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Justice for Oscar Grant! Justice for Anita Gay!
Mon. Feb. 16, 5pm-7pm
Martin Luther King Blvd & Ashby, near Ashby BART, Berkeley
WE WILL NOT FORGET!
On February 16, 2008, Anita Gay -grandmother and longtime Berkeley resident - was shot in the back and killed on her front porch by a lone Berkeley police officer. The bullets passed through her into her apartment, grazing her daughter’s face and narrowly missing her grandchild. The police claim the shooting was justified. The media demonized the family and blame the shooting on Anita.
Many neighbors saw what really happened.
The police report was a cover up and a lie. Anita called the police for help. She should have not been killed. The officer who killed her and the Berkeley Police Department must be held accountable. Her family, friends, and supporters have organized to demand justice. We need better jobs and housing, not more racist cops and excuses. We need your help.
WE MUST STAND UP!
Too many people have been killed by the police. We haven’t forgotten Gary King Jr., Jose Luis Buenrostro, Casper Banjo, Jody Woodfox, and so many others. One year after Anita Gay was shot in the back by a Berkeley cop, join family, friends and supporters of Anita Gay to celebrate her life, mourn her loss, and demand an end to racist police brutality and murder.
Call 510-435-0844 for more info or to volunteer!
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MASS COMMUNITY OUTREACH TO BUILD MARCH 21
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 11:00 A.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
NEXT MARCH 21 COALITION PLANNING MEETING:
SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
CALL FOR ENDORSEMENTS FOR MARCH 21:
Greetings:
The March on the Pentagon and the demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities scheduled for Saturday, March 21 – marking the beginning of the 7th year of war and occupation of Iraq – are now only weeks away. This is a time for peace activists across the country to go all-out in helping to publicize and build these actions. You can start by endorsing March 21, if you and your organization have not done so already.
A mass movement in the streets is needed now more than ever if we are to succeed in getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, ending U.S. support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, preventing further attacks on Pakistan, and stopping a war against Iran. The occupation of Iraq continues with every indication that the new administration intends to stay there indefinitely. Meanwhile, 30,000 additional U.S. troops are to be sent to Afghanistan. The whole world watched with horror as Israel massacred thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, using weapons of mass destruction provided by Washington. And only days after the inauguration, orders were given to bomb Pakistan, resulting in 21 deaths, most of them women and children.
March 21 provides concerned people throughout the country an opportunity to let the world know that opposition to these U.S. policies of war, occupation, intervention and expansionism exists and is determined to be heard. It lets the beleaguered people in those countries where the U.S. is an oppressor know that there is an American antiwar movement that does not forget their needs for peace and national sovereignty. That is a message we must also send to the new administration. The size of the turnout on the 21st will be critical if we are to help make a difference. So we count on you to do whatever you can to build highly visible mass actions and to ensure that they are as large, vocal and spirited as possible.
There are March 21 committees and coalitions already formed or being formed in many areas working to publicize the event and send people to one of the demonstration sites. We encourage you to join or organize such a grouping in your locale. The National Assembly, as one of many initiators of March 21, is going all out to make the actions as large as possible.
Please send endorsements to our website at www.natassembly.org, where an endorsement form is provided, or by writing natassembly@aol.com. While we would like to have these endorsements for our records so that we can keep everyone updated regarding National Assembly activities, we will also forward them to the March 21 National Coalition website at www.PentagonMarch.org, where the latest list of endorsers can be viewed.
In solidarity,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
www.natassembly.org
216-736-4704 for more info
P.S. Check out the National Assembly website to see our statement on Gaza, get information on March 21st organizing, learn about our July 10-12 national antiwar conference in Pittsburgh, make a donation, and participate in our discussion blog.
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Wall Street Executive Air
http://www.markfiore.com/
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Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row - U.S. Supreme Court
Legal Update
Robert R. Bryan, lead counsel
February 8, 2009
RobertRBryan@aol.com
New case filing in Supreme Court On February 4, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court docketed and accepted for filing the Petition for Writ of Certiorari, with supporting Appendix, that I had submitted December 19, 2008 on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. (AbuJamal v. Beard, U.S. Sup. Ct. No. 08-8483.) A copy of the petition is attached. The central issue in this case is racism in jury selection. The prosecution systematically removed people from sitting on the trial jury purely because of the color of their skin, that is, being black. The bigotry that killed Martin Luther King, Jr., so many years ago, has been rampant in the case of my client and is a central part of the state's quest to murder him in the name of the law.
Prosecution's separate Supreme Court petition In an entirely separate case (Beard v. Abu-Jamal, Sup. Ct. No. 08-652), the prosecution is seeking to overturn the victory we achieved last year in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. (Abu-Jamal v. Horn, 520 F.3d 272 (3rd Cir. 2008).) In that ruling the court ordered a new jury trial on the question of the death penalty. Our Brief In Opposition will be filed in the Supreme Court on February 13, 2009.
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense The legal defense for Mumia needs help. The costs for our litigation in two case before the Supreme Court are substantial. To help, please make your checks payable to the “National Lawyers Guild Foundation” (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). The donations are tax deductible, and should be mailed to:
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
Conclusion Mumia remains on Pennsylvania's death row. We are in an epic struggle in which his life hangs in the balance. What occurs now in the Supreme Court will determine whether Mumia will have a new jury trial, or die at the hands of the executioner.
As I have previously pointed out, Mumia is in greater danger than at any time since his 1981 arrest. Your support and activism is needed. This great journalist and author does not belong on death row or in prison. We must not rest until he is free.
Yours very truly,
Robert R. Bryan
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
[E-mail: RobertRBryan@aol.com]
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Israel-Palestine: A Land in Fragments
A film by American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)-- 2 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewF7AXn3dg
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Resolution regarding an IVAW Position Statement on Afghanistan
http://ivaw.org/afghanistan/resolution
Whereas, Iraq Veterans Against the War is an organization that has opened its membership to veterans of the war in Afghanistan;
Whereas, the war in Afghanistan is continuing into its seventh year with rising casualties among the Afghan people, and with U.S. and Coalition forces facing their deadliest year since the invasion;
Whereas a primary motivation for the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan is competition between the U.S., Russia and China for control of oil and natural gas resources in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea;
Whereas, the military occupation is creating tension and resentment among the Afghan people, to include Afghan women, many of whom are calling for the removal of all foreign occupying troops;
Whereas, the Afghanistan war dehumanizes the Afghan people and denies them their right to self-determination;
Whereas, our military is being exhausted by involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve, National Guard and Individual Ready Reserve, and by repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan;
Whereas, service members are facing serious health consequences due to our government's negligence in Iraq and Afghanistan and mismanagement of the Department of Veterans Affairs;
Whereas, there is no battlefield solution to terrorism, and any escalation of the war in Afghanistan will only serve to exacerbate the plight of the Afghan people, destabilize the region, and further the breakdown of our military;
Therefore, be it resolved that Iraq Veterans Against the War calls for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces in Afghanistan and reparations for the Afghan people, and supports all troops and veterans working towards those ends.
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RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.
Dear Friends,
Courage to Resist has published an IRR overview that contains critical
information for anyone nearing the end of their military enlistment and the
hundreds of thousands of recently discharged veterans still eligible for
involuntary recall. I don't believe this information exists anywhere else,
so I'm hoping you might be able to help distribute, link and share this as
broadly as possible so that those who need it the most might find it.
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.
Online version:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/658/1/
PDF leaflet:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/images/stories/pdf2/irr-leaflet.pdf
Additional related IRR information from Courage to Resist:
http://couragetoresist.org/irr
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/business/15global.html?hp
2) U.S. Airstrike Kills 30 in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/asia/15pstan.html?hp
3) British Officers in ’05 Killing in Subway Won’t Be Charged
By JOHN F. BURNS
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/world/europe/14britain.html?ref=world
4) 100,000 Parents of Citizens Were Deported Over 10 Years
By MICHAEL FALCONE
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14immig.html?ref=us
5) Coal Industry Wins a Round on Mining
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/science/earth/14mountain.html?ref=us
6) Economic Confidence Continues to Fall
By REUTERS
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/business/economy/14econ.html?ref=business
7) Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers
By JAMES GLANZ, C.J. CHIVERS and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/middleeast/15iraq.html?hp
8) U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship
"“We’re going to give people the opportunity to be part of the United States who are dying to be part of this country and they weren’t able to before now,” said Sergeant Campos, who was born in the Dominican Republic and became a United States citizen after he joined the Army."
By JULIA PRESTON
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/us/15immig.html?ref=world
9) Killing Stirs Racial Unease in Texas
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/us/15paris.html?ref=us
10) Economic Lessons From Lenin’s Seer
By KYLE CRICHTON
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15crichton.html?ref=business
11) Decade at Bernie’s
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
February 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/opinion/16krugman.html
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1) Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/business/15global.html?hp
PARIS — From lawyers in Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the globe.
Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.
High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.
Last month, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.
Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.
“Nearly everybody has been caught by surprise at the speed in which unemployment is increasing, and are groping for a response,” said Nicolas Véron, a fellow at Bruegel, a research center in Brussels that focuses on Europe’s role in the global economy.
In emerging economies like those in Eastern Europe, there are fears that growing joblessness might encourage a move away from free-market, pro-Western policies, while in developed countries unemployment could bolster efforts to protect local industries at the expense of global trade.
Indeed, some European stimulus packages, as well one passed Friday in the United States, include protections for domestic companies, increasing the likelihood of protectionist trade battles.
Protectionist measures were an intense matter of discussion as finance ministers from the Group of 7 economies met this weekend in Rome. [Page A16.]
While the number of jobs in the United States has been falling since the end of 2007, the pace of layoffs in Europe, Asia and the developing world has caught up only recently as companies that resisted deep cuts in the past follow the lead of their American counterparts.
The International Monetary Fund expects that by the end of the year, global economic growth will reach its lowest point since the Depression, according to Charles Collyns, deputy director of the fund’s research department. The fund said that growth had come to “a virtual halt,” with developed economies expected to shrink by 2 percent in 2009.
“This is the worst we’ve had since 1929,” said Laurent Wauquiez, France’s employment minister. “The thing that is new is that it is global, and we are always talking about that. It is in every country, and it makes the whole difference.”
In Asia, any smugness at having escaped losses on American subprime debt has been erased by growing despair over a plunge in sales among major exporters. On Thursday, Pioneer of Japan said it would abandon the flat-screen television business and cut 10,000 jobs worldwide in response to sagging demand for consumer electronics.
Millions of migrant workers in mainland China are searching for jobs but finding that factories are shutting down. Though not as large as the disturbances in Greece or the Baltics, there have been dozens of protests at individual factories in China and Indonesia where workers were laid off with little or no notice.
The breadth of the problem is also becoming apparent in Taiwan, where exports were down 42.9 percent last month, compared with a year ago, the steepest plunge in Asia.
Chang Yung-yun, a 57-year-old restaurant kitchen worker, was laid off when her employer closed in mid-November. Her son, an engineer, has been put on unpaid vacation for weeks, a tactic that has become common in Taiwan.
“The greatest fear for our people is losing jobs,” Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, said in an interview.
Calls for protectionism have resonated among a fearful public. In Britain, refinery and power plant employees walked off the job last month to protest the use of workers from Italy and Portugal at a construction project on the coast. Some held up signs highlighting Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s earlier promise of “British jobs for British workers.”
Unemployment in Britain is expected to rise to 9.5 percent by the middle of 2010, from 6.3 percent now, according to Peter Dixon, an economist with Commerzbank in London. Germany’s jobless rate could rise to 10.5 percent from 7.8 percent, he added.
In France last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to supply low-interest loans of 3 billion euros, or $3.86 billion, each to PSA Peugeot Citroën and Renault in exchange for an agreement not to lay off French workers.
To a greater extent than in past European downturns, highly trained white-collar workers are pounding the pavement, too. Naomi Runquist-Ohayon, a trademark lawyer, has been looking for work in Paris since the beginning of the year, after losing her job in December.
“This is a new experience for me,” said Ms. Runquist-Ohayon, 39, a Swedish native who has lived in Paris and London and speaks fluent English, French, Swedish and Italian. “In London, I never had to really look. Recruiters or headhunters would call me or I would call them. It’s not so easy now.”
Half a world away in Colombia, Jaime Galeano, 40, is in a similar predicament. As a bodyguard in a country notorious for drug-related violence and kidnappings, Mr. Galeano thought his profession was immune until he lost his job last year.
“The conditions for finding a job are terrible,” he said. What is more, his age is now an impediment, with a ministry informing him that only applicants under the age of 32 would be considered for new positions.
“After turning 35, a person is worth nothing,” Mr. Galeano said.
Even India, whose startling rise to the forefront of the global economy was portrayed in the hit movie “Slumdog Millionaire,” has hit a wall. About 500,000 people lost jobs between October and December 2008, according to one recent analysis.
In New Delhi, Tarun Lamba lost the first real job he ever had about a month ago, when he was laid off as a sales manager. Mr. Lamba, 24, said he knew bad news was coming because it had been weeks since he had written a truck loan. If he has to, he said, he could join his father’s business, selling clothes. But he hopes it will not come to that.
“The cycle has to keep running,” he said. “We had a boom period one year ago, now we are in a recession, and after some time the boom will come again.”
Many newer workers, especially those in countries that moved from communism to capitalism in the 1990s, have known only boom times since then. For them, the shift is especially jarring, a main reason for the violence that exploded recently in countries like Latvia, a former Soviet republic.
“For the young generation, aged 20 to 24, this is the first time we’ve had this,” said Valdis Zatlers, Latvia’s president.
The ripples from the slowdown in Europe, North America and Asia are also being felt in Africa as migrant workers abroad lose their jobs and find themselves unable to send money home.
Since his last temporary job as a metalworker in Paris ended three months ago, Ignace Abdul has halted the monthly 200 euro payments he had been sending to his wife and three children back in Senegal. “Between 2004 and 2008, I worked nonstop,” Mr. Abdul, 30, said in an interview in a bleak Paris unemployment office. “Right now, there is nothing.”
Reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher from Taipei, Taiwan; Heather Timmons from New Delhi; Simon Romero and Jenny Carolina González from Bogota, Colombia; and Maïa de la Baume from Paris.
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2) U.S. Airstrike Kills 30 in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/asia/15pstan.html?hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Two missiles fired from American drone aircraft killed more than 30 people, including Qaeda and Taliban fighters, near the Pakistani border with Afghanistan on Saturday, according to a Pakistani intelligence official and residents of the area.
The missiles struck three compounds, including one where the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, and foreign and local fighters loyal to him sometimes gather, the official and residents said.
Mr. Mehsud, one of the most feared leaders in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, was not among those killed, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
Mr. Mehsud, a Pakistani, has fought the government openly in the past, and government and intelligence officials say forces loyal to him continue to attack Pakistani troops in the Swat Valley and the Bajaur and Mohmand tribal areas. The previous government, led by Pervez Musharraf, accused Mr. Mehsud in the killing of Benazir Bhutto, a former Pakistani prime minister.
If Mr. Mehsud was the target of the attack in South Waziristan, it would be the first time that American missiles were aimed at him, the intelligence official said.
Missile attacks in Pakistan by remotely piloted aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency have generally been aimed at foreign Qaeda fighters and Taliban guerrillas from Afghanistan, who take shelter in Pakistan between raids into their country to fight American and NATO soldiers.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment on the reports of missile strikes on Saturday, as is the agency’s standing policy. A spokesman for Pakistan’s military was unavailable for comment.
Arabic and Uzbek fighters were among those killed Saturday, according to the intelligence official and residents of the area.
The attack followed a visit to Pakistan last week by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special American envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, that was part of a review of American policy in the region ordered by President Obama.
During his visit, Mr. Holbrooke heard a litany of complaints about drone strikes, some of which have inadvertently killed civilians, making it harder for the country’s shaky government to win support for its own military operations against the Taliban.
It was unclear if any civilians where killed in Saturday’s strikes, which residents say also hit a madrasa.
The drone attack also comes after a statement on Thursday by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the aircraft take off from a base in Pakistan. “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” Ms. Feinstein said during a hearing.
The drone attacks, especially in the last six months, have increased anti-American sentiment in Pakistan to very high levels, and Ms. Feinstein’s statement is likely to further inflame the protests over them. Her statement was prominently covered by the Pakistani press on Saturday.
Although many Pakistanis have accused their government of giving quiet approval for the United States to strike in the tribal areas, they also assumed that the strikes came from Afghanistan.
In 2008, the American drones carried out more than 30 missile attacks against Qaeda and Taliban targets in the tribal areas, according to a report by the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington. Two missile attacks just days after Mr. Obama was inaugurated indicated that his administration, at least for now, planned to continue the policy of the Bush administration.
The compounds that were hit Saturday were in the village of Shwangai, near the town of Makeen.
A resident of the area said that bodies were still being recovered from the debris hours after the attack.
The attack was the fourth in the area controlled by Mr. Mehsud, but none of the others were believed to have had him as a target. Most of these attacks have occurred since September, when President Asif Ali Zardari took power.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
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3) British Officers in ’05 Killing in Subway Won’t Be Charged
By JOHN F. BURNS
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/world/europe/14britain.html?ref=world
LONDON — After a new review of a police shooting that killed a Brazilian man mistakenly identified as a terrorist bomber, the agency that oversees criminal prosecutions said Friday that it would not charge any of the police officers involved.
The decision appeared to end years of efforts by the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician, to have members of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism squad prosecuted for the actions of two undercover officers who shot Mr. de Menezes seven times in the head after he boarded a subway train in London.
Several government-ordered inquiries and a prolonged inquest in 2008 showed that a series of police errors led to Mr. de Menezes being wrongly identified as a prime suspect in a series of abortive subway bombings on July 21, 2005, two weeks after suicide bombers killed 56 people, including the bombers, on the London transit system.
Despite the police errors, and wide differences between the police account of the shootings and that given by witnesses on the train, the Crown Prosecution Service said there was “insufficient evidence that any offense was committed by any individual officers.”
The inquest focused on actions of two firearms officers, identified only as “Charlie 2” and “Charlie 12,” who said they had shouted a warning to Mr. de Menezes as he sat in the stationary subway train, identifying themselves as police officers, and that he had advanced toward them.
But several witnesses testified at the inquest that they had heard no warning and that Mr. de Menezes had not moved toward the officers. Those discrepancies helped lead to the inquest jury’s decision in December rejecting police claims that Mr. de Menezes had been shot lawfully.
On Friday, Stephen O’Doherty, a lawyer who led the review for the prosecution, acknowledged that “although there were some inconsistencies in what the officers said at the inquest, there were also inconsistencies in what passengers had said.”
“I concluded that in the confusion of what occurred on the day, a jury could not be sure that any officer had deliberately given a false account of events,” Mr. O’Doherty said.
It was not the first time the prosecution service had looked at the evidence and decided not to proceed. Mr. O’Doherty was appointed to review the inquest evidence and see if there were any fresh grounds for actions against the officers.
After the inquest finding, Mr. de Menezes’s family had said they would take legal action challenging the coroner’s ruling that a finding of unlawful killing was not an option. Given the choice of ruling that the killing was lawful or rendering an open verdict, the jury chose the latter. But on Friday the family announced through lawyers that they were dropping that action.
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4) 100,000 Parents of Citizens Were Deported Over 10 Years
By MICHAEL FALCONE
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14immig.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — Of nearly 2.2 million immigrants deported in the decade ended 2007, more than 100,000 were the parents of children who, having been born in the United States, were American citizens, according to a report issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security.
But the department lacks data that might have addressed questions left unanswered by the report, like the number of American children who were left behind in the United States or, alternatively, exited the country with their deported parents. Nor could the report say in how many instances both parents of such children were deported.
Similarly, said Representative José E. Serrano, Democrat of New York, since no one knows how many children a given deportee had, the number of affected children could be much higher than 108,434, the exact number of deported parents of American citizens.
So “the problem goes deeper than just the numbers you see,” said Mr. Serrano, who requested the study. He called the circumstance “tragic.”
“If they took their children back,” he said of the deportees, “then technically we deported an American citizen. No matter which side of the immigration issue you fall on, there’s something wrong with the notion of kicking American citizens out of their own country.”
The Homeland Security Department’s office of inspector general, which conducted the review, said it had ordered a look at the feasibility of tracking down more data about the deportations.
Mr. Serrano, who represents a heavily Hispanic district in the Bronx, is vice chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees spending on the department. He has introduced legislation that would allow immigration judges to take family status into account when deciding on deportations.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a policy institute in Washington that supports tighter controls on immigration, said immigrant parents of children born here should not receive special treatment.
“Should those parents get off the hook just because their kids are put in a difficult position?” Mr. Krikorian said. “Children often suffer because of the mistakes of their parents.”
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5) Coal Industry Wins a Round on Mining
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/science/earth/14mountain.html?ref=us
The latest in a series of federal court rulings on mountaintop coal mining in Appalachia came down firmly on the side of the coal industry on Friday.
The ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., overturned a 2007 decision that supported environmentalists’ claims that the Army Corps of Engineers had improperly issued permits for several such mining operations.
For more than a decade, environmental campaigners have tried various legal avenues to fight the mining technique, a form of strip-mining that blasts the tops off mountains and dumps the leftover rock in valleys, burying streams.
After Friday’s ruling, environmental groups urged President Obama to follow up on statements he had made during his campaign that were critical of mountaintop mining by reversing Bush administration policies intended to expand the practice.
Jennifer Chavez, a lawyer at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm that is a plaintiff in the case, called the decision “a landmark in a bad way,” that could unleash a burst of new mining.
“There’s a big backlog of permits, something like 80 or 90, we hear from our partners in West Virginia,” Ms. Chavez said. “We’re afraid there’s going to be just a floodgate opening.”
But Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said the industry was “delighted” and called the ruling “a sweeping vindication.”
Mr. Popovich said that the 2007 ruling had resulted in a backlog of mining permits and created uncertainty that was harming the economy in the region.
The case, heard by three judges on the federal appeals panel, focused on whether the corps had been too liberal in allowing mining companies to bury streams as long as they created settling ponds and promised to transform drainage ditches into artificial streams that, in theory, might filter out contamination. The corps is responsible for preventing actions that could harm waters in the United States.
Among other arguments, the plaintiffs contended that the corps had not demonstrated scientifically that the ponds and artificial streams were effective.
The ruling said the corps had the expertise and discretion to issue such permits.
The mining association says that mountaintop mining in Appalachia produces about 10 percent of all coal mined in the United States and 40 percent of the coal mined in West Virginia and Kentucky.
Environmentalists have recently intensified their campaigns against mountaintop mining, arguing that it causes water contamination that is harmful to the residents of the valleys and that the expanding use of coal increases emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming.
In the last months of the Bush administration, the Interior Department issued new rules intended to ease rules governing buffer zones along waterways, a change that could expand the mining method.
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6) Economic Confidence Continues to Fall
By REUTERS
February 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/business/economy/14econ.html?ref=business
Consumers and professional forecasters have cast off the last remnants of economic optimism, reports showed on Friday, as they confronted the reality of a long and deep recession.
The nation’s economy will shrink by 5.2 percent in the first quarter on an annualized basis, its worst performance since 1982, according to a quarterly forecasting survey published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
Consumer confidence fell to its lowest in three months in early February as sentiment grew increasingly gloomy over an economic downturn that most expect to last up to five years, according to another survey, the Reuters-University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.
“Confidence fell in early February as consumers came to the consensus that the economy would remain in recession throughout 2009,” the report said. “Moreover, nearly two-thirds anticipated that the downturn would last five more years.”
The Reuters-University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said its index reading of confidence for February tumbled to 56.2, from 61.2 in January.
The University of Michigan index is near the record low of 51.7 that it hit in May 1980. “The index was disappointing, reversing all the gains of the past two months,” said Cary Leahey, an economist at Decision Economics.
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7) Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers
By JAMES GLANZ, C.J. CHIVERS and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/middleeast/15iraq.html?hp
Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.
Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.
It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.
Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.
Mr. Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Mr. Stoffel’s lawyer, John H. Quinn Jr. There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption.
Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases. Although Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle were military officers, they worked in a civilian contracting office.
“These long-running investigations continue to mature and expand, embracing a wider array of potential suspects,” a federal investigator said.
The reconstruction effort, intended to improve services and convince Iraqis of American good will, largely managed to do neither. The wider investigation raises the question of whether American corruption was a primary factor in damaging an effort whose failures have been ascribed to poor planning and unforeseen violence.
The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.
Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.
“You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances.”
In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers.
In Major Cockerham’s private notebooks, Colonel Bell is identified as a possible recipient of an enormous bribe as recently as 2006, the two senior federal officials said. It is unclear whether the bribe was actually offered or paid.
When asked if Major Cockerham had ever offered him a bribe, Colonel Bell said in a telephone interview, “I think we’ll end the discussion,” but stayed on the line. Colonel Bell’s response was equally terse when asked if he thought that Colonel Hirtle had carried out his duties properly: “No discussion on that at this time.”
The current focus on Colonel Bell is revealed in federal court papers filed in Georgia, where he has a residence and is trying to quash a subpoena of his bank records by the Special Inspector General. The papers, dated Jan. 27, indicate that Colonel Bell’s records were sought in connection with an investigation of bribery, kickbacks and fraud.
Colonel Bell said that he sought to quash the subpoena not because he had anything to hide, but because the document contained inaccuracies. “If they clean it up, I won’t have a problem,” he said, suggesting that he would cooperate. He declined to detail the inaccuracies, although his handwritten notations on the court papers indicated that the home address and the bank account number on the subpoena were incorrect.
Asked whether he knew why the records had been subpoenaed, he said, “That is not for me to direct what they’re going to do.”
Another case that has raised investigators’ suspicions about top contracting officials involves a company, variously known as American Logistics Services and Lee Dynamics International, that repeatedly won construction contracts for millions of dollars despite a dismal track record.
One contracting official committed suicide in 2006 a day after admitting to investigators that she had taken $225,000 in bribes to rig bids in favor of the company. At least two other former contracting officials in Iraq have admitted to taking bribes in the case and are cooperating with investigators. It is unknown what information they may have provided on Colonel Hirtle, a high-ranking contracting official in Baghdad. But Colonel Hirtle signed the company’s first major contract in Iraq in May 2004, a roughly $10 million deal to build arms warehouses for the fledgling Iraqi security forces, according to a copy of the contract and federal officials. The warehouses went largely unbuilt. Investigators said the inquiry into the Lee case was continuing.
“I can’t talk to any media right now, because I don’t know anything about this and I’ve got to do some research on it,” Colonel Hirtle said when reached by phone in California, before abruptly hanging up.
The next day, Colonel Hirtle said he had been “taken aback” by questions about an investigation involving himself. “I try to keep things as transparent and aboveboard as I can,” he said, referring questions to an Air Force public affairs office.
The Air Force referred questions to the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, where a spokesman, Christopher Grey, said the command “does not discuss or confirm the names of persons who may or may not be under investigation.”
An extraordinary element of the current investigation is a voice from beyond the grave: that of Mr. Stoffel, who died with a British associate, Joseph J. Wemple, in a burst of automatic gunfire on a dangerous highway north of Baghdad in December 2004 as he returned from a business meeting at a nearby military base.
A previously unknown Iraqi group claimed responsibility for the killings, which remain unsolved. The men may simply have been unlucky enough to be engulfed in the violence that was then just beginning to grip the country.
On May 20, 2004, a little more than a week after Colonel Hirtle signed the Lee company’s warehouse contract, Mr. Stoffel was granted limited immunity by the Special Inspector General for what amounted to a whistle-blower’s complaint. Copies of the immunity document were obtained from two former business associates of Mr. Stoffel.
The picture of corruption Mr. Stoffel painted, including the clandestine delivery of bribes, was “like a classic New York scenario,” said a former business associate.
“Fifty thousand dollars delivered in pizza boxes to secure contracts,” said the former associate, a consultant in the arms business with whom Mr. Stoffel sometimes worked in the former Eastern bloc. “Of course, it just looked like a pizza delivery.”
It was Mr. Stoffel’s experience with Eastern bloc weaponry that helped him win a contract to refurbish Iraq’s Soviet-era tanks as part of a program to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces. Mr. Stoffel’s company remains locked in a dispute over payments it says are owed by the Iraqi government.
His problems with American officials were what led him to make the accusations of corruption. Mr. Stoffel, the associate said, “was trying to do this as quietly as possible, to blow the whistle.”
“He knew enough about what was going on, and he was getting pretty frustrated.”
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington, David Beasley from Atlanta, Margot Williams from New York, and Riyadh Mohammed from Baghdad.
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8) U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship
"“We’re going to give people the opportunity to be part of the United States who are dying to be part of this country and they weren’t able to before now,” said Sergeant Campos, who was born in the Dominican Republic and became a United States citizen after he joined the Army."
By JULIA PRESTON
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/us/15immig.html?ref=world
Stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American military will begin recruiting skilled immigrants who are living in this country with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become United States citizens in as little as six months.
Immigrants who are permanent residents, with documents commonly known as green cards, have long been eligible to enlist. But the new effort, for the first time since the Vietnam War, will open the armed forces to temporary immigrants if they have lived in the United States for a minimum of two years, according to military officials familiar with the plan.
Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.
“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army, which is leading the pilot program. “There will be some very talented folks in this group.”
The program will begin small — limited to 1,000 enlistees nationwide in its first year, most for the Army and some for other branches. If the pilot program succeeds as Pentagon officials anticipate, it will expand for all branches of the military. For the Army, it could eventually provide as many as 14,000 volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits.
About 8,000 permanent immigrants with green cards join the armed forces annually, the Pentagon reports, and about 29,000 foreign-born people currently serving are not American citizens.
Although the Pentagon has had wartime authority to recruit immigrants since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, military officials have moved cautiously to lay the legal groundwork for the temporary immigrant program to avoid controversy within the ranks and among veterans over the prospect of large numbers of immigrants in the armed forces.
A preliminary Pentagon announcement of the program last year drew a stream of angry comments from officers and veterans on Military.com, a Web site they frequent.
Marty Justis, executive director of the national headquarters of the American Legion, the veterans’ organization, said that while the group opposes “any great influx of immigrants” to the United States, it would not object to recruiting temporary immigrants as long as they passed tough background checks. But he said the immigrants’ allegiance to the United States “must take precedence over and above any ties they may have with their native country.”
The military does not allow illegal immigrants to enlist, and that policy would not change, officers said. Recruiting officials pointed out that volunteers with temporary visas would have already passed a security screening and would have shown that they had no criminal record.
“The Army will gain in its strength in human capital,” General Freakley said, “and the immigrants will gain their citizenship and get on a ramp to the American dream.”
In recent years, as American forces faced combat in two wars and recruiters struggled to meet their goals for the all-volunteer military, thousands of legal immigrants with temporary visas who tried to enlist were turned away because they lacked permanent green cards, recruiting officers said.
Recruiters’ work became easier in the last few months as unemployment soared and more Americans sought to join the military. But the Pentagon, facing a new deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, still has difficulties in attracting doctors, specialized nurses and language experts.
Several types of temporary work visas require college or advanced degrees or professional expertise, and immigrants who are working as doctors and nurses in the United States have already been certified by American medical boards.
Military figures show that only 82 percent of about 80,000 Army recruits last year had high school diplomas. According to new figures, the Army provided waivers to 18 percent of active-duty recruits in the final four months of last year, allowing them to enlist despite medical conditions or criminal records.
Military officials want to attract immigrants who have native knowledge of languages and cultures that the Pentagon considers strategically vital. The program will also be open to students and refugees.
The Army’s one-year pilot program will begin in New York City to recruit about 550 temporary immigrants who speak one or more of 35 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Igbo (a tongue spoken in Nigeria), Kurdish, Nepalese, Pashto, Russian and Tamil. Spanish speakers are not eligible. The Army’s program will also include about 300 medical professionals to be recruited nationwide. Recruiting will start after Department of Homeland Security officials update an immigration rule in coming days.
Pentagon officials expect that the lure of accelerated citizenship will be powerful. Under a statute invoked in 2002 by the Bush administration, immigrants who serve in the military can apply to become citizens on the first day of active service, and they can take the oath in as little as six months.
For foreigners who come to work or study in the United States on temporary visas, the path to citizenship is uncertain and at best agonizingly long, often lasting more than a decade. The military also waives naturalization fees, which are at least $675.
To enlist, temporary immigrants will have to prove that they have lived in the United States for two years and have not been out of the country for longer than 90 days during that time. They will have to pass an English test.
Language experts will have to serve four years of active duty, and health care professionals will serve three years of active duty or six years in the Reserves. If the immigrants do not complete their service honorably, they could lose their citizenship.
Commenters who vented their suspicions of the program on Military.com said it could be used by terrorists to penetrate the armed forces.
At a street corner recruiting station in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, Staff Sgt. Alejandro Campos of the Army said he had already fielded calls from temporary immigrants who heard rumors about the program.
“We’re going to give people the opportunity to be part of the United States who are dying to be part of this country and they weren’t able to before now,” said Sergeant Campos, who was born in the Dominican Republic and became a United States citizen after he joined the Army.
Sergeant Campos said he saw how useful it was to have soldiers who were native Arabic speakers during two tours in Iraq.
“The first time around we didn’t have soldier translators,” he said. “But now that we have soldiers as translators, we are able to trust more, we are able to accomplish the mission with more accuracy.”
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9) Killing Stirs Racial Unease in Texas
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/us/15paris.html?ref=us
PARIS, Tex. — The killing of Brandon McClelland, though horrible, never fit the classic description of a lynching. The police say two friends ran him over with a pickup truck after an argument during a night of drinking.
But Mr. McClelland was black and the men accused of killing him are white, and his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public lynchings.
Blacks complain that the justice system is tilted against them; whites complain about the crime, teenage pregnancy and drug use ravaging black neighborhoods.
“I think we are probably stuck in 1930 right about now,” said Brenda Cherry, who is black and is the founder of Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality. “If you complain about anything, you are going to be punished.”
Paris is an agricultural town 100 miles northeast of Dallas that was built on cotton and grain in a part of Texas that shares more with the Deep South than with the West. In 1850, there were 4,000 residents, a quarter of them slaves. A large monument to the Confederate dead stands outside the courthouse, a bronze soldier standing guard, while at the Paris Fairgrounds, no plaques mark the spot where thousands of white spectators watched as black men were burned alive or hanged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Today, 26,000 people live here, about 5,700 of them black. They are concentrated in public housing projects and run-down neighborhoods near the center of town. They send their children to Paris High School, where nearly half the students are black and test scores are low. The best school, North Lamar High School, is 86 percent white, and some blacks complain that the district lines are drawn to keep it that way.
Lamar County’s highest elected official, Judge M. C. Superville, says Ms. Cherry and others who are unhappy with the justice system have exaggerated the role of race in recent events.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding in the community between blacks and whites,” he said. “I do not believe there is systematic racial discrimination in Lamar County. I do believe there is a misperception that that is going on.”
Still, the suspicions and ill will have grown so strong that the federal Department of Justice has dispatched a team of mediators to get residents to begin talking about the problem and to propose possible resolutions.
Last month, about 100 people of all races went to a building on the fairgrounds to vent their frustrations, while federal mediators took notes and tried to keep the peace. The speakers ran the gamut from young members of the New Black Panther Party in Dallas, who accused the local authorities of racism, to older black residents of Paris who chided younger blacks for comparing the problems of today with those of the Jim Crow era.
The few whites who spoke said they were sympathetic to the complaints of some black residents.
Mr. McClelland’s death, on Sept. 16, attracted attention beyond the confines of Lamar County, because, on the surface, it resembled the racially motivated murder in 1998 of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Tex. Three white supremacists hunted Mr. Byrd down and dragged him behind a truck until he died.
Mr. McClelland, 24, was run over and dragged 40 feet by the pickup truck. His mutilated body was found on the side of a road, his skull smashed.
There the similarities to the Byrd killing end, however. Mr. McClelland, an affable young man who worked as a garbage collector and wanted to become a long-haul trucker, had a longstanding friendship with the two men in the truck. They had spent the previous day hanging wallboard and then had gone out drinking after the job.
The men — Shannon Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley, both 27 — fled the scene of the killing, the police said. Later that night, they turned up at Mr. McClelland’s ramshackle home in Paris and told his mother that they had left him walking on the side of the road after they had argued about who should drive.
State troopers at first accepted the men’s story and considered the case a hit and run, but they changed their minds after discovering Mr. McClelland’s blood and tissue on the underside of the truck. Mr. Finley and Mr. Crostley are awaiting trial on murder charges; they have denied running Mr. McClelland down.
A special prosecutor from Dallas was appointed in November. The Lamar County district attorney, Gary Young, had declined to handle the case because as a private lawyer he represented Mr. Finley against a manslaughter charge in 2003.
In that case, Mr. Finley shot another friend, who was white, as they were sitting in a pickup. He claimed he had grabbed his friend’s gun and was trying to shoot two armed men who were trying to rob them. Instead, his friend was hit three times in the head by accident, he said.
The district attorney agreed to a plea bargain on the reduced manslaughter charge. Mr. Finley served three years in prison; the robbers were never found.
Mr. Finley’s manslaughter conviction ensnared Mr. McClelland as well. Mr. McClelland was convicted of lying to a grand jury about Mr. Finley’s whereabouts to provide him with an alibi. He served more than a year in prison.
It was this friendship between the men that led the police to conclude that Mr. Finley’s motive in the killing of Mr. McClelland was something other than race, the state police said.
The victim’s mother, Jacqueline McClelland, said that the initial investigation into her son’s death was shoddy and incomplete. The investigators left evidence scattered at the scene: freshly opened beer cans near the body, loose change covered with blood, skull fragments and tissue on the pavement.
Ms. McClelland said it was pressure from civil rights advocates, who held several protests in Paris last fall, that led to the arrest of Mr. Finley and Mr. Crostley. “They would have swept it under the rug, if I hadn’t gotten other people involved,” she said.
Mr. McClelland’s death comes a year after another incident stirred up accusations of racism here. Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl, was sentenced by Judge Superville to juvenile prison after she shoved a hall monitor into a wall. Three months earlier, Judge Superville had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation for burning down her family’s house.
National civil rights groups protested what they called the unequal and harsh treatment of Miss Cotton, who spent a year in a West Texas juvenile prison.
Judge Superville denied that race played a role in Miss Cotton’s sentence. He said she had a history of disciplinary problems, and her mother, Creola Cotton, had refused to cooperate with the state’s efforts to change her daughter’s behavior.
But Creola Cotton contends that her daughter was singled out and railroaded. She said she had complained several times to the school district about what she saw as unequal punishments for black and white students. That angered officials, so they retaliated against her daughter, she said.
“We live under a good-old-boy system here: the schools, the courthouse, the housing department,” Ms. Cotton said at the recent meeting. “Everybody is relatives or good friends.”
The mayor of Paris, Jesse James Freelen, who is white, dismissed such complaints as the result of “a lack of communication.” He pointed out that the town previously elected a black mayor and now had a black mayor pro tem.
“Once we start communicating,” Mr. Freelen said, “I believe we will find out the problems we believe we have are not as big as we think.”
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10) Economic Lessons From Lenin’s Seer
By KYLE CRICHTON
February 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15crichton.html?ref=business
NIKOLAI KONDRATIEFF was not exactly a faceless bureaucrat in post-revolutionary Russia. He had held an important economic post in the last, short-lived government of Alexander Kerensky before the Bolsheviks took charge; then he founded an influential research organization, the Institute of Conjecture, and became an important theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin.
But he would long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history had it not been for his quirky academic passion, which he pursued in a series of books and papers through the 1920s. Reviewing economic history since the late 18th century, Kondratieff came to a startling, doomsday conclusion: that capitalist economies were fated to go through regular and predictable cycles of around 50 years, inevitably culminating in a depression.
Despite having become a committed Communist and the author of a theory of inevitable if periodic capitalist collapses, Kondratieff was executed in 1938, a victim of the Stalinist purges. Apparently, he had raised too-trenchant questions about the government’s newfound enthusiasm for heavy industry and agricultural collectives. After spending eight years in the gulag, he left behind a final letter to his daughter, poignantly urging her to be “a clever and good girl” and “not to forget about me.”
It was a fitting epitaph, for whenever it seems Kondratieff is about to be forgotten, the economy nosedives. And once again, perhaps the most dismal of the dismal science’s practitioners is back in the news, which his disciples try to fit into the cycles, or “Kondratieff waves,” that he described.
Kondratieff and his disciples — among whom was Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote about capitalism’s “creative destruction” — identified four stages in each cycle, corresponding to the seasons. After spurting ahead in the spring phase, they said, the economy cruises through the summer, experiences a scary drop as autumn sets in, and then — despite the TARPs, TALFs and whatever else governments do — descends into a winter phase that can last up to 20 years.
In case you hadn’t noticed, it has been getting quite chilly lately.
Over the years, Kondratieff’s appeal has waxed and waned in counterpoint to the economy, falling out of favor in good times but charging back when things look bleak. But his theory has never been accepted by mainstream economists, who consider it an occult hall of mirrors in which any sort of pattern can be discerned by shifting starting dates and definitions.
Kondratieff’s adepts have cried depression before, for example in 1982. Reporting on the buzz his theory was getting during that downturn, a New York Times correspondent, Paul Lewis, wrote: “According to Kondratieffian analysis, the world is caught in the fourth great economic downswing since the 1790’s, a period of global recession that will probably last until near the end of the century when a new age of prosperity will begin — and there is little anyone can do about it.”
Today, Kondratieff’s disciples (a dwindling band, by the way) are just as certain that the bad times began in 2000, with that year’s stock market crash. That was followed by the autumn phase of the Bush years, characterized by an enormous (Kondratieff would say desperate) expansion of debt and leverage in an attempt to maintain the prosperity of the spring and summer years.
Evidently, Kondratieff waves tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and whatever value they have is descriptive, rather than predictive. After all, the American economy ultimately shrugged off several market drops like that of 2000, allowing the 25 years that followed 1982 to be a period of largely uninterrupted growth. But in the last decade of that period, the United States’s growth was driven by debt in a desperate attempt to maintain an unsustainable level of consumption, a stage that Kondratieff’s theory quite accurately describes.
“The people who do the predicting are usually not central within the discussion of economics,” said David Colander, an economic historian at Middlebury College, and an expert in the discipline’s crank theorists. But economies do “have this tendency to exceed” that Kondratieff and others have grasped, he added, and that is largely lost in modern economic theory.
He offers the Austrian School as a possible rival to Kondratieff’s line of thought. Austrian economists tend to emphasize a laissez-faire approach and entrepreneurship (not the most popular policies at this moment) and strict limits on money supply growth, usually by hitching the currency to the gold standard.
While considered outside the mainstream, the Austrian School is far more respectable, counting in its ranks two Nobel Prize winners, Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital — an adviser to the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul and one of the most prominent doomsayers in the current collapse — also subscribes to its theories.
Hayek is said to have successfully predicted the Great Depression and some Austrian School devotees are taking credit for calling this one. “The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived,” Mr. Paul wrote in September, 11 days after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes displaced Hayek and the Austrian School in intellectual popularity, establishing his “general theory” as the economic bible of the postwar decades. The Austrian line of thought made something of a comeback in the Reagan years, but never quite gained acceptance in the economic fraternity, Mr. Colander says.
“It probably should,” he says.
“A good profession should take its outsiders more seriously,” Mr. Colander says. “They make you look at things in different ways. The worst thing for policy makers is to think they are right.”
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11) Decade at Bernie’s
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
February 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/opinion/16krugman.html
By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.
Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.
At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?
Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.
Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.
So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.
For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.
And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.
Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral,” says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser.
In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.
There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what’s needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.
Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.
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