“All over the world today people have gathered in love to celebrate the life of a man that taught the world how to love. People may be wondering why there’s such an emotional outburst, but you would have to understand the journey of Michael to understand what he meant to all of us. For those that sit here with the Jackson family, a mother and father with nine children that rose from a working class family in Gary, Indiana, they had nothing but a dream. No one believed in those days that these kinds of dreams could come true, but they kept on believing and Michael never let the world turn him around from his dreams. I first met Michael around 1970 at the Black Expo, Chicago Illinois; Rev. Jessie Jackson stood by his family until now and from that day as a cute kid to this moment, he never gave up dreaming. It was that dream that changed culture all over the world. When Michael started it was a different world, but because Michael kept going, because he didn’t accept limitations, because he refused to let people decide his boundaries, he opened up the whole world- in the MUSIC WORLD. He put on one glove, pulled his pants up and broke down the color curtain, when now our videos are shown and magazines want us on the cover.
It was Michael Jackson that brought Blacks and Whites and Asians, and Latinos together. It was Michael Jackson that made us sing ‘We are the World’ and ‘feed the hungry’ long before Live Aid. Because Michael Jackson kept going, he created a comfort level where people that felt they were separate became interconnected with his music and it was that comfort level that kids from Japan and Ghana and France and Iowa, and Pennsylvania got comfortable enough with each other. Til later, it wasn’t strange for us to watch Oprah on television, it wasn’t strange to watch Tiger Woods golf. Those young kids grew up from being teenage comfortable fans of Michael to being 40 years old and being comfortable to vote for a person of color to be the President of the United States of America. Michael did that, Michael made us love each other, Michael taught us to stand with each other. There are those who like to dig around mess, but millions around the world we are going to uphold his message. It’s not about mess, it’s about his love message, as you climb up steep mountains sometimes you scar your knee, sometimes you break your skin, but don’t focus on the scars, focus on the journey. Michael beat it, Michael rose to the top. He sang out his critics, he danced out his doubters, he out performed the pessimists. Every time he got knocked down he got back up, every time you counted him out he came back in. Michael never stopped, Michael never stopped, and Michael never stopped.
I want to say to Mrs. Jackson and Joe Jackson, and his sisters and brothers, thank you for giving us someone that taught us love, someone that taught us hope. We want to thank you because we know it was your dream, too. We know that your heart is broken; I know you have some comfort from the letter from the President of the United States and Nelson Mandela, but this was your child, this was your brother, this was your cousin, nothing will fill your hearts loss. But I hope the love that people are showing would make you know that he didn’t live in vain. I want his three children to know there wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy, it was strange what your daddy had to deal with. But he dealt with it anyway; he dealt with it for us. So some came today with Mrs. Jackson to say goodbye to Michael, I came to say thank you. Thank you because you never stopped, thank you because you never gave up. Thank you because you never gave out, thank you because you tore down our divisions, thank you because you eradicated barriers, thank you because you gave us hope. Thank you Michael, Thank you Michael, Thank you Michael”.
Rev. Al Sharpton’s Eulogy at Michael Jackson Memorial
Parents Demand Voice in Education System
Charge Rising Test Scores Don’t Mean Rising Education
Demonstrators filled the street in front of the Tweed Building where the Department of Education and Mayor Bloomberg were the target of demands from parents to be a part of the education of their children and accusations that increasing test results do not necessarily mean an increase in knowledge. Juan Torres of People Power told the crowd, “We are here today because Bloomberg, coming from Wall Street and the financial district, is bringing the same business mentality which has wrecked our country. Bloomberg has taken the lying numbers from Wall Street and brought them to education. We want democracy in our schools. We want parents, teachers and students in control of the system.”
Issues raised included the so-called “Rubber Rooms”, desolate, detention-like facilities where teachers report daily at full pay while they await disposition of administrative charges, a process that may take years, and the proliferation of “No-Bid Contracts” that exist outside of a review process. (See Audit this page.)
Rally moderator Jitu Weusi, a retired public school administrator and member of the New York Coalition for Neighborhood School Control, described the event as “An opening rally by a group that is fed up with mayoral dictatorship” in the schools. “Students should have a voice in our schools”, agreed Youth Leader Sharesse Paradise. “The fight for our education continues. Our privilege to learn every day should not be stripped from us. We should not be robbed of the opportunity to be better than what we are. Everybody here should fight for our education. We are all responsible for what happens next.”
Longtime community activist Viola Plummer of the December 12th Coalition made plain the reason they were there. “This is a serious struggle and what is at stake are the lives of our children.”, she said. “It is not a joke or passing idea that Bloomberg has. It is a plan to take away the very essence of our being and that is the development of those young men and women who must replace us. We must be as serious as those Wall Street bankers because it is a war. If you don’t feel it in your gut, you don’t understand.”
Mr. Weusi introduced Bronx resident Diane Lowman, who has grandchildren in the system and is a member of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence. “Bloomberg is manipulating the test scores and Joel Klein is unqualified to run the New York City school system” she charged and noting that Klein is an attorney with “no educational experience,” she added, “These are our children and we must be at the table when decisions are being made about our children.”
Another concern Mrs. Lowman spoke about was the racial makeup of school administrations. “Our Latino teachers and administrators are being forced out of the building. One of the things we fought for was people in the classrooms that looked like our children and loved our children. That doesn’t exist in most of our schools. In one school after the other, the mayor has seen fit that our teachers leave. We are committed to our communities to organize, because we will not survive if we don’t.”
Teacher Sam Coleman said that just because test scores were going up, it did not mean that kids were smarter. “Test scores have gone up but that does not mean education. It means LESS teaching is going on in the classrooms. It means our children are spending hours practicing to take the tests so Bloomberg’s numbers can go up. Test scores were 10 % better, but that doesn’t mean our children are 10% better at math. It means that we’ve spent hours and hours teaching for the test. And the tests have gotten easier this year. The parents and the teachers have to get together to fight this.”
Assemblywoman Inez Barron said that New York City is the only city in the nation that does have parent representation on school issues. Noting that she has spent 18 years in the classroom and 18 years in school administration, Assemblywoman Barron agreed that “Joel Klein is not qualified to be chancellor.” And that in an effort to justify all of the efforts they put on testing and testing as evaluation, Assemblywoman Barron said Joel Klein goes so far as to say “Creative thinking can’t happen if children can’t read.” And this is who is in charge of the school system says the Assemblywoman.
Barron went on to say that there is a depth of talent that is “unappreciated and disrespected.” “We are women and men who have been in the system who have been inspected and who have demonstrated an understanding of our children.” But their voices are “nowhere to be found in the Department of Education.”
Susan Crawford, a member of the NYC Parent Commission and founder of the Right to Lead Project said “the Educational Partnership Bill needs to pass. Parents need to stop the privatization of the schools. Every village and town has parents as part of the education system. Why don’t we?”
According to Mr. Weusi, the group promised prolonged activities until “the Bloomberg dictatorship of public education is destroyed.” He also said that the group demands the immediate firing of Chancellor Klein and that his replacement be “a qualified educator.”
View From Here
Writing for the Future of Freedom Foundation, Sheldon Richman toes the same line of false options that the anti-Universal Health Care crowd always cite. He says of Obama’s public health plan, “ He wants a ‘public option.’ That’s a euphemism for a government-run health-insurance program that is to provide a competitive alternative to private, for-profit insurance. This rationale is misleading because there is already competition among insurers — and there would be far more if state governments did not restrict intrastate competition and prevent interstate competition. For example, a resident in Minnesota, whose insurance policy is burdened with dozens of state-mandated provisions for coverage he may not want (for instance, alcoholism/drug rehab and breast reconstruction), may not legally buy a policy offered in Idaho, which has far fewer mandates.”
What Richman is describing is a race to the bottom in benefits. The insurance companies will follow the same path as the off-shore profit seekers, they want the cheapest place to operate and in the example Richman gives, that would be the state with the fewest mandated services. In short, the state that mandates the least health care will become the favorite home state of the insurers.
The competition among insurers is not a cost deterrent, it is just a cost.
To understand how the government program would cost less, we need only consider the expenses the government will not have: No sales force. No sales people to pay, no trucks idling at the curb while folks sit at tables trying to catch customers for their health care dollars. No advertising, no little gifts to give away. They wouldn’t have the sales support staff. No secretaries, no regional and area managers. They wouldn’t have to pay chief executives exorbitant salaries. Wouldn’t have to pay for their support staff, limousines, lunches or first class air tickets. None of those expenses would exist. Wouldn’t have to pay for car service at night, no vice presidents in charge of marketing, the art and design departments, and all other departments, will not need to be duplicated.
The list of expenses that would disappear or would no longer need to be duplicated is astonishing and virtually endless. The fact that they are never spoken about is amazing. Perhaps it’s because one person’s expense is another’s job. And that’s what will keep this health albatross around our collective necks.
Commerce & Community
Senate Standoff
It’s a mistake to think of the stalemate in the New York State senate as the product of mere incompetence, as if the 62 members were simply unable to create a governing quorum. This is a bona fide power struggle in which the first side that blinks will lose.
From January 7 until early June, Democrats ran the chamber with a razor-thin one-vote majority. Then two renegade Dems, Pedro Espada of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate, joined with Republicans in a legislative coup that gave power back to the Republicans.
A few days later, Monserrate crossed back over to the Dems, leaving the chamber deadlocked at 31 to 31. The normal means of breaking senate ties – a vote cast by the Lieutenant Governor – is impossible because the man with that job, David Paterson, was elevated to governor when Eliot Spitzer resigned, and New York has no provision for holding special elections to fill a vacancy for Lieutenant Governor.
The question worth asking is why both sides remain so adamant about not letting the over side govern even temporarily. The answer is that billions of dollars and the entire political future of New York are at stake.
Before the GOP coup, Democrats were about to enact housing reforms that would have broken the stranglehold the real estate industry maintains on the state legislature. Issues like rent stabilization were about to tilt in favor of tenants before the coup.
Even more important than the real estate standoff is the political redistricting set to take place after the 2010 census. Next year, in keeping with the U.S. Constitution, the country will count all residents, after which state legislatures – in New York the state senate – will redraw all political boundary lines.
The fate of thousands of politicians who hold county, village and state offices across New York – not to mention the state’s congressional delegation– will turn on whether the lines drawn after the census place them in a friendly or hostile district.
That’s too much power to simply hand over. Expect the Albany stalemate to last a good while longer.
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Shelter Fight Continues
Crown Heights is continuing the fight to block an ill-conceived effort to transfer the city’s central intake center for homeless men from its midtown location to a residential neighborhood already overburdened with social service centers.
A lawsuit is being planned and could be filed in the near future. But it shouldn’t take a court order to make City Hall use common sense.
Statistics show that nearly 60% of all homeless men are in Manhattan, and many are mentally ill – yet the city remains determined to close the intake center on E. 30th St. next to Bellevue Hospital to make room for a luxury hotel.
The estimated 20,000 homeless men who seek shelter in New York annually will instead be diverted to the notorious Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Crown Heights, across the street from brownstones, churches and hundreds of seething homeowners.
The armory, among the worst-run in the city, is not close to any hospital. It’s also a known haven for drug dealing, prostitution and crowds of men who congregate in front of the shelter every day, trying to flag down passing trucks for work as day laborers.
A little over a year ago, I wrote about 41 Level 3 sex offenders – the highest level, reserved for the most violent criminals – listed on the state’s official criminal justice Web site as living at the shelter and the Peter Young residence, a privately run shelter across the street from the armory.
Bedford-Atlantic is part of a larger story of municipal failure. We recently passed the fifth anniversary of a promise by Mayor Bloomberg to cut homelessness by two-thirds within five years.
In reality, the number of homeless families has climbed 9.5% since the mayor’s announcement, to 9,538 from 8,712. And the current overall number of homeless people now exceeds the numbers when Bloomberg first took office in 2002.
To make matters worse, administration officials have been less than truthful about important parts of the half-baked Bedford-Atlantic plan.
Last September, Commissioner Robert Hess of the city Department of Homeless Services testified at a state Assembly hearing that the Bedford-Atlantic site would be spiffed up with a “state-of-the-art athletic facility.”
The idea was to make the site similar to projects in Washington Heights and Park Slope, Brooklyn, where small homeless facilities share armory space with first-class sports facilities – including the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
A Department of Homeless Services spokeswoman says the proposal is still on the table – but also confirmed that the recently passed 2010 city budget includes no money for a recreation facility at Bedford-Atlantic.
Hess also promised that his department would create a new Manhattan-based intake facility for the homeless. That’s another agreement that has changed: No new Manhattan facility has been identified, and the closing of the 30th St. intake center, originally scheduled for next week, has been delayed indefinitely.
My guess is that the administration will wait until after Election Day in November to announce where a new Manhattan shelter will be.
And despite making good on a promise to shut down the 150- bed, privately run Peter Young residence, Homeless Services says it is “not involved” and will take no position on an effort by the facility to place 100 homeless beds on the very same site under state auspices.
No wonder my neighbors are seeing red.
“This is the one issue in this community that has managed to unify the young and the old, black and white folks, longtime residents and gentrifiers alike,” says Mark Griffith, my friend and neighbor, who will chair tonight’s town hall.
That might be the only positive effect of the plan: bringing together an often contentious community in a joint fight against a truly bad idea.
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Join me weekdays from 6 am to 9 am on WWRL 1600 AM for news and debate about these and many other issues. For past shows, go to wwrlmorningshow.libsyn.com.
Brooklyn High Achievers Accept Awards
Councilwoman Letitia James said, “I am a proud mama today”, as she stood in anticipation of the commencement of the 2009 graduating class of Medgar Evers Preparatory High School June 26th. Two young scholars, Dane Russell and Jeffrey Williams, stood out in their class for their high academic achievement being named Valedictorian and Salutatorian of the graduating class.
In their reflections of their high school journey, they spoke of their educational growth and how they had to become selective in the choices they made as students involving friendships, to associate with positive people. Dr. Michael A. Wilshire, principal spoke of these young men as, “dedicated, hardworking, and disciplined” students. Jeffrey Williams, salutatorian coined the expression of his upcoming transition from high school to college life, finding it, “splend-awesome”. Mr. Williams’ winning attitude and self -confidence that he evidentally displayed in high school will stand him in good stead against what life would throw at him. “High school has been an amazing experience that I can grow from. It helped me to develop in character and attentiveness to my surroundings. I have learned to access resources for opportunities where I can succeed”, said Williams. Graduating with a 93.62 GPA, Willaims is recognized by the College Board for having completed Advance Placement courses in Biology, Chemistry, English Language, and Environmental Science. He finds interest in musical performance, debating, drama, and writing. In September 2009 he will be attending New York University on a full scholarship double-majoring in Political Science and English. “I am ready, willing and able”, he says about his career goal to be a litigation lawyer.
Dane Russell, valedictorian graduate was humble in acknowledging high school as “really exciting in preparation for college”. Dane graduated with an outstanding GPA 97.57, was also recognized by the College Board as an AP scholar excelled in AP courses in Physics, Statistics, Calculus, English Language and Biology. Extra curricular activities Dane dedicated his time to were track and field, table tennis, chess and writing. He served as a member on the National Honors Society. Brown University awaits this phenomenal young man’s arrival, having accepted him as 1 of 50 applicants from a pool of 1,800. He is accepted into the prestigious Program of Liberal Medical Education (PLME). At the end of this 8 year program Mr. Russell will receive a B.A or B.S degree and an M.D. on his path to an envisioned career as a neurosurgeon.
By Victoria Taylor