Big Beat

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A shooting at Lone Star College in Houston resulted in three injuries last week, just two days after the first-ever “Gun Appreciation Day.” Gawker tallied at least sixteen incidences of gun-related death or injury on Gun Appreciation Day, too. Because none of these events was a mass shooting, the reader comments on the news stories covering them often contained sentiments like the following from the Houston Chronicle: “No ‘school shooting’ here at all. Just two thugs in a part of town known for gang and gun violence on a daily basis,” or, “A couple of thugs got into a typical thug fight. It happens every day in Houston. The media would have you believe this was a massacre,” or, “This is NOTHING like the shooting at the elementary school…it just happened to happen at a junior college between 2 hot blooded young men!”

They’ve got one thing right. It does happen everyday. Unlike mass shootings, other types of gun violence are so common that, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, more children and teens die from guns every three days than died in the Newtown massacre. That they’re treated as yawn-worthy speaks to our acceptance of gun violence in certain neighborhoods.

Those neighborhoods, of course, tend to be populated by people of color. The Children’s Defense Fund reports that 43 percent of all children and youth killed by firearms in 2009 were black. And while the annual number of shooting deaths of white youth decreased by 44 percent between 1979 and 2009, the deaths of black children and teens increased by 30 percent. The annual number of shooting deaths of Hispanic children decreased, but only by 25 percent.

The question we have to face is this: Do we want to address all gun violence or do we only want to try to prevent mass shootings? Is one group of victims more important than the other? The answer, of course, is no. All lives are important.

Whether it’s a seemingly random mass shooting at a predominantly white, suburban school or the death of a child of color caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting in the inner city, gun violence is often facilitated by two things: Availability of guns and a lack of services and supports available to our children and their families around the issues of drugs, gangs, failing schools and mental health services.

If I had my druthers, we’d ban both assault weapons and handguns, but the proliferation of guns in America makes that a near-impossibility. So, let’s start with the proposal on the table from President Obama. It calls on Congress to close background check loopholes and bans military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Current law only requires background checks be performed by licensed gun dealers, but about 40 percent of guns are sold through private dealers. Requiring all gun sellers to perform background checks and facilitating better sharing of this information among states will help keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.

The president’s plan also suggests that Congress allocate money to schools for social and mental health services that address students’ behavioral issues. But it also gives the schools the option to hire more school cops, covertly termed “school resource officers,” that some youth advocates fear will exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline.

Here’s how the ACLU explained it: “We fear that neutral sounding safety policies, such as putting more cops in school will lead to the over-incarceration of school-age children, especially students of color and students with disabilities, who are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted for issues that would normally be handled by school administrators when law enforcement is introduced into schools.”

Legislators must consider not only middle-class, white victims who’ve died in mass shootings, but the victims who are more likely to die everyday because of the color of their skin—think Trayvon Martin or 23-year-old Rodrigo Diaz of Georgia, who was shot in the head and killed this weekend after pulling into the wrong man’s driveway.

The president’s plan is not as comprehensive as it should be.. Studies show most gun crime is committed with handguns and it’s not clear how much of an impact the Obama proposals will have on that. Still, even modest, common sense measures will have trouble clearing Congress, especially the Republican-controlled House. That’s just the current political reality.

But while we’re debating gun violence, let’s no longer pretend that it’s a problem just confined to the occasional mass shooting.

facebook.com/PromisedLandMovie

Matt Damon and Frances McDormand in Promised Land.

This month, a new film starring Matt Damon and directed by Gus Van Sant, will hit select theaters in time for the holiday movie-going season, a film that will familiarize Americans, if they’re not already, with the f-word—fracking.

(Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing for the uninitiated, is the controversial method of extracting oil and gas by injecting millions of gallons of high-pressure fluids deep underground to fracture rock formations.)

Environmentalists warn that fracking poses serious dangers to groundwater, air quality and public health. They point to evidence that the process can cause earthquakes. Proponents, mostly big oil companies, say that’s nonsense. They argue that fracking is unleashing impressive amounts of domestic energy, decreasing reliance on foreign oil and creating jobs.

Guess which side Matt Damon is on?

In Promised Land Damon plays a young corporate salesman, Steve Butler, who grew up in the heartland and moved to the big city to seek opportunities not available in his small town. On the verge of reaching executive status with his natural gas company, Butler is sent to a rural farming community in Pennsylvania along with his partner, played by Frances McDormand, to buy out the town and begin fracking the hell out of their farmland. Butler’s higher-ups assure him that this is the best thing that could happen to these people who’ve been hit hard by the recession. In fact, many do stand to make millions.

Enter environmentalist Dustin Noble, played by The Office’s John Krasinski. Noble riles the town with a grassroots anti-fracking campaign that includes announcing that fracking killed his farmland. “The land just turned brown and it died,” he says in the trailer. “It’s happened to one of us, it can happen to all of us.” Also featured in the trailer is a short clip of Noble setting a model farm on fire in front of a class of elementary school kids for effect. (This is presumably a reference to a scene from the anti-fracking documentary Gasland in which a man is able to light his tap water on fire.) If that weren’t enough, everybody’s dream grandpa Hal Holbrook plays a local schoolteacher who roundly disapproves of this whole fracking idea.

“You’re a good man, Steve. I just wish you weren’t doing this,” he tells Damon’s character in the trailer. Yeouch.

Critics of the film—mostly conservative news sources at this point since the general public hasn’t seen the film —say the movie is essentially liberal propaganda. One of their favorite items to point out is that Image Nation Abu Dhabi, which helped finance the film, is owned by United Arab Emirates, an oil rich nation that would stand to profit billions by delaying the growth of America’s natural fuel industry. Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who is working on his own fracking documentary and who also directed a documentary called Not Evil, Just Wrong to challenge Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, first raised the issue of Image Nation’s involvement at a promotional Q&A for Promised Land. The confrontation was captured on video by McAleer’s team.

In the clip, Damon, who co-wrote the script with Krasinski, says the film was actually funded by Focus Features and Participant Media. Participant, Damon explains, has a deal with Image Nation, which finances 10 percent of all Focus films sight-unseen.

“The first time we were aware that Image Nation was involved with our movie was when we saw the rough cut and saw their logo, and that’s that.” Damon tells McAleer.

It seems with a deal like that, the government of UAE is probably unaware that they helped fund Promised Land, either.

Later, a podcast of the event posted on iTunes was lacking McAleer’s question, according to The Hollywood Reporter—a fact flogged on the social media site of Energy in Depth, a leading pro-fracking public outreach campaign launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA).

According to The Guardian, Energy in Depth is just one of many pro-fracking interests that are preparing for the public backlash that could result from Promised Land. It has, for example, drafted a fact sheet it is considering sending to the press and distributing to moviegoers.

For their parts, Damon and Krasinski told Peter Tavers of Rolling Stone magazine that judging Promised Land as “the anti-fracking movie” without having seen it is a mistake.

“We’re both happy to discuss anything once people have actually seen the movie and they know what it is they’re upset or feeling good about,” Krasinski said.

“It’s all grey area to me,” said Tavers, who has presumably seen the film. “It’s all people saying, ‘I need the money. What am I doing? How do I justify it to myself?’ It’s people.”

“Frances McDormand’s character is making her decisions entirely on her son and on taking care of her kid,” Damon added. “We all know those people. That’s us.”

The title of the film is ambiguous. In the Bible, the Promised Land is a gift from God. But is man’s moral obligation to guard it, or exploit it for the natural resources it provides? I look forward to finding out soon.

Photo source: city-data.com

McAllen, Tx.

Earlier this year, when San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, many Hispanic Texans felt they had finally arrived. When Latinos overwhelmingly helped re-elect President Obama in November, Tejanos continued to celebrate this apparent rise to power. But Hispanic Texans will never take their rightful place at the table until they succeed economically. Nowhere is this tension between rising political power and lagging economic status more apparent than the Texas border. Sixteen of the 100 poorest counties in America are found along or near the Texas-Mexico border. This isn’t surprising when you consider that Hispanic Texans generally receive inferior educations and experience higher unemployment than their Anglo counterparts. So, what’s to be done?

Some border-based entrepreneurs are trying to address these inequities by giving Latinos access to the rarefied world of venture capital.
Rodolfo Sanchez lives in the Rio Grande Valley, and earlier this year, his company, Plasma2Energy, got a contract from the city of McAllen to build a waste-to-energy plant—a cutting-edge, green-energy technology. Developed by Monterrey, Mexico-based ABA Research, the 27-megawatt plant converts municipal trash into electricity, 25 percent of which would be used by the city.

“This technology offers savings in the long term for the city, which is very attractive,” Sanchez says. “It’s also very clean, and that is very attractive too.”

Sanchez offered to deploy the first commercial-sized facility in the U.S. for ABA Research. He just needed the capital, about $15 million for the first phase.

But raising the money took longer than Sanchez’s Monterrey investor was expecting. ABA got nervous and pulled out, leaving Sanchez to bootstrap Plasma2Energy while he searched for funds—funds he still hasn’t acquired. Ultimately, ABA decided to build a plant in Mexico instead. He hopes that Plasma2Energy will build a plant in McAllen in the future, though that’s uncertain.

Sanchez says the McAllen Economic Development Corporation didn’t understand the technology enough to offer more than standard city incentives—a blow that not only cost him much-needed money, but deprived his company of an endorsement that could have generated interest from venture capitalists.

Sanchez’s experience is all too common for Hispanic entrepreneurs. A 2011 Venture Capital Census of nearly 600 venture capitalists found that 87 percent of all respondents identified as white, with fewer than 2 percent identifying as Latino. Eighty-nine percent were men.

This nearly all-white, all-male demographic adversely affects high-tech entrepreneurs who don’t fit the “white guy” tech mold.

“Most people rely on their relationships with wealthy people to get venture capital,” says Teo Tijerina, co-founder and executive director of Austin-based EDCO Ventures, a nonprofit focused on economic development in poorer areas of Texas, including the border region. EDCO has a goal of raising $50 million to $100 million in venture capital for business investment in Texas. So far it’s amassed $3.5 million from the federal government, private investors and national banks.

“If you can do a semiconductor plant in Taiwan with far less infrastructure, you can do one in the Valley,” says Tijerina, who was raised in McAllen, as was the company’s co-founder Leo Ramirez. “The border region just needs the know-how and the access to capital and technology.

Of course, there’s a whole historical basis for why they don’t have it.”

The state of Texas runs an Emerging Technology Fund to help promising start-ups. Recipients must show that they can also raise capital locally. That can be a challenge for entrepreneurs along the border. Few subsidies from the Tech Fund flow south.

“Perhaps regions like Austin, Dallas and Houston don’t need state funding, but the border, East Texas, and other parts of the state do,” Tijerina says.

Tijerina also says that Texas’ leading research universities don’t do enough to aid poor communities. At a meeting with the University of Texas at Austin’s Office of Technology Commercialization, Tijerina says, an official told him the office prefers to work with entrepreneurs who headquarter in Austin.

“It would make sense that the office show a preference toward entrepreneurs in Texas versus an entrepreneur in Michigan, but it shouldn’t matter whether it’s Austin or San Antonio or Brownsville,” Tijerina said.

It shouldn’t matter, but it always has, and only educated and motivated border entrepreneurs are going to change that.

Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).

Every so often, the GOP is beaten badly enough that some Republicans realize that appearing to support immigrants might be their ticket to relevancy with Latinos. That time has come again for retiring U.S. Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Jon Kyl (R-Arizona). The pair recently filed an alternative to the DREAM Act called the ACHIEVE Act. As the title suggests, they are not letting immigrants get away with any idle dreaming. They must ACHIEVE to stay in America legally.

The ACHIEVE Act is similar to the DREAM Act in that it requires young immigrants brought here illegally when they were minors to obtain academic or military achievement before earning a pathway to legal status. The important difference, however, is that the DREAM Act ultimately provides a path to citizenship while the ACHIEVE Act only provides a path to permanent residency. If you want to know how the ACHIEVE Act works in detail, you can read about it here.

This isn’t the first time in 2012 that the GOP has flirted with immigration reform. In June, the Texas Republican Party, at its convention, replaced a zealously xenophobic plank on immigration with something called “the Texas Solution,” a Texas-based guest worker program that would provide cheap labor to business owners while offering no path to citizenship for workers. So, what’s new? Well, the Texas Solution calls for workers’ private health insurance to be provided by employers or the workers themselves. (Ha.) It also demands that the federal government limit birthright citizenship to those born to a citizen of the United States “with no exceptions.” Republicans try to pander to Latino voters, but they always end up going off a cliff.

What both Republican plans have in common is that they don’t help immigrants. They help the Republican party win Latino votes. They’re the sort of desperate act that comes of realizing your political party will die if you don’t appeal to the country’s largest growing demographic, no matter how much you wish they would just go back to Mexico.

In reality, both the ACHIEVE Act and the Texas Solution are unfeasible. The Texas Solution is essentially the Bracero Program of the mid-twentieth century all over again. Back then, employers realized that the provisions of the program increased their costs and thus began hiring under-the-table workers again. The ACHIEVE Act not only doesn’t provide a path to citizenship, but would only be applicable for a fraction of the current young immigrant population. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found that less than 5 percent of the country’s 2.1 million immigrants who currently meet all the requirements for the DREAM Act, which are similar to the ACHIEVE Act, have the academic credentials to begin the six-year waiting period required before they can apply to adjust to permanent status. The rest of the undocumented youth and young adults must overcome steep financial burdens, high drop-out rates, and a language barrier in hopes that they will even make it out of high school, much less college.

In short, all the immigration plans discussed here, including the DREAM Act, are a band-aid. What’s needed urgently is comprehensive immigration reform that deals realistically and fairly with the 12 million undocumented people living in this nation. Broaden political asylum to include those fleeing cartel-related violence, beginning with Mexico. Going forward, give all immigrants the same chance we give Cubans. If we don’t catch them entering our border, then they are free to stay and allowed to apply for expedited legal permanent resident status and, eventually, U.S. citizenship.

Whether out of fear for their own political future or because Republicans have truly come to embrace immigrants, maybe it doesn’t matter so much. Just get it done.