Where Do They Find These Clowns? Black Candidate and Cliven Bundy

Hold you nose for this one!

Now the second clown in this ad, an Uncle Tom known as Kamau Bakari is a local electrician, and is running under the banner of the Independent America Party, which if you go to their website here notes that they are part of the Constitution Party. The Constitution Party provides a safe haven for racists like Cliven Bundy…

The Constitution Party, a small third party that has been around in one form or another since 1992, says its goal is “to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, Constitutional functions.” As a practical matter, that has meant that it opposes abortion and most immigration, seeks to drastically reduce government spending and end the income tax, and works toward a noninterventionist foreign policy that requires dropping out of international organizations and treaties.

What it has not done, despite serious flirtations with radical anti-abortionists and antigovernment militias, is get into open racism. Not until now, anyway.

Enter Peter Gemma.

Virtually unnoticed, Gemma, who lives in Florida, has recently joined the governing national executive committee of the Constitution Party as its eighth living member (party founder Howard Phillips, who died earlier this year, is also listed). Although Gemma is described by the party website as “a veteran political and fundraising consultant” who was a staffer on three presidential campaigns, he is in fact a white nationalist with deep ties to a whole array of racist hate groups.

For years, he was the head of design, marketing and advertising for the racist tabloid of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) — a group that has complained that non-white immigration was turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop” and described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” He also was the media coordinator for the CCC’s Capital Region for several years.

He is part of the American Holocaust denial movement, reviewing a book by British denier David Irvingfor the racist Occidental Quarterly journal, organizing a 2005 speaking event for Irving, and giving a speech at the denialist Institute for Historical Review, according to the Institute for Research on Education & Human Rights.

In 2000, Gemma appeared with David Duke and Don Black, both former leaders of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, at an event meant to raise money for the fascist, whites-only British National Party, according to the same report.

He has been media director at the National Policy Institute, a hate group that is staffed by leading racists and anti-Semites and whose founder worries that “the white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity.” He still writes for The Social Contract, a racist anti-immigration journal. He has contributed to VDARE, a racist website named after Virginia Dare, said to be the first English child born in the New World. He is a member of Florida’s ResistNet Tea Party, where two veteran anti-Semitic activists — White Revolution founder Billy Roper and Internet radio host Clay Douglas — also found a home.

Gemma has also appeared as a guest on James Edwards’ racist, Memphis-based radio program, “The Political Cesspool,” later reviewing Edwards’ book for a white nationalist blog called Middle American News. And he has been on the other side of many interviews, speaking to such heroes of the radical right as nativist Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Ariz., and former congressman Virgil Goode, who was the Constitution Party’s nominee for president of the United States in 2012.

Here is a link detailing the groups relationship with KKK level racists like David Duke and Tony Perkins and Gordon Baum of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

The National Policy Institute was recently kicked out of Hungary for being a racist group.

Come on down, Kamau Bakari…And get your Lawn Jockey of the Week Award!

Another Award for Uncle Herman

 

The New Willie Horton – Nikko Jenkins Ad by Republican

Good old Republican racist fear mongering…Again.

NRCC releases Willie Horton-style ad in Nebraska House race

National Republicans are hammering Rep. Lee Terry’s (R-Neb.) Democratic opponent, state Sen. Brad Ashford, with an ad tying him to a convicted murderer.

Within hours of its launch, national Democrats were demanding Republicans take it down and apologize for the “repellent, race-baiting” ad.

The National Republican Congressional Committee’s ad tells the story of Nikko Jenkins, who committed four murders in 11 days after getting out of prison early under the state’s “good time” law.

“Brad Ashford supported the good time law, and still defends it, allowing criminals like Nikko Jenkins to be released early,” a narrator says in the ad.

The ad has evoked comparisons to the controversial “Willie Horton ad” that ran during the 1988 presidential election. That ad hit former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, for furloughing Horton, who was already serving a life sentence for murder.

Horton was let out for the weekend under a state furlough program, but ran away from authorities and later kidnapped and stabbed a couple.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokeswoman Ashley Lewis decried the ad, saying it “has no place in America” and demanding the NRCC take it down.

“Republicans should be ashamed that they have resorted to divisive rhetoric, playing up racial stereotypes and fear-mongering to save their sinking candidate,” she said in a statement.

The Nebraska law automatically reduces prisoners’ sentences based on how much time they have served. Critics say it effectively cuts inmates’ sentences in half.

Terry, who has emerged as one of this cycle’s most surprisingly vulnerable House incumbents, hit Ashford on the issue last week, saying he should have added restrictions to the good-time law when he served as chairman of the state legislature’s Judiciary Committee.

“I think that one of the egregious votes and efforts of my opponent is letting violent criminals out of jail through good time, which in Nebraska is just a straight half time,” he told The Hill. “My opponent prefers criminals over law abiding citizens, putting people in jeopardy.”

Ashford called the accusations “baseless and desperate attacks” from a “flailing campaign” in a statement to The Hill last week.

During a debate last week, Ashford blamed corrections officers, whom he said could have reversed Jenkins’s sentence reductions after he got into trouble behind bars.

The content of the ad underscores just how vulnerable Terry is heading into the final weeks of the election. There’s been scant polling of the race, but a survey Ashford released in August showed the two essentially tied.

The NRCC’s choice to go nuclear, by tying Ashford to a convicted murderer, is likely fueled by an urgent need to shift momentum in Terry’s favor.

NRCC spokesman Tyler Q. Houlton last week said Republicans are not worried about Terry’s campaign and insisted the strategy is to merely shine a light on Ashford’s record.

“This is why we are helping Lee Terry and helping the voters get to know who Brad Ashford is because as soon as they see all this stuff and realize what this guy stands for, there’s no way they’re going to vote for him,“ Houlton said.

 

SCUMUS 5 Support New Jim Crow Voting Law in Texas

No surprise here. The most political court in US history has come up with the usual vote to support Jim Crow Voter ID in Texas to assure a Republican victory by disenfranchising more than 600,000 minority voters.

The Supreme Court’s Kleagle – The 5 Thugs in Robes Again interfering in elections just as they did in 2000

 

Supreme Court allows Texas voter ID law for now

Texas election officials can go ahead and enforce a controversial voter identification law opposed by the Obama administration and civil rights groups, the U.S. Supreme Court said early Saturday.

The decision comes just two days before early voting begins in the state.

A civil rights leader reacted harshly to the ruling, calling it an “affront to our democracy.”

“Today’s decision means hundreds of thousands of eligible voters in Texas will be unable to participate in November’s election because Texas has erected an obstacle course designed to discourage voting,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

While the court offered no reasoning for its decision, it backs up a federal appeals court ruling Tuesday saying that voting procedures shouldn’t be upended so close to the election.

That decision came in response to a federal judge’s ruling after a nine-day trial that a Texas law requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls is unconstitutional.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed courts to consider the importance of preserving the status quo on the eve of an election,” the 5th Circuit court said.

Proponents say the law will help prevent voter fraud. Critics say such practices make it harder for poor, minority and disabled people to vote.

Minority and civil rights groups who banded together to oppose the law said it was among the most restrictive in the nation.

Some 600,000 people in Texas lack state-issued IDs, according to the U.S. Justice Department — which rejected Texas’ law as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Nationwide, the NAACP says 25% of African-Americans and 16% of Latinos of voting age lack a current government-issued photo ID.

Saturday’s decision doesn’t speak to the constitutionality of the law — only whether it can be enforced in this fall’s election. Continued legal challenges are a certainty, Ifill said.

While the court’s majority didn’t offer any explanation for the ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a nearly seven-page dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Ginsburg said the costs associated with the law — obtaining identity cards and the documents needed to get them — aren’t as insignificant as backers claim, and argued they harken back to the use of the poll tax in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a method of preventing blacks from voting.

“The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters,” Ginsburg wrote.

The first day of early voting in Texas is Monday. Voters will choose a new governor to replace outgoing Gov. Rick Perry, new lieutenant governor, and new attorney general in addition to voting on one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats and several House districts.

 

America’s disgrace

 

Stand Your Ground to Vote

 

Get No Respect! President Obama’s Credit Card Denied

AmEx’s Exclusive Black Card… Apparently “Leave home without it”

President Obama’s credit card got rejected last month. Here’s what happened next.

Presidents, they’re just like us — their credit cards get declined.

President Obama’s credit card was rejected last month at a restaurant in New York.

“I went to a restaurant up in New York when I was — during the U.N. General Assembly, and my credit card was rejected,” Obama said Friday while signing an executive order to protect consumers from identity theft. “It turned out I guess I don’t use it enough. They were — they thought there was some fraud going on. Fortunately, Michelle had hers.”

And, yes, Obama had to defend himself.

“I was trying to explain to the waitress, you know, I really think that I’ve been paying my bills,” Obama said. “Even I’m affected by this.”

Obama has been concerned about the state of his credit before. In Austin in July, he ordered more than $300 worth of barbecue and realized he didn’t have enough cash. So he pulled out his credit card but asked trip director Marvin Nicholson if it was good before handing it over to the cashier. Nicholson assured Obama that the card – photos show it as a black JP Morgan card – would work, and apparently it did.

Despite this, when Obama went to a boutique grocery store in Minneapolis in June he paid for $82.55 in groceries with cash. At the time, he said he only carried cash and his driver’s license in his wallet.

Cash is king. I imagine there is a bit of a reshuffle going on at JP Morgan who issued the President the black VISA (not AMEX) Card, which looks like this –

And if you have to ask…No, you can’t afford it.

Would seem that if these guys were on top of their game, and doing what they should be doing for this level of customer – they would figure out a way to know it is actually THE President using the card…

 

Jordan Davis’ Murderer Sentenced to Life Without Parole

At last!

 

Michael Dunn sentenced to life without parole for killing of Florida teenager

The man convicted of shooting dead a Florida teenager in a dispute over loud rap music has been given the maximum possible sentence of life in prison without parole plus 90 years.

Michael Dunn’s sentence was handed down after Lucia McBath, mother of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, broke down in the courtroom on Friday, telling her son’s killer through tears that she forgave him.

Dunn, who was convicted of murder earlier this month, sat impassively as McBath spoke of the devastation she felt at losing her only child in the November 2012 shooting at a Jacksonville gas station.

“For years to come I will be forced to celebrate my son’s birthday without his presence. As I quietly watch my friends’ boys grow into young men, I will forever be reminded of what might’ve been for my Jordan,” she said.

“I choose to forgive you Mr Dunn for taking my son’s life. I choose to release the seeds of bitterness and anger and honour my son’s love. I choose to walk in the freedom of knowing God’s justice has been served. I pray that God has mercy on your soul.”

Judge Russell Healey sentenced software engineer Dunn, 47, to maximum prison terms on all counts: life without parole for the first-degree murder of Davis, three consecutive 30-year sentences for the attempted second-degree murder of the teenager’s friends, who were in the car with him, and an additional 15 years for shooting into a moving vehicle.

“Mr Dunn, your life is effectively over,” Healey said. “This tragedy should and could have been prevented.”

 

Senegal is Free of Ebola

The West African country of Senegal has managed to do something the US hasn’t despite all our vaunted medical facilities, science, and training…

Clear their country of Ebola.

Of course they are probably far to intelligent to have Faux News type conservatwits whimpering and wailing to the rafters getting in the way of the people who could contain the disease.

A view of the Capital City – Dakar

Senegal is free from Ebola, WHO says

The West African nation of Senegal is free of Ebola, the World Health Organization declared Friday, congratulating the country on the diligence that enabled it to repel the threat.

Senegal had only one case, a man who had entered the country by road from Guinea, where he’d had direct contact with an Ebola patient.

The government’s response included identifying and monitoring 74 close contacts made by the man for signs of infection.

It also introduced prompt testing of all suspected cases, increased surveillance at entry points to Senegal and nationwide public awareness campaigns, the WHO statement said.

The patient recovered from Ebola and tested negative for the virus on September 5, the statement said. He’s since returned to Guinea.

Since then, 42 days have passed — double the maximum known incubation period for the virus — without another case, allowing Senegal to be declared free of Ebola.

When the case was first detected, WHO treated it as a public health emergency it said, sending a team of epidemiologists to help local health officials and international partners such as Doctors Without Borders manage the situation.

“The most important lesson for the world at large is this: An immediate, broad-based, and well-coordinated response can stop the Ebola virus, carried into a country in an infected traveler, dead in its tracks,” WHO said.

WHO sounded a note of caution, however, given that Senegal shares a border with Guinea, a hotspot for the disease along with Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“While the outbreak is now officially over, Senegal’s geographical position makes the country vulnerable to additional imported cases of Ebola virus disease,” it said.

Wrestling is the National Sport of Senegal

 

Being Gullah or Geechee, Once Looked Down On, Now a Treasured Heritage

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor links historic African-American communities in four southern coastal states.

Emory Campbell remembers growing up Gullah on Hilton Head Island, before the golf courses and the resorts. He remembers hunting in the forests and roaming free in the marshes. He remembers an island where white people were a rarity and his family was part of a close-knit community of African-American farmers and fishers, of teachers and preachers. He remembers the curse and blessing found in the island’s isolation, of having to take a ferry to get to the outside world.

And he remembers the year it all changed: 1956, when the first bridge opened and the developers poured in. Campbell was 15. Today, the cemetery where his ancestors are buried is corralled by vacation homes set back from a fairway at the Harbour Town Golf Links. To visit, he needs to get waved through at a guardhouse.

“This part of the South used to be too hot for anybody to care about before mosquito control, before bridges and air conditioning,” said Campbell. “We were the ones that endured, and ironically, it is us who is now suffering.”

The Gullahs or Geechees are descendants of slaves who lived and still live on the coastal islands and lowcountry along the coast of the southeastern United States, from the St. John’s River in Florida to the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. (Gullah tends to be the preferred name in North and South Carolina, Geechee in Georgia and Florida.) Their communities dot the 400-mile strip, and they are slowly disappearing, casualties of progress and our love affair with coastal living.

In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the Gullah/Geechee Coast on its list of most threatened places. “Unless something is done to halt the destruction,” the trust said, “Gullah/Geechee culture will be relegated to museums and history books, and our nation’s unique cultural mosaic will lose one of its richest and most colorful pieces.” (Read “Lowcountry Legacy” in the November issue of National Geographic magazine.)

Drayton Plantation Slaves (Former?) c.1865

 

Bulletproof Vests for Black Children

Forget the PS-4 – Get the kid something which, quite literally may save his life this Christmas!

 

‘Bulletproof Vest For Boys’: Florida Billboards Put A Twist On Police Brutality

An activist group aiming to organize opposition to killings by police and armed vigilantes has launched satirical ads depicting a new line of bulletproof vests for boys of color.

Mocking an advertisement for a clothing line, a billboard by Dream Defenders in Tallahassee, Fla. depicted a sale event with a young black boy modeling body armor, WCTV reported.

The billboard, along with a video featuring the same theme, was part of the group’s “Vest or Vote” campaign. The ads urged pressure on police departments after the high-profile killings of Michael Brown by a police officer in Missouri and Trayvon Martin by an armed vigilante in Florida.

The campaign doesn’t appear to be advocating for or against any specific ballot measure but is more broadly about voting and voter registration.

“No one wants to live in a world where bulletproof vests are the norm,” read a description on the group’s website. “Vote on November 4th (and earlier, in Florida and most states), and let’s together take a stand on laws, like Stand Your Ground, that create fear and insecurity in our communities.”

Now BTx3 persoanlly has a different approach…

No Picture ID? Vote…Or Stand Your Ground

 

A Little Bit of Justice – Judge Overturns Marissa Alexander Conviction And 20 Year Sentence

 

Under the category “Special Laws for certain people”…

Marissa Alexander at sentencing

JUSTICE: COURT FINALLY OVERTURNS MARISSA ALEXANDER’S 20 YEAR SENTENCE

A Florida woman who claimed to be a victim of abuse was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for allegedly firing a warning shot during an argument with her husband was granted a new trial.

The appellate court ruling erased a decision by a jury that took just 12 minutes to convict Marissa Alexander, a mother of three, of aggravated assault.

The conviction of Alexander, who is black, sparked outrage and cries of a racial double standard in light of the exoneration of George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, for the death of Trayvon Martin, who was black. In particular, outrage aired on social media and among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Alexander unsuccessfully tried to invoke Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law as the same prosecutors who unsuccessfully worked to put Zimmerman behind bars told the court that she did not act in self-defense.

In granting the new trial, Judge James Daniel also seemed unmoved by the Stand Your Ground defense.

“We reject her contention that the trial court erred in declining to grant her immunity from prosecution under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, but we remand for a new trial because the jury instructions on self-defense were erroneous,” wrote Daniel.

Alexander testified that, on Aug. 1, 2010, her then-husband, Rico Gray Sr., questioned her fidelity and the paternity of her 1-week-old child.

She claimed that he broke through a bathroom door that she had locked and grabbed her by the neck. She said she tried to push past him but he shoved her into the door, sparking a struggle that felt like an “eternity.”

Afterwards, she claimed that she ran to the garage and tried to leave but was unable to open the garage door, so she retrieved a gun, which she legally owned.

Once inside, she claimed, her husband saw the gun and charged at her “in a rage” saying, “Bitch, I’ll kill you.” She said she raised the gun and fired a warning shot into the air because it was the “lesser of two evils.” The jury rejected the self-defense claim and Alexander was sentenced under the state’s 10-20-life law, sparking outrage over how self-defense laws are applied in the state.

A Florida appellate court ruled that jury instructions, which unfairly made Alexander prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that she was acting in self-defense, were wrong — and that there were other incorrect instructions that self-defense only applied if the victim suffered an injury, which Gray had not.

The Lynching of Laura Nelson. The Old Jim Crow…Just Like the New Jim Crow

 

Ebola And Media Hysteria

About once every year or two, somebody on Faux News says something intelligent. Shep Smith seems to be one of the more frequent commentators over there who actually speaks to reality, instead of fear mongering to the right. The most accurate, intelligent thing said on Faux News about the Ebola scare so far…

 

How Conservatism is Going to Kill You

 

 

If you watched the news during the Bushit Administration as conservatives got rid of “regulation” by allowing food producers to “self inspect” instead of being under the watchful eye of “Gub’ment Authority”, you would have caught the result of that in hundreds of thousands of Americans being sickened or killed by tainted food products including the emergency recall of millions of pounds of meat for salmonella poisoning. Yet another bad conservative idea resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

Former Energy Department science chief Raymond Orbach (under Bush) said the bill’s cuts in funding for research “would effectively end America’s legendary status as the leader of the worldwide scientific community, putting the United States at a distinct disadvantage with other nations in the global marketplace.” … The House passed the Republican-backed cuts on February 19 in what was seen as a victory for Tea Party conservatives elected in November who advocate drastic reductions in government spending…Proposed cuts in health research also drew criticism — 5.2 percent in the budget of the National Institutes of Health for the next seven months, and 21 percent for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the same period.

Thanks to Conservatives – Coming to a City Near You?

Now it is time to pay the Piper for conservatwit stupidity, not only in the likely Ebola epidemic – but failing, once again to protect the country from a pathogen which would make a deadly bio-terrorist weapon. Nobody on the Hill has the courage to ask the question – What if ISIS or one of the radical terrorist groups used this as a weapon?

Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts: NIH Director

As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country’s top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has “slowed down” research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

It’s not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola “were on a slower track than would’ve been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory.”

“We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference,” he said.

Speaking from NIH’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, the typically upbeat Collins was somber when discussing efforts to control the Ebola epidemic. His days are now spent almost exclusively on the disease. But even after months of painstaking work, a breakthrough doesn’t seem on the immediate horizon.

Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH’s purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency’s budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion — barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation. The situation is even more pronounced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subdivision of NIH, where the budget has fallen from $4.30 billion in FY 2004 to $4.25 billion in FY 2013. (Story continues here.)

Thanks Tea Baggers!

 

Not Just Cops And Bullets…Hiring Discrimination in High-Tech

BTx3 has been in the High-Tech Industry for over 40 years. Seen some bad, and some good in that time…

This one doesn’t really surprise me though.

This one is another “dividend” from Prop 209’s resegregation of California Universities. These companies are hiring most of their staff from West Coast Universities. which means – there are few, if any black or Hispanic graduates in the field.

Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired

Top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them, a USA TODAYanalysis shows.

Technology companies blame the pool of job applicants for the severe shortage of blacks and Hispanics in Silicon Valley.

But these findings show that claim “does not hold water,” said Darrick Hamilton, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School in New York.

“What do dominant groups say? ‘We tried, we searched but there was nobody qualified.’ If you look at the empirical evidence, that is just not the case,” he said.

As technology becomes a major engine of economic growth in the U.S. economy, tech companies are under growing pressure to diversify their workforces, which are predominantly white, Asian and male. Leaving African Americans and Hispanics out of that growth increases the divide between haves and have-nots. And the technology industry risks losing touch with the diverse nation — and world — that forms its customer base.

On average, just 2% of technology workers at seven Silicon Valley companies that have released staffing numbers are black; 3% are Hispanic.

But last year, 4.5% of all new recipients of bachelor’s degrees in computer science or computer engineering from prestigious research universities were African American, and 6.5% were Hispanic, according to data from the Computing Research Association.

The USA TODAY analysis was based on the association’s annual Taulbee Survey, which includes 179 U.S. and Canadian universities that offer doctorates in computer science and computer engineering.

“They’re reporting 2% and 3%, and we’re looking at graduation numbers (for African Americans and Hispanics) that are maybe twice that,” said Stuart Zweben, professor of computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

“Why are they not getting more of a share of at least the doctoral-granting institutions?” said Zweben, who co-authored the 2013 Taulbee Survey report.

An even larger gulf emerges between Silicon Valley and graduates of all U.S. colleges and universities. A survey by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that blacks and Hispanics each made up about 9% of all 2012 computer science graduates.

Nationally, blacks make up 12% of the U.S. workforce and Hispanics 16%.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Yahoo declined to comment on the disparity between graduation rates and their hiring rates.

LinkedIn issued a statement that it was working with organizations to “address the need for greater diversity to help LinkedIn and the tech industry as a whole.”

Google said on its diversity blog in May that it has “been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science.”

In his blog post on diversity, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook cited improving education as “one of the best ways in which Apple can have a meaningful impact on society. We recently pledged $100 million to President Obama’s ConnectED initiative to bring cutting-edge technologies to economically disadvantaged schools.”

All of the companies have insisted they are hiring all of the qualified black and Hispanic tech workers they can find.

In an interview earlier this year, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the key to getting more women and minorities into the technology field had to start with improvements to education…

“We are not going to fix the numbers for under-representation in technology or any industry until we fix our education system,” she said.

Others say tech giants simply don’t see the programmers right in front of them.

Janice Cuny directs the Computer Education program at the National Science Foundation. She says black and Hispanic computer science graduates are invisible to these companies.

“People used to say that there were no women in major orchestras because women didn’t like classical music. Then in the 1970s they changed the way people auditioned so it was blind, the listeners couldn’t see the players auditioning. Now the numbers are much more representative,” she said.

The same thing happens in the tech world, said Cuny. “There are these subtle biases that make you think that some person is not what you’re looking for, even when they are.”

One of the key problems: There are elite computer science departments that graduate larger numbers of African-American and Hispanic students, but they are not the ones where leading companies recruit employees. Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA and MIT are among the most popular for recruiting by tech companies, according to research by Wired magazine.

“That is the major disconnect,” said Juan Gilbert, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“The premise that if you want diversity, you have to sacrifice quality, is false,” he said. His department currently has 25 African-American Ph.D. candidates. Rice University in Houston has a large number of Hispanic students.

“These are very strong programs, top-ranked places that have excellent reputations,” he said. “Intel has been hiring from my lab, and they say our students hit it out of the ballpark.”

Justin Edmund says he was fortunate to attend Carnegie Mellon. Today he’s the seventh employee at Pinterest and one of the top designers at the San Francisco start-up valued at $5 billion.

He’s also one of the few African Americans in his company.

“There’s a lot of things that can be done to fix the problem, but a lot of them are things that Silicon Valley and technology companies don’t do,” Edmund said. “If you go to the same prestigious universities every single time and every single year to recruit people … then you are going to get the same people over and over again.”

 

Morgan Freeman – The Future of Green

 

Cornel West…And President Obama

Cornel West certainly has a problem with President Obama – and this isn’t the first time it has come out. The last time his criticisms were so ill formed and logic so convoluted he got his head handed to him.

Well…Maybe Dr West has learned something, although it must have been a tremendous blow to his over-sized ego to do so.

This is actually a pretty reasonable critique of Obama’s Presidency sans a few things I will discuss below.

Cornel West’s 8 Most Eye-Opening Critiques of Barack Obama’s Presidency

Very few progressive voices articulate more vitriol and uncompromising disdain for President Barack Obama than Cornel West. During Obama’s six years in the White House, West has critiqued every layer of the president’s policies, from his use of drones in the Middle East to what he feels is the president’s cozy relationship with Wall Street.

In 2011, West wrote in the New York Times that Obama has fallen short of epitomizing Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream.

“The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy,” he wrote. “Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.”

West’s commentary is a breath of fresh air for some who feel they’d be blacklisted in liberal circles for criticizing the president, while others see his remarks as coming from a space of personal bitterness. Regardless of where you stand on West’s opinions, his remarks are always worthy of further inspection.  In an excerpt from his new bookBlack Prophetic Fire, West outlines why he believes Obama has turned his back on the black philosophical traditions that put him in the White House. Here are eight of the most insightful quotes.

1. African Americans Have Done Worse Under Obama

“The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand black prophetic tradition is weak and feeble. Obama’s black face of the American empire has made it more difficult for black courageous and radical voices to bring critique to bear on the U.S. empire. On the empirical or lived level of black experience, black people have suffered more in this age than in the recent past. Empirical indices of infant mortality rates, mass incarceration rates, mass unemployment and dramatic declines in household wealth reveal this sad reality.”

2. Leadership In The African-American Community Has Weakened

“First, there is the shift of black leadership from the voices of social movements to those of elected officials in the mainstream political system. This shift produces voices that are rarely if ever critical of this system. How could we expect the black caretakers and gatekeepers of the system to be critical of it?”

3. Upward Mobility Is The Worst In The Modern World

“Second, this neoliberal shift produces a culture of raw ambition and instant success that is seductive to most potential leaders and intellectuals, thereby incorporating them into the neoliberal regime. This culture of superficial spectacle and hyper-visible celebrities highlights the legitimacy of an unjust system that prides itself on upward mobility of the downtrodden. Yet, the truth is that we live in a country that has the least upward mobility of any other modern nation!”

4. Leaders Who Challenge the Statue Quo Are Silenced

“Third, the U.S. neoliberal regime contains a vicious repressive apparatus that targets those strong and sacrificial leaders, activists, and prophetic intellectuals who are easily discredited, delegitimated, or even assassinated, including through character assassination. Character assassination becomes systemic and chronic, and it is preferable to literal assassination because dead martyrs tend to command the attention of the sleepwalking masses and thereby elevate the threat to the status quo.”

5. Mass Media Ignores Voices That Take on Issues Such as Use of Drones and War Crimes

“The central role of mass media, especially a corporate media beholden to the U.S. neoliberal regime, is to keep public discourse narrow and deodorized. By ‘narrow’ I mean confining the conversation to conservative Republican and neoliberal Democrats who shut out prophetic voices or radical visions. This fundamental power to define the political terrain and categories attempts to render prophetic voices invisible. The discourse is deodorized because the issues that prophetic voices highlight, such as mass incarceration, wealth inequality, and war crimes such as imperial drones murdering innocent people, are ignored.”

6. Obama Doesn’t Really Care About Protecting Working People

“The state of black America in the age of Obama has been one of desperation, confusion, and capitulation. The desperation is rooted in the escalating suffering on every front. The confusion arises from a conflation of symbol and substance. The capitulation rests on an obsessive need to protect the first black president against all forms of criticism. Black desperation is part of a broader desperation among poor and working people during the age of Obama. The bailout of Wall Street by the Obama administration, rather than the bailout of homeowners, hurt millions of working people.”

7. First Lady Michelle Obama Legitimizes Obama’s “Symbolic Status”

“Needless to say, the presence of his brilliant and charismatic wife, Michelle—a descendent of enslaved and Jim-Crowed people, unlike himself—even more deeply legitimizes his symbolic status, a status that easily substitutes for substantial achievement.”

8. To Be Successful and Black, One Must Turn His Back on the Poor

“To be a highly successful black professional or politician is too often to be well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference toward poor people, including black poor people. The black prophetic tradition is fundamentally committed to the priority of poor and working people, thus pitting it against the neoliberal regime, capitalist system, and imperial policies of the U.S. government.”

Toward the end of the book, West writes how modern black leadership has abandoned the traditions that have helped position it and President Obama. “What does it profit a people for a symbolic figure to gain presidential power if we turn our backs from the suffering of poor and working people, and thereby lose our souls?” he writes. “The black prophetic tradition has tried to redeem the soul of our fragile democratic experiment. Is it redeemable?”

With all that said, I have to disagree with West in two areas. The first is his concept of “Prophetic” leaders. The time is long past for that. The Black Community is no longer powerless under the boot heel of Jim Crow, and group organizations like Color of Change, which find and their strategy and ideas from essentially crowd funding the ideas of the group are far more effective than the Big Man on the podium Dr West so desperately seeks to be. No Big Man – the entire strategy of suppression through attacking an individual become naught.

Second is his use of the term neo-liberal, and assigning it’s anchor to one political group. We are in the post Raygun era of neo-liberal destruction of the country’s basic beliefs and foundations (including the destruction of the Middle Class) – but that neo-liberalism and destruction isn’t being wrought by one party – both are guilty.

And picking on Michelle…

Will get you Pimp Slapped.

I’m putting this one under Giant Negroes.

 

St Louis Baseball Fans and Mike Brown Protestors

Let you make your own mind up about this one –