Monroe Anderson

Cops victim of Trigger Finger-itis epidemic

  

 

 

    A Black man who had suffered a stroke was shot with a Taser and pepper spray because he was unable to get out of his car as a Virginia cop ordered. A Cleveland cop was found not guilty in the 137 bullets trial. From coast to coast police are too quick to pull the trigger. Here's my Chicago Defender column on the situation. 

 

Lethal or nonlethal, same shoot, different day

By Monroe Anderson

 

 

When it comes to white cops shooting unarmed Blacks, the hits just keep on coming. So do the misses.

              A viral video-surfaced last week that featured David Washington’s turn at taking the hit. The 34-year-old Black man was shot by a Taser then hit by a stream of pepper spray for failing to get out of his car on demand.

Washington was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because Fredericksburg Police Officer Shaun Jergens shot him with the Taser and pepper sprayed him, leaving him short of breath and with his eyelids swollen closed, instead of aiming a couple of lead slugs at his head. Not that he didn’t threaten to.

“Get out the car,” Jergens yelled after assaulting Washington,“ or I’m going to f--king smoke you.”

Washington was unlucky because he had just suffered a stroke and was in need of medical care not an instant application of tough policing for sitting in a car while Black.

             As for the miss, this time it was in Cleveland. In the hometown of Tamir Rice, who would have turned 13 years old next month if he hadn’t been shot to death by Officer Timothy Loehmann while playing cops and robbers in a city playground, justice was on the lam.

            Apparently, like Agent 007, America’s police have a license to kill. Michael Brelo, a Cleveland cop, was acquitted Saturday of charges of voluntary manslaughter in the “137 bullets” case for the shooting deaths Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30.

            Why is it that cops tasked with serving and protecting routinely see Blacks as the usual suspects before rendering us the usual victims? Why are some police so prone to shoot first, before coming up with answers later? Is innocent until proven guilty a whites only right?

Both Officers Brelo and Jergens suffered from that epidemic that has stricken too many men in blue across the nation: Trigger Finger-itis.

             Jergens shot Washington with his Taser as the incapacitated driver sat in his car facing the wrong way on the street because he assumed the Black man was the perpetrator in a hit-and-run accident. The sick man mattered so little to Cleveland police that after he was assaulted by Jergens, he was thrown, handcuffed on the hot pavement while they allowed a police car to roll over one of his feet.

Of course, white cops abusing Black men is nothing new. But the Taser has become Officer-Not-So-Friendly’s high-tech billy club. Back in the day, many a cop’s knee-jerk reaction was to beat a Black man bloody before taking him to the station. In this modern age, rather than crack open their heads, the practice is to hit them with a 50,000 volts of electricity instead.    

In 2012, an American Heart Association report linked stun gun use to heart attacks and deaths. There are real-life tragedies to underscore those findings. Last year, 60 Americans died from Tasers. Since they’ve become the “nonlethal” weapon of choice for police worldwide more than 600 people have died from them in the past 14 years.

While Tasers may or may not amount to deadly force, bullets certainly do.

Both unarmed, Russell and Williams were killed on November 29, 2012 after officers mistook the sound of his 1979 Chevy Malibu backfiring as gunshots. Since dead men or women tell no tales, we will never know what led to the 62- police vehicle high speed chase across Cleveland. It is known that 137 bullets struck the Malibu that the two occupants were in. Forty-nine of those shots came from Officer Brelo’s Glock 17. He squeezed off 15 of the rounds as he stood on the car, both it and its passengers motionless, as if he was making his day in a sequel to Dirty Harry.

Ohio Judge John O'Donnell ruled Saturday that Officer Brelo acted within his constitutional rights. In his ruling, the judge explained that since 12 other Cleveland police--eleven white, one Hispanic--had fired shots as well, there was no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that any of the 23 bullets in Russell’s body was the one fired by Brelo that took the Black man’s life.

So Officer Brelo will not see a day behind bars for the deaths of an unarmed Black man and woman although he remains on leave without pay. No charges have been filed against Jergens for his abuse. But he was forced to resign from the force.

             Who knows? Someday, maybe we’ll read about some cop actually doing the time for doing the crime.

Who arrested religion in Indiana?

 

    Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

 

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men.  Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation.  Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

    The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.   

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday  that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

“Clearly. Clearly, there’s been misunderstanding and confusion and mischaracterization of this law,” Gov. Pence said. “I abhor discrimination.”

Right. Don’t stop paying attention yet. Arkansas passed its own religious freedom law yesterday.

Post post-racial America

 

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

 

From Selma to Madison to Norman

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

 

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

 

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

 

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

 

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

 

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

 

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

 

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

 

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

 

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

 

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops  than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

 

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

 

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

 

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

 

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

 

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

 

Some students’ chants are far better than others.

 

From jail cell to ballot box

 

 

Chicago's mayoral run-off election on April 7 looks like it may be too close to call. VOTE--Voice of the Ex-Offenders--plans to make its presence felt in the election. Whether the organization pulls it off or not is worth watching. Here's my March 4, 2015 Chicago Defender column on the election and VOTE.

 

Will ex-offenders be on offensive for April’s Run-off?

 

Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

 

 

If community activist Ziff Sistrunk’s plan is well laid, Chicagoans who did time for breaking the law may be the decisive players in determining who makes some of the city’s laws in the future.

Along with mayoral candidates, Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a record number of aldermen—more than a third—are in next month’s run-off election. As of now, all bets are off regarding who will be the winners and losers after the votes are counted.

By the time the tallying is done, and all the talking points about law and order and budget balancing are delivered, Sistrunk says he wants to make sure that both mayoral candidates and the 19 aldermanic candidates have addressed one other subject: What to do about Chicago’s neglected population of ex-offenders.

That’s what to do with them, not to them. This ambitious plan is not one of those “keep an eye on them so we can catch them before they violate again.” It’s one that recognizes that ex-offenders paid their debt to society and ought to be given a fair shake and full participation in what those of us who have walked the straight and narrow take for granted.

Sistrunk says his organization, VOTE—Voice of the Ex-Offenders, has already launched what it’s calling the “X-Offenders 6:45 A.M. Movement.” Forty-five minutes after the polls open at 6 a.m. on April 7, the mission is to have 50,000 ex-cons standing first in line just itching to vote for the candidate who has pledged to look out for them.  

To pull this off, Sistrunk says he has recruited 50 ex-offenders to round up 1000 voters in each of Chicago’s 50 wards. The end result is to have 50,000 voters across the city making a political point.

Voter turnout could even be greater since an ex-con exercising his civic duty presumably would bring his family and friends along, reversing the poor participation the city experienced during last week’s election.

Since he was released from Pontiac prison nearly four decades ago after doing two and a half years for armed robbery, Sistrunk, who is the director of the South Side’s Kirby Puckett Youth Center, has taken on his fair share of quixotic challenges. For example, along with perennial candidate William “Dock” Walls, in 2007, Sistrunk was briefly a mayoral challenger to Mayor Richard M. Daley until he failed to get the 12,500 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. Three years ago, Sistrunk was one of the supporters outside Rod Blagojevich’s house protesting the stiff sentencing on the last day of the governor’s freedom.

In five short weeks, we’ll know if the community activist is better at organizing than he is at pipe dreaming. I’m hoping that Sistrunk’s for real and has real skills to galvanize and mobilize ex-offenders that get them out to vote. There’s a real need. Ex-offenders remain second-class citizens in America. In Illinois, they can’t live in public housing, can’t coach your kid in Little League and can’t work for the city or state.

Nationally, it’s worse. If you did the crime, then do the time, you still can’t vote.

An estimated 5.8 million Americans are prohibited from casting a ballot by state law because of current or previous felony convictions. “That’s more than the individual populations of 31 U.S. states,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last month in a speech to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights at Georgetown University Law Center. “And although well over a century has passed since post-Reconstruction states used these measures to strip African Americans of their most fundamental rights, the impact of felony disenfranchisement on modern communities of color remains both disproportionate and unacceptable.”

The war on drugs and the creation of the Prison Industrial Complex has compounded this discriminatory development. Under the Obama Administration, federal life sentences have fallen dramatically from 280 in fiscal year 2009 to 153 in 2013 and according to a report released Monday, but three-fourths of federal life sentences are given to minorities and the bulk are for non-violent drug offenses. Although the report didn’t say why there are fewer life sentences now than before Obama was sworn in, it’s more than likely because five years ago the president signed a bill narrowing the crack and powder cocaine sentencing disparity from 100:1 to 18:1 and for the first time eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.

More work needs to be done. Since Illinois is one of only 16 states where ex-offenders can vote, it makes sense to make that vote count here.   

Sistrunk says he wants to make sure that opportunities abound for ex-offenders. Come April 7, he will have a chance to prove that he can deliver. If he doesn’t, it will be an opportunity missed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cop shoots armed man: Sees reverse prosecution

I'm now writing a weekly column for the legendary Chicago Defender. This is my first one.

 

 

Justice Needs New Eyes

By Monroe Anderson

Chicago Defender

 

 

When it comes to black men in America, justice isn’t blind--it’s cockeyed.

 

For the latest evidence of this fundamental fact, take a look at what happened in suburban Park Forest. In July of 2013, the cops were called after an unruly old man at the suburb’s Victory Centre assisted living facility refused to voluntarily go to get checked out for a suspected urinary tract infection.

 

By the time the police arrived, the old man, possibly experiencing dementia, was leaning on his cane with one hand and yielding a 7-inch fillet knife with the other. He was ordered to drop the weapon. He refused as police rushed his room. One of the cops attempted to taze him but missed. The next cop fired, hitting the old man with four beanbag rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun. Hours later, the old man died.

 

We’ve seen this scenario in one sequence or another so many times before and since that it is nothing more than a cliche: The hapless perp goes to the morgue. The warrior-cop goes free.

 

No crime here, folks, now move along.

 

And for more than five months, it looked like it was going to be the same old story.

 

Then last April, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez did something virtually no other American prosecutor had done in the 461 deadly police confrontations that had happened in 2013. Rather than come up with the usual conclusion that it was “justifiable homicide,” Alvarez accused the trigger-pulling cop of  using “unjustified” and “unreasonable” force and charged him with reckless conduct.

 

And that’s when the cock-eyed Justice appears to have reared her ugly head. In this case, the cop squeezing off the rounds, Craig Taylor, was black. The man on the wrong end of the barrel, John Wrana, was white.

 

There were a few other wrinkles making the Park Forest case different from the standard-issue deadly force police encounter. Wrana was a 95-year-old World War II veteran. Married with five children, Taylor is an 11-year-veteran of the Park Forest Police Department with an exemplary record. He is also the only black cop on the force.

 

During last week’s trial, prosecutors argued that Park Forest police could have, should have waited Wrana out; that they had other options besides Tazing or bean-bagging a frail 95-year-old man.

 

In testifying in his own defense, Taylor trotted out the law officer’s old tried and blue. He said that he was ordered by his superior to fire on Wrana and that he was following police procedure. Taylor claimed that he feared for his life therefore his actions were justifiable. “When I saw John Wrana with the knife in his hand,” he said, “threatening to kill me and my fellow officers, I was afraid, in fear of my life, and felt I had to do something.”

 

Whether the law thinks Taylor did the right thing or not will be determined by February 5. His bench trial at the Markham Courthouse ended Friday and Cook County Circuit Court Judge Luciano Panici promised he would hand down a verdict by then.

 

Whatever the judgement, it is easy for a casual observer of American justice to find this case curious. How is it that an armed white man in Park Forest is accidentally killed by a police weapon that is intended to be non-lethal, and the one black cop involved in the incident goes to trial?--while the outcome has been totally different elsewhere?

 

In Missouri, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed black teen, Michael Brown, at least six times, twice to the head, in front of eye witnesses. Even though 16 out of the 18 eyewitnesses testified that Brown had his hands up, when he was shot to death, St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch presented a case before the grand jury that was so incompetent or insincere, it that looked like he was the defense attorney for the white cop and the prosecutor to the black teen.

In New York, there was a now famous video showing police gang tackling Eric Garner for selling single cigarettes. We saw office Daniel Pantaleo ride the black father of five, grandfather of two to the hard pavement. We heard Garner say “I can’t breath.” Like McColloch, Staten Island District Attorney Daniel M. Donovan Jr. managed not to be competent or dedicate enough to get the grand jury to find probable cause.

In Ohio, we also saw another video. This time it was a 12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice,  playing cops and robbers on a Cleveland playground with a toy gun all by himself,  when he was shot and killed by a white cop,Timothy Loehmann, two seconds after his squad pulled up to the child. The trigger happy cop has been canned but has not yet been brought before a grand jury.

 

Maybe Justice needs new eyes that see more clearly the injustices being perpetuated in our legal system day in and day out.

 

Discouraging Development: Republicans scheme to suppress vote

 

The conservatives are up to their old tricks. I'm calling them out in my latest commentary for The Root.

 

Déjà Vu in Texas Voter-ID Fight

The Lone Star state is among several places where new legislation will hit blacks hard at the polls.

• By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 25, 2012 at 12:57 AM

(The Root) -- If you're a strong believer in coincidence, the outbreak of voter-identification laws across the nation just might make sense. If you're a student of American politics and history, on the other hand, you see it slightly differently. In that case, what you see is what we've got: voter suppression.

Thirty-three states, almost all of them Republican-controlled, now require some sort of voter ID. A decade ago, none did. A decade ago, there was no evidence of massive voter fraud. Today, there remains little evidence of voter fraud.

But there is clear evidence that the rash of voter-ID laws could have a profound impact on African-American participation at the polls. As Attorney General Eric Holder pointed out at the NAACP convention earlier this month, recent studies show that 8 percent of white voting-age citizens lack a government-issued ID, while 25 percent of black voting-age citizens lack one. Considering that Barack Obama received 95 percent of the African-American vote in 2008, if you think Republicans might be interested in suppressing that vote, you might be right.

Take the Lone Star state, for example. Since 2002, there have been only two documented cases of a Texan being convicted for voter impersonation fraud. But last year, a voter-ID law was passed as an "emergency item." Under the proposed Texas state law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID while student IDs would not. Some voters would need to travel 100 miles in Texas, particularly Hispanics, to designated government offices just to get their photo IDs; others would be hard-pressed to pay for the documents needed to get the IDs. The currently contested law, if implemented, would make it easier to buy a gun than to cast a ballot in Gov. Rick Perry's state

Texas is one of 16 mostly Southern states with a history of discrimination required by the Voting Rights Act to get pre-approval from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court in D.C. for changes in voter procedures. Understanding that Holder would be a bad bet, the state is gambling on the District Court in D.C. ruling in its favor. After a weeklong trial, a three-man panel will announce its judgment later this month on whether Texas is up to its old voter-discrimination tricks.

Unfortunately, the Lone Star state is not alone in adopting restrictive voter-ID laws as a tactic to discourage African-American and Latino voters from showing up at the polls. As is the case in some of the problems Americans face today, we can blame it on George W. Bush. In the aftermath of the Florida fiasco that led to the Supreme Court declaring Bush president, Americans became desperate for measures that might stem voter fraud. Halfway through his first term, Bush signed the Help America Vote Act into law, which required first-time voters in federal elections to show some form of ID during registration or at the polling place.

Although voter identification had little to do with the problem of hanging chads, Republican-controlled Indiana saw its possibilities, then upped the ante. In 2004, Arizona passed a law requiring voters to bring a state-issued photo ID to the polling place. The next year, Indiana's Republicans pushed through a law requiring that a photo ID be shown before a voter could cast a ballot. Civil rights groups and the state's Democratic party challenged the law, arguing that it unjustly targeted poor and minority voters without any evidence that in-person voter fraud was taking place in the Hoosier state.

The same fab five right-wing activist justices on the Supreme Court who ruled that corporations are people also gave Indiana's ID law a nod. Like dominoes falling, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have followed with restrictive laws requiring voters to show up with photo IDs in hand -- even though in 2007, five years after the George W. Bush administration launched a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department found virtually no evidence of organized efforts to influence federal elections with ineligible voters.

A study by New York's Brennan Center for Justice last week reported that 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters in the nation live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. It also reported that "these voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25 ... By comparison, the notorious poll tax -- outlawed during the civil rights era -- cost $10.64 in current dollars."

Just why would Republicans want to make minority voters, who don't have and don't need photo IDs in their day-to-day lives, cough up extra cash or go far out of their way in order to exercise their civic duty?

And why, oh, why are the Republicans hand-wringing over non-existent voter fraud? Let's see. As polls have consistently shown, President Barack Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney are locked in a dead heat. Depending on who's counting, there are 10 to 12 swing states that will determine the outcome of November's election. Among those battleground states, Florida, Colorado, Nevada and North Carolina are heavily populated with either Hispanic or black voters who could make a difference. But that's only if they show up and are allowed to cast their ballots.

And, as we all know, stuff happens. Let's just make sure it doesn't happen to us.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

 

 

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Rent too high, pants too low!

 

    It's not often that I miss not having my own TV show, but I'm there right now.

If I had a TV talk show, I'd love to book two guests for a joint appearance: General Larry Platt and New York Gubernatorial Candidate Jimmy McMillan.

Between the two, they cover the current American political spectrum.

You may remember General Platt from American Idol when he performed "Pants on the Ground," a whamit, bamit, cut-it-out damnit song about young men wearing baggy, saggy pants. 

And, of course, Wannabe New York Governor Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High Party is the media story du jour after yesterday's gubernatorial candidate debate.

If I had my show, the three of us could talk politics and culture. We could talk about how the war on drugs and the outsourcing of unskilled jobs have produced a guns and drugs commerce in the nation's inner-cities that has led to a prison culture in America from inner-city to suburb to farmland to the world.

After that, the three of us could discuss how Reaganomics and deregulation has led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Of course, I'd drop in the fact that the CEO compensation ratio to worker was 24 to 1 in 1965 while today it's 300 to 1, therefore highlighting one reason the rent's definitely too damn high.

Unfortunately, I no longer have a TV show, so I'll just have to have Platt and McMillan as my guests right here, right now.

Daddy Fearest

 

    As far as I’m concerned, James Jones should be a candidate for Father of the Year. Instead, the Central Florida father is just one more mug shot of just one more black man who had a run-in with the law.

Jones was arrested Thursday in Lake Mary, Fla. and charged with disorderly conduct and disturbing a school bus for this crime: Protecting his 13-year-old daughter.

Jones’ daughter, a transfer student, had been bullied time and time again by some of her fellow students. Deciding that he was mad as hell as wasn’t going to take it anymore, Jones boarded his daughter’s school bus and threatened to open up a can of whup ass on the students who had been bullying her and the bus driver for allowing them to do it.

According to an ABC News account, Jones boarded his daughter’s school bus, obviously angry. "Everybody sit down. Everybody sit down," Jones said, not caring that the bus’ surveillance camera was recording him. He then ordered his daughter to point out the bullies. "Show me which one. Show me which one," he demanded.

Jones confronted the middle school students he says have been bullying his daughter, who has cerebral palsy. He charges that they had taunted, hit and even thrown condoms at her, ABC News reported. "I'm gonna (expletive) you up.…this is my daughter, and I will kill the (expletive) who fought her," Jones said.

He also had a few choice words for the bus driver: "If anything happens to my daughter I'm going to (expletive) you up and everybody on this (expletive)," he said.

As a father myself, I understand his anger. In fact, I resembled his remarks.

But, beyond just threatening, I took action. A taxi cab driver nearly hit my then pre-teen sons, Scott and Kyle, while we were out riding our bicycles. The cabbie cruised through an intersection, ignoring them, although they were already in the street.  Luckily, they stopped in time, since he had only bothered to slow down before blowing his stop sign. Although he cleared the intersection, there were too many cars stuck in traffic ahead for him to go anywhere. Thinking of what almost happened, my rage, like Jones’, got the better of me.

“You almost hit my kids,” I yelled as I rode my bike next to the side of his cab. I dismounted and kicked his taxi as hard as I could startling his passengers in the back seat. 

Later, after I’d cooled off, I thought about what I’d done. I realized then, what Jones realizes now, that I may have over-reacted. 

On the other hand, to this day, I can’t help for hoping that the cabbie’s passengers gave him this tip in lieu of money: Watch out for children.