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Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
"JR" interviewed William Singletary on Dennis Bernstein's KPFA Flashpoints program Thursday 7 June at 5 P.M. You can listen to the audio archive of the program on the url above. The Singletary interview is about 22 minutes into the program.
William Singletary insisted that he is the "only" witness to the events that night when police officer Daniel Faulkner was shot. He states that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not arrive on the scene until about 4 or 5 minutes after Faulkner was shot.
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=20627
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PUT AN END TO WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS.
http://www.facesofwrongfulconviction.org/action.htm
Check it out!
http://www.deathpenalty.org/index.php?pid=Act&menu=1"
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Stop the poison, heal the people: Come to the town hall meetings every Thursday, 6pm, Grace Tabernacle Church, Oakdale & Ingalls, editorial by Willie Ratcliff, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=194&Itemid=14
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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Note: Because of the importance of this call, I am keeping
it on the list as number 1 for the next couple of weeks...bw
1) What Should the Anti-War Movement Do Now?
A Proposal from the ANSWER Coalition
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
2) Mumia Abu-Jamal on the Road to Freedom?
By JEFF MACKLER
jmackler@locrian.com
3) President or Priest?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
June 6, 2007
prisonradio.org
4) Setback for Ill Workers at Nuclear Bomb Plant
By DAN FROSCH
June 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/washington/13rockyflats.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
5) The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
Posted on June 13, 2007,
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/53962/
6) The foul stench of Firestone
Robtel Neajai Pailey
June 2007
www.pambazuka.org
Source: redpepper.org
7) Hamas Moves Close to Full Control of Gaza
By STEVEN ERLANGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
June 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/world/middleeast/14cnd-mideast.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
8) In Health Care, Cost Isn’t Proof of High Quality
By REED ABELSON
June 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/health/14insure.html?hp
9) Detroit Pursues Sweeping Cuts In Union Talks Big 3 Cite Wide Cost Gap With Asian Auto Rivals; Threat to Export Jobs
By JEFFREY MCCRACKEN
June 14, 2007; Page A1
Wall Street Journal
10) In Shift, Judge Eases Limits on Surveillance by the Police
By ALAN FEUER
June 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/nyregion/14ruling.html?ref=nyregion
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1) What Should the Anti-War Movement Do Now?
A Proposal from the ANSWER Coalition
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
[Please note: I endorse this call wholeheartedly and
encourage everyone to sign on! --Bonnie Weinstein, www.bauaw.org]
It is an absolute responsibility of the anti-war movement
to make an honest and straightforward assessment of the
current situation and to craft a strategy that can really
make a difference. Every serious organization, and especially
those with the greatest mobilizing reach, must be asked
to avoid posturing, make an assessment and develop an
action plan that will change the political landscape
in a decisive way.
This document does not seek to address or detail the
political differences between organizations and groups.
They exist and they have been detailed often. At this
moment, there needs to be an effort at clear perspective
that focuses on one simple question: What will end the
war and occupation of Iraq and what should the US anti-
war movement do?
It is clear that the anti-war movement is not sufficiently
strong at the moment to bring this criminal and despised
war to an end. Every organization must ask why is this
so and most importantly what can be done to change the
situation immediately.
The first question to ask and answer is: Can a people's
movement in the United States overcome the commitment
of the White House, Congress and the Pentagon to authorize,
extend and finance the war and occupation in Iraq?
If you or your organization answers the question negatively
then the rest doesn’t really matter. Perhaps, individuals
can bear witness and continue to protest, but it will
be little more than an individual statement.
If the answer to the question is yes, however, we must
assess various factors and craft a strategy that will be
fundamentally different from the current path of the
anti-war movement.
Historically, wars come to an end either because one side
wins and one side loses, or the people rise in revolution
(usually as a result of a military defeat or pending defeat),
or both sides exhaust each other over a protracted period.
What is the military situation in Iraq? The US cannot
achieve military victory in Iraq. Its multiple opponents
in Iraq are not militarily strong enough to decisively
defeat the US military in the short term. If the Iraqi
population, however, were able to overcome sectarian
divisions introduced with the US occupation it is possible
that Iraq could witness a repeat of a nationwide uprising
such as the 1958 Revolution that drove the British military
out of Iraq. But the flames of division are being whipped
up every day and function as a deterrent to such a spontaneous
national uprising against the occupiers. Finally, the
US military is stretched thin but is clearly able to
continue the occupation for some time, and the anti-U.S.
opponents in Iraq are not exhausted yet by the protracted
conflict. If anything they are gathering strength and
energy as the occupation forces cannot take the strategic
initiative away from guerrilla forces.
Given this complex reality, or realities, we believe that
the U.S. antiwar movement must take strategic and bold
initiatives that change the political climate in this
country. To succeed, these initiatives must be based
on a correct assessment of where we are.
The ANSWER Coalition wants to offer its own brief assessment
of the political equation in the United States. We are
also offering a proposal to all of the major anti-war
coalitions and groups and to all of those organizations
that function on a local level
Assessment of the political situation as it regards
the Iraq war
1) The people of the country have turned decisively against
the continuation of the war. Most recognize that the war was
based on lies and most no longer believe the president and
the generals when they assure them that victory is still
possible.
2) The military situation is worsening rather than improving
in light of the so-called surge. The number of US war dead
in May 2007 spiked to the third highest month since the
initial invasion in 2003. The numbers of Iraqi dead is about
3,000 each month. Two million Iraqis have fled the country
and another two million are internal refugees.
3) The US is unable to secure its political control over
the region as is evident by what is happening in Lebanon,
Iran and Syria and its intensified destabilization campaign
towards the Palestinian people.
4) The Bush administration is increasingly isolated, at home
and abroad, because of its failure in Iraq and its inability
to regain the military initiative even with tens of thousands
of more troops. The Pentagon anticipates occupying Iraq for
decades, as it has Korea and other countries.
5) More and more U.S. soldiers, marines, veterans and the
families of service members are either disillusioned or
completely opposed to the continuation of the war and
occupation.
6) The Democratic-controlled Congress voted overwhelmingly
to extend and finance the war and occupation. The calculation
of the Democratic Party leadership and the vast majority
of its elected officials in Congress is based on avoiding
at all costs taking responsibility for a pullout from Iraq
which will be perceived as a defeat for the United States
in this strategic oil-rich region. They believe that they
can secure an electoral advantage in 2008 by having the war
drag on and have the public hold the Republicans responsible
for the war. Moreover, the Democratic Party is feeding from
the same corporate financing trough as the Republicans and
they share the Bush government’s broad objective of U.S.
domination in the Middle East. Congress, under the current
circumstances, is completely committed to not ending the war
in Iraq in the next two years and probably for much longer
than that.
Assessment of the weakness and strength of the antiwar
movement:
1) There have been a growing number of anti-war protests
on the national, regional and local level during the past
six months.
2) The antiwar protests are being joined and, in some
cases, initiated by the people who have not been involved
in past demonstrations.
3) A growing sentiment of opposition and disgust to the war,
occupation (and the politicians) is building among rank and
file service members and some officers.
4) A large amount of energy and activity was directed at
Congress with the hope that the Congress would heed their
constituents' desire to end the war. When the Congress
instead voted against its constituents and with Bush
to extend the war there was a huge wave of anger, frustration
and desperation but with few available or recognized channels
for effective action.
5) Although the antiwar sentiment is growing among the
general population, the size and intensity of the
demonstrations, protests and acts of resistance does
not at all measure up to the vast magnitude of feelings
against the Iraq war among the general population.
6) The single biggest reason for this dichotomy is the
fact that the anti-war movement is badly splintered rather
than working together or in a united fashion so as to marshal,
stimulate and mobilize a truly massive outpouring of the people.
Proposal to build a truly mass outpouring of the people
If every anti-war coalition and organization came together
on a particular day, and with enough advance notice, under
the simple demand End the War Now it would be easily possible
to mobilize one million people. The political mood in the
country exists to make this happen.
So as to facilitate the greatest degree of coordination between
organizations to build a massive outpouring, the ANSWER Coalition
is not unilaterally setting a date for this potentially million-
strong march and rally. However, we recommend holding it sometime
in November of 2007, or on March 22, 2008--the fifth anniversary
of the war." In order to have such a huge demonstration, enough
time must be given to allow the organizations and coalitions
to come together and for intensive national outreach and
organizing.
This period of time between now and the demonstration would
not be a period of quiet, it would be a time of intensifying
anti-war activity and education at the local and regional level
culminating in this mass action. Unfortunately, unless the
political relationship of forces changes inside the United
States or in Iraq, the war and occupation will continue
through November and beyond. We are proposing a specific
tactic that can contribute to shifting the equation.
The aim is not just one more demonstration but the largest
antiwar demonstration in US history.
A mobilization of one million people marching on Washington
DC would be the best possible trigger for an avalanche
of grassroots organizing throughout the country and among
service members and their families and veterans. It is time
for something bold and broad. Something that sends an
unmistakable message to the powers that be that the people
of the United States have entered the field of politics in
such a way as to become an irresistible force.
Each group and movement should maintain its political
independence. Each group can inscribe on its banners
a variety of slogans or ideas or demands but what will allow
us to unite for the largest mobilization of all the people
is the simple unifying demand. Whatever differences that
exist between groups, and there are many and they are important,
are not sufficient justification for preventing us from coming
together in a show of force that will change the direction
of this country. The lives of too many people, all victims
of a criminal war, are too precious for our movement to tolerate
anything that prevents us from reaching our potential
to end the war in Iraq. With determination, maturity and mutual
respect our diverse anti-war movement can unite.
We would like to hear from everyone in consideration of this
proposal. If you, your friends, or your organization support
the proposal for a unified mass demonstration aiming to bring
1 million people onto the streets of Washington DC, please
join with us and sign on, which you can do by clicking
this link or visiting http://www.answercoalition.org/.
This movement has grown strong because of its grassroots
base. Let’s hear from everyone who supports this exciting
possibility.
During the next week, people like you and thousands of others
can circulate this proposal, discuss it with your organization,
family and friends, and be part of the effort to make it
a reality. We look forward to hearing from you and working
together.
Proposal by the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism)
Coalition, May 31, 2007
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2) Mumia Abu-Jamal on the Road to Freedom?
By JEFF MACKLER
jmackler@locrian.com
It is difficult to imagine that the systematic race
and class bias that permeate America's criminal
"justice" system could be set aside and that the
nation's most famed and innocent death row inmate and
political prisoner of 25 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal, could
win a new trial and freedom.
But that is precisely what appeared to be unfolding on
May 17 in the packed Ceremonial Courtroom of the
Federal Courthouse in Philadelphia as a three-judge
panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third
Circuit, in full view of 200 riveted Mumia supporters
and others from across the country and around the
world, mercilessly queried Pennsylvania's lead
prosecutor and persecutor, Hugh Burns.
In contrast, Mumia's three-person legal team of Robert
R. Bryan, Judith Ritter, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund
amicus curiae (friend of the court) counsel Christina
Swarns appeared to have the rapt, if not sympathetic,
attention of the three judges during most the
two-and-a-half-hour proceeding. In almost every
instance Mumia's defense team responded to the panel's
questions and arguments without hesitation and with
citations buttressing their central arguments.
The day's events left little doubt that these
Judges, Chief Justice Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert
Cowen (Reagan appointees), and Judge Thomas Ambro of
the Clinton era, had carefully read the voluminous
briefs submitted by both sides and thoroughly
researched the history of the constitutional issues
involved, including the precedent-setting cases that
govern their interpretation.
Indeed, a number of the Third Circuit's previous
decisions on several critical issues that directly
pertain to Mumia's most telling arguments have marked
this court as among the few remaining "liberal"
juridical institutions in the country.
Hugh Burns was hard pressed to offer his own skewed
interpretation of Third Circuit decisions when the
judges, who had themselves authored a number of the
cases cited, were virtually staring/glaring in his
face as they peppered him with citations contradicting
his central arguments.
This appears to be the real reason why Pennsylvania's
prosecutors, looking for a more conservative panel of
judges, filed motions prior to the hearing to
literally recuse (remove) the entire Third Circuit
from hearing Mumia's appeal. The prosecutors argued
spuriously that the circuit included a judge who is
the wife of Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (Rendell has
pledged to sign a third warrant for Mumia's
execution). They postulated that Marjorie Rendell's
presence, by virtue of her relation to the governor,
would constitute grounds for a future successful
appeal of the proceedings by Mumia in the event of any
decision against him.
The prosecution's effort to escape the Third Circuit's
jurisdiction was rejected, as Robert R. Byran's
response brief successfully countered that the move
was a blatant effort to circumvent the court for
political reasons. The judges also granted Bryan's
request to double the time for oral arguments,
granting each side one hour as opposed to the
traditional 30 minutes.
Frame-up trial under "hanging judge" Sabo
In a 1982 frame-up trial presided over by now deceased
"hanging judge" Albert Sabo, Mumia Abu-Jamal, an
award-winning radio journalist, was convicted of the
Dec. 9, 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer
Daniel Faulkner. The grotesque trial proceedings have
been condemned by groups ranging from Amnesty
International and the NAACP to the European Parliament
and the presidents of France and South Africa.
More than a third of the 35 Philadelphia police
officers indicted at that time on charges of
corruption, witness intimidation, falsification of
evidence, and involvement in drug peddling and
prostitution were involved in one way or another in
Mumia's case.
Judge Sabo himself was a retired member of the
death-penalty-obsessed Fraternal Order of Police and
was widely seen as "a prosecutor's best friend." Sabo
sentenced to execution a national record of 32
defendants (30 of whom were racial minorities) over
the course of his 14-year stint on the bench.
According to an affidavit filed by award-winning court
stenographer Terri Maurer Cater, she overheard Sabo
state during a Mumia trial recess period and in the
presence of another judge, "Yeah, and I'm going to
help 'em fry the n****r."
This and other evidence of racial bias was clearly
presented to the court. In one instance, said Bryan, a
Black juror with a hearing disability, who explained
that he could function perfectly well when he turned
up his hearing aid, was dismissed while a white juror
with the same disability was accepted.
The May 17 hearing began with prosecution designee
Hugh Burns presenting the state's case to reinstate the
death sentence and execute Mumia by lethal injection.
A 2001 federal district court decision by William H.
Yohn Jr. had previously voided the trial court's death
sentence based on Judge Sabo's flawed and ambiguous
oral instructions and the similar written forms
regarding mitigating circumstances sufficient to
sentence Mumia to life imprisonment rather than death.
In the face of repeated questions on this issue it
seemed apparent that Burns was losing ground with his
effort to cite cases to justify the flawed
instructions that operated to lead jurors to falsely
conclude that they had to be unanimous with regard to
each and every mitigating circumstance to find
sufficient grounds to sentence Mumia to life
imprisonment as opposed to death.
In a withering presentation of Mumia's side of this
issue, Judith Ritter detailed the flaws in Sabo's oral
and written instructions and cited chapter and verse
why similar unclear and ambiguous instructions had
been struck down by the courts.
If Mumia wins on this issue the state would be
compelled within 180 days to hold what amounts to a
new trial, except that the new jury would be barred
from finding a verdict of innocence and instead be
limited to choosing a sentence of either life in
prison or death.
Prosecutor McGill has stated that in this eventuality
the state has yet to decide if it would pursue a new
trial. Instead it might well conclude that its
interests would best be served by dropping the matter,
thereby keeping Mumia in prison for life and avoiding
having the state's frame-up further exposed with a
defense presentation to a new jury, replete with
volumes of new or suppressed evidence that prove
Mumia's innocence. Before facing such a prospect the
state has a further option, perhaps its magic weapon
in turning and defeat it might suffer into victory.
It can appeal any decision against it to that bastion
of reaction and graveyard of civil liberties, U.S.
Supreme Court.
Black jurors excluded from trial
The next critical issue in dispute was Mumia's
contention that in violation of the famous U.S.
Supreme Court decision in the 1986 case of Batson v.
Kentucky, racism guided the state's use of preemptory
challenges to exclude Black jurors. Of the 14
qualified Black jurors interviewed in Mumia's 1982
trial, prosecutor Joseph McGill eliminated 10 with
preemptory strikes, that is, removal with no stated
cause.
Of the 25 possible white jurors, McGill eliminated
only five. That left Mumia with a jury of nine whites
and three Blacks (plus four white alternate jurors) in
a city with a Black population of 40 percent. The
jury's racial composition was further altered when
Judge Sabo eliminated a Black juror already selected,
who was replaced with a white juror, for a final jury
composition of 10 whites and two Blacks.
The Black juror was dismissed after she went home in
the evening when the trial was not in session to attend
to her sick cat despite Judge Sabo's refusal to grant
her permission to do so. But permission to leave the
courtroom was not denied to a white juror for who Sabo
authorized a police escort to take a civil service exam
although it meant suspending the trial itself for a half day.
Race prejudice in jury selection by prosecutor Joseph
McGill was cited by Bryan in both Mumia's written
brief and Bryan's oral arguments. McGill, in six
murder trials, including Mumia's, had removed 74
percent of Black jurors with preemptory challenges as
compared to 25 percent of white jurors. Prior to
becoming Pennsylvania governor, District Attorney Ed
Rendell had established a two-term record of having
prosecutors use preemptory challenges to bar 58
percent of all Blacks from Philadelphia juries as
compared to 22 percent for whites.
Further, the routine exclusion of Black jurors was the
established practice of Philadelphia prosecutors, in
accord with an overtly racist 1982 State Supreme Court
decision in the case of Commonwealth v. Henderson,
which held, "The race, creed, national origin, sex or
other similar characteristics of a venireman (member
of a jury pool) may be proper considerations in
exercising peremptory challenges."
That is, a Black person in Pennsylvania could be
legally excluded from a jury panel if the prosecutor
believed that he/she would be sympathetic to a Black
defendant! Henderson was reversed at least in part by
the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 Batson decision.
Hugh Burns' response to the data proving the exclusion
of Blacks was that it was irrelevant and technically
barred from consideration because the defense
allegedly did not present it in a timely manner, that
is, during the 1995 Post Conviction Relief Act hearing
when new evidence was supposedly open to
consideration. At that time, however, the extent of
the data was unknown and did not become known until
the case reached the federal courts.
A new twist to the issue of racist exclusion of Blacks
was added to the hearing when the presiding judges
themselves queried the defense as to the composition
of the entire venire (jury pool) from which jurors
were selected. Since no such data was available on
this matter two of the judges speculated that it was
hypothetically possible that the Black percentage of
the entire jury pool could have been so high that
McGill's peremptory elimination of 71 percent of the
Black jurors might not constitute discrimination at
all. Indeed, one judge speculated with a straight face
that it was possible that "discrimination against whites"
might be the case!
At no time during Mumia's decades of legal battles had
the prosecution itself raised such a possibility,
either in written briefs or oral arguments. The reason
is obvious. The history of jury pools in Philadelphia
had always indicated that Blacks were highly
underrepresented, as opposed to the hypothetical
scenario presented by two of the judges that the
possibility existed that Blacks could have been
over-represented. But the judges' toying with the
issue could indicate an inclination to establish a new
precedent to undermine Mumia's Batson claim.
Mumia's defense attorneys responded that even in the
absence of data on the overall jury pool, the sum
total of the evidence of discrimination they had
presented constituted a prima facie case of racial
discrimination sufficient to comply with the standards
set forth in Batson.
Should the Third Circuit affirm the state's violation
of Batson, the result could either be a new trial or
the court's sending the issue of jury discrimination
back to the previous court for an evidentiary hearing,
where the prosecution's 1982 striking of each and
every Black juror would have to be defended based on
grounds other than race. Bryan told me that such a
hearing would open the door wide to factually
demonstrate that the exclusion of Blacks was based on
racist criteria.
Perhaps the most stunning dispute of the day took
place over the defense contention that prosecutor
Joseph McGill's summation to the jury included the
statement, "If you find the defendant guilty of course
there would be appeal after appeal and perhaps there
could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that
may not be final."
It was here that the full force of the three-judge
panel was brought to bear. Hugh Burns was challenged
to justify why this statement did not constitute a
violation of the U.S. Constitution. The justices were
referring to the due-process clause of the 14th
Amendment of the Bill of Rights as it applies to the
Sixth Amendment's fair-trial provisions, in short, the
necessity of applying the standard that a jury must
operate with a "presumption of innocence" to be
negated only if the defendant is found to be guilty
"beyond a reasonable doubt."
The judges felt compelled to remind Burns that only
juries, bound by this standard, determine guilt or
innocence, not appeals courts, the latter being limited
to deciding issues of the common law (law made by
judicial decisions), statutory law, and associated
constitutional interpretations.
McGill's "appeal after appeal" statement to the jury
was in fact his stock in trade. In fact, a 1986
decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed a
death sentence and ordered a new trial in another case
where McGill dutifully offered the jury virtually the
same "appeal after appeal" summation.
If the present judges apply this precedent, not to
mention the constitutionally-mandated "reasonable
doubt" imperative, Mumia's guilty verdict will be
voided and he will be granted a new trial, a trial
during which all the evidence of innocence that had
been previously suppressed can be submitted to a new
jury.
Of course, should the Third Circuit take this course
of action, it is likely that the state will appeal the
decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, placing Mumia's
fate once again in the hands of the reactionary
judiciary.
Robert R. Bryan told this writer that "if the Third
Circuit follows the law, Mumia will be granted a new
trial," an eventuality that he believes "will result
in Mumia's freedom."
While it certainly appears that the "law" is on
Mumia's side, the conclusion that it will be applied,
as Bryan fully understands, is far from certain. "The
law, in its majestic equality," French novelist
Anatole France aptly observed, "permits the rich and
the poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the
streets, or steal bread."
A review of "the law's" record to date makes clear
that its interpretation remains in the hands of a
racist and class-biased judiciary that has to date
torn it to shreds with tortuous renditions that defy
logic.
It was Judge Sabo, whose version of "the law" was
applied nearly 100 times against defense motions
protesting his violation of Mumia's constitutional
rights, who first indicated how the system works. It
was Federal District Court Judge William H. Yohn's
interpretation of "the law" that was applied to rule
against 28 of Mumia's 29 constitutional issues
originally presented to his court. Yohn repeatedly
cited the 1996 Anti-terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act (AEDPA), signed by President Clinton, to
justify his interpretation of "the law."
This reactionary law's central proposition for the
first time requires federal courts to grant a
"presumption of correctness" to the findings of state
courts, in this case the "legal" findings of racist
Judge Albert Sabo. It was signed by President Clinton
with his own warning that "parts of it" may be "found
to be unconstitutional." This "liberal" president was
referring to the law's abrogation of the presumption
of innocence and associated denial of the right of
habeas corpus, that is, the right to appeal injustices
to the federal courts.
The AEDPA was so named because
it was designed to make state court death penalty
sentences "effective," that is, immune from appeal to
the federal courts. Prior to its passage a full 40
percent of all state court convictions in murder cases
were reversed on appeal. Why? The record shows that
the major grounds for reversal were incompetent
counsel intimidation of witnesses and falsification of
evidence, in effect, the central issues in Mumia's
case.
The AEDPA's new standard, applied to Mumia's appeal,
allowed Judge Yohn to eliminate from consideration the
myriad of factual and legal issues demonstrating
police/prosecution's falsification and fabrication of
evidence, intimidation of witnesses and other
atrocities under "the law" that had been buried
beneath a mountain of contrary "legal" findings over
the past 25 years.
Judge Yohn felt compelled to cite another novel
interpretation of "the law," the present doctrine that
"innocence is no defense." Authored by the U.S.
Supreme Court in the infamous Herrera case, this holds
that innocence is trumped by timeliness. If evidence
of innocence is submitted beyond a statutory deadline,
it is irrelevant. The legal process must embody
"finality," says the "law of the land" today, even if
the result is the execution of an innocent man.
Today, the truth of what happened in the fateful early
morning hours of Dec. 9, 1981, has been obliterated
from the record by a system that has reduced Mumia's
chances of freedom to the interpretations of a handful
of "constitutional issues" by three supposedly
unbiased jurists, while the vast reserve of evidence
proving Mumia's absolute innocence had been long ago
been barred from consideration.
The political stakes involved in Mumia's case are
recognized by all. The federal government itself
believed that it was necessary to inform the Third
Circuit where it stood when the House of
Representatives in the last session of the Republican
Congress passed a lying resolution condemning Mumia as
a cop killer and warning the French city of St. Denis
that its naming of a street after Mumia was
unacceptable to the U.S. government.
This is but one indication that "the law's"
interpretation extends far beyond the judiciary. All
but 31 House members approved this resolution that
pitifully stated that Mumia had exhausted all his
appeals at a time when his most important appeal was
pending before one of the nation's highest courts. So
much for the objectivity, not to mention the factual
accuracy, of the legislative branch, the same branch of
government that voted to hasten the execution of the
3500 people (mainly Blacks and other oppressed
minorities) who inhabit the death-row sections of the
profit-oriented prison industrial complex.
What really happened on the morning of Dec. 9, 1981?
The truth of that day has been largely obliterated by
countless police and prosecution manipulations and
falsifications designed to buttress a scenario that
cannot stand up to the massive accumulations of facts
that were known at the time and subsequently unearthed.
The facts are simple enough. A police officer, shortly
before 4:00 am, in a red-light district of Philadelphia,
stopped a banged-up blue Volkswagen bug with a dangling
license plate and demanded that the driver, Mumia's
brother Billy Cook, present his driver's license. Cook
did so, but gave Officer Faulkner, who had put in a call
for police back-up, a temporary license that belonged to
Arnold Howard, who had given it to Kenneth Freeman, Cook's
street-stall business partner and a passenger in the VW bug.
The license was almost immediately found by the police
in Faulkner's clothing, but only reported to the defense
12 years later.
An argument ensued and Faulkner bludgeoned Cook with his
17-inch flashlight. Mumia, parked in his taxicab a distance
away, observed the beating. He headed toward the scene and was
shot by Faulkner. Freeman then alighted from the VW and shot
Faulkner. Six witnesses say the shooter, Freeman, fled the
scene, with several describing his clothing, hair, and physical
characteristics, all vastly different from Mumia's. Mumia, near
dead, lay a few feet away from Faulkner. All the evidence
accumulated since that time proves these assertions and
disproves the prosecutions fabricated scenario (see freemumia.org).
The 31 photographs of the crime scene taken minutes
after the shootings by photojournalist Pedro Polokoff
put the lie to the testimony of police "eyewitness"
Robert Chobert, who claimed that he viewed the murder
from his taxicab that was parked immediately behind
Faulkner's police car. There was no such taxicab
there.
Chobert changed his testimony three times to conform
to the police scenario. The photographs recently made
public by Polokoff show conclusively that the police
manipulated the crime scene, rearranging critical
evidence and destroying fingerprint evidence on guns
found at the scene.
The critical details of the frame-up have been vividly
recounted for decades, with new evidence found just
months ago further proving their veracity. New
ballistic evidence revealed by Michael Schiffman,
a German researcher who wrote his PhD. thesis on the
case, again demonstrates the impossibility that Mumia
murdered Officer Faulkner.
What can be done today to win Mumia's freedom? In a
perfect world the solution would be in the French
tradition of 1789. Drive the corrupt modern day
monarchs of capital from their haughty palaces of
power and storm the Bastille to free the innocent,
including Mumia!
But we do yet not live in a perfect world. Our power
has proved sufficient to stay the executioner's hand
for 25 years and beat back two warrants for Mumia's
execution. It has gotten us to the point where a possible
aberration in the system has allowed the May 17 hearing
to finally expose a critical aspects of Mumia's frame-up.
But we are still far from seeing a free Mumia walk out of
his supermax death row cell at the State Correctional
Institution Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.
But with the fight for one man's life, (Mumia is Everyman
and Everywoman who faces death at the hands of criminals.)
once again on the line and at center stage, we have a new
opportunity to reinvigorate our movement, broaden its base
and ensure that justice is done.
Our capacity to mobilize in unprecedented numbers and
make the political price of Mumia's murder and
continued incarceration too high to pay is central to
the work ahead. History has amply demonstrated that
all of our historic victories stem from the exercise
of our collective power. That power lies with all who
cherish freedom and despise injustice. Join the fight
for Mumia's freedom!
Jeff Mackler is the Director of the Northern California-
based Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
freemumia.org; 415-255-1085.
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3) President or Priest?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
June 6, 2007
prisonradio.org
It is a year and 1/2 before elections, and already we have been treated to the spectacle of a parade of politicians, promising almost everybody everything, with promises of better, sweeter things to come.
On what passes for the left and right of acceptable U.S. politics, a plethora of candidates have proceeded to pronounce their religious beliefs, and their tacit unbelief in science - especially evolution.
Of course, in the U.S. one is free to believe or not believe in a given religious dogma. They are free to speak of it, or not.
But there is something fishy when politicians speak of their faith. They use it as an advertising tool, a campaign sign of the soul, so to speak.
What is rarely heard is how that religious belief relates to the health, education and welfare of the poorest millions who still dwell in the unseen crevices of American society.
What is rarely heard is the state and fate of those called 'the least of these'.
What is still more rare is the mention of peace.
Poverty and peace are off of the agenda. Instead, there is the muscular religion of smiting one's enemies, or jailing one's opponents, or using the power of the State to enforce their religious codes upon others, especially those who are of a different belief.
There is the aura of holy war wafting over the heads of the assembled throng, as they try to outdo each other in false piety, and the promotion of what amounts to a theocracy.
This is done not because any of the given political figures actually believes in their stated faith, but because they know that a large number of people in the U.S. do believe in faiths, and they want to capture their votes.
How could one claim to believe in a faith that preaches peace, while practicing war?
How can there be claims to justice, when there is injustice, torture, and planning for new imperial adventures?
Presidents make poor priests.
That's because the interests of priests are supposedly spiritual, while the interests of presidents are mostly temporal.
When either muddles in the other's realm, this almost inevitably leads to chaos.
In the U.S., the fastest growing religion is Islam, with adherents numbering in the millions, across a broad ethnic and racial spectrum. Although the present administration is in power, at least in part, because of a majority of their votes, can it be said that he has represented their interest?
In a nation of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, Hare Krishnas, Confucianists, Seven Day Adventists, and an almost uncountable host of others, (as well as millions who believe in no faith) whom does the president represent?
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4) Setback for Ill Workers at Nuclear Bomb Plant
By DAN FROSCH
June 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/washington/13rockyflats.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
LAKEWOOD, Colo., June 12— A federal advisory panel recommended Tuesday that thousands of former workers at a nuclear weapons plant be denied immediate government compensation for illnesses that they say result from years of radiation exposure there.
The recommendation is a significant setback for a large number of people once employed as plutonium workers at the plant, Rocky Flats, 16 miles northwest of Denver. Their union, the United Steelworkers of America, had petitioned the Department of Health and Human Services to allow more than 3,000 of them to bypass a complex federal evaluation and compensation process established by Congress in 2000.
In that time-consuming process, sick workers from Rocky Flats and other American nuclear facilities may apply for $150,000 in compensation, plus medical benefits, if there is evidence that they suffer from any of 22 kinds of cancer linked to radiation. A worker must first file a claim with the Labor Department, a step that brings a lengthy investigation in which scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, through records, research and interviews, determine eligibility by establishing the radiation dose incurred by the worker. If the scientists are unable to determine the dose, the worker may file for “special exposure cohort” status.
It was this status that was sought by the former Rocky Flats workers. But after more than two years of hearings and debate, the panel — the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — decided on a vote of 6 to 4 Tuesday that the occupational safety scientists could accurately determine dose exposure for almost all of the plant’s former workers.
The board did recommend that a relatively small subset of the petitioning workers be allowed to receive the expedited benefits. These workers were exposed from 1959 to 1966, and the panel found that the occupational safety agency could not be expected to establish the dose for so early a period.
The board’s recommendations now go to the Department of Health and Human Services, though it is unclear when the department will rule.
“I’m stunned,” said Laura Schultz, a former plutonium worker who has suffered from cervical and kidney cancer. “We don’t have the money to keep fighting for this.”
One panel member, Dr. James Melius, a physician, called the process “grossly unfair” and said the board had had little opportunity to review the accounts of the former workers, many of whom argued that the occupational safety agency’s records were incomplete and vastly understated their illnesses.
But a member who voted with the majority, Mark Griffon, a consultant on radiation and hazardous waste, said he felt that the agency’s scientists had proved that they could accurately reconstruct the radiation dose level for most Rocky Flats workers.
“At the end of the day,” Mr. Griffon said, “I do feel like we have data.”
Rocky Flats opened in 1952 and ultimately produced more than 60,000 nuclear weapons parts. It was closed in 1989 after a raid by federal agents investigating accusations of environmental crimes on the part of its operator, Rockwell International, an Energy Department contractor. The plant was designated a Superfund hazardous waste site by the Environmental Protection Agency, and a cleanup took place from 1992 to 2005. It is now a wildlife sanctuary.
In the absence of expedited benefits, a total of 2,682 Rocky Flats workers have filed claims over their illnesses, the steelworkers union says, with 807 approved and 617 denied. The rest, 1,258, are still pending.
On Monday, more than 100 Rocky Flats workers and supporters attended a hearing of the advisory panel in this Denver suburb. Some of them — burly men with worn faces and white-haired women with slouched shoulders — told of suffering, and sometimes death, their plain-spoken narratives in sharp contrast to the data-driven discussions of board members.
Judy Padilla, who worked as a sheet metal worker at Rocky Flats for 22 years and has since had a mastectomy, told the board: “We ask neither for sympathy nor charity. All we ask for is the truth.”
Jennifer Thompson, a former Rocky Flats worker who is a spokeswoman for the petitioners, told the panel that it took an average of 742 days to process a successful claim. Sixty-seven workers have died waiting for their benefits to come through, Ms. Thompson said.
Charlie Wolf, a former project engineer at the plant who now suffers from brain and bone marrow cancer, said he had waited more than four years before his claim was approved. “It’s hard for me to even read anymore,” said Mr. Wolf, whose bald head is creased by a nine-inch scar from brain surgery related to his cancer.
Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado and all the members of the state’s Congressional delegation sent letters asking the panel to support the petition. Representative Mark Udall testified on Monday that the compensation program’s red tape left workers in a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”
Michelle Dobrovolny, 42, is one of 15 family members who worked at Rocky Flats. Four have died of cancer. Five others are sick, among them Ms. Dobrovolny herself, who has a brain tumor.
“We’re the forgotten bunch,” she said.
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5) The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
Posted on June 13, 2007,
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/53962/
A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass. A great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor.
Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.
But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."
But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein in an essay in the same issue of the New York Times magazine that features Larry Summers' sobered mood.
Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?
In Lowenstein's view: "...whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem..."
Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact. A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.
First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder.
You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $200 billion family fortune?
Second, though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial industry, by means that are occult to the average citizen and do not seem to involve much labor of any kind, we all pay a price, somewhere down the line. All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the huge concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy. Yes, we should acknowledge the philanthropic efforts of exceptional billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates.
But if we don't end up with universal health insurance in the next few years, it won't be because the average American isn't pining for relief from escalating medical costs. It may well turn out to be because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry." And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- the AFLCIO.
Lowenstein notes, that "if the very upper crust were banished to a Caribbean island, the America that remained would be a lot more egalitarian."
Well, duh. The point is that it would also be more prosperous, at the individual level, and democratic. In fact, why give the upper crust an island in the Caribbean? After all they've done for us recently, I think the Aleutians should be more than adequate.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/53962/
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6) The foul stench of Firestone
Robtel Neajai Pailey
June 2007
www.pambazuka.org
Source: redpepper.org
Slavery isn't dead, writes Robtel Neajai Pailey. Its modern-day variant is just found on a different kind of plantation
Emmanuel B is 30, a slender five foot three, and a labourer whose piercing brown eyes tell unspeakable truths. He's not the kind of slave-labourer we're familiar with from 19th-century plantations in the Deep South of the United States. Instead, Emmanuel is a modern-day plantation labourer in 21st-century, post-conflict Liberia, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is his unyielding master. Like many workers on Firestone's largest rubber plantation, Emmanuel was born in Harbel, has lived in Harbel all his life, and will most likely waste away in Harbel.
As westerners drive around in their heavy-duty SUVs, propelled along on the black gold of Firestone tires, Emmanuel wakes up at the crack of dawn to tap raw latex from 800 rubber trees daily. His clothes are tattered and his shoulders covered in red puss-infected blisters from carrying buckets full of raw latex suspended from an iron pole to the Firestone processing plant two miles from his tapping site.
Emmanuel was gracious enough to demonstrate what a tapper does from sun-up to midmorning. With a pitchfork suspended in the air, he extended his long wiry arms to ease the raw latex out of the trees and into the small red cups that catch it. The drip-drip-drip of the whitecoated liquid was almost as laborious to witness as Emmanuel's daily task - another 799 trees still to go after this one. For Emmanuel and his fellow tappers, a 5am start is the only means of meeting their daily quotas; their wages are reduced by half if they fail to do so. Some have begun to use their children to complete the Herculean task.
I visited the Firestone rubber plantation for the first time in December 2006 while on a research fact-finding mission. I decided to take a break from high browed academic work, and visit the sprawling modern day encampment I had heard so many horror stories about. It's what I imagined the South to look like during the century or so of chattel slavery in the United States, with the hustle bustle activity of plantation life and the accompanying strokes of exploitation.
As my brother-in-law, Christopher Pabai, and I pulled into the one million acre - and constantly expanding - plantation, we were welcomed by an ungodly stench, a stench I can only compare to the smell of rotten cheese. Not just ordinary rotten cheese, but the kind that has been drenched in burning oil, steamrolled on a conveyor belt, and neatly packaged for nonhuman consumption. That's what raw latex smells like when it's being processed.
Rather than wearing masks to protect their noses from the assault, the plantation workers ingest the foul stench day in and day out. It took all my willpower not to retch all over Firestone's perfectly manicured lawn or lush green golf course that senior management frequents while on hiatus from their back-breaking overseeing.
But the foul stench is the least of the workers' worries.
While England celebrates its 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, plantation workers in Liberia are trapped in a time warp of monumental proportions. They exist in the parallel universe of multinational corporate checkmate, where the prize goes to the highest exploiter. Firestone has been playing the chess pieces of Liberia's rubber pawns since the company signed a concession agreement with the Liberian government in 1926 to lease one million acres of land for six cents per acre - an abominable exchange given the astronomical dividends garnered from rubber sales then and now.
In 2005, Liberia's transitional government signed another concession agreement for an extra 37 years of rubber slavery. Rubber is Liberia's largest export, and Firestone its largest international corporate exploiter, I mean employer, to date. The country and its people have paid a high price for the asymmetrical relationship.
History challenges us to stay on a forward moving dialectic of change. The Firestone example shows us that an ironic distortion of that dialectic is taking place right under our noses. Slavery isn't dead, it's manufactured in the rubber we use daily. We owe it to Emmanuel and his comrades on the Firestone Rubber Plantation to change the course of history, to make a clean break from modernday slavery and its peculiar 21stcentury manifestations. We owe it to ourselves.
For more information on the struggle against Firestone, visit the Stop Firestone Campaign website at www.stopfirestone.org. Liberian native Robtel Neajai Pailey is a graduate student at the University of Oxford and a multi-media producer for Fahamu/ Pambazuka News (www.pambazuka.org), which has published a longer version of this article
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7) Hamas Moves Close to Full Control of Gaza
By STEVEN ERLANGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
June 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/world/middleeast/14cnd-mideast.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
JERUSALEM, June 14 — The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, faced the further collapse of his power in Gaza today as fierce clashes continued and Hamas fighters took over the headquarters of Fatah’s Preventive Security forces and the military intelligence building in Gaza City.
Those two advances meant Hamas came close to full control of Gaza. Only the presidential compound of Mr. Abbas and the Suraya headquarters of the National Security Forces, the Palestinian army, remained under Fatah’s control. But Hamas had surrounded Al Suraya, calling on the occupants to surrender, and the compound was under attack today.
Mr. Abbas was holding meetings outside Gaza, in Ramallah, on the West Bank, and is expected to announce an “important decision” later today, his aides said. Mr. Abbas is under pressure from within Fatah and from some of his other allies to suspend participation in the so-called unity government with Hamas, which began in March, and to declare a state of emergency.
As Hamas tightened its grip on Gaza, the fall of the headquarters of the Fatah-dominated Preventive Security forces, in the Tal el-Hawa district of Gaza City, was especially significant.
It would have powerful resonance for both Fatah and Hamas. Preventive Security is an elite national security force that was founded by Mohammed Dahlan, a Fatah strongman, and was considered to be one of the most important Fatah forces in Gaza.
After the capture of the headquarters, witnesses said Hamas fighters dragged the vanquished Fatah gunmen outside and executed them on the street, The Associated Press reported.
As Hamas moved closer to securing full control of the Gaza Strip, the European Union suspended its humanitarian aid projects in the area, The A.P. said. The European Union also called for a “humanitarian truce” to allow the wounded to be evacuated, the A.P. said.
The powerful Hamas move to exert authority in Gaza and the poor response by the larger security forces supposedly loyal to Fatah have raised troubling questions for Mr. Abbas and Israel and have left the White House, which supports Mr. Abbas, with a dwindling menu of policy options.
Mr. Abbas now faces a putative Palestinian state divided into a West Bank run by Fatah and a Gaza run by Hamas.
Hamas forces had consolidated their control over much of Gaza during fighting on Wednesday. Hamas took command of the main north-south road and blew up a Fatah headquarters in Khan Yunis, in the south.
By Wednesday evening, in northern Gaza and Gaza City, Hamas military men, many of them in black masks, moved unchallenged through the streets as Fatah fighters ran short of arms and ammunition and abandoned their posts.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel has warned of “regional consequences” if Gaza fell under the complete control of Hamas, an Islamist movement that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Hamas control of Gaza would limit Israel’s ability to negotiate with Mr. Abbas, as Washington wants.
Hamas spokesmen said the movement had no political goal except to defend itself from a group within Fatah collaborating with Israel and the United States. They said they wanted to bring the security forces under the control of the unity government, in which Fatah agreed to play a part until the current fighting.
Some Israeli security officials say Israel wants to see the West Bank isolated from Gaza, even more so with Hamas in control there. One official suggested that Hamas’s show of strength in Gaza would make it more likely that the Israeli military would intervene there this summer to cut back Hamas’s military power. The Israeli security services say Hamas, which is able to smuggle weapons and explosives from Egypt, is developing a sophisticated army on the model of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, said Israel did not see “the implosion of the Palestinian Authority in anyone’s interest.” In Gaza, he added, “the clear strength that Hamas is demonstrating on the ground is a problem for us, and a challenge.”
“It’s a problem for the Palestinians, too,” Mr. Regev said. “Our whole policy is to work with moderate pragmatic Palestinians who believe in peace, and Hamas hegemony in Gaza is not good for Israel, for the Palestinians or for peace.”
Since the election victory of Hamas in January 2006, the United States and Israel have worked to isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with recognition and weaponry. Asked whether the Hamas gains showed the failure of that policy, Mr. Regev said: “I don’t think Israel or the international community should give up on Palestinian moderates. That would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Some in Israel, however, are beginning to ask whether it might make sense to have indirect discussions with Hamas, which is clearly not going away.
In Wednesday’s clashes in Gaza City, Hamas took over the Awdah building, a tall apartment complex where many Fatah leaders lived, causing another Fatah leader, Maher Miqdad, to flee with his family, after at least eight Fatah men were killed.
Hamas also took over and burned the main police station, another symbol of Fatah power, and surrounded the main national security headquarters building, Al Suraya.
In northern Gaza, Hamas gave fighters in isolated Fatah military headquarters until Friday at 7 p.m. to surrender their weapons.
In Khan Yunis, Hamas detonated a large bomb in a tunnel under the headquarters of Fatah’s Preventive Security, killing at least one of those inside and wounding eight more.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said the movement was defending itself, not reaching for unalloyed power.
“There is no political goal behind this but to defend our movement and force these security groups to behave,” Mr. Zuhri said in an interview.
He insisted that “Hamas did not initiate these attacks, but it was pushed to do so to end crimes by the factions inside Fatah who favor a coup.”
He said Hamas “is doing the work that Fatah failed to do, to control these groups,” whom he accused of crimes, chaos and collaboration with Israel and the United States.
Mr. Zuhri said the United States should “sit with the movement at the dialogue table on the basis of mutual respect, respecting the elections.”
Mr. Miqdad accused Hamas of following an Israeli script. “This is an Israeli plan,” he said. “They want to connect the West Bank to Jordan and make Gaza a separate jail. This will be the end of an independent Palestinian state.”
Abdullah al-Aqad, 28, of Khan Yunis, said he joined the national security forces to have a job. He marveled at the speed of the Hamas advance. “We are 70,000 P.A. soldiers, and where are they all?” he asked. “And facing 10,000 Hamas soldiers.”
From Ramallah, Mr. Abbas spoke to the exiled Hamas political leader, Khaled Meshal, to try to ease the crisis. “This is madness, the madness that is going on in Gaza now,” Mr. Abbas told reporters.
At least 13 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday and 64 injured, according to Moaweya Hassanein of the Palestinian Health Ministry. He said 59 had died since Monday.
The dead included two workers with the United Nations agency that helps the 70 percent of Gazans who are refugees or their descendants. The agency announced it was curtailing its operations until the fighting stopped.
While Fatah blamed Hamas for the crisis, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, Danny Rubinstein, said the “primary reason for the break-up is the fact that Fatah has refused to fully share the Palestinian Authority’s mechanism of power with its rival Hamas, despite Hamas’s decisive victory in the January 2006 general elections.”
Fatah “was forced to overrule Palestinian voters because the entire world demanded it do so,” Mr. Rubinstein added. “Matters have come to the point where Hamas attempted to take by force what they believe they rightfully deserve.”
Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem, and Graham Bowley from New York. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza City and Khan Yunis.
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8) In Health Care, Cost Isn’t Proof of High Quality
By REED ABELSON
June 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/health/14insure.html?hp
Stark evidence that high medical payments do not necessarily buy high-quality patient care is presented in a hospital study set for release today.
In a Pennsylvania government survey of the state’s 60 hospitals that perform heart bypass surgery, the best-paid hospital received nearly $100,000, on average, for the operation while the least-paid got less than $20,000. At both, patients had comparable lengths of stay and death rates.
And among the 20 hospitals serving metropolitan Philadelphia, two of the highest paid actually had higher-than-expected death rates, the survey found.
Hospitals say there are numerous reasons for some of the high payments, including the fact that a single very expensive case can push up the averages.
Still, the Pennsylvania findings support a growing national consensus that as consumers, insurers and employers pay more for care, they are not necessarily getting better care. Expensive medicine may, in fact, be poor medicine.
“For most consumers, the fact that there is no connection between quality and cost is one of the dirty secrets of medicine,” said Peter V. Lee, the chief executive of the Pacific Business Group on Health, a California group of employers that provide health care coverage for workers.
Some Pennsylvania employers said the state’s findings, based on data from 2005, might put more pressure on insurance carriers and hospitals to start demonstrating the value of care. “It now provides us a tool to have a serious dialogue with our carriers,” said Mark Dever, a benefits consultant for Duquesne Light, a regional utility in Pittsburgh.
“We have to question,” he said. “There’s a big difference in price — why?”
The report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, a state agency, provides a rare public glimpse of detailed information about hospital payments and patient outcomes. And the seemingly random nature of the payments is striking.
Although federal Medicare payments are largely fixed, they varied somewhat among the Pennsylvania hospitals surveyed. The far greater disparity involved commercial insurers, which must negotiate their rates hospital by hospital.
And the survey found that good care can go unrewarded. One Philadelphia area hospital, Main Line Health’s Lankenau center, which performs a large number of bypass surgeries and has a high success rate, according to the survey, was paid an average of $33,549 by private insurers. That was less than half the nearly $80,000 in average payments received by the other hospitals, with poorer track records.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Marc P. Volavka, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. “Certain payers are paying an awful lot for poor quality.”
He points to some of the experiments to change how hospitals are paid, like Geisinger Health System in central Pennsylvania, which is trying to demonstrate its commitment to high-quality care by offering a 30-day warranty on its cardiac surgery.
“The current reimbursement paradigm is fundamentally broken,” said Dr. Ronald Paulus, an executive with Geisinger, who says there is no current financial incentive for a hospital to provide the kind of care that leads to better outcomes and lower payments.
Pennsylvania is the first state to make such information, normally closely guarded by the hospitals and the insurers, available to everyone — including patients who may never see their hospital bills or be aware of how their hospitals compare with others in the state.
The council collected the payment data from the insurers and calculated averages of the payments to each hospital. So each hospital’s average includes small numbers of extraordinarily high-cost cases, where patients may have developed complications and had lengthy hospital stays.
As a result, a hospital with a relatively low number of surgeries but a high number of costly cases, could wind up with a high average payment. In the Philadelphia area, for example, Lower Bucks Hospital says its average of nearly $100,000 paid by commercial insurers for a bypass patient was skewed by a single very expensive case. Without that case, its average would be closer to $40,000, the hospital said.
But fully explaining the discrepancies in payments and quality of care is difficult.
In Philadelphia, heart patients have a choice among several academic medical centers. Two, Albert Einstein and Hahnemann University, were paid nearly $80,000, on average, for treating a bypass patient. The hospitals at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University, whose patients did as well or better, were paid much less.
Both Albert Einstein and Hahnemann disputed the survey’s findings, saying payments they receive are lower than the state is reporting.
Hahnemann says its calculations show the average to be significantly lower — $23, 420 — rather than the $78,312 reported in the survey.
The council conceded that the pool of Hahnemann patients it used for its calculations was different from the patients the hospital might count. The council defended its conclusions, saying it used the same methodology for all the hospitals surveyed.
As for the quality measures, Hahnemann says its higher-than-expected mortality rates might reflect the hospital’s own poor record-keeping, which it says did not give the state an accurate picture of how sick some of its patients were before their surgeries. As eye-opening as the Pennsylvania report may be to the public, insurers have already been aware that their payment practices do not necessarily encourage hospitals to provide better care. Medicare, for example, pays essentially a flat fee, which varies depending on location and type of hospital, for the same surgery, regardless of outcome. Complications tend to simply mean additional payments. And many insurers follow the government’s lead.
And so hospitals are rewarded for providing more care, not better care.
“The Medicare program pays for services,” said Leslie Norwalk, the acting administrator for the federal program, who says hospitals are reimbursed even if the care they are providing is a result of a mistake or avoidable hospital infection.
Independence Blue Cross, which is Philadelphia’s largest private insurer, says the difficulty lies in finding the right measures to use to pay for quality care.
“Philosophically, you’re not going to get an argument from us,” said Dr. Richard Snyder, a senior executive at Independence. “We believe we should pay more for high quality than poor quality.”
He says hospitals that are poor performers do risk being excluded from its network, as happened in one case with a hospital — which he would not identify — that was not allowed to deliver cardiac care to the plan’s members for a year until the hospital improved its performance.
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9) Detroit Pursues Sweeping Cuts In Union Talks Big 3 Cite Wide Cost Gap With Asian Auto Rivals; Threat to Export Jobs
By JEFFREY MCCRACKEN
June 14, 2007; Page A1
Wall Street Journal
Detroit's Big Three, facing their worst crisis in decades, are seeking unprecedented concessions from the United Auto Workers union in a bid to narrow what they say is a $30-an-hour labor-cost disadvantage against Asian rivals like Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., auto executives say.
The unusually tough stance by General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group marks their latest attempt to stanch heavy losses in their North American auto operations. It also sets up a potential showdown with the UAW -- which has a 70-year history of winning progressively richer contracts for its members -- as the two sides prepare for contract talks that start this summer.
In recent years, the union has agreed to work-rule changes and benefit cuts for its retirees designed to save the auto makers billions of dollars a year. However, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, who declined to comment on the coming negotiations, has argued his workers shouldn't bear the entire cost of Detroit's restructuring.
The Big Three have talked tough before ahead of contract talks, only to agree in the end to a costly labor deal. This time around, however, people familiar with their plans say all three are united in believing they have no choice but to close the $10 billion-a-year labor-cost gap between them and their leaner Asian competitors on cars and trucks built in the U.S. The three are also resolved to move jobs abroad if they can't bring down U.S. wage-and-benefit costs, one industry executive says.
GM, Ford and Chrysler have eliminated about 70,000 UAW jobs over the past two years through buyouts and other means. The three, which currently employ about 210,000 of the UAW's 520,000 active members, say they pay union workers $70 to $75 an hour, when wage, health-care and pension expenses are factored in. By comparison, according to Big Three estimates, Toyota and other Asian auto makers, pay $40 to $45 an hour at their U.S. plants, which together employ about 62,300 nonunion workers.
"We need to eliminate most, if not all...like 80%" of the gap, says a senior automotive executive involved in labor planning. "It has to be gone by the end of the contract, or doing business in the United States is unsustainable."
All three domestic auto makers "will move investment in plants and people outside the country" if they don't bring U.S. labor costs in line with those of Toyota and the other foreign auto makers, the executive said.
Detroit's auto makers are in a more precarious position than at any time since the early 1980s. Ford and GM are bleeding cash in North America and their debt ratings have sunk to junk status. Control of Chrysler is about to be passed from German industrial giant Daimler to private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LLC, which has profited by aggressively restructuring distressed companies.
The Big Three's competitive problems extend far beyond labor costs, a point UAW bargainers have made in the past and will likely make again. Union leaders have said the auto makers should invest more in improving the quality and design of their vehicles.
The three companies allowed quality to deteriorate in the 1980s, a stumble that still haunts them by hurting their standing with consumers. Detroit also resorted to discount-driven marketing, undermining its profits and cheapening the image of its brands.
Moreover, the auto makers have been slow to respond to shifts in consumer tastes over the past two years; a sharp rise in gasoline prices caught them with too much of their production capacity devoted to trucks and sport-utility vehicles that got relatively poor mileage.
Mr. Gettelfinger, the UAW president, has been maneuvering for two years to soften the potential blow to the union's more than 700,000 active and retired members, agreeing to mass buyouts, some cuts in retiree health-care benefits and moves to improve factory-floor efficiency.
Former and current union officials say Mr. Gettelfinger prefers to make smaller, less dramatic sacrifices that still add up to substantial savings, concessions such as changing work rules to allow for outsourcing of jobs such as janitor or materials handler or restricting the amount of time a union worker can remain unemployed but on full pay in the industry's so-called Jobs Bank. Such moves can save an auto maker tens of millions of dollars per plant.
In recent speeches, Mr. Gettelfinger has reiterated calls for the federal government to take over some or all of the auto makers' health-care burdens. "The UAW believes it would be immoral and irresponsible to abandon the hundreds of thousands of retirees who helped build GM, Ford and Chrysler. We are simply not going to do that," he said in a speech earlier this month.
Jerry Sullivan, president of UAW Local 600 at Ford's Dearborn Truck plant, says his members know this summer's talks will be all about trying to catch up with Toyota. "But closing that gap, it will be very difficult," Mr. Sullivan says. "Hopefully we can get something worked out. That's why all the big minds are getting together to talk this summer."
The Big Three argue that Toyota, Honda, Nissan Motor Co. and other foreign auto makers building cars and trucks in the U.S. -- and not the UAW -- set the industry's rate for labor. This year more vehicles are expected to be built in the U.S. by non-UAW workers than by UAW members for the first time in the union's 72-year history, according to CSM Worldwide.
UAW workers in GM, Ford and Chrysler plants earn about $27 an hour in wages, roughly the same as the nonunion workers in the U.S. plants of Toyota, Honda and Nissan. But the UAW's generous health-care plans and pensions for the hundreds of thousands of union retirees and their dependents more than double the total hourly cost. By contrast, the foreign-owned auto plants in the U.S. haven't been around long enough to accumulate significant numbers of retirees.
Detroit's labor costs are continuing to rise, mainly due to rapidly increasing health-care expenses. According to an internal Chrysler estimate, the labor-cost gap could grow to $45 an hour by 2011 if nothing is done.
Cutting total labor costs by anywhere close to $30 an hour would be an unprecedented accomplishment. For decades, the UAW has won steady improvements in job security and benefits as well as wage increases of 2% to 3% per year.
Four former and current UAW officials with knowledge of the union's thinking say Mr. Gettelfinger wants to sign a new contract that, among other things, slows or stops the rapid decline of UAW membership. The union's membership could sink below 500,000 as a result of the tens of thousands of buyouts and early retirements GM, Ford and Chrysler are now in the process of completing. It had one million members in 1987.
The UAW has made significant concessions to save jobs in other industries. The auto makers are studying a six-year deal the union reached with heavy-equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. in January 2005 which allowed the company to pay new hires between $10 and $15 an hour, compared with $20 and $22 for previous hires.
UAW-Caterpillar workers must pay some of their health-care costs for the first time and get annual bonuses but no raises over the term of their contract. "A deal like the Caterpillar contract would take out $7 to $10 an hour of that $30 gap," said one senior automotive executive familiar with plans for the UAW talks.
Detroit, especially GM, would like the three companies to merge their combined $95 billion retiree health-care obligation into a separate trust. It would be partially funded by the auto makers, but managed by the UAW.
A UAW official that has worked on national contract talks said the union is analyzing a similar trust that Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. recently created for its union retirees. One of the union's lawyers, Dan Sherrick, negotiated a similar health-care plan for the UAW a few years ago with engine maker Navistar International Corp.
The Goodyear trust involved just $1.2 billion in unfunded health-care liabilities, and Goodyear's Steelworkers union had also previously agreed to inflation caps, which the UAW hasn't. By contrast, the Big Three would have to come up with billions of dollars to fund such a trust. The UAW would likely have to agree to accept just 50 cents to 60 cents on the dollar of funding for the trust to make economic sense for the auto makers, one individual familiar with the process said.
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10) In Shift, Judge Eases Limits on Surveillance by the Police
By ALAN FEUER
June 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/nyregion/14ruling.html?ref=nyregion
In a startling legal reversal, a federal judge in Manhattan decided yesterday to vacate his own order that had greatly limited the New York police in videotaping people at public gatherings. He said the reversal was based partly on new information.
In February, the judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., issued what seemed an ironclad, somewhat scathing rebuke of the police, ruling that its surveillance teams could videotape protesters only if there was an indication that unlawful activity might be under way.
Citing two events in 2005 — an antiwar march in Harlem and a protest by homeless people in front of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s town house — the judge ruled in February that the police had broken their own guidelines for political surveillance by videotaping people who were lawfully exercising their right to free speech.
But in yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court, somewhat reluctantly set that order aside, saying he had received fresh accounts of the demonstrations from city lawyers that directly contradicted accounts provided by lawyers for the plaintiffs. The new accounts suggested that unlawful activity might indeed have been occurring, with protesters becoming unruly. “Given these conflicting accounts, the descriptions of these events in the court’s 02/07 order cannot be regarded as findings of fact by the court in areas where the facts are disputed,” he wrote.
Yesterday’s ruling came in the context of what is known as the Handschu case, a class-action lawsuit filed in 1971 that is among the most important (and certainly longest-lived) federal disputes that have sought to balance the citizenry’s right to political expression with the state’s interest in keeping public order. The case has resulted, most importantly, in the establishment of guidelines in 1985 that forbid the police to investigate political groups unless a crime is being — or is about to be — committed.
The current dispute arises from the fact that after the Sept. 11 attack, the city asked the judge to relax the guidelines and allow more leeway to conduct investigations of political groups. Judge Haight agreed to a somewhat milder set of guidelines, but gave them teeth by later ruling that his own court would hold in contempt any police official who violated the rules.
In yesterday’s ruling, however, Judge Haight reversed himself, saying that he lacked the power to enforce the guidelines alone: The police could be liable for punishment only if they violated the United States Constitution, not his order.
At a hearing in April, Gail Donoghue, special counsel for the city’s Law Department, argued that if Judge Haight remained the sole authority to enforce the guidelines, his court would soon be inundated with “minitrial after minitrial.” The judge himself agreed with this assessment, writing in yesterday’s decision, “It would be unduly burdensome for this court to police every alleged violation of the N.Y.P.D. guidelines no matter how slight.”
The judge, however, used the authority of contract law to ensure that the police did abide by the guidelines.
“In the language of contracts” he wrote, “the N.Y.P.D. promised to enact (and impliedly to follow) the N.Y.P.D. guidelines in exchange for the court’s promise to grant modifications.”
He later wrote: “If the N.Y.P.D. should break its promise to the court, I am not required to sit idly by with my hands tied.”
From the start of the recent arguments, lawyers for the plaintiffs have said that the protests in Harlem and at the mayor’s house were legal and peaceable. Until a few months ago, the city did not dispute that portrayal, for reasons, the judge wrote, that “passeth all understanding.”
When the city did file its accounts of the marches, they contradicted those of the plaintiffs in key ways: A city lawyer said the march at Mayor Bloomberg’s house, for instance, was “unruly and disobedient” with the crowd blocking traffic and forcing a woman with a baby carriage into the street.
Jethro M. Eisenstein, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that he and his partners would return to Judge Haight’s court and prove that the marches were, in fact, calm and lawful, and seek to prove that the department engages in political surveillance against its own guidelines.
Ms. Donoghue, the city lawyer, said through a spokeswoman that the city was “continuing to study the decision’s full import.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Strike in South Africa expands
By Geoff Hill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published June 12, 2007
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20070611-114232-8445r.htm
Oregon: More Than 165 Workers Are Detained After Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
More than 165 workers were detained to be processed for possible deportation after federal agents raided the Fresh Del Monte Produce food-processing plant and two offices of a staffing company in Portland. Three people were indicted on immigration, illegal documents and identity theft charges. An official at Fresh Del Monte Produce Company headquarters in Coral Gables, Fla., said the company could not comment until federal investigators provided it with more information. Mayor Tom Potter of Portland criticized the raids. The three arrests were understandable, Mr. Potter said, but “to go after local workers who are here to support their families while filling the demands of local businesses for their labor is bad policy.”
June 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/us/13brfs-immigration.html
Robert Fisk: Lies and outrages... would you believe it?
It was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran
Published: 09 June 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2636206.ece
Judge Throws Out Sentence in Teen Sex Case
By BRENDA GOODMAN
June 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/us/11cnd-consent.html?hp
US Military Envisions "Post-Occupation" Force
"US military officials are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061107J.shtml
Lieberman Backs Limited U.S. Attacks on Iran
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
June 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/washington/10cnd-policy.html
Biologists Make Skin Cells Work Like Stem Cells
By NICHOLAS WADE
June 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/science/07cell.html?ref=science
Report Confirms CIA Secret Prisons in Europe
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060807J.shtml
The Dirty Water Underground
By GREGORY DICUM
OAKLAND, Calif.
May 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html
A Hot-Selling Weapon, an Inviting Target
By ANDREW PARK
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03rifle.html?ref=business
Surf’s Up, but the Water Is Brown
By MIREYA NAVARRO
June 3, 2007
Los Angeles
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/fashion/03beaches.html
When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?
By ELIZABETH WEIL
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html?hp
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/health/03docs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
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