You knew who it was meant for, lets not play dumb..
And she has never suggested that only whites are capable of racism. Willing put ethnic cleansing into the title of this thread, it wasn't in the article.

Bernie Sanders Applies "ACORN Standard" to Defense Contractors posted by John Nichols on 10/04/2009 @ 12:25pm

Now that the U.S. House and Senate have established an "ACORN Standard" for policing federal expenditures -- if even a few employees of an organization that feeds at the public trough stand accused of engaging in activities that appear to be inappropriate, then federal funding must be yanked – it would be nice to think that Congress has given itself permission to go after the seriously sleazy players who make it their business to rob American taxpayers.

We're still in "wait-and-see" mode on that one.

But what should by now be clear to anyone who is interested in dealing with government waste is that cracking down on community organizers who try to help poor people find housing and register voters in historically-disenfranchised communities was a cheap distraction. No one with wealth or power was confronted. No policies were changed. No societal challenges were addressed.

ACORN collected around $53 million in federal largess over a 15 year period when congressional Republicans were more often than not in charge of the budgeting process. In fairness to the Republicans, they spent the money rather responsibly. Despite some embarrassing video tapes of irresponsible ACORN employees who have since been fired, the evidence is overwhelming that most of the money that was allocated to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to support affordable housing and community empowerment initiatives was well and wisely spent.

So, for all the blather from ridiculously partisan congressional Republicans and their ridiculously frightened Democratic colleagues, the ACORN purge accomplished little or nothing when it came to combating fraud or freeing up federal funds for useful purposes.

But that does not mean that the ACORN distraction was a complete waste of time and legislative energy.

Now that the Congress has established the ACORN precedent, it can be used to go after the multinational corporations that have mastered the game of Grand Theft Treasury.

Members of the House and Senate have given themselves permission to grab the cuff-linked wrists of the penthouse pimps and prostitutes and pull their manicured fingers out of our wallets of the taxpayers.

Where to begin?

Bernie Sanders has the right idea.

"The sad truth of the matter is that virtually every major defense contractor in this country has, for a period of many years, been engaged in systemic, illegal, and fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money," the independent senator from Vermont explained in a floor statement last week. "We're not talking here about the $53 million that ACORN received over 15 years. We're in fact talking about defense contractors who have received many, many billions in defense contracts and year after year, time after time, violated the law, ripping off the taxpayers of this country big time. And in some instances, these contractors have done more than ripping off the taxpayers. In some instances, they have endangered the lives and well being of the men and women who serve our country in the armed forces."

Sanders came to the debate armed with weapons that the critics of ACORN lacked: facts, figures and a sense of proportion.

"According to the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan, widely respected organization focusing on government waste, the three largest government contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, all have a history riddled with fraud and other illegal behavior. Combined, these companies have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct just since 1995, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion. Let me repeat that - these three companies, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct just since 1995, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion," said the independent senator.

Then Sanders added "the kicker: Despite violating the law time after time after time; despite being fined time after time after time -- Guess what? In 2007, their punishment was... $77 billion in government contracts, $77 billion in government contracts."

That was a sufficiently shocking figure to shame the senators into backing a Sanders-sponsored amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations bill that would require the Secretary of Defense to calculate how much money it pays out each year to corporations that have committed fraud. (Unlike with ACORN, which was targeted for punishment on the basis of embarrassing actions portrayed in videos shot by critics of the organization, this amendment applies to defense contractors that have been convicted of committing fraudulent acts or that have admitted to engaging in illegal actions taken with the purpose of defrauding the federal government.)

The Sanders amendment would also require Pentagon officials to recommend penalties for contractors that repeatedly cheat the government out of hundreds of millions – and perhaps billions – of dollars.

The acceptance by the Senate of the Sanders amendment was a significant act -- if not quite an accountability moment.

It is not often that members of Congress pick on corporations that make meaningful campaign contributions and pack their lobbying teams with former members of the House and Senate.

But, with the "ACORN Standard" now in place, it was hard for senators to argue with Sanders, especially when the their colleague from Vermont offered this bit of perspective:


Just to reiterate, a few weeks ago, this Senate voted to strip funding for an organization called ACORN, which received $53 million in federal funds over a period of 15 years. The basis of that decision was a video tape shown repeatedly on national television in which several ACORN employees were involved in a totally absurd and reprehensible discussion. Those employees have since been fired, and should have been fired, and ACORN should be extremely ashamed that people like that were employed by them.

But now, we are involved with an issue of far greater consequence than ACORN. Not of $53 million of federal funds over 1 5 years but of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to large corporate defense contractors who year after year after year engage in illegal behavior and rip off the American taxpayer. One has got to be pretty blind not to perceive that this type of behavior is systemic to the industry and that it is part of their overall business model. And, let me just add, what I've described now is just some of what these companies have been caught doing. Who knows what other illegal activities have taken place which have not yet been discovered.

Mr. President, the time is long overdue for us to get to the bottom of this situation. We owe that not only to the taxpayers of this country but to the men and women in our Armed Forces.


Sanders did his part. So did the Senate.
Now, of course, the House must do its part.
President Obama must get on board.
And then the Pentagon must be made to begin a process of policing the military-industrial complex. That's a whole lot harder than picking on an anti-poverty group.

It's also a whole lot more important.

Article found here

It was made to dismiss one particular poster, about something she wasn't even suggesting.

Just a bit of ganging up in the thread, Winx.

Who Gains From Framing Gang Attacks in LA as “Ethnic Cleansing”?

Color Lines, News Report , Tarso Luís Ramos

“We need to go on the offensive to put an end to this idea of ethnic cleansing in L.A.,” declares Noreen McClendon, executive director of Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles. “It is not happening.”

McClendon—an African American who serves as vice president of operations for the Watts Gang Task Force—is upset about a recent deluge of news stories claiming that Latinos are “ethnically cleansing” their African American neighbors in southern California. The reports, which McClendon characterizes as dangerously misleading, have circulated widely in print, broadcast, and Web media, generating alarm in civil rights circles and unrestrained glee in those of anti-immigrant activists and white supremacists. In McClendon’s view, all this hype obscures some basic realities: “Gangs kill each other. Gangs kill innocent people.” The ethnic cleansing label, she says, “is blown so far out of proportion” with the facts on the ground.

Violent competition for control of the southern California drug trade between two prison gangs, the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerilla Family, has been spilling onto the streets of L.A. for more than 15 years. Gangs that once included African American and Chicano youth are increasingly segregated. In neighborhoods like Harbor Gateway, racist, anti-Black graffiti has become commonplace. Last year’s trial of several Chicano gang members on murder and civil rights charges and other police investigations strongly indicate that some Mexican Mafia-connected gang members have crossed the line separating gang rivalry from deliberate, racially motivated crimes against innocent bystanders.
But the reasons for these developments, the scale of the problem, and what must be done have been largely lost amidst sensationalist media declarations that a “race war” has broken out in Los Angeles. While it is now clear that racism has indeed played a role in some gang killings, other non-lethal attacks, and in the ongoing threats faced by African American residents of certain neighborhoods, the propagation of the ethnic cleansing frame has badly distorted a story that is sobering enough without the exaggerations.

* * *

Last November, three members of a street gang known as Avenues 43 were sentenced on federal civil rights charges for their roles in the murders of two African American men, Christopher Bowser and Kenneth Wilson, in separate attacks six years earlier in the Highland Park neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. (A fourth convicted gang member was sentenced in January.) The victims were not gang members, and prosecutors successfully demonstrated that they had been targeted because of their race as part of an ongoing campaign to intimidate African Americans in the neighborhood. It’s the first time that the Justice Department has brought civil rights conspiracy charges against members of a street gang.

The following month, 14-year-old Cheryl Green was killed in a spray of bullets that also wounded three of her friends in the South L.A. neighborhood of Harbor Gateway. Green and her friends, all African Americans, had no gang ties. The LAPD says that attack was also racially motivated and has charged two members of the 204th St. gang with murder and hate crimes violations. Both the Avenues and 204th Street gangs are Chicano, and—in the current climate of heightened concern over African American/Latino conflict inside California prisons, politics, and schools—these heinous crimes have made local and national headlines.

A recent wave of news stories on gangs in Los Angeles—known as the “gang capital of the world”—reveals that 2006 saw a 14 percent increase in gang violence and that racial hate crimes rose by 46 percent in 2005. An L.A. County Human Relations Commission report indicates that African Americans, who represent 9 percent of the county’s population, account for over half of its hate crime victims in 2005, and that Latinos were the perpetrators in 68 percent of those crimes (156 incidents). African Americans were the perpetrators in 93, or 76 percent, of bias crimes against Latinos, who make up a much larger share (45 percent) of L.A.’s population. Of the 56 cases of gang-involved racial crimes, the overwhelming majority involved Latino gang members and African American victims. According to LAPD figures, “serious” gang crimes (i.e. homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies) across racial lines rose 11 percent between 2002 and 2006: from 213 to 240 Black-on-Latino attacks (+12.6 percent); and from 247 to 269 Latino-on-Black attacks (+8.9 percent).

Despite this disturbing increase in inter-racial violence, the vast majority of gang crime has been and remains intra-racial—Latino on Latino and Black on Black—a fact often lost in the jumble of crime statistics, and media coverage that highlights racial conflict between communities of color. Also, some of the incidents cited as evidence of “ethnic cleansing”—such as the murders that resulted in convictions of Avenues 43 members on civil rights charges—took place six or more years ago. Violent gang crimes are actually down from highs 10 years ago, overall crime in Los Angeles has dropped for five straight years and even bias crimes are below mid-’90s and post-911 peaks. Between 2002 and 2005, only one African American was killed by a Latino, a gang member, in a racially motivated incident.

While these crimes statistics raise serious concerns and demonstrate that all is not well in SoCal, they do not support the charge of ethnic cleansing.

In January that phrase, which had previously appeared on gang-watch websites, was suddenly everywhere following the Los Angeles Times’ publication of an editorial by Rutgers Law Professor Tanya K. Hernandez. Referencing the trial of Avenues 43 members, Hernandez pronounced Green’s murder “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.” Rather than explain this bombshell of a conclusion, Hernandez used the Green murder as an opportunity to present her thesis that Latino prejudices against African Americans often have roots in immigrants’ countries of origin–a subject on which she has published scholarly articles. This argument deserves consideration, but in presenting it as context for the charge of ethnic cleansing, Hernandez provided ammunition for those who would argue that Latinos, as a generalized whole, are a threat to African Americans and that the danger posed by new (read “illegal”) immigrants can be lethal. Ironically, the people actually charged with the Green, Bowser, and Wilson murders were members of Chicano gangs whose L.A. roots go back many decades.

On the heels of the Hernandez editorial and bolstering her charge, the Southern Poverty Law Center, best known for its research on and prosecution of white supremacist organizations, published an exposé under the titles “L.A. Blackout” and “Ethnic Cleansing in L.A.” Writing for SPLC’s Intelligence Report magazine, journalist Brentin Mock provided a chilling account of the racial boundaries drawn and violently enforced by Avenues 43 in Highland Park, and racial attacks by “Latino gangs” against African Americans in other L.A. neighborhoods. However, the story’s main claim is that Latino gangs are waging “a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’—racial terror that is directed solely at African Americans.” Mock claims that the Mexican Mafia prison gang (La Eme in Spanish) has issued a “green light” or “gang-life fatwah” on Blacks all over Southern California, to be carried out by the numerous gangs under its influence. (A companion story labels the violence a “race war.”) The piece concludes with the message that Blacks everywhere in Los Angeles are considered “green light” targets by Latino gangs.
News outlets from National Public Radio to England’s Observer newspaper have picked up the ethnic cleansing frame. Even reporters who have avoided phrases like “race war” and “ethnic cleansing” have left Hernandez and Mock’s characterizations largely unchallenged. There has been no debate in the mainstream media as to whether these characterizations are legitimate. One notable critique appeared in The Nation magazine, but the ethnic cleansing stories have also reached broad progressive audiences by means of alternative media websites such as AlterNet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some local African American community activists, concerned that law enforcement has been slow to respond to the dynamic of racial attacks, began using the term “ethnic cleansing” to protest the situation in Harbor Gateway, the neighborhood where Cheryl Green was killed.

* * *

Racially motivated violence directed by some Chicano gangs against African Americans is an alarming development that warrants both sober investigation and determined community action. However, some violence prevention organizers in L.A.’s African American community reject the ethnic cleansing charge as wrongheaded and even outrageous.

Aqeela Sherrills, a former Crip who has been a leader in gang intervention efforts in L.A. and all over the United States for the past 16 years, insists, “There is no green light on African Americans.” Sherrills helped broker a famous truce between L.A.’s Crips and Bloods in 1992 and understands the dynamics of gang violence better than most. He says the Mexican Mafia is run by “businessmen—some of the smartest people around,” and would find no advantage in a generalized conflict with African Americans.
Noreen McClendon, at Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, questions the labeling of some high-profile crimes as racially motivated. She believes the murder of 14-year-old Cheryl Green—which prompted the LA Times’ “ethnic cleansing” editorial—was revenge for the killing of Arturo Mercado, 34, the previous week, allegedly by an African American gang. Police have not solved that murder. Sherrills, too, believes Green’s death was “a random act, a conflict between a few 204th St. gang members and a local Black gang.” “Innocent people get caught in the crossfire,” he says. The “race war” image, he concludes, “is driven by law enforcement and the media.”

Sheilagh Polk, the media relations manager at the Community Coalition, a South Los Angeles agency dedicated to addressing the socioeconomic conditions that lead to violence, is concerned about incidents of racially motivated violence against African Americans but fears the media hype could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. She notes that news media “have played a significant role in escalating gang violence” in the past. McClendon echoes this concern, saying, “When you have Fox news broadcasting about racial violence inside prisons, that creates pressure outside to retaliate.”
Pressed on the question of whether African Americans throughout L.A. and southern California might be under threat of violence from Latino gangs, Sherrills argues, “Gangs put out green lights on specific people or neighborhoods. If there were a green light [on all African Americans], there would be a lot more dead Black people and dead Latinos out there.”

Indeed, “ethnic cleansing” conjures the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs (recently declared “genocide” by the International Court of Justice), the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and Sunni attacks on Shiites in present-day Iraq. It indicates a policy of forcible removal of whole communities and is sometimes a prelude to mass murder. However dangerous Highland Park, Harbor Gateway, and other L.A. neighborhoods have become for their African American (and other) residents, the charge of ethnic cleansing is inaccurate and unproductive. Rather, it distorts our understanding of the scale and nature of the actual problem and cheapens the meaning of the language we use to describe modern-day mass ethnic violence. Moreover, the misuse of the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe the ongoing situation in parts of Los Angeles has played to the benefit of reactionary groups and movements unconcerned with racial justice.

* * *

Tony Rafael is the pen name of perhaps the most persistent purveyor of the ethnic cleansing frame. Described in the Southern Poverty Law Center story as “a respected writer” who conceals his identity to avoid gang reprisals, “Rafael” is a key source for its assertion that the Mexican Mafia has put out a “green light” for hits on all African Americans. Rafael operates a gang-focused blog site, In the Hat, where he has been making the ethnic cleansing charge against Latino gangs for the last several years. His liberal-baiting book reviews can be found on infamous rightwing culture warrior David Horowitz’s Web magazine Frontpagemag. (Horowitz is a key figure in campaigns against affirmative action and campus multiculturalism.) In one such screed, Rafael tars liberals (e.g., John Kerry supporters) as approving of Holocaust denial theories that are, in point of fact, popular with the far right. His forthcoming book on the Mexican Mafia is from Encounter Books–publisher of Victor Davis Hanson’s anti-immigrant tract, Mexifornia—whose catalog features such conservative stars as Horowitz, Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, and William Kristol. While the Mexican Mafia may indeed be ratcheting up racially motivated violence in some neighborhoods, Intelligence Report readers deserve to know that

Rafael’s analysis may be colored by his apparent rightwing leanings.

Tony Rafael sees the Mexican Mafia’s alleged ethnic cleansing policy as an extension of its leaders’ pride in their Aztec ancestry. In an interview published by SPLC, Rafael explains, “[T]here are no black people in the Aztec culture… They see themselves as a race unto themselves, and there’s really not too much room for anybody else.” Some Chicano activists refer to the southwestern U.S. as Aztlán, the Aztec homeland. Rafael’s characterization resonates with a popular racist Reconquista conspiracy theory, peddled by the Minuteman Project and other anti-immigrant groups, which holds that Mexico is infiltrating its citizens into the Southwest with the goal of reclaiming territory conquered by the United States in 1848.

Predictably, white supremacist and other anti-immigrant forces have exploited the “race war” and “ethnic cleansing” frames for their own purposes. In late March, African American Minuteman Ted Hayes led a “civil rights march to stop ethnic cleansing of U.S. black citizens by illegal aliens” on the anniversary of a massive 2006 immigrant rights march. Hayes told some 200 supporters assembled before City Hall that, 40 years after winning civil rights legislation, “Here we are again in the streets of America fighting, marching for our civil rights—this time not from the racists down South but from people who are foreigners illegally within the borders of the United States of America.”

Such anti-immigrant rhetoric overlaps with problematic post-911 notions of national security, in which Latino immigration has been recharacterized as a terrorism threat. When asked who benefits from this framing, Noreen McClendon answers, “Follow the money.” She’s referring to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s efforts to maintain and expand federal funding for local law enforcement, which these days flows from a national security spigot. In February, L.A. played host to an international conference on gangs and, that same month, announced both a most-wanted list of 11 gangs and plans for another crackdown of the kind that has helped make the LAPD notorious for racial profiling and corruption. Capt. Ray Peavy, who heads L.A. County’s Homicide Bureau, recently told the L.A. Times that the solution to gang violence is “the same thing you do about cockroaches or insects; you get someone in there to do whatever they can do to get rid of those creatures.”

* * *

Oversimplifying the gang problem as one of criminals and terrorists is another rightwing frame that encourages militaristic responses. Diverging from the martial plans being drawn up by law enforcement agencies, in January Advancement Project codirector and civil rights attorney Connie Rice released a major city-funded report on L.A. gangs, calling for a $1 billion “Marshall Plan,” with emphasis on school-based gang intervention and job programs. Rice appropriately reframes gang crime as an issue that requires more than just increased policing and more aggressive prosecutions. Unless viable economic and social opportunities are created in communities devastated by joblessness and structural racism, additional policing will simply swell already overcrowded prisons, themselves schools for criminality.

We mustn’t turn a blind eye to the bigoted motivations of some Latino gang members who commit violent acts against African Americans. But neither can we allow rightwing interpretations of those dynamics to substitute for a deeper analysis that can give rise to responses that elevate racial and economic justice as their core objectives. The available evidence doesn’t support the “ethnic cleansing” claimed by “Tony Rafael” and others. There’s much more at stake here than semantics.

Tragedies unfolding in L.A. neighborhoods are being hijacked by Minutemen and other rightwing forces. Let us not leave their framing of the issues unchallenged or, worse, become their unwitting messengers. The Right’s “solutions” can only aggravate racial strife and increase the suffering of African American and Latino residents of Los Angeles–and beyond.?

Ah well one does have to wonder about a guy that so Denys the Holocaust even happened, and a guy that says there are no gays in Iran.. LMAO

There are a few good reasons why this is not covered, but why break up the party in here that is so focused on one line of thought they are incapable of seeing anything else. Geezuz, think already!!!!

Yes she will, but it will the the murder of a campaign. lmao. She left her gov job because she knew very well she could make more money off her supporters than she could working for the gov. Palin cares about Palin, period. She hasn't sufficiently embarrassed the faithful base enough to stop the gravy train... YET. She should save as much as she can, because as soon as the base finds someone more electable, she'll tossed like old clothes.

As for frivolous law suites... Of course those law suites had to be a conspiracy against her.. lol

Actually I don't think he was stupid, more stubborn / pig headed bully, though he sure got weepy as the end came, like his daddy.

If you say so, but I'll just run along...

That was so uncalled for. While I agree with the fact that Bush was not articulate, his accent had nothing to do with it.

He was never very articulate.

Ya we can't believe it either.

Ah finally something worth posting to. I watch CNN Heroes the other day, don't watch Cnn too much so it caught my eye. It's nice to know there are lots of good people actually out there doing things instead of sitting around whining. There's lots of good things going on.

Some times hard times motivates people to think of things they might never have thought about, and gives them something possitive to focus on. Nice thought to end the day with, thanks. Night..

We ARE influenced by your child hood upbringing. I was in a strict catholic religious family. But I let go of all that indoctrination when I read the history of religion. As for the catholic church being full of gays, that's a very strange remark. There are no more gays in that church than any other church except that maybe one doesn't hide it while others make it so uncomfortable for gays to be out that no one knows but family members and friends who is gay in other churches.

Sounds like you have a problem with the catholic religion.. funny, so do I, but because it's just as messed up as every other christian church.

I went through hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the state was completely unprepared for that storm. I was in Homestead the worst hit, and they didn't bother to tell us we were in an evacuation zone until the bloody storm was over with.

The army got there AFTER we no longer needed them. It was pathetic. Looting everywhere. We all carried side arms because of it. They promised never to be caught off guard like that again.. I will say that once the Army and services did get moving they did a fairly decent job, though it could have been improved, and maybe it has by now.

If the government is not prepared for another 9/11, the conspiracy people will be whining about that too. It's getting really old but then Glen Beck and fox will keep the anxiety up in those that see everything the government does as a conspiracy against them personally.

I think one has to be a bit naive to take care of someone else's kids in their home, with out thinking of the possible problems that can and do happen. I lived in a neighborhood one time where one of the neighbors took care of a couple of the kids after school until the parents got home.

Something happened to one of the children in the home and the parents of that child sued their kindly neighbor and so called friend. The women has never even allowed a neighbor kid on her property after that.

We don't want government butting in but we are the first to call when kids are in danger. Guess we better make up our minds what we want and who is held responsible for parents that don't think before making such agreements.

Flooding the forum with anything and everything negative about this president seems to be all that happens here lately. As if it's going to change any one's mind. There are lots of things going on, but there's nothing worth replying to anymore.

I pop in now just to check the list of topics, see it hasn't changed and then leave.

Then you guys who are Christian better take a very close look at your fundamentalist fanatical leaders, many of whom are in the republican party, they are far more powerful than you think.

They don't much care for the little guy that just does as he is told and attends church, but your money does help them, and they have far bigger things in mind. But I won't waste my time because few will believe that, and I'm at the point in my life where their agenda will not affect me. I'll be dead.

Visit their websites, find out for yourself, they aren't hiding it. They don't have to because the only people that their agenda being out in the open serves, is to keep other leaders updated. They know the average Christian isn't paying attention and if they are it's because they support the agenda.

You bet.. No kidding here..