“Underwater homeowners and hundreds of allies barricaded the front door of the Department of Justice building Monday afternoon to protest the ‘too big to jail banks’ who have shirked punishment despite having destroyed ‘homes, savings and livelihoods,’ begins a piece at Common Dreams.

Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese go into what the protest is all about in this week’sClearing the FOG.

Thursday night, President Obama says he will finally tell us about his unmanned drone killing program.  Will he also finally explain why Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American boy and the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in this program, after his father was killed?  We urge those involved in the anti-drone campaign to tune in and pay attention.  Pressure is mounting to either come up with a policy which can be explained to the public or discontinue the killing in our name, so expect a cloudy diversion from reality in order to keep support behind the President.

Dean Baker tears apart the argument for austerity, saying we should now be spending big bucks on infrastructure if we want to leave a better world to the children of tomorrow.  What caught my eye about his piece is the intriguing title  –Jack Balkwill

Destroying the lair of the budget balancing cretins

by Dean Baker

By now almost everyone knows of the famous Excel spreadsheet error by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. It turns out that the main conclusions from their paper warning of the risks of high public sector debt were driven by miscalculations.

When the data are entered correctly, this hugely influential paper can no longer be used to argue that the United States or other wealthy countries need fear a large growth penalty by running deficits now. There is no obvious reason that governments cannot increase spending on infrastructure, research, education and other services that will both directly improve people’s lives and foster future growth.

With the advocates of austerity on the run this is a great time to pursue the attack. The public should understand that the often expressed concerns about long-term growth, the future and the well-being of our children are simple fig-leafs for inhumane policies that deny people (aka the parents of our children) work and redistribute income upward.

We can only harm our children by reducing the deficit in the current economy, we are not helping them. The wealthy people who benefit from the policies of austerity may have the power to keep them in place, but the public should realise that the politicians and public figures who promote these policies are not doing it out of a concern for the future.

Crowding out private investment

Once we get past the Reinhart-Rogoff debt disaster story, the only argument left against government deficits is the standard economic argument that it could raise interest rates by crowding out private investment. This argument can easily be shown to be ridiculous; there will almost certainly not be any crowding out in the economy now.

Interest rates will likely remain very low even if the government undertook a major investment programme. Furthermore, the spur to demand is likely to increase private investment because firms invest more when they see demand for their products growing. Since some of the spending – such as spending on improved infrastructure and reduced energy consumption – will make the economy more productive, a public investment programme today should make our children richer, not poorer.

This fact is not changed even if we pass on more government debt, although debt can raise distributional issues within generations. This point is straightforward. At some point everyone alive today will be dead.

This means that the government debt (bonds) that people alive today possess will be passed on to future generations. Future generations will not just owe future debt; they will also own future debt. If we take the extreme case where the ownership of government bonds is evenly divided among our children and grandchildren, then the burden of the debt will be money that they are paying to themselves. How can that make them poorer?

Of course, the debt is not evenly held so there can be intra-generational distributional issues. Suppose that Bill Gates’ grandchildren end up owning all the debt. Then the debt will impose a burden on everyone else’s children and grandchildren. They will be paying interest to Bill Gates’ grandchildren.

But this is an issue between Bill Gates’ grandchildren and everyone else’s grandchildren. If our children and grandchildren tax Bill Gates’ grandchildren, then they will face little burden from debt built up today.

Many of the deficit scaremongers have raised the issue of foreign, and especially Chinese, ownership of the debt. While this may appeal to racist sentiments, it has little to do with government deficits.

China is able to buy up government debt because it has a trade surplus with the US of roughly $300bn a year. As long as it has a $300bn trade surplus China can buy up government debt, regardless of whether or not the government is currently running a deficit. If the government is not currently borrowing then China could just buy up government bonds in the secondary market where hundreds of billions of dollars of government debt are bought and sold every day.

Dishonest fear-mongering

Of course, even if China did not buy up government bonds, but instead bought the bonds of private corporations or stock and US real estate, the situation would be the same. A portion of future output would be paid to China and other foreigners as interest, profits or dividends.

If this outflow is large enough (the net flow of such payments is still in the US’ favour) then it will pose a burden to future generations, but this speaks to the importance of getting the trade deficit down. This in turn depends overwhelmingly on the value of the dollar. If the value of the dollar were lower we would export more and import less, bringing our trade closer to balance. If the deficit hawks were really concerned about our children’s future, they would be focusing on the over-valued dollar, not yelling about budget deficits.

Finally, it is important to keep these issues in some proportion. Even though our debt burden is relatively large, because interest rates are extremely low, the interest burden is not. In fact, relative to the size of the economy it is near post-war lows. It is at post-war lows if we subtract the $80bn in interest refunded to the Treasury each year by the Federal Reserve Board.

While this burden is projected to rise somewhat when interest rates return to a more normal level, even in a decade the interest burden is not projected to be back to its early 1990s level. In short, there is absolutely no horror story in this picture.

The deficit hawks have used dishonest fear-mongering to prevent the country from taking the steps needed to get the economy back to full employment. These people have enormous economic and political power. As a result they may be able to keep their austerity policies in place. But we have to recognise, this is about making the rich richer, not helping our children and grandchildren.

Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed
by the Current Political Scandals

                                                                            

Let Them Eat Bugs (when capitalists address hunger)

                                                                          By Mickey Z.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers have updated the resistance actions going on all over the country for this week.  Although you won’t find it in your mainstream media, millions of people are rebelling in the Land of the Free against the creeping fascism.

Throughout the trial of Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala, the US mainstream media have painstakingly avoided seeing the elephant in the living room– complicity by the US Empire.  This goes back to 1954 when President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was overthrown by the CIA.  Árbenz had a plan to buy land from the United Fruit Company, which owned 42% of the arable land of the entire country, at fair market value and then allow Guatemalan peasants to farm it.

United Fruit (now Chiquita Banana) went bananas (pun intended), even though this was land they were not using, and had President Eisenhower overthrow the democratically-elected government and replace it with a military dictatorship which served United Fruit, rather than the Guatemalan people.  Thereafter, the government began a slaughter of its people estimated to be some 250,000, and Montt was one of the slayers, just last week convicted.

But since our leaders put these scumbags in office, don’t they share in the responsibility for human rights violations?  There are a lot of Americans who supported the policy, working in the State Department and CIA as well as the White House and the Pentagon that deserve to be imprisoned every bit as much as Montt.  It is well documented that CIA agents on the ground in Guatemala witnessed the torture and murder.  Will this be another example of the Empire’s thugs being to big to jail?  –Jack Balkwill

Last week news coverage around the world heralded the conviction of Efrain Rios Montt on the charges of genocide against the Mayan people during his 17 month tenure as Guatemala’s head of government and military strongman. The three-judge panel led by Jazmin Barrios determined that evidence presented to the court established that there was a clear and systematic plan to exterminate the Ixil people as a race and that the plan developed and executed by the Montt government satisfied the definition of genocide. With this conviction, the 86 year-old ex-dictator was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

This is a tremendous victory for the people of Guatemala that is a powerful expression of justice and accountability for human rights abuses that offers hope to the many victims of atrocities around the world. This victory, however, doesn’t end with the sentence of the Guatemalan dictator. Another chapter needs to be opened with a more thorough examination of the relationship between Montt, the Guatemalan military and the United States government which, if examined objectively, establishes a clear chain of moral and legal culpability. A relationship that even with a cursory understanding of the history of the conflict in Guatemala would lead logically to the inescapable conclusion that if Efrain Rios Montt, and by extension the Guatemalan military, are guilty of the crime of genocide, the U.S. government and its officials are just as guilty as Rio Montt and that justice in Guatemala remains unfulfilled until everyone, including those responsible for pulling the strings in Guatemala, are also brought to justice.

“President Ronald Reagan called Rios Montt ‘a man of great personal integrity and commitment.’”

The story of Rio Montt and the U.S. government was uncovered in the bloodstained, declassified U.S. government documents that graphically detail how U.S. officials were fully aware of the pogrom against the Ixil people in the mountains of Guatemala at the very moment that the U.S. government was involved in training and arming the Guatemalan military, passing intelligence to its clandestine services, and providing political and diplomatic support to the government. President Ronald Reagan called Rios Montt “a man of great personal integrity and commitment” even as he was receiving reports from his intelligence agencies documenting the scorched- earth policies of the Guatemalan military in its’ campaign against the Ixil.

As horrible as that 17 month period during the Reagan administration was for the indigenous people of Guatemala it was only a brief moment of horror in the macabre drama of U.S.-Guatemala relations. For many in the world there is no doubt that U.S. support, encouragement and guidance made it culpable in the genocidal policies of its’ client State during that 17-month period. The history of U.S. and Guatemalan relations since the U.S. inspired coup of 1954 that overthrew Guatemala’s reformist President Jacobo Arbenz has been a sordid history of criminal collusion against the people of Guatemala.

From the moment the U.S. Ambassador met with the military leaders of the coup to give them their instructions and deliver a list of radical opponents to be eliminated, the country’s future would be marked by systematic brutality. Thousands were arrested in those early days with many tortured and killed and a period of bloodshed ushered in that would define everyday life in the country over the next decades.

“There is no doubt that U.S. support, encouragement and guidance made it culpable in the genocidal policies of its’ client State during that 17-month period.”

The cost for the people of Central America as a result of U.S. support for tyrannical regimes across the region has been staggering. Just in the 80s, over a 100,000 people lost their lives in in Guatemala, 70,000 in El Salvador and 20,000 in the U.S. destabilization of Nicaragua. Honduras was turned into a staging base for U.S. intervention throughout the region from Panama to Nicaragua with murder and political “disappearances” the weapon to bludgeon the Honduran population into compliance.

The people of Guatemala have made the first courageous step toward real accountability. Now it is up to the international community to take the next step to bring full justice to the victims. For those of us who lived through the 1980s and opposed the genocidal policies in Guatemala, we celebrate the small sliver of justice that the conviction of Rios Montt represents. But our moment of satisfaction is tempered by the awful memories of what occurred in that country, our knowledge of the role that the U.S. played in those horrors and the possibility that the hegemonic puppeteer might once again escape accountability if we don’t act.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/16-1

Retired 24-year CIA analyst Melvin Goodman has a piece at Counterpunch this morning explaining that the real problem in the Benghazi “consulate” attack is the politicization of the CIA, which now has its oversight all but cut off.

We knew that the CIA was politicized under the Bush regime, helping to manufacture a cassus bellum for invading Iraq, but what seems to be missing from the national discussion is that the same problem exists with the current president.  There is little oversight of our secret government by Congress.

If all Members of Congress knew what the CIA was doing we would be closer to a representative government, or a republic, and most of the nasty stuff would come to a screeching halt.  The National Security State requires a plutocratic oligarchy operating in stifling darkness.  Most of our Congress is just as ignorant as the masses, watching the same TV propaganda.

When the Associated Press (AP) scandal broke, and mainstream media went into cardiac arrest, the first thing I thought was “Where were these scumbags when Julian Assange was being hounded and had to finally hole up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, if they care so much about free press?”  I have long thought the AP is to journalism what Hitler was to human rights.  AP has a long record of kissing corporate butt and fetching for the National Security State– they wouldn’t know journalism if it bit them in the ass.

Still, when the scandal broke, we defended AP from unwarranted searches in our coverage.  At LUV News we have always defended the First Amendment, unlike AP, who would throw us to the wolves if the scandal were about us, just as AP would never defend Julian Assange or Bradley Manning for their courageous reporting of facts that are in the public interest and should have been revealed by our government, were it on the side of justice and the public interest.

Instead, our government went after Assange and Manning much harder than anything AP has experienced.  None of the editors at AP have had to stand naked in a cell, woke up every hour throughout the night, or had to hide in a foreign embassy for fear of their lives.  They are only experiencing a fraction of what those of us in the public interest media go through.

At LUV News we’ve had several web sites hacked so badly and riddled with viruses we decided to destroy them and start over again, and again, and again.  We have found keylogger software on our computer that records every keystroke and transmits it to the spyware’s master, again and again, with other malware not found in the common virus/spyware programs, something no common hacker could do.  We’ve had our hard drives fried, and other attempts to shut us down, something that would not happen to AP, because they deliver the official propaganda line nearly all of the time.

Glenn Greenwald takes delight in exposing the hypocrisy, in his latest, following  –Jack Balkwill

The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

by Glenn Greenwald

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:

“President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.

“The Justice Department’s collection of journalists’ phone records and the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama’s credibility as a champion of civil liberties – and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor.”

You don’t say! The Washington Post’s breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama’s civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: “I’m disgusted with this president.” In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a “better-late-than-never” outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterdayheadlined “DC turns on Obama”, writing that “the town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House” and “reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.” The Washington Post’s political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies “reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days”. About the AP story, Balz wrote that “no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists.”

This morning, the New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the AP story and the broader War on Whistleblowers, and said that Obama’s presidency is “turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press.” She added:

This isn’t just about press rights. It’s about the right of citizens to know what their government is doing. In an atmosphere of secrecy and punishment – despite the hollow promises of transparency – that’s getting harder every day.”

The New York Times itself editorialized today that “the Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification” for its “spying on the AP”; the NYT editors also quoted a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Attorney General Holder stating that the AP spying “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press. The New Yorker this morning published an article by its general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, denouncing the DOJ’s conduct as “cowardly”; she wrote: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.” Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale, who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration, said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms.

Those are all media venues generally sympathetic to and supportive of Obama. But this anger has infected even the most Obama-loyal circles. Journalist Jonathan Alter, who has literally written books using whathe touts as his “unmatched access” that are paens to Obama’s greatness and Goodness, yesterday demanded: “Obama should simply apologize to the AP and its reporters. It’s the least he can do to show he still believes in the First Amendment.” Even at MSNBC, its most influential host, Rachel Maddow, broadcast a 20-minute segment vehemently condemning the Obama DOJ on the AP matter that featured an interview with an AP lawyer and used Nixon’s attacks on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as the historical context. Maddow then broadcast another segment on the IRS’ targeting of right-wing groups in which she correctly pointed out that there is no evidence of Obama’s personal role in that targeting but that it will create serious problems for his administration. Even Harry Reid – the Senate’s top Democrat - denounced the DOJ’s actions as “inexcusable”, saying “there is no way to justify this.”

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”.

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs - suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

Second, we yet again see one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy: the way in which it has transformed and degraded so many progressive precincts. Almost nobody is defending the DOJ’s breathtaking targeting of AP, and with good reason: as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Pressmade clear yesterday, it’s unprecedented:

“In the thirty years since the Department issued guidelines governing its subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for news gathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review.”

But there are a few people excusing or outright defending the DOJ here: namely, some progressive blogs and media outlets. They are about the only ones willing to defend this sweeping attempt to get the phone records of AP journalists.

As I noted yesterday, TPM’s Josh Marshall – who fancies himself an edgy insurgent against mainstream media complacency as he spends day after day defending the US government’s most powerful officials -printed an anonymous email accusing AP of engineering a “smear of Justice”. Worse, Media Matters this morning posted “talking points” designed to defend the DOJ in the AP matter that easily could have come directly from the White House and which sounded like Alberto Gonzales, arguing that “if the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated” and that “it was not acceptable when the Bush Administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either.” It also sought to blame Republicans for defeating a bill to protect journalists without mentioning that Obama, once he became president, reversed his position on such bills and helped to defeat it. Meanwhile, the only outright, spirited, unqualified defense of the DOJ’s conduct toward AP that I’ve seen comes from a Media Matters employee and “liberal” blogger.

During the Bush years, it was conservatives who supported the Bush DOJ and Alberto Gonzales’ threats against the press on national security grounds; now, defenders of such threats to press freedoms are found almost exclusively from progressive circles (similarly, many of the most vicious and vocal attacks on WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning have come from progressives).

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIAprepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists’ phone records comes from government-loyal progressives – reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists – is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/15/obama-civil-liberties-sea-change

Black farmers protest at Lafayette Park across from the White House in Washington, D.C. on September 22, 1997. Protesters alleged the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) denied black farmers equal access to farm loans and assistance based on their race. North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford and 400 other black farmers filed the Pigford v. Glickman (Pigford I) class-action lawsuit against USDA in 1997. The USDA settled Pigford I in 1999. (Photo: Anson Eaglin / USDA)

Despite claims that we live in a post-racial era, racism and classism continue to permeate US society, including in the governmental and advocacy organizations that are supposed to prevent discrimination and abuse. Racism is well documented in thecriminal (in)justice system, and since the Occupy movement arose, inequality in incomes and wealth are more frequently discussed. But little attention has been given to racism and classism in the environmental movement and in agricultural policy, where their effects create intolerable injustices.

The plight of black farmers came to the forefront recently when The New York Times published a controversial report regarding the Pigford I and II court settlements which attempted to compensate black farmers for past discrimination against them by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The report and current practices of the USDA are still being protested by black farmers, who continue to face mistreatment despite laws meant to prevent discrimination.

Big polluters locate their factories and waste dumps in poor neighborhoods and communities of color that do not have the resources to stop them while large environmental advocacy groups look the other way. Robert Bullard, the father of the environmental justice movement, described to Grist what is happening, saying: “Now it’s institutional racism. You don’t have a lot of individuals out there wearing sheets and hoods. Instead you see it as the policies get played out.”

We explored racism and classism within governmental and nongovernmental organizations and how they prevent voices from affected communities being heard on Clearing the FOG with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) whistleblower Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees Lawrence Lucas, president of the African-American Environmentalist Association Norris McDonald and environmental justice activist Rue.

The failure to include and respect the diversity of voices of those affected by unfair practices is allowing the poisoning and disappearance of whole communities. Just as diversity in biological systems brings resilience and strength, diversity in advocacy creates more just and equitable public policy and creates a better world for all of us.

Black Farmers Still Face Discrimination by USDA

Ongoing institutional racism and discrimination by the USDA are the primary reasons that the number of black farmers is declining. At the turn of the last century, there were over 200,000 black farmers cultivating 15 million acres of land. However, federal loan practices and other practices have made it impossible for many black farmers to purchase or maintain land. Reports show that compared to white farmers, black farmers wait twice as long for responses to their loan applications and are more likely to have their loans denied, the amount of the loan cut and their properties sent to foreclosure.

As a result of this racially discriminatory policy, by the 1990s, there were less than 20,000 black farmers working only 2.3 million acres of land. These facts started to receive more attention when one farmer, Timothy Pigford, filed a lawsuit in 1997 because he was denied a loan by the Farmers Home Administration. Thousands of black farmers stepped up to say that they had been treated similarly to Pigford and the case became a class-action lawsuit.

The lawsuit led to two settlements, Pigford I and Pigford II. The first was for the farmers who joined Pigford in his initial lawsuit, and the second was for farmers who had not been notified about the case. Pigford II was signed by the president in December 2010. But Lucas states that many black farmers today have still not been compensated as required by law. This has been documented in a study called “Obstruction of Justice” conducted by the National Black Farmers Association and the Environmental Working Group.

A third case, the Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation, was won in October 2011 because black farmers continued to be discriminated against: their complaints were not being investigated, the USDA did not take steps to correct civil rights violations and the “USDA’s failure to act deprived countless farmers of credits and payments under various federal programs which resulted in financial and real estate losses.”

Racism and discrimination against black farmers continues today. The right-wing group founded by Andrew Breitbart published a report implying that black farmers were committing fraud by applying for settlement dollars under Pigford to which they were not entitled. The New York Times conducted its own investigation which agreed with the Breitbart report.

But Lucas states that these reports “distorted the truth” and black farmer groupsprotested them. John Boyd of the National Black Farmers Association explains where some of the errors in the reports originated. For example, the US Census Bureau data grossly underestimate the number of black farmers. And the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund published a point-by-point response to The New York Times article called “Sharon LaFraniere [the Times reporter on the story] Got It Wrong.”

Racism is still a problem within the USDA. It affects the employees, especially whistleblowers who bring attention to problems, and the people they serve. Although the head of the USDA, Tom Vilsack, claims ”we celebrate diversity instead of discriminate against it,” Lucas emphatically disagrees, responding that there is “systemic and planned and orchestrated discrimination by the federal government” which he calls a “plantation mentality.”

Lucas states that “Things are worse now under this administration when it comes to civil rights than in the past, and even under the Bush administration it was never this bad.” Title VI and Title VII laws are not being adhered to and increasing numbers of complaints are being filed. In fact, the only person who has been held accountable for racism is Shirley Sherrod because Breitbart’s group edited a video to make it appear that she made an anti-white comment. Sherrod was wrongly fired from the USDA and later received an apology from the president and Vilsack.

According to Lucas, organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congressional Black Caucus, which have historically stood up for the rights of blacks, are silent on racism within the government and the situation affecting black farmers. In addition, Lucas says that people who try to bring up the issue of racism are “slapped down” and that this is not a “post-civil rights era for minorities” as racism continues.

Lucas calls for these organizations to step up and for there to be a dialogue about racism that has not yet occurred. He and black farmers are going to continue to confront these issues. A march to the White House this June is being organized by a coalition of independent black farmers.

Environmental Nonprofits “Wealthy and White”

Racism and classism are also pervasive within mainstream environmental organizations. Racism is manifested through employment practices, how people of color are treated within environmental groups and what causes are given priority. Even more concerning, efforts by mainstream environmental groups to protect wilderness have pushed polluters into minority communities where the residents have few resources to stop them and are abandoned by the larger environmental groups.

Mainstream environmental groups have a deserved reputation for being wealthy and white. A 2005 study of diversity from the Minority Environmental Leadership Development Initiative reported that out of 158 environmental institutions examined, 33 percent of mainstream groups and 22 percent of government groups had no people of color on staff. Another study that looked at member groups of the National Resources Council of America found that only 11 percent of employees and 9 percent of board members were people of color.

This lack of diversity is not due to a lack of quality minority applicants in environmental fields. University of Michigan Professor Dorceta Taylor interviewed students and found “Minority students are being trained in environmental disciplines, thereby creating a robust pool of talent.” Taylor also reported, “My research shows they express the same willingness as white students to work for environmental organizations, and at minimum salaries well within the range these groups are willing to pay.”

And the lack of diversity is not because minorities do not care about the environment. In fact, just the opposite is true. A recent poll found that 84 percent of Latinos support regulations to control air pollution and 86 percent support limits to pollutants that cause climate change.  Other polls also found majorities of minorities in favor of environmental measures to address various ecological problems. Andminority communities that are adversely affected by pollution, land use and lack of access to healthy food also care about broader environmental issues such as climate change.

Lack of diversity within environmental groups has been going on since the beginning and it continues today, as this recent Washington Post article describes. Norris McDonald was the first black environmentalist who, as a result of his experiences, founded the African-American Environmentalist Association in 1985. Norris states, “White groups weren’t hiring black professionals, and when they did, it was a hostile atmosphere. There were a handful of black professionals in the environmental groups then, and there are a handful now.”

The culture within mainstream environmental groups is so homogeneous that people of color often feel that they have to adopt that culture in order to be heard, as McDonald describes in his autobiography. And discrimination is inherent, as thisreport on diversity states: “People of color are often hired as support staff and placed into positions not marked for leadership potential. The few people of color who are a part of a professional staff often leave environmental organizations (and at times the movement altogether) because of unfortunate experiences. Many feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in institutions because of the homogeneous culture both within organizations and the movement.”

In general, people are most inspired when they are doing work that they care about. It is no surprise, then, that minorities who work in mainstream environmental groups lose interest over time if the agenda does not match what they are seeing as the greatest needs in their communities. Center for Health, Environment & Justice Executive Director Lois Gibbs writes that there is a bigger problem than simply diversifying an organization. She explains, “I know from experience that a diverse staff and board will not change much unless it is accompanied by a radical shift in mission, goals and resource allocations.”

And when it comes to the needs of minority communities, resources are the greatest obstacle. Gibbs quotes a report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy which found “environmental funders mainly support large, professionalized environmental organizations instead of the grass-roots, community-based groups that are most heavily affected by environmental harm. Organizations with annual budgets greater than $5 million make up only 2 percent of all environmental groups, yet they receive more than 50 percent of all grants and donations.”

And finally, mainstream organizations that work to protect wildlands and wildlife have had the unintended effect of pushing big polluters into areas where minority communities are overwhelmingly affected. This 1990 letter signed by one hundred organizations through the SouthWest Organizing project to the “Group of Ten” or “Big Green” environmental organizations (which include the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the National Audubon Society, and the Environmental Defense Fund,among others) states: “Your organizations continue to support and promote policies which emphasize the clean-up and protection of the environment on the backs of working people in general and people of color in particular.” The letter lists specific examples of environmental injustice and states that large environmental groups receive funding from big polluters, a definite conflict of interest.

Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin makes the connection between environmental injustice and the failure to integrate communities. She states that racism is behind suburban sprawl as whites move to areas they consider to be safer and to have better schools. This has the effect of increasing the use of cars as transportation, which in itself has negative environmental consequences. It also has the effect of creating predominantly higher-income white communities which have more influence and thus receive more public dollars for infrastructure. Minority and less affluent communities subsidize the wealthy white communities to their own detriment.

There are environmental groups that are trying to create greater diversity. But without a discussion of the many ways that racism and classism infect our culture, and without a real shift in behavior and priorities, diversity alone is not an antidote.

Environmental Injustice: Killing Invisible Communities

Although environmental injustice has been going on since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the environmental justice movement is relatively new. Bullard wrote the first book documenting the rise of the environmental justice movement, “Dumping in Dixie,” in the 1990s. He looked at the locations of landfills and incinerators in Houston for a legal case that his wife was litigating andfound that: “100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators.”

Houston continues to be an area that is plagued with environmental injustice. It is the home of one of the most toxic areas in the United States, the community of Manchester. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo describes the primarily Latino neighborhood,: “Surrounding the Manchester community is the Valero refinery, a trash incinerator; Rhodia chemical, Goodyear Tire, and Texas Petro-Chemical Group plants; Lyondell Basell refinery and Westway liquid storage terminals (massive tanks). Adding insult to the already overburdened community is a car crushing facility, 17 railway crossings, and a major highway with industrial trucks inundating the community 24 hours a day 365 days a year as they go to and from the Houston Ship Channel.”

Rue, an environmental justice activist working with the Manchester community, adds that the two refineries sit at the end of the Keystone XL pipeline and will process most of the bitumen coming from the Alberta tar sands. There are currently seven different known carcinogens in the air in Manchester and other chemicals that are affecting the health of the community. Children are 56 percent more likely to develop leukemia if they live within two miles of the Houston Shipyard (which includes Manchester) than if they live ten miles away. What other toxins will be expelled when the tar sands are processed?

Despite the documented health effects and the increased focus on Manchester due to the Keystone XL pipeline, the broader Houston community and environmental groups are not taking any steps to stop this environmental injustice. However, the residents of Manchester are organizing. They recently sent a letter to the EPA asking the new head, Gina McCarthy, to enforce EPA laws. In fact, Rue states that their “research proves that these facilities cannot operate within EPA guidelines and they self-report, but the EPA has done nothing, not even fined them.”

Manchester is one of many communities throughout the United States that is suffering because corporations and the wealthy have more political power than they do. What is happening in minority communities seems to be invisible to mainstream society. Journalist and commentator Chris Hedges calls communities like Manchester “sacrifice zones.” He writes about others in his book with graphic artist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. People are suffering and dying in these places because their homes are dumping grounds for the waste that fuels our consumer society.

There are thousands of frontline communities, like Manchester, that are fighting for the right to survive in their homes. But they are fighting against a system that is rigged against them. A report, “The American Environmental Justice Movement,” illustrates the problem:

In addition, environmental justice proponents contend that governmental policy is also bent toward the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and also the establishing of polluting industries in those communities. Further, policy and legislation not only permit but also endorse the official sanctioning of life-threatening poisons and pollutants being located in communities of color. Environmental justice advocates also contend that residents of victimized people groups are ostracized from access to political power and consequently have been excluded from service on decision-making boards and regulatory bodies, thereby subtly yet deliberately promoting environmental injustice and environmental racism.

Not only do frontline communities lack a voice, they also lack resources to fight laws that are too weak to protect them or that discriminate against them. For example, the oil and gas industry is exempt from many federal regulations, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund law. And when it comes to discrimination, frontline groups have the burden of proving there was an intention to discriminate.

Conclusion: Strength in Diversity in the Environment and Advocacy

The environmental movement should know from its understanding of ecology that diversity is stronger than homogeneity. Diversity allows the environment, whether species of plants or animals, to survive stress and thrive with greater creativity. The same power of diversity would strengthen the environmental movement and government agencies.  It would bring new perspectives and innovative approaches to environmental problems.

The environmental movement also knows the Gaia Principle, that the Earth is one system and that all aspects of the ecological system are connected. With this principle in mind, allowing toxicity and pollution in poor, black and Latino communities is an injury to the entire ecological system. If the voices of people in those communities were respected, the environmental movement would be pushing for solutions that protect all – for example, ending the extraction economy, not just stopping one pipeline; protecting wild forests with measures that do not result in pollution in urban areas; developing new land-use planning that does not involve sprawl and suburban spread that facilitates racial division.

To really solve the environmental crises that we face, we must also address economic injustice and inequity. As Bullard told Grist, “This whole question of environment, economics, and equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt with as an afterthought, that stool won’t stand. The equity components have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of poor people and race are raised.”

And the time has come to have real conversations about racism and classism, how they permeate and affect our society. We cannot just pretend to be colorblind, as if race and class do not matter. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” it did not mean that we should all become homogenous. No, our diversity remains – our black, brown, red and white skins remain, our historic ethnic heritage remains, and the experiences of different communities do not disappear. Racial, ethnic and economic fairness do not mean we cannot recognize the strength in our diversity. Rather, our diversity is something to celebrate.

As the ecological system is stronger in its diversity, we must also recognize that environmental advocacy – indeed, all social and economic justice advocacy – is strengthened by our human diversity. We should not be colorblind, but embrace and find strength and wisdom in our differences as part of the work to end racism and classism.

You can listen to Racism in Government/NGOs and Environmental Injustice with Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, Lawrence Lucas, Norris McDonald and Rue on Clearing the FOG.

Further Reading

Gang Green or Fresh Greens?

US Climate Bomb Is Ticking: What the Gas Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

A Forest of Poisonous Trees: The US Criminal (In)Justice System