Crack Babies: A Retrospective Report

For those of you who lived in the late 1980s and 1990s you might remember the "crack epidemic." This was a huge political and media event in which crack cocaine was portrayed as a drug that led to super predators, addicted mothers who will do anything for more, and crack babies that are destined for a life living on social welfare.  This was also the time when the U.S. government and many states adopted tougher and tougher sentencing policies for drug offenses.  There was even discussion of forced sterilization for mothers who gave birth to babies addicted to crack.  However, while use of any hard drug during pregnancy is potentially troublesome, the media and political narrative seemed to over blow the case. Here's a retrospective video report from The New York Times on this popular narrative and it's relationship to reality.

Xavier Prep School to Reopen as St. Katherine Drexel Preparatory High School

I'm a little late on this, but it's certainly news worth posting.  Xavier Prep, which was scheduled to close at the end of the school year, will remain open under a new name, St. Katherine Drexel Preparatory High School. Courtesy of The Uptown Messenger.

Happy Hour with The Lens

This Thursday (May 9th) at 7pm, the folks at The Lens are hosing their first happy hour. This is an opportunity for them to meet readers and for readers to meet them, and an opportunity to learn what readers appreciate about their work and what they can do to better serve the city.  It will be held at Molly's at the Market (1107 Decatur St.). The folks with the Digital News Alliance (DNA) will also be there.  Hope to see you there.

Consent Decree Hearing Regarding Orleans Parish Prison

Tom Gogola from The Lens is live blogging this morning' meeting on the consent decree with OPP. His summary before the life blog is useful for a little primer on exactly what's going in the city with the prison.  Click here for the story and live blog.

FCC, High Speed Internet Access and Telecom Oligarchy

From Crooks & Liars:
This is from "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age", a book by Susan Crawford, a former adviser to Obama on science, technology and innovation issues. In this excerpt, she homes in on the monopoly extended by the Comcast/NBC merger:

To those who argued that the merger would stick U.S. consumers with high-priced, homogenized entertainment and second-class Internet access, Comcast had only to respond that the situation for consumers would not be any worse than it already was. If opponents could not decisively prove “merger-specific harms,” the phrase Comcast employees repeated endlessly to staff members across Washington, the deal could not be blocked.

By February 2010, the accepted wisdom in Washington was that the deal would go through. And it showed Americans their Internet future. Even though there are several large cable companies nationwide, each dominates its own regions and can raise prices without fear of being undercut.

Talk show host Rick Smith on Meredith Attwell Baker, the NBC/Comcast merger, and FCC corruption.

Wireless access, dominated by AT&T Inc. (T) and Verizon, is, for its part, too slow to compete with the cable industry’s offerings; mobile wireless services are, rather, complementary. Verizon Wireless’s joint marketing agreement with Comcast, announced in December 2011, made that clear: Competitors don’t offer to sell each other’s products.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Other developed countries have a watchdog to ensure that all their citizens are connected at cheap rates to fiber-optic networks. In South Korea, more than half of households are already connected to fiber lines, and those in Japan and Hong Kong are close behind. In the U.S., only about 7 percent of households have access to fiber, and it costs six times as much as in Hong Kong.

Rather than try to ensure that the U.S. will lead the world in the information age, American politicians have removed all regulation of high-speed Internet access and have allowed steep market consolidation. The cable industry has done its best to foil municipal efforts to provide publicly overseen fiber Internet access. Now, the U.S. has neither a competitive marketplace nor government oversight.

In the subcommittee hearing, Roberts never faltered, and his performance was judged a success. In the end, the Antitrust Division allowed the merger, and the FCC followed suit.

Compared with people in other countries, Americans are paying more for less and leaving many of their fellow citizens behind. Perhaps they will start to care when they see that the U.S. is unable to compete with nations whose industrial policy has been more forward-thinking.

Connecticut Shooting

If anyone's looking for more information on the school shootings in Connecticut here are some local sources.  I grew up about an hour and a half from where it happened.  I didn't learn until just recently that one of my older cousins on my dad's side lives in Newtown and has small children enrolled in school there.  I hope they're ok, but don't know yet.

http://www.wfsb.com/ (local CBS affiliate)

http://www.courant.com/ (Hartford Courant Newspaper)

http://danbury.patch.com/ (The Danbury Patch--Danbury is the nearest "city", maybe 20 minutes away)

http://www.nhregister.com/ (The New Haven Register Newspaper)

http://www.newstimes.com/news/ (A Danbury based blog/paper)

http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/ctnj.php (a really good Connecticut blog)

Update: just found out my cousin did have children in that school (Sandy Hook). One in first grade and the other in second.  They're physically safe, thankfully, but God Damn!

Michelle Alexander-author of "The New Jim Crow" to talk at Dillard University: Wednesday, November 28

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow and Associate Professor of Law at The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, will be giving the Ortique Lecture at Dillard University.  The talk will take place this Wednesday (i.e., tomorrow) at 7pm in the Georges Auditorium.  It's free and open to the public.  Definitely worth seeing.   More information below.