Response from Latinos in Arizona: BOYCOTT ARIZONA!
By Eddie Griffin
Texans speak a different language than New York or Illinois. When people speak of Immigration, there are those who favor going in with jackboot, Gestapo-style, ICE SWAT team in search of people with Spanish surnames. They cannot distinguish between citizens and non-citizens; therefore, literally all Latinos must carry numerous forms of verifiable ID. This loss of Hispanic freedom suits some politicians well.
(February 11, 2008, “Political Beauty Contest in Texas (Part 2)” by Eddie G. Griffin, BASG)
We saw federal ICE troops go into Latino communities and into factories and drag out Spanish surname workers, detained them when they could not produce citizenship papers, incarcerated them in places where their family, friends, and lawyers could not find them. They separated husbands from wives, and left children stranded in their schools, crying for the parents. It put undue hardship upon the state to incarcerate, and then having to feed and support their legal families. Many had worked for years, earning paychecks, with regular payroll deduction, but no benefits there from, because they were not legal immigrants. The taxes they paid went for naught towards citizenship.
We remember the story of school teachers who were stranded with crying Latino elementary school children, with nowhere to go, because both parents working in the factory were locked up, and nobody knew where.
Then there was the American wife of an illegal working in the country with an expired “green card”. When he is locked up, she must appeal to the state for food and welfare.
Then there were the prisons built for illegal aliens, and prison cells for mothers and their babies.
This is the kind of ENFORCEMENT the state of Arizona is looking for. But instead of federal ICE SWAT troopers, it would be State Troopers conducting the raids. This is what The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act (SB1070) in Arizona is all about, supplanting federal authority by use of State Troopers to enforce current Immigration Laws.
Farmer Branch, Texas is spending millions of dollars fighting to enforce its own brand of Immigration legislative ordinances. There is another city in Pennsylvania with its own brand. And, so we have a chaotic trend with every state, every county, and every city writing its own Immigration Laws.
Response from Latinos in Arizona: BOYCOTT ARIZONA!
Candidate BARACK OBAMA: We need comprehensive immigration reform that creates a system that is fair, consistent, compassionate, and emphasizes both maintaining the rule of law and security of our borders while working to keep families together and putting the undocumented on an earned path to citizenship.
We also need to bring the 12 million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. We need to be realistic about the fact that they are here, we can’t deport them, want they have become an integral part of our society. We need to give this population a chance to pay a fine, to have provisional status in the country, and to get into the back of the line for citizenship. (Response to 2007 NAACP survey)
Monday, April 26, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
A Crime against the Humanity of Children
TYC Official Found Guilty- Not Enough
In March 2007, I wrote these words to the Child Protection Section of the United Nations and sent copies to other international children rights organizations:
Children of the poor who unfortunately become ensnared in the criminal juvenile justice system in Texas are being incarcerated and sexually molested by high level reform school officials. (A copy of the original correspondence attached below)
After a relentless fight to bring these pedophiles to justice, we received the news that one prison official has been found guilty, and the trial of another is pending.
CBS NEWS: “Ex-Texas Youth Prison Official Guilty of Abuse”
OTHER NEWS SOURCE: “Former TYC Official Convicted of Sexually Abusing Teenage Inmates”
However, there is little consolation in these convictions because the charges were understated from the beginning. Ray Edward Brookins, former assistant superintendent of the Texas Youth Commission juvenile prison facility at Pyote, Texas, was found guilty of “having an improper sexual activity with a person in custody and having an improper relationship between an educator and student.”
This hardly fits the magnitude of the crime. When you consider that these children were convicted in a court of law, many for minor misdemeanors such as school infractions, sent to prisons in small rural communities whose lifeblood depended on prison headcounts, and placed under the absolute authority of pedophile officials, then you can understand their predicament when they tried to cry out for help.
To whom could the juvenile cry when he is dragged out of his cell in the middle of the night to the warden’s office and sexually molested. It is a crime against the humanity of the child.
Brookins was vested with the police powers of the State of Texas, positioned to make life and death decisions of juvenile inmates under his authority. A Texas Ranger investigation reveals other things, such as juveniles being paired with bullies. Even the bullies testified that they understood this pairing up between the weaker inmate and the strong was for the sole purpose of “turning them out”, making sexual slaves of them. The assistant warden capitalized on these fears and exploited it for his own perverse sexual gratification with young male inmates and little boys.
When these children cried, they were not heard, because the State was too busy displaying the incarcerated juveniles as untrustworthy liars and dangerous criminals. These depictions were later proved false. Many juveniles were needlessly locked up over minor offenses, and were having their period of incarceration extended. Besides bodily harm, prison officials could determine how long juveniles can remain in lockup. Sexual favors won early release.
[Please review Email dated: Monday, March 12, 2007]
The pinnacle of horrors surrounds a 2005 Texas Rangers investigation that documented how two former West Texas State School administrators allegedly sexually abused scores of teens they yanked from their dorm beds and classrooms. Ray Brookins, who rose from the ranks of a prison guard in 1985 to captain in 1999 to supervisor at the Cotulla Unit to director of security in 2003 and later acting superintendent of the West Texas State School for troubled youth, was accused of having coerced sex with teenage boys under his care. Also accused was school principal John Paul Hernandez. Both men resigned in lieu of being fired…
A volunteer teacher at the West Texas State School cried out for juveniles being sexually abused at the facility, and it caught the ear of Sgt. Brian Burzynski of the Texas Rangers. He investigated and found Superintendent Ray Brooks living in co-habitation with a 16-year old boy. Here was a man promoted to his high state office after being disciplined for possession of pornography on his office computer and failing to administer requires drug tests upon youth inmates.
The Ranger began an investigation and here are some of things he told the legislative committee appointed by the governor to probe the allegations.
“I’m here today because I’ve got a promise to keep,” said Sgt, Burzynski. “When I interviewed the victims in this case, I saw kids with fear in their eyes, kids who knew they were trapped in an institution within a system that would not respond to their cries for help. Perhaps their families failed them, TYC definitely failed them. I promised each one of those victims that I would not fail them.” The Lone Ranger spoke and legislators shed tears.
Even after these revelations, Brookins remained assistant warden. There was a terrible reluctance to prosecute, even as Sgt. Burzynski pressed the Attorney General. [This is a story, in and of, itself]. But the saddest part about this ordeal was the incarcerated children who testified and were retaliated against, with impunity, and the employees who reported abuses terminated.
It took an international effort to force the State of Texas to clean up its juvenile penal system, and this is only the juvenile side of the corruption in the system.
The conviction of Brookins confirms our allegations against the State of Texas in violating the Human Right of Children in their custody.
REITERATION
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance…
Bearing in mind that the need to extend particular care to the child has been stated in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924 and in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Nations on 20 November 1959 and recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in particular in articles 23 and 24), in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in particular in article 10) and in the statutes and relevant instruments of specialized agencies and international organizations concerned with the welfare of children,
Bearing in mind that, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth",
Recalling the provisions of the Declaration on Social and Legal Principles relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children, with Special Reference to Foster Placement and Adoption Nationally and Internationally; the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice ("The Beijing Rules"); and the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict,
Recognizing that, in all countries in the world, there are children living in exceptionally difficult conditions, and that such children need special consideration,
Taking due account of the importance of the traditions and cultural values of each people for the protection and harmonious development of the child,
Recognizing the importance of international co-operation for improving the living conditions of children in every country, in particular in the developing countries,
Have agreed as follows:
Article 16
1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
2. The child has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 19
1. States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.
2. Such protective measures should, as appropriate, include effective procedures for the establishment of social programmes to provide necessary support for the child and for those who have the care of the child, as well as for other forms of prevention and for identification, reporting, referral, investigation, treatment and follow-up of instances of child maltreatment described heretofore, and, as appropriate, for judicial involvement.
Article 20
1. A child temporarily or permanently deprived of his or her family environment, or in whose own best interests cannot be allowed to remain in that environment, shall be entitled to special protection and assistance provided by the State.
3. States Parties shall take all effective and appropriate measures with a view to abolishing traditional practices prejudicial to the health of children.
Article 34
States Parties undertake to protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For these purposes, States Parties shall in particular take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent:
(a) The inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity;
(b) The exploitative use of children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices;
(c) The exploitative use of children in pornographic performances and materials.
Article 36
States Parties shall protect the child against all other forms of exploitation prejudicial to any aspects of the child's welfare.
Article 37
States Parties shall ensure that:
(a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below 18 years of age;
(b) No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time;
(d) Every child deprived of his or her liberty shall have the right to prompt access to legal and other appropriate assistance, as well as the right to challenge the legality of the deprivation of his or her liberty before a court or other competent, independent and impartial authority, and to a prompt decision on any such action.
Article 39
States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of: any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse; torture or any other form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; or armed conflicts. Such recovery and reintegration shall take place in an environment which fosters the health, self-respect and dignity of the child.
Article 40
1. States Parties recognize the right of every child alleged as, accused of, or recognized as having infringed the penal law to be treated in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child's sense of dignity and worth, which reinforces the child's respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of others and which takes into account the child's age and the desirability of promoting the child's reintegration and the child's assuming a constructive role in society.
2. To this end, and having regard to the relevant provisions of international instruments, States Parties shall, in particular, ensure that:
(b) Every child alleged as or accused of having infringed the penal law has at least the following guarantees:
(iii) To have the matter determined without delay by a competent, independent and impartial authority or judicial body in a fair hearing according to law, in the presence of legal or other appropriate assistance and, unless it is considered not to be in the best interest of the child, in particular, taking into account his or her age or situation, his or her parents or legal guardians;
(v) If considered to have infringed the penal law, to have this decision and any measures imposed in consequence thereof reviewed by a higher competent, independent and impartial authority or judicial body according to law;
For these offenses, done with impunity under the Color of Law, as crimes only comparable under the Nazi regime, Eddie Griffin (BASG) subscribes to a punishment of death for crimes against humanity, crimes against the private persons of children made helpless by the shackles of a cruel state, and authority given into the hands of a pedophile, more heinous and malicious than Catholic priests or school teacher molesters.
In March 2007, I wrote these words to the Child Protection Section of the United Nations and sent copies to other international children rights organizations:
Children of the poor who unfortunately become ensnared in the criminal juvenile justice system in Texas are being incarcerated and sexually molested by high level reform school officials. (A copy of the original correspondence attached below)
After a relentless fight to bring these pedophiles to justice, we received the news that one prison official has been found guilty, and the trial of another is pending.
CBS NEWS: “Ex-Texas Youth Prison Official Guilty of Abuse”
OTHER NEWS SOURCE: “Former TYC Official Convicted of Sexually Abusing Teenage Inmates”
However, there is little consolation in these convictions because the charges were understated from the beginning. Ray Edward Brookins, former assistant superintendent of the Texas Youth Commission juvenile prison facility at Pyote, Texas, was found guilty of “having an improper sexual activity with a person in custody and having an improper relationship between an educator and student.”
This hardly fits the magnitude of the crime. When you consider that these children were convicted in a court of law, many for minor misdemeanors such as school infractions, sent to prisons in small rural communities whose lifeblood depended on prison headcounts, and placed under the absolute authority of pedophile officials, then you can understand their predicament when they tried to cry out for help.
To whom could the juvenile cry when he is dragged out of his cell in the middle of the night to the warden’s office and sexually molested. It is a crime against the humanity of the child.
Brookins was vested with the police powers of the State of Texas, positioned to make life and death decisions of juvenile inmates under his authority. A Texas Ranger investigation reveals other things, such as juveniles being paired with bullies. Even the bullies testified that they understood this pairing up between the weaker inmate and the strong was for the sole purpose of “turning them out”, making sexual slaves of them. The assistant warden capitalized on these fears and exploited it for his own perverse sexual gratification with young male inmates and little boys.
When these children cried, they were not heard, because the State was too busy displaying the incarcerated juveniles as untrustworthy liars and dangerous criminals. These depictions were later proved false. Many juveniles were needlessly locked up over minor offenses, and were having their period of incarceration extended. Besides bodily harm, prison officials could determine how long juveniles can remain in lockup. Sexual favors won early release.
[Please review Email dated: Monday, March 12, 2007]
The pinnacle of horrors surrounds a 2005 Texas Rangers investigation that documented how two former West Texas State School administrators allegedly sexually abused scores of teens they yanked from their dorm beds and classrooms. Ray Brookins, who rose from the ranks of a prison guard in 1985 to captain in 1999 to supervisor at the Cotulla Unit to director of security in 2003 and later acting superintendent of the West Texas State School for troubled youth, was accused of having coerced sex with teenage boys under his care. Also accused was school principal John Paul Hernandez. Both men resigned in lieu of being fired…
A volunteer teacher at the West Texas State School cried out for juveniles being sexually abused at the facility, and it caught the ear of Sgt. Brian Burzynski of the Texas Rangers. He investigated and found Superintendent Ray Brooks living in co-habitation with a 16-year old boy. Here was a man promoted to his high state office after being disciplined for possession of pornography on his office computer and failing to administer requires drug tests upon youth inmates.
The Ranger began an investigation and here are some of things he told the legislative committee appointed by the governor to probe the allegations.
“I’m here today because I’ve got a promise to keep,” said Sgt, Burzynski. “When I interviewed the victims in this case, I saw kids with fear in their eyes, kids who knew they were trapped in an institution within a system that would not respond to their cries for help. Perhaps their families failed them, TYC definitely failed them. I promised each one of those victims that I would not fail them.” The Lone Ranger spoke and legislators shed tears.
Even after these revelations, Brookins remained assistant warden. There was a terrible reluctance to prosecute, even as Sgt. Burzynski pressed the Attorney General. [This is a story, in and of, itself]. But the saddest part about this ordeal was the incarcerated children who testified and were retaliated against, with impunity, and the employees who reported abuses terminated.
It took an international effort to force the State of Texas to clean up its juvenile penal system, and this is only the juvenile side of the corruption in the system.
The conviction of Brookins confirms our allegations against the State of Texas in violating the Human Right of Children in their custody.
REITERATION
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance…
Bearing in mind that the need to extend particular care to the child has been stated in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924 and in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Nations on 20 November 1959 and recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in particular in articles 23 and 24), in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in particular in article 10) and in the statutes and relevant instruments of specialized agencies and international organizations concerned with the welfare of children,
Bearing in mind that, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth",
Recalling the provisions of the Declaration on Social and Legal Principles relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children, with Special Reference to Foster Placement and Adoption Nationally and Internationally; the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice ("The Beijing Rules"); and the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict,
Recognizing that, in all countries in the world, there are children living in exceptionally difficult conditions, and that such children need special consideration,
Taking due account of the importance of the traditions and cultural values of each people for the protection and harmonious development of the child,
Recognizing the importance of international co-operation for improving the living conditions of children in every country, in particular in the developing countries,
Have agreed as follows:
Article 16
1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
2. The child has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 19
1. States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.
2. Such protective measures should, as appropriate, include effective procedures for the establishment of social programmes to provide necessary support for the child and for those who have the care of the child, as well as for other forms of prevention and for identification, reporting, referral, investigation, treatment and follow-up of instances of child maltreatment described heretofore, and, as appropriate, for judicial involvement.
Article 20
1. A child temporarily or permanently deprived of his or her family environment, or in whose own best interests cannot be allowed to remain in that environment, shall be entitled to special protection and assistance provided by the State.
3. States Parties shall take all effective and appropriate measures with a view to abolishing traditional practices prejudicial to the health of children.
Article 34
States Parties undertake to protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For these purposes, States Parties shall in particular take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent:
(a) The inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity;
(b) The exploitative use of children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices;
(c) The exploitative use of children in pornographic performances and materials.
Article 36
States Parties shall protect the child against all other forms of exploitation prejudicial to any aspects of the child's welfare.
Article 37
States Parties shall ensure that:
(a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below 18 years of age;
(b) No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time;
(d) Every child deprived of his or her liberty shall have the right to prompt access to legal and other appropriate assistance, as well as the right to challenge the legality of the deprivation of his or her liberty before a court or other competent, independent and impartial authority, and to a prompt decision on any such action.
Article 39
States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of: any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse; torture or any other form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; or armed conflicts. Such recovery and reintegration shall take place in an environment which fosters the health, self-respect and dignity of the child.
Article 40
1. States Parties recognize the right of every child alleged as, accused of, or recognized as having infringed the penal law to be treated in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child's sense of dignity and worth, which reinforces the child's respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of others and which takes into account the child's age and the desirability of promoting the child's reintegration and the child's assuming a constructive role in society.
2. To this end, and having regard to the relevant provisions of international instruments, States Parties shall, in particular, ensure that:
(b) Every child alleged as or accused of having infringed the penal law has at least the following guarantees:
(iii) To have the matter determined without delay by a competent, independent and impartial authority or judicial body in a fair hearing according to law, in the presence of legal or other appropriate assistance and, unless it is considered not to be in the best interest of the child, in particular, taking into account his or her age or situation, his or her parents or legal guardians;
(v) If considered to have infringed the penal law, to have this decision and any measures imposed in consequence thereof reviewed by a higher competent, independent and impartial authority or judicial body according to law;
For these offenses, done with impunity under the Color of Law, as crimes only comparable under the Nazi regime, Eddie Griffin (BASG) subscribes to a punishment of death for crimes against humanity, crimes against the private persons of children made helpless by the shackles of a cruel state, and authority given into the hands of a pedophile, more heinous and malicious than Catholic priests or school teacher molesters.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
LETTER TO THE TEA PARTY
From: Eddie Griffin (BASG)
RE: Wichita Falls Hate Crime Shootings
Let me be very, very clear to say that the Tea Party had nothing to do with inciting the violent shootings of Ross Muehlberger in Wichita Falls, Texas on Tuesday night. Nevertheless, it proves the point that someone out there in the vast reaches of America was feeding on all this hateful rhetoric, and found this an opportune time to strike. There may be others.
No one wants to blame the Tea Party, because this rampage could happen anywhere, at anytime, and for any reason. Particularly, April 20, Hitler’s birthday, is attractive as a full moon on lunatic night. The Columbine shooters chose this day. So, the acts of Ross Muehlberger are not beyond the blue in the realm of understanding.
In case you missed the news and find yourself being accused of fueling the fire of a madman, here is the story: A 22-year old Iraq War veteran, with a history of mental problems and a long string of violent crimes, went on a shotgun shooting spree, shouting “White power.” One man was killed, and three women injured. Then, he killed himself.
(See http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2010/apr/20/several-may-be-wounded-shooting-incident/ and http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/04/21/2131129/2-dead-4-wounded-in-wichita-falls.html)
I reason that the shooter probably would have chosen this night anyway, because of its historical significance. That he was a white supremacist is evident. But he was not created by the Tea Party, but more likely by his experience in the Texas prison system, where white inmates are forced to join one of several supremacist gangs.
His crime, therefore, would be more akin to James Byrd who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. Byrd’s killers were also members of a prison white supremacist hate group.
No, it is not the Tea Party that creates these guys, but rather the Tea Party has given them refuge to do their dirty work.
The City of Wichita Falls is trying to heal. Everyone in the community is giving condolences to the family of the deceased and praying for the wounded. But a side dialogue is going on, full of anger and bitterness. Some have attributed this violence to the Tea Party. Supporters are responding with hostility. Some just simply want to heal.
There are more important issues in this story, such as: Why was Ross Muehlberger on the streets, anyway, having been previously charged with stabbing two men? Why was the judge so lenient with a known drug dealer with a violent history in reducing his bond? Didn’t they know that he was going to strike again?
This is where the real investigation of racism belong, not on the Tea Party, but upon lone wolves with violent intents inside it, under the cover of the organization's legitimacy.
RE: Wichita Falls Hate Crime Shootings
Let me be very, very clear to say that the Tea Party had nothing to do with inciting the violent shootings of Ross Muehlberger in Wichita Falls, Texas on Tuesday night. Nevertheless, it proves the point that someone out there in the vast reaches of America was feeding on all this hateful rhetoric, and found this an opportune time to strike. There may be others.
No one wants to blame the Tea Party, because this rampage could happen anywhere, at anytime, and for any reason. Particularly, April 20, Hitler’s birthday, is attractive as a full moon on lunatic night. The Columbine shooters chose this day. So, the acts of Ross Muehlberger are not beyond the blue in the realm of understanding.
In case you missed the news and find yourself being accused of fueling the fire of a madman, here is the story: A 22-year old Iraq War veteran, with a history of mental problems and a long string of violent crimes, went on a shotgun shooting spree, shouting “White power.” One man was killed, and three women injured. Then, he killed himself.
(See http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2010/apr/20/several-may-be-wounded-shooting-incident/ and http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/04/21/2131129/2-dead-4-wounded-in-wichita-falls.html)
I reason that the shooter probably would have chosen this night anyway, because of its historical significance. That he was a white supremacist is evident. But he was not created by the Tea Party, but more likely by his experience in the Texas prison system, where white inmates are forced to join one of several supremacist gangs.
His crime, therefore, would be more akin to James Byrd who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. Byrd’s killers were also members of a prison white supremacist hate group.
No, it is not the Tea Party that creates these guys, but rather the Tea Party has given them refuge to do their dirty work.
The City of Wichita Falls is trying to heal. Everyone in the community is giving condolences to the family of the deceased and praying for the wounded. But a side dialogue is going on, full of anger and bitterness. Some have attributed this violence to the Tea Party. Supporters are responding with hostility. Some just simply want to heal.
There are more important issues in this story, such as: Why was Ross Muehlberger on the streets, anyway, having been previously charged with stabbing two men? Why was the judge so lenient with a known drug dealer with a violent history in reducing his bond? Didn’t they know that he was going to strike again?
This is where the real investigation of racism belong, not on the Tea Party, but upon lone wolves with violent intents inside it, under the cover of the organization's legitimacy.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Prefabrication of a Leftist
A Response to Cal Thomas “Protesting the Protesters”
From: Eddie Griffin (BASG)
PREMISE: The Fable of the Leftist is a false creation of conservative editorialists.
Cal Thomas writes that he is “sick and tired” of this debate about racism in the Tea Party. So are we. But he fabricates a stereotypic Leftist that fits nobody’s description in real life, and counterpoises this straw dog with a Rightist stereotype. This whole enigma about Conservative and Liberal confuses me, because I believe every American is a little liberal over here, a little conservative over there, a little to the right on this issue, and a little to the left on that issue.
He writes: “The left invented the modern protest movement. I recall covering some of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late '60s and early '70s.”
Anyone who lived this history, instead of just reading about it, would know: It was lead by students, and it consumed the mainstream of America. But we were politically powerless because 18-year olds had not yet won the right to vote, and African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. Otherwise, we could have taken the 1964 election.
Protesting the Vietnam War was not unpatriotic. We believed it was morally wrong to go into Southeast Asia to take the place of the imperial power of France. The Vietnamese people were throwing off centuries of French colonialism. Communism spurred the international revolutions in the 1960.
Instead, we supported the liberation movements around the world, to end Estado Novo colonialism in Portuguese African colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau, and called for universities to divest in South Africa because of white supremacist practice of apartheid. That was our generation, burning draft cards, and shouting: “Hell No, we won’t go.” We wanted Peace. We wanted to come home. We were tired of fighting for an unappreciative nation who suppressed our right to vote in the South.
Cal writes here: “Conservatives believed that it was unpatriotic to criticize a president fighting communists. Many conservatives supported Nixon almost to the very end in the Watergate scandal.”
We were irreconcilably divided on President Richard Nixon. Maybe he was good to some people. But to us, he made life hell. His fight against “communism”, as supported by the political conservatives of the day, meant squashing our rights by illegal means and under false pretenses.
Mr. Thomas would rewrite history and once again vilify those on the Left, who have long since been exonerated. He writes: “People like William Ayers, Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Brown and Jane Fonda, and groups like the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, were seen by the mainstream media and liberal cultural commentators as exercising free speech and assembly, even when that assembly sometimes turned violent.”
I assume Sam Brown is H. Rap Brown, field organizer for SNCC in 1966, and successor of Stokely Carmichael. These infamous words are quoted in the article:
The left conveniently forgets people like the 1960s black-power apostle H. Rap Brown, who said, “Violence is American as cherry pie.”
It seems convenient now for Mr. Thomas to forget that, at the time, blood ran in the streets. Never in history had so many black leaders died a bloody assassin’s death, and the civil rights workers murdered on the back roads of Mississippi and Georgia, and all the raids on Black Panther properties, where one-sided shot-outs took some 40 lives of community leaders and potential leaders. These things were so casual that America went about its business with a cherry pie attitude.
Mr. Thomas subtle attempt to rewrite history, slander the exonerated, and falsify facts is contradicted, not by the same newspapers complicit in the crime, but the U.S. Senate records of the Church Committee, 1976.
April 1976 Church Commission investigation, 94th Congress, 2nd Session
Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II
I. Introduction and Summary
II. The Growth of Domestic Intelligence: 1936 to 1976
III. Findings
(A) Violating and Ignoring the Law
(B) Overbreadth of Domestic Intelligence Activity
(C) Excessive Use of Intrusive Techniques
(D) Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups
(E) Political Abuse of Intelligence Information
(F) Inadequate Controls on Dissemination and Retention
(G) Deficiencies in Control and Accountability
IV. Conclusions and Recommendations
Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports, Book III
COINTELPRO: The FBI's Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study
The FBI's Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party
The Use of Informants in FBI Intelligence Investigations
Warrantless FBI Electronic Surveillance
Warrantless Surreptitious Entries: FBI "Black Bag" Break-ins And Microphone Installations
The Development of FBI Domestic Intelligence Investigations
Domestic CIA and FBI Mail Opening
CIA Intelligence Collection About Americans: CHAOS Program And The Office of Security
National Security Agency Surveillance Affecting Americans
Improper Surveillance of Private Citizens By The Military
The Internal Revenue Service: An Intelligence Resource and Collector
National Security, Civil Liberties, And The Collection of Intelligence: A Report On The Huston Plan
* Books II and III of the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976
From: Eddie Griffin (BASG)
PREMISE: The Fable of the Leftist is a false creation of conservative editorialists.
Cal Thomas writes that he is “sick and tired” of this debate about racism in the Tea Party. So are we. But he fabricates a stereotypic Leftist that fits nobody’s description in real life, and counterpoises this straw dog with a Rightist stereotype. This whole enigma about Conservative and Liberal confuses me, because I believe every American is a little liberal over here, a little conservative over there, a little to the right on this issue, and a little to the left on that issue.
He writes: “The left invented the modern protest movement. I recall covering some of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late '60s and early '70s.”
Anyone who lived this history, instead of just reading about it, would know: It was lead by students, and it consumed the mainstream of America. But we were politically powerless because 18-year olds had not yet won the right to vote, and African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. Otherwise, we could have taken the 1964 election.
Protesting the Vietnam War was not unpatriotic. We believed it was morally wrong to go into Southeast Asia to take the place of the imperial power of France. The Vietnamese people were throwing off centuries of French colonialism. Communism spurred the international revolutions in the 1960.
Instead, we supported the liberation movements around the world, to end Estado Novo colonialism in Portuguese African colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau, and called for universities to divest in South Africa because of white supremacist practice of apartheid. That was our generation, burning draft cards, and shouting: “Hell No, we won’t go.” We wanted Peace. We wanted to come home. We were tired of fighting for an unappreciative nation who suppressed our right to vote in the South.
Cal writes here: “Conservatives believed that it was unpatriotic to criticize a president fighting communists. Many conservatives supported Nixon almost to the very end in the Watergate scandal.”
We were irreconcilably divided on President Richard Nixon. Maybe he was good to some people. But to us, he made life hell. His fight against “communism”, as supported by the political conservatives of the day, meant squashing our rights by illegal means and under false pretenses.
Mr. Thomas would rewrite history and once again vilify those on the Left, who have long since been exonerated. He writes: “People like William Ayers, Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Brown and Jane Fonda, and groups like the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, were seen by the mainstream media and liberal cultural commentators as exercising free speech and assembly, even when that assembly sometimes turned violent.”
I assume Sam Brown is H. Rap Brown, field organizer for SNCC in 1966, and successor of Stokely Carmichael. These infamous words are quoted in the article:
The left conveniently forgets people like the 1960s black-power apostle H. Rap Brown, who said, “Violence is American as cherry pie.”
It seems convenient now for Mr. Thomas to forget that, at the time, blood ran in the streets. Never in history had so many black leaders died a bloody assassin’s death, and the civil rights workers murdered on the back roads of Mississippi and Georgia, and all the raids on Black Panther properties, where one-sided shot-outs took some 40 lives of community leaders and potential leaders. These things were so casual that America went about its business with a cherry pie attitude.
Mr. Thomas subtle attempt to rewrite history, slander the exonerated, and falsify facts is contradicted, not by the same newspapers complicit in the crime, but the U.S. Senate records of the Church Committee, 1976.
April 1976 Church Commission investigation, 94th Congress, 2nd Session
Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II
I. Introduction and Summary
II. The Growth of Domestic Intelligence: 1936 to 1976
III. Findings
(A) Violating and Ignoring the Law
(B) Overbreadth of Domestic Intelligence Activity
(C) Excessive Use of Intrusive Techniques
(D) Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups
(E) Political Abuse of Intelligence Information
(F) Inadequate Controls on Dissemination and Retention
(G) Deficiencies in Control and Accountability
IV. Conclusions and Recommendations
Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports, Book III
COINTELPRO: The FBI's Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study
The FBI's Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party
The Use of Informants in FBI Intelligence Investigations
Warrantless FBI Electronic Surveillance
Warrantless Surreptitious Entries: FBI "Black Bag" Break-ins And Microphone Installations
The Development of FBI Domestic Intelligence Investigations
Domestic CIA and FBI Mail Opening
CIA Intelligence Collection About Americans: CHAOS Program And The Office of Security
National Security Agency Surveillance Affecting Americans
Improper Surveillance of Private Citizens By The Military
The Internal Revenue Service: An Intelligence Resource and Collector
National Security, Civil Liberties, And The Collection of Intelligence: A Report On The Huston Plan
* Books II and III of the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976
Monday, April 19, 2010
I Got Hate Mail
Monday, April 19, 2010
My Dear Editor:
Let me address the criticism to my article “Unhealthy Rhetoric”, and separate the genuine from the bigoted hate mail. Eddie Griffin is a nice guy compared to what most African-Americans are saying in secret. Most see the Tea Party as the new KKK. I see it as a cover from Racism.
Now let’s not be “intellectually lazy” as one critic accuse of me. The word “Racism” should not be confused with bigoted racial hatred. The latter is an outgrowth of the former. Racism is an ideology that precedes the outward emotional demonstration of racial hatred.
Who has the power to define, anyway? Who has the power to define what Racism truly is?
The black intelligentsia specifically defined Racism as “the ideology of white supremacy practiced by class suppression along racial lines.” For us, this is not a debatable concept. It is simply the definition we put forth to the United Nations in 1964, when “We Charged Genocide” against the United States for the second time in history- the first being submitted in the 1950s by Paul Robeson and company, and later amended by Malcolm X and the black intelligentsia, of which Eddie Griffin was an original party.
Some Fort Worth Weekly critics accuse me of being a “racist” because I described what I saw as “unhealthy rhetoric” in the Tea Party movement and at its rallies. This accusation of my being a racist is a throwback to the Mike Wallace interview of Malcolm X around 1964. Wallace accused Malcolm X of being a “black racist”. Malcolm, on the other hand, pointed out that Racism was a political ideology like other “ism” (Nazism, communism, socialism, totalitarianism). The ideology was founded long ago on the premise of white supremacy and the myth of the “White man’s burden”, as the sole conveyor of civilization.
A person cannot change the word to change the reality of race relationships. Calling a black man a racist, Malcolm X pointed out, was like calling the victimized the victimizer. No so, only a few Negroes would subscribe to the ideology of white supremacy. And, in those, would be found a “racist” in black skin.
That the United Nation rejected our definition because, as they said, any race can oppress another race, and technically be called “racism”. White supremacy was more evident under the “apartheid” system in South Africa.
Nevertheless, the definition and meaning of the word stuck with those of us who believed in the validity of Malcolm X’s argument. Webster dictionary was no authority either, seeing that it defined “Negro” as “something dead”. And, we refused to let others put words in our mouths, as was customary for slave owners to put words in the mouth of the slave. For the first time in history, we spoke for ourselves and defined our own reality, as we saw it.
One of the Seven Principals of Liberation was Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
Meaning no disrespect, it would be inappropriate for someone to tell me what to see and what to say. I saw in the Tea Party movement is what I saw. And, I am not the only one.
[See also “Brutal Political Debate Once Again Widens A Cultural Divide” by Elisabeth Ivy, Star-Telegram, April 19, 2010; and “Remember, Some People Take Battle Cries Seriously” by Kathleen Parker, Star-Telegram, April 18, 2010]
Eddie Griffin
My Dear Editor:
Let me address the criticism to my article “Unhealthy Rhetoric”, and separate the genuine from the bigoted hate mail. Eddie Griffin is a nice guy compared to what most African-Americans are saying in secret. Most see the Tea Party as the new KKK. I see it as a cover from Racism.
Now let’s not be “intellectually lazy” as one critic accuse of me. The word “Racism” should not be confused with bigoted racial hatred. The latter is an outgrowth of the former. Racism is an ideology that precedes the outward emotional demonstration of racial hatred.
Who has the power to define, anyway? Who has the power to define what Racism truly is?
The black intelligentsia specifically defined Racism as “the ideology of white supremacy practiced by class suppression along racial lines.” For us, this is not a debatable concept. It is simply the definition we put forth to the United Nations in 1964, when “We Charged Genocide” against the United States for the second time in history- the first being submitted in the 1950s by Paul Robeson and company, and later amended by Malcolm X and the black intelligentsia, of which Eddie Griffin was an original party.
Some Fort Worth Weekly critics accuse me of being a “racist” because I described what I saw as “unhealthy rhetoric” in the Tea Party movement and at its rallies. This accusation of my being a racist is a throwback to the Mike Wallace interview of Malcolm X around 1964. Wallace accused Malcolm X of being a “black racist”. Malcolm, on the other hand, pointed out that Racism was a political ideology like other “ism” (Nazism, communism, socialism, totalitarianism). The ideology was founded long ago on the premise of white supremacy and the myth of the “White man’s burden”, as the sole conveyor of civilization.
A person cannot change the word to change the reality of race relationships. Calling a black man a racist, Malcolm X pointed out, was like calling the victimized the victimizer. No so, only a few Negroes would subscribe to the ideology of white supremacy. And, in those, would be found a “racist” in black skin.
That the United Nation rejected our definition because, as they said, any race can oppress another race, and technically be called “racism”. White supremacy was more evident under the “apartheid” system in South Africa.
Nevertheless, the definition and meaning of the word stuck with those of us who believed in the validity of Malcolm X’s argument. Webster dictionary was no authority either, seeing that it defined “Negro” as “something dead”. And, we refused to let others put words in our mouths, as was customary for slave owners to put words in the mouth of the slave. For the first time in history, we spoke for ourselves and defined our own reality, as we saw it.
One of the Seven Principals of Liberation was Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
Meaning no disrespect, it would be inappropriate for someone to tell me what to see and what to say. I saw in the Tea Party movement is what I saw. And, I am not the only one.
[See also “Brutal Political Debate Once Again Widens A Cultural Divide” by Elisabeth Ivy, Star-Telegram, April 19, 2010; and “Remember, Some People Take Battle Cries Seriously” by Kathleen Parker, Star-Telegram, April 18, 2010]
Eddie Griffin
Friday, April 16, 2010
The Tale of Hiller "Red" Hayes
Dear Lorenzo Komboa Ervin:
It has been an eventful and exciting life that we have lived. Was it all real, you recently asked? I wondered the same. But then I found the archive location of our prison writings at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, Northeastern University, and Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Particularly, you might be interested in some boxes at Swarthmore: Box 33 Lorenzo Ervin [2 folders] and Box 34 Lorenzo Ervin [3 folders]. In addition, Box 35 contains records of Eddie Griffin.
I wish that I could go back in time and do a rewrite of my prison writings, and correct and update all the files. But the record is what it is. It was written with all truthfulness and sincere at heart.
When I wrote about Hiller “Red” Hayes in “Breaking Men’s Minds”, I was begging on behalf of a dying man that someone listen to his story. He had been locked up in solitary confinement for 13 straight years, half of which was inside a dungeon called the Control Unit. When I described him in my early prison writings, readers in the outside world appealed to the International Red Cross.
Like a dead man walking the cold concrete floor inside a prison cell block, buried at eye-level beneath the earth, he walked like a ghost in search of telling some one, any one, how he died. He looked at me and through me as if I wasn’t there, then turned and stared into outer space, and began to talk.
“I am the boogey man in the system,” he began. “Always, there is someone they lock up, designated never to see the light of day again.”
His faded red hair crackled like sandpaper whenever he raked his rough course fingers across his head. His skin was dry and pale as the desert sand. His back was cover with giant ringworms of bedsores, raw and red.
He talked like a man possessed of psychotic spirits, like a delusional man, coming out of a twilight world of drugs. He has been one of the first government experimental prison subjects to test a new drug in the 1950s called Valium. After his release, his drug supply was suddenly cut off, and he suffered a “white out”. He woke up in the federal prison hospital at Springfield, next door to a dying Bird Man of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud, who died on the even of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, November 21, 1963.
Birdman was a hard luck case. Locked up in 1909, during the rough-and-tumble heydays of the Alaska frontier where he killed a man. Clearly, it was in self defense, but he was sent to prison anyway, where he later killed a prison guard and was given the death penalty. Finally, his death sentence commuted to life in the hole, never to see the light of day again, by President Woodrow Wilson.
The Birdman was the Boogey Man prior to Red Hayes.
He remembered becoming frustrated with the courts. So after years of solitary confinement, he had “a barbeque”. He piled all his law books and legal papers into the middle of the floor of his cell, and set it afire.
It was obvious he had given up hope. He never came out of his cell for recreation. All day, every day, he would just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. I was the only human contact he had made in years.
Why me?
“I’m dying,” he said. “I want you to tell my story.”
In “Breaking Men’s Minds” (1977), I wrote:
At the root of the Control Unit's behavior modification program, though, is indefinite confinement. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Control Unit to communicate to the public. Yet a testament to this policy was a man named Hiller ‘Red’ Hayes. After thirteen years in solitary confinement (nearly six in the control unit), he became the ‘boogie man’ of the prison system - the living/ dying example of what can happen to any prisoner. The more he deteriorated in his own skeleton, the more prisoners could expect to wane in his likeness. He died in the unit in August, 1977.
The editor added the last sentence.
I would make a correction here in the Red Hayes story. The International Red Cross did help get Red Hayes released from the dungeon. Two days later, he died on the prison compound at Marion.
What has always intrigued me about the Hayes case was his crime. What did he do during that “white out” period? Thanks to the Internet, I discovered this story. The Tale of Hiller Arthur Hayes is an ironic as mine own.
That on or about the 5th day of June, 1960, Hiller Arthur Hayes and Vivian Darlene McCracken, the defendants, did knowingly transport and willfully cause to be transported, by automobile, in interstate commerce a person who had been unlawfully seized, confined, inveigled, decoyed, kidnapped, abducted, carried away and by defendants held, to wit, one Harry Robert Wilde, Jr., who was by said defendants transported from St. Louis County, in the State of Missouri, within the Eastern Division of the Eastern District of Missouri, to Monroe County, in the State of Illinois. 'In violation of Section 1201, Title 18, United States Code.'
In short, they tried to buy a car with a hot check. The manager secretly called the police. When a deputized female attempted to search Red’s girlfriend, Vivian pulls a gun and the cop reacts. Hayes disarms him cop and takes the cop and everybody else hostage. The chase lasted about an hour.
Hayes defended himself in court and was given 99 years in 1960. I met him in 1973. He died in 1977.
It is ironic that I went to prison in 1972, charged with bank robbery, kidnapping, and commandeering a police squad car. The chase lasted more than three hours before our capture by a lone Texas Ranger sharpshooter, named Tom Arnold. The state of Texas wanted to give us the death penalty. But the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty before we went to court. I wound up with 50 years, ironically next door to the Boogey Man who committed virtually the same crime.
[This is one of the many stories in the Conversion of Eddie Griffin]
It has been an eventful and exciting life that we have lived. Was it all real, you recently asked? I wondered the same. But then I found the archive location of our prison writings at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, Northeastern University, and Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Particularly, you might be interested in some boxes at Swarthmore: Box 33 Lorenzo Ervin [2 folders] and Box 34 Lorenzo Ervin [3 folders]. In addition, Box 35 contains records of Eddie Griffin.
I wish that I could go back in time and do a rewrite of my prison writings, and correct and update all the files. But the record is what it is. It was written with all truthfulness and sincere at heart.
When I wrote about Hiller “Red” Hayes in “Breaking Men’s Minds”, I was begging on behalf of a dying man that someone listen to his story. He had been locked up in solitary confinement for 13 straight years, half of which was inside a dungeon called the Control Unit. When I described him in my early prison writings, readers in the outside world appealed to the International Red Cross.
Like a dead man walking the cold concrete floor inside a prison cell block, buried at eye-level beneath the earth, he walked like a ghost in search of telling some one, any one, how he died. He looked at me and through me as if I wasn’t there, then turned and stared into outer space, and began to talk.
“I am the boogey man in the system,” he began. “Always, there is someone they lock up, designated never to see the light of day again.”
His faded red hair crackled like sandpaper whenever he raked his rough course fingers across his head. His skin was dry and pale as the desert sand. His back was cover with giant ringworms of bedsores, raw and red.
He talked like a man possessed of psychotic spirits, like a delusional man, coming out of a twilight world of drugs. He has been one of the first government experimental prison subjects to test a new drug in the 1950s called Valium. After his release, his drug supply was suddenly cut off, and he suffered a “white out”. He woke up in the federal prison hospital at Springfield, next door to a dying Bird Man of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud, who died on the even of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, November 21, 1963.
Birdman was a hard luck case. Locked up in 1909, during the rough-and-tumble heydays of the Alaska frontier where he killed a man. Clearly, it was in self defense, but he was sent to prison anyway, where he later killed a prison guard and was given the death penalty. Finally, his death sentence commuted to life in the hole, never to see the light of day again, by President Woodrow Wilson.
The Birdman was the Boogey Man prior to Red Hayes.
He remembered becoming frustrated with the courts. So after years of solitary confinement, he had “a barbeque”. He piled all his law books and legal papers into the middle of the floor of his cell, and set it afire.
It was obvious he had given up hope. He never came out of his cell for recreation. All day, every day, he would just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. I was the only human contact he had made in years.
Why me?
“I’m dying,” he said. “I want you to tell my story.”
In “Breaking Men’s Minds” (1977), I wrote:
At the root of the Control Unit's behavior modification program, though, is indefinite confinement. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Control Unit to communicate to the public. Yet a testament to this policy was a man named Hiller ‘Red’ Hayes. After thirteen years in solitary confinement (nearly six in the control unit), he became the ‘boogie man’ of the prison system - the living/ dying example of what can happen to any prisoner. The more he deteriorated in his own skeleton, the more prisoners could expect to wane in his likeness. He died in the unit in August, 1977.
The editor added the last sentence.
I would make a correction here in the Red Hayes story. The International Red Cross did help get Red Hayes released from the dungeon. Two days later, he died on the prison compound at Marion.
What has always intrigued me about the Hayes case was his crime. What did he do during that “white out” period? Thanks to the Internet, I discovered this story. The Tale of Hiller Arthur Hayes is an ironic as mine own.
That on or about the 5th day of June, 1960, Hiller Arthur Hayes and Vivian Darlene McCracken, the defendants, did knowingly transport and willfully cause to be transported, by automobile, in interstate commerce a person who had been unlawfully seized, confined, inveigled, decoyed, kidnapped, abducted, carried away and by defendants held, to wit, one Harry Robert Wilde, Jr., who was by said defendants transported from St. Louis County, in the State of Missouri, within the Eastern Division of the Eastern District of Missouri, to Monroe County, in the State of Illinois. 'In violation of Section 1201, Title 18, United States Code.'
In short, they tried to buy a car with a hot check. The manager secretly called the police. When a deputized female attempted to search Red’s girlfriend, Vivian pulls a gun and the cop reacts. Hayes disarms him cop and takes the cop and everybody else hostage. The chase lasted about an hour.
Hayes defended himself in court and was given 99 years in 1960. I met him in 1973. He died in 1977.
It is ironic that I went to prison in 1972, charged with bank robbery, kidnapping, and commandeering a police squad car. The chase lasted more than three hours before our capture by a lone Texas Ranger sharpshooter, named Tom Arnold. The state of Texas wanted to give us the death penalty. But the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty before we went to court. I wound up with 50 years, ironically next door to the Boogey Man who committed virtually the same crime.
[This is one of the many stories in the Conversion of Eddie Griffin]
Friday, April 9, 2010
Beasley’s Defense of Erykah Badu
In response to my call for the prosecution of Ms. Erykah Badu, Charles Beasley writes in her defense:
Yes I know the law was recently changed on crack cocaine. That is not the central point I was referring to. Go back to the beginning when the law was put in place. good Americans were screaming for heavier penalties. Now I see you my brother screaming for the prosecution based on your moral port hole to the world. Badu has a port hole to. I can respect the Pennsylvania Dutch religious group when the man walked in to there school a few years ago and killed all their students they didn't speak a mean word they went to the mans family and offered help to his wife. We as an historically oppressed people are to quick to call on the legal organized violence of the state to punish people we have failed to communicate with. Perhaps you should seek out Badu and ask her as a concerned citizen would she be willing to explain her actions before calling on Craig Watkins to prosecute her. Craig Watkins needs to spend his time making sure his office is prosecuting guilty violent criminals. I just don't think Badu's actions warrant the attention of the District Attorney when the case is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and can be resolved by city courts.
Charles Beasley was a politically conscious jailhouse lawyer during the 1970s, and a member of an elite cadre known as “The Collective”, one of the original Marion Brothers.
Take it, then, that this is the side of the argument that I would have normally heard from him while in prison- what I would call the “devil’s advocate” position.
Beasley suggests that I should first speak with Ms. Badu, before going to Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins and asking for prosecution.
Instead, I called the Dallas brothers out on the immoral behavior of Ms. Erykah Badu. In a town that never listens, Beasley was the only one, once confronted, responded, in Badu's defense. [This is the way we were accustomed in prison- once a man is called out, on the basis of his manhood].
Notice what Beasley sees: Now I see you my brother screaming for the prosecution based on your moral port hole to the world. Badu has a port hole to.
If he could actually see me screaming somewhere in the dimensions of his mind, then surely he would have heard me screaming- not for prosecution, but to convey the fear of prosecution to the mind of Ms. Badu. People must fear that there is a consequence for their behavior.
[A young black inmate steals a candy bar from a Mafia don in prison. What did the don want to do? You know it. He wanted to hit the guy, take him out, kill him, and eliminate one more maggot from planet earth. They sent me as a messenger, to warn, and save his life.]
I believe in putting the fear of God into people, not through violence, or the threat of violence, but with the written word. [Have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?]
If I speak truth to Ms. Badu’s situation, then let her tremble, and repent, and apologize to her fans and the public and to all the children she offended.
But Beasley invents these individualized, totally isolated, compartmentalized things in absentia called “moral port holes”. Supposedly, I got one, he got one, Erykah Badu got one, and each is separate and apart from the other, and should not be infringed upon one by the other. Sounds like another kind of hole, but for the sake of argument we can call it The Theory of Moral Port Holes, in the name of its inventor, Charles Beasley. This takes the World According to Garp one step closer to a state of mass insanity.
I saw the naked woman they call Erykah Badu on a video in front of the public in Dallas, and a child with a terrorized look in his eyes- all in the same frame. What about his innocent “moral port hole”?
An adult does not have the right to violate the rights of a child. This is not an equal rights debate. The child has absolute rights over the adult rights to obscenity, nudity, and profanity. This is not a court of legal and criminal opinion, but an absolute right given to innocent children by God. [Suffer the little children to come unto me… whosoever offend one of these least of these, it would be better to hang a millstone around his neck and cast him into the sea… except you become as little children, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven]
Why should the children be put through the hell of man’s own makings?
Yes I know the law was recently changed on crack cocaine. That is not the central point I was referring to. Go back to the beginning when the law was put in place. good Americans were screaming for heavier penalties. Now I see you my brother screaming for the prosecution based on your moral port hole to the world. Badu has a port hole to. I can respect the Pennsylvania Dutch religious group when the man walked in to there school a few years ago and killed all their students they didn't speak a mean word they went to the mans family and offered help to his wife. We as an historically oppressed people are to quick to call on the legal organized violence of the state to punish people we have failed to communicate with. Perhaps you should seek out Badu and ask her as a concerned citizen would she be willing to explain her actions before calling on Craig Watkins to prosecute her. Craig Watkins needs to spend his time making sure his office is prosecuting guilty violent criminals. I just don't think Badu's actions warrant the attention of the District Attorney when the case is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and can be resolved by city courts.
Charles Beasley was a politically conscious jailhouse lawyer during the 1970s, and a member of an elite cadre known as “The Collective”, one of the original Marion Brothers.
Take it, then, that this is the side of the argument that I would have normally heard from him while in prison- what I would call the “devil’s advocate” position.
Beasley suggests that I should first speak with Ms. Badu, before going to Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins and asking for prosecution.
Instead, I called the Dallas brothers out on the immoral behavior of Ms. Erykah Badu. In a town that never listens, Beasley was the only one, once confronted, responded, in Badu's defense. [This is the way we were accustomed in prison- once a man is called out, on the basis of his manhood].
Notice what Beasley sees: Now I see you my brother screaming for the prosecution based on your moral port hole to the world. Badu has a port hole to.
If he could actually see me screaming somewhere in the dimensions of his mind, then surely he would have heard me screaming- not for prosecution, but to convey the fear of prosecution to the mind of Ms. Badu. People must fear that there is a consequence for their behavior.
[A young black inmate steals a candy bar from a Mafia don in prison. What did the don want to do? You know it. He wanted to hit the guy, take him out, kill him, and eliminate one more maggot from planet earth. They sent me as a messenger, to warn, and save his life.]
I believe in putting the fear of God into people, not through violence, or the threat of violence, but with the written word. [Have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?]
If I speak truth to Ms. Badu’s situation, then let her tremble, and repent, and apologize to her fans and the public and to all the children she offended.
But Beasley invents these individualized, totally isolated, compartmentalized things in absentia called “moral port holes”. Supposedly, I got one, he got one, Erykah Badu got one, and each is separate and apart from the other, and should not be infringed upon one by the other. Sounds like another kind of hole, but for the sake of argument we can call it The Theory of Moral Port Holes, in the name of its inventor, Charles Beasley. This takes the World According to Garp one step closer to a state of mass insanity.
I saw the naked woman they call Erykah Badu on a video in front of the public in Dallas, and a child with a terrorized look in his eyes- all in the same frame. What about his innocent “moral port hole”?
An adult does not have the right to violate the rights of a child. This is not an equal rights debate. The child has absolute rights over the adult rights to obscenity, nudity, and profanity. This is not a court of legal and criminal opinion, but an absolute right given to innocent children by God. [Suffer the little children to come unto me… whosoever offend one of these least of these, it would be better to hang a millstone around his neck and cast him into the sea… except you become as little children, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven]
Why should the children be put through the hell of man’s own makings?
Monday, April 5, 2010
Godless Goddess Erykah Badu
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BROTHERS IN DALLAS
From Eddie Griffin (BASG)
She left nothing to the imagination, but much to be desired. She is neither cute, nor as fine as she thinks herself to be. Ms. Erykah Badu is vain in her imagination, if she thinks her physique looks better than a degusting 46-year old Wanda Sykes. They are both undesirable, except to the basest of men.
To bear it all before the eyes of children is to destroy their innocence. The secret parts of the body are not secret any more. The unknown becomes an ugly hairy looking thing. Uch!
Damn me once, damn me, twice, the idiot Wanda Sykes follows suit, only to get as far as pulling off her pants, and exposing her panties. Mama, why don’t boys wear panties?
It was the second act, Wanda Sykes stripping on the streets, that made me realize: If Erykah Badu can do it and Wanda Sykes can do it, then any woman in America can strip down to their birthday suit. Then if women are so “free” spirited, then why not men, stripping down to their ding thing in front of your 5-year old daughter?
What difference is there between Chester the Molester and Erykah Badu?
The author of this communiqué is the same Eddie Griffin who heckled and booed D.L. Hughley performance at Fort Worth Bass Hall in 2007. The fight against this black comedian was over the issue of MISOGYNY, calling black women “bitches” and “whores”.
Now we got one, acting just like one. This is not art. This is pornography in the flesh… as pornographic as filming a gang rape, set to music, and calling it Art.
With the conspiracy to distribute this live pornography, across internet line, we have a federal offense, punishable by some years in prison. This is how you cut off evil in the land, by exercising the law to protect the innocent, especially the innocence of our children.
From Eddie Griffin (BASG)
She left nothing to the imagination, but much to be desired. She is neither cute, nor as fine as she thinks herself to be. Ms. Erykah Badu is vain in her imagination, if she thinks her physique looks better than a degusting 46-year old Wanda Sykes. They are both undesirable, except to the basest of men.
To bear it all before the eyes of children is to destroy their innocence. The secret parts of the body are not secret any more. The unknown becomes an ugly hairy looking thing. Uch!
Damn me once, damn me, twice, the idiot Wanda Sykes follows suit, only to get as far as pulling off her pants, and exposing her panties. Mama, why don’t boys wear panties?
It was the second act, Wanda Sykes stripping on the streets, that made me realize: If Erykah Badu can do it and Wanda Sykes can do it, then any woman in America can strip down to their birthday suit. Then if women are so “free” spirited, then why not men, stripping down to their ding thing in front of your 5-year old daughter?
What difference is there between Chester the Molester and Erykah Badu?
The author of this communiqué is the same Eddie Griffin who heckled and booed D.L. Hughley performance at Fort Worth Bass Hall in 2007. The fight against this black comedian was over the issue of MISOGYNY, calling black women “bitches” and “whores”.
Now we got one, acting just like one. This is not art. This is pornography in the flesh… as pornographic as filming a gang rape, set to music, and calling it Art.
With the conspiracy to distribute this live pornography, across internet line, we have a federal offense, punishable by some years in prison. This is how you cut off evil in the land, by exercising the law to protect the innocent, especially the innocence of our children.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
On The Constitutional Question of State Rights vs Healthcare Rights
By Eddie G. Griffin
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Children should be taught Civics in school, due to mass ignorance on the rights between the states, and rights and responsibilities of the federal government.
Some have claimed that the President and the Congress have overstepped their boundaries, in the recent healthcare legislation. In the separation of powers, all powers, not delegated to the federal government are reserved by the states. It is upon this Tenth Amendment constitutional premise that the State Rights claim arises.
The claim dates back to the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the 13 colonies came together to fight against the British in the Revolution of 1776. There was no central federal government, and the colonists were suspicious in turning over their authority to a central governing body. What came out of it was the formation of the United States of America, as we know it.
The republics agreed in the principal of “majority rule”, but not at the tyranny over the minority. Therefore, constitutional provisions gave recognition of the claim of the minority. This principal became very important in the South, due to racial suppression, and the denial of blacks to vote.
Although traditionally, America was governed by a white male dominated society, at the time of her birth, and for some time thereafter, Conservatism was built upon the premise that this was the natural order of society, and this was the way it would always be. Hence, conservatism meant preserving existing relationships of power and domination.
The third great body, the U.S. Supreme Court, would arbitrate the claims between the federal central government and the states- and, so began an evolution of government, and the growth of federal responsibilities and authorities.
President John F. Kennedy reasoned that wherever federal funds are dispersed, there is a federal responsibility for Equal Opportunity and Equal Protection under the Law. African-Americans were not afforded either equal opportunities, or equal protection in America. This is, as we knew it then. Negroes lived under the tyranny of white supremacy in the former slave states of the South, who clung to the doctrine of State Rights.
When Negroes in Texas were set free in 1865, they began to pay taxes, like other white citizens. Their taxes went to local, state, and federal governments, but they were receiving no benefit for their money. Taxation Without Representation: Negroes were taxed, but could not vote. They had no protection from lawless night raiders and lynch mobs. Yet their taxes paid the sheriff’s salary.
While streets and sidewalks were being paved in white communities with tax dollars, the Negro neighborhoods had muddy trails to navigate home, in a restricted and neglected community, redlined by finance and insurance corporations. The Negro tax dollars went for naught. And, those who did vote had to pay a Poll Tax for the privilege in Texas, which poll tax many could not afford., especially knowing that they vote for naught to gain.
When it came to hiring public servants with tax dollars, the government workforce in the South was all white. The government “overstretched” it bounds to force the states to accept Equal Opportunity in Employment. This authority trumped over states rights because it involved the disbursement of federal funds through contracting and administration. And, federal funds were derived from all citizens, black and white.
Compliance was monitored through an ineffective EEOC system. They derided it as a “quota system”. In practice, the policy amounted to “tokenism”, where each government department and contractor hired a “token black”, in order to comply with the new federal “mandate”. Equal employment opportunity is still a problem today, due to racial nepotism in hiring and promotion.
But the federal mandate that I believe led to the killing of JFK in Dallas in 1963 was the Executive Order 10925 to integrate the colleges and universities. These heretofore all-white colleges and universities had been beneficiary of federal funds and grants. Yet the doorway of entrance into the halls of higher learner excluded the Negroes who lived in the South.
President John F. Kennedy “overstepped” the bounds of his authority, they said. This was the debate of the day. The state had the right to regulate admissions to colleges and universities in their state. The president had no right to mix the races. The South was segregated.
Alabama Governor George Wallace declared immediately after the Executive Order went into effect: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
By state rights, segregations would have prevailed. Conservatism would have fulfilled its purpose: No Change. And Southern Negroes would still be in bondage.
There has always been a state declaration against “federal intrusion”, otherwise code named, Big Government. But what is often overlooked is the Right of the Minority to be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
On the Constitutionality of the Healthcare Legislation
As for the federal mandates included in the recent Healthcare Reform Legislation, some have been called into question, on constitutional grounds.
First, I believe that no American citizen should be forced to buy health insurance, but I would not pull the plug on unborn “blue babies”, simply because they have a pre-existing condition. Why does the legislation not give the individual of opting out for the federally regulated exchange?
The Tyranny of the Majority is not always sized up in poll numbers, but in dollars and cents, the classic struggle between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots. Such struggles have existed since the days of cave men, which descendents we seem sometimes not removed from.
Whenever a bank accepts deposits from a variety of communities, it has an obligation to reinvest funds into the places from whence the funds originate. But historically, the practice of “Redlining” allowed bankers and insurance companies to rob Peter and give to Paul, from minority customers to big businesses. The banks financed unequal community development by contracting almost exclusively in favor of white-owned business and corporations, while mom and pop business had to sell their souls to the devil in order just to get a loan, at usury racketeer rates.
Health insurance companies have also practiced redlining by excluding high-risk clients. As insurance profits go up and executives receive bonus the size of some Third World countries, we see a trend in policies that maximize profits.
CASE EXAMPLE
A Crowley, Texas couple was about to have their third child, they had no idea that the birth would be complicated, that the newborn would require immediate surgery, that the child would be denied healthcare insurance coverage, base upon the company’s “pre-existing” condition policy.
The father wondered: How could the child have a pre-existing condition before he is even born?
It is a loophole in equal protection under the law, insofar as total discretion is at the arbitrary whims of the insurance company health insurance providers. By claiming unfair encroachment upon their business, insurers seek relief from federal law and regulation under provisions of protection under states rights. Under this doctrine, the federal government has no authority to regulate insurance companies operating inside the states. This is a power to regulate the insurance companies comes under purview of those reserved to the states.
But every insurance company that operates across state lines come under the federal jurisdiction through the interstate commerce clause. The federal government has the right to keep monopolies from forming and prevent unfair commerce and interstate business fraud.
Lost is the fact that it is a federal crime to engage in interstate commerce by defrauding a customer to believe one thing about their benefit under an insurance policy, with twisted, convoluted, complicated legalese embedded in the contract that takes some of those same benefits away. It is called bait-and-switch in the crime world, but not so in the corporate insurance world.
No one told the Crowley couple that if the wife gave birth to a “blue baby” that the baby would be denied health insurance coverage. No one knows what a “pre-existing” condition is. Any at-risk pregnant mother could give birth to a child with a pre-existing condition.
What of the Right of the Unborn Child verses these State Rights?
The new healthcare law binds the insurance companies to a new set of relationships and a new mode of practice, and changes the condition of coverage for all patients. The unborn child now has a chance to be born with the most fundamental inalienable of rights of an American citizen under the constitution: The right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, where before all such rights were jeopardized by an insurance company’s arbitrary policies.
Do the damages have to be proven if all blue babies born in America were denied healthcare coverage based upon these so-called pre-existing conditions? Under protective provisions of the Constitution and Interstate Commerce Act, the state cannot put the unborn child at risk again of llife, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
If the states seek to undo any or all the provisions of the new healthcare law, then this provisions protecting the unborn should stand constitutional challenge, separate and apart from all else.
Maybe the Court might find the law to be unconstitutional, in part, but not in all. And those young people who can now be carried on their parents’ policy, wherein they had no coverage at all, would the Supreme Court undo this coverage, and once again put the rider at risk? I think not.
Should everyone be required to buy health insurance? I think not, also. It only benefits the health insurance companies even more. There should be an “Opt-Out” provision for anyone who wants no part of the federally regulated insurance exchange. This opt-out option, however, should be the right of the individual, and not the right of the state.
Social Security recipients are already being forced to purchase healthcare coverage under Medicare through SSI deduction on benefits, whether or not the retiree has other coverage or not. And workers are already forced to pay FICA and MICA through payroll deductions, for future retirement and medical needs.
Is this not a federal mandate? Heretofore, the rich has been exempt from FICA and MICA, because of a cap on taxation at the higher income level. They pay middle income taxes and benefit the most from the healthcare system, because they can afford the luxury add-ons.
It should be noted that all companies pay federal and state unemployment taxes, for the benefit of the worker, not the state. The problem with state rights today is its tendency of states defending big corporations and businesses, at the expense of those who pay into the system through taxation.
Caveat Emptor, Let the Buyer Beware
Another problem is deregulation. The state wants less federal regulation.
We have already seen recently the consequences of deregulation, and a system of caveat emptor. The Wall Street collapse is a result thereof… Madoff, ENRON, Worldcom, Tyco, only to name a few of those companies and corporations that exploited loopholes in federal regulation and oversight.
The king found it necessary to regulate what bakers put into their loaves and the weight thereof. Before they were regulated, bakers would put substitutes into the mix, including sweepings off the floor. Each loaf varied in weight and yet had a fixed price. Without regulation, this was free enterprise commerce whereby the customer was responsible for whatever he bought. They called it Caveat Emptor, which means “Let the Buyer Beware”.
This is the natural tendency of unregulated free enterprise, and not on the goodness of men. Without regulation, the insurance companies and financial institutions would profess the same free market principal: Caveat Emptor.
Whose responsibility is it to protect the consumer from tainted bread, divers weights, and unfair balances?
It is first the sovereign right of the state to protect its citizens from illegal and corrupt commercial practices. But when the state defends the corrupters, just as the state defended slave ownership, it is the responsibility of the federal government to restore the balances of fairness, in the marketplace, and in the nation. This responsibility and right supercedes the state.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Children should be taught Civics in school, due to mass ignorance on the rights between the states, and rights and responsibilities of the federal government.
Some have claimed that the President and the Congress have overstepped their boundaries, in the recent healthcare legislation. In the separation of powers, all powers, not delegated to the federal government are reserved by the states. It is upon this Tenth Amendment constitutional premise that the State Rights claim arises.
The claim dates back to the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the 13 colonies came together to fight against the British in the Revolution of 1776. There was no central federal government, and the colonists were suspicious in turning over their authority to a central governing body. What came out of it was the formation of the United States of America, as we know it.
The republics agreed in the principal of “majority rule”, but not at the tyranny over the minority. Therefore, constitutional provisions gave recognition of the claim of the minority. This principal became very important in the South, due to racial suppression, and the denial of blacks to vote.
Although traditionally, America was governed by a white male dominated society, at the time of her birth, and for some time thereafter, Conservatism was built upon the premise that this was the natural order of society, and this was the way it would always be. Hence, conservatism meant preserving existing relationships of power and domination.
The third great body, the U.S. Supreme Court, would arbitrate the claims between the federal central government and the states- and, so began an evolution of government, and the growth of federal responsibilities and authorities.
President John F. Kennedy reasoned that wherever federal funds are dispersed, there is a federal responsibility for Equal Opportunity and Equal Protection under the Law. African-Americans were not afforded either equal opportunities, or equal protection in America. This is, as we knew it then. Negroes lived under the tyranny of white supremacy in the former slave states of the South, who clung to the doctrine of State Rights.
When Negroes in Texas were set free in 1865, they began to pay taxes, like other white citizens. Their taxes went to local, state, and federal governments, but they were receiving no benefit for their money. Taxation Without Representation: Negroes were taxed, but could not vote. They had no protection from lawless night raiders and lynch mobs. Yet their taxes paid the sheriff’s salary.
While streets and sidewalks were being paved in white communities with tax dollars, the Negro neighborhoods had muddy trails to navigate home, in a restricted and neglected community, redlined by finance and insurance corporations. The Negro tax dollars went for naught. And, those who did vote had to pay a Poll Tax for the privilege in Texas, which poll tax many could not afford., especially knowing that they vote for naught to gain.
When it came to hiring public servants with tax dollars, the government workforce in the South was all white. The government “overstretched” it bounds to force the states to accept Equal Opportunity in Employment. This authority trumped over states rights because it involved the disbursement of federal funds through contracting and administration. And, federal funds were derived from all citizens, black and white.
Compliance was monitored through an ineffective EEOC system. They derided it as a “quota system”. In practice, the policy amounted to “tokenism”, where each government department and contractor hired a “token black”, in order to comply with the new federal “mandate”. Equal employment opportunity is still a problem today, due to racial nepotism in hiring and promotion.
But the federal mandate that I believe led to the killing of JFK in Dallas in 1963 was the Executive Order 10925 to integrate the colleges and universities. These heretofore all-white colleges and universities had been beneficiary of federal funds and grants. Yet the doorway of entrance into the halls of higher learner excluded the Negroes who lived in the South.
President John F. Kennedy “overstepped” the bounds of his authority, they said. This was the debate of the day. The state had the right to regulate admissions to colleges and universities in their state. The president had no right to mix the races. The South was segregated.
Alabama Governor George Wallace declared immediately after the Executive Order went into effect: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
By state rights, segregations would have prevailed. Conservatism would have fulfilled its purpose: No Change. And Southern Negroes would still be in bondage.
There has always been a state declaration against “federal intrusion”, otherwise code named, Big Government. But what is often overlooked is the Right of the Minority to be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
On the Constitutionality of the Healthcare Legislation
As for the federal mandates included in the recent Healthcare Reform Legislation, some have been called into question, on constitutional grounds.
First, I believe that no American citizen should be forced to buy health insurance, but I would not pull the plug on unborn “blue babies”, simply because they have a pre-existing condition. Why does the legislation not give the individual of opting out for the federally regulated exchange?
The Tyranny of the Majority is not always sized up in poll numbers, but in dollars and cents, the classic struggle between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots. Such struggles have existed since the days of cave men, which descendents we seem sometimes not removed from.
Whenever a bank accepts deposits from a variety of communities, it has an obligation to reinvest funds into the places from whence the funds originate. But historically, the practice of “Redlining” allowed bankers and insurance companies to rob Peter and give to Paul, from minority customers to big businesses. The banks financed unequal community development by contracting almost exclusively in favor of white-owned business and corporations, while mom and pop business had to sell their souls to the devil in order just to get a loan, at usury racketeer rates.
Health insurance companies have also practiced redlining by excluding high-risk clients. As insurance profits go up and executives receive bonus the size of some Third World countries, we see a trend in policies that maximize profits.
CASE EXAMPLE
A Crowley, Texas couple was about to have their third child, they had no idea that the birth would be complicated, that the newborn would require immediate surgery, that the child would be denied healthcare insurance coverage, base upon the company’s “pre-existing” condition policy.
The father wondered: How could the child have a pre-existing condition before he is even born?
It is a loophole in equal protection under the law, insofar as total discretion is at the arbitrary whims of the insurance company health insurance providers. By claiming unfair encroachment upon their business, insurers seek relief from federal law and regulation under provisions of protection under states rights. Under this doctrine, the federal government has no authority to regulate insurance companies operating inside the states. This is a power to regulate the insurance companies comes under purview of those reserved to the states.
But every insurance company that operates across state lines come under the federal jurisdiction through the interstate commerce clause. The federal government has the right to keep monopolies from forming and prevent unfair commerce and interstate business fraud.
Lost is the fact that it is a federal crime to engage in interstate commerce by defrauding a customer to believe one thing about their benefit under an insurance policy, with twisted, convoluted, complicated legalese embedded in the contract that takes some of those same benefits away. It is called bait-and-switch in the crime world, but not so in the corporate insurance world.
No one told the Crowley couple that if the wife gave birth to a “blue baby” that the baby would be denied health insurance coverage. No one knows what a “pre-existing” condition is. Any at-risk pregnant mother could give birth to a child with a pre-existing condition.
What of the Right of the Unborn Child verses these State Rights?
The new healthcare law binds the insurance companies to a new set of relationships and a new mode of practice, and changes the condition of coverage for all patients. The unborn child now has a chance to be born with the most fundamental inalienable of rights of an American citizen under the constitution: The right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, where before all such rights were jeopardized by an insurance company’s arbitrary policies.
Do the damages have to be proven if all blue babies born in America were denied healthcare coverage based upon these so-called pre-existing conditions? Under protective provisions of the Constitution and Interstate Commerce Act, the state cannot put the unborn child at risk again of llife, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
If the states seek to undo any or all the provisions of the new healthcare law, then this provisions protecting the unborn should stand constitutional challenge, separate and apart from all else.
Maybe the Court might find the law to be unconstitutional, in part, but not in all. And those young people who can now be carried on their parents’ policy, wherein they had no coverage at all, would the Supreme Court undo this coverage, and once again put the rider at risk? I think not.
Should everyone be required to buy health insurance? I think not, also. It only benefits the health insurance companies even more. There should be an “Opt-Out” provision for anyone who wants no part of the federally regulated insurance exchange. This opt-out option, however, should be the right of the individual, and not the right of the state.
Social Security recipients are already being forced to purchase healthcare coverage under Medicare through SSI deduction on benefits, whether or not the retiree has other coverage or not. And workers are already forced to pay FICA and MICA through payroll deductions, for future retirement and medical needs.
Is this not a federal mandate? Heretofore, the rich has been exempt from FICA and MICA, because of a cap on taxation at the higher income level. They pay middle income taxes and benefit the most from the healthcare system, because they can afford the luxury add-ons.
It should be noted that all companies pay federal and state unemployment taxes, for the benefit of the worker, not the state. The problem with state rights today is its tendency of states defending big corporations and businesses, at the expense of those who pay into the system through taxation.
Caveat Emptor, Let the Buyer Beware
Another problem is deregulation. The state wants less federal regulation.
We have already seen recently the consequences of deregulation, and a system of caveat emptor. The Wall Street collapse is a result thereof… Madoff, ENRON, Worldcom, Tyco, only to name a few of those companies and corporations that exploited loopholes in federal regulation and oversight.
The king found it necessary to regulate what bakers put into their loaves and the weight thereof. Before they were regulated, bakers would put substitutes into the mix, including sweepings off the floor. Each loaf varied in weight and yet had a fixed price. Without regulation, this was free enterprise commerce whereby the customer was responsible for whatever he bought. They called it Caveat Emptor, which means “Let the Buyer Beware”.
This is the natural tendency of unregulated free enterprise, and not on the goodness of men. Without regulation, the insurance companies and financial institutions would profess the same free market principal: Caveat Emptor.
Whose responsibility is it to protect the consumer from tainted bread, divers weights, and unfair balances?
It is first the sovereign right of the state to protect its citizens from illegal and corrupt commercial practices. But when the state defends the corrupters, just as the state defended slave ownership, it is the responsibility of the federal government to restore the balances of fairness, in the marketplace, and in the nation. This responsibility and right supercedes the state.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Logjam in Texas Federal Food Stamps vs. GOP Priorities
When I first met Congressman Michael C. Burgess, I referred him to Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who once wrote: “At nature’s great table, there are no plates for some.” The same is true in healthcare.
By Eddie Griffin
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Except that a family is destitute and hungry, no one would understand the hell poor people go through just to qualify and receive food stamps in Texas. At the grassroots level, we have always known. We have had to assist welfare recipients in navigating the system- a system which the Star-Telegram calls “broken”.
Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Tom Suehs says, “It's almost like a system that time forgot for a while.”
That would be an understatement, considering the federal food stamp program has had problems from the very beginning. Food stamps were once extorted for sex from women applying for it. Supposedly, a little sex would expedite the process. This case created a scandal in Fort Worth, Texas a few years back.
But generally speaking, the Food Stamp program has been stigmatized as a “welfare program”, with stereotypes and images, of lazy poor people. Anyone who understands the evolution of the Medieval Poor Laws would understand how that image came to be.
Applying for food stamps in Texas can be quite a chore, according to a new state auditor's report.
Need to ask a basic question? Forget the phone. Workers often don't have time to answer questions by phone and their voice mailboxes tend to be full, the report says.
Instead, applicants "make unnecessary trips to a local office, in which they sometimes sit for hours just to ask a question or submit a document," says the report released Tuesday by State Auditor John Keel.
"Crowded lobbies, long waits, and delays in eligibility determinations clearly resulted in frustrated clients," the report said.
The report describes an inefficient system in which 80 percent of cases are kept on paper and a lack of experienced workers is contributing to problems processing applications accurately and within the 30 days required by the federal government. It recommends using technology such as automated kiosks and allowing applicants to check the status of cases online, an option the state now makes available only to certain applicants.
But now we have 3.3 million mouths to feed in Texas, as a result of the Great Recession. It is no longer about “them lazy folks”. It is about us “hungry folks”.
The federal food stamp program today may not be as heartless and corrupt as in the past. But it is old and antiquated, and frustrating to navigate. 1970s technology ran the system. Wherein they have since called in non-profit food banks, churches, and community organizations to assist in clearing the backlog, they have still not address its structural problem of antiquity.
Charles Kuffner of Offthekuff reports “Food stamp application backlog to be cleared by April”
The commission had projected it would clear the backlog by February. That didn’t happen. Though the backlog disappeared in the Tyler, Beaumont, Austin, El Paso and Edinburg areas, there were still 16,000 applications in February for which decisions were past due, Suehs said. About 90 percent of that backlog was in the Houston and Dallas areas.
Suehs now expects the Lubbock, Abilene and San Antonio regions to clear the backlog by the end of March, he told members of a joint Senate-House panel overseeing the state’s system for enrolling Texans in programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. And he expects the Dallas and Houston areas to be back on track by the end of April.
A Fort Worth Star-Telegram editorial, “Help these hungry Texans”, draws a sharp contrast in priorities of our political leaders:
Some of our state officials have been acting tough by bad-mouthing Washington, resisting federal aid in some areas and preparing lawsuits to fight recently enacted legislation. If only they could devote that much attention and energy to fixing a broken system right here at home.
These are very tough times, and many families are having to ask for help from the state for the first time in their lives.
Texas should be able to give them the help they need to have food on the table without unnecessary roadblocks caused by a food stamp system that badly needs an overhaul.
COMMENTARY by Eddie Griffin
Of those who are “bad-mouthing Washington” and “preparing lawsuits to fight recently enacted legislation” is Congressman Michael C. Burgess, 26th District of Texas.
It is customary to think that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty was a failure, that it created a dependent welfare class of people. Food stamp recipients were cast into that mold.
Now while Texas is trying to do good by its new welfare class, Burgess and Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott are waging another battle against the poor, trying to undo healthcare legislation that new life to babies born as “blue babies” (a pre-existing condition).
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and 12 attorneys general from other states have sued in a Florida federal court to block implementation of the healthcare legislation that President Barack Obama signed into law last week.
The Texas Attorney General overstepped his bounds. Governor Sam Houston was against joining the Confederacy, but Sam Houston, Jr. led a coup against his Texas governor father, usurped by a minority interest of slave holder of 25% property ownership. This is how authority has been usurped in Texas, not once, but many times.
What is ignored is “the people’s interest”. Always it is political party interest sounded in the courts. But there is an amicus in the people’s interest to controvert this lawsuit to undo the healthcare bill.
Cost expectations are far lower than the Attorney General anticipate. We have a global human interest in the needs and protections of the unborn. Let the U.S. Supreme Court rule as it will. We have the World Court, and international option on our side.
Sincerely,
Eddie Griffin (BASG)
By Eddie Griffin
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Except that a family is destitute and hungry, no one would understand the hell poor people go through just to qualify and receive food stamps in Texas. At the grassroots level, we have always known. We have had to assist welfare recipients in navigating the system- a system which the Star-Telegram calls “broken”.
Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Tom Suehs says, “It's almost like a system that time forgot for a while.”
That would be an understatement, considering the federal food stamp program has had problems from the very beginning. Food stamps were once extorted for sex from women applying for it. Supposedly, a little sex would expedite the process. This case created a scandal in Fort Worth, Texas a few years back.
But generally speaking, the Food Stamp program has been stigmatized as a “welfare program”, with stereotypes and images, of lazy poor people. Anyone who understands the evolution of the Medieval Poor Laws would understand how that image came to be.
Applying for food stamps in Texas can be quite a chore, according to a new state auditor's report.
Need to ask a basic question? Forget the phone. Workers often don't have time to answer questions by phone and their voice mailboxes tend to be full, the report says.
Instead, applicants "make unnecessary trips to a local office, in which they sometimes sit for hours just to ask a question or submit a document," says the report released Tuesday by State Auditor John Keel.
"Crowded lobbies, long waits, and delays in eligibility determinations clearly resulted in frustrated clients," the report said.
The report describes an inefficient system in which 80 percent of cases are kept on paper and a lack of experienced workers is contributing to problems processing applications accurately and within the 30 days required by the federal government. It recommends using technology such as automated kiosks and allowing applicants to check the status of cases online, an option the state now makes available only to certain applicants.
But now we have 3.3 million mouths to feed in Texas, as a result of the Great Recession. It is no longer about “them lazy folks”. It is about us “hungry folks”.
The federal food stamp program today may not be as heartless and corrupt as in the past. But it is old and antiquated, and frustrating to navigate. 1970s technology ran the system. Wherein they have since called in non-profit food banks, churches, and community organizations to assist in clearing the backlog, they have still not address its structural problem of antiquity.
Charles Kuffner of Offthekuff reports “Food stamp application backlog to be cleared by April”
The commission had projected it would clear the backlog by February. That didn’t happen. Though the backlog disappeared in the Tyler, Beaumont, Austin, El Paso and Edinburg areas, there were still 16,000 applications in February for which decisions were past due, Suehs said. About 90 percent of that backlog was in the Houston and Dallas areas.
Suehs now expects the Lubbock, Abilene and San Antonio regions to clear the backlog by the end of March, he told members of a joint Senate-House panel overseeing the state’s system for enrolling Texans in programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. And he expects the Dallas and Houston areas to be back on track by the end of April.
A Fort Worth Star-Telegram editorial, “Help these hungry Texans”, draws a sharp contrast in priorities of our political leaders:
Some of our state officials have been acting tough by bad-mouthing Washington, resisting federal aid in some areas and preparing lawsuits to fight recently enacted legislation. If only they could devote that much attention and energy to fixing a broken system right here at home.
These are very tough times, and many families are having to ask for help from the state for the first time in their lives.
Texas should be able to give them the help they need to have food on the table without unnecessary roadblocks caused by a food stamp system that badly needs an overhaul.
COMMENTARY by Eddie Griffin
Of those who are “bad-mouthing Washington” and “preparing lawsuits to fight recently enacted legislation” is Congressman Michael C. Burgess, 26th District of Texas.
It is customary to think that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty was a failure, that it created a dependent welfare class of people. Food stamp recipients were cast into that mold.
Now while Texas is trying to do good by its new welfare class, Burgess and Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott are waging another battle against the poor, trying to undo healthcare legislation that new life to babies born as “blue babies” (a pre-existing condition).
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and 12 attorneys general from other states have sued in a Florida federal court to block implementation of the healthcare legislation that President Barack Obama signed into law last week.
The Texas Attorney General overstepped his bounds. Governor Sam Houston was against joining the Confederacy, but Sam Houston, Jr. led a coup against his Texas governor father, usurped by a minority interest of slave holder of 25% property ownership. This is how authority has been usurped in Texas, not once, but many times.
What is ignored is “the people’s interest”. Always it is political party interest sounded in the courts. But there is an amicus in the people’s interest to controvert this lawsuit to undo the healthcare bill.
Cost expectations are far lower than the Attorney General anticipate. We have a global human interest in the needs and protections of the unborn. Let the U.S. Supreme Court rule as it will. We have the World Court, and international option on our side.
Sincerely,
Eddie Griffin (BASG)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
