NEIGHBORS One Year In The Life Year’s Project Moves To The New Resolutions East Side For 2019 Go Awry Five Reasons Your
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Michigan Chronicle Vol. 82 – No. 18 | January 9-15, 2019
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An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tliab By Jazzmine Henry Dear Rashida, you have the privilege of representing Michigan’s 13th Congressional District that was formerly represented by the architect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Disclaimer, I did work for Congressman Conyers. I witnessed firsthand your predecessor do battle with Republican presidents from Reagan to George Walker Bush.
COMMENTARY
In 1983, I sat in committee as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Bill Conyers introduced for 15 years after the assassination of MLK was finally passed and later signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. In 1990 I saw him respectfully but Rashida Tliab passionately call his former congressional colleague Jack Kemp who was serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George H. W. Bush urging him to meet with Chicago public housing residents that descended on our office seeking assistance from their blighted horrific living conditions. Those resident’s requests for meetings with the HUD Secretary fell on deaf ears within their Illinois congressional delegation. These people went to Conyers because they believed he could get them in the door to state their case for investing federal funds to uplift their living conditions. Kemp granted them a meeting. Why? Because while he was a conservative Republican who had served as the Chairman of the Republican Conference (third ranking in House Republican leadership) that’s how Republicans and Democrats should work together in a divided Congress for the benefit of the people. I saw your Democratic predecessor work with Secretary Kemp thereby helping Kemp champion affordable housing, tenant management, and a housing voucher program for homeless veterans and their families. That’s how you get things done in Congress. Hours after you were sworn in, you publicly called President Trump a [mother f&#@%!]. In less than a week, you’ve damaged relationships and set out on a reckless collision course that won’t help your constituents. Minutes after that profane manner of boisterously announcing you would champion impeachment of the President, Democratic House leadership, including the Speaker of the House, were distancing themselves from you. This is not what you were elected to do by voters in the third-poorest congressional district in the United States experi-
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WHAT’S INSIDE
Trump’s Government Shutdown and what it means for Michigan By Trevor W. Coleman
know what we are going to see and how it is going to end.”
For Michigan residents both Washington and Lansing are broken.
Although Michigan has not been as adversely impacted by the shutdown as places such California, Texas, Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and other regions with large numbers of federal employees have, it’s being felt here, nonetheless.
If there was any doubt about this, the cynical last-minute watering down of popular minimum wage and sick leave bills by the Republican-controlled legislature last month, coupled with the now three-week federal government shutdown in Washington, certainly put that to rest. In fact, Americans literally started off 2019 with a government shutdown in January that began in December, after starting off 2018 with a government shutdown. Although it is partial this time, it is still the third government shutdown since President Trump took office two years ago under a unified Republican-controlled government. The federal government shutdown began after Democratic and Republican lawmakers could not agree on terms to a new spending bill. President Trump has demanded that a bill include $5.6 billion for a steel wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which Democrats oppose. The ruthless partisanship underscored by poor governance has veteran political observers shaking their heads.
“We’ve had shutdowns before, but they have been bonafide discussions and challenges; on strongly felt and held beliefs,” said former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer. “The last significant one occurred during the Clinton presidency when Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House.” He said that shutdown was over understandable, definable issues such as budget deficits and the rate of government spending, which most people clearly understood. This shutdown, however, is murkier and much less principled with President Trump insisting on U.S. taxpayers paying for a moatlike wall along the southern border to ostensibly keep out
illegal immigrants although he promised Mexico would pay for it. And his own administration has acknowledged that illegal immigration is at a decade low with more immigrants from Mexico returning back to their country than staying in the U.S. “This is something I’ve never seen before; no one has ever seen before,” said Archer. “Even during the Reagan years, he and Tip O’Neil got along and during President George W. Bush early years Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) got along to pass legislation to improve … education. There has always been the ability to discuss and work out things.”
According to USA Today, the partial government shutdown resulted in all but essential operations in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Interior, State, Transportation, Treasury and Housing and Urban Development, and several smaller agencies being closed. And about 800,000 federal employees are furloughed or forced to work without pay until the standoff is resolved. That means in Michigan, state and local farm service centers operated by the Agriculture Department are closed, and no staff is available to answer questions or assist farmers in signing up for new programs under the Farm Bill spearheaded by Sen. Debbie Stabenow and recently approved by Congress. Considering just before the shutdown she held a large press conference at Eastern Market heralding the
But in this case, Archer is much less sanguine. “I don’t
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Detroit’s own Dream Hampton Talks “Surviving R. Kelly” By Stacy M. Brown
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For Detroit native Dream Hampton, who served as executive producer of the much-talked about “Surviving R. Kelly” documentary, the explosive revelations in the film were just the tip of the iceberg. Hampton said there were many things she couldn’t talk about and will never discuss because it’s “so dark and sad and traumatic.” That’s saying quite a bit as the three-part Lifetime Television series not only has social media and the general public aghast but has celebrities like John Legend and Chance the Rapper expressing remorse for ever working with Kelly. “Maybe he could’ve gotten help when he was 30, or you know, 29 when the Aaliyah stuff broke,” Hampton said in an extensive interview on The Karen Hunter Show on Sirius XM Radio. Aaliyah was largely left out of the documentary, but Hampton said she didn’t want to devote an entire episode on the late songstress. “For me, she’s actually his type,” Hampton told Hunter. “You know, what he targets are very regular, and you know, your audience understands this, like brown-skin
black girls. You know, like he, we can talk about publicly, oh, that he targets black girls who aren’t famous. No, he has a very specific type, you know.” Surviving R. Kelly — which aired on Lifetime from Thursday, Jan. 3 to Saturday, Jan. 5 — featured wide-ranging interviews with
Kelly’s family members, former friends and colleagues, but most notably, women who claim that for decades, the hit-making singer and producer used his power and influence to sexually and physically abuse women and young girls.
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