The Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice (MAPJ) will hold their Annual Meeting and dinner on Saturday 27 March beginning with at 6:00 pm at the Holiday Inn at the Campus, 1641 Anderson Avenue in Manhattan. The MAPJ Annual Meetings are a time for the membership and progressives from the area to come together and recharge for another year. This year's keynote speaker, Sasha Abramsky, promises to challenge as well as inform those in attendance.

Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. Originally from England and a graduate of Oxford University, he has since adopted his mother's homeland of America and now lives in Sacramento, CA, with his wife, daughter and son. He has a master degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. In 2000 he was awarded a Soros Society, Crime and Communities Media Fellowship. He is a Senior Fellow at the New York City-based Demos think tank. Abramsky's keynote for the evening is entitled: When Progressives Flinch: The Poverty Challenge in Obama's America.

Abramsky is a well-established author. His first book, Hard Time Blues, was published in 2002; his second book, Conned, was published in 2006. His third book, American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, was published by Beacon Press in the spring of 2007. In 2009 he published, Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It by PoliPoint Press. His most recent book, Inside Obama's Brain, came out in December 2009.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - All winter long a male Northern Harrier has been hunting in our crop fields. We see him gliding close to the ground, his slender body rising and falling with the contour of the land. Back in the pasture, a female Harrier is doing the same thing. As in most hawk species, she is larger than the male, but she too appears to float effortlessly just above the grass, sometimes rising above a ridge top only to disappear behind it as she follows a Flint Hills swale. Both the gray male and the brown female sport prominent white patches above the tail.

Northern Harriers used to be called Marsh Hawks, as they often hunt in open wetlands--but "harrier" is a more accurate term, for they are by no means limited to swampy ground. In fact, they are one of the characteristic birds of the tall grass prairie. My mentor, KSU ornithologist John Zimmerman, wrote in The Birds of Konza: The Avian Ecology of the Tallgrass Prairie that the grasslands of all continents have a similar array of birds: a chicken-like bird; a dryland shorebird; small, medium, and large insectivores; and a hawk that hunts on the wing.

WICHITA, Kan. - During the 1960s, while male activists were out in the streets protesting the war, the draft, the CIA, Dow Chemical, or what have you, their female counterparts often complained that they were left behind to brew the coffee and tidy up the meeting rooms. By the beginning of the decade that started Jan. 1, 1970, however, the ferment that had started to percolate in the '60s erupted into a movement that eventually became a feminist tsunami of marches, political appointments, laws, and legal decisions that changed forever the lives of women and the men who lived and worked with them.

The feminist movement, often called The Second Wave, spread across the country and around the world. Women sought equality in the workplace, in education, in their relationships, and even in men-only bars. In New York City, feminists demonstrated to liberate the men's bar in the New York's Biltmore Hotel. McSorley's, a 116-year old New York bar admitted its first woman patron on Aug. 10 after Mayor John Lindsay signed a bill prohibiting sexual discrimination in public places, making New York the first major city to have such a law.

MANHATTAN, Kan. - In 2005, I attended the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis sponsored by Free Press. While I had always been an "activist," this conference change my outlook on US culture and society like nothing else I have even been involved in. In particular, Bill Moyers's speech (you can watch it here) articulated much of the frustration I had and have with the direction our nation has taken since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

For seventeen years following the "Reagan revolution," I lived in Italy and became accustomed to a national press that truly informed along with television and radio that provided a broad diversity of music, content, and opinions with minimum commercial interruptions.

When it came to newspapers, if I wanted to read what the capitalists thought on a topic I read Il Sole 24 Ore; if I wanted to know what the Communist and Socialist Left thought I read L'Unitá or Il Manifesto. If I wanted to read what the center thought, I read La Repubblica. If I wanted the Christian Democrat point of view, I could read Avvenire. And if I wanted to know what the fascists thought, I could read Il Popolo d'Italia. In addition to these national papers, there was a profusion of local and regional newspapers. All of which received some sort of government support to help balance their budgets.

SALINA, Kan. - In a new book, Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook contend workplace equality for women boils down to not only whether women are included in the work force but on how they are included.

Despite big changes over recent decades, workplace gender inequalities endure in the United States and other industrialized nations around the world. These inequalities are created by facets of national social policy that either ease or concentrate the demands of care giving within households and shape expectations in the workplace.

GREAT BEND, Kan. - A corporation is not a person. A corporation is a piece of paper filed with the Secretary of State's office. As has been said many times: "A corporation has no body to throw into jail nor soul to throw into hell."

The U.S. Supreme Court, all nine of them, will tell you that the idea that a corporation is a person is a "legal fiction." Although a corporation is not a flesh-and-blood person, the U.S. Courts have ruled for a hundred years that they are "fictional persons" and thus have the same rights as you and I.

Republican economist Milton Friedman, when asked if corporations had any duty other than to make money for stockholders, replied: "No." In other words: "Send American jobs overseas, raid the pension plans of American workers - don't feel guilty corporate officers, because you don't have to have morals."

Politicians from both parties - from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt to Jim Hightower - have railed against the dangers of unfettered corporate power. The Democratic party was always the last line of defense to make sure that "We the People" were never drowned out by big corporations.

And then a terrible thing happened.

SALINA, Kan. - For days at a time during a four-year period, the two men slept under bridges and in makeshift camps set up by homeless individuals they befriended. They also spent a night in a shelter and visited other shelters for their research.

Jeffrey Michael Clair, Ph.D., and Jason Wasserman, Ph.D., set out to find the answer to one simple question: Why do many homeless individuals prefer living on the street to living in shelters?

So the two ventured into the streets of Birmingham, Alabama to interview homeless people, learning in the process that many programs and policies designed to help the homeless succeed only in alienating them.

Clair and Wasserman say armchair proclamations by experts and politicians about dealing with homelessness are routinely dismissed by those on the street with this response: "They don't know us."

SALINA, Kan. - The Democrat's bitter election loss in Massachusetts may be a result of how Democrats have been losing ground on the public opinion front. As fellow KFP writer, Marty Keenan, recently pointed out, "Democrats are terrible at explaining things in simple, emotional ways that win hearts and minds. Republicans are experts at explaining things in simple, emotional ways that win hearts and minds."

Marty recommended that Democrats read the excellent book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

A few other books may also provide some of the tools that Democrats need to regain lost ground. In addition to The Political Brain, I'd like to recommend four additional books: 1) Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives, 2) Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 3) Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments, and perhaps the best one, 4) The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics.

SALINA, Kan. - The ninth season of the hit television program American Idol is scheduled to begin tomorrow night, almost a year after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. Professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill, a civil rights lawyer and law professor at the University of Maryland Law School, authored a provocative essay exploring the link between the two phenomena.

From Idol to Obama: What TV Elections Teach Us About Race, Youth & Voting appears in the recently released collection of essays Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America's New Leadership. The book, edited by Manning Marable, professor of history and political science, and public affairs at Columbia University includes the contribution of over a dozen scholars analyzing the significance of the election of President Obama.

GREAT BEND, Kan. - Sometimes something is right in front of your face, and you don't notice it. The Bible repeatedly warns against the sin of "usury" - of charging excessive interest rates. There was a historic consensus among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that charging high interest rates is wrong.

I have sat through hundreds of sermons in my life, and I've never heard this issue mentioned once by a clergyman. The "pelvic" issues seem to be the only issue most pastors want to talk about - abortion, and issues regarding sexuality. The Bible contains thousands of verses that admonish us to help the poor. Yet economic justice simply isn't spoken of much today.

It reminds me of the story of the two monks. One obsessively studied various religious sects, to the point where he would spend hours a day reading and talking about obscure offshoots of mainline religion. His fellow monk got fed up and told him: "Sects, sects, sects, that's all you think about is sects!"