Author: Natasha Chart

As Winter Rabbit points out, Native Americans aren’t a people of the past, they’re with us right now. Their rights, dignity and autonomy didn’t stop being trampled on back in the mists of time past living memory, they’re being trampled on right now. Promises made to them are still being broken today.

If that ticks you off, and I hope that it does, take the pledge to support indigenous rights.

Also, your help is sought for the indigenous people of Peru whose lives have been devastated in the recent earthquake.

AT&T will handicap the BlackBerry 8820 so it doesn’t compete with the iPhone. That’s pretty obnoxious.

Hard to say if Apple made the original call, but AT&T has forced RIM to disable GPS functionality on their upcoming release. So if you want the new BlackBerry, don’t get it through AT&T. If you have that choice.

AT&T’s other odious recent behavior includes censoring political content from a Pearl Jam concert. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps talked recently in this context about the importance of net neutrality, or treating the internet like a telecommunications service with built-in consumer protection.

Here’s the thing: AT&T doesn’t give a damn about their customers. They don’t give a damn about whether or not you can use the phone that best suits you, or have access to free speech, or if they government uses them to illegally wiretap their customers. They. Just. Don’t. Care. Not even a little bit.

They’re too big for their customers to challenge them individually. They’re too big for even one of their major vendors to challenge them. There are areas of the country where they’ve got a near lock on service. In order not to pay highway robbery prices for decent equipment, you’ve also got to lock in a 2 year service agreement with them.

Now, think of all the other big companies out there that are exactly like AT&T, petty, greedy tyrants with absolute power over some little corner of your life that you just have to bend over and put up with.

These same companies, through their lobbyists, bought politicians, and wholesale purchase of the Republican Party have been telling anyone who’ll listen that the biggest threat to a free market is the government. The people we hire to represent us when we cast our ballots in an election, and that we can at the least fire at the next election. But what is so dang free about AT&T customers having to put up with an artificially incapacitated BlackBerry? What’s so free about their locking up the iPhone so you can only use it with their service? What’s so free about the fact that if you have a problem with the way they handle their contracts, you have to take it to corporate-friendly arbitration instead of being able to take it to court?

Can anyone tell me what is so utopian about AT&T’s latitude to screw over whoever the hell they want to without check? Want to explain how it’s good for customers, commerce, free choice or the American way? How this is the best outcome?

Corporations like AT&T have consistently proven, time and again, that they absolutely can’t be trusted to act in the common good. Yet they tell us that they’re the best managers of common resources, like our communications bandwidth and infrastructure. The best. Yet they routinely leave smaller communities behind, and lie in order to maximize profits without having to provide better services or invest more significantly in infrastructure.

These are the bozos that conservatives and libertarians believe can, always and by definition, make better decisions for society than our elected government can? Or at least they’d like us to think they believe that. Personally, I doubt they’re that stupid, they just seem to also believe they’ll be invited aboard the in-crowd’s gravy train. And isn’t that just the very best example of how to love your neighbor, ever?

Dave Johnson over at Seeing the Forest talks about why Democrats lack courage:

… Republicans who toe the right wing corporate line know they have the whole “conservative movement” infrastructure and political system watching their backs, sticking up for them and going after their opponents. Even if they get tossed out of office they can expect serious rewards. They get appointed to a nice agency position, or a think tank job, or a lobbying job – something will be there for them and they know it. The right takes care of their own. (And we all know this system extends through their whole infrastructure, right down to speaking fees and book advances for lowly RW bloggers.)

But it is not easy for Democrats to do the right thing. Not at all. It takes incredible courage and commitment, because they are on their own when going against the system and the right’s apparatus. For politicians who might support progressive values and policies there just is not much of a system beyond the blogosphere to encourage and support them to do the right thing. So they can expect no support – only punishment and pain. Dem politicians largely still do not support and stick up for each other and there is very little organized support from . There isn’t a reward/job/payment system at all – candidates and their staff in fact have to worry that they are harming their future political and business careers by sticking up for progressive values. …

Johnson then goes on to talk about how the blogosphere reflects this dynamic. We’re free to say what we like, and stand up for progressive values, but … we don’t get paid for what’s enormously time-consuming work and we can’t expect that everyone can do that.

This is one of the reasons why the blogs skew male, and skew white. This, in addition to the tendency of any subculture to reflect the racial, class or gender hierarchy of the dominant culture, means that an expansion of diversity requires some significant intentionality. People who statistically tend to do well, tend to carry that into all their activities.

So the culture of blogging is the culture of the same people who can afford to take unpaid career track internships of the sort that are common in liberal organizations. Conservative interns get paid though, and sometimes get housing and the occasional meal. Liberal interns get … the satisfaction of a job well done, just like most bloggers. And wherever two or three bloggers are gathered together, I will tell you that talk will turn sooner or later to how broke we all are, and how tired we all are of being broke and/or in debt. And yes, Dave, the healthcare question, it does come up with regularity. We’re holding this blogosphere together with duct tape and bailing wire by now, even those of us who you’d think would be doing well.

It’s a reason why you see fewer women, fewer people from low-income backgrounds, fewer people of color. Fewer of the people in whose hands society has not seen fit to concentrate wealth, and who just don’t have the cushion, credit or freedom to forgo potential income.

Everybody has to eat, and it’s hard to be courageous when you’re hungry.

Peter Brown of the Politico seems super-excited by the Draft Thompson effort, mainly it seems because it gives him a chance to gush about Eisenhower. And we know how much everybody liked Ike. Brown also doesn’t seem to remember Gen. Wesley Clark, but he was a Democrat, everybody is well aware that Democrats don’t count.

Or is that can’t count? It’s hard to keep track sometimes whether they mean to insult our very existence, or merely our numeracy.

But this, this is true comedy:

… Today, the frustration is with a Republican president who will not be on the ballot. And Bush’s GOP affiliation will make it more difficult for someone such as Thompson to benefit politically from the widespread unhappiness in the country. …

“Bush’s GOP affiliation”!!? Like we didn’t all know that Bush’s so-called Texas swagger was caused by having so many GOP noses affixed permanently to his backside? Now he’s just an affiliate. Engaging in Republican affiliated program activities, if you will.

And moreover, an affiliate whose behavior has somewhat mysteriously tarnished the Republican brand, as if regrettably by association. However could that have happened?

Surely not because the rest of the Republicans have spent the last six and a bit years marching in lockstep with him, hanging on his every word, refusing to check his outrageous abuses of power or exercise the barest of oversight, encouraging his warmongering and obscene waste of the public treasury, and praising him as loudly as possible every time they could be found near an open mic. That can’t have had anything whatever to do with the fact that it’s hard out there for a Republican who wants to politically benefit from a public unhappiness directly caused by the man whose boots their party has been busy licking to a fine, mirrored glow.

It’s enough to make a girl miss the agonies of the calculus. Discuss.

The middle class. It used to be something you could expect to be a part of with a high school education. Maybe you’d gone to a trade school, or had an apprenticeship. You might even live in a small town. And you could get decent work, put your kids through college, or at least help them out.

Today, those kids are struggling to stay in the middle class even if they’ve been to college. Low-income families often despair of the class mobility available to previous generations. And as further opportunities have opened to minorities, it’s become harder and harder to get ahead. This has made it difficult to economically redress the fact that at the end of the Civil Rights era, the country was already starting out with disproportionate numbers of minorities living in poverty.

Add in the sort of greedy, feudalistic rightwing economics we’ve been putting up with since Reagan, and people are falling behind or just staying behind with a regularity masked by the occasional bubble in one sector or another. We’re fast becoming a nation of serfs with falling life expectancies.

Environmental skeptics play into our tenuous grasp on whatever lifestyle we manage. They tell us that fixing global warming will make us all poor, and that it will hurt those people who are even poorer than we are. They’ll tell us that zeroing out our carbon emissions would be an economic catastrophe of dire proportions. But that’s just as much of a lie as when those same people were telling us that global warming wasn’t happening.

Yet a carbon neutral economy is a job engine, first and foremost. Not like the dotcom bubble, where only a slice of the population with a certain level of education got better opportunities, either. The level of change we would need to see to cancel out our emissions and live cleanly would bring back the era of middle class jobs for people with high school and trade school educations.

To fix our infrastructure, to change over, we’re going to need a lot of things made and built that can’t be outsourced. We’ll have construction work doing building retrofitting, building distributed generation power facilities, or building mass transit and rail projects. When those mass transit and rail projects are finished, we’ll need people to run and repair them. We’ll have manufacturing jobs, building the solar panels, wind turbines, wave turbines, and biomass co-firing machinery necessary to tackle our energy problems a piece at a time. Our electric power delivery infrastructure will have to be completely overhauled so that it’s more efficient. Our recycling industry could be expanded universally, instead of existing as a piecemeal patchwork. We’d be buying more local food, with more of our food dollar going directly to the farmer, and so there could be more farm sector work that paid a decent wage.

We could have all this, and an environment that was slowly returning to health. Inner cities whose air stopped stunting children’s lungs and giving them asthma. Farming communities whose residents didn’t face higher rates of miscarriage, developmental disorders and degenerative disorders due to the poisons that they’re forced to spray on their fields. A transportation system whose main hallmark wasn’t hours of miserable gridlock.

Sound good? Why do you think our politicians won’t demand it for us?

Is it just me, or is does it seem like the temperature’s setting in to get warmer, or like the weather all over the world is going crazy, while Congress’ response has been tepid? Right. Just me, then. And on that note, I bring you the latest updates on our species’ ongoing attempt to commit suicide by mass starvation, flooding, droughts, and disease, as well as the ongoing attempts by others to prevent that from happening.

Prominent climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, says no more new coal, please, as he travels to Iowa to raise grassroots awareness of the seriousness of our climate crisis.

A ski resort installs its own wind turbine, which should generate 60% of its electricity needs and pay for itself in seven years.

Youth climate activists consider drawing a line in the sand and refusing to support proposed solutions to climate change that are going to continue damaging the environment.

Al Gore double dog dared people to protest for climate sanity, but there are those who’ve gone so far as to get themselves arrested for it, or glue themselves to buildings over it, and others are fresh from holding regional climate convergence conferences to coordinate strategies and challenge the energy companies. Some of us, Mr. Gore, are paying attention, I swear.

Cities could fight the climate crisis by supporting privately operated, low-cost bike rental stations to cut the need for cars. Don’t say it too loudly, but they’re trying it in Europe. Where, for example, Switzerland is losing GDP, and will be every year hereafter, over climate changes that are hitting the high altitude nation harder than their lowland counterparts.

Is the environmental movement succumbing to testosterone poisoning?

Global warming is spreading flesh-eating disease. Umm, ewwwww.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film, The 11th Hour, covers the perilous situation in which we find ourselves.

Climate change is devastating East African wildlife, killing off Scottish birds and expanding favorable mosquito conditions. Yay, malaria!

George Bush wants to be taken seriously as an ‘honest broker’ for climate change strategies. That can’t be right, though. As superficial gigs go, it has no compelling costume for our intrepid Commander Codpiece to parade around in. His advisors will never convince him to do it.

Climate change is a social justice issue, with the poor in developing nations bearing the brunt of the bad effects, and facing severe hunger as their crop yields are projected to drop due to weather disruption faster than even genetic modification could improve them.

Bill McKibben, who’s run the Step It Up! efforts to draw attention to the climate crisis has urged people to support carbon emission reductions of 80% by 2050. That people are paying attention, that Congress is starting to pay attention and take early steps, is encouraging. Before an Inconvenient Truth came out and a great many committed activist organizations laid the groundwork for awareness, not even that much would be possible.

But it isn’t enough. For one thing, it’s not quite enough to get the job done. For another, I’m concerned that it won’t even sustain people’s interest long enough to mobilize for better legislation and industrial solutions once they see that ‘something’ has been passed.

2050 is a long ways away. In terms of my own timescale, I’ll be 75 then. I’ll be shaking my cane at the young whippersnappers who won’t get off my lawn. (Not that I’d have a lawn. Very ecologically unsound. Can I suggest a nice, friendly, native plant landscaping, instead?) The teens and 20 year olds involved in these campaigns will be around retirement age, and when you’re their age, 40 years old seems incomprehensibly distant. The people who are passing these laws today will be long dead by 2050. (Unless we have incredible leaps in cryonic storage, which is exactly the sort of wild and crazy thing that comes to mind as being possible over long time periods.)

Considering the amount of technological change that’s happened just in my lifetime, I think encouraging people to deal with it on a scale like that creates a favorable climate for those who say we should do nothing, because surely we’ll figure it out by then.

Yet we don’t have until 2050, and we can’t afford for the public at large to think that we do. We are in the time of consequences. Of worsening weather. Of bad droughts that could get much worse. Now.
A person might be tempted to despair. Because the situation is dreadful. End of civilization as we know it. But, and this is the somewhat cliche good news, we have the technology to fix it if we would only employ the will to use it. Consider again the question of despair:

… Oates points to Emily Dickinson as a prime example of the “poetics of despair” with its “keenly heightened inwardness.” It’s true enough that Dickinson eloquently describes despair — sometimes passionately, sometimes chillingly dispassionately. But the substance of her poetry has to be reconciled with the sheer, incontrovertible fact of her poems.

In other words: Emily Dickinson did not despair; she wrote. And she kept writing even when no one seemed particularly interested in publishing her poems. You can’t despair and write 1,775 poems. You can’t despair and write one poem. The act of writing — because it is an act, and a choice to act rather than to give up and do nothing — is a rejection of despair.

Had Dickinson withdrawn into the indulgent inwardness of despair, as Oates suggests, then we wouldn’t be talking about her now. She would never have written anything. That, of course, would have been a sin. …

It’s because I know what sort of relationship with writing most people have that I can promise you something: It would be much easier for you to have a measurable, positive impact on our climate crisis than to write 1,775 good poems about despair. Or even one. Unless you were a literature major. But you see what I mean.

Now, there are helpful proposals in the Energy Bill and people are thinking about cap and trade carbon markets that might even be implemented. That’s nice, but it isn’t going to be enough. In desperation, some people have proposed widespread chemical release to counter certain effects of global warming, but that just sounds very, very dodgy. Other technical fixes have been proposed, many will be tried. As the CEO of Duke Energy says, “There is no silver bullet here, … What we need is more like silver buckshot, a lot of things working together.” He’s hoping one of those buckshot attempts will be nuclear energy. Erm, ahem.

Though I don’t really want to talk about wonky engineering fixes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that there are plenty of low tech, high concept fixes for our current predicament that we could bring about just by taking better care of our soil.

Consider, for example, that one of the things we can do to combat climate change is one of the first things human beings had to learn how to do in order to create permanent settlements. We could, in part, farm our way out of this mess:

… In addition, we have to remember that photosynthesis by plants and the decay of biomass into soil organic matter is the primary link in the functioning of the global carbon cycle. To the extent that land is desertified, or agricultural lands have bare soil not covered by living and decaying plants, then the carbon cycle is broken, and annual emissions of carbon dioxide from decaying biomass and burning of fossil fuels can’t help but be in excess of the normal fixing of carbon in soils through photosynthesis and decay.

… [C]limate change, biodiversity loss and desertification are all one issue, and need to be addressed as such to realize success in any area. The planned grazing of livestock on perennial grasslands is the single most powerful tool we have to restore ecosystem health and functioning to our agricultural lands.

… There is this prevailing idea that soil can only form very slowly, taking a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil. Through Keyline soil building, developed by P.A. Yeomans in Australia, and other methods that we are currently using, we can build topsoil very quickly. And soil fertility is the key to everything. Essentially, human agriculture has destroyed an enormous quantity of organic matter over the last thousands of years and especially industrialized agriculture in the last 50 years at an accelerated rate. The soil organic matter lost and its conversion into carbon dioxide is perhaps an equal contributor to the burning of fossil fuels to climate change.

… Everyday people can have can have a tremendous impact on carbon emissions and carbon sequestration in soil. The key to doing this on any sort of meaningful scale is the planned grazing of livestock on perennial grasslands. So the first thing that we can do is to start eating the food grown by grass farmers. We can support these farmers by buying their products, which in turn stimulates the local economies. We can support them through our purchase of “Carbon Sinks,” the Carbon Farmers of America-version of carbon credits, to offset our personal, family, or business carbon dioxide emissions. …

The Carbon Farmers of America assert that, “[i]f the American people were to restore the soil fertility of the Great Plains that we have destroyed in the last 150 years, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would be reduced to near pre-industrial levels.” Though we could to the Carbon Farmers one better, because we’ve been disturbing the carbon balance for a very long time all around the world. The ability of our ecosystems to store carbon in solid form is being significantly underused. Consider further that carefully planned agricultural and horticultural techniques, careful attention to increasing organic matter and harvesting rain water, can turn a salt flat into productive farmland. You can re-green a desert, if the soil is given the right attention.

The only problem with that technology, something that requires skill and understanding, if not sophisticated equipment, is that it’s supposedly inefficient. It can’t be done by one person atop a grand machine, managing hundreds of acres in a day. And it’s axiomatic in modern commerce that the best thing is always the thing that takes the fewest people. Yet the technologies and the chemicals we use to grow our food are disrupting the planet’s ability to support life, certainly, the kind of life we’re used to. Though not just because of carbon emissions. In agriculture, nitrogen is key, and we release quite a bit of it:

… I call it the biggest global change that nobody has ever heard of, Weiss said at the spring event. The planet has never seen this much nitrogen at any time. Human activity now releases 125 million metric tons of nitrogen from agricultural activities and fossil fuel combustion a year, compared to 113 million metric tons annually from natural sources, according to a 2007 United Nations report called Human Alteration of the Nitrogen Cycle.

In 1860, the U.N. report noted, there was virtually no release from human activity. The consequences of this spike, the report added, are profound.

Not only is this glut of nitrogen disrupting ecosystems, polluting waters and harming human health, but its a silent partner, along with carbon dioxide, in changing the Earths climate. …

The Earth Policy Institute lays out more information about the waste of nitrogen, saying that the Mississippi drains 1.6 million tons of nitrogen from agricultural runoff into the Gulf of Mexico, where it causes enormous dead zones, and that yearly, worldwide nitrogen fertilizer use is somewhere around 145 million tons. As of 2002, the US adds 12 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer to its soil. And we could stop doing that, too, if our farming techniques kept more nutrients in the soil instead of wastefully letting them wash away.

And you, yes you, could perhaps do something about this next time you go to the grocery store. You could, for example …

• Buy organic food
• Buy pasture-raised, grass-fed meat, or ask your grocer to stock it
• Buy locally grown food

If we weren’t talking about food, I’d feel like Bush telling us to go shopping after 9/11 so the terrorists wouldn’t win. Except that we aren’t talking about new clothes and a big screen television. We’re talking about something you have to have every day. Something you have to buy, or grow. And hey, there’s a thought. Maybe you, personally, don’t want to farm. But not only are there far worse jobs, I’ve talked to a lot of farmers who really like what they do. So consider calling your Senators and asking them to support generous funding for beginning farmer programs in the upcoming Senate version of the Farm Bill.

I’m not just promoting altruism here, though. It could eventually pay off directly for you. As Dan Imhoff notes in the book Food Fight, between 1985 and 2000, the price of fresh fruits and vegetables has gone up 38%. Thirty eight percent. In the same time, the price of soft drinks, which depend on plentiful supplies of diabetes-causing wholesome corn syrup, have dropped by 23%. The only way to push that ratio back the other way is to have more, and more diverse, farms.

… The population of U.S. agriculture is poised to make a dramatic change – half of all current farmers are likely to retire in the next decade. U.S. farmers over age 55 control more than half the farmland, while the number of entry-level farmers replacing them has fallen by 30 percent since 1987 and now makes up only 10 percent of farmers and ranchers.

Absent a new generation of beginners, that land will concentrate in large farms, causing the permanent loss of opportunity for family farms, ranches, and rural communities and squandering the chance to shift to a more sustainable system of agriculture. …

So, see, not just shopping, either. And not just technology. We need people to solve this problem. We need all the tools at our disposal, and there are a lot of them available.

Answers could be right under our feet.

When it’s Iranian, silly.

The Bush administration now wants to label a branch of the Iranian military as a terrorist organization:

By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States may soon designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization in a hard-line diplomatic move that will target the finances of the group, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

… U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior U.S. officials have said frequently that Washington could take tougher action unilaterally outside of the United Nations. A move against the Revolutionary Guard would be in line with that thinking. …

You know what this would be exactly like? It would be like Iran declaring the US Navy a terrorist organization and threatening to attack it. They wouldn’t be attacking the US, right? Just this terrorist organization … that happens to be a branch of our government. Who could ever take offense at that? I mean, it isn’t an act of war or anything to go after terrorists.

Laura Rozen at War and Piece has more stories linked, and notes that the administration is putting this forward as a way to extract more sanctions against Iran out of the United Nations Security Council.

Also, consider what this administration has said previously about how to regard terrorists and what protections they’re entitled to:

[Ari Fleischer, May 7, 2003] … Afghanistan is a party to the Geneva Convention. Although the United States does not recognize the Taliban as a legitimate Afghani government, the President determined that the Taliban members are covered under the treaty because Afghanistan is a party to the Convention.

Under Article 4 of the Geneva Convention, however, Taliban detainees are not entitled to POW status. To qualify as POWs under Article 4, al Qaeda and Taliban detainees would have to have satisfied four conditions: They would have to be part of a military hierarchy; they would have to have worn uniforms or other distinctive signs visible at a distance; they would have to have carried arms openly; and they would have to have conducted their military operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

The Taliban have not effectively distinguished themselves from the civilian population of Afghanistan. Moreover, they have not conducted their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. Instead, they have knowingly adopted and provided support to the unlawful terrorist objectives of the al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda is an international terrorist group and cannot be considered a state party to the Geneva Convention. Its members, therefore, are not covered by the Geneva Convention, and are not entitled to POW status under the treaty. …

I wonder which of these designations Iranian military personnel would fall under if declared terrorists. I wouldn’t put it past the Bush administration to say that they don’t regard Iran’s current government as legitimate, but in theory they wouldn’t claim that Iranian guard captures were international terrorists. Under the policy laid out for Afghan Taliban detainees, they might be subject to Geneva conventions generally, but might not be regarded as POWs.

After a 2006 Supreme Court decision, the Bush administration was forced to apply Geneva protections to all detainees, which they of course hadn’t been doing. In fact, they’ve done a lot of things to a lot of detainees of the US government that shouldn’t be done to anybody, ever.

Though the Bush administration doesn’t seem to care about any of that, anyway. They’ve already been treating the Revolutionary Guard as though they were a terrorist organization. Acting as though they were just daring the Iranian government to call the Bush administration’s actions what anybody else would call them: acts of war.

US forces already attempted to kidnap a senior intelligence officer of the Revolutionary Guard, seizing instead several junior staff of an embassy in Kurdish Arbil. A member of the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence service might even indeed go out dressed in civilian clothes, displaying no insignia, carrying no obvious weapons, operating internationally, as do the members of many countries’ intelligence services. As did, probably, Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, who disappeared mysteriously in Turkey; the US claims he defected, his wife says he was kidnapped. Asgari is alleged to be still providing information to the US, but who knows.

Let’s not be lulled into believing that this is in sum just a hamfisted ploy to curtail Iran’s financial dealings. Like the FISA law that’s now ‘legitimized’ Bush’s previous breaking of the law, a declaration that the Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization will merely be a legitimization of the actions the administration has already taken against them, and perhaps, even more provocative strikes in the months to come.

This is an opening invitation to open war. With yet a third country.

The perpetual outrage that is our prison system (h/t Ampersand)

… According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century. …

As the article notes, part of the reason for the scope of the problem is more punitive sentencing, particularly for drug crimes. Sentences can be imposed for drug possession that prosecutors would hesitate to ask for in a rape conviction. But there’s also the racial injustice factor, from 1999 data, slightly edited from original:

The disproportionate representation of black Americans in the U.S. criminal justice system is well documented. Blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested, 41 percent of people in jail, and 49 percent of those in prison. Nine percent of all black adults are under some form of correctional supervision (in jail or prison, on probation or parole), compared to two percent of white adults. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995. One in ten black men in their twenties and early thirties is in prison or jail. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws. …

From other government data:

Of the 250,900 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses in 2004, 133,100 (53.05%) were black, 50,100 (19.97%) were Hispanic, and 64,800 (25.83%) were white. [2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics.]

… According to the federal Household Survey, “most current illicit drug users are white. There were an estimated 9.9 million whites (72 percent of all users), 2.0 million blacks (15 percent), and 1.4 million Hispanics (10 percent) who were current illicit drug users in 1998.” And yet, blacks constitute 36.8% of those arrested for drug violations, over 42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations. African-Americans comprise almost 58% of those in state prisons for drug felonies; Hispanics account for 20.7%. [Department of Justice and related bureau data, 1996-2001]

There are more young black men, according to other data compiled at that last link, in prison than in college. Black women are more likely to be reported to authorities for prenatal drug use, which sometimes results in criminal charges and a pregnancy spent in a jail cell, and they’re on balance far more likely to be incarcerated than white women on all charges.

Our society has not served our fellows well.

A discussion by Melissa Ryan at MyDD about women in the Netroots.

Twisty Faster isn’t impressed with the BlogThing feminist quiz.

Feministing’s weekly feminist reader, including a link to the 42nd feminist blog carnival and a story about a technique doctors are using to get around the ban on so-called partial birth abortion (dilation & extraction.)

Feministing also pointed to Black and Missing but Not Forgotten, a blog that tracks missing person reports on women and girls whose absence would probably be a national uproar if they were white.

Shark-Fu muses on Elizabeth Edwards’ comments about John Edwards’ non-female and non-blackness.

If you strap people into lie detectors, gender-based differences in average numbers of sex partners goes away.

Brownfemipower on the high levels of violence directed against black women in Florida.