Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

by  Stanley Kinard
Schools Out – Beware of a Long, Hot Summer
With the exception of taking Regents exams, this school year is technically over.   Students have taken all of their state and citywide exams and are looking forward to summer.  I am concerned that the summer they are looking at may be a “long, hot summer.”  On a positive note many students have done very well this school year and are moving up to the next level.  Many teachers have completed a successful year working without a contract and under rather stressful conditions.
The Boys & Girls track team was cited as the top team in America for their placement in the Penn Relays.  They have in the past won citywide and statewide championships and continue to excel under the legendary coach, James Jackson.  The new principal of Boys & Girls, Mr. Spencer Holder, made a smooth transition in taking over for the irreplaceable Dr. Frank Mickens.  I have spent much of my column on education in critiquing a failed system and attacking the policies of both the mayor and the chancellor.
In many ways I am concerned about what will happen to our youth over the next two months.  With the breakdown of the culture and the values obtained from TV and radio, many of our youth have adopted a demeanor which invites trouble.   Insanity has prevailed in our community over the last month.  A police officer shot and killed his tenant in a dispute over the rent.  A week later, an 18 -year- old young man was shot and killed by a white male in Brownsville.  He was shot in the back.  Yet the next day, the Daily News reported that he was a troubled youth having been previously arrested 10 times.  This is not true.  To date, the Daily News has not retracted the story or printed the truth.  The Aiken family is devastated.   The horrible incident regarding the 9-year-old girl stabbing her 11-year-old best friend over a rubber ball.    Brownsville was  recently turned into a police state when a police officer was shot.    The  alledged shooter fled the scene and later openly took his own life. 
My reason for calling this a “long, hot summer” is because people are feeling a lot of rage and the economy has nothing to offer our youth.  Mass media, controlled by the Murdocks and Viacom, are doing nothing to prepare us for this reality.  As a community, we are not prepared for this long, hot summer which is why spiritual alignment is in order.  We must protect our youth and encourage them to use cool heads in resolving conflicts.  As the late James Davis said “Let’s stop the violence and let’s love ourselves.”  We must also make the distinction between revolution and a “thug solution.”   We will never overthrow oppression and transform our community through thuggery.  The only people we really hurt are ourselves.  It’s time to turn off the TV, the warcraft video games and get back to the revolution.  Let’s take control of our schools and transform the whole society.  Let’s protect our community and stop killing each other, and certainly let’s stop allowing others to kill us.

 (NAPSI)-Stroke, the third leading cause of death among Americans, can be especially devastating for African-Americans. In fact, statistics show that there is a two to threefold greater stroke incidence for African-Americans than for Caucasians.
          Most people who are at risk for a stroke meet one or more of the following criteria:
 55 years of age or over who have had a stroke or have a family history of stroke
 Diabetes
 High blood pressure
 Heart disease
 Cigarette smoking
     Compared to Caucasians, African-Americans have a higher incidence of stroke risk factors including diabetes and high blood pressure. African-Americans develop high blood pressure earlier in life and their average blood pressures are much higher overall compared with Caucasians. In fact, the rate of high blood pressure for African-Americans in the U.S. is among the highest in the world. As a result, compared with Caucasians, African-Americans have a 1.3 times greater rate of nonfatal stroke and a 1.8 times greater rate of fatal stroke.
Compounding these risk factors, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States often receive a lower quality of care than Caucasians and are therefore less likely to receive adequate diagnostic and screening tests or disease management.
        “It is important that African-Americans understand their risk of stroke and get the medical attention they need,” said Dr. Jose Suarez, director, Neurointensive Care Unit, University Hospital of Cleveland. “It is particularly important for racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. to arm themselves with as much information as possible so they can talk to their doctors and develop appropriate plans to combat this disease.”

About Michael Jackson:
“I’ve known him for 30 years; he is childlike.  Not in a negative sense but really like a child. He is not a child molester.  A child molester does not openly say they are sleeping in the same bed with children.  They try to hide it.  As a male adult, he is talking about sleeping in the same bed with a male child.  Now, if he had said he slept in the bed with little white girls you can guess what would have happened. . .
About the case:
It is about money.  There is no way around that.  There was no credible evidence; there should not have even been a trial.  Michael Jackson is being set up because they want his ownership rights.  He has a 50% stake in Sony Music Publishing, copyrights to thousands of songs, including, the words and music to most of the Beatles tunes as well as a valuable catalog of his own work. He owns the Elvis catalog too, and found out that he had all of Little Richard’s music, which, by the way, Michael gave him back and made him very happy.  But what a lot of people don’t know is that Michael also controls a large percentage of all country and western music.  That is what this is all about, getting control of what he has.  It’s his nigger wake-up call.  You can’t get too powerful in this white supremacist system without a wake-up call . . .  Bill Cosby got his when he tried to buy NBC.
About the use of that word, “nigger?”
What I am doing is part of the ‘de-fanging’ of the word nigger.  I use “nigger,” and I’m not afraid to use it.  It’s not the “n-word.” Can you imagine allowing the word “swastika,” a symbol of hatred, Hitler, and the Nazis, to be called the “s-word”?
America since September 11th
The Patriot Act is an erosion of all of our civil liberties and has led to what Cornel West has called the “niggerization of America.”  It’s in his new book.  You ought to read it.  You can see it in the airports where even white women are made to walk barefoot going through the metal detector. The civil rights that we fought hard and long to benefit everybody, but the punitive laws we let them slip in affects everybody, too.  For instance, when they came out with the RICO Act in the 1970s it wasn’t for the Mafia although it affects them, it was for us, to suppress civil rights activists.  Where two or more people organize for rightful protest, the government can apply it.  And they do!
You marched with Dr. King.
What was he like?
I really had no idea how much vision he had, nobody did.  Martin saw far beyond what any of us saw.  Today, in Mississippi, you have the more Black-elected officials anywhere in the country, the chief of the state troopers is Black, and the head of social services is a Black woman. Today, in Mississippi, a white woman has to go by a Black woman to get a welfare check. Who could have seen that 30 years ago?  King did.  I think everybody owes King a debt of gratitude, including a whole lot of white women and even white men who many have benefited. This country needs to thank Martin for all he did to liberate white people as well as Black and all people.
After 50 years, they have exhumed the body of Emmett Till and reopened the case. Till was brutally tortured and shot as a young boy visiting in Mississippi in 1955,  Your thoughts?
His mother did a very different thing by insisting that his casket be kept open. It took a lot of love and a lot of courage.  Prior to that, a horrible lynching like that was kept as a private thing.  But once that photo of Emmett Till’s body hit Jet Magazine and AP, the whole world saw it.  With new DNA technology, we can learn more and maybe find out who else was involved. There is still no antilynching law in America to this very day.
As you see it, what are Black people
up against today?
It has always been the same thing: white supremacy, by that I mean a “white racist mentality.”  It does not matter if it’s Black cops or white cops – what difference does it make — if you have a white racist mentality?  It’s not about white people, it is about a white racist mentality.  As long as that sick, white racist mentality exists, it’s the same fight.  But today, the states are paying through the nose for police brutality and discrimination cases.  That is what is different today.  Each year, the states, including New York, are paying millions of dollars in settlements and damages.  We have got to keep fighting not with hatred, but with the universal God-force. We have got to keep using the divine power we each have been given, which is Love.

Brooklyn, NY, June 3, 2005 — Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers (SVCMC) announced today that its Board had reluctantly authorized management to submit a closure plan to the New York State Department of Health for St. Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn.  St. Mary’s Hospital continues to experience heavy losses from operations, for the first four months of this year, it had an estimated $3.6 million operating loss.  Over the past three years, St. Mary’s Hospital has required $62 million from SVCMC to cover it operating losses and capital needs. 
Late in 2004, SVCMC began discussions to transfer operations of St. Mary’s to the Kingsbrook HealthCare System, also in Brooklyn. Kingsbrook recently terminated negotiations for a full transfer when it became evident that the facility would continue to need at least $10 million annually to cover operating losses and capital requirements. 
The required level of state support is not available in the current economic environment.  Since no other source of financial support has been identified to fund St. Mary’s losses, the Board approved proceeding with a closure.
SVCMC continues discussions with Kingsbrook HealthCare System, elected officials, and community leaders regarding the potential transfer of ambulatory services from St. Mary’s Hospital to Kingsbrook prior to the closure to meet the ongoing urgent and outpatient needs of Central Brooklyn residents.  SVCMC welcomes the input of any other alternatives from state and local officials.
The licenses for St. Mary’s methadone clinics and Mentally Ill Chemical Abusers (MICA) program will be transferred to Mary Immaculate Hospital and remain in their current locations; the residency program in dentistry will also be transferred to Mary Immaculate Hospital.
SVCMC will work with the appropriate unions, and with its dedicated physicians and employees to assist them identifying internal system job opportunities or in any other way possible.
As Governor Pataki convenes the new Health Facilities Commission, SVCMC will support Kingsbrook as it looks to access restructuring funding or other state funding to preserve outpatient and urgent health care services in the St. Mary’s Hospital community.

While New York City (NYC) is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic in the United States, Bedford-Stuyvesant is the epicenter of the pandemic for African-Americans, adolescents, infants and children. Twenty-four percent of individuals living with AIDS in Brooklyn live in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
United Hospital Fund(UHF) Neighborhoods AIDS data is reported by zip code and the NYC Department of Health (DOH) generally reports AIDS statistics using the  (UHF) zip code clusters. For UHF Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights (UHF Bed-Stuy), the cluster includes zip codes 11212, 11213, 11216,11233 and 11238.
UHF Bed-Stuy with 13% of the adult population has 6,761 (23%) of Brooklyn’s diagnosed AIDS cases at the end of March 2000 – the largest percentage of all UHF neighborhoods in Brooklyn. At 2,792, UHF Bed-Stuy also has the second-highest case rate per 100,000 population
UHF Bed-Stuy had more residents diagnosed with  AIDS than New Orleans, Louisiana, 22nd in the nation, the entire state of Mississippi and 30 other states. At 2,792, UHF Bed-Stuy has more PLWAs than the state of Nevada and 25 other states.
UHF Bed-Stuy-Crown Heights ranked 1st in Brooklyn in the rate of all three reported STDs: gonorrhea, chlamydia and P & S Syphilis. Bed-Stuy-Crown Heights ranked 3rd for the rate of gonorrhea, 6th for chlamydia and 11th for P & S syphilis in NYC.
 The Community Needs Index (CNI)
Developed by the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute, the CNI is a composite measure of service needs at the zip code level “to help users identify and direct health care and prevention services to communities most in need of such services.”
In the unpublished 2000 CNI, all zip codes in Bedford-Stuyvesant/CD3, except 11213 (“moderate need”), ranked “high need.”
Zip code 11216 ranked first of 37 in Brooklyn and 19th of the 177 zip codes for NYC.
Zip codes 11233, 11212, 11238 and 11213 ranked 3rd, 5th, 6th and 10th in Brooklyn, respectively, while ranking 24th, 30th, 32nd and 43rd, respectively in NYC.
Zip code 11216 also rated in the top 20% for all-risk indicator rates, as well as HIV infection and AIDS case rates. 11233 ranked in the top 20% for all risk indicators as well. All five zip codes in UHF B-S/CH ranked in the top ten of the CNI score out of the 37 zip codes in Brooklyn.