U.S. National

Racism is best known among white folks for the overt ways that bigotry chooses to abuse. This is what allows white liberals to excuse themselves from charges that they are racist, because (God bless 'em) they don't set out to hurt anybody. But Ralph Ellison titled his classic novel Invisible Man, because racism is a grim problem also of what white folks do not see. And this problem persists insufferably, right down to this morning's news.

On this day after the election-fraud hearings led by John Conyers and his Democratic colleagues at the Judiciary Committee, I am beginning to feel the effects of racism's one-two punch. On the overt side, we have the written testimony of Judith A. Browne, acting co-director of the Advancement Project in Washington, D.C.

For Browne, whose testimony to the Conyers committee is posted online, "voters of color" have been targets of Republican-led disenfranchisement in the elections of 2000 and 2004.

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/brownevotestmt12804.pdf target=brown

A spectacular and emotionally devastating Miss Saigon has triumphed at the Palace Theater in a rich, brilliant production that underscores the tragedy of yet another American overseas war.

From the searing single shaft of light that introduces the powerful Jennifer Paz to the show's gut-wrenching finale, this is a not-to-be-missed musical x-ray of our catastrophic Vietnam excursion. 

Paz's lovely voice and heart-rending dramatic performance form the play's centerpiece.  She is utterly convincing as a rural waif who finds herself in a Saigon brothel, only to fall in love with her earnest American lover (Alan Gillespie).  The real male force in the show is the versatile, very impressive Johann Michael Camat, whose conniving, street smart Engineer gives the play its credibility and much of its depth.

In Philadelphia, the Republican Party hired local people including down-and-out addicts as neighborhood poll watchers, paid the poll watchers to challenge their neighbors' voting, and sent visiting teams of burly enforcers in window-tinted vans in a mixed strategy of intimidation, pay and misinformation to suppress voting on November 2, according to a Brooklyn law student who worked as a poll monitor. "I witnessed the difficulties of getting out the vote firsthand, exacerbated by the Republican Party's operations in urban, predominantly Democratic communities," she says.

Liberal Arts faculties at most universities are politically and philosophically one-sided, while partisan propagandizing often intrudes into classroom discourse. It is appropriate for faculty to want open-minded students in their classes, not disciples." This dire quote about academia is on the webs ite of a group called Students for Academic Freedom, a Washington D.C.-based group supported by rig conservative activist David Horowitz. What the quote doesn't say is that the group only approaches this issue from one side and that the group's mission is to win the war of words on this issue using a tactic called "framing."

In a 1993 scholarly article one of framing's chief theorists, Robert Entman, defined framing as, "to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described." Like a picture frame, framing shows some parts of the world outside the window, but not all. Framing is successful when it becomes part of the media discourse.

Shovels ground into the four-foot high mound of mud in the road. Several cars were piled either on top or in front of the lump, freshly formed by a sudden landslide following a rainstorm. This was only a minor obstacle in our two-day journey through Sichuan Province to Da Ze Temple ("Temple of the Great Rule"), a small monastery in a remote region bordering Tibet. Our group consisted of over 20 people, mostly educated young or middle-aged professionals from Shanghai and Sichuan, all devout followers of a Living Buddha, or Huo Fo, whom they called "master."

They represented a growing contingent of people in Chinese society who have both the resources and the will to pursue something beyond material existence. Overwhelmed or disappointed with the influx of material wealth, people who came of age in the Reform Era are moving away from the drive toward wealth and toward another type of success, in which the profit margin is serenity and the chief asset is contained not in a bank but in a spiritual vision.

Settled amid rows of urban housing and apartment buildings on a busy thoroughfare of Milwaukee's north side is the Growing Power Community Food Center. What at first glance appears to be a modest roadside produce market and aging greenhouse - the last of its kind, standing in an area that was once the thriving agricultural center of the city known as Greenhouse Alley - is a pioneer meeting place and educational facility, committed not only to growing food but also to growing communities.

Nine years ago, Will Allen, a local farmer and co-director of Growing Power, Inc., tapped into a movement that was emerging from beneath the shadows of waxy apple towers and pallid wilted greens of mega-markets across the nation. However, the vision of providing a community-based education center was never a part of his original plan. "I bought this place for my own selfish reasons, to sell my farm produce," he explains. His main desire was to expose his family to the pride and integrity he associated with farming, as he had experienced it first-hand as a child growing up in rural Maryland.

It happens somewhere in America almost every day. On Chicago's South Side, dozens of elderly folks gather outside the power company's gates before dawn to block utility trucks from going to shut off poor people's electricity and are arrested. In Los Angeles, African-American, Latino, and Korean bus riders, all wearing yellow t-shirts and chanting, march one week against poor public transportation, and the next against the war in Iraq.

Despite the supposed lack of class conflict in the United States, hardly a day passes without angry crowds of ordinary people confronting the elites whose decisions affect their lives. In organizing terminology, these groups are frequently called community-based organizations, or CBO's. From national networks like ACORN and the Industrial Areas Foundation to locally based groups like Direct Action for Rights and Equality in Providence or the Bus Riders' Union in Los Angeles, these groups share a particular set of organizing methods first developed in the 1930s.

Warren County, a traditional Republican stronghold northeast of Cincinnati, came to national attention on election night. While the nation awaited returns from Ohio, the state that would decide the election, county officials locked down the administrative building and prohibited all independent observers from watching the vote count.

An analyst who has all the vote data for 2000 and 2004 by precinct in several Ohio counties did a detailed analysis by precinct of the huge increase in Bush votes and margin in Warren county. This county first did a lockdown to count the votes, then apparently did another lockdown to recount the votes later- resulting in an even bigger Bush margin and very unusual new patterns.

Several very unusual patterns were evident in the history and the vote totals by precinct. The analyst concludes:

Food and its distribution have been the spark for more riots, revolutions, and political movements than anything else you can name. Still, in a rich country such as ours, food can ebb and flow as a political issue. The mid-1970s, however, was a time when food was in the forefront of many people's political work. Rainbow Grocery Cooperative started as part of an ambitious food system in 1975 that sought to incorporate collective stores, producers, and distributors into one big counter-cultural network that would destroy corporate agribusiness by providing healthier, less processed, cheaper food alternatives.

While almost all of the food collectives that made up that network have collapsed over the last 30 years, Rainbow has survived, becoming the largest natural foods store in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has gone from an all-volunteer staff to a 200-person worker cooperative, still dealing with the ongoing issues of how to best support its community - and who their community actually is.

Economic Power