EDITORIAL
A4
MAY 16 – MAY 22, 2014
The EPA has become a criminal enterprise The Environmental Protection Agency always had a shady purpose. Its origin lies with the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon. President Nixon was very concerned about the civil rights movement linking up with with the Anti-Vietnam War movement. He needed a diversion and came up with the fledgling environmental movement. He took the EPA which was a small bureau buried in the Department of Interior and made it a freestanding agency. He also fully supported the annual Earth Day event with the new and empowered EPA supporting it in grand fashion. Even today many civil rights groups believe in the concept known as Environmental Racism or Environmental Justice. It is a “Boogey Man.”
Any means necessary HARRY C. ALFORD NNPA COLUMNIST
President William J. Clinton came to power in 1992 and directed his Vice President Al Gore to take the EPA to the top. Their EPA Administrator was Carol Browner who in my opinion is a pure zealot when it comes to global warming or climate change. This was the beginning of the Environmental Protection Agency becoming more than part of the Executive Branch of government. It became a monster.
The new players sought power – pure, out of control power by any means necessary. Business coalitions feared the economy would falter under the new onslaught of rules and regulations. Congress would defeat any obscene legislation that was tried; thus they used rules and regulations that slipped through and, in effect, became law itself. The Clinton Administration was checked, at least boxed in. Things cooled off under the succeeding Bush Administration. But after six years of the Obama Administration the extremists are on the attack and business is finding itself reeling from expensive and unnecessary rules and regulations. Browner is an advisor to the Ad-
VISUAL VIEWPOINT: NIGERIAN ABDUCTIONS
PARESH NATH, THE KHALEEJ TIMES, UAE
Random thoughts of a free Black mind, v. 211 My hometown, Daytona Beach, had only three high schools when I grew up: all-White Mainland High, all-White Seabreeze High, and all-Black Campbell High. In the late 1960s, the Volusia County School Board reacted to the Brown vs. Board of Education case as did many Southern school boards: they refused to desegregate public schools until they got sued; then they shut down the Black public schools, and scattered the students and the teachers, staff and principals among the remaining White schools. (The damage those shutdowns caused in Black communities is a subject for another column.) Black kids didn’t want to be there any more than many Seabreeze kids wanted us there. Even worse, Black kids who grew up with each other were split between the two high schools, which were bitter archrivals. The Black athletic talent was diluted, and in many ways wasted, because of an unspoken racial quota in sports at Seabreeze that saved slots for White kids. Rather than having a strong Black high school which would have consistently won city championships (if Mainland and Seabreeze dared play Campbell), and being taught by strong, no-nonsense Black teachers we knew from living in the same community, we were thrown into an academic and cultural environment that was
QUICK TAKES FROM #2: STRAIGHT, NO CHASER
CHARLES W. CHERRY II, ESQ. PUBLISHER
indifferent to us at best – and often downright hostile. That’s the backdrop of my tenure at Seabreeze High, which began in 1971. But as I look back at my high school career, and at the Donald Sterling-NBA controversy, it was the unifying nature of sports – and the desire to beat Mainland at everything – that began to slowly help change the culture and environment at Seabreeze. Coaches, and more importantly White parents, began to understand that if you wanted to beat Mainland, you better let your best players play. So last week, it was good to memorialize and celebrate a rite of historical passage with all my Seabreeze classmates and fellow trailblazers Percy Williamson, Sr., Maurice Gainey, my first-grade classmate Lucy Stewart Desmore, and former cheerleaders Atawa Washington Rollins and K’Netha Laws Jones. God bless us all.
Contact me at ccherry2@gmail.com.
Opinions expressed on this editorial page are those of the writers, and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of the newspaper or the publisher.
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ministration and Gore cashed in on his vile and false predictions. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a billionaire. Yes, there is big money in this environmental hustle. Let’s look at some of the horrors that are coming out of this “basket of fraud and deceit.” Since 1997, every rule concerning air quality standards are based on false calculations. How did this happen? Believe it or not there were some executives at the EPA who were just plain corrupt and lazy. The ringleader was a guy named John Beale who is currently in prison for the things he was doing. We are learning more and more from the criminal who is now starting to talk to authorities. There should be indictments flying all over the place at EPA but, of course, we now have an attorney general who protects criminals by avoiding any prosecution of them. Beale might still be there doing his dastardly duties if he didn’t confess his sins. In the end, they will be going to jail by the dozens with or without Attorney
General Holder. Read all about this: http://1.usa.gov/1mhmZTU Another thing the EPA is doing is called “sue and settle.” This is when extremist environmental groups like Sierra Club will file a suit against the EPA and the EPA immediately settles the case by agreeing to do whatever the environmental group wants. In effect, this is writing new rules and laws without legislative approval. Finally, the EPA has established a new office within itself. This is the Office of Homeland Security. As investigators start digging into their mess they will claim “national security” and and won’t produce any evidence or documentation. It is clearly meant to make these crooks immune to prosecution. For the love of God and our nation, where is the outrage?
Mr. Alford is the co-founder, President/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. Write our own response at www.flcourier.com.
JET magazine and me JET Magazine’s becoming an online-only publication is not something to cheer about. For me personally, especially pre-1990s, JET was the magazine that I read most often and most thoroughly. It played a significant role in my becoming what my grandfather and his friends used to call me, “a race man.” As a child growing up in the small town of Tuskegee, Ala., it was JET - along with the Pittsburgh Courier - that kept me abreast of what was happening in the national Black community. Because of Jackie Robinson, I had become a devoted fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was these two publications that helped me to know about his every move. It was delivered to our home weekly and I devoured every single word of JET and the Pittsburgh Courier.
Brought awareness It was also JET, by publishing that horrific photo of Emmett Till, that made me much more aware of the terrorist viciousness of white supremacist /racists. I was 17 years old when that photo was published in JET and until today it is seared in my memory. Before that, of course, I was aware of Jim Crow and its physical and psychological attacks on Black people. But, fortunately I had never personally had to confront it as a child in a place like Tuske-
ter his departure from the Nation of Islam.
A. PETER BAILEY TRICEEDNEYWIRE.COM
Personal memory In the summer of 1967, JET wanted coverage of an incident in Long Island, N.Y., in which a White female summer school student, angry over a C grade, accused her Black male teacher of molesting her. When the event broke, the JET editor and one EBONY editor were away on assignments. The other EBONY editor was ill. Knowing my desire to be a journalist, the JET editor recommended that JET send me to cover the trial. That’s how I got my first JET by-line. A few weeks later, I was brought on EBONY’s staff as an assistant editor in its New York office. Again, I am eternally thankful to JET. I once heard Mr. John H. Johnson say that his magazines reflected where Black people are as a community at any give time. Unfortunately, too many - if not the majority - of our people have been living in kind of a fluffy fantasyland since the 1980s. Most Black magazines, including JET, have reflected that fluffiness. That same affliction probably contributed to JET’s demise as a valuable source of information for Black folk in the United States.
gee whose population was overwhelmingly Black and which was the home of major employers, such as then Tuskegee Institute and the Veterans Hospital. This made Black folk not so economically susceptible to the Whites. That JET photo of Emmett Till brought home to me, like nothing else, the true evilness of the proponents of White supremacy/racism. For that I am eternally thankful to the magazine. The third way that JET impacted my life was as a journalist. It was the first nationally distributed magazine to send me to cover a news event. In early December 1965, I was hired as the mailroom clerk in Johnson Publishing Company’s New York office located in Rockefeller Center. The editorial staff in that office, which main focus was advertising sales, consisted of two EBONY editors, a JET editor, two photographers and a secretary. I made myself useful to them in numerous ways, including assisting in research. At the time my only journalistic experience had been as editor of the newsA. Peter Bailey's latest letter published by The Organization of Afro-Ameri- book is "Witnessing Brothcan Unity, which was found- er Malcolm X, the Master ed by Brother Malcolm X af- Teacher.
Indenturing our young people The young in America are being forced into cruel levels of debt, and this debt is already curbing their life prospects. Its economic effects are damaging to everyone. Yet with Washington frozen, the debt burdens on the young are likely to get worse. For the young, a college education or post-high school professional training is the equivalent of what a high school degree was a generation ago. College is the necessary but not sufficient ticket to the middle class. For the nation, educating the next generation beyond high school is essential both for producing the citizens we need for a healthy democracy and for producing the work force we need for a healthy economy. And yet college costs keep soaring, growing faster even than health-care costs. Government support for public universities and community colleges is down 25 percent since 2000. Students and their families must pay more and more of the cost. But family incomes have stagnated, failing to keep up with soaring costs of college, health care and housing.
Overwhelming debt The result is an explosion of student debt. It has nearly quadrupled since 2003, soaring to nearly a trillion dollars. Two-thirds of all students now graduate with
REV. JESSE L. JACKSON, SR. TRICEEDNEYWIRE.COM
debts averaging $27,000. The poorer the family, the higher the percentage of students with debt. These debts are brutal; 12 percent are more than 90 days delinquent, but that figure is misleading because nearly one-half (47 percent) are in deferment (students can defer payment on their debt while in school, for example). That means nearly 1 out of 4 working loans are delinquent. Staggeringly, over 20 percent of loans for those 30-49 — in the peak of their earning years — are more than 90 days delinquent. Because of the force of the bank lobby, student loans can’t be discharged with bankruptcy. They cannot be refinanced. They burden students for a lifetime. The feds will even garnish your Social Security to repay them. As Slate contributor David Dayen argues, this is very much like indentured servitude that Americans suffered at the beginning of the Republic. Then impoverished workers and peasants traded years of labor for the cost of passage to the new world. For three to seven years, depending on the contract, they would labor, virtually
like slaves, for masters who paid their way.
More than pockets This injustice offends America’s tradition. Historically, America prided itself on its public education. We were first to provide secondary school free for all. With the GI bill, 3 million veterans received tuitionfree college or advanced training. Not surprisingly, researchers at the Federal Reserve worry that the debt burdens will harm the economy, as the young put off buying cars or renting apartments or starting new families. This is the down side of Gilded Age extremes in wealth. As the rich get richer, they rig the rules to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Top rates go down; tax dodges proliferate. The only way this will change is if students, parents and indebted graduates make their voices heard. But all of us should demand action. It is unacceptable that the sons and daughters of America’s working families must face indentured servitude simply to get the education they need.
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Write your own response at www.flcourier.com.