The Civil Right Institute Announces New Research Project to Examine Kerner Commission

The Civil Right Institute Announces New Research Project to Examine Kerner Commission

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The Civil Right Institute Announces New Research Project to Examine Kerner Commission
‘Choosing the Future’ Research Project Looking to Create New Data to Influence Better Public Policies


July 6, 2015 – Today, The Civil Rights Institute (TCRI) is excited to announce a strategic partnership with thought leaders around the country to revisit the Kerner Commission in light of recent events.   This particular project, Choosing the Future, will use the next three years to gather the data and convene a national convention in 2018 to share their findings and discussion new solutions.

In 2018 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) will be celebrating its 50th anniversary. Less than 3 years after the 1968 report was released President Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” devastating the same communities that the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts were meant to protect and creating the modern-day prison-industrial complex.  TCRI’s research will use the Kerner Commission, along with recent events, to engage urban communities in discussions about the current public policies and their effectiveness in their neighborhoods.

Noted names who have come together to work with TCRI and its proposed research project are Dr. Nicholas Johnson – Fordham University School of Law; Dr. Glenn Loury – Brown University; Dr. Craig Frisby – University of Missouri; Robert Woodson, a noted civil rights activist and President/CEO of Center for Neighborhood Enterprise;  Stephan Thernstrom – former Harvard professor; Abigail Thernstrom – former Vice-Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; Dr. Anthony Bradley – King’s College and Acton Institute  and Prof. John McWhorter – Columbia University.

 “Our country is ready to begin the healing process, especially on race and public policy.” said Regina Roundtree, President/CEO of The Civil Rights Institute. The  “Choosing the Future” research project is exactly what the name says – giving back to local residents the opportunity to have a voice in what policies affect them and their children.”  

TCRI  is using a community based participatory research model to tackle some of the hardest issues facing citizens today like police attitudes, unemployment and underemployment, housing, education and race.  One of their many goals is to create a new research model for effectively engaging marginalized communities in the public policy debate.

For more information please visit http://www.ChoosingTheFuture.org.

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About The Civil Rights Institute www.CivilRightsInstitute.org
 The Civil Rights Institute is a non-partisan, non-sectarian organization created to facilitate the emergence of a society where all humans walk in the fullness of their unalienable rights. TCRI  partners with local advocates to assist marginalized communities via research and culturally-competent public policies that support individual freedom, efficient government and free enterprise.

I Can’t Breathe: How to Reduce Police Brutality | Learn Liberty

Should we have laws we aren’t willing to kill for?

Following tragic deaths at the hands of police, like that of Eric Garner, many are outraged over racism and unaccountability in law enforcement. But George Mason Law Professor Ilya Somin takes issue with the laws themselves, and asks whether all laws are really worth killing for. Police run the risk of injuring or killing Americans every time they arrest someone--and each year, hundreds of thousands are arrested for nonviolent crimes. The more racist and unaccountable you believe the police are, Somin argues, the more you should want to limit the number of situations where they can inflict that abusive and racist behavior on civilians.

Can we justify killing people for nonviolent crimes? Can we justify the death of Eric Garner and countless others?

Howard Husock, Manhattan Institute, "Top Ideas for Revitalizing Cities"

Cuomo’s 'Start-Up NY' program cost $28 million, but has only created just 76 jobs.

(Watchdog Arena)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ‘Start-Up NY’ program has been billed as a big jobs creator, but the numbers aren’t matching the rhetoric. 

Companies that invest in certain areas known as “tax free zones” are given big tax breaks for expanding or starting new businesses, and New Yorkers were promised 2,100 new jobs over five years. The state has spent $28 million on a massive advertising campaign for the program, but so far, Start-Up NY has only created 76 of the 2,100 jobs that were promised.

One aspect of the program bothers some current business owners in the state: there are no tax breaks for existing companies that have been paying taxes and creating jobs for years, unless those companies expand into the zones specified by the state.

Read more: http://watchdog.org/210954/cuomo-start-up-ny/

The War on Ridesharing

Jared Meyer, policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, explains the economic and social benefits of ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft.

The Good of Government

        

AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES NEED A POSITIVE VIEW OF GOVERNMENT. 

by Roger Scruton June 2014

In his first inaugural address, President Reagan announced that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," and his remark struck a chord in the hearts of his conservative supporters. American conservatives, called upon to define their position, reiterate the message that there is "too much government." 

The seemingly unstoppable expansion of regulations; the increasing control over what happens in the workplace, in the public square, and even in the family; the constant manufacturing of new crimes and misdemeanors, aimed at controlling how we associate and with whom; the attempts to limit First and Second Amendment rights—these developments are viewed by many conservatives with alarm. They seem to be taking America in a new direction, away from the free association of self-governing individuals envisaged by the founders, toward a society of obedient dependents, who exchange their freedom and their responsibilities for a perpetual lien on the public purse. And you only have to look at Europe to see the result.

First Things June 2014.

To read full article please click here

British Conservative Conference 2014 | City Living: What can the Conservatives do to win more urban seats?

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Gracy Olmstead - Why Conservatives Should Care About Urban Farming

We are used to a “country versus city” dichotomy. It’s not just typical to American society—the polarity has created a lot of class, cultural, and political differences throughout the world.

There are a variety of disparate mores usually cultivated in the two separate communities: one is usually more liberal, the other more conservative, one more focused on the individual and careerism, the other more focused on the family.

Urban folk and agrarians are often at odds with each other, representing different camps in larger political and ideological debates. But what happens when people bring the country to the city?

Read full article.

City of Villages Vibrant ethnic neighborhoods, not tall buildings, define the real Los Angeles

                       

Los Angeles is unique among the big, world-class American cities. Unlike New York, Boston, or Chicago, L.A. lacks a clearly defined core. It is instead a sprawling region made up of numerous poly-ethnic neighborhoods, few exhibiting the style and grace of a Paris arrondissement, Greenwich Village, or southwest London. In the 1920s, the region’s huge dispersion was contemptuously described—in a quotation alternately attributed to Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, or H. L. Mencken—as “72 suburbs in search of a city.” Los Angeles’s lack of urbane charm led William Faulkner to dub it “the plastic asshole of the world.” But to those of us who inhabit this expansive and varied place, the lack of conventional urbanity is exactly what makes Los Angeles so interesting.

My adopted hometown is the exemplar of the modern multipolar metropolis: less a conscious city than a series of alternatives created by its climate, its diversity, and a congested but still-functional system of freeways that historian Kevin Starr calls “absolute masterpieces of engineering.”

Read full article.

Brandon Loran Maxwell - Blame Unions for High Prison Costs

What’s not to love about Oregon? It’s green. It’s hip. It’s weird. Yet, behind the cultural mystique of Oregon lies a troubling truth: Compared to similar-sized states, it has one of the fastest growing prison populations in the nation and spends 7.5 percent more per inmate than the national average—$84.81 each day.

To put $84.81 in perspective, Mississippi spends $39.56 a day—merely half of what Oregon spends. In fact, of the nation’s 14 states with populations ranging between two and five million people, ten of them spend less per inmate than Oregon. Only Iowa, Connecticut, and New Mexico spend more. So where is the money going?

Interestingly enough, of the ten states that spend less than Oregon per inmate, nine are right-to-work states. Of the four states that spend equal to or more than Oregon per inmate, three are forced-union states.

Read full article.

Matt K. Lewis - Why Conservatives see rural America as the 'real' America (and why this is a problem for the GOP)

Matt K. Lewis is a contributing editor at TheWeek.com and a senior contributor for The Daily Caller.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about other conservatives adopting an anti-city worldview is that it is partly based on a pernicious lie advanced by the high priest of romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau essentially invented his own creation myth out of whole cloth. It differed greatly with the Christian understanding of creation, inasmuch as instead of viewing man as a fallen creature (due to original sin),

Rousseau envisioned early man as a sort of noble savage. It wasn't until man recognized the concept of property and ownership, Rousseau argued, that he became greedy and corrupted. In that view, a simple life is good and pure. A modern urban life is dirty and wrong.

 "Many scholars have pointed out the romanticists' idea that somehow cities are breeders of sinful behavior and people who live in the country are more virtuous is actually something that's been passed into the American psyche and actually into the American Christian psyche so that we have a tendency to have a very negative view of cities," says Keller.

Read full article.

Jill Homan - The path to Republican urban renewal

Thirteen years ago on July 1, Mayor Richard Riordan ended his term as Los Angeles mayor, leaving Republicans out of office in another major city.

 Since that time, some of the city’s residents have moved out and new residents moved in, resulting in over 300,000 net new voters registered – none of whom have lived in Los Angeles as a Republican city. If the GOP wishes to remain competitive in national elections in 2014 and beyond, it must reverse a two-decade decline in voter support in the country’s major cities.

Twenty years ago, Republicans controlled the executive branch in six of the nation’s 12 largest cities, including today, a member of the Grand Old Party holds the mayoralty in just one of these cities (San Diego). In fact, only three cities in the top 25 largest cities – representing approximately 36 million people – are led by Republican mayors. There’s no simple partisan diagnosis for this dramatic shift in political fortunes. It’s true that Republicans have, at least since Reagan was in office, focused on suburban and rural voters – some of whom were escaping cities that were dangerous or poorly managed.

Read full article.

Akindele Akinyemi: Urban Conservatism

Akindele Akinyemi is a Nigerian American educator, motivational speaker, researcher and former political consultant from Detroit, Michigan. He is widely known for his work on educational reform in K-12 in the United States with charter schools.

Detroit & The Urban Machine

I’m quite familiar with Detroit. I’ve been there many times. I was born in Sandusky, Ohio, and I can see that many Detroiters are familiar with my hometown, too, as evidenced by the license plates of the cars snaking their way along the roads leading to Cedar Point.

Ohio has a Rust Belt problem, too. On two occasions (2002 and 2004) I was the Republican candidate for state representative in a portion of Ohio’s Rust Belt, encompassing Lorain, Oberlin, parts of Elyria, and the vicinity. I didn’t win the elections, as one would expect in such Democrat bastions, but I had a chance to think long and hard about remedies for Rust Belt decay as I drew up my own economic development plans for the district I hoped to represent.

It would take a book to detail each facet of what I envisioned, and even my own blog, to date, contains only a fraction of my proposals, so I don’t plan to elaborate much within this thread (it’s already a wall of text, as it is), but my approach to urban renewal differs from most other approaches I’ve come across. My approach is different because my assessment of the causes of the decay are different. While I readily agree that Detroit’s economy must be diversified to counter the prevailing trend, I do not think that the auto industry is at the root of the decay at all.

Attitudes are at the root of the decay.

Republicans Can’t Win America if They Lose the Cities

America crossed a remarkable threshold last year when Democrat Bob Filner won the race for Mayor of San Diego. For the first time in the modern era and perhaps the first time since the two major parties took shape, none of the nation’s ten largest cities have a Republican mayor.

It would be tough to find a more pressing symptom of the party’s demographic challenge than the decline of the iconic Republican Mayor. Symbols of pragmatic, sensible leadership, Republican mayors formed a powerful link to the party’s Hamiltonian capitalist roots. Our countryside is continuing to empty as more and more Americans build a life in the city. Rebuilding a competitive urban agenda will be a critical key to building a 21st century GOP.

The decline of the party’s influence in urban areas is particularly shocking for how quickly it has developed. Outside of the machine politics of Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, Republicans were regularly competitive in most of America’s major cities until the late sixties.

During that decade, cities like Detroit, San Francisco, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles all had Republican mayors. Beyond the urban core Republicans in all of America’s big cities remained a potent, sometimes unchallenged force in suburban politics until the last few elections.

Mick Cornett: How an obese town lost a million pounds

Mayor Mick Cornett (born July 16, 1958) is the current mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, having served in that position since 2004. He is only the fourth mayor in Oklahoma City history to be elected to three terms and the first to be elected to four terms. He also serves on notable positions including the national President of the Republican Mayors and Local Officials (RMLO), and also serves on the Board of Trustees for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He was also Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Urban Economic Affairs Committee until 2007. He is a Republican.

City Journal - The Childless City

It’s hip, it’s entertaining—but where are the families?

SPLASH NEWS/CORBIS

The modern city: the casts of The Real World and Jersey Shore party it up at a New York nightclub.

 

What is a city for? Ever since cities first emerged thousands of years ago, they have been places where families could congregate and flourish. The family hearth formed the core of the ancient Greek and Roman city, observed the nineteenth-century French historian Fustel de Coulanges. Family was likewise the foundation of the great ancient cities of China and the Middle East. As for modern European cities, the historian Philippe Ariès argued that the contemporary “concept of the family” itself originated in the urbanizing northern Europe shown in Rembrandt’s paintings of bourgeois life. Another historian, Simon Schama, described the seventeenth-century Dutch city as “the Republic of Children.” European immigrants carried the institution of the family-oriented city across the Atlantic to America. In the American city until the 1950s, urbanist Sam Bass Warner observed, the “basic custom” was “commitment to familialism.”

 

Read more: http://www.city-journal.org/2013/23_3_childless-cities.html

As Detroit Prepares for Clear-Cutting, Signs of Hope

Detroit's collapse may have reached the point of providing clear ground for new growth:

spirit of america / Shutterstock.com

Yesterday an Obama administration-convened task force released what the New York Times called “perhaps the most elaborate survey of decay conducted in any large America[n] city,” detailing the pervasiveness of perceived blight in the Motor City. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force surveyed 377,603 properties, and recommended 40,077 for demolition, 38,429 for further review. Task force leader Dan Gilbert set the stakes somewhat colorfully, saying, “Blight sucks the soul out of anyone who gets near it.” In order to fully follow the task force’s clear-cutting recommendations, Detroit would need to spend at least $850 million, almost twice the $450 million the city has already planned to spend on blight.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/as-detroit-prepares-for-clear-cutting-signs-of-hope/

Cities as cradles of progressivism?

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once said that there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up garbage, and he’s still largely right. Most mayors focus much more on service delivery than ideology. There is just too much to do on any given day for mayors to indulge in the hyper-partisanship that dominates Washington and the nation’s state capitals.

 However, some believe that ideology is on the rise in American cities. Recent columns by the Washington Post’s EJ Dionne and Harold Meyerson and Tom Edsall from the New York Times have identified a trend among city officials to implement, at the local level, what they see are distinctly leftwing policies such as raising the minimum wage.

 The first question that should be asked about this trend is why is it happening now?

 Read more: http://www.publicsectorinc.org/2014/05/cities-as-cradles-of-progressivism/ 

Green Conservatism

Writer and philosopher Roger Scruton argues that conservatism is far better suited to tackle environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism.

Chaired by Matthew Taylor, chief executive, the RSA.

Listen to a podcast of the full event including the audience Q&A:http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-an...