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GET JROTC OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS, THE FIGHT BEGINS YET AGAIN!
Attend a meeting TONIGHT! MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 7:00 P.M.
474 Valencia Street
(Near 16th Street, San Francisco)
For more info, call: 415-824-8730
Remember when SF made history a year ago when the Board of Education voted to phase out JROTC from our public schools? Well it seems like the military forces have succeeded in delaying, if not stopping, the phase out. Even previously anti-JROTC school board members are wavering.
In 2004, 63 percent of San Franciscans voted to withdraw all troops from Iraq. In 2005, 59 percent of San Franciscans voted to end military recruiting in our public schools. In 2006 the school board, the first in the country, voted to phase out JROTC. San Franciscans clearly do not support the military taking our children. We MUST muster enough support to hold the school board to its courageous vote last year.
In solidarity,
Medea Benjamin
Eric Blanc
Riva Enteen
Bob Forsberg
Vickie Leidner
Cristina Gutierrez
Tommi Avicoli Mecca
Millie Phillips
Carole Seligman
Bonnie Weinstein
Please sign this letter and pass it along to all those opposed to JROTC in our schools.
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SUPPORT THE DAY AFTER DEMONSTRATIONS TO FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
From: LACFreeMumia@aol.com
A ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Mumia's case, based on the hearing in Philadelphia on May 17th 2007, is expected momentarily. Freeing Mumia immediately is what is needed, but that is not an option before this court. The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal calls on everyone who supports Mumia‚s case for freedom, to rally the day after a decision comes down. Here are Bay Area day-after details:
OAKLAND:
14th and Broadway, near the Federal Building
4:30 to 6:30 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or on Monday if the ruling comes down on a Friday.
Oakland demonstration called by the Partisan Defense Committee and Labor Black Leagues, to be held if the Court upholds the death sentence, or denies Mumia's appeals for a new trial or a new hearing. info at (510) 839-0852 or pdcbayarea@sbcglobal.org
SAN FRANCISCO:
Federal Courthouse, 7th & Mission
5 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or Monday if the decision comes down on a Friday
San Francisco demo called by the Mobilization To Free Mumia,
info at (415) 255-1085 or www.freemumia.org
Day-after demonstrations are also planned in:
Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver
and other cities internationally.
A National Demonstration is to be held in Philadelphia, 3rd Saturday after the decision
For more information, contact: International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, www.mumia.org;
Partisan Defense Committee, www.partisandefense.org;
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), www.freemumia.com;
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL IS INNOCENT!
World-renowned journalist, death-row inmate and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is completely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Mountains of evidence--unheard or ignored by the courts--shows this. He is a victim, like thousands of others, of the racist, corrupt criminal justice system in the US; only in his case, there is an added measure of political persecution. Jamal is a former member of the Black Panther Party, and is still an outspoken and active critic of the on-going racism and imperialism of the US. They want to silence him more than they want to kill him.
Anyone who has ever been victimized by, protested or been concerned about the racist travesties of justice meted out to blacks in the US, as well as attacks on immigrants, workers and revolutionary critics of the system, needs to take a close look at the frame-up of Mumia. He is innocent, and he needs to be free.
FREE MUMIA NOW!
END THE RACIST DEATH PENALTY!
FOR MASS PROTESTS AND LABOR ACTION TO FREE MUMIA!
In 1995, mass mobilizations helped save Mumia from death.
In 1999, longshore workers shut West Coast ports to free Mumia, and teachers in Oakland and Rio de Janeiro held teach-ins and stop-works.
Mumia needs powerful support again now. Come out to free Mumia!
- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610
510.763.2347
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
November 2007
ACTION ALERT: Ensure Fairness For Mumia Abu-Jamal on NBC’s The Today Show!
On Dec. 6, NBC’s The Today Show intends to air a show about Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner’s new book “Murdered By Mumia.” According to the announcement on Michael Smerconish’s website, the show is planning to feature both Smerconish and Faulkner as guests.
The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (FreeMumia.com), Journalists for Mumia (Abu-Jamal-News.com), and Educators for Mumia (EmajOnline.com) have initiated a media-activist campaign urging people to write The Today Show at today@msnbc.com asking them to fairly present both sides of the Mumia Abu-Jamal / Daniel Faulkner case, by also featuring as guests, Linn Washington, Jr. (Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University ) and Dr. Suzanne Ross (Clinical Psychologist and Co-Chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC).
A sample letter (http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/TodayShow.doc), accompanied by an extensive informational press pack (http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/PressPackNov07.pdf) has been created to use for contacting The Today Show. Please take a minute and contact them to ensure fair media coverage of this controversial and important case.
Sincerely,
The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (FreeMumia.com)
Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal (Abu-Jamal-News.com)
Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EmajOnline.com)
SAMPLE LETTER:
Dear Today Show,
In December 2007, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal will be entering the 27th year. In the course of those years, much of the media coverage has contained pure speculation and falsehoods. Media watchdogs like FAIR.ORG have sharply criticized this coverage as being biased against Abu-Jamal.
We understand that on Dec. 6, the Today Show intends to air a show about Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner’s book “Murdered By Mumia.” Interestingly, the scheduled interview regarding the new book focusing on Mrs. Faulkner comes at a time of many startling new developments in this historic case, generating international attention.
Reflecting the international interest in this case, in 2003, Abu-Jamal was named an honorary citizen of Paris , and in 2006, the city of St. Denis named a street after him. While this was largely motivated by opposition to the death penalty, they also cited strong evidence of both an unfair trial and Abu-Jamal’s innocence.
One of these developments centers on extraordinary photos of the 1981 crime scene taken by Philadelphia-based press photographer Pedro Polakoff (viewable at Abu-Jamal-News.com) that reveal manipulation of evidence, and completely contradict the prosecution’s case, including Officer James Forbes’ testimony that he properly handled both Abu-Jamal’s and Faulkner’s guns (the photos show Forbes holding both guns in his bare hand). Also the photos reveal that there were no large bullet divots or destroyed chunks of cement where Faulkner was found, which should be visible in the pavement if the prosecution’s scenario was accurate, according to which Abu-Jamal shot down at Faulkner and allegedly missed several times while Faulkner was on his back. Of particular note, this photographer twice attempted to provide these photos to the District Attorney for both the 1982 trial and the 1995 PCRA hearings, and was ignored both times.
Since his incarceration, Abu-Jamal has published six books and countless articles, and has delivered hundreds of speeches, including keynote addresses for college graduations. As a prolific writer and tenacious journalist, he has earned the respect (and support) of such notable prize-winning authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Salman Rushdie. Just recently, he was accepted into the PEN American Center , one of the highest honors a writer can achieve. Additionally, at the time of his arrest, he was president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Association of Black Journalists, and was awarded the PEN Oakland award for outstanding journalism after the publication of his first book, Live from Death Row. Since Live, he has garnered a following of dedicated readers around the world, including scholars, college educators, and journalists. His work is, in part, testament to the dignity he has demonstrated for the past 25 years he has been on death row.
The ethical interests in balance and fairness in presenting “news” regarding the Abu-Jamal case, arguably requires providing Today Show viewers with information evidencing Mr. Abu-Jamal’s innocence and unfair trial. To represent this other side, and to provide perspectives addressing the informational needs of your viewers, I ask that you also feature experts Linn Washington, Jr. (Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University ) and Dr. Suzanne Ross (Clinical Psychologist and Co-Chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC) as guests on your Dec. 6 show (they can be contacted via Journalists for Mumia: hbjournalist@gmail.com).
While Mrs. Faulkner certainly has a “story” and is entitled to her opinions, your viewers should be privy to other facts, such as the prosecution withholding key evidence, witness coercion, racist jury selection, and evidence that Judge Albert Sabo boasted about his desire to help the prosecution “fry the nigger,” as enclosed in the press packet provided here for you: http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/PressPackNov07.pdf
I also write to provide you with information (inclusive of material from Abu-Jamal’s lawyer) in the interests of journalistic balance, fairness and integrity. The press packet includes 1) A recent Black Commentator article by Philadelphia lawyer/journalist David A. Love describing the significance of the Polakoff photos, 2) An Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal press release about the Polakoff photos, written by Princeton University Professor Mark L. Taylor, 3) Criticism of the 1998 ABC 20/20 program about Abu-Jamal, 4) Background on the case, focusing on both the 1982 trial and 1995-97 PCRA hearings, with a focus on Abu-Jamal’s alleged “hospital confession,” ballistics evidence, and the testimony of Veronica Jones, 5) Recent police intimidation of Abu-Jamal’s supporters, including reported death threats against Sgt. DeLacy Davis, of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, and more.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Your Name
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Help end the war by supporting the troops who have refused to fight it.
Please sign the appeal online:
"DEAR CANADA: LET U.S. WAR RESISTERS STAY!"
"I am writing from the United States to ask you to make a provision for sanctuary for the scores of U.S. military servicemembers currently in Canada, most of whom have traveled to your country in order to resist fighting in the Iraq War. Please let them stay in Canada..."
To sign the appeal or for more information:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/canada
Courage to Resist volunteers will send this letter on your behalf to three key Canadian officials--Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley, and Stéphane Dion, Liberal Party--via international first class mail.
In collaboration with War Resisters Support Campaign (Canada), this effort comes at a critical juncture in the international campaign for asylum for U.S. war resisters in Canada.
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Next Antiwar Coalition meeting Sunday, January 6, 1:00 P.M.
474 Valencia St.
The OCT. 27 COALITION met Saturday, November 18. After a long discussion and evaluation of the Oct. 27 action, the group decided to meet again, Sunday, January 6, at 1:00 P.M. at CENTRO DEL PUEBLO, 474 Valencia Street, SF (Near 16th Street) to assess further action.
Everyone felt the demonstration was very successful and, in fact, that the San Francisco demonstration was the largest in the country and, got the most press coverage. Everyone felt the "die in" was extremely effective and the convergence added to the scope of the demonstration.
Please keep a note of the date of the next coalition meeting:
Sunday, January 6, 1:00 P.M.
EXPLORATORY LETTER: UNIFIED NATIONAL ACTION DURING MARCH 2008:
The regional antiwar demonstrations on October 27th were a great success.. The Boston mobilization organized by New England United (NEU) drew about 10,000 people, including many new activists and young people. Nationally, tens of thousands demanded an end to war and occupation now.
The NEU-sponsored action on October 27 was endorsed by a broad range of over 200 organizations. At a follow-up meeting, many members of NEU believed that we should build on this momentum by bringing together the antiwar movement in unified national protest in the spring for the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war.
Reasons given included: 1) March will be the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and the antiwar movement must come together to demand an end to this war now; 2) The war plans against Iran are intensifying, and we have to fight now to stop a war on Iran before it's too late. At the same time, it was recognized that successful national action in the spring would require a broad base of support from antiwar organizations around the country. Therefore, NEU decided to create a working group to assess the level of support for such an action, and report back to our next general meeting in December with both an assessment of support, and a detailed proposal for a unified national mobilization in the spring. As an indication of growing interest in national action, Cindy Sheehan is convening a peace summit in San Francisco in January to help develop a unified strategy for the peace movement and to develop a plan for a unified national mobilization in DC during the March anniversary of the Iraq war.
A strong base of support from the grass-roots organizations around the country will be necessary to make unified national action a reality. If your organization is interested in planning for unified national action in March, please contact us as soon as possible at the following email address: spring2008@lists.riseup.net . Thank you. Spring Mobilization working group New England United http://www.newenglandunited.org/
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Seizing Destiny for U.S. Capital
By Bonnie Weinstein
November/December 2007
http://socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_07/novdec_07_28.html
2) Big Rise in Cost of Birth Control on Campuses
By MONICA DAVEY
November 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/health/22contraceptives.html?ref=us
3) The Dictatorship of ‘Freedom’
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
November 4, 2007
Prisonradio.org
4) Why Israel Has No ‘Right to Exist’ as a Jewish State
By Oren Ben-Dor
Counterpunch
November 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/bendor11202007.html
5) Banks Gone Wild
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
November 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/opinion/23krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
6) Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level
By SOLOMON MOORE
November 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/us/23mapping.html?ref=us
7) Vote Is Postponed as Lebanese President Leaves
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS and NADA BAKRI
November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/world/middleeast/24lebanon.html?ref=world
8) Barely Getting By and Facing a Cold Maine Winter
By ERIK ECKHOLM
November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/us/24maine.html?ref=us
9) Congressman Sees Bias in Chicago Traffic Stop
By CATRIN EINHORN
November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/us/24chicago.html?ref=us
10) The High Cost of Health Care
Editorial
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25sun1.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1196015477-vgCAR17MzHNW0zjs0FvNZA
11) Free and Uneasy
Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside
By FERNANDA SANTOS
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25jeffrey.html?hp
12) Trying to Guess What Happens Next: Recession
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Go Figure
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25goodman.html
13) Pakistani Middle Class, Beneficiary of Musharraf, Begins to Question Rule
By DAVID ROHDE
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/world/asia/25class.html?ref=world
14) Massachusetts Faces a Test on Health Care
By KEVIN SACK
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/politics/25mass.html?ref=us
15) Dr. Drug Rep
By DANIEL CARLAT
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25memoir-t.html?ex=1196658000&en=a4284ca32dab397d&ei=5070&emc=eta1
16) Just Off Insular Senate Floor, Life of the Uninsured Intrudes
By ROBERT PEAR
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/washington/25health.html?ref=health
17) Man Entering U.S. Illegally Stops to Help Boy Involved in Crash
["No good deed goes unpunished" Clare Boothe Luce ((April 10, 1903 – October 9, 1987) was an American editor, playwright, social activist, politician, journalist, and diplomat. Witty, perceptive, and determined, she was also a prominent figure in New York society circles. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Boothe_Luce ]
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25illegal.html?ex=1196658000&en=b03b8561c9cf30c3&ei=5070&emc=eta1
18) Winter of Our Discontent
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
November 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html?hp
19) Defend Teachers Threatened With Termination for Antiwar Student
Walkout
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!
Urgent Call for Solidarity
tukwila.teachers.solidarity@hotmail.com
20) French Youths Clash With Police
By ARIANE BERNARD
November 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/world/europe/27paris.html?ref=world
21) New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India
By HEATHER TIMMONS and J. ADAM HUGGINS
November 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/nyregion/26manhole.html?ref=nyregion
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1) Seizing Destiny for U.S. Capital
By Bonnie Weinstein
November/December 2007
http://socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_07/novdec_07_28.html
An article appeared in The New York Times on September 13, 2007, entitled “Compromise on Oil Law in Iraq Seems to Be Collapsing,” by James Glanz. This piece could have been a chapter in the book Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea,by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Kluger. It’s a painstaking historical breakdown of the wheeling and dealing between the commanders of capital in England, France, Spain, even Mexico, and the commanders of U.S. financial and business interests in their pursuit of the acquisition of the land that now makes up the United States of America. By any means necessary—through war, occupation, slavery, and extermination of the indigenous peoples of America—U.S. commanders of capital got most of what they wanted. But it is still not enough of what they need—an unending supply of capital.
U.S. big business wheeling and dealing
The Times article by Glanz details the financial machinations going on in the Iraqi oil fields. The pivotal thorn in the U.S. occupying paw is the Iraqi Oil Law, which includes, according to Glanz, “Article 111 of the Iraqi Constitution...oil and natural resources are properties of Iraqi people....” It is worth a closer look at this article.
“Contributing to the dispute is the decision by the Kurds to begin signing contracts with international oil companies before the federal law is passed. The most recent instance, announced last week on a Kurdish government Web site, was an oil exploration contract with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas.
“The Sunni Arabs who removed their support for the deal did so, in part, because of a contract the Kurdish government signed earlier with a company based in the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas, to develop gas reserves.
“The Kurds say their regional law is consistent with the Iraqi Constitution, which grants substantial powers to the provinces to govern their own affairs. But Mr. Shahristani believes that a sort of Kurdish declaration of independence can be read into the move. ‘This to us indicates very serious lack of cooperation that makes many people wonder if they are really going to be working within the framework of the federal law,’ Mr. Shahristani said in a recent interview, before the Hunt deal was announced.
“Kurdish officials dispute that contention, saying that they are doing their best to work within the Constitution while waiting for the Iraqi Parliament, which always seems to move at a glacial pace, to consider the legislation.
“’We reject what some parties say—that it is a step towards separation—because we have drafted the Kurdistan oil law depending on Article 111 of the Iraqi Constitution, which says oil and natural resources are properties of Iraqi people,’ said Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government. ‘Both Iraqi and Kurdish oil laws depend on that article,’ Mr. Abdullah said.
“The other crucial players are the Sunnis and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Some members of one of the main Sunni parties, Tawafiq, which insists on federal control of contracts and exclusive state ownership of the fields, bolted when it became convinced that the Kurds had no intention of following those guidelines.”
Of course, all of these negotiations are made under the giant umbrella of U.S. military occupation and constant bombardment, while it insists upon the Iraqi “people’s [read: competing Iraqi business interests’] right” to make business deals with American oil corporations for a cut of the profits for themselves—the Iraqi people be damned! In reading a September 20, 2007, Timesarticle entitled “Cholera Case Reported in Baghdad,” by Andrew E. Kramer, I couldn’t help thinking about the similarities between the treatment of the indigenous population of the Americas in the pursuit of U.S. territory (which I learned by reading Kluger’s book) and the current seizing of Iraq by the U.S. military for the benefit of U.S. business interests:
“Iraqi health officials confirmed the first cases of cholera in Baghdad today, in a sign that an epidemic that has infected approximately 7,000 people in northern Iraq is spreading south through the country’s decrepit and unsanitary water system.... ‘It is already endemic in some parts of Iraq, but when it is growing and moving, that’s when it becomes an epidemic,’ said Dr. Naeema al-Gasseer, the World Health Organization’s representative for Iraq. The organization said there was laboratory confirmation of the disease in a 25-year-old woman living in Baghdad.
“Cholera is fairly simple to treat under normal circumstances, but the war in Iraq makes it far more difficult to contain. The mass displacement of the population has pushed many people into unsanitary living conditions, where food and water can become tainted with sewage and spread the cholera bacteria.
“Kamar el-Jadi, head of the health department for the Red Crescent Society in Baghdad, said cholera was spreading because some people embraced unsanitary living conditions, and she criticized the government for not responding properly.
“‘They like to live and eat in the rubbish,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how they can eat in these bad conditions.’
“She added: ‘The government is doing nothing. They don’t have a program. They have done nothing against this disease.’
“Health officials at the Red Crescent had earlier predicted that cases would begin turning up in Baghdad in late September or early October, when temperatures are especially favorable for the bacteria, Vibrio cholerae, which infects the intestines. People contract cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the bacteria, which comes from the feces of an infected person.”
In his book, Seizing Destiny,Richard Kluger describes the same kinds of wars of occupation that landed the Original Boundaries with the Treaty of Paris in 1783; the Louisiana Territory purchased from France in 1803; the purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819; the Republic of Texas annexed by Congress in 1845; acquisition of the Oregon Territory—a treaty with Britain in 1846; the Mexican cession—the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848; the Gasden Purchase—a treaty with Mexico that resulted in the acquisition of 29,670 square miles of Mexican territory; the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867; the annexation of Hawaii by Congress in 1898; the 1898 treaties with Spain for Puerto Rico and Guam; the annexation of American Samoa by Congress in 1900; the purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917; and the 1947 UN Trusteeship and the 1976 Covenant by Congress of Northern Marianas, bringing the total U.S. territory to 3,540,305 square miles.
All of this territory was acquired by wheeling and dealing with self-declared “Old World” rulers and “landowners” who themselves had no real right over the territory they ruled over by force of violence and for their own financial and business gains.
None of treaties that were negotiated with the native peoples were kept. The people were swept away, systematically exterminated. They were not human beings, just “nits” in the way of Manifest Destiny, i.e., nits in the hair of rich white men!
The modus operandi described in this book that was adopted by the “forefathers” of U.S. imperialism differs from the current situation in Iraq only to the extent that today, the imperialists are not sending “settlers,” with the U.S. Calvary to defend them. The government is sending its military outright, backed up by an equal or surpassing number of “private contractors” who are working to protect Iraqi oil directly. They are occupying the Iraqi oil fields and pipelines, trying to protect the U.S. military and corporate-owned machinery waiting to be put into operation, to fully exploit Iraqi oil reserves and secure their military might in the region.
While they have not distributed contaminated blankets to the Iraqis, the U.S. has created all the conditions for cholera and other such diseases to flourish and take hold among innocent Iraqi people struggling for survival under war, occupation, and the total destruction of their infrastructure and their way of life.
Kluger’s book does more than expose the brutal and violent truth behind the seizure—the outright theft—of U.S. territory. Along with this he exposes the imperial interests of the wealthiest nations with the mightiest fleets and most powerful weapons—no match for the simple life of the indigenous peoples who lived off the land gathering nuts and berries and hunting with spears, bows, and arrows.
The Iraqis are not hunters and gatherers. Iraq is a nation with more engineers per capita than the United States. But its people are up against the most powerful military force ever amassed on the earth, and they had no weapons of mass destruction! Its population has been reduced to hunting and gathering in the garbage dumps of the U.S. occupiers, drinking from contaminated water supplies and contracting preventable diseases, all at the hands of the historically despotic corporate rulers of the United States of America.
Kluger’s book only mentions a few “Indian massacres.” But what glares out from his book is the near absence of concern about the indigenous peoples in the minds and hearts of those in pursuit of the private ownership of the land. For this is what this country was founded upon: the right of the wealthy—originating in the Old World and continuing to today—to steal land and resources away from the inhabitants, human or otherwise, that stand in their way, whom they deem inferior to themselves.
Manifest Destiny was a racist-to-the-core justification for the extermination of millions upon millions of indigenous peoples in the North American continent and in every continent on the planet. It was the Old World’s license to kill! How familiar it sounds! Under the guise of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”—of saving the Iraqi people from themselves; of militarily occupying their land; of destroying their cities and towns and factories like they destroyed native villages, destroyed the crops, and slaughtered the buffalo.
In Iraq the U.S. destroyed modern cities, schools, hospitals, and access to electricity, clean water, and working sewage systems. U.S. occupation of and war against Iraq and Afghanistan has left masses of the indigenous population of those countries without any means of support or any way to make a living except around the dumping grounds of U.S. enclaves on their land.
In the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Sitting Bull, while traveling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the summer of 1885, was quoted as telling Annie Oakley, another one of the show’s “stars,” that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. “The white man knows how to make everything,” he said, “but he does not know how to distribute it.”
Richard Kluger’s, Seizing Destinyexposes the truth about what was really on the minds of the “forefathers” of U.S. imperialism from the instant they set foot on the North American continent. It was the white man’s burden and his destiny to rule this world, seize the land and resources for himself, use slaves whenever necessary and convenient, exterminate whenever convenient and expedient, and wage war and occupation and the spreading of disease whenever necessary for the betterment of his own private and selfish interests. As the imperialists so proudly claim, they are the best—the only ones worthy of the title, human being.
The massive accumulation of personal wealth justified by Manifest Destiny allowed and still allows these despots to buy the biggest and most deadly weapons and support a large military force to put muscle behind those weapons for the purpose of seizing even more for themselves.
They claim they have a right to all of this because white people from the Old World are not only smarter, more advanced, more civilized, but in fact, a higher level of human being. All the rest, even their own poor and ignorant white trash, are less than fully human and thereby need to be ruled by them, to live only at their discretion and only for as long as they are useful to them.
Manifest Destiny is still being carried out today by the same despotic government, with its very roots soaked in the blood of the multitudes of the innocent of centuries past—the indigenous peoples; the slaves; the indentured servants; and the multitudes working for subsistance wages—whose lives were and still are sacrificed to increase the profits, property, power, and status of the wealthiest U.S. capitalists and their allies.
I recommend Kluger’s book because it shows how this country came to be. I also recommend that people study further about how this country has treated its own indigenous people, because this helps to make sense out of the treatment of the Iraqi and Afghani people by the U.S. military today.
‘Nits Make Lice!’
In 1864, Governor Evans of Colorado Territory issued a general proclamation dispatched to the Indian camps by messengers, ordering all peaceful Indians to assemble at Fort Lyon. Those Indians who did not comply with the order would be killed. The order authorized the citizens of Colorado Territory to go in pursuit of all hostile Indians of the plains, to kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever the Indians may be found. Colonel Chivington responded in kind. In a Denver speech, in August of 1864, Chivington is quoted as saying, “kill and scalp all, little and big... nits make lice.” He was applauded, and the phrase became the slogan among his fighting regiment. On the early morning of November 29, 1864, Chivington’s troops did just that, killing more than 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, primarily women and children—scalping and dismembering them in what is now known as the Sand Creek Massacre.
In March 2006, U.S soldiers in Iraq participated in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family, then set her body on fire to hide the evidence. On November 19, 2005, a group of United States Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children. To date, nearly one million Iraqi people have been murdered by the U.S. war and occupation. Millions more were murdered as a result of ten years of U.S. sanctions against Iraq that stopped the flow of medicines and life-saving food and equipment to the Iraqi people.
Once again it is the innocent who are sacrificed mercilessly to fill the coffers of the wealthy elite of U.S. capital and its Old World allies.
Neither the modus operandi of U.S. imperial conquest nor its distinctly unequal distribution of wealth has changed since its formation. In fact, its distribution of wealth has become more concentrated than ever before. And the massacres have gotten larger, more deadly, and more widespread.
How wise was Chief Sitting Bull?
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2) Big Rise in Cost of Birth Control on Campuses
By MONICA DAVEY
November 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/health/22contraceptives.html?ref=us
In health centers at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country, young women are paying sharply higher prices for prescription contraceptives because of a change in federal law.
The increases have meant that some students using popular birth control pills and other products are paying three and four times as much as they did several months ago. The higher prices have also affected about 400 community health centers nationwide used by poor women.
The change is due to a provision in a federal law that ended a practice by which drug manufacturers provided prescription contraception to the health centers at deeply discounted rates. The centers then passed along the savings to students and others.
Some Democratic lawmakers in Washington are pressing for new legislation by year’s end that would reverse the provision, which they say was inadvertently included in a law intended to reduce Medicaid abuse. In the meantime, health care and reproductive rights advocates are warning that some young women are no longer receiving the contraception they did in the past.
Some college clinics have reported sudden drops in the numbers of contraceptives sold; students have reported switching to less expensive contraceptives or considering alternatives like the so-called morning-after pill; and some clinics, including one at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., have stopped stocking some prescription contraceptives, saying they are too expensive.
“The potential is that women will stop taking it, and whether or not you can pay for it, that doesn’t mean that you’ll stop having sex,” said Katie Ryan, a senior at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, who said that the monthly cost of her Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, a popular birth control pill, recently jumped to nearly $50 from $12.
Ms. Ryan, 22, said she had considered switching to another contraceptive to save money, but was unsure which one to pick. She has ended up paying the higher price, but said she was concerned about her budget.
“I do less because of this — less shopping, less going out to eat,” said Ms. Ryan, who has helped organize efforts to educate others on campus about the price jump. “For students, this is very, very expensive.”
Not everyone is troubled by the price increases. Some people said they wondered why college students, many of whom manage to afford daily doses of coffee from Starbucks and downloads from iTunes, should have been given such discounted birth control to begin with, and why drug companies should be granted such a captive audience of students. Others said low-priced, easy-to-attain contraception might encourage a false sense of security about sex.
“From our perspective, this does bring to light a public health concern, but for a different reason,” said Kimberly Martinez, the executive director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, which advocates abstinence from sex until marriage. “These young women are relying on this contraception to protect them. But contraception isn’t 100 percent — for pregnancy or for disease.”
The price change came as part of the tangled method by which drug manufacturers pay rebates to states for prescription drugs covered by Medicaid, the federal drug program for low-income people. Those rebates are set by calculations that take into account the lowest prices paid for certain drugs. Since 1990, the steeply discounted contraception given to university health centers and low-income clinics was considered exempt from those calculations.
The arrangement helped those who could least afford the contraceptives to receive them, but was also seen as potentially beneficial to drug companies, which might not make money on the college clinic sales but were able to market their products to young women who might grow accustomed to one brand over another.
More recently though, legislators, worried about abuse in the rebate calculations, set strict limits about which facilities would be exempt. Student health centers, among others, were left out — an unintended oversight, some lawmakers now say.
The new rules, part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, came into effect at the start of this year, prompting pharmaceutical manufacturers to tell college clinics that they could no longer afford the huge discounts. Knowing that the change was coming, many health clinics stocked up on the discounted prescriptions and were able to offer cheaper contraception for months, into the summer and even the fall.
Then prices began skyrocketing.
“What happened here is what happened everywhere: The price went up,” said Jeanne Galatzer-Levy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We are a state institution, so we’re not in a position to do something different.”
At the University of Montana, the price of a NuvaRing, another birth control method, rose to $36 from $18, said Allyson Hagen, the state director of Naral Pro-Choice America. “This is a state school where people are on Pell grants and don’t have huge amounts of spending money,” Ms. Hagen said. “For them this is like a choice — groceries or birth control.”
Some types of prescription birth control have generic alternatives, which can be significantly less expensive than their counterparts. But even some generics are not as inexpensive as the discounted contraceptives had been at student health centers, experts said. And other types of contraceptives have no generic option.
In a 2006 study, 39 percent of undergraduate women said they relied on oral contraceptives to prevent pregnancy, said Mary Hoban of the American College Health Association. But no one can be sure how many of the more than three million women on college campuses nationwide who are estimated to use such contraceptives have been affected by the price increases.
College health centers have handled the circumstances in a variety of ways. Some colleges, too, say they were mainly unaffected by the change because students were covered by their parents’ insurance plans or their own insurance policies.
In Washington, lawmakers have introduced a proposal that would reverse the price increase, allowing an exemption so that drug companies would once again not be required to include sharply discounted contraception for university clinics in their Medicaid rebate calculations.
“This is such a mainstream issue,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “This is clearly an issue with wide bipartisan support.”
Still, there were signs that some lawmakers might not want to be seen as supporting the provision, leading to the possibility that it would be attached to some other legislation sometime before year’s end.
Representative Joseph Crowley, a Democrat from New York who introduced a bill on the matter, said the change would require no taxpayers’ money to subsidize contraception. The drug manufacturers would pay for any discounts, but would not be required to pay larger Medicaid rebates because of those discounts.
“We’re not promoting promiscuity, but we’re also cognizant that people live,” said Mr. Crowley, who is among the lawmakers who say the change that took discounts away from university clinics was inadvertent. “We’re talking about adults, responsible adults who want to do the responsible thing.”
In Boston, Nikki Bruce, a senior at Tufts, said the price of her NuvaRing, once an $8-a-month investment at the campus health clinic, had soared to more than $50. Ms. Bruce said she investigated and found that her health insurance policy would require a co-payment of $45 for the product.
Ms. Bruce, who is also a member of a Tufts student group, Vox, that advocates for reproductive rights, said she thought about switching to another method of birth control, something less expensive. She talked to her mother, she said. In the end though, she worried that her body might have a difficult time adjusting to new hormones.
A search led her to a nearby Planned Parenthood Clinic — off campus — where she said she now buys her NuvaRing for $27.
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3) The Dictatorship of ‘Freedom’
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
November 4, 2007
Prisonradio.org
With shining boots, cadenced marches and loaded arms, the Pakistan Army entered the country’s Supreme Court and announced martial law.
America’s biggest ally in the so-called “War on Terror” has launched another war: one on democracy and the very notion of an independent judiciary.
The problem, it seems, is that the Pakistani judiciary was growing a tad too independent for President-General Pervez Musharraf.
The fig leaf of this pretend democracy has been discarded; it is a military dictatorship plain and simple.
So much for the American rhetorical exercise of bringing democracy to the benighted Islamic world.
Nor should we be surprised!
A month ago, when Pakistani opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif tried to return home, he was met by a wall of military resistance that wouldn’t allow him to enter the country that he once led as prime minister.
While en route to Pakistan, in London’s Heathrow Airport, Sharif described his imminent return thus: “It’s a final battle now between dictatorship and democracy.” Sharif added, “Civil society is there now struggling for the restoration of the rule of law. The judiciary is today independent. I think it is about time that we put an end to this menace of dictatorship because it has inflicted so much damage to my country.” (New York Times, September 11, 2007, Page A8.)
Denied his court ordered right of return, Sharif told reporters at the Pakistan airport, “Mr. Musharraf does not believe in the rule of law. He tries to bulldoze everything that comes in his way.” (New York Times, September 11, 2007)
Sound familiar?
And what’s the White House response? The Bush Regime has announced it still supports the military junta that suspended the constitution, removed objectionable judges from the Supreme Court—and placed the whole capital on lockdown.
Observers say Musharraf’s moves come just as the court was about to rule on his right to stand in a recent election.
As Nawaz Sharif noted a month ago, “President Bush is somehow supporting an individual who today has become a symbol of hatred in Pakistan, a man whom everybody in Pakistan wants to get rid of.” Added Sharif, “ I don’t know why Mr. Bush is still supporting this man. He must not equate Pakistan with Mr. Musharraf. He should have this friendship with the people of Pakistan, not with an individual who is becoming more and more unpopular in the country.”
As democracy dies in Pakistan, it casts a pall on the biggest supporter of this dictatorship—the United States of America.
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4) Why Israel Has No ‘Right to Exist’ as a Jewish State
By Oren Ben-Dor
Counterpunch
November 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/bendor11202007.html
Yet again, the Annapolis meeting between Olmert and Abbas is preconditioned upon the recognition by the Palestinian side of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Indeed the “road map” should lead to, and legitimate, once and for all, the right of such a Jewish state to exist in definitive borders and in peace with its neighbors. The vision of justice, both past and future, simply has to be that of two states, one Palestinian, one Jewish, which would coexist side by side in peace and stability. Finding a formula for a reasonably just partition and separation is still the essence of what is considered to be moderate, pragmatic and fair ethos.
Thus, the really deep issues—the “core”—are conceived as the status of Jerusalem, the fate and future of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and the viability of the future Palestinian state beside the Jewish one. The fate of the descendants of those 750,000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 from what is now, and would continue to be under a two-state solutions, the State of Israel, constitutes a “problem” but never an “issue” because, God forbid, to make it an issue on the table would be to threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. The existence of Israel as a Jewish state must never become a core issue. That premise unites political opinion in the Jewish state, left and right and also persists as a pragmatic view of many Palestinians who would prefer some improvement to no improvement at all. Only “extremists” such as Hamas, anti-Semites, and Self-Hating Jews—terribly disturbed, misguided and detached lot—can make Israel’s existence into a core problem and in turn into a necessary issue to be debated and addressed.
The Jewish state, a supposedly potential haven for all the Jews in the world in the case a second Holocaust comes about, should be recognized as a fact on the ground blackmailed into the “never again” rhetoric. All considerations of pragmatism and reasonableness in envisioning a “peace process” to settle the “Israeli/Palestinian” conflict must never destabilize the sacred status of that premise that a Jewish state has a right to exist.
Notice, however, that Palestinians are not asked merely to recognize the perfectly true fact and with it, the absolutely feasible moral claim, that millions of Jewish people are now living in the State of Israel and that their physical existence, liberty and equality should be protected in any future settlement. They are not asked merely to recognize the assurance that any future arrangement would recognize historic Palestine as a home for the Jewish People. What Palestinians are asked to subscribe to is the recognition of the right of an ideology that informs the make-up of a state to exist as a Jewish one. They are asked to recognize that ethno-nationalistic premise of statehood.
The fallacy is clear: the recognition of the right of Jews who are there—however unjustly many of their Parents or Grandparents came to acquire what they own—to remain there under liberty and equality in a post-colonial political settlement, is perfectly compatible with the non-recognition of the state whose constitution gives those Jews a preferential stake in the polity.
It is an abuse of the notion of pragmatism to conceive its effort as putting the very notion of Jewish state beyond the possible and desirable implementation of egalitarian moral scrutiny. To so abuse pragmatism would be to put it at the service of the continuation of colonialism. A pragmatic and reasonable solution ought to centre on the problem of how to address past, present, and future injustices to non-Jew-Arabs without thereby causing other injustices to Jews. This would be a very complex pragmatic issue, which would call for much imagination and generosity. But reasonableness and pragmatism should not determine whether the cause for such injustices be included or excluded from debates or negotiations. To pragmatically exclude moral claims and to pragmatically protect immoral assertions by fiat must in fact hide some form of extremism. The causes of colonial injustice and the causes that constitutionally prevent their full articulation and address should not be excluded from the debate. Pragmatism cannot become the very tool that legitimate constitutional structures that hinder de-colonization and the establishment of egalitarian constitution.
So let us boldly ask: What exactly is entailed by the requirement to recognize Israel as a Jewish state? What do we recognize and support when we purchase a delightful avocado or a date from Israel or when we invite Israel to take part in an international football event? What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What precisely is that Jewish state whose status as such would be once and for all legitimized by such a two-state solution?
A Jewish state is a state which exists more for the sake of whoever is considered Jewish according to various ethnic, tribal, religious, criteria, than for the sake of those who do not pass this test. What precisely are the criteria of the test for Jewishness is not important and at any rate the feeble consensus around them is constantly reinvented in Israel. Instigating violence provides them with the impetus for doing that. What is significant, thought is that a test of Jewishness is being used in order to constitutionally protect differential stakes in, that is, the differential ownership of, a polity. A recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is a recognition of the Jews special entitlement, as eternal victims, to have a Jewish state. Such a test of supreme stake for Jews is the supreme criterion not only for racist policy-making by the legislature but also for a racist constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court. The idea of a state that is first and foremost for the sake of Jews trumps even that basic law of Human Freedom and Dignity to which the Israeli Supreme Court pays so much lip service. Such constitutional interpretation would have to make the egalitarian principle equality of citizenship compatible with, and thus subservient to, the need to maintain the Jewish majority and character of the state. This of course constitutes a serious compromise of equality, translated into many individual manifestations of oppression and domination of those victims of such compromise—non-Jews-Arabs citizens of Israel.
In our world, a world that resisted Apartheid South Africa so impressively, recognition of the right of the Jewish state to exist is a litmus test for moderation and pragmatism.
The demand is that Palestinians recognize Israel’s entitlement to constitutionally entrench a system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights, differential capital investments, differential investment in education, formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and debate.
In the Jewish state of Israel non-Jews-Arabs citizens are just “bad luck” and are considered a ticking demographic bomb of “enemy within.” They can be given the right to vote—indeed one member one vote—but the potential of their political power, even their birth rate, should be kept at bay by visible and invisible, instrumental and symbolic, discrimination. But now they are asked to put up with their inferior stake and recognize the right of Israel to continue to legitimate the non-egalitarian premise of its statehood.
We must not forget that the two state “solution” would open a further possibility to non-Jew-Arabs citizens of Israel: “put up and shut up or go to a viable neighboring Palestinian state where you can have your full equality of stake.” Such an option, we must never forget, is just a part of a pragmatic and reasonable package.
The Jewish state could only come into being in May 1948 by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous population—750,000 of them. The judaisation of the state could only be effectively implemented by constantly internally displacing the population of many villages within the Israel state.
It would be unbearable and unreasonable to demand Jews to allow for the Right of Return of those descendants of the expelled. Presumably, those descendants too could go to a viable Palestinian state rather than, for example, rebuild their ruined village in the Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish young couple from Toronto who never set their foot in Palestine has a right to settle in the Galilee. Jews and their descendants hold this right in perpetuity. You see, that right “liberates” them as people. Jews must never be put under the pressure to live as a substantial minority in the Holy Land under egalitarian arrangement. Their past justifies their preferential stake and the preservation of their numerical majority in Palestine.
So the non-egalitarian hits us again. It is clear that part of the realization of that right of return would not only be just the actual return, but also the assurance of equal stake and citizenship of all, Jews and non-Jews-Arabs, after the return. A return would make the egalitarian claim by those who return even more difficult to conceal than currently with regard to Israel Arab second-class citizens. What unites Israelis and many world Jews behind the call for the recognition of the right of a Jewish state to exist is their aversion for the possibility of living, as a minority, under conditions of equality of stake to all. But if Jews enjoys this equality in Canada why cannot they support such equality in Palestine through giving full effect to the right of Return of Palestinians?
Let us look precisely at what the pragmatic challenge consists of: not pragmatism that entrenches inequality but pragmatism that responds to the challenge of equality.
The Right of Return of Palestinians means that Israel acknowledges and apologizes for what it did in 1948. It does mean that Palestinian memory of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah, is publicly revived in the Geography and collective memory of the polity. It does mean that Palestinians descendants would be allowed to come back to their villages. If this is not possible because there is a Jewish settlement there, they should be given the choice to found an alternative settlement nearby. This may mean some painful compulsory state purchase of agricultural lands that should be handed back to those who return. In cases when this is impossible they ought to be allowed the choice to settle in another place in the larger area or if not possible in another area in Palestine. Compensation would be the last resort and would always be offered as a choice. This kind of moral claim of return would encompass all Palestine including Tel Aviv.
At no time, however, it would be on the cards to throw Israeli Jews from their land. An egalitarian and pragmatic realization of the Right of Return constitutes an egalitarian legal revolution. As such it would be paramount to address Jews’ worries about security and equality in any future arrangement in which they, or any other group, may become a minority. Jews national symbols and importance would be preserved. Equality of stake involves equality of symbolic ownership.
But it is important to emphasis that the Palestinian Right of Return would mean that what would cease to exist is the premise of a Jewish as well as indeed a Muslim state. A return without the removal of the constitutionally enshrined preferential stake is return to serfdom.
The upshot is that only by individuating cases of injustice, by extending claims for injustice to all historic Palestine, by fair address of them without creating another injustice for Jews and finally by ensuring the elimination of all racist laws that stems from the Jewish nature of the state including that nature itself, would justice be, and with it peace, possible. What we need is a spirit of generosity that is pragmatic but also morally uncompromising in terms of geographic ambit of the moral claims for repatriation and equality. This vision would propel the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But for all this to happen we must start by ceasing to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. No spirit of generosity would be established without an egalitarian call for jettisoning the ethno-nationalistic notion upon which the Jewish state is based.
The path of two states is the path of separation. Its realization would mean the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalism for many years. It would mean that the return of the dispossessed and the equality of those who return and those non-Jew-Arabs who are now there would have to be deferred—indefinitely consigned to the dusty shelves of historical injustices. Such a scenario is sure to provoke more violence, as it would establish the realization and legitimization of Zionist racism and imperialism.
Also, any bi-national arrangement ought to be subjected to a principle of equality of citizenship and not vice versa. The notion of separation and partition that can infect bi-nationalism, should be done away with and should not be tinkered with or rationalized in any way. Both spiritually and materially Jews and non-Jews can find national expression in a single egalitarian and non-sectarian state.
The non-recognition of the Jewish state is an egalitarian imperative that looks both at the past and to the future. It is the uncritical recognition of the right of Israel to exist at a Jewish state, which is the core hindrance for this egalitarian premise to shape the ethical challenge that Palestine poses. A recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state means the silencing that would breed more and more violence and bloodshed.
The same moral intuition that brought so many people to condemn and sanction Apartheid South Africa ought also to prompt them to stop seeing a threat to existence of the Jewish state as the effect caused by the refugee “problem” or by the “demographic threat” from the non-Jew-Arabs within it. It is rather the other way round. It is the non-egalitarian premise of a Jewish state and the lack of empathy and corruption of all those who make us uncritically accept the right of such a state to exist that is both the cause of the refugee problem and cause for the inability to implement their return and treating them as equals thereafter.
We must see that the uncritically accepted recognition of Israel’s right to exist is, as Joseph Massad so well puts it in Al-Ahram, to accept Israel’s claim to have the right to be racist or, to develop Massad’s brilliant formulation, Israel’s claim to have the right to occupy to dispossess and to discriminate. What is it, I wonder, that prevents Israelis and so many of world Jews to respond to the egalitarian challenge? What is it, I wonder, that oppresses the whole world to sing the song of a “peace process” that is destined to legitimize racism in Palestine?
To claim such a right to be racist must come from a being whose victims face must hide very dark primordial aggression and hatred of all others. How can we find a connective tissue to that mentality that claims the legitimate right to harm other human beings? How can this aggression that is embedded in victim mentality be perturbed?
The Annapolis meeting is a con. As an egalitarian argument we should say loud and clear that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.
Oren Ben-Dor grew up in Israel. He teaches Legal and Political Philosophy at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK. He can be reached at:
mailto:okbendor@yahoo.com>okbendor@yahoo.com
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5) Banks Gone Wild
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
November 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/opinion/23krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.
The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn’t.
In a direct sense, the carnage on Wall Street is all about the great housing slump.
This slump was both predictable and predicted. “These days,” I wrote in August 2005, “Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.” It wasn’t.
But even as the danger signs multiplied, Wall Street piled into bonds backed by dubious home mortgages. Most of the bad investments now shaking the financial world seem to have been made in the final frenzy of the housing bubble, or even after the bubble began to deflate.
In fact, according to Fortune, Merrill Lynch made its biggest purchases of bad debt in the first half of this year — after the subprime crisis had already become public knowledge.
Now the bill is coming due, and almost everyone — that is, almost everyone except the people responsible — is having to pay.
The losses suffered by shareholders in Merrill, Citigroup, Bear Stearns and so on are the least of it. Far more important in human terms are the hundreds of thousands if not millions of American families lured into mortgage deals they didn’t understand, who now face sharp increases in their payments — and, in many cases, the loss of their houses — as their interest rates reset.
And then there’s the collateral damage to the economy.
You still hear occasional claims that the subprime fiasco is no big deal. Even though the numbers keep getting bigger — some observers are now talking about $400 billion in losses — these losses are small compared with the total value of financial assets.
But bad housing investments are crippling financial institutions that play a crucial role in providing credit, by wiping out much of their capital. In a recent report, Goldman Sachs suggested that housing-related losses could force banks and other players to cut lending by as much as $2 trillion — enough to trigger a nasty recession, if it happens quickly.
Beyond that, there’s a pervasive loss of trust, which is like sand thrown in the gears of the financial system. The crisis of confidence is plainly visible in the market data: there’s an almost unprecedented spread between the very low interest rates investors are willing to accept on U.S. government debt — which is still considered safe — and the much higher interest rates at which banks are willing to lend to each other.
How did things go so wrong?
Part of the answer is that people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.
But another part of the answer lies in what hasn’t happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven’t been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.
Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.
But if the success turns out to have been an illusion — well, they still get to keep the money. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Not only is this grossly unfair, it encourages bad risk-taking, and sometimes fraud. If an executive can create the appearance of success, even for a couple of years, he will walk away immensely wealthy. Meanwhile, the subsequent revelation that appearances were deceiving is someone else’s problem.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. The huge rewards executives receive if they can fake success are what led to the great corporate scandals of a few years back. There’s no indication that any laws were broken this time — but the public’s trust was nonetheless betrayed, once again.
The point is that the subprime crisis and the credit crunch are, in an important sense, the result of our failure to effectively reform corporate governance after the last set of scandals.
John Edwards recently came out with a corporate reform plan, but it didn’t receive a lot of attention. Corporate governance still isn’t regarded as a major political issue. But it should be.
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6) Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level
By SOLOMON MOORE
November 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/us/23mapping.html?ref=us
HOUSTON — Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of prison and moved into his grandmother’s house in Sunnyside, a south central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards.
During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of the neighborhood’s chronic problems.
“Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different,” he said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. “I have some friends I haven’t seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or they were locked up.”
Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.
Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together accounted for 15 percent of the city’s population, yet received half of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.
The group, which is based in Brooklyn, has done work for the Texas Legislature that helped lead to a $217 million expansion of rehabilitation services.
Neighborhoods like Sunnyside can be found in virtually every big city in the nation. Even as violent crime statistics trend downward, incarceration rates throughout the country remain at a historic high of 750 per 100,000 residents. Each year about 650,000 prisoners are released on parole, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Mapping studies in neighborhoods as distant as the Phoenix suburb of South Mountain and the Newhallville area of New Haven show incarceration rates far higher than the national rate.
The parolees are almost always coming back to areas where support systems, like schools and public assistance programs, receive less money and attention than incarceration does, the studies show. In an effort to break the cycle, Texas this fall began its expansion of services for former inmates, including job training classes, drug treatment programs and psychological counseling.
The approach, based in part on legislative presentations by the Justice Mapping Center, is a sharp departure from the state’s longtime criminal justice focus on retribution.
The shift is intended to save the state money by slowing the revolving door between state prisons and neighborhoods like Sunnyside. The parolees released last year cost the state $100 million over the course of their prison terms; the 85 who returned to Sunnyside, population 21,000, accounted for almost $8 million of that, according to data by the mapping group.
“It’s not uncommon for children of criminal justice system clients to themselves go into the criminal justice system,” said State Senator John H. Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.
“Certain lower socioeconomic areas produce clients for the criminal justice system in a way that is analogous to the way that the welfare system created a cycle of first- and second- and third-generation welfare recipients.”
Despite declining crime and lower arrest rates, Texas’s adult prison expenditures have grown to $2.8 billion a year, tripled since 1990. Decades of tough-on-crime legislation and low parole rates have quadrupled the state prison population since 1985.
The prisons are about 4,000 inmates beyond their legal capacity, according to prison officials.
A variety of groups, including the Council of State Governments and the Open Society Institute, are investigating the economic cost of communities with high rates of prison admissions and releases and the effectiveness of incarceration policies.
Eric Cadora, a founder of the Justice Mapping Center, said high incarceration rates hinder government efforts to turn around troubled neighborhoods by taking people out of the work force, compelling families to rely on government assistance and scaring away investment.
The Fifth Ward, an east Houston neighborhood, has one of the city’s highest concentrations of former prisoners. At least 125 state parolees resettled in the neighborhood in 2006, according to the mapping studies. Their prison terms cost Texas $9 million.
Mark Wright, 31, stood outside a house in the Fifth Ward recently selling drugs just weeks after completing a prison term for drug possession. Altogether, Mr. Wright said he had served 10 years for four drug-related convictions and one parole violation.
“I was bred into this life,” said Mr. Wright, who said he still made his living selling drugs. “It’s survival of the fittest out here.”
Mr. Wright said that “damn near 99 percent” of his friends had served prison terms, mostly for drug possession, including his younger brother, who is currently in prison.
“Half these dudes dropped out of junior high,” he said, pointing to several friends standing with him sipping from plastic foam cups of “Purple Drank,” a brain-battering draft of prescription-strength codeine cough syrup cut with soda. “Some of them dropped out of elementary school. All they got is this hustle. They got no backup.”
In east Houston, another of the city’s troubled neighborhoods, Marilyn Gambrell, the founder of No More Victims Inc., a support group for students at M. B. Smiley High School with incarcerated parents, said that more than half of the 1,250 students there have relatives in prison or who have done time in the past. Ms. Gambrell is a former parole officer who supervised many of the parents.
Each day, several dozen of the teenagers gather in a carpeted classroom with plush sofas and cushioned chairs to talk about what it is like to have a family member in jail or prison.
During a recent discussion, drugs, violence and poverty were running themes. One boy said he had accompanied his stepfather on drug runs, and most of the students said they themselves had already had run-ins with the police.
Tangenea Miller, 20, is considered a graduate of the support group. She works as a corrections officer at a Houston lock-up. “I see a lot of people there from my old neighborhood,” Ms. Miller said.
The situations described in the high school sessions were front and center one recent day in the Houston neighborhood of Kashmere Gardens. Weeds curled out of broken windows and open doorways in abandoned homes. Mounds of trash sat in empty lots flooded with stagnant water.
Young men, most of them unemployed, stood in front of shotgun houses sipping Purple Drank. Others dealt dope in front of strip-malls and on side streets in broad daylight. The Justice Mapping Center estimates that Texas taxpayers spent $10 million to incarcerate the 117 state prison inmates who were paroled to Kashmere Gardens last year.
Al Jarreau Davis, 26, was released back to Kashmere Gardens five months ago after serving less than a year in state jail for drug possession. It was his second jail term. Mr. Davis and his older brother, Bay Davis, also a recently released drug offender, support themselves by selling marijuana and crack cocaine.
A third Davis brother was shot to death a year ago during an argument after a traffic accident.
“There ain’t no jobs out here for someone like me,” said Al Jarreau Davis. Both brothers said they fully expected to be arrested again, or worse.
“I’m probably going to stay out on the street until somebody murders me,” said Bay Davis, matter-of-factly.
And new parolees keep coming. Every few weeks, several dozen inmates assemble in the chapel of the state prison in Huntsville on the eve of their release for a two-hour orientation program by Christian outreach workers. The prisoners are offered phone lists of clinics, churches, shelters and drug treatment programs. Then they file out of the chapel and back to their cells for one more night of restless confinement.
It is a shoestring program and most inmates do not participate, said the Rev. Emmett Solomon, a prison minister who leads the classes. “Most of what they get to prepare them for their release, they get right here,” Mr. Solomon said. “But it’s probably too little, too late.”
Mr. Taylor, the Sunnyside drug dealer, was in a recent class. He left for the bus station the next morning, with about 40 other men, wearing tattered, unfashionable donated clothes and carrying their possessions in mesh bags.
As Mr. Taylor got off the bus in Houston later in the afternoon, a passing stranger who called himself Ice welcomed him home.
“Hey man, I know how it is,” he told Mr. Taylor. “I just got out, too.”
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7) Vote Is Postponed as Lebanese President Leaves
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS and NADA BAKRI
November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/world/middleeast/24lebanon.html?ref=world
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Saturday, Nov. 24 — The departing Lebanese president, Émile Lahoud, asked the military to take charge of the nation’s security on Friday, a few hours after the speaker of Parliament prolonged the country’s political crisis by postponing for a week a vote to choose a new president.
But experts on Lebanese law said that the president’s declaration did not affect the relationship of the military to the caretaker government, which took charge of day-to-day operations at midnight on Friday, when Mr. Lahoud’s term ended.
“This doesn’t change anything,” said Mohammed Kabbani, a member of Parliament from the governing majority. “The army is already in charge of security.”
The caretaker government, composed of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his cabinet, has final authority until a new president is chosen.
Lebanon’s presidential crisis intensified Friday night, when the parliamentary vote to replace Mr. Lahoud, already postponed four times, was delayed yet again by Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament. Mr. Berri set the vote for next Friday.
Mr. Berri said in a statement that Parliament could convene earlier if an agreement was reached.
The governing majority, backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, has failed during two months of haggling to reach a deal with the opposition, backed by Syria and Iran. Mr. Lahoud is aligned with Syria. Mr. Siniora is considered an ally of the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Legislators said that with the presidential palace suddenly empty, negotiators might feel pressure to reach an agreement.
“It is dangerous,” said Ahmed Fatfat, a cabinet minister and an outspoken critic of Syria. “We do not want to go to a confrontation.”
The Hezbollah-led parliamentary opposition sought to calm fears of civil strife, promising not to send supporters into the street against the caretaker government as long as it refrains from issuing any major policies. “For us, there is no government now,” said Nawar Sahili, a Hezbollah member of Parliament. “But we want stability, so we will tell our followers to wait until next Friday.”
One of the opposition’s main demands is that Hezbollah be allowed to keep its militia under a new president and new cabinet.
Opposition members of Parliament said they hoped it would be easier to reach a deal on a new president after the Middle East peace conference scheduled to take place next week in Annapolis, Md.
Samir Franjieh, a lawmaker with the governing coalition, said that Syria was waiting to see if it would be asked to play a central role in the peace talks. If Damascus reached an understanding with Washington, he said, Syria might use its considerable influence in Lebanon to push for a settlement.
“The Syrians are taking their time,” Mr. Franjieh said.
Members of the governing coalition said that with the crisis coming to a climax, momentum at the negotiating table could shift in favor of the pro-Western bloc.
“We are for consensus and we will remain for consensus,” said Saad Hariri, who is the front-runner to take over as prime minister in a new government.
Both sides appeared to make concessions to draw the country back from the brink of a full showdown, which many here feared could set off widespread violence.
The governing coalition insists that it has the right to elect a new president with a simple parliamentary majority, even in the absence of a deal with the opposition. The majority coalition has not exercised that option to avoid worsening the crisis.
Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hezbollah member of Parliament, said, “The crisis remains unresolved because the fake majority refuses to share power with the opposition.” He said that if the majority took “any unconstitutional measure,” it would be “tantamount to a coup and we will respond with a coup.”
In the end, the governing coalition refrained from making a power play, and the opposition said it would not challenge the caretaker government’s authority, even as it insisted the temporary government was unconstitutional, since all the Shiite opposition ministers in the government had resigned in protest.
Now leaders have a week to hammer out a consensus. The governing majority is eager to elect a head of state who is considered independent of Syrian influence, unlike Mr. Lahoud.
The president is elected by Parliament, not by popular vote, and must be a Maronite Christian under Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system.
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8) Barely Getting By and Facing a Cold Maine Winter
By ERIK ECKHOLM
November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/us/24maine.html?ref=us
MILBRIDGE, Me. — They have worked since their teens in backbreaking seasonal jobs, extracting resources from the sea and the forest. Their yards are filled with peeling boats and broken lobster traps.
In sagging wood homes and aged trailers scattered across Washington County, many of Maine’s poorest and oldest shiver too much in the winter, eat far more biscuits and beans than meat and cannot afford the weekly bingo game at the V.F.W. hall.
In this long-depressed “down east” region, where the wild blueberry patches have turned a brilliant crimson, thousands of elderly residents live on crushingly meager incomes. This winter promises to be especially chilling, with fuel oil prices rising and fuel assistance expected to decline. But many assume that others are worse off than themselves and are too proud to ask for assistance, according to groups that run meal programs and provide aid for heating and weatherizing.
“One of our biggest problems is convincing people to take help,” said Eleanor West, director of services for the Washington Hancock Community Agency, a federally chartered nonprofit group. “I tell them, ‘You worked hard all your life and paid taxes and are getting back a little of what you paid in.’”
Over the last half century, Social Security, Medicare and private pensions have lifted most of the nation’s elderly. In 1960, one in three lived below the poverty line; now fewer than one in 10 do. But in Washington County, the poverty rate among those 65 and older is nearly one in five and many more live only a little above the federal subsistence standard in 2007 of $10,200 for a single person and $13,690 for two.
For thousands on fixed incomes, fuel assistance may decline while Social Security checks are scarcely rising.
Viola Brooks, 81, worked in fish and blueberry factories while her husband worked in textile and logging jobs. Now widowed, she gets $588 a month from Social Security, supplemented by $112 in food stamps and one-time fuel aid of more than $500 for the winter.
But this year, that fuel aid will not fill a single tank. The average house cost $1,800 to heat last year, and minimal comfort this winter may require closer to $3,000; trailers will require somewhat less. Electricity and rent already take up most of Ms. Brooks’s income.
“I’m broke every month, and the trailer needs storm windows,” she said. “I cook a lot of pea soup and baked beans and buy flour to make biscuits.”
“Some day I’d like to go to a hairdresser,” Ms. Brooks said of a dream deferred. Still she says she enjoys her lovebirds and cats, and points out that “some people have it worse.”
Jobs for the elderly, a growing trend nationwide, are virtually nonexistent in these hamlets. Many people survive with help from a range of programs including food stamps, Medicaid, disability and energy assistance; others suffer silently, long used to hardship and fiercely independent.
In a pattern still common, older people here often held a series of seasonal jobs, usually without benefits. They worked on lobster boats and dug clams or bloodworms (to sell for bait) from spring to fall, raked wild blueberries in August, harvested potatoes and then made Christmas wreaths for mail-order companies to mid-December. Wives often worked in sardine canneries or in blueberry processing.
“By their 50s, their bodies start breaking down,” said Tim King, director of the community agency at its headquarters in Milbridge, adding that high rates of smoking, obesity and diabetes also contributed to early aging. The aid programs define those as 60 and over as elderly.
Because of their irregular careers and payments into the system, many people get Social Security benefits far below the national average of more than $1,000 a month.
Velma L. Harmon, a 79-year-old widow, receives only $220 a month from Social Security and has a grand total of $85 to live on each month after she pays her subsidized rent and utilities at her apartment complex in Machias, one of a growing number of such federally aided facilities for the elderly.
She is grateful for free lunches provided by the Eastern Agency on Aging, another government-financed group, but too proud to apply for food stamps that would give her a bit more spending money. “Trying to buy Christmas presents, that’s the hardest thing,” said Ms. Harmon, who has a mangled finger from her years of snipping sardine heads in a canning factory.
The preoccupation right now is soaring fuel prices: cheaper natural gas is unavailable in this region, and wood heat is often impractical or insufficient. But because of limited federal money, average fuel assistance for the 46,000 low-income Maine families expected to apply will probably decline to $579 this year, from $688 last year, said Jo-Ann Choate of the Maine State Housing Agency.
“Low-income people aren’t even going to be able to fill up a single tank of fuel oil,” Ms. Choate said. “They already wrap themselves up in blankets during the winter. This year they’ll be colder.”
The disabled, and there are many, may have it hardest. Dolly Jordan of Milbridge has a history of two bad marriages, a bone-crushing auto accident and poor health, and looks and feels older than 61. With osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes and obesity, she spends most of the day in a wheelchair and uses a combination of a gripper, a broom and a cane to make her bed or hang her laundry.
Come winter, she hangs a blanket over the front door of her little red wooden house, where she has lived alone the last 10 years and which sits on concrete blocks with no foundation. She turns the heat off at night to save fuel.
Her disability payment is $623 a month, plus she gets just $10 from the state and $74 in food stamps. After paying the housing tax and her utility bills, she said, she must watch every remaining penny. A daughter drives her to the distant town of Ellsworth for cheaper shopping.
Like many, she keeps a police scanner on as a diversion and, unable to afford cable, she watches the same videos over and over — her favorite is “On Golden Pond.”
“I wish for bedtime to come,” she said. “The days are so long.”
Easing down a ramp to her mailbox is a perilous 15-minute ordeal. Still, she said, “I wait for Fridays.”
“That’s junk-mail day, and I read all the ads. That’s my best day.”
She added, “There’s always older people out there who have it harder.”
Frederick and Kathleen Call, in Harrington, are in their 60s and live in a 1970s trailer with buckling walls. They live on his disability check — he has had six heart attacks — and food stamps and fuel assistance. Like many others in the region, they buy all their clothes at a church-run thrift shop. They spend their days playing board games and rummy and watching squirrels on their porch.
“We used to go to the food pantry for a free box,” Ms. Call said, “but I saw an old woman who looked like she really needed it. She was thin and cold. I gave her a blanket. We haven’t gone for free food for years.”
Some people here seem to have sunny outlooks no matter what. In the fishing village of Jonesport, Elizabeth Emerson, 87, is hard of hearing and has a titanium knee but is spry and irrepressively cheerful.
She lives in the tiny house her husband, a trucker, built in 1949, and has a view of the gravestone where her name is already etched next to his. Having a daughter nearby, and a total of 52 grand-, great-grand and great-great-grandchildren, whose pictures fill the walls and the refrigerator door, helps in ways practical and emotional.
Ms. Emerson said she “thoroughly enjoyed” the 25 years she spent working as an aide in a nursing home, and she demonstrated the yodeling she used to perform on command for one patient.
Each day she walks with her dog, Sabrina, down to the stony beach where her family once swam. “I saw moose tracks the other day,” she exulted. “Here is where I used to pick heather.”
With her Social Security payment of $683 a month, she refuses to feel impoverished.
“I was never a person to be extravagant,” Ms. Emerson said, adding, “I don’t play beano,” using the local term for bingo.
Besides, she said, she can still afford an indulgence here and there. “My greatest vice,” she added, “is Hershey bars.”
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9) Congressman Sees Bias in Chicago Traffic Stop
By CATRIN EINHORN
November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/us/24chicago.html?ref=us
CHICAGO, Nov. 23 — A black Congressman who was issued a ticket this week after being pulled over while driving with three black passengers has accused the Chicago police of racial profiling in the traffic stop.
The representative, Danny K. Davis, Democrat of Illinois, said he was driving his Mercury Grand Marquis just after midnight Monday on the city’s West Side when two police officers pulled him over and asked to see his driver’s license and proof of insurance.
When Mr. Davis asked why they had stopped him, he said, they accused him of weaving, and they ticketed him for driving left of the center line.
Mr. Davis says he did not commit any traffic violation.
“I just could not believe it,” he said Friday. “I had to conclude that race had to have entered the picture, and that the only reason we were stopped is that there were four African-Americans a little after midnight, in a car going down the street. And it really breaks my heart to have to arrive at that conclusion, but I can’t conclude anything else.”
The Chicago Police Department is investigating, said Monique Bond, a spokeswoman. “The Chicago Police Department does not tolerate, encourage or condone racial profiling on any level,” Ms. Bond said.
But Ms. Bond said it appeared that the officers had followed procedure, and she noted that because the officers approached the car from behind, they might not have been able to determine the race of its passengers. “Because we have two different sides of the story, the matter will be thoroughly investigated,” she said.
Mr. Davis’s accusation comes at a time when the Police Department is dealing with widespread accusations of misconduct. Earlier this month, a legal team at the University of Chicago reported that Chicago police officers were the subject of more brutality complaints per officer than the national average, and that the department was less likely than the national norm to pursue abuse cases seriously.
Two civil juries recently awarded multimillion-dollar settlements to men who said officers had abused them. And the city has been searching for a police superintendent since April when Philip J. Cline resigned after an outcry over the lack of swift discipline against officers accused of involvement in two beatings of civilians caught on videotape.
In 2005, James T. Meeks, a black state senator and a minister, accused the police of racial profiling and pointing a gun at him during a traffic stop.
In Mr. Davis’s case, he said he had just completed a segment of his weekly radio show and was driving home some participants. One of them, Lowry S. Taylor, who is president of the Digital Development Corporation and Oversight Committee, which runs the Danny K. Davis Job Training Program for ex-offenders, agreed with Mr. Davis’s version of events. “This was a blatant stop for no reason,” Mr. Taylor said.
Mr. Davis said he would fight the $75 ticket, though not for the money.
“It’s because the ticket that I received is symptomatic of what has been taking place with many people in the African-American community,” Mr. Davis said. “There’s too much of the feeling that people are criminalized in the minds of some law enforcement officers.”
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10) The High Cost of Health Care
Editorial
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25sun1.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1196015477-vgCAR17MzHNW0zjs0FvNZA
The relentless, decades-long rise in the cost of health care has left many Americans struggling to pay their medical bills. Workers complain that they cannot afford high premiums for health insurance. Patients forgo recommended care rather than pay the out-of-pocket costs. Employers are cutting back or eliminating health benefits, forcing millions more people into the ranks of the uninsured. And state and federal governments strain to meet the expanding costs of public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
Health care costs are far higher in the United States than in any other advanced nation, whether measured in total dollars spent, as a percentage of the economy, or on a per capita basis. And health costs here have been rising significantly faster than the overall economy or personal incomes for more than 40 years, a trend that cannot continue forever.
It is the worst long-term fiscal crisis facing the nation, and it demands a solution, but finding one will not be easy or palatable.
The Causes
Varied and Deep-Rooted. Contrary to popular beliefs, this is not a problem driven mainly by the aging of the baby boom generation, or the high cost of prescription drugs, or medical malpractice litigation that spawns defensive medicine. Those issues often dominate political discourse, but they have played relatively minor roles in driving up medical spending in this country and abroad. The major causes are much more deep-seated and far harder to root out.
Almost all economists would agree that the main driver of high medical spending here is our wealth. We are richer than other countries and so willing to spend more. But authoritative analyses have found that we spend well above what mere wealth would predict.
This is mostly because we pay hospitals and doctors more than most other countries do. We rely more on costly specialists, who overuse advanced technologies, like CT scans and M.R.I. machines, and who resort to costly surgical or medical procedures a lot more than doctors in other countries do. Perverse insurance incentives entice doctors and patients to use expensive medical services more than is warranted. And our fragmented array of insurers and providers eats up a lot of money in administrative costs, marketing expenses and profits that do not afflict government-run systems abroad.
Does It Matter? If citizens of an extremely wealthy nation like the United States want to spend more on health care and less on a third car, a new computer or a vacation home, what’s wrong with that? By some measures, Americans are getting good value. Studies by reputable economists have concluded that spending on such advanced treatments as cardiac drugs, devices and surgery; neonatal care for low-birth-weight infants; and mental health drugs have more than paid for themselves by extending lives and improving their quality.
But if health care spending continues on its same trajectory, the United States will reach the point — probably several decades from now — where every penny of the annual increase in gross domestic product would have to go for health care. There would be less and less money for other things, like education, environmental protection, scientific research and national security, that may be equally or more important to the well-being of society.
Governmental budgets will face the crisis even sooner. States are already complaining that they have to crimp other vital activities, like education, to meet soaring Medicaid costs. And federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid is surging upward at rates that will cause the deficit to soar. That means politicians will have to raise taxes, severely cut a wide range of other governmental programs, or chop back the health programs themselves.
The question is: What can be done to lower both the high level of health care spending and its high rate of increase from year to year?
The Solutions
Geography. Pioneering studies by researchers at Dartmouth have shown enormous disparities in expenditures on health care from one region to another with no discernible difference in health outcomes. Doctors in high-cost areas use hospitals, costly technology and platoons of consulting physicians a lot more often than doctors in low-cost areas, yet their patients, on average, fare no better. There are hints that they may even do worse because they pick up infections in the hospital and because having a horde of doctors can mean no one is in charge.
If the entire nation could bring its costs down to match the lower-spending regions, the country could cut perhaps 20 to 30 percent off its health care bill, a tremendous saving. That would require changing the long- ingrained practices of the medical profession. Public and private insurers might need to refuse coverage for high-cost care that adds little value.
Stick to What Works. The sad truth is that less than half of all medical care in the United States is supported by good evidence that it works, according to estimates cited by the Congressional Budget Office. If doctors had better information on which treatments work best for which patients, and whether the benefits were commensurate with the costs, needless treatment could be junked, the savings could be substantial, and patient care would surely improve. It could take a decade, or several, to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies, modify relevant laws, and change doctors’ behavior.
Managed Care. For a brief period in the 1990s it looked as if health maintenance organizations competing for patients and carefully managing their care might bring down costs and improve quality at the same time. The H.M.O.’s did help restrain costs for a few years. The problem was, doctors and patients hated the system, management became much looser, and the upsurge in costs resumed. Managed care techniques are creeping back into some health plans, especially for services apt to be overused, but too heavy a hand would most likely produce another backlash.
Information Technologies. The American health care system lags well behind other sectors of the economy — and behind foreign medical systems — in adopting computers, electronic health records and information-sharing technologies that can greatly boost productivity. There is little doubt that widespread computerization could greatly reduce the paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals, head off medication errors, and reduce the costly repetition of diagnostic tests as patients move from one doctor to another. Without an infusion of capital, the transition from paper records is not apt to happen very quickly.
Prevention. Everyone seems to be hoping that preventive medicine — like weight control, exercise, better nutrition, smoking cessation, regular checkups, aggressive screening and judicious use of drugs to reduce risks — will not only improve health but also lower costs in the long run. Preventive medicine actually costs money — somebody has to spend time counseling patients and screening them for disease — and it is not clear how soon, or even whether, substantial savings will show up. Still, the effort has to be made. The Milken Institute recently estimated that the most common chronic diseases cost the economy more than $1 trillion annually, mostly from lost worker productivity, which could balloon to nearly $6 trillion by the middle of the century.
[Why not make the cigarette companies, fast-food moguls, etc. who market unhealthy life choices—especially to the poor--be held responsible?…bw]
Disease Management. Virtually all policy experts want more careful coordination of the care of chronically ill patients, who account for the largest portion of the nation’s health care expenditures. Although that should improve the quality of the care they get, coordination may not cut costs as substantially as people expect. In some initial trials it has cut costs, in others not.
Drug Prices. Compared with the residents of other countries, Americans pay much more for brand-name prescription drugs, less for generic and over-the-counter drugs, and roughly the same prices for biologics. This page believes it would be beneficial to allow Medicare to negotiate with manufacturers for lower prescription drug prices and to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from abroad. The prospect for big savings is dubious.
Who Picks Up the Tab?
Pay Providers Less. With doctors dreadfully unhappy under the heavy hand of insurers, it would seem shortsighted to make them even unhappier by cutting their compensation to levels paid in other countries. But many experts believe it should be possible to tap into the vast flow of money sluicing through hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities to find savings.
[Note: No mention of tapping into the massive profits of drug manufacturers or health insurance corporations…bw]
Emphasize Primary Care. In a health system as uncoordinated as ours, many experts believe we could get better health results, possibly for less cost, if we changed reimbursement formulas and medical education programs to reward and produce more primary care doctors and fewer specialists inclined to proliferate high-cost services. It would be a long-term project.
Skin in the Game. The solution favored by many conservatives is to force consumers to shell out more money when they seek medical care so that they will think harder about whether it is really necessary. The “consumer-directed health care” movement calls for providing people with enough information about doctors and treatments so that they can make wise decisions.
There would most likely be some savings. A classic experiment by Rand researchers from 1974 to 1982 found that people who had to pay almost all of their own medical bills spent 30 percent less on health care than those whose insurance covered all their costs, with little or no difference in health outcomes. The one exception was low-income people in poor health, who went without care they needed. Any cost-sharing scheme would have to protect those unable to bear the burden.
And consumer-driven plans have limitations. Most health care spending is racked up by a small percentage of individuals whose bills are so high they are no longer subject to cost sharing; they will hardly be deterred from expensive care they desperately need. Moreover, few consumers have the competence or knowledge to second-guess a doctor’s recommendations.
Single Payer. Deep in their hearts, many liberals yearn for a single-payer system, sometimes called Medicare-for-all, that would have the federal government pay for all care and dictate prices. Such a system would let the government offset the price-setting strength of the medical and pharmaceutical industries, eliminate much of the waste due to a multiplicity of private insurance plans, and greatly cut administrative costs.
But a single-payer system is no panacea for the cost problem — witness Medicare’s own cost troubles — and the approach has limited political support. Private insurers could presumably eliminate some of the waste through uniform billing and payment procedures.
•
By now it should be clear that there is no silver bullet to restrain soaring health care costs. A wide range of contributing factors needs to be tackled simultaneously, with no guarantee they will have a substantial impact any time soon. In many cases we do not have enough solid information to know how to cut costs without impairing quality. So we need to get cracking on a range of solutions. The cascade of knowledge flowing from the human genome project, new nanotechnologies and the advent of treatments tailor-made for individual patients may well accelerate, not mitigate, the rise in medical spending. If we want the benefits, we will need to make them affordable.
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11) Free and Uneasy
Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside
By FERNANDA SANTOS
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25jeffrey.html?hp
As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming.
For months after his release in September 2006, he had been yearning for a chance to dive in, to test his endurance, to feel that familiar sensation of pushing his body through the water, to get to the other side.
On a late-winter afternoon before giving a speech on wrongful convictions, Mr. Deskovic giggled mischievously as he stood at the edge of a hotel pool in Latham, N.Y., an Albany suburb, then leapt in abruptly, hugging his knees to produce a huge splash. In shorts and T-shirt, he sucked in some air and dived under, holding his breath. And holding it. He made his way across the pool in hurried, sideways strokes, and emerged gasping but smiling.
“Yes! Yes! I did it,” Mr. Deskovic yelled, his fists clenched above his head like a victorious boxer. “I still have it in me.”
A grown man with a full bushy beard, celebrating the simple accomplishment of an innocent youth. A tiny yet transcendent moment, one among many such moments of recaptured pleasures and newfound problems since his exoneration and release from prison last autumn.
Having walked out of the Westchester County Courthouse vindicated yet petrified of the unpredictable tomorrows ahead, Mr. Deskovic found that his first year on the outside was more turbulent than triumphant. Still trying to recover what was stolen from him, he is, at 34, a free man who has yet to feel truly free.
At least 205 men and one woman nationwide have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, including 53 who, like Mr. Deskovic, were convicted of murder. In gathering information on 137 of them over the past four months — one of the most extensive such efforts to date — The New York Times found that many faced the same challenges Mr. Deskovic has confronted, like making a living, reconnecting with relatives and seeking financial recompense for his lost years.
But given Mr. Deskovic’s age at conviction (he was 17, one of about two dozen of the 206 exonerated inmates imprisoned as teenagers) and length of incarceration (about 35 percent spent more than 15 years behind bars), he has faced particular challenges.
He could be the assertive adult who articulately lobbied at the State Capitol in April to require videotaping of police interrogations. He could also be the overgrown adolescent who stamped his feet and pouted at a Grand Central Terminal kiosk in August when asked if he wanted his smoothie with yogurt or apple juice.
Having spent nearly half his life locked up, accused of brutalizing a high school classmate he hardly knew, Mr. Deskovic was sent into the world last fall lacking some of life’s most fundamental skills and experiences.
He had never lived alone, owned a car, scanned the classifieds in search of work. He had never voted, balanced a checkbook or learned to knot a tie.
He missed the senior prom, the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise him, and his best friend’s wedding.
He said he had never made love.
For six months, Mr. Deskovic got by on $137 a month in disability checks and $150 in food stamps from the federal government, carrying cans of tuna in his backpack. Now earning money through speeches and newspaper columns about wrongful conviction, Mr. Deskovic paid rent for the first time in his life in August, for a cozy attic apartment in Tarrytown that the county subsidizes because of his depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In September, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police, the medical examiner, a prison guard and the governments of two counties, alleging that detectives falsified reports and coerced his confession, and that the prison guard groped and beat him. A separate lawsuit in the Court of Claims is planned seeking payment from the state for the wrongful incarceration.
Since January, he has been enrolled at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, and he expects to earn a bachelor’s degree in behavioral sciences in two months. Since June, he has studied daily for the Law School Admissions Test in hopes of soon going to law school.
At Mercy on a $22,000 scholarship, Mr. Deskovic has read Marx, Freud and Jung but has struggled to navigate the nuances of flirtation and friendship.
“These people are half my age,” he said one morning in a campus cafeteria filled with loud young men in baseball caps and baggy jeans. “They have their own social networks and I’m not part of it. They have direction. They’re going through the normal cycle of things.”
Mr. Deskovic’s life after exoneration has been punctuated by milestones like getting a driver’s license (and a $3,000 Pontiac Grand Am with a bumper sticker proclaiming, “Failure is not an option”), and new adventures, like playing table tennis at a Greenwich Village bar with people he had met online.
There have been confounding trips to the supermarket and painful reunions with his mother, hard-won victories over his fear of speaking in public and profound disillusionment over his own inability to accept his past.
And there was a bittersweet return to the courthouse in White Plains in May for the sentencing of the man found by DNA evidence to have committed the crime. There, the victim’s mother offered Mr. Deskovic an apology: “How I would like to turn back time and return to you what was cruelly taken away.”
Of course, she can’t. No one can.
“Sometimes,” Mr. Deskovic said one morning in his dorm room, “I feel that the only difference from here to prison is that I don’t have bars on my windows.” He was kneeling on his bed and staring at the neat lawn outside. “I’m free, but I’m trapped, and no matter how much I run, I’ll never make up for the lost time.”
Scarred Life, Severed Family
Carrying a box of religious and self-help books, a garbage bag full of legal documents and a few worn-out sweaters, Mr. Deskovic went from prison to Cobleskill, a speck of a town in central New York where his mother, Linda McGarr, settled after his conviction. He calls Cobleskill “the boondocks,” adding an expletive whenever he is angry at his mother, which is often.
While he was locked up, Ms. McGarr was Mr. Deskovic’s connection to the outside world (he has never known his father). He wrote letters and sent them to her to type. She, in turn, sent money for cans of oysters at the prison commissary. When he needed to badger a lawyer, she was his voice. But the relationship withered through the bars. Ms. McGarr, 60, said she tired of the lonely 150-mile drives to visit him. Mr. Deskovic said he resented her lack of urgency in tackling his legal appeals.
Two days after his release, Mr. Deskovic exploded: “How come you didn’t do more to help me?”
“I know you went through hell in there,” Ms. McGarr responded, “but I paid dearly, too.”
The next morning, Mr. Deskovic stuffed his possessions in plastic bags and boarded a train to Peekskill, the scene of the crime that scarred his life.
On Nov. 15, 1989, Angela Correa — a sophomore at Peekskill High, like Mr. Deskovic — slipped a “New Kids on the Block” tape into a portable cassette player and took her camera to a park near her home, snapping a picture of a dove perched on the roof as she left. Two days later, someone spotted her naked body in the woods.
The police retrieved hair and semen samples, which did not match Mr. Deskovic’s DNA; prosecutors argued that they were from earlier consensual sex. Mr. Deskovic, however, fit the description provided by a criminal profiler for the police, and raised investigators’ suspicions when he cried copiously at Ms. Correa’s funeral, though they were not close friends. (In a recent interview, Mr. Deskovic explained that he was always picked on in school and Angela was one of few students who were nice to him, once helping him with algebra.)
After repeated questioning over two months, Mr. Deskovic confessed during a seven-hour interrogation and polygraph test, telling the police he had hit Ms. Correa with a Gatorade bottle and grabbed her around the throat. In the lawsuit, Mr. Deskovic contends that detectives fed him these details, and promised that if he confessed he would not go to prison but would receive psychiatric treatment.
“I was tired, confused, scared, hungry — I wanted to get out of there,” he recalled recently. “I told the police what they wanted to hear, but I never got to go home. They lied to me.”
More than a quarter of all prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence had falsely confessed or made incriminating statements, according to the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that secured Mr. Deskovic’s release. Like many of those men, he had maintained his innocence since shortly after the confession, proclaiming at his sentencing hearing: “I didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe you’re innocent,” the judge conceded before sentencing him to 15 years to life. “But the jury has spoken.”
Back in Peekskill after his release, frosty raindrops pelting his skin, Mr. Deskovic ambled past the police station on Nelson Avenue where he was held after his arrest and up Brown Street toward Crossroads, the apartment complex where he grew up.
“I used to play kickball here, and when it snowed, I’d get a piece of cardboard and sled down this hill over there,” he said, staring at a slope between a tall brick building and a playground. “I used to have a life.”
“Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are people on other planets and that all of a sudden you’re dropped there, with no idea how these people live their lives, how their society works,” he blurted. “I’m this alien. I’m the man pretending he knows what the hell is going on around him when, in fact, he’s clueless.”
Growing up, Mr. Deskovic and his younger half-brother, Christopher McGarr, spent hours shooting hoops at Depew Park, swimming in a local pool or watching wrestling on television, then mimicking the moves of Hulk Hogan and Mr. T on the living-room carpet.
“I didn’t have no father growing up, so I looked up to my brother,” explained Mr. McGarr, now 30. “But when he went to prison, a part of me died.”
On the school bus, other children called his brother a rapist, a killer. So he stopped taking the bus. Eventually, he stopped going to school. Soon he followed Mr. Deskovic into the criminal justice system, racking up more than 20 arrests and several stays in jail for drugs, theft, assault and trespassing.
By the time of Mr. Deskovic’s release, the brothers had not seen each other for 12 years. They waited another six months, until Mr. Deskovic was speaking at Siena College, near Albany, where Mr. McGarr lives.
“I don’t see him,” Mr. Deskovic said as he entered the lecture hall.
“He’s right there,” his mother replied, pointing to a man on a couch.
Mr. Deskovic hesitated, pursing his lips to stop them quivering, then trudged over to his brother, who spread his arms. They hugged a long time — Mr. Deskovic in a suit and striped tie, Mr. McGarr in loose clothes and gold chains — as their mother snapped pictures and an uncle rolled video.
“It’s been so long,” Mr. McGarr said, rubbing his fists against Mr. Deskovic’s back.
But the brothers saw each other only once more, for a tense evening of bowling and pizza in April. Mr. Deskovic’s meetings with his mother have devolved into sporadic phone calls that invariably end in screams and tears.
“Too much time has passed; we have no connection,” Mr. Deskovic said. “My relatives don’t know who I am.”
Seeking Friends
In his canvas book bag, Mr. Deskovic carries a copy of a newspaper article about his exoneration, in case anyone questions why a convicted killer is walking the streets. The newspaper picture of him and his lawyers also adorns Mr. Deskovic’s new Web site (jeffreydeskovicspeaks.org) and MySpace page, which until recently included a plea: “Is anyone up to showing a man who has been away for 16 years how to have a good time?”
In his loneliest moments, when he scans the few personal contacts on his cellphone and realizes he has no one with whom to share his angst, Mr. Deskovic misses the predictability of prison life, where decisions were made for him.
At Elmira, guards woke Mr. Deskovic at 5:30 a.m. and escorted him to the kitchen, where he helped prepare breakfast for 1,800 inmates. He stood outside his cell for each of four daily counts; after the last, at 10:30 p.m., what the guards call the “quiet bell” signaled bedtime.
“If I was looking for entertainment, I’d stand by the chess players in the yard until someone challenged me” for a match, Mr. Deskovic recalled. For kinship and protection, Mr. Deskovic — a former altar boy who converted to Islam during his first year in prison — sought out fellow Muslim inmates. “If it weren’t for my religion,” he said, “I would have taken my own life in prison, or I would have lost my mind.”
On the outside, life’s pace is his to establish. During the week, there are classes, college work, psychotherapy sessions, meetings with a social worker and with the lawyers handling his compensation suit, plus practicing table tennis. Most weekends, he sits alone in his apartment, scouring the Internet for phone numbers of colleges, churches and other institutions that might be interested in hiring him for a speech.
He also trawls the Web for companionship, joining a hodgepodge of groups: “Westchester/So CT Social and Active Group,” “Straight Edge NYC” and a table tennis club.
One June evening, Mr. Deskovic took the train to the Fat Cat, a cavernous basement bar in Greenwich Village, to meet the table tennis players. As a duo played Sinatra on piano and trumpet, Mr. Deskovic ordered a ginger beer and stood across the table from a 37-year-old stockbroker who runs the group.
Score: 13-10.
“I got the momentum, baby,” Mr. Deskovic said, bobbing side to side.
14-10. 15-10.
“I got the serve now!”
18-12.
“I’m going to win! I’m going to win!”
Speaking With Motivation
On a brisk March morning, Mr. Deskovic arrived at the Mercy College cafeteria ahead of the breakfast rush, wearing a suit and carrying three ties on a hanger. He approached a woman wiping counters and whispered in her ear. She grabbed the silver tie with white diamonds and knotted it around his neck.
“I’m an adult and I don’t know how to fix my ties,” Mr. Deskovic said.
He wolfed down a plate of pancakes, then called Darren Wilkins, a concert promoter he met in December and hired to manage his career as a speaker.
Weeks before, Mr. Wilkins took Mr. Deskovic shopping in Harlem, where he bought three four-button suits. For inspiration, they have listened to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. For technique, they have watched videos by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins.
Together, they drafted a lecture describing the mistakes that led to Mr. Deskovic’s wrongful conviction and outlining changes to prevent others from meeting the same fate.
That March day, before speaking to the League of Women Voters at an elegant home in Bronxville, he and Mr. Wilkins, a Christian, held hands, bowed their heads and prayed.
“Public speaking is a way for me to find some meaning to what happened to me,” explained Mr. Deskovic, who has not applied for traditional jobs since his release, but has traveled across New York and four other states for speeches, including one in Texas in September.
In Bronxville, Mr. Deskovic rested his hands on a plant stand in lieu of a lectern. His voice was flat and soft. He seemed to deliberately lock eyes with each of the 16 women sipping coffee.
“If anything I’ve said here today has moved you in any way, I’d like you to join me in a movement against wrongful convictions and to get the death penalty out of New York State,” he said. “Can you make a phone call? Can you join a demonstration?”
Between speeches, Mr. Deskovic counts on donations of food, clothes and cash from people who have heard his story in the news, as well as members of local mosques and the Westchester charity New Beginnings.
He rarely eats out, but for the occasional $4 kebab. Mostly, he survives on Cheerios, tuna, canned corn and shrimp-flavored noodle soup.
On July 27, Mr. Deskovic got the keys to a one-bedroom attic apartment, in a yellow house with green shutters in Tarrytown. The living room window overlooks the Hudson River, a view much like the one he had during a short stint at nearby Sing Sing.
He trimmed his beard that day, shedding perhaps the last visible reminder of the man prison had made him.
A month later, a dean at Mercy College, Shelley Alkin, who had helped arrange Mr. Deskovic’s scholarship after his release from prison, took him shopping at Pathmark to teach him about cleaning products, what types of food he ought to be eating and how much he should expect to pay.
“And I have a plan for when I go shopping on my own,” Mr. Deskovic said proudly. “I’m saving up the empty containers so I can bring them with me and buy the same things all over again.”
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12) Trying to Guess What Happens Next: Recession
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Go Figure
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25goodman.html
YOU need not be a Wall Street chieftain to feel the anxiety that has wrapped its arms around the American economy. The stock market seems locked in a downward spiral as one bank after another suffers its day of reckoning with bad mortgages. Companies are sharply cutting profit forecasts as the sense takes hold that American consumers are finally too loaded with debt to buy the next flat-screen television. The dollar has fallen to inglorious depths, turning Manhattan department stores into something like a Tijuana street market for Germans. One unpleasant word hovers large: recession.
How bad could things get? Pretty bad, say many economists. Not so bad that your grandfather’s prescriptions for enduring the Great Depression need dusting off, but nasty enough to force many Americans to get reacquainted with living within their means. That could make life uncomfortable. It may also be an unavoidable step toward purging the United States and the global economy of a major source of instability — an unhealthy dependence on the willingness of American consumers to keep buying even as debt mounts. Concerns that Americans must eventually grow thrifty, leaving factories from Guangzhou to Guatemala City scrambling for buyers, now sows unease around the world.
It is worth bearing in mind that the American economy has a history of unexpected resilience in the face of supposedly grim prospects. Moreover, some parts of the economy are enjoying good times, notably farmers able to cash in on the making of ethanol. That said, most economists think the American economy is headed for a significant slowdown, as housing prices keep falling, consumers grow tight, and businesses cut investments.
The Federal Reserve last week said it expected the economy to grow 1.6 percent to 2.6 percent next year, a stark contrast from the 3.9 percent rate registered in the most recent quarter. Some see signs of a worst-case scenario — a severe recession that would feature a plummeting stock market, a lower dollar and the loss of many jobs. That would make for an unpleasant year or two for Americans from most walks of life. It would probably drag down the world economy, as Americans put off purchases of everything from computers made in China to Italian-produced sports cars.
The most bearish indulge frighteningly gloomy tones. “The evidence is now building that an ugly recession is inevitable,” declared Nouriel Roubini, an economist who was among the first to warn of the dangers of a real estate downturn, writing last week on his blog, the Global EconoMonitor. “When the United States sneezes the rest of the world gets the cold. And since the United States will not just sneeze, but is risking a serious case of protracted and severe pneumonia, the rest of the world should start to worry about a serious viral contagion.”
Most economists are not so pessimistic. The most likely outcome envisioned by many is a slowdown or a mild recession. That would increase unemployment somewhat, and it would keep the stock market in the doldrums, but it would probably not be severe enough to significantly crimp economies abroad. And while it would impose pain, some see in this more moderate path a way to fix the imbalances in world trade that are at the center of fears of a great unraveling.
Americans have been buying staggering quantities of goods from overseas using money lent by foreigners. Foreign exporters have been relying on American consumers to keep them in business. For years, this dynamic has made for increasingly lopsided terms of trade: Last year, American imports outstripped exports by $764 billion, with foreigners stepping in to cover the difference.
Economists have long intoned that somehow, some day, the United States will be forced to settle up and stop depending upon the largess of foreigners. The basic laws of economics say imbalances are eventually balanced. Some have warned of a worst-case scenario where the foreigners holding American debt get spooked that the value of the dollar is about to plummet and dump the currency in a self-fulfilling prophesy. This would jack up the price of imported goods in the United States, making it harder for Japan, China and Europe to sell their wares, and delivering a global recession.
In the more appetizing scenario, the adjustment would happen gradually. The dollar would fall, making American goods cheaper abroad and helping to correct the trade imbalance. The American economy would slow, but the world economy would continue apace, allowing American firms to export aggressively.
Faced with slower business at home, Americans would be more inclined to save. That would force Japan, China, India and other export giants to find new ways to prosper without leaning on the beleaguered American consumer. The world economy would be cleansed of its imbalances, emerging stronger. The more optimistic suggest that this very scenario is now unfolding.
“If you’re a global benevolent despot, you want a five-year period where China booms, India booms and the U.S. consumer takes a decided back seat,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage and advisory firm ITG. “You need to have a period where Asia booms and we limp along, because the No. 1 worry for the world economy is large, unsustainable trade imbalances.”
To grasp what may at first seem perverse — pain required to get back to gain — it is worth recalling the genesis of our current predicament.
A decade ago came a financial crisis in Asia. As losses rippled around the globe, credit dried up, threatening the willingness of consumers to spend and businesses to invest. With the health of the global economy menaced, central banks lowered interest rates, fueling a wave of spending that, for the most part, has kept things rolling along.
In the United States, cheap credit added momentum to the boom in technology. That story ended badly, of course, with many companies extinguished along with tens of billions of shareholder dollars. But it did not deter the American consumer, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the American economy. The Federal Reserve again opened the taps of cheap credit. Spending went on.
As Americans have carried home mountains of goods manufactured in Japan, China and elsewhere, they have sent trillions of dollars across the Pacific to pay for them. Asian central banks have taken these winnings and parked them back in the United States, buying up Treasury bills, stocks and property. In so doing, they have kept American interest rates low and the dollar stronger, ensuring that consumers have the wherewithal to keep buying.
Asia’s export-led prosperity has in turn generated business for American firms. As China erects factories, office towers and modern airlines, it is snapping up construction equipment from Caterpillar, airplanes from Boeing and engines from Cummins.
Cheap credit has fostered another development that was crucial in creating the current state of things: It unleashed a wave of mortgages with exotically lenient terms, such as interest-only payments and no money down. That allowed buyers to take on more expensive homes than they could have otherwise afforded. As home values rose much the way dot-com stocks had a decade earlier, banks offered loans and no-fuss refinancing that allowed homeowners to turn increased value into money. From 2004 to 2006, Americans took more than $800 billion a year out of their homes, according to most estimates.
With prices now plummeting and banks savaged by mortgage losses, this artery of credit is drying up. The American consumer, a crucial engine of growth for the global economy, may finally be tapped out.
With recent history as a guide, many argue that the Fed and other central banks need simply step in anew, cut interest rates and send Americans back to the mall. Except a new force preoccupies those who control the credit taps: Central banks in the United States and Europe fear inflation, particularly as oil prices soar. This makes them reluctant to bring interest rates down much more.
Where foreigners have in recent years been content to keep buying American debt with the proceeds of the money they earn by selling us their goods, that is now changing. As the dollar keeps falling in value, China has sent signals that it plans to put more of its savings in the euro. Petroleum-rich countries such as Kuwait and Russia, swimming in dollars as the price of oil climbs, have been buying more euros and other currencies, too, adding to the downward pressure on the American currency.
So, for better or worse, Americans and countries whose prosperity is tied to Americans’ spending are apparently headed into uncharted territory: We are about to find out what happens when the easy money runs out.
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13) Pakistani Middle Class, Beneficiary of Musharraf, Begins to Question Rule
By DAVID ROHDE
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/world/asia/25class.html?ref=world
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For the last eight years, Tanveer Ahmed, a 40-year-old pharmaceutical company manager, has prospered under the economic reforms put in place by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
In that time, Pakistan’s economy has grown about 6 percent a year. Mr. Ahmed rose from an entry-level employee to a regional manager. Today he sends his five children to private school, drives a new car and rents a home in Islamabad, one of the country’s most expensive cities.
But Mr. Ahmed says that he now feels disdain for the man who brought prosperity to the urban middle class he is a part of. General Musharraf’s Nov. 3 emergency decree was illegal and embarrassing, he says, and is crippling the economy that has changed his life.
“It’s not democracy,” said Mr. Ahmed, wearing a striped tie, blue V-neck sweater, pants and dress shoes as he shopped for DVDs on a recent night. “What he’s doing is to promote himself.” He asked that his picture not be taken for fear of arrest.
General Musharraf’s loss of support among people like Mr. Ahmed is one of the great setbacks of his rule, which has shaped Pakistan into a vastly different country from the one he seized control of in a 1999 coup.
As he fights to hold on to power, General Musharraf finds himself opposed by the expanded middle class that is among his greatest achievements, and using his emergency powers to rein in another major advance he set in motion, a vibrant, independent news media.
Since he took power, Pakistan’s gross domestic product has doubled. The number of cellphones has soared to 50 million, from 600,000 six years ago. The privatization of banks has led to a huge increase in the sales of cars, motorcycles and, perhaps most important, television sets. Globalization has taken hold, as it has in other countries.
That spreading economic success — and exposure to the outside world — has filled Pakistan’s white collar office workers, stockbrokers and small-business operators with a belief that their country can be more than the backward fief of a few generals, many said in interviews.
While increasingly dissatisfied, however, their ranks remain too thin to exert much influence over Pakistan’s politics, political scientists say. Nonetheless, their emergence could prove decisive, particularly if growing anger translates into greater political activism and broader alliances.
“The emerging urban middle class is very important to Pakistan’s future,” said Teresita Schaffer, South Asia program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But by themselves, they are not numerous enough to swing elections or spearhead a major social movement.”
The size of Pakistan’s expanded middle class is in fact debated. Tara Vishwanath, the World Bank’s lead economist for South Asia, said 5 percent of Pakistan’s 160 million people — or roughly 8 million Pakistanis — appear to have moved from living in poverty to being part of the lower middle class between 2001 and 2004. She said data being collected this year was needed to confirm whether the increase was permanent.
While they have no precise figures, Pakistani political scientists say the upper and middle classes may now include 10 to 20 percent of the population.
But, they caution, the recent economic growth has been uneven and concentrated in the banking, cellphone and construction industries while the agriculture and textile sectors have remained stagnant.
Lagging behind has been the roughly 65 percent of the population that lives in rural Pakistan and that has long been where politics is played.
For decades, Pakistan’s moderate elite has been dismissed as “the chattering classes,” who have shied away from the political arena and rarely voted.
Instead the political system has been dominated by feudal landlords who could deliver huge blocks of votes from poor tenant farmers. The key to winning elections was striking the right alliances and spreading graft, not developing a coherent political platform or putting in place broadly beneficial social policies.
Yet the country is slowly changing, in ways that have left a growing number arguing that Pakistan is more prepared than ever for democratic rule.
Growing political and economic clout from the upper and middle classes has helped fuel the creation of the booming cable television industry, which shows programs from around the world and includes a dozen aggressively independent news networks.
Business owners mounted a sweeping private relief effort during the 2005 earthquake that devastated northern Pakistan.
This spring, the middle class vigorously supported a successful campaign by the country’s lawyers to reverse an attempt by General Musharraf to dismiss the country’s chief justice.
For now, greater mobilization is hobbled by a deep distrust of their political leaders and the United States. A perception is growing that the United States will betray middle-class Pakistanis — Washington’s greatest long-term ally in the fight against terrorism — and continue backing an unpopular military ruler who refuses to give up power.
Many said they believed that General Musharraf had tried to contain — but not eliminate — a dangerous rise in militancy in the country because it allowed him to garner billions in American military aid for Pakistan’s army.
“The U.S. needs to realize that Musharraf is not fighting against terrorism and will not fight against terrorism,” said a student at one of the country’s elite universities who said she feared arrest if her name was printed. “He’s only interested in his own survival.”
Since the emergency decree, small pockets of upper- and middle-class activism have emerged. Lawyers are carrying out protests. Students are writing blogs. Journalists are resisting government censorship.
Yet so far few have joined the small protests by the country’s main opposition political parties. They express disdain for the main opposition leaders, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, two former prime ministers whose rule in the 1990s was plagued by allegations of corruption.
“I don’t like anyone,” said Tahir Mehmood, a 23-year-old cellphone shop owner, referring to the country’s political leaders. “Whoever comes, they fill their own pockets.”
Instead, the protests by middle- and upper-class Pakistanis have been quieter. On a recent Friday, Mumtaz Ali, a 27-year-old lawyer who studied law in London, typed e-mail messages on his laptop before heading to a small protest rally.
The messages were thank-you notes to the heads of the American Bar Association and New York City Bar Association for recent protests they held against General Musharraf.
Other wealthy Pakistanis have contacted members of Congress — as well as classmates from American colleges they attended — and urged them to cut American aid to Pakistan, according to Western diplomats.
If free and fair elections are held, new political leaders will emerge in Pakistan, Mr. Ali said, and middle-class apathy will decrease. “The reason they are not going into the streets, is only because they do not have a leader before them,” he said.
Political scientists here agreed. “I think they will vote this time if there is a level playing field,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. “The middle class that we are talking about is about changing the system.”
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14) Massachusetts Faces a Test on Health Care
By KEVIN SACK
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/politics/25mass.html?ref=us
BOSTON, Nov. 20 — As the Democratic presidential candidates debate whether Americans should be forced to obtain health insurance, the people of Massachusetts are living the dilemma in real time.
A year after Massachusetts became the only state to require that individuals have health coverage, residents face deadlines to sign up or lose their personal tax exemption, worth $219 on next year’s state income tax returns. More than 200,000 previously uninsured residents have enrolled, but state officials estimate that at least that number, and perhaps twice as many, have not.
Those managing the enrollment effort say it has exceeded expectations. In particular, state-subsidized insurance packages offered to low-income residents have been so popular that the program’s spending may exceed its budget by nearly $150 million.
But the reluctance of so many to enroll, along with the possible exemption of 60,000 residents who cannot afford premiums, has raised questions about whether even a mandate can guarantee truly universal coverage.
Additional concerns have been generated by projections that the state’s insurers plan to raise rates 10 percent to 12 percent next year, twice this year’s national average. That would undercut the plan’s secondary goal of slowing the increase in health costs.
“We’re going to be very aggressive in trying to get those numbers down to single digits,” said Jon M. Kingsdale, executive director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, the agency that markets the subsidized insurance policies. “If we continue with double-digit inflation, I don’t think health reform is sustainable.”
The state’s experience should be instructive to the presidential campaigns, and to officials in California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has proposed a similar plan. Democratic leaders there initially rejected an individual mandate because labor unions argued that workers might not be able to afford coverage. They have recently reversed course, but have yet to agree with Mr. Schwarzenegger on how to finance the plan.
Each of the three leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination has pledged to achieve universal health coverage, which polls show to be a priority for party voters. But as the candidates seek to differentiate themselves, a rift has emerged over whether it is possible to insure all Americans without requiring them to obtain coverage.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, support a mandate. It is, they say, the only way to guarantee that everyone is covered and to thereby bring down costs by spreading the country’s insurance risk as broadly as possible.
“The sad reality is that the uninsured don’t just struggle with costs themselves, they impose costs on the rest of us,” Mrs. Clinton said in September. “It’s a hidden tax: the high cost of emergency room visits that could have been prevented by a much less expensive doctor’s appointment, the cost of unpaid medical bills that lead insurance companies to raise rates on the rest of us.”
Mr. Edwards echoed those remarks a week later. “The reason the mandate is necessary is because you cannot have universal health care without it,” he said. “Does not exist, and anyone who pretends it is, is not being straight.”
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois sees it a different way. He argues there is danger in mandating coverage before it is clear it can be affordable for those at the margins. While Mr. Obama does not rule out a mandate down the road, his emphasis is on reducing costs and providing generous government subsidies to those who need them. He would mandate coverage for children.
That distinction set off a pointed exchange in the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Nov. 15. “I don’t think that the problem with the American people is that they are not being forced to get health care,” Mr. Obama said. “The problem is they can’t afford it.”
Mrs. Clinton jabbed back, saying Mr. Obama’s plan “starts from the premise of not reaching universal health care,” a virtual slur in the Democratic campaign. Mr. Obama responded that Mrs. Clinton had yet to explain how she would enforce a mandate. “She is not garnishing people’s wages to make sure that they have it,” he pointed out.
Obama strategists had been considering that point of attack for several weeks. It served the purpose, they said, not only of separating the candidates on a crucial domestic issue, but also of reinforcing their message that Mrs. Clinton does not, in Mr. Obama’s words, provide “straight answers to tough questions.”
Mrs. Clinton discovered the peril of revealing too many policy details in 1993, when the 1,342-page health plan she developed for her husband attracted a legion of opponents. This year, she has said she would leave the particulars of enforcement to her negotiations with Congress.
The Massachusetts plan was signed into law by former Gov. Mitt Romney, who, like each of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, does not now support a national insurance mandate. The law, which requires adults to be covered by Dec. 31, grants exemptions from the penalty if an income-based formula determines that coverage would not be affordable.
State officials warned that if policies were not bought this month they were not likely to be in effect by the deadline. But some insurers said they would sell last-minute policies.
The state established a mild penalty for the first year: the loss of the $219 tax exemption. But in the second year, the fine can amount to half the cost of the least expensive policy available, probably at least $1,000.
Ann F. McEachern, 33, a waitress and student who lives in Cambridge, said she did not buy insurance this year but probably would in 2008. “The penalty in 2007 wasn’t enough to kick it up to the top of my priority list,” Ms. McEachern said. “It’s always nice to be insured, but I think I’m at pretty low risk for anything happening to me that would be financially devastating.”
Though officials do not yet have data to determine who the remaining uninsured are, they assume many are in the group they call “the young invincibles.”
“At 27, it’s not like I’m thinking, ‘Oh, man, what if I need an operation down the line?’ ” said Samuel B. Hagan of Lenox, a courier who remains uninsured. “Furthest thing from my head.”
John E. McDonough, executive director of Health Care for All, an advocacy group based here, said he found it breathtaking that political leaders were calling for an individual mandate well before there was any way to measure the success of the Massachusetts experiment.
But Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health policy, said it had become broadly accepted “that an individual mandate is the only alternative to government provision of coverage if you hope to achieve universal coverage.”
That said, even Massachusetts officials acknowledge that their universal coverage plan is not likely to be universal anytime soon.
“There’s good evidence,” Mr. Kingsdale said, “whether it’s buying auto insurance or wearing seat belts or motorcycle helmets, that mandates don’t work 100 percent.” He added, “We’re talking about how close you can get to 100 percent, and to me it’s pretty evident you can’t get as close without the mandate as you can with it.”
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15) Dr. Drug Rep
By DANIEL CARLAT
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25memoir-t.html?ex=1196658000&en=a4284ca32dab397d&ei=5070&emc=eta1
I. Faculty Development
On a blustery fall New England day in 2001, a friendly representative from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals came into my office in Newburyport, Mass., and made me an offer I found hard to refuse. He asked me if I’d like to give talks to other doctors about using Effexor XR for treating depression. He told me that I would go around to doctors’ offices during lunchtime and talk about some of the features of Effexor. It would be pretty easy. Wyeth would provide a set of slides and even pay for me to attend a speaker’s training session, and he quickly floated some numbers. I would be paid $500 for one-hour “Lunch and Learn” talks at local doctors’ offices, or $750 if I had to drive an hour. I would be flown to New York for a “faculty-development program,” where I would be pampered in a Midtown hotel for two nights and would be paid an additional “honorarium.”
I thought about his proposition. I had a busy private practice in psychiatry, specializing in psychopharmacology. I was quite familiar with Effexor, since I had read recent studies showing that it might be slightly more effective than S.S.R.I.’s, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants: the Prozacs, Paxils and Zolofts of the world. S.S.R.I. stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, referring to the fact that these drugs increase levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, a chemical in the brain involved in regulating moods. Effexor, on the other hand, was being marketed as a dual reuptake inhibitor, meaning that it increases both serotonin and norepinephrine, another neurotransmitter. The theory promoted by Wyeth was that two neurotransmitters are better than one, and that Effexor was more powerful and effective than S.S.R.I.’s.
I had already prescribed Effexor to several patients, and it seemed to work as well as the S.S.R.I.’s. If I gave talks to primary-care doctors about Effexor, I reasoned, I would be doing nothing unethical. It was a perfectly effective treatment option, with some data to suggest advantages over its competitors. The Wyeth rep was simply suggesting that I discuss some of the data with other doctors. Sure, Wyeth would benefit, but so would other doctors, who would become more educated about a good medication.
A few weeks later, my wife and I walked through the luxurious lobby of the Millennium Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. At the reception desk, when I gave my name, the attendant keyed it into the computer and said, with a dazzling smile: “Hello, Dr. Carlat, I see that you are with the Wyeth conference. Here are your materials.”
She handed me a folder containing the schedule of talks, an invitation to various dinners and receptions and two tickets to a Broadway musical. “Enjoy your stay, doctor.” I had no doubt that I would, though I felt a gnawing at the edge of my conscience. This seemed like a lot of money to lavish on me just so that I could provide some education to primary-care doctors in a small town north of Boston.
The next morning, the conference began. There were a hundred or so other psychiatrists from different parts of the U.S. I recognized a couple of the attendees, including an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a while. I’d heard that he moved to another state and was making a bundle of money, but nobody seemed to know exactly how.
I joined him at his table and asked him what he had been up to. He said he had a busy private practice and had given a lot of talks for Warner-Lambert, a company that had since been acquired by Pfizer. His talks were on Neurontin, a drug that was approved for epilepsy but that my friend had found helpful for bipolar disorder in his practice. (In 2004, Warner-Lambert pleaded guilty to illegally marketing Neurontin for unapproved uses. It is illegal for companies to pay doctors to promote so-called off-label uses.)
I knew about Neurontin and had prescribed it occasionally for bipolar disorder in my practice, though I had never found it very helpful. A recent study found that it worked no better than a placebo for this condition. I asked him if he really thought Neurontin worked for bipolar, and he said that he felt it was “great for some patients” and that he used it “all the time.” Given my clinical experiences with the drug, I wondered whether his positive opinion had been influenced by the money he was paid to give talks.
But I put those questions aside as we gulped down our coffees and took seats in a large lecture room. On the agenda were talks from some of the most esteemed academics in the field, authors of hundreds of articles in the major psychiatric journals. They included Michael Thase, of the University of Pittsburgh and the researcher who single-handedly put Effexor on the map with a meta-analysis, and Norman Sussman, a professor of psychiatry at New York University, who was master of ceremonies.
Thase strode to the lectern first in order to describe his groundbreaking work synthesizing data from more than 2,000 patients who had been enrolled in studies comparing Effexor with S.S.R.I.’s. At this time, with his Effexor study a topic of conversation in the mental-health world, Thase was one of the most well known and well respected psychiatrists in the United States. He cut a captivating figure onstage: tall and slim, dynamic, incredibly articulate and a master of the research craft.
He began by reviewing the results of the meta-analysis that had the psychiatric world abuzz. After carefully pooling and processing data from eight separate clinical trials, Thase published a truly significant finding: Effexor caused a 45 percent remission rate in patients in contrast to the S.S.R.I. rate of 35 percent and the placebo rate of 25 percent. It was the first time one antidepressant was shown to be more effective than any other. Previously, psychiatrists chose antidepressants based on a combination of guesswork, gut feeling and tailoring a drug’s side effects to a patient’s symptom profile. If Effexor was truly more effective than S.S.R.I.’s, it would amount to a revolution in psychiatric practice and a potential windfall for Wyeth.
One impressive aspect of Thase’s presentation was that he was not content to rest on his laurels; rather he raised a series of potential criticisms of his results and then rebutted them convincingly. For example, skeptics had pointed out that Thase was a paid consultant to Wyeth and that both of his co-authors were employees of the company. Thase responded that he had requested and had received all of the company’s data and had not cherry-picked from those studies most favorable for Effexor. This was a significant point, because companies sometimes withhold negative data from publication in medical journals. For example, in 2004, GlaxoSmithKline was sued by Eliot Spitzer, who was then the New York attorney general, for suppressing data hinting that Paxil causes suicidal thoughts in children. The company settled the case and agreed to make clinical-trial results public.
Another objection was that while the study was billed as comparing Effexor with S.S.R.I.’s in general, in fact most of the data compared Effexor with one specific S.S.R.I.: Prozac. Perhaps Effexor was, indeed, more effective than Prozac; this did not necessarily mean that it was more effective than the other S.S.R.I.’s in common use. But Thase announced that since the original study, he had analyzed data on Paxil and other meds and also found differences in remission rates.
For his study, Thase chose what was at that time an unusual measure of antidepressant improvement: “remission,” rather than the more standard measure, “response.” In clinical antidepressant trials, a “response” is defined as a 50 percent improvement in depressive symptoms, as measured by the Hamilton depression scale. Thus, if a patient enters a study scoring a 24 on the Hamilton (which would be a moderate degree of depression), he or she would have “responded” if the final score, after treatment, was 12 or less.
Remission, on the other hand, is defined as “complete” recovery. While you might think that a patient would have to score a 0 on the Hamilton to be in remission, in fact very few people score that low, no matter how deliriously happy they are. Instead, researchers come up with various cutoff scores for remission. Thase chose a cutoff score of 7 or below.
In his study, he emphasized the remission rates and not the response rates. As I listened to his presentation, I wondered why. Was it because he felt that remission was the only really meaningful outcome by which to compare drugs? Or was it because using remission made Effexor look more impressive than response did? Thase indirectly addressed this issue in his paper by pointing out that even when remission was defined in different ways, with different cutoff points, Effexor beat the S.S.R.I.’s every time. That struck me as a pretty convincing endorsement of Wyeth’s antidepressant.
The next speaker, Norm Sussman, took the baton from Thase and explored the concept of remission in more detail. Sussman’s job was to systematically go through the officially sanctioned “slide deck” — slides provided to us by Wyeth, which we were expected to use during our own presentations.
If Thase was the riveting academic, Sussman was the engaging populist, translating some of the drier research concepts into terms that our primary-care-physician audiences would understand. Sussman exhorted us not to be satisfied with response and encouraged us to set the bar higher. “Is the patient doing everything they were doing before they got depressed?” he asked. “Are they doing it even better? That’s remission.” To further persuade us, he highlighted a slide showing that patients who made it all the way to remission are less likely to relapse to another depressive episode than patients who merely responded. And for all its methodological limitations, it was a slide that I would become well acquainted with, as I would use it over and over again in my own talks.
When it came to side effects, Effexor’s greatest liability was that it could cause hypertension, a side effect not shared by S.S.R.I.’s. Sussman showed us some data from the clinical trials, indicating that at lower doses, about 3 percent of patients taking Effexor had hypertension as compared with about 2 percent of patients assigned to a placebo. There was only a 1 percent difference between Effexor and placebo, he commented, and pointed out that treating high blood pressure might be a small price to pay for relief from depression.
It was an accurate reading of the data, and I remember finding it a convincing defense of Effexor’s safety. As I look back at my notes now, however, I notice that another way of describing the same numbers would have been to say that Effexor leads to a 50 percent greater rate of hypertension than a placebo. Framed this way, Effexor looks more hazardous.
And so it went for the rest of the afternoon.
Was I swallowing the message whole? Certainly not. I knew that this was hardly impartial medical education, and that we were being fed a marketing line. But when you are treated like the anointed, wined and dined in Manhattan and placed among the leaders of the field, you inevitably put some of your critical faculties on hold. I was truly impressed with Effexor’s remission numbers, and like any physician, I was hopeful that something new and different had been introduced to my quiver of therapeutic options.
At the end of the last lecture, we were all handed envelopes as we left the conference room. Inside were checks for $750. It was time to enjoy ourselves in the city.
II. The Art and Science of Detailing
Pharmaceutical “detailing” is the term used to describe those sales visits in which drug reps go to doctors’ offices to describe the benefits of a specific drug. Once I returned to my Newburyport office from New York, a couple of voice-mail messages from local Wyeth reps were already waiting for me, inviting me to give some presentations at local doctors’ offices. I was about to begin my speaking — and detailing — career in earnest.
How many doctors speak for drug companies? We don’t know for sure, but one recent study indicates that at least 25 percent of all doctors in the United States receive drug money for lecturing to physicians or for helping to market drugs in other ways. This meant that I was about to join some 200,000 American physicians who are being paid by companies to promote their drugs. I felt quite flattered to have been recruited, and I assumed that the rep had picked me because of some special personal or professional quality.
The first talk I gave brought me back to earth rather quickly. I distinctly remember the awkwardness of walking into my first waiting room. The receptionist slid the glass partition open and asked if I had an appointment.
“Actually, I’m here to meet with the doctor.”
“Oh, O.K. And is that a scheduled appointment?”
“I’m here to give a talk.”
A light went on. “Oh, are you part of the drug lunch?”
Regardless of how I preferred to think of myself (an educator, a psychiatrist, a consultant), I was now classified as one facet of a lunch helping to pitch a drug, a convincing sidekick to help the sales rep. Eventually, with an internal wince, I began to introduce myself as “Dr. Carlat, here for the Wyeth lunch.”
The drug rep who arranged the lunch was always there, usually an attractive, vivacious woman with platters of gourmet sandwiches in tow. Hungry doctors and their staff of nurses and receptionists would filter into the lunch room, grateful for free food.
Once there was a critical mass (and crucially, once the M.D.’s arrived), I was given the go-ahead by the Wyeth reps to start. I dove into my talk, going through a handout that I created, based on the official slide deck. I discussed the importance of remission, the basics of the Thase study showing the advantage of Effexor, how to dose the drug, the side effects, and I added a quick review of the other common antidepressants.
While I still had some doubts, I continued to be impressed by the 10 percent advantage in remission rates that Effexor held over S.S.R.I.’s; that advantage seemed significant enough to overcome Effexor’s more prominent side effects. Yes, I was highlighting Effexor’s selling points and playing down its disadvantages, and I knew it. But was my salesmanship going to bring harm to anybody? It seemed unlikely. The worst case was that Effexor was no more effective than anything else; it certainly was no less effective.
During my first few talks, I worried a lot about my performance. Was I too boring? Did the doctors see me as sleazy? Did the Wyeth reps find me sufficiently persuasive? But the day after my talks, I would get a call or an e-mail message from the rep saying that I did a great job, that the doctor was impressed and that they wanted to use me more. Indeed, I started receiving more and more invitations from other reps, and I soon had talks scheduled every week. I learned later that Wyeth and other companies have speaker-evaluation systems. After my talks, the reps would fill out a questionnaire rating my performance, which quickly became available to other Wyeth reps throughout the area.
As the reps became comfortable with me, they began to see me more as a sales colleague. I received faxes before talks preparing me for particular doctors. One note informed me that the physician we’d be visiting that day was a “decile 6 doctor and is not prescribing any Effexor XR, so please tailor accordingly. There is also one more doc in the practice that we are not familiar with.” The term “decile 6” is drug-rep jargon for a doctor who prescribes a lot of medications. The higher the “decile” (in a range from 1 to 10), the higher the prescription volume, and the more potentially lucrative that doctor could be for the company.
A note from another rep reminded me of a scene from “Mission: Impossible.” “Dr. Carlat: Our main target, Dr. , is an internist. He spreads his usage among three antidepressants, Celexa, Zoloft and Paxil, at about 25-30 percent each. He is currently using about 6 percent Effexor XR. Our access is very challenging with lunches six months out.” This doctor’s schedule of lunches was filled with reps from other companies; it would be vital to make our sales visit count.+
Naïve as I was, I found myself astonished at the level of detail that drug companies were able to acquire about doctors’ prescribing habits. I asked my reps about it; they told me that they received printouts tracking local doctors’ prescriptions every week. The process is called “prescription data-mining,” in which specialized pharmacy-information companies (like IMS Health and Verispan) buy prescription data from local pharmacies, repackage it, then sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This information is then passed on to the drug reps, who use it to tailor their drug-detailing strategies. This may include deciding which physicians to aim for, as my Wyeth reps did, but it can help sales in other ways. For example, Shahram Ahari, a former drug rep for Eli Lilly (the maker of Prozac) who is now a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy, said in an article in The Washington Post that as a drug rep he would use this data to find out which doctors were prescribing Prozac’s competitors, like Effexor. Then he would play up specific features of Prozac that contrasted favorably with the other drug, like the ease with which patients can get off Prozac, as compared with the hard time they can have withdrawing from Effexor.
The American Medical Association is also a key player in prescription data-mining. Pharmacies typically will not release doctors’ names to the data-mining companies, but they will release their Drug Enforcement Agency numbers. The A.M.A. licenses its file of U.S. physicians, allowing the data-mining companies to match up D.E.A. numbers to specific physicians. The A.M.A. makes millions in information-leasing money.
Once drug companies have identified the doctors, they must woo them. In the April 2007 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown teamed up with Ahari (the former drug rep) to describe the myriad techniques drug reps use to establish relationships with physicians, including inviting them to a speaker’s meeting. These can serve to cement a positive a relationship between the rep and the doctor. This relationship is crucial, they say, since “drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.”
III. Uncomfortable Moments
I gave many talks over the ensuing several months, and I gradually became more comfortable with the process. Each setting was somewhat different. Sometimes I spoke to a crowded conference room with several physicians, nurses and other clinical staff. Other times, I sat at a small lunch table with only one other physician (plus the rep), having what amounted to a conversation about treating depression. My basic Effexor spiel was similar in the various settings, with the focus on remission and the Thase data.
Meanwhile, I was keeping up with new developments in the research literature related to Effexor, and not all of the news was positive. For example, as more data came out comparing Effexor with S.S.R.I.’s other than Prozac, the Effexor remission advantage became slimmer — more like 5 percent instead of the originally reported 10 percent. Statistically, this 5 percent advantage meant that only one out of 20 patients would potentially do better on Effexor than S.S.R.I.’s — much less compelling than the earlier proportion of one out of 10.
I also became aware of other critiques of the original Thase meta-analysis. For example, some patients enrolled in the original Effexor studies took S.S.R.I.’s in the past and presumably had not responded well. This meant that the study population may have been enriched with patients who were treatment-resistant to S.S.R.I.’s, giving Effexor an inherent advantage.
I didn’t mention any of this in my talks, partly because none of it had been included in official company slides, and partly because I was concerned that the reps wouldn’t invite me to give talks if I divulged any negative information. But I was beginning to struggle with the ethics of my silence.
One of my most uncomfortable moments came when I gave a presentation to a large group of psychiatrists. I was in the midst of wrapping up my talk with some information about Effexor and blood pressure. Referring to a large study paid for by Wyeth, I reported that patients are liable to develop hypertension only if they are taking Effexor at doses higher than 300 milligrams per day.
“Really?” one psychiatrist in the room said. “I’ve seen hypertension at lower doses in my patients.”
“I suppose it can happen, but it’s rare at doses that are commonly used for depression.”
He looked at me, frowned and shook his head. “That hasn’t been my experience.”
I reached into my folder where I kept some of the key Effexor studies in case such questions arose.
According to this study of 3,744 patients, the rate of high blood pressure was 2.2 percent in the placebo group, and 2.9 percent in the group of patients who had taken daily doses of Effexor no larger than 300 milligrams. Patients taking more than 300 milligrams had a 9 percent risk of hypertension. As I went through the numbers with the doctor, however, I felt unsettled. I started talking faster, a sure sign of nervousness for me.
Driving home, I went back over the talk in my mind. I knew I had not lied — I had reported the data exactly as they were reported in the paper. But still, I had spun the results of the study in the most positive way possible, and I had not talked about the limitations of the data. I had not, for example, mentioned that if you focused specifically on patients taking between 200 and 300 milligrams per day, a commonly prescribed dosage range, you found a 3.7 percent incidence of hypertension. While this was not a statistically significant higher rate than the placebo, it still hinted that such moderate doses could, indeed, cause hypertension. Nor had I mentioned the fact that since the data were derived from placebo-controlled clinical trials, the patients were probably not representative of the patients seen in most real practices. Patients who are very old or who have significant medical problems are excluded from such studies. But real-world patients may well be at higher risk to develop hypertension on Effexor. +
I realized that in my canned talks, I was blithely minimizing the hypertension risks, conveniently overlooking the fact that hypertension is a dangerous condition and not one to be trifled with. Why, I began to wonder, would anyone prescribe an antidepressant that could cause hypertension when there were many other alternatives? And why wasn’t I asking this obvious question out loud during my talks?
I felt rattled. That psychiatrist’s frown stayed with me — a mixture of skepticism and contempt. I wondered if he saw me for what I feared I had become — a drug rep with an M.D. I began to think that the money was affecting my critical judgement. I was willing to dance around the truth in order to make the drug reps happy. Receiving $750 checks for chatting with some doctors during a lunch break was such easy money that it left me giddy. Like an addiction, it was very hard to give up.
There was another problem: one of Effexor’s side effects. Patients who stopped the medication were calling their doctors and reporting symptoms like severe dizziness and lightheadedness, bizarre electric-shock sensations in their heads, insomnia, sadness and tearfulness. Some patients thought they were having strokes or nervous breakdowns and were showing up in emergency rooms. Gradually, however, it became clear that these were “withdrawal” symptoms. These were particularly common problems with Effexor because it has a short half-life, a measure of the time it takes the body to metabolize half of the total amount of a drug in the bloodstream. Paxil, another short half-life antidepressant, caused similar problems.
At the Wyeth meeting in New York, these withdrawal effects were mentioned in passing, though we were assured that Effexor withdrawal symptoms were uncommon and could usually be avoided by tapering down the dose very slowly. But in my practice, that strategy often did not work, and patients were having a very hard time coming off Effexor in order to start a trial of a different antidepressant.
I wrestled with how to handle this issue in my Effexor talks, since I believed it was a significant disadvantage of the drug. Psychiatrists frequently have to switch medications because of side effects or lack of effectiveness, and anticipating this potential need to change medications plays into our initial choice of a drug. Knowing that Effexor was hard to give up made me think twice about prescribing it in the first place.
During my talks, I found myself playing both sides of the issue, making sure to mention that withdrawal symptoms could be severe but assuring doctors that they could “usually” be avoided. Was I lying? Not really, since there were no solid published data, and indeed some patients had little problem coming off Effexor. But was I tweaking and pruning the truth in order to stay positive about the product? Definitely. And how did I rationalize this? I convinced myself that I had told “most” of the truth and that the potential negative consequences of this small truth “gap” were too trivial to worry about.
As the months went on, I developed more and more reservations about recommending that Effexor be used as a “first line” drug before trying the S.S.R.I.’s. Not only were the newer comparative data less impressive, but the studies were short-term, lasting only 6 to 12 weeks. It seemed entirely possible that if the clinical trials had been longer — say, six months — S.S.R.I.’s would have caught up with Effexor. Effexor was turning out to be an antidepressant that might have a very slight effectiveness advantage over S.S.R.I.’s but that caused high blood pressure and had prolonged withdrawal symptoms.
At my next Lunch and Learn, I mentioned toward the end of my presentation that data in support of Effexor were mainly short-term, and that there was a possibility that S.S.R.I.’s were just as effective. I felt reckless, but I left the office with a restored sense of integrity.
Several days later, I was visited by the same district manager who first offered me the speaking job. Pleasant as always, he said: “My reps told me that you weren’t as enthusiastic about our product at your last talk. I told them that even Dr. Carlat can’t hit a home run every time. Have you been sick?”
At that moment, I decided my career as an industry-sponsored speaker was over. The manager’s message couldn’t be clearer: I was being paid to enthusiastically endorse their drug. Once I stopped doing that, I was of little value to them, no matter how much “medical education” I provided.
IV. Life After Drug Money
A year after starting my educational talks for drug companies (I had also given two talks for Forest Pharmaceuticals, pushing the antidepressant Lexapro), I quit. I had made about $30,000 in supplemental income from these talks, a significant addition to the $140,000 or so I made from my private practice. Now I publish a medical-education newsletter for psychiatrists that is not financed by the pharmaceutical industry and that tries to critically assess drug research and marketing claims. I still see patients, and I still prescribe Effexor. I don’t prescribe it as frequently as I used to, but I have seen many patients turn their lives around because they responded to this drug and to nothing else. +
In 2002, the drug industry’s trade group adopted voluntary guidelines limiting some of the more lavish benefits to doctors. While the guidelines still allow all-expenses-paid trips for physicians to attend meetings at fancy hotels, they no longer pay for spouses to attend the dinners or hand out tickets to musicals. In an e-mail message, a Wyeth spokesman wrote that Wyeth employees must follow that code and “our own Wyeth policies, which, in some cases, exceed” the trade group’s code.
Looking back on the year I spent speaking for Wyeth, I’ve asked myself if my work as a company speaker led me to do bad things. Did I contribute to faulty medical decision making? Did my advice lead doctors to make inappropriate drug choices, and did their patients suffer needlessly?
Maybe. I’m sure I persuaded many physicians to prescribe Effexor, potentially contributing to blood-pressure problems and withdrawal symptoms. On the other hand, it’s possible that some of those patients might have gained more relief from their depression and anxiety than they would have if they had been started on an S.S.R.I. Not likely, but possible.
I still allow drug reps to visit my office and give me their pitches. While these visits are short on useful medical information, they do allow me to keep up with trends in drug marketing. Recently, a rep from Bristol-Myers Squibb came into my office and invited me to a dinner program on the antipsychotic Abilify.
“I think it will be a great program, Dr. Carlat,” he said. “Would you like to come?” I glanced at the invitation. I recognized the name of the speaker, a prominent and widely published psychiatrist flown in from another state. The restaurant was one of the finest in town.
I was tempted. The wine, the great food, the proximity to a famous researcher — why not rejoin that inner circle of the select for an evening? But then I flashed to a memory of myself five years earlier, standing at a lectern and clearing my throat at the beginning of a drug-company presentation. I vividly remembered my sensations — the careful monitoring of what I would say, the calculations of how frank I should be.
“No,” I said, as I handed the rep back the invitation. “I don’t think I can make it. But thanks anyway.”
Daniel Carlat is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry Report.
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16) Just Off Insular Senate Floor, Life of the Uninsured Intrudes
By ROBERT PEAR
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/washington/25health.html?ref=health
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 — When senators debate health care, they usually speak in abstract terms about soaring health costs and the plight of the uninsured.
But just 20 feet from the Senate chamber is a young man who knows those problems all too well from personal experience. The man, Sergio A. Olaya, runs the Capitol elevators on which the senators ride. Whenever the Senate is in session, he is on duty.
Mr. Olaya, 21, is struggling with $255,000 of medical bills incurred by his mother before she died in April from an aggressive form of brain cancer.
A local hospital and its collection agency have been hounding him in an effort to collect from his mother’s estate, Mr. Olaya said. To pay the bills, he is selling the Maryland home where he lived with his mother, Clara Ines Olaya, 61.
His experience highlights the problems of the uninsured, from which members of Congress are usually insulated. The leading Democratic presidential candidates say all Americans should have coverage as good as what Congress has.
As a government employee, Mr. Olaya has health insurance. But his mother, like 47 million other Americans, was uninsured.
“I wonder how many senators have been in the elevator with Sergio, talked to him, shared a smile with him, but had no idea of the terrible burden he and his mother were carrying,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate Democratic whip, who learned of Mr. Olaya’s problems from an aide.
In an interview, Mr. Olaya said: “I’m just a college kid. I don’t have financial support from anyone. Paying $255,000 for medical bills derails my ability to pay for college.”
Senators have access to a wide range of insurance options through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Congress has its own “attending physician” — actually, a team of 5 doctors and 14 nurses who work in the Capitol and nearby Congressional office buildings. Lawmakers can fill prescriptions at a small pharmacy in the Capitol. For more serious problems, they can use nearby military hospitals.
But Congress is far from agreement on any comprehensive proposals to help the uninsured. Even legislation to cover children has been caught up in a furious battle with President Bush over the proper role of government in providing insurance.
Senators are not normally exposed to the fears that strike many workers as employers reduce health benefits and insurers increase premiums year after year. Annual increases of 20 percent or more are not unusual for small businesses. The National Federation of Independent Business, a lobby for small business owners, says health costs are their top concern.
Since 2000, the number of uninsured, as reported by the Census Bureau, has increased by 8.6 million, or 22 percent. Some private studies suggest that one in three Americans under the age of 65 may have been uninsured at some time in the last two years.
“The truth is, almost every family is at risk because of a fraying health care safety net,” Mr. Durbin said. “Almost all of us could be one pink slip, one election, one bad diagnosis or one serious accident away from a health and economic disaster. This affects Sergio, a member of our Senate family. It affects all families.”
One lawmaker, Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, has refused to accept the health insurance available to members of Congress. He says he will not take it until all Americans have access to affordable coverage.
Former Senator John Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said, “There is no excuse for politicians in Washington having health care when America has no health care.”
Mr. Edwards has been conveying that message to Iowa voters in 30-second television commercials. On his first day in office, he said, he will “submit legislation to end coverage for the president, all members of Congress and all senior political appointees in the legislative and executive branches of government on July 20, 2009 — unless Congress has enacted universal health insurance.”
One of his rivals for the nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, said she would “give all Americans the same set of insurance options that their members of Congress have.” This, she said, could be done “without any new bureaucracy.”
Another Democratic presidential contender, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, said that under his proposal for universal coverage, everyone would have access to “health care that is as good as the health care that I have as a member of Congress.”
While waiting for such coverage, many Americans will wrestle with debts like those facing Mr. Olaya, the Senate elevator operator. He had been a student at the University of Delaware, but said he would not return until he paid his mother’s medical bills.
His mother, an expert on health and nutrition, was born in Colombia, received a master’s degree from Stanford in 1981 and became a United States citizen in 1994. She had health insurance in most of her jobs over the last 20 years, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Agency for International Development, Unicef and other organizations.
But she had been unemployed and uninsured since December.
Mrs. Olaya had applied for a new federal job. When the job offer finally came in March, her son said, she had just suffered a stroke and could not get out of bed to answer the telephone. In another month or two, she might have had health coverage through her new job. In another four years, she would have been eligible for Medicare.
“Instead,” Senator Durbin said, “she had the bad luck and bad timing to fall through one of the gaping holes in America’s unraveling health care safety net. Now her only child, her son, is paying the price.”
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17) Man Entering U.S. Illegally Stops to Help Boy Involved in Crash
["No good deed goes unpunished" Clare Boothe Luce ((April 10, 1903 – October 9, 1987) was an American editor, playwright, social activist, politician, journalist, and diplomat. Witty, perceptive, and determined, she was also a prominent figure in New York society circles. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Boothe_Luce ]
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25illegal.html?ex=1196658000&en=b03b8561c9cf30c3&ei=5070&emc=eta1
PHOENIX, Nov. 24 (AP) — A 9-year-old boy dazed after his mother crashed their van in the southern Arizona desert was comforted by a man entering the United States illegally, an official said Friday. The man stayed with the boy until help arrived the next day.
The woman, 45, had been driving on a Forest Service road in a remote area just north of the Mexican border when she lost control of her van on a curve on Thursday, Sheriff Tony Estrada of Santa Cruz County said.
The van vaulted into a canyon and landed 300 feet from the road, Sheriff Estrada said. The woman, from Rimrock, north of Phoenix, survived the crash but was pinned inside, he said.
Her son, unhurt but disoriented, crawled out to get help and was found about two hours later by the man, Jesus Manuel Cordova, 26, of the northern Mexican state of Sonora.
Unable to pull the mother out, Mr. Cordova comforted the boy while they waited for help. The woman died a short time later.
“He stayed with him, told him that everything was going to be all right,” Sheriff Estrada said.
As temperatures dropped, Mr. Cordova gave the boy a jacket and built a bonfire. He stayed with the boy until about 8 a.m. Friday, when hunters passed by and called the authorities, Sheriff Estrada said.
Mr. Cordova had been trying to walk into the country when he came across the boy. He was taken into custody by Border Patrol agents and was returned to Mexico on Friday night.
The boy and his mother were in the area camping, Sheriff Estrada said. The woman’s husband, the boy’s father, died two months ago.
The boy was flown to University Medical Center in Tucson as a precaution but appeared unhurt.
The names of the woman and her son were not being released until relatives were notified.
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18) Winter of Our Discontent
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
November 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html?hp
“Americans’ Economic Pessimism Reaches Record High.” That’s the headline on a recent Gallup report, which shows a nation deeply unhappy with the state of the economy. Right now, “27% of Americans rate current economic conditions as either ‘excellent’ or ‘good,’ while 44% say they are ‘only fair’ and 28% say they are poor.” Moreover, “an extraordinary 78% of Americans now say the economy is getting worse, while a scant 13% say it is getting better.”
What’s really remarkable about this dismal outlook is that the economy isn’t (yet?) in recession, and consumers haven’t yet felt the full effects of $98 oil (wait until they see this winter’s heating bills) or the plunging dollar, which will raise the prices of imported goods.
The response of those who support the Bush administration’s economic policies is to complain about the unfairness of it all. They rattle off statistics that supposedly show how wonderful the economy really is. Many of these statistics are misleading or irrelevant, but it’s true that the official unemployment rate is fairly low by historical standards. So why are people so unhappy?
The answer from Bush supporters — who are, on this and other matters, a strikingly whiny bunch — is to blame the “liberal media” for failing to report the good news. But the real explanation for the public’s pessimism is that whatever good economic news there is hasn’t translated into gains for most working Americans.
One way to drive this point home is to compare the situation for workers today with that in the late 1990s, when the country’s economic optimism was almost as remarkable as its pessimism today. For example, in the fall of 1998 almost two-thirds of Americans thought the economy was excellent or good.
The unemployment rate in 1998 was only slightly lower than the unemployment rate today. But for working Americans, everything else was different. Wages were rising, yet inflation was low, so the purchasing power of workers’ take-home pay was steadily improving. So, too, were job benefits, including the availability of health insurance. And homeownership was rising steadily.
It was, in other words, a time when Americans felt they were sharing in the country’s prosperity.
Today, by contrast, wage gains for most workers are being swallowed by inflation. In fact, the reality for lower- and middle-income workers may be worse than the official statistics say, because the prices of necessities like food, transportation and medical care are rising considerably faster than the Consumer Price Index as a whole. One striking statistic: the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner was 11 percent higher this year than last year.
Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans receiving health insurance from their employers, which began to decline in 2001, is continuing its downward trend. And homeownership, after rising for several years on a tide of subprime mortgages — well, you know how that’s going.
In short, working Americans have very good reason to feel unhappy about the state of the economy. But what will it take to make their situation better?
The leading Republican candidates for president don’t even seem to realize that there’s a problem. A few months ago Rudy Giuliani, denouncing Hillary Clinton’s economic proposals, declared that “she wants to go back to the 1990s” — as if that would be a bad thing.
In fact, memories of how much better the economy was under Bill Clinton will be a potent political advantage for the Democrats next year.
But simply putting another Clinton, or any Democrat, in the White House won’t ensure that the good times will roll again. President Clinton was a good economic manager, but much of the good news during the 1990s reflected events that won’t be repeated, including low oil prices and the great medical cost pause — the temporary leveling off of health care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. that took place in the 1990s despite his failure to pass health care reform.
And there are good reasons to think that the negative effects of globalization on the wages of some Americans are larger than they were in the ’90s. That’s a hugely contentious issue within the progressive movement, with no easy resolution. I’ll write more about it in the months ahead.
Despite these caveats, Democrats have every right to make a political issue out of the failure of the Bush economy to deliver gains to working Americans — especially because conservatives continue to insist that tax cuts for the affluent are the answer to all problems.
But Democrats shouldn’t kid themselves into believing that this will be easy. The next president won’t be able to deliver another era of good times unless he or she manages to tackle the longer-term trends that underlie today’s economic disappointment: a collapsing health care system and inexorably rising inequality.
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19) Defend Teachers Threatened With Termination for Antiwar Student
Walkout
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!
Urgent Call for Solidarity
tukwila.teachers.solidarity@hotmail.com
BRIEF BACKGROUND:
On November 16th, over 1,000 students in Washington State walked
out to protest the war in Iraq and the presence of military recruiters
in public schools. Students at Foster High School in Tukwila,
Washington organized and 150 walked out, saying "Money for Schools, Not
War." (For more info, see www.yawr.org)
Foster students rallied at the school flagpole, marched down to the
I-5 overpass, and then marched to the Tukwila City Hall. The march and
rally were student generated and entirely peaceful.
In reaction the Tukwila School District has done the following:
- Suspended one Social Studies teacher, Brett Rogers, who
supported his students in a student generated democratic movement
- Threatened administrative action against five other teachers
- Threatened to discipline students for exercising their First
Amendment Right to free speech
When Brett Rogers was asked if he had a personal stake in the war,
he said: "It's an illegal war and my cousin is deploying December 4th,
and I'm not happy about it."
Please call and email the Principal and Superintendent now!
Tell them they need to:
1. Reinstate the teacher Brett Rogers who has been put on
administrative leave!
2. Drop the disciplinary hearings against all six teachers who
face investigations!
3. Support the initiative and moral fortitude of students who
took a stand against the effects caused by this war to their
communities!
4. Take no disciplinary action against students who participated
in the walkout!
We request that you flood the school administration with phone
calls and emails. Tell them to halt all disciplinary action against
students and the Tukwila Six!
CONTACT:
Foster HS Principal George Ilgenfritz: (206) 901-7905
ilgenfritz@tukwila.wednet.edu
And Interim Superintendent Ethelda Burke: (206) 901-8000, (206)
901-8006, burke@tukwila.wednet.edu
Please send a copy of protest emails to us at
tukwila.teachers.solidarity@hotmail.com so we can count how many
protest emails have been sent in.
If they refuse to answer your call, call Foster HS Assistant
Principal Daryl Wright (206) 901-7902 and Foster HS Office Manager
Darlene Aguiluz (206) 901-7915.
MORE BACKGROUND INFO:
On Friday, November 16th, more than a 1,000 students in Washington
State participated in a nation-wide student walkout to protest the war
and military recruiters in schools. This included around 150 students
at Foster High School, just south of Seattle. Foster is part of the
Tukwila School District, of which 71 percemt of the student body is low-income
and eligible for the free and reduced-cost school meals. Since the
beginning of the Iraq War, the U.S. military has been assigning ever
greater numbers of recruiters to lure young people into signing up for
this bloody, costly and illegal quagmire in Iraq, especially in
marginalized schools like Foster High School.
Student made signs, walked out, marched to an I-5 overpass and the
Tukwila City Hall for a civic and peaceful assembly. Now the principal
and school district superintendent have begun a witch-hunt against
students and at least six of their teachers and threatened to suspend
students who walked out. The students took a bold stand against the war
and these teachers have stood up for their students, some of the most
disenfranchised in the state, both inside and outside the classroom.
Students who walked out are threatened with truancy, and their
teachers‚ jobs are on the line. Now, who will stand up for these
students and teachers?
One teacher was put on administrative leave on Monday, November
19th. On Tuesday, November 20th, at least five more were delivered
memos notifying them that the Tukwila school district was
"investigating reports of possible misconduct relating to you in
connection with the student walk-out." These teachers were further
notified that they were not to discuss "this matter with any District
students or staff" under threat of being terminated. Several of these
teachers were completely unconnected with the walkout, but because they
have been previously marked out as individuals that speak their minds,
they are being lumped into the teacher hunt. "Investigative interviews"
are to begin this Tuesday.
- With a "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 provision forcing
principals to give up the private contact information of young people
to military recruiters, students and teachers have the natural right to
protest.
- With a bloody and illegal war, where the soldiers that are
killed and maimed are disproportionately minorities and victims of the
"poverty draft," students and teachers of Tukwila have the natural
right to protest.
- With more than $500 billion dollars and the lives of more
than a million Iraqis having been utterly wasted on a failed war, with
schools in marginalized areas falling apart, we should all be
protesting with the slogan: "Money for Schools--Not For War!"
- With 75 percent of the American people polling against the war
according to the latest Washington Post poll, and a Democratic Congress
still making excuses for why it can't cut off funding to bring the
troops home, we must support the young people who speak out against
their future being bombed away.
- And we MUST support their teachers whose only misconduct
was making their lesson plans truly relevant to the lives of their
students.
If this Principal gets away with this attack on these workers and
students, it will embolden more bosses to try to further undermine
workers‚ rights, wages, and benefits, and it will intimidate more
people from speaking out against injustice--this is an attack on all
students and workers. These teachers are union members of the Tukwila
Education Association, and there are measures being taken to try to
ensure their defense through this channel, BUT A STRONG COMMUNITY AND
NATION-WIDE RESPONSE IS CRITICAL!!!
How can we give thanks to those on the REAL frontlines of freedom
in America?
Call and email the school officials above!
And please forward this alert to supportive organizations and
individuals!
YET MORE BACKGROUND INFO:
The memo from Interim Superintendent to at least 6 teachers
essentially says:
1. In the next couple days, we will summon you to a meeting
because we are "investigating reports of possible misconduct relating
to you in connection with the student walk-out." There could be
disciplinary consequences pending completion of this investigation.
2. You are not to discuss "this matter with any District
students or staff," or else you could be terminated.
3. You have the right to have a union representative present
with you during the investigative interview in case you feel your
rights might be violated.
The administration is clearly trying to isolate the teachers and
students from one another to try to divide them and weaken them. They
are trying to use the tactic of divide and rule. They are also
blatantly violating the teachers‚ right to free speech.
The teachers have been careful to abide by the Interim
Superintendent's directive not to talk with any District students or
staff about these matters. But nothing in the Superintendent's letter
said teachers could not talk with their union representatives or
community supporters. In fact, the letter explicitly says they could
talk with the union.
Some teachers who received letters were simply on their lesson
planning hour and therefore were not scheduled to teach class when the
student walkout happened. These teachers went outside just to see what
was going on when the students walked out, but they did not walk out or
promote the walkout. So the school has no evidence against some
teachers who received the threatening letters.
It appears the administration is targeting these teachers in a
political with-hunt because they have spoken their minds in the past
over other issues. For example, two of these teachers were banned in
the past from sending out school-wide emails because they spoke their
minds in school-wide emails that the administrators did not like.
Iraq Veteran
The husband of one of the teachers who received the threatening
letters is an Iraq veteran. He went to Foster High School on November
16th and spoke to the students from first-hand experience about the
truth of the Iraq War that the government and corporate media are
actively hiding from the American people, and he walked out with the
students.
As the Iraq veteran left the building, he was confronted by a
security guard who identified himself as a police
officer/veteran/federal marshal who said: "Don't even start with me,
I'm a veteran."
The school administration is disciplining a teacher whose husband
is a veteran whose life was put at serious risk in Iraq and who has now
turned against the war. This is very disrespectful to the veteran, his
family, and the working-class students who are being forced to shoulder
the burdens of this war. The school administrators are more concerned
with trying to having power over teachers and students than letting the
communities who have been hit the hardest by the war speak out against
the war and the predatory military recruiters in their schools.
This˜after the American people voted the Democrats into Congress to end
the war, but the Democrats are still making excuses about why they
cannot cut off funds for the war and direct those funds toward
education and other desperately needed social services. When the
leaders of our country will not end this unjust war, then it becomes up
to ordinary workers, parents, students, and soldiers to end the war.
The attendance secretary at the school also refused to excuse the
absences of students who had permission slips signed by their parents
to miss school, which is a flagrant violation of parent and student
rights.
Principal George Ilgenfritz also told one student that she didn't
know anything about war. (Ironically, the student is from an immigrant
Somali family who has family in the war-torn country of Somalia.)
On the Tukwila School District's website, the following message has
been posted by Interim Superintendent Ethelda Burke: "We believe in the
historic mission of public education within our democracy. Our schools
are expected to encourage and prepare students to be productive
citizens. We believe the challenge is to transform every child--to
give every student a chance to become an autonomous, thinking person
and a self-governing citizen. We are all here to work together to
provide the best education for the most prized commodity of our fine
city--the students of the Tukwila School District."
Yet when the students participate in an act of peaceful civil
disobedience in the best traditions of Martin Luther King and the Civil
Rights Movement who challenged unjust segregation laws, now the
Superintendent is hypocritically trying to discourage students from
being "self-governing citizens" and standing up for what is right.
We need to match the determination of these courageous teachers,
students and the Iraq veteran with all the support we can! Please take
a few minutes now to call and email the Principal and Superintendent at
the numbers and emails at the top of this email!
YouTube video of Foster High School student rally for peace:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOuLz3kKExI
Report on Washington State Nov. 16th student walkouts against the
war: http://yawr.org/nov16/seattle.html
Articles on Youth Against War and Racism student victories against
military recruiters in schools:
http://yawr.org/victory/victory.htm#tacoma
http://yawr.org/victory/victory.htm#kennedy
http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article13.php?id=611
Please forward this email widely to supportive organizations and
individuals who might be able to help!
For more info, contact the Tukwila Teachers and Students Solidarity
Committee: foster_nfo@hotmail.com (253) 573-9252
Please leave a brief message and we‚ll get back to you as soon as
we can.
"There is no native criminal class except Congress." - Mark Twain
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass
www.socialistalternative.org
[My letter to Foster High School Principal and Interim Superintendent:
Dear Principal Ilgenfritz and Interim Superintendent Burke,
I am astounded to hear that you plan disciplinary action against both students and teachers who participated in a legal and peaceful demonstration against the war at Foster High School.
The courageous demonstration at Foster High School November 16th as part of a nation-wide student walk-out against the war and against military recruiting in the schools was inspiring and uplifting. The school community should be proud of these students and their teachers who supported them! They should be honored not punished!
Over 70 percent of people in this country are opposed to this war but have taken no stand in protest! How do we hope to end this atrocious war if we do not speak out and stand up and walk out against it!
What better lesson can education bring than to teach young people to stand up for their beliefs and demand that this government act according to what it's people believe is right!
Our children are facing an extremely difficult future. This government has not created a better world for them. On the contrary, this is the first generation in decades that will not fair as well as their parents in either life-expectancy or income. This government has left them a legacy of war and environmental catastrophe on a world scale! Their only hope for survival is their determination to make changes and protest this dreadful heritage.
The whole world is watching what you do now as they watched with pride at what Foster High School students did on November 16th.
We therefore demand that you:
1. Reinstate the teacher Brett Rogers who has been put on
administrative leave!
2. Drop the disciplinary hearings against all six teachers who
face investigations!
3. Support the initiative and moral fortitude of students who
took a stand against the effects caused by this war to their
communities!
4. Take no disciplinary action against students who participated
in the walkout!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, bauaw.org
San Francisco, California
415-824-8730 ]
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20) French Youths Clash With Police
By ARIANE BERNARD
November 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/world/europe/27paris.html?ref=world
PARIS, Nov. 26 — The French police were bracing for new violence today in a troubled Paris suburb after arson and rioting erupted overnight Sunday when two youths were killed in a collision with a police car.
The clashes broke out after two teenagers on a motorbike collided with a police car Sunday in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, about 12 miles north of Paris.
Within an hour of the accident, bands of youths began stoning police and firemen, and set four buildings ablaze, including a police station and a McDonald’s restaurant. More than 28 cars were torched, many at a garage, officials said.
Twenty-five police officers were injured, including one with a punctured lung, and nine people were arrested, mainly in Villiers-le-Bel.
The violence spread to nearby Sarcelles, and some damage was reported in other towns.
“We’ve talked to our colleagues from the domestic intelligence services, who themselves talked to their contacts, in particular in schools, and what they are hearing are the little brothers saying, ‘My big brother told me to stay home tonight because they are going to destroy everything,’ ” said Patrick Trotignon, who is in charge of the Paris area for the Synergie Officiers police union.
The circumstances recalled the accidental deaths of two teenagers in October 2005 in another Paris suburb that sparked a three-week wave of unrest across France.
The two teenagers who died Sunday were identified in the French media only as Moushin, 15, and Larami, 16. They were riding on a small motorbike, or ‘dirt-bike,’ in Villiers-le-Bel in the Val d’Oise department, north of Paris.
Police described the accident as probably an ordinary crash at an intersection. “What is almost entirely sure is that it wasn’t a chase with the youths, but that they crashed into each other at the intersection,” said a police spokeswoman for the Val d’Oise region. “There is a theory that the youths ignored the right of way.” Mr. Trotignon said the kind of motorbike that was involved was not approved for road use.
The two teenagers who died in October 2005 were electrocuted in a power station in another suburb, Clichy-sous-Bois, while fleeing police.
An investigation concluded that officers had chased the two youths on foot, though not as far as the power station. In the ensuing troubles, which spread to many urban areas in France, thousands of cars were burned and dozens of public buildings were set on fire.
Since the 2005 riots, authorities have increased funding to help the suburban areas which often suffer from poverty and high unemployment rates; in some of the largely immigrant areas, youth unemployment is close to 50 percent.
Earlier this month, police found three gas cylinders loaded with screws and bolts in the troubled suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, north of Paris. One had been placed in a trash container which was later set ablaze, in what was considered to have been a trap for the police.
“There’s an escalation,” said Mr. Trotignon, speaking about the discovery of the gas cylinders in Aulnay in light of the events in Villiers-le-Bel.
“It wasn’t just to scare us off, it was to kill. And now we’ve got an officer who’s got a perforated lung.”
Mr. Trotignon said he expected “that tonight we’re going in for more,” with the chance that violence will spread to nearby towns. “We’ve been saying for eons that we’re sitting on a powder keg,” he said.
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21) New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India
By HEATHER TIMMONS and J. ADAM HUGGINS
November 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/nyregion/26manhole.html?ref=nyregion
NEW DELHI — Eight thousand miles from Manhattan, barefoot, shirtless, whip-thin men rippled with muscle were forging prosaic pieces of the urban jigsaw puzzle: manhole covers.
Seemingly impervious to the heat from the metal, the workers at one of West Bengal’s many foundries relied on strength and bare hands rather than machinery. Safety precautions were barely in evidence; just a few pairs of eye goggles were seen in use on a recent visit. The foundry, Shakti Industries in Haora, produces manhole covers for Con Edison and New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, as well as for departments in New Orleans and Syracuse.
The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages. That’s what attracted the interest of a photographer who often works for The New York Times — images that practically radiate heat and illustrate where New York’s manhole covers are born.
When officials at Con Edison — which buys a quarter of its manhole covers, roughly 2,750 a year, from India — were shown the pictures by the photographer, they said they were surprised.
“We were disturbed by the photos,” said Michael S. Clendenin, director of media relations with Con Edison. “We take worker safety very seriously,” he said.
Now, the utility said, it is rewriting international contracts to include safety requirements. Contracts will now require overseas manufacturers to “take appropriate actions to provide a safe and healthy workplace,” and to follow local and federal guidelines in India, Mr. Clendenin said.
At Shakti, street grates, manhole covers and other castings were scattered across the dusty yard. Inside, men wearing sandals and shorts carried coke and iron ore piled high in baskets on their heads up stairs to the furnace feeding room.
On the ground floor, other men, often shoeless and stripped to the waist, waited with giant ladles, ready to catch the molten metal that came pouring out of the furnace. A few women were working, but most of the heavy lifting appeared to be left to the men.
The temperature outside the factory yard was more than 100 degrees on a September visit. Several feet from where the metal was being poured, the area felt like an oven, and the workers were slick with sweat.
Often, sparks flew from pots of the molten metal. In one instance they ignited a worker’s lungi, a skirtlike cloth wrap that is common men’s wear in India. He quickly, reflexively, doused the flames by rubbing the burning part of the cloth against the rest of it with his hand, then continued to cart the metal to a nearby mold.
Once the metal solidified and cooled, workers removed the manhole cover casting from the mold and then, in the last step in the production process, ground and polished the rough edges. Finally, the men stacked the covers and bolted them together for shipping.
“We can’t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the boots and all that,” said Sunil Modi, director of Shakti Industries. He said, however, that the foundry never had accidents. He was concerned about the attention, afraid that contracts would be pulled and jobs lost.
New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection gets most of its sewer manhole covers from India. When asked in an e-mail message about the department’s source of covers, Mark Daly, director of communications for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, said that state law requires the city to buy the lowest-priced products available that fit its specifications.
Mr. Daly said the law forbids the city from excluding companies based on where a product is manufactured.
Municipalities and utility companies often buy their manhole covers through middlemen who contract with foreign foundries; New York City buys the sewer covers through a company in Flushing, Queens.
Con Edison said it did not plan to cancel any of its contracts with Shakti after seeing the photographs, though it has been phasing out Indian-made manhole covers for several years because of changes in design specifications.
Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred Spada, the editor and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the spokesman for the American Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in India are paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day, while foundry workers in the United States earn about $25 an hour.
The men making New York City’s manhole covers seemed proud of their work and pleased to be photographed doing it. The production manager at the Shakti Industries factory, A. Ahmed, was enthusiastic about the photographer’s visit, and gave a full tour of the facilities, stopping to measure the temperature of the molten metal — some 1,400 degrees Centigrade, or more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
India’s 1948 Factory Safety Act addresses cleanliness, ventilation, waste treatment, overtime pay and fresh drinking water, but the only protective gear it specifies is safety goggles.
Mr. Modi said that his factory followed basic safety regulations and that workers should not be barefoot. “It must have been a very hot day” when the photos were taken, he said.
Some labor activists in India say that injuries are far higher than figures show. “Many accidents are not being reported,” said H. Mahadevan, the deputy general secretary for the All-India Trade Union Congress.
Safety, overall, is “not taken as a serious concern by employers or trade unions,” Mr. Mahadevan added.
A. K. Anand, the director of the Institute of Indian Foundrymen in New Delhi, a trade association, said in a phone interview that foundry workers were “not supposed to be working barefoot,” but he could not answer questions about what safety equipment they should be wearing.
At the Shakti Industries foundry, “there are no accidents, never ever. Period,” Mr. Modi said. “By God’s will, it’s all fine.”
Heather Timmons reported from New Delhi and J. Adam Huggins from Haora, India.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Canada: Man Dies After Shock From Taser
By IAN AUSTEN
World Briefing | Americas
November 23, 2007
A 45-year-old man who had been arrested on assault charges died, about a day after the police in Nova Scotia used a Taser to subdue him. The man was the third person to die in Canada in just over a month after being shocked by Tasers wielded by police officers. Justice Minister Cecil Clarke ordered a review of the use of the hand-held stun guns following the man’s death, the latest in a series of government inquiries into the use of Tasers by the police. Widespread outrage in Canada followed the broadcast of a video last month that showed another man being shocked at least twice with Tasers at a Vancouver airport by officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The man, a Polish immigrant who appeared extremely confused on the video, died. A Montreal man also died last month, three days after he was subdued by the police with a Taser while being arrested for drunken driving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/world/americas/23briefs-taser.html?ref=world
California: Cards for Immigrants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lawmakers have given final approval to a law making San Francisco the nation’s largest city to issue identification cards to illegal immigrants. The Board of Supervisors voted 10 to 1 to create a municipal ID program to help residents without driver’s licenses obtain access to services and feel secure dealing with local law enforcement. The measure is modeled after a program that started last summer in New Haven, Conn. Supporters say that along with immigrants, elderly people who no longer drive and transgender individuals whose driver’s licenses no longer reflect their appearances also would benefit from having the cards. The measure goes into effect in August.
November 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/us/21brfs-CARDSFORIMMI_BRF.html?ref=us
Manhattan: Teachers Criticize Review Unit
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor to apologize to the city’s 80,000 teachers yesterday, a day after the chancellor sent principals an e-mail message announcing the formation of teams of lawyers and consultants meant to help principals remove poorly performing tenured teachers. Ms. Weingarten said that the message seemed timed to the release yesterday of national reading and math test scores showing little progress among New York City students. “The first speck of bad news, all of the sudden they go after teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. The mayor said yesterday that removing tenured teachers was “a last alternative.”
November 16, 2007
New York
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/nyregion/16mbrfs-TEACHERS.html?ref=nyregion
Waterboarding and U.S. History
by William Loren Katz
"U.S. officers in the Philippines routinely resorted to what they called ‘the water cure.'"
November 14, 2007
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=435&Itemid=1
Writers Set to Strike, Threatening Hollywood
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
November 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/business/media/02cnd-hollywood.html?ref=us
Raids Traumatized Children, Report Says
By JULIA PRESTON
Hundreds of young American children suffered hardship and psychological trauma after immigration raids in the last year in which their parents were detained or deported, according to a report by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute. Of 500 children directly affected in three factory raids examined in the report in which 900 adult immigrants were arrested, a large majority were United States citizens younger than 10. With one or both parents deported, the children had reduced economic support, and many remained in the care of relatives who feared contact with the authorities, the study said. Although the children were citizens, few families sought public assistance for them, the study found.
November 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/us/01brfs-raids.html?ref=us
Newark: Recalled Meat Found in Store
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New Jersey consumer safety officials said yesterday that state inspectors bought recalled frozen hamburgers at a store weeks after the meat was recalled because of fears of E. coli contamination. The 19 boxes were bought in Union City on Wednesday, nearly four weeks after the manufacturer, the Topps Meat Company, issued a nationwide recall of 21.7 million pounds of frozen patties. Officials would not name the store yesterday because of the investigation, and investigators have not determined when the store received the meat, said Jeff Lamm, a spokesman for the state’s Division of Consumer Affairs.
New Jersey
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/nyregion/26mbrfs-meat.html?ref=nyregion
Florida: Sentence for Lionel Tate Is Upheld
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An appeals court has upheld a 30-year probation violation sentence for Lionel Tate, who for a time was the youngest person to be sentenced to life in an American prison. The ruling Wednesday by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach sets the stage for Mr. Tate’s trial on robbery charges that could carry another life term. Mr. Tate, 20, had sought to have the sentence thrown out based on procedural mistakes. Mr. Tate was 12 at the time of the 1999 beating death of 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick. An appeals court overturned his murder conviction in 2004, and he was released but was on probation. In May 2005, the police said, Mr. Tate robbed a pizza delivery man, and he was found to be in possession of a gun even before that, a violation of his probation.
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26brfs-lionel.html?ref=us
Submarine’s Commanding Officer Is Relieved of His Duties
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The commanding officer of the nuclear-powered submarine Hampton was relieved of his duty because of a loss of confidence in his leadership, the Navy said. The officer, Cmdr. Michael B. Portland, was relieved of duty after an investigation found the ship had failed to do daily safety checks on its nuclear reactor for a month and falsified records to cover up the omission. Commander Portland will be reassigned, said Lt. Alli Myrick, a public affairs officer. [Aren't you glad they are out there making the world safe for democracy?...bw]
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26brfs-sub.html?ref=us
Britain: New Claim for Sovereignty in Antarctica
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Europe
Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by 386,000 square miles, the Foreign Office said. Argentina wants some of it, and its foreign minister said his country was working on its own presentation. May 13, 2009, is the deadline for countries to stake their claims in what some experts are describing as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history.
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/europe/18briefs-claim.html?ref=world
California: Veto of 3 Criminal Justice Bills
By SOLOMON MOORE
Bucking a national trend toward stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed bills that would have explored new eyewitness identification guidelines, required electronic recordings of police interrogations and mandated corroboration of jailhouse informant testimony. Mr. Schwarzenegger cited his concern that the three bills would hamper local law enforcement authorities, a contention shared by several state police and prosecutor associations. The proposals had been recommended by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a bipartisan body of police officials, prosecutors and defense lawyers charged by the State Senate to address the most common causes of wrongful convictions and recommend changes in criminal justice procedures.
October 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16brfs-VETOOF3CRIMI_BRF.html?ref=us
Illinois: Chicagoans May Have to Dig Deeper
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Chicagoans would have to spend 10 cents more on a bottle of water, pay higher property taxes and spend more for liquor under Mayor Richard M. Daley’s proposed budget for next year. Also financing Mr. Daley’s $5.4 billion budget are higher water and sewer fees and more expensive vehicle stickers for people driving large vehicles, $120 a vehicle sticker, up from $90. Mr. Daley announced his budget to aldermen, calling it a last resort to ask taxpayers for more money. His budget closes a $196 million deficit and avoids service cuts and layoffs. Budget hearings will be held, and a city spending plan will require a vote by aldermen.
Midwest
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/us/11brfs-CHICAGO.html?ref=us
Wisconsin Iraq vet returns medals to Rumsfeld
By David Solnit, Courage to Resist / Army of None Project.
"I swore an oath to protect the constitution ... not to become a pawn in your New American Century."
September 26, 2007
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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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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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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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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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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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
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"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
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SHOP:
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donvasicek.com.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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