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There has always been a proud heritage of Welsh companies producing quality goods, clothes, gifts glassware and craft items. Here are a list of some of the products happily still made in Wales.
Pembrokeshire based National Weaving Company are suppliers of custom woven clothing labels, specialise in designer labels, woven name tapes, identification labels, craft labels, care labels and personalised woven celebration ribbon.
Based in Harlech North Wales we have The Rocking Sheep Company.
We've been handcrafting the woolly alternative to the rocking horse since 1992. Over the years, we're proud to think we've created a product of the highest quality.
Your sheep or lamb will be made individually to your order & we think it's important that each one is made from start to finish by one, highly skilled craftsman - from natural timber to beautiful wooden toy. 100% made in Britain; we don't believe in mass production. Our rocking sheep flock will stand the test of time.
They're sturdy enough to withstand years of active play and they're beautiful enough to live with, keep and pass on to future generations. We would like our rocking sheep to be a gift for your children and for your children's children.
Knobbs Hardware are a small family firm set up in 1995 and based in North Pembrokeshire. From their purpose built workshop Knobbs specialise in hand made, bespoke, quality wooden doorknobs. They also make kitchen cabinet/cupboard knobs turned and hand finished to a very high standard.
Conscious Skincare are passionate about making truly organic handmade skincare products from their rural retreat in West Wales. They have spent years perfecting the ultimate blend of natural ingredients such as organic seed butters and essential oils, leaving out the synthetic or harmful chemicals and preservatives that your skin really doesn't need.
GDH Leatherwork is based in the foothills of the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales producing beautiful bespoke, leather bags and briefcases, hand made in Wales


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Each week throughout 2014 we will be posting images from a different Instagram feed which we think you should be following.
This will eventually be a carefully curated list featuring 52 photographers (one for each week of 2014).
Getting featured on this list couldn't be easier, just leave a comment below with a link to your Instagram feed, with the best ones being added to this list each week.
Feel free to share this with your friends, and don't forget to follow us @oftheafternoon!
Here's the list so far:
Week 1: @lydaux
Week 2: @mauriziodiiorio
Week 3: @bryanschutmaat
Week4: @rvstapleton
Week 5: @hokaytokay
Week 6: @parkerfitzhenry
Week 7: @jodyrogac
Week 8: @allscriptmagazines
Week 9: @hellomr
Week 10: @marble_rye
Week 11: @dklinckwort
Week 12: @analaframboise
Week 13: @littlebrownmushroom
Week 14: @chrisnunnphoto
Week 15: @yuvalitheis
Week 16: @aaronmcelroy13
Week 17: @vanessapeterson
Week 18: @igortermenon
Week 19: @patriciakarallis
Week 20: @leannesurfleet
Week 21: @fr3nchiejane
Week 22: @moisatu
Week 23: @primozzorko
Week 24: @sophieedavidson
Week 25: @thisisnow_here
Week 26: @mtesoriere
Week 27: @ronanronanronan
Weel 28: @vega_lyrae
Week 29: @yuvalitheis
Week 30: @heathersten
Week 31: @martinkeenan
Week 32: @gogioko
Week 33: @gilleamtrapenberg
Week 34: @victoryjournal
Week 35: @tomaszwagnerco
Week 36: @vishalparadigm
Week 37: @jannicaluoto
Week 38: @__________________._
Week 39: @gavinmullan
Week 40: @fvonf
Week 41: @czarkristoff
Week 42: @kentandreasen
Feel free to share this with your friends, and don't forget to follow us @oftheafternoon!

subset: commoncrawl


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PETA buys shares of SeaWorld stock
PETA has purchased newly-issued shares of SeaWorld Entertainment Inc., the theme park company that often has been the target of the animal rights group's protests.
PETA spokesman David Perle said Tuesday his group purchased 80 shares for more than $2,200 during last week's initial public offering of SeaWorld stock.
PETA officials say being shareholders will allow them to attend shareholder meetings and introduce resolutions.
The animal rights group says it wants SeaWorld to stop breeding and buying new animals at its parks in Orlando, San Diego and San Antonio. It also wants SeaWorld to release its whales and dolphins.
SeaWorld spokesman Fred Jacobs says the company anticipated PETA's purchase.
But he says SeaWorld will try to do for PETA what it does for any other shareholder - create investor value.
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Arizona Diamondbacks
D-backs' manager Kirk Gibson: The mood of the team is still good
Since the 2014 MLB season started March 22, the Arizona Diamondbacks have spent all but one day in last place in the National League West.
They've been besieged with injuries, most notably pitchers Patrick Corbin and David Hernandez missing the entire season after undergoing Tommy John surgeries. There are currently 11 players on the disabled list.
Home hasn't been kind to them; their 14-29 mark at Chase Field is by far the worst home record in baseball.
In other words, not much has gone right for this year's club. However, it hasn't affected the mood of the team, according to manager Kirk Gibson.
"It's good, they've been good," Gibson told Burns and Gambo Tuesday on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM when asked about the club's disposition. "I give them credit for that, I'm proud of them. The energy is good -- we've played pretty good, aggressive baseball."
There's no denying that the Diamondbacks have played better following a disastrous start to the season that saw them go 9-22 in March/April with a run differential of -62. Since May 1, they're 23-25 with a respectable run differential of -4.
"We've played hard, we've played it right to the last out, the last strike," Gibson said. "It is frustrating. The losses hurt. But we've kind of vowed that we wouldn't give in, we're not going to give in. We regroup every day.
"I still believe there's going to be a good run in this team and we'll get back to .500."
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- Alabaradio
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Alabaradio is an Internet Radio station broadcasting from Tampico, Veracruz, Mexico, Provides Evangelical, Christian, Religious and Gospel programs.
Tampico - Veracruz, Mexico - Spanish
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"We had to swim underneath the door jams to get outside, where we clung to the gutters. We made our way to the back of the house and clung to the magnolia tree out there."
Related quotes
"I noticed the sliding glass door wouldn't open. The concrete under the door had cracked and buckled upward and jammed the door into its frame."
"He was mad and started kicking the door. He jammed the door and couldn't get out, but he didn't want us to know, so he went to the vent and tried whispering to the security guard there."
"What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer."
"The optimist already sees the scar over the wound; the pessimist still sees the wound underneath the scar"


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Weissberg speaking at American Renaissance Conference, an organization whose journal promotes racial supremacy. Weissberg himself has written that Blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
Weissberg speaking at American Renaissance Conference, an organization whose journal promotes racial supremacy. Weissberg himself has written that Blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
In St. Louis, Missouri on April 28th, 1836, a lynch mob burned Francis McIntosh alive. He was a mixed-race freeman who worked on a riverboat. His crime was refusing to assist two cops who were chasing after another sailor who had been in a fight. When under police custody, he learned that he would have to spend five years in prison. In an attempt to flee from an obviously unjust punishment, he stabbed one of the cops to death and wounded the other.
Wikipedia reports on what happened next:
After a brief chase, McIntosh was captured and placed in jail; however, a white mob soon broke into the jail and removed McIntosh. The mob then took him to the outskirts of town (near the present-day intersection of Seventh and Chestnut streets in Downtown St. Louis), chained him to a locust tree, and piled wood around and up to his knees. When the mob lit the wood with a hot brand, McIntosh asked the crowd to shoot him, then began to sing hymns. When one in the crowd said that he had died, McIntosh reportedly replied, "No, no — I feel as much as any of you. Shoot me! Shoot me!" After at most twenty minutes, McIntosh died. Estimates for the number present at the lynching range in the hundreds, and include an alderman who threatened to shoot anyone who attempted to stop the lynching.
During the night, an elderly African-American man was paid to keep the fire lit, and the mob dispersed. The next day, on April 29, a group of boys threw rocks at the corpse in an attempt to break the skull. When a grand jury was convened to investigate the lynching on May 16, most local newspapers and the presiding judge encouraged no indictment for the crime, and no one was ever charged or convicted. During the grand jury trial, Judge Luke E. Lawless remarked in court that McIntosh's actions were an example of the "atrocities committed in this and other states by individuals of negro blood against their white brethren," and that with the rise of abolitionism, "the free negro has been converted into a deadly enemy."
On January 27, 1838 Abraham Lincoln gave the first important speech in his life to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. A Lyceum was a place where politicians or other celebrities could give talks to the up and coming professional, sort of like the 92nd Street YMHA. Titled "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions", it was a plea to resist mob rule and adhere to the rule of law. He referred to the lynching of Francis McIntosh as a threat the American republic:
Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. His story is very short; and is, perhaps, the most highly tragic, if anything of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.
Such are the effects of mob law; and such as the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which, have even now grown too familiar, to attract any thing more, than an idle remark.
At first blush, this sounds like the Lincoln we know from Stephen Spielberg's biopic—a man committed to emancipation. But not so fast. Lincoln goes on to say:
He had forfeited his life, by the perpetuation of an outrageous murder, upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens of the city; and had not he died as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law, in a very short time afterwards. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was, as it could otherwise have been.–But the example in either case, was fearful.–When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake.
As someone who is not that fond of Lincoln's ornate circumlocutions, let me paraphrase it in Proyectesque terms. Lincoln said that McIntosh deserved to die but only after being found guilty in a court of law. One can only imagine what a jury made up of his "peers" would have decided in a state that passed a law in 1825 stating that Blacks were not competent to testify in cases that involved Whites.
Even more worrisome was Lincoln's remarks on abolitionism. In the South, there were laws that banned the promotion of abolitionist ideas. Lincoln warned against "mob rule" that would attempt to circumvent the rule of law. Once again, you have to put up with the circumlocutions: "There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the interposition of mob law, either necessary, justifiable, or excusable."
When I first got wind of Barack Obama in 2007, I noticed that he was a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals", a study of Lincoln's presidency that found great merit in his appointment of men who were hostile to abolitionism. Obama, of course, was inspired to appoint a bunch of shithooks every chance he got, to show how determined he was to be like Lincoln.
Upon taking office, Obama told a reporter: ""I will tell you, though, that my goal is to have the best possible government, and that means me winning. And so, I am very practical minded. I'm a practical-minded guy. And, you know, one of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln." He referred the reporter to "a wonderful book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin called 'Team of Rivals,' in which [she] talked about [how] Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet because whatever, you know, personal feelings there were, the issue was, 'How can we get this country through this time of crisis?'"
Well, we know how that turned out. Badly.
We have had six years now of an administration that is to the right of Richard Nixon's. It harasses reporters, favors the rich, sends drones to blow up wedding parties, creates health care "reform" more beneficial to the insurer than the insured, and caves in to the Republicans every chance it gets.
And, now returning to the crime against a Black man in St. Louis once again, we have Obama following in Lincoln's footsteps. Which means trying to straddle the fence and be acceptable to Black voters and to the white racists who would as soon see them get the short end of the stick just like the Palestinians. No wonder the people of Ferguson carry signs in solidarity with Gaza.
Today's NY Times reports on the crackdown on break-dancers in the subway.
The young dancers, Peppermint and Butterscotch, scanned the scattered faces aboard the New York City subway. One caught their eye.
"Are you a cop?" a performer asked, as their Q train rumbled toward Canal Street. The man waved them off. Peppermint and Butterscotch were satisfied.
"It's showtime!" they shouted.
Music filled the train. Legs curled around the car's graspable bars like creeping ivy. Then came a finale that surprised even the dancers: four plainclothes officers converging in tandem, and two sets of handcuffs.
Cheered by tourists, tolerated by regulars, feared by those who frown upon kicks in the face, subway dancers have unwittingly found themselves a top priority for the New York Police Department — a curious collision of a Giuliani-era policing approach, a Bloomberg-age dance craze and a new administration that has cast the mostly school-age entertainers as fresh-face avatars of urban disorder.
There's probably nobody more opposed to being a captive audience on the subways than me. I have been riding NYC subways since they cost 15 cents a ride. When they were this cheap, they lacked air conditioning and were as noisy as hell, but you could at least be assured that you would never be forced to watch a musical performance, begged for spare change, or listen to a sermon.
That was a function of the city being a lot more economically and socially viable than it has been ever since the fare reached the dollar level at least. In 1961 the city was home to a million and one small manufacturing plants that provided jobs for Blacks and Latinos. This is not to speak of the jobs in heavy industry just across the river in New Jersey, such as the Ford plant in Mahwah. In those days, jobs were like low-hanging fruit for recent immigrants from the Deep South or Puerto Rico. They disappeared long ago, forcing the grandchildren of those who worked in them to beg for change or to break dance just one step ahead of the law.
In some ways it is the subway preachers that make me the most crazy, even though they are probably certifiably insane themselves. When I used to take the number one train up to Columbia University, there was a guy who showed up about once a month and preach to us. He had a thick Jamaican accent and would always prattle on about how Jesus was coming to take the faithful up to heaven and send the sinful down to hell. I had to restrain myself from ranting about there being nothing but colliding atoms. What good would it do?
During the Giuliani administration, chief of police William Bratton implemented the "broken window theory", one that posited petty crime as creating a climate for more serious crimes. This meant in practice arresting the homeless men who used squeegees on car windows when they were stopped for a red light. They generally didn't say anything if you refused but hoped to get a dollar for their work. The cops also went after young men, mostly Black and Latino, who spray-painted graffiti on subway cars, including Michael Stewart who died in 1983 while under police custody. Despite eyewitnesses who saw the cops kicking and beating him, an all-white jury acquitted the six officers.
Eventually the "broken windows" policy led to the formation of a Street Crimes Unit that targeted young Blacks and Latinos for selling drugs or other minor offenses. This was really the beginning of "Stop and Frisk", the policy that Bill De Blasio claimed he wanted to abolish. Obviously it has snuck back in through the back door. In a very good article on Bratton in the ISO newspaper, attorney David Bliven describes his experience with Bratton's law and order:
As a young civil rights lawyer in Jamaica, Queens, at the time, I had more than a few victims of this police harassment come into my office. They were often Black teenagers who described how they were walking home from school, or from the store, or just hanging out with friends, when a car pulled up and out jumped the NYPD thugs. They'd throw the teen into their car, rough him up in the backseat, try to get drug sale information out of him, and when they determined the kid knew nothing, end up dumping the then utterly frightened kid on the other side of Queens.
The Street Crimes Unit was eventually disbanded–not because it wasn't effective at its mission (intimidating and oppressing Blacks and Latinos)–but because it eventually made its way into the mainstream press and thus fell out of favor with the white liberal establishment. The idea behind the Street Crimes Unit lived on and was quickly replaced by Drug Sweep Teams, which were the precursor to the "stop-and-frisk" policy.
Now that Bratton is running the police department again, the "broken window theory" has been reinstituted. Besides break dancers, it seeks to protect the public from the mostly minority men and women who sell single cigarettes on the street at a cut-rate price. One of them was Eric Garner, an immense but sickly African-American who died as an illegal chokehold was being placed on him and as he cried out that he could not breathe:
To its credit, the NY Times editorialized against Bratton's policy:
How terrible it would be if Eric Garner died for a theory, for the idea that aggressive police enforcement against minor offenders (he was a seller of loose, untaxed cigarettes) is the way to a safer, more orderly city. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton responded swiftly after Mr. Garner was fatally assaulted by officers on Staten Island. They reached out to his family, promising to retrain every officer about the rules against using chokeholds. Two officers have been put on desk duty pending investigations.
The mayor and the commissioner should also begin a serious discussion of the future of "broken windows" policing, the strategy of relentlessly attacking petty offenses to nurture a sense of safety and order in high-crime neighborhoods, which, in theory, leads to greater safety and order. In reality, the link is hypothetical, as many cities and towns across the country have enjoyed historic decreases in violent crime since the 1990s, whatever strategies they used. And the vast majority of its targets are not serious criminals, or criminals at all.
Bratton is a pioneer of broken windows policing and Mr. de Blasio is a stout defender. The tactic was embraced in the crime-plagued New York of 20 years ago. But while violence has ebbed, siege-based tactics have not. The Times reported on Friday that the Police Department made 394,539 arrests last year, near historical highs.
The mayor and the commissioner should acknowledge the heavy price paid for heavy enforcement. Broken windows and its variants — "zero-tolerance," "quality-of-life," "stop-and-frisk" practices — have pointlessly burdened thousands of young people, most of them black and Hispanic, with criminal records. These policies have filled courts to bursting with first-time, minor offenders whose cases are often thrown out, though not before their lives are severely disrupted and their reputations blemished. They have caused thousands to lose their jobs, to be suspended from school, to be barred from housing or the military. They have ensnared immigrants who end up, through a federal fingerprinting program, being deported and losing everything.
No matter how much clout the "newspaper of record" has, the politician that the Nation Magazine, Salon.com, and the Huffington Post drooled over will likely ignore its recommendations. Once again from the NYT article we linked to at the beginning of this post:
Mayor Bill de Blasio has defended the approach even as some police reform advocates have called for big changes after the death of a Staten Island man, Eric Garner, during an arrest over accusations of selling untaxed cigarettes, a subject of complaints by local businesses.
"If you're violating the law, I can understand why any New Yorker might say, well that might not be such a big offense or that might not be something that troubles any of us individually," the mayor said, standing with Mr. Bratton on Monday at City Hall. "But breaking the law is breaking the law."
And what exactly is the difference between Giuliani and De Blasio? I guess the same difference between Bush and Obama. In a period of declining economic opportunities, law and order will become more and more repressive. In the early stages of capitalism, vagabonds roamed the British countryside and prompted the equivalent of "stop and frisk" back then—draconian policies including being sentenced to a debtor's prison.
Chapter 28 of V. 1 of Capital begins as follows:
The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this "free" proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as "voluntary" criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.
Now that we are in the period of capitalism's senescence, we find that once again manufacturing cannot absorb the "free" proletariat. In the 18th century this was because it had not come into existence. In the 21st it is because it no longer exists.
This week there were blatant signs that America was not yet a "postracial" society. First we were treated to the spectacle of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, hailed by the libertarian right for his stand against a federal government he deemed non-existent, telling a NY Times reporter that Blacks abort their young children and put their young men in jail "because they never learned how to pick cotton."
Fast on his heels, Donald Sterling, the 81 year old owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a basketball team with a Black coach and star guard who also happens to be the president of the players' union, was caught saying over the phone to his 38 year old girlfriend—of mixed Latino and Black ancestry—that she should stop showing up at his arena with so many Blacks. Quoting Sterling:
It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people. Do you have to?
You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that … and not to bring them to my games.
I'm just saying, in your lousy fucking Instagrams, you don't have to have yourself with, walking with black people.
…Don't put him [Magic Johnson] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don't bring him to my games.
This was all on a tape that his girlfriend released to TMZ, a gossip website.
This story has burst through the seams of sports and become a hot topic on television news and the newspapers. In today's NY Times, William C. Rhoden, a Black sports reporter, wrote:
The more compelling question for the league's players is whether they will speak out — or act out — against Sterling. And what about the league's other owners? How will they respond? Will they remain silent? Will they issue a collective statement? Or will individual owners like the usually vocal Mark Cuban, who declined to address the Sterling issue, send their own messages?
Mark Cuban has a reputation for being one of the more progressive-minded owners (his Dallas team, like Sterling's, is in the playoffs). He also owns Magnolia Pictures, a prime distributor of hard-hitting documentaries including one based on the the March 2006 rape, murder, and burning of 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her parents and younger sister by U.S. soldiers.
But I am not that surprised he declined to comment on the Sterling affair. Cuban is a diehard libertarian and as such views property rights as sacrosanct, just like the Nevada rancher.
In digging into Sterling's past, I made the discovery that he was born to Jewish immigrants surnamed Tokowitz. Like many men getting off the boat, his father made a living as a peddler just like my grandmother. Sterling's father peddled fruit while my grandmother pushed clothing.
Sterling started off in Los Angeles as a divorce lawyer but soon switched to real estate cases. That led in turn to a full-time real estate business that included properties in Black and Latino neighborhoods. This is where his racism first reared its ugly head. Dave Zirin, a radical sportswriter for the Nation Magazine, details his sordid past:
Sterling is also the Slumlord Billionaire, a man who made his fortune by building low-income housing, and then, according to a Justice Department lawsuit, developing his own racial quota system to decide who gets the privilege of renting his properties. In November of 2009, Sterling settled the suit with the US Department of Justice for $2.73 million, the largest ever obtained by the government in a discrimination case involving apartment rentals. Reading the content of the suit makes you want to shower with steel wool. Sterling just said no to rent to non-Koreans in Koreatown and just said hell-no to African-Americans looking for property in plush Beverly Hills. Sterling, who has a Blagojevichian flair for the language, says he did not like to rent to "Hispanics" because "Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building." He also stated that "black tenants smell and attract vermin."
One of my earliest memories was visiting "Tante Leya" in New York with my mother—I must have been 10 years old or so. This was most likely my grandmother's cousin who spoke no English. After spending two of the longest hours in my life as Leya and my mother chatted in Yiddish over tea and cookies, we finally left to go downtown—probably to see the Radio City Christmas show or something like that. In the elevator, my mother turned to me and said,"Leya is a slumlord. She buys buildings and rents the apartments to Negros who complain about rats and broken boilers." That was the first time in my life I heard the term slumlord.
At 81, Sterling's values were a lot closer to Tante Leya's than mine. This was a man who worshipped money not "Jewish values". When a Satmar Hasidic slumlord was killed a few months ago, I was reminded of Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express", a case in which Inspector Poirot was stymied by the fact that a multitude of people had motives to kill the victim. The Satmar was such a crook and so callous in his dealings with Black tenants that it was impossible to figure out who killed him. If Donald Sterling ever ends up with a knife in the back, the cops will have the same problem.
A Sports Illustrated profile on Sterling from 2000 analyzes his cheapskate behavior as a reaction to childhood poverty. Michael Selsman, his former publicist, told SI: "As a kid, Donald never had enough of anything. With him, acquiring great wealth is a crusade. He's psychologically predisposed to hoarding." Not every Jew who lived through the Great Depression ended up in quite that manner. My mother complained bitterly about my father's reluctance to buy a house in the roaring 1950s but understood it as a reaction to childhood poverty. That being said, my father—like most Depression era men—had no ambition to build an economic empire over hapless victims, particularly Black people.
Perhaps taking the advice of another publicist concerned about his shitty reputation, Sterling got involved in a project to benefit Los Angeles's enormous homeless population but like everything else the billionaire gets involved with, it was nothing but a scam. The Los Angeles Weekly reported in 2008:
These days, though, Sterling's vow to help the homeless is looking more like a troubling, ego-inflating gimmick dreamed up by a very rich man with a peculiar public-relations sense: Witness his regular advertisements proclaiming another "humanitarian of the year" award — for himself. From homeless-services operators to local politicians, no one has received specifics for the proposed Sterling Homeless Center. They aren't the least bit convinced that the project exists.
"He uses every opportunity to have it announced somewhere," says Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest who runs the Skid Row day-care and education center Las Familias del Pueblo. "But it sounds like a phantom project to me."
Like many other scumbags who made a fortune (George Steinbrenner, Fred Wilpon, James Dolan) in some other type of business, Sterling decided to buy a professional sports team at the top of his game. In 1981, he bought the Los Angeles Clippers, a franchise that was nowhere near as prestigious as the Los Angeles Lakers (Kareem Abdul Jabbar's team) but a bargain at twice the price. His initial 12.5 million dollar investment is now worth a half-billion.
The SI profile captures a man who would make Scrooge McDuck look like Lucky Jim Fitzsimmons. He suggested to coach Paul Silas that they could save money if he taped the players' ankles.
Nobody ever bothered to challenge Sterling until the superstar Elgin Baylor became general manager. Baylor was committed to making the team competitive even if it meant demanding that his boss open up his wallet. After 22 years of fighting a losing battle, Baylor was probably relieved to be fired in 2008 but not so much so to prevent him from filing a racial discrimination case against Sterling. The LA Times reported:
In the original lawsuit, Baylor said that Sterling had a "vision of a Southern plantation-type structure" for the Clippers and accused the owner of a "pervasive and ongoing racist attitude" during long-ago contract negotiations with Danny Manning. The lawsuit also quoted Sterling as telling Manning's agent, "I'm offering you a lot of money for a poor black kid."
Baylor alleged Sterling said he wanted the Clippers to be "composed of 'poor black boys from the South' and a white head coach."
It should of course come as no surprise that Sterling was a sexist pig as well as a racist. ESPN, a sports magazine similar to Sports Illustrated, Jason Easly recounts his scandalous abuse of women. Christine Jaksy, a former employee, sued Sterling for sexual harassment in 1996. ESPN states:
Jaksy first worked for Sterling in 1993, as a hostess at one of his "white parties," where guests dressed Gatsby style at his Malibu beach house; she eventually went into property management. Jaksy testified that Sterling offered her clothes and an expense account in return for sexual favors. She also testified that he told her, "You don't need your lupus support groups I'm your psychiatrist." Jaksy left her job in December 1995, handing Sterling a memo that read in part, "The reason I have to write this to you is because in a conversation with you I feel pressured against a wall and bullied in an attempt to be overpowered. I'm not about to do battle with you." She carried a gun because, according to her testimony, she feared retribution.
One of the most shocking revelations about Donald Sterling was the NAACP's decision to present him with a Lifetime Achievement award this year. (Of course, they also decided to give a Man of the Year award to the snitch Al Sharpton.) Even though they made the decision to present the award before the phone call tape was released to TMZ, they must have been aware of all his other anti-Black words and actions. What prompted them to overlook this was his handing out of from 2 to 3 thousand tickets to Black youth for home games of the LA Clippers. They have since rescinded the award.
Professional sports fascinates me both as a fan and as a critic of American society. What makes it unique is the tension between private ownership and the public's sense that it is "their team". Toward the end of the NBA season, New Yorkers planned to stage a protest against owner Jim Dolan in front of Madison Square Garden. They were sick and tired of his meddling in the team's business, making decisions that undercut the team's fortunes. Apparently nervous that the protest might lead to more escalated forms of action such as a boycott, Dolan hired Phil Jackson, a basketball legend like Elgin Baylor, to run the team and promised to not interfere.
When you listen to sports fans calling in to WFAN or the ESPN station in New York, they sound more informed about the team than Jim Dolan. Unlike their generally passive acceptance of whatever Chase Manhattan Bank has up its sleeves to screw the working person, the sports fan is ready to take to the barricades in order to win a championship. In the documentary "Manufacturing Consent", Noam Chomsky states:
Take, say, sports — that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about — keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in (discussions of) sports (as opposed to political and social issues). I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.
If and when that passion becomes devoted to challenging the corporate system as a whole, we might finally see the possibility of realizing that old-time vision of a Socialist America.
At the risk of stretching a point until it breaks, both films under review bear on the relationship between race and petroleum. "Vanishing Pearls", a documentary opening on April 18th at the Imagenation in New York and Downtown Independent in LA (nationwide screening info is at http://www.affrm.com/vanishing-pearls/), looks at the plight of the largely African-American oyster fisherman of Louisiana who have been screwed royally by BP and their henchmen—witting or unwitting.
Since "Bad Hair" (Pelo Malo) is a Venezuelan narrative film about a 9-year-old biracial boy living in Caracas with his mestizo mother and since the Tribeca Film Festival where it is being shown is a platform for films from a left perspective, one might assume that it would be full of positive references to the benefits accrued from petro-development. In fact, just the opposite is the case. The protagonists of Mariana Rondón's very accomplished film appear totally untouched by the Bolivarian revolution. Despite my commitment to the goals of the Venezuelan government, I could not help but be troubled by the reality depicted in Rondón's film. Notwithstanding the doubts it raised in my mind, I strongly recommend it as a neorealist examination of the lives of poor people in Caracas, and particularly as a study of the challenges that Junior, its 9-year-old hero, faces in a society where homophobia still looms strong.
If you've grown sick of those BP commercials about how the Gulf coast has "returned", generally shown to the point of saturation on Sunday morning news shows, as well as those full-page ads in the NY Times about how poor BP is being robbed by unscrupulous lawyers, "Vanishing Pearls" is a film that that will provide some satisfaction since it nails the criminal corporation to the wall. Written, directed, and produced by Nailah Jefferson, a young African-American female from New Orleans in her debut production, it profiles a group of oyster fishermen from Pointe a la Hache taking the lead of Byron Encalade, a sixtyish boat owner whose family, neighbors and friends have been ruined by BP's greed and neglect.
The film is both a fascinating history of an important element of the Black struggle in the Deep South and a study of the environmental impact of unregulated oil drilling in a state where criminal outfits like BP run the state government like a puppet on a string.
Alcalade's ancestors started out as sharecroppers on sugar and cotton plantations. When Black Louisianans first broke into the oyster fishing business, it was also as sharecroppers. A wealthy white man would pay for the boat and the gear and hire Black crews to operate them. Based on the haul, they would earn a percentage of the profits, just as if the oysters were cotton. Eventually, however, they were able to put away enough money to buy their own boats and become independent small entrepreneurs.
Oyster fishing was one of the prime casualties of the chemical dispersants BP sprayed into the Gulf waters to mitigate the effects of the disaster. In a very real sense the cure was more harmful than the disease since the oil was simply broken down into smaller droplets and floated to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it could destroy the habitat not only for oysters but other marine life.
Jefferson did not manage to get interviews with the openly nefarious BP corporate heads and the politicians they own but did get plenty of time with two men who were supposedly on the side of the fishermen. One is Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer who is supervising payments from BP and who has an alarming tendency to sound and look like a bald Donald Rumsfeld. Feinberg was also the lawyer who managed payouts to the victims of Bernie Madoff. After seeing his double-dealing with the oyster fishermen, you pray that he would end up in a cell next to Madoff. Essentially, most of the fishermen took one-time payments of $25,000 from BP in exchange for agreeing that they would make no further claim. Since all were out of business for months after the BP spill and economically distressed, the payoff was effectively a form of blackmail. Feinberg made no effort to force BP to look after their long-term interests. Feinberg's firm was paid $850,00 per month for its services. After a couple of months showing its pro-corporate bias, BP rewarded it with a raise to $1,250,000.
The other unwilling villain is a scientist named Wes Tunnell who wrote a report in three days effectively underscoring BP's claim that things would return to normal by now. At one point he tells Nailah Jefferson that the spill amounted to a cup of coffee being spilled into the New Orleans Superdome, seen from an aerial mounted video camera.
The press notes for "Vanishing Pearls" reveals how Feinberg and Tunnell worked as a tag-team:
By December, many of the fishermen were in dire and desperate straights. Suddenly, Feinberg and GCCS decided to issue "emergency funds" as Christmas neared. This move was not without one small caveat – getting the funds required waiving all rights to bring a suit against the BP oil company. The gravity of the struggling that many of the fishermen had to deal with led many to take the settlement offered in the hopes that they would be able to save their homes and businesses.
Amidst this mess, in 2013, the documentarian decided to contact Feinberg to try and get some answers. Strangely and without hesitation, he agreed to meet with her. It was revealed that BP had begun to urge Feinberg to halt claims payouts all together. They had paid for a "scientific study" and based on the resulting report, BP felt "the areas affected by the spill had recovered and the economy was improving." The biased report had been commissioned by GCCS and was the sole instrument used to stifle claims. The reality of the situation was quite different, it had been over the stated two years and the oyster beds had not regenerated themselves, the fishermen were still out of work, and recovery claims were still not being paid. Feinberg remained ambivalent. He offered no apology and simply stuck to his ludicrous story that "everything would come back."
Ms. Jefferson has made a very compelling documentary on a shoestring budget. Considering the fact that Barack Obama has given BP a green light to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, this film arrives at a time when it is most needed. My recommendation is to check this film out and to tell your friends about it.
Marta has her hands filled raising her son Junior and another baby son in a Caracas high-rise that has seen better days. She has just lost her job as a security guard and is scraping by as a maid. In an early scene, she asks Junior to scrub the walls of a Jacuzzi in a middle-class apartment. Yielding to temptation, he fills the tub, strips down to his underwear, and reclines beneath the soothing waters until the matron of the house spots him. Chagrined by her son's fecklessness, Marta returns home where the conflict between mother and son continues.
Like the women in Chris Rock's documentary "Good Hair", very likely a partial inspiration for Rondón's film, Junior is obsessed with his "bad hair", the curly legacy of his Black father who was killed by gang members in their typically lawless neighborhood. While fleeing from his Black identity, Junior seems equally gravitating toward some early form of Gay identity, or at least that is Marta's fear based on his love of singing. What can be more gay, after all, then a 9 year old loving to sing?
Marta's mother-in-law is okay with his gay tendencies since that would protect him from gangsters. Who would find a reason to shoot a gay man? When Marta leaves the boy with his grandmother while she is out job-hunting, the stay is always crowned by her tending to his hair with a blow dryer. When he all set to get a photo id for school, she gets the bright idea to adorn him in a costume she is sewing together that is similar to the one worn by a popular singer. It goes one step further than Elvis's costumes in Las Vegas. It is a gold lamé dress that Junior rejects with the words: "I am not a girl". If the film is influenced by Rock's documentary, it also bows in the direction of "Billy Elliot", a British narrative film about a young boy who prefers ballet to boxing, defying his coal miner father's homophobia.
The film depicts a daily life that is not only untouched by socialism, but by any of the social safety nets of a welfare state except for the local clinic that is free. Marta keeps bringing Junior in the hopes that the doctor can figure out what is making her son "queer".
There is little doubt that Rondón takes the Bolivarian revolution with a grain of salt. The film is set in the final months of Hugo Chavez's illness and she includes footage from Venezuelan television of that time when people were praying for the president or shaving their heads in solidarity. She leaves the impression that the people view him as a semi-divine benefactor.
As might be expected, the film has generated a fair amount of controversy in Venezuela. Caracas Chronicles, an anti-Chavista website, has taken the director's side. While keeping her distance from the violent street protesters, she blames the country's polarization for the way that her film has been used as ammunition against the government.
Wikipedia reports that "In 2007 she directed and produced Postales de Leningrado (Postcards from Leningrad), an autobiographical film (her parents were members of the Venezuelan guerrilla movement Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN)."
It is a little hard for me to glean her politics from this film other than to say that it is best seen as a study of sexual and racial paradoxes in a country trying to move forward as best it can under very difficult circumstances. As film, it is deeply involving and worth seeing whatever its political orientation, especially for the performance of Samuel Lange Zambrano as Junior, about as fine as one from a child actor as can be imagined.
Chances are that if you grew up in a small town like me, you keep up with online versions of the local newspapers. For me that means bookmarking the Middletown Times Herald-Record and the Sullivan County Democrat. Back in the 1950s such papers were running stories on the front page about the opening of the county fair or some local hotel hosting Fourth of July fireworks. Some of you might recall that I grew up in Woodridge, a town celebrated in the pages of leftie NYC newspaper PM back in 1947 as a "utopia in the Catskills". Now it is much more of a dystopia with items like this from the Middletown Times Herald-Record:
In a related story, the Sullivan County Democrat reported about heroin turning up at my old high school:
Sullivan County Democrat, Mar. 31 2014
Fallsburg police replacing school resource officer
By Dan Hust – staff writer
FALLSBURG — The Town of Fallsburg Police Department has reassigned Martin Gonzalez from his duties as Fallsburg Central School District's School Resource Officer (SRO).
Gonzalez, who found heroin inside a men's bathroom at the Benjamin Cosor Elementary School in Fallsburg last month, remains a police officer with the department. A previous NYS Medal of Valor awardee for a 2011 rescue effort in Liberty, Gonzalez is not accused of any wrongdoing and is not under investigation, said Fallsburg Police Chief Simmie Williams.
Calling it "the toughest decision of my life," Williams said Gonzalez is being replaced for the sake of the SRO program.
At Monday's Fallsburg Town Board meeting, a group of teachers told town officials that they no longer trust Gonzalez and criticized the way the police had handled the heroin investigation, which focused on more than half a dozen faculty who had accessed the bathroom prior to the drug discovery.
That's the school I graduated from in June 1961 at the tender age of 16. Back then the only thing we knew about heroin was what we saw in movies like "A Hatful of Rain" or "The Man with the Golden Arm" that were set in the slums of New York City and Chicago respectively. By 1975 most of Sullivan County had turned into a rural slum, mostly the result of the Borscht Belt hotel industry hollowing out.
In 2012, the median family income for New York State was $52,095, for Sullivan County it was $43,458. Most of the jobs are in the public or nonprofit sector, like working as a prison guard or as a hospital orderly. Back in the 1950s, many people who decided to remain in the area rather than moving to New York City opened small businesses or went to work for their parents. With the collapse of the tourist industry, that possibility no longer exists.
On October 21, 2013 a Monticello lawyer (the Borscht Belt town, not Thomas Jefferson's plantation locale) named Steven Kurlander blogged in the Huffington Post about the need for casino gambling to revive the Catskills. After 35 years of wrangling, it looks like it might finally be coming. Here's how he described the once thriving Monticello:
It's not just that Sullivan County has had the highest unemployment rate, the worst health care outcomes, and the highest percentage of poverty in upstate New York for years.
Just walk down Broadway, the main street of Monticello, and the answer is clear.
Broadway, once a thoroughfare famed for being the epicenter of a booming Borscht Belt, is now basically an abandoned main street devoid of businesses, its storefronts empty and failing into disrepair.
The lights on this Broadway have been turned off for decades and Monticello's business district is a ghost town.
Gangs and drug abuse run rampant in Monticello and prey on its poor residents living in subsidized projects and crumbling neighborhoods abandoned by a fleeing middle class and taken over by absentee Section 8 landlords.
Last summer I went upstate to do some video recording about my hometown and the surrounding environs. A major part of the film will involve interviews with Herman Goldfarb, a retired physician who has been involved with progressive politics for decades. I plan to work on getting that film together in the next few weeks but in the meantime here are his observations on the streets of Monticello's Broadway:
Just around the time that the tourist industry began dying, Sullivan County began becoming more African-American and Latino. I am not sure what explains the demographic change since the region was not generating new jobs. One of the big employers for Latino workers is Murray's poultry, a supplier of "organic" chickens and turkeys to NY grocery stores. Mrs. Murray Bresky was a woman named Ellen that was in my class back at Fallsburgh High School. I doubt that I spent more than five minutes in conversation with her my entire time there.
Despite his concerns about the health and well-being of his customers, Murray appears to care little about his largely Latino workforce:
Washington Post, April 25, 2013
At chicken plants, chemicals blamed for health ailments are poised to proliferate
By Kimberly Kindy
When Jose Navarro landed a job as a federal poultry inspector in 2006, he moved his wife and newborn son to a rural town in Upstate New York near the processing plant, believing it was a steppingstone to a better life.
Five years later, Navarro was dead. The 37-year-old's lungs had bled out.
His death triggered a federal investigation that raised questions about the health risks associated with a rise in the use of toxic, bacteria-killing chemicals in poultry plants. Agriculture Department health inspectors say processing plants are turning to the chemicals to remove contaminants that escape notice as processing line speeds have accelerated, in part to meet growing consumer demand for chicken and turkey.
At the end of each workday at Murray's Chicken, Jose Navarro would climb into his Ford station wagon, drive by the Holy Ghost and Fire Church, and pass a single stoplight to reach his rented home in South Fallsburg, N.Y.
His wife, Nicole Byrne Navarro, said he would give "lengthy, detailed reports" each evening about his concerns about the plant, which often focused on the chemicals used to disinfect both equipment and birds.
"Some themes that were constant were poor ventilation and overuse and mishandling of chemicals which constantly irritated his lungs," Byrne Navarro said. "Sometimes he would hold his hand over his chest and talk about the chlorine reaching intolerable levels that day."
Several months before he died, he coughed up blood, but it "self-resolved," according to the autopsy report. Then on Nov. 19, 2011, he began coughing up blood and went to the hospital, where his lungs continued to hemorrhage. He died a week later after his lungs and kidneys failed, the autopsy report said.
At the time of Navarro's death, Murray's Chicken was using chlorine and peracetic acid to treat the birds, according to federal records and interviews with company officials.
Chlorine and peracetic acid are two of the most commonly used chemicals in plants, according to OSHA inspection documents and interviews with USDA inspectors and poultry plant workers.
At plants where line speeds have been increased, inspectors and plant workers say chemical use is on the rise and that the exposure time to the chemicals has been extended. Sometimes a third chemical is added, but that practice varies from plant to plant.
Back in 2008 Monticello elected its first Black mayor, a former prison guard who now ran a shoe store on the town's decaying Broadway. While by no means a big a deal as Obama's election, it was news enough to make the NY Times:
NY Times, March 27, 2008
Our Towns
A Lesson in Politics as Unusual
By PETER APPLEBOME
Gordon Jenkins outside his store in Monticello, N.Y. "You look at the heyday of this place, and it was beautiful," he says.
You might think Gordon Jenkins would be excited.
He just made history, elected on Tuesday as the first black mayor of this faded resort town. And a day later, people filter nonstop into his G-Man shop, a beauty supply, hip-hop clothing and footwear store on Broadway, to shake his hand, give him a hug. Drivers honk at him on the street, and passers-by give him the thumbs-up and shout, "Jenkins for mayor!" They bring him free coffee from the bagel store next door. Big-shot lawyers wander in looking for jobs.
Not all politics is about race. Was it a factor? Sure. The town's population is about 55 percent white, 30 percent black and 23 percent Hispanic. But Mr. Jenkins isn't all that big on having a national or local conversation about race. "I hate racial issues; that's not what this was ever about," he said as some of his new constituents stopped by to talk about the flooding on their streets or how they were managing their diabetes. "It just brings up old wounds. We'd all get along a lot better if we could just get past it."
Things went downhill rapidly after Jenkins took office, especially—surprise, surprise—when it came to the local cops who probably were not used to seeing a Black man in a position of authority. His first run-in occurred in February 2012 when police were summoned to his store to eject a 300-pound man who was trying to pick a fight with Jenkins. In the ensuing melee Jenkins accidentally hit one of the cops. That was not extenuating enough for him to be convicted of a misdemeanor last month.
His next run-in occurred on November 16, 2013 when he showed up at a major auto accident not far from his home, something he saw as his responsibility. Unfortunately, he had some alcohol on his breath and the cops ordered him to take a Breathalyzer test. Upon failing it, they took him to jail where he threw a tantrum while in custody. Carmen Rue, a Republican on the Town Board who has been spearheading a drive to remove Jenkins, made the tape of Jenkins available to the news media that played up the story as Monticello's Rob Ford.
Michael Sussman, Jenkins's attorney who specializes in civil rights cases, went on CNN (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1311/26/ijvm.01.html) to discuss the incident. The exchange reflects the state of race relations in the USA:
JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL, HOST: Tonight, the latest mayor gone wild. Yet another politician behaving badly. And once again, it`s all caught on tape.
Good evening. I`m Jane Velez-Mitchell coming to you live.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Charged with drunk driving, busted by his own cops.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s not a good example. He (EXPLETIVE DELETED) (EXPLETIVE DELETED)
GORDON JENKINS, MAYOR OF MONTICELLO, NEW YORK: And trying to do the (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
Straight out to the attorney representing this guy, caught on tape, Mayor Jenkins. Now, you`re reported as saying that the mayor`s base has suffered indignities at the hands of the local cops, and they understand what he was saying. Well, please translate, because I don`t really understand what he`s saying.
MICHAEL SUSSMAN, ATTORNEY FOR MAYOR GORDON JENKINS: I don`t think any of your guests understand. Listening to you, it`s a very ignorant group, honestly. Let`s start…
VELEZ-MITCHELL: Well, why don`t you educate us as to what this gentleman that you represent is talking about?
SUSSMAN: Let`s start with this, please. The mayor was at a social engagement Saturday night. The mayor understood there was a serious accident in his community, and he drove over to give assistance at the accident.
If any police person at the scene thought the mayor was in any way intoxicated, what a reasonable police officer would do is go up to the mayor and say to the mayor, "Do you need a hand? Do you need a ride anywhere?"
Instead, an individual who had been passed over for police chief has testified in his sworn statement that he waited for the mayor to get into a vehicle, thereby endangering the public if he was really drunk, waited for the mayor to drive away, and then picked up the mayor. He then brought the mayor back to the police station and chained the mayor to a wall for approaching nine hours. When the mayor asked to have his lawyer called they essentially laughed at him and never called me.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: All right. Hold on one second, sir. You`ve said something…
SUSSMAN: All of you have such strong opinions, but none of you know what occurred.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: His words are his words. He`s calling people names that I cannot repeat here.
SUSSMAN: Let me try to respond to what you`re all saying for a moment. OK?
It`s one thing if you have no life experience like Gordon Jenkins, 29 years a correction officer in New York state, an honorably discharged Army veteran, in the city government in Monticello as mayor for five years, on the board for nine years. If you have no track record and you have no experience and you don`t understand who you are dealing with, it`s one thing. What Gordon Jenkins did is…
VELEZ-MITCHELL: Well, that`s — all of that is even more of a reason why he shouldn`t do that. He should have known better.
SUSSMAN: Let me speak for a moment. You have five guests who have one opinion. Let me explain the situation, please.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: OK. Go for it. Because we`re running out of time.
SUSSMAN: You have — you have people on this force who have been engaged in — against Gordon for a number of years. Rather than do what any reasonable police officer would do, if they thought he was drunk, which is to go to — if it was a white mayor you mean to tell me that they wouldn`t have gone up to the man and said, "We think you`re drunk, Mayor. Can we give you a ride home?"
That goes across the board, obviously. Blacks get long sentences for selling or possessing crack cocaine while white professionals get a slap on the wrist for using powdered cocaine, a recreational drug. It doesn't matter that Jenkins was once a law enforcement employee. Once he got on the wrong side of the Town Board, he would end up under a microscope.
What's the lesson in all this? Fifty years ago I never would have imagined that my home town could end up looking like it does today, with heroin busts, vendettas against a Black mayor, and rural squalor. But then again I never would have imagined back then that the USA as whole would be as bad off as it is today, with cities like Detroit writing large what is happening in my old home town.
Enjoying what deejays call heavy rotation, Bob Wing's article on "Rightwing Neo-Secession or a Third Reconstruction?" has not only popped up on ZNet and Counterpunch, but even unsolicited in my mailbox at Columbia University, a receptacle generally for notifications on overdue books from the library and the usual spam with "My Beloved" in the subject heading. If I had to rate my mail by interest, I am not sure where Wing's article would end up. I have been getting arguments from my Marxist brethren about the need to elect Democrats since 1967 and doubt that anything new could come along. After reading Wing's article, I am glad that I stubbed my big toe on it since it raises some interesting questions about what the original Reconstruction meant and why Wing's call for a "Third Reconstruction" is so, so wrong.
Before dealing with the substance of Wing's article, some historical background might be useful for young people coming around Marxism that would help explain a seeming paradox—why someone like Wing, who can quote Marx like the devil quotes scripture—would make the case for electing candidates from a party that was totally committed to slavery in the 19th century. If anything, the open-and-shut case against the Democrats was made in the 1840s.
Wing was a leader of something called Line of March (LofM), a Marxist-Leninist sect that was part of the "New Communist" movement in the 70s and 80s. Unlike most of the groups that identified as Maoist, LofM was fixated on the early CP as a model. In a somewhat vain hope of spawning a party after this fashion, LofM focused on the shortcomings of the CP in its newspaper reminiscent of the CPGB's fixation on the SWP in Britain.
The main leader of LofM was Irwin Silber who died in 2010. He used to review films for the Guardian, an American radical newsweekly. His approach was to "expose" Hollywood movies for racism, sexism, imperialism and the like. My approach is somewhat different. I generally avoid Hollywood and am mainly interested in drawing my readers' attention to documentaries and independent films that get short shrift in the bourgeois press. By the 1990s Silber had become pessimistic about socialist revolution. He wrote a book titled "Socialism—What Went Wrong" that concluded Lenin was wrong. Capitalism continued to be a dynamic system and socialists had to learn to live with that fact. I recommend Reihana Mohideen's article "Has capitalism won? A reply to Irwin Silber" that appeared in the April 12, 1995 Greenleft Weekly. (http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/9497)
I first ran into LofM when I was a member of Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) in the early 80s. They and the Communist Workers Party were the only left groups who worked in CISPES. The CWP, a Maoist sect, was best known for its disastrous confrontation with the KKK in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 that left five of their members dead. They had made the mistake of choosing to utilize armed self-defense as a tactic rather than building a mass movement against Klan terror.
In 1984 the CWP, LofM and the CISPES leadership decided to support the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign. For Marxists coming out of the CWP and LofM tradition, voting for Democrats is a tactical question. If there was ever any tactical motivation for voting for a Democrat, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition might meet all qualifications. Many people, including me, hoped that the Rainbow Coalition could develop into a third party but Jackson was too much of a careerist to make the kinds of tough choices Ralph Nader made. One year after the end of the Jackson campaign, the CWP dissolved itself with a number of its members finding a home in the Democratic Party, including Ron Ashford, a very capable African-American who represented the CWP in CISPES. Today Ashford is a HUD bureaucrat.
The Line of March dissolved in 1989 with some of their former members deciding to work with Peter Camejo on a magazine called Crossroads. When it finally stopped publishing in 1996, the magazine reflected on its experience:
On the ISES Board [that published Crossroads], members of the Communist Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and smaller groups from the Maoist and Trotskyist traditions worked alongside 'independents' and former members of Line of March and North Star–not in a tactical, single-issue coalition or in organizing a one-shot conference, but on a common, ongoing socialist project. This was almost unprecedented on the U.S. left, and was decisive in institutionalizing CrossRoads non- sectarian character. Even further, the interaction between once-warring activists proved to be substantive, democratic and exciting. People found it politically and intellectually stimulating to get to know one another and tear down previously insurmountable barriers.
Bob Wing was a member of the ISES board and probably had a major role in the editorial policy of Crossroads. In keeping with the erstwhile attraction LofM members had to the CPUSA, Wing was solidly behind the formation of the Committees of Correspondence in 1992, a Eurocommunist split from the CP. Peter Camejo, who was probably adapting somewhat to the views of the ex-LofM'ers he worked with on Crossroads, joined the CofC and, if I remember correctly, backed the Jackson campaign. I was still not ready to vote for Jackson but did join the CofC. After going to one of their meetings, I resigned. It was filled with people, mostly in their sixties, getting up and talking about the work they were doing in their Democratic Party club. Camejo quit not long afterwards, writing a sharp rebuke of their orientation to the DP. I will try to find that article one of these days.
At the time of Crossroad magazine's demise, I wrote an appraisal that I think holds up pretty well:
A closely related question is why the 1996 convention of the Committees of Correspondence drew only 300 people. The two events are symptomatic of the same process, and that process is the exhaustion of "regroupment". While regroupment was necessary, it could not by itself fuel a new revivified left. In CrossRoads' view, the warning signs had been apparent for some time:
Less tangible but more important were the limits that soon became evident in the broader left dialogue process. The interaction between activists from different traditions produced a certain energy by its very novelty, and many harmful stereotypes were laid to rest. But soon the excitement of getting-to-know-each-other sessions passed. Beyond consensus on a few generalities–democracy, non-sectarianism, etc.– little was produced in the way of strategic unity or theoretical insight into a new model of socialism. Better ties between activists were built, but the 'socialist regroupment' current was unable to generate sufficient momentum to conduct large-scale campaigns or undertake any major cross-tendency realignment. A noticeable 'generation gap'– few under-30 activists were attracted to socialist renewal efforts– began to registered as a serious problem.
I concur with these observations and want to amplify on them, as well as draw out some other ideas on what the problem may be and what solutions are possible.
To begin with, it is a mistake to think that any single organization can be the vehicle for a new resurgence of the left. Not only does C. of C. suffer from this illusion, so does Solidarity. While neither, to their credit, sees themselves as a "nucleus of a vanguard", both have trouble seeing a new Marxist left emerging outside of their own framework.
In the case of the C. of C., there are obvious reasons for this. To a very large extent, the C. of C. exists as spin-off from the CPUSA. Much of the functioning and attitudes of key leaders is identical to what they picked up in decades of experience in the CPUSA. I attended one C. of C. meeting over a year ago and was struck by how "routine" things seemed. All of the behavior and discussion suggested to me that most of these people had known and worked with each other for decades. Alas, this was probably true. When one old-timer got up during a discussion period and suggested that the C. of C. follow the example of the CP of Japan, which had cleaned the streets of working-class neighborhoods, I knew we were in troubled waters.
The plain fact of the matter is that newly radicalizing youth are likely to be put off by a meeting with such a character. Why would you want to join an organization whose culture and internal life seem so rigid and one-dimensional?
Turning now to Wing's article, it likens the differences between the Republicans and Democrats to those that existed in the time of Lincoln but with a complete role reversal. In 1860 the Democrats were the pro-slavery party and the Republicans would eventually become the abolitionist party under the pressures of the battlefield. He writes:
The main precedent in U.S. history for this kind of unbridled reactionary behavior was the states rights, pro-slavery position of the white South leading up to the Civil War. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called out the attempts at nullification in his famous "I Have a Dream Speech," and the movement of the sixties defeated it. As shown in the ultra-conservative playground that is the North Carolina legislature, the new laws and structures of today´s rightwing program are so extreme and in such stark contrast to the rest of the country that I believe both their strategy and their program should be called "Neo-Secession."
Does anybody believe that the white South is a secessionist threat today? Frankly, this sounds like a variation on the "fascist threat" rhetoric that has been deployed since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to stampede voters into backing Democrats. The danger of secession is less than zero. There is a simple reason for this, one that does not enter Wing's calculations. There are no class differences between the ruling class in North Carolina and New York. As Malcolm X once said, everything south of Canada is the South. In 1860 the South seceded because it wanted to preserve chattel slavery. What mode of production exists today in the South that needs to be preserved against Northern designs? Wal-Mart? The oil companies in Louisiana whose toxic dumping has been protected against regulations by Democrats and Republicans alike for most of the last century? The big three auto plants located in the South that cut deals with the UAW to create a two-tier labor system? And what about the crackdown on undocumented workers, a form of racial oppression just one step above peonage? What hope should we pin on electing Democrats when the President of the United States deported 409,849 immigrants in 2012, breaking all records under the evil Republican administration of George W. Bush.
As a sign of an utter lack of political discretion, Wing cites Melissa Harris-Perry's call for "a Third Reconstruction that builds on the post-Civil War first Reconstruction and the Civil Rights/Second Reconstruction." (In Harris-Perry's schema, the second Reconstruction was the civil rights movement of the 60s that ended Jim Crow.)
If you have access to Nexis, as I do, you can find the source of Harris-Perry's quote above, an MSNBC show from July 7, 2013 that encapsulates everything that is wrong with her way of thinking. The show originated from the Essence Festival in her native New Orleans. She spoke about some of the sponsors:
On this show, we spent a lot of time scrubbing with big corporation over their treatment of their workers and their consumers.
Coca-cola has tried to escape blame in its roll for the obesity epidemic. Workers for McDonald`s and in other fast-food chains have gone on strike in multiple cities this year to demand better pay. And then there is Walmart with its everyday low wages.
But credit where credit is due. All three of those companies, no matter how evil their policies maybe are here at the essence festival, putting in their time and making the effort to connect with the African-American community.
What Harris-Perry left out was that all three of these corporations were in favor of the Voter ID laws that Wing singled out as a prime neo-secessionist danger. They only backed off after consumer boycotts were threatened. But more to the point, how can anybody deny the reality that the Democrats, the ostensible salvation of the South, have had an incestuous relationship to these corporations for many years now? Deval Patrick is a Coca-Cola board member. Bill Clinton relied heavily on the Waltons for campaign contributions. Meanwhile, McDonald's has gone one step further and named an African-American as its CEO in July 2012. Walmart and Coca-Cola have corporate headquarters in the South. Does anybody in their right mind think that the Northern bourgeoisie has class interests opposed to those in the South? Frankly, does it really matter to Bob Wing who sees politics as some kind of battle between "reactionaries" and "progressives", as if what people think is the main cause of racial oppression in the U.S.
I also find Wing's take on the New Deal outrageous, with its ostensible distinction between FDR and racists. Is he kidding? He describes Southern racists as having "survived" the New Deal, as if they were trees confronting a forest fire. He also says "Since the Nixon and especially the Reagan administrations, the rightwing has sought to rout both the New Deal and the Civil Rights reconstruction, and replace it with an updated version of racism and reaction."
Maybe I have my facts wrong but the Southern Democrats were a solid base of the New Deal. Racism did not have to "survive" the New Deal. Indeed, it flourished under Roosevelt.
Back in September 2008, I dealt with FDR and racism and invite you to read the article that includes these facts:
To begin with, the political reality of the Democratic Party is that it catered to the racist wing of the party based in Dixie. Roosevelt felt it imperative to retain the support of politicians like Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, an open white supremacist who proposed an amendment to the federal work-relief bill on June 6, 1938 that would deport 12 million black Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment.
While most people are familiar with Roosevelt naming Hugo Black, a former Klan member, to the Supreme Court, there was just as much insensitivity involved with naming James F. Byrnes, a South Carolina politician, to the same post. Byrnes once said "This is a white man's country, and will always remain a white man's country" and most assuredly meant it.
If you are worried about neo-secessionism, you'd better stop kidding yourself that FDR was a "friend of the Negro".
I do think it is useful to analogize from secessionist the Civil War, and Reconstruction but not in the manner found in Wing's article. Today the question that confronts the left is not chattel slavery but wage slavery. In Lincoln's day, there was a Democratic Party and a Whig Party that both supported slavery. There were some Whigs who opposed slavery but not so much so as to bolt from the party. In some ways the far left of the Democratic Party were like the anti-slavery Whigs. But it took independent political action in the form of the Free Soil Party to begin to set in motion the forces that would eventually become the Republican Party, a revolutionary party in terms of its challenge to the backward agrarian wing of the capitalist class in the South.
Our goal today is to create equivalents of the Free Soil Party but along the lines of the Nader campaign, the Greens or any other initiative that refuses to compromise with the two-party system. In 1959 Carlos Fonseca joined a guerrilla group in Nicaragua because the two-party system there had excluded the possibility of reforming the system. In taking such a chance, he risked death.
In the U.S., opposing the two-party system will not get you killed but it will earn you the scorn of people who are committed to piecemeal reform, especially those who enjoy a good living working for a nonprofit funded by some liberal hedge fund manager or real estate magnate. With hundreds of millions of dollars devoted each year to magazines and newspapers that routinely include articles dismissing socialists as hopelessly Quixotic, it is a miracle that any of us keep tilting at windmills. I guess the fact that we are dealing with real horrors rather than imaginary ones is what keeps us going.
On July 19th Barack Obama spoke to reporters about the Trayvon Martin killing. This time he said that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago, a follow-up to his March 23, 2012 observation that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. Although I generally have little use for Melissa Harris-Perry, there was little to disagree with in her remarks during an MSNBC round-table discussion of Obama's remarks later that day: "But part of what the president did today in that sort of groping authentic conversation where you saw him saying, I don`t have all the answers here, I`m not quite sure — heck, have you noticed racism in America, big problem, you know, multiple generations, I don`t have all the answers." Yes, big problem, I know.
But things are definitely getting better, according to the Chief Executive:
And let me just leave you with — with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don't want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn't mean that we're in a postracial society. It doesn't mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they're better than we are. They're better than we were on these issues. And that's true in every community that I've visited all across the country.
Despite denying that we are in a postracial society, others perceive Obama as moving "past race". In a perceptive August 10, 2008 NY Times article titled "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?", Matt Bai—a DLC-minded inside-the-beltway pundit—clearly saw what was in store and liked it very much. An Obama aide was very much in the post-racial mode:
''I'm the new black politics," says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. "The people I work with are the new black politics. We don't carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but that's just the way it is.
"I don't want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here," Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. "Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He's the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that.
After speaking to Corey Booker, Newark's mayor who is cut from the same cloth as Obama, Bai learned that such politicians are not renouncing Black identity only the responsibility to defend Black people:
Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn't really to "transcend race." Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it's all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black — to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn't have to obscure his racial identity.
This pretty much sums up what the Bill Cosby Show meant to most white Americans, a look at a family you would not mind living next door to even if they preferred shooting hoops to playing tennis, or listening to Mary J. Blige rather than Barbra Streisand.
Speaking of belonging to a Black church, Obama took advantage of the controversy surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright's militant comments about racism in America to evoke postracial themes:
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
Of course, this begs the question of how you are going to get that Confederate Flag off the South Carolina state capitol unless you have some of Reverend Wright's spine and big mouth.
In contrast to the Clintons, who built ties with the old guard civil rights leaders particularly those who became elected officials, Obama sought out fresh faces unburdened by the past. Bai reported:
For some black operatives in the Clinton orbit — people who have functioned, going back to Jesse Jackson's campaigns in the 1980s, as Democratic Washington's liaisons to black America — the fallout from an Obama victory would likely be profound. "Some of them will have to walk the plank," an Obama adviser told me bluntly. In their place, an Obama administration would empower a cadre of younger black advisers who would instantly become people to see in Washington's transactional culture. Chief among them is Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago real estate developer who is one of Barack and Michelle Obama's closest friends. "She's poised to be one of the most influential people in politics, and particularly among African-Americans in politics," Belcher told me. "She may be the next Vernon Jordan." In fact, the last time I saw Clyburn, he told me he had just spent two and a half hours at breakfast with Jarrett.
As Obama's Senior Adviser, Valerie Jarrett amounts to his Karl Rove. She was key to Obama's early fundraising success, putting him in touch with powerful and wealthy figures on Wall Street and Chicago's big bourgeoisie.
Robert Fitch, a NYC adjunct professor and long time Marxist author who died much too young at the age of 72 in 2011, gave a speech titled "The Change they Believe In" in November 2008 that was characteristically laser-sharp.
For almost a hundred years in Chicago blacks have lived on the South Side close to Chicago's factories and slaughter houses. And Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. The area where they lived was called the Black Belt or Bronzeville—and it's the largest concentration of African American people in the U.S.—nearly 600,000 people—about twice the size of Harlem.
In the 1950s, big swaths of urban renewal were ripped through the black belt, demolishing private housing on the south east side. The argument then was that the old low rise private housing was old and unsuitable. Black people needed to be housed in new, high-rise public housing which the city built just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. The Administration of the Chicago Housing Authority was widely acclaimed as the most corrupt, racist and incompetent in America. Gradually only the poorest of the poor lived there. And in the 1980s, the argument began to be made that the public housing needed to be demolished and the people moved back into private housing.
But what does this all have to do with Obama? Just this: the area demolished included the communities that Obama represented as a state senator; and the top black administrators, developers and planners were people like Valerie Jarrett—who served as a member of the Chicago Planning Commission. And Martin Nesbitt who became head of the CHA. Nesbitt serves as Obama campaign finance treasurer; Jarrett as co-chair of the Transition Team. The other co-chair is William Daley, the Mayor's brother and the Midwest chair of JP Morgan Chase—an institution deeply involved in the transformation of inner-city neighborhoods through its support for—what financial institutions call "neighborhood revitalization" and neighborhood activists call gentrification.
This is the real meaning of Blacks and whites coming together around an Obama presidency. On one side you have Obama, Jarrett, and Nesbitt—all African-American—and on the other side William Daley. The only color that matters to them is green, not the ecology green but the dollar bill green.
Given the deepening of racial injustice in the USA during Obama's administration, he has to walk a tightrope. On one hand, he calls on people to serve under him who are inimical to Black interests such as Lawrence Summers, who is in line to become the head of the Federal Reserve. This is the same character that dressed down Cornel West for making a hip-hop record and argued for exporting toxic waste to African nations using the following logic: "The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City."
Even more troubling is the possibility that Obama will follow through and install Raymond Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security. In an interview with Univision, a Spanish-language TV station (), Obama praised Kelly to the skies:
Well, Ray Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York and the federal government partners a lot with New York. Because obviously our concerns about terrorism oftentimes are focused on big city targets. And I think Ray Kelly is one of the best there is. So he's been an outstanding leader in New York.
Kelly is one of the best there is? Kelly was the architect and dead-end defender of stop-and-frisk. In a study conducted by the NY Civil Liberties Union, it was revealed that in the cops stopped people on the street 532,911 times. 55 percent were Black, 32 percent were Latino, and only 10 percent were white. The NY Daily News, which has evolved recently into a critic of stop-and-frisk and which carried bold attacks on George Zimmerman ostensibly in order to assuage its largely Black working-class readers, nailed the top cop:
At bottom, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk regime represents a civil rights violation — one that disproportionally targets young black and Latino men. Though they make up only 4.7% of the city's population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6% of stops in 2011. The number of stops of young black men exceeded the city's entire population of young black men.
The commissioner contends that this happens only because officers go where the crime is. But last year, large percentages of blacks and Latinos were also stopped in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, where 77% of people stopped were black or Latino.
So why does Obama speak out of both sides of his mouth? Or perhaps more accurately, why does he say that he is opposed to racial profiling while he is at the same time ready to put a racist like Raymond Kelly in his cabinet?
Clearly the answer is that the Democratic Party needs Black votes to win elections. Unlike any issue in recent memory, the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin has activated the Black community. Just this week, Willie Louis, the Black youth who testified against the killers of Emmett Till in 1955, died at the age of 76. Despite the obvious differences between the state of lawlessness that existed in the Deep South in 1955 and today, there is still a problem with racists declaring an open season on Black youth–both of whom coincidentally had just returned from an innocent visit to a convenience store. Obama was under some pressure to take a clear stand on this matter, even if his words were in contradiction to his actions past and future.
In 2009 I wrote an article for Swans on "Are We Living in a Postracial America?" that reviewed David Roediger's recently published "How Race Survived U.S. History: from settlement and slavery to the Obama phenomenon". I recommend a look at my article but more importantly Roediger's book that was published by Verso. Let me conclude with a few paragraphs from my review. In deference to the editors of Swans, I will keep my excerpt brief—understandably as they are opposed to the sort of crossposting that is endemic to the Internet.
As part of the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama, members of the punditocracy speculated that the U.S. had entered a "post-racial" epoch. Typical was The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland who editorialized on Election Day last year:
Barack Obama has succeeded brilliantly in casting his candidacy — indeed, his whole life — as post-racial. Even before the votes have been cast, he has written a glorious coda for the civil rights struggle that provided this nation with many of the finest, and also most horrible, moments of its past 150 years. If the results confirm that race was not a decisive factor in the balloting, generations of campaigners for racial justice and equality will have seen their work vindicated.
After deploying data in his introduction to How Race Survived U.S. History to the effect that racism continues unabated (one in three children of color lives in poverty as opposed to one in ten of white families, etc.), David Roediger poses the question: "How did white supremacy in the U.S. not yield to changes that we generally regard as constant, dramatic, and, in the main, progressive?" The remainder of his brilliantly argued and researched book gives the definitive answer to this question. As such, it belongs on the bookshelf next to Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and other such works that offer a "revisionist" history of this country in accordance with truth and — more importantly — justice.
The theme that Roediger keeps coming back appears initially in Chapter One on colonial Virginia in the 17th century ("Suddenly White Supremacy"); namely, that a white identity was created in order to unite men and women of conflicting classes against the most exploited groups of the day: the slave and the Indian. And when necessary, blacks were also recruited to the master's cause against the Indians. As has always been the case, the British — including the freedom-loving colonists who would form a new republic in 1776 — have been adept at dividing and conquering. Roediger writes:
The most spectacular example of revolt, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, took Virginia to the brink of civil war. Broadly arising from the desire for good land among European and African servants and ex-servants, the rebellion therefore also had anti-Indian dimensions, demanding and implementing aggressive policies to speed settlement onto indigenous lands. Bondservants joined those who had recently served out "their time" under the leadership of the young English lawyer and venture capitalist Nathaniel Bacon, laying siege to the capital in Jamestown, burning it, driving Governor William Berkeley into exile, and sustaining insurrection for months. Authorities offered freedom "from their slavery" to "Negroes and servants" who would come over into opposition to the rebellion. Rebels, meanwhile, feared that they would all be made into "slaves, man, woman & child." Both the promise of liberation and the language registering fear of retribution suggest how imperfectly class predicaments aligned with any firm sense of racial division.
(I will be following up on this post with something about Obama's doublespeak on the economy.)


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Santa Fe Enchiladas
"These flavorful enchiladas are my sister's favorite - she requests them whenever we get together," writes Lisa Zamora of Beloit, Wisconsin. This meaty main dish is cooked in the microwave, so it's done in a jiffy.
5 Servings
Prep/Total Time: 25 min.
1-1/2 pounds lean ground beef (90% lean)
1 medium onion, chopped
1 can (12 ounces) tomato paste
1 cup water
1 envelope taco seasoning
10 flour tortillas (6 inches), warmed
1 jar (8 ounces) process cheese sauce
1 can (4 ounces) chopped green chilies
Crumble beef into a large microwave-safe bowl; stir in onion. Cover
and microwave on high for 3-5 minutes or until meat is no longer
pink, stirring every 1 minute; drain. Stir in the tomato paste,
water and taco seasoning. Cover and cook on high for 1-2 minutes or
until heated through, stirring once.
Spoon about 1/3 cup meat mixture down the center of each tortilla;
roll up tightly. Place seam side down in a greased shallow 2-1/2-qt.
microwave-safe dish. Set remaining meat mixture aside.
In a microwave-safe bowl, combine cheese sauce and chilies. Cover and
microwave on high for 40 seconds; stir. Pour over tortillas.
Spoon remaining meat mixture down the center of tortillas. Cover and
cook on high for 3 to 3-1/2 minutes or until heated through. Let
stand for 5 minutes before serving. Yield: 5 servings.
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Santa Fe Enchiladas
Nutritional Facts:
2 enchiladas equals 609 calories, 25 g fat (11 g saturated fat), 94 mg cholesterol, 2,081 mg sodium, 54 g carbohydrate, 5 g fiber, 40 g protein.
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Canes hoops ACC schedule released
Published On: Jun 19 2012 01:30:20 PM EDT
The University of Miami men's basketball schedule for 2012-2013 has been released for ACC play.
The Canes have several highlights.
They will host North Carolina, Duke, and Florida State.
The Canes will play home-and-home series against seven schools.
That list includes Florida State, North Carolina, Duke, Clemson, Virginia Tech, Boston College, and Georgia Tech.
The final schedule has not been released.
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