We Are a Nation of Bullies

Rush Limbaugh's years of bullying may have finally caught up with him. His vicious attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, was over the top even by Limbaugh's standards. Calling the young woman a "slut" and a "prostitute" for supporting health insurance coverage for contraception has cost the on-air personality and full-time blowhard a number of advertisers, and many hope his radio program as well.

Another conservative personality -- blogger, editor and publisher Andrew Breitbart -- met an untimely passing just days ago. Praised by the right as a hero who stood up for what he believed in, there is no question he was a warrior for his cause, and was very good at what he did. Meanwhile, African Americans, progressives and others will not fail to mention that Breitbart employed methods of deception and dishonesty to bring about the downfall of ACORN. And he ruined the reputation and career of USDA official and civil rights activist Shirley Sherrod by doctoring a video of a speech she made, falsely portraying her as a hater of white people.

This nation has a love-hate relationship with bullies. In one breath, society condemns bullying. And yet our society thrives on it, encourages it and glorifies it.

America names buildings after its bullies. Take J. Edgar Hoover, one of America's most notorious villains. The FBI chief destroyed social justice movements, and led a campaign to "prevent the rise of a black Messiah" through his COINTELPRO program. According to one of his purported black relatives, he was also a black man passing for white. Now, that adds a new layer of complexity to his bullying, if it doesn't actually provide a context to his motivation in declaring a war on black America.

A problem among young people, bullying is a cause of teen suicides and schoolhouse shootouts. First, there is outrage and sadness, then silence, as people resume their daily lives until the next tragedy occurs.

Politicians make a lucrative career out of bullying low income and working people for not being rich, women for wanting control over their own bodies, and Latino immigrants for having brown skin and speaking Spanish.

Bullies make sure that other bullies have as many guns as they want, at home or abroad, making it far easier to shoot someone than to vote for someone. By the way, voter ID laws are a form of bullying against people of color, the poor, students and the disabled.

In today's rancorous political discourse, bullies are afraid of change and want to impose their will. So they rewrite the textbooks to wipe out Latino studies and all traces of the civil rights movement, and would refight the Civil War to get another shot at victory -- a century-and-a-half after the fact. The nation of their dreams is 100 percent white and fully Christian -- but in a Talibanic sense, where women are subservient and powerless -- so they enact legislation to ban Sharia law and monitor women's reproductive organs.

Bullies called police officers brutalize and pepper spray protestors practicing nonviolent civil disobedience, and spy on Muslim students outside of their jurisdiction. These bullies frame people for crimes they didn't commit, and beat scripted confessions out of them. Bullies also known as district attorneys coerce innocent people into taking a plea. Sometimes, they even send innocent people to death row --just to score more points on the tally sheet -- and never have to pay for their crimes.

Now is the time that we all must stand up to these bullies, for our own sake and for America's future.

Are Corporations People Who Kill People?

Can corporations be sued in U.S. courts for violations of international human rights law? This week, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case that may have a profound impact on corporate accountability and human rights in this country.


The case is Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., and the plaintiffs allege that Shell Oil was complicit in human rights abuses in the Ogoni region of Nigeria. Specially, they say that the oil giant worked with that country’s then-military dictatorship in the early 90s to detain, torture and, by way of a trial in a kangaroo court, executed nine Ogoni activists who protested the company’s desecration of the Niger River delta.


The plaintiffs invoke the Alien Tort Statute of 1789 (ATS), which allows foreigners that do business in the U.S. to be held accountable for international human rights crimes they commit in other countries. Plaintiffs in the companion case, Mohammad v. Palestinian Authority, have sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, which allows for civil suits in the U.S. for torture and extrajudicial killings committed by officials in a foreign nation.


Kiobel brings together the subject of the rape of Africa and its people with and notions of corporate personhood. On the one hand, it seems fitting that a seminal human rights case would implicate brutal, corrupt Third World dictators and their corporate puppet masters. The whole thing conjures up images from one of the lateFela Kuti’s songs, “I.T.T.,” which stands for “International Thief Thief.” “Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money go,” Fela said:


Them go dey cause confusion (Confusion!)
Cause corruption (Corruption!)
Cause oppression (Oppression!)
Cause inflation (Inflation!)
Oppression, oppression, inflation
Corruption, oppression, inflation
Them get one style wey them dey use
Them go pick one African man
A man with low mentality
Them go give am million naira breads
To become of high position here
Him go bribe some thousand naira bread
To become one useless chief


Corporations ruin the land, wreck the environment and prop up petty dictators that will allow them to do it. And people of the developing world are exploited and murdered in the process. On the other hand, while corporations want us to believe that they are people too, they don’t want any of the responsibilities that come with it. The Supreme Court has come out in favor of corporate personhood. Moreover, the Citizens United decision has sanctioned the corruption of democracy and the buying of elections by the 1 percent of the 1 percent - the wealthy few running roughshod over the rights of the many, all in the name of so-called free speech.


The lower court in Kiobel sided with Big Oil. Opponents of corporate liability claim that this Alien Tort Statute case will drive corporations from less developed countries, make American businesses uncompetitive because their competitors are beyond the reach of the law, and deter foreign investment in the U.S. by corporations that want to avoid U.S. courts.


“Holding corporations liable for human rights violations is fully consistent with international law. At the heart of this case is the value we attach to the idea of the rule of law, an idea expressed in the following simple statement: ‘Be you never so high, the law is above you.’” said Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in an amicus brief to the high court in this case.


“The battle for subjecting human rights violators to the rule of international law has been fought and won against natural persons, groups, organizations and States. On a proper understanding of contemporary international law, corporations are also subject to the rule of law on the international plane, in which they ubiquitously operate. Under that law, they are accountable for human rights violations. In particular, corporations are not immune from responsibility under international law if they engage in, or are complicit in, conduct amounting to international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes,” Pillay added.


According to Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, recognizing corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute is a matter of economic efficiency. “[I]t is now well-recognized that in a modern economy, the provision of appropriate incentives (to avoid injury to others) must extend beyond the imposition of liability to the person who commits the injury. In particular, corporations must be provided with incentives to discourage and deter their employees from engaging in such potentially harmful acts and to develop monitoring systems that ensure compliance with corporate policies.”


Stiglitz argues that corporations are best situated to effectively monitor harmful activity at a minimal cost. Further, given the limited resources of individual persons as opposed to their corporate employers, a system that imposes liability solely on individuals would be weak and ineffective.


“Furthermore, recognition of corporate liability would demonstrate commitment to a variety of widely shared principles and morals,” Stiglitz adds. “The liability imposed by the ATS reflects norms of human rights endorsed by international law. TheUnited States values, and benefits from, the existence of such international norms. And the enforcement of these norms by the United States confirms and promotes their universality.”


For an often outdated U.S. Constitution which grants rights only sparingly - and has fallen out of favor in the world as a casualty to far superior human rights documents in Canada, South Africa and elsewhere - the Alien Tort Statute may well prove our saving grace. When corporations violate the laws of nations by torturing and killing people, the U.S provides a human rights mechanism to address it. But whether a corporation-friendly majority on the Supreme Court sees things the same way, well, that remains to be seen.

The White Working Class was Bamboozled

Originally, this was to be a commentary on the plight of the white middle class, but that demographic no longer exists in America.  So, let’s talk about the swindling of the white working class.


And although it has all come to a head in the past few years, it is a story that is years in the making.  If Stockholm Syndrome relates to the feeling of empathy that kidnap victims have with their captors, then certainly what we are witnessing today is a Stockholm Syndrome of those on the losing end of American capitalism.


To single out white working people is not to assume that others are immune from identifying with those who would exploit them financially - their own economic kidnappers, if you will.  At the same time, it was white working folks who made a deal with the devil a long time ago.  And now they’ve been sent the invoice from that Faustian bargain.  Allow me to explain.


American capitalism has promoted the mythology of the “American Dream,” the notion that everyone has a chance to get rich.  In pursuit of that dream, poor and working white Americans chose their enemy years ago.  They made a conscious decision to side with the “1 percenters” whose feet were firmly placed on their neck, rather than with similarly situated black and brown common folk.  They decided it was those of a darker hue whose progress stood in the way of their own movement up the ladder.


Generation after generation, they fought and died in wars, someone else’s beef, designed to protect the interests of the 1 percent. 


They opposed social programs that had any chance of helping blacks, even if they stood to benefit from the programs themselves.  And ultimately they failed to join forces with workers of color to build a strong labor movement.  As a result of that fatal decision, the jobs moved offshore to where the labor costs were cheapest.  Chinese slave laborers are now making our iPhones, iPads, X-Boxes and other toys, and now even Chinese workers are becoming too expensive.


The most impoverished European immigrant had neither a pot nor a window to throw it out of.  But at least he or she was not black, and thus could be considered a real American.  Though poor whites had far more in common with their poor black-, Latino-, Asian- and Native-American counterparts than with some Wall Street banker or fat cat industrialist, nonetheless they viewed racial minority groups and others as the enemy.  That’s how scapegoats are created. 


So, the blame is not placed where it should, which is the über-wealthy sucking the lifeblood out of democracy.  Rather the problem is identified as affirmative action, or welfare queens, or undocumented Mexican immigrants.  Solutions to the nation’s woes are offered in the form of mass incarceration and the death penalty.  Tighter social controls are introduced in the form of bans on Sharia law and Latino studies, voter ID, draconian anti-immigrant legislation and prohibitions on same-sex marriage. 


Culture wars are the ultimate shell game, a cheap parlor trick of smoke and mirrors to mask the wide scale corporate theft taking place.  These cultural issues - which also include gun proliferation and the war against a woman’s reproductive rights, including contraception - will do nothing to improve anyone’s station in life.  Yet these time-tested culture wars are fought because someone is betting that the common folk will take the bait.  And usually, such is the case.


Meanwhile, the sanctimonious and self-righteous rightwing among us, a morals police and Christian Taliban of sorts, would distract us with fertilized egg personhood and mandatory sonograms for women seeking an abortion.  But in the face of injustice, like the white clergy in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, they “have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”   King called the contemporary church “a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.  So often it is an archdefender of the status quo.  Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent - and often even vocal - sanction of things as they are.”


So, those who obsess over the sex lives of private citizens have said little about our national scourge of economic inequality or the suffering of the poor - you know, the stuff Jesus talked about.  Preoccupied as they are with birth control bans and zygote rights, they were conspicuously silent when the living among them suffered and the innocent died.  Last year, when the state of Georgia killed Troy Davis, an innocent black man, they said nothing.  And they had remained silent seven years earlier, when the state of Texas wrongfully executed Cameron Todd Willingham, an innocent white man.


Yet, there is hope that for their own sake, people will not fall for the shell game forever.  There is a chance that citizens are waking up, resisting the Stockholm Syndrome, and refusing to act against their economic self-interests.  The spirit of the Occupy movement has liberated the public discourse, an alternative to the neo-segregationist Tea Party and its reliance on racial scapegoats.

David on MSNBC discussing interracial marriage

Recently I was on MSNBC to discuss my piece in theGrio on interracial marriage:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Reggie Clemons is Troy Davis

The case of Reggie Clemons represents everything that is wrong with the death penalty and the U.S. criminal justice system.


His case reminds us of Troy Davis, a black man who was executed by the state of Georgia in September, despite strong evidence of innocence, no physical evidence, another suspect and unreliable witnesses, not to mention worldwide protests.


In 1993, Clemons was sentenced to death in St. Louis, Missouri as an accomplice to the 1991 murder of Julie and Robin Kerry - two white women who plunged to their deaths off the Chain of Rocks Bridge into the Mississippi River. He was 19 at the time of the killings, with a clean record.


He was beaten by police, denied a lawyer, and coerced into making a false confession. As Amnesty International reported, there was no physical evidence linking Clemons to the murders. Even the prosecution admitted that Clemons did not murder the victims, nor did he plan the crime.


Two other young black men, Marlin Gray and Antonio Richardson, were sentenced to death along with Clemons. Gray was executed, and Richardson had his sentence reduced to life. Two sketchy eyewitnesses were essential to Clemons’ death conviction. Daniel Winfrey, a white co-defendant, pled guilty to a lesser offense in exchange for his testimony against the black defendants. Winfrey allegedly told a cellmate he would “say anything” to get a plea bargain, and “no one is going to believe a bunch of niggers.” He is now a free man on parole.


Meanwhile, Thomas Cummins, the victims’ cousin, originally confessed to killing the women, which he told police stemmed from an argument after he tried to have sex with Julie. Cummins also claimed he fell 90 feet off the bridge and swam to safety, which was unlikely given that he was dry and unscathed. Despite the inconsistencies in his statements, the charges against Cummins were dropped after he identified Clemons and the other suspects. Cummins received a $150,000 settlement in a police brutality suit.


Meanwhile, Clemons and Gray both claimed police brutality and coercion but were ignored. Clemons - who had been beaten by police and was ordered hospitalized by the judge at his arraignment - was coerced into confessing to rape. He did not confess to murder. And the audiotaped forced confession was admitted as evidence of his guilt.


This is where the problems for Reggie Clemons were only just beginning. To sum it up, he just couldn’t win, and the system seemed to conspire against him. His defense attorneys were unprepared for trial and neglectful, and the deck was stacked against him, as was the jury. The prosecutor, Assistant Circuit Attorney Nels Moss, who was disciplined by the court and had a pattern of misconduct, disproportionately excluded black prospective jurors, leaving a mostly white pro-death penalty jury in this heavily black city.


And then there was the rape kit and lab reports from one of the victims, buried in police headquarters for years, and never revealed at trial. One could reasonably assume that if that evidence had been helpful to his case, Moss would not have hidden it.


Police torture and false testimony, crooked prosecutors and a stacked jury, incompetent defense counsel and missing evidence. Let’s not forget raw racism. These are the key ingredients of a horrid dish called American justice. 


And sadly, this is why Reggie Clemons is facing execution. This is a prime example of what happens when criminal behavior in the police station and the courtroom sends an innocent man to his death. But unlike Troy Davis in Georgia, Cameron Todd Willingham, Ruben Cantu or Carlos DeLuna in Georgia, or Larry Griffin in Missouri, Reggie Clemons is still alive. There is still time to save him. We can fix this.


On the other hand, we cannot fix our system of capital punishment. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, 140 innocent men and womenhave been freed from death row in 26 states, each spending an average of nearly 10 years in prison awaiting execution.

I'm Really Trying to Understand Black Conservatives

Only a few weeks into the new year, and it seems that black conservatives made their way out of the gate on the wrong foot.

That’s not to say that they ever were on point, in my estimation. But these days, they seem particularly off their game, out of place, out of step and isolated. When the Republicans were a center-right party with a semblance of a big tent, black conservatives were useful tools – pawns who were willingly exploited to put a black face on regressive social and economic policy. And I’m sure they did it all for a chicken wing and a bowl of grits. Now, at a time when the GOP is tea party-owned and steeped in 100 percent pure corporatism, greed, intolerance and white supremacy, they are simply useful idiots.

Case in point: the lieutenant governor of Florida, Jennifer Carroll, said that she couldn’t think of anyone who epitomizes the values and vision of Martin Luther King more than Gov. Rick Scott. That would be Rick Scott, the anti-union, voter disenfranchising corporate fraudster, and perhaps the worst governor in the country, which is no easy feat.

Ward Connerly, the former California regent and anti-civil rights crusader, is accused of financial impropriety and is being investigated by the IRS. He earns around $1.5 million a year at the American Civil Rights Institute, accounting for half of the nonprofit’s budget. The person leading the charge against him is none other than Jennifer Gratz, the white plaintiff in the University of Michigan affirmative action case that struck down programs of inclusion in that institution. Gratz later worked for Connerly, but no longer does. And Connerly is portraying her as disgruntled former employee. So, a man widely regarded in the black community as a race-based con man who pimps colorblindness and quotas for personal profit is now being accused by his own supporters of being just that – a race-based con man who pimps colorblindness and quotas for personal profit.

And in an apparent case of buyer’s remorse, Juan Williams, Fox News’ resident black apologist, received a proper verbal beat down from Newt Gingrich at a recent GOP presidential debate in South Carolina. Williams appropriately exposed Gingrich for his comments on food stamps and the poor – including his remark that “black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps” – saying the words were “intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.”Black tea party spectacle Jesse Lee Peterson said he agrees with Newt Gingrich that blacks lack a work ethic. Peterson’s solution is to send blacks back to the plantation, literally, not figuratively. Doubling down on Newt’s racial rhetoric, Peterson said “one of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working. I’m going to put them all on the plantation. They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”

Don’t get me wrong, Juan was right to attempt to put Gingrich in his place. But that was not the job for which Fox – and by extension the Republicans - pay Juan so generously. They pay him to be different from the rest of us, to engage in self-loathing and attacks on black people, poor and working people, liberal thought and progressive values. So for a moment, Juan forgot where he was, and that’s why the crowd booed him. I don’t know what caused Mr. Williams to lose his way, but if this is a sign he has found it, we should embrace him. But he must realize that a GOP debate is the wrong venue to address Republican racism and scapegoating of the poor. The base wants to hear about doing away with child labor laws, about forcing black and Latino kids to clean the toilets in their school for pennies, and about calling Obama a food stamp president.

As for the black conservatives who are embracing this ignorance in the era of the 99 percent, they are really just a sideshow oddity. It is likely the loneliest job in the nation as a person of color, to sell your soul to a nearly exclusively white-extremist-fringe movement, one that truly hates everyone who looks like you, and works hard to scapegoat you for political gain. It’s as if they’re turning their back on the mama who raised them.

Meanwhile, J.C. Watts - who has returned from obscurity after apparently not suffering enough abuse in the party – says that Republican candidates need black strategists at the table to help them win over black voters and avoid controversial remarks. “Somebody that looks like us needs to be at the strategists’ table to say ‘I know what you’re trying to say, but I wouldn’t say it like that,” Watts said at an even hosted by black tea party darling, Rep. Allen West (R-Florida). West said that blacks have conservative views but don’t vote Republican.

Watts and West are missing the point. Having a black face at the Republican race-card table never changed the game, and they are proof of it. They are the only ones who don’t realize that they are the punch line to this offensive joke, and the joke’s on them.

Dr. King's Stance Against the Death Penalty

As the U.S. observes the eighty-third birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this is a perfect time to reflect on the slain civil rights leader, Nobel laureate and death penalty opponent.

Much is known of the Montgomery bus boycott that he led in the 1950s. He fought for economic justice and the plight of the poor, and supported Memphis sanitation workers before he was assassinated. And he opposed the war in Vietnam. But rarely do we hear about his position against capital punishment.

"I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime, rape and murder included," King said. "Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God."

King's words are just as relevant now in the twenty-first century, over four decades after his death.

America has reached a turning point in its application of capital punishment. Last year, Illinois abolished the death penalty over concerns of wrongful convictions and executing the innocent. This came following historic decisions to end the practice in New Mexico and New Jersey. Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber recently placed a moratorium on all executions, stating that the death penalty fails "basic standards of justice."

In addition, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Senate voted to review the death penalty, in light of questions of racial, ethnic and gender bias, high costs, and a lack of a deterrent effect. And a ballot initiative in California this year will allow voters to give an up or down vote to state-sponsored killing.

Across the nation, the death penalty is an emerging civil rights issue. The execution of Troy Davis last September--an African-American man who was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of a white police officer in Savannah, Georgia-- has awoken many to the inherent injustices of capital punishment. That the state could execute a man despite strong evidence of his innocence, including seven of the nine trial witnesses recanting or changing their testimony, was an indication that the death penalty has little to do with guilt or innocence.

Rather, executions in the U.S. are part of a racially-coded system of retribution. Poor people and members of racial minorities are more likely to receive a death sentence, as are those who are charged with murdering a white victim.

In North Carolina, where defendants in cases with white victims are 3.5 times more likely to receive a death sentence, the state legislature voted to repeal the state's Racial Justice Act, which Gov. Bev Perdue signed into law in 2009. The Act allows people facing a death sentence to present statistics and other evidence of racial bias in court. Gov. Bev Perdue vetoed the repeal legislation supported by prosecutors and Republican lawmakers. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP and People of Faith Against the Death Penalty fought the repeal.

State-sponsored executions are part of an American culture of violence. Perhaps it is no accident that the former Confederate states, with their history of dehumanization through slavery and segregation, and the meting out of mob justice through lynching, are among the more enthusiastic practitioners of death.

And the late Coretta Scott King--whose husband and mother-in-law both were assassinated--spoke out against the practice. "An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation," Dr. King's widow proclaimed. "Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder".

Further, the death penalty is an international human rights issue as well. The European Union, which forbids the practice among its member nations, has imposed new restrictions on the importation of anesthetics used to execute people in the U.S.

Sadly, some would dilute Dr. King's human rights message, including his "radical revolution of values," in which he urged America to begin the necessary shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. Meanwhile, the "drum major for justice, peace and righteousness" as the inscription reads on his memorial--stands on the National Mall as a reminder of his dedication to human rights, including opposition to the death penalty.

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy," King said. "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

If America truly wants to follow the teachings of Martin Luther King, we should end all executions now.

It's the Old South vs. the New South

The American South can't seem to shake off the Civil War.  Or Jim Crow.  And yet, that region of the U.S. is undergoing some dramatic changes.  How the South responds to these changes will determine how easily it will enter the modern world and usher out the racial demons of its past.

Latinos are on the rise in the new South, with the nation's fastest growing Hispanic populations in the states of the former Confederacy.  Georgia and North Carolina are now among the ten largest Latino communities in the nation.

Further, African Americans are coming back home to the region, reflecting the nation's largest demographic shift.  The South now has its highest share of black folks in half a century.  As northern states and California have witnessed a loss in their black populations, Atlanta has gained half a million black people in a decade.  The largest black city after New York is no longer Chicago, it is Atlanta.

The migration of Latinos and the reverse migration of blacks mean that people of color are poised to become a majority in some areas of the South, as is the case in Texas.  Add to that the influx of white professionals and high-tech workers in states such as North Carolina -- a red state that Obama turned blue in 2008 -- and you have the makings of noticeable change.

Then again, you have Alabama.  After the state enacted the harshest anti-immigration law in the land, Latinos are leaving Alabama.  Now, farmers are hoping to replace migrant workers with prisoners to work the fields because, after all, we know how forced agricultural labor worked out the first time around.

Alabama, as an aside, has a majority black prison population.  African-Americans are 27 percent of the population and 63 percent of the prisoners.   The state is 23rd in the nation in population, but was second in the number of executions in 2011.  And over the past decade, nearly two dozen death penalty cases were overturned because prosecutors illegally struck black jurors.

Last year, like Alabama, South Carolina also passed its own bad anti-immigration law -- modeled after Arizona's SB 1070 -- key parts of which were thrown out by a federal judge in Charleston.  And the U.S. Department of Justice blocked the state's new voter ID law, which would require voters to present a photo idea at the polls, and discriminate against racial minorities in the process.  Under the Voting Rights Act, states such as South Carolina and Texas, because of their history of racial discrimination, require federal approval of any changes to their election laws.

The old South meets the new, as South Carolina's Governor Nikki Haley signed both of these cruel, atrocious pieces of legislation into law, and vows to fight in court to have them upheld.  Governor Haley is the children of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India.  The Sikh-American community has endured its share of discrimination in the post-911 era, branded as terrorists and persecuted for the traditional turban and beard worn by Sikh men. 

And so, a woman of South Asian ancestry, a person of color and darling of the Tea Party, has chosen to channel the angry white segregationist governors that came before her.  Some names that come to mind are George Wallace of Alabama, who stood in the schoolhouse door to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama; Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, who kept blacks from voting, and Ross Barnett, who denied James Meredith, an African-American, admission to the University of Mississippi. 

Haley's policies, not unlike those of her predecessors, are the unjust laws that Martin Luther King discussed in Letter from Birmingham Jail.  As King said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. ... An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal."

Even today, such laws are designed to keep communities of color isolated, scared and disempowered, down and out of the process.  That the dominant party in the South has changed its affiliation from Democratic to Republican since the Civil Rights era really is beside the point.  The old mentality remains.  We're talking old South vs. new South, a steadfast resistance to civil rights, and clinging to a segregationist mindset, even well into the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, a black man named Troy Davis was executed last year under the rules of the old South -- a justice system of mob rule, in which racial vengeance and scapegoating take precedence over guilt or innocence.  In the end, what mattered was not the evidence pointing to Davis's innocence, or the seven out of nine witnesses who recanted or changed their testimony, but rather that the victim was a white police officer and Davis was a black man.    

Although I was born and raised in New York and now live in Philadelphia, I always regarded the South as a second home, if not something of an ancestral homeland.  My mother was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and my late father was from Augusta, Georgia.  I have lots of family there, not to mention fond childhood memories of visiting cousins.  Many good people in the South, to be sure, but there's a great deal of ugly in the South. 

The problem arises when some people can't pick a century to live in and stick with it.   

In the Guardian: The racial bias of the US death penalty

Check me out in my first commentary for The Guardian.  It deals with the problems of racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty.  Click here for more.

China and the U.S.: World Leaders in Executions

They say you're judged by the company you keep. And the countries that execute the most people are members of quite a club.

According to Amnesty International, two-thirds of the nations of the world have abolished the death penalty, including 30 countries over the past decade. Only 21 of the 192 UN member nations carried out executions last year. China was the world leader with likely thousands of executions a year.

Following China were Iran, North Korea, and Yemen, with the U.S. in fifth place.  Trailing the U.S. were Saudi Arabia, Libya and Syria.

As the world trends toward abolition of the death penalty, so too is the U.S. losing some of its appetite for executions. As the Death Penalty Information Center announced in its year-end report, 2011 was the first year since 1976 -- when capital punishment was reinstated in the U.S. -- that fewer than 100 death sentences were produced in one year.

But let's not be mistaken. The death penalty, though on the decline, is still widely practiced in America, and it still is the law in 34 states.

State-sponsored executions represent the ultimate violation of human rights, and it is shameful that the U.S. is one of the world's most willing and enthusiastic executioners. China, which makes no pretenses regarding human rights, executes thousands of people a year because life is cheap in that authoritarian, hyper-capitalist state. Mass forced evictions and demolitions are commonplace for the sake of urban development, whether to make way for the Olympics, the Asian Games, a shoddy high-speed rail project, or Disneyland.

When Wang Yue, a two-year-old girl was left to die by two hit-and-run van drivers and 18 passers-by, people in China blamed a Nanjing judge for creating a climate of apathy. In 2006, the judge forced a Good Samaritan -- a young man who helped an elderly woman who had fallen in the street -- to pay her hospital expenses.  The judge's rationale was that "common sense" dictated that the young man took the woman to the hospital because he was guilty.

In China, with the world's most voracious appetite for executions, 55 crimes (down from 68) are capital offenses, including nonviolent crimes such as government corruption for a relative few unlucky scapegoats, and drug smuggling. It is an arbitrary system in which political maneuvering, the absence of an independent judiciary and perhaps even public pressure play a role in who is executed.

But at least the U.S. isn't China, right?  Maybe not.

In the land of the free, capital punishment remains the tip of the iceberg in a society that often disregards human dignity and human rights. Nearly one in two Americans is poor or low income, and America has the highest level of economic inequality of the advanced nations.  We stand alone in our lack of a national healthcare system. Our lawmakers, legally bribed by corporations, deny climate change for the sake of profit, and squeeze working people as they reward the rich.

Executions are merely the most violent manifestation of this inequity and injustice in the land, a failure to come to terms with bad habits and the demons of an American past that continue to torment us today. In 2011, three-quarters of the executions in the U.S. took place in the South. The lion's share of executions have taken place in the former Confederacy, with its long history of racial violence and segregation, and dehumanization born out of a legacy of slavery.

The U.S. death penalty discriminates against the poor and uneducated, racial minorities and those who cannot afford adequate legal representation.  And a small number of counties are responsible for seeking most of the country's death penalty prosecutions and convictions.

Meanwhile, as America touts its human rights record, it is hard to preach to others, especially China, as it continues to execute its citizens. The death penalty remains America's moral blind spot. It will take a movement, not to mention Europe cutting off America's supply of lethal injection drugs, to turn things around.