxes for every $1 from individuals. But the trend continued over the following decades. By 2010, corporations were taxed about 22 cents for every dollar paid by individuals, about one-seventh the relative proportion they paid in 1943.

These figures contradict the deceptive claims of pro-business commentators who love to complain about how U.S. corporate tax rates--nominally 35 percent of income--are "the highest in the world."
In reality, the biggest corporations pay a fraction of that rate, if they pay any taxes at all. In a joint report, Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy examined the tax records of 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies from 2008 to 2010. The average tax rate for all of these corporations was 18.5 percent, and 30 profitable corporations paid no taxes at all over the three-year period--they actually received a refund. A total of 78 companies paid no taxes during at least one of the three years.

There's an old saying that "nothing is certain except death and taxes"--but that applies to everyone except major U.S. corporations, which are saved from death by insolvency with taxpayer-funded bailouts and freed from the burden of paying taxes despite massive profits.

For example, General Electric, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt was chosen by Obama to chair the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, made $10.5 billion in profits from 2008 to 2010, yet reaped $4.7 billion in tax benefits, for a tax rate of -47.8 percent. Verizon, whose workers went on strike last year after the company demanded cuts in wages, health and retirement benefits, made more than $32 billion over the same three-year period, and received tax benefits of nearly $1 billion.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN ADDITION to the tax burden shift from corporations to individuals, wealthy individuals are paying relatively less, and middle-income and lower-income individuals more.

Long before the Bush tax cuts, tax rates for the wealthiest U.S. households had already declined dramatically. According to a report by Wealth for the Common Good, "Over the last half-century, America's wealthiest taxpayers have seen their tax outlays, as a share of income, drop by as much as two-thirds. During the same period, the tax outlay for middle-class Americans has not decreased."

As recently as the early 1960s, the tax rate on income at the highest levels--known in tax terminology as the top income bracket--exceeded 90 percent. By the end of Ronald Reagan's eight years in the White House in the 1980s, the rate had dropped below 30 percent. George H.W. Bush increased the top tax rate to 31 percent, and Clinton hiked it to 39.6 percent. The Bush tax cuts reduced the rate to 35 percent, where they remain today.

Meanwhile, the tax rate on capital gains, which was raised in the late 1960s and mid-1970s to a maximum of close to 40 percent, has been cut over the past few decades to the current rate of 15 percent. These reductions have almost exclusively benefited the top 1 percent. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, were the capital gains tax rate restored to its high point, 80 percent of the tax increase would be borne by the richest 1 percent of taxpayers, and 90 percent by the richest 5 percent.

Right-wing commentators often seek to confuse the tax issue by pointing to the fact that only half of U.S. residents paid federal income taxes in 2009. Low-income households who don't make enough money to pay the federal income tax are viewed as "freeloaders."

This turns reality on its head. The real "freeloaders" are the giant corporations raking in record profits while paying little to nothing--or less than nothing--in taxes, and the banks who receive giant government bailouts and then pay billions in bonuses to executives while throwing working people out of their homes.

In reality, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) points out, the statistic about 2009 is misleading because that was the low point of the recession and a number of temporary tax breaks were in place. Two years earlier, 40 percent of households didn't owe federal taxes.

More importantly, the right-wing complaints about income tax freeloaders on the bottom of the income ladder conveniently ignores the many other taxes, most of them highly regressive, that working people do pay--like the federal payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare, and state and local sales taxes.

According to the CBPP, "When all federal, state, and local taxes are taken into account, the bottom fifth of households pays about 16 percent of their incomes in taxes, on average" (emphasis in original)--a major burden on households on the lower end of the income ladder, and still higher than Mitt Romney paid on his income taxes.

The Buffett Rule wouldn't even come close to making the rich "pay a fair share." For that to happen would require a fundamental overhaul of a tax code that is currently designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of those who produce the wealth.

Raising our voices for Trayvon

Published at Socialist Worker. Co-written with Julian Guerrero.

THOUSANDS of people gathered in Union Square in New York City March 21 for a "Million Hoodie March" to demand justice for Trayvon Martin, as outrage at his racist murder continues to spread across the country and the world.

Trayvon was gunned down in the central Florida town of Sanford in late February as he walked to the home of his father's fiancé. His killer was George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who was patrolling a gated community when he spotted Trayvon. To judge from chilling 911 recordings, Zimmerman decided that the African American 17-year-old was "suspicious," began stalking him and then shot him at point-blank range.

Police questioned Zimmerman, and then released him because he claimed he killed Trayvon in "self-defense"--though Zimmerman outweighed Trayvon by nearly 100 pounds and was armed with a handgun, while Trayvon possessed only a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Nearly a month after the crime, Zimmerman has still not been arrested.

Trayvon's parents led the protest in New York City. Demonstrators wore hoodies as a show of solidarity--Trayvon was wearing one when he was murdered--and to dramatize the statement from the organizers' Facebook page that "a Black person in a hoodie isn't automatically 'suspicious.'"
New York's was the largest, but not the only demonstration to express the growing anger at Trayvon's killing--and more actions are planned in cities around the country in the coming days.

In Orlando, only a few miles from Sanford, hundreds rallied at a protest organized by the Florida Civil Rights Association to demand that the state to revoke the concealed weapons permit issued to George Zimmerman. Later that night, in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood, more than 200 supporters gathered, carrying bags of Skittles and cans of ice tea. "I wanted to come 'armed and dangerous,'" said teacher Suneeta Williams.

The night before, in Sanford itself, some 1,000 people packed a town meeting led by NAACP President Ben Jealous, along with leaders of the ACLU and Nation of Islam. As Jealous told the crowd, "I stand here as a son, father, uncle who is tired of being scared for our boys. I'm tired of telling our young men how they can't dress, where they can't go and how they can't behave."

There were plans for another protest in Sanford on Thursday, this one led by Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. In Atlanta, activists booked several buses to make the nearly eight-hour drive to Sanford--and sold every seat in advance.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AT UNION Square, thousands of people turned out for the quickly organized protest. The multiracial crowd wore hoodies, scores of people defiantly held up bags of Skittles. One Black youth of elementary school age held a sign asking, "Am I next?" A man held a sign that read, "Racism is not a fringe issue," and listed, "George Zimmerman, NYPD, Newt Gingrich, Jan Brewer, and on and on and on..."

As one protester, Aisha Mays, said:

Things like this happen all the time because Black men are targets. You see the worst of this here, but you also see it everywhere--in the schools, the workplaces. I'm glad that people are here. We have to continue these speakouts and rallies, we have to continue to talk about these issues and bring them out in the open, we have to break down these racist barriers. We have to take action.

Alia, a white woman who attended the rally with her 7-year-old son Sam, said "I've got kids, too, and I know that Trayvon was somebody's baby. We have to be here for them because of that. This is the only way to have a better world."

Sam added: "I'm here because I'm really angry at the man who killed Trayvon. He must be crazy, out of his mind to do what he did. We should protest the government until it gives up and stops racism!"

Speakers at the protest highlighted the racist double standard of police doing a background check and drug/alcohol test on Trayvon, but not on Zimmerman, the shooter. A lawyer for Trayvon's family pointed out that without the support from activists and the hundreds of thousands who signed petitions demanding justice for Trayvon, the case would never have gained the prominence it has.
After he finished speaking, the crowd parted and began chanting "Justice for Trayvon," as Trayvon's parents made their way to the front to speak.

Trayvon's father, Tracy Martin, said, "If Trayvon was alive, he'd be on these steps with you rallying for justice. Trayvon Martin did matter. We're aren't going to stop until we get justice for Trayvon!"
His mother Sybrina Fulton thanked the crowd for their support. Choking back tears, she said, "Our son did not commit any crimes...Our son is your son. Justice for Trayvon!"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CHANTING "WE are Trayvon Martin!" the crowd in its thousands poured into the streets to march for justice.

This echoed the chant of "We are Troy Davis!" that rang out in Union Square six months before as about 1,000 people marched in the "Day of Outrage" protest on September 22, the day after the state of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis, an innocent African American man. A number of people at the rally for Trayvon had marched for Troy.

Initially, the march made its way west down 14th Street, taking over two full lanes of traffic. Demonstrators chanted, "They don't care if Black kids die, protect and serve, that's a lie!" Police attempted to corral marchers back onto the sidewalk. They succeeded for a brief time, but were overwhelmed as the crowd took the streets again. Eventually, marchers made their way back to Union Square.

New York has also seen growing anger and action against police abuse and violence at home. There is a growing movement against the racist "stop and frisk" policy of the NYPD, whose 2,000 or so victims each day are overwhelmingly Black or Latino. Plus, activists in the Bronx have organized a number of demonstrations this winter against the police murder of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed Black teenager killed in his own home, and the beating of another Black teen, Jateik Reed.

The spirited demonstration for Trayvon is a further sign that a new movement for racial justice is emerging in New York, as it is in other cities. As protester Lupe Rodriguez said, "People are fed up about hearing these stories of people of color being beat down and shot down by cops. There have been too many of them brought to light in the last couple of months, and Trayvon is the tipping point for these communities."

One influence on the new movement is Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow, which argues that mass incarceration of people of color is a system of racist social control akin to Jim Crow segregation and slavery. The many signs and chants that drew connections between the murder of Trayvon and instances of police brutality and racism made it clear that people don't view this as an isolated incident but as a broader system of racism and injustice.

As another marcher, Armani Williams, said:

It makes me really angry to be a young Black male who knows that in 2012, I can be shot and killed, and the police don't do anything...Black people are sick of how police terrorize us...This country was built on racism, and honestly, I feel that if the roles were reversed, if it was a white boy named Travis Martin who was killed by a Black man called George Jenkins, without a doubt, the killer in this instance would be in jail right now.

Nicole Colson contributed to this article.

Graduating into never-ending debt

Published at Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

OVERWHELMING STUDENT debt has become a source of worry and financial distress for many millions of people--and even worse for the one in five people with student loan debt who are classified as delinquent.

And the problem will only get worse as a new generation of students and recent graduates, carrying a bigger loan burden than ever before, struggles to find work in an economy that, despite statistics showing job growth, still seems like the Great Recession, especially for young workers.

The scale of the student crisis has even caused mainstream financial commentators to suggest that a supposed "student loan bubble" will cause as much trouble as the "mortgage bubble" did a few years ago. But the real pain won't be suffered by bankers and rich investors, but by ordinary working people dealing with the effects of a higher education system where the burden of the costs of education has fallen increasingly onto students and their families.

Early this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report titled "Grading Student Loans," which analyzed the student debt crisis in the U.S.

The report revealed that student loan debt stands at a whopping $870 billion, with 27 percent of borrowers who are in repayment past due and 21 percent classified as delinquent. Total debt on student loans easily surpassed total debt on credit cards ($693 billion) and total debt on auto loans ($730 billion), according to the study.

Some 37 million people in the U.S. carry student debt, with an average of $23,500 per borrower. However, the median amount owed--which means half of all borrowers owe more than this amount and half less--is $12,800.

The median is so much lower than the average because a relatively small number of borrowers carry extreme amounts of debt, skewing the average. According to the New York Fed's report: "About one-quarter of borrowers owe more than $28,000; about 10 percent of borrowers owe more than $54,000. The proportion of borrowers who owe more than $100,000 is 3.1 percent, and 0.45 percent of borrowers, or 167,000 people, owe more than $200,000."

In other words, about a million people have student loan debts for an amount equivalent to the cost of a house in many parts of the country.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AND THE crisis is worse than even these numbers suggest. The figure of 27 percent who have missed payments likely understates the severity of the crisis, given that nearly half (47 percent) of borrowers have student loans that are deferred or in forbearance--which means that they don't yet have to make payments on their debt.

These are disproportionately young, current students or recent graduates, a group facing record levels of debt--the class of 2011 was the most indebted on record--and high rates of unemployment.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the middle of last summer, less than half of the aged 16-24 had paying jobs--the 48.8 percent figure was the lowest level of youth employment since statistics started being kept in 1948. And nearly half of youth who do have jobs are employed in the "hospitality" (including food service) and retail industries--generally low-paying jobs with few benefits or little job security.

As in the broader employment statistics, Black youth--who also carry higher average student loan debt and are less likely to graduate--suffered a worse situation, with the official (and highly understated) unemployment at 31 percent last summer, nearly twice the overall official youth jobless rate of 18.1 percent.

Given this situation, it's a sure thing that when payments on the loans of current students and recent graduates begin to come due, rates of past due and delinquent borrowers will shoot up. Hedge fund investors who profit by betting on student loans expect default rates for current graduates to be as high as 40 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The student debt crisis is a result of decades of tuition hikes, which have outpaced the rate of inflation by four times, alongside cuts to grant-based financial aid and funding for public higher education. Degree programs that students could pay for with a part-time minimum wage job two generations ago now require students to go into massive debt.

This in turn reflects broader trends of the privatization of public higher education and a long-term shift of the costs of education further onto students and their families. The rise in student loan debt is part and parcel of the last three decades of neoliberalism, as working families facing stagnant incomes and rising costs for necessities like housing, health care and education, went into debt to maintain their standard of living.

But unlike credit card or mortgage debt, it is nearly impossible to get out from under most student loan debt without paying it off.

In the case of federally guaranteed loans, which make up the bulk of student loans, lenders can even garnish borrowers' Social Security checks, and loans can balloon to multiple times the original amount if borrowers fall behind on payments and accrue penalties.

Sara from New York City, an adjunct professor who barely earns enough to make ends meet, has $200 taken from her paycheck by a collection agency who bought her loan from Sallie Mae. As Sara put it:

I often feel like my entire life is spent trying to figure out ways to make money rather than focusing on finishing my degree...a single medical expense wiped out the small amount of money that I usually have saved...Going to a great university, getting into one of the best programs in my field at the time--all of this seems to be worthless, because I still spend all of my time worrying about getting by.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
STUDENT LOAN debt is a crisis in the sense that it represents a human disaster for a generation of students that entered the labor market at a time when unemployment was at the highest rate it's been in decades. These graduates, labeled a "lost generation" by many commentators, face a future of working low-paying jobs they are overqualified for in order to pay back loans for degrees that mean little at a time when the fastest-growing industries don't require workers with a college education.

But it is also a potential crisis for the financial system. Some media sources, including the Washington Post, have even asked whether student loans represent the next "debt bomb" on the verge of bursting, a threat akin to the housing bubble of a few years ago.

The "student loan bubble" is not insignificant. But student loans don't pose anything like the threat to the economy that the housing bubble did. As economist Dean Baker explained:

At the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, the residential housing market in the United States was worth more than $22 trillion. It has since lost close to $8 trillion in real wealth, which is the basis of the current downturn...

[The] student loan market is now valued at $867 billion, less than 1/25th the size of the housing market at its bubble peak. Furthermore, all of it will not default, and the defaults that do occur will be spread over many years. And the government will cover most of the losses since it is guaranteed.

In addition to student loans being a fraction of the size of the mortgage bubble, banks and other private investors hold a proportionally much-smaller stake in student loans than they do in mortgage debt.

For example, in 2006, major financial institutions held nearly $5 trillion in mortgage debt, and over $6.6 trillion was in mortgage pools or trusts, collateral for the mortgage-backed securities at the center of the housing crisis. This represented over 80 percent of outstanding mortgage debt, which exceeded U.S.'s gross domestic product--the value of all goods and services produced in the country in a year. When a chunk of this massive amount of debt went bad, it threatened to bring down the world financial system.

By comparison, the market for securities backed by student loans is less than $250 billion, a significant sum, but a small fraction of the trillions in mortgage-backed securities.
So student loans don't pose the systemic threat to the financial system that the mortgage bubble did. But that fact certainly doesn't ease the human suffering caused by the student debt burden, which is akin to a modern-day form of indentured servitude.

Young people are going into debt at 6.8 percent interest--the current rate for federal student loans--just to receive an education that is now a basic requirement for the vast majority of jobs with decent pay and benefits. But when the banks were in trouble, they each got to borrow tens of billions from the Federal Reserve at effective interest of 0 percent, or close to it--and many made a profit by lending it right back to the U.S. government to finance the deficit.

But it does not have to be this way. While the student loan crisis is very real, it is also manufactured. As left-wing economist Doug Henwood points out:

It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely free in the USA. It accounts for not quite 2 percent of GDP. The personal share, about 1 percent of GDP, is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households in the U.S., or three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than four months of what we waste on administrative costs by not having a single-payer health care finance system."

The money is there; what is lacking is the political will, and that will only change if people fight back.

The rise of the Occupy struggle last fall showed the potential of movements built from the ground up to capture the imagination of millions of people who want change. Grassroots action alone represents the only hope for those enduring the heavy burden of student debt. We need to put this crucial issue at the heart of building a new student movement.

Protesting the NYPD Spies

Published in Socialist Worker.

NEW YORK--Approximately 100 protesters confronted NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly outside an event for alumni of the Fordham Law School on March 3 to protest the NYPD's assault on Muslims, communities of color and peaceful protesters.

The demonstration, organized by the Fordham Muslim Law Students Association, called for the resignation of Kelly after revelations by Associated Press journalists of extensive NYPD surveillance of Muslim communities and student groups across the Northeast, as well as recent attacks on communities of color and Occupy Wall Street.
According to a statement by the group:

[W]e demand the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Kelly who unabashedly violates the civil liberties of Muslim New Yorkers and students, through the illegal practice of "Stop & Frisk" largely on minority communities, and by the violent suppression of "Occupy Wall Street."

Specifically, protesters denounced Fordham Law School's invitation to Kelly to speak to alumni at an event at the posh Cipriani Wall Street, just blocks from where New York police brutalized activists and forcibly evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment just a few months ago. The demonstrators also demanded Fordham release a statement "which affirms its commitment to the equality of all of its students and opposes the NYPD's racist policies."

Two days before the protest was scheduled to take place, Fordham issued a mealy-mouthed statement that paid lip service to supporting civil liberties and opposing discrimination, but did not clearly condemn NYPD spying or rescind the invitation to Kelly.

While Fordham officials claimed they are "deeply concerned about, the chilling effect such surveillance could have on academic freedom, and on freedom of speech and association," they also accepted the logic that spying on Muslims is an attempt to keep people safe, rather than an example of religious and racial profiling, harassment and intimidation.

Fordham stated that the university "acknowledges the enormous responsibility placed in the hands of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to safeguard the city and all of its citizens, while at the same time preserving civil liberties. We trust that the mayor and commissioner understand the importance of preserving those liberties, especially in times of heightened danger."

This "trust" comes despite revelations that the NYPD played the Islamophobic film The Third Jihad, which Kelly himself appears in, for 1,500 officers, and then lied to the press when questioned about it.
While Fordham went on to claim that its decision to invite Kelly "should not be construed as a university endorsement of his policies," Kelly used the forum provided by Fordham to defend the very policies of profiling and surveillance of Muslims for which he was denounced by protesters in front of an audience of lawyers, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
UNDETERRED BY Fordham's statement, members of the Fordham Muslim Law Students Association went ahead with their protest outside the venue at 55 Wall Street. They were joined by activists from Independent Viewpoints, Occupy Wall Street, the International Socialist Organization and opponents of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies, among others.

Protesters initially gathered on the sidewalk in front of the venue, but they were threatened with arrest by officers, who claimed the sidewalk was "frozen," unless they moved across the street.
According to Mohammad Ali Naquvi of Independent Viewpoints:

Legally, and I'm a lawyer, we're allowed to stand on a sidewalk as long as we don't block passageway or an entrance...We don't have to stand in a pen...but they were making up rules, saying the sidewalk is "frozen." "Frozen" is not a legal term. I tried to push him on it...I said, you know, "frozen" means that water solidifies at 0 degrees...I don't know the legal term "frozen" in any way. He didn't have a response, [and] he threatened us with arrest.

Chants included "Kelly spies, Bloomberg lies," and protesters held signs with slogans such as "NYPD is racist" and "NYPD, CIA, hands off our people," while well-dressed Fordham alumni arrived for the event.

Sara Bokhari of Brooklyn, a Muslim woman active in Occupy Wall Street, drew attention to the need for unity among those targeted by the NYPD:

I'm out here protesting these racist policies that the NYPD has been using for generations...It didn't just start with Muslims; it didn't start after 9/11. They've been profiling and infiltrating our brothers and sisters in Harlem and the Bronx, all over...It doesn't make our city safer, and we need to stand up and fight back against it."

Asked about the potential to unite struggles against police brutality and profiling of Blacks and Latinos with the fight against anti-Muslim spying, Bokhari said, "I think there is a ton of potential...We're all people who are being oppressed by these same policies, and we need to stand together in solidarity."

Protesters used the "peoples' mic," where one person speaks and the crowd repeats and amplifies their words, to address Kelly and those who came to hear him speak. One woman used the mic to say:

In the last several months, the Associated Press has blown the cover of the NYPD. The AP has confirmed what Muslim communities have known for years: the NYPD has been spying on our communities, just because we're Muslim. They have been spying on our mosques...on the businesses we go to and own...and the NYPD has been spying on our students.

Ray Kelly: we are a growing chorus of people...we are students and professors, we are workers, we are Muslims, and we are here together to say "No more"!

Drowning in student debt

Published at Socialistworker.org and IndyBlog.

COLLEGE STUDENTS across the U.S. are drowning in debt--yet a promised plan by the Obama administration to provide "relief" will do little in the long run to reduce their burdens.

Facing increasing pressure from an Occupy movement that has brought attention to youth unemployment and crushing student debt among other issues, President Obama announced an executive order in October that would decrease student loan payments for some borrowers and allow others to consolidate their loans at lower interest rates.

In addition, the "pay as you earn" plan will forgive student loans for some borrowers after they make 20 years of payments, rather than the 25 years mandated under current law.

This proposal comes just months after Obama's 2012 budget cut Pell Grants that would allow students to attend school year-round, and got rid of government subsidies that paid interest on student loans for graduate students, adding to their debt burden when they graduate.

Now, pitching the plan as a lifeline to those struggling with massive student loans, Obama has pointed out that the plan would have a stimulative effect on the economy, as money spent repaying student loans could otherwise be devoted to consumer goods.

For those with qualifying federal student loans, Obama's order means that changes to the "Income-Based Repayment (IBR) Plan" approved by Congress last year will take effect in 2012, rather than 2014 as originally planned.

The IBR plan currently allows borrowers who fit the criteria of having excessive student loans relative to their income and family size to pay a lower monthly amount on their student loans over a longer period of time.

Currently, those who fit IBR criteria pay 15 percent of their discretionary income (all income over 150 percent of the federal poverty level) in student loan payments each month. Obama's plan would reduce this to 10 percent. In addition, those paying their loans back via the IBR program will have their remaining balance forgiven after 20 years of making payments under the program, rather than the current 25 years.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHILE THESE changes will assist some borrowers burdened by excessive student loan debt, only a fraction of those with student loans will qualify under Obama's order, and there are drawbacks to the IBR plan.

The changes to the IBR plan will only impact those who take out a student loan in 2012 and have taken out a loan between 2008-12. That disqualifies recent graduates as well as those currently in default.

And according to the Federal Student Aid office, borrowers who enroll in IBR may end up paying more interest on their student loans than they would if they repaid them in the standard 10-year period. This is because IBR stretches repayment out over a longer period of time, during which interest continues to accrue.

The consolidation portion of Obama's plan would allow borrowers with both direct federal loans and loans from the Family Education Loan Program (loans from private lenders backed by the government) to consolidate their debts and pay up to one-half of a percentage point less in interest, which would reduce monthly payments and the total amount repaid over the life of the loan. Private loans, and those who have already consolidated their loans with private lenders, will not qualify.

The Obama administration claims that 6 million people would be impacted by the loan consolidation portion, while 1.6 million would qualify under the changes to the IBR plan. In other words, the plan will impact only about one-fifth of the 36 million people in the United States with student loan debt.

Jeff Selingo, vice president of the Chronicle of Higher Education, told PBS that Obama's executive order is:

not going to make a huge difference...between both programs, it's probably going to impact maybe about 7 million of those people in repayment or new students coming into the program...The income-based program that was announced today is...only going to affect students in college right now.

So all of these students, these recent college grads who have graduated with a lot of debt who are now looking for jobs and can't find them or are doing jobs that only require a high school diploma, it's not going to provide much help to them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

STUDENT LOAN debt is at crisis levels. The class of 2011 is the most indebted in U.S. history, with an average debt burden of nearly $23,000. According to the Wall Street Journal, "That's 8 percent more than last year and, in inflation-adjusted terms, 47 percent more than a decade ago."

According to USA Today, total student loan debt in the U.S. is on track to exceed $1 trillion this year, having surpassed credit card debt. And while consumers have paid down other forms of debt, student loan debt continues to rise, doubling in the last five years.

This is a result of the skyrocketing cost of college tuition and fees, which has increased at over four times the rate of inflation over the past 25 years, a process that has accelerated in recent years as budget cuts target higher education spending in states across the country.

Average tuition at public four-year universities has tripled over the past three decades, as states have shifted the burden of paying for college onto students. According to"State of Young America," a report by the policy center Demos and the Young Invincibles, "In 1985, 23 percent of higher ed revenue was from tuition--by 2010, it had climbed to 40 percent."

At the same time that the cost of college has risen dramatically, students in need of assistance who once received grants now have to borrow to pay tuition and fees. "Federal financial aid has shifted from a grant-based to a loan-based system," says the Demos report. "Today, 36 percent of all federal aid is grant-based, down from 55 percent in 1980."

And, grants available to low-income students have not kept pace with rising costs. According to the report, "in 1980, the maximum Pell grant covered 70 percent of the costs of a 4-year public college, including room and board...today, it covers 34 percent."

The result is that nearly half of all students who start college never finish, many of whom are forced to drop out because they can't afford to continue. While 55 percent of students earn a bachelor's degree in 6 years. African Americans and Latinos are hardest hit: just 39 percent of African Americans and 46 percent of Latinos graduate within 6 years.

African Americans are also disproportionately indebted. According to Demos, "among 2008 bachelor's degree graduates, 80 percent of African American students borrowed to pay for their education in 2008, graduating with an average debt of nearly $29,000."

Those who do not graduate must still pay back their loans, without the higher wages on average that come from a college degree. David from New York City explains:

After four years at college, I left half way through my engineering program because of mental health issues. Since then I've worked in the service industry, making about 25 cents more than minimum wage. I had $10,000 debt when I left school...I still have the same amount of debt now despite 10 years of making payments over the last 25 years. I've been in debt my entire adult life...it's been a ball and chain around my neck for 30 years.

Unlike credit card and mortgage debt that can be discharged in bankruptcy, student loan debt cannot be gotten rid of except by paying it off or having it forgiven through select programs like the IBR. Wages and even Social Security payments can be garnished to collect. In other words, in order to obtain access to higher education, working-class students are forced into massive debt that in some cases can continue to haunt them even after they retire.

Ben, a student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, a public university, who will graduate with $50,000 in loans, said:

My financial aid was pretty good--for the first two semesters. Then my grants dried up. Then more of my loans were of the unsubsidized kind, meaning my debt will have an even higher rate of interest charged. It's a scam, it's unjust, it's modern day indentured servitude. I'll be paying this debt off for the rest of my life--and when I die, there will probably still be some left.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT is at record highs, with less than 50 percent of youth aged 16-24 employed, the lowest figure on record at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More people in what the mainstream media is calling a "lost generation" are unable to keep up with student loan payments. According to USA Today, "The portion of borrowers in default--more than nine months behind on payments--rose from 6.7 percent in 2007 to 8.8 percent in 2009, according to the most recent federal data."

Default spells disaster for those who cannot make payments on time. Julian, from New York City, explained:

I took out a loan of $45,000 in 2004, and it's ballooned to $75,000 already. By the time I pay it off, it'll cost me $125,000 if I were to pay the $900 they demand every month, which I can't afford. It's like making another rent payment, and it's killing my credit score.

How can we tolerate an educational system that is more worried about making money than educating people? Especially now, when they check your credit score for any loan approval--when you're looking for a place to live, buying a car or even when you look for a job...It's economic disenfranchisement. We already have a generation of students with loans like myself who won't be addressed by Obama's plan. What about all of us who can't discharge or pay off these student loans? What about our future?

In addition to only impacting a fraction of borrowers, Obama's executive order does not even begin to address the root causes of the student loan crisis--skyrocketing tuition and fees, stagnant wages and record youth unemployment. It is a bandage on a gaping wound.

The student loan crisis is one of the many grievances driving the Occupy movement around the country. Protestors at Occupy Wall Street have proposed demands including free higher education and the forgiveness of all student loans. At Occupy Philly, there is a "Student Loans Jubilee Working Group" raising similar demands.

On October 5, as workers joined in a community-labor march in which 20,000 people take to the streets of New York City, thousands of students on hundreds of campuses in New York and across the country walked out, protesting among other things the rising cost of higher education and the loans that students are saddled with just to obtain a degree.

It is in this context, as well as the approaching 2012 election, where Obama will be hard-pressed to match the unprecedented youth turnout that was a key to his victory in 2008, that Obama issued his order on student loan debt. He and his advisers no doubt hope his plan will bolster support for his re-election bid--and make it seem as though the government is listening to the Occupy movement and taking action.

But while many Occupy supporters understand that Obama's executive order on student debt is a response to the pressure he is feeling from Occupy Wall Street, they aren't satisfied and are demanding more.

According to New York Public Radio, "[M]any Occupy Wall Street protesters see the president's move as trying to harness their energy without doing enough to change the system."

"It's really frustrating to see how something [that's presented] in the language of helping us is not actually doing anything," said protester Jason Ahmadi. "The people have these real concerns and mobilized to look for real answers, and they make changes that have the language of solving the problem, but actually don't do anything."

Rather than dampen the struggle, Obama's announcement has spurred activists to take further steps--Occupy supporters have declared November 12 "Student Debt Day," with protests planned at Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street, and a call for it to spread to other encampments.

Obama's executive order on student loans won't help nearly enough people, and those who do benefit deserve more. Our struggle to make higher education a human right continues.

Using Black children as guinea pigs

Published at Socialistworker.org.

ANOTHER HORRIFIC chapter in the history of American racism was revealed last month when a class action lawsuit was filed against the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. The suit accuses the institute of intentionally exposing young Black children to lead paint and dust in order to study the effectiveness of various types of abatement strategies for decreasing lead levels in housing.

The suit alleges that beginning in 1993 and until 1999, Kennedy Krieger, which is affiliated with the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, moved Black families with children between the ages of 1 and 5 into apartments subsidized by the state, telling them that they were "lead safe."

However, the apartments allegedly contained lead dust and paint that put the children at great risk. Kennedy Krieger is accused of not informing parents of the risk of lead exposure and providing no medical care to children in the study.

Lead exposure is especially harmful to children; it can cause serious and permanent health problems, including learning disabilities and behavioral disorders.

These allegations have drawn comparisons to the infamous Tuskegee Experimentconducted by the United States Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972, in which hundreds of poor African American men were misled in order to study the affects of syphilis if left untreated.

Subjects in the study were not told they had syphilis; the government "deliberately denied treatment to the men with syphilis and they went to extreme lengths to ensure that they would not receive therapy from any other sources."

Many of the subjects died of syphilis, several passed it on to their wives, and many of their children were born with congenital syphilis, which can cause a host of serious health problems, including deformities, brain damage, seizures and death. The men were denied treatment for decades, even after penicillin was introduced as an effective treatment for syphilis in the 1940s.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SIMILARLY, KENNEDY Krieger allegedly did not inform the parents of the low-income African American subjects of their study that they risked exposing their children to unsafe levels of lead paint and dust. The lawsuit claims that over 100 children were placed at risk of exposure.

According to the New York Times, the lead plaintiff in the suit against Kennedy Krieger, David Armstrong, says he brought his 3-year-old son to the institute for treatment for elevated lead levels in his blood.

Armstrong agreed to participate in a two-year study, but was not told this would mean exposing his son to lead. He and his son, unaware of the health risks, continued to live in the contaminated apartment after the conclusion of the study. According to theTimes:

Mr. Armstrong said blood was collected from his son for two years, but that no one told him the lead levels had increased. After the two-year mark passed, Mr. Armstrong said he continued to live in the two-bedroom apartment but did not hear from Kennedy Krieger.

During those two years, he said his son, now 20 years old, received no medical treatment for lead. Later, when Mr. Armstrong took his son to a pediatrician, the doctor detected blood lead levels two-and-a-half to three times higher than they had been before the family moved into the apartment.

Kennedy Krieger claims that the study "was conducted in the best interest of all of the children enrolled," citing the fact that "[with] no state or federal laws to regulate housing and protect the children of Baltimore, a practical way to clean up lead needed to be found so that homes, communities, and children could be safeguarded."

While that is certainly an argument for reforms to ensure lead-free housing for children in Baltimore and beyond, it does not justify the use of poor Black children as guinea pigs, subjecting them to the risk of permanent developmental disabilities and behavioral disorders, let alone without their parents' knowledge or informed consent.

The technology to test lead levels in paint had been available for decades prior to the study, and Kennedy Krieger was already aware of the crisis of lead poisoning among Black children in Baltimore because so many had been brought by their parents to the institute for care.

There were clear alternatives, such as the use of lead paint tests on animal subjects that did not involve violating the basic human right of Black children to a safe, lead-free home environment.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHILE THE allegations contained in the lawsuit against Kennedy Krieger are outrageous enough and demand justice and accountability, the fact remains that poverty exposes poor children, especially Black children, to lead paint on a scale far greater than that of the study.

More generally, the disproportionately poor health of Black children is the shame of a nation, a crime whose victims are defenseless children targeted because they happened to be born Black in the United States. It is a preventable catastrophe on a mass scale in our society, the result of poverty and institutionalized racism that are behind racial disparities in access to health care, housing and healthy food.

According to the United States Census Bureau, nearly 40 percent of Black children, or 4.8 million, live below the poverty line. This compares with 22 percent of all children in the country, and 12.4 percent of white children.

These figures understate the actual scale of poverty in the country, as the poverty line is artificially low, based on a measure of the standard of living that dates back to the 1950s. In order to count as officially poor, a family of four must make less than $22,113 per year. For a single parent with two children, that number drops to $17,568. Especially in large cities with high costs of living, families making twice that amount can have difficulties making ends meet.

Poverty forces families into substandard housing, especially African Americans, for whom decades of racist de facto and legal housing discrimination ("redlining") have pushed them into old, dilapidated, unsafe apartments and houses.

The risk of lead exposure is highest in housing built before 1978, when the federal government outlawed the use of white lead paint in homes. Black children are disproportionately likely to live in old, untreated housing contaminated with lead and with chipping lead paint, the most common source of exposure. They therefore suffer a relatively larger share of the impact of lead poisoning.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 1991 to 1994, around the time the Kennedy Krieger study began, 11.2 percent of Black children ages 1 to 5 had elevated blood lead levels, nearly five times the rate of 2.3 percent for white children the same age. Although these rates decreased significantly by 1999-2001, racial disparities remained, with 3.1 percent of Black children ages 1 to 5 suffering from elevated blood lead levels, over twice the rate of 1.3 percent for white children.

Lead paint exposure is just one of many ways that poverty and institutional racism harm Black children's health.

According to the Children's Defense Fund, when compared with whites, Black children are less likely to have health insurance, their mothers are less likely to have access to prenatal care, they suffer from asthma at a 50 percent higher rate, they are more likely to be overweight or obese, they are less likely to have access to dental care, and more than 25 percent do not receive full immunizations against childhood diseases.

Health disparities fueled by poverty and racism are responsible for a situation where Black children are almost twice as likely as whites to be born with low birth-weight, which increases the risk of behavioral and learning problems. And "Black infants are more than twice as likely as White infants to die before their first birthday," according to the Children's Defense Fund.

To make things even worse, when Black children exhibit the behavioral problems associated with lead poisoning and other health disparities, rather than receiving the health care they need, they are more likely to be funneled into the criminal injustice system instead. Approximately one in three Black men born in the early 21st century will go to prison during their lifetime.

The Kennedy Krieger Institute's study is emblematic of the 1990s, a decade that saw the continuation of the attacks on the gains of the civil rights movement that were a central focus of the rise of the right wing in the 1980s. These included the "war on drugs," which precipitated the rise and growth of a system of racist mass incarceration that has locked millions of African Americans behind bars for nonviolent offenses, what author Michele Alexander has dubbed the "New Jim Crow."

Central to racism is the dehumanization of the oppressed. In the United States, the dehumanization of people of African descent began with their enslavement over 300 years ago and persists to this day. It is this context of racial oppression that makes possible atrocities like the Kennedy Krieger Institute study.