http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Green_All_Views/

Super Bowl City on the Brink

“A celebration of concentrated wealth.” That’s what Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser called the National Football League’s two-week long pre-Super Bowl party binge. Every Super Bowl Sunday, corporate executives and politicians exchange besotted, sodden backslaps, amidst an atmosphere that would shame Jack Abramoff. Only this year the bacchanalia — complete with ice sculptures peeing Grey Goose vodka and two tons of frozen lobster flown directly to the stadium — is happening in the United States’ most impoverished, ravaged city: Detroit.

Detroit’s power elites in government and the auto industry are rolling out the red carpet while many of its people shiver in fraying rags. This contrast between the party atmosphere and abject urban suffering has been so stark, so shocking and so utterly revealing that news coverage on the city’s plight has appeared in the sports pages of the New York Times and Detroit Free Press, among others.
*
*
*
Ryan Anderson of Detroit, wrote me a chilling email saying, “The mood is one of Orwellian-flavored siege: dire warnings of a 30-day police speeding ticket bonanza, designed to raise $1 million for the construction of a damn bridge welcoming out-of-towners to the Motor City; the mayor, the governor, and every other notable on the radio urging us all to ’show ‘em what we got’ [read: Don’t further sully our already bad reputation]; and the homeless being taken to a three-day ‘Superbowl Party,’ where they’ll get the actual food and shelter they need until the big game’s over, after which they’ll be kicked back out on the streets. Welcome to the Poorest City in America, sponsored and enabled by lily-white Oakland County.”
*
*
*
Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press described the shelter, called the Detroit Rescue Mission, throwing the “three day party” to cleanse homeless people from the city’s landscape. As Albom wrote, “Lines formed before sunset, dozens of men in dirty sweatshirts, old coats, worn-out shoes. They had to line up in an alley, because, [the shelter’s director says], the city doesn’t want lines of homeless folks visible from the street. Even at a shelter, they have to go in the back door.”

FYI: You need to scroll all of the way down the page in order to read the story
http://www.alternet.org/story/31635/

NAFTA Corridors: Dividing the Nation to Multiply Profits
This essay discusses the socio-economic and envirnomental impact of two limited-access highways that are being built.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/vogel040206.html

BLACK HAWK: THE BATTLE FOR THE HEART OF AMERICA

In early April 1832, Black Hawk’s band of Sauks—some two thousand men, women, and children, including several hundred well-armed warriors—crossed the Mississippi near the mouth of the Iowa River and began making their way north toward Saukenuk, their traditional summer village, at the junction of the Mississippi and Rock rivers (now within the city limits of Rock Island, Illinois). A startled American settler encountered them along the river road. They had come in peace to reclaim their village, the Sauks told him, “but if the Whites want War they shall have it.”

That was precisely what many Americans wanted. Historian Kerry A. Trask makes this clear in Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America, both a biography of the Sauk leader (Makataimeshekiakiak—”Black Sparrow Hawk”—in the Sauk language) and a history of the war that took his name, a war that was nothing short of an instance of American genocide. Trask quotes General Henry Atkinson, commander of a small force of US Army troops sent to patrol the northern Illinois frontier: “I will treat them like dogs,” he sneered. “If Black Hawk’s band strikes one white man[,] in a short time they will cease to exist!” Atkinson was blustering—he was unwilling to take on such a large force—but his rhetoric was commonplace. Indian hating, Trask understands, was part of the very character of American settler society. Atkinson wrote Illinois governor John Reynolds for assistance, warning that “the frontier is in great danger.” Reynolds responded quickly. Facing reelection and sensing the political advantage of a quick and violent strike against a despised enemy, he called out the militia.

http://www.bookforum.com/faragher.html