Irony: Mitt Romney Profited From the Auto Bailout That He Opposed

BUSINESS AND POLITICS: WGBH RADIO NEWS on The HUFFINGTON POST

Just weeks after Sen. John McCain lost the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in The New York Times opposing an auto bailout and calling instead for a "managed bankruptcy" — in fact, his opposition was a theme at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. But by saving auto-related industries,  that bailout had an unexpected beneficiary: Mitt Romney. One of those companies was Sensata, an organization bought by Bain Capital in 2006. Even though Romney was several years gone from the private equity firm that he founded, he was still making money from his Bain investments. Listen to my report

TAKING ON THE HIV PANDEMIC in HO CHI MINH CITY

WGBH RADIO SPECIAL REPORT

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — This summer, two Boston College professors are leading a group of students to volunteer at a clinic for HIV patients who are at the end of their lives in a society where the illness carries significant stigma.  They’re not here to tell Vietnamese clinicians, caregivers and patients what to do and how to do it, but instead they listen and learn.
Here's my audio and written report from Vietnam. 


ALSO LISTEN TO MY REPORT ON THE STRUGGLE AGAINST HIV IN ONE BLACK COMMUNITY IN BOSTON.

funding for my reporting trip to Vietnam was provided by the International Center for Journalists in Washington through the generosity of the Ford Foundation.  Phillip Martin, Ford Foundation Fellow and Senior Fellow with the Schuster Center for Investigative Reporting at Brandeis University.

My Hot Friday Night in North Vietnam by The World

A Hot Friday Night in North Vietnam by The World

THE COLOR INITIATIVE

How to Create a World-Class Transit System

How to Create a World-Class Transit System

My latest report on WGBH Boston Public Radio: 

BOSTON — Cities all over the world rely on robust public transportation systems. What are they doing right, and what can Massachusetts learn? Listen to report:

Urban planners believe that a so-called world class city must have at least two things to deserve that title: class and a good subway system. But Bostonians can take comfort in knowing that their transit system ranks high-up—at least in the US— on some lists of indicators.

Remembering Photojournalist Paula Lerner by The World

Remembering Photojournalist Paula Lerner by The World    

THE COLOR INITIATIVE

Mayor Kevin White and Violence Over Boston School Desegregation

WGBH BOSTON PUBLIC RADIO SPECIAL: 

Learning About Desegregation In Charlestown at Charlestown High School 


Boston traditionally has evoked images of a colonial past, Ivy League prestige and a glistening modern skyline.  It  also—seemingly inescapably—is linked to the racially fueled anti-busing violence of the 1970’s.  The  death of Kevin White in January, who presided for several terms over the city as mayor, has once again brought that period into stark relief.  We wanted to know what students in Boston know about the former mayor and his role in the busing controversy. And to explore this question we chose Charlestown High School, which was at the center of resistance to 
 court ordered busing.   My radio report:          


Pulitzer–winning image "The Soiling of Old Glory" became the icon of racial tensions in Boston. (Stanley Forman/Boston Herald American)

Violence over Busing In The Kevin White Era

BOSTON — Mayor Kevin White presided over a tumultuous time of race relations. We look at his actions at three different crisis points and how they're seen today. My radio report:

Somalia’s Plight Overlooked Among Global Troubles: PRI'sTHE WORLD

THE COLOR INITIATIVE

Somalis Helping Somalis

After prayer one day at the Islamic Cultural Center in the Roxbury section of Boston, Hirsi Hassan and other young Somalis sat down to discuss the crisis in the Horn of Africa. Though raised most of his 21 years in Boston, Hassan remembered life in a refugee camp and said the famine has affected all Somalis.

I feel like the world has not reacted to what’s going on in Somalia. It’s affecting the whole region, the whole Somali ethnicity, you know. The world should be doing more. It should be like the main news. 

Hear the complete Audio report on the WORLD:

Resources: Oxfam America, InterAction

SPRUCING UP OCCUPY WALL STREET'S IMAGE: What Would Don Draper Do?

WGBH BOSTON PUBLIC RADIO SPECIAL:

When your image is sullied, your fundraising is sinking fast and a poll shows even a majority of “Millennials” have a low opinion of your movement… you might consider turning to that paragon of cultural excess and Madison Avenue self-absorption: Don Draper.  What can advertising experts do to spruce up Occupy Wall Street's image that has been sullied by conservative ideologues, as well as self-afflicted mis-steps?  Read or listen to the public radio special report here:

DNA and QUESTIONS OF INNOCENCE IN MASSACHUSETTS' PRISONS

WGBH NEWS

Why is Massachusetts one of only two states in the country without a law granting prison inmates the right to test DNA evidence that might prove their innocence? 

Betty Ann Waters used DNA testing to exonerate her brother Kenny. Now she's advocating for a Mass. law that will make it easier for inmates to access similar evidence. The Innocence Project)

PART ONE:
Over the past two decades, eight people have been released from prison in Massachusetts after serving time for crimes they did not commit. DNA tests proved their innocence. But if you've been convicted here, it's harder to get access to DNA evidence in your case than it is for inmates in 48 other states. A report in the Nov. 20 Boston Globe Magazine examined why. WGBH News’ Phillip Martin questioned whether DNA evidence could help Tyrone Dixon, another man serving life in Massachusetts. 

PART TWO:  
Massachusetts legislators are considering a bill that would allow inmates access to DNA evidence that was critical to their convictions. Though the legislation is supported by the Massachusetts Bar Association, the state crime lab and many police departments, it is not clear that it will be passed by the spring deadline. Advocates say it can help free the innocent. Opponents believe the bill might serve to assist the guilty.

---

WGBH’s two-part report on post-conviction DNA access was produced in cooperation with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

'Occupy Boston' Demonstrators Bring Wall Street Protests North

After more than 2000 demonstrators took to Boston’s streets over the weekend, dozens remain camped out in tents in a park facing the city’s Federal Reserve Building. Occupy Boston organizers say they watched while many demonstrators protesting financial policies on Wall Street were arrested, and decided to act here.

9-11 RADIO STORIES by PHILLIP MARTIN

SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING:

Vance Gilbert, a light-skinned black man with a salt and pepper beard, has what many would describe as an unusual hobby, and in response, someone said something. Would you have said something? 

"Google a picture of Vance Gilbert and then Google a picture of Osama Bin Laden or anybody else from the Middle East. Look, I’m a brown skinned- guy. Take a look at that and you tell me that combined with looking at a picture of planes from the 1940s is not going to trigger somebody’s panic twenty-three days out from the anniversary of Sept.1"

  

FROM THE ROOFTOPS

From high-rise balconies, and the top floors of homes and businesses, people look smaller, trees are closer, and some imagine they can touch the sky. Cathy Procopio standing on her 23rd floor balcony in Tribeca stared at a big gaping hole with smoke pouring from the north tower.

“It’s really close. It’s kinda like a bird’s eye view. And I remember looking and seeing people jump out through the hole and sitting there thinking ‘Oh, they’re falling at a different rate.’ Somehow I knew they were human beings jumping out but it didn’t register with me until afterwards. I was just looking at how their bodies were falling at a different rate than the debris. It was just very odd,”

 PLANE SPOTTING

Like so many who sit along railroad tracks to watch trains go by, plane spotters look to the air. With advances in digital photography, the ranks of aviation enthusiasts have grown, and many are unofficial watchdogs of the sky. But since Sept. 11, the plane spotters themselves are now being more carefully watched. 

FREEDOM RIDERS AND WORLD OPINION

ON PRI's THE WORLD:

Download Audio

My most recent story on the PRI-WGBH-BBC Program "The WORLD".


50 years ago this month, black and white activists boarded buses in Washington and headed into the Deep South. That took courage in 1961.The year before, the Supreme Court had made segregation illegal in interstate travel. But the law wasn’t being enforced in the South. And so those bus passengers forced the issue.

They became known as the “Freedom Riders.”

This month, a racially integrated group of 40 American – and foreign – students recreated the Freedom Riders’ journey. Ray Arsenault, the author of a history of the Freedom Riders of 1961, is leading a group of 40 College students on a tour of one of Alabama’s most notorious sites. This place just outside of Anniston, Alabama, is where fifty years ago, the Ku Klux Klan attacked a Freedom Riders’ Greyhound bus bound for New Orleans. After slashing the tires, the bus was firebombed, which forced the riders into the road.

Along this highway outside of Anniston, Zilong Wang, who was born many years after 1961 in Baotou, China, is thinking about the lessons of non-violence practiced by the original Freedom Riders and how they might guide his beliefs and actions.

“This is not just a healing of the past but also it sheds a light on the future. Not just a future of the United States but also for China, because China will definitely go through a similar period,” Wang said. “How can we use non-violence and civil disobedience to bring meaningful reform into China’s social system under the condition of social harmony and stability, I think we’re learning a lot from them.”

Wang, a philosophy student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, is one of a handful of students chosen to board a bus from DC to New Orleans, to re-create the journey of 50 years ago along with original freedom riders. They met important figures from the time along the route.

Like John Siegenthaler, who was an assistant to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1961. He pointed out the contradictions of era – the Administration was pushing for freedoms around the world even as president Kennedy tolerated segregation and injustice throughout the Jim Crow South.

“The timing of the Freedom Rides and the conflagration that he (President Kennedy) hoped would never come, came at exactly the wrong time,” Siegenthaler said. “Came at the moment when’ he ‘s not able to make a convincing case about freedoms around the world, is not able to convince the Soviet Union ‘look free your people, let your people go. He’s not able to make that case because he had not let his own people go.” Siegenthaler said that the critical worldwide focus on domestic events in the USA helped to push the Administration into supporting civil rights.

Those events included attacks on Freedom Riders at this Trailways Bus Terminal in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the 8th city visited by the students on Freedom Ride 2011. Here Zilong Wang comes face to face with Freedom Rider James Zwerg, whose bloodied face peered from newspapers in 1961 helped compel hundreds of new riders to join the movement. Zwerg offers the college kids some pointers for their struggles, whatever they may be.

Follow the money: “If you want to bring about change you’re going to have to go the decision makers. In trying to change the movie theaters, it wasn’t going to happen,” Zwerg said. “In Nashville, for example, we had to make the people who owned the theaters decide to change.”

On this journey South, Zilong Wang and his fellow travelers also learned about the ultimate price that some paid for the advancement of human rights in the United States. The bus carring the 40 students has stopped in front of the 16th Street baptist Church in Birmingham. A bomb planted here took the lives of four little girls on September 15th , 1963.

Zilong Wang is only one of several foreign students on this tour of history and memory. Bakhrom Ismoilov is studying at Eastern Oregon University. He’s from Tajikistan. He equated some of the violence his country has recently experienced with the segregation of the south during the 1960’s. “It helps me a lot to see how much bigger and how much bigger scale it was. I can definitely relate this to terrorism, and actually putting a population of black Americans in fear,” Ismoilov said.

And over the din of the 16th Street Baptist Church Choir, Doaa Dorgham, a Palestinian born in Kuwait who wears a headscarf, laments what she sees as the irony of past and present discrimination in her adopted American land. “The irony of this situation is here I am celebrating how 50 years ago we made great strides to stop segregation in public transportation and discrimination, and then I’m in an airport and have to go through a body scan and have to go through a pat-down. And how is it that no one is able to see the correlation?” Dorgham asked.

As the Freedom Riders’ Tour winded down, students were asked what they will do with the knowledge they’ve collected along the way. Tanya Smith, who grew up in Haiti, and plans to return there to lead a non-violent movement on behalf of youth, spoke up.

“Just like the Freedom Riders saw the need in society for change, Haitian youth realize the power they do have and the stake they have for building Haiti’s future,” she said. “And I want to be able show that non-violence is more effective in the sense that you’re able to do what you’re doing without resorting to the same tools that your oppressors are using against you.”

Human Trafficking Ringleader Jailed In Providence

WGBH Investigates:

BOSTON — A New York man is beginning 10 years behind bars in Rhode Island after pleading no contest to three counts of human trafficking earlier this month.

Twenty-three year olds Andy Fakhoury and Joseph Defeis enticed two young women from Yonkers to come to Providence with promises of jobs and love. Once the women arrived, they were forced into prostitution, according to the state attorney general’s office.   Read and listen to my radio report here (audio and print):  

Questions about the Killing of Black Africans in Libya

THE COLOR INITIATIVE

At the onset of the conflict in Libya, citizens in open revolt against a brutal government rounded up mercenaries and slaughtered them on the spot.

Almost all of the three-thousand or so mercenaries transported to Libya to defend Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s embattled regime are dark-skinned men from Niger, Chad, Mali and elsewhere throughout the vast Sub-Saharan. An undetermined number are in fact black Libyan citizens from the south of the country. (Read Complete Article at Race Talk.Org)

Fukushima Crisis Puts New Eyes On MIT Nuclear Reactor

BOSTON — Japan’s frantic effort to cool down a damaged nuclear facility has thrust nuclear power reactors back into the public’s imagination here in the United States. That’s bringing attention to New England's Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee plants — but also to a little-noticed reactor in Massachusetts.  I report for WGBH, New England's NPR station for news and culture. 

Coming up on THE COLOR INITIATIVE ON PRI'S THE WORLD

                
                     Eugenics Singapore Style

Eugenics was the so-called science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. In the 20th century it lead to millions of forced sterilizations worldwide and was linked to Nazi atrocities. In modern times China enacted a form of eugenic policy to control population and to restrict marriages between persons with certain disabilities and diseases. Singapore also briefly experimented with eugenics. The program, introduced in 1984, sought increased fertility for university-educated women and provided major subsidies for the voluntary sterilization of poor and uneducated parents. The official program has long been abandoned, but “social Darwinism” or what many historians regard as the ideological underpinning of eugenics is the dominant view still promulgated by Singapore’s founder and long standing mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, in his quest to create the perfect society. 



Critics of Singapore’s social engineering argue that the resulting policies are invariably skin color-coded and hierarchical since the “poor and uneducated” are disproportionately tan skinned Malays and charcoal-colored Tamils, rather than the politically-dominant Chinese ethnic majority. How does this view measure up objectively to Singapore’s quest to create a racially balanced society?

THE COLOR INITIATIVE on The World (PRI, BBC and WGBH) http://www.theworld.org/2009/07/24/color-initiative/

SUMMER OF 2011 ON THE COLOR INITIATIVE

A GLOBAL VIEW OF THE COLOR BLACK
(photo by Nancy Thomas)

In an upcoming series on PRI's The World, we'll look at the global perception of black skin color. We speak with a cognitive psychologist who has studied initial reactions to skin phenotypes, political scientists, a refugee from Darfur, historians, Chinese students, a development specialist from Yemen, African expats, Latin American activists and others.

There have been many attempts to understand blackness. Among the most classic explorations was Frantz Fanon’s "Black Skin, White Masks". (see video clip) Fanon observed that the most common view of black skin –which exists in hues from tan to charcoal and shades of gray –was a denial of recognition. Other perceptions at the time of the Algerian Revolution, and still in force today, are heavily weighted down in stereo-types.

So we ask these questions: Can anything or anyone change the universal or global perception of blackness? Is it even necessary in a world where perceptions of race and racism are changing, albeit slowly?   Does the fact that race is a social construct in any way mitigate anti-black skin prejudice? And does the ascendency of prominent individuals of African descent (Obama, Mandela, Rice, Powell) connote "post-racial" progress, or merely obfuscates what some regard as an immutable negative frame of reference to black skin color? 

WGBH SPECIAL SERIES

RECOGNIZING BRUCE

An estimated 15,482 homeless people eke out an often-solitary existence on town and city streets across Massachusetts. About 20 percent of them are veterans. One of them is a former army soldier named Bruce Stuart.

Three years ago,I stopped into a cafe in Cambridge and struck up a conversation with a man sitting alone on a bench. It was Bruce, and he was making drawings of the world around him -- or at least the world as he saw it. That conversation led to more like it, and to the revelation of a complex human story.

Part One: A Man Without A Home
Jan. 19, 2010

Part Two: Enduring Street Life Through Art
Jan. 20, 2011

Part Three: A Home For Bruce And His Art

COLOR INITIATIVE 16, 17, 18 19:

December 28-31, 2010 on THE COLOR INITIATIVE on PRI's The World (PRI, BBC and WGBH)







NOMADIC MIGRATION AND SKIN COLOR

Malta is the smallest of the twenty-seven EU nations, and in the view of many Maltese, it is under siege. With other routes to continental Europe closed off, thousands of African immigrants in recent years have steered closer to Malta in their torturous and risky journey north from Libya on the waves of the Mediterranean. But most of the approximately 8,000 asylum seekers that have reached Malta in recent years are "accidental tourists”. Few ever intentionally land on the island nation of 400,000. Rather, it is leaky boats and lack of sea-know-how that LANDS them there. Once in Malta, some are detained for nearly two years, essentially living between where they come from and where they'd like to go. And many of them believe—rightly or wrongly—that their skin color plays a role in their ultimate fate. In the following multi-part series, I interview desperate asylum seekers, a detention camp warden, the new US Ambassador to Malta, fishermen who saved lives at sea and another who said he was instructed not to stop, courageous Maltese naval men, Somali women and children, Malta's Justice Minister, social workers, a Jesuit priest-advocate whose car was firebombed and Maltese who feel they're being overrun by refugees (given the size of their island nation).  We also travel to Geneva to speak with a representative of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and to Italy to speak with residents of Pozzallo and Taormina, Sicily, in this exploratory series.

Nomadic Migration Part I: From Somalia to Denver, the long way
Around the world, people are on the move in search of better lives. That is particularly true in Africa, where a wave of migrants is trying to reach Europe. Despite the dangers, they keep trying – and most do not succeed. Those who do are often on the move for years before they find a place to call home. In the first in a series of reports on nomadic migration to Europe and the United States, Phillip Martin tells the story of one man’s difficult journey to the US. Download MP3
 
Nomadic Migration Part II: From Libya to detention in Malta
Malta sits between Africa and Europe.Because of its location, wave after wave of illegal immigrants traveling by boat have come ashore on a regular basis.Though migration waves have slowed down dramatically in recent months from a high of nearly 3000 in 2009, the tiny island nation of 400,000 citizens, receives more asylum seekers –for its size—than any other EU country.In an effort to discourage illegal immigration, Malta has one of the toughest detention policies in Europe, and some say it goes too far.
This is part two of Phillip Martin’s special report on nomadic migration and skin color. Download MP3

Nomadic Migration Part III: The challenges faced by Africans living in Malta
Since 2002, thousands of Africans have journeyed through deserts and risked their lives to reach the shores of the Mediterranean and north to Europe. Some have been rescued at sea by the Maltese navy and transported to Malta, which lies between Africa and continental Europe. When their requests for asylum elsewhere are denied, they become stuck – often indefinitely – in the EU’s smallest nation-state. In part 3 of his series on nomadic migration and skin color, Phillip Martin reports. Download MP3

Nomadic Migration Part IV: Leaving Malta:
Since 2002, nearly 10,000 African migrants – trying to get to mainland Europe – have landed on the tiny island nation of Malta. Many were rescued from leaky boats by the Maltese navy. Once there, they can be detained in prisons for up to 18 months and then languish for years in Malta without jobs and, and in some cases, without a decent place to live. But some manage to move on – and find new homes in Europe and in the U.S. This is Phillip Martin’s final report in our special series on nomadic migration and skin color. Download MP3

The Color Initiative is funded by the Ford Foundation

Blue Hill Avenue: If A Street Could Speak

The murders in late September 2010 of a toddler, his mother and two adult men were described by police as the worst shooting rampage in Boston since 2005.  These homicides, as well as other murders in recent months, have largely taken place in urban neighborhoods abutting Blue Hill Avenue, the street that connects Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and suburban Milton. Violence has given this street a tragic notoriety, but it's also a place with a deep history, and a present filled with complexity and alive with growth.  You can listen to my four-part series here: