Other - Politics & Government - July 2006

why is it that when it comes to America no matter what we do everyone always pisses and moans about it. If we help someone America is EVIL! If America doesn't help anyone or do anything then America is EVIL!!
I wish you people would make up your minds!! You need to STOP blaming America for your problems!! America is not the cause of your problems so think before you start bashing America. IF you dont like America ,ooo ouch that really hurts. But If America is such an EVIL and oppresive country why does everyone want to live here?

2006-07-19 05:57:21 · 3 answers · asked by slyone40068 2

Seems we had a little "bashing" that we did not attend. This is a group that does not even know the words Robert's Rules

I said, "We were not there because we were not members of the committee. Those who are not members should not attend. It is advisable that officers are not appointed as members, to stimulate a more relaxed thus productive meeting." Correct?

2006-07-19 05:54:03 · 1 answers · asked by Jennifer 3

2006-07-19 05:52:16 · 5 answers · asked by crazzzyb 1

Israel is attacking Lebanon and nobody moves.If it had been any other country attacking lebanon or Israel Bush would already had drop a few bombs wouldn't he.

2006-07-19 05:48:42 · 10 answers · asked by LOL 5

Why is it that the most religeous place in the world is contantly in a state of war

2006-07-19 05:37:00 · 19 answers · asked by comfortinknowlage 1

My mom says that the U.S. economy is headed towards a time of major inflation where the prices of things will become astronomically high. Even the smallest houses will be over one million dollars. She is pressuring me to be a nurse because she says that the only secure jobs will be in healthcare. I don't want to do that with my life. Is she right?

2006-07-19 05:28:48 · 6 answers · asked by ash5907 2

I'd like to speak to one, if you're one, then find me =) I'd be a perfect agent for local undercover / espionage.

2006-07-19 05:26:50 · 5 answers · asked by Nagnag 3

What are their beliefs or views cause I want to know what I am.

2006-07-19 05:25:24 · 12 answers · asked by Anonymous

Georgetown's Hidden History
First, it was a slave port. Later, it was a thriving center of black life. Today, it's a virtually all-white enclave. Why?
Georgetown's Hidden History
First, it was a slave port. Later, it was a thriving center of black life. Today, it's a virtually all-white enclave. Why?

By Andrew Stephen
Sunday, July 16, 2006; B01



Two ***** men $300

One ditto woman $150

Four ditto girls $150

Two horses $200

Two cows $30

It was a shocking discovery . Flipping through files at the local library a few months ago for a school project, my 16-year-old son chanced upon the deeds of the house in which we live. He already knew it was one of the oldest in Georgetown; now he learned that in 1807, it was owned by a Thomas Turner and valued at $3,500. But it was the valuation of this other property, listed so matter-of-factly in the records, that stopped him cold: Slaves, he realized, had once lived in our house.

This awful knowledge set him on a quest for the hidden history of Georgetown, exposing unpalatable truths that had been lost, if not willfully forgotten, over the decades: that the supposedly chic Georgetown of today had once been the center of a thriving slave trade, a significant port of call for traffickers in human flesh transported in from Africa and plantations in Maryland and Virginia.

Yet so obscured has this history become that not even most Washingtonians are aware of it. Nor are they aware of the flourishing black community, mostly descended from those slaves, that once occupied a large portion of Georgetown -- until a combination of legislative, social and economic pressures gradually forced nearly all the black people out, turning the neighborhood into the wealthy, effectively all-white enclave it is today.

My son's research unearthed one part of this forgotten narrative of our neighborhood. A second hint lay in a curious Georgetown phenomenon that had always puzzled us: the continuing existence of several thriving black churches, filled every Sunday morning with African Americans who do not actually live here.

The history of our own house, though, still seemed surreal -- until, that is, very recently. Deep in the bowels of our house, there is a crude crawl space beneath the basement, a darkly mysterious place in which it is impossible to stand upright. It is filled with an ancient cesspit, cavities, brickwork and ledges that I had vaguely assumed served some long-forgotten purpose; one of my least-favorite tasks is crawling into it to remove the bodies of our share of the huge Norway rats that swarm all over the neighborhood. A month or so ago, an electrician had to crawl into the space, and afterward I apologized that he'd had to do so. "No problem," he replied. "You can see that was where slaves did the cooking."

For me, at least, the penny suddenly dropped. In that space below my house where only rats now live, we concluded, fellow humans had almost certainly cooked for Mr. Turner and his family -- and may even have slept there, too. This thought brought home to my family and me some realities of U.S. history that so many white Americans choose either not to know or to forget: the roots of racial animosity and why their legacy persists to this day.

Lest we forget, there were neither blacks nor whites in Georgetown -- then known as Tahoga -- before British settlers came ashore around 1696. It was a peaceful village inhabited by the Nacotchanke Indians. Straightforward facts and precise dates of Georgetown history are difficult to establish; much of the subject is undocumented, and accounts differ.

But the basic story is indisputable. The Indians were soon expunged by the settlers. Then, in the 18th century, white entrepreneurs realized that huge sums of money could be made from the insatiable demand -- in both Europe and the United States -- for the tobacco cultivated in Virginia and Maryland (of which Georgetown was then a part). Because of its position on the Potomac, Georgetown provided an ideal port from which ships laden with tobacco could sail to Europe; by the end of the 18th century, it was just about the largest tobacco port in the United States, an economic powerhouse to which slaves were brought to provide labor and to service the households of the tobacco merchants.

Slavery, of course, is as old as humanity. European powers -- first Portugal, followed by Spain, France and Britain -- began abducting men and women from Africa to work as slaves in the New World. To its everlasting shame, Britain, my own country, was responsible for the transport of probably more than a million slaves, many of them to work in the sugar fields of the Caribbean. But at the point when English abolitionists were finally forcing an end to my country's slave trade, America's exploitation of slaves on its soil had not even reached its zenith.

The year of Britain's Abolition of the Slave Trade Act -- 1807 -- has a special resonance for me, as it is the very year when Thomas Turner owned those seven slaves. I shudder to realize that just a two-minute walk from my house, a white man named John Beattie conducted a highly successful slave-trade business on what is now O Street, just east of Wisconsin Avenue, that flourished well into the second half of the 19th century.

Blacks thus became essential economic tools for the development of Georgetown, but were simultaneously feared and rejected socially. The first Georgetown law to oppress them came as early as 1795, forbidding them to congregate in groups of seven or more. The 1800 Census showed that, in a population of 5,120 in Georgetown, there were already 1,449 slaves and 277 "free blacks."

There was a lone exception to the congregating law: Blacks could go to church on the Sabbath. But they were still kept rigidly separate from whites. St. John's Episcopal Church, established in 1816 at 33rd and O streets NW, had an outdoor staircase built especially for blacks; it's still there today.

That same year, hardly surprisingly, a handful of free black men managed to start their own tiny church -- which was to become Mount Zion United Methodist Church, one of the churches that remain a potent black force in Georgetown today. It was another half-century, though, before Mount Zion was allowed to have its own black minister. Its burial crypt, still visible at the church's cemetery at 27th and Q streets NW, was reputed to be a hiding place for escaped slaves fleeing to the North via the Underground Railroad.

I imagine that at least the girls who formed part of the property of my house in 1807 were still alive when the 1848 "Black Code; Ordinances of the Corporation of Georgetown" was introduced. It is hard to convey the viciousness of the laws, so I will confine myself to just three examples: The code decreed that any black person swimming in the Potomac or Rock Creek at night "shall be publicly whipped"; that any black person who watched a cockfight could be punished with as many as 39 lashes; and that even flying a kite was punishable by whipping. That same year, 77 slaves tried to escape this kind of oppression on a ship called the Pearl; furious owners sent a posse on a steamer called the Salem to recapture them, and it caught up with the Pearl 140 miles downriver.

The black flight from Georgetown was already beginning. But blacks were still being bought and sold here as late as November 1861. The next year, President Abraham Lincoln signed a local law that freed slaves eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation. Furious white merchants demanded compensation, and an "expert examiner of slaves" was brought in. After examining their teeth and general health, he assessed the overall value of the slaves of Georgetown, D.C., at $300,000. Georgetown's whites then voted against a ***** Suffrage Bill by 712 to 1, passing a motion describing it as "wholly uncalled for, and an act of grievous oppression."

Blacks from the South, anticipating freedom, nonetheless poured into Georgetown. Between 1865 and 1870, its black population increased from 1,935 to 3,271. Over the next two or three decades, a skilled black working class started to emerge alongside a handful of black professionals. But countless laws and regulations that continued well into the 20th century prevented true economic and social emancipation: Only white passengers were allowed to ride on Georgetown's new electric streetcars, for example, enabling them to commute to Washington for well-paying jobs that were effectively denied to blacks.

Then came a series of economic blows that began to seal the fate of Georgetown's blacks. The Potomac silted up, virtually ending the industrial effectiveness of Georgetown's harbor. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which flowed through Georgetown and was crucial to many businesses such as flour and paper mills, flooded disastrously in 1889. Blacks were the first to lose their jobs when countless firms went bust. By 1910, the black population of Georgetown had peaked, and when the Great Depression struck 19 years later, more and more blacks found themselves displaced by whites taking menial jobs.

Perversely, FDR's New Deal then began to work against blacks in Georgetown. Thousands of well-paid white government workers poured into Washington, creating further demand for housing and pushing property prices ever higher in Georgetown. "The dispossession of the ***** resident [of Georgetown]," the Conference on Better Housing Among Negroes reported, "is jointly managed by the city's leading realtors and their allied banks and trust companies."

Two pieces of legislation passed in the 20th century by none other than Congress itself, though, were the final straws for Georgetown's blacks. The ostensible purpose of the District of Columbia Alley Dwelling Act of 1934 was to get rid of slums; but I suspect that to a House with only one black member and a Senate with none at all, slums and blacks were synonymous.

Then, in 1950, Congress passed the Old Georgetown Act "to preserve and protect places of historic interest," but it had the effect of making Georgetown's gentrification legally enforceable. It was pushed through despite fears from "***** groups," The Washington Post reported at the time, that it "might drive them from the area." Less than a decade later, Georgetown's black population had dwindled to fewer than 3 percent, and in 1972 The Post noted that fewer than 250 remained, "so few that some Georgetown residents are unaware they are there."

Blacks were thus becoming invisible by the time the likes of Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman started creating Georgetown's all-white "social salons" of such ludicrous legend. Indeed, racism was so entrenched in the nation's capital that even the glamorous young Sen. John F. Kennedy voluntarily signed a deed containing a "restrictive covenant" when he bought his house on N Street NW in 1957, agreeing that the home should not "ever be used or occupied or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to Negroes or any person or persons of the ***** race or blood."

Which brings us full circle to 2006. My son and I went to Mount Zion church on a recent Sunday morning and met an 84-year-old black parishioner named Carter Bowman, who was born in Georgetown but who long ago moved out. With neat serendipity, we met three generations of Bowmans because his son and grandson, who attends university in England, happened to be visiting. But if you go three generations in the reverse direction, you find that all of Carter Bowman's great-grandparents were born and raised when slavery was at its most intense in Georgetown. For all I know, they could have resided in that crude basement in my house, or someplace like it.

Knowing what I know now, I found it strangely moving when the Rev. Robert Slade, chief pastor at Mount Zion -- who doesn't live in Georgetown -- told my son that "when we didn't have anything, the church was our everything. . . . When there was nothing and no place to go, [it] was the one place to go." Slade's words, to us, explain why the emotional bonds to the black churches in Georgetown remain so strong.

It took a 16-year-old to bring all these realities of life in Georgetown, past and present, home to me. As a foreigner who remains deeply attached to America, I find it bewildering how so self-reverential a country can proclaim that all men are created equal but then proceed to implement racist oppression that manifestly expresses the reverse. The truth that my son and I discovered is that for many decades, blacks in Georgetown were treated little better than rats. He will never forget that, and neither will I.

newstatesman@usa.net

Andrew Stephen is the U.S. editor

of the New Statesman magazine.

2006-07-19 05:23:17 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous

Please try and convince us if you think yes, because I think the Alpha Females would likely be quite similar to their Alpha Male counterparts that currently do so much chest banging (think Gorillas here).

The best answer choice will be based on the most persuasive arguement, meaning not necessarily what I agree with.

2006-07-19 05:16:29 · 8 answers · asked by Anonymous

The title is pretty self explainatory. Will George W. Bush be remembered as one of the worst Presidents of all time, even though he's served two terms? What will his legacy be remembered for? Has he done a good job at anything?

2006-07-19 05:15:33 · 30 answers · asked by kris_rynshall 3

2006-07-19 05:14:34 · 9 answers · asked by esgunda 1

2006-07-19 05:11:06 · 4 answers · asked by JOANNE L 1

does anyone know if we are capable of doing this? How many civilians (women and children) would we kill?

2006-07-19 05:02:17 · 8 answers · asked by apresocratic 2

Its obvious that most of the time they dont listen to the public.
I thought they were suppose to represent our best interest and our ideas?
US Govt.

2006-07-19 04:56:21 · 7 answers · asked by Jimmy1575 2

They get money from you in several ways no matter what you do.

If you rent a house they take money, if you own a house they take money and if you inherit a house they take money from you then as well! You can't possibly win!

2006-07-19 04:54:43 · 17 answers · asked by Elite117 3

2006-07-19 04:53:51 · 22 answers · asked by Anonymous

2006-07-19 04:48:06 · 6 answers · asked by Morenita 1

I'll agree that America is a great country, but hardly any greater than most others in the western world.
Some American cities have murder rates many times higher than a small country of similar population.
It's the only developed country that engages in capital punishment, that actually holds the Bible up as evidence against scientific theories (eg evolution) etc...
Even on the wealth issue it doesn't fair particularly well. The average Japanese citizen is the wealthiest, followed by the Irish... an American citizen lingers in 9th place.
It's not a welcoming place for immigrants as some like to portray it, many European countries take in proportionately more immigrants (including Ireland).
Personally, I do like America. Historically it has done more to bring peace and prosperity to the world than any other country. Many of the greatest achievments of the 20th century can be attributed to Americans.
But why the greatest country in the world? I just can't see it.

2006-07-19 04:40:04 · 13 answers · asked by Anonymous

I heard that the israeli soldiers kinapped were inside lebanons borders when taken. I posed this question in a few ways and all I got was people calling me a jew hater. No one seems to understand that this is a QUESTION. let me re pose once again ~ does anyone know or can site a credible news source adressing why those soldiers were inside the border and IF that is true? GeeeeeZ people!!!! if you dont have a real answer to this, please pass by because Im tired of being attacked by those who cant read the damn question!

2006-07-19 04:37:42 · 8 answers · asked by prancingmonkey 4

We could spend it elsewhere for a better cause.

2006-07-19 04:31:30 · 4 answers · asked by Jimmy1575 2

It seems like Congress and the President would rather spend billions on other countries then re-invest into our own and fix our own problems, then maybe once fixed we could actually start to help some other countries and make a real difference.
I talking about all the govt cuts, like Veterans healthcare , etc etc etc.

2006-07-19 04:30:41 · 11 answers · asked by Jimmy1575 2

2006-07-19 04:17:51 · 23 answers · asked by Anonymous

Do Cons magnimize minor problems and minimize major problems. For example, I read the newspaper every day for the past 20 years. In that time I don't recall reading of one instance of someone burning the flag in protest. Yet the Cons want to AMEND the Constituion to ban flag burning. Then, if you point out that according to the CBO from March 2003 activities in Iraq have cost $290 Billion, they call it whining. What's the deal???

2006-07-19 04:10:54 · 2 answers · asked by 5375 4

I know this question will piss many of you off, but think about what I propose here:
A. Right now only Middle class or poor people are what compose our military. Most join to get money for college.
B. Our people are dying...but those who are Financially blessed...keep their children away.
C. Freedom is for all...so we all must pay the price. Besides those who serve can win their path to college, maybe with additional incentives.
D. We wouldn't have to give so high recruiting incentives. We can even discourage some of the immigrants who want citizenship...because one must serve first!
While I was in the military, I observed this in other countries...and it was working well...and was "Fair". "What say you?" Do you agree?
What do u think are the Pro and Cons?
Do you think the Military would be stronger?
or Do you think it is totally outrageous to propose?! "What ye say?

2006-07-19 04:02:11 · 20 answers · asked by Anonymous

Hezbollah has been using thier missles, they are not a wealthy bunch of terrorists. Actually, almost as broke as the now bankrupt Hamas. So how can they afford their weapons without help? They also have the same religious artibutes, both being Shi'a, both hating Israel.

2006-07-19 04:00:35 · 14 answers · asked by Yisrael Chai 3

"fatboys daddy" asserts I must hate jews, and "khutswe" thinks palestinians should get out of "israel" and take over jordan. Ho Hum. such tired thngs to say. One thing I hate most is being told I hate something which I actually love. ugh!!! Just because a nation and some (perhaps many, but Im sure not all) baptizes its agenda with gods holy approval, does not make it just or right. In fact, crimes against humanity are being commited. I dont supposrt terrorist actvity, but that IS what happens when an illegitimate power comes in and forces people off land and marginalizes and demonizes them. Bring this up and you get labeled an anti-semite. It is the most immature and dishonest way of lookng at an issue that on both sides has death, destruction, and loss of human rights all over the place. How arrogant to merely approach the debate with " You dont agree with us therefore you hate jews" how many people fee l HATE jews? especially not knowing my own religious or spiritual ideas.

2006-07-19 03:46:36 · 14 answers · asked by prancingmonkey 4

what do you think is going to happen on the world stage over the next 10 - 20 years? do you think the USA will fall like the roman empire? will there ever be peace in the middle east? what will become of the bird flu pandemic predictions? will george w. bush ever go on trial as a war criminal? what will come of the expression "china rising"?

2006-07-19 03:45:13 · 10 answers · asked by kogirl 2

Everybody is going on and on about how the Taliban is evil and all, but didn't our Christian forefathers do the same thing durring the Crusades and the Spanish inquisition? If it's ok for us to do it then why not them? Don't get me wrong, I'm very patriotic and I love my country, I even had an uncle die in 9-11. I just wanna know what the difference between their actions and the actions of our ancestors is. In fact wasn't the Crusades what started this whole thing, the war between the middle east and Christians? I'm just out to get a good answer that makes sense, unlike my town leaders' answers of "because this is the way that God wills it". God, or whom ever you pray to, wants us all to get along, as it says in just about every religious text. So why all the wars in the name of religion? Anyways, sorry for the ramblings, and any help in my confusion would be much apreciated.

2006-07-19 03:36:58 · 17 answers · asked by Netta 1

2006-07-19 03:33:55 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous