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Stop the deportation of Corey Glass and all war resisters!
July 9 actions at Canadian Consulates across the United States
San Francisco - Noon to 1pm - 580 California St (map). Sponsored by Courage to Resist. Info: 510-488-3559; courage(at)riseup.net
Join a vigil and delegation to a Canadian consulate near you on Wednesday, July 9th to support war resisters.
On the eve of Corey Glass' possible deportation, we will demand, "Dear Canada: Abide by the June 3rd resolution - Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
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JROTC MUST GO!
Come to a planning meeting to celebrate and take stock of where we are now:
Thursday, July 10, 7:00 P.M.
ANSWER Office
2489 Mission Street, Rm. 28
(Near 21st Street)
San Francisco
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!
P.S., 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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STOP WAR ON IRAN !
An Emergency Call to Action AUGUST 2:
• An Attack could be Imminent
• We Can’t Afford to Wait
• Take It to the Streets This Summer
• U.S. out of Iraq, Money for human needs, not war!
MASS MARCH IN NYC
SATURDAY, AUGUST 2
Assemble 12 p.m.
at Times Square
43rd St. & Broadway
AN APPEAL TO ORGANIZERS AND ACTIVISTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND AROUND THE WORLD:
Consider as soon as possible if you can organize a STOP WAR ON IRAN protest in your locality during the weekend of August 2 – 3. Let us know
YET ANOTHER U.S. WAR?
The U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is hated by the people there. These wars have no support at home and are ruining the domestic economy. Instead of pulling out, the Bush administration is preparing for still another warÅ]this time against Iran . This must be stopped!
AGRESSION TOWARDS IRAN IS ESCALATING
On June 4, George Bush, with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at his side, called Iran a “threat to peace.” Two days before, acting as a proxy for the Pentagon, Israel used advanced U.S. fighter planes to conduct massive air maneuvers, which the media called a “dress rehearsal” for an attack on Iran ’s nuclear facility. Under pressure from the U.S. , the European Union announced sanctions against Iran on June 23. A bill is before Congress for further U.S. sanctions on Iran and even a blockade of Iran.
IRAN “THREATS” A HOAX
Iran as a “nuclear threat” is as much a hoax as Bush’s claim of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq used to justify the war there. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects Iran ’s nuclear facilities, says it has no weapons program and is developing nuclear power for the days when its oil runs out. Even Washington ’s 16 top spy agencies issued a joint statement that said Iran does not have nuclear weapons technology!
U.S. and Israel are the real nuclear danger. The Pentagon has a huge, nuclear-capable naval armada in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, with guns aimed at Iran . Israel , the Pentagon’s proxy force in the Middle East , has up to 200 nuclear warheads and has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran did sign it.
WAR HURTS U.S. ECONOMY
While billions of dollars go to war, at home the unemployment rate had the biggest spike in 23 years. Home foreclosures and evictions are increasing; fuel and food prices are through the roof. While the situation is growing dire for many, Washington ’s cuts to domestic programs continue. A new U.S. war will bring only more suffering.
WHAT WE DO RIGHT NOW CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
While the summer is a difficult time to call protests, the August recess of Congress gives the White House an opportunity for unopposed aggression against Iran . We must not let this happen! From the anti-war movement and all movements for social change, to religious and grassroots organizations, unions and schools, let us join forces to demand “No war on Iran, U.S. out of Iraq, Money for human needs not war! “
This call to action is issued by StopWarOnIran.org
Endorse the Emergency Call to Action for August 2 at
http://stopwaroniran.org/aug22008endorse.shtml
List your local action at
http://stopwaroniran.org/aug22008volorgcent.shtml
Sign the Petition at http://stopwaroniran.org/petition.shtml
Make an Emergency Donation at http://stopwaroniran.org/donate.shtml
Tell a Friend
http://stopwaroniran.org/friend.shtml
Sign up for updates
http://stopwaroniran.org/updates.shtml
DONATE
Please help build a grassroots campaign to Stop War on Iran
http://stopwaroniran.org/donate.shtml
• Endorse the Emergency Call to Action for August 2
• List your local action
• Sign the Petition
• Make an Emergency Donation
• Tell a Friend
• Sign up for updates
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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
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george carlin nails it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KReZyAZLI0
http://www.vfpchapter72.org/
Howard Zinn: An illustrated people's history of the US empire
http://links.org.au/node/486
This is a wonderful short video publicizing the main ideas behind the
Cleveland conference coming up this weekend [see below for details.] Take a look and pass it along!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NvlpT62GKk
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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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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) Bill Moyers interviews Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, about his latest book, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, which looks at an "age of neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
June 20, 2008
http://www.pbs.org:80/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
2) Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner
By BRIAN STELTER
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23logan.html?ref=business
3) Books, Not Bombs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Op-Ed Columnist
AMMAN, Jordan
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/opinion/26kristof.html?hp
4) 160 Arrested in Immigration Raid at a Houston Plant
By THAYER EVANS
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/us/26raid.html?ref=us
5) Judge Rejects Bid to Let Police Check Immigration Status
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/us/26lapd.html?ref=us
6) Damages Cut Against Exxon in Valdez Case
By ADAM LIPTAK
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/washington/26punitive.html?ref=us
7) This Recession, It's Just Beginning
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, June 27, 2008; D01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR2008062604030.html
8) Save Our Kids From JROTC
By Michael Wong
June 16, 2008
http://www.asianweek.com/2008/06/29/letters-to-the-editor-flip-flopping-on-obama-save-our-kids-from-jrotc/#
9) Iraq to Open Oil Fields for 35 Foreign Companies; Initial No-Bid Contracts Delayed
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW E. KRAMER
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?ref=world
10) Court Dismisses Rendition Suit
By ALAN FEUER
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/world/americas/01arar.html?ref=world
11) Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/washington/01gitmo.html?ref=world
12) Budget Pain Hits States, With Relief Not in Sight
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/us/01taxes.html?ref=us
13) Fending Off Pot Smokers on Gay Street
By Corey Kilgannon
July 1, 2008, 12:58 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/fending-off-pot-smokers-on-gay-street/
14) Union Fears the Loss of High Pay and Solid Benefits, Once Virtual Givens at Con Ed
By KEN BELSON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
"'The union was really taking care of us at the time,” said Mr. Cobert, now 86. 'Prices were going up, and the union always thought you had to do better than in the previous contract. When the union got going and started pushing hard on things, the threat of a strike was always there.'”
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01coned.html?ref=nyregion
15) EXPOSÉ and THE JOURNAL go inside America's poultry industry, which employs almost a quarter million workers nationwide, to show the reality of working conditions and to investigate how official statistics showing a drop in workplace injuries may have been the result of deceptive reporting.
Bill Moyers Journal
June 27, 2008
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch2.html
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1) Bill Moyers interviews Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, about his latest book, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, which looks at an "age of neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
June 20, 2008
http://www.pbs.org:80/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
BILL MOYERS: That was just a portion of the film. When "Traces of the Trade" airs on P.O.V. next week, Katrina Browne and several of her kinfolk follow the path of those ships to the West Coast of Africa, on to Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned a huge slave plantation, and then back again to new England, where an orderly economy run by pious, church-going people prospered from their bargain with the devil. You'll hear those modern DeWolfs struggling to come to terms with what they've learned about their "crazy partnership" with silence between the present and the past. Denial of course was not unique to the DeWolf family. Every time I walked downtown where I grew up in Texas, I passed the statue of Johnny Reb, facing east toward Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy, reminding us of the bravery of gallant men who fought and died to protect a way of life . Tragically, it was a way of life built around slavery.
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
BILL MOYERS: Look at these pictures. Those photographs are from one of the most stunning new books you'll read this year, Slavery by Another Name. The author is Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other issues have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four times. His reporting on U.S.Steel and the company's use of forced labor was included in the 2003 edition of Best Business Stories, and his contribution to the Journal's coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special Headliner Award in 2006. Welcome.
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally this generation of people, who experienced authentic freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in America, that effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was that the southern economic, and in a way, the American economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade. But the way that happened was that, of course, before the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
BILL MOYERS: You have a photograph in here I have literally not been able to get this photograph out of my mind since I saw it the first time several weeks ago, when I first got your book. It's a photograph of an unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time around 1932, which this is hard to believe was two years before I was born.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, that picture was taken by a journalist named John Spivak, who took an astonishing series of pictures in these forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part, because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame in what was happening.
BILL MOYERS: That's a surprising thing.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It was it's just astonishing, the level of brutality.
BILL MOYERS: You have a story in here of a young man who a teenager who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of the farmer he was working for. He was stripped, stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times with a leather strap. And he died a week later. But that's not a unique story in this book.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No, that was incredibly common. And there were on the there were thousands and thousands of people who died under these circumstances over the span of the period that I write about in the book. And over and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition, and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
BILL MOYERS: You give voice to a young man long dead, whose voice would never had been heard, had you not discovered it, resurrected it, and presented it. He's the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham, is that is.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Yes, that's right.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Green Cottenham.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s born to a mother and a father who, both of whom had been slaves, who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Imagine, a young man and a young woman who've just been freed from slavery. And now they have the opportunity to break away from the plantations where they'd been held, begin a new life. And so, they do. They marry. They have many children. Green Cottenham is the last of them.
He's born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep across all of black life in the South. And by the time he becomes an adult, in the first years of the 20th century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave black Americans are in full power across the South. And in the North, the allies, the white allies of the freed slaves, have abandoned them. And so, right at the before of the 20th century, whites all across America have essentially reached this new consensus that slavery shouldn't be brought back. But if African-Americans are returned to a state of absolute servility, that's okay.
And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that moment. And then, in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he's arrested, standing outside a train station in a little town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn't remember what the charge was by the time he brought him in front of the judge. So he's conveniently convicted of a different crime than the one he was originally picked up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and then dies under terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: You write, 45 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Cottenham was one of thousands of men working like a slave in these coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12.
BILL MOYERS: What was slope number 12?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown Birmingham?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It's just miles away. In fact there are just two places there, because all of these mines now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that if you dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies were buried.
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men. And-
BILL MOYERS: And yet, slavery was illegal?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It had been illegal for 40 years. And this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta. And those bricks are still there. And so these are the bricks that we stand on.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't this economic machine that was built upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way that black life was criminalized, didn't this put African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage then and now?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Absolutely. The results of those laws and the results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there's just no foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges, so they could be forced back into labor.
BILL MOYERS: Another reason -- I just think, as you talk -- another reason is that anybody who raised these allegations or charges, or wrote about them when I was growing up, were dismissed as Communists. If it had been from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a different take.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there's some truth to that. Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions was at risk of complete excoriation among other white Southerners. But that's also what's remarkable about the present moment. And one of the things I've discovered in the course of talking about the book with people is that there's an openness to a conversation about these things that I think didn't exist even ten or 15 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: What has been the response to it? Americans don't like to confront these pictures, these stories.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They don't. But over and over and over again I've encountered people who've read the book, who e-mailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it somewhere, particularly African-Americans, who African-Americans know this story in their hearts. They may not know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale of things were. But they know in their hearts that this is what happened. And so, people come up to me and say, "Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before she died 20 years ago, I never believed it. Because she would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia after World War II, or just before. And it never made sense to me. And now, it does."
BILL MOYERS: It is amazing that this was happening at a time when many of the African-Americans retiring today, were children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And so, again, these are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.
BILL MOYERS: Does it explain to you why there might be so much anger in the black community among, let's say, African-Americans who are my age, 73, 74, who were children at the time this was still going on?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African-Americans today.
BILL MOYERS: If people want to know more about not only your book, but about all of this, for research and so forth, where do they go?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Go to my website, or the book's website, www.slaverybyanothername.com.
BILL MOYERS: Douglas Blackmon, thanks for being with me.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thank you for having me.
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2) Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner
By BRIAN STELTER
June 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23logan.html?ref=business
Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network.
“Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”
Ms. Logan let a sly just-kidding smile sneak through as she spoke, but her point was serious. Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.
“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.
According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)
CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.
Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”
In a telephone interview last week, Ms. Logan said the CBS News bureau in Baghdad was “drastically downsized” in the spring. The network now keeps a producer in the country, making it less of a bureau and more of an office.
Interviews with executives and correspondents at television news networks suggested that while the CBS cutbacks are the most extensive to date in Baghdad, many journalists shared varying levels of frustration about placing war stories onto newscasts. “I’ve never met a journalist who hasn’t been frustrated about getting his or her stories on the air,” said Terry McCarthy, an ABC News correspondent in Baghdad.
By telephone from Baghdad, Mr. McCarthy said he was not as busy as he was a year ago. A decline in the relative amount of violence “is taking the urgency out” of some of the coverage, he said. Still, he gets on ABC’s “World News” and other programs with stories, including one on Friday about American gains in northern Iraq.
Anita McNaught, a correspondent for the Fox News Channel, agreed. “The violence itself is not the story anymore,” she said. She counted eight reports she had filed since arriving in Baghdad six weeks ago, noting that cable news channels like Fox News and CNN have considerably more time to fill with news than the networks. CNN and Fox each have two fulltime correspondents in Iraq.
Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, who splits his time between Iraq and other countries, said he found his producers “very receptive to stories about Iraq.” He and other journalists noted that the heated presidential primary campaign put other news stories on the back burner earlier this year.
Ms. Logan said she begged for months to be embedded with a group of Navy Seals, and when she came back with the story, a CBS producer said to her, “One guy in uniform looks like any other guy in a uniform.” In the follow-up phone interview, Ms. Logan said the producer no longer worked at CBS. And in both interviews, she emphasized that many journalists at CBS News are pushing for war coverage, specifically citing Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” CBS News won a Peabody Award last week for a “60 Minutes” report about a Marine charged in the killings at Haditha.
On “The Daily Show,” Ms. Logan echoed the comments of other journalists when she said that many Americans seem uninterested in the wars now. Mr. McCarthy said that when he is in the United States, bringing up Baghdad at a dinner party “is like a conversation killer.”
Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year.
Both Ms. Logan and Mr. McCarthy noted that more coalition soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in May than in Iraq. No American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan, although CNN recently said it would open a bureau in Kabul.
“It’s terrible,” Ms. Logan said in the telephone interview. She called it a financial decision. “We can’t afford to maintain operations in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time,” she said. “It’s so expensive and the security risks are so great that it’s prohibitive.”
Mr. Friedman said coverage of Iraq is enormously expensive, mostly due to the security risks. He said meetings with other television networks about sharing the costs of coverage have faltered for logistical reasons.
Journalists at all three American television networks with evening newscasts expressed worries that their news organizations would withdraw from the Iraqi capital after the November presidential election. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid offending their employers.
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3) Books, Not Bombs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Op-Ed Columnist
AMMAN, Jordan
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/opinion/26kristof.html?hp
The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn’t in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it’s found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman.
Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.
Many youngsters are getting no education, and some girls are pushed into prostitution, particularly in Damascus. Impoverished, angry, disenfranchised, unwanted, these Iraqis are a combustible new Middle Eastern element that no one wants to address or even think about.
American hawks prefer to address the region’s security challenges by devoting billions of dollars to permanent American military bases. A simpler way to fight extremism would be to pay school fees for refugee children to ensure that they at least get an education and don’t become forever marginalized and underemployed.
We broke Iraq, and we have a moral responsibility to those whose lives have been shattered by our actions. Helping them is also in our national interest, for we’ll regret our myopia if we allow young Iraqi refugees to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies.
“My husband and I have decided to pull our three children out of school,” said Yussra Shaker, a college-educated English teacher who fled Iraq and went to Jordan when her 15-year-old son was shot in the leg in a kidnapping attempt. Ms. Yussra deeply believes in education, and her eyes welled with tears as she described the decision to withdraw her children because of school fees and beatings by Jordanian students.
“My children are very good students, and the teachers like them,” Ms. Yussra explained, “and so the local children beat them up even more.”
Ms. Yussra’s family is Christian, but most of those fleeing Iraq are Sunni Muslims — and some of them may have shot at Americans or brutalized Shiites in the ongoing sectarian conflict. One Sunni family I visited came from Falluja after their house was blown up, possibly by Americans, and they have decorated their leaking apartment with a huge poster of Saddam Hussein.
This family was composed of two wives of one man (who was back in Iraq, living in a tent) and their five children. The eldest son was a surly young man in his 20s who looked as if his preferred interaction with Americans might have involved an AK-47 in his arms.
Yet the family also has four small children and was nine months behind in its rent and in danger of being thrown out on to the street. I visited them at 2 p.m., and nobody in the house had eaten anything so far that day.
Iraqi refugees don’t get help in part because this is a problem that almost everybody wants to hide. Syria and Jordan worry that if the refugees get assistance, then they will stay indefinitely. The U.S. doesn’t want to talk about a crisis created by our war, and Iraq’s Shiite leaders don’t much care about Sunnis or Christians displaced by Shiite militias.
“It’s among the largest humanitarian crises in the world today,” said Michael Kocher, a refugee expert at the International Rescue Committee, which recently published a report on the crisis. “It’s getting very little attention from the Security Council on down, which we feel is scandalous and also bad strategy.”
It’s easy to blame the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Syria, for not being more hospitable to Iraqis. But those countries have, however grudgingly, tolerated the influx despite the burden and political risk.
Iraqi refugees are hard to count but may now amount to 8 percent of Jordan’s population of six million. The average Jordanian family, which opposed the war in the first place, is now bearing a cost that may be as much as $1,000 per year for providing for the refugees.
In contrast, last year the United States took in only 1,608 Iraqis. European countries have done better, but they believe that America created the refugee crisis and should take the lead in resolving it.
“Apathy towards the crisis has been the overwhelming response,” Amnesty International said in a report last week.
We have already seen, in the case of Palestinians, how a refugee diaspora can destabilize a region for decades. If Jordan were to collapse in part from such pressures, that would be a catastrophe — and the best way to prevent that isn’t to give it Blackhawk helicopters, but help with school fees and school construction.
If we let the Iraqi refugee crisis drag on — and especially if we allow young refugees to miss an education so that they will never have a future — then we are sentencing ourselves to endure their wrath for decades to come. Educating Iraqis may not be as glamorous as bombing them, but it will do far more good.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
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4) 160 Arrested in Immigration Raid at a Houston Plant
By THAYER EVANS
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/us/26raid.html?ref=us
HOUSTON — Federal immigration agents arrested 160 employees on Wednesday in a raid on a used clothing and rag exporting plant.
The authorities said it was the largest workplace raid ever here. Most of those arrested were from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, officials said, and 70 percent of them were women.
It was the second major raid in Houston in just over two months. Federal agents arrested 20 workers at a Shipley Do-Nuts factory on April 16.
The roundup on Wednesday at Action Rags USA, which is just north of the Houston Ship Channel, began at 7 a.m. and was conducted by about 200 immigration agents, said Robert Rutt, special agent in charge of the Office of Investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston.
It was part of more than a yearlong investigation by the agency that was prompted by accusations that Action Rags had hired illegal immigrants, Mr. Rutt said.
In addition to the 160 arrested, the plant’s employees included 2 United States citizens and 13 to 19 legal residents, Mr. Rutt said. They were released.
The company’s hiring practices are being investigated for potential criminal violations, Mr. Rutt said.
“By attacking this issue in a comprehensive, strategic way, we believe we can force the culture of corporations to change,” Mr. Rutt said.
William F. Estes, who identified himself as a lawyer for Action Rags, said the company was shocked by the raid.
“We want to abide by the law, and we’re going to abide by the law,” Mr. Estes said. “If we have an illegal employee, we don’t know it. No way. Tell us what the law is, and we’ll obey it.”
After the white immigration vans had driven away, Maria Lopez huddled across the street from the plant with friends. Four of her friends worked at the plant, Ms. Lopez said.
After one of them called, crying, at 7:20 a.m., she went to the plant, where family members and friends of other employees had gathered.
Ms. Lopez said her friends at the plant had lived in Houston for more than 10 years, but none were legal residents. She said she was worried that they would be deported.
“It’s not fair,” said Ms. Lopez, 27, a legal resident. “They’re working to support their families. This shouldn’t have happened.”
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5) Judge Rejects Bid to Let Police Check Immigration Status
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/us/26lapd.html?ref=us
LOS ANGELES — A Superior Court judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit seeking to end a longstanding police policy that prohibits officers from initiating contact with people for the sole purpose of learning their immigration status.
The policy has come under scrutiny in recent months after the killing of a high school football star, Jamiel Shaw Jr., who the police say was murdered by an illegal immigrant who is a member of a gang. The victim’s parents are seeking to have the policy overturned, and a city councilman has been seeking a similar change to the directive, known as Special Order 40.
Some predominantly black gangs here are in a constant battle with members of Latino-dominated gangs, creating tensions between blacks and Latinos in South Los Angeles. In some cases, black residents with no gang affiliations have been singled out by Latino gang members and killed.
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group based in Washington, filed a suit in 2006 on behalf of a Los Angeles resident, Harold Sturgeon, arguing that the city should not be using taxpayer money to enforce the policy, saying the order blocked cooperation between the local police and federal immigration agents.
But Judge Rolf M. Treu of Los Angeles Superior Court granted a motion from the city and the American Civil Liberties Union for a summary judgment to throw the suit out, arguing that Mr. Sturgeon was unable to show that the order violated federal law or impeded immigration officials from communicating with the police.
“Special Order 40 neither mentions nor refers to such communication,” Judge Treu said in his ruling. “It is not the court’s function to consider the wisdom of the enactment of Special Order 40.”
Hector Villagra, the director of the Orange County office of the A.C.L.U., said he thought the judge’s decision would “put to rest” any further challenges to the police order, which has been vigorously defended by the police chief, William J. Bratton.
Paul J. Orfanedes, a lawyer for Judicial Watch, said Mr. Sturgeon was considering an appeal.
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6) Damages Cut Against Exxon in Valdez Case
By ADAM LIPTAK
June 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/washington/26punitive.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday reduced what had once been a $5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon Mobil to about $500 million. The ruling essentially concluded a legal saga that started when the Exxon Valdez, a supertanker, struck a reef and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989.
The decision may have broad implications for limits on punitive damages generally. Punitive damages, which are meant to punish and deter, are imposed on top of compensatory damages, which aim to make plaintiffs whole.
Justice David H. Souter, writing for the majority in the 5-to-3 decision, said a ratio between the two sorts of damages of no more than one-to-one was generally appropriate, at least in maritime cases. Since Exxon has paid about $507 million to compensate more than 32,000 Alaska Natives, landowners and commercial fishermen for the damage caused by the spill, it should have to pay no more than that amount in punitive damages, Justice Souter said.
The plaintiffs have received an average of $15,000 each as compensation, and Wednesday’s decision means they will receive a similar amount in punitive damages.
Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissent, said he would have upheld the punitive damages award, which the federal appeals court in California had reduced to $2.5 billion.
“In light of Exxon’s decision to permit a lapsed alcoholic to command a supertanker carrying tens of millions of gallons of crude oil though the treacherous waters of Prince William Sound, thereby endangering all of the individuals who depended upon the sound for their livelihoods,” Justice Stevens wrote, “the jury could reasonably have given expression to its moral condemnation of Exxon’s conduct in the form of this award.”
The Exxon Valdez spill was the worst in American history, damaging 1,300 miles of shoreline, disrupting the lives and livelihoods of people in the region and killing hundreds of thousands of birds and marine animals. It occurred after the ship’s captain, Joseph J. Hazelwood, left the bridge at a crucial moment. Mr. Hazelwood, an alcoholic, had downed five double vodkas on the night of the disaster, according to witnesses.
The question remaining after Wednesday’s decision is whether the one-to-one ratio will apply outside of maritime cases. In the Exxon case, the Supreme Court was acting as a state appellate court typically might, assessing the reasonableness of the punitive award under the common law rather than asking whether it violated constitutional due process protections.
The one-to-one ratio was not grounded in statutory law or other maritime cases. Justice Souter relied instead on studies showing that in hundreds of cases, the median punitive damage award was about 65 percent of the compensatory award.
“We consider that a 1:1 ratio, which is above the median award, is a fair upper limit in maritime cases,” Justice Souter wrote.
It is not clear what effect the decision will have in cases presenting the constitutional question. In 2003, in State Farm v. Campbell, the court ruled that a single-digit ratio (that is, no more than nine-to-one) was appropriate as a matter of due process in all but the most exceptional cases. In cases where compensatory damages are substantial, the State Farm decision went on, “a lesser ratio, perhaps only equal to compensatory damages,” might be warranted.
Justice Souter’s last footnote in Wednesday’s decision, Exxon Shipping v. Baker, No. 07-219, underscored the suggestion in State Farm that in cases with substantial compensatory awards “the constitutional outer limit may well be 1:1.”
The Exxon decision may also be influential in cases where state court judges are making their own common-law assessments of reasonableness. While the Supreme Court’s reasoning in a federal maritime case is not binding on them, at least some state judges will find it instructive and persuasive.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. owns Exxon stock and did not participate in the decision. As a consequence, the court split 4-to-4 on a separate question, whether Exxon may be held accountable for Mr. Hazelwood’s recklessness. The effect of the split was to leave intact the ruling of the lower court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which said Exxon might be held responsible.
In addition to Justice Stevens, two other justices issued dissents from the majority’s ruling reducing the punitive award.
Justice Stevens wrote that imposing a broadly applicable rule is a job for Congress, not the courts. He acknowledged the problem of “large outlier awards” but said courts could address those case by case.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked a series of pointed questions in her dissent. For instance: “What ratio will the court set for defendants who acted maliciously or in pursuit of financial gain?” And: “On the next opportunity, will the court rule, definitively, that 1:1 is the ceiling due process requires in all of the states, and for all federal claims?”
In his dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that Exxon’s conduct warranted “an exception from strict application of the majority’s numerical rule.”
Jeffrey L. Fisher, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said there was “a great deal of sadness” among his clients. “What is painful,” Mr. Fisher said, “is that there seems to have been some disagreement between the dissenters and the majority on how reprehensible Exxon’s conduct was.”
In a statement, Rex W. Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said: “The company cleaned up the spill and voluntarily compensated more than 11,000 Alaskans and businesses. The cleanup was declared complete by the State of Alaska and the United States Coast Guard in 1992.”
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7) This Recession, It's Just Beginning
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, June 27, 2008; D01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR2008062604030.html
So much for that second-half rebound.
Truth be told, that was always more of a wish than a serious forecast,
happy talk from the Fed and Wall Street desperate to get things back to
normal.
It ain't gonna happen. Not this summer. Not this fall. Not even next winter.
This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond
defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent
unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals
that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of.
Only this will be a different kind of recession -- a recession with an
overlay of inflation. That combo puts the Federal Reserve in a Catch-22
-- whatever it does to solve one problem only makes the other worse.
Emerging from a two-day meeting this week, Fed officials signaled that
further recession-fighting rate cuts are unlikely and that their next
move will be to raise rates to contain inflationary expectations.
Since last June, we've seen a fairly consistent pattern to the economic
mood swings. Every three months or so, there's a round of bad news about
housing, followed by warnings of more bank write-offs and then a string
of disappointing corporate earnings reports. Eventually, things
stabilize and there are hints that the worst may be behind us. Stocks
regain some of their lost ground, bonds fall and then -- bam -- the
whole cycle starts again.
It was only in November that the Dow had recovered from the panicked
summer sell-off and hit a record, just above 14,000. By March, it had
fallen below 12,000. By May, it climbed above 13,000. Now it's heading
for a new floor at 11,000. Officially, that's bear market territory.
We'll be lucky if that's the floor.
In explaining why that second-half rebound never occurred, the Fed and
the Treasury and the Wall Street machers will say that nobody could have
foreseen $140 a barrel oil. As excuses go, blaming it on an oil shock is
a hardy perennial. That's what Jimmy Carter and Fed Chairman Arthur
Burns did in the late '70s, and what George H.W. Bush and Alan Greenspan
did in the early '90s. Don't believe it.
Truth is, there are always price or supply shocks of one sort or
another. The real problem is that the underlying fundamentals had gotten
badly out of whack, making the economy susceptible to a shock. The only
way to make things better is to get those fundamentals back in balance.
In this case, that means bringing what we consume in line with what we
produce, letting the dollar fall to its natural level, wringing the
excess capacity out of industries that overexpanded during the credit
bubble and allowing real estate prices to fall in line with incomes.
The last hope for a second-half rebound began to fade earlier this month
when Lehman Brothers reported that it wasn't as immune to the
credit-market downturn as it had led everyone to believe. Lehman
scrambled to restore confidence by firing two top executives and raising
billions in additional capital, but even that wasn't enough to quiet
speculation that it could be the next Bear Stearns.
Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of worrisome news from
nearly every sector of the economy.
American Express and Discover warn that customers are falling further
behind on their debts. UPS and Federal Express report a noticeable
slowdown in shipments, while fuel costs are soaring. According to the
Case-Shiller index, home prices in the top 20 markets fell 15 percent in
April from the year before, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac report that
mortgage delinquency rates doubled over the same period -- and that's
for conventional home loans, not subprime. United Airlines accelerates
the race to cut costs and capacity by laying off 950 pilots -- 15
percent of its total -- as a number of airlines retire planes and hint
that they may delay delivery or cancel orders of new jets from Boeing
and Airbus. Goldman Sachs, which has already had to withdraw its rosy
forecast for stocks, now admits it was also too optimistic about junk
bond defaults, and analysts warn that Citigroup and Merrill Lynch will
also be forced to take additional big write-downs on their mortgage
portfolios.
Meanwhile, General Motors, already reeling from a 28 percent plunge in
the pace of auto and truck sales, now confronts the fact that it won't
get any help this time from GMAC, its once highly profitable finance
arm, which is reeling from an increase in delinquencies on home and auto
loans. With the carmaker hemorrhaging cash, whispers of a possible
default sent the price of insuring GM bonds soaring on the credit
default market.
You know things are bad when middle-class Americans have to give up
their boats and Brunswick, the nation's biggest maker of powerboats, is
forced to close 10 plants and lay off 2,700 workers.
For much of the year, optimists took comfort in the continuing strength
of the technology sector and exports to fast-growing countries around
the world. But even those bright spots have dimmed.
Tech stocks got hammered yesterday after software maker Oracle and
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion warned that the pace of corporate
orders had slowed.
And both India and China raised interest rates and bank reserves sharply
in an effort to tame inflation and slow their overheated economies, even
as the air continued to rush out of their real estate and stock market
bubbles.
Like the rain-swollen waters of the Mississippi River, this sudden surge
of downbeat news has now overflowed the banks of economic policy and
broken through the levees of consumer and investor confidence. At this
point, there's not much to do but flee to safety, rescue those in
trouble and let nature take its course. And don't let anyone fool you:
It will be a while before things return to normal.
Steven Pearlstein can be reached at pearlsteins@washpost.com.
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8) Save Our Kids From JROTC
By Michael Wong
June 16, 2008
http://www.asianweek.com/2008/06/29/letters-to-the-editor-flip-flopping-on-obama-save-our-kids-from-jrotc/#
About 30 to 50 percent of JROTC students enter into the military, according to testimony given to Congress by the four chiefs of staff of the armed services — including General Eric Shinseki — in Feb. 2000 (“Save JROTC in the City’s Schools,” Voices From the Community, June 13). What does this mean in human terms?
Forty years ago, I graduated from Galileo High School as a 1st Lieutenant in Army JROTC. Of my five closest friends in JROTC — four of whom were Chinese and all of whom were either cadet officers or sergeants — four entered into the military after high school. Three went to Vietnam. One saw heavy combat and came back suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One was lucky enough to be stationed at a large base and saw occasional shelling but came back more or less O.K. One I never heard from again, and I don’t know if he’s even dead or alive. One never went to Vietnam and is O.K. The fifth friend tried to join the Army but was rejected because of a physical condition. I joined the Army only to learn first hand how much of what the JROTC taught us were lies, particularly about the role of America and the U.S. Army in the world, and what it means to be an American soldier. Out of the six of us, five ended up in the military — and the sixth would have if he could have. So don’t believe it when they tell you that JROTC “is not a recruiting program.”
What was my experience in JROTC? JROTC taught us to believe totally in the Army and our government; to obey authorities above us; and to admire the values and virtues of the combat infantryman. Military literature given to us said things such as, “The American fighting man is the best fighting man in the world!”; “Never give up!”; or “The mission of the infantry is to engage the enemy in ground combat and capture or destroy him!” Army training films instructed us in everything from military organization, small unit tactics and bayonet fighting to “citizenship” and “leadership,” as defined by the Army. I learned to handle weapons in JROTC and found it easy to disassemble an M1 rifle and put it back together blindfolded, or to do a bayonet-style lunge with a rifle at the throat of an imaginary enemy. Photos of soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets, tanks roaring across the ground, and soldiers charging out of a helicopter filled my mind. The pictures excited me. I wanted to be one of those soldiers. I wanted to join the Army right out of high school. This is what I learned from JROTC. So did my five friends.
What were the lies I learned about in the real Army? I learned from fellow soldiers returning from Vietnam that the My Lai massacre — where an American Army platoon murdered 500 Vietnamese civilians — was just the tip of the iceberg, and that such war crimes were mostly unreported, widespread and driven by policy, not just “a few bad apples.” I learned how our government lied to set up the South Vietnamese government and the war, and how our war there was illegal under international law and immoral. This was documented by our own government in the Pentagon Papers, released by Daniel Ellsberg.
Soldiers returning from Iraq today are now telling us that Haditha and Abu Ghraib are likewise just the tip of the iceberg and also driven by policy, not individual soldiers. And we all know about the lies of Saddam links to 9/11 and WMD that George Bush used to invade Iraq. One simply has to go to the Iraq Veterans Against the War website (http://ivaw.org/) to read many accounts, particularly in their “Winter Soldier Investigation.”
JROTC fills youths’ minds with pictures of heroic military images, excites the blood and thus recruits young people with false images of war and “loyalty” to country. Yes, the majority of JROTC may be Asian; it certainly was in my time, too. But that just means our minority group gets majority brainwashing and exploitation, big time. Would you support a form of exploitation of Asians? Not if you recognized it for what it is. Our youth, Asian or not, should never be used as cannon fodder for Bush and Cheney’s rich friends and the big oil and arms industries that are profiting from the Iraq war. Is this what we want our children to die for?
As for JROTC teaching leadership, well…O.K., I am now a leader in the peace
movement. But I have met many movement leaders who have never been in JROTC or
the military, and they are as good or better activists than me. There’s a lot of better places to learn leadership and discipline. Don’t fall for exploitation to learn it. We must stop JROTC now.
Michael Wong
San Francisco, Calif., June 14
[If anyone is in doubt about the military influence in JROTC just check these articles out:
JROTC Cadets Ship Out For Summer Camp
KHTS Radio, CA -Jun 24, 2008
http://www.hometownstation.com/local-news/jrotc-valencia-high-2008-06-24-10-59-2.html
Camp San Luis Obispo, CA
"LCPL Daniel Jones, 21, (class of 2004) is with the 23rd Marines, 4th Infantry Division and scheduled to deploy to Iraq in 2009. He spent 4 years in the JROTC program and was group commander his senior year. He has been an advisor in each of the summer camps since graduating high school."
Robins hosts Junior ROTC camp
Macon Telegraph, GA - Jun 13, 2008
http://www.macon.com/403/gallery/377900.html
Robins Air Force Base, GA
"Robins has been hosting Junior ROTC cadets this week from a number of local high schools, offering them a taste of military life."
Students partake in JROTC
Winston County Journal, MS - Jun 25, 2008
http://www.winstoncountyjournal.com/articles/2008/06/25/news/news07.txt
Camp Shelby, MS
JROTC to learn skills at Camp Williams
Daily Herald, UT - Jun 9, 2008
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/269365/
http://www.sltrib.com/davis/ci_9636040
Camp Williams, UT
"This is the first summer camp after a one-year hiatus. Last year the Army cut funding, and the camp, which is mostly free for the students, couldn't function. Workman said the funding was reinstated they saw the need for the program."
Students join camp
Malvern Daily Record, AR - Jun 10, 2008
http://www.malvern-online.com/content/view/100238/1/
Camp Clark, MO
"For the fifth time, approximately 800 JROTC students representing high schools from Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas and Oklahoma will participate in an adventure training camp at Camp Clark."
JROTC cadets participate in training camp
Huntington Herald Dispatch, WV - Jun 26, 2008
http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/x2102938663/JROTC-cadets-participate-in-training-camp
Ft. Knox, KY "home to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command" (http://www.knox.army.mil/)
"Cadet Cody Walls, 16, admitted to being nervous on the first day, but said on the bus ride to the first training obstacle everyone was encouraging each other."
Fort Gordon Hosts Camp Semaphore
WJBF-TV, GA - Jun 3, 2008
http://www.wjbf.com/midatlantic/jbf/news_index.apx.-content-articles-JBF-2008-06-03-0050.html
Ft Gordon, GA
Hello,
I just came across a June 26 article titled "JROTC cadets participate in training camp" from the Harald Dispatch of Huntington, W.VA. In summary, 169 students from 18 high schools with 40 instructors and chaperons attended the camp at Ft. Knox, KY last week.
Ft. Knox, KY is an Army base. In fact, it is the "home of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command" as is stated the first line of Ft. Knox's web site, "Welcome to Fort Knox, home of the Army Armor Center and home to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command."
http://www.knox.army.mil/
It is ludicrous that JROTC proponents continue to claim that
the program is not a military recruiting vehicle when it so clearly is.
Here is a link to the article that has a picture of some of the kids dressed in fatigues at the training camp at Ft. Knox.
http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/x2102938663/JROTC-cadets-participate-in-training-camp
Jon
--Thanks to Jon for sending these links...BW)
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9) Iraq to Open Oil Fields for 35 Foreign Companies; Initial No-Bid Contracts Delayed
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW E. KRAMER
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD — Iraq announced Monday that it was opening six key oil production fields to more than 30 foreign companies, while delaying an announcement on a series of no-bid consulting contracts with a handful of Western oil companies.
Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, speaking at a news conference here, said Iraq would begin taking bids later this year for longer-term contracts on six of its oil fields. Thirty-five foreign companies have qualified to participate. Winners will be announced in 2009, Mr. Shahristani said.
Iraq hopes to almost double its production, to 4.5 million barrels of oil a day over the next five years from the current 2.5 million barrels, Mr. Shahristani said. The contracts are aimed at helping the country do that.
Iraq had been expected on Monday to issue its first contracts to foreign oil companies that would provide technical support and help raise Iraqi oil production ahead of awarding lucrative long-tern contracts.
Those initial short-term contracts, with Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP and Chevron, are still under negotiation, a person close to the talks said, and will probably be completed in the next month.
The reason for the delay was unclear.
Chevron said in a statement that it was “continuing to negotiate” with the Oil Ministry on the short-term technical contract on an oil field called West Qurna, which is currently producing.
“The ministry has separately announced a tender for full field development and Chevron has been prequalified to participate in that bid round,” the company said.
Mr. Shahristani defended the way Iraq has handled the oil contracts, which have led to criticism in the Arab world and abroad, where suspicions run rampant that the United States-led invasion was at least partly about access to Iraq’s oil.
The initial contracts are expected to be awarded without competitive bidding, but Mr. Shahristani told the news conference, “There will be no privilege for any of those companies to participate in future contracts.”
Bloomberg News quoted the chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, as saying at the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid that the company expected to sign oil agreements with Iraq in “a matter of weeks.”
A major legal question hangs over the process: Iraq has yet to pass a law that divides oil revenue among all parts of the country.
Iraq has some of the largest oil reserves on earth, but they are largely untapped because the country has long lacked the resources to develop them. The companies will provide equipment and expertise to refurbish the country’s aging infrastructure.
The six fields “are producing now, but there is a need for development because they were established years ago,” Mr. Shahristani said.
Iraqis interviewed on Monday said profit from oil was the business of the country’s most powerful politicians, as well as the United States, and ordinary people got little benefit from it
“The income won’t come to me,” said Abu Riyam, a 42-year-old engineer who was shoe shopping with a relative in central Baghdad. “They won’t build houses or hospitals with it.”
Despite Iraqi skepticism, oil accounts for nearly all of Iraq’s revenue, and provides salaries for public sector employees as well as financing for most public works projects.
Other Iraqis were more hopeful.
“American technology is the best in the world,” said Salah Mahmood, a 45-year-old cab driver in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and the center of oil production for the country. “Why would we reject these contracts?”
Also on Monday, a spate of violence against judges escalated sharply. Bombs exploded in front of the houses of four judges from the Court of Appeals in largely-Shiite eastern Baghdad, a spokesman for the court said.
A fifth judge discovered a bomb in his car as he was leaving the same court Monday afternoon. An Interior Ministry spokesman said the bomb exploded and the judge, Hassan Fuad, was wounded.
The attacks seemed to be calculated to intimidate rather than to kill. It was not clear who was responsible.
“This is an attack to destroy the state itself,” said Wail Abdul Latif, a member of Parliament who worked as a judge for decades. “These judges were far from sectarianism and politics.”
In addition, bombs exploded in Mosul, in northern Iraq, and near a police station in a town called Mandli in Diyala Province in eastern Iraq, killing two and wounding more than 20, the authorities said.
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow. Reporting was contributed by Riyadh Muhammad, Mudhafer al-Husaini and Mohammed Hussein from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Basra, Mosul, Baquba and Diwaniya.
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10) Court Dismisses Rendition Suit
By ALAN FEUER
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/world/americas/01arar.html?ref=world
A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Syrian-born Canadian man who had accused the United States of violating the law and his civil rights after he was detained at Kennedy Airport and sent to Syria under what he claims was an act of “extraordinary rendition.”
The man, Maher Arar, tried to win civil damages from United States officials in his suit, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled that because he was never technically inside the United States, his claims could not be heard in the federal courts.
While stating that “threats to the nation’s security do not allow us to jettison principles of ‘simple justice and fair dealing,’ ” the majority opinion ruled nonetheless that Mr. Arar, who had been seized as he tried to change planes at Kennedy Airport while flying back to Canada from Switzerland, had no federal standing in his case and that the government did not violate the Torture Victim Protection Act by sending him abroad.
Mr. Arar, a telecommunications engineer, was detained at the airport in September 2002 when immigration officers found his name on a terrorist watch list. After being held for several days in New York, he was sent to Jordan by immigration officers and turned over to Syrian intelligence, which, he claims, tortured him.
In an occasionally scathing dissent, one judge, Robert D. Sack, said Mr. Arar’s suit should have been able to proceed because the argument that he was never really in the United States was “a legal fiction.”
“Arar was, in effect, abducted while attempting to transit at J.F.K. Airport,” Judge Sack wrote.
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11) Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/washington/01gitmo.html?ref=world
In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.
The release on Monday of the unclassified parts of the decision followed a brief court notice last week. The notice said a classified decision had directed the government to release Mr. Parhat, transfer him to another country or conduct a new military hearing at Guantánamo to determine if he had been properly classified as an enemy combatant.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.
Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.
American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them.
Detainees’ lawyers said the ruling in the case of Mr. Parhat, who says he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to escape China, could broadly affect other detainees because of its skeptical view of the government’s evidence.
A lawyer representing other detainees, Marc D. Falkoff, said the evidence against many of the 270 men now at Guantánamo was similar to that in the Parhat case.
“This opinion shows that the government is going to have a hard time defending the military’s decision to detain many of these men,” said Mr. Falkoff, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law.
Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The ruling released Monday overturned the Pentagon’s finding after a 2004 hearing that Mr. Parhat was an enemy combatant based on that affiliation. He and the 16 other Uighurs were detained after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.
“Those bare facts,” the decision said, “cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.”
Some lawyers said the ruling highlighted the difficulties they saw in civilian judges reviewing Guantánamo cases.
“This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making,” said Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy and a national security fellow at Harvard.
The appellate panel reviewed Mr. Parhat’s case under a limited procedure Congress provided for challenging military hearings at Guantánamo. The case was argued before the Supreme Court’s decision on June 12 that detainees have a constitutional right to seek release in more expansive habeas corpus proceedings.
The 17 Uighurs now held at Guantánamo say they are allies, not enemies, of the United States.
The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.
The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The decision was written by Judge Merrick B. Garland, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. It was joined by Chief Judge Sentelle, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a 2005 appointee of President Bush.
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12) Budget Pain Hits States, With Relief Not in Sight
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/us/01taxes.html?ref=us
Squeezed by high inflation, dwindling tax revenues and a national economic downturn, states from coast to coast have struggled to close yawning budget gaps while bracing for another difficult fiscal year, which in most states begins Tuesday.
State tax revenues, adjusted for inflation and tax cuts, fell 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the same time a year ago, according to a report to be released Tuesday; it was the third quarter in a row that total adjusted revenue declined. The first quarter revenues were the weakest among states since early 2003.
Sales tax revenues, the beating heart of many budgets, were essentially flat for the first time in six years. Corporate income taxes declined 5.1 percent from January to March compared with the same period the previous year — the third straight quarterly decline. And 12 states showed a falling off in personal income taxes, though revenue from those taxes rose 4.4 percent nationwide.
Continued weakness in the national economy dims prospects for states in the near future, according to the authors of the report, by the Nelson A Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, which tracks state revenues.
“There are signs that the economic weakness is very widespread,” said Don Boyd, a senior fellow at the institute’s fiscal studies program. “Between this past May and three months prior, a lot more states were declining, and we have not caught up with them in the data yet.
“Many more states,” Mr. Boyd continued, “are having outright declines in their economies, and that is presumably a harbinger of budget problems.”
Many state legislatures have been embroiled in pitched budget battles, with education, social services and fees in the crosshairs.
The states with the biggest budget troubles are those where the nation’s mortgage crisis has hit the hardest.
Among them is California, which faces a $17 billion shortfall. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to borrow against future proceeds from the state’s lottery program to shore up finances. Mr. Schwarzenegger is battling both fellow Republicans, who would like to see more spending cuts, and Democrats, who are seeking to protect education and social services.
In Nevada, where the Legislature is not officially in session, Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, called last week for state agencies to cut their budgets by 4 percent on top of $914 million in previous cuts in the current two-year budget cycle — all toward closing a $275 million deficit. Layoffs are also expected.
“Revenues continue to decline,” Mr. Gibbons said in a televised address, adding that for “the first time in at least the past 30 years, the state will take in less revenue this year than it did last year.”
The Arizona Legislature struggled to end its session as lawmakers wrangled over how to pay for capital improvement projects with a $2.2 billion budget gap that was enormous in proportion to the state’s $9.9 billion spending plan.
States in the Southeast also felt a tremendous pinch. Sales tax revenues declined on average 3.8 percent in the region, which had 9 of the 23 states that posted such declines, according to the Rockefeller report.
For example, Kentucky has endured one of the largest budget problems in its history, and faces a $900 million budget gap over its next two fiscal years. While the Medicaid, K-to-12 education and corrections programs enjoyed modest increases, the majority of other agencies were forced to cut by 12 percent, said Mary Lassiter, the state’s budget director.
Ms. Lassiter said the state was unable to keep up with expenditures that began during the good times a few years back and, as the Rockefeller report cited for other states, inflation, particularly in gasoline prices, further hampered the budget.
“The same dollar is not buying as much, especially in the fuel area,” she said. “Many of our agencies have large transportation costs.”
Tennessee dealt with its woes by offering a voluntary buyout package that it hopes will yield 2,000 fewer state jobs. April was the worst month on record for revenue growth in the state.
Unlike other economic downturns, when states were hurt by faltering corporate and personal income tax revenue, problems this time appear to be led by declines in sales taxes, prompted in large part by the issues with the housing market.
This has been particularly painful for states like Florida and Tennessee that have no personal income tax and rely on people buying things.
“We saw a problem with the sales taxes, and it just got worse,” said Lola Potter, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration. “Most people would agree that consumer confidence was down a bit. If they’re not buying, we’re not collecting the sales tax.”
Other states, like California, have looked to their lotteries for revenue growth or borrowing; some, including New York, raised the tax on cigarettes. Many continued to be constrained by high Medicaid costs, even as they sought to increase access to health insurance.
Acrimony between the governor and the legislature has marked the budget processes in some states. In other places, though, elected officials have hunkered down to undertake the grim task of cutting.
“This was one of the smoothest sessions I have ever been part of,” said Ken Pruitt, the president of the Florida Senate, where $6 billion in cuts were needed to compensate for the hammered housing market. “And a lot of that had to do with the cold hard reality of a tanking economy.”
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13) Fending Off Pot Smokers on Gay Street
By Corey Kilgannon
July 1, 2008, 12:58 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/fending-off-pot-smokers-on-gay-street/
“See, it looks like the safest street in the city, but it’s actually the most dangerous if you happen to be smoking a joint.”
This is how Randy Credico sums up Gay Street, a quiet, one-block lane in Greenwich Village connecting Waverly and Christopher Street. People out for an evening in the Village often use the darkened block as a spot to surreptitiously smoke marijuana, he says, but the illusion of privacy is shattered by sirens and the swooping down of police officers.
Mr. Credico, 50, a stand-up comic and drug-law reform activist, says he has been warning people constantly, and that the police in the area have in turn warned him that he is interfering in their arrests.
“The cops are always making arrests here, and so I tell people not to light up, that they’re going to get busted,” he said. “Since when is it a crime to tell people, ‘Listen, don’t break the law.’”
On June 12, Mr. Credico had his own run-in with officers, after berating police officers making a pot arrest on Gay Street. According to the police, Mr. Credico used obscenities and yelled that that they should be “solving murders,” not making marijuana arrests. He was handcuffed and charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct and spent a night in the Manhattan Detention Complex, known as the Tombs. Mr. Credico called the arrest retaliation for his practice of warning pot smokers.
Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Credico is “free to lobby for the legalization if he’s so inclined, but he may not interfere with police.”
At any rate, the arrest seems like the perfect culmination of Mr. Credico’s long crusade against Rockefeller drug laws in New York State, which are among the harshest in the nation, and he has been a longtime advocate for inmates serving sentences under them. He lives at 13 Gay Street, which was once the home of the late radical lawyer William Kunstler and is now the headquarters for the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, a legal aid service which Mr. Credico helps run, along with Mr. Kunstler’s widow, Margaret.
Mr. Credico said he generally supports the police, but he sees arrests for small amounts of marijuana as a waste of their resources. He said he has begun documenting what he sees as a misguided policy of drug enforcement, by taking photographs of plainclothes detectives arresting people for smoking or possessing marijuana. And he lurks outside city courthouses at lunchtime to try to take pictures of judges, prosecutors and detectives bringing in marijuana arrests. He plans to use the pictures to illustrate a comprehensive study to be posted online to prove his claim that the justice system is unfair, especially to people of color.
Much of Mr. Credico’s stand-up routine consists of his drug-law gripes. He says Mr. Kunstler taught him that publicity is perhaps his strongest weapon. Mr. Crecido made headlines in October when he offered $25,000 of his own money to bail out Shawn Kovell, who was arrested on cocaine charges along with her boyfriend, Robert Chambers, “the preppy killer” who pleaded guilty to strangling Jennifer Levin during rough sex in Central Park two decades ago.
On Monday, Mr. Credico stood outside the courthouse at 100 Centre Street, dressed in jeans and a blazer and tie, he smoked a cigar and wielded a point-and-shoot camera. He paced in front of the courthouse, scouring the people walking out. The judges he could recognize from sitting in their courtrooms while they heard cases, he said. The prosecutors he could recognize because of their suits (and other attributes which he considers less unflattering). He also looked for detectives walking in people in handcuffs.
“Pretty easy to spot,” he said. “The cops are usually white and the perps are almost always people of color. They get them on measly, harmless marijuana arrests, which is the fuel they use to keep this factory of a criminal justice system going.”
He had an acquaintance nearby with a video camera to document things in case he got arrested again, he said.
Mr. Credico’s father served time in jail for safe-cracking and later owned nightclubs in California, where Mr. Credico grew up and began doing comedy and cocaine in back rooms with other entertainers. His played the circuit in Las Vegas and performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” at age 27. He was the subject of a documentary called “60 Spins Around the Sun,” financed by Jack Black, and was featured alongside Russell Simmons in “Lockdown, USA,” a documentary about the Rockefeller drug laws. He is the house comedian on the Albany radio show of Fred Dicker, a veteran New York Post reporter.
He jokes onstage that “Bloomberg” is Yiddish for “Giuliani,” and that narcotics agents in the city are truly undercover because “they leave their white sheets and hoods back on Long Island.”
Mr. Credico said his viewpoints were fostered by being around Mr. Kunstler, who remains his hero and is memorialized inside 13 Gay Street by photographs on the wall, along with images of other counterculture icons like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.
Mr. Credico met Mr. Kunstler, when an old sweetheart, the entertainer Joey Heatherton, faced criminal charges and needed a lawyer. Mr. Credico looked up Mr. Kunstler, who took the case pro bono and took on Mr. Credico as a friend.
As Mr. Credico sat in the Kunstler house explaining all this last Monday, the phone rang. He answered. It was an inmate with a drug case.
“Kunstler Fund.”
“Wait, where are you? Rikers?”
“So, it wasn’t yours? Why did you plead out? Oh, so you took the rap for your father then – I see. Yeah, I agree: A year and a half seems like a long sentence for a dime bag.”
“Listen, write your whole story up for me in a letter and send it to me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Mr. Credico said that while spending his night in jail recently, most of the other detainees he spoke to said they had been arrested on marijuana charges. He said he turned down a settlement offer in his case — one day of community service — because he wants to bring the case to trial for the publicity – representing himself, of course.
In the meantime, he said, he would continue to take pictures of undercover police arresting pot smokers, and warning people about smoking pot on Gay Street.
“Listen, I don’t want people committing crimes on my street and I tell them not to,” Mr. Credico explained.
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14) Union Fears the Loss of High Pay and Solid Benefits, Once Virtual Givens at Con Ed
By KEN BELSON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
"'The union was really taking care of us at the time,” said Mr. Cobert, now 86. 'Prices were going up, and the union always thought you had to do better than in the previous contract. When the union got going and started pushing hard on things, the threat of a strike was always there.'”
July 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01coned.html?ref=nyregion
Last year, Con Edison officials said, the company sifted through 68,000 job applications to hire 1,314 new workers. So far in 2008, the utility has picked up 528 new people from a pool of 26,000. The deluge of applicants for what has long been seen as a blue-collar ticket to a middle-class life led Louis L. Rana, president of Consolidated Edison of New York Inc., to remark over the weekend that his company was harder to get into than Harvard.
Now, the solid wages and benefits that for decades have led Irish- and Italian-American men to follow their fathers and grandfathers into manholes, bucket trucks and substations are under threat, as the utility and the union that represents 8,800 of its nearly 14,000 workers try to hammer out a new four-year contract. The most recent pact expired on Sunday morning, with the union angry over what it described as the company’s proposal for a 1.5 percent annual wage increase — short of the 4.2 percent inflation rate — and a 401(k)-style savings plan, rather than the traditional pension, for new workers. The union, Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America, represents almost two-thirds of Con Edison’s employees.
“When I started, Con Ed was a very good company with great benefits, job security,” said Ken Burns, 46, a splicer who works in the Bronx and has 22 years with the company, where his grandfather spent his working life. “But with each contract, our benefits have decreased.”
Like other Con Edison workers interviewed on Monday, Mr. Burns said he liked his job and was treated well. But with gas prices rising, he said he had been spending $120 a week lately to get to work from his home in Stroudsburg, Pa., where he moved because he said it was the closest place he could find something affordable. And he noted that splicers risk serious injury handling high-voltage lines and must work in extreme heat and cold.
The slowing economy and the increase in prices of everyday goods make the prospect of going on strike unappealing to many workers. At the same time, the union has some leverage, because fast-growing parts of the country have a shortage of utility workers and are offering higher wages with lower costs of living.
Talks are scheduled to reconvene Tuesday at 9 a.m.
Wages at Con Edison appear to be healthy for workers without college diplomas, with a general utility worker, the equivalent of an Army private, earning $15.20 an hour to start and topping out at $25.35, which translates into about $52,000 a year for a full-time worker. Meter readers can earn as much as $31.92, mechanics up to $36.33, though it may take them nearly 20 years to reach that level. Splicers like Mr. Burns can earn more than $38 an hour.
As the power industry was deregulated over the past decade, Con Edison, like other utilities, has been under pressure from shareholders and customers to keep labor costs down, eroding some of the benefits that drew workers to the utility.
“I know the company needs to pay for increased prices of fuel, et cetera, but I feel the company is trying to take advantage of the situation,” said Winston Krieger, 49, who lives in Hicksville, N.Y., and has been a welding mechanic at the utility for 20 years. “They’re going backwards. If they give us this this time, what will they do next time?”
Paul Albano, a mechanic in transformer operations for 21 years, said that he started putting money aside as a precaution about a month ago, when the possibility of a strike began to seem real. “It’s hard on me, as well as everyone else,” said Mr. Albano, 45, who supports an ill wife on his wages and has six children. “There are a lot of young people working here with children and older folks with health issues.”
Con Edison executives declined to discuss the tenor or details of the contract negotiations.
With electricity demand in New York City having grown 20 percent in the last decade and baby boomers retiring, Con Edison has been hiring aggressively, and more than a third of the utility’s current work force has less than five years’ experience. That has created a rift between older workers who are trying to protect what they have fought for and younger workers not wanting to jeopardize their standing in the company.
While Irish and Italian men long dominated both the rank and file and the union leadership, more than half of the people hired in the past two years have been minorities, company officials said, and one in five were women.
Union officials contend the company is trying to drive a wedge between the generations with the two-tiered pension plan.
“The men are nervous,” said Joseph Tusa, 57, who has worked for 38 years at Con Edison as an underground transmission mechanic, as he left the utility’s substation in Astoria, Queens, on Monday. “They don’t have confidence in the future. They are worried about who is going to get the money in the future. It’s a trap for down the road.”
Ed Ott, the executive director of New York City Central Labor Council, said of the union workers: “They’ve obtained a certain level of benefits, health care and raises that anyone would be glad to have, and they’re fighting to keep what they gained.”
Local 1-2 began representing Con Edison’s workers in 1937, the year after the Public Service Commission approved a merger of several utility companies.
According to one history, those smaller, individual utilities had what were known as company unions, which management had helped set up. Once Con Edison was formed, the workers moved quickly to leave those organizations and join the feisty Utility Workers Union.
Through a series of contract battles during the late 1930s and ’40s, the union, part of the often-militant Congress of Industrial Organizations, obtained a coveted compensation package for Con Edison workers.
“It was a union where you get out of high school, you get a job and because of that union, you get a good life,” said Joshua B. Freeman, a historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of “Working-Class New York.”
Joseph Cobert went to work at Con Edison in 1948, after serving on the Intrepid during World War II, and spent 58 years as a utility mechanic, returning home every day covered with coal dust.
“The union was really taking care of us at the time,” said Mr. Cobert, now 86. “Prices were going up, and the union always thought you had to do better than in the previous contract. When the union got going and started pushing hard on things, the threat of a strike was always there.”
Sushil Cheema, Ann Farmer and Jason Grant contributed reporting.
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15) EXPOSÉ and THE JOURNAL go inside America's poultry industry, which employs almost a quarter million workers nationwide, to show the reality of working conditions and to investigate how official statistics showing a drop in workplace injuries may have been the result of deceptive reporting.
Bill Moyers Journal
June 27, 2008
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch2.html
BILL MOYERS: As Senator Boxer dukes it out over the health and safety of the planet, other hearings in Congress are looking at health and safety in the workplace.
GEORGE MILLER: That you will tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth…
BILL MOYERS: Just last week, the House Committee on Education and Labor heard some disturbing testimony about the reliability of the government agency charged with protecting workers on the job.
BOB WHITMORE: The mission of OSHA is to take care of American Workers. If OSHA can't or won't do its job, it's up to you all to make it do the job.
BILL MOYERS: That's Bob Whitmore, a longtime civil servant at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - or OSHA. And that's his lawyer sitting behind him. Whitmore's been placed on administrative leave, and he's testifying as a private citizen despite his two decades of expertise overseeing the agency's injury and illness records.
BOB WHITMORE: Information is inaccurate to impart to wide-scale underreporting
BILL MOYERS: As you'll see, Whitmore has a record of challenging the credibility of reports companies are required to provide OSHA about injuries and illnesses workers suffer on the job. The Chairman of the Committee, Representative George Miller of California, had some strong remarks about OSHA's performance.
GEORGE MILLER: OSHA refuses to recognize that the problem exists. We simply must not allow the lack of information to allow hazardous conditions to exist, putting workers lives and limbs at risk.
BILL MOYERS: Businesses, on the other hand, say the requirements are cumbersome, and have long pressured the agency for weaker standards of regulation.
The pressure's paid off. THE NEW YORK TIMES' Stephen Labaton reported last year that since George W. Bush became president, the agency has left worker safety largely in the hands of industry, and has issued the fewest significant standards in its history.
Then, last February, came another strong indictment. THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER published an investigative series on how and why OSHA has let companies in the poultry industry get away with reporting inaccurate information about injured workers. As often happens in journalism, The OBSERVER reporters were in pursuit of one story when an unexpected lead sent them on to something bigger. What happened is the subject of this report from our colleagues at Exposé. Sylvia Chase narrates.
NARRATOR: In the fall of 2005, reporters at THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER were hard at work researching and reporting a story that gripped the nation: the avian flu.
For much of the media, the story was an end in itself. For the OBSERVER, it was only the beginning.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: The workers would tell me, if if there is avian flu here in this plant, we're going to get it. But we really have much more serious problems right here, right now.
The problems the workers described were not about disease…they were about on-the-job injuries.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: They're cutting thousands of thousands of times without breaks, you know, developing tendonitis problem, hand problems, wrist problems, uh, shoulder and back problems; a lot of workers having carpal tunnel and not being able to get medical care, because every time they go to the nurse to say, hey, I'm in pain, they either get written up or told that they're not being -- they're not hurting from this job and it's something else.
NARRATOR: The poultry industry employs about 28,000 workers in the Carolinas and about 240,000 nationwide. Its production lines move at a relentless pace, meeting the enormous demand for America's most popular meat.
AMES ALEXANDER: Workers are making 20,000 cuts a day, highly prone to repetitive motion kinds of problems like carpal tunnel. They're working with sharp knives, around dangerous chemicals and equipment.
KERRY HALL: We started to wonder who was looking out for the workers. They really seemed to be kind of on their own. What really is happening behind these factory walls?
MITCH WEISS: I said, "let's do this;" we know from, from our initial research that there are poultry plants in 27 states. Why don't we start filing Freedom of Information Act requests with all the agencies out there that deal with the poultry industry.
KERRY HALL: I ended up sending more than 50 FOIAs to agencies in 27 states requesting more than 800 inspection files.
NARRATOR: While waiting for the FOIA requests to be filled, THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER's Kerry Hall and Ames Alexander researched publicly available Bureau of Labor Statistics about safety in poultry plants. They were surprised by what they found.
AMES ALEXANDER: What we saw is that according to the official records, the injury and illness rates in the poultry industry had declined immensely over the last decade, by more than half.
NARRATOR: Especially surprising were statistics saying that incidents of certain painful and debilitating injuries like carpal tunnel and tendonitis had gone down even more. Poultry workers suffered these conditions less than 25% as often as they had ten years ago.
These muscoloskeletal disorders - or "MSD's," as they are known --are common in jobs where workers perform repetitive motions. But by 2006, the statistics suggested it had become harder to get an MSD working in a poultry plant…than in a toy store. Intrigued, the OBSERVER reporters began questioning sources knowledgeable about industry conditions. They included labor attorneys, experts in workplace safety, regulators and physicians.
AMES ALEXANDER: And a lot of the experts we began talking to said that these official numbers just couldn't possibly be right, because this was a very dangerous industry.
NARRATOR: One example: Dr. Jorge Garcia, who practiced in rural South Carolina. He told the paper he had seen about 1000 poultry workers in the past seven years. He said, "I don't know a single worker who doesn't have some sort of pain in their hand."
NARRATOR: Soon, data from the reporters' freedom of information requests began to trickle in.
KERRY HALL: Here actually is some of our FOIA requests and FOIA responses. Letters from all the agencies: Indiana, Texas, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania.
NARRATOR: The documents included not only plant inspection reports but also injury logs from the occupational safety and health administration…OSHA.
KERRY HALL: OSHA regulates poultry plants based off of these self-reported injury and illness rates. If you have a high injury and illness rate you'll get targeted possibly for an inspection. If you post a low rate, you can fall off the radar screen completely.
NARRATOR: While the documents showed some gruesome injuries, even deaths, there was nothing to contradict the statistics that said injury rates were way down.
But in comments that OSHA inspectors included in their reports, there were clues that something might be amiss.
AMES ALEXANDER: Inspectors were finding cases where injuries weren't showing up on the official records for one reason or another. There were, there were, uh, workers who said, you know, uh, "People get hurt all the time, but they're afraid to report."
NARRATOR: "Afraid," the paper would learn, because most line workers in poultry plants are immigrants, concerned they might be fired if they complain.
And many, though not all, are undocumented, and also fear deportation.
NARRATOR: Now Spanish-speaking reporter Franco Ordoñez went to see if some Latino immigrant workers might be willing to speak up.
Some did talk.
Celia Lopez had carpal tunnel;
Karina Zorita's hand pain made it hard to bend her fingers…or hold things.
Seferino Guadalupe shattered his ankle in a forklift accident.
It was put back together with screws.
And there was much more: punctures, fractures, chemical burns, and laceration after laceration.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: these communities are just filled with injured workers. I mean, this -- these plants are just, you know, just shredding them out.
NARRATOR: Ordonez also learned of workers who had not only been injured…but claimed to have been coerced into staying at work once they were.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: Jaime Hernandez was probably the most difficult to track down. We were looking for him for about three weeks to a month. Jaime Hernandez: My job focused on the meat, getting it off the bone, at first grab it and cut it, that is piece after piece after piece.
JAIME HERNANDEZ: Because of the pain and such, I got these little balls in my hand. I had surgery, and after that, I asked if I could go home to rest. And they said no, that I needed to be at work, even if I didn't do anything, just sitting in the office. And I said, but I don't feel well, I'm dizzy, it hurts, things like that. They said you have to be at the plant so they can pay you, because if you aren't, you can lose your job.
NARRATOR: Hernandez told Franco Ordonez a supervisor drove him back to work right after his surgery. The OBSERVER learned why a company might do that.
Patrick Scott: having no days away from work is the single biggest factor in determining worker's compensation costs for a factory.
NARRATOR: Consultants who advise companies on workers compensation told the OBSERVER if injured workers return quickly, a company can save money in workers comp costs.
A quick return also means the company won't have to report what OSHA calls a lost-time injury - reducing the chance that regulators will inspect the plant.
Jaime Hernandez worked for a company called House of Raeford Farms. The company would tell the OBSERVER that the paper's account of what happened to Hernandez was inaccurate…but that it couldn't discuss why because its personnel records are confidential.
House of Raeford is one of the nation's top ten poultry producers, employing about 6,000 people in seven plants in the Carolinas and one in Louisiana.
The company slaughters and processes about 29 million pounds of chicken and turkey each week.
Kerry Hall and OBSERVER photographer John Simmons were granted access to House of Raeford's West Columbia, South Carolina plant…where they got a firsthand glimpse of working conditions.
JOHN SIMMONS: The start of, uh, the whole process is in the live hang room. Where all the employee stands behind the line, uh, that -where live chickens are fed up a conveyer belt, and they're moving around; they're squawking and-and, uh, cackling. And, uh, the people are grabbing them, these large birds -- at least 5, maybe 7 lbs, and they're hanging them upside down by their -- by their feet in the, uh, stirrups as they go by.
JOHN SIMMONS: Uh, there's an animal feces smell from the, uh, from the chickens. Um, and just the animal smell itself. They're doing hundreds and hundreds of birds per shift, if not thousands.
JOHN SIMMONS: And they're constantly working to sharpen the knife - and immediately going back and cutting the bird.
KERRY HALL: I could see these people really literally standing shoulder to shoulder just having to do this work over and over again, and kind of the relentlessness of it.
NARRATOR: Kerry Hall had learned a remarkable fact about the West Columbia plant. It had gone four straight years without reporting a single case of a musculoskeletal disorder.
Experts told her zero MSD's were inconceivable in a place where jobs require so much repetitive motion.
Something went wrong here
At another House of Raeford plant -- this one is in Greenville, South Carolina, and known as "Columbia Farms" -- Franco Ordonez and Ames Alexander interviewed the safety director, Bill Lewis.
He told the reporters that Columbia Farms had a streak of seven million safe hours. He said -- quote -- "we come to work with five fingers and toes, and we go home with the same thing we came in with."
AMES ALEXANDER: You know, after we got back from that interview, we started looking through the logs.
KERRY HALL: And noticed that there had been some pretty serious injuries that occurred during this time that there were seven million safe hours with no lost-time accidents.
NARRATOR: The logs the reporters were examining are known as 300 logs. They're required by OSHA and are intended to serve as an accounting of serious jobsite injuries and illnesses. Osha uses 300 logs to help determine how safe plants are, and whether or not they need inspection.
The reporters would use them to help determine whether or not the companies were under-reporting injuries.
But it was something the logs didn't contain that would help them answer a broader question: why did official statistics make the poultry industry seem so much safer than experts believed it could possibly be?
AMES ALEXANDER: There used to be a column on injury logs where companies were supposed to record all repetitive motion injuries. Uh, and this essentially gave OSHA inspectors a very quick idea of how common repetitive motion problems like carpal tunnel, like tendonitis, were. Uh, and then, uh, under pressure, uh, from the industry, OSHA removed that column.
NARRATOR: It was OSHA under the Bush administration that removed the column in 2002. The result, according to Ames Alexander?
AMES ALEXANDER: OSHA essentially made it easier for companies to hide these sort of repetitive motion injuries. One plant we looked at, uh, in 2001, it had 150 repetitive motion injuries. After they removed the column, they had fewer than 10.
NARRATOR: The Bush administration also repealed a collection of rules put in place at the end of the Clinton administration. The rules, which formed a national ergonomics standard, would have required employers to correct workplace conditions likely to cause repetitive-motion and other injuries.
Charles Jeffress, who headed OSHA from 1997 to 2001, told the OBSERVER that the effect of repealing the ergonomic standard and removing the column was to "turn a blind eye to a lot of what happens in poultry plants."
And one OSHA insider was even more blunt. Bob Whitmore - When you look at a log, it's supposed to tell us -- it is supposed to tell us what's going on in this workplace. You have to understand, it was always intended to be a surveillance tool.
NARRATOR: Bob Whitmore, for twenty years the OSHA official in charge of the agency's injury and illness records, agreed to act as an inside source for the OBSERVER.
BOB WHITMORE: We have so many workplaces to cover and so few people to cover them with. When we walk in, we want to see what's going on. It's like a Candid Camera. That's what it's supposed to be. It's not like that anymore; it's a report card. Problem is, the students are grading themselves.
NARRATOR: Other OSHA officials told the OBSERVER that poultry plants are safer than ever. They cited enforcement programs, a decade of declining reported-injury rates, and a growing recognition that reducing injuries is good for business.
NARRATOR: For Franco Ordonez, one woman's story crystalized the plight of immigrant poultry workers. Her name was Cornelia Vicente, and she worked at House of Raeford's Columbia Farms plant.
The OBSERVER found her name in the records of a workers compensation lawsuit. Now Ordonez went looking for her.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: I was able to find Cornelia through talking to enough workers, where eventually they'd point you to the right house.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: She slowly started to open up, uh, about what occurred to her. Um, and as she opened up and she, uh, started to explain what happened, she just started -- basically just everything started pouring out of her, uh, you know, all the-the anger, the sadness, the fear, um, everything that kind of was wrapped up in this experience of her working at that poultry plant.
KERRY HALL: She had been working on a conveyor belt. She was grabbing boxes. And she didn't want to get behind in her work so she tried to grab two boxes at the same time and her right arm ended up getting caught in the conveyor belt. It grabbed her arm, broke her arm and amputated the tip of her, uh, one of her fingers.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ: you know, she gets rushed to the -- to the hospital, uh, you know, she doesn't know what's going on…
KERRY HALL: While she was at the hospital she says the plant nurse came and visited with her and fed her but also told her that she was expected back for the next shift. Patrick Scott: So she wound up going to work and saying that she was -- wanted to go home. She had asked to go home, that she was crying at work because she couldn't deal with the pain of the physical loss of her finger and her broken arm and the pain of having your body altered.
NARRATOR: Jaime Hernandez worked at Columbia Farms. He saw Cornelia Vicente the day after her she returned to work. The next day when she got there she went around, trembling, sad, crying like she wasn't even there. She wasn't there. Physically yes, but in her thoughts no. She was out of it, gone. I felt like crying with her.
NARRATOR: The Columbia Farms log revealed that Vicente would spend over nine weeks on what it known as "job transfer," given tasks away from the conveyor belt.
KERRY HALL: She said at one point they asked her to sweep and she said it was -- she described it as an impossible task given her broken arm and the pain she was feeling.
NARRATOR: When the reporters compared Vicente's account of her injuries and her medical records with what House of Raeford Farms had reported to regulators they found the company had mentioned the broken arm…but not the amputation.
KERRY HALL: That wasn't noted on this.
NARRATOR: And, the OBSERVER would report, because Vicente didn't miss a complete shift, the accident wouldn't have to be counted as a lost-time injury.
KERRY HALL: She was on job transfer for 64 days. No days away from work.
NARRATOR: The paper would also report that House of Raeford refused to answer its questions about Cornelia Vicente.
In 2006 and 7, Ordonez, Hall and Alexander interviewed more than 200 current and former poultry workers from different companies, mostly in the Carolinas... Including about 120 from House of Raeford Farms.
Now, in March 2007, armed with numerous stories of underreporting of injuries -- and employees being pressured to work while injured -- Kerry Hall went to Washington to seek comment from the OSHA records expert, Bob Whitmore . Among other evidence, the reporters had compiled a list of injury rates reported by poultry companies in 2005.
KERRY HALL: When I was showing this to Bob...
AMES ALEXANDER: Uh-huh.
KERRY HALL: He was looking through this and he would see these zeroes, these zero injury and illness rates, and he just started getting fired up. He would just start saying, "I can't believe that, I can't believe that's there."
NARRATOR: Kerry Hall also shared evidence of 41 House of Raeford injuries that the team learned of in a sampling of workers who lived near the company's plants.
BOB WHITMORE: As Kerry and I went through some of the descriptions of injuries that she was finding out about, I decided at that point in time was that a recordable case or not? Should it have been on that log?
NARRATOR: Whitmore concluded the company violated workplace safety law by failing to record more than half of the injuries. The OBSERVER would report that House of Raeford Farms told the paper the company follows the law, looks out for the safety of its workers and treats them with respect.
Presented with findings from the OBSERVER, the company wrote in a letter that there were - quote - "many inaccuracies" in the information workers provided, and said that "the allegations made by these former employees do not fairly or accurately represent the policies or management practices of House of Raeford Farms." The letter continued, "We value our employees and strive to treat them in a fair and respectful manner at all times."
NARRATOR: In February 2008, after 22 months of work examining thousands of pages of documents and conducting over 800 interviews THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER published a 6-day series. It was called "The Cruelest Cuts."
The paper concluded that "weak enforcement, minimal fines and dwindling inspections have allowed [poultry] companies to operate largely unchecked"…and that "official injury statistics aren't accurate and that the industry is more dangerous than its reports to regulators suggest."
Among other findings:
In North Carolina, the number of OSHA poultry plant inspections fell from 25 in 1997 to nine in 2006. South Carolina poultry plant inspections dropped from 36 in 1999 to 1 in 2006.
Nationwide, OSHA workplace safety inspections at U.S. poultry plants have dropped to their lowest point in 15 years. In fact the government rewards companies that report low injury rates by inspecting them less often. And Washington's regulators rarely check whether companies are reporting accurately.
BOB WHITMORE: There's a disconnect. The spin in D.C. disconnects you from reality. The agency isn't doing what it should be doing. Because we're not there representing the workers. We're there representing the businesses.
MITCH WEISS: You know, when I go to work every day there is the expectation that I'm going to come home in one piece. That I'm going to go to an office and leave and come home safe. These workers have no such expectations.
© 2007 Public Affairs Television. All Rights Reserved.
Take a moment to educate yourself about what happened with the workers at House of Raeford. It's the ugly side of America we don't want to see or even believe -- http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/.
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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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