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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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