Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of the death penalty for federal or state crimes. Neither candidate is interested in eliminating or reducing the 5,113 US nuclear warheads. Neither candidate is campaigning to close Guantanamo prison. Neither candidate has called for arresting and prosecuting high ranking people on Wall Street for the subprime mortgage catastrophe. Neither candidate is interested in holding anyone in the Bush administration accountable for the torture committed by US personnel against prisoners in Guantanamo or in Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of drones to assassinate people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia.  Neither candidate is against warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, or racial profiling in fighting “terrorism.” Neither candidate is interested in fighting for a living wage.  In fact neither are really committed beyond lip service to raising the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour  – which, if it kept pace with inflation since the 1960s should be about $10 an hour. Neither candidate was interested in arresting Osama bin Laden and having him tried in court. Neither candidate will declare they refuse to bomb Iran. Neither candidate is refusing to take huge campaign contributions from people and organizations. Neither candidate proposes any significant specific steps to reverse global warming. Neither candidate is talking about the over 2 million people in jails and prisons in the US. Neither candidate proposes to create public jobs so everyone who wants to work can. Neither candidate opposes the nuclear power industry.  In fact both support expansion. 

Davida Finger also contributed to this submission.1          Rank of New Orleans in fastest growing US cities between 2010 and 2011.  Source: Census Bureau.1          Rank of New Orleans, Louisiana in world prison rate.  Louisiana imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of the other 50 states.  Louisiana rate is five times higher than Iran, 13 times higher than China and 20 times Germany.  In Louisiana, one in 86 adults is in prison.  In New Orleans, one in 14 black men is behind bars.  In New Orleans, one of every seven black men is in prison, on parole or on probation.  Source: Times-Picayune.2          Rank of New Orleans in rate of homelessness among US cities.  Source: 2012 Report of National Alliance to End Homelessness.2          Rank of New Orleans in highest income inequality for cities of over 10,000   Source: Census. 3          Days a week the New Orleans daily paper, the Times-Picayune, will start publishing and delivering the paper this fall and switch to internet only on other days.  (See 44 below).  Source: The Times-Picayune.10        Rate that New Orleans murders occur compared to US average.  According to FBI reports, the national average is 5 murders per 100,000.  The Louisiana average is 12 per 100,000.  The New Orleans reported 175 murders last year or 50 murders per 100,000 residents.  Source: WWL TV.13        Rank of New Orleans in FBI overall crime rate rankings.  Source: Congressional Quarterly.15        Number of police officer-involved shootings in New ...

US civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world.  Thousands of people have been assassinated.   Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners.    These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US.  Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US? Some Facts about Drone Assassinations The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.   But the government routinely refuses to provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths or the identities of most of those killed. In Pakistan alone, the New America Foundation reports US forces have launched 297 drone strikes killing at least 1800 people, three to four hundred of whom were not even combatants.   Other investigative journalists report four to eight hundred civilians killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan. Very few of these drone strikes kill high level leaders of terror groups.  A recent article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS estimated “only one out of every seven drone attacks in Pakistan kills a militant leader.  The majority of those killed in such strikes are not important insurgent commanders but rather low level fighters, together with a small number of civilians.” An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in November 2011 revealed that most of the time the US did not even know the identities of the people being killed by drones in Pakistan.  The WSJ reported there are two types of drone strikes.  Personality strikes target known terrorist leaders.  Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants but are people whose identities are not known.  Most of the drone ...

Question One.  The combined pay of the 299 highest paid CEOs in the US is enough to support how many median salary jobs?

45,000?  83,000?  102,325?

Two.  The median net worth of black households in the US is $2,200.  What is the median net worth of white households in the US?

$4,400?  $44,000?  $97,000?

Three. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development issues a national survey every year listing fair market rents for every county in the US.  HUD also suggests renters should pay no more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs.   In how many of the USA’s 3068 counties can someone who works full-time and earns the federal minimum wage pay 30% of their income and find a one-bedroom apartment at the fair market rental amount?

19?  368?  1974?

Four.  How much must the typical U.S. worker earn per hour to rent a two-bedroom apartment if that worker dedicates thirty percent of his income, as HUD suggests, to rent and utilities?

$9.39? $14.63?  $18.46?

Five.  The wealthiest 1 percent of the US has a net worth which is how many times greater than the median or typical household’s net worth?

50?  150?  225?

Six.  Which of these countries puts the highest percentage of their people in jails and prisons?

China? Iran?  Iraq?  Germany?  Russia? USA?

Seven.  In 2012, the US will pay out about $620 million for old age Social Security benefits to 45 million families.  How much is budgeted for military spending by the US in 2012?

$310 billion?  $620 billion?  $836 billion?

Eight.  The US ...

“Corporations are people, my friend.” -Mitt Romney at the Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more ...

Haiti, a close neighbor of the US with over nine million people, was devastated by earthquake on January 12, 2010.  Hundreds of thousands were killed and many more wounded.

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in ...

Broken and collapsed buildings remain in every neighborhood.  Men pull oxcarts by hand through the street. Women carry 5 gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street.  Hundreds of thousands remain in grey sheet and tarp covered shelters in big public parks, in between houses and in any small pocket of land.  Most of the people are unemployed or selling mangoes or food on the side of every main street.  This was Port au Prince during my visit with a human rights delegation of School of Americas Watch – more than a year and a half after the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands and made two million homeless.

What I did not see this week were bulldozers scooping up the mountains of concrete remaining from last January’s earthquake.  No cranes lifting metal beams up to create new buildings.  No public works projects.  No housing developments.  No public food or public water distribution centers.

Everywhere I went, the people of Haiti asked, “Where is the money the world promised Haitians?” 

The world has moved on.  Witness the rows of padlocked public port o lets stand on the sidewalk outside Camp St. Anne.  The displacement camp covers a public park hard by the still hollow skeleton of the still devastated St. Anne church.  The place is crowded with babies, small children, women, men, and the elderly.  It smells of charcoal smoke, dust and humans. Sixty hundred fifty families live there without electricity, running water or security. 

I talked with several young women inside the camp of shelters, most about eight feet by eight feet made from old gray tarps, branches, leftover wood, and pieces of rusty tin.  When it rains, they stand up inside their leaky shelters and wait for it to stop.  In a path in front of one home, crisscrossed with clotheslines full of tiny ...

Mathias O is 34 years old.  He is one of about 600,000 people still homeless from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.  He lives with his wife and her 2 year old under a homemade shelter made out of several tarps.  They sleep on the rocky ground inside.  The side tarp walls are reinforced by pieces of cardboard boxes taped together.  Candles provide the only inside light at night.  There is no running water.  No electricity.  They live near a canal and suffer from lots of mosquitoes.  There are hundreds of families living in tents beside him.  This is the third tent community he has lived in since the earthquake.

The earthquake made Mathias homeless when it crushed his apartment and killed his cousin and younger brother.  He and his wife first stayed in a park next to St. Anne’s Catholic Church.  Then the family moved to what they thought was a safer place, Sylvio Cator stadium.  They put up a tent on the lawn inside the stadium and stayed there for several months.  The authorities then moved them just outside of the stadium so the soccer team could practice.  They lived in a tent outside the stadium with 514 other families for over a year until they were ordered to leave in July 2011.  Each family was told they had to leave and were given 10,000 Goudes (about $250 in US dollars) to assist in their relocation.  Where did the 514 families go?  No one knows for sure.  About 150 families stayed together and live under tarps beside Mathias.  Some used the money to build new tarp shelters elsewhere and some used it for food.  The rest?  No one knows.  No one is keeping track.

When I asked what Mathias would like to say to the human rights community, he said, “The life of the people living in the tents is not a human life.  Our human rights are not respected.  No institutions are taking care of us, we are the ...

Note: Written in collaboration with Davida Finger, an esteemed Professor and associate at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Six years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast.  The impact of Katrina and government bungling continue to inflict major pain on the people left behind.  It is impossible to understand what happened and what still remains without considering race, gender, and poverty.The following offer some hints of what remains.

$62 million.  Amount of money HUD and the State of Louisiana agreed to pay thousands of homeowners because of racial discrimination in Louisiana’s program to disburse federal rebuilding funds following Katrina and Rita.  African American homeowners were more likely than whites to have their rebuilding grants based on much lower pre-storm value of their homes rather than the higher estimated cost to rebuild them. Source:  Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

343,829.   The current population of the city of New Orleans, about 110,000 less than when Katrina hit.  New Orleans is now whiter, more male and more prosperous.  Source: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. 

154,000.   FEMA is now reviewing the grants it gave to 154,000 people following hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.  It is now demanding that some return the long ago spent funds!  FEMA admits that many of the cases under review stem from mistakes made by its own agency employees.  FEMA’s error rate following Katrina was 14.5 per cent.  Michael Kunzelman and Ryan Foley, Associated Press.

65,423.   In the New Orleans metropolitan area, there are now 65,423 fewer ...

Haiti experienced a major earthquake January 12, 2010. Tens of thousands died, estimates range from 65,000 to 230,000 people killed. About 2 million more people were displaced. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with a per capita income of about $2 a day. Seventeen months later, Haiti remains deeply wounded. The numbers below give an indication of some of the challenges that remain for the Haitian people.

Housing

570,000 people in Haiti have moved back into 84,000 buildings which are heavily damaged and marked by engineers as “yellow” because they may collapse in foul weather or in the event of another tremor. USAID Draft Report 2011. “I see little children sleeping next to the heavily cracked walls every day,” said one of the experts quoted in the USAID report.

465,000 people have moved back into 73,000 buildings that are so terribly damaged they are designated for demolition and are categorized as “red” because they may fall at any moment. USAID Draft Report 2011.

Homeless

250,000 to 800,000 people in and around Port au Prince Haiti are still living under flimsy tents or tarps where water and electricity are scarce, security is poor and people are exposed to diseases. UN Report – January 2011 and USAID Draft Report 2011.

166,000 people living in tents have been threatened with evictions, nearly one in four of the people living under tarps and tents. International Organization for Migration, April 2011.

1000 people were illegally evicted at gunpoint from three tent camps in the Delmas suburb of Port au Prince during one week in May 2011. They are part of a series of illegal evictions of over 50,000 homeless people in Haiti in the last several months. June 16, 2011 human rights complaint filed with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights by IJDH, CCR, BAI and Trans ...