| Number 25 | April 14, 1999 |
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This Week: |
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Greetings, Too much going on this week to even touch on it all. In future issues I'll be writing about the Governor's speech this week to the ultra-right wing CATO Institute, something about the IRS, and a bit more on prisons and police. For this week, some thoughts on war, race, and drugs. I am trying to please everyone, so you will receive two different versions of NN from now on. Whichever one is easiest for you to read is the one for you. Just delete the other one, as the content is identical. ‘Til next week, Nygaard |
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Upon returning from Nicaragua last month, I reflected on the visit to that same country by Bill Clinton (NN #22, March 24). I made the following statement: "Clinton's Central American agenda had essentially two components. The lesser component had the President making an appearance at the sites of the greatest damage from the recent hurricane, where he promised almost a billion dollars in U.S. aid for reconstruction in the region. I doubt that the President ever expected to be able to deliver such an amount and, sure enough, within a couple of days the Republicans in Congress indicated that the money couldn't be appropriated without cutting some other, less worthy, program - child nutrition, perhaps." Some may have thought I was being unjustifiably cynical when I used nutrition programs to make my rhetorical point. However, just a couple of days ago (April 13th) I received an Action Alert from the Resource Center of the Americas, with the following quote: "The Senate and House each have approved aid packages to help victims of Hurricanes Mitch and Georges, but the two versions have significant differences that must be worked out before a bill can be sent to President Clinton for his signature. And the White House has threatened to veto both versions because they would cut domestic programs such as food stamps." You don't need to know the details to simply call or write your elected officials and say, "These are poor people and they have been hit by a disaster. We are the richest country in the world. Cut out the politics and send them as much aid as you can. As a taxpayer I want my tax money to be spent in this way." Senator Rod Grams MN phone is (612) 427-5921; D.C. phone (202) 224-3244. Snail mail: 257 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510. E-mail: mail_grams@grams.senate.gov Senator Paul Wellstone MN phone is (651) 645-0323; D.C. phone (202) 224-5641; snail mail: 136 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510-2303; E-mail: visit his website at: http://www.senate.gov/~wellstone/index.html . To write your federal representative, go here: http://www.house.gov/writerep/welcome.html . |
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Stop the Presses: This Could Be A Reason To Send In Ground Troops |
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The banner headline on the front page of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) this past Monday said "SIGNS HINT AT MASS GRAVE: NATO aerial photo shows dirt mounds in south Kosovo." The lead paragraph reads, "NATO released an aerial photograph Sunday of what officials said could be 'possible mass graves' of ethnic Albanian villagers killed by Serb forces inside Kosovo." This is undoubtedly true. These "could be possible graves" of anyone, or they could be compost heaps. So why is it that some "official's" guess is the material for a banner headline? We're at war, folks, so please read the paper even more skeptically than usual. If you are interested in getting some sort of clue as to what is really motivating U.S. policy in the region (and that you'll likely never see in the daily papers), again I urge you to visit the Znet website. Lots of links, lots of articles right in the site, and overall the best, most up-to-date coverage AND CONTEXT that I have seen. (Context Club members take note.) Go to: http://www.zmag.org/ |
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I know a lot of you Nygaard Notes readers are not sports fans, but this story is not really about sports. It's about a phenomenon known as "DWB." Khalid El-Amin is a basketball player for the University of Connecticut. He played for North High School in Minneapolis, where his team won 3 state championships in a row. He is now a sophomore at UCONN, where his team won the national collegiate (NCAA) basketball championship a couple of weeks ago, defeating heavily-favored Duke University in a dramatic championship game. He is one of the most famous basketball players in the country right now. This past Monday El-Amin came back to Minneapolis for a ceremony in which North High School honored him for his accomplishments while at North. They paid him the highest honor, by retiring his jersey. For you non-fans, that means that no other player at North can ever wear his number again, so it will be forever associated with Khalid El-Amin. On Tuesday of this week, El-Amin was arrested in Connecticut for possessing marijuana. News reports stated that Khalid was driving a "late-model red Cadillac" when he "allegedly roll[ed] through a red light." According to the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) "An officer found the marijuana, estimated to be less than one ounce, when he was patting down El-Amin." A couple of months ago, I was riding with my sister in her new SUV, going across the 10th Avenue bridge in Minneapolis. We were pulled over by a Minneapolis police officer, because my sister was speeding. The officer then discovered that my sister had an expired license, and that she had no title to the vehicle. The officer advised her to "get these things taken care of," and sent her on her way. My sister is white. Khalid El-Amin is black. There is a criminal offense that is well-known in the black community, although it's not written down anywhere and is almost unknown among whites. It's known as DWB, or "Driving While Black." Black people in cars are routinely harassed by police for no apparent reason. Especially if they are driving "nice" cars, as the police apparently assume that black people can only afford such cars if they are dealing drugs. In this light, I noted a headline in the New York Times from Wednesday (the same day that the El-Amin story ran) about this very phenomenon: "Drivers Tell of Racial Profiling by Troopers." "Racial Profiling" is the "polite" term for DWB. One (black) man had been pulled over 50 times over a three-year period. For those who have the least interest in racial justice and the police, it's been interesting to follow the coverage of El-Amin's case over the past several days. (My sister's case did not make it into the papers, for some reason.) I'll here reprint a few noteworthy quotes I found, followed by some questions. None of these questions were raised by the reporters and editors involved.
I urge you to think about two separate issues here. One is the issue of police power and racism. The other is the issue of drug use and abuse. Why is it a crime for a 19-year-old to have a nickel bag of marijuana? None of the reports claimed that he was abusing it. None of the reports even claimed that he was using it, which might raise the issue of DWI. Let's be honest, now: Have you ever used marijuana? 18 million of your fellow Americans used it within the last year. By definition, they are all criminals. Behind the Wire Although I have been concerned for many years with the troubling relationship between drugs and the powers of the state, my consciousness is even higher this week due to my attending a conference entitled "Behind the Wire: A Conference Confronting Prisons and Police in Our Communities." I told you about it in a previous Nygaard Notes, and you should be sorry you missed it. There was too much going at the conference to even attempt to summarize here, but a few large-sized facts may stimulate you to learn more, and do something, about how the United States is criminalizing large segments of the population.
The above facts come from The Sentencing Project. Check them out at: http://www.sentencingproject.org/ |