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Video of Rev. Pinkney
Discussing Local Democracy
http://bhbanco.blogspot.com/
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Fri. Feb. 20, 5pm-7pm
Justice for Oscar Grant! Justice for Anita Gay!
Martin Luther King Blvd & Ashby, near Ashby BART, Berkeley
This event was postponed from Mon. due to rain.
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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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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Afghan Civilian Deaths Rose 40 Percent in 2008, U.N. Says
By ALAN COWELL
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/world/asia/18afghan.html?ref=world
2) For Education Chief, Stimulus Means Power, Money and Risk
By SAM DILLON
February 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/education/17educ.html?ref=education
3) Resisting Home Evictions Becomes a Group Effort
By FERNANDA SANTOS
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/nyregion/18foreclose.html?scp=1&sq=Resisting%20Home%20Evictions%20Becomes%20a%20Group%20Effort&st=cse
4) A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff
Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq reconstruction billions
By Patrick Cockburn in Sulaimaniyah, Northern Iraq
The Independent (UK)
February 16, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-fraud-bigger-than-madoff-
1622987.html
5) Obama Unveils $75 Billion Plan to Fight Home Foreclosures
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/business/19housing.html?hp
6) Fed Offers Bleak Economic Outlook
"Bleak economic data reflecting a sharpening slide in housing, trade, industrial production, spending and employment rates “more than offset” any potential impact from an economic stimulus plan, the Fed said, forcing it to cut its economic outlook."
By JACK HEALY
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/business/economy/19fed.html?hp
7) Study Shows Sharp Rise in Latino Federal Convicts
By SOLOMON MOORE
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19immig.html?hp
8) Cuba: A Bay of Pigs Apology From Guatemala
By MARC LACEY
World Briefing | The Americas
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/world/americas/18briefs-ABAYOFPIGSAP_BRF.html?ref=world
9) Putting Stamp on Afghan War, Obama Will Send 17,000 Troops
By HELENE COOPER
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/washington/18web-troops.html?ref=us
10) For Uninsured Young Adults, Do-It-Yourself Health Care
By CARA BUCKLEY
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/nyregion/18insure.html?ref=health
10) For Uninsured Young Adults, Do-It-Yourself Health Care
“Young adults are the nation’s largest group of uninsured — there were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007, or 29 percent, according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.”
By CARA BUCKLEY
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/nyregion/18insure.html?ref=health
11) Cancer Survivors Struggle to Find Jobs, Study Finds
By RONI CARYN RABIN
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/health/18cancer.html?ref=health
12) Jailing Kids for Cash
By Amy Goodman, Truthdig.com
Tuesday 17 February 2009
http://www.truthout.org/021909J
13) Mr. Obama’s Foreclosure Plan
"(After five years, the interest rate will begin to gradually adjust upward again.)"
Editorial
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/opinion/19thu1.html
14) U.S. Rep Fred Upton Steals Land From The Black Residents of Benton Harbor
Dorothy Pinkney
Join us in boycotting Whirlpool.
You must call Governor Granholm at 517-373-3400
Help the residents of Benton Harbor
DO NOT SUPPORT HARBOR SHORES!
February 17, 2009
http://bhbanco.blogspot.com/
15) Newly Poor Swell Lines at Food Banks Nationwide
By JULIE BOSMAN
February 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/nyregion/20food.html?hp
16) General Sees Long Term for Afghanistan Buildup
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/washington/19pentagon.html?ref=world
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1) Afghan Civilian Deaths Rose 40 Percent in 2008, U.N. Says
By ALAN COWELL
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/world/asia/18afghan.html?ref=world
PARIS - Civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose by 40 percent last year, the highest level since the American-led invasion in late 2001 that dislodged the Taliban government, a United Nations report said Tuesday.
More than half of the 2,118 casualties were caused by militants' roadside bombs and suicide attacks, but many were from airstrikes and other actions by NATO and American forces battling the resurgent Taliban, the report said.
The findings deepened concern about civilians trapped between the combatants in an intensifying war that looms as one of the main foreign policy challenges facing the Obama administration. Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has just completed a tour of the region.
President Obama is already weighing whether to double the American troop deployment in Afghanistan to about 60,000 troops. But Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, have expressed dismay about civilian casualties, arguing that more troops could lead to more fatalities.
The United Nations report, compiled by a human rights unit, said the death toll among civilians rose to 2,118 in 2008 from 1,523 in 2007, most in the south of the country where fighting is intense.
The insurgents were blamed for 1,160, or 55 percent, of the deaths - an increase of 65 percent over similar attacks in 2007, the report said.
The report said 828 deaths, or 39 percent, were caused by pro-government forces, an increase of almost a third over the 2007 level.
The most glaring recent example of civilian casualties came last week, when five children were killed in predawn fighting between Australian special operations troops and Taliban guerrillas in south-central Afghanistan. Such episodes have reduced support among the Afghans for foreign troops on their soil.
But civilians have more to fear from the insurgents, the United Nations report said. A joint statement on Tuesday from the Afghan Interior Ministry and the American Command in Kabul said a roadside bomb on Monday killed five civilians near Kandahar; coalition forces who went to investigate came under small arms fire.
The report said: "2008 saw a distinct pattern of attacks by the armed opposition in crowded residential and other such areas with apparent disregard for the extensive damage they can cause to civilians."
The report also took issue with "an intimidation campaign that includes the summary execution of individuals perceived to be associated with, or supportive of the government and its allies."
It said 130 deaths "could not be attributed to any of the conflicting parties since, for example, some civilians died as a result of cross-fire or were killed by unexploded ordinance."
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2) For Education Chief, Stimulus Means Power, Money and Risk
By SAM DILLON
February 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/education/17educ.html?ref=education
WASHINGTON - The $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges in the economic stimulus bill could transform Arne Duncan into an exceptional figure in the history of federal education policy: a secretary of education loaded with money and the power to spend large chunks of it as he sees fit.
But the money also poses challenges and risks for Mr. Duncan, the 44-year-old former Chicago schools chief who now heads the Department of Education.
Mr. Duncan must develop procedures on the fly for disbursing a budget that has, overnight, more than doubled, and communicate the rules quickly to all 50 states and the nation's 14,000 school districts. And he faces thousands of tricky decisions about how much money to give to whom and for what.
"It'll be wonderful fun for a time for his team - it'll be like Christmas," said Chester Finn, a former Department of Education official who has watched education secretaries or commissioners come and go here since the mid-1960s. "But the thing about discretionary spending is that it makes more people angry than it makes happy."
The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign on Tuesday, doubles federal spending on disadvantaged and disabled children, includes hefty increases in the main federal college scholarship program and for Head Start, and, for the first time, makes billions in federal dollars available for school renovation.
Expectations are running so high, and the appetite for information is so large among the nation's educators, that when Mr. Duncan organized a conference call last Wednesday to begin explaining the stimulus bill's terms to a few dozen state and district superintendents, 800 callers swamped the switchboard.
Most of Mr. Duncan's unusual power would come in disbursing a $54 billion stabilization fund intended to prevent public sector layoffs, mostly in schools. The bill sets aside $5 billion of that to reward states, districts and schools for setting high standards and narrowing achievement gaps between poor and affluent students. The law lets Mr. Duncan decide which states deserve awards and which programs merit special financing.
"It's hard to imagine moving that much money that quickly," said Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan's predecessor, who turned her seventh-floor office over to him last month. "The point is, it's never been done before, and as much confidence as I have in Arne Duncan, there's an awesome opportunity for slippage with that much money moving through the meat grinder."
Maybe Ms. Spellings is slightly jealous, since she and other secretaries stretching back decades had only small amounts of money for favored projects.
"Teeny, teeny," said Amy Wilkins, who as vice president at the Education Trust, a civil rights group, has studied the budgets of several of Mr. Duncan's predecessors. "Margaret was looking for quarters in her pencil drawer."
Mr. Duncan said he understood the unusual circumstances.
"There's going to be this extraordinary influx of resources," he said in an interview. "So people say, 'You're going to be the most powerful secretary ever,' but I have no interest in that. Power has never motivated me. What I love is opportunity, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something special, to drive change, to make our schools better."
Mr. Duncan said he intended to reward school districts, charter schools and nonprofit organizations that had demonstrated success at raising student achievement - "islands of excellence," he called them. Programs that tie teacher pay to classroom performance will most likely receive money, as will other approaches intended to raise teacher quality, including training efforts that pair novice instructors with veteran mentors, and after-school and weekend tutoring programs.
The stimulus money will help states avert some, but most likely not all, of the education cutbacks for the 2009-10 school year resulting from state budget shortfalls that currently total some $132 billion. California, for instance, is facing a $41 billion budget shortfall, much of it in school spending, but will receive some $11 billion in education money from the stimulus, estimates the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union.
The positions of deputy secretary, under secretary and chief of staff and dozens of other senior posts at the Education Department remain unfilled, so Mr. Duncan is relying on help from career officers and consultants. He has appointed teams to develop procedures for distributing the stimulus billions quickly, and many aides, he said, have been working evenings and weekends to begin organizing the effort.
"I want all of us to work hard enough and smart enough to take full advantage of this, because it'll never happen again," Mr. Duncan said last month in his first speech to hundreds of civil servants at department headquarters, as the outlines of the huge stimulus package were taking shape in Congress.
Urging department employees not to be deferential, he described the reception he got on his first visit to his headquarters.
"It was like, 'Hello, Mr. Secretary-designate-nominee,' and it didn't feel right," Mr. Duncan said. "My name is Arne. It's not Mr. Secretary. Please just call me Arne." That line drew a standing ovation.
He has hit it off well with Congress, too, so far. His wife, Karen, whom Mr. Duncan met in Australia, where he played professional basketball after his 1987 graduation from Harvard, accompanied him to his Senate confirmation, along with their daughter, Claire, 7, and son, Ryan, 4, who sat quietly during the hearing, reading storybooks.
"If you and your wife have done such a great job with Ryan, who is so well behaved, I hope you can do that with every child in American classrooms," said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia.
Another Republican senator, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said Mr. Obama had made "several distinguished cabinet appointments."
"I think you're the best," Mr. Alexander, who was education secretary under the first President Bush, said to Mr. Duncan.
But now comes the hard part.
Last year the Education Department distributed about $59 billion to states, school districts and colleges, most of it along well-worn financing paths mapped out by Congress.
"Congress usually spends two years debating the rules for how to spend $50 million," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a research organization in Washington. "But this time they're providing money without spelling out how it should be spent, so Arne Duncan and his staff are going to have to work out rules themselves in just weeks. He's going to have his hands full."
Congress has stipulated some rules, of course. To receive a share of the $54 billion stabilization fund, governors must make several "assurances" to Mr. Duncan, intended to drive school reforms: that they are developing statewide data systems that can allow schools to track individual students' academic progress, that they are assigning experienced teachers fairly to rich and poor schools alike, and so on. Mr. Duncan has the ticklish job of ruling on whether the governors' assurances are convincing.
And Congress has given him a $5 billion incentive fund that he can use to reward states that are raising student achievement and withhold money from states that are not. "We have states that tell the public that 90 percent of kids are meeting state standards," Mr. Duncan said, "but when we look at how they're doing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it's nowhere close. I'm not going to reward that. I want to be transparent about the good, bad and the ugly."
Some states and districts will get less than what they believe is their share, which could create powerful enemies.
"Secretary Duncan has a very challenging job," said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association. "It'll take a lot of effort to get this right."
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3) Resisting Home Evictions Becomes a Group Effort
By FERNANDA SANTOS
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/nyregion/18foreclose.html?scp=1&sq=Resisting%20Home%20Evictions%20Becomes%20a%20Group%20Effort&st=cse
As resistance to foreclosure evictions grows among homeowners, community leaders and some law enforcement officials, a broad civil disobedience campaign is starting in New York and other cities to support families who refuse orders to vacate their homes.
The community organizing group Acorn unveiled the campaign with a spirited rally on Friday at a Brooklyn church and will roll it out in at least 22 other cities in the coming weeks. Through phone trees, Web pages and text-messaging networks, the effort will connect families facing eviction with volunteers who will stand at their side as officers arrive, even if it means risking arrest.
“You want to haul us out to jail? Fine. Let the world see how government has been ineffective,” Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief organizer, said in an interview. “Politicians have helped banks, but they haven’t helped families in the way that it’s needed, and these families are now saying, enough is enough.”
At the onset of the foreclosure crisis, the problem was regarded by some as one of a homeowner’s own making, the result of irresponsible decisions made by families who chose to live beyond their means. But as foreclosures spread across the country, devastating even solidly middle-class communities, the blame has slowly shifted to the financial companies that made questionable loans and have received billions of dollars in federal aid to stave off collapse.
In recent months, a budding resistance movement has grown among Americans who believe they have been left to face their predicament on their own — and the Acorn campaign is an organized expression of that frustration, Ms. Lewis said. Instead of quietly packing up and turning their homes over to banks, homeowners are now fighting back.
On Feb. 9, a man scrawled a message on the roof of his house in a suburb of Los Angeles: “I Want 2 Be Heard.” Then he barricaded himself inside when deputies showed up to evict him, surrendering after a few hours. In October, a woman in San Diego chained herself to her front porch after the bank that held her mortgage refused to renegotiate the terms. She remains in her home, but has received a second eviction notice.
And last year in Boston, neighbors and activists locked arms outside eight buildings that had been foreclosed upon to prevent the authorities from forcing residents onto the streets.
Sheriffs in some places have also taken a stand. In Wayne County in Michigan, Sheriff Warren C. Evans, suspended all evictions starting Feb. 2 until the federal government implements a plan to help homeowners facing foreclosures.
In Cook County in Illinois, which includes Chicago, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart directed a lawyer to review all eviction orders to protect people who kept on paying rent after the buildings where they lived had been seized by banks. In Butler County in Ohio, Sheriff Richard K. Jones ordered his deputies not to evict people who had no place else to go.
“This is a cold place in the winter and I will not give people a death sentence for not paying their debts,” Sheriff Jones said in an interview. “These are human beings, responsible middle-class people who fell on hard times, and I just can’t toss them out onto the streets.”
Acorn’s strategy is modeled on a movement the group led in the 1980s, when squatters occupied and set out to renovate thousands of abandoned city-owned buildings in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, among other cities. The motivation was to solve what Ms. Lewis has called “the working family’s housing crisis.”
In cities like Orlando, Fla., which has one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates — and Boston, Houston, Baltimore, Oakland, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz. — Acorn organizers have been creating networks to alert a homeowner’s neighbors when an eviction has been scheduled or deputies are on the way. Some volunteers will summon friends and relatives to converge at the home, while others will be in charge of notifying the news media. Organizers are also recruiting lawyers willing to defend for no fee those who are arrested.
The campaign, called Home Defenders, enlisted about 500 participants during meetings held Friday and Saturday in New York and five other cities. Ms. Lewis and other organizers said that they believed the number will reach into the tens of thousands within weeks.
“This is a desperate, last-ditch effort by folks who are working two or three jobs, single mothers, elderly people who don’t know what else to do to save their homes,” said Ginny Goldman, Acorn’s lead organizer in Texas, where the campaign began in Houston on Saturday.
The rally in Brooklyn, at Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Fort Greene, drew about 150 people. There were homeowners, Acorn members, community advocates and candidates for the City Council. One councilman, Mathieu Eugene, was carrying a slab of papers as thick as a large dictionary, each sheet representing, he said, a family facing foreclosure in his district, which includes parts of Crown Heights, Flatbush and Kensington.
The church’s pastor, the Rev. Clinton M. Miller, opened the gathering with this prayer: “If anybody here is facing foreclosure, God, we ask that a miracle be made and a home be saved.”
Then, between homeowners’ sharing their plight, the crowd chanted, “Enough is enough.”
One homeowner, Myrna Millington, 73, who lives in Laurelton, Queens, said that she had to take a second mortgage on her home of 38 years to pay for repairs that turned out to more extensive than originally planned. What Ms. Millington did not know was that she had signed for a subprime loan, which carried interest rates so high she could not keep up with the payments. Her house was foreclosed on in September.
“I may lose my home, but I’m only leaving in handcuffs,” Ms. Millington said.
Another homeowner, Denise Parker, a mother of three who works as a housekeeper at two Midtown Manhattan hotels, bought a home in Springfield Gardens, Queens, in 2005 with an adjustable interest rate that, after two years, went up every six months. Her payments started at $3,500 and now are $5,050 a month, she said. She fell behind last year and her house is scheduled to be auctioned off on Friday.
“I refuse to leave the home that I’ve worked so hard to keep,” Ms. Parker, 42, told the audience. “I will not let the bank take my home and I will not leave.”
Eviction resistance actions are scheduled for Thursday in cities including New York, Oakland and Houston. Organizers will try to recruit enough volunteers to form a human wall on the sidewalk to avoid being arrested for trespassing. But occupying a house or having people attach themselves to a home could also be a tactic.
The campaign has earned praise and raised concern. Sheriff Dart, in Illinois, said it was a “slippery slope when you have individuals deciding whether they can lawfully remain in their homes.”
Sheriff Jones, in Ohio, equated the planned resistance to “chaining yourself to a tree that’s about to be cut down” and said that though he may not agree with it, he sympathizes.
In Washington, Acorn has found a staunch supporter in Representative Marcia C. Kaptur of Ohio, who, during a discussion last month about the $700 billion bailout package for financial companies, took to the floor of the House and instructed people to “stay in your homes — if the American people, anybody out there, is being foreclosed, don’t leave.”
In an interview, Ms. Kaptur said, “I’m thrilled that the American people are rising up and exercising the power that Wall Street has taken away from them.”
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4) A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff
Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq reconstruction billions
By Patrick Cockburn in Sulaimaniyah, Northern Iraq
The Independent (UK)
February 16, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-fraud-bigger-than-madoff-
1622987.html
In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American
authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military
officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to
reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may
never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even
bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme.
"I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials
and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US
businessman active in Iraq since 2003.
In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in
"pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" to the US comptroller for
south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing
with t
he mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq
to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.
Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there
have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work
building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant
mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few
visible signs of government work on Baghdad's infrastructure is a tireless
attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between
main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.
Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and
Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were
themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military
procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defence
Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly
and armoured cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were
blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of
the Defence Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent
or participants in the fraud.
American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions
of senior US officers involved in the programme to rebuild Iraq, according
to The New York Times, which cites interviews with senior government
officia
ls and court documents. Court records reveal that, in January,
investigators subpoenaed the bank records of Colonel Anthony B Bell, now
retired from the US Army, but who was previously responsible for contracting
for the reconstruction effort in 2003 and 2004. Two federal officials are
cited by the paper as saying that investigators are also looking at the
activities of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald W Hirtle of the US Air Force, who
was senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004. It is not clear what
specific evidence exists against the two men, who have both said they have
nothing to hide.
The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh
impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars
were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In
the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republicans were awarded
jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican
family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close
down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building.
In the expanded inquiry by federal agencies, the evidence of a small-time US
businessman called Dale C Stoffel who was murdered after leaving the US base
at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is being re-examined. Before he was
killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor, was granted limited
immunity from prosecution after he had provided information that a network
of
bribery – linking companies and US officials awarding contracts – existed
within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of thousands
of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting
officers.
So far, US officers who have been successfully prosecuted or unmasked have
mostly been involved in small-scale corruption. Often sums paid out in cash
were never recorded. In one case, an American soldier put in charge of
reviving Iraqi boxing gambled away all the money but he could not be
prosecuted because, although the money was certainly gone, nobody had
recorded if it was $20,000 or $60,000.
Iraqi ministers admit the wholesale corruption of their government. Ali
Allawi, the former finance minister, said Iraq was "becoming like Nigeria in
the past when all the oil revenues were stolen". But there has also been a
strong suspicion among senior Iraqis that US officials must have been
complicit or using Iraqi appointees as front-men in corrupt deals. Several
Iraqi officials given important jobs at the urging of the US administration
in Baghdad were inexperienced. For instance, the arms procurement chief at
the centre of the Defence Ministry scandal, was a Polish-Iraqi, 27 years out
of Iraq, who had run a pizza restaurant on the outskirts of Bonn in the
1990s.
In many cases, contractors never started or finished facilities they were
supposedly building. As security deteriorated in Iraq from the summer of
2003 it20was difficult to check if a contract had been completed. But the
failure to provide electricity, water and sewage disposal during the US
occupation was crucial in alienating Iraqis from the post-Saddam regime.
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5) Obama Unveils $75 Billion Plan to Fight Home Foreclosures
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/business/19housing.html?hp
MESA, Ariz. — President Obama pledged on Wednesday to help as many as 9 million American homeowners refinance their mortgages or avert foreclosure, an initiative he said would shore up distressed housing prices, stabilize neighborhoods and slow a downward spiral that he said was “unraveling homeownership, the middle class, and the American Dream itself.”
The plan, more ambitious than many housing analysts had expected, was unveiled by Mr. Obama in a high school gymnasium here, in a community that is among the nation’s hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.
“This plan will not save every home, but it will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild,” the president told the crowd. “It will prevent the worst consequences of this crisis from wreaking even greater havoc on the economy. And by bringing down the foreclosure rate, it will help to shore up housing prices for everyone.”
The plan has three basic components. One would help homeowners who continue to make loan payments on time, but are paying high interest rates and would otherwise not be able to refinance because they do not have enough equity or their houses are worth less than they borrowed. A second would assist people who are at risk of foreclosure by providing incentives to lenders to alter the terms of loans to make them substantially more affordable to struggling homeowners. The third would try to assure there is plenty of credit available for mortgages by giving $200 billion of additional financial backing to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-controlled mortgage finance companies.
The announcement came a day after Mr. Obama signed his $787 billion economic recovery package, and administration officials like Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, made the case that they will work in tandem. In announcing the housing plan, Mr. Obama struck a populist note, criticizing speculators and “lenders who knowingly took advantage of homebuyers” with the same vehemence he used in going after Wall Street bankers for giving themselves bonuses as their companies were seeking government help.
“It will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell,” he said, adding, “And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”
The plan will take effect March 4, when the administration publishes detailed rules explaining it. Most of the plan can be enacted by Mr. Obama though his executive powers, although part of it — including changing the bankruptcy laws to allow homeowners to seek changes to their mortgages through bankruptcy proceedings — will require legislation. Mr. Geithner said the administration is already in discussions with lawmakers on how to proceed.
In allowing homeowners who are not delinquent to qualify, the plan marks a sharp break from the housing policies of Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. Mr. Geithner and the new Housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, said the administration’s research had determined that, with 10 percent of American homeowners either in foreclosure or in danger of it, it was better to intervene early.
Mr. Obama’s plan boils down to a handful of basic components that are aimed at two distinct groups of homeowners: an estimated 3 million or 4 million distressed homeowners who are in danger of foreclosure; and a potentially much larger number of people who are not in immediate distress but are paying rates higher than available to credit-worthy borrowers now and who would likely be resentful about bailouts going to others.
To help distressed homeowners, Mr. Obama will create a $75 billion program to subsidize loan modifications that would reduce a family’s monthly payment to as little as 31 percent of his or gross monthly income.
As envisioned, a mortgage lender would have to first make enough concessions to reduce a borrower’s payments to 38 percent of monthly income. The government will offer a series of financial incentives to encourage lenders to make the concessions. At that point, the government would match, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, additional reductions to bring the payment as low as 31 percent of monthly income.
The changes could be accomplished in several ways, from stretching out the repayment period of a loan to reducing the interest rate or reducing the outstanding principal.
But the plan would not come close to preventing all foreclosures, because lenders would still have the last word on whether to make concessions. If a lender decides that the cost of the concessions is higher than the cost of foreclosing, even with the government subsidies, then a borrower would probably still lose the property.
That could be the case for many people who have lost jobs in the automobile industry and have little hope of being rehired. A family whose income has dropped by half and whose mortgage payment might now equal 100 percent of its monthly income might well be out of the program’s reach.
The incentives for mortgage-servicing companies to tilt their calculation in favor of loan modification include a $1,000 fee for each mortgage they restructure as well as up to $1,000 a year for the next three years if the borrower remains current. In addition, the government would pay up to $1,000 a year to reduce the size of a homeowner’s mortgage, if the borrower remained current.
A second major component of Mr. Obama’s plan is aimed at most homeowners who are not behind on their payments, but whose homes may be worth less than the outstanding amount on their mortgage or no longer worth enough that the homeowners have sufficient equity to refinance. It could also assuage homeowners who angry that seemingly irresponsible neighbors are being rescued.
For this group, Mr. Obama’s plan would make it much easier to refinance their homes and take advantage of the extremely low interest rates now available.
The plan would apply to people with fairly traditional loans that are owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anybody with such a mortgage would be allowed to refinance at today’s rates, which are about 5 percent, without needing a 20 percent downpayment.
Normally, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require that such borrowers pay private mortgage insurance, which can add hundreds of dollars to a monthly payment. In effect, the government would be taking on the added risk, at no charge, that comes from lending to people with no financial stake in their house.
A third and a more vague component of Mr. Obama’s plan is aimed at propping up the mortgage market as a whole by having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac step up their purchases of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
To make that possible, the Treasury Department will use its authority under a housing bill passed last year to provide more capital to both companies. The Bush administration had pledged to provide up to $100 billion to each company to keep it solvent. The Obama plan would increase that to $200 billion. The plan would also allow the two mortgage companies to expand the size of their mortgage portfolios.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Mesa, Ariz., and Edward L. Andrews from Washington.
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6) Fed Offers Bleak Economic Outlook
"Bleak economic data reflecting a sharpening slide in housing, trade, industrial production, spending and employment rates “more than offset” any potential impact from an economic stimulus plan, the Fed said, forcing it to cut its economic outlook."
By JACK HEALY
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/business/economy/19fed.html?hp
The Federal Reserve cut its economic outlook for 2009 on Wednesday and warned that the United States economy would face an “unusually gradual and prolonged” period of recovery as the country struggles to climb out of a deep global downturn.
In gloomy economic projections released by the central bank, the Fed’s Open Market Committee said it expected that the economy would contract by 0.5 percent to 1.3 percent this year, that unemployment would rise to 8.5 to 8.8 percent and that inflation would remain under greater pressure.
Bleak economic data reflecting a sharpening slide in housing, trade, industrial production, spending and employment rates “more than offset” any potential impact from an economic stimulus plan, the Fed said, forcing it to cut its economic outlook.
“Financial markets continued to be strained over all, credit remained unusually tight for both households and businesses, and equity prices had fallen further,” the Open Market Committee said in the report, which reflected the minutes of its Jan. 27-28 meeting.
On Tuesday, President Obama signed a $787 billion package of tax cuts and spending projects, saying it was necessary to stop the bleeding in the economy. He unveiled a $75 billion plan on Wednesday that seeks to help as many as nine million families refinance their mortgages or avoid foreclosure.
The Fed released the minutes as its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, defended the intense measures it had taken to try to revive frozen credit markets and restore confidence among borrowers and lenders. The Fed has expanded its balance sheet to $2 trillion, demonstrating a willingness to print money to try to fight the downturn.
“The Federal Reserve has done, and will continue to do, everything possible within the limits of its authority to assist in restoring our nation to financial stability and economic prosperity as quickly as possible,” Mr. Bernanke said in remarks at the National Press Club in Washington.
Members of the Federal Open Market Committee expect that the economy will ultimately rebound from a recession that began in December 2007, and will grow at a pace of 2.5 to 3.3 percent two years from now. But even as the economy heals, the Fed expects unemployment to remain near 8 percent.
The unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent last month as the faltering economy lost 598,000 jobs.
For the first time, the Fed also released projections of longer-term growth going beyond its normal one-to-three-year predictions. The committee members said that the American economy was expected to grow by 2.5 to 2.7 percent annually over the next five to six years, and that unemployment rates would hover near 5 percent in the longer term.
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7) Study Shows Sharp Rise in Latino Federal Convicts
By SOLOMON MOORE
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19immig.html?hp
LOS ANGELES — The sharp growth in illegal immigration and increased enforcement of immigration laws have dramatically altered the ethnic composition of offenders sentenced in federal courts. In 2007, Latinos accounted for 40 percent of all those convicted of federal crimes and one third of all federal prison inmates, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank.
Nearly half of all Latino offenders, or about 48 percent, were convicted of immigration crimes. Drug offenses were the second-most prevalent charge among Latino federal convicts, according to the report, which was made public on Wednesday.
As the annual number of federal offenders more than doubled between 1991 and 2007, the number of Latino offenders sentenced in a given year nearly quadrupled, growing to 29,281 from 7,924. Latino convicts now represent the largest ethnic population in the federal prison system, although they make up only 13 percent of the United States population.
Of Latino federal offenders, 72 percent are not United States citizens and most were sentenced in courts from one of four states bordering Mexico. Undocumented federal prisoners are usually deported to their home countries after serving their sentences.
“The immigration system has essentially become criminalized at a huge cost to the criminal justice system, to courts, to judges, to prisons, and prosecutors,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “And the government has diverted the resources of the criminal justice system from violent crimes, financial skullduggery and other areas that have been the traditional area of the Justice Department.”
Last month The New York Times reported that federal immigration prosecutions have increased over the last five years, doubling in the last fiscal year to reach more than 70,000 cases. Meanwhile other categories of federal prosecutions including gun trafficking, public corruption, organized crime and white-collar crime have declined over the past five years.
The federal justice system accounts for 200,000 or 8.6 percent of the total 2.3 million inmates in federal and state prisons and city and county jails. Nineteen percent of state prisoners and 16 percent of jail inmates were Latinos. African-Americans make up 39 percent of state prisoners and jail inmates while representing about 12 percent of the total national population.
Deborah Williams, an assistant federal defender in Phoenix, said that the large number of Latinos in the federal system, particularly those who are not citizens and have limited English proficiency, have dramatically changed federal prison culture.
“I have Anglo and Native American clients who tell me about being the only non-Spanish speaker in their pod,” Ms. Williams said. “Ten years ago, it just wasn’t that way. Everything is changing in there, including the language, the television shows they watch and a lot of times the guards don’t speak the language. How do you safely guard people who may not understand your orders?”
A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, Tracy Billingsley, declined immediate comment on the Pew report.
“It’s hard to understand whether we’re seeing a policy change or just a growth in the total number of immigrants coming to this country,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, a co-author of the study, who relied on United States Sentencing Commission statistics. The number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. increased from 3.9 million in 1992 to 11.9 million in 2008.
Under federal anti-illegal immigration programs like Operation Gatekeeper, which hired thousands of immigration enforcement officials along the southwest border, and Operation Streamline, which instituted a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal border crossings in the same region, immigration crimes have skyrocketed.
The large number of immigration crimes and low-level drug offenses account for the relatively light sentences that Latinos typically receive — about 46 months compared with 62 months for white inmates and 91 months for African-American prisoners.
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8) Cuba: A Bay of Pigs Apology From Guatemala
By MARC LACEY
World Briefing | The Americas
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/world/americas/18briefs-ABAYOFPIGSAP_BRF.html?ref=world
President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala apologized to Cuba on Tuesday for his country’s role in permitting the C.I.A. to train Cuban exiles on Guatemalan soil to take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The Sierra Madre mountain range in Guatemala was the failed operation’s main training ground, with preparations also taking place in southern Florida and Panama. Mr. Colom, speaking at the University of Havana on his first official visit to the island, said he wished to “officially ask Cuba for forgiveness.”
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9) Putting Stamp on Afghan War, Obama Will Send 17,000 Troops
By HELENE COOPER
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/washington/18web-troops.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — President Obama said Tuesday that he would send an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan this spring and summer, putting his stamp firmly on a war that he has long complained is going in the wrong direction.
The order will add nearly 50 percent to the 36,000 American troops already there. A further decision on sending more troops will come after the administration completes a broader review of Afghanistan policy, White House officials said.
Mr. Obama said in a written statement that the increase was “necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.”
At least for now, Mr. Obama’s decision gives American commanders in Afghanistan most but not all of the troops they had asked for. But the decision also carries political risk for a president who will be sending more troops to Afghanistan before he has begun to fulfill a promised rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Many experts worry that Afghanistan presents an even more formidable challenge for the United States than Iraq does, particularly with neighboring Pakistan providing sanctuary for insurgents of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Under Mr. Obama’s plan, a unit of 8,000 marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., will be deployed in the next few weeks, aiming to be in Afghanistan by late spring, administration officials said, while an Army brigade from Fort Lewis, Wash., composed of 4,000 soldiers, will be sent in the summer. An additional 5,000 Army support troops will also be deployed in the summer.
Antiwar groups criticized Mr. Obama’s decision even before the White House announced it.
“The president is committing these troops before he’s determined what the mission is,” said Tom Andrews, director of the coalition organization Win Without War. “We need to avoid the slippery slope of military escalation.”
Mr. Obama said in his statement that “the fact that we are going to responsibly draw down our forces in Iraq allows us the flexibility to increase our presence in Afghanistan.”
American generals in Afghanistan had been pressing for additional forces to be in place by late spring or early summer to help counter growing violence and chaos in the country. Of the 30,000 additional troops that the commanders had initially sought, some 6,000 arrived in January after being sent by President Bush.
The administration’s review of Afghanistan policy is supposed to be completed before early April, when Mr. Obama heads to Europe for a NATO summit meeting at which he is expected to press American allies for more troops and help in Afghanistan.
In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he was “absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means.”
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10) For Uninsured Young Adults, Do-It-Yourself Health Care
“Young adults are the nation’s largest group of uninsured — there were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007, or 29 percent, according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.”
By CARA BUCKLEY
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/nyregion/18insure.html?ref=health
They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.
“My first reaction was to start laughing — I just kept saying, ‘No way, no way,’ ” Alanna Boyd, a 28-year-old receptionist, recalled of the $17,398 — including $13 for the use of a television — that she was charged after spending 46 hours in October at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with diverticulitis, a digestive illness. “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”
In the parlance of the health care industry, Ms. Boyd, whose case remains unresolved, is among the “young invincibles” — people in their 20s who shun insurance either because their age makes them feel invulnerable or because expensive policies are out of reach. Young adults are the nation’s largest group of uninsured — there were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007, or 29 percent, according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.
Gov. David A. Paterson of New York has proposed allowing parents to claim these young adults as dependents for insurance purposes up to age 29, as more than two dozen other states have done in the past decade. Community Catalyst, a Boston-based health care consumer advocacy group, released a report this month urging states to ease eligibility requirements to allow adult children access to their parents’ coverage.
“There’s a big sense of urgency,” said Susan Sherry, the deputy director of Community Catalyst. She described uninsured young adults as especially vulnerable. “People are losing their jobs, and a lot of jobs don’t carry health insurance. They’re new to the work force, they’ve been covered under their parents or school plans, and then they drop off the cliff.”
If Governor Paterson’s proposal is approved, an estimated 80,000 of the 775,000 uninsured young adults across New York State would be covered under their parents’ insurance plans. That would leave hundreds of thousands to continue relying on a scattershot network of improvised and often haphazard health care remedies.
In dozens of interviews around the city, these so-called young invincibles described the challenge of living in a high-priced city on low-paying jobs, where staying healthy is one part scavenger hunt and one part balancing act, with high stakes and no safety net.
“For a lot of people, it’s a choice between being able to survive in New York and getting health insurance,” said Hogan Gorman, an actress who was hit by a car five years ago and chronicled her misadventures in “Hot Cripple,” a one-woman show that was a hit at last summer’s Fringe Festival. “There was no way that I could pay my rent, buy insurance and eat.”
Nicole Polec, a 28-year-old freelance photographer living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and has a client who procures Ritalin on her behalf from a sympathetic doctor who has seen Ms. Polec’s diagnosis. Ms. Polec’s roommate, Fara D’Aguiar, 26, treated her last flu with castoff amoxicillin — “probably expired,” she said — given to her by a friend.
When Robert Voris last had health insurance, in 2007, he stockpiled insulin pumps, which are inserted under the skin to constantly monitor blood-sugar levels and administer the drug accordingly. He said the tubing for the pump costs $900 a month, so lately he has instead been injecting insulin with a syringe. But Mr. Voris, 27, a journalism student at the City University of New York who works at a restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is constantly worried about diabetes-induced seizures like the one that sent him to the hospital last summer. (Because it happened at work, his boss covered the ambulance and other bills.)
“That’s definitely the concern: what happens if I have to pay for this?” he said. “And the answer, I guess, is credit cards. Hopefully it won’t happen until I find a job that actually gives me insurance, which probably won’t happen anytime in the near future, given the way the economy works.”
Most family insurance policies cut off dependents when they turn 19 or finish college, and many young adults start out in New York cobbling together part-time or freelance work with no benefits. To qualify for Medicaid, a single adult can earn no more than $706 a month — less than what a full-time minimum-wage earner makes. Yet the average insurance premium for a single adult is $900 a month, according to a spokesman for the State Insurance Department.
“At this point, I can’t really justify it monetarily,” said Ian McElroy, a musician who moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, from Omaha, last year. “It’s not like I think I’m invincible, I’m 29, the world can’t touch me. It’s the very opposite of that. I’ve got to make rent and eat.”
With insurance out of reach, Mr. McElroy has taken to playing doctor, using online resources like WebMD, which offers medical news, descriptions of various diseases and drugs, and discussion groups. As he spoke, Mr. McElroy was icing his feet, which, one day in January, had become cripplingly painful; he was unable to walk.
“I think I have plantar fasciitis,” he said. “I’ve been laid out for two weeks.”
(Even if the Paterson proposal passes, Mr. McElroy, like Mr. Voris and Ms. Polec and her roommate, would not qualify because their parents live out of state.)
Internet diagnoses, self-medicating and trading prescriptions, of course, come with potentially dangerous side effects. Dr. Barbie Gatton, who has worked in emergency rooms throughout the city since 2002, said she often sees young people who have taken the wrong antibiotics borrowed from friends.
“We see people with urinary tract infections taking meds better suited for ear infections or pneumonia — the problem is, they haven’t really treated their illness, and they’re breeding resistance,” she explained. “Or they take pain medicine that masks the symptoms. And this allows the underlying problem to get worse and worse.”
There are clinics throughout the city that provide the young and uninsured free or cheap snippets of medical help, like the Community Healthcare Network mobile unit, which was parked in the East Village one snowy night. Lindsay Bellinger, 26, who does administrative work through a temp agency and lives in Astoria, Queens, said she relied on the mobile unit for pap smears and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
“This takes care of gynecological work,” Ms. Bellinger said. “And I get a visit to the dentist from my parents as a Christmas gift.”
Levon Aaron, who has asthma and works as a bouncer at a West Village bar, has not had insurance since he was 19. Mr. Aaron, now 23, said that his asthma attacks had been less frequent since he began playing handball and working out, but they had not gone away. He tries to use his inhalers sparingly, but four times in the past year he has found himself out of medicine during a severe attack and landed in the emergency room.
In the hospital, he gets a prescription for a new inhaler, which costs about $30 to fill. But his outstanding bills total about $3,000, he said, an amount he cannot fathom paying.
Mr. Aaron was one of several young adults who said living without insurance meant trying to take better care of themselves.
“I’ve stopped eating fast food,” said Santiago Betancour, who is 19 and lives in Rosedale, Queens. “I’m eating rice, vegetables and fruits. And when I get sick, I exercise to sweat it off.”
Of course, there are those who do feel invincible, like Eric Williams, who is 24, unemployed and currently in the middle of a six-week snowboarding adventure in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah, British Columbia and California. Mr. Williams said by cellphone near Bozeman, Mont., that he looked into buying health insurance before he left, but abandoned the idea after being unable to find anything for less than $400 a month. Instead, he is just trying to be careful, though not always with success.
“I’ve hit a couple of trees,” Mr. Williams said. “But I’m trying not to.”
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11) Cancer Survivors Struggle to Find Jobs, Study Finds
By RONI CARYN RABIN
February 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/health/18cancer.html?ref=health
Lori Siegel did not even wait for her hair to grow back. Still feeling the effects of radiation treatments, she sent her résumé to potential employers, bought a new suit and a wig that does not look like a wig, and started going on job interviews.
But so far there have been no offers, and she is convinced that the nine-month gap in her work history gives her away. “It’s like I’m hiding something awful because I got sick,” said Ms. Siegel, 51, who lives on Long Island and is recovering from breast cancer. “I don’t want to bring it up, but I don’t want to lie.”
For Ms. Siegel and many other cancer survivors, money is tight and going back to work a financial necessity. But one of the first big analyses to examine employment rates among American and European cancer survivors has found that they are at significantly higher risk for joblessness than healthy counterparts.
The report, appearing Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is an analysis of previously published studies. After accounting for variations in data among those studies, it concluded that cancer survivors in the United States and Europe were 37 percent more likely to be unemployed than healthy peers. In the United States, where it is particularly critical for survivors to hold on to jobs, because they provide health insurance, cancer patients may be at even greater risk of unemployment than patients in Europe, the study suggested.
“This issue is so important to patients, because they often regard returning to work as indicative of complete recovery,” said the study’s chief author, Angela G.E.M. de Boer of the Coronel Institute of Occupational Health, in Amsterdam. “Employment is associated with a higher quality of life, and encouraging survivors to return to work also benefits aging societies economically.”
Although the study did not explore the reasons for high unemployment, Dr. de Boer speculated that disability played a leading role. Many survivors, she said, may simply be unable to return to work.
She urged businesses and other employers to adopt policies more accommodating to cancer survivors, like additional breaks and flexibility in work hours and tasks.
Nancy Redwine, a 49-year-old cancer survivor in Santa Cruz, Calif., said she had to quit her job at a local newspaper a few years ago after being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. “I was just really sick,” she said. “I had a really stressful job, and I just couldn’t do it. I was totally overwhelmed, and I didn’t know how much longer I had to live.”
She lived on credit cards for several years and eventually had to declare bankruptcy, she said.
“Cancer used to be a disease that occurred after you retired, because that’s when you were diagnosed,” said Cathy J. Bradley, a health economist at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center who has studied employment among cancer patients. “Now patients are getting that diagnosis early on, which is a good thing. . . .But I don’t think they or their employers are prepared for the tradeoff, which is that someone may be out of work for a long time.”
The new study is one of several recent reports focusing on the financial burdens of cancer. A report earlier this month by the American Cancer Society and the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that even privately insured patients struggle to pay for cancer care and often end up in debt, declaring bankruptcy, and foregoing or postponing needed treatment. They may face steep out-of-pocket costs because of annual caps on benefits and co-pays from frequent doctors’ visits. And if patients have to stop working, they often have to make a steep monthly payment for extended coverage, which can easily cost $1,000 a month, at the same time their income is reduced.
“You think you’re okay when you have insurance, but then when you get something like cancer, you discover there are a lot of holes in your insurance,” said Christie Schmidt, senior director of policy with the American Cancer Society and a co-author of the report.
For example, an insurance policy may cover up to ten radiation treatments over the course of a year, Ms. Schmidt noted, while the course of therapy for breast cancer may involve seven weeks of treatment.
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12) Jailing Kids for Cash
By Amy Goodman, Truthdig.com
Tuesday 17 February 2009
http://www.truthout.org/021909J
As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.
Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration:
"I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word."
Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up ... because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible."
She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: "I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program." She was hospitalized three times.
Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella.
As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: "Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court." The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC's case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud.
They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.
This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, "the United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails—a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years." The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails." For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out).
Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is "built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration."
Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, "It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
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13) Mr. Obama’s Foreclosure Plan
"(After five years, the interest rate will begin to gradually adjust upward again.)"
Editorial
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/opinion/19thu1.html
The anti-foreclosure plan announced by President Obama on Wednesday is a decisive break from the Bush administration’s disastrous protect-the-banks-but-not-the-homeowners policy. The president has promised that it will help as many as nine million American families refinance their mortgages or avoid foreclosure. That’s a good start, but given the dire state of the economy, we fear it still may not be enough.
For two years, while house prices cratered and mortgage defaults soared, the Bush administration stubbornly refused to compel the mortgage industry to clean up the bad loans that had been made so recklessly; it even refused to give banks any incentives to do so. Some two million families lost their homes to foreclosure.
The Obama plan will provide up to $75 billion, mostly from the bank bailout fund, to help lenders and borrowers come to new terms. That could allow up to four million at-risk homeowners stay in their homes.
Most of the money will go for incentive payments to encourage lenders to modify troubled loans and for subsidizing lower interest rates to reduce borrowers’ monthly payments. (After five years, the interest rate will begin to gradually adjust upward again.)
Equally important, Mr. Obama is coupling the incentives to bankers with a big stick — support for a change in the law that would allow bankrupt homeowners who cannot come to new affordable terms with a lender to have their mortgages modified under court protection. Mr. Bush stubbornly opposed that idea, too.
The plan will also provide help for homeowners who may be struggling, but not delinquent, making it easier for them to refinance their loans to lower rates. Loans that are owned or backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — about half of all mortgages — will be eligible for refinancing even for homeowners who have less than 20 percent equity in their homes.
That will allow up to an estimated five million homeowners to trade their current mortgages for loans with lower rates, making repayments easier and possibly heading off future defaults.
The truly worrisome part of the Obama plan is that it does not forcefully address the fact that some 13.6 million homeowners — and counting — are stuck in mortgages that have balances that are higher than the value of their properties.
Reducing the interest rates on the loans may make their mortgages affordable — for now. But if a family has a setback, like unemployment or illness, even the new lower payment may prove too onerous. Without an equity cushion to fall back on, default and foreclosure may be impossible to avoid. Similarly, if the family has a big expense — for a new roof or new plumbing — it would not make sense to plow more money into a home in which they have no equity. In those circumstances, declaring bankruptcy may be a homeowner’s only option.
Mr. Obama must fight for bankruptcy reform legislation that is expansive enough to accommodate borrowers who cannot make payments for reasons beyond their control. It will be a tough fight. The mortgage industry — which has carefully cultivated friends on both sides of the political aisle — will press for a bill that makes it as difficult as possible for borrowers to seek bankruptcy protection. Mr. Obama must not back down.
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14) U.S. Rep Fred Upton Steals Land From The Black Residents of Benton Harbor
Dorothy Pinkney
Join us in boycotting Whirlpool.
You must call Governor Granholm at 517-373-3400
Help the residents of Benton Harbor
DO NOT SUPPORT HARBOR SHORES!
February 17, 2009
http://bhbanco.blogspot.com/
I am here today to let you know about the injustice that is going on in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Our city has one of the highest levels of poverty and unemployment in the country. Benton Harbor’s population is made up of Blacks, Hispanics and poor whites of which 94% are black, 90% live below the poverty level and 70% are unemployed. This is the location of the Whirlpool Corporation Headquarters and of U.S. Representative Fred Upton, who is the heir to the Whirlpool family fortune.
My husband the Rev. Edward Pinkney, one of the beloved leaders in Benton harbor, was put in prison for organizing against the Whirlpool Corporation, U.S. Representative Fred Upton, and its lynching judges Alfred Butzbaugh and Dennis Wiley. He was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison for quoting the Bible verse `Deuteronomy 28` about what God shall visit upon the iniquitous. Whirlpool, U.S. Representative Fred Upton and Judge Dennis Wiley used this quote in an attempt to silence my husband, but he is not a man to be silenced. Beware you could be next!
This original charge stems from a successful recall of a corrupt city commissioner in a effort to stop Whirlpool, Harbor Shores, Cornerstone Alliance, and U.S. Representative Fred Upton from stealing prime lake front property, our very own Jean Klock Park, the only beach along Lake Michigan that was given to the citizens of Benton Harbor by John Klock. Whirlpool, Harbor Shores Developers and U.S. Representative Fred Upton want to steal the land to develop a 750 million to 1 billion dollars development known as Harbor Shores.
My husband, a true black community leader and activist, has led the fight against official corruption and corporate greed in his impoverished and beloved community of Benton Harbor. It is the only city in the United States where Black’s own lake front property. He is a political prisoner only because he had the spirit to take on Whirlpool and U.S. Representative Fred Upton, a known racist. My husband is under house arrest 24/7. The police come by everyday to check on him even though he wears a G.P.S. tether. He cannot preach in a church or speak in any church, but they cannot stop him from speaking or preaching at home.
My question to the people is; why should Governor Jennifer Granholm help Whirlpool and U.S.Representative Fred Upton steal our lake front land? Also, why will the Michigan Democratic Party let her or any other public representative support Whirlpool against the people of Benton Harbor? Our lakefront is being stolen for the development of a playground for wealthy people. We Need Your Help!
The Democratic Party has always claimed itself to be the party of the people. Then when will they begin to protect our rights? Join the campaign to stop Whirlpool, Harbor Shores, and U.S.Representative Fred Upton from stealing our public lake front park and land and removing all blacks from the city of Benton Harbor.
Dorothy Pinkney
Join us in boycotting Whirlpool.
You must call Governor Granholm at 517-373-3400
Help the residents of Benton Harbor
DO NOT SUPPORT HARBOR SHORES!
February 17, 2009
http://bhbanco.blogspot.com/
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15) Newly Poor Swell Lines at Food Banks Nationwide
By JULIE BOSMAN
February 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/nyregion/20food.html?hp
MORRISTOWN, N.J. — Cindy Dreeszen and her husband live in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. They have steady jobs, his at a movie theater and hers at a government office. Together, they earn about $55,000 a year.
But with a 17-month-old son, another baby on the way, and, as Ms. Dreeszen put it, “the cost of everything going up and up,” the couple went to a food pantry this month to ask for some free groceries.
“I didn’t think we’d even be allowed to come here,” said Ms. Dreeszen, 41, glancing around at the shelves of fruit, whole-wheat pasta and baby food. “This is totally something that I never expected to happen, to have to resort to this.”
Once a crutch for the most needy, food pantries have responded to the deepening recession by opening their doors to what one pantry organizer described as “the next layer of people,” a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse’s aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time. Over all, demand at food banks across the country increased by 30 percent in 2008 from the previous year, according to a survey by Feeding America, which distributes more than two billion pounds of food every year. And while pantries usually see a drop in demand after the holiday season, many in upscale suburbs this year are experiencing the opposite.
Here in Morris County (median household income, $82,173), the Interfaith Food Pantry added extra hours this month after seeing a 24 percent increase in customers and 45 percent increase in food distributed in November, December and January compared with the same period last year.
In Lake Forest, Ill., a wealthy Chicago suburb, a pantry in an Episcopal church that used to attract people from less affluent towns nearby has been flooded with people who have lost jobs. In Greenwich, Conn., one pantry organizer reported a “tremendous” increase in demand for food since December, with out-of-work landscapers and housekeepers as well as real estate professionals who have not made a sale in months filling the line.
And amid the million-dollar houses of Marin County, Calif., a pantry at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center last month changed its policy to allow people to stop by once a week instead of every other week, since there are so many new faces in line alongside the regulars.
“We’re seeing people who work at banks, for software firms, for marketing firms, and they’re all losing their jobs,” said Dave Cort, the executive director. “Here we are in big, fancy Marin County, but we have people who are standing in line with their eyes wide open, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m here.’ ”
The demand is not limited to pantries, which distribute groceries from food banks, supermarket surplus and individuals who donate through church or school can drives. The number of food-stamp recipients was up by 17 percent across New York State, and 12 percent in New Jersey, in November from a year before. When a mobile unit of the Essex County welfare office, as part of a pilot program to distribute food-stamp applications in other counties, stopped in Shop-Rite parking lots recently in Morris County, it was swamped.
“If one of our richest counties has people signing up for food stamps who have never signed up before, that indicates the depth of this problem with the lack of food,” said Kathleen DiChiara, executive director of Community FoodBank of New Jersey. “It’s the canary in the coal mine.”
Experts said that chronically poor people tend to adapt to the periods where money is scarce by asking for support from friends or tapping into social services, but that working-class people who suddenly lose jobs or homes often find themselves at sea, unsure how to navigate the system or ashamed to seek help.
It is those people who, over the last several months, have started arriving in growing numbers at food pantries, which are often the first tentative step for those whose incomes are too high to qualify for government assistance. (Many pantries have a no-questions policy, though they might determine how many bags of groceries a customer can receive by the number of people in their household.)
“These are people who never really had to ask for help before,” said Brenda Beavers, human services director for the Salvation Army in New Jersey, which dispenses emergency food supplies at 30 pantries throughout the state. “They were once givers and now they’re having to ask for assistance.”
In Morristown, Rosemary Gilmartin, executive director of the Interfaith Food Pantry, has over the last several months watched a steady stream of new faces pushing shopping carts among the cardboard boxes on metal shelves in a former nursing home. In 2008, the pantry gave away 620,000 pounds of food, a 24 percent increase from 2007.
Along with fresh apples and Nature’s Path Organic Soy Plus cereal, Ms. Gilmartin, who began volunteering at the pantry 13 years ago, gives children “Dora the Explorer” books. In the past few months, she has found herself fielding more inquiries about social service programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit from people who clearly had never before hovered this close to the poverty line.
“They look shellshocked,” she said. “I’ve had people walk back out and say, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”
She recalled one recent walk-in, a television sound engineer who lost his house to foreclosure. “His life just went reee-eeer,” Ms. Gilmartin said, twirling her finger in a downward circle.
Usually, the pantry distributes food at two locations several mornings a week, including most Saturdays, and on the first and third Wednesday evenings of the month. But this month, Ms. Gilmartin decided to also open on the second Wednesday because she has been having trouble accommodating everyone.
By 5:30 p.m. on that Wednesday, a half-hour before the pantry was to open, a line of nearly two dozen had formed. Once inside, people were escorted individually through the shelves of low-fat mozzarella cheese, dried beans and Pepperidge Farm chocolate chunk cookies, where a few paused — often reluctantly — to explain what had brought them.
“A deadbeat husband and a loss of a job,” said one woman in her 20s, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want her friends to know she had been visiting the pantry. It was her second visit. The first time, she could barely get out of her car. “Let me put it this way — it took me a long time to come here,” the woman said as she added a bag of lentils to her cart. “I felt like a loser. I felt like a total lowlife.”
A woman wearing gold earrings and a red Vera Bradley bag over her shoulder, who is in her 50s and gave only her first name, Louise, said she had recently lost her job and has been struggling to pay her bills.
“I can understand why people would be embarrassed to come here,” she said, as she loaded her groceries into the trunk of her silver Chevy Malibu. “I guess I am a little embarrassed.”
Joan Verba, 53, said she had been coming up short financially since she quit her job as an accountant after her husband became ill with cancer. When her husband died, leaving her and a 14-year-old son, she put off plans to re-enter the work force.
“The job market is so bad right now,” she said. “My son eats 24-7. I just need this to supplement my food bills.”
Her mother, Carol Morrison, stood nearby. “I’m just here for moral support,” she said, inspecting the shelves. “And nosiness.”
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16) General Sees Long Term for Afghanistan Buildup
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/washington/19pentagon.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, said Wednesday that the heightened troop levels that President Obama ordered for Afghanistan could remain in place for as long as five years.
General McKiernan, who spoke at a news conference at the Pentagon a day after Mr. Obama ordered 17,000 additional troops to the country, said that the buildup “is not a temporary force uplift” and that it was essential to break what he called a stalemate in southern Afghanistan, the epicenter of the Taliban-led insurgency.
He said that he could not determine exactly how long the troops would be there, but that the buildup would “need to be sustained for some period of time,” and that he was looking at “the next three to four or five years.”
General McKiernan said the additional troops would get him through the start of the traditional fighting season in the spring and a presidential election scheduled for August, when there is expected to be a surge in violence.
But he said he would still like 10,000 additional troops in Afghanistan to fulfill a request that neither President Bush nor President Obama had met.
Later on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said no decision on additional troops would be made until the administration completed a sweeping policy review now under way. Mr. Gates said that review would determine how long the heightened troop levels in Afghanistan would remain in place.
The additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by Mr. Obama amount to an increase of nearly 50 percent over the 36,000 American troops already there. About 30,000 other foreign troops are operating there under a NATO-led command.
Of the new reinforcements, General McKiernan said, “What this allows us to do is change the dynamics of the security situation, predominantly in southern Afghanistan, where we are, at best, stalemated, and we need additional, persistent security presence in areas that we’re not at today.” He added, “I have to tell you that 2009 is going to be a tough year.”
Mr. Gates spoke to reporters before departing for a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Krakow, Poland. He said the decision to sharply increase the American troop presence in Afghanistan came with an expectation that allies would increase their contributions to the effort, in particular to civilian projects to develop the country’s economic and political structures.
Despite the buildup, General McKiernan said Afghanistan would not be won by military power alone. “We’re not going to run out of people that either international forces or Afghan forces have to kill or capture,” he said. “It’s going to be ultimately a political solution.”
General McKiernan, who declared three times during the news conference that “the insurgency will not win in Afghanistan,” said that the failed history of the British and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan should not be a predictor of America’s future in the country.
“There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” General McKiernan said, adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.”
Thom Shanker contributed reporting.
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