We are all keenly aware, as it has been drummed into our heads for a couple of years now, that the School District of Philadelphia is in financial crisis. We further understood that this deficit — more than $600 million and yet somehow still rising — would lead to painful cuts in programs and personnel.

We’ve watched helplessly as extracurricular activities, sports, art and music fell one by one to the budget axe. We sat on our hands through the first few rounds of layoffs, even while some favored private contractors (and a few administrators) gorged shamelessly at the public trough District officials swore had run dry.

The money coming in never quite equaled the money going out, and virtually none of it ever made its way to the communities, the schools and the students who needed it most. Long-suffering parents, taxpayers and stakeholders endured each indignity, assured that tighter fiscal controls and better oversight would pave the way for better days ahead. Of course, we were given those assurances by the same band of gypsies who stole the money in the first place, but that’s another story for another time.

My roundabout point here is someone is going to have to draw a line somewhere.

Effective Dec. 31, 141 District employees — including 47 nurses, 28 secretaries, 18 non-teaching assistants and others — will lose their jobs in the latest game of musical chairs the District calls “belt tightening measures.”

If you don’t think that’s a big deal, you’re mistaken. As a product of the Philadelphia public schools, and as one who spent significant portions of those years in the nurse’s office, taking away school nurses is easily the most shortsighted, band-aid-on-a-bullet-wound budgetary move yet devised.

True, I had more sprains, broken bones, contusions, concussions, scrapes, bumps, bruises and boo-boos than most — but still, fewer than others. Multiple sports activities, plus a teenager’s natural penchant for stupid human tricks and boneheaded stunts often resulted in a trip to the nurse’s office. Having a trained, qualified health care professional in every school is not a luxury — it is the right of every child and parent in the system.

If school nurses were essential back in the ’70s, they are irreplaceable today, when so many more students have so many more problems requiring medical attention. The number of kids who are asthmatic has skyrocketed since those old days, not to mention the numbers of students on various medications, which must be dispensed and monitored during school hours.

Imagine what happens when a child gets sick — I mean really sick — and no one is trained on what to do. Imagine what happens when the parents then sue the school district for negligence, and probably win. How much money will we have saved from pink slipping the school nurses then?

You might as well remove all the handrails and banisters from the stairwells in every school and sell them as scrap iron for ten cents a pound. Then you can brag about pulling in a couple of thousand bucks in savings — while personal injury attorneys station themselves at the bottom of the stairs offering a fat payday for each turned ankle.

It was a school nurse who first recommended that my eyesight be re-tested in elementary school. She was right, and I’ve been wearing glasses ever since. How many other kids with hearing loss, vision problems and a host of other ailments owe that initial diagnosis to a caring school nurse? And the converse question: How many will now go unnoticed, undiagnosed and untreated when those nurses are gone?

We’re not just talking about taking away band instruments or after school clubs here (although that would be bad enough). A school nurse can, and has, made the difference in certain life-saving situations, by providing a trained eye when every second counts.

It’s hard to imagine the back-and-forth among school administrators that day when the conversation turned to the subject of getting rid of school nurses. What bothers me more than whoever made the idiotic recommendation in the first place is that everyone else in the room didn’t shout it down as the exercise in stupidity that it clearly is.

The lawsuits alone will bankrupt the system so fast their heads will spin.

Next brilliant idea: Since new cars aren’t selling very well, perhaps auto manufacturers can save some money by eliminating unnecessary gadgets — like brakes, air bags and seat belts.

That should save a few bucks, right?

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

Give a “cut-above” credit to Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey for quietly traveling to barber shops in numerous neighborhoods around the city to talk with customers, engaging in conservations about community perceptions of police.

The Commissioner taking his time to listen — getting earfuls from folks sharing their complaints and kudos — is smart policing. This is the type of initiative needed to move the phrase “community partnership” from a politically popular cliché to an effective crime fighting practice.

Commissioner Ramsey and Mayor Nutter both know about and care about doing something about the biggest crime related problem confronting Philadelphia: the outrageous levels of murders.

The victims of those murders are disproportionately young Black males as are the perpetrators.

As Philadelphia Tribune City Editor Daryl Gale perceptively noted in a commentary last week, “young Philadelphians are so hopeless and filled with shortsighted desperation that they’ve engaged in what could well be the first case of self-inflicted genocide in human history.”

The 324 murders recorded in Philadelphia last year produced the unenviable distinction of ranking Philly as #1 in murder rates among America’s ten largest cities…more than New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.

And before the smoke of New Year’s Eve fireworks dissipated the smoke of gunfire besmirched the dawning of 2012 with another spate of homicides around Philly.

Mayor Nutter, during his inauguration speech last week for his second term, described this murderous behavior among some (and certainly not all) young Black men as “a local and national epidemic not sufficiently talked about, much less tackled.”

Mayor Nutter went beyond the standard “we’re going to put more police on our streets — 120 new officers on foot patrol by summer this year” by promising to “continue to build partnerships with the community through community policing and Philly Rising.” Let’s hope that 2012 is truly the year for new commitment and new thinking in City Hall about engagement with “community” in crafting and implementing crime reduction strategies.

One of the biggest failings in Philadelphia regarding crime reduction is the failure of City Hall to effectively work with community groups that daily work in the trenches with those impacted by crime and those apart of destructive criminal behavior.

As one community activist noted during an interview last week, “There’s been a disconnect between police and community initiatives. The City has to work in partnership with communities. There are groups out there working on violence reduction that never get credit.”

While politicians and police officials talk about partnerships with communities you rarely see community groups included in press conferences where City Hall pats itself on the back by announcing reductions in murder rates and/or decreases in crime generally.

Community based violence reduction efforts already confront uphill battles on the front lines from those they are trying to impact who feel these efforts have little influence among the power-brokers in City Hall and Center City corporate suites that hold real sway over matters involving employment, education and criminal justice policies.

City Hall brushing aside these efforts — deliberately or inadvertently — reinforces the perception of powerlessness of those efforts in the minds of people those efforts are trying to reach. Community groups are getting ready to launch a new violence reduction initiative captioned “Live and Let Live” — phrasing that tactically addresses a prime trigger for much of the conflicts leading to fatal violence: arguments over perceptions of someone not “respecting” someone.

The Mayor, City Council, corporate and civic leaders need to back these kinds of community initiatives, not just with making the easy endorsements but with resources inclusive of providing money.

Mayor Nutter deserves credit for declaring during his inauguration speech his willingness to “extend a hand” to persons ready to “put guns down.” Nutter said, “We must show them that if you put the gun down we’ll work with you to put a book in your hands, to put some work and a job in your hands, to put a paycheck in your hands.”

To transform the mayor’s sincere rhetoric into reality City Hall has to stop shooting itself in the foot with counter-productive practices like the Police Department’s Stop-&-Frisk campaign and the sweet-heart Project Labor Agreement Nutter announced late last year for trade unions with a history of racial discrimination.

Stop-&-Frisk is infused with racial profiling mainly targeting Black and Latino males. This dragnet policing alienates people who the police need for cooperation in identifying criminals. Commissioner Ramsey bemoaned the lack of community cooperation in solving murders and the impact that has on lower rates of solving murders yet some of that lack of cooperation comes from adverse reactions to offensive policing.

As law professor Sherrilyn Ifill noted in a short essay posted recently on The Root there are “unintended consequences” from the Stop-&-Frisks in New York City that like Philadelphia overwhelmingly targets non-whites. “Fostering a relationship of hostility with the city’s Black and Latino male population is not only wrong; it’s also not smart policing,” Ifill wrote noting disincentives like discouraging providing police with crime solving tips.

Last June the Nutter Administration entered a legal settlement to reform Stop-&-Frisk yet months later the mayor committed city-funded construction jobs exclusively to discriminatory building trade unions, the types of jobs needed for that “hand-up” referenced in his inauguration speech.

The time is ripe for real engagement with communities.

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.

What a disgusting spectacle!

Mobs of mad (as in insane) shoppers violently surging through shopping malls from Staten Island to Seattle to snatch-up expensive Air Jordan sneakers.

Mob members — overwhelmingly Black in composition — punched, kicked, trampled and pepper-sprayed each other while pursuing their perverse right to pay a small fortune for shoes that supposedly make a fashion statement but brings little improvement to their daily lives beyond intangible emotional satisfaction.

At a Philly suburb, Burlington County, N.J. mall witnesses told news reporters that men threatened gunfire to bolster their efforts to “get their pair.”

Yes, a willingness to shoot someone to eliminate a shoe purchase competitor — a willingness to shoot someone — not to secure a full-time job or snatch a jackpot Mega-Millions lotto ticket but blasting a human being for a pair of shoes that will surely soil when worn regularly which is necessary for making that fashion statement.

Needless to say many racists raging around cyberspace exploited this disgusting spectacle rightly ranting about the stupidity of predominately poor Blacks fighting to spend scarce money on overpriced sneakers.

Typical of racists, their criticisms contained no reference to the larger context of consumerism gone wild in America — mindless spending of the kind that one London newspaper account about Black Friday Christmas shopping frenzy termed an “orgy.”

Let’s not forget that post-Thanksgiving shoppers scratched and clawed each other for items to buy with one Los Angeles area shopper using pepper spray to secure an X-Box for his purchase and shoppers in a Little Rock, Arkansas Wal-Mart physically battling each other over waffle makers selling for $2 bucks each.

And we shouldn’t forget another salient point.

That violent consumerism evident in sneaker wars is another branch of the amassing-possessions tree that includes those top tiered financial types (a/k/a fraudsters) who wrecked the economic system by their orgy of exploiting get-rich-quick schemes like credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities.

Those schemes accelerated the economic damage arising from the regular tax avoidance and insider-trading misconduct among the wealthy.

Is this rioting over sneakers and the rich paying-off politicians to prevent higher taxes on the (often ill-gotten) fortunes creeping indicators of what the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin warned a few weeks ago of America becoming ungovernable?

That mid-December assessment from the think-tank behind the GEAB stated that the “already insolvent” United States “will become ungovernable bringing about for Americans and those who depend on the United States violent and destructive economic, financial, monetary, geopolitical and social shocks.”

The GEAB predicts that the impact of global systemic crisis on the U.S. during the four year period between 2012 and 2016 “will radically transform the country’s institutional system, its social fabric and its economic and financial weight.”

Despite the larger context of consumerism excesses and U.S. empire collapse the spectacle from mobs of Black folks battling over paying nearly $200 dollars for sneakers contains particularly disturbing aspects.

Disturbing aspects arise from facts like it’s virtually impossible to consistently assemble hundreds of Black folks to address ills crushing their lives like unemployment.

Unemployment in Black communities is larger in scope and longer lasting in duration than in all other sectors of American society.

Where are those ready-&-willing to demonstrate against the structural joblessness that created economic Depression in Back communities long before America’s Recession of the past few years?

Why is it so hard to find unemployed persons possessed with vigor to protest their conditions comparable to that sneaker-purchase-zeal?

There are enough unemployed Back folks in and around Washington, D.C. alone to pack Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to Capitol Hill daily to demand that the president push for targeted jobs creations initiatives and the recalcitrant Republicans controlling Congress approve such initiatives.

Where’s the sneaker-purchase enthusiasm to protest against a menacing facet of the prison-industrial-complex where private prison operators provide state legislators with campaign contributions and lobbying largess to enact favorable measures.

Those measures include actions like transferring prisons from state government to private control, passing harsher sentences for non-violent offenses and provisions for keeping people in prison longer — all measures that benefit the financial bottom-lines of for-profit prison operators.

Blacks and other non-whites provide the “raw material” the private prison industry needs.

A new form of slavery is how many rightly reference this renewed mass imprisonment push — interestingly coinciding with decreases in crime rates.

However, the U.S. Constitution permits slavery for prisoners. The post-Civil War amendments eliminating slavery allowed slavery “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

A Forbes.com article in November about the private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America carried the headline — “Still Locking Up Fat Profits.”

The CCA that operates 60 facilities in 19 states and D.C. made $433.5 million in profits during the past year according to the Forbes.com article, up ten million from the year before.

With politicians controlling employment and penal policies, where are the Black masses protesting what a report issued in December by the NAACP and NAACP Legal Defense Fund declared is “a coordinated and comprehensive assault … against our voting rights.”

During 2011, that report stated, 14 states approved over two dozen measures designed to restrict or limit access to ballots — blatant anti-democracy onslaughts by Republicans against minorities, the elderly and students who often vote for Democrats.

Those sneaker-snatchers need to focus their attention on the feet of exploitation systemically planted in their backsides.

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.

The very first mention of Philadelphia in the national news for 2012 was not very encouraging. We actually made number one in a significant statistical category, but it’s nothing to write home about. Residents of the City of Brotherly Love murder each other more often than anyone else in America’s ten largest cities.

Heck, the mayor of Washington, D.C. is already bragging about losing the “murder capital” status to Philly, and using it to push his public safety agenda. When the numbers were announced last Friday, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray called a press conference, where he crowed, “The days when the District was known as the nations ‘Murder Capital’ are long behind us, and the plans we are announcing today will enable our police to continue this progress.”

There were 324 homicides in Philadelphia last year, up from 306 in 2010. Sure, that’s down from 2007’s high water mark of 391, but 324 murders in one year is ridiculous no matter how you parse the numbers.

As if to drive that point home for the nonbelievers, already there were six murders in 2012, and we’re only a couple of days into the new year.

About 85 percent of those murdered were young Black men, almost the exact percentage of the murderers themselves. Simply put, young Philadelphians are so hopeless and filled with shortsighted desperation that they’ve engaged in what could well be the first case of self-inflicted genocide in human history.

Our young men are willfully doing what nearly a hundred years of Ku Klux Klan raids could not do — what the night riders, cross burners and skinheads have only dreamed of in their wildest fantasies: the slow, deliberate extermination of the Black race.

Think about it for a minute. For every murder, there are two Black men taken out of the picture: the victim, who was deprived of life itself, and the killer, who is then deprived of any chance at a productive life by rotting in prison for dozens of years. Two sets of children are deprived of their fathers. How many of those children will then grow up in poverty and despair, repeating the same cycle of victim/perpetrator for yet another generation?

Fortunately, these facts are not foreign to the powers that be. In his second inaugural speech Monday morning, Mayor Michael Nutter called the phenomenon of young Black boys murdering each other “the epidemic not sufficiently talked about.”

Nutter is brainstorming with city, state and federal law enforcement agencies to come up with a strategy for combating handgun violence. Handguns are the weapons of choice for urban killing, used in more than four out of five of last year’s 324 Philadelphia murders.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

Any solution will require an entire sea change, a paradigm shift on two fronts: first, laws must be changed or amended to specifically target people who have no business with guns.

Not as easy as it sounds, given that anywhere outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you’ll be hard pressed to find even a handful of state legislators willing to talk about gun control. Our local leaders have tried for years to implement common sense controls in Philadelphia, only to be shouted down by the rural gun nuts that hate Philadelphia anyway, and don’t much care if Black folk shoot each other until the cows come home.

The second hurdle, sadly, is internal. There are those among us — decent, enlightened, aware Black people — who bristle immediately at any notion that part of the blame lies squarely on our kids and what influences them. This is a mistake, because burying our heads in the sand won’t help them. They need to understand that their future (and ours) lies in their hands, and that future is determined by whether they’re carrying a book — or carrying a gun.

Sure, you can blame the white man for manufacturing all those guns, and legislators for allowing the guns to proliferate in the Black community — but while that’s true, we have to admit, at least to ourselves, that it isn’t the whole story.

White men are not driving in from the suburbs to gun down our children every weekend in our communities. State legislators are not shooting up bars, nightclubs, bowling alleys and house parties in Black neighborhoods.

Our children are doing that. The mayor was right when he correctly identified it as an epidemic. And it’s up to us — all of us — to stop it.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

Overshadowed by the political posturing of an epic Capitol Hill battle over funding priorities was news of an agreement between federal officials and rouge mortgage agency Countrywide Financial.

That announced agreement produced a historic $335 million settlement regarding massive discrimination by Countrywide against minorities seeking mortgages.

According to U.S. Justice Department officials Countrywide — once America’s largest single-family mortgage lender — charged non-whites higher fees and shunted them into costlier mortgages than whites from 2004 to 2008.

Now, under the standard terms of civil settlements, Countrywide does not admit that it did what it did: discriminate against minorities.

But excluding ugly race-based discrimination as Countrywide pretends, what explains that firm persistently slamming high income earning non-whites with solid credit into predatory adjustable rate mortgages while giving more favorable treatment to whites with lesser income and worse credit histories?

The time frame of Countrywide’s alleged skullduggery covers the period of the greatest loss of wealth in the histories of America’s Black and Latino communities.

During that time frame Blacks and Hispanics lost in excess of $350 billion in wealth from just foreclosures and home value depreciations triggered by foreclosures, according to an array of expert examinations.

Other consequences roiling within this wealth loss is a widening of the wealth gaps between whites and non-whites in America.

In 2005 that gap was ten times while by 2010 that gap increased to nearly twenty times with the average white family having $113,000 in wealth compared to $6,300 for Hispanics and $5,700 for black families.

While Countrywide, now owned by Bank of America, was not the sole cause of that historically high wealth loss (a.k.a. fraudulent theft), it was a major player.

And as a major player, here’s a major rub: Few, if any, responsible for that wealth loss have faced prosecution, much less endured imprisonment for their misdeeds.

Yet, during that 2004-to-2008 time frame tens of thousands of non-whites ended up in federal and state prisons across America for crimes (and false convictions) of far less devastation than those committed by economic fraudsters.

Another major story overshadowed by the recent Washington wrangling over extending payroll tax cuts (really siphoning money from Social Security) and extending unemployment benefits to those still eligible involved news that federal prosecutors back away from pressing cases against financial big-shots because it’s allegedly too hard to prove “criminal intent.”

The same feds that can find (and/or manufacture) criminal intent from the most innocent of acts among the poor to facilitate criminal charges suddenly fall stupid when it comes to finding comparable intent among fraudsters who can afford the best defense money can buy to exploit a presumption unavailable to the poor.

That presumption respected by judges and juries is that the wealthy are innocent even when proven guilty.

The entrenchment of extreme economic inequities symbolized by the 99 percent vs. 1 percent is one of the things clearly exposed during Year 2011.

The subtle and in-your-face favoring of the wealthy prompted unprecedented resistance in 2011.

In Philadelphia criticisms were raised by a few (unfortunately too few) over this city government’s failure to collect the School Income Tax with the same aggressiveness as property taxes for public school funding.

That Income Tax impacting “toys’” of the wealthy like bonds, stocks and trusts raked in less income that the city’s liquor-by-the-drink tax, another income sources siphoning revenue disproportionately from the less wealthy.

That exposure of economic inequities and companion political corruption during 2011 drove the “Occupy” movements across the U.S. and other countries plus spurring pro-democracy revolts in many Arab nations.

“People are trying to take power from the government because the government is just about helping the rich make more money,” said Nuage Noire, a Black man participating in Occupy Paris, during an interview a few weeks ago.

“The way the government operates is not good for people because it costs too much just to live,” said Noire, as fellow Occupy participates cleaned their site at La Defense, the showcase major business district containing most of the tallest buildings in the French capital.

But while folks finally started hearing the realities of economic inequities they still were not listening to the race-based rhythms of those inequities cited for decades by Blacks.

The 1951 petition to the United Nations charging the U.S. government with genocide against African-Americans pointedly identified “monopoly capital [as] the prime mover” in the mammoth conspiracy of genocide.

“While monopoly’s immediate interest is profit, its long term aim is keeping the political and economic control it now enjoys over the American people and the American government through emasculating democratic mass movements by disfranchising millions and setting one group of Americans over and against others.”

Those behind that genocide petition, progressive Blacks and whites, endured cavalier dismissal then and now with critics blasting them as communists.

Even earlier this year a Princeton Black History professor who should know better use communist to demean when referencing petitioners who included respected activist Mary Church Terrell and then lawyer/later U.S. Congressman George Crockett. 

In 2011 with millions of dollars now legally flowing into political campaigns to sway outcomes, authorities unleashing SWAT cops on peaceful Occupy protestors and media pundits aligned with the wealthy purveying racist divisiveness the accuracy of assertions in the 1951 genocide petition remain evident…for those who want to see…

Hopefully, clarity will continue in 2012…

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Fellowship Program.

Gene Marks is clearly an idiot. It’s entirely possible that he is a kind, decent, well-meaning idiot whose heart is in the right place, but the man is an idiot nonetheless.

Marks, if you haven’t heard, is a Main Line-based certified public accountant and business consultant who this week wrote an article for Forbes magazine titled, “If I Were A Poor Black Kid.”

My eye-rolling started as soon as I saw the headline — as it usually does when a middle-aged, white man of privilege starts preaching about what poor people should do and how they should live — and doing so from the safety and comfort of his tastefully-appointed den in Bryn Mawr.

The article contained much of the expected ‘those people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ mentality — with such pearls of wisdom as, “If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.”

It gets even more condescending from there, touting educational apps for smartphones and the latest advances in school-assisted software. All nice, and all true — and for the most part, unattainable for all but a few poor Black kids.

But it isn’t his patronizing condescension that makes Marks an idiot — it isn’t even the fact that he published his screed in Forbes magazine, where he cannot possibly believe large numbers of poor Black kids hold a subscription.

No, he’s an idiot because any middle class, suburban white guy who thinks he has the instant solution to what ails poor Black people — without actually meeting or talking to any of them — is as clueless as his is out of touch.

Notice I did not call the man a racist — for I have no idea of his racial feelings — and arrogance, even hubris on the level of Mr. Marks, is not by itself an indicator of racial hatred. For all I know, Marks could really be thinking he’s somehow helping poor Black folks. He could genuinely believe that 350 years of prejudice, poverty and oppression — plus another fifty years of inequality, subjugation and mass incarceration — could all be wiped away if poor Black kids would only follow his simplistic, naïve advice.

That doesn’t necessarily make you a racist. It does, however, make you an idiot.

Surely he must have known his piece would cause backlash — otherwise why name it that, and why offer the caveat of being “short, balding and mediocre” — as if self-deprecating humor is a substitute for reasoned thought.

Yes, it is extraordinarily difficult for children in poor communities to obtain a high-quality education — even for the smartest, most willing students. Teachers are overworked, overwrought and spend so much class time disciplining disruptive students there’s very little time left for the kids who aren’t causing problems.

As long as they keep quiet, bright kids can go through their entire 12 years without being recognized as gifted. Their talents will never be nurtured or allowed to blossom to their full potential. Still, we all know kids who thrive and manage to make the best of their few educational opportunities.

Yes, it is difficult for single mothers to raise quality children — especially boys — without a sufficient support system, including, most especially, the boy’s father. But we all know women who do it every day — maturely, admirably and without fanfare.

Every time some white guy comes down from on high with his holy proclamations about what poor Blacks should do, they seem to believe they’re the first to come up with these handy dandy “solutions.” As if Black teachers, parents, psychologists, sociologists and community activists haven’t been working on these problems for years — and happen to know for a fact that there are no handy dandy solutions.

Admittedly, no one has all the answers — and what solutions do exist are not easy, and not without great effort and on the part of a great many people are they fulfilled.

But when I want advice about poor Black people, I’ll ask one.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

If one instant is too long to endure an injustice imagine the anguish of suffering nearly one billion seconds locked inside a solitary confinement prison cell for a crime evidence indicates you did not commit.

That is the plight of the most recognized death-row inmate in the world, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia-born journalist whose imprisonment reaches the thirty-year mark this Friday, Dec. 9, 2011.

For many in Philadelphia, Abu-Jamal’s guilt is solid fact so Abu-Jamal spending 946-million-plus-seconds inside a cell since his arrest for killing a Philadelphia policeman constitutes just punishment.

However, for millions around the world, the 15.7-million-plus minutes of Abu-Jamal’s incarceration constitutes a horrific miscarriage of justice staining America’s cultivated image of commitment to legal fairness.

“Every time I demonstrate for Mumia down in London’s financial district I see this guy who says he’s from Philadelphia, and he always shouts that Mumia is guilty as hell,” said Osagyefo Tongogara, the head of Britain’s Free Mumia Coalition.

“But when I ask this guy to debate, putting his facts out and I presenting my facts, this guy just runs away,” said Tongogara said during an interview last week.

Those convinced of Abu-Jamal’s guilt cite facts like Pennsylvania courts constantly confirming Abu-Jamal’s guilt by dismissing all of his appeals.

Yet, those convinced of Abu-Jamal’s mistreatment question the propriety of Pennsylvania courts voiding more than 200 death penalty convictions citing various factual and procedural errors while claiming that not a single legal error exists anywhere in the most controversial murder case in Pennsylvania’s 300-year-plus history.

Pennsylvania courts, for example, have eliminated over two dozen death sentences on the sole procedural issue of defense lawyers failing to present mitigating evidence against capital punishment during the trial’s death penalty phase.

Although Abu-Jamal’s overwhelmed/undermined defense lawyer presented no mitigating evidence during the 1982 trial, state courts claim no error exists like in similar cases receiving relief by contending Abu-Jamal “controlled” his defense.

That rationale of Abu-Jamal controlling his defense contradicts the reality that the 1982 trial judge snatched away Abu-Jamal’s self-defense right days before that trial began and then barred Abu-Jamal from attending most of his trial because of Abu-Jamal’s protests against having his self-defense right robbed.

That asserted “control” is legal fiction marauding as fact.

But that assertion is consistent with court patterns twisting established law to speciously justify rejecting Abu-Jamal’s valid appeal claims.

While Abu-Jamal detractors say disruptions rightly resulted Abu-Jamal losing self-defense rights, news accounts from 1982 contradict that contention.

Those news accounts depict Abu-Jamal’s courtroom behavior as “business like” and non-disruptive until the trial judge revoked self-representation, granting the prosecutor’s unproven assertion that some potential jurors found Abu-Jamal’s dreadlocks scary.

“Mumia has been a popular hero for many French people [because] he is the victim of a corrupt justice system,” said Claude Gillaumaud, a professor in France who began campaigning for Abu-Jamal in 1995 by organizing her college students.

Abu-Jamal is an honorary citizen in more than 20 French cities, Gillaumaud said, and a street in the Paris suburb of St. Denis carries his name. Similar support for Abu-Jamal exists across Europe and beyond from South America to the African nation of Ghana.

“He’s an example to all of us because he remains an activist even after spending 30-years in hell,” said Gillaumaud, who published a 2007 Abu-Jamal biography “A Free Man on Death Row.”

Typical of tensions in this scrutinized case Abu-Jamal opponents and proponents see different things in the same set of facts.

Opponents cite the eyewitness who testified he saw Abu-Jamal shoot Officer Daniel Faulkner from his cab that was parked behind Faulkner’s patrol car.

Proponents question this eyewitness account by citing the failure of any official police crime scene photographs to show the parked cab.

Some opponents say police immediately took the cab and its driver to homicide headquarters for questioning.

But police crime scene investigation regulations operative in 1981 forbade removal of that cab and if removed required chalk-marks listing its location.

If police, in fact, moved the cab they improperly tampered with the crime scene, enhancing error by failing to make regulation required chalk-marks.

Police even failed to follow standard procedure by testing Abu-Jamal’s hands to confirm he fired a gun that night.

Police claim they just forgot to perform that standard test — curiously the same test police didn’t forget to perform on others initially suspected of possible involvement in Faulkner’s fatal shooting.

That failure to perform such a basic and crucial test evidences either sloppy police work or police hiding results of a test proving Abu-Jamal’s innocence.

“This is ridiculous and disgraceful that the government ignores evidence of innocence in this case,” said Demitry Lapidus, a student at the prestigious London School of Economics. “I am from Russia, and it makes me sad to see political prisoners in the U.S. the same as in Russia.”

Despite questions about what did or didn’t happen at the 1981 crime scene or during years of appellate court review, it is unquestionable that they jury convicting Abu-Jamal in 1982 did not hear all available evidence.

Will Francome, the Englishman at the center of the award-winning 2007 film “In Prison My Whole Life” examining the Abu-Jamal case, criticized this inauspicious 30th anniversary.

“It’s clear to me that there are and always have been major questions surrounding the case, and a grave injustice has been done.”

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.

Over 5,000 students marched through the streets of London last Wednesday loudly protesting against increases in college tuition fees, decreases in education funding at all levels and reductions to public services initiated by Britain’s conservative-led government.

Hours after that London demonstration thousands of students at Penn State University staged a loud, violent protest that police in the central Pennsylvania town of State College tagged a riot.

That Penn State protest/riot had nothing to do with either the tuition increase caused by funding cuts initiated by Pennsylvania’s conservative governor nor solidarity with other college students protesting against corporate greed under the “Occupy Movement.”

No, Penn State students went on a riotous rampage because university officials sacked their beloved football coach, Joe Paterno.

Penn State’s Board fired the 84-year-old football legend due to his remote role in an alleged pedophilia spree by Jerry Sandusky, a man formerly a ranking coach in Paterno’s powerhouse.

That firing fired rage in many students who felt it was too harsh, despite some students acknowledging to reporters that Paterno didn’t “morally” do the right things when dealing with reports of Sandusky molesting children.

News reports said some participants in that Penn State riot physically attacked police without suffering beatdowns, unlike Berkeley, Calif., campus police who brutalized students with batons when breaking up a peaceful Occupy site late last Wednesday evening.

While criticisms rightly rain down on those rioting Penn State students, it’s wrong to think that dumb outbursts related to sports are exclusive to that school.

In 2010 students at the University of Maryland celebrating a basketball victory went into riot mode while in 2005 Michigan State University students rioted over a basketball loss — as did Penn State students in 2001.

However, some Penn State students need to learn an important lesson lost in their apparently blind allegiance to Paterno and the football dynasty he engineered.

The really ugly thing here isn’t officials punting Paterno or penalties against the image of Penn State — the university and/or its football team.

Far worse than any insult — actual or imagined — is damage done to individuals — those young victims that authorities charged Sandusky with abusing sexually.

As one child sex abuse survivor wrote, the true tragedy is “the very real physical and emotional pain inflicted on at least eight, and now possibly nine or more young boys …”

Another tragedy obscured here is adults constantly turning blind eyes to child abuse.

Yes, two former Penn State officials are under indictment for covering up Sandusky’s crimes.

Yet, according to the grand jury report, the top prosecutor in the county containing State College had solid evidence of a Sandusky sex crime in 1998 — from an admission by Sandusky — but decided against filing child abuse charges.

That evidence came from police who themselves declined to go beyond that blind-eyed prosecutor.

Once again, the State College area isn’t unique for prosecutors ignoring abuses against children.

In Wilkes-Barre, 173 miles northeast of State College, prosecutors for years ignored a judge abusing the rights of children by forcing them to face trial without defense lawyers then quickly sending them to kiddy prison for the flimsiest of offenses.

That judge is now in prison for taking bribes from a private prison operator to send children to his government-funded prison.

Prosecutors have legal and ethical duties to report wrong-doing — as that judge was doing — but Wilkes-Barre prosecutors ignored that duty … claiming like Paterno that they didn’t realize it was real abuse.

Blind-eyed Wikes-Barre prosecutors — including one now serving as a juvenile court judge — remain in their jobs because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court blind-eyes their outrageous inaction disregarding that court’s duty to enforce ethical/legal-conduct rules covering lawyers.

An outrageous mishandling by Philadelphia and federal officials of blatant physical child abuse took place forty-four-years ago.

That Nov. 17, 1967 incident involved Philly cops under the command of infamous Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo savagely attacking public school students peacefully protesting outside School District headquarters.

That night-stick swinging assault described in 1967 as a “police riot” left many among the 5,000 Black student protestors hospitalized some with serious injuries and it produced 57 arrests.

Police crushed students peacefully seeking Black History instruction plus basic improvements like fixing leaking school roofs and supplying textbooks.

Philly’s 1967 mayor refused widespread demands to fire Rizzo who became mayor six years later plunging Philadelphia into a reign of racist terror that cost taxpayers millions.

Philly’s 1967 top prosecutor ignored those criminal assaults by cops.

Adding insult to those 11/17/67 injuries, federal judges found no fault with police brutalizing peaceful children without provocation.

This Thursday (11/17) a commemoration of that 1967 protest is scheduled for School District headquarters on N. Broad Street at 12:30pm.

Commemoration speakers include Dr. Walter Palmer, organizer of that ’67 protest.

Ironically, today Black School District officials (including now former Superintendent Ackerman) fight against Palmer’s efforts for educational improvements despite their employment resulting from struggles for desegregated employment at the District by people like Palmer.

Philly students four decades ago learned a searing lesson following that 1967 police riot that haunts America today: authorities dismiss official misconduct…to society’s detriment.

As a white speaker stated during a predominately-white anti-police-abuse rally days after the 11/17/67 riot noted: Whites must combat racism or “we whites will also be used as tools of oppression.”

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.

Back when I was in the military, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” was pretty much required reading. Commanders quoted from the book freely and often, and everyone, down to us lowly deck swabbies, were supposed to understand its metaphors and hidden meanings.

An all-time favorite passage was, “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.”

Translation: A well-planned strategy of deployment, mapped out to the smallest detail, is as much a guarantor of success as a hastily formed plan is a guarantor of failure.

Every smart military commander knows this. Smart politicians know it too. In fact, you’ll often hear politicians quote Sun Tzu, although few of them seem to understand the practical modern day applications.

President Barack Obama understands.

In fact, I’m going to give the brother his just due. Obama is the smartest man in Washington, bar none. He just ran rings around the Republican leadership, beat them to a pulp at their own game, and left them confused and wondering what to do next. On the deficit, the GOP’s core issue and dog whistle talking point, Obama just pulled off what could be the greatest smackdown in congressional budget history.

Start putting the pieces together, and watch the man’s genius at work.

That bitter fight a few months ago over raising the debt ceiling triggered the formation of the debt supercommittee, six Republicans and six Democrats whose job would be to cut through the gridlock and figure out a way to cut $1.2 trillion from the national debt.

As you recall, the GOP threatened to hold the entire government hostage over the raising of the debt ceiling, a routine formality afforded without much debate to every president in modern history. In fact, those same Republicans had no objection to raising the ceiling under Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush seven times.

See, it all goes back to the GOP’s core strategy, as outlined more than two years ago by Sen. Mitch McConnell and others: to make sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president. Not to make America a better country, not to serve their constituents to the best of their abilities, but to do everything in their power to nullify Obama’s initiatives and policies, no matter how worthy or necessary.

Knowing that, Obama would have to know the supercommittee would crash and burn through their deadline this week without having accomplished a single thing. They were, predictably, handcuffed by the deadlock they willfully created.

So what happens, and how does that benefit the president?

Now, those spending cuts the GOP were dead set against go into effect automatically in January 2013, after next year’s elections for president, and for congress. That means large cuts to the defense budget, but no cuts at all to Medicare and Social Security, the Democrats’ bread and butter. And as a bonus, also in January 2013, the federal tax rate shifts back to the rates during the Clinton era, before Bush’s millionaire tax loopholes.

By banking on the GOP’s hatred of him, and by betting on their willingness to act against their own interests, he got what he wanted without much sacrifice on his part. Knowing their blind allegiance to a pinhead demagogue named Grover Norquist and a no-taxes-forever pledge he made them sign, Obama watched while the GOP members of the supercommittee backed themselves, and their party, into an uncomfortable corner.

They were now, like it or not, the party of the one percent. While they have always been the unflinching champions of greedy bankers and corporations, they were forced, maybe for the first time, to admit it in front of the nation.  

By publicly defending the very thieves who sank our economy in the first place, and by demanding that the middle class, not the richest one percent of Americans, shoulder the burden of fixing that economy — the GOP has put themselves right where the president wants them — shooting blindly in every direction.

Couple that with the pitiful collection of dullards and maniacs they’ve decided are their best chance of beating Obama next fall, and you can see how the president must have seen this coming eight or ten moves ago, and like a chess grand master, skillfully maneuvered his opponent into a position of vulnerability.

He fooled the entire leadership of the Republican Party. They will never give him credit for it, but he made them all look foolish, and gave himself another leg up on his re-election campaign.

I’ll give him credit, though. Barack Obama is the smartest man in Washington.

While most African Americans quietly accept insulting policies from the Obama Administration, like eliminating affirmative-action, many Africans loudly reject destructive policies emanating from the White House of the first American president of acknowledged African ancestry.

This criticism by Africans, rarely reported in U.S. media, is particularly harsh regarding the escalation of American military activities across their vast continent.

These escalations contradict Obama’s professions of positive changes in American policies that raised African expectations of more books not bombs.

Affiong L. Affiong, a Nigerian-born activist once imprisoned in her homeland for opposing human rights violations there, feels President Barack Obama (son of a Kenyan father) has not been good for Africa.

“I think Obama is the classic case of neo-colonialism,” said Affiong, during a recent interview in London. She is co-founder of the Moyo wa Taifa Pan Afrikan Women’s Solidarity Network. She splits her work life between London and Ghana.

American military activities on the African continent have escalated steadily under the Obama administration, which has authorized assaults against terrorists suspected of links to al Qaeda, enlarged the U.S. military command in Africa (AFRICOM) and joined the British and the French in overthrowing Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi this year.

President Obama justified America’s billion-dollar-plus involvement in the assault against oil-rich Libya on humanitarian grounds, claiming that bombing prevented Gaddafi from massacring his opponents.

Yet the Libyan rebels Obama and NATO supports — including some rebel leaders with long-standing al Qaeda links — have themselves engaged in a horrific racist massacre of Black Libyans and African migrant workers in that country, all without strong condemnation from the White House, which has made no effort to end those atrocities.

“Yesterday it was slavery, then colonialism and now the dictators Obama, [British Prime Minister David] Cameroon and [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy are attempting to colonize Africa again,” said Made’ Gueu.

Gueu is a member of an organization opposed to the French removal this year of the elected president of the Ivory Coast in West Africa, a move backed by the Obama administration.

Many Africans and others see escalations in American military activity as a projection of Western power directed toward securing tighter dominance over Africa’s vast mineral wealth.

African critics reject contentions by the U.S. and its European allies that military escalation promotes democracy.

“Africa is the new battle ground in a war over resources between the West and China,” a member of the African Peoples Socialist Party said during an early November protest at the American Embassy in London.

At the end of October the American news service Associated Press released an article detailing increased U.S. military activities across the African continent supposedly designed to “fight militants.”

Those activities, the article stated, include supplying military equipment, providing intelligence and expending “tens of millions of dollars” — dollars the White House claims are not available for targeted initiatives for decreasing historic high rates of unemployment and mortgage foreclosures among Blacks.

That article referenced $45-million in military equipment sent to Uganda and Burundi to support their forces in Somalia plus $24-million to Kenya, which invaded southern Somalia near the end of October.

Kenyan officials said their incursion in Somalia is to end murderous cross-border raids by the Al-Shabaab militia, an organization in Somalia that U.S. officials link to al Qaeda.

Duale Yusuf, an activist from Somalia, denounced destructive U.S. foreign policy in Somalia during that November protest outside the American Embassy in London.

“There is a Guantanamo Bay prison in Mogadishu where thousands of Somalis are being tortured. American drones are killing people in Somalia. We don’t need drones, we need peace, like in America and Britain,” said Yusuf, criticizing the latest upsurge in American military activity in his homeland in the Horn of Africa.

“We tell Obama to remove the CIA from Mogadishu where they are torturing people. We are not terrorists in Somalia. We want schools, and hospitals like in the U.S. and Britain,” Yusuf said about his homeland wrecked by twenty years of civil war following the over-throw of an American-aligned dictator in 1991.

The opinions about Obama Administration African policies expressed by activists like Affiong Affiong mirror sentiments expressed recently in an article co-authored by Bill Fletcher, the immediate past president of the Afro-American lobbying/policy group Trans Africa Forum.

Fletcher wrote:  “…there is something very wrong in Obama’s foreign policy” criticizing U.S. military aggression in regions ranging from Africa to Afghanistan and beyond under President Obama.

Fletcher’s article pointedly criticized the lack of “outcry” from black Americans about Obama Administration foreign policy, noting that historically blacks “regularly criticize and openly oppose interventionist activities by the USA…”

Fletcher blames this “relative silence” on the paralysis stalking the African-American body politic stemming from a misplaced belief that criticizing Obama is “somehow disloyal.”

Similar to Fletcher’s criticism, some Africans are critical of their leaders.

The Ghana-based Coalition Against Foreign Military Intervention In Africa, a group Alliong works with, criticizes Africa’s leaders and the African Union for failing to “represent the people of Africa” against the resurgent domination efforts by America, Britain, France and other industrialized nations to monopolize Africa’s resources.

“To date, the performance of most African leaders has been nothing less than shameful,” stated a Coalition position paper, stressing an “indisputable” track record of European/American alliances in “staging coups [and] decimating economies [to] control African resources and its people.”

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Program.