DCentric

Good morning, DCentric readers! While you were dreading dreaming of a White Christmas, we were out, gathering links!

Gandhi wants D.C. to be Bermuda on the Potomac “…do we really want to encourage gambling on our home turf? Brown would have to face the fact that gambling is a drug to poor folks and those already down on their luck. Why prey on them? Natwar Gandhi has a better idea: Let’s bring in dollars from rich corporations, namely banks and insurance companies who currently park millions of dollars abroad in island tax havens. Gandhi wants to change federal tax laws and make D.C. “Bermuda on the Potomac.”…”The financial center of the country is in Washington now,” Gandhi tells me. “All the trading can be done in New York, but the decisions are made here.” (Washington Examiner )

Pro-WikiLeaks denial of service attacks: just another form of civil disobedience. “…the DDoS attacks launched by Anonymous were not acts of civil disobedience because they failed one crucial test implicit in Rawls’ account: Most attackers were not willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions. This is the crucial difference between Anonymous and the civil rights movement. Those who participated in lunch counter sit-ins…knew that they would likely be arrested for it. Their faces could be photographed, their papers could be checked. The civil rights-era protesters knew that effective civil disobedience could not be carried out in complete anonymity; members of the Anonymous collective have not grasped this yet.” (Slate)

At Gray’s D.C. jobs summit, leaders express doubts about city’s progress in preparing workers “Employers repeatedly brought up obstacles – from government policies and labor disputes to social ills – that prevent them from hiring D.C. residents. Despite about 300,000 jobs that are expected to be developed in the District over the next decade, George Mason University professor Stephen S. Fuller opened the summit by challenging Gray (D). He and others urged the city to prepare residents for those jobs but also to bring in industry that could match the skills of the unemployed and underemployed. “There’s a large group . . . unprepared for the jobs being created,” he said.” (The Washington Post)

Two men sentenced in R Street Apartments hate crime “I felt bad for them, in a strange way,” Puntanen says of his experience meeting the men convicted of assaulting him this summer. “Part of me was glad they’re not on the street anymore, and they can’t hurt anyone else. But honestly, they’re kids to me. I looked at them, and I realized I’ve had HIV longer than they have been alive.” Puntanen received his HIV diagnosis 24 years ago, in December 1986. “These kids weren’t even born when I got my death sentence,” Puntanen says. “So I had very mixed emotions.” (tbd.com)

The Shrinking Black Middle Class – COLORLINES [Ed note: Check out the chart, too]“…in 2008, 45 percent of African Americans who were born into the middle class, measured by income, were living at the bottom income level as adults. That was true for only 16 percent of whites born into the middle class. Meanwhile, over half of black people who were born into poverty remained there as adults, while about two-thirds of whites had moved up the income ladder. The point is plain: economic mobility is not the same for everybody in America, and to the degree we can talk about a genuine black middle class, it’s not a terribly secure one.” (colorlines.com)

All We Can Eat – Colicchio calls Hunger-Free Kids law a ‘great start’ “Colicchio is not only a chef, but also a father of two and the son of a former cafeteria supervisor. For 20 years, the chef’s mother, Beverly Colicchio, oversaw a school lunch program in Elizabeth, N.J. “It dawned on me about five or six years ago when we tried to get her to retire, and she said she wanted a few more years,” Colicchio said. “And I said, ‘Why? Your house is paid for.’ And her response was, ‘I know that kids are coming into my lunch room. This is the only thing they’re eating all day, and I want to make sure that they have something healthy.’ I was floored by that…” (voices.washingtonpost.com)