The Dangers of Privatization

Privatization-a new word and an old concept. There is a dangerous trend in the United States that has been afoot for the past several decades, that of privatization. Privatization, to lay out the case, is simply the effort to take public entities and institutions and put them in the hands and under the control of private interests. Highways, parks, prisons, schools, public services, healthcare- everything of public value is being sought after by certain public officials to be remitted to private interests for the benefit and use of private investment. There used to be a time in this country—and throughout much of the Western world, when the lives of the rich and comfortable and the lives of the poor were quite different. Not more than a century and a half ago the realities of American society were such that, if you wanted the services of a doctor, you paid for it, or if you wanted your children to receive any level of education, one paid for that too. As such, these services were considered privileges of the wealthy elite. There were parks that belonged to the rich and roads that belonged to the rich and police that worked on behalf of the rich. All of these things worked for the benefit, prosperity, and upkeep of a certain class of people in society.

If one was poor, to learn to read and write was a privilege. Any schooling beyond the first or second grade was considered noteworthy. The services of a doctor were something in the realm of imagination. One could really define one’s life by the parameters of the community you lived in. The average person never traveled more than three or four miles beyond their place of birth at any given point in their lives and their life’s prospects never contained more than dreams and hopes of what their local community could offer them. If you lived in the rural, you worked on the farms, if you lived in the cities, you worked in the factories. People eked out meager existences for little pay and little reward for their life’s efforts.

There is an interesting continuum that exists between the wealthy elite of not so very long ago and those interests in American society who would like to refashion our society in that model. What transpired between that time and the times we live in now was nothing short of social revolution. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, there were urgent calls for social reform and a strong push towards remaking society to extend better living conditions to those at the bottom of the economic ladder. With many middle and upper-class women such as Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger taking the lead, reforms were made to clean up the cities, to eradicate disease and poverty, and to ensure the medical, moral, and social needs of those that existed at the bottom rungs of society were taken care of. Other people, like Mother Jones, Mary Lease, and Ida B. Wells fought for better living conditions and social justice for workers, Blacks, women, and every other oppressed group in America. They and others like them fought for government intervention in the disease and decay overrunning urban America-and the founding of social work as an occupation. They fought for an eight hour work day, a living wage, public education, and the rights of workers to organize. They lived through such tragedies as the Triangle Shirt Waist massacre, the Ludlow Massacre, and the race riots that swept this nation in the summers of 1917 and 1919. They remade this society and refashioned it to broaden the horizons of every person who lived on American soil.

In this new millennium, you have such people as Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, trying to sell the public highways to private companies. You have Mike Rogers, a republican congressman from Alabama crying over the injury that healthcare reform legislation will do to insurance companies. You have a congress that sells our public airwaves, public health, and even national security to those who will pay for their reelection bids.

This current debate over healthcare is really a debate over privatization. Will the public health be guaranteed and publicly funded as apart of our social contract or will we contend with Blue Cross Blue Shield and other major corporations who are more than willing to step in? It is time that we looked at this debate in a new light. It is time that we viewed the healthcare debate as a debate over privatization. We must decide whether we will hand over our national resources to private interests and if so, at what cost. These are matters that cannot be taken lightly, but must weigh on the conscience of every soul in this country.

Happy New Year!

Labelle's "What Can I Do For You?" is my mantra from henceforth;-) Happy New Year to all!

"Films and life are like clay, waiting for us to mold it," she said. "And when you trust your own insides and that becomes achievement, it's a kind of principle that seems to me is at work with everyone. God bless that principle. God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it.
I deserve this."

-Shirley Maclaine's Oscar acceptance speech

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist thru any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatsoever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."
-Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille

1968 Academy Awards

Make Someone Happy

Barbra Streisand

Make someone happy,
Make just one someone happy.
Make just one heart the heart you sing to.
One smile that cheers you,
One face that lights when it nears you.
One gal you're everything to.

Fame, if you win it,
Comes and goes in a minute.
Where's the real stuff in life to cling to?
Love is the answer,
Someone to love is the answer.

Once you've found her,
Build your world around her.
Make someone happy.
Make just one someone happy
And you will be happy too

Chicago: Health Gap Widens Between Blacks, Whites

Health Study For Chicago: Health Gap Widens
Between Blacks, Whites
Problem is worse in Chicago than nationwide,
Sinai Urban Health Institute study says.
A new study finds a widening gulf in the health status
of blacks and whites in Chicago, even though
disparities between blacks and whites nationally
have remained static.
By Deborah L. Shelton
Chicago Tribune
December 18, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-chicago_health_gapdec18,0,628023.story

A widening gulf in the health status of blacks and
whites in Chicago comes even as disparities between the
two races nationally have remained relatively constant,
a new study has found.

The disparity is particularly jarring in five areas:
death from all causes, heart disease mortality, breast
cancer mortality, rates of tuberculosis and the
percentage of women who received no prenatal care during
the first trimester of pregnancy.

Nationally, the racial gap got worse from 1990 to 2005
for six of the 15 health indicators researchers studied.
However, in Chicago, disparities worsened for 11 of the
15 indicators, according to research by the Sinai Urban
Health Institute, published online Thursday in the
American Journal of Public Health.

Poverty, segregation and access to health care all
appear to play a role, researchers said. In Chicago
neighborhoods and medical offices, doctors and patients
see the same factors.

Dr. Charles Barron, medical director at Access Southwest
Family Health Center, said many of his patients struggle
to pay for health care.

"Access is definitely an issue, even at federally
qualified health centers such as Access Community Health
Network, which offers treatment on a sliding-scale
basis," he said.

Tonya Jackson, 39, of North Lawndale, takes seven
medications to treat heart failure. She is a patient at
Mount Sinai Hospital, which is widely known for its
initiatives to treat low-income and poor patients.

"Even with health insurance, a lot of medicines are very
expensive," she said. "When you're a single parent,
you're trying to pay rent, you have your child, and
you're trying to pay bills and buy food, so it's
difficult. A lot of people don't get the care they need
because they have to decide whether they want to eat
that day."

Dr. Niva Lubin-Johnson, an African-American physician,
has witnessed the disparities firsthand in her 20-year
solo practice in Chatham.

"Based on what I see," she said, "we have a greater
disease burden, and part of that comes from lifestyle,
part of it comes from income, part of it comes from
health literacy and people not understanding what they
need to do to live a healthy lifestyle."

An author of the study, institute director Steve
Whitman, previously has compared breast cancer
disparities in Chicago and New York. He said the health
of African-Americans in Chicago fares worse than blacks
elsewhere.

"The underlying issue here is racism and poverty,"
Whitman said. "In Chicago, it's exacerbated by
segregation. Black people in Chicago are forced to live
in neighborhoods where there are no stores to buy fresh
fruits and vegetables, where schools are failing, where
they don't have parks to exercise in and where they tend
to go to segregated health facilities that are poorly
funded and, in different ways, failing."

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American
Public Health Association, cautioned about making
geographic comparisons.

"While it is important to measure an urban city like
Chicago against national numbers," Benjamin said, "the
national statistics include lots of places where some of
the challenges of racial disparity don't exist.

"When you average numbers out -- even though researchers
try statistically to correct for some of those things --
you have to be cautious."

But he agreed that racial disparities appear to be
worsening in Chicago.

"Despite Chicago's ... transit system, it still has
pockets of people where people have tremendous problems
accessing care, and that's a huge overlay," Benjamin
said. "Part of it is lack of insurance, and part of it
is access to care."

Ultimately, money might matter most when it comes to
good health, Benjamin said.

"If we were serious about doing something about
eliminating these disparities, we would pay attention to
the social determinants of health that put people in
these situations to begin with," he said. "At the end of
the day, there is very strong correlation between health
and wealth."

Sinai researchers analyzed the 15 measures using data
from city communicable disease records and Illinois
birth and death records.

The study builds on work published in 2004, believed to
be the first to examine the health of blacks and whites
in a major urban center over time and put findings in
the context of national trends.

Researchers reported that the African-American death
rate from breast cancer was 99 percent higher in Chicago
than for white women, a fivefold increase since 1990.

In 1990, blacks in Chicago were 8 percent more likely
than whites to die of heart disease.

In 2005, blacks were 24 percent more likely to die.

In 1990, black women were two times more likely to go
without prenatal care in the first trimester of
pregnancy. By 2005, they were three times more likely to
go without prenatal care.

Most of the measures showed improved health for both
blacks and whites nationally and locally, but whites'
health status improved much more, widening the gap.

If health indicators were equal, 3,200 fewer African-
Americans in Chicago would die every year, or about nine
a day, the study estimates.

Joseph M. Harrington, assistant commissioner for chronic
disease for the Chicago Department of Public Health,
agreed that the problem in Chicago is significant.

"But," he said, "what do we do about it? You can keep
talking about how bad the numbers are, but the real
question is, what do you plan to do?"

The city health department has initiated programs to
address the problem, including a federally funded
project focused on cardiovascular disease among blacks
and Hispanics living in North and South Lawndale,
Harrington said.

"These findings should provoke us to think about what
can be done, that's the call to action," Harrington
said.

"This should provoke us to do something."

_____________________________________________

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Sleeping in Aunt Earnestine's Bed, Part One

One memory of my childhood that I now find hovering over me, just above my consciousness is that of sleeping in my Aunt Earnestine's bed. My aunt Earnestine had one of those tall, high backed, old-fashioned beds, the type that if you successfully climbed up into it on your first try you really needed a medal or something. There were two windows surrounding the bed, one directly behind it, where her climbing rose could be seen growing through the pane right behind the bedboard. The other was in the bottom right hand corner of the bed, letting out onto the front porch. The television sat on a separate stand at the foot of the bed. Mounds of Ebonys and Jets sat on the bottom shelf of the stand. A bookcase sat at the direct right of the bed, a buffer between the bed and the wall. There was always something that I might pluck from the shelf to hold my interest while lying in bed--the entire complete series of those children's bible stories that you always find in doctors' offices; anthologies from the Reader's Digest-always interesting reading material; and other books of varied degrees of interest. On the nightstand situated at the left side of the bed, she always kept various copies of The Daily Word, her glasses, and various other items.

In the top drawers of the chest of drawers across from her bed, one could always find sweet, crunchy peanut butter candy or whole sticks of peppermint, or lemondrops. Those drawers also contained thousands of letters, perhaps merely hundreds, but mounds of them--correspondence that she had kept with her relatives, friends, and other people going back for years. Aunt Earnestine was a renowned letter writer Among her most treasured correspondences, I believe was that she kept with our Cousin Cottye, which went on or over forty years. Also in those drawers, along with those letters, were an autographed picture of a 1950s popular do-wop group and hundreds of notebooks, papers, obituaries, photographs of various relatives, and other documents which altogether I'm sure transcribed her years as a teacher and a principal, her two master's degrees, doctoral work, years as a church steward, sunday school teacher, baker of communion bread and steadfast relative and friend. Her papers not only resided in her chest of drawers. They also claimed their own space in stacks against the back wall against one chiffarobe and again against another chiffarobe in the lower right hand corner of the room. Without fail, as one spent the night in Aunt Earnestine's bed, one could retrieve from the stack of papers that stood against the rear wall, either at her invitation, without her knowledge, or to be shared with her, oreo cookies in the blue paper package, in various states of either smoothness or crumble. Sometimes the package, you could rest very assured, had been in that corner for one or more years, however, you obligingly ate the cookies-not only because they were offered and they were good, but because it wasn't so much the age of the cookies as the sentiment behind them that was enjoyed.

To spend the night in Aunt Earnestine's bed, one was either comforted by the warmth of the mounds of quilts that she kept on the bed, winter, spring, summer or fall, or one constantly tried to fight one's way to the top of the bed to have at least your nose sticking out from under the covers so that you might breathe and not suffocate under the mounds and heaps of bedcovers.

Jennifer Hudson's Christmas Special

Oh my, how I relished and enjoyed Jhud's Christmas special this evening! Talking about nostalgia in high gear! When she went to Evergreen Plaza, I yelped! When I was little, Evergreen Plaza was the place to go! At Christmas, when everything was lit up-there wasn't a better sight anywhere. Oh Chicago, fair city! Kudos to Jennifer for taking it home!

Notes from New York

While in New York I attended a labor conference held at the Joseph. S. Murphy Institute at CUNY. The conference took place very early in the morning my first day there. The topic for the panel was Unemployment and the African American community and the two panelists who spoke were Steven Pitts from California and David Jones from New York. Mr. Pitts is an academic and Mr. Jones is the CEO of a Nonprofit. Here are some of the notes that I jotted down from the session. Mr. Pitts spoke first and spoke about a U.S. Jobs machine-an idea that I had never heard or thought of before--the idea that jobs in this country--in that classic sense of the word, are created through a "jobs machine" as opposed to some kind of organic thing. He spoke about the need for place based jobs--construction, education, hospitality, healthcare-jobs that do not move and therefore are stable. Black women are situated mostly in place-based jobs--primarily domestics and social services.

Pitts' first major question/focal point was "Whats wrong with Black folks and the progressive community?" There has always been a disconnect between the Black Community and the Social Justice community (only with the communists from the beginning of the 20th century up through the 1950s was there truly a cohesive union between the two). The New Deal was basically Affirmative Action for white folks-- the two groups excluded from the Social Security Act--domestics and sharecroppers--blatantly excluding Black folks. Mr. Pitts made it very loud and clear

YOU CANNOT HAVE RACE NEUTRAL POLICIES AND ADDRESS THE ECONOMIC CRISIS AT HAND

(My thoughts--my Aunt Johnnie was very active in the Chicago Teachers Union. My father was active in unions--disdains them-the bad rub for some Blacks with unions).

He said that the country needs to shift the discussion beyond job training -beyond individuals to a much broader picture.

Mr. Jones Asked-

why does the ruling class feel impelled to help the poor? Not because of any noble reasons--Social Control is the idea--you dont want sick immigrant workers handling food in the supermarket--make sure they have reasonable access to healthcare. You dont want a crime problem--fund schools and provide opportunities. Margaret Sanger and the early immigrants of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries.

Black Male Labor Participation. Currently there are approximately four million Black men unemployed in the United States. Rockefeller Drug laws--civil death for nonviolent offenders--they can never participate in the economy- unemployable. Not just an urban problem, but a suburban problem too.

Underpaid workers-- no sick days, no benefits, no unions, no nothing.

One million workers in New York City are working without the benefit of a High School Education.

unemployment rates for people with less than a high school education- 24.2 percent.

In NY half a trillion for transportation infrastructure. Need to create WPA camps.

Welfare reform in NY actually increased the poverty levels... tie that to the need for unionization among low wage workers.

The budget for public housing in NYC alone is 1.3 billion dollars.
Section 3 of New York housing code--give employment priority in public housing sector to public housing residents and people in the local community--this provision ignored.

Blacks and Latinos not universally welcomed into the U.S. labor market.

Unions need power-self interests.

power means the ability to cut deals--Steven Pitts.

David Jones-son of first black assemblyman in NY--friend of Shirley Chisolm.

Detroit has downsized from a population of 3000000 to 600000-all sorts of problems.

Borders are not official--they are an act of power. The nationstate is no longer needed.

Transnational corporations.

How do you engage folk?

My Recent Trip to New York

I just returned from a lovely trip to New York on in the wee hours of Monday morning, where I spent four days in conference. While planning to make the trek to New York, I decided that one thing I wanted to do was find Chez Josephine, the restaurant dedicated to the legacy of Josephine Baker, owned and operated by two of her sons. I found the restaurant on 42nd Street in Manhattan, in the far end of the theatre district. I arrived terribly early, so was not able to eat there but did see the decor and exquisite menu offered.



God and the fates were at play that day as well as quite to my surprise, exactly right next door to Chez Josephine was the famed nightclub, The Lion, where Barbra Streisand got her start oh so many legendary years ago. Not to mention that I stayed in Brooklyn in Flatbush, where I constantly wondered how far I was from the actual birthplace of Barbra....what a lovely time!

Afghanistan the Unwinnable War: Parrallels between the Russian Effort and the American One

A Wonderful Article By Melissa Harris Lacewell

President Obama is steering the ship in the right direction! Right makes might- not Might makes right!

Obama is rewriting the course of America--a Progressive course!

Thoughts on President Obama's Speech on Afghanistan

I love Afghan quilts...."to seek an end to this era of war and violence"....I love President Obama because he is a conscious and beautiful spirit, good in soul and spirit....however, I don't know or think that America will be able to escape this "era of war and violence...." this war and violence is much larger than Obama...it is something in the sinews of this country that will be the destruction of it. I love that he addressed the idea of America no longer being anyone's patron...a nice blow to patriarchy. May he be wise and forthright always....