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george carlin nails it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KReZyAZLI0
Howard Zinn: An illustrated people's history of the US empire
http://links.org.au/node/486
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JROTC MUST GO!
Re: June 10 and June 27 Board of Ed meetings and Jane Kim
Hi All,
It was easy to miss Jane Kim’s announcement that she was going out of town the night of the June 10 Board of Education. I hardly paid any attention to it. That's what people do when they get summer's off. They did announce on the night of the vote June 17, after all, that the reason they called the special meeting on June 17 was because people would be going out of town over the summer break. I would have passed it on to others if I thought there was any significance to Kim’s announcement she was going out of town at the time of the June 10 meeting.
I had no idea that a special meeting would be called the following Tuesday, June 17; and that a resolution to end PE credit for JROTC was going to be brought up then; or that it was to be brought forward by Jane Kim and Norman Yee (who were at the June 10 meeting as well); or that such a vote was to take place without her being there on June 17. But, certainly Norman Yee, Eric Mar and Mark Sanchez and all the other board members—-since they were sitting at the table with Jane Kim the night of June 10 when she said she would be out of town—-heard her; or perhaps none of the board members—-none of them--were paying attention when she said it?
I find it hard to believe that neither Yee, Sanchez nor Mar, nor any of the other board members, heard her or didn’t know already her plans for her extensive trip. So there definitely is a mystery in my mind as to why they acted surprised June 17 that she was not there; or couldn’t explain to anyone why she was not there; for the very predictable tie-vote that would defeat the Kim/Yee resolution to end PE credit for JROTC.
It just doesn’t make any sense—first of all why Kim, who knew she had no intention of coming to the meeting on June 17 signed onto the motion knowing she could not be there to vote for it; or that the none of board members heard her June 10 when she said she was going out of town; and/or why they called a special meeting to vote on the motion when they obviously knew it wouldn’t pass without Kim’s vote?
The only sense it makes is that JROTC is still here and still giving PE credit to students who should be in a PE class, not in a military recruitment program!
And the only sense it really makes to me is that it’s “politics and politicians as usual” saying whatever they can to whomever they can whenever it seems it will benefit them and to hell with the students thrown into the clutches of the military; and to hell with the voters of San Francisco who, in 2004 voted for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and, in 2005, voted to get the military—-not just JROTC-—but to get the military out of our schools--including our colleges and universities!
I hope this board can redeem themselves as Dan Kelly has so beautifully and articulately appealed to them to do and get rid of JROTC NOW--before the next school year gives the military recruiters more cannon fodder.
It is up to them to right this wrong-—at least they have the power to do it that is true!
But it’s up to us to continue insisting that they do! And bringing as much pressure from the people of San Francisco as possible to bear on them until they do it!
The amount of pressure we can bring upon them depends upon the unity, solidarity, and strength and dedication that the antiwar movement can muster to get the military out of our schools—-especially in these hard economic times when there are so few other choices young people have--because of the trillions spent on war!
We will get no where if we don’t unite and reach out to the people—-young and old who are overwhelmingly opposed to these wars of occupation, death and destruction—-and let them know just what a recruiting tool JROTC is; just what the military is doing already in our schools; how entrenched it is in our educational system; how incredibly entrenched in our whole society.
(For a great picture of this I recommend Nick Turse’s, "The Complex, How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives, The American Empire Project," Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. I also recommend the following:
Howard Zinn: An illustrated people's history of the US empire
http://links.org.au/node/486
I think we have to begin to think about how to reach out to the community and gain their support in our struggle to de-militarize our schools and our lives.
JROTC MUST GO! Get the military out of our schools!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
JROTC is a military recruitment program!
JROTC discriminates against queers!
(JROTC says it's OK to be gay in JROTC, but not in the military. How can that instill pride in anyone?)
JROTC costs the school district a million bucks!
JROTC MUST GO! GET THE MILITARY OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS!
Come to a planning meeting:
Thursday, July 10, 7:00 P.M.
ANSWER Office
2489 Mission Street, Rm. 28
(Near 21st Street)
San Francisco
P.S., This just in: I got the following from Pat Gerber letting us know that there will be at least one “antiwar” resolution on the ballot this November, filed by Chris Daly and signed by Tom Ammiano, Ross Mirkarimi and Jack McGoldrick that states:
"It is the Policy of the people of the City and County of San Francisco that:
"Its elected representatives in the United States Senate and House of Representatives should vote against any further funding for the deployment of United States Armed Forces in Iraq, with the exception of funds specifically earmarked to provide for their safe and orderly withdrawal."
We don't know what the resolution ballot designation will be yet--Prop.?
We will keep you posted about the ballot designation.
JROTC MUST GO! NOW!
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING PAYING PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO NUMBERS 6 AND 7 BELOW:
Memo from U.S. Army Cadet Command ordering JROTC teachers to help the military recruit students into the Army. Can be used to rebut claims that JROTC is not a recruiting program.
From PROJECT YANO, The Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities
http://www.projectyano.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=62
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY HEADQUARTERS, UNITED STATES ARMY CADET COMMAND FORT MONROE, VIRGINIA 23651-5000
ATCC-ZA (145-1)
30 March 1999
MEMORANDUM FOR
Region Commanders, u.s. Army Cadet Command Brigade Commanders, U.s. Army Cadet Command Battalion Commanders, U.s. Army Cadet Command
SUBJECT: Policy Memorandum 50 - U.s. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) Partnership Initiatives
1. Purpose: To provide guidance on implementation of initiatives to enhance recruiting efforts with USAREC and Cadet Command.
2. Scope: Provisions of this memorandum apply to Cadet Command elements worldwide.
3. Philosophy: The mission of the ROTC program is to commission the future officer leadership of the u.s. Army and to motivate young people to be better citizens .. The Senior ROTC program is designed to produce officers for the U.S. Army and the Junior ROTC program is designed to help young people become better citizens. While not designed to be a specific recruiting tool, there is nothing in existing law, DOD directive or Army regulations that precludes either ROTC program from facilitating the recruitment of young men and women into the U.S. Army.
4. Cadet Command elements, at all levels, will:
a. Establish forums to exchange information with USAREC and state National Guards on recruiting and enrollment programs and policies.
b. Conduct joint advertising efforts with USAREC and the National Guard when applicable and appropriate.
c. Provide leads and prospect referrals to their USAREC and National Guard counterparts obtained froITl college dropout and ROTC dropout lists. Refer qualified leads generated during off-campus visits th~ough QUEST using established procedures.
SUBJECT: Policy Memorandum 50 - U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) Partnership Initiatives
d. Provide USAREC and National Guard counterpart elements a listing of current ROTC Recruiting Publicity Items (RPIs).
e. Assist USAREC and National Guard recruiters in obtaining access to Army JROTC units within the local geographic area.
f. Encourage USAREC and National Guard participation in scheduled ROTC social functions.
g. Share on-campus logistical and operational assets, e.g. I5-passenger van, office space for conducting recruiting interviews, and on-campus community support/endorsement of USAREC initiatives.
5. SROTC Battalion Commander will:
a. Invite all recruiters (officer and NCO) in surrounding area to meet with ROTC Cadre at least quarterly to share information and update each other on each program.
b. Provide recruiters names of college dropouts, ROTC dropouts and graduating seniors who are not cadets.
c. Include USAREC personnel in social functions, parades and ceremonies, etc.
d. Include USAREC in all Quality of Life initiatives.
e. Recognize recruiters who provide cadets to the program.
f. In selected locations provide administrative and logistical support for recruiters working on campus in conjunction with ROTC.
SUBJECT: Policy Memorandum 50 - U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) Partnership Initiatives
6. JROTC SAI and AI will:
a. Actively assist cadets who want to enlist in the military. Emphasize service in the U.S. Army (all components).
b. Facilitate recruiter access to cadets in JROTC program and to the entire student body.
c. Encourage college bound cadets to enroll in SROTC.
d. Work closely with high school guidance counselors to sell the Army story. Encourage them to display RPIs and advertising material and make sure they know how to obtain information on Army opportunities, including SROTC scholarships.
7. The intent of these partnership initiatives is to promote a synergistic effort of all Army assets, maximize recruiting efforts, exchange quality referrals, and educate all on both recruiting and ROTC programs and benefits.
Stewart W. Wallace,
Major General, U.S. Army
Commanding
CF:
CG, USAREC
DCG, U.S. Army Cadet Command
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SAN FRANCISCO IS A SANCTUARY CITY! STOP THE MIGRA-ICE RAIDS!
Despite calling itself a "sanctuary city", S.F. politicians are permitting the harrassment of undocumented immigrants and allowing the MIGRA-ICE police to enter the jail facilities.
We will picket any store that cooperates with the MIGRA or reports undocumented brothers and sisters. We demand AMNESTY without conditions!
BRIGADES AGAINST THE RAIDS
project of BARRIO UNIDO
(415)431-9925
Next planning meeting Thursday June 26th 7PM at 474 Valencia St. S.F.
(near 16th St.) in Room 145
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No To Torture: John Yoo Must Go
Fri. June 27, 7PM in Berkeley:
TOWN HALL WITH SPECIAL GUEST STEPHEN ROHDE
Hear the "torture professor" controversy discussed by renowned civil liberties attorney Stephen Rohde (past president So. Calif. ACLU), joined by speakers from the National Lawyers Guild, World Can't Wait, the UC and Boalt Hall communities, and others.
7 PM at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall
1606 Bonita Avenue (At Cedar Street) in Berkeley
Ann Fagan Ginger (Executive Director, Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute) will talk from the floor about German lawyers and judges, tried and convicted, at Nuremberg.
Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute
PO Box 673, Berkeley, CA 94701
(510) 848-0599
(510) 848-6008 fax
mcli@mcli.org; http://mcli.org
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION:
http://natassembly.org/
TO READ THE CALL:
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
AN OPEN NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO SUPPORT THE DEMANDS:
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home NOW!
We invite everyone who opposes the war and occupation to attend an open democratic
national antiwar conference to place on the agenda of the entire US antiwar movement
a proposal for the largest possible united mass mobilization to stop the war and end
the occupation.
Saturday, June 28 & Sunday, June 29, 2008
Cleveland, Ohio
Speakers include:
Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO
Fred Mason, President of the Maryland AFL-CIO and President of the
Metro Washington D.C. Central Labor Council, one of the National
Co-Convenors of U.S. Labor Against the War
Greg Coleridge, Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends
Service Committee; Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition
Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, author, Anti-War Soldier and
co-founder of Appeal for Redress
Jeremy Scahill, Author, of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World‚s Most Powerful Mercenary Army"
Jesse Diaz, Organizer of the May 1, 2006 immigrant rights boycott
Cindy Sheehan, by video
To register and for more information, log on to: www.natassembly.org
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"Canada: Abide by resolution - Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
Dear Canada: Let Them Stay
Urgent action request—In wake of Parliament win, please sign this new letter to Canada.
By Courage to Resist
June 18, 2008
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
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JROTC is a military recruitment program!
JROTC discriminates against queers!
JROTC costs the school district a million bucks!
JROTC MUST GO! GET THE MILITARY OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS!
Come to a planning meeting:
Thursday, July 10, 7:00 P.M.
ANSWER Office
2489 Mission Street, Rm. 28
(Near 21st Street)
San Francisco
Clearly, the the military is going to go on the offensive to keep JROTC in the schools permanently. Going on the offensive is what they do best, as we know. So we must be prepared to get the basic truth about JROTC out onto the streets ASAP.
Everyone should do everything they can to build this next meeting, Thursday, July 10, 7:00 P.M. Clearly we can’t rely on the Board to act so we must organize broad opposition to JROTC and military recruitment in our schools ourselves.
If a pro-JROTC measure gets on the ballot we must go out into the streets like we did to get the College Not Combat, Proposition I initiative on the ballot in 2005. In our case we must organize informational flyering telling the truth about JROTC and setting up tables in communities--at the malls where kids will hang out in the summer; at supermarkets where their parents will be; at the parks; and throughout San Francisco weekly—getting the truth out about the JROTC military recruitment program.
The encouraging thing I must tell everyone is that it was very easy to gather the signatures for Proposition I. It was inspiring how many people were opposed to any military presence in our schools. People with young children were especially opposed to the military getting their clutches on their children. We must make them aware what JROTC really is!
But we will, of course, be up against the U.S. Military and all the resources they have at their fingertips. We have quite a battle ahead of us so we have to get organized now.
What happens in San Francisco will have repercussions across the country and the world. I believe this. And that’s why I think it’s so important for us to succeed!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
JROTC MUST GO! NOW!
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
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Alison Bodine defense Committee
Lift the Two-year Ban
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/
Watch the Sept 28 Video on Alison's Case!
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post.html
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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Not So Sweet
Why Dunkin' Donuts shouldn't have caved in the controversy over Rachael Ray's 'kaffiyeh' scarf.
By Lorraine Ali
Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 30, 2008
Read Article [#4 Below] on line at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139334
Sign Petition:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr007=7nginw7ml3.app8a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=221
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Board Backs Rise in Rent Up to 8.5%
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
June 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/nyregion/20rent.html?ref=nyregion
2) 8 Reasons You Should Not Expect an Inheritance
By RON LIEBER
Your Money
June 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/business/yourmoney/21money.html?ref=business
3) Court Upholds Ruling on Health Benefits
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
June 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20bizcourt.html?ref=business
4) Treasury Secretary Requests Greater Powers for the Federal Reserve
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/washington/20paulson.html?ref=business
5) Statement of Support for Berkeley, California Anti-Recruitment Actions
from Ron Kovic, Vietnam Veteran and author of Born on the Fourth of July
May 1, 2008
http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4689&Itemid=69
6) School rallies around dismissed Watts teacher deemed too 'Afro-centric.'
Karen Salazar was let go from Jordan High.
Other instructors say they plan to resign or transfer in protest.
By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-jordan12-2008jun12,0,5331588.story
7) A Dubious Milestone
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/opinion/21herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
8) Buying Power of Food Stamps Declines
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/22food.html?hp
9) Rise in Renters Erasing Gains for Ownership
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
June 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us/21renters.html?hp
10) Uncle of girl who died from heatstroke is fired
By Jennie Rodriguez
June 21, 2008
Record Staff Writer
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080621/A_NEWS/806210317
11) Iraq Oil Rush
Editorial
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/22sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
12) Sea of Trash
By DONOVAN HOHN
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Plastics-t.html?hp
13) At a Roadside Vigil, an Iconic Voice of Protest
By DENNIS GAFFNEY
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/22seeger.html?ref=nyregion
14) JROTC: School Board Votes to Flout State Law
Copyright © 2008 Marc Norton
Marc Norton Online
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/108394.html
First published in Beyond Chron on June 20, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5792
15) Rights Groups Assail U.S. for Withholding Haiti Money
By MARC LACEY
June 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/world/americas/24haiti.html?ref=world
16) New Outreach to Blacks as Border Patrol Grows
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/23border.html?ref=us
17) ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Hits Women Much More
By THOM SHANKER
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/washington/23pentagon.html?ref=us
18) Britain Admits to using 'Brutal' Vacuum Bomb against Taliban
Michael Smith
The Australian
June 23, 2008
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23904133-2703,00.html
19) Bill Moyers interviews Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, about his latest book, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, which looks at an "age of neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
June 20, 2008
http://www.pbs.org:80/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
20) Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner
By BRIAN STELTER
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23logan.html?ref=business
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1) Board Backs Rise in Rent Up to 8.5%
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
June 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/nyregion/20rent.html?ref=nyregion
The board that regulates rents for New York City’s one million rent-stabilized apartments approved its highest rent increases in years at a raucous meeting on Thursday, angering tenants who said high rents were forcing the poor and working class out of the city.
At a meeting punctuated by ear-splitting whistle-blowing and shouting matches between sign-waving tenants and landlords, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board authorized rent increases of up to 4.5 percent on one-year leases and 8.5 percent on two-year leases.
The board also took the unusual and controversial step of authorizing a supplemental rent increase that affected only tenants who have lived in their apartments for six years or more. Owners of buildings with those tenants have the option of charging them the approved increases, or a $45 monthly increase for one-year leases or $85 for two-year leases, whichever is greater.
The last time the board approved a set of increases that were higher was in 1989, when one-year leases saw a 5.5 percent increase and two-year leases a 9 percent increase. In 2003, one-year leases increased 4.5 percent, but two-year leases increased 7.5 percent. Last year, the board approved increases of 3 percent on one-year leases and 5.75 percent on two-year leases.
The meeting in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in the East Village was the epitome of chaos: for much of the proceedings, groups of tenants armed with whistles blew persistently and loudly, drowning out a long statement read by the board’s chairman, Marvin Markus, and the taking of the nine-member board’s 5-to-4 vote.
The noise got so loud at one point that the chairman called at least one 15-minute recess.
Some board members put their fingers in their ears to block out the high-pitched whistling. The circus atmosphere was peppered with a sarcastic and subversive brand of political theater. Tenants stood side by side and face to face with landlords, and they shouted at board members and those next to them, booing and holding brief but heated debates about the city’s affordability for renters and owners. At times, Mr. Markus and the other board members sat on the stage for long stretches just waiting for the din to die down.
“Landlords have loopholes!” shouted Barry Soltz, the legal coordinator for the tenants’ association at a rent-stabilized building in the Bronx. “Tenants have hellholes!”
“Get your own place if you don’t like it!” a Brooklyn landlord named Frank, who did not want to give his last name, screamed in his face.
In 2006, tenant organizers tried to shut down the meeting by blowing whistles and banging on homemade drums. A ban on noisemaking instruments and drums was instituted last year, but tenants came prepared this year: They sneaked about 300 earplugs and 360 plastic whistles past the metal detectors at the Great Hall.
“The point we’re making is that this is a charade,” said Michael McKee, the treasurer of Tenants Political Action Committee, part of the Real Rent Reform Campaign, which is seeking to drastically restructure the board. “This was a done deal from the beginning.”
Tenant leaders had said they would try to shut down the meeting if the supplemental rent increase was debated or discussed.
The supplemental increase was not part of the tentative range of increases approved by the board in May. Adriene L. Holder, a board member who represents tenants, said that a memorandum prepared by the board’s staff at the request of the chairman describing a supplemental increase was distributed to board members shortly after 9 a.m. on Thursday. She added that for the board to vote in haste on a 22-page memo whose analysis she found questionable was “a procedural outrage.”
The board’s vote had a mixed reaction among property owners. They said that on the one hand the increases were not enough, but that on the other hand they were pleased with the supplemental increase, which they felt would ease the burden on small-property owners who have longtime rent-stabilized tenants paying $500 or $600 a month.
“We are satisfied that for the first time, there’s a recognition by this board that percentages do not work, and that you need to drive more cash to these small-property owners,” said Joseph Strasburg, the president of the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents thousands of landlords.
According to the landlords’ group, operating costs of rent-stabilized units have grown by more than 40 percent in the past six years, while the board’s rent increases in that time for one-year leases have risen by only 20 percent. Mr. Strasburg and the group had called on the board to pass rent increases of 10 percent to 15 percent this year.
The increases approved on Thursday apply to leases renewed between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009. Tenants who pay for their own heat are subject to lower increases.
Mr. Markus said the minimum dollar amounts in supplemental increases had been authorized by the board numerous times, though not recently. He defended carrying on with the meeting despite the disruptions.
“I’d love not to have chaos, but unfortunately I’ve got a job to do,” he said, adding that he was not sure what the security procedures would be for next year. “We’re going to have plastic detectors,” he said.
The board’s nine members are appointed by the mayor. Two represent tenants, two represent owners, and five represent the public. Since the board was established in 1969, it has never approved a rent decrease or a rent freeze.
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2) 8 Reasons You Should Not Expect an Inheritance
By RON LIEBER
Your Money
June 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/business/yourmoney/21money.html?ref=business
You’ve probably heard about the bumper sticker, even if you haven’t seen it. It’s the one on Cadillacs in Florida and Lexuses in Arizona that says “I’m spending my children’s inheritance.”
We’ve laughed at that for years. But the truth is retirees have a lot of demands on their savings. Out-of-pocket health care costs, for one, are rising fast. At the same time, many people are not waiting until they die to help their children and grandchildren financially. And some are finding creative ways to draw on money that would otherwise be part of their estate.
For all these reasons and many more (I’ve ticked off a total of eight below), it would be a bad idea to plan on getting any inheritance from your older relatives.
Many people have figured this out, though not all. An AARP analysis of the Federal Reserve Board’s 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances noted that 21 percent of people born after 1964 thought they would inherit some money someday. After all, most of them still have living parents or even grandparents.
But with each passing year, the pressures on the nest eggs of those older people will only grow. The truly rich will be fine, as they usually are. But a lot of other people, even retirees with net worths well into the seven figures, could end up spending every dime before they die.
There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. This is a judgment-free column on that front. There is no moral obligation to leave a cent to the next generation. And there are some people who struggle each day to make ends meet who only wish they could leave an inheritance.
But for those who thought that they would have something to pass on, or that money would be coming to them, here are the things that may get in the way.
People who make it to 65 will live a lot longer. As of 2005, according to National Center for Health Statistics data, male 65 year olds could expect to live until 82 while for females, it was 85. That’s 37 years of living expenses for couples, and it isn’t easy or fun to scale back your standard of living.
Want to get a sense of how long you or your older relatives may live? Drop the phrase, “How long will I live,” into a search engine and play with some of the longevity questionnaires that pop up on the results page.
Social Security and Medicare will probably change. It’s hard to find anyone who thinks those programs will get much more generous. Medicare premiums will rise, and the program may cover fewer procedures or not cover emerging ones. Meanwhile, taxes on Social Security benefits may rise, and everyone may have to wait longer to collect.
Fewer people have pensions, so they’re more wedded to the markets. In 2005, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute, 63 percent of workers in the private sector worked for employers who only offered 401(k) or similar plans.
As pensions continue to disappear, retirees and those close to quitting time will depend more heavily on how their investments perform. And as large numbers bet heavily on stocks to finance 20-plus years of retirement cruises and Cadillacs, some will inevitably lose big.
Out-of-pocket health care costs for retirees may soon hit seven figures per couple. Sounds crazy, right? Sure, these post-retirement costs probably won’t get that high for people who have employer-provided retiree health insurance, though few in the private sector do anymore.
For those who don’t have such insurance and are retiring this year at age 65, the mutual fund giant Fidelity figures they will need $225,000 to cover their health care costs in retirement, though that doesn’t include over-the-counter drugs, dentistry or nursing home expenses.
For 55-year-old couples, the numbers could go much higher, according to projections by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Once these people hit 65, if they pay all Medicare costs, purchase Medigap coverage beyond that and have prescription costs higher than 90 percent of their peers, they’ll need $1,064,000 in savings to finance these costs over the rest of their lives.
Divorced individuals may pass on less money. Splitting up can be expensive in itself, and maintaining two households for decades afterward will often cost more than sharing a dwelling.
Even if the parents have money left over, the ones who didn’t have custody of the children may be less inclined to pass an inheritance on to them. “The ties that parents have with kids and their interest in supporting them could well be weakened by the fact that they haven’t spent much time with them,” said Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University and the co-author of “Spend ‘Til the End,” which gives readers a new way to think about financial planning.
It’s getting easier to drain a home’s equity. Homeowners who are 62 or older (though there are some exceptions) can take out a reverse mortgage, which is roughly akin to a home equity loan that you don’t have to pay back until you (or your heirs) sell the house. So homeowners can tap the equity in their homes without having to make monthly payments to repay the debt.
So far, borrowers have taken out roughly 450,000 of these loans since 1990, according to the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association. But the pace is picking up. Lenders, including mainstream operations like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, wrote more than 100,000 of them for the first time in the year ended Sept. 30, 2007.
Meanwhile, the association claims, retirees are increasingly using mortgages as a financial retirement tool — and not simply using them as a last resort to pay for health care emergencies and the like.
Indeed, there is nothing to stop people from using the loan proceeds for vacations or cars or whatever they want. Millions just may do that someday, which makes reverse mortgages a real wild card. Their growth certainly raises the likelihood that large portions of family homesteads in America will end up belonging to banks, not heirs.
Life insurance may not offer much help. It’s now possible for people to sell their life insurance policies to investors in many circumstances. For a $1 million policy, an investor would pay some fraction of that immediately to the original policy holder, then hang on to the policy to collect the full amount when the seller dies. The more people who do this, the less money any heirs will receive.
Meanwhile, the popularity of term life insurance, where policy holders are covered for 10 or 20 years or so but then get nothing afterward if they don’t get a new policy, could also have an impact. Many people stop buying term life insurance after their children become adults or once a spouse dies. Their heirs will get nothing in the way of a payout.
The transfer of wealth will increasingly happen while the older generations are still alive. People in the latter halves of their lives now find themselves financing college tuition for grandchildren, chipping in when children or grandchildren graduate with five and six figures in student loan debt, supplying down payments in a tightening mortgage market and bailing the younger generations out of a host of other financial calamities.
Sometimes, this is part of a concerted effort to reduce an estate that could be subject to taxes. Other times, it’s pure necessity.
But it may well be everything you’ll ever get. If you put it to good use now, perhaps you won’t have to choose later between selling your life insurance and draining your home equity.
Bequeath your comments to rlieber@nytimes.com
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3) Court Upholds Ruling on Health Benefits
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
June 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20bizcourt.html?ref=business
Employees whose benefits claims are denied are entitled to a fuller day in court than they tend to get now, the United States Supreme Court decided Thursday, in a case that examined the conflicts of interest underlying most benefits decisions.
Until now, employees who felt wrongly deprived of benefits could expect little help in court unless they could show that their plan administrators had behaved in an arbitrary, capricious or unprincipled way.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, eased that requirement, but stopped well short of setting out specific new rules for when and how employees could challenge adverse benefits decisions.
Employers said it was a ruling they could live with. “This is going to put the thumb on the scale in the employees’ favor,” said Lonie A. Hassel, a partner at the Groom Law Group in Washington who represents companies in employee benefits litigation. “But I think it’s only going to make a difference in close cases.”
But others were deeply disappointed. “We had hoped the court would give greater clarity and guidance in these cases,” said John H. Langbein, a Yale law professor who is an authority on employee benefits law. “But they did not move the ball at all.”
The Supreme Court issued its 6-to-3 ruling in favor of Wanda Glenn, an Ohio woman who worked for 14 years as a supervisor in the women’s department of a Sears store. She suffered from heart disease and took a leave of absence in 2000, providing extensive documentation from her doctor that she could not return to work.
Sears offered employees long-term disability insurance as a benefit, but the plan administrator, MetLife, said Ms. Glenn did not qualify. She sued, and the trial court rejected her complaint because she had not shown that MetLife behaved arbitrarily.
But the Appellate Court for the Sixth Circuit found in Ms. Glenn’s favor, saying that MetLife had acted under a conflict of interests. The Supreme Court’s affirmed that ruling, and Ms. Glenn will receive her benefits.
The conflict the Supreme Court observed in MetLife’s role is one that employers, employees and insurance companies have been struggling with ever since Congress enacted a landmark employee benefits law in 1974. The law requires the officials who make decisions about employee benefits, known as plan administrators, to act solely in the interest of workers, yet they are usually hired by the company that pays for the benefits, and thus share the employer’s interest in keeping costs down.
A 1989 Supreme Court decision acknowledged this potential conflict but stirred up confusion about how to address it. In the 1989 decision, the court decided that when district courts reviewed benefits disputes, they should review all the facts afresh, something called a de novo review. Employers feared this would undercut their plan administrators’ decisions and make the plans a legal battleground.
But the opinion said that if companies explicitly gave discretionary authority to their plan administrators, then judges should generally defer to the plan administrator. Companies quickly began inserting clauses into their plans making the administrators’ decisions “final,” “conclusive,” and “binding.”
But the 1989 decision also said that employees could sometimes win by showing that the plan administrator had acted under a conflict of interest.
In his majority opinion, Justice Breyer wrote that it would be inappropriate for district courts to stop treating administrators with deference, or to give every dispute a full-blown de novo review.
Instead, he called for something in between, requiring district judges to bear the administrator’s conflict in mind and factor it into their thinking.
In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called the majority opinion “painfully opaque, despite its promise of elucidation.”
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4) Treasury Secretary Requests Greater Powers for the Federal Reserve
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/washington/20paulson.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration said Thursday that the Federal Reserve should be given sweeping new powers to protect the integrity of the financial system, contending that this year’s market turmoil had exposed a badly outdated regulatory system.
While acknowledging that debate on the issue in Congress would take time, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said in a speech to a women’s banking group in Washington that the discussion should begin without delay because the stakes for the financial system were so high.
Mr. Paulson said the near collapse of Bear Stearns, once the country’s fifth-largest investment bank, had “placed in stark relief the outdated nature of our financial regulatory system.”
Because of the problems highlighted by the credit crisis, Mr. Paulson said, “We must dramatically expand our attention to the fundamental needs of our system and move much more quickly to update our regulatory structure.”
Later, responding to an audience question about how quickly the reform could be approved, Mr. Paulson said, “Do I have an expectation that it will get done this year? Probably not.”
“But it needs to be focused on soon,” he added.
The Fed provided $30 billion to facilitate the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase in March and for the first time began lending money to other investment banks.
Mr. Paulson said the country had come to rely on the Fed in times of crisis, but he said that the Fed had “neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risk across our entire financial system.”
On March 31, Mr. Paulson released a blueprint that proposed the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system since the stock market crash of 1929. It would change how the government regulates thousands of businesses, from the nation’s biggest banks and investment houses to local insurance agents and mortgage brokers.
On Thursday, Mr. Paulson said that work should begin on the overhaul “very quickly” and should proceed with a sense of urgency.
Mr. Paulson proposes giving the Fed more power to protect the stability of the entire financial system, but under the plan the central bank would lose its authority to oversee day-to-day bank supervision, which would be transferred to a single bank regulatory agency, merging the powers of five current federal bank regulatory agencies.
Fed officials have said they must continue to have day-to-day supervision of commercial banks to monitor the banking system’s health.
Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who leads the House Financial Services Committee, has announced that his panel would hold hearings on Mr. Paulson’s recommendations later this year, but the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, has set no date for committee hearings. Neither panel is expected to take up legislation on the overhaul proposals until next year, when a new administration will be in office.
Democrats have complained that Mr. Paulson’s regulatory proposals do not go far enough to deal with abuses in mortgage lending, while state officials have criticized what they see as an unwanted federal intrusion on their territory.
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5) Statement of Support for Berkeley, California Anti-Recruitment Actions
from Ron Kovic, Vietnam Veteran and author of Born on the Fourth of July
May 1, 2008
http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4689&Itemid=69
As a former United States Marine Corp Sergeant who was shot and paralyzed from my mid-chest down during my second tour of duty in Vietnam on January, 20, 1968, I am sending my complete support and admiration to all those now involved in the courageous struggle to stop military recruitment in Berkeley. Not since the Vietnam War protests of the late sixties has there been a cause more just than the one you are now engaged in.
Who knows better the deep immorality and deception of military recruiters than those of us who decades ago entered those same recruiting offices with our fathers believing in our hearts that we were being told the truth, only to discover we had been deceived and terribly betrayed.
Many of us paid for that deceit with our lives, years of suffering and bodies and minds that were never to be the same again. If only someone had warned us, if only someone would have had the courage to speak out against the madness that we were being led into, if only someone could have protected us from the recruiters whose only wish was to make their quota, send us to boot camp, and hide from us the dark secret of the nightmare which awaited us all.
Over the past five years I have watched in horror the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding in Iraq. So many similarities, so many things said that remind me of that war thirty years ago which left me paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for life. Refusing to learn from the lessons of Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception, distortion, manipulation and denial, doing everything it can to hide from the American people their true intentions and agenda in Iraq.
As we approach the fifth anniversary of this tragic and senseless war, I cannot help but think of the young men and women who have been wounded, nearly 30,000, flooding Walter Reed, Bethesda, Brooke Army Medical Center and Veterans Hospitals all across our country. Paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain damaged and psychologically stressed, a whole new generation of severely maimed who were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx Veterans Hospital in New York in 1968.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ( P.T.S.D.) which afflicted so many of us after Vietnam, is just now beginning to appear among soldiers recently returned from the current war. For some the agony and suffering, the sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, and awful bouts of insomnia, alienation, anger and rage, will last for decades if not their whole lives. They will be trapped in a permanent nightmare of that war, of killing another man, a child, watching a friend die...fighting against an enemy that can never be seen, while at any moment someone, a child, a woman, an old man, anyone --- might kill you. These traumas return home with us and we carry them, sometimes hidden, for agonizing decades. They deeply impact our daily lives, and the lives closest to us.
To kill another human being, to take another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is something that never leaves you. It is as If a part of you dies with them. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing, and even hope and happiness again --- but that scar and memory and sorrow will be with you forever. Why did the recruiters never mention these things? This was never in the slick pamphlets they gave us.
Some of these veterans are showing up at homeless shelters around our country, while others have begun to courageously speak out against the senselessness and insanity of this war and the leaders who sent them there. During the 2004 Democratic Convention, returning soldiers formed a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, just as we marched in Miami in August of 1972 as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Still others have refused deployment to Iraq, gone to Canada, and begun resisting this immoral and illegal war.
Like many Americans I have seen them on T. V. or at the local Veterans Hospitals, but for the most part they remain hidden like the flag draped caskets of our dead returned to Dover Air Force base in the darkness of night as this administration continues to pursue a policy of censorship tightly controlling the images coming out of that war and rarely ever allowing the human cost of their policy to be seen.
Many of us promised ourselves long ago that we would never allow what happened to us in Vietnam to ever happen again. We had an obligation, a responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, as human beings to raise our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the intensive care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their lives, those long and painful years after we came home, those lonely nights. There were lives to save on both sides, young men and women who would be disfigured and maimed, mothers and fathers who would lose their sons and daughters, wives and loved ones who would suffer for decades to come if we did not do everything we could to stop the forward momentum of this madness.
Mario Savio once said that, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
It is time to stop the war machine.
It is time for bold and daring action on the part of us all. Precious lives are at stake, both American and Iraqi, and military recruiters must be confronted at every turn, in every high school, every campus, every recruiting office, on every street corner, in every town and city across America. In no uncertain terms we must make it clear to them that by their actions they represent a threat to our community, to our children and all that we cherish.
We must explain to them that condemning our young men and women to their death, setting them up to be horribly maimed, and psychologically damaged in a senseless and immoral war is wrong, and will not be tolerated by Berkeley, or for that matter, any town or city in the United States.
The days of deceiving, manipulating and victimizing our young people are over. We have had enough and I strongly encourage all of you to use every means of creative nonviolent civil disobedience to stop military recruitment in Berkeley and all across our country. I stand with you in this important and courageous fight and I am confident your actions in the days ahead will inspire countless others across our country to do everything they can to end this deeply immoral and illegal war!
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6) School rallies around dismissed Watts teacher deemed too 'Afro-centric.'
Karen Salazar was let go from Jordan High.
Other instructors say they plan to resign or transfer in protest.
By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-jordan12-2008jun12,0,5331588.story
Students and fellow educators are rallying behind a fired Jordan High School teacher they say was sacked for encouraging political activism among her students.
About 60 students rallied Wednesday at the Watts campus, while a colleague of the fired teacher said he and 15 other instructors planned to resign or transfer to other schools to protest the dismissal of Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher.
The dust-up has gone digital as well. Salazar backers have posted videos on the website YouTube. The postings, which have attracted thousands of hits, intersperse music, outraged protesters and interviews, as well as statements from the outspoken educator.
"You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual," she told students through a bullhorn in one video. "You are part of the long legacy, the strong history, of fighting back."
In another instance, Salazar rips the Los Angeles Unified School District, saying, "This school system for too long has been not only denying them human rights, basic human rights, but doing it on purpose in order to keep them subservient, to subjugate them in society."
A union official said the critique against Salazar included a statement that her teaching was too "Afro-centric." An assistant principal, in his evaluation of a particular lesson, accused Salazar of brainwashing students, according to Salazar and others.
Her course materials include "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which is approved for students. Salazar, 25, also sprinkles in lyrics of slain rapper Tupac Shakur and the poetry of Langston Hughes.
Salazar's political science degree from UCLA includes minors in African American studies and Chicano studies. She recently completed a master's in education at UCLA.
A veteran teacher assigned to mentor Salazar took issue with the negative characterization of Salazar's teaching.
"I did not see the same things that the administrator said he saw," said Miranda Manners, who observed the same lesson during a different class period. "I saw a new, young teacher teaching her lesson according to the objectives she stated on the board. I saw her engage with her students and interacting with them in a very positive way."
As for Salazar's overall campus profile, "she is definitely a teacher who wants kids to wake up and look around them and ask questions and be motivated and be engaged."
It was the latter penchant that caused the furor, said others.
Salazar served as faculty advisor for campus student activists who wanted to pass out surveys about the school and students' education. Unlike at other schools, Principal Stephen G. Strachan forbade the distribution of surveys on campus.
Salazar said Strachan also accused her of starting a separate student activist group that demanded more culturally relevant courses as well as accurate, up-to-date student records. Some students have complained that transcript errors result in them being placed in the wrong classes.
"She's one of the teachers that needs to stay here," said junior Deysy Ruiz, 16, who estimated that at least half of her teachers had been ineffective by comparison.
Another group behind the protest was the Assn. of Raza Educators, which includes Santee Education Complex teachers who advocated successfully for the removal of a principal at that high school.
Strachan did not respond to a request for an interview Wednesday. But the video footage suggests that Salazar's removal is justified, said Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines through a spokesman. The course materials are appropriate, but the advocacy may have crossed the line, he said.
Salazar, who was informed of her pending dismissal in April, needed at least one more year of service to earn district tenure, which limits her recourse.
"I think she was a terrific teacher, who had a real connection with kids, but teachers in her position have a hard time winning these battles," said Joshua Pechthalt, a vice president with United Teachers Los Angeles.
howard.blume@latimes.com
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7) A Dubious Milestone
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/opinion/21herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Some years ago, I wrote about a teenager named Kendra Newkirk, who was raised by her mom and had only seen her dad once in her life. Because of an emergency, Kendra and her mom had to meet the father at a particularly busy public location in Brooklyn.
Kendra had no idea what he looked like. “It was hard,” she told me. “He could have been any one of those men walking on the street. I kept asking my mother: ‘Is that him? Is that him?’ ”
I’ve been thinking about Kendra ever since Barack Obama spoke on Father’s Day about the tragic flight of so many American fathers, especially black fathers, from their children’s lives.
His comments came as the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston was compiling data that revealed a dubious milestone. In 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of all births to women under 30 — 50.4 percent — were out of wedlock. Nearly 80 percent of births among black women were out of wedlock.
By comparison, when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, just 6 percent of all births were to unmarried women under 30.
Since then, the percentages have risen across the ethnic spectrum. One-third of white, non-Hispanic women under 30 who gave birth in 2006 were unmarried. For Hispanics, it was 51 percent.
“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important,” said Senator Obama, in remarks he delivered at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. “And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation ...
“But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
This is not a simple matter. Obviously, fathers should care for their children. But just wagging a finger and telling them sternly to step up to their responsibilities is about as effective as hollering at the wind.
Senator Obama touched on this when he talked about the need for certain policy changes to make it easier for young men to fulfill their parental obligations — for example, offering tax incentives and job training to those making a sincere effort.
“We should be making it easier for fathers who make responsible choices and harder for those who avoid them,” he said.
But a lot more is needed. One of the main reasons out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed in recent decades is because it has become so difficult for poor and poorly educated young men to earn enough to support a family.
There is no doubt that a lot of clowns have fathered babies when they shouldn’t have, and too many have irresponsibly taken a walk. But it’s also incredibly difficult for many of these young people to find the kind of employment that makes raising a family feasible.
The U.S. economy does not come close to providing decent employment — enough jobs — for everyone who wants to work. At the lowest end of the economic ladder the crisis in employment is reminiscent of the Great Depression in its intensity.
It is in this group of poor and educationally deprived young people that out-of-wedlock births are highest.
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, put it this way in a research paper:
“The marriage rates of all native-born young males and young black males (22-32 years old) in the U.S. are strongly correlated with the annual earnings of these young men. The higher their annual earnings, the more likely they are to be married. Among native-born black males, those men with earnings over $60,000 were four times more likely to be married than their peers with annual earnings under $20,000.
“Unfortunately, the mean annual earnings of young men without four-year college degrees have plummeted substantially over the past 30 years, and declined again over the 2000-2007 period. Declining economic fortunes of young men without college degrees underlie the rise in out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and they are creating a new demographic nightmare for the nation.”
His words of warning echoed those I heard a few weeks ago from Walter Fields of the Community Service Society in New York. “These are the kids everyone forgets about,” he said. “It’s a huge population, and I think of it as the hidden crisis of America.”
Employment is the master key to the thriving families that Senator Obama talked about and that are supposed to be the American ideal. If we can’t achieve something close to full employment for the wider society, there is very little hope for those mired at the bottom.
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8) Buying Power of Food Stamps Declines
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/22food.html?hp
Making ends meet on food stamps has never been easy for Cassandra Johnson, but since food prices began their steep climb earlier this year, she has had to develop new survival strategies.
She hunts for items that are on the shelf beyond their expiration dates because their prices are often reduced, a practice she once avoided.
Ms. Johnson, 44, who works in customer service for a medical firm, knows that buying food this way is not healthy, but she sees no other choice if she wants to feed herself and her 1-year-old niece Ammni Harris and 2-year-old nephew Tramier Harris, who live with her.
“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Johnson, as she walked out of a market near her home in Hackensack, N.J., pushing both Ammni and the week’s groceries in a shopping cart. “And we’re not coping.”
The sharp rise in food prices is being felt acutely by poor families on food stamps, the federal food assistance program.
In the past year, the cost of food for what the government considers a minimum nutritional diet has risen 7.2 percent nationwide. It is on track to become the largest increase since 1989, according to April data, the most recent numbers, from the United States Department of Agriculture. The prices of certain staples have risen even more. The cost of eggs, for example, has increased nearly 20 percent, and the price of milk and other diary products has risen 10 percent.
But food stamp allocations, intended to cover only minimum needs, have not changed since last fall and will not rise again until October, when an increase linked to inflation will take effect. The percentage, equal to the annual rise in prices for the minimum nutritional food basket as measured each June, is usually announced by early August.
Some advocates and politicians say that this relief will not come soon enough and will probably not be adequate to keep pace with inflation.
Stacy Dean, the director of food assistance for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington social issues research and advocacy organization, estimates that the rising food prices have resulted in two fewer bags of groceries a month for the families most reliant on the program.
“We know food stamps are falling short $34 a month” of the monthly $576 that the government says it costs a family of four to eat nutritional meals, she said. “The sudden price increases on top of everything else like soaring fuel and health care have meant squeeze and strain that is unprecedented since the late 1970s.”
The declining buying power of food stamps has not gone unrecognized in Washington. In May, Congress passed a farm bill that would raise the minimum amount of food stamps that families receive, starting in October. The bill, which was passed over President Bush’s veto, will also raise for the first time since 1996 the amount of income that families of fewer than four can keep for costs like housing or fuel without having their benefits reduced.
Earlier this month, a coalition led by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. called on Congress to enact a temporary 20 percent increase in food stamps. Officials at the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, say there is no precedent for such an action. Families on food stamps have been hit hard across the nation, but perhaps not as hard as families in New York, where food costs are substantially higher than prices almost everywhere else, including other urban areas, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
The more than one million New Yorkers on food stamps receive on average $107 a month in assistance, which is slightly higher than the average for the rest of the country. But it is not enough to close the gap in food costs, experts say.
Poor families interviewed in the New York area say that they are not going hungry — thanks in large part to the city’s strong network of 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries — but that they have really felt the pinch. To cope, many say, they are doing without the basics.
June Jacobs-Cuffee of Brooklyn shares $120 a month in food stamps with her 19-year-old epileptic son. She says that even after her once-a-month trip to the food pantry at St. John’s Bread & Life in Brooklyn, she has had to give up red meat and is also cutting back on buying fresh fruits and sticking instead with canned goods and fruit cocktail.
“It is not a question of running out, yet” she said. “But it does require very careful budgeting.”
The most recent census data showed that from 2003 to 2006 an average of 1.3 million New Yorkers identified themselves as “food insecure,” meaning that they were worried about being able to buy enough food to keep their families adequately fed. City officials are concerned that the food price increase has caused that number to increase significantly.
“I am much more worried about the state of hunger in New York City than I was 6 or 12 months ago,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Ms. Quinn said that food pantries were increasingly complaining about being tapped out. She added, “What we are hearing from constituents is that they are having to make tougher and tougher decisions like to water down milk for kids or not purchase medication to keep money for food.”
Yessenia Villar, who lives in Washington Heights and works tutoring children in Spanish and English, knows about tough choices. She says it is getting harder to stretch her monthly $190 in food stamps to cover food for herself, her mother and her 5-year-old daughter. At the end of the month, she runs out of oil, rice and, most painful of all, plantains, which have gone from five for $1 to two for $1, she says.
She says she has stopped buying extras like summer sandals for herself, and has also given up treats like cookies and ice cream for her daughter. “I used to make all my groceries for $150 a month and then have a little extra,” she said. “Now it is, like, crazy.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
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9) Rise in Renters Erasing Gains for Ownership
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
June 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us/21renters.html?hp
WASHINGTON — Driven largely by the surge in foreclosures and an unsettled housing market, Americans are renting apartments and houses at the highest level since President Bush started a campaign to expand homeownership in 2002.
The percentage of households headed by homeowners, which soared to a record 69.1 percent in 2005, fell to 67.8 percent this year, the sharpest decline in 20 years, according to census data through the end of March. By extension, the percentage of households headed by renters increased to 32.2 percent, from 30.9 percent.
The figures, while seemingly modest, reflect a significant shift in national housing trends, housing analysts say, with the notable gains in homeownership achieved under Mr. Bush all but vanishing over the last two years.
Many of the new renters, meanwhile, are struggling to get into decent apartments as vacancies decline, rents rise and other renters increasingly stay put. Some renters who want to buy homes are unable to get mortgages as banks impose stricter standards. Others remain reluctant to buy, anxious that housing prices will continue to fall.
The confluence of factors has largely derailed what Mr. Bush called “the ownership society,” his campaign to give millions of people — particularly minority and lower-income families — a shot at homeownership by encouraging lenders to finance more home purchases.
“We’re not going to see homeownership rates like that for a generation,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, a research company.
For many minority and lower-income families who viewed homeownership as a stepping stone to building wealth and passing it on to their children, the transition from owning to renting has been the unraveling of a dream. Burdened now by debt and bad credit, some of these families are worse off than they were before they bought.
“The bloom is off of homeownership,” said William C. Apgar, a senior scholar at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University who ran the Federal Housing Administration from 1997 to 2001. “We’re seeing more dramatic growth in renters and a decline in the number of owners. People are beginning to understand that homeownership can be a very risky venture.”
Mr. Apgar said the Joint Center had predicted an increase of 1.8 million renters from 2005 to 2015, given expected population trends. Instead, they saw a surge of 1.5 million renters from 2005 to 2007 alone. In the first quarter of this year, 35.7 million people were renting homes or apartments, census data show.
“Even though we’re only looking at a short period, these trends are pretty powerful,” Mr. Apgar said.
Mr. Zandi said he believed that minority and lower-income homeowners had been hardest hit. Nearly three million minority families took out mortgages from 2002 to the first quarter of this year, housing officials say. Since minority families were more likely to receive subprime loans, economists believe these families account for a disproportionate share of foreclosures.
Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said that officials had hoped the homeownership gains would stick. “We’re disappointed that conditions in the housing market didn’t allow those gains to be sustained,” he said. “But we’re optimistic that they can return.”
The new renters include people like Tina Williams, a 43-year-old medical assistant who lost her three-bedroom colonial in Cleveland to foreclosure in March after her adjustable rate mortgage spiked and she struggled to find work.
Ms. Williams slept at a homeless shelter and at the homes of friends after five apartment complexes rejected her, citing her bad credit and history of foreclosure.
Finally, someone offered to rent her the third floor of their house. Her new $300-a-month rental has a bedroom, a living room and a bathroom, but no kitchen.
“People say, ‘Tina, how are you living?’ ” said Ms. Williams, who has cobbled together the semblance of a kitchen with a microwave, a minirefrigerator and an electric frying pan.
“I say, ‘I’m living on God’s grace and mercy,’ ” said Ms. Williams, who had dreamed of passing on her first home, bought in 2001, to her two grown daughters.
“My daughter says I’m living in a hole in the wall,” she said. “But I can eat every day. I have a roof over my head. When I found this place, I started shouting for joy.”
Nationally, rents have increased about 11 percent since 2005, when homeownership rates started to decline, though that growth is slowing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2005, vacancy rates for rental properties in Cleveland hovered around 10 percent, according to the Northeast Ohio Apartment Association, which represents landlords in the Cleveland area. Today, the rate stands at 5.2 percent.
Christopher E. Smythe, the association’s president, said the collapse of the housing market had improved the economic climate.
“Our apartment traffic is up, people are renting again and occupancies are up,” he said in a letter to members this year.
In other places, like Los Angeles, the slump in the housing market has begun to push up vacancies as condominiums are converted into rentals, according to Raphael Bostic, the associate director at the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California.
But those new apartments are often out of reach of struggling families. And since many owners of rental properties are also going into default, the foreclosure wave has resulted in fierce competition for affordable apartments in some cities.
In Rhode Island, 41 percent of the state’s foreclosed properties are multifamily dwellings, which would most likely have housed tenants, a recent study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition concluded.
“We’re seeing the displacement of tenants at the same time that we’re seeing former homeowners enter the rental market,” said Raymond Neirinckx, a coordinator at the Rhode Island Housing Resources Commission, which handles housing policy.
Meanwhile, some people who have lost their homes find that landlords view them with suspicion.
Steve Allen, 51, a Vietnam veteran in Seattle, was repeatedly rejected when he and his wife, Lesa, started searching for an apartment this month. Some apartment managers said no because they had lost their home to foreclosure. Others said their credit scores were too low.
Debbie Suber, 46, who lost her home in Cleveland last year, said she and her husband were lucky to find a landlord who was willing to consider their income, not their credit scores. “By the grace of God, that’s why I have a place,” she said.
Times are also tough for renters hoping to buy. Banks have tightened mortgage standards, insisting on good credit scores, proof of income and sizable down payments. Lez Trujillo, the national field director for Acorn Housing, a nonprofit group that helps lower-income families get mortgages, said a third of their applicants ended up with houses just a few years ago. Now, it is one in 10, she said.
Barbara O’Leary-Hatfield-Liberace, a 68-year-old retiree and an Acorn member, encountered such difficulties when she and some friends decided to buy a $340,000 house in Seattle.
The mortgage company they consulted said they needed to clean up their credit and come up with a $45,000 down payment, money they do not have.
So on most nights, when Ms. O’Leary-Hatfield-Liberace thinks about her dream house, she reaches for the rosary that she keeps under her pillow.
“I pray a lot and hope to heck we’ll win the Lotto,” she said.
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10) Uncle of girl who died from heatstroke is fired
By Jennie Rodriguez
June 21, 2008
Record Staff Writer
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080621/A_NEWS/806210317
LODI - The uncle of Maria Jimenez, the teenager who died May 16 of heatstroke while pruning a vineyard near Farmington, was fired Wednesday by the contractor who replaced Merced Farm Labor.
That was the same day his sister, Maria's mother, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the vineyard company and the contractor in charge when Maria Jimenez became ill.
"I knew this would happen," Doroteo Jimenez said.
Juan Chavez, the new contractor, fired Jimenez for missing a safety meeting that took place Wednesday, Jimenez said.
According to Jimenez, he was given permission from Chavez to miss work. Supervisors didn't inform him of the safety training, he said. Jimenez accompanied lawyers to file the lawsuit and spoke at a news conference that day.
Afterward, he returned to work. Jimenez said he was fired at the end of his shift.
"Here we have a worker who is attempting to help his family deal with the death of his teenage niece by being the family representative. ... It seems too much of a coincidence this alleged training occurred the same day as the (lawsuit) filing," Armando Elenes, a United Farm Workers organizing director, said in a written statement.
Representatives from the grower and the contractor could not be reached for comment Friday evening.
Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the state Labor Commission, said the firing could be illegal if proven to be retaliation. California labor code states an employee has a right to disclose and file a complaint about working conditions to labor officials.
Fryer said if that can be proved, regardless of the worker's U.S. residency status, state officials may take action.
"We would have to conduct our own investigation," Fryer said. "The employee has to come forward to us and tell us he wants (an) investigation."
Contact reporter Jennie Rodriguez at (209) 943-8564 or jrodriguez@recordnet.com.
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11) Iraq Oil Rush
Editorial
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/22sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
So great is the demand for oil today — and so great the concern over rising prices — that it would be tempting to uncritically embrace plans by major Western oil companies to return to Iraq.
Unfortunately, the evolving deals could well rekindle understandable suspicions in the Arab world about oil being America’s real reason for invading Iraq and fan even more distrust and resentment among Iraq’s competing religious and ethnic factions.
As reported by Andrew Kramer in The Times, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — are in the final stages of discussions that will let them formally re-enter Iraq’s oil market, which expelled them 36 years ago. The contracts also include Chevron.
Iraq can certainly use the modern technology and skills these oil giants offer. Although Iraq’s oil reserves are among the world’s largest, years of United Nations sanctions and war have badly eroded the industry. Government officials say they aim to increase production from 2.5 million barrels of oil a day to 3 million barrels. That is a minor increase in global terms, but with oil at $140 a barrel, it is good news for Iraqis, who need the money to rebuild their war-torn country.
We cannot blame Baghdad for wanting to get on with exploiting the country’s lucrative oil deposits, especially when Kurds in northern Iraq are rapidly signing contracts to develop oil fields in their own semiautonomous region. Still, the negotiating process pursued by Baghdad is flawed and troubling.
The contracts are being let without competitive bidding to companies that since the American invasion have been quietly advising Iraq’s oil ministry how to increase production. While the contracts are limited to refurbishing equipment and technical support and last only two years, they would give these companies an inside track on vastly more lucrative long-term deals.
Given that corruption is an acknowledged problem in Iraq’s government, the contracts would have more legitimacy if the bidding were open to all and the process more transparent. Iraqis must apply that standard when they let contracts for long-term oil field development.
Also troubling is that the deals were made even though Iraq’s parliament has failed to adopt oil and revenue sharing laws — critical political benchmarks set by the Bush administration. That is evidence of continued deep divisions in Iraq over whether oil should be controlled by central or regional government, whether international oil companies should be involved in development and how the profits should be distributed.
The United States and the oil companies must encourage Iraqi officials to make the political compromises needed to establish in law the rules for managing Iraq’s abundant natural resources with as much transparency as possible. Otherwise, oil will just become one more centripetal force pulling the country apart.
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12) Sea of Trash
By DONOVAN HOHN
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Plastics-t.html?hp
Off Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and steepen into whitecaps. Quiet with concentration, Chris Pallister decelerates from 15 knots to 8, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel and, like a skier negotiating moguls, coaxes his home-built boat, the Opus — aptly named for a comic-strip penguin — through the chaos of waves. Our progress becomes a series of concussions punctuated by troughs of anxious calm. In this it resembles the rest of Pallister’s life.
A 55-year-old lawyer with a monkish haircut, glasses that look difficult to break, an allergy of the eyes that makes him squint and a private law practice in Anchorage, Pallister spends most of his time directing a nonprofit group called the Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK (pronounced GO-ay-kay). According to its mission statement, GoAK’s lofty purpose is to “protect, preserve, enhance and restore the ecological integrity, wilderness quality and productivity of Prince William Sound and the North Gulf Coast of Alaska.” In practice, the group has, since Pallister and a few like-minded buddies founded it in 2005, done little else besides clean trash from beaches. All along Alaska’s outer coast, Chris Pallister will tell you, there are shores strewn with marine debris, as man-made flotsam and jetsam is officially known. Most of that debris is plastic, and much of it crosses the Gulf of Alaska or even the Pacific Ocean to arrive there.
The tide of plastic isn’t rising only on Alaskan shores. In 2004 two oceanographers from the British Antarctic Survey completed a study of plastic dispersal in the Atlantic that spanned both hemispheres. “Remote oceanic islands,” the study showed, “may have similar levels of debris to those adjacent to heavily industrialized coasts.” Even on the shores of Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, the survey found on average a plastic item every five meters.
Back in the 1980s, the specter of fouled beaches was a recurring collective nightmare. The Jersey Shore was awash in used syringes. New York’s garbage barge wandered the seas. On the approach to Kennedy Airport, the protagonist of “Paradise,” a late Donald Barthelme novel, looked out his airplane window and saw “a hundred miles of garbage in the water, from the air white floating scruff.” We tend to tire of new variations on the apocalypse, however, the same way we tire of celebrities and pop songs. Eventually all those syringes, no longer delivering a jolt of guilt or dread, receded from the national consciousness. Who could worry about seabirds garotted by six-pack rings when Alaska’s shores were awash in Exxon’s crude? Who could worry about turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets when the ice caps were melting and the terrorists were coming?
Then, too, for a while it seemed as if we might succeed in laying this particular ecological nightmare to rest. In the mid-1980s, New York’s sanitation department began deploying vessels called TrashCats to hoover up scruff from the waterways around the Fresh Kills landfill. Elsewhere beach-sweeping machines did the same for the sand. In 1987 the federal government ratified Marpol Annex V, an international treaty that made it illegal to throw nonbiodegradable trash — that is, plastic — overboard from ships in the waters of signatory countries. The good news for the ocean kept coming: in 1988, Congress passed the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, which forbade cities to decant their untreated sewage into the sea. In 1989 the Ocean Conservancy staged its first annual International Coastal Cleanup (I.C.C.), which has since grown into the largest such event in the world. But beautification can be deceiving. Although many American beaches — especially those that generate tourism revenues — are much cleaner these days than they used to be, the oceans, it seems, are another matter.
Not even oceanographers can tell us exactly how much floating scruff is out there; oceanographic research is simply too expensive and the ocean too varied and vast. In 2002, Nature magazine reported that during the 1990s, debris in the waters near Britain doubled; in the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica the increase was a hundredfold. And depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today’s marine debris is made of plastic.
Plastic gets into the ocean when people throw it from ships or leave it in the path of an incoming tide, but also when rivers carry it there, or when sewage systems and storm drains overflow. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, the U.S. still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, according to a 2004 E.P.A. report. Comb the Manhattan waterfront and you will find, along with the usual windrows of cups, bottles and plastic bags, what the E.P.A. calls “floatables,” those “visible buoyant or semibuoyant solids” that people flush into the waste stream like cotton swabs, condoms, tampon applicators and dental floss.
The Encyclopedia of Coastal Processes, about as somniferously clinical a scientific source on the subject as one can find, predicts that plastic pollution “will incrementally increase through the 21st century,” because “the problems created are chronic and potentially global, rather than acute and local or regional as many would contemplate.” The problems are chronic because, unlike the marine debris of centuries past, commercial plastics do not biodegrade in seawater. Instead, they persist, accumulating over time, much as certain emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. The problems are global because the sources of plastic pollution are far-flung but also because, like emissions riding the winds, pollutants at sea can travel.
And so, year after year, equipped with garbage bags and good intentions, the volunteers in the International Coastal Cleanup fan out, and year after year, in many places the tonnage of debris is greater than before. Seba Sheavly, a marine-debris researcher who ran the I.C.C. until 2005, says the Ocean Conservancy’s cleanup “has never been about curing the problem of marine debris.” It has always been, she told me, “a public awareness campaign.” Now a private consultant to the plastics industry and the United Nations Environment Program, among other clients, Sheavly says she believes that the primary value of coastal cleanups lies in the lesson they teach volunteers — “that what they’re picking up comes from them.” On Alaska’s outer coast, however, only a fraction of the debris washing in comes from local litterbugs. On much of Alaska’s 33,000-mile shoreline, in fact, there are no local litterbugs. On much of Alaska’s shoreline there are no people at all.
When Pallister took me there last July, a GoAK crew had been at work for two weeks cleaning up Gore Point (population: 0), part of a 400,000-acre maritime wilderness at the heart of the Kenai Fjords. Despite the pretty scenery, few nature lovers bother to visit. You can travel to Gore Point only by helicopter, seaplane or boat, and then only when weather permits, which it often does not. In the lower 48, beach cleanups tend to involve schoolchildren gleaning food wrappers and cigarette butts left by recreational beachgoers. GoAK’s cleanups, by contrast, are costly expeditions into the wild. The group’s volunteers must be 18 or older, and all must sign a frightening waiver in which they agree not to hold the organization liable for perils like “dangerous storms; hypothermia; sun or heat exposure; drowning; vehicle transportation and transfer; rocky, slippery and dangerous shorelines; tool and trash related injuries; bears; and” — in case that list left anything out — “other unforeseen events.”
The windward shore of Gore Point is what’s known among beachcombers and oceanographers as “a collector beach.” In 1989, according to The Anchorage Daily News, more of Exxon’s spilled oil ended up there than on any other beach on Alaska’s outer coast, but unlike the oil, the incoming debris never ended. Every tide brings more. Over the course of several decades, ever since the dawn of the plastics era, a kind of postmodern midden heap accumulated behind the driftwood berm. To beachcombers in the know, Gore Point was a happy hunting ground, one of the best places in Alaska to find exotic oddities. To Pallister, it was a paradise lost. Now, subsidized by a $115,000 matching grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.), he had embarked upon a possibly quixotic mission to regain it.
Pallister refuses to accept that beach cleanups are merely public awareness campaigns. And so, it seems, does the federal government. In 2006, in part thanks to lobbying by the Ocean Conservancy, Congress passed the Marine Debris Research, Prevention and Reduction Act. Last winter, Pallister applied for one of the grants authorized by the bill. By then GoAK certainly had acquired the requisite expertise. Before founding GoAK, Pallister and his field manager, Ted Raynor, helped organize an annual volunteer beach cleanup in Prince William Sound. Over the course of four summers, working their way eastward from Whittier, the volunteers scoured approximately 70 miles of rugged shoreline. At that rate, Pallister and Raynor calculated, it would take 200 years to clean Prince William Sound just once. Rather than abandon all hope — perhaps the most rational response — they chartered GoAK and started raising money.
In its first summer in action, GoAK managed to clean 350 miles of rugged shoreline, picking up enough trash to fill 46 trash-hauling bins. Pallister wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t enough to clean beaches near coastal communities. And so, last summer, Gore Point became a front line in the federal government’s campaign against debris. What would it take, Pallister hoped to learn, to clean up one wild beach?
To me, Gore Point seemed like the scene of an unsolved environmental mystery — unsolved and possibly unsolvable. Who, if anyone, can be held accountable for all that plastic trash? What, if anything, does it forebode for us and for the sea?
By the time we reach GoAK’s base camp on Gore Point’s leeward shore, Alaska’s long midsummer twilight has begun. Pallister is anxious to have a look at the cleanup site before dinner. Raynor leads the way, his brindled pit bull Bryn racing ahead, sniffing the ground for marmots and bears. The narrow trail dips and meanders eastward across an isthmus, following the edge of a meadow where wildflowers are in bloom before veering into the forest, the floor of which is overgrown with devil’s club, an aptly named shrub whose thorns, Pallister warns me, can be fiendishly difficult to get out. In the distance, trash bags, some yellow, others white, flash between the spruce trunks. By Raynor’s estimate, in the last two weeks, he and nine other workers the crew manager Doug Leiser, Leiser’s two sons, Pallister’s three sons and three volunteers from Homer filled around 1,200 garbage bags weighing, on average, 50 pounds each. That’s 60,000 pounds, or 30 tons, of debris. All along the length of the beach, a dozen yards apart, are heaps of bags, great colorful cairns, and here and there, clustered in the grass, are loose objects too big or heavy for bags the wheel of a car, a microwave oven, a television screen that, shorn of its cabinet, looks naked, like a brain without a skull.
There’s one acre of forest left to be cleaned up. As we approach, the mossy earth begins to crackle and crunch underfoot. I recognize the sound: we’re walking over buried plastic. Behind the moldering trunk of a fallen spruce, a deep drift of trash has collected, like water behind a dam. This is what the entire shore looked like two weeks ago, Raynor says. Gill-net floats appear to be the most abundant item, polyethylene water bottles the second-most abundant. Many of the floats and nearly all of the bottles are inscribed with Asian characters. I unearth a flip-flop, and then, a few moments later, an empty container of Downy, the fabric softener.
Pallister has a theory about where all this trash comes from. “There’s a weather phenomenon we have here,” he told me in Anchorage. “A winter low sets this prevailing wind pattern that will just funnel this way for days on end if not weeks on end. That wind is blowing right across that bunch of plastic out there.” The “bunch of plastic” he was talking about is the flotilla of trash, purportedly at least as big as Texas, that has accumulated at the becalmed heart of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a giant clockwise circuit of currents that revolves between East Asia and North America.
High-pressure systems like the one that predominates over the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre force currents to spiral inward. Oceanographers call these spirals “convergence zones.” Low atmospheric pressure systems like the one that predominates over the Gulf of Alaska have the opposite effect, creating “divergence zones” where the surface currents move outward toward shore. Divergence zones tend to expel debris. Convergence zones collect it.
In 2001 a peer-reviewed scientific journal called The Marine Pollution Bulletin published a study, whose undramatic title, “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre,” belied its dramatic findings. The lead author — a sailor, environmentalist, organic farmer, self-trained oceanographer and onetime furniture repairman named Charles Moore — went trawling in the North Pacific convergence zone about 800 miles west of San Francisco and found seven times as much plastic per square kilometer as any previous study.
“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,” Moore later wrote in an essay for Natural History, “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” An oceanographic colleague of Moore’s dubbed this floating junk yard “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” and despite Moore’s efforts to suggest different metaphors — “a swirling sewer,” “a superhighway of trash” connecting two “trash cemeteries” — “Garbage Patch” appears to have stuck.
The Garbage Patch wasn’t merely a cosmetic problem, nor merely a symbolic one, Moore contended. For one thing, it was a threat to wildlife. Scientists estimate that every year at least a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die when they entangle themselves in debris or ingest it. “Entanglement and ingestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution,” Moore wrote. Plastic polymers, as has long been known, absorb hydrophobic chemicals, including persistent organic pollutants, or POPS, like dioxin, P.C.B.’s and D.D.T. Highly controlled in the U.S. but less so elsewhere, such substances are surprisingly abundant at the ocean’s surface. By concentrating these free-floating contaminants, Moore worried, particles of plastic could become “poison pills.” He also worried about toxins in the plastic itself — phthalates, organotins — that have been known to leach out over time. Once fish or plankton ingest these pills, Moore speculated, poisons both in and on the plastic would enter the food web. And since such toxins concentrate, or “bioaccumulate,” in fatty tissues as they move up the chain of predation — so that the “contaminant burden” of a swordfish is greater than a mackerel’s and a mackerel’s greater than a shrimp’s — this plastic could be poisoning people too.
In the scientific community, Moore’s work is somewhat controversial. Even marine biologists who share his alarm have misgivings about the sensationalism with which the Garbage Patch is sometimes described. Since the plastic debris in the North Pacific convergence zone is spread out unevenly across millions of miles of ocean, and since most of it is fragmentary, flowing through the water column like dust through air, the Garbage Patch bears little resemblance to a floating junkyard. But it is, numerous scientists assured me, very much for real.
Beth Flint’s nuanced testimony was typical. Flint is a wildlife biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One seabird she studies is the Laysan albatross, which, thanks to a recent Greenpeace ad campaign, has become plastic pollution’s most famous victim — its poster bird, if you will. The ad shows a photograph in which a slimy casserole of bottle caps, cigarette lighters and unidentifiable plastic shards spills from the downy belly of a necropsied Laysan albatross chick. “How to starve to death on a full stomach,” the caption reads. The image is not merely powerful, or shocking; it’s persuasively accusatory. Look, dear consumer, it seems to say; look at what you’ve done, look where what you throw away ends up.
There’s only one problem, Flint says. No one knows for certain whether plastic killed the albatross. Do plastic shards perforate the intestines of chicks? Sometimes. Does plastic obstruct the digestive tract or make a bird “starve to death with a full stomach”? Probably, in some cases. Then again albatrosses eat squid, and chitonous squid beaks are also indigestible. Are the toxins in and on plastics poisoning the birds, as Moore has proposed? It wouldn’t be surprising. According to Flint, long-lived seabirds like albatrosses do indeed have alarmingly high contaminant burdens. But research into the pathology of plastic poisoning is ongoing, and in the meantime, “it’s still all sort of circumstantial.”
Despite these caveats, Flint has little doubt that plastic is “clearly not good” for seabirds, and her praise for Moore is unequivocal. “I think that he’s done a tremendously valuable service to humanity by pursuing this when none of the big oceanographic or academic institutions or government institutions did,” Flint said. She predicts that other researchers will soon “get on his bandwagon.” Already her prediction seems to be coming true. In the last few years several studies of plastic poisoning appeared in prominent journals, including Science.
The hardest question to answer about the Garbage Patch, it turns out, isn’t whether plastic threatens animals and ecosystems, but what, if anything, can be done about it. “We haven’t been able to hatch up any good ideas,” Flint admitted. Albatross chicks don’t forage on land, she said. In fact they don’t forage at all. Their parents do, flying far and wide across the Pacific, swooping down to snatch morsels off the surface, which they bring back home and regurgitate into a hungry chick’s mouth. That’s where all the detritus in that Greenpeace ad came from. Even if we were to clean every beach in the world, it wouldn’t keep albatrosses from stuffing their offspring full of plastic. “You’d have to clean the entire ocean,” Flint said.
During the few days I spent helping out at Gore Point, GoAK’s labors came to seem all the more Herculean. Cleaning up debris turns out to be slow, mind-numbing, back-straining work. We crouched amid the devil’s club, a few feet apart, like gleaners harvesting surreal produce — plastic gourds, fungi of foam. Every now and then someone would find something remarkable — a bottle with Arabic writing on it, a toy, a shoe, a Russian vacuum tube — and would hold it up for the rest of us to see, before pocketing it or, more often, dropping it into a bag with the other trash. When you stepped back to examine your progress, the difference would hardly be noticeable. But the hours and bags added up, and finally there was nothing left on that forest floor but a sprinkling of plastic foam.
Pallister wasn’t ready to celebrate. Even now, the success of GoAK’s rescue mission remained in doubt. He still didn’t know how he was going to remove all that trash from that windward shore, where the waters were rocky and the surf could be dangerously rough. The original plan was to load the bags onto six-wheelers, drive them across the isthmus to the protected leeward shore and transfer the bags onto a bow-loading amphibious barge, which would ferry them 80 miles to the landfill in Homer. But archaeologists with the Alaska parks department recently told Pallister, no six-wheelers. So now what? Sweat equity? Helicopters?
The week before, he spoke to a helicopter pilot who assured him that timber companies regularly airlifted logs out of forests as dense as this one. If GoAK loaded the debris into bulk bags, and if the weather wasn’t too foul, it wouldn’t be a problem. (A bulk bag is a giant, white, rip-proof plastic sack, the size and shape of a balloonist’s gondola, that the shipping and construction industries use to sling cargo — more than 4,000 pounds of it — through the air.) The pilot would snake a hook down through the trees on a 125-foot cable, a man on the ground would catch it, snap on a load of bulk bags, and up through the branches they would go, three or four at a time. But standing in the forest, peering up through the dense canopy, Pallister was having a hard time imagining it, despite the pilot’s assurances. “We’re going to have to find some clearings for the helicopter,” he said to Raynor.
Even if he could make the airlift work, it wasn’t clear how he was going to pay for it. A chartered helicopter would run him approximately $2,000 an hour, the barge $4,000 a day. Already Pallister, who keeps a well-thumbed copy of Edward Abbey’s “Monkey Wrench Gang” on his coffee table, had hit up dozens of corporate sponsors — Princess Cruises, REI, Alyeska Pipeline, BP, whose sunflower logo decorates most of GoAK’s garbage bags. Then there was the weather to worry about. Autumn comes early to the Kenai Peninsula’s outer coast. The barge and helicopter wouldn’t be available until mid-August. By then, summer would be ending, the purple fireweed would have finished blooming and on the upper slopes of the Kenai Mountains the tundra would be tingeing red. By then the weather could turn. The southeasters could start howling in off the Pacific, buffeting the windward shore, making waves surge up into driftwood, stripping branches, scattering debris 400 feet into the trees. If that happened, you could forget about an airlift. If that happened, the crew would have to lash down the heaped bags with cargo nets and pray they survived the winter.
“That’s not unusual,” Charles Moore told me, when I described the midden at Gore Point. “Any windward side of an island’s going to have situations like that. The question is, how much can we take? We’re burying ourselves in this stuff.” Moore sympathized with Pallister’s motives, and said that GoAK’s efforts could help “raise awareness.” But if Pallister thought he was saving Gore Point from plastic pollution, he was fooling himself. “It’s just going to come back,” Moore said.
This, in Moore’s opinion, is why the 2006 Marine Debris, Research, Prevention and Reduction Act is likewise doomed to fail. “It’s all been focused on cleanups,” he says of federal policy. “They think if they take tonnage out of the water, the problem will go away.”
In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, whose shores are washed by the southern edge of the Garbage Patch, federal agencies are staging one of the biggest marine-debris projects in history. Since 1996, using computer models, satellite data and aerial surveys, they have located and removed more than 500 metric tons of derelict fishing gear in hopes of saving endangered Hawaiian monk seals from entanglement. The results have been mixed at best. Biologists are now finding fewer monk seals entangled in debris; but they are also finding fewer monk seals, period. Meanwhile, an estimated 52 tons of fresh debris inundates the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands every year.
Along with financing and volunteers, corporate sponsors of the International Coastal Cleanup contribute homilies about saving the planet. “Working together we help keep our coasts clean,” ran Coca-Cola’s contribution to the I.C.C.’s 2006 report. Marine debris, declared Dow Chemical, is a “people problem that we, the citizens of the world, have the power to stop.” Is it? Yes, says Moore, but “there is no magic bullet,” and the solutions may require sacrifices that the citizens, governments and corporations of the world are reluctant to make. Eventually we will have to abandon planned obsolescence, and instead manufacture products that are durable, easily recyclable or both, Moore said. And we will have to overcome our addiction to conspicuous consumption.
In the meantime, other smaller, more practical actions could be taken. In 1999, the National Resources Defense Council successfully sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for permitting municipalities to pollute watersheds around Los Angeles. As a result of the lawsuit, Los Angeles County had to comply with stricter total maximum daily loads, or T.M.D.L.’s, the local pollution limits that the E.P.A. places on a region’s waterways under the Clean Water Act. The new T.M.D.L.’s, the first in the country to treat trash as a pollutant, will require the county to reduce the amount of solid waste escaping its rivers and creeks from 4.5 million pounds a year to zero by 2016. To meet that target, cities will have to invest in “full-capture systems,” filters that strain out everything larger than 5 millimeters in diameter. In theory, every region in the country could follow suit, but already cash-strapped governments in Southern California are complaining that these “zero-trash T.M.D.L.’s” are too costly and ambitious to implement. Moore, meanwhile, has collected data showing that even full-capture systems would allow tens of thousands of plastic particles to escape the Los Angeles River every day.
As nearly everyone I spoke to about marine debris agrees, the best way to get trash out of our waterways is, of course, to keep it from entering them in the first place. But experts disagree about what that will take. The argument, like so many in American politics, pits individual freedom against the common good. “Don’t you tell me I can’t have a plastic bag,” Seba Sheavly, the marine-debris researcher, says, alluding to plastic-bag bans like the one San Francisco enacted last year. “I know how to dispose of it responsibly.” But proponents of bag bans insist that there is no way to use a plastic bag responsibly. Lorena Rios, an environmental chemist at the University of the Pacific, says: “If you go to Subway, and they give you the plastic bag, how long do you use the plastic bag? One minute. And how long will the polymers in that bag last? Hundreds of years.”
“The time for voluntary measures has long since passed,” says Steve Fleischli, president of Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of environmental watchdogs to which, it should be noted, the Gulf of Alaska Keeper does not belong. (Waterkeeper officials have objected to GoAK’s use of their brand, but Pallister insists that their objections are without legal merit. “They’ve trademarked ‘Riverkeeeper,’ ‘Soundkeeper,’ ‘Baykeeper,’ ” he told me, “but not ‘Alaska keeper.’ ”) Fleischli would have us tax the most pervasive and noxious plastic pollutants — shopping bags, plastic-foam containers, cigarette butts, plastic utensils — and put the proceeds toward cleanup and prevention measures. “We already use a portion of the gasoline tax to pay for oil spills,” Fleischli says. Such levies shouldn’t be seen as criminalizing the makers and sellers of plastic disposables, he argues; they merely force those businesses to “internalize” previously hidden costs, what economists call “externalities.” This market-based approach to environmental regulation, known as extended producer responsibility, is increasingly popular with environmental groups. By sticking others with the ecological cleaning bill, the thinking goes, businesses have been able to keep the price of disposable plastics artificially low. And as Pallister learned at Gore Point, the cleaning bill may be greater than we can afford.
We still have limited tax dollars to spend and scarier nightmares to fear. No one — not Pallister, not Moore — will tell you that plastic pollution is the greatest man-made threat our oceans face. Depending whom you ask, that honor goes to global warming, agricultural runoff or overfishing. But unlike many pollutants, plastic has no natural source and therefore there is no doubt that we are to blame. Because we can see it, plastic is a powerful bellwether of our impact upon the earth. Where plastics travel, invisible pollutants — pesticides and fertilizers from lawns and farms, petrochemicals from roads, sewage tainted with pharmaceuticals — often follow. Last June, shortly before my voyage in the Opus began, Sylvia Earle, formerly N.O.A.A.’s chief scientist, delivered an impassioned speech on marine debris at the World Bank in Washington. “Trash is clogging the arteries of the planet,” Earle said. “We’re beginning to wake up to the fact that the planet is not infinitely resilient.” For ages humanity saw in the ocean a sublime grandeur suggestive of eternity. No longer. Surveying the debris on remote beaches like Gore Point, we see that the ocean is more finite than we’d thought. Now it is the sublime grandeur of our civilization but also of our waste that inspires awe.
One evening in mid-August, despite N.O.A.A. forecasts calling for gale-force winds, a rusty 100-foot barge called the Constructor plowed its way in darkness from Homer to Gore Point, reaching the leeward anchorage just before dawn. Day broke to mild breezes and blue skies, which showed how much you could trust N.O.A.A. forecasts out here on the unpredictable coast. The helicopter was supposed to arrive by 10, bringing a local television news crew with it. Shortly before the appointed hour, Raynor, Leiser and Pallister’s elder sons assembled on Gore Point’s leeward shore. Dressed in fleece jackets and rubber boots, reclining on overstuffed bulk bags as if they were Barcaloungers, they gazed west, beyond the barge, to the Kenai Mountains, above which, any moment now, they expected the helicopter to appear. “God’s smiling,” Raynor remarked of the weather. “God’s saying: ‘Thank you. Thank you for cleaning up Gore Point.’ ”
A half-hour later, when the helicopter had not arrived, Raynor wasn’t so sure what God was saying. Had something gone wrong? Was Homer weathered in? The Pallister boys rose from their bulk bags, walked down to the surf and began amusing themselves with strands of bull kelp, whipping the slick green ropes toward the water as if casting lines.
At last, from the opposite direction than expected, the unmistakable throb of a rotor could be heard, growing louder. The four men turned almost in unison and shaded their eyes with their hands. But then the noise faded. The treetops tossed around in the wind. The men continued to stare. “They must be doing a flyover of east beach,” Leiser said. “Probably the TV crew wants an aerial shot.” The treetops kept tossing. At this distance the helicopter sounded like a neighbor’s lawn mower. Then, thundering, it appeared, swooping past, dark blue, alive with gleams, flying low enough that it was easy to read the words “Maritime Helicopter” on its side. Here in the wilderness it seemed angelic. The pilot banked over the inlet, over the Constructor, where Chris Pallister stood on the deck looking up.
Donovan Hohn, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is at work on a book about a shipment of bath toys lost at sea.
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13) At a Roadside Vigil, an Iconic Voice of Protest
By DENNIS GAFFNEY
June 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/22seeger.html?ref=nyregion
WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. — Pete Seeger pulled his black Toyota Highlander into the Staples parking lot here and plucked some signs from the back seat, including one with “Peace” spray-painted in large orange letters. With that, he slung his banjo over his shoulder like an old musket and marched toward the intersection of Route 9, a bustling six-lane thoroughfare, and 9D, the “Hudson Valley P.O.W.-M.I.A. Memorial Highway.”
But before the 89-year-old folk singer flashed his antiwar signs to passing drivers from this no-man’s land — a patch of green about an hour north of New York City on the Hudson River — he bent over again and again, picking up litter.
“This is my religion now,” said Mr. Seeger. “Picking up trash. You do a little bit wherever you are.”
Mr. Seeger, the man behind the founding of the Clearwater Festival, being held this weekend at Croton Point Park, is scheduled to appear there on Sunday.
But for the last four years, most Saturdays he has been keeping his vigil in Wappingers Falls, usually not recognized by the hundreds of drivers who whiz by. It is a long road from 1969, when to protest the Vietnam War he sang John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” at the foot of the Washington Monument.
“After two minutes, thousands were singing,” he recalled. “After three minutes, four minutes, a hundred thousand were singing. At the end of eight minutes, all five hundred thousand were singing.”
These days, fewer than a dozen protesters usually participate, while nearly as many who support the war in Iraq hold a counterdemonstration across Route 9. Mr. Seeger, a political activist who has traveled the world, rarely ventures farther than the few miles from here to his home in Beacon, N.Y.
On this particular Saturday, Mr. Seeger chatted easily with Chris Miller of Poughkeepsie. “He’s an ex-Army member,” Mr. Seeger said, “and they’re trying to send him over again.”
Mr. Miller, 38, served as a therapist for four years before receiving an honorable discharge in January 2006. But on Dec. 22, 2007, he said, he received orders to return to Iraq, although he is appealing that decision.
Mr. Miller said he had spent countless hours listening to Mr. Seeger’s stories, like the one about how his car windows were shattered in Peekskill in 1949 as he and his family left a performance he had given with the singer Paul Robeson, who was thought to have Communist sympathies, as was Mr. Seeger. Or the one about the Vietnam veteran who said he had come to a concert in the Catskills to kill Mr. Seeger because of his antiwar stance, but was turned around by the performance and made his way backstage to tell of his transformation.
“I smiled and shook his hand,” Mr. Seeger said. “I had my banjo. We sat down and sang, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ ” Afterward, Mr. Seeger said, the man told him, “I feel clean now.”
Mr. Seeger said he wrote that song in the mid-1950s accompanied by the same banjo he totes around today.
As for Mr. Miller: “Seeing what Pete has gone through and always standing up for what he believed in, despite the consequences, made my decision easier to resist the war. It made me comfortable that in the long run I’ll be all right.”
At one point, Mr. Seeger looked across the highway to the knot of counterdemonstrators. “They always have more flags,” Mr. Seeger said. “But our signs are more fun.” He said he crossed the street once about a year ago and talked to a veteran.
“I shook his hand and said, ‘I’m glad we live in a country where we can disagree with each other without shooting at each other.’ He had to shake my hand. He didn’t know what to say. I even picked up a little litter over there.”
As he chatted, Mr. Seeger broke into “Take It From Dr. King,” which he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks, in a voice as worn as an old phonograph record.
“Don’t say it can’t be done,” he sang, tapping out the rhythm on his thighs as his Adam’s apple bobbed to the music. “The battle’s just begun/Take it from Dr. King/You too can learn to sing/So drop the gun.”
With songs like that one and “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” an anti-Vietnam War anthem, it is easy to assume he is a pacifist. But that assumption would be wrong. His family tree is adorned with both Quakers and a Revolutionary War veteran.
“Hitler had to be done away with,” said Mr. Seeger, who served in World War II.
His 1966 antiwar anthem, “Bring ’Em Home,” resurrected by Bruce Springsteen in recent years, includes the words: “There’s one thing I must confess/I’m not really a pacifist/If an army invaded this land of mine/You’d find me out on the firing line.”
Asked whether he thought that protesting by the side of the road would help end the war, he said: “I don’t think that big things are as effective as people think they are. The last time there was an antiwar demonstration in New York City I said, ‘Why not have a hundred little ones?’ ”
He said that working for peace was like adding sand to a basket on one side of a large scale, trying to tip it one way despite enormous weight on the opposite side.
“Some of us try to add more sand by teaspoons,” he explained. “It’s leaking out as fast as it goes in and they’re all laughing at us. But we’re still getting people with teaspoons. I get letters from people saying, ‘I’m still on the teaspoon brigade.’ ”
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14) JROTC: School Board Votes to Flout State Law
Copyright © 2008 Marc Norton
Marc Norton Online
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/108394.html
First published in Beyond Chron on June 20, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5792
Where was Jane Kim?
The facts:
The well-regarded public interest law firm Public Advocates sent a letter to the school board in early May detailing the district's apparently illegal granting of physical education (PE) credits to JROTC cadets, urging them to cease and desist doing so, and asking a series of questions that any reasonable person would think is preparation for a lawsuit.
More facts:
The school board subsequently holds several closed session meetings to discuss "anticipated/potential litigation." At some point, Jane Kim and Norman Yee co-author a resolution to cease granting PE credits to JROTC cadets. This looks like a slam-dunk winner. Kim and Yee, plus JROTC opponents Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar, make the magic number of four votes necessary to pass a school board resolution.
Even more facts:
The board calls a special meeting for Tuesday evening, June 17, to discuss the Kim/Yee resolution. The board's legal staff publicly advises the board that they are in violation of state law, and that they would very likely lose any potential lawsuit, subjecting the district to significant legal costs, and sowing confusion among JROTC cadets who might wrongly believe they had satisfied the state's PE requirements. Superintendent Carlos Garcia urges the board to approve the Kim/Yee resolution.
The pro-JRTOC forces predictably do a full court press to convince the board to continue violating the law. The military, as we all know, is above the law.
Facts, facts, facts:
In the end, the motion to cease granting PE credit fails on a 3-3 vote. Sanchez, Mar and Yee vote yes. Jill Wynns, Hydra Mendoza and Kim-Shree Maufas vote no. Kim -- the swing vote, and the co-author of the resolution -- is unaccountably absent. Presumably the outcome would have been entirely different if Kim had been there, assuming that she would have supported her own resolution.
Enough facts already:
What gives? I emailed Kim early Wednesday morning [June 18] and asked a simple question: "Why were you not at the meeting?" So far [June 22], I have not received an answer.
[I hear that Jane Kim has told others that she was in New Orleans on a Habitat for Humanity project. OK, but I don't recall the people of New Orleans electing her to the San Francisco school board. I am also told that she was expecting a unanimous vote in favor of her motion -- even though Wynns, Mendoza and Maufas have previously voted to give PE credit to JROTC cadets.]
Does Yee, the other co-sponsor of this resolution, feel played by Kim? I don't know, but wouldn't you? He certainly didn't look happy.
For the past several weeks, JROTC opponents have been conducting a high-profile campaign to get Kim and Maufas, the two school board members most critical of JROTC, other than Sanchez and Mar, to vote to end JROTC, right now, today. The campaign has gotten several political organizations to sign on to a statement saying that they "will look very closely" at the next school board vote on JROTC, and "consider the votes carefully when making any endorsement for future candidates."
Organizations that have signed on to this statement include the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, Chinese Progressive Association, the SF Tenants Union, the SF Bay View newspaper, the Idriss Stelley Foundation, and the San Francisco Green Party (of which Jane Kim is a member).
Well, it is time to start considering. Both Jane Kim and Kim-Shree Maufas just flunked this test, big time.
The day after the special meeting, Beyond Chron published a letter signed by Kim and Sanchez. The letter accuses unnamed people (presumably including yours truly) of attempting to "smear members of the Board of Education through a campaign of misinformation." The authors offer no specific examples of "misinformation." I must say that, in light of recent events, Kim is doing a pretty good job of smearing herself without my help. Why Sanchez signed onto this, I don't know.
I respectfully challenge Kim and Sanchez to point out even one item of "misinformation" that I have written about JROTC and the school board. If they are talking about somebody else, say who, and say what.
If Kim can't handle a forthright political campaign aimed at getting her to change her stance on JROTC, her future in politics is likely very short.
The special school board meeting also provided a certain levity, for those who are able to see the humor in such things.
For example, we got to see big shot Mike Bernick present the pro-JROTC spin on why the board should shoot down the legal logic behind the Kim/Yee resolution. According to Bernick, the whole thing was a big surprise that they just learned about a day or two ago. Yeah, sure -- the board has been discussing this matter for weeks, and none of his allies on the board told him anything. This is how the JROTC spinmasters try to position the military -- the most undemocratic institution in the world -- on the side of democracy.
And who is Mike Bernick? He is the guy running the pro-JROTC ballot initiative aimed at the November ballot. He is a former BART Board member who got caught a few years back, in the words of Matier and Ross, "having taken contributions from contractors doing business" with BART. In fact, "half of Bernick's contributions came from companies that do business with BART." Bernick's response: "This is how business is done." Meanwhile, the FBI got interested, did some wiretaps, and caught Bernick telling one contributor: "If you can help me raise $500 or $1,000, it would be great, but no money directly from you... We've got to keep real clean, so there is nothing linking the two of us."
Somehow, Bernick was never indicted for any crime. He did, however, lose his BART seat to Tom Radulovich. He then re-invented himself as the director of the California Employment Development Department. He now uses that claim-to-fame in opinion pieces declaring that:
"The military and JROTC, though separate, both offer a mobility route for a significant number of youth seeking employment."
And, can any school board meeting on JROTC be complete without Daniel "Jane Kim needs to die" Chin? Here is this guy, who threatened the life of a school board member, prancing around the room and making speeches. Look, if I said what Chin said, I'd be in the hoosegow right now. Why does the school board tolerate this guy?
But, of course, the real question is why does the school board tolerate JROTC, one of the military's prime recruitment tools, in the midst of the illegal and immoral war in Iraq?
Chin's speech -- about how JROTC taught him "leadership" and "discipline" -- demonstrated that no matter how much of those qualities he may have learned, he still needs some math lessons. He lectured us anti-JROTC folks for stating that JROTC is a military recruitment tool, claiming that he only knew two cadets who joined the military last year. That makes only 2.7%, he said. Oh yeah? Two cadets out of 1600 or so is more like .001%.
They shouild all get their stories straight.
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15) Rights Groups Assail U.S. for Withholding Haiti Money
By MARC LACEY
June 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/world/americas/24haiti.html?ref=world
An array of human rights groups has strongly criticized the United States government for withholding money meant to provide clean drinking water to Haiti as leverage for political change in the country.
The activists, in a report released Monday, called the delay of $54 million in international loans to the Haitian government “one of the most egregious examples of malfeasance by the United States in recent years.”
The loans from the Inter-American Development Bank were intended to revamp the water and sanitation systems in Les Cayes and Port-de-Paix, two Haitian towns in dire need of the money to improve their infrastructure. In Haiti, close to 70 percent of the population lacks regular and direct access to potable water, experts say. The lack of clean water contributes to intestinal parasites and amoebic dysentery.
The development bank, over which the United States Treasury Department holds significant influence, approved the loans in 1998. Although payments began to be made several years later, the water projects have yet to be started, the report said, “largely the result of aggressive attempts by the U.S. government to block the disbursement of these loans.”
Haiti’s own political turmoil and financial difficulties also contributed to the delays, the report acknowledged.
The report was prepared by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law; a Haiti-based health care provider called Partners in Health; the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights; and Zanmi Lasante, a Haitian advocacy group.
The groups went to court to get access to internal government correspondence explaining why the United States sought to prevent the approved loans from reaching Haiti in the years after their approval. The Inter-American Development Bank’s charter says that the bank should not interfere in the political affairs of member countries.
But the delays in disbursing the loans were linked by American officials to their concerns about the administration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose first presidency was overthrown by a military coup in 1991 and whose return to power in 2001 was cut short three years later with the encouragement of the Bush administration.
Dean Curran, who was the American ambassador to Haiti at the time, said publicly in 2001, “There now are a certain number of loans of the Inter-American Development Bank that are not yet disbursed with the objective of trying to request of the protagonists of the current situation, in the current political crisis, to reach a compromise.”
A top Treasury Department official then sent an e-mail message to staff members that called it a “major screwup” for the ambassador to explicitly acknowledge a connection between the holdup in development loans and American political concerns in Haiti.
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16) New Outreach to Blacks as Border Patrol Grows
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/23border.html?ref=us
MEMPHIS — Nearly 1,500 miles from his post at the Mexican border, Cyril V. Atherton, a Border Patrol agent, embarked on one of his trickiest missions.
He was here recruiting young blacks to an agency few had ever heard of, trying to entice them to the hot, arid Southwest, where few blacks live, for a job that requires learning Spanish proficient enough to know if their lives are in danger while arresting as many as 100 people at a time.
Any questions?
“I’m just thinking about the snakes,” said Cassandra Holland, crinkling her nose after watching a promotional video filled with agents in adventurous exploits in the desert.
It was a measure of Mr. Atherton’s persuasion — “I can’t say you won’t see one, but you don’t have to hunt them out,” he said — that Ms. Holland filled out an application, joining several hundred others who have applied since the recruitment drive by the agency’s Minority Recruitment Strike Team began in January.
The team is part of a blitz by the Border Patrol to bring its ranks up to 18,000 agents by the end of the year.
With 16,200 agents, the Border Patrol is the largest federal law enforcement agency. But only about 1 percent of its agents are black, and the agency is moving aggressively to recruit members of a group that officials acknowledge have often been overlooked or been difficult to attract and keep because of the lack of blacks in the agency and in the border towns where they work.
The Border Patrol says it has no quota for recruiting blacks, but it says it wants their ranks to be more reflective of the civilian workforce, where they number 11 percent. Hispanics make up the bulk of the agents, 52 percent, a reflection of the agency’s concentration on the heavily Latino Southwestern border. All agents must serve in the Southwest before seeking posts elsewhere, like on the Canadian border.
Some in this economically hurting region seemed willing to look beyond the low numbers of black agents — 150 men, 8 women — in light of the fact that the Border Patrol is one of the few large law enforcement agencies that does not require a college degree or even a high school diploma and can offer pay of $70,000 after just a few years, factoring in overtime.
“It could be a way to get ahead in life,” said Marquees Hodges, 21, a college dropout and unemployed factory worker who filled out an application at a recruiting event here.
Despite its size and rapid growth, the Border Patrol — which began in 1924 with 450 agents, mostly on horseback — is unknown to many people, including in this region, where border issues, despite obsession over them in the Southwest and the halls of Washington, are only occasionally seen on the news.
“I have never heard of the Border Patrol and didn’t even know the border needed to be protected,” Stacey McGhee, a 19-year-old community college student, said while listening to a recruiting pitch by Michael E. Douglas, an assistant chief with the Border Patrol.
“I understand that,” replied Mr. Douglas, a native of Owensboro, Ky., and a 19-year veteran who heads the recruitment team.
All eight members of the team are black, and for the past few months they have been scouring the South for new agents. Traveling to high schools, colleges, churches, community centers, black-oriented radio shows — anywhere he hopes he will find an audience — Mr. Douglas offers a pitch that emphasizes a sense of duty to country.
Sometimes, he seems to be offering inspirational life lessons along with his pitch. Stay out of trouble, because a “felony on your record will close every door of opportunity for you,” he says. Fill up your life with acquaintances, “but make five friends, people you know and trust.” Hit the books and “pay attention and get it right.”
“If only one of you listens to me today, I have been successful,” Mr. Douglas said. “I would be ecstatic.”
Team members have been to Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and other states in the South.
Mr. Douglas, speaking to a group of young high school students, made no bones about the lack of black agents. When a young man let out a gasp at the mention of just eight black women in the ranks — “Did you say 8 percent or 8 women?” — Mr. Douglas smiled and nodded.
Reaching its goal of 18,000 agents would make the Border Patrol twice as large as it was in 2001 and meet a mandate set by President Bush.
To meet its target, and meet it quickly, the agency has tried endeavors like sponsoring a Nascar race car and entering a promotional alliance that makes it “the official federal law enforcement officers of the Professional Bull Riders.” The Border Patrol swarmed states with recruiters at events like the “Sunshine Blitz” last weekend in Florida, emphasizing its role in preventing terrorists from crossing and playing down the tedium and more routine arrests of thousands of illegal immigrants.
The Border Patrol union, as well as some members of Congress, have raised concerns about how well recruits are being screened — one was recently ejected from the training academy after being arrested in a gun smuggling case — and how well the new agents are being supervised.
T. J. Bonner, the head of the union, called the minority recruitment team and other tactics gimmicks that mask the problems with growth. He said that by the end of the year nearly half of the agents in the Border Patrol would have less than two years’ time on the job, and that many of those with fewer than five years on the force were leaving for other law enforcement jobs.
“It’s one thing to get to 18,000,” Mr. Bonner said. “It’s another to sustain it with quality people.”
Agency officials said the screening process and academy were rigorous and weed out undesirables. Though the agency does not require psychological testing, a panel of senior agents interviews all prospects to determine their readiness. For every 30 who apply, one gets in, a yield in line with other large law enforcement agencies.
To help keep its application numbers high, the agency in recent years raised the maximum age of recruits to under 40 from under 37 and now allows candidates fluent in Spanish to skip much of the language training at the academy. A fifth of the force’s members are military veterans, and the agency has recruited hard at bases, including overseas this year for the first time, at an installation in Germany.
Here in Memphis, the goal was not only to draw young prospects but also to raise public awareness of the agency and what it does. The recruitment team has generated more than 400 applicants since January, but, in part because it can take six months or more to complete written tests, background checks and other requirements, it is not yet clear how successful the effort has been.
Among the people, all of them black, drawn to a hotel conference room by the recruitment team were a single mother raising two children, a young woman itching for something more adventurous than processing insurance claims, a truck salesman finding business slow and a stream of unemployed people.
Mr. Douglas said he harbored no illusions that the team would solve the agency’s recruitment challenges. But he took solace in the effort to spark at least a little interest, as he did with Xavier Sullivan, 25, a car and truck salesman looking to get out of dead-end jobs in Memphis.
“It’s something different,” said Mr. Sullivan, who learned about the recruitment drive from a radio spot. “It’s a way to change, and it sounds like good benefits to provide for the family I want to have. And I do want to see how it is out there in the West.”
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17) ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Hits Women Much More
By THOM SHANKER
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/washington/23pentagon.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — The Army and Air Force discharged a disproportionate number of women in 2007 under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibits openly gay people from serving in the military, according to Pentagon statistics gathered by an advocacy group.
While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46 percent of those discharged under the policy last year were women. And while 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, 49 percent of its discharges under the policy last year were women.
By comparison for 2006, about 35 percent of the Army’s discharges and 36 percent of the Air Force’s were women, according to the statistics.
The information was gathered under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a policy advocacy organization.
“Women make up 15 percent of the armed forces, so to find they represent nearly 50 percent of Army and Air Force discharges under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is shocking,” said Aubrey Sarvis, the organization’s executive director. “Women in particular have been caught in the crosshairs of this counterproductive law.”
The organization compiled gender statistics on the discharges, but conducted no formal set of interviews and thus could offer no verifiable reason for the increase in women separated from the military under “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The Pentagon in recent days released overall numbers of discharges under the policy for 2007, without a breakdown by gender.
Over all, the number of gay men and lesbians discharged from the military in 2007 rose to 627 from 612 a year before, according to Pentagon statistics. Those figures represent a drop of about 50 percent from a peak in 2001, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite stress on the armed forces from two wars, the Pentagon is not advocating a change in policy, saying it is up to Congress to decide whether the law should be altered or repealed.
November was the 14th anniversary of the legislation that allows gay men and lesbians to serve in the military, but only if they keep their sexual orientation secret.
Advocacy groups say that 65,000 gay men and lesbians serve in the American armed forces and that there are more than one million gay veterans.
Early last year, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the policy was adopted, argued for its repeal, saying that conversations with military personnel had prompted him to change his position.
“I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces,” General Shalikashvili wrote in an Op-Ed article published in The New York Times on Jan. 2, 2007. “Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.”
According to the statistics, the Army in 2007 discharged 302 soldiers under the policy, up from 280 the year before. The Air Force dismissed 91 people, down from 102 in 2006. The Navy discharged 166, the same as in 2006. The Marine Corps discharged 68, up from 64 in 2006.
“Separated members have the opportunity to continue to serve their nation and national security by putting their abilities to use by way of civilian employment with other federal agencies, the Department of Defense or in the private sector, such as with a government contractor,” said Eileen M. Lainez, a Pentagon spokeswoman on personnel issues. “We expect all service members to be treated with dignity and respect all the time.”
Pentagon officials could not explain why the numbers for women spiked last year.
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18) Britain Admits to using 'Brutal' Vacuum Bomb against Taliban
Michael Smith
The Australian
June 23, 2008
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23904133-2703,00.html
British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world's most deadly
and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban.
Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against
fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks
the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their
bodies.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted to the use of the weapons,
condemned by human rights groups as "brutal", on several occasions,
including against a cave complex.
The use of the Hellfire AGM-114N weapons has been deemed so successful
they will now be fired from RAF Reaper unmanned drones controlled by
"pilots" at Creech air force base in Nevada, an MoD spokesman added.
Thermobaric weapons, or vacuum bombs, were first combat-tested by the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their use by Russia
against civilians in Chechnya in the 1990s was condemned worldwide.
The secret decision to buy the Hellfire AGM-114N missiles was made
earlier this year following problems attacking Taliban fortified
positions.
British Apache pilots complained that standard Hellfire antitank
missiles were going straight through buildings and out of the other
side. Even when they did explode, there were limited casualties among
the Taliban inside, particularly when a building contained a number of
rooms.
American Apache pilots overcame the problem in Iraq with the
thermobaric Hellfire.
The weapons are so controversial that MoD weapons and legal experts
spent 18 months debating whether British troops could use them without
breaking international law.
Eventually, they decided to get round the ethical problems by
redefining the weapons.
"We no longer accept the term thermobaric [for the AGM-114N] as there
is no internationally agreed definition," said an MoD spokesman. "We
call it an enhanced blast weapon."
The redefinition has allowed British forces to use the weapons
legally, but is undermined by the publicity of their manufacturer,
Lockheed Martin, which markets them as thermobaric.
When the American military bought them in 2005, President George W
Bush said: "There are going to be some awfully surprised terrorists
when the thermobaric Hellfire comes knocking."
Despite the Bush rhetoric, it is unlikely anyone targeted by the
missile would know much about it. The laser-guided missile has a
warhead packed with fluorinated aluminium powder surrounding a small
charge.
When it hits the target, the charge disperses the aluminium powder
throughout the target building. The cloud then ignites, causing a
massive secondary blast that tears throughout any enclosed space.
The blast creates a vacuum which draws air and debris back in,
creating pressure of up to 430lb per sq in. The more heavily the
building is protected, the more concentrated the blast.
The cloud of burning aluminium powder means victims often die from
asphyxiation before the pressure shreds their organs.
Jim Gribschaw, Lockheed Martin's programme director for air-to-ground
missiles systems, said the thermobaric Hellfire was "capable of
reaching around corners to strike enemy forces hiding in cases,
bunkers and hardened multi-room complexes."
Human Rights Watch argues they are "particularly brutal" and that
their blast "makes it virtually impossible for civilians to take
shelter".
Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said: "It is
staggering the MoD has added these weapons to Britain's arsenal in
cloak-and-dagger secrecy. Parliament has never assented to their use."
He added: "Gordon Brown claimed the moral high ground when Britain
supported a ban on cluster munitions but leaving a loophole for these
weapons casts a different picture on the true position."
The MoD said: "We are conscious of the controversial aspects [of this
weapon] but it is being used sparingly and under strict circumstances
where it is deemed appropriate by the commander on the ground."
A spokesman added that it could "achieve objectives with the minimum
coalition casualties and reduced collateral damage".
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19) Bill Moyers interviews Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, about his latest book, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, which looks at an "age of neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
June 20, 2008
http://www.pbs.org:80/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
BILL MOYERS: That was just a portion of the film. When "Traces of the Trade" airs on P.O.V. next week, Katrina Browne and several of her kinfolk follow the path of those ships to the West Coast of Africa, on to Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned a huge slave plantation, and then back again to new England, where an orderly economy run by pious, church-going people prospered from their bargain with the devil. You'll hear those modern DeWolfs struggling to come to terms with what they've learned about their "crazy partnership" with silence between the present and the past. Denial of course was not unique to the DeWolf family. Every time I walked downtown where I grew up in Texas, I passed the statue of Johnny Reb, facing east toward Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy, reminding us of the bravery of gallant men who fought and died to protect a way of life . Tragically, it was a way of life built around slavery.
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
BILL MOYERS: Look at these pictures. Those photographs are from one of the most stunning new books you'll read this year, Slavery by Another Name. The author is Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other issues have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four times. His reporting on U.S.Steel and the company's use of forced labor was included in the 2003 edition of Best Business Stories, and his contribution to the Journal's coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special Headliner Award in 2006. Welcome.
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally this generation of people, who experienced authentic freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in America, that effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was that the southern economic, and in a way, the American economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade. But the way that happened was that, of course, before the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
BILL MOYERS: You have a photograph in here I have literally not been able to get this photograph out of my mind since I saw it the first time several weeks ago, when I first got your book. It's a photograph of an unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time around 1932, which this is hard to believe was two years before I was born.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, that picture was taken by a journalist named John Spivak, who took an astonishing series of pictures in these forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part, because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame in what was happening.
BILL MOYERS: That's a surprising thing.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It was it's just astonishing, the level of brutality.
BILL MOYERS: You have a story in here of a young man who a teenager who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of the farmer he was working for. He was stripped, stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times with a leather strap. And he died a week later. But that's not a unique story in this book.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No, that was incredibly common. And there were on the there were thousands and thousands of people who died under these circumstances over the span of the period that I write about in the book. And over and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition, and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
BILL MOYERS: You give voice to a young man long dead, whose voice would never had been heard, had you not discovered it, resurrected it, and presented it. He's the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham, is that is.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Yes, that's right.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Green Cottenham.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s born to a mother and a father who, both of whom had been slaves, who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Imagine, a young man and a young woman who've just been freed from slavery. And now they have the opportunity to break away from the plantations where they'd been held, begin a new life. And so, they do. They marry. They have many children. Green Cottenham is the last of them.
He's born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep across all of black life in the South. And by the time he becomes an adult, in the first years of the 20th century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave black Americans are in full power across the South. And in the North, the allies, the white allies of the freed slaves, have abandoned them. And so, right at the before of the 20th century, whites all across America have essentially reached this new consensus that slavery shouldn't be brought back. But if African-Americans are returned to a state of absolute servility, that's okay.
And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that moment. And then, in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he's arrested, standing outside a train station in a little town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn't remember what the charge was by the time he brought him in front of the judge. So he's conveniently convicted of a different crime than the one he was originally picked up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and then dies under terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: You write, 45 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Cottenham was one of thousands of men working like a slave in these coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12.
BILL MOYERS: What was slope number 12?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown Birmingham?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It's just miles away. In fact there are just two places there, because all of these mines now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that if you dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies were buried.
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men. And-
BILL MOYERS: And yet, slavery was illegal?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It had been illegal for 40 years. And this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta. And those bricks are still there. And so these are the bricks that we stand on.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't this economic machine that was built upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way that black life was criminalized, didn't this put African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage then and now?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Absolutely. The results of those laws and the results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there's just no foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges, so they could be forced back into labor.
BILL MOYERS: Another reason -- I just think, as you talk -- another reason is that anybody who raised these allegations or charges, or wrote about them when I was growing up, were dismissed as Communists. If it had been from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a different take.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there's some truth to that. Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions was at risk of complete excoriation among other white Southerners. But that's also what's remarkable about the present moment. And one of the things I've discovered in the course of talking about the book with people is that there's an openness to a conversation about these things that I think didn't exist even ten or 15 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: What has been the response to it? Americans don't like to confront these pictures, these stories.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They don't. But over and over and over again I've encountered people who've read the book, who e-mailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it somewhere, particularly African-Americans, who African-Americans know this story in their hearts. They may not know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale of things were. But they know in their hearts that this is what happened. And so, people come up to me and say, "Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before she died 20 years ago, I never believed it. Because she would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia after World War II, or just before. And it never made sense to me. And now, it does."
BILL MOYERS: It is amazing that this was happening at a time when many of the African-Americans retiring today, were children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And so, again, these are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.
BILL MOYERS: Does it explain to you why there might be so much anger in the black community among, let's say, African-Americans who are my age, 73, 74, who were children at the time this was still going on?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African-Americans today.
BILL MOYERS: If people want to know more about not only your book, but about all of this, for research and so forth, where do they go?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Go to my website, or the book's website, www.slaverybyanothername.com.
BILL MOYERS: Douglas Blackmon, thanks for being with me.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thank you for having me.
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20) Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner
By BRIAN STELTER
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23logan.html?ref=business
Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network.
“Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”
Ms. Logan let a sly just-kidding smile sneak through as she spoke, but her point was serious. Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.
“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.
According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)
CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.
Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”
In a telephone interview last week, Ms. Logan said the CBS News bureau in Baghdad was “drastically downsized” in the spring. The network now keeps a producer in the country, making it less of a bureau and more of an office.
Interviews with executives and correspondents at television news networks suggested that while the CBS cutbacks are the most extensive to date in Baghdad, many journalists shared varying levels of frustration about placing war stories onto newscasts. “I’ve never met a journalist who hasn’t been frustrated about getting his or her stories on the air,” said Terry McCarthy, an ABC News correspondent in Baghdad.
By telephone from Baghdad, Mr. McCarthy said he was not as busy as he was a year ago. A decline in the relative amount of violence “is taking the urgency out” of some of the coverage, he said. Still, he gets on ABC’s “World News” and other programs with stories, including one on Friday about American gains in northern Iraq.
Anita McNaught, a correspondent for the Fox News Channel, agreed. “The violence itself is not the story anymore,” she said. She counted eight reports she had filed since arriving in Baghdad six weeks ago, noting that cable news channels like Fox News and CNN have considerably more time to fill with news than the networks. CNN and Fox each have two fulltime correspondents in Iraq.
Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, who splits his time between Iraq and other countries, said he found his producers “very receptive to stories about Iraq.” He and other journalists noted that the heated presidential primary campaign put other news stories on the back burner earlier this year.
Ms. Logan said she begged for months to be embedded with a group of Navy Seals, and when she came back with the story, a CBS producer said to her, “One guy in uniform looks like any other guy in a uniform.” In the follow-up phone interview, Ms. Logan said the producer no longer worked at CBS. And in both interviews, she emphasized that many journalists at CBS News are pushing for war coverage, specifically citing Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” CBS News won a Peabody Award last week for a “60 Minutes” report about a Marine charged in the killings at Haditha.
On “The Daily Show,” Ms. Logan echoed the comments of other journalists when she said that many Americans seem uninterested in the wars now. Mr. McCarthy said that when he is in the United States, bringing up Baghdad at a dinner party “is like a conversation killer.”
Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year.
Both Ms. Logan and Mr. McCarthy noted that more coalition soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in May than in Iraq. No American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan, although CNN recently said it would open a bureau in Kabul.
“It’s terrible,” Ms. Logan said in the telephone interview. She called it a financial decision. “We can’t afford to maintain operations in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time,” she said. “It’s so expensive and the security risks are so great that it’s prohibitive.”
Mr. Friedman said coverage of Iraq is enormously expensive, mostly due to the security risks. He said meetings with other television networks about sharing the costs of coverage have faltered for logistical reasons.
Journalists at all three American television networks with evening newscasts expressed worries that their news organizations would withdraw from the Iraqi capital after the November presidential election. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid offending their employers.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Louisiana: Case of Ex-Black Panther [The Angola Three]
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
The conviction of a former Black Panther in the killing of a prison guard in 1972 should be overturned because his former lawyer should have objected to testimony from witnesses who had died after his original trial, a federal magistrate found. The lawyer’s omission denied a fair second trial for the man, Albert Woodfox, in 1998, the magistrate, Christine Nolan, wrote Tuesday in a recommendation to the federal judge who will rule later. Mr. Woodfox, 61, and Herman Wallace, 66, were convicted in the stabbing death of the guard, Brent Miller, on April 17, 1972. Mr. Wallace has been appealing his conviction based on arguments similar to Mr. Woodfox’s. Mr. Woodfox and Mr. Wallace, with another former Black Panther, became known as the Angola Three because they were held in isolation for about three decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
June 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12brfs-CASEOFEXBLAC_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Killer Is Executed
By REUTERS
National Briefing | Southwest
A convicted killer, Karl E. Chamberlain, was put to death by lethal injection in Texas, becoming the first prisoner executed in the state since the Supreme Court lifted an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty in April. Texas, the country’s busiest death penalty state, is the fifth state to resume executions since the court rejected a legal challenge to the three-drug cocktail used in most executions for the past 30 years. Mr. Chamberlain, 37, was convicted of the 1991 murder of a 30-year-old Dallas woman who lived in the same apartment complex. Mr. Chamberlain was the 406th inmate executed in Texas since 1982 and the first this year.
June 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12brfs-KILLERISEXEC_BRF.html?ref=us
Tennessee: State to Retry Inmate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
The Union County district attorney said the county would meet a federal judge’s deadline for a new trial in the case of a death row inmate whose trial was questioned by the United States Supreme Court. The state is facing a June 17 deadline to retry or free the inmate, Paul House, who has been in limbo since June 2006, when the Supreme Court concluded that reasonable jurors would not have convicted him had they seen the results of DNA tests from the 1990s. The district attorney, Paul Phillips, said he would not seek the death penalty. Mr. House, 46, who has multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair, was sentenced in the 1985 killing of Carolyn Muncey. He has been in a state prison since 1986 and continues to maintain his innocence.
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/us/29brfs-STATETORETRY_BRF.html?ref=us
Israel: Carter Offers Details on Nuclear Arsenal
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Middle East
Former President Jimmy Carter said Israel held at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a current or former American president had publicly acknowledged the Jewish state’s nuclear arsenal. Asked at a news conference in Wales on Sunday how a future president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, he sought to put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally. “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” he said, according to a transcript. The existence of Israeli nuclear arms is widely assumed, but Israel has never admitted their existence and American officials have stuck to that line in public for years.
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-CARTEROFFERS_BRF.html?ref=world
Iowa: Lawsuit Filed Over Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
The nation’s largest single immigration raid, in which nearly 400 workers at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville were detained on Monday, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, a lawsuit contends. The suit accuses the government of arbitrary and indefinite detention. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office said he could not comment on the suit, which was filed Thursday on behalf of about 147 of the workers. Prosecutors said they filed criminal charges against 306 of the detained workers. The charges include accusations of aggravated identity theft, falsely using a Social Security number, illegally re-entering the United States after being deported and fraudulently using an alien registration card.
May 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17brfs-LAWSUITFILED_BRF.html?ref=us
Senate Revises Drug Maker Gift Bill
By REUTERS
National Breifing | Washington
A revised Senate bill would require drug makers and medical device makers to publicly report gifts over $500 a year to doctors, watering down the standard set in a previous version. The new language was endorsed by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Company. Lawmakers said they hoped the support would prompt other companies to back the bill, which had previously required all gifts valued over $25 be reported. The industry says the gifts are part of its doctor education, but critics say such lavish gestures influence prescribing habits.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/washington/14brfs-SENATEREVISE_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Sect Mother Is Not a Minor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
Child welfare officials conceded to a judge that a newborn’s mother, held in foster care as a minor after being removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch, is an adult. The woman, who gave birth on April 29, had been held along with more than 400 children taken last month from a ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was one of two pregnant sect members who officials had said were minors. The other member, who gave birth on Monday, may also be an adult, state officials said.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14brfs-SECTMOTHERIS_BRF.html?ref=us
Four Military Branches Hit Recruiting Goals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.
May 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/13brfs-FOURMILITARY_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Prison Settlement Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. The judge, Ricardo Hinojosa of Federal District Court, signed the settlement Monday, and it was announced by the commission Wednesday. Judge Hinojosa had previously rejected a settlement on grounds that it lacked a specific timeline. Federal prosecutors began investigating the prison, the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, in 2006. The settlement establishes parameters for safe conditions and staffing levels, restricts use of youth restraints and guards against retaliation for reporting abuse and misconduct.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-PRISONSETTLE_BRF.html?ref=us
Michigan: Insurance Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
Local governments and state universities cannot offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the State Supreme Court ruled. The court ruled 5 to 2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against same-sex marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers. The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling. Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-INSURANCERUL_BRF.html?ref=us
Halliburton Profit Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON (AP) — Increasing its global presence is paying off for the oil field services provider Halliburton, whose first-quarter income rose nearly 6 percent on growing business in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the company said Monday.
Business in the first three months of 2008 also was better than expected in North America, where higher costs and lower pricing squeezed results at the end of 2007.
Halliburton shares closed up 3 cents, at $47.46, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Halliburton said it earned $584 million, or 64 cents a share, in the three months that ended March 31, compared with a year-earlier profit of $552 million, or 54 cents a share. Revenue rose to $4.03 billion, from $3.42 billion a year earlier.
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/business/worldbusiness/22halliburton.html?ref=business
Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
National Briefing | South
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/us/22brfs-002.html?ref=us
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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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"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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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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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
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