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Sign the Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal Online Petition to the U.S. Supreme Court
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/supreme/petition.html
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Clemency for Jose Briseno
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/t/5820/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26979
Jose Briseno, who sits on Texas' death row awaiting execution on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 is a poignant example of the power of change. Because Mr. Briseno has consistently demonstrated an extraordinary and unique ability to make a transformative difference in his own life and in the lives of those around him, we urge you to act now to save his life.
Please appeal to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency for Jose Briseno.
Letters will be sent to:
Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
8610 Shoal Creek Boulevard
Austin, Texas 78757
Phone (512) 406-5852
Fax (512) 467-0945
bpp-pio@tdcj.state.tx.us
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This captures the dreaming of the hobo. It rings so true for so many more people increasing every day. Really listen to the lyrics. -- Davy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYGCpGzFWh0
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
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A Judge's Victims
Voices of those who went through the courtroom of Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. in Luzerne County, Pa. Judge Ciavarella has pleaded guilty in connection to a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers for kickbacks.
March 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/28/us/20090328_JUDGES.html?ref=us
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Abolish the Federal Death Penalty: Support S.650
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/t/5820/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=11504
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Rally for Tristan Anderson
Rally for Justice
Rally for Palestine
12:00 noon, Federal Building, Oakland
Thursday, April 2, 1301 Clay St., 12th St. BART
On March 13, 2009, Tristan Anderson of Oakland, California was shot in the head by Israeli forces in the Palestinian village of Ni'lin. After participating with the villagers in a nonviolent demonstration against the confiscation of their land, Tristan was taking pictures of Israeli soldiers and police attacking the demonstrators. A high velocity long-range tear gas canister was illegally used at short range, crushing his forehead. Israeli forces twice delayed his ambulance to a hospital where he is fighting for his life.
Demand Justice for Tristan and Palestine!
Other actions you can do:
Call Representative Barbara Lee (202-225-2661) and Senators Dianne Feinstein (202-224-3841) and Barbara Boxer (202-224-3553). Demand that Israel be held accountable for its attacks against US citizens like Tristan, Rachel Corrie, James Miller and Brian Avery, and for killing thousands of Palestinian civilians with US weapons. Demand an end to billions of US taxpayer dollars to Israel every year.
More info: 510-236-4250, www.norcalism. org, www.palsolidarity. org
Tax exempt donations (please instruct "for Tristan"):
Checks to: ISM, 405 Vista Heights Rd., El Cerrito, CA 94530
On line: www.norcalism.org/tristan.html
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SF Bay Premiere Screening of "Obama's Iraq"
This Friday, April 3 at 7:00 pm
ATA Theater, 992 Valencia St (at 21st St), San Francisco
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
OBAMA'S IRAQ
A Big Noise Film followed by a Public Discussion:
How Do We End Occupation & Empire Under Obama?
* Carl Davison, organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War, served in the Marines and the Army, and refused deployment to Iraq.
* Antonia Juhasz, analyst, activist, author of Tyrany of Oil; The World's Most Powerful Industry--and What We Must Do to Stop It
* Rick Rowley, Big Noise film maker recently returned for Iraq.
Everyone welcome, $6 donation requested, not required.
Obama's Iraq is an evening of short films never before seen in America. Shot on the other side of the blast shields in Iraq's walled cities, it covers a very different side of the war than is ever seen on American screens. It reports unembedded from war-torn Falluja, from the giant US prison at Umm Qasr, from the Mehdi Army stronghold inside Sadr City -- from the places where mainstream corporate channels can not or will not go. Obama's Iraq asks the questions -- what is occupation under Obama, and how can we end the war in Iraq and the empire behind it? After the film, a public discussion will begin to answer that question. Join us.
Sponsored by Courage to Resist,
Bay Area Iraq Veterans Against the War,
& Unconventional Action in the Bay.
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Sat. April 11 - 11:00 am
Corporate Bail-Out Protest
On the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve Bank
101 Market St., San Francisco
near Embarcadero BART Station
Bail out the people, not the CEO's!
Peacefully protest the greed that resulted in 12 million unemployed and foreclosures up 81%.
We want our economy restored for the public.
Sign up at:
http://www.anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/
There will be protests in over 40 other cities nationwide at the same time.
Organized via A New Way Forward.
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Celebrate the release of the new book by Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. the USA"
Friday, April 24th (Mumia's birthday!), 6:30 P.M.
Humanist Hall
411 - 28th Street, Oakland
$25.00 donation or what you can afford.
Featuring:
Angely Y. Davis
Mistah F.A.B.
Lynne Stewart
Tory Serra
Avotcja
Kiilu Nyasha
JR Minister of Information POCC
Ed Mead
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia
Molotov Mouths
Prison Radio, 415-648-4505
www.prisonradio.org
www.mumia.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) A World of Hurt
For Injured Workers, a Costly Legal Swamp
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/nyregion/31comp.html?hp
2) Record Drop in January Index of Home Prices
By DAVID STREITFELD
April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/economy/01econ.html?hp
3) Haiti's Woes Are Top Test for Aid Effort
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/world/americas/31haiti.html
4) French Workers Hold Bosses at Caterpillar Plant
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:08 a.m. ET
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/03/31/business/AP-EU-France-Caterpilla.html?ref=world
5) $296 Billion in Overruns in U.S. Weapons Programs
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/business/31defense.html?ref=us
6) Settlement for Man Wrongly Convicted in Palladium Killing
By BENJAMIN WEISER
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/nyregion/31palladium.html?ref=nyregion
7) Exams of Injured Workers Fuel Mutual Mistrust
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/nyregion/01comp.html?_r=1&hp
8) Protesters Block London’s Financial District
By JULIA WERDIGIER and LANDON THOMAS, Jr.
April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/world/europe/02protest.html?ref=world
9) Israeli Minister Dismisses Peace Effort
By ISABEL KERSHNER
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/world/middleeast/02mideast.html?ref=world
10) Standoff Ends at Caterpillar Plant in France
By DAVID JOLLY
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/global/02caterpillar.html?ref=world
11) Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran—Or I Will
The message from Israel's new prime minister is stark: if the Obama administration doesn't prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, Israel may be forced to attack.
An Atlantic exclusive
by Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/netanyahu
12) Making Ends Meet in the Great Depression
By JOYCE WADLER
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/garden/02depression.html?hp
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1) For Injured Workers, a Costly Legal Swamp
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/nyregion/31comp.html?hp
The hurt workers wait on benches at the Queens office of the New York State Workers' Compensation Board.
People like Hopeton Watkis, 64, a laborer, who lost two teeth when he fell and hit a wheelbarrow.
Or Rajcoomar Jagan, 50, a construction worker, who injured a leg falling off a scaffold.
Or Vicki Marquez, 32, a retail sales associate, who hurt her elbow hauling clothes.
They come to the board seeking authorization for medical treatment and replacement wages - in short, a quick and fair resolution from a system set up to replace fractious court fights between employers and employees.
What they find instead is a subbasement of the legal world, a $5.5 billion-a-year state-run bureaucracy that, an examination by The New York Times found, struggles to treat workers with due speed, protect employers from fraud or mute tensions in the workplace.
These struggles are particularly evident each day in Queens, the state's busiest hearing office, where The Times spent 18 months attending hearings, reviewing cases and interviewing participants, virtually none of whom defended the system as efficient.
At some hearings, as judges looked on, lawyers chatted on cellphones, cracked bawdy jokes or read newspapers during testimony. Expert witnesses seemed biased to the point of caricature. Claims dragged on, but hearings seldom exceeded a few blurred minutes, rarely proved conclusive and were conducted in baffling shorthand.
Mr. Watkis waited two years to get his front teeth fixed. Ms. Marquez had to postpone elbow surgery for a year until the board allowed it. Mr. Jagan exhausted three years trying to get compensated, only to be denied all benefits, a decision that stunned even some insurance company lawyers.
"Comparing Supreme Court, say, to this is like comparing a hospital to a MASH unit," said Anthony Pizza, a lawyer for insurance companies. "A lot of it is meatball justice."
Workers' compensation systems across the country are troubled, and reform efforts are under way here. But New York, a pioneer of the concept and home to the nation's second-largest system, has some signature claims to dysfunction and is widely recognized as the most adversarial.
Though its commissioners largely function as a legal tribunal, most are not lawyers but relatives or allies of politicians, appointed usually without regard to experience in the field.
Though many cases turn on medical evaluations, the board has not had its own medical director for nearly a decade. Decisions are often driven by the opinions of doctors certified by the state as so-called independent medical examiners. Yet claimant lawyers and treating doctors say these examiners often understate workers' ailments to win business from the insurers who pay them.
Fines for infractions are usually small, and some insurers ignore paying them for years without consequence. A few months ago, New York City agreed to produce $1.1 million in penalties, some years overdue.
Workers are known to fabricate claims, while employers can be equally uninhibited about pressuring injured workers against filing for compensation, or punishing them if they do.
And everywhere the system tolerates delays that can make the injured wait months or years for money and care. Statewide, in about one in six cases, insurers dispute that injuries are real or were suffered on the job. Until recently, these cases had averaged nearly nine months to resolve. And many of them remain unresolved years later.
Even unchallenged cases plod on. A.I.G., the insurance company, said a review of its 2007 New York cases found that those involving missed work took on average 802 days to reach a final stage, 30 percent longer than in the rest of the country.
A recent task force study found that when insurers reject a medical procedure, say, an operation, it takes more than three or four months for the board to settle the dispute. The delay can mean that injuries heal slowly or improperly, and in 75 percent of those cases, the worker's need for the procedure is upheld.
Zachary S. Weiss, the chairman of the compensation board since late 2007, said that given the scope of what needs to be done, change must be incremental.
"There are millions of things I would like to correct and I'd like to correct them all immediately, and I can't," Mr. Weiss said.
State officials do say that as imperfect as it is now, the system used to be much worse. Before he resigned, Gov. Eliot Spitzer managed to pass a law that sliced costs and gave workers more money. Until then, New York's system had achieved the neat trick of being both among the most expensive for business and the stingiest to workers.
The board has recently found an interim medical director. But the intended overhaul has yet to deliver on many of its other goals and does not address some of the most stubborn flaws.
"There are still many issues that need to be dealt with," said Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health and a labor advocate. "How it will play out will not be known for a number of years."
One target for improvement is basic record keeping. No one has ever documented, for example, the extent of worker fraud, though accounts of bogus claims have dominated news accounts of workers' compensation for years.
Actually, while the system has a lengthy history of being cheated by employees who exaggerate injuries, experts say they believe more substantial fraud and misbehavior are woven through the process in less obvious ways that hurt workers.
"This is a terrible thing to say," said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the occupational and environmental division at Mount Sinai Medical Center, "but if I had a health problem at work, I'm not sure I'd file a workers' comp claim. It's the Wild West of health insurance."
Mary Jeffords, the head of Injured Workers of New York, an advocacy group, says she knows of numerous disabled workers so ground down by the process that they begin to unravel.
"I've talked to workers that held a gun to their head as we talked," she said.
Waiting for Help
George Vasilescu's reaction was immediate. He tossed his head back, thumped his feet.
"No more," Mr. Vasilescu, who is deaf and mute, signed. "I beg you. No more."
Mr. Vasilescu, 64, a hotel steward who hurt his back, neck and wrist, had just been told by his lawyer that the judge wanted him back for another medical exam, another hearing, another delay, after four years churning through the system.
It is a good day at the Queens hearing office when there is only one such outburst.
Few people think about workers' compensation until they wrench their back or lose a thumb and become one of the roughly 140,000 new cases filed statewide each year. Those with minor injuries often sail through the process.
But so many workers have been so frustrated or mistreated that they don't even submit claims when they are injured. Instead, they improperly use regular medical coverage. Or they apply only for Social Security disability or welfare. Costs rightly borne by employers are then billed to the general public.
All that is flawed with the system can be witnessed daily inside the stubby building at 168-46 91st Avenue in Jamaica, one of three dozen redoubts statewide where cases get heard. It doesn't take long there to grasp how proceedings have devolved into something out of Kafka, who was himself once a compensation claims examiner.
Cases are delayed for any of myriad reasons, or no reason. When the Workers' Compensation Research Institute recently studied speed of payment among 15 states, it found New York the slowest to pay workers their first check.
"These people are not chattel," said Neil Abramson, a claimant lawyer. "They're human beings."
In Queens, it often takes four to six months from the time of injury to get before a judge, a period during which a worker may not receive care or wages. Typically cases are decided piecemeal - months can pass before both sides even agree on how much a worker earned - and so that first encounter may begin a procession of hearings that become stretched-out wars. Any appeal had once meant another six to nine months for a ruling, though since the board made recent changes many have been coming much quicker.
Three-quarters of the appeals are by insurers.
An insurer appealed, for example, when Ms. Marquez sought surgery for her injured elbow in 2007. The appeal, which the board found particularly weak, meant the surgery did not get approved until a year later.
To accelerate cases, the board has increasingly allowed some involving lesser injuries to be decided by a claims examiner, instead of a judge. The examiners are not required to have legal or medical training, or even a high school diploma, and lawyers and judges say their decisions often contain errors. Judges must review the rulings, but some admit it often gets done hastily.
Largely because of delays and litigiousness, only about a third of the state's 66,000 active licensed doctors take compensation cases. One of those who does, Dr. Miron Fayngersh of Brooklyn, said he had 41 outstanding bills for a single case, one a year old.
"The percentage of denials is worse in workers' comp than in any other area in my experience," said Dr. Robert Goldberg, former head of the Medical Society of the State of New York.
One case that seems to exemplify the broad faults is that of Richard Frank, a forklift driver for New York City Transit. After he had a work accident in 1991, the agency prolonged his case for years, ignoring judges' orders, according to court rulings.
After a September 1995 hearing was adjourned because his employer had furnished illegible evidence, Mr. Frank told his lawyer "the Transit Authority is going to kill me." That night he died of a heart attack. He was 50.
For a decade, the agency then contested whether his widow was due death benefits, until an appeals court ruled in 2005 that his death had been caused in part by the agency's "unlawful coercion" and "disgraceful conduct" in resisting his claim.
Claimants who typically wait months to talk to a judge are surprised by the lightning speed of hearings. Eight minutes is typical. A trial can run a half-hour to an hour. Some matters finish in a minute or two. Often workers don't even get to speak. Sometimes they wait outside while their lawyers perform.
Vera Rutherford, a substance abuse counselor whose carpal tunnel case had plodded along for two years, asked, "Is it normal for a person to go in there and say nothing and have people decide their life for them?"
One day, Fernando Tenorio, a school safety officer hindered by a knee injury, emerged from his hearing, dazed by its velocity: four minutes flat.
For months, Mr. Tenorio had received no money. Now, his lawyer, Mark Allen, explained to him, the case was adjourned for another few weeks for an investigation, though he would be paid something while waiting.
As Mr. Allen put it, "Six weeks is like tomorrow around here."
But Mr. Tenorio blurted out, "There're some other things I want to tell you." He had lost his apartment and was cooped up in his brother's basement; his bank account was empty.
Mr. Allen halted him: "Forget about personal. They don't think of you as a person. They think of you as a file with a dollar sign on it. They don't care if you can't put food on the table or put braces on your daughter. You're thinking of this logically. I stopped thinking that way a long time ago. This is comp."
Ambitious Assurances
New York's workers' compensation system was born in 1914, an idea of great promise that grew in part from great tragedy, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 garment workers in 1911.
The state, one of the first to adopt such a program, founded the system on a simple bargain. Hurt workers, who previously had to prove their employer's negligence in court to get compensated, now would get medical care and wage benefits automatically. In turn, they would be barred from filing suit.
At its most basic, that no-fault insurance system is the same today. Essentially, companies buy compensation insurance and their premiums underwrite the cost of running the system and all claims. Virtually all employers must carry coverage.
Hearing rooms across the state are filled, not with office workers, but with people who make biscuits or work construction or strip beds: physical laborers who often live just above society's safety nets.
These workers confront a law that is maddeningly complex. In its barest form, it requires workers to report an injury to their employer within 30 days, then file a claim with the compensation board. If the insurer doesn't object, it is generally required to begin medical and wage benefits within a few weeks.
But if information is missing, as is common, the clock doesn't start until it is submitted, so payments often start much later. Disputed cases are frequent, require judicial intervention and can take months or years to resolve.
There are no cost-of-living adjustments, so payments can lag behind wages. A plumber who has New York's longest-running claim, from a back injury in 1937, gets all of $6 a week.
Given its tortuous nature, it's no wonder the system has figured in some of New York's noir moments. For 16 years in the 1940s and 1950s, George Metesky, the so-called Mad Bomber, concealed bombs around New York in a rage precipitated by the rejection of his claim.
Changes introduced in 2007 mean that for the first time since 1992 the maximum weekly benefit will rise, in stages, from a flat $400 to what will next year and thereafter be indexed to two-thirds of the state's average wage, a cap of about $760. But the reform also ended payouts that could last a lifetime for workers with permanent partial injuries, like an impaired back. Now these awards generally expire within 10 years.
Those adjustments were designed to correct a longstanding paradox of the New York system: how it could be one of the most expensive for employers yet have one of the lowest payouts to workers. Experts say that although the wage benefit was low, insurance rates were steep because the state, unlike many others, had no time limit on payments for permanent partial disabilities.
New York not only had a high level of these injuries, it also had one of the more litigious processes, which further drove up costs.
Today, even with the payout increases, New York lags behind many states. Injured workers in Iowa can get about double New York's limit.
John F. Burton Jr., professor emeritus at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations and an expert on workers' compensation, feels that systems nationwide have become less fair to workers, in part because the political balance has tilted toward management.
"In general, it's not economics that is driving this," he said. "It's that employers have gotten the upper hand."
In New York, average premiums have fallen over the last dozen years (though they vary enormously among employers), as have claims. But the perception reigns, driven in part by insurers, law enforcement and the news media, that the system is expensive because it is bloated with embroidered claims.
Fraud does occur, not only when workers feign injuries, but also when they stay out five weeks when four would suffice. In 2007, the authorities arrested a bus driver, receiving compensation for a hurt shoulder, who Brooklyn prosecutors said had been touring Europe as a drummer in a rock band.
But experts believe far more money is siphoned by employers that illegally underpay premiums by underreporting the size of their work force or by doctors who fabricate bills.
Some defects are addressed by the latest changes. For example, "rocket docket" rules are being applied to speed up initially disputed cases, and while not everyone has embraced them, some progress has been made.
"We want our comp system to do so much," Mr. Weiss said. "And it should do so much. And it does so little."
As head of the compensation board, Mr. Weiss, who earns $120,800, directs the system, which employs 1,500 people. The other commissioners earn $90,800 and primarily rule on appeals that bubble up from local offices.
Commissioners often work from home, reviewing opinions generated for them by board lawyers. Just five of the current 11 commissioners are lawyers.
Last year, after a dozen years as a commissioner, Michael T. Berns wrote a book titled "Behind the Closed Doors," which he describes as a kind of apology for a system where, he said, workers suffer in part because some commissioners know too little about the relevant law, work just a few hours a week and do not read many of the decisions they sign.
"The whole push is a numbers production," he said. "Quality is irrelevant."
The board members are appointed by the governor in a process long regarded as dominated by politics.
Commissioner Candace K. Finnegan is a former personnel director for a state psychiatric facility, and also a close friend of Libby Pataki, the wife of former Gov. George E. Pataki. Ellen O. Paprocki had been assistant director of the New York State Fair, and is also the daughter of John O'Mara, who was an adviser to Mr. Pataki.
Frances M. Libous, a former nurse, is married to Thomas W. Libous, a ranking Republican state senator. Mark D. Higgins, recently appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson, is a longtime union official and brother of Representative Brian Higgins, an upstate Democrat.
"It is political employment for the politically connected," said Richard A. Bell, a commissioner. He once served as the board's executive director, and his wife worked as an executive assistant to Mr. Pataki.
While politics is a factor in appointments, several members said those selected are nonetheless qualified.
For years, judges and lawyers say, politics also played a role in who got hired as district administrators to run the system's 11 district offices. The posts, created a decade ago by state lawmakers, paid $104,080 a year. But critics said the administrators' duties were light and little different from those of the district managers they were brought in to supervise.
This month, the board simply did away with district administrators, leaving two regional administrators in their stead, millions of dollars having been spent to no clear end.
Injured and Indigent
Carlos Pabon, a parks department manager and an Army veteran, hurt his back and neck when someone opened a door into him in a Bronx storeroom in 1997 and knocked him down a flight of stairs. Tossed into the cumbersome workers' compensation system, he has never left.
Initially, the system took care of his injuries and Mr. Pabon, now 50, stayed on the job, earning up to $60,000 a year. But his pain worsened over time, he said, and he began to miss days. In the summer of 2006, his doctors advised him to stop working.
New York City arranged for him to get an independent medical exam. That doctor felt that Mr. Pabon's doctors were wrong. He had no disability. He could do his job without restriction.
In January 2007, the wage benefits he had been receiving stopped because of the independent doctor's report.
Michael Serres, Mr. Pabon's lawyer, sought to challenge the doctor by having him testify. But nearly a year would go by before he did.
In the meantime, Mr. Pabon, who said he wrestled with grinding pain, could not live on a tiny military pension and the slim disability income of his fiancée, Grace James. The bank seized his car. He reached the limit on his credit cards and pawned his jewelry. He went on welfare.
In November 2007, the city's doctor finally testified. He stood by his report. Another hearing in Queens was scheduled.
The matter was still unresolved last year when a city marshal arrived at Mr. Pabon's apartment with an eviction notice. It was Valentine's Day. Mr. Pabon was eight months behind on the rent.
In a bone-chilling wind, they left: Mr. Pabon, Ms. James, their child and another from Ms. James's previous relationship. A third child was at school. They juggled what they could carry, including their bird. After depositing the children with a relative, Mr. Pabon and Ms. James rode the A train all night. The next evening, they slept in the boiler room of an apartment house.
Soon, they landed in an echoing homeless shelter where they washed their clothes in the tub. Occasionally, Mr. Pabon stole food. "I took cookies, hard salami, half a pint of milk, cakes, doughnuts, small stuff," he said. "I stole a deodorant stick from Rite-Aid."
"I worked in the parks taking care of kids, making sure they didn't get hurt, being a role model," he said. "Here I am stealing things."
They moved from one shelter to another. Mr. Pabon began to have nightmares and imagined himself blowing up people. He and Ms. James bickered.
"Look at where we are," she told him one day. "What kind of man are you?"
The next hearing for Mr. Pabon, his 13th in a case in its 11th year, was set for April 1, 2008.
Mr. Pabon arrived by bus from the shelter. He was penniless.
"I feel so down. I mean, down on the ground," he told his fiancée.
"This could put someone in a mental hospital," she replied. "I can see myself sitting in a room in a straitjacket, rocking."
As the hearing approached, as often happens, the lawyers fashioned a deal. Mr. Pabon was offered $265 a week. By the system's metrics, he was deemed about 33 percent disabled.
The calibrations of disability can be arbitrary. Few doctors are trained to gauge how injuries restrict a person's particular work capability. Some workers with frightful injuries are judged 75 percent disabled. But a professor, or an accountant, can often continue a career. Laborers judged 25 or 50 percent disabled often are stuck. Who hires a laborer who can manage half a job?
Mr. Pabon had expected $400 a week, the limit for a case of this vintage. Yet he accepted.
"I need money now," he said.
After the lawyer's fee, Mr. Pabon would get a back-payment check of $11,921. Once he satisfied his most pressing creditors and bought clothes for his family, he expected to have maybe $7,000 left.
He still would be unable to work and without a home.
John Vos, the lawyer for the insurer, saw the deal as an effort "to meet in the middle." He said he had no idea how injured Mr. Pabon was - "I'm not a doctor" - and that the cyclical hearings were simply the norm.
Compensation cases are like serials without endings. Over the next eight months, Mr. Pabon was sent to two more insurance exams, had two more hearings, got his rate raised to $350 because of continuing depression and had a kidney removed.
He continues to live in a shelter.
Joking and Settling
The compensation lawyers in Queens are a clubby bunch. Often they go to greasy spoons for burgers and pizza, claimant and insurer alike, piling into the van of Ed Hilfer, a claimant lawyer.
Few students in law school imagine a career as a workers' comp lawyer or judge. For most, it is an accidental destination. Many say they chose it because of the hours. Hearings go from 9 to 4, and judges and lawyers often fly out the door minutes after their last case.
Fees for claimant lawyers are set by judges and come out of awards to workers. Insurer lawyers get paid whatever they negotiate. Rewards for claimant lawyers in Queens typically arrive in dribs and drabs of $50 and $100 fees, augmented by sweeter windfalls from settlements.
For both sides, it is a volume business: the more hearings, the more fees, thus the incentive to keep cases alive.
For workers, a lawyer can be an essential brace. In Queens, though, a claimant is commonly represented by a firm that specializes in workers' compensation law, not an individual. So if there are six hearings, a different lawyer might handle each one. Sometimes a freelancer steps in when the assigned lawyer is overloaded.
As a result, some hearing lawyers have never spoken to the client, and have barely studied the file. The same hasty preparation is often true for the insurance lawyer and the judge. Even preparation for trial testimony might get done in a few stuttering moments in the waiting area.
During one hearing, a claimant's lawyer asked his client a question in Spanish. That went poorly, since the man was Armenian.
"There was a judge I was talking to and he said there are only two ways in my court that your fees would be cut: if you're not friendly or if you're not willing to compromise," said Mr. Pizza, the insurance company lawyer. "I said, 'What if you're not prepared?' He said that doesn't matter."
Between hearings, the lawyers' room has the feel of a college social club. Lawyers play pinochle. Watch hockey fights on YouTube. Joke about judges, like the "Cruise Director," whom they mock for roaming the halls. Or they check the "meat chart," which lists awards for lost body parts, based on a grisly schedule that codifies missing limbs with weeks of wages.
The rate for an arm is 312 weeks of wages. A leg gets 288, a big toe 38, the index finger 46. Rates fluctuate by state, for no apparent reason. Lose an index finger in Idaho, it's 70 weeks.
Despite the esprit de corps, the opposing lawyers have clashing worldviews about the system.
A few years ago, Mark Allen represented a delivery driver who had injured his back lifting packages. The next day, the man told his manager the pain was so bad it hurt when he pulled on his socks. The insurer said: not a work injury; he must have hurt himself putting on his socks.
"If you fell out of a tree when you were 5 and you have a knee injury when you're 55, they'll say it was the tree," Mr. Allen said.
On the insurer side, Nicholas Rupwani typifies the many lawyers who view the system as a worker fraud trough. One day he recounted the case of a pet store clerk bitten by a rat who said her injuries had been serious and the experience traumatizing. Yet, Mr. Rupwani noted, her MySpace page showed her throwing darts in a bar and indicated she might start a pornographic Web site.
Mr. Rupwani said he felt bad for workers who suffer crushing injuries - but not too bad. "If you're a secretary with a torn meniscus who is losing her house, go back to work," he said. "It might hurt, but people work through the pain."
When workers moan during hearings about family strife and ruin, he said, "that's when I tune out." His theory is that the more people broadcast their situation, the more likely they are fakes.
"Sometimes the claimant is sitting next to you and doing this quiet sobbing," Mr. Rupwani said. "That's when I usually recommend that the insurer put them under surveillance."
He said he recommended surveillance about once a day.
Both sides talk about how inconsistent decisions are. "The law allows some leeway," said Mr. Pizza, "but there shouldn't be eight different ways of doing things. 'I won't allow depositions,' 'I will allow depositions,' 'I'll only allow 15 minutes a witness.' You shouldn't put justice on a time clock."
A popular option in the last decade is a cash settlement under which workers close their cases in exchange for a lump payment to cover living expenses and medical bills.
For some workers, a settlement might allow them to start a business or get a degree. For others, they are economic quicksand, one-time payouts that some people find hard to resist. A state task force found that those who accept them are typically lower-paid workers, with average wages of about $19,000.
Insurers relish settlements because they end their exposure. Claimant attorneys relish them, too. They typically extract a 10 to 15 percent cut.
But do workers know what they're choosing?
The lawyers routinely say clients are "adults." But the compensation system is so puzzling that even a Queens judge abandoned her own case years ago out of frustration. And there are lawyers in Queens, regulars at the hearing office say, who undersell settlements, pushing low-ball deals on workers just to pocket a quick payday.
No comprehensive studies have examined the impact of settlements, though limited academic studies tend to find them problematic.
"If it were my case, I wouldn't take one," said Thomas Gleason, a former executive director of the board who is now a deputy executive director of the State Insurance Fund, New York's biggest workers' compensation insurer. "Some guys get $50,000 or $60,000 and go out and buy a new car - or go to the casino."
Jorge Manzano, 31, a lumber company driver who hurt his back lifting a cement bag, was offered a settlement in 2007. His lawyer negotiated a $12,500 payment, but Mr. Manzano felt that was insufficient and hired a new lawyer.
At a hearing, his new lawyer asked, "What do you want?"
He said, "Like double."
The insurance lawyer agreed to $20,000. After a legal fee of $3,000, Mr. Manzano would get $17,000.
His lawyer, who knew almost nothing about the case, made a quick fee, the insurer concluded its exposure and the compensation board closed one more file.
And Mr. Manzano?
He said he plucked the $25,000 number out of the air. His friends warned him not to settle. What if he needed surgery? After all, he could barely hold his daughter. "I'm like an old man," he said.
But his motivation, as it so often is in the compensation universe, was simply to escape the stultifying system.
"I don't want to come here and feel like I'm begging," he said. "Frankly, I'll take just about anything, just so I don't have to see this place ever again."
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2) Record Drop in January Index of Home Prices
By DAVID STREITFELD
April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/economy/01econ.html?hp
It may be spring on the calendar but housing prices are locked into perpetual winter.
Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller Home Price Index, a widely watched measure of 20 metropolitan areas, fell 19 percent in January from a year earlier. That was a record drop, slightly edging out the previous month.
The worst hit metropolitan areas have now fallen nearly in half. None of the cities showed month-to-month improvements. Thirteen showed record annual rates of decline.
"There's no daylight that I can see in this report," said David Blitzer, chairman of S.& P.'s index committee.
He cited the numbers for Phoenix, the quintessential boomtown, as "gruesome." Prices there fell 5.5 percent from December, and are now down 48.5 percent from its June 2006 peak.
Las Vegas, Miami, San Francisco and San Diego are not far behind. All have fallen more than 40 percent. The best performing city in the index is Dallas, down a mere 10.8 percent from its peak. Unlike the rest of the Sunbelt and the coasts, Dallas never had a boom, so it did not have as far to fall.
Here is what passes for good news in the Case-Shiller world: in a handful of cities, including Minneapolis, New York and Charlotte, N.C., the rate of decline in January slowed a little from the rate of decline in December.
The 20-city index is now at 146.40, its lowest point since September 2003. The peak was 206.52 in July 2006.
Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist for MFR Inc., said in a note to clients that "it is unlikely that we are anywhere near a bottom in nationwide home prices." He estimated the index was perhaps two-thirds of the way through its ultimate total decline.
That would bring big city prices back to where they were in late 2001 or early 2002 and would probably encourage another round of beleaguered owners to surrender their underwater homes.
The monthly Case-Shiller numbers examine only one segment of the real estate market, which happens to be the places where the boom was most frenzied. And even in those communities, agents argue that the report does not give a full picture of a market that can vary by neighborhood.
"Sales are up dramatically," said Jim Klinge, an agent in San Diego. "There's a group of buyers that need housing more than they need to pay attention to the doom and gloom headlines we see every single day."
Many of his buyers are young people who are backed financially by their parents. Mr. Klinge noted that all the sales were on the low end, which in San Diego means less than $500,000.
Still, he said, "We're back off the ledge."
The Case-Shiller report comes on the heels of a Census Bureau release that said sales of new one-family homes in February rose 4.7 percent above the revised January rate. The report was received in some quarters as a hopeful sign of a bottom in sales.
Housing prices traditionally lag sales, giving the market time to clear. Much of the activity in the Sunbelt is coming from foreclosure sales by banks, not traditional sales by homeowners. These markets will not truly recover until the foreclosures end.
Mr. Blitzer said that in any case he was not sure the market was improving. "If there were a real, absolute, no-questions-asked uptick in sales in January, we might not see clear price movement until August, September or later," he said.
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3) Haiti's Woes Are Top Test for Aid Effort
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/world/americas/31haiti.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Paul Collier, a leading poverty guru, spent a recent morning here waxing positive about how the world's economic freefall might prove the perfect moment for Haiti to sell more exports like T-shirts and mangoes to Americans.
His improbable enthusiasm coincided with appearances by a bevy of luminaries descending on Haiti this month, including Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, and the entire Security Council. All of them came to stress that this destitute nation stands at a crossroads between salvation and "the darkness," as Mr. Ban put it.
The spotlight was calculated. A landscape of deepening woe is emerging among the world's most destitute. About 46 million more people are expected to tumble into poverty this year amid the largest decline in global trade in 80 years, according to the World Bank. The results ripple through every index. An additional 200,000 to 400,000 infants, for example, may die every year for the next six years because of the crisis, the bank said.
Amid the turmoil, the United Nations is reminding the world's wealthy nations, however embattled their finances, not to forget the poorest. A panel commissioned by the United Nations General Assembly suggested on Thursday that one percent of any nation's stimulus package be set aside for poor countries, while Mr. Ban has vowed that when he joins the leaders of the Group of 20 at their economic summit meeting in London on Thursday, he will voice the concerns of the uninvited.
"There are many countries who cannot even dream of formulating their own fiscal stimulus packages," Mr. Ban said. Last week, he sent a letter to the Group of 20 members arguing that, domestic problems aside, they should give $1 trillion over the next two years to the world's most vulnerable nations.
Mr. Ban is trying to turn Haiti into something of an Exhibit A on the need to keep foreign aid flowing despite tighter budgets. Haiti's upheavals last year proved particularly intense, with the nation staggering beneath the double whammy of food riots that toppled the government and a series of hurricanes that killed hundreds and battered the economy.
Now the United Nations worries that while the groundwork has been laid to get past those threats, the moment will fade because of the global crisis. The organization has spent some $5 billion on peacekeeping operations here since 2004, when the government of the still popular President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was toppled - many say with a shove from the Bush administration.
The peacekeeping force declared war against the gangs that plague Haiti, with some success. Kidnappings dropped to 258 victims last year from 722 in 2006, according to United Nations figures.
With the issue of security improved, Mr. Ban commissioned Mr. Collier - an Oxford University don whose book on fixing failed states, "The Bottom Billion," turned him into a darling at United Nations headquarters - to whip up some solutions for rejuvenating Haiti.
Haiti needs jobs, a particular challenge in the current economic climate. Haitians often seek work in the United States, but that safety valve has been squeezed given the recession. With some 900,000 youths expected to come into the job market in the next five years, dismal prospects are the main threat to stability.
"There is nothing that is going to turn Haiti around until people have jobs," said the rap artist and native son Wyclef Jean, who came to the island with Mr. Ban and former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Jean's charity, Yéle Haiti, underwrites education for thousands of young Haitians.
In a downtown park, Idelson François, 24, said he finished high school four years ago and had failed to find a job or money to continue his education. "When you have no self-esteem, sometimes you can't resist the desire to do something violent," he said.
It required five months to seat a new government after the April 2008 food riots, and United Nations officials say development is stymied by a corrupt judicial system, weak land tenure laws and wildly inefficient ports. The roads are such moonscapes that some 40 percent of the mango crop gets too bruised to be sold abroad, said Jean M. Buteau, a leading exporter.
Some diplomats worry that the government does not have the capacity to carry out even Mr. Collier's limited prescriptions for improving manufacturing, infrastructure, agriculture and the environment.
"What is lacking is the determination to put these good ideas into a coherent policy," said Yukio Takasu, the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations, on the Security Council tour here. "I don't think there is a focus."
Constant upheaval has long scared off investors. To counter that, last year the United States Congress granted Haitian textiles duty-free access to the American market for a decade, giving rise to Mr. Collier's optimism. The policy has added just 12,000 jobs thus far, but it is viewed as a possible boon in an era of rising protectionism.
Senior United Nations officials and other diplomats worry, however, that the tempo of new factory jobs is too slow, so they think money should be pumped into emergency programs like creating jobs to fix the environmental disaster by planting the denuded hills with forests.
There is also some criticism that Mr. Collier's basic recommendation involves turning Haiti into a sweatshop for American consumers, with workers paid $5 per day or less. He and others defend the approach, with Mr. Clinton noting after a visit to a Hanes T-shirt factory here that its workers earned some two or three times Haiti's minimum wage of $1.75 a day.
Haiti is so close to the United States that its problems tend to reverberate as illegal immigration, and the Marines have stormed ashore repeatedly since the first American occupation started in 1915.
Not every problem can be addressed with the military, and ignoring development has proved deadly, said Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations. "Where we have neglected it, it comes back to bite us." Haiti could receive more than $245 million in American development aid this year.
Haitian officials hope the world gives generously, though there is a certain recognition of donor fatigue, especially in the economic storm.
But young Haitians grumble that their government has yet to paint a vision of the country's future - complaints echoed by United Nations officials who say it is difficult to get President Réne Préval or his ministers to commit to an action plan.
"Just providing rice and beans is not a long-term solution," said John Miller Beauvoir, 26, who founded a charity right out of college and wrote a book calling on other young Haitians to get involved in development. "If the captain does not know where you are going, no boat will take you in the right direction."
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4) French Workers Hold Bosses at Caterpillar Plant
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:08 a.m. ET
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/03/31/business/AP-EU-France-Caterpilla.html?ref=world
PARIS (AP) -- Angry French workers facing layoffs at a Caterpillar factory detained four of their bosses Tuesday at the Peoria, Ill.-based manufacturer's plant in the Alps and refused to let them leave the premises, union representatives said.
It is the third time in several weeks that French workers have seized their bosses to protest job losses as a result of the global economic crisis.
Last week, workers at a 3M plant held the company boss for two days, and earlier this month workers at a Sony (NYSE:SNE) plant held a similar protest.
Unions representing the workers say they want new talks on Caterpillar's layoff plans at the site in Grenoble. The plant that produces building equipment is supposed to cut 733 jobs in two of its factories in France.
"There is no violence or sequestration, but simply pressure so they restart negotiations," said Pierre Piccarreta, a representative from the CGT union.
"At a time when the company is making a profit and distributing dividends to shareholders, we want to find a favorable outcome for all the workers and know as quickly as possible where we are going," Piccarreta said.
Caterpillar France says the layoffs are justified. In February, the company said it was facing a 55 percent loss of orders between 2008 and 2009.
In response to the worsening economic prospects, Caterpillar in January announced job cuts that will ultimately eliminate 20,000 positions worldwide.
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5) $296 Billion in Overruns in U.S. Weapons Programs
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/business/31defense.html?ref=us
Nearly 70 percent of the Pentagon's 96 largest weapons programs were over budget last year, for a combined total of $296 billion more than the original estimates, a Congressional auditing agency reported Monday.
The findings, compiled by the Government Accountability Office, seemed likely to add to the pressure on officials to make sizable cuts in the most troubled programs as they work out the details of a proposed $664 billion defense budget for fiscal 2010.
President Obama has said that the "days of giving defense contractors a blank check are over." Pentagon officials have said they will finish putting together a list of proposed cuts in April.
In a letter to Congress, Gene L. Dodaro, the acting comptroller general for the G.A.O., an auditing agency, said that while there had been modest improvements in the last year, the Pentagon's management of the contracts remained poor, and cost overruns were "still staggering."
The accountability office reported that the programs were behind schedule by an average of 22 months, up from 21 months last year and 18 months in 2003.
The office had previously said that the cost of a similar portfolio of programs had risen by $295 billion through 2007, or $301 billion when adjusted for inflation.
In the report released on Monday, the G.A.O. said the Pentagon often had to reduce the number of planes and ships it could buy.
The report said, for instance, that the cost of 10 of the largest weapons systems was running 32 percent higher than projected, and the quantities that could be purchased had been cut.
Some programs, like the Air Force's F-22 fighter jet and the Army's Future Combat System, are among the systems that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said he is scrutinizing.
According to the G.A.O., the F-22, which was designed in the 1980s, was originally expected to cost $88 billion in 2009 dollars for 648 planes. The program is now expected to cost $73.7 billion for the 184 planes.
Some military analysts say they believe that Mr. Gates will recommend canceling the plane, or buying fewer planes than the Air Force wants.
But the G.A.O. also said the Pentagon had done a better job of managing some newer programs.
In a response to the office, John J. Young Jr., the Pentagon's top acquisition official, said department officials had "instituted several major changes that are beginning to show results."
Mr. Young also noted that in some cases, the cost growth was not a result of overruns but of program expansions. And in others, delays were ordered by top Pentagon officials or Congress as part of budgeting trade-offs.
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6) Settlement for Man Wrongly Convicted in Palladium Killing
By BENJAMIN WEISER
March 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/nyregion/31palladium.html?ref=nyregion
New York City and State have agreed to pay $2.6 million to a man who served almost 14 years in prison before he was cleared in the 1990 Palladium nightclub shooting that left a bouncer dead, the man's lawyer said on Monday.
The city will pay $2 million to the man, Olmedo Hidalgo, to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit he filed against the Manhattan district attorney's office, the Police Department and other defendants, said the lawyer, Irving Cohen.
He said that the state would pay an additional $625,000 to resolve a case filed in the Court of Claims.
Mr. Hidalgo, who was cleared by the district attorney's office in 2005, is one of two men who were convicted and sent to prison in the killing. The other, David Lemus, was retried in 2007 and acquitted; he has a lawsuit pending.
Mr. Hidalgo, 43, who now lives in the Dominican Republic, could not be reached for comment. Mr. Cohen said that while no amount of money could adequately compensate his client, "at least it gives him the opportunity to go forward with his life, and an added level of vindication."
"In the end, there was no doubt that he was innocent," Mr. Cohen added.
A senior lawyer in the city's Office of Corporation Counsel, Celeste Koeleveld, said through a spokeswoman, "We felt that settlement was in the best interest of all parties." There was no admission of wrongdoing in the agreement, the spokeswoman said.
Mr. Hidalgo and Mr. Lemus were convicted by a jury in 1992, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. But questions were repeatedly raised, by the police and federal prosecutors, defense lawyers and the press, about whether the wrong men were behind bars. Among the evidence pointing to their innocence was a confession by a former member of a Bronx drug gang that he and a friend had committed the crime.
The bouncer, Marcus Peterson, was shot and killed after a scuffle outside the nightclub, in the East Village.
By early 2003, the office of the district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, had opened a new investigation, led by a veteran homicide prosecutor, Daniel L. Bibb, who concluded after 21 months that neither Mr. Hidalgo nor Mr. Lemus were guilty of the murder. But when Mr. Bibb raised the matter with his superiors, they ordered him to defend the convictions in a court hearing, he said last year in an interview with The New York Times. "I was angry that I was being put in a position to defend convictions that I didn't believe in," he said at the time.
Mr. Bibb has said that in the 2005 hearing about whether the two men should be retried, he quietly assisted their lawyers. After the hearing ended, Mr. Morgenthau's office agreed to ask a judge to drop Mr. Hidalgo's conviction, but pressed ahead with a retrial of Mr. Lemus.
Mr. Bibb, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on any settlement in the Palladium shooting, but said: "I came to believe that Hidalgo wasn't there. And if he wasn't there, he certainly couldn't have done it."
Last year, in a letter to The Times, Mr. Morgenthau defended his office's actions in the case, saying the original convictions were based on "substantial evidence, including multiple eyewitness identifications and a confession" made by Mr. Lemus to a girlfriend. Mr. Morgenthau said that when new evidence surfaced, his office "willingly reopened the case."
He said that Mr. Bibb "was never asked to prosecute someone he believed to be innocent."
Mr. Hidalgo's lawsuit against the city, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, charged that despite "clear-cut proof" that both men were not guilty, the district attorney's office "continued to dig in its heels until it had no choice - in light of the overwhelming factual support of Mr. Hidalgo's innocence - but to consent to vacate his conviction and dismissal of his indictment."
The settlement documents are being submitted to the courts, Mr. Cohen said. Officials from the offices of the district attorney and the New York attorney general declined comment.
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7) Exams of Injured Workers Fuel Mutual Mistrust
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/nyregion/01comp.html?_r=1&hp
Dr. Hershel Samuels, an orthopedic surgeon, put his hand on the worker’s back. “Mild spasm bilaterally,” he said softly. He pressed his fingers gingerly against the side of the man’s neck. “The left cervical is tender,” he said, “even to light palpation.”
The worker, a driver for a plumbing company, told the doctor he had fallen, banging up his back, shoulder and ribs. He was seeking expanded workers’ compensation benefits because he no longer felt he could do his job.
Dr. Samuels, an independent medical examiner in the state workers’ compensation system, seemed to agree. As he moved about a scuffed Brooklyn office last April, he called out test results indicative of an injured man. His words were captured on videotape.
Yet the report Dr. Samuels later submitted to the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board cleared the driver for work and told a far different story: no back spasms, no tender neck. In fact, no recent injury at all.
“If you did a truly pure report,” he said later in an interview, “you’d be out on your ears and the insurers wouldn’t pay for it. You have to give them what they want, or you’re in Florida. That’s the game, baby.”
Independent medical exams are among the most disputed components of New York’s troubled workers’ compensation system. Under that system, workers with bona fide injuries are entitled to medical care and replacement wages, usually paid for by their employer’s insurer.
The independent exams are designed to flush out workers who exaggerate injuries or get unnecessary care, and there is no question that some of that goes on. As a check on what a worker’s doctor determines, insurers are allowed to order an ostensibly neutral exam by a doctor they select and pay for. They do so regularly, with more than 100,000 exams conducted each year.
But a New York Times review of case files and medical records and interviews with participants indicate that the exam reports are routinely tilted to benefit insurers by minimizing or dismissing injuries.
“You go in and sit there for a few minutes — and out comes a six-page detailed exam that he never did,” said Dr. Stephen M. Levin, co-director of the occupational and environmental medicine unit at Mount Sinai Medical Center, who has been picked as the interim medical director at the compensation board. “There are some noble things you can do in medicine without treating. This ain’t one of them.”
New York uses independent medical examiners far more extensively than many states do, and critics say the practice adds to the mistrust in the system. The examiners’ opinions can empower an insurer to slash benefits, withhold medical treatment or stall a case. Workers say that psychologically, there is something particularly damaging about being dishonestly evaluated by a medical professional.
“I was in so much pain and felt so hopeless for so long,” said Carol Houlder, a substance abuse counselor who waited a year for surgery on her injured ankle to be approved. “Doctors see you’re in pain and say you’re not. How do they call themselves doctors?”
Many independent examiners are older, semiretired physicians who no longer treat patients, and claimants and lawyers have asserted that the memories and judgments of some of the doctors have at times been impaired by their age and frailties. The examiners do not need special training, only to have a state license and to be authorized in a specialty.
“Basically if you haven’t murdered anyone and you have a medical license, you get certified,” said Dr. Alan Zimmerman, 75, a Queens orthopedic surgeon who does the exams. “It’s clearly a nice way to semiretire.”
Some examiners see dozens of injured workers a day. Often the appointments are booked by brokers who help insurance companies find doctors. Some brokers are not registered with the state, as required, but there has been little enforcement of the rules.
Insurers, examiners and brokers, however, defend the exams as necessary and largely untarnished by bias. Dr. Brian L. Grant, chairman of Medical Consultants Network, a company based in Seattle that arranges independent exams across the country, said, “We never get pressure from an insurer.”
Many workers contest independent medical examiner opinions and often prevail. Judges can, and do, dismiss the exam findings. In fact, some lawyers and judges laugh when certain examiners’ names come up at hearings.
Dr. Kenneth E. Seslowe, an orthopedic surgeon who mainly does independent medical exams, is mocked at hearing offices by attorneys as Dr. Says-No, because they feel he consistently finds no disability. Asked about this, Dr. Seslowe said, “I really don’t have time for this.”
But even when the opinions are discounted, resolution can take months, years, even decades, and many workers, tired of the ordeal of five, six, seven exams, eventually give up.
Some examiners, of course, do furnish honest, well-reasoned opinions. And sorting out the yawning breach between what a worker’s doctors and an independent medical examiner conclude is complicated by the fact that some injuries and their impact on a person’s ability to work — especially soft-tissue injuries like those to the back and neck — are hard to document with indisputable tests.
Zachary S. Weiss, the chairman of the workers’ compensation board, said that he found the disparities in medical opinions shocking and that use of independent examiners was “off the charts.” But Mr. Weiss, who was appointed in late 2007, said he was unsure what would rectify the problems.
After nearly a dozen years without a medical director, the board has finally filled that job temporarily. It has introduced new, more detailed forms, which many doctors find maddening. It is also working on fresh guidelines that it hopes will better calibrate an injured worker’s care and work limits.
Dr. Robert E. Bonner, the medical director of the Hartford, an insurance company, said it was clear that the landscape had polarized. “Physicians regrettably have moved away from being neutral observers,” he said. “They’ve moved toward one camp or the other.”
Doctor vs. Doctor
When New York companies complain about the high cost of doing business in the state, they often cite fraudulent workers’ compensation claims as a key factor.
Though experts say talk of worker fraud is frequently overstated, it is widely acknowledged that some doctors collaborate with workers or their lawyers to magnify injuries or provide treatment for years without making someone better. Law firms representing workers often have cozy relationships with doctors to whom they refer patients, and vice versa.
A few years ago, Dr. Rafeak Muhammad, a Queens ophthalmologist, was barred from taking workers’ compensation patients after acknowledging that he had treated several long after it was necessary. He declared them unable to work when in fact they could.
David Donaldson, senior vice president at the domestic claims subsidiary of A.I.G., one of the state’s largest workers’ compensation insurers, said, “Our position on I.M.E.’s is we’re looking for someone who is going to give us a coldly objective view of the injury.”
Critics, however, contend that independent medical examiners who reliably dispute workers’ doctors are hired more often by insurers. Some workers cynically refer to them as “insurers’ medical examiners.”
Shu-Ying Xu, 66, a home health aide, said she met with an independent examiner in October 2006 so he could review the back, neck and leg injuries she suffered when she tried to prevent a patient from falling.
She said the exam took two minutes and was so quick that the doctor, Wayne Kerness, an orthopedic surgeon, did not ask her anything.
As a result, she said, when the doctor filed his report he said she spoke English. She does not.
He said she took no medications. She said she took nine.
He said her disability was mild and she could resume work.
She said that she was in debilitating pain and that the Social Security Administration had already concluded that by its standards, she was totally disabled.
“She can’t even hold a gallon of milk,” said Peter Chang, her son. He had come along to the exam to translate. Since no questions were asked, he said he had nothing to do.
After checking his notes, Dr. Kerness said it was an error to have said that Ms. Xu spoke English. Otherwise, he stood by the report. “What can I say?” he said. “People can say whatever they want.”
He added: “I have my share of people I’ve found totally disabled and even recommended treatment that has been overlooked. I think I’m pretty heterogeneous.”
A judge ultimately ruled that Ms. Xu’s benefits should continue.
For decades, independent medical examiners were essentially unregulated. Reports were sometimes altered by brokers and exams often were done at airports, hotels or in the garages of doctors’ homes. In 2000, a doctor examined five patients in a Long Island bar.
In 2001, the state introduced rules. Among them: doctors had to register with the board, work in a medical office and let workers record or videotape their exams. Claimants are permitted to bring along anyone they choose to witness or film the sessions.
While the law has helped, the process remains riddled with flaws. Lawyers and injured workers say many of the examiners still do brief, perfunctory, one-sided exams.
A small study conducted a few years ago at the Central New York Occupational Health Clinical Center in Syracuse found that the clinic’s doctors and independent medical examiners virtually never agreed on whether a worker was disabled. When it can be proven that medical examiners have acted inappropriately, the compensation board revokes their certification — which has happened more often in recent years. But investigations are time consuming and only a dozen or so result in revocations each year.
William Gurin, the board’s fraud inspector general, says his unit’s limited resources are best focused on more fertile areas of fraud, such as employers who underreport their work force to save on insurance premiums.
Similarly, the board struggles to regulate businesses, from storefront exam factories to multistate networks, that help produce independent exams. Decades ago, insurers hired doctors directly. Now the job is increasingly done by third-party brokers called entities.
Entities are paid by insurers — around $500 or $600, say, for an orthopedic exam — and they in turn pay the doctor. Often, doctors submit dictated notes or checklists to clerical staff at the firms, who then draft the reports. Other times the notes go to transcription companies. The people preparing the reports may have no medical training.
Since 2001, the state has required entities to be registered. About 170 have signed up. But a fair amount of independent exam work is performed by companies that have never registered.
It was an unregistered company, Wine Medical Management, that arranged an independent medical exam of Santos Padilla, an injured worker, in 2006. The exam was to be done by Dr. Kerness, but it was canceled, and Mr. Padilla was seen by another doctor.
But somehow the compensation board received a report signed by Dr. Kerness recounting an exam that had never happened.
Dr. Kerness blamed the bogus submission on a clerical error by Wine. He said the company, using a signature stamp, had affixed his name to a report he had not seen.
Wine went out of business last year. A former manager at Wine, Laura Urban, blamed the discrepancy on a transcription company that prepared the reports. Ms. Urban moved to Commander Management, another entity that was doing unregistered work until the board ordered it to cease.
The board is looking into the Padilla episode, and has pledged to crack down on unregistered I.M.E. entities. Only a handful have ever had their certifications revoked, usually not for creating shoddy reports but for failing to pay their doctors.
Robert Grey, a claimant lawyer, said the board should track the opinions of independent medical examiners and compare them to ultimate verdicts, and then exclude doctors who were constantly found not credible.
Currently, the best protection for a worker is to tape an exam. But few do. The board does virtually nothing to promote the practice, and some doctors do not like it. When a woman brought a camera to an appointment upstate, the doctor called the police to toss her out.
Ms. Houlder, 63, who hurt her ankle, videotaped her exam by Dr. M. Pierre Rafiy, a 77-year-old Long Island orthopedic surgeon.
In the videotape, Dr. Rafiy grasps Ms. Houlder’s right ankle and says it is swollen. In the written report, he stated that there was no swelling and no disability and that she could return to work.
When subsequently deposed, he backtracked, saying it had been a secretary’s mistake to say no disability. He did not correct anything else.
Asked about the exam in an interview, Dr. Rafiy said: “I have no way to know if she had real pain. You have to remember, a lot of people don’t want to work. They lie a lot.”
Examiners, or Advocates
Dr. Samuels, 79, with a radiant smile and a burst of snowy hair, stopped doing surgery years ago. Until recently he commonly filled his days performing insurance exams on workers, sometimes as many as 50 in an afternoon, he said in his small office in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
“You obviously can’t spend a lot of time with that volume pushing up your back,” he said. “You have to assume there are going to be errors. Look, there are a lot of holes in this thing.”
At times, evidence shows, Dr. Samuels’s official reports were quite different from what he appeared to find during an exam.
Consider his 2007 examination of Johanne Aumoithe, a pastry chef who said she had hurt her arm and neck. On a videotape that Ms. Aumoithe recorded on her cellphone, Dr. Samuels comments that she had limited range of motion. His written report concluded the opposite.
Asked about the discrepancy in an interview, Dr. Samuels chuckled and said he could not even recall the people he saw yesterday. The way he worked, he said, was to submit a checklist to a Queens company called All Borough Medical, which transformed it into a narrative.
“I never write a sentence,” he said. “It’s really crazy, but that’s how it’s done.”
He often inserted numbers in the checklist — say, a measure of hand strength — after the person left, rather than as he performed the tests.
Was he sure they were correct? “I’m not sure of anything,” he said. “They’re just a guess in the first place.”
The law requires a doctor to attest to the accuracy of a finished report before signing it, but Dr. Samuels said he rarely read them. He doubted he had read the Aumoithe report. “I just sign them,” he said.
If he seldom read them, how did he know they were correct?
“I don’t,” he said. “That’s the problem. If I read them all, I’d have them coming out of my ears and I’d never have time to talk to my wife. They want speed and volume. That’s the name of the game.”
Dr. Samuels said he generally received about $100 for one of these exams.
The state does not regulate how much a doctor can make for an independent medical exam, though it does limit what a treating physician may charge an injured worker, and generally that is much lower for roughly equivalent work. Some examiners said insurers pay them by the session, say $1,500 to be available from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and handle whatever workers are sent to them.
An occupational medicine doctor deposed by Scott Clippinger, a claimant lawyer, said he charged $550 an hour for an independent medical exam. In 2006, Mr. Clippinger complained to the state board that the imbalance in fees “allows the carriers to purchase opinions.” He asked the state why it was not following a clause in state law that says that independent medical exams “shall be paid according to the fee schedule.”
The board’s response was that while the law “does provide that I.M.E. fees shall be paid according to the fee schedule, the fee schedule does not specify a particular fee for an I.M.E.”
Dr. Edward Toriello, a Queens orthopedic surgeon who cares mainly for his own patients, said he is paid nearly twice as much for an independent medical exam than he is for seeing a workers’ compensation patient he treats ($250 versus $140).
Like many who perform the exams, he views the compensation system as bloated with charlatans. Dr. Toriello, who does about 30 such exams a week, estimates that 80 to 85 percent of the time he finds no disability or need for medical treatment in workers whose doctors have found otherwise. He says the disparity is explained by the “comp mentality.”
“I think it’s human nature to help your patient,” he said. “I think a lot of doctors say: ‘I don’t need the aggravation. It doesn’t hurt to keep him out of work.’ ”
Dr. Zimmerman, of Queens, said he believed that 75 percent of people getting workers’ compensation did not deserve it, but also said he was not surprised to hear that insurance lawyers in Queens said his opinions were overwhelmingly disregarded by judges.
“Judges come up with wrong decisions a huge amount of time,” he said. “The lawyers work it so that anyone who scratches their toenail deserves equal treatment as someone who fell out of a 40-story building.”
Sometimes, a review of cases shows, there are stark discrepancies between the testimony independent medical examiners give at trial and their reports.
Twice in 2005, for example, Dr. Francis O’Malley, a Long Island orthopedic surgeon, testified that a disability was more serious than indicated by his reports.
In one case, Dr. O’Malley testified that a man who had hurt his back lifting packages had a “marked” partial disability. The report described the injury as a less severe “moderate” disability.
When confronted with the discrepancy, Dr. O’Malley testified, “I don’t know what’s going on.”
The reports were filed on Dr. O’Malley’s behalf by Hooper Holmes, a national medical services company that operated an I.M.E. entity. The company said that it always submitted exactly what doctors gave it and that it believed Dr. O’Malley, who is 78, was confused. Dr. O’Malley did not return calls for comment.
In the case of William Cassone, the plumbing company driver whose father taped his examination, the exam by Dr. Samuels was arranged by All Borough Medical, an unregistered I.M.E. entity, which got the assignment from another registered entity.
Mr. Cassone had been injured years earlier but was being examined because, as he says on the videotape, he had suffered a second, recent injury.
But Dr. Samuels’s report made no mention of the second injury and deemed Mr. Cassone able to work. When Mr. Cassone got the report, he said, “I was screaming so much I left the house and slept in the car.”
Dr. Samuels later swore in a deposition that the report was accurate. A few weeks later, though, the board received an addendum signed by Dr. Samuels saying he had viewed the videotape and, yes, he had been told of the second injury. Still, he found no evidence of disability.
All Borough declined to comment on the case and its business.
Dr. Samuels said in a recent interview that he had never seen the addendum or the videotape and doubted he had read the original report. He said All Borough must have prepared the addendum without his knowledge.
“This is the first I’ve heard of this,” he said. “Listen, there’s a lot of hanky-panky that goes on.”
Mr. Cassone’s lawyer, Michael Pyrros, told a judge at a hearing that he was concerned there might have been fraud involved in the conduct of Dr. Samuels, the I.M.E. entity and the insurer. When the Cassone case next came before a judge, late last summer, a deal was reached between lawyers to grant Mr. Cassone benefits. Fraud allegations were dropped against the insurer.
Dr. Samuels, who was told to appear at the hearing, did not show up. According to a letter from his lawyer, he was unwell. His behavior was never addressed. Soon after, he retired, his official record unblemished.
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8) Protesters Block London’s Financial District
By JULIA WERDIGIER and LANDON THOMAS, Jr.
April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/world/europe/02protest.html?ref=world
LONDON — About 4,000 protesters locked down a section of London’s financial district for much of the day on Wednesday a day before the Group of 20 summit meeting here, shouting “storm the banks” and “shame on you,” but erupting just once into violence.
Around 2 p.m., several hours into the protest, a handful of furious protesters smashed the windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which became a symbol of the financial crisis because of a record loss that prompted a government bailout. Some painted slogans such as “class war” on the facade while others carried computers through the broken windows and smashed them on the street. When the police stepped in to stop the looting, Liam Edin, a student, said “the police are defending the very people they should be fighting: the bankers.”
By early evening, when most of the protesters had dispersed, there had been 23 arrests. No serious injuries were reported.
A second demonstration in support of Palestinians started in front of the American Embassy in the west of London. Marchers made their way peacefully to Trafalgar Square, waving placards that said “Free Palestine” and “End the Gaza Siege.”
A third protest was planned for the evening at the conference center close to Canary Wharf, where the G-20 representatives are to meet on Thursday.
The police said that more than 5,000 officers were deployed across the capital to guarantee the safety of G-20 delegates as well as to maintain order.
The financial district protests started off peacefully in the morning, with people gathering in a square in front of the Bank of England, blocking four converging streets. Tensions began rising sharply when the crowds began pressing against police barriers intended to confine them, while helicopters hovered above. A wide range of interest groups were in attendance, including climate change campaigners, self-described anarchists and pensioners concerned about their life savings. Some held up effigies of bankers; others carried four large models of the biblical “horsemen of the apocalypse” toward the Bank of England.
“I’m protesting against corporate greed and the bankers who recklessly gambled our pension money and the money of savers, lost it and had to be bailed out,” said Tony Streeter, a 54-year-old who traveled to London for the protests from his home in Sussex more than an hour’s drive away. “They walked away with fat pensions. It is our money and pensions they’ve lost.”
Many shops adjacent to the Bank of England, including Molton Brown, Gucci and Hermès, either remained closed, removed goods from the shopping windows or boarded them up completely. The Ritz hotel in London’s affluent Mayfair district boarded up the windows of its jewelry shop. The Royal Bank of Scotland said it closed some branches, including the office that was attacked, to protect customers and staff members.
Financial district employees had been told to dress casually or work from home, but some decided to wear bowler hats and pin striped suits in a gesture of defiance.
Some watched the protests — mild by the standards of many European countries — from their office windows.
Stephen Tailor, a telecommunications adviser, said, “There are so many people protesting and you are trying to do your work it is oppressive. But I understand why they’re doing it and it seems to be fairly well organized.”
Stephen Castle contributed reporting.
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9) Israeli Minister Dismisses Peace Effort
By ISABEL KERSHNER
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/world/middleeast/02mideast.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM — In a blunt and belligerent speech on his first day as Israel’s new foreign minister, the hawkish nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, declared Wednesday that “those who want peace should prepare for war” and that Israel was not obligated by understandings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reached at an American-sponsored peace conference in 2007.
“Those who think that through concessions they will gain respect and peace are wrong,” Mr. Lieberman said during a handover ceremony at the Foreign Ministry. “It is the other way around; it will lead to more wars.”
His predecessor in the post of foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, a centrist, led Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians in a year of intensive talks after the 2007 conference, held in Annapolis, Md.
The aim of the Annapolis process, as it became known, was to agree on the framework for a Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2008, a goal that was not achieved.
Mr. Lieberman said that the Israeli government “never ratified Annapolis, nor did Parliament,” and it therefore “has no validity.”
Mr. Lieberman is part of the new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud Party, which was sworn in late Tuesday. Mr. Lieberman leads the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, an important partner in the governing coalition and the third largest party in Parliament.
As the new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to strike a more conciliatory tone, promising to hold negotiations with the Palestinian Authority toward a permanent accord. But he has also stopped short of endorsing the two-state solution, putting the new government at odds with the United States administration and the European Union.
Tony Blair, the special envoy of the so-called quartet of Middle East peace-makers, which includes the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia, said Wednesday that the peace process was in “very great jeopardy.” Speaking after talks at European Union headquarters in Brussels, Mr. Blair said “We need a combination of strong political negotiations toward a two-state solution and major change on the ground,” according to The Associated Press.
Palestinian officials reacted with alarm to Mr. Lieberman’s statements. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said by telephone that Mr. Lieberman “closed the door on Annapolis and closed the door in the face of the international community.”
The choice of Mr. Lieberman, an unsubtle and often unpredictable politician, as foreign minister had already aroused trepidation in Israel and abroad.
Not known for diplomacy, he ran a contentious election campaign demanding loyalty as a condition for Israeli citizenship. Seen by many as racist, it was widely viewed as a broadside against Israel’s Arab citizens, a sense bolstered by the campaign slogan: “Only Lieberman understands Arabic.”
He once advocated bombing Egypt’s Aswan dam and last year, he suggested that Egypt’s president should “go to hell” if he did not want to visit Israel.
Mr. Lieberman now seems to have moderated his stance toward Egypt, an important strategic ally of Israel’s. He said on Wednesday that “Egypt is an important element in the Arab world and in the world in general.” He added that he would “certainly be happy to visit Egypt, but I’ll also be happy to see Egypt’s leaders visit here.”
Often contradictory and contrary in his positions, Mr. Lieberman, a resident of a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, has said that he advocates the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Yet in Jan. 2008 he pulled his party out of the last governing coalition, led by Ehud Olmert and the centrist Kadima Party, in protest against the Annapolis-inspired talks.
Mr. Lieberman said on Wednesday that instead of Annapolis, Israel was committed to the road map, a 2003 American-backed performance-based peace plan that made the creation of a Palestinian state contingent on the Palestinians reining in militants.
Mr. Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, noted that the road map also obliged Israel to freeze all settlement construction. “I’d really like to know, are we going to see a settlement freeze?” Mr. Erekat said.
At an official ceremony welcoming the new Israeli leadership at the President’s residence here on Wednesday, the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, urged Mr. Netanyahu’s government to “invest great effort in advancing the peace process on every front.”
“The outgoing government espoused the vision of two states for two peoples, which was initiated by the American government and accepted by the majority of countries in the world,” Mr. Peres said. “It is up to your government to decide the shape of the reality to come.”
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10) Standoff Ends at Caterpillar Plant in France
By DAVID JOLLY
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/global/02caterpillar.html?ref=world
PARIS — Workers at a Caterpillar plant in the French Alps let their bosses go Wednesday after holding them overnight in a dispute over their severance packages.
The Caterpillar executives, jeered by union members, were escorted from the plant by police and union security, after being detained for more than 24 hours, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
The standoff ended after President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an interview with Europe 1 radio Wednesday that he would “save the site,” and that he would meet with union members. “We won’t abandon them,” he said.
On Tuesday, striking workers at the plant detained five managers in a dispute over benefits to departing employees. They later let one manager go out of concern for his health.
A Caterpillar spokesman, Jim Dugan, said Wednesday that no one had been hurt.
“At a time when the company is making a profit and distributing dividends to shareholders,” Pierre Piccarreta, a representative from the C.G.T. union, on Tuesday told The Associated Press, “we want to find a favorable outcome for all the workers and know as quickly as possible where we are going.”
A member of the worker’s council reached by telephone through a union contact said “the employees just want a fair deal.” He refused to identify himself.
Chris Schena, a Caterpillar executive, said Tuesday in a statement that the company “is hoping this matter can be resolved quickly,” and that Caterpillar’s the “utmost priority is to find a solution that guarantees the sustainability of our presence in Grenoble.”
Caterpillar, based in Peoria, Ill., in January and February announced 22,000 job cuts worldwide. It is seeking to lay off 733 workers — about a quarter of the work force — at its factories in Grenoble and Échirolles. Combined with those already laid off and those whose short-term contracts will not be renewed, a total of about 1,000 workers at the French factories are losing their jobs.
Caterpillar France has said the job cuts were necessary because its order book had been cut in half.
In another show of worker anger on Tuesday, François-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of PPR, had to be rescued by riot police in Paris after workers protesting job cuts at his FNAC and Conforama units surrounded his car and blocked the road with garbage cans to keep him from escaping.
Workers at a 3M plant in the plant in Pithiviers, in central France, held their boss last week for more than 24 hours in a labor dispute. Workers at a Sony plant in Pontonx-sur-l’Adour, in southwest France, held their boss overnight to gain better severance packages.
France, with a long history of labor militancy, has becoming increasingly restless as the impact of the global economic crisis deepens. The French unemployment rate rose to 8.6 percent in February from 8.5 in January, according to the European Union.
Demonstrations in recent months have drawn millions of protesters to the streets to challenge Mr. Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis. Opponents of Mr. Sarkozy’s government say he has focused on bailouts for banks and industrial companies while ignoring the fate of workers.
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11) Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran—Or I Will
The message from Israel's new prime minister is stark: if the Obama administration doesn't prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, Israel may be forced to attack.
An Atlantic exclusive
by Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/netanyahu
In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.
“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”
History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, he suggested. In recent years, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has regularly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, this month called Israel a “cancerous tumor.”
But Netanyahu also said that Iran threatens many other countries apart from Israel, and so his mission over the next several months is to convince the world of the broad danger posed by Iran. One of his chief security advisers, Moshe Ya’alon, told me that a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. “This is an existential threat for Israel, but it will be a blow for American interests, especially on the energy front. Who will dominate the oil in the region—Washington or Tehran?”
Netanyahu said he would support President Obama’s decision to engage Iran, so long as negotiations brought about a quick end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “How you achieve this goal is less important than achieving it,” he said, but he added that he was skeptical that Iran would respond positively to Obama’s appeals. In an hour-long conversation, held in the Knesset, Netanyahu tempered his aggressive rhetoric with an acknowledgement that nonmilitary pressure could yet work. “I think the Iranian economy is very weak, which makes Iran susceptible to sanctions that can be ratcheted up by a variety of means.” When I suggested that this statement contradicted his assertion that Iran, by its fanatic nature, is immune to pressure, Netanyahu smiled thinly and said, “Iran is a composite leadership, but in that composite leadership there are elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist right now in any other would-be nuclear power in the world. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”
He went on, “Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they’ll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?”
Netanyahu offered Iran’s behavior during its eight-year war with Iraq as proof of Tehran’s penchant for irrational behavior. Iran “wasted over a million lives without batting an eyelash … It didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind.”
He continued: “You see a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” I asked Netanyahu if he believed Iran would risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.
Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.
Both Israeli and American intelligence officials agree that Iran is moving forward in developing a nuclear-weapons capability. The chief of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, said earlier this month that Iran has already “crossed the technological threshold,” and that nuclear military capability could soon be a fact: “Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb.”
American officials argue that Iran has not crossed the “technological threshold”; the director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, said recently that Israel and the U.S. are working with the same set of facts, but are interpreting it differently. “The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view,” he said. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, recently warned that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would undermine stability in the Middle East and endanger the lives of Americans in the Persian Gulf.
The Obama administration agrees with Israel that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to Middle East stability, but it also wants Israel to focus on the Palestinian question. Netanyahu, for his part, promises to move forward on negotiations with the Palestinians, but he made it clear in our conversation that he believes a comprehensive peace will be difficult to achieve if Iran continues to threaten Israel, and he cited Iran’s sponsorship of such Islamist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas as a stumbling block.
Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff who is slated to serve as Netanyahu’s minister for strategic threats, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, telling me that “jihadists” interpret compromise as weakness. He cited the reaction to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza four years ago. “The mistake of disengagement from Gaza was that we thought like Westerners, that compromise would defuse a problem—but it just encouraged the problem,” he said. “The jihadists saw withdrawal as a defeat of the West … Now, what do you signal to them if you are ready to divide Jerusalem, or if you’re ready to withdraw to the 1967 lines? In this kind of conflict, your ability to stand and be determined is more important than your firepower.”
American administration sources tell me that President Obama won’t shy from pressuring Netanyahu on the Palestinian issue during his first visit to Washington as prime minister, which is scheduled for early May. But Netanyahu suggested that he and Obama already see eye-to-eye on such crucial issues as the threat posed by Hamas. “The Obama administration has recently said that Hamas has to first recognize Israel and cease the support of terror. That’s a very good definition. It says you have to cease being Hamas.”
When I noted that many in Washington doubt his commitment to curtailing Jewish settlement on the West Bank, he said, in reference to his previous term as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999, “I can only point to what I did as prime minister in the first round. I certainly didn’t build new settlements.”
Netanyahu will manage Israel’s relationship with Washington personally—his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, of the anti-Arab Israel Beiteinu party, is deeply unpopular in Washington—and I asked him if he could foresee agreeing on a “grand bargain” with Obama, in which he would move forward on talks with the Palestinians in exchange for a robust American response to Iran’s nuclear program. He said: “We intend to move on the Palestinian track independent of what happens with Iran, and I hope the U.S. moves to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons regardless of what happens on the Palestinian track.”
In our conversation, Netanyahu gave his fullest public explication yet of why he believes President Obama must consider Iran’s nuclear ambitions to be his preeminent overseas challenge. “Why is this a hinge of history? Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they’d force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.
“Third, they would be able to pose a real and credible threat to the supply of oil, to the overwhelming part of the world’s oil supply. Fourth, they may threaten to use these weapons or to give them to terrorist proxies of their own, or fabricate terror proxies. Finally, you’d create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area—nearly all the Arab regimes are dead-set opposed to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. They fervently hope, even if they don’t say it, that the U.S. will act to prevent this, that it will use its political, economic, and, if necessary, military power to prevent this from happening.”
If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Netanyahu asserted, Washington’s Arab allies would drift into Iran’s orbit. “The only way I can explain what will happen to such regimes is to give you an example from the past of what happened to one staunch ally of the United States, and a great champion of peace, when another aggressive power loomed large. I’m referring to the late King Hussein [of Jordan] … who was an unequalled champion of peace. The same King Hussein in many ways subordinated his country to Saddam Hussein when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Saddam seemed all-powerful, unchallenged by the United States, and until the U.S. extracted Kuwait from Saddam’s gullet, King Hussein was very much in Iraq’s orbit. The minute that changed, the minute Saddam was defeated, King Hussein came back to the Western camp.”
One of Iran’s goals, Netanyahu said, is to convince the moderate Arab countries not to enter peace treaties with Israel. Finally, he said, several countries in Iran’s neighborhood might try to develop nuclear weapons of their own. “Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The Middle East is incendiary enough, but with a nuclear arms race it will become a tinderbox,” he said.
Few in Netanyahu’s inner circle believe that Iran has any short-term plans to drop a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv, should it find a means to deliver it. The first-stage Iranian goal, in the understanding of Netanyahu and his advisers, is to frighten Israel’s most talented citizens into leaving their country. “The idea is to keep attacking the Israelis on a daily basis, to weaken the willingness of the Jewish people to hold on to their homeland,” Moshe Ya’alon said. “The idea is to make a place that is supposed to be a safe haven for Jews unattractive for them. They are waging a war of attrition.”
The Israeli threat to strike Iran militarily if the West fails to stop the nuclear program may, of course, be a tremendous bluff. After all, such threats may just be aimed at motivating President Obama and others to grapple urgently with the problem. But Netanyahu and his advisers seem to believe sincerely that Israel would have difficulty surviving in a Middle East dominated by a nuclear Iran. And they are men predisposed to action; many, like Netanyahu, are former commandos.
As I waited in the Knesset cafeteria to see Netanyahu, I opened a book he edited of his late brother’s letters. Yoni Netanyahu, a commando leader, was killed in 1976 during the Israeli raid on Entebbe, and his family organized his letters in a book they titled Self-Portrait of a Hero. In one letter, Yoni wrote to his teenage brother, then living in America, who had apparently been in a fight after someone directed an anti-Semitic remark at him. “I see … that you had to release the surplus energy you stored up during the summer,” Yoni wrote. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s too bad you sprained a finger in the process. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with a good fist fight; on the contrary, if you’re young and you’re not seriously hurt, it won’t do you real harm. Remember what I told you? He who delivers the first blow, wins.”
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/netanyahu
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12) Making Ends Meet in the Great Depression
By JOYCE WADLER
April 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/garden/02depression.html?hp
AT a time when life in America is beginning to resemble a roller-coaster ride on the way down and everyone is trying to find ways to save money, it may be instructive — both in terms of offering helpful hints and putting things in perspective — to look at how people ran their households during the Great Depression.
Back then there was little money for food, let alone new curtains, but people found ways to cope. Backyard gardens were cultivated not because of a sudden itch to eat locally grown produce, but out of necessity; homeowners did their own repairs and found ingenious ways to make their homes functional and attractive.
Below, some who lived through the Depression share their memories.
THOMAS MOON, 87
Huntsville, Ala.
Thomas Moon, a retired electrical engineer, grew up in New Hope, Ala., 20 miles from Huntsville. One of six children of a sharecropper, he began working in the fields just as the Depression hit, when he was 7 or 8, earning 50 cents a day. At 17, he joined the Navy, where he served in World War II.
The house I grew up in, all we had was a fireplace for heat and a wood stove in the kitchen to cook with, and two kerosene lamps. The living room had the fireplace — we had two full-size beds in that room.
In the winter the chickens would come up under the house and sit in the basement, so if we wanted a chicken we’d raise a plank up and reach down and get the chicken. (It was warm in the wintertime. The base of that chimney would be nice and warm; I don’t blame them for going down there.)
There was nothing thrown away. We’d make soup out of the feet that was delicious. The gizzard, oh, man, that was choice meat, everybody loved the gizzard. We used to make featherbeds out of chicken feathers and geese, but we’d pick the goose without killing him: all you do is pick him up, yank the feathers off when he was still alive. He don’t mind it. It grows back in two or three months.
In the summer, I took a washtub and put it on a little scaffold out near the chicken house and put burlap sacks around it to make it private. You’d fill that tub full of water in the morning, the sun would heat the water. I found a valve somewhere and I had a valve in the bottom of the tub, and that’s where we got the warm water. It held about 20 gallons. We might take one shower a week.
When you got hungry, you could take a walk out in the mountains. There was always something to eat — all kinds of berries — and in the winter you got pecans, hickory nuts, walnuts. We used to eat bullfrog; that’s a delicacy. And we used to eat squirrels and rabbits.
And possums. Ever eat a possum? Don’t try it. I’ll never forget the first possum I ate.
My grandfather and his son invited me to have a possum dinner. You know how a possum looks at you with his teeth open?
When they opened the oven door, the possum’s mouth was wide open. I took one bite out of that possum, that was the end of my possum career.
ANNIE PEZZILLO MOON, 87
Huntsville, Ala.
Annie Pezzillo Moon, Mr. Moon’s wife, who has been a homemaker for more than 65 years, grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of 12 children — nine of whom survived — of Italian immigrants. Her father was a self-employed truck driver, she says, delivering fruits and vegetables in an operation controlled by the Mafia. (“If you didn’t pay off the Mafia, they shot you,” she says. “I guess my father paid.”) As a 13-year-old during the Depression, she sometimes sold shopping bags in the street. A few years later, she dropped out of high school to make 50 cents an hour working at Woolworth’s. She met her husband when she was 21 and he was a sailor on leave in New York.
Our house wasn’t nice. All we had was three bedrooms and a kitchen. We never had a living room, we never had pictures on the walls. My sister slept at the foot of the bed, and I slept at the head of the bed.
I went to the Madonna House on Cherry Street, where the nuns were; my father didn’t know this, but we needed food. The nuns gave me a ticket where I would get stale bread and stale cake.
For Christmas we got fruit — maybe a case would break and my father gave us a piece of it. We never, ever got a present.
At the Madonna House, they would put us on a bus and take us uptown to what we called the Rich Lady’s House. I don’t think it was a house, maybe it was a club house. They would have toys on tables, and you could take a toy from every table. And at the end, they would give us a coupon and there was an Endicott Johnson factory and we would get a new pair of shoes.
My sister wanted to go roller skating one Christmas Eve. I wasn’t doing nothing. I said, Oh, heck, I’ll go. My sister met these two sailors and brought my husband over to me. He didn’t pick me up, I’ll make that clear. That was Dec. 24. We got married March 11.
He was never on a pair of roller skates in his life. He fell down, they ran over his fingers. He said he was in love, so there was no pain.
MERLIN NELSON, 87
New York
Merlin Nelson, a retired executive of American Machine and Foundry, lives in Manhattan. He grew up in San Bernardino, Calif., where his father, a onetime North Dakota farmer, worked in real estate. In 1933, when Mr. Nelson was 11, the real estate market had collapsed and his father bartered property in San Bernardino for an old house and some land in Salem, Ore., where he eventually started a chicken farm.
We spent the Christmas of 1933 in this modest house there. Dad drove the 1930 Chevrolet out in the foothills toward the Cascade range, found a tree, put it on top of the car, found some mistletoe and picked some sprigs of that and some holly and then some white berries. They popped corn and then you got a needle and thread, and that combination of fruit and popcorn basically was our decoration.
The next summer, we all went out every day helping restore this derelict house. We did things like lift the house up and put a basement underneath.
You got the neighbors to help you. There was a team of Belgian horses nearby; they helped pull the barn closer to the house. Farmers in those days knew how to do all kinds of things. You didn’t need much cash — you did everything on a swap.
My dad got the idea of having Rhode Island Red chickens, and they built a big coop for 200 or 300 chickens. He put in a trap nest system, with a board in front. If it laid an egg, I’d mark a plus on the board; if not, a minus, and after a while the poor ones were sold or eaten.
The male chickens we wouldn’t keep, we’d sell them. I’d have to go and get one and chop its head off and pluck it. No big deal.
GLADYS COLE, 74
Nokomis, Fla.
Gladys Cole, a retired teacher and insurance investigator in Nokomis, Fla., was born in the middle of the Depression and grew up in Hartford. Her father was a mechanical engineer at a dairy there; her mother ran the boarding house where they lived. That meant keeping the tenants in linens and trying to make the house attractive when buying new things was not a good option.
My mother never threw anything away. If a sheet got worn, she would cut it up and put it together with another sheet for the people who lived in the rooms — they didn’t care, they weren’t fussy about linens the way people are today. She mended towels, and when they frayed around the edges, she cut them up to make washcloths.
The sheets that got old and were worn out in the middle, they cut strips from the sides, narrow strips, and tied the ends together and put it on the loom and wove blankets. If they wanted color, they added narrow strips of fabric from old dresses.
You didn’t go to the store and buy clothing; you went to the 5-and-10-cent store, where you could buy fabric very inexpensively. You darned socks — you had a special little wooden ball you put inside the sock; you had cotton yarn. You could actually weave it so it didn’t show. You can’t do that today because the socks are synthetic; it doesn’t hold. My mother would make picture frames out of papier-mâché, and she cut pictures from the Sears catalog and then would make the frames to go around the pictures.
They recycled everything, I tell you, everything.
ANNA JANE NICHOLAS, 87
Oakmont, Pa.
Anna Jane Nicholas, a retired arts and antiques appraiser in Oakmont, Pa., was luckier than many: While by her estimate, the families of 40 percent of her schoolmates could not afford to buy them shoes, her own father, who worked for United States Steel in Gary, Ind., kept his job through the Depression. Still, her family was always very careful with money, and her mother made the family’s clothing and curtains herself, and even re-covered the dining room chairs. She would also line a wooden box on the back porch with burlap and leave dinner in it for migrants searching for work.
My mother would put food out there if she had an extra helping, then she would pull the blinds in the kitchen, because she didn’t want my brother and I to be watching. We discovered later there was a mark in the alley that indicated there was something on the back porch.
My mother was a big-hearted woman. If she had a dessert, she always put a dessert out there. Sometimes they’d leave little notes: ‘Thank you, Ma’am.’
One woman came along — I was surprised, it was usually men — she said, ‘Your gingerbread was lovely.’ She had some sort of piece of paper, it looked like a piece of a bag, just a few words, she said, ‘I always liked to bake gingerbread and your gingerbread was lovely.’
PETER G. HOLDEN, 92
New York
Peter Holden worked for the New York City parks department for 35 years and still lives in Manhattan. He grew up in Raleigh, N.C., where his mother took a job as a cleaning woman for North Carolina State University when he was 7, after the death of his father, a brick mason. Mr. Holden’s home had electricity, but no water; water had to be drawn from a neighbor’s well or hauled from a stream several houses away.
We lived high up on a hill above the southwestern campus, and we just worked together and shared. There was a great feeling of cooperation and help, even among the poor whites and the poor blacks. My grandfather had a farm and most any time he would come in, he would bring enough for two or three days — corn or tomatoes, whatever the season was — and we would share.
We ate beans maybe four times a week, boiled in salt pork. On Saturday or Sunday somehow or other we would have a nice meal. My mother would bring back a steak, that might have been 25 cents a pound. She was paid $8 or $9 a week, but at that time you could have more than a whole week’s groceries with that and have a little money left over.
She got laid off from the N.C. State job and there was just no jobs around Raleigh, so she went to Stamford — she had a sister living up there — and took my younger sister with her. I finished high school in 1934.
My mother always told us you can be anything you want, don’t come here telling me you can’t be this and they won’t let me be that.
That first year, I didn’t think I would be able to go to college, but my mother sent $10 from Stamford. She said, ‘Boy, you take this to St. Augustine’s and see if they don’t take this as a down payment, and if they don’t take it, you send my money back to me or I’ll come back to Raleigh and beat you all over.’
So I went out and tried to discourage St. Augustine’s, but they took me. I graduated college in 1938.
Like my mother said, if you really want to do something you can.
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