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PHILADELPHIA -- Every day at noon, a couple of blocks from the convention complex where GOP delegates held their caucuses, destitute men lined up for lunch on the sidewalk in front of the Ministry to the Homeless. It was not a photo op.

More than a few journalists were visiting Philadelphia -- in fact, about 15,000 of them arrived to cover the Republican National Convention. But midway through the week, an aide at the Ministry to the Homeless told me, not a single reporter had dropped by to inquire about the bedraggled spectacle.

"We feed homeless guys," the staff member said. "Yesterday, we fed 223." At least three-quarters of them, he estimated, were living on the streets in the City of Brotherly Love.

Is this kind of situation unusual for an American city? He shook his head. "There's homelessness wherever you go."

That night, I overheard a few delegates discussing news coverage of the convention. About the only negative theme emerging, they agreed, was that the event had been carefully staged. "If the criticism is that it's scripted," said one, "well, God bless it."

What are the economic costs for American society of the vast expansion of our prison-industrial complex? According to criminal justice researcher David Barlow at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, between 1980 and 2000, the combined expenditures of federal, state and local governments on police have increased about 400 percent. Corrections expenditures for building new prisons, upgrading existing facilities, hiring more guards, and related costs, increased approximately one thousand percent. Although it currently costs about $70,000 to construct a typical prison cell, and about $25,000 annually to supervise and maintain each prisoner, the U.S. is currently building 1,725 new prison beds per week.

The driving ideological and cultural force that rationalized and justifies mass incarceration is the white American public’s stereotypical perceptions about race and crime. As Andrew Hacker perceptively noted in 1995, “Quite clearly, ‘black crime’ does not make people think about tax evasion or embezzling from brokerage firms. Rather, the offenses generally associated with blacks are those . . .

There are today over two million Americans incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails throughout the United States. More than one-half, or one million, are black men and women. The devastating human costs of the mass incarceration of one out of every thirty-five individuals within black America are beyond imagination. While civil rights organizations like the NAACP and black institutions such as churches and mosques have begun to address this widespread crisis of black mass imprisonment, they have frankly not given it the centrality and importance it deserves.

Black leadership throughout this country should place this issue at the forefront of their agendas. And we also need to understand how and why American society reached this point of constructing a vast prison industrial complex, in order to find strategies to dismantle it.

AUSTIN, Texas -- For those of us trying to get our slacker fellow citizens to pay attention to this absorbing presidential race, life is looking up a little.

Gov. George W. Bush was complaining last week about attacks by Democrats -- he frequently does that -- and then he added, in his sunny, positive way:

"Secretary Cheney brought people together and helped win a war, which stands in contrast to Vice President Al Gore, who tends to divide people, to create war."

I like this pattern. Bush used it quite successfully against John McCain in the primaries, time and again. Bush would say something tacky about McCain, who would then say something tacky about Bush; then Bush would loudly protest that he was being attacked. "This is nothing but attack politics, and aren't we all tired of attack politics?"

He had a whole ad campaign complaining that McCain had compared him to Bill Clinton. Then he'd say something else tacky about McCain.

If you’re trying to make sense out of recent Dispatch reporting on racial profiling by the Columbus Police Department (CPD), forget it. The Dispatch coverage suggests that since 28% of the traffic tickets issued in 1999 were given to African American drivers in Columbus and the city’s black population is 25%, there obviously isn’t any racial profiling.

James Moss, President of the Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER), the organization that spearheaded the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of the Columbus Police, has a different take than the daily monopoly.

Moss, who holds a master’s degree, points out the obvious shortcomings in the Dispatch analysis. By uncritically reporting the statistical data supplied by Deputy Chief Rockwell of the Columbus Police, the paper bought the assumption that African Americans in Columbus are licensed drivers and use cars for transportation at the same rate as the white population. Labor statistics indicate that the black population is disproportionately younger, unemployed/underemployed and out of the labor market. They’re also disproportionately COTA bus users and far less likely to own or drive a car.

“The past is prologue.”

“Those who are ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it.”

These are profound statements. When it comes to the history of Black folks in America these statements merely scratch the surface. As a proponent of Dr. Claud Anderson (author of Black Labor White Wealth) the president of the Harvest Institute and the father of Powernomics I have often writhed in spiritual pain over the programmed control and in some cases dismantling of the Black community. Undoubtedly by now you have heard the suggestion of the CIA bringing drugs into our urban communities. Though some want to deny the plausibility of such a scheme, records and evidence indicate that Southern Air Transport has an ominous and dark CIA past. As time goes by the allegations that Mena, Arkansas was one of the CIA’s landing and distribution sites gains more credibility. Remember, we were also shocked to learn about the Tuskegee Project and abominations against members of the Black community. Whatever the case, I believe that even the most reticent of us understands that the U.S. government has long been the best “friend” of, yet the most nefarious foe of Black people.

Two recent controversies at the Ohio State University, the flagship educational institution in the Buckeye State mostly known for its football prowess, underscore that institution’s shift from its original liberal arts land grant mission to corporate shill and Republican Party booster.

Under the direction of President William E. Kirwan, two new courses were added to the University’s general education curriculum: The Art of Scabbing 101 and Intermediate Snitching 250. During the recent Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 4501 strike, Sarah Blouch, Director of Transportation and Parking Services, personally instructed the overwhelmingly white student scabs on the joys of scabbing against the predominantly minority and vastly underpaid service and staff workers. She proudly informed the Lantern on May 8 that, “Our students have been the backbone of our [bus] service.” Blouch saw nothing wrong with the fact that “the student drivers are working more than 60 hours a week.” Perhaps she can become the advisor to a new student group, Future Scabs of America.

It’s summertime and the reading should be easy. Or, at least, fun and educational for progressives. Here are the books I’m enjoying this summer: A double dose of Texas populism at its best in the new books by Jim Hightower, If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates, and Molly Ivins’ and Lou Dubose’s Shrub, The Short But Happy Political Life Of George W. Bush.

Ivins, a syndicated columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (who thankfully appears in the Free Press) and Dubose, the editor of the Texas Observer, a Freep role model, are long-time observers of the notorious Bush dynasty. A clan I personally believe to be the most evil political family in the United States history. Shrub does an excellent job of cataloging the rise of “Dubya’s” bizarre career and fabricated imagery. If you thought George W. was a drunken frat boy ne’er do well who shamelessly leveraged his father’s political power to gain preferential treatment, and a governorship, now you’ve got the facts.

“Anytime you have nine power plants fail in whole or in part in a 24-hour period,” says Gary Groesch, “that’s not bad luck. That’s not even bad maintenance. That’s a maintenance meltdown.”

A veteran New Orleans-based consumer activist, Groesch is talking about Entergy, the huge regional utility based there and in Mississippi. The July 23, 1999 multiple fossil burner failure Groesch describes left half a million people without power, and was sandwiched between unexpected shutdowns at two Entergy-owned commercial reactors, River Bend and Waterford 3. Grand Gulf, another radioactive Entergy property, earned the nickname “Grand Goof” from its massive cost overruns.

Nonetheless, Entergy and AmerGen, a Philadelphia-based multi-national partnership, want to buy as many as they can of the 103 U.S. reactors currently to licensed to operate. They want to string them together in “McNuke” reactor chains and operate them in cut-rate style, with national pools of technical trouble-shooters.

Bobbie is the 29 year old brother of Paula Dunn, a lovely and talented singer of contemporary Christian music. I recently heard her tell a woeful story of how Bobbie was incarcerated recently with rapists, murderers, and other violent criminals. Had he committed a crime against anyone’s life, liberty or property? Had he killed, raped, or stolen money? No. His crime? He was caught with the possession of cocaine. Had he done any harm to anyone other than, possibly, himself?

The proponents of the war on drugs have seen all of their strategies fail. Many intelligent and thoughtful people from Charles Schultz, former Secretary of State to Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico to Kurt Schmoke, the Democratic mayor of Baltimore have all said the current “drug war” is not working. We are spending billions of dollars, arresting and jailing millions of people, as military style police units trample on the Bill of Rights of the Constitution in pursuing the “enemy” — people who many times have committed no harm against anyone else’s life, liberty or property.