[Is the President a King? (in 2008), Justice for Crimes Against
Humanity (1983), A Safe, Legal, Way to Relieve Stress (1913), Where
Was OSHA and EPA?, (2008) Integrating Carnegie Hall (1938), You Call
This "Home Rule"? (1973), Freedom Now! (1848)]
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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, DEC 19–25  
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_ Is the President a King? (in 2008), Justice for Crimes Against
Humanity (1983), A Safe, Legal, Way to Relieve Stress (1913), Where
Was OSHA and EPA?, (2008) Integrating Carnegie Hall (1938), You Call
This "Home Rule"? (1973), Freedom Now! (1848) _

,

 

_A PRESIDENT IS NOT A KING, OR IS HE?_

15 YEARS AGO, on December 19, 2008, President George Bush announced
that he had the authority to order the U.S. Treasury to loan two of
the world's biggest corporations, General Motors and Chrysler, $13.4
billion in order to avert their slide into bankruptcy. Bush's action
might have resulted in a constitutional crisis, because the money for
the bailout had been appropriated by Congress for the Troubled Asset
Relief Program, which was specifically limited to provide assistance
to "financial institutions." Bush had tried, and failed, to get
Congress to agree to bail-out GM and Chrysler, so he decided to ignore
the legislative mandate and declared that he was not bound to obey it.
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_JUSTICE FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY IN ARGENTINA, BUT FOR HOW LONG?_

40 YEARS AGO, on December 20, 1983, an Argentinian court indicted the
last president to serve during the 8-year military dictatorship that
resulted in the death or disappearance of 30 thousand people, the vast
majority of them leftists. Reynaldo Bignone was eventually sentenced
to 25 years in prison for his role in his government's systematic use
of kidnapping, torture and murder. He died in a prison hospital.
 Today, the brand-new Trump-like president of Argentina, Javier
Milei, questions just how bad the Army's brutal reign of terror was.
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_A SAFE, LEGAL, WAY TO RELIEVE STRESS_

110 YEARS AGO, on December 21, 1913, the Sunday New York World
published the first known crossword puzzle, invented by journalist
Arthur Wynne. The diversion caught on and within a decade most U.S.
newspapers published them regularly.
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_WHERE THE HECK WAS OSHA AND EPA?_

15 YEARS AGO, on December 22, 2008, the largest-ever U.S. industrial
spill occurred near Kingston, Tennessee, when a dike owned by the U.S.
government's Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) failed, releasing more
than 1.1 billion gallons of highly toxic coal ash slurry to flow free
over more than 300 acres and seriously pollute two rivers. Contrary to
a "fact" sheet published by the TVA a week after the spill, stating
the ash was "not hazardous," the slurry was found to be radioactive
and to contain dangerous levels of arsenic, copper, barium, cadmium,
chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and thallium, all of them toxic.
Initially the TVA estimated that the spill would take four to six
weeks to clean up instead of the 7 years and more than $1 billion
required.  At least 30 members of the clean-up crew, who did not
receive essential protection from the mess, have died prematurely as a
result of their exposures. If you've read this far, you won't be
disappointed by this 5-minute video: [link removed]

_INTEGRATING CARNEGIE HALL, ONSTAGE AND OFF_

85 YEARS AGO, on December 23, 1938, an unprecedented concert took
place in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. A racially integrated,
standing-room-only crowd filled the hall to spend three-and-a-half
hours listening to a large cast of musical performers, all of whom
were African-American. Nothing like the combination of an all-Black
cast playing for an integrated audience had ever taken place in any
major concert hall in North America. 

The concert that helped to eradicate the musical color line as nothing
before was titled "From Spirituals to Swing" and subtitled "The Music
Nobody Knows." Its cast included many performers who are now
considered to be musical immortals, such as Count Basie, Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, Ruby Smith, Big Joe Turner, Big Bill
Broonzy,  Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Albert Ammons, Meade ‘Lux’
Lewis, Pete Johnson and James P. Johnson, but who were, at the time,
totally unknown to white audiences. 

The event, which was an enormous success, would probably never have
happened had it not been for the willingness of the Communist Party of
America to put up the front money that made it possible. Not
surprisingly From Spirituals got a rave review from the CP's weekly
magazine, "New Masses," which made many excellent points, including
this one: The concert "marked the close alliance between the music
made in the everyday life of the Negro and the music which has come to
be called swing ; it maintained an authenticity which served as a
crushing indictment of commercial jazz with all its attendant
chicanery and lack of sincerity; and finally, it proved that an
instinctive love of music will break through the thickest fog of
oppression, and with lightning speed and irrefutable argument, record
that oppression."
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_You Call This "Home Rule"?_
 
50 YEARS AGO, on December 24, 1973, Congress gave up its dictatorial
control of Washington, D.C., when Richard Nixon signed the District of
Columbia Home Rule Act, which gave D.C. its first elected mayor and
city council. But Congress -- a governing body that is overwhelmingly
white -- stopped far short of allowing the citizens of D.C. -- the
majority of whom are Black -- from governing themselves. In fact,
under so-called "Home Rule" government, Congress controls D.C.'s
budget and has veto power over legislation passed by the city council.
Also, the President appoints the District's judges, and the District
has no voting representation in Congress. 

Conservatives in Congress have repeatedly exercised veto power over
liberal laws adopted by the D.C. City Council. For example, in 1981,
Congress struck down a D.C. law that would have decriminalized
homosexual acts and adultery between consenting adults and lowered
rape sentences from life to 20 years. In 1988, Congress blocked the
D.C. Council's decision to use public funds to pay for abortion
service and a law that would have required city employees to live in
D.C. In 1998, Congress vetoed the result of a D.C. referendum in favor
of legalizing medical marijuana. Earlier this year, Congress -- with
President Biden’s support – blocked the D.C. Council’s
criminal-code reform, which would have eliminated mandatory-minimum
sentences. To add insult to injury, Congress is now considering the
repeal of the 50-year-old "Home Rule" law.
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_Freedom Now!_
 
175 YEARS AGO, on December 25, 1848, Ellen and William Craft, having
liberated themselves from enslavement in Georgia by an amazing and
heroic ruse, arrived safely in Philadelphia, finally out of the reach
of slave-catchers. The story of the Craft's successful flight to
freedom is well worth reading at length, which you can do here
[link removed], but this is the
100-word version: The Crafts were married and working for their
enslavers in Macon, Georgia, some thousand miles by train and by
steamship from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Twenty-two-year-old Ellen
Craft was light-skinned enough to pass for white. She had the
brilliant idea to disguise herself as a young man and travel openly to
Philadelphia in the company of a man posing as her enslaved servant,
who was actually her 24-year-old husband William. At the time it was
common for enslavers to travel with an enslaved servant, but a
slave-owning woman would almost never travel with a male enslaved
person. Hence Ellen's decision to disguise herself as a man. Their
perilous journey took five days. Here's a link to a detailed (but
brief) version of the the heroic life and times of Ellen and William
Craft: [link removed]  

* U.S. history
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* 2008 Financial Crisis
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* Argentina's Dirty War
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* 2008 Tennessee coal slurry catastrophe
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* racism in music
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* DC home rule
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* escape from slavery
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