New York (hopefully) to Repeal (some) Draconian Drug Laws

New York to repeal many of its current Drug Laws, including Mandatory Minimums for "lower level drug felons"
NYT article here


though in press release today with the subtitle, "devil in the details," the Drug Policy Alliance warns advocates that no final deal has yet been reached:
"This agreement is a good sign that progress is being made to enact real reform, but it is not final, and meaningful reform will be determined by the details,” said Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance. “The final deal must include the core components of meaningful reform: restoration of judicial discretion in drug cases including 2nd time offenses, sentencing reform, expansion of community drug treatment and alternatives to incarceration, and retroactive sentencing relief for those serving unjust, long sentences for low-level offenses.”



NYT article notes, among other things, that
- though the cost of added programs, like drug courts and drug addiction treatment programs, will be high (100s of millions), "in the long run, the changes are expected to save money because sending offenders to treatment is less expensive than spending $45,000 a year to keep them confined."
-some, but not all currently incarcerated for crimes that fall under the new policy would be eligible to apply to have their sentences commuted
-"lawmakers said they were on track to wipe out the central elements of laws that have been criticized for decades as overly punitive and disproportionately harmful to minorities."
-under new legislation, judges would be able to send "all but the most serious" offenders to treatment

the article ends,
“New York could actually become a national leader,” said Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that urges relaxation of certain drug sentencing laws. “We’re going in a public health direction here. We’re making that turn, and that’s what’s significant.”

and lets hope that others follow suit:
According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums,
"On March 12, members of Congress introduced bills to repeal all drug mandatory minimums; eliminate mandatory minimums for both crack and powder cocaine, and increase federal good time."

*image from cannabisculture.com

reclaiming vast areas of our being, reclaiming grace

inspiration in the form of alexis gumbs,
whose beautiful/powerful/truthful/wonderful/colorful/painful/importantfull/lovefull
presence on the internet i can't help but keep accidentally discovering more of...
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
to you alexis gumbs AND to all those who make you able to do what you do

discovered most recently is the no less awesome free online course, "to be a problem" on radical literature making. this sub-site of gumbs' words/ways i found while looking for sylvia wynter essays online. one of sylvia wynter's pieces is on the Problem syllabus, and participants posted their responses in their own blogs, which i am no less excited about reading. oh, when the world feels small in all the right ways/ huge at the same time, but also in all the right ways!

http://tobeaproblem.wordpress.com/

course description from fall 2007:

• To Be A Problem: An Online Course in Radical Literature Making

  Welcome! This is the online home of a course entitled To Be A Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production. As Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Fred Moten teach us, all knowledge belongs to the people. This is an effort to steal the force out of mechanisms through which the private University privileges itself as a site of "knowledge production". Since we all know that learning happens everywhere this FREE online version of a course that will be taught this fall at Duke University invites you to participate in an interactive process of reading and creating. Look for bi-weekly posts on the materials listed and weekly writing assignments. Please read and write along with us...

one of the participants, Serena Sebring writes on their blog, problematicserenity.wordpress.com:

Sylvia Wynter for today, 14Sep07

“THE SALVAGING OF OURSELVES, THE RECLAMATION OF VAST AREAS OF OUR BEING, IS DIALECTICALLY RELATED TO THE DESTRUCTION OF THOSE CONDITIONS WHICH BLOCK THE FREE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUMAN POTENTIALITIES OF THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLES OF THE THIRD WORLD” (83)

- Sylvia Wynter alcheringa/ethnopoetics/two/2/1976

"I am still working through this week’s readings and Wynter has a lot of powerful things to say, but I definitely heard that truth today. I think that yes, this is the work - in so many ways. Because reclaiming vast areas of our being means eventually reclaiming the (birth)right of self-determination, reclaiming the (birth)right of community, and reclaiming the justice and peace which we surely must have been meant to have since the longing for them moves us so deeply.

And, I think that in addition to the vastness beyond our own selves, this must mean reclaiming the vastness that is within us as well. Reclaiming our faith, our trust, our love, our generosity and grace from a social order that cannot make sense of them within capitalist logic. Reclaiming our rage full of power, hope, and sorrow for what should have been from an order that perceives only cost, destruction, and inconvenience when we cry for justice.

Reclaiming our identities and sexualities and erotic power and our friendships and loves and partnerships and also those relationships that our language eclipses (so much of what ties us together is unspeakable, for instance how do I even name my relationship to the other people “in” this “class” - but also our partners in open relationships, our communities that are more like family, or our shared destiny with and accountability to that little 6 year old girl whose body was found raped and hung in her garage in Texas this week) from a social order that chops us into legible bits. And reclaiming our children as a hope and promise of tomorrows from a social order that knows only today and has no vision beyond what our children cost or signify about the proper configuration of families (which of course corresponds to maintenance of the way things are rather than future as possibility). And absolutely it means reclaiming our priceless bonds to mothers and grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers and ancestors from a social order that also sees people as commodities of relative worth, and recognizes neither future in wisdom nor value in history.

And it means we will have to do this ahead of time, before reclaiming is legible as life-giving and while it can only be read as theft. We will have to steal knowledge, time, and dreams from this machine. We will have to do it while still bound to the market relations on which our survival depends. We will have to reclaim the vastness of ourselves in order to claim a future worth hoping for. I believe this is possible."

thank you, sylvia wynter, alexis gumbs, and sebrena sebring, for helping ME to keep believing in the same.

"conspicuous unfairness" randall robinson on Obama administration and deportation of 30,000 Haitians

Citing the ugly aftermath of Summer and Fall 2008 hurricanes, many are pleading the Obama administration to grant Temporary Protective Status to the 30,000 Haitians now slated for imminent deportation.


Democracy Now March 20, 2009: Randall Robinson on immigration policy, the 5th anniversary of the 2nd coup against Aristide in Haiti, and the Obama Administration's position on the UN Conference against racism

another article which highlights the disparity in immigration policy between Haiti/Cuba

and one more: Immigrant Rights: Yes We Must--HUNDREDS (INCLUDING WYCLEF) RALLY TO PROTEST PLANNED DEPORTATION OF 30,000 HAITIANS

oh disney.. what have you done?

oh my gosh oh my gosh read this. click, click away.

synopsis of the story from wkipedia:

The film, which began production under the working title The Frog Princess, will be an American fairy tale, Broadway-style musical set in the French Quarter of New Orleans. A prince named Naveen from the land of Maldonia [5], is transformed into a frog by the evil scheming voodoo magician Dr. Facilier. The frog prince asks a waitress named Tiana to break the spell by kissing him. However, the kiss doesn't break the spell but rather makes Tiana a frog, as well. Together the two of them must reach the good voodoo priestess of the Bayou, Mama Odie, while befriending a trumpet playing alligator and a hopelessly romantic firefly along the way. The film is set to be released on December 11, 2009.

a few things of note:

-interracial couples being used to cover a collective inability to respect men of color as heroes at all.
-the fire fly's accent?! (actor Jim Cummings will be doing the voice for the firefly)
-new orleans? talk about a loaded history
-disney, oh my gosh disney

this is most inarticulate I've felt in some time.

maybe ill start making a best of and put the slavery/jackson 5 theme park on the list and this can be second.

we are (thankfully) all we have

Just finished reading eat, pray, love which I found at points to be hilarious, inspiring, very lame and a little appropriative (i will explain more how when I can finally explain it to myself) but if this says anything I finished the book on the plane on my way home from a trip and after I closed it I realized i was crying, a lot. It ended with a passage that embodies the way that I think about my relationships with people and how I ideally want to always move through the world. She talked about how we are all we have. I really think we are all we have ( and that's a lot )

Liz Gilbert writes, "In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices."

word liz.

photo album-induced nostalgia for a time before i was born

i am sitting in my mother's bed in philadelphia, looking at old photo albums. in a thick dark red burgundy one, not the one labeled "alan and robyn 1983" but another one, I find a charmingly sweet and funny narration of my parents' wedding, scrawled in my mother's handwriting, accompanying the photos.

"people already waiting; robyn hasn't changed yet."
"everyone waits in the hot sun while robyn scribbles down their vows."

two long paragraphs about marriage, aka "a public statement of our commitment to each other" as a way to "better preserve our sense of equality," a "time in our lives where we feel it is appropriate to create a refuge from the turmoil around us...indeed, from this center we will have even more energy to reach out."

a description of chupah as symbolic of community...
AND THEN
their vows.
my mother's starts off with "you give me an image of a world to strive for."
my father's ends with,
"i want to marry you because i believe that together we can raise children who will be better prepared to create peace."

my parents divorced years ago, and i've never had quite such a perspective on their marriage, though i have been musing for awhile now, when i think about their now seemingly unlikely union, on how successfully they imparted my sisters and me with their values.

on another note, in a photo of them in their new house, the busy fruit wallpaper of the living room is interrupted by a mustard-colored poster which reads in block letters, 'ARTISTS CALL AGAINST U.S. INTERVENTION IN CENTRAL AMERICA.'

in light of this poster, the personalities and politics of my parents in their twenties-- newly articulated by my discovery of the narration of their wedding, and a first-hand experience of my own politics, personality, and imaginations of my own love and/or something like marriage, let me say: how some things don't change.

thoughts from spring break '09: race discourse

back from my last ever undergraduate spring break trip! was visiting my younger sister z, who is currently living in san juan, puerto rico.
thinking about: conceptions/constructions of RACE (who knew?) in places other than the continental united states of a...
i think that puerto rico would be an interesting case study in professor eudell's "race discourse in the americas" syllabus, which included non-US societies of cuba, the dominican republic, and... venezuela, perhaps? though maybe the wishy-washy status of puerto rico as a freely associated commonwealth aka colony of the united states would muddy its eligibility as a non-US example. if you ask me, it'd just make it that much more interesting/complex... (though really, what's not complex?) looking at a semi-shared, semi-not shared cultural/political history with the continental USA.
the/a point being: our constructions of race as a society inform how our society functions in relation to people's exterior skin tones, despite the fact that the amount of our genetic makeup as humans which accounts for said skin tones is surprisingly and astonishingly TINY--and yet, not surprisingly, because those societal ideas of race are based off of so many non-truths (that some people are inferior to others, or less human, based on thier skin tones), different societies have different ideas of race... and maybe there's hope in that.

Rihanna

Because of self-protection and because often times such information is not available in order to protect and justify the violent actions of men I do not often read things as violent and explicit as this.

This article explains in REALLY PAINFUL detail all of the available information that investigators have ascertained as to the beating of Rihanna by her boyfriend Chris Brown. I am trying to hold them both in the light and really hoping we encourage our loved ones in violence situations to seek support in shifting out of them.

heaven

im not really into new york but im so into this chorus and the way it sounds

If it was my last day on earth
I'd treat it like my first
go out the way I came in
so innocent so pure with no thoughts of insecurity
Live life to the fullest be what I wanna be
Last day on earth I tell my girl don't cry I'm with my daddy in paradise
Where the blind can see, the mute can talk, the crippled can walk
but for now Heaven's in New York
Oh oh oh oh oh


video

I received news of this petition about the deportion of 30,000 Haitians via a Philly activist listserv. the petition comes from the International Action Center.
i still have mixed feelings about petitions...i tend to assume they are not useful because signing my name electronically seems like it couldn't possibly counter the world's forces of oppression--in this case the power, racism, and imperialism of the U.S. state-- and yet petitions keep circulating, and i have as little proof that they aren't effective as that they are.

update: i signed the petition and within seconds received emails from the Los Angeles Times and BBC News thanking me for my letters... that would be "members of the media", i guess, which the petition DOES say it's being sent to...





(INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER: INFORMATION, ACTIVISM & RESISTANCE TO U.S. MILITARISM, WAR & CORPORATE GREEN, LINKING WITH STRUGGLES AGAINST RACISM AND OPPRESSION WITHIN THE UNITED STATES)

Stop Deportation of 30,000 Haitians!

Tell President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, U.N. Secretary-General Ban, Caribbean Economic Community Chair Barrow, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, ICE director John P. Torres, Congress and members of the media: Stop the Deportation of 30,000 Haitians!

Please tell Homeland Security and ICE to STOP THE DEPORTATION OF 30,000 HAITIANS!
YOUR EMERGENCY ACTION IS NEEDED NOW!

Sign the Petition today at http://www.iacenter.org/haiti/haitideportationpetition

---

Petition

To: Janet Napolitano, Secretary, Homeland Security; Esther Olavarria, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy;
cc: President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Congressional leaders, and members of the media

Dear Janet Napolitano, Secretary, Homeland Security and Esther Olavarria, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Homeland Security:

The Department of Homeland Security has singled out 30,000 Haitians living in this country to be deported to the famine, disease and homelessness currently raging in Haiti.

>From September to December last year, Haitians had "temporary protected status" which allowed them to stay because four hurricanes had washed houses, bridges, roads, crops and the land on which they were growing away.

Now, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson says the 10,000 UN peace keepers currently occupying the country guarantee everybody's safety.

A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Miami replied, "Deportations at this time are simply inhumane, sending people to conditions of famine and disease."

The temporary protected status must be restored for these 30,000 Haitians and they must be released from detention and house arrest immediately.

Haiti's National Coordination of Food Supply (CNSA) estimates 3 million Haitians out of 8 million cronically eat less than they need to maintain themselves.

People not only need food, they also need homes. The bishop of Cap Haitian says that over 10,000 buildings, which sheltered 165,337 families in his diocese, have been destroyed.

In Gonaïves, which used to be Haiti's second largest city, every single building was damaged. Over 500 people died there and over a thousand in all of Haiti.

The Haitian government has refused to issue travel documents because it cannot handle a massive influx of 30,000 people when its economy is in complete shambles. In response, ICE is threatening to keep Haitians under indefinite detention.

Almost all the people that ICE targets are people of color but many Haitian activists feel that they have been singled out because they resist the wishes of the United States.

For example, they elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president in 1990 over the U.S. favorite. After a U.S.-backed coup in September 30, 1991, he came back and in 2000 was elected president with 92% of the vote. Another U.S. organized coup-kidnapping sent him into exile in 2004.

Many other citizens of countries like Nicaragua and Honduras living in the U.S. have received TPS after natural disasters. Haitians should be released from detention and granted the same relief.

Sincerely,

Sign the Petition today at http://www.iacenter.org/haiti/haitideportationpetition

Shooting in Lehore

There was an attack on Sri Lankan Cricketers in Pakistan that resulted in the death of 7 people and many more being injured. I know so little about Sri Lanka and feel ignorant as to how Pakistan India and Sri Lanka have come to be intertwined in this cycle of violence but I am keenly aware that this has been mounting and is leading down a path that is only getting more and more difficult to unpack. The bbc article about the shooting speaks to the attacks as having similarities to the attacks in Mumbai just a few months ago. Please hold the leaders of these counties and the mindset that sees this type of action as helping to reach goals of safety, in the light.

eternal principles of right

james weldon johnson writes, in the autobiography of an ex-colored man, 1912

"the greatest interest of the audience was centered on Booker T. Washington, and not because he so much surpassed the others in eloquence, but because of what he represented with so much earnestness and faith. And it is this that all of that small but gallant band of colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race have behind them. Even those who oppose them know that these men have the eternal principles of right on their side, and they will be victors even though they should go down in defeat."

this quote reminds me of the letter written by activists in Austin in response to learning that a co-organizer was a government informant. they referenced "the trust and openness that give our communities cohesion and power."

i keep going back to this last sentiment. it speaks worlds to me, reminding me that as impossible as these struggles may seem because we are up against power and money ( and i can only imagine how they seem for those with less social/economic status than i have been unjustly afforded!), our very strength is in our refusal to accept society's definitions of what is important (individual over the collective, which leads us not to be open and not to trust one another), and who is more human/deserving/etc.

a part of me reacts to the idea that one side is right. and yet, as sociology professor rob rosenthal reminded me last week, all activism is by definition arrogant*, we believe ourselves to be right, to have a better idea of what justice looks like or what other reality is more desirable than the status quo. perhaps what Johnson calls 'the eternal principles of right,' that which will ultimately win out because it has to, is what i think of as (again!) humanity-- some underlying, over-arching entity of good, an essence of what we are as human beings and what we share as members of a species, that will always have more capacity to generate love than hatred.

i believe in this humanity more strongly than i believe in all else.

* partial definition of arrogant, since the word has such negative connotations: "making claims or pretensions to superior importance or right"

rest of the definition: overbearingly assuming; insolently proud

how do we find the balance between holding on to our dearest beliefs and not doing so in such a way that prevents us from keeping our eyes/ears/minds open to critique and change?

nobel prize-winning economist: "deregulation has failed"

Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, on globalization, free markets

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Stiglitz, very briefly, the whole issue of globalization—we’re in the tenth anniversary of the mass protests in Seattle, the Battle of Seattle. What about the questions raised in corporate-led globalization?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, I think two very important issues. One of them is the model that was behind much of the impetus for that globalization was a model based on free unfettered markets. And we know that model, deregulation, has failed. That was the kind of thinking that led into the problems the United States is in today.

The second point is that while we talk about free and open markets, what the United States has been doing has destroyed a level playing field and will have profound implications for the evolution of globalization going forward

full article, on the bailout, saving bankers not banks, and universal health care, at Democracy Now

advice of a congresswoman: facing foreclosure? don't leave. squat.

Amy Goodman, Wednesday, February 4, 2009

• Drug wars near and far 03.01.09

---

Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is the longest-serving Democratic congresswoman in U.S. history. Her district, stretching along the shore of Lake Erie from west of Cleveland to Toledo, faces an epidemic of home foreclosures and 11.5 percent unemployment. That heartland region, the Rust Belt, had its heart torn out by the North American Free Trade Agreement, with shuttered factories and struggling family farms. Kaptur led the fight in Congress against NAFTA. Now, she is recommending a radical foreclosure solution from the floor of the U.S. Congress: "So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don't you leave."

She criticizes the bailout's failure to protect homeowners facing foreclosure. Her advice to "squat" cleverly exploits a legal technicality within the subprime-mortgage crisis. These mortgages were made, then bundled into securities and sold and resold repeatedly, by the very Wall Street banks that are now benefiting from TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program). The banks foreclosing on families very often can't locate the actual loan note that binds the homeowner to the bad loan. "Produce the note," Kaptur recommends those facing foreclosure demands of the banks.

"[P]ossession is nine-tenths of the law," Rep. Kaptur told me. "Therefore, stay in your property. Get proper legal representation ... [if] Wall Street cannot produce the deed nor the mortgage audit trail ... you should stay in your home. It is your castle. It's more than a piece of property. ... Most people don't even think about getting representation, because they get a piece of paper from the bank, and they go, 'Oh, it's the bank,' and they become fearful, rather than saying: 'This is contract law. The mortgage is a contract. I am one party. There is another party. What are my legal rights under the law as a property owner?' "If you look at the bad paper, if you look at where there's trouble, 95 to 98 percent of the paper really has moved to five institutions: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wachovia, Citigroup and HSBC. They have this country held by the neck."

Kaptur recommends calling the local Legal Aid Society, Bar Association or 888-995-4673 for legal assistance.

The onerous duty of physically evicting people and dragging their possessions to the curb typically falls on the local sheriff. Kaptur conditions her squatting advice, saying, "If it's a sheriff's eviction, if it's reached that point, that is almost impossible." Unless the sheriff refuses to carry out the eviction, as Sheriff Warren C. Evans of Wayne County, Mich., has decided to do. Wayne County, including Detroit, has had more than 46,000 foreclosures in the past two years.

After reviewing TARP, Evans determined that home foreclosures would conflict with TARP's goal of reducing foreclosures, and that he'd be violating the law by denying foreclosed homeowners the chance at potential federal assistance. "I cannot in clear conscience allow one more family to be put out of their home until I am satisfied they have been afforded every option they are entitled to under the law to avoid foreclosure," he said.

Bruce Marks of the Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America is taking the fight to the homes of the banks' CEOs. Last October, as the TARP bailout was shaping up to benefit Wall Street and not Main Street, NACA blockaded the entrance of mortgage giant Fannie Mae until it got a meeting with executives there. Now NACA is working with Fannie Mae to restructure mortgages. Marks is organizing a nationwide, three-day "Predator's Tour," going to the CEOs' homes to demand meetings with them. He told me: "This is what we're going to do with thousands of homeowners, go to their (the CEOs') home and say: 'I want you to meet my family. I want you to see who you're foreclosing on.' ... If they're going to take our homes, we're going to go to their homes, and we're going to tell them, 'No more.' "

Before the inauguration, Larry Summers, the chair of President Obama's National Economic Council, promised congressional Democratic leaders to "implement smart, aggressive policies to reduce the number of preventable foreclosures by helping to reduce mortgage payments for economically stressed but responsible homeowners, while also reforming our bankruptcy laws and strengthening existing housing initiatives."

According to a report by RealtyTrac, "Foreclosure filings were reported on 2.3 million U.S. properties in 2008, an increase of 81 percent from 2007 and up 225 percent from 2006." As the financial crisis deepens, people facing foreclosure should take Kaptur's advice and tell their bankers, "Produce the note."

-sfgate.com

bill re: mentally ill in solitary confinement

Paterson Seeks Delay of Solitary Confinement Ban for Mentally Ill

Here in New York, a coalition of mental health, legal and prison rights advocates are opposing a move by Governor David Paterson to delay implementation of a bill that would bar holding seriously mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement. Under the bill, mentally ill prisoners would be transferred to secure treatment facilities rather than kept in twenty-four-hour solitude. Advocates for mentally disabled prisoners have argued that solitary confinement is inhumane and has driven some to suicide and declining mental health. The measure is supposed to take effect in 2011. But Governor Paterson’s new budget calls for delaying its implementation until 2014.

from Democracy Now