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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
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
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
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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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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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