Under The Gun - Shooting Negroes

In the eyes of the law, Black and dangerous mean the same thing

By Jabari Asim • Illustrations by Brian Stauffer

When Black people first set foot in the territory now known as the United States, they stepped onto contested ground. Before there was a legal term for what they were, before the law carefully circumscribed their hearts and loins, each of their footfalls was subject to contention. How many strides until the end of their world? How far could their limbs take them? To the edge of the plantation? To the back door of the big house? Centuries before Trayvon Martin took his last steps in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., his ancestors confronted similar boundaries. Gated neighborhoods? Try gated states. By the 1860s, several of them, including Illinois, lndiana, Iowa and Oregon, prohibited Black people from traveling anywhere without proof of permission.

Your name?

George.

What's going on there, George?

I'm with the neighborhood watch. We've had some burglaries and vandalisms lately.

This gentleman was walking in the neighborhood I've seen before on. trash days, going around picking up trash. I don't know what his deal is.

Is he White, Black or Hispanic?

Black.

Wherever such laws or customs prevailed, bands of dutiful Americans took on the task of enforcing them. Slave patrols, the forerunners of police cruisers and neighborhood watch squads, first emerged in South Carolina around 1704.

The patrols were based on earlier efforts in Barbados, where the "Act for the Better ordering and governing of Negroes" empowered all whites with the right to stop and investigate Black people who, left to their own devices, were considered likely to steal or run away. .

In the view of patrollers, all Negroes were as dishonorable as thieves. Consequently, they were to be apprehended and punished for moving or walking about without permission. In modem terms, patrollers were expected to be on the lookout for Black people who were "up to no good."

In his book An Imperfect God, historian Henry Wiencek writes of enslaved men and women who risked the wrath of such patrols by slipping away after sundown to visit loved ones on neighboring plantations. This habit was called "night walking".

"Romance accounted for some night walking," Wiencek notes, "but there were more serious purposes as well." These included visits to take care of sick children and elderly relatives. One overseer observed, "The separation of families seems like death to them."

Nineteenth-century Black people wrestled with a dilemma in which "everything they clid was wrong," according to W.E.B. DuBois. "If they cowered on the plantation, they loved slavery," he observed. "If they ran away, they were loafers." When everything they did was wrong, even something as innocuous as breathing could be cause for harassment or death. As Trayvon Martin discovered, 21st-century racial maladies often pose the same trap.

"This guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about," George Zimmerman reported during his 911 call on February 26, 2012, moments before he gunned Martin down in cold blood. Zimmerman's easeful assumption of authority is both significant and historically resonant, but no more so than the notion that a Black man simply walking - in his own neighborhood, no less - is automatically suspect.

Zimmerman's eagerness to take matters into his own hands reflects an implicit mandate that White citizens are as responsible for their safety as police officers are. Inheritors of a Patroller Complex deriving from those early acts for the better ordering of Negroes, they are, in effect, deputized to investigate anyone (read "Black people") who seem out of place. When law enforcement officials speak to civilian groups, they seldom hesitate to reinforce this understanding. Following a highly publicized murder in Washington D.C., in July 2006, Andy Solberg, then-acting commander of the city's Second District, instructed a group of Georgetown residents to report anything suspicious - such as, say, the presence of African-Americans. "This is not a racial thing to say that Black people are unusual in Georgetown," he said. "This is a fact of life."

Solberg's language was only slightly more diplomatic than that of Sheriff Harry Lee, a notorious lawman who conducted an intrusive surveillance campaign against young Black people in Jefferson Parish, La., in the 1980s. "If there are some young Blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly White neighborhood, they will be stopped," Lee promised . "There's a pretty good chance they're up to no good."

Pipeline + Prison = Cheap Labor

At least Lee's mythical troublemakers were driving a car; Solberg's scenario suggests that Black people needn't do much more to deserve scrutiny than be seen standing on a corner or, to borrow Zimmerman's phrase, walking around and looking about. The idea that African Americans can commit a crime simply by existing is more than just a deeply entrenched racist misconception; it is also an idea rooted in capitalism's need for a cheap, exploitable labor force. These two cancerous strands came together in the philosophy of prosperous landowners such as George Washington, who cast his practice of working slaves to death as a humanitarian gesture. Without constant work, he argued, they would be "ruined by idleness." Those strands can be tracked, as easily as a trail of spilled Skittles, to a modern prison industrial complex that runs on equal parts racism and greed.

In the seventeenth-century, forced labor was still something of an equal-opportunity injustice. States such as Connecticut and Florida arranged their prosecution and parole dockets according to planting schedules so that Whites incarcerated in debtors' prisons could be conscripted to help with the harvest. They found themselves paying off their debt to society by toiling like slaves. The industry became less diverse after the Southern Rebellion, when Emancipation proved highly inconvenient for ambitious Confederate planters eager to shake off the dust of their inglorious defeat. Black Codes emerged, making criminal offenses of vagrancy, loitering and public drunkenness.

There are two suspicious characters at the gate of my neighborhood and I've never seen them before. I have no idea what they're doing: They're just hanging out, loitering.

Okay, Mr. Zimmennan, Can you describe the two individuals?

Two African American males. They look uh, I know one is in a white Impala.

How old do they look to you?

Hmm, mid- to late twenties, early thirties.

With the help of cooperative judges, Black men and women unfortunate enough to be caught moving around, looking about or even standing still in the wrong place at the wrong time were hauled back to the same fields where they previously sweated. (To get an idea of the durability of these underhanded practices, compare Black Code offenses with grounds for suspicion established during New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk reign of error. They included "furtive movements," "fits a relevant description" and wearing "clothes commonly used in a crime.") Southern law officers, taking full advantage of the Thirteenth Amendment's timely loophole allowing compulsory labor "as a punishment for crime," set out to tum as many newly freed Black people into criminals as they could. States and counties filled their depleted coffers by convicting those they swept from the streets and leasing them to farmers and businessmen. Prison populations swelled, foreshadowing the incarceration disparities we see today - and a generation of "convicts" was sentenced to hard labor planting and harvesting crops, doing the most dangerous factory tasks, digging in mines, logging timber and building railroads - ultimately laying the groundwork for the South's resurgent infrastructure.

Douglas Blackmon described the process in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery By Another Name: "It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery - a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of White masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion."

Pipeline + Prison = Profit

Convict leasing, begun soon after the Southern Rebellion was crushed, officially ended in 1928 when Alabama terminated its program. Unofficially, states continued it under different guises. For example, in the state where Trayvon Martin breathed his last, prison officials added license plate, laundry and shirt factories after it ended convict leasing. The practice continues today as a mainstay of private prisons, whose owners reap huge financial profits by using their inmates as low-wage and unpaid laborers. Companies such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group owe their success to the American Legislative Exchange: Council (ALEC), which they in turn sponsor through financial contributions. ALEC's work includes creating the template for the Prison Industries Act, state legislation enabling the employment of inmate labor across the country. Just as southern legislatures created Black Codes to establish a captive labor force, ALEC has abetted modern lawmakers' attempts to push through "three strikes" laws, mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, "truth-in-sentencing'' laws, and anti-immigration measures designed to keep African Americans and Latinos off the streets and behind bars where, presumably, they'll be most useful. New agreements between state governments and private prisons can also include guaranteed minimum occupancy rates (see CCA’s purchase of Ohio's Lake Erie Correctional Institution in January 2012, for example), making "tough on crime" laws even more critical for profiteers of captive labor.

The Sunshine State

Few states have followed ALEC's guidebooks more zealously than Florida, home of 48 slate prisons, 7 private prisons and 41 prison work programs. Black people make up 32 percent of the state's prison population, according to the Florida Dept. of Corrections, while making up around 16 percent of the state's entire population. In addition, at least one out of every five Black people in Florida is disenfranchised resulting from a felony conviction.

Unsurprisingly, Florida is the birthplace of Stand Your Ground (SYG), a law that most people weren't aware of until it was invoked - repeatedly - following Martin's violent death. With the help of National Rifle Association lobbyist Marion Zimmer, Florida launched the law in 2005, empowering residents to use force to defend themselves against a perceived threat. Critics of such measures condemn them as Black Codes given a fresh coat of paint but their complaints have mostly gone unheeded. Since 2005, ALEC and the NRA have helped more than 20 states add versions of the law to their own statutes. With SYG in mind on that rainy February night, the police permitted Zimmerman to do what law and custom made sure Martin could not: they Jet him walk.

Does he live in the neighborhood or is he just out walking?

I don't know. It's the first time I've ever seen him.

"A conversation about brutality and identity goes right to the body," the author and legal scholar David Dante Troutt has observed. The body, he goes on to argue, becomes "the currency of control." Consequently any discussion of Black bodies, at least regarding their sojourn in America, must also include the idea of ownership. For Black people to claim possession of their bodies, they must also declare themselves persons, capable of agency, language and independent thought. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that humanizing impulse remains partly indigestible in a nation whose economic foundation depended on the idea that Black people were not humans to be respected but property to be maintained. Property cannot be maintained if it dares to move about freely and - even worse - resists being apprehended.

Body Snatchers

Solomon Northup's encounter with this dehumanizing process provides a useful example. His 1853 memoir, Twelve Years A Slave, relates his first moments after body snatchers captured him in Washington, D.C. and subsequently sold him into slavery. Awaking in darkness and in chains, he reached into his pockets "as far as the fetters would allow" and made another troubling discovery. "I had not only been robbed of liberty," he later recalled, but "my money and free papers were gone!"

Edward P. Jones portrays an ordeal no less horrifying for being fictional. In his novel The Known World, Augustus Townsend, a free Black man, must sit helplessly in his mule-drawn wagon while a hostile White man takes Augustus' dearly purchased free papers and stuffs them into his own mouth. Augustus' wife is waiting for him at home, not far away. She might as well be in Africa as Augustus watches a White man devour his freedom.

As if speaking for all Black people similarly abused, Solomon Northup bemoans his fate as a free American "who had wronged no man, nor violated any law" only to be "dealt with thus inhumanly."

Northup's experience and Jones's novel illustrate how even nominally free Black people were nonetheless captives, vulnerable to the caprice and power of men of questionable integrity whom authorities endowed with the power to determine life and death. The state's peculiar permissiveness deputized half-wits to wreck lives with the kindly approval of the state. George Zimmerman's power to fire his Licensed handgun at an unarmed teen and strike him dead with impunity lengthens a tradition of dubious deputizing that began in the slavery era and continued after Emancipation.

As Sally Hadden points out in Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, during Reconstruction lawmen and Klansmen adopted enforcement methods initially designed to monitor the enslaved. Together they turned patrolling into "a highly effective but still legal means of racial oppression."

Three factors combined to create a deadly environment for the newly emancipated: 1) battle-hardened White men with military training, 2) widespread fear of imaginary rampaging Blacks hell bent for revenge and White women, and 3) a marrow- deep belief that blackness and freedom are irreconcilable. From this strange brew the posse tradition emerged, extending the might of the Jaw lo volunteers who operated both with and without official sanction, depending on the circumstances and popular sentiment.

Bullies With Badges

"Posses, which were cheap, quick and ruthlessly effective, provided welcome assistance to law officers," William Fitzhugh Brundage observed in his history of lynching in the New South. "Hence, posses and the violence they initiated endured in much of the South until at least the 1920s." And beyond. More than 4,700 Black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, usually at the hands of posses. Perhaps the most haunting demonstration of posse violence took place on March 7, 1965, a day now remembered as Bloody Sunday. Long before Sheriff Joe Arpaio and self-anointed "militiamen" began to troll Arizona's dusty perimeter for elusive Latinos, Sheriff Jim Clark conducted a similar campaign of terror against the Black people of Dallas County, Ala. Under his boisterously racist command, a posse of mounted Alabama state troopers and "volunteer officers" brutalized a group of peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. While the protesters were unarmed, the posse was prepared for war. Their weapons included clubs as big as baseball bats, guns, bull whips and at least one rubber hose wrapped with barbed wire.

Tear gas, too. Mustn' t forget that: C-4, a particularly toxic form of the gas, designed to induce crippling nausea.

John Lewis and Hosea Williams led the marchers. Fifty feet from the bottom of the bridge, a police major ordered them to stop and reverse direction. He gave them two minutes to comply.

"We couldn't go forward. We couldn't go back," Lewis remembered. "There was only one option left that I could see."

The men chose to kneel and pray. They passed the word but had hardly moved when the major issued his fateful order:

"Troopers! Advance!"

The mob of armed lawmen surged forward in an awesome wave of malevolence, clubs and whips in motion. They descended on their defenseless opponents and, in a tradition as old as the country itself, commenced to dispensing justice American-style, cracking skulls, crunching bones and flaying the vulnerable flesh of men, women and children.

"Something about that day in Selma touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before," Lewis contends. "The sight of them rolling over us like human tanks was something that had never been seen before."

In many such Civil Rights Movement skirmishes, posses rolled over marchers in full view of the federal government. Recalling another showdown in Selma, this one in 1963, activist historian Howard Zinn witnessed federal officials refusing to intervene on behalf of more than 300 Black people waiting to register outside the county courthouse. Surrounded by blue-helmeted troopers brandishing guns and. cattle prods, some of the prospective voters had been standing in line for five hours or more.

Zinn writes, "I spoke to the senior Justice Department attorney: 'Is there any reason why a representative of the Justice Department can't go over and talk to the state troopers and say these people are entitled to food and water?' He was perturbed by the question. There was a long pause. Then he said, 'I won' t do it.' He paused again. 'I believe they do have the right to receive food and water. But I won't do it.'"

John Conyers, a young attorney from Detroit who later became a congressman, was also on the scene. "Those cops could have massacred all those three hundred Negroes on line," he said to Zinn, "and still nothing would have been done."

Deputy Dawg

Nearly 50 years after Selma, Conyers' charge still resounds. The Southern fried behavior of government, via Stand Your Ground laws and juries that wink at wayward vigilantes, suggests that violence against unarmed Black Americans continues to take place with the consent of the state - and by extension, the governed.

My name is George and I live at the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision. I'm part of the neighborhood watch.

The American vigilante is an offshoot of the posse, a stalwart guardian of community virtue so moved by threats to his home and hearth that he must take matters into his own hands. Impatient with the pace of cosmic justice and his neighbors' heartwarming faith in holy reckoning, he knows his quarry is quick on his feet, too swift and evasive for plodding squad cars and donut-swollen patrolmen. It takes a real man to do a man's job and who is more up to it than him? Deputy Dawg straps up and.hits the streets.

Name: Kel-Tec 9mm PF-9
Caliber: 9 mm
Length: 6 inches
Height: 4.3 inches
Width: 0.9 inches
Barrel length: 3 inches
Price: $330-390
Weight, fully loaded: 18 ounces
Trigger pull: 5 pounds
Effective range: 7 yards

Hard chrome and hollow points, baby, he's ready to roll. This is the Wild West and he needs no stinking badge to prove he's a natural-born bad ass.

OK, and this guy is he White, Black, or Hispanic?

He looks Black.

There have been far too many break-ins lately, broken windows and "a-holes" trespassing on his peace. On one of his moonstruck patrols, someone will die, sprawled on a lawn, torn up from a bullet designed to expand and disrupt the body's soft insides. A few bleeding hearts might object, but security is seldom achieved without a price. Flyers distributed to residents advise them to call him, not the police, to report suspicious activity. "We must send a message that we will not tolerate this in our community," the flyers declare. Not here. Not on his watch.

Are you following him?

Yes.

Okay, we don't need you to do that.

Before Trayvon Benjamin Martin was evicted from his body, before the open-eyed husk of him cooled and stiffened on a grassy lot in Sanford, Fla., he was a child. The son of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, he was clearly loved and is sorely missed. He had no criminal record. Like Solomon Northup, he had wronged no man, nor violated any law.

If not for his parents' persistence, he'd be like so many others, buried without inquiry and presumed to have died while up to no good. By the approach of Zimmerman' s trial, the response in Black communities across the country suggested that Martin was poised to become a martyr and a catalyst, joining historical figures such as Sam Hose and Emmett Till.

Death and Dishonor

Sam Hose, a Black Georgia laborer whose confrontation with a White man ended in the White man's death, was tortured to death by a lynch mob in 1899. After the mob ritually dismembered Hose's body (W.E.B. DuBois later described the murder as a crucifixion), they arrayed his knuckles and toes in a butcher shop window to intimidate Black people and titillate thrill-seeking Whites. For DuBois, learning about the displayed body parts amounted to "a red ray which could not be ignored." He turned from a life of quiet scholarship to a long and extraordinary career as a public activist and intellectual, shaping the emergence of the NAACP and organizing Black people throughout tht! African diaspora. Whereas Hose's horrific death is mostly remembered for its impact on DuBois' trajectory, Emmett Till's killing resonated via a photo circulated in Jet magazine, for many years the nation's most popular magazine among African American readers. Till, a Black teenager, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. His executioners shot him multiple times, bashed his head in and tied a cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire before tossing his body in the Tallahassee River. Jet's publication of the photo in which Till' s face has been brutalized with such frenzy that it is barely recognizable as a face, added critical momentum to the burgeoning civil rights movement. Rosa Parks pointed to Till' s murder as an incentive behind her refusal to give up her seat on a public bus, an act of defiance that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. "I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn't move," she said.

For many newly politicized Americans of color, Trayvon' s killing became a galvanizing force in much the same way that the image of Till' s battered corpse helped stir Parks and thousands of others to action. News reports by Black journalists Trymaine Lee, Charles Blow and others received vital distribution on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Social media campaigns followed immediately afterward, spawning marches on statehouses where SYG is in effect, along with online petitions calling for charges against Zimmerman.

Like many of the most effective protest campaigns of bygone eras, organized Black outrage, channeled through groups such as the NAACP, ColorOfChange.org and Dream Defenders, received critical assistance from equally motivated allies outside African American communities. YouTube videos and blog posts from White, Latino and Asian Americans professing their support lifted spirits and influenced citizens who might otherwise have turned a blind eye.

But even as Martin moved toward an unforeseen prominence as a symbol of hls nation's enduring inequities, he was also becoming something of a national joke. His parents, appearing before their countrymen as paragons of dignified suffering, had to watch as their child, who had been merely a junior in high school, was sacrificed on the altar of American psychosis. The ind ignities he suffered for the sins of his nation have been widely circulated on the Internet, the modern equivalent of the shop window that proved so pivotal to DuBois' repurposing. Like the knuckles of Sam Hose, Facebook and Tumblr photos of young White males posing as dead Trayvon, sprawled amid Skittles and cans of iced tea, both demonstrated the depravities of the vanishing majority and raised the ire of otherwise complacent observers. Assaults on Martin's reputation flourished amid sick jokes on Twitter, including a nauseating flurry from Todd Kincannon, former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party:

"Will karma find me as quick as it did Trayvon? Oh wait I made it past my 18th birthday. So I guess the answer is no.

"Hey what's the difference between Trayvon Martin and a dead baby? They're both dead, but Pepsi doesn't taste like Trayvon."

In addition to the caricatures and demonizing, an aggressive disinformation campaign substituted the image of Trayvon with that of another Black boy, shirtless and aggressively posturing. Another deception followed in the form of a viral screed that inserted in Martin's place a picture of Jayceon Terrell Taylor, a muscular thirty-something rap star who performs as The Game. Said one earnest citizen who posted the photo of The Game on his FB page, "I am not trying to say this was a good shooting. 1 am not trying to say this kid deserved to die. I am saying the media in the USA is controlled by liberals who twist and distort what you see and hear in order for you to see things their way."

The motives of Greg Cimeno, 22, and William Filene, 25, are less clear.

The Floridians celebrated Halloween by dressing as Zimmerman and Martin, respectively. Cimeno wore a "Neighborhood Watch T-shirt, and Filene, wearing a blackface mask and a blood-spattered hoodie, proudly showed off their costumes via social media. On a widely circulated photo, Cimeno pretends to shoot Filene in the head.

Other Americans wore similar get-ups, evidence of the quasi-erotic thrill that blackface and the ritual reenactment of violent Black death apparently provides. Whereas White Georgians - men, women and children - gathered by the thousands to bear joyous witness to the butchering of Sam Hose, countless voyeurs can endlessly revel in the virtual killing of Trayvon Martin, secure in the anonymous glow of their cellphones and computer screens. Seeking to profit from the controversy, an Orlando-based entrepreneur created a shooting target complete with a hooded figure, a package of Skittles and a can of ice tea. He told reporters he sold out his inventory in two days, further proof of the durable link between capital and commoditized blackness.

Following Florida's half-hearted prosecution of Zimmerman, Attorney General Eric Holder discussed the possibility of a civil rights lawsuit at the federal level, an unlikely scenario that, even if it happened, would leave SYG untouched. Months after Zimmerman walked away a free man, the opponents of SYG have yet to achieve a significant reversal

Still Confederates After All These Years

In late October, 2013, the Senate held hearings to review SYG laws. With Sybrina Fulton looking on, Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert echoed the Confederate obstinacy of centuries past. "The idea that states are less intelligent or less able to discern their citizens' needs is a mistake of federal proportions," Gohmert said. His argument reduces the occasional loss of Black lives to a regrettable but acceptable inconvenience, a small price to pay for public safety and the sustenance of state's rights. SYG is the Patroller Complex written into law, Confederate in spirit and always invoked with Black people - the ultimate phantom menace - in mind. Elected officials like Gohmert are confidently representative of a consensus among their constituencies, an ethos perhaps most memorably articulated by the bard of the Sunflower state, William Faulkner. "If it came to fighting," he said, "I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes." Zimmerman, on the prowl for night-walking Black people, stalked the Retreat at Twin Lakes according to a similar creed. Oearly Faulkner's defense of armed vigilantism remains fatally relevant today.

And what he said about the past not being past? That, too.

The CRISIS, Spring 2014

The Warren Brief - Reading Elizabeth Warren

by Jill Lepore

In her new book, Elizabeth Warren tells the story of her life in order to make an argument about America (the middle class is trapped in a vise of debt), which is the sort of thing politicians do when they’re running for office. Warren, who spent most of her career as a law school professor, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012; she's not up for reelection until 2018. "I am not running for President," she insisted at a press conference in Boston in December, pledging that she will finish her term. But the publication, this month, of her autobiography, "A Fighting Chance" (Metropolitan), ahead of a memoir by Hillary Clinton that is due out this summer, only adds to the speculation that Warren is considering challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And, even if Warren doesn't run, this book is part of that race.

Warren's book was originally called "Rigged," a reference to her contention that the American political system places power in the hands of plutocrats and bankers at the expense of ordinary, middle- class Americans. "Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor," Warren writes. "Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they'll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children."

"A Fighting Chance" is in many ways heir to a book published a century ago. "Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It," by Louis Brandeis, appeared in the spring of 1914. Brandeis believed that the country was being run by plutocrats and, especially, by investment bankers, who, by combining, consolidating, and aggregating the functions of banks, trusts, and corporations, controlled both the nation's credit and the majority of its resources-including the railroads-and yet had not the least accountability to the public or any sense that the functions they had adopted were essentially those of a public utility. 'The power and the growth of power of our :financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others," Brandeis wrote. 'The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people's own gold."

Brandeis was concerned with Gilded Age plutocrats' use of people's bank savings to build giant, monopolistic conglomerates answerable not to the people but to shareholders. "Other People's Money", which originally appeared as a series of essays in Harper's, is a polemic, but it’s also a huge compilation of facts and figures. Brandeis pointed out, for instance, that J. P. Morgan and the First National and the National City Bank together held "341 directorships in 112 corporations having aggregate resources or capitalization of $22,245,000,000," a sum that is "nearly three times the assessed value of all the real estate in the City of New York" and "more than the assessed value of all the property in the twenty-two states, north and south, lying west of the Mississippi River." (Brandeis's ability to enlist data in the service of a legal argument, a statement known as a "Brandeis brief," is among his many legacies.) In 1933, Brandeis arranged to have "Other People's Money" republished - in an edition that cost only fifteen cents - so that it could exert the same influence on F.D.R.'s Administration that it had exerted on Woodrow Wilson's. In the first decades of the twentieth century, arguments made by writers like Brandeis led to a series of antitrust reforms and financial-industry regulations that, in the middle decades of the century, made possible the growth of the middle class.

Warren is concerned not with saving but with borrowing, not with monopoly but with debt. Since the nineteen-eighties, many Progressive-era and New Deal reforms have been repealed, including a cap on interest rates and a wall, erected in 1933, separating commercial and savings banking from investment banking. In the second gilded age, the fetters that bind the people were forged first .from the people's own credit cards and then from their mortgages. Credit-card companies lured borrowers in with "teaser rates." Rates of consumer bankruptcy skyrocketed. Eying the profits made by credit-card companies, mortgage companies began selling an entirely new inventory of "mortgage products," with low down payments, ballooning rates, and prepayment penalties. Home prices shot up, and then they collapsed. "When the housing market sank," Warren writes, "so did America's middle class."

Warren speaks Brandeis's language. "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own," Warren said at a campaign stop in 2011, in remarks that defined her candidacy. "Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate." You used other people's money. "You built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea-God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along." It's the Brandeis in Warren that got her elected. What she does next will have to do with the many ways in which 2014 is not 1914.

"A Fighting Chance" begins this way: I'm Elizabeth Warren. I'm a wife, a mother, and a grandmother." Nowhere in "Other People's Money" did Brandeis mention his life or his family; no doubt, these matters did not strike him as relevant to his discussion of financial oligarchy. Also, Brandeis wasn't running for office. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, but, even if he had run for office, and had been required to write the necessary campaign autobiography, its first words would not have been "I'm Louis Brandeis. I'm a husband and a father."

Warren, like Brandeis, is a lawyer and a scholar. She was born in Oklahoma in 1949, the youngest of four children. When she was twelve years old, her father, a salesman for Montgomery Ward, had a heart attack and lost his job. The family lost a car and might have lost their house if Warren's mother hadn't managed to get a job at Sears. Warren went to college on a debating-society scholarship but dropped out when she was nineteen to marry an old high-school boyfriend, Jim Warren. She later finished college and moved with her husband to New Jersey; he'd been transferred there by his employer, I.B.M. Warren started work as a schoolteacher; by the end of her first year teaching, when she was twenty-one, she was pregnant. "Somewhere in between diapers and breast-feeding, I hatched the idea of going to school," she writes. Her husband didn't want her to work full time, but agreed that it would be okay if she took classes. She decided on law school, because she liked the lawyers on TV. Every day, she brought her daughter, Amelia, to a woman who took care of half a dozen kids, and went to class at Rutgers Law School. By the end of her third year, she was pregnant again; she had a boy named Alex. Much of Warren's book is about her children and grandchildren. She writes about a moment in 1978: "It was early evening, the cranky time of day. I was jostling Alex on my hip and frying pork chops. Amelia was on the floor with crayons scattered all around. I kept an eye on the clock, knowing Jim would come through the door in about twenty minutes." The phone rang. It was a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, asking her about a job inquiry she'd sent because her husband might be transferred to Houston. Warren writes, "I tried to sound smooth and relaxed, even as I jiggled Alex furiously in the hope that he wouldn't start crying. And I kept looking at those damn pork chops."

Warren got a teaching position at the law school (where she was routinely mistaken for a secretary), and the family moved to Houston. One day in 1979 when she picked up Alex from a daycare center in a strip mall, he held on to her and cried and cried and cried. She took him out of the day-care center. "I was so rued that my bones hurt," Warren writes. She was about to quit. Then her aunt Bee volunteered to move to Houston from Oklahoma, to help take care of the children. "Nearly eighty years old and so needed," Bee said. Not long afterward, when Warren's marriage fell apart, her parents moved to Houston to help out, too. In 1980, Warren remarried.

Warren's interest in debt, she says, is partly personal. "My daddy and I were both afraid of being poor, really poor. His response was never to talk about money or what might happen if it ran out-never ever ever. My response was to study contracts, finance, and, most of all, economic failure, to learn everything I could." Her research led her to conclude that the bankruptcy rate is a canary in the economy's coal mine and that, sometime during the Reagan Administration, the canary died.

The argument Warren offers in "A Fighting Chance" is one that she began to make in "As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America," a monograph written with Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Lawrence Westbrook and published by Oxford in 1989. Sullivan, a sociologist, is now president of the University of Virginia; Westbrook teaches bankruptcy law al the University of Texas School of Law, where Warren taught from 1981 to 1987. (In 1986, Warren and Westbrook wrote a textbook, "The Law of Debtors and Creditors," currently in its seventh edition.) In "As We Forgive Our Debtors," Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook reported the results of a study they made of seventy-four hundred bankruptcy petitions filed in 1981. Bankruptcy rates had risen because of the 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act, which made filing for bankruptcy easier, but also because, by the nineteen-seventies, consumer spending had become the engine of the American economy. Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook found that most filers weren't cheats or frauds and they also weren't poor; they were members of the middle class, undone by the volatility of the economy and by a six-hundred-billion dollar consumer-credit industry. More than half were homeowners, and many were women rearing children.

In 1987, Warren began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 1995, she moved to Harvard. In "The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt," published by Yale in 2000, Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook reported the results of a follow up study of another twenty-four hundred bankruptcy filings, these from 1991. Even more Americans were drowning in debt. Between 1979 and 1997, the number of personal-bankruptcy filings rose by four hundred per cent.

In an age of debt, an unexpected loss can drive almost anyone to ruin. "Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job," Warren writes. "A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too."

Louis Brandeis had a knack for making himself an expert on just about anything, but the original "Brandeis brief" was a hundred-and-thirteen-page document char be submitted to the Supreme Court in 1908, in Muller v. Oregon, a case concerning a law limiting the workday for women in laundries and factories to ten hours. "'The decision in this case will, in effect, determine the constitutionality of nearly all the statutes in force in the United States, limiting the hours of labor of adult women," Brandeis explained in his brief. He proceeded to cite and summarize the findings of hundreds of reports and studies by physicians, municipal health boards, public-health departments, medical societies, factory inspectors, and bureaus of labor, demonstrating the harm done to women who worked long hours, an argument that relied on ideas about women's weakness relative to men. The Oregon law was upheld.

The efforts of a generation of Progressive reformers, including Brandeis, lies behind the abolition of child labor and the establishment of maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws for both men and women. A century later, Warren's brief, too, has to do with the long hours that women work. She's interested in the unintended economic consequences that arise when women rearing children enter the paid labor force. Warren's counterintuitive argument is that, for all the public and private good that has come from gains made by women in education and employment, earning money has made women who are mothers more economically vulnerable, not less.

Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate. "For middle-class families, the most important part of the safety net for generations has been the stay-at-home mother," Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote in "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke" (2003), a book aimed at a wider audience than Warren's earlier, academic work ("Mom, you are boring," Tyagi told Warren. "Collaborating with my daughter is not for sissies," Warren says.) It used to be that when a middle-class family was faced with a financial crisis the woman in the house could get a job, to tide things over, which is what happened when Warren's father had a heart attack and her mother got a job at Sears.

This cushion doesn't exist in the two income family, which, in its short history-it has its origins, as a middle-class phenomenon, in the nineteen-seventies-has also taken on a great deal more housing debt. The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act required lenders to count a wife's income when evaluating borrowers; the deregulation of the mortgage lending industry began in 1980. With two wage earners and low down payments, middle-class families took on bigger mortgages and contributed to an increase in the cost of housing, especially when families with children paid a premium for property in school districts with high test scores. Financial crisis, for a two-income family, usually means having to live, quite suddenly, on one income. In these straits, families with children tend to totter on the edge of ruin. "Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse," Warren and Tyagi reported. Between 1981 and 2001, the number of women filing for bankruptcy rose more than six hundred per cent.

Warren entered the world of policymaking when, in 1995, she was appointed to serve on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, during the Clinton Administration. She found the work thrilling and the results maddening. She describes a report, sponsored by the banking industry, alleging that bankruptcy protection amounted to a five hundred-and-fifty-dollar "hidden tax" levied on every hardworking American family: "I'd spent nearly twenty years sweating over every detail in a string of serious academic studies, agonizing over sample sizes and statistical significance to make certain that whatever I reported was exactly right. Now the banks just wrote a check, commissioned a friendly study, and purchased their own facts." Warren's frustration was part of what led her to seek a broader audience for her research by writing "The Two-Income Trap," which led to appearances on the "Today" show and "Dr. Phil," where she spoke with a family struggling with debt. "Year in and year out, I'd been fighting as hard as I could," Warren writes. "But by spending a few minutes talking to that family on Dr. Phil's show - and to about six million other people who were looking on - I might have done more good than in an entire year as a professor."

Nevertheless, the solutions that Warren has proposed often fail to convince. To counter both the crisis in public education and the high cost of housing, Warren and Tyagi recommend a universal public-school voucher system in which parents could send their kids co any public school. "An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs." Yes, that would be a shock. It would also be reckless.

In 2008, Warren joined a five-person congressional-oversight panel whose creation was mandated by the seven hundred- billion-dollar bailout. She found that thrilling and maddening, too. In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had one choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: "They don't criticize other insiders." That's about when Warren went on the Jon Stewart show, and you get the sense that, over that dinner, she decided to run for office.

Elizabeth Warren has a case to make about what bankers do with other people's money; she's been making it for twenty-five years. It's hardly uncontested, but it rests on collaborative, peer-reviewed, empirical research. Getting that argument across to voters in 2012 required a great deal of compression and simplification, even more than was required to write "The Two-Income Trap," but Warren's expertise - her authority as an intellectual - also helped get her elected. Running against Scott Brown, she had to tell a srump-size story about her life, a story that includes this fact: for a time, she was a single mother. That story helped get her elected.

My life explains my fight has been the agreement of every American political biography for a long time. When you're grafting a life story onto a political argument, there will always be places where the grain runs in different directions. (An argument that the system is rigged tends to be somewhat undermined, for instance, by the success of the person pointing that out.) And, particularly for women with children, campaign biography can be a snare. When Wendy Davis decided to run for governor of Texas, her consultants advised her to tell the story of how she started out as a single mother before becoming a lawyer, conservatives accused her of having abandoned her children. This snare exists because political biography as a genre follows conventions whose origins lie with Andrew Jackson, in the early nineteenth century, long before women gained the right to vote or to hold office. Discrimination is the afterlife of discredited ideas. By the standards applied to Davis, who left her two young daughters with their father so that she could go to law school, most candidates elected to office in the United States in the past two centuries abandoned their children.

But there's another snare here: the danger of adopting, in place of the conventions of the Andrew Jackson's-bootstraps political biography, the newer conventions of diaper-pin Girl Jacksonianism. Political consultants appear to be eager to advise their female candidates to include, when telling the story of their lives, gauzy intimacies, silly-little-me confessions of domestic ineptitude, sragy performances of maternal devotion, and the shameless trotting out of twinkle-eyed tots. In "A Fighting Chance," Warren argues that the federal government has allowed an unregulated financial industry to prey on the middle class; she also writes no small amount about peach cobbler and burned frying pans. Still, she is not adorable; instead, she's fierce in her affections. "Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet, l'd scoop Lavinia out of her crib and hold her," she writes, referring to one of her grandchildren. "Not because she needed it but because I did."

Warren is also smart enough to use the conventions of political biography, old and new, to insist on the existence of a relationship between caring for other people and cuing about politics. Her brief is really about the abandonment of children, not by women who go to school or to work but by legislatures and courts that have allowed the nation's social and economic policies to be made by corporation  and bankers. Writing about her children and grandchildren-rocking that baby is more than the place where Warren leaves Brandeis behind It's an argument about where our real debts lie.

The New Yorker, April 21, 2014, p96

The legacy of Allen Iverson & Latrell Sprewell

Allen Iverson – who earned over $154 million in salary plus a $50 million lifetime endorsement contract from Reebok – filed for bankruptcy in 2012 reportedly in $3.6 million debt.

“As much as I admired Iverson as a player and guiltily enjoyed his inimitable, incorrigible bad boy charm, it is still tragic that someone, anyone, in his expansive network of takers, enablers, handlers, and sycophants did not at some point pull the 11-time All-Star aside and be a genuine financial friend. And I don’t mean the lecture that all rookies receive that 60% of NBA players are broke within five years of leaving the game. That lecture is obviously not working. A genuine financial friend would have spoken ongoing, unvarnished, personal truth: lose the lottery mindset, dump the hangers-on, drop the traveling hair stylist, and, instead, start saving and investing wisely. A bona fide financial friend would have done the difficult thing and gotten the league or the players union to hold Iverson’s paychecks in escrow.”

“Moreover, an NBA that cared more about its personnel and brand would have required that Iverson, as well as all players, pass a yearly financial planning and retirement course before they were allowed on the hardwood (including how to read a financial statement, why to run from promises of a “guaranteed” return, and how a rock-solid prenup, living will and family planning can prevent you from getting soaked by a gold-digging ex).”

And what of former NBA All-Star Latrell Sprewell?  “Sprewell, whose NBA career spanned 13 years, made headlines in 2005 after he turned down a three-year, $21 million contract extension from the Minnesota Timberwolves. He reportedly demanded more money, saying that the amount offered would not be enough to support his family.  Sprewell owed the state of Wisconsin "unpaid income taxes in 2011 to the tune of $3.5 million." His house was also reportedly foreclosed in 2008.”

 

California Online Voter Registration (COVR) system

Nationally, California ranks 45th out of 50 states in the percentage of eligible voters who are actually registered to vote. There are 8.5 million Californians who are eligible to vote, but have not taken the step of registering to vote.

COVR is one tool that can contribute to increasing the state’s low voter registration rate while helping election officials maintain quality voter rolls.

http://futureofcaelections.org/COVR/

California’s online voter registration system now has some incredible new features:

*· You can register online using a tablet or a smart phone.

*· The application is shorter and easier – you can register in just a few minutes.

*· It is now available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Tagalog/Filipino, Thai, and Vietnamese.

*· It is easier to use with a screen reader and more accessible for people with a disability.

*· You can submit an online registration form without a driver’s license or state identification card and your county will then follow-up with you to complete the final step of registration – providing your signature.

http://futureofcaelections.org/COVR/

Thank-You to my anonymous angel

My angel (who are you?) sent me wonderful gifts yesterday: jazz singer Gregory Porter CDs “Liquid Spirit” and “Be Good”.  Both are outstanding and I love them !!!  In the tradition of Kurt Elling and Bobby McFerrin, Gregory Porter has expanded my universe of soulful jazz singers.  Thank you again!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/arts/music/gregory-porter-mines-soulful-jazz-in-liquid-spirit.html?_r=0

 

7 Steps to Succeed With Crowdfunding in 2014

by Mazarine Treyz

Like in all fundraising, marketing and relationship building are key.

Have you ever thought about doing a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign for your nonprofit? I was approached recently by a board member of a nonprofit to give feedback on the organization's Indiegogo campaign. I looked at its campaign text, and it was terrible. The organization was trying to raise operating funding, but its 18-minute video was a train wreck. Learn from this! 

Before you dive in to a crowdfunding campaign, there are a few things you should know. 

What is the same? How is Kickstarter crowdfunding like traditional fundraising? You build relationships with people and share your updates and stories with them so they want to give to you. And with your deadline, people get excited to give, tell their friend s, and word spreads quickly. 

What is different? How is Kickstarter crowdfunding not like traditional fundrai sing? People who back you expect to get something tangibl e out of the arrangement. It's not just a " feel good" opportunity. It's a chance to get something they want too. As far as I can tell, it's kind of like online shopping ... but with a feel-good twist that they're helping other people's dreams come true. And if the campaigns don't make their goals, well, they haven't actually spent anything. (Did you know that 56 percent of Kickstarter projects never make their goals?) 

Recently, I went to a meetup about crowdfunding for startups. Each person who spoke had raised more than $150,000 via Kickstarter. One of them was Andy Baio, who raised $175,000 for his XOXO Festival. We also heard from Ryan Frayne, who raised $149,000 for a new invention that inflates and deflates things really fast, and Zeke Kamm, who raised $6,000, $223,000 and $87,000 with three different Kickstarters to make products for filmmakers. 

Kamm and Baio both made products, and as they put it, "If you have an idea, it allows you to see if the idea is worth anything." Say your nonprofit wants to start a project. Or your association wants to do a new, fun conference. Or maybe you want to start an earnedincome stream - let's say, getting th e startup capita l to make a new product for your nonprofit. (You're a homeless shelter and want to make bedbug-free beds for other homeless shelters, for example.) Here's some advice you might find helpful. 

TIP 1: Cost it out 
If you're making a product, Kamm suggests, "Do not do a Kickstarter for a $10 product." 
That was his first mistake. People fund your project to get the prizes. That is really one of the best ways to get your Kickstarter funded. "Do the numbers," he says. "If you have something that needs 1,000 backers, can you get th em? Don't make your $20 level be a T-shirt. Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a T-shirt made? Even one T-shirt, with eight colors, costs $25." 

TIP 2: Do your research 
You will put the same amount of work into your Kickstarter if you research or don 't, and you wil l have vastly superior results if you do the research. Kamm suggests watching 150 successful project videos and 100 unsuccessful project videos to pick out the characteristics of successful Kickstarters. 

TIP 3: The top 2 secrets to Kickstarter success are ... 
Marketing and marketing. And marketing is - BOOM! - fundraising! Kamm suggests getting started early on this. Look at other similar projects on Kickstarter and the biogs they're featured on. Then comment on the blogs and create a relationship with the bloggers. Then launch your Kickstarter and ask them in a quick pitch email to cover it. Do not try to find the email addresses of people who have funded other Kickstarters. Big no-no. 

TIP 4: How do you set a fundraising goal? 
"For our XO event, we set the price at $400 per ticket because that was the cost, including our time," Baio says, adding that you should set the goal at the minimum you can to make the project worth your time. 
"Figure out what your core reward is, and price that fairly. That is what people are primarily backing the project for," he says, adding that Kickstarter frowns on stretch goals. Just put a modest goal, and then talk in the description text about what you will do if you exceed that goal. 

TIP 5: What should you use for prizes? And now many levels? 
Baio suggests $5 as a level to start at and, as a prize, provide backer updates (which is a nice way of keeping people informed about your project). He also says that if you're selling high-end tickets, you should sell them but give something more to people who maybe can't make it to the event. Beca use his conference was about honoring and highlighting do-it-yourself (DIY) artists and crafters, Baio offered a DIY kit; Tshirt; and goodie box with coffee, Etsy-bought crafts and artwork. He suggests three to fo ur prize levels, tops. Admittedly, he says, he's seen up to 40 prize levels in a Kickstarter, but those usually work best with role-playing games. 
If you give people too many choices, he says, they'll run away from your project. Remember this when you're giving people 10 options to donate on your website. Maybe just have one to start, and make it more complex later. 

TIP 6: What makes a successful Kickstarter video? 
Videos should be no more than two minutes and 53 seconds, says Kamm, who is a filmmaker. Why? People have short attention spans. And if you're thinking, "Well, all I have is an iPhone," that's OK. Frayne made his Kickstarter video with his iPhone and iMovie on his computer. 
"Look, the main thing that comes through is sincerity," he says. "If you can be sincere, and find your audience, and speak to them in the language they understand, you will create fans. People will feel connected to your story and  become your fans, and back you again and again." Frayne also mentions that people might just see your video on Kickstarter and want to mentor you or partner with you in other ways. For his invention, he says, he's talking with a rubber company in Canada on a potential partnership to market his product with its product, which he would never have gotten if he hadn't had the exposure of a Kickstarter project. 

TIP 7: It's not just about the money 
(This one will have fundraisers nodding their heads!) It's about creating true fans - people you can call on again and again to back your Kickstarter projects. Which is like saying, "Build a donor base, and keep asking donors to get involved!" 
Duh. A woman in the audience said, "Oh, well, but I don't want to ask my backers to give again!" To which all three of the speakers responded, "Why not?" 
In the end, it's a free country, and they have the right to refuse you. But why deny them the choice to give to you again, if that's what they want to do? 

That is an excellent motto for fundraising, really. If you'd like to read more about how to have a successful Kickstarter, I also helped an artist and filmmaker create a successful fundraising email last year. Read about it here: bit.ly/1d7Q3up

fundraaisingsuccessmag.com  18 April 2014

Philadelphia® Double-Lemon Cheesecake Bars

Why should the kids get all the Easter treats?

Philadelphia® Double-Lemon Cheesecake Bars

Prep Time: 35 min. / Total Time: 7 hrs. 75 min. incl. refrigerating /Makes: 76 servings

2 cups vanilla wafer crumbs

3 Tbsp. butter, melted

4 pkg. (8 oz. each) Cream Cheese, softened

1 3/4 cups sugar, divided

3 Tbsp. flour

1 Tbsp. lemon zest

1/3 cup lemon juice, divided

1/2 tsp. vanilla

4 eggs, 1 separated

2 Tbsp. cornstarch

1/2 cup water

HEAT oven to 325°F and line a 13x9-inch pan with foil. Mix wafer crumbs and butter; press onto bottom of pan. Bake 10 min.

BEAT cream cheese, 1 cup sugar, flour, lemon zest, 2 Tbsp. lemon juice and vanilla with mixer until blended.

ADD 1 egg white and remaining 3 whole eggs, beating after each just until blended. (Reserve yolk for later use.)

POUR batter over crust. Bake 40 min. or until center is almost set. Cool 1 hour. Refrigerate 4 hours.

MIX cornstarch and remaining sugar in sauce~ gradually stir in water and remaining lemon juice. Bring just to boil, stirring constantly; cook and stir until clear and thickened. Lightly beat reserved egg yolk until blended; stir in 2 Tbsp. hot cornstarch mixture. Return to remaining cornstarch mixture in saucepan; cook and stir 1 min. or until thickened. Cool.

SPOON glaze over cheesecake. Refrigerate 1 hour. Use foil handles to remove cheesecake from pan before cutting to serve.

creamcheese.com

© 2014 Kraft Foods Made with fresh milk, real cream and no preservatives.

How to Avoid a Slumped, Sad Pie Crust

by Hannah Klinger

No shortage of home bakers have witnessed the Great Piecrust Disappearing Act-dough that looks perfect in the pan but contracts in the oven.  The problem: too much gluten. The gluten in dough can become like rubber bands stretched to their limit: too much strain, and the proteins snap back into a tangled heap. You need some gluten for structure, but you need to treat it gently. By the way, even packaged pie dough can shrink.

The solution: Relax your dough. It's tempting to work homemade dough into a cohesive ball, but this over develops gluten. The dough should just hold together when squeezed in the palm of your hand, with bits of fat visible throughout. Form the dough into a disk, wrap, and chill at least 20 minutes-this lets the gluten unwind.

To form the pie shell, gentry roll the dough into a circle larger than the pan, at least 12 inches, and then trim and flute. Stretching a too small circle to fit the pan will stretch the gluten.

Chill the pie shell before filling. (If you feel you've stretched purchased dough, chill it, too; this will relax the gluten and help prevent shrinkage.)  The fat, still solid from the fridge, will melt and steam in the oven, creating delicious flaky layers.

"The Ends of BGLOs" - Dr. Gregory Parks

"We now live in an age in which many college students do not feel the need to join any fraternity or sorority. Some choose to join something other than a BGLO. It is problematic that BGLOs have built no real pipeline to membership by seeing mentoring K-12 African Americans as not simply good for the community but also necessary for the future viability of these organizations. At this rate, a decade or two from now, the pickings will be remarkably slim for college students who are interested in BGLO membership and possessed of the requisite qualities and characteristics that will sustain BGLOs. Even more, BGLOs have not thought through an optimal MIP that will commit members to their respective BGLO in real and tangible—financially and physically active—ways. As such, while BGLOs are likely to see fewer and fewer aspiring members or ones with poorer credentials than decades before, they are also likely to witness a greater hemorrhaging of active members. And for organizations with an economic model that depends largely on initiation fees and membership dues, their best hope will be to lower the bar to membership. This will fundamentally alter the nature of these organizations, not guarantee long-term membership commitment, and continue to leave them vulnerable to limited coffers and increasing hazing allegations, among other things."

Read the article in its entiry:
http://gregoryparks.net/wordpress/
by Gregory S. Parks, JD, PhD
email: gsp28@cornell.edu
twitter: @BlackJDPHd

Notes on 19th Century European History

the French Revolution; Napoleon seizes power; Napoleon's defeat at waterloo (1812);Congress of Vienna (1815) to maintain power through diplomatic relations; 2nd industrial revolution at the ned of the century; growth of class consciousness; rise of nationalism; unification of Italy and Germany;

Romanticism is a backlash to Enlightenment (read Shelly’s “Frankenstein”)

Industrialism/Capitalism verses Liberalism/Individualism (read Dicken’s “Hard Times”)

and the Rise of Unitarianism (1830)

1848 - The French Revolution - Emperor Louis XVI believes in divine right; population growth; pressures of stagnant economy (the estate system) feudal economy; the 3rd estate carries tax burden; American Revolution success due to French support; French frustration of Estates General had not met since 1610; Enlighten political discussion that there is a "Prime Creator" undermines the notion of divine right; begins looking inward (human political relationships & rights). Thomas Hobbes writes of a commonwealth to organize society (Levant) to create a better society. "The life of man is about conference and indifference and short & indifference."

John Locke writes that people have natural rights: life, liberty, and property. "To life under absolutism is slavery." Tabula risa:  Humans are a blank slate at birth environment models intellectual; argument for human equality and human rights.

Rousseau writes about the Social Contract; individuals have power by membership in a larger group; power is held by the group, the general will can effect political change through democratic consensus by qualified people free of self-interest, informed acting for the good of the society.

French Finance Minister, Jacque advises against raising taxes. Louis XVI calls the Estates General in Spring 1789.  the 3rd Estate is locked out and convenes in a Handball Court to create the Deceleration Rights of Man (aka constitution). Food riots in Paris; mood becomes darker and darker. July 14, 1789 decides to liberate political prisoners in the Bastille. August 1789, National Assembly is born.

Jan 1793 - Louis XVI is executed; Radicals (Jacobeans) gain power; 'san coulte' (trouserless) minority pushes National Assembly further: Committee for Public Security over 16 months is the "Terror" lead by Robespierre, to attain a new political state.  Napoleon enters into a power vacuum and leads a coup; and builds an army to disrupt England power.

Kurt Elling - 1619 Broadway - The Brill Building Project

With his new album, Kurt Elling - the outstanding male vocalist in jazz today — celebrates a legendary legacy outside the jazz world. 1619 Broadway - The Brill Building Project honors a locale that the London Telegraph called "the most important generator of popular songs in the Western world." Even for the ceaselessly inventive Grammy-winning singer-lyricist, it's a hugely unexpected step, and one guaranteed to further solidify his reputation for bold innovation and superb craftsmanship. "Having done so many projects about my love for Chicago," Elling says, "I wanted to make something that spoke of my love for New York." The two cities define his career. Elling developed his craft in Chicago, and recorded several of his early albums there—including his debut. Close Your Eyes, which catapulted him onto the national stage and earned the first of his many Grammy nominations. (All told, every one of Elling's ten albums has been nominated for at least one jazz Grammy—a streak unequalled in Grammy history.) But in fact, Elling and his family have lived in Manhattan since 2008, and 7679 Broadway - The Brill Building Project is his response to that experience. "I didn't want to cover any of the New York songwriters jazz people usually go to: the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, all of whom I love; I wanted to reach out for something different. The vast collection of songs coming out of The Brill Building seemed like a gold mine." A honeycomb of offices and claustrophobic studios at 1619 Broadway, in the heart of midtown Manhattan, the fabled Brill Building at its peak served as the creative home for more than 160 tenants associated with the pop-music industry. Of these, the vast majority were composers and lyricists. From the mid-1930s through the early 1970s the architects of the "Brill Building Sound” churned out a preponderance of the popular songs that three generations of America grew up hearing and singing. The term "Brill Building Sound" describes the string of rock-and-roll masterpieces that defined the genre and signaled its first maturing. These instantly recognizable songs came from such songwriting teams as Leiber and Stoller ("Stand by Me"), Goffin and King ("Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"), Mann and Weil ("You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling"), and Bacharach and David ("Walk On By"). Such teams crafted hit after hit while working in a physical environment with paper-thin walls that allowed the writing teams to hear and learn (or steal) from each other. It became a fertile and competitive hothouse of cross-influence and collaboration. Even as Elling began researching this material, he "knew this would be a challenge, because the Brill is so much associated with doo-wop"—not his usual neighborhood. For help, he turned to a friend: hit songwriter and educator Phil Galdston ("Save the Best for Last"). "This is really his metier, and he did encyclopedic research," says Elling. "We must have touched on a couple hundred songs before we narrowed it down. Phil did a masterful job of codifying first-tier, second-tier, and third-tier choices. Several of my choices, like the classic "On Broadway," were foregone conclusions; some, like that hip lick recorded by The Coasters, "'Shoppin' for Clothes," gradually percolated to my attention." And, indeed, the reworking of that novelty "B-Side" fails right into Elling's penchant for spoken-word fun, games and hipster jive. Another surprise choice is the Goffin-King exercise in social satire, "Pleasant Valley Sunday." As Elling recounts, "I had summarily dismissed that one until it had time to simmer on its own, and I found an idea on how to handle it." This version mixes John McLean's retro-lectric guitar, authentic-sounding sound clips of the 60s, and an audio profile that recalls Ken Nordine's classic "Word Jazz." The result is a trippy and darker-than-the- original ride through a neighborhood that the Monkees first visited in 1967. Some jazz fans may raise an eyebrow at these song choices, but they'd do well to remember that throughout the 20th century, artists from Louis Armstrong to Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock have successfully transformed one era's pop songs into another generation's jazz standards. And throughout his career, Elling has worked to expand the jazz repertoire, sprinkling his albums with songs made famous by (among others) The Zombies and King Crimson. Some of the tunes on 1619 Broadway - The Brill Building Project were actually written years after their composers had left the Brill entirely. For example, Elling explains, "Carole King, like many other signatories to The Brill Sound,' never had an actual office at the Brill. So it doesn't pay to be too didactic about any of this. The Brill is both a physical reality and a mental construct; and because of that, I felt comfortable casting a wide net." That wide net contains more than rock and doo-wop. As Elling's inspired song choices reveal, the Brill was a hive of music activity from the mid-30s on, housing the creative efforts of Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn, Johnny Mercer, Harry Warren, and more. One survey estimates that of the 1200-odd songs performed between 1935 and 1948 on the Your Hit Parade broadcasts (radio and then television), more than 400 of them— nearly a third of the total—came from Brill tenants. Thus the inclusion here of such great American standards as "I Only Have Eyes for You" (Warren/Dubin, 1934) and the Sinatra signature "Come Fly With Me" (Cahn/Van Huesen, 1957). For that matter, even Duke Ellington (through his long-time publisher Irving Mills) leased space in The Brill, as did Nat "King" Cole and a host of other Swing Era stars. Elling pays heed to that corner of the Brill as well, with the Duke's "Tutti for Cootie," written to showcase the Ellington band's unsurpassed trumpeter Cootie Williams. And on the flip side, Paul Simon, represented here by "American Tune," still keeps an office at the Brill. On track after track, Kurt Elling and Laurence Hobgood, his collaborator for two decades, illustrate the creative fireworks that have marked their work together from the start. Some tracks, such as "On Broadway" and "You Send Me," glow with atmospheric re-harmonizations (either audacious or subtle), unexpected rhythms, and jazz sensibility. Others, such as "I'm Satisfied" and "A House is Not a Home," artfully distill the essence of the original through a jazz filter. But all of them manage to strike a balance of tradition and modernity that will by now be familiar to Elling's longstanding admirers, on a program of songs guaranteed to bring new fans to the party.
 
The party takes place at 1619 Broadway, as The Brill Building Project provides the inspiration for intrepid exploration of the great jazz singers of our time.

Kurt Elling, vocals, Grammy-winner is among the world's foremost jazz vocalists. He has won every DownBeat Critics Poll for the last fourteen years and has been named "Male Singer of the Year" by the Jazz Journalists Association eight times in that same span. Every one of Elling's ten albums has been nominated for a Grammy. Elling's rich baritone spans four octaves and features both astonishing technical mastery and emotional depth. His repertoire includes original compositions and modern interpretations of standards, all of which are springboards for inspired improvisation, scatting, spoken word, and poetry. The New York Times declared, "Elling is the standout male vocalist of our time." The Washington Post added, "Since the mid-1990s, no singer in jazz has been as daring, dynamic or interesting as Kurt Elling. With his soaring vocal flights, his edgy lyrics and sense of being on a musical mission, he has come to embody the creative spirit in jazz." Elling was the Artist-in-Residence for the Singapore and Monterey Jazz Festivals. He has also written multi-disciplinary works for The Steppenwoif Theatre and the City of Chicago. The Obama Administration's first state dinner featured Elling in a command performance. Elling is a renowned artist of vocalese-the writing and performing of words over recorded improvised jazz solos. The natural heir to jazz pioneers Eddie Jefferson, King Pleasure, and Jon Hendricks, Elling has set his own lyrics to the improvised solos of Wayne Shorter, Keith Jarrett, and Pat Metheny. He often incorporates images and references from writers such as Rilke, Rumi, Neruda, and Proust into his work. The late poet and Bollingen Prize-winner Robert Creeley wrote, “Kurt Elling takes us into a world of sacred particulars. His words are informed by a powerful poetic spirit." Said Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, "In Kurt Elling's art, the voice of jazz gives a new spiritual presence to the ancient, sweet and powerful bond between poetry and music." Kurt Elling has toured vigorously throughout his career, thrilling audiences throughout the world, in that time he has led his own ensemble and has collaborated with many of the world's finest orchestras. Elling's latest recording, 1619 Broadway - The Brill Building Project, honors and celebrates the locale that the London Telegraph called "the most important generator of popular songs in the Western world." Elling's interpretations and signature arrangements of songs like "On Broadway," "A House Is Not a Home," and "So Far Away" make this record a must-have for those in search of current great singing. Even for the ceaselessly inventive Elling, 1619 Broadway is another unexpected step, and one guaranteed to further solidify his reputation for thrilling innovation and superb craftsmanship.

Rule 15: Why I must haze this pledge

"The pledge has to earn his membership."  Joining a Greek organization is an honor. Membership is exclusive. We should only allow the most qualified people into our organizations. However, they can prove their worthiness by means other than hazing.  "You have to break pledges down to build them back up. This is what the military does, and it produces the best leaders in the world." This is nonsense. I was an officer in the military, and that is not how it works. The military takes individuals who show potential (which is why it has such an extensive recruiting program) and makes them a better version of themselves. There is no hazing or breaking anyone down. If someone can't cut it, the military weeds him out. The military trains officers by giving them a number of tasks that they cannot possibly accomplish in the time allotted. This forces officers to be efficient- to be smart in how they prioritize tasks. This instills discipline. It also instills confidence because officers learn that they can do more than they thought was possible. This is how the military teaches leadership, and they are the best in the world at it.  "This is how I became a brother/sister, and I'm not going to stop a tradition." This is tough one to counter because it isn't a very intellectual argument. If this mindset were prevalent everywhere in the world, then there would never be any improvement. I would deal with this reason by continually asking, "Why can't we be better?" If your chapter members don't want to improve, then you are talking to a lost cause.

“The Chapter President –Preparing Sorority and Fraternity Leaders for the Unexpected”
by Patrick Daley
thefraternityadvisor.com