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U.S. Out Now! From Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all U.S. bases around the world; End all U.S. Aid to Israel; Get the military out of our schools and our communities; Demand Equal Rights and Justice for ALL!
TAX THE RICH NOT THE POOR! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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LABOR DAY Rally and March for a Fair Contract
One Union! One Contract!
Date: September. 7, Monday
Time: 11:00 am
Meeting Place: Justin Herman Plaza, SF*
On August 14, the contract of 9,000 SF hotel workers expired. Bargaining is
underway, and the bosses are trying to undercut our health care benefits but
we will stand up to protect the standards we have fought for. Health care is
a fundamental human right, and we will take to the streets to defend it.
Join us and community supporters in demanding a fair contract and affordable
quality health care. Flyer for this event is attached.
For more information please contact
Rev. Israel Alvaran, ialvaran@clueca.org or call 415.863.1142
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Eyewitness Gaza:
Breaking the Siege
ANSWER Educational Forum
San Jose:
Tuesday, September 8, 6:30 p.m.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Library
150 E. San Fernando Street (at S. 4th St.)
ANSWER South Bay
408-829-9506
ANSWERsouthbay@gmail.com
San Francisco:
Thursday, September 10, 7:00 p.m.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street (Between 16th and 15th Streets)
ANSWER Coalition, Bay Area
415-821-6545
ANSWER@answersf.org
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THE NEXT OCTOBER 17 COALITION MEETING:
Sunday, September 13, 2:00 PM
Unitarian Church (Chapel)
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF (wheelchair accessible).
Let's make a collective effort to build the heck out of the meeting, that is, get out the word to the broadest forces we can and resume the hard work and collective process that is required to make October 17 a success.
We should have well-prepared reports from our established committees:
a) Logistics
b Program/Speakers (Colonel Ann Wright has confirmed if we want her)
c) Leaflets
d) Fundraising
e) Media/publicity
f) Outreach
2,500 leaflets have already been distributed. As per the sense of the body last Saturday, the back side of all future leaflets will be for educational material on issues that relate to the theme, "Money for Human Needs Not War." A top notch piece on the healthcare debate seems like a great way to start.
Let's have some volunteers to cover this Wednesday's 4:30 pm SF City Hall Single Payer Healthcare Rally. Call Kathy Lipscomb for leaflets if you need them, but call before 10 am.
We will also have tables to distribute thousands of leaflets at the three Bay Area Noan Chomsky meetings as follows:
Oakland (Middle East Children's Alliance sponsored) Saturday, October 3, Paramount Theater, Oakland 7:30 pm
Sunday, October 4, 2 pm, Unitarian Church, San Francisco, Franklin and Geary
Sunday, October 4, 7:30 pm, Spangenberg Theater at Gunn High School, Palo Alto 780 Arastradero Road. Sponsor: Peninsula Peace and Justice Center
Brief announcements (1-2 minutes) on our October 17 rally will be made at all three Chomsky events due to the good graces of all the sponsors. We will have an opportunity to distribute thousands of leaflets. We need your help!
Please call Jeff (510-268-9428) or Kathy (415-387-0873) to volunteer at one of these great opportunities to get out the word.
In solidarity,
Kathy Lipscomb and Jeff Mackler
Temporary Coordinators
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National Call For Action And Endorsements at the
G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA
Sept. 19 - 25, 2009
Endorsers (list in formation): Iraq Veterans Against the War Chapter 61, Pittsburgh; PA State Senator Jim Ferlo; Veterans for Peace Chapter 047, Pittsburgh; National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations; Thomas Merton Center Pittsburgh; Codepink Pittsburgh Women for Peace; Bail Out The People; Green Party of Allegheny County; World Can't Wait; ISO (International Socialist Organization); WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) Pittsburgh; Socialist Action; Ohio Valley Peace
Activists from Pittsburgh, the U.S., and across the globe will converge to protest the destructive policies of the G-20 - meeting in Pittsburgh this September 24-25.
The Group of Twenty (G-20) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors represents the world's economic leaders, intimately connected to the most powerful multi-national corporations that dominate the global economy. Their neo-liberal policies have squandered billions on war, plunged economies into deep recessions, worsened social, economic and political inequality, and polluted the earth.
We believe a better world is possible. We anticipate involvement and support from like-minded people and organizations across the country for projected actions from September 19-25:
People's Summit - Sept. 19, 21-22 (Saturday, Monday, Tuesday)
A partnership of educators and social justice groups is organizing a People's Summit to discuss global problems and seek solutions that are informed by the basic principles of genuine democracy and human dignity. This will bring together informed speakers and panels to discuss problems we face and possible solutions, also providing interactive workshop discussions.
Mass March on the G-20 - Friday, Sept. 25:
Money for human needs, not for war!
Gather at 12 noon, march to the City County Building downtown
A peaceful, legal march is being sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an umbrella organization that supports a wide variety of peace and justice member projects in Pittsburgh. We will hold a mass march to demand "Money for human needs, not for war!"
WE SEEK THE BROADEST RANGE OF SUPPORT, PARTICIPATION, AND ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE MASS MARCH AND PEOPLE'S SUMMIT
To endorse, E-mail: info@pittsburghendthewar.org
Or contact: Thomas Merton Center AWC, 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224
Several other events are being planned by a wide variety of community and social justice groups in Pittsburgh.
For more information and updates please visit:
http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/g20action.htm
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The Human Face of Death Row
Join us October 2nd at 7pm for the opening reception for an exhibition of paintings from three men - Kevin Cooper, James Anderson and Eddie Vargas. Two of them are condemned - on death row; the third has a life sentence - the other death penalty.
These three men use art to express themselves. We hope you will see their work, hear their stories, and take away an understanding of their humanity from viewing it.
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
ROCK PAPER SCISSORS GALLERY
TELEGRAPH & 23RD ST, OAKLAND
October 1 - October 31, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2ND - 7 TO 9 PM
JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH - 7 TO 9 PM - a memorial movie of Oscar Grant, with Uncle Cephus Bobby Johnson, other members of Oscar's family and Jack Bryson. Come for update: Meserlhe's trial starts October 13th, unless continued again.
STAN TOOKIE WILLIAMS LEGACY NETWORK: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17TH - 4 TO 6 PM - with Barbara Becnel and Stan Tookie Williams' books for children.
LIVE FROM DEATH ROW: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23RD - 7 TO 9 PM - with Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on San Quentin's death row calling (at 7:30 sharp). Q&A with Kevin Cooper and members of the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee.
PLEASE JOIN US
FOR MORE INFO: CALIFORNIA@NODEATHPENALTY.ORG
510-589-6820
2278 Telegraph Ave., Ca 94612(click here for a map)http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Oakland&state=CA&address=2278+Telegraph
Presented by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, a grassroots organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment in the United States.
website: www.nodeathpenalty.org
Also by Art for a Democratic Society, an Oakland based art and activism group specializing in participatory grassroots interventionist art.
website: www.a4ds.org email: a4ds@earthlink.net
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On the 8th Anniversary of the War on Afghanistan
U.S. -- NATO OUT!
BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
End colonial occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti...
Healthcare, jobs, housing, education for all--Not War!
San Francisco Protest:
Wednesday, October 7, 5:00 p.m.
New Federal Building
7th and Mission Streets, Near Civic Center BART
Initiated by the ANSWER Coalition--Act Now to Stop War and End Racism
Volunteers needed: 415-821-6545
answer@answersf.org
ANSWERcoalition.org
ANSWERsf.org
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NATIONAL MARCH FOR EQUALITY
WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 10-11, 2009
Sign up here and spread the word:
http://www.nationalequalitymarch.com/
On October 10-11, 2009, we will gather in Washington DC from all across
America to let our elected leaders know that *now is the time for full equal
rights for LGBT people.* We will gather. We will march. And we will leave
energized and empowered to do the work that needs to be done in every
community across the nation.
This site will be updated as more information is available. We will organize
grassroots, from the bottom-up, and details will be shared on this website.
Our single demand:
Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.
Our philosophy:
As members of every race, class, faith, and community, we see the struggle
for LGBT equality as part of a larger movement for peace and social justice.
Our strategy:
Decentralized organizing for this march in every one of the 435
Congressional districts will build a network to continue organizing beyond
October.
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
(TIME AND ROUTE DETAILS TO BE ANNOUNCED)
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Money for Human Needs Not War!
Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, military personnel, bases, contractors, and mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Colombia.
End U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine! End the Seige of Gaza!
U.S. Hands Off Iran and North Korea!
Self-determination for All Oppressed Nations and Peoples!
End War Crimes Including Torture and Prosecute the War Criminals!
See historical images of the Vietnam Moratorium at:
http://images.google.com/images?q=vietnam+moratorium&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=lGaISs7pMIP-sQOr2OznAg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4
Image of San Francisco Vietnam Moratorium, Golden Gate Park, October 17, 1969 (I was there...bw):
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rchrd.com/photo/images/pb2-12-15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rchrd.com/photo/archives/1969/&usg=__FeHN5CAwDXv-ewwCt2Hfni6ZUn8=&h=567&w=850&sz=143&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=EJH6Kzj6YI6zzM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvietnam%2Bmoratorium%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1
This is an initial announcement. Contact information, endorsers and further details to be announced.
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Please forward widely. Contact us if you or your organization would like to endorse this call.
CALL FOR OCTOBER 22 DEMONSTRATION IN OAKLAND, CA:
NATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST TO STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION
Oscar Grant. Brownie Polk. Parnell Smith. And dozens more Oakland alone. Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo in New York City. Adolph Grimes in New Orleans. Robbie Tolan in Houston. Julian Alexander in Anaheim. Jonathan Pinkerton in Chicago. And thousands more nationwide.
All shot down, murdered by law enforcement, their lives stolen, victims of a nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder.
The racist arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts - right in his own home - showed that any Black man or woman, no matter their stature, no matter their education, no matter their accomplishments can be targeted for brutality - even murder - at any moment.
Meanwhile, a whole generation of youth is treated as guilty until proved innocent, and hundreds of thousands are criminalized, and locked away in U.S. prisons with no hope for the future. And immigrants are subject to brutal raids, with families cruelly split up in an instant.
We refuse to suffer these outrages in silence. We need to put a stop to this and drag the truth about the nationwide epidemic of police violence and repression into the light of day for all so see. We say no more! Enough is Enough!
Oct 22nd 2009 is the 14th annual national day of protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of Generation---bringing together those under the gun and those not under the gun as a powerful voice to expose the epidemic of police brutality. On that day in cities across the country many different people will take to the streets against police brutality and murder, against the criminalization of youth, and against the targeting of immigrants.
We call for a powerful demonstration in Oakland on October 22 demanding:
* Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation!
* October 22....No To Police Brutality
* No to ICE raids and round-ups of immigrants!
* Enough Is Enough! No More Stolen Lives!
* Justice for Oscar Grant and all victims of police murder!
* Wear Black, Fight Back
Contact the National Office of October 22nd at:
Info@october22.org or 1-888-NOBRUTALITY
October 22nd Coalition
P.O. Box 2627
New York, N.Y. 10009
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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URGENT ALERT!
Call-In To Save San Francisco's Only State Park Wilderness Area From
Toxic Condominium Development!
Within the next two weeks, State Senator Mark Leno will seek to pass a
bill allowing environmentally criminal Lennar Corporation to build high
priced condos on the wildlife habitat and parkland in San Francisco's
Candlestick Point State Recreation Area!
San Francisco Supervisors Avalos, Daly, Mirkarimi, Mar and Campos have
sponsored a local resolution to tell the State legislature not to wreck
our State parkland for real estate developer profits.
This measure needs the crucial sixth vote of Board of Supervisors
President David Chiu to win, before Leno's bill (SB 792) goes for its
own final vote.
**WHAT YOU CAN DO**
Call Supervisor David Chiu at 415-554-7450 with the comment:
"Please bring the Avalos/Daly resolution opposing SB 792 to a full Board
vote by September 15th and vote YES! Don't give away one inch of
California's only urban state park!"
If you call during the weekend or evening, or get a recording, just
leave your comment as voice mail.
For more on the State Park land grab see
http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/privatizing-california-senate-bill-792/
For more on Lennar's history of corporate abuses see page 3 of Our
City's Fall 2007 Update at http://our-city.org/Update-Oct07.pdf
###
This alert sent by:
Our City
1028-A Howard St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-756-8844
For more information about Our City campaigns go to:
http://www.our-city.org
info@our-city.org
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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TRAILER: Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhydyxRjujU&feature=player_embedded
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Take Action: Stop Rite Aid's abuses: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act!
Stop Rite Aid's abuses: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act!
For years Rite Aid workers have faced unfair firings, campaigns of misinformation, and intimidation for trying to form a union. But Rite Aid would never have been able to get away with any of this if Congress had passed the Employee Free Choice Act.
You can help us fight mounting anti-union opposition to the bill that would have protected Rite Aid's workers. Tell Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act today!
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/riteaidefca2/8gg63dd407ejd5wi?
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From: Labor Cmte. for Peace & Justice
To: bay_area_lc4pj@lists.riseup.net
Sent: Fri, Aug 21, 2009 2:46 am
Subject: [BayArea LC4PJ] Why boycott Whole Foods?
Does John Mackey live in this country, or even on this planet? Reading his recent op-ed article on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal raises that question. And it's prompted quite a few people to swear off shopping at Whole Foods, of which he is co-founder and CEO.
He wrote in part: "With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.
"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead , we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction-toward less government control and more individual empowerment."
He touts his company's own coverage model, notwithstanding that, by his own admission, it carries a high deductible and leaves 11 percent of its employees uncovered.
What prompt my question about his place of residence are the "reform" proposals he makes in the article. You can read it (and weep, or scream, or tear your hair out, or whatever) at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html
Richard Knee
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Scraping By
Opinion | Op-Ed
In the first of a series by the filmmaker Stewart Thorndike on life during the economic crisis, a tent city in Redmond, Wash., is filling up with the newly homeless who are forming a makeshift community.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/08/06/opinion/1247463860996/op-ed-scraping-by.html
06/26/1787 James Madison Statement: "The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, - when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability."
As quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 by Robert Yates. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Madison
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END THE DEATH PENALTY NOW! END "LIFE WITHOUT POSSIBILITY OF PAROLE"!
This video is a very compelling story of a man who spent 14 years on Death Row for murders he did not commit. He was finally released upon evidence of his innocence and of racial prejudice at his trial. The whole criminal "In-Justice" system in this country is racist to the core and corrupt. That's why the death penalty and life w/o possibility of parole must be overturned and all inmates should be awarded new chances for exoneration...Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCZK7AxUCQ
Death Penalty Focus
870 Market St. Ste. 859 San Francisco, CA 94102
Tel. 415.243.0143 - Fax 415.243.0994 - www.deathpenalty.org
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Urgent: Ahmad Sa'adat transferred to isolation in Ramon prison!
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/
Imprisoned Palestinian national leader Ahmad Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was transferred on August 11, 2009 to Ramon prison in the Naqab desert from Asqelan prison, where he had been held for a number of months. He remains in isolation; prior to his transfer from Asqelan, he had been held since August 1 in a tiny isolation cell of 140 cm x 240 cm after being penalized for communicating with another prisoner in the isolation unit.
Attorney Buthaina Duqmaq, president of the Mandela Association for prisoners' and detainees' rights, reported that this transfer is yet another continuation of the policy of repression and isolation directed at Sa'adat by the Israeli prison administration, aimed at undermining his steadfastness and weakening his health and his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Sa'adat has been moved repeatedly from prison to prison and subject to fines, harsh conditions, isolation and solitary confinement, and medical neglect. Further reports have indicated that he is being denied attorney visits upon his transfer to Ramon.
Ahmad Sa'adat undertook a nine-day hunger strike in June in order to protest the increasing use of isolation against Palestinian prisoners and the denial of prisoners' rights, won through long and hard struggle. The isolation unit at Ramon prison is reported to be one of the worst isolation units in terms of conditions and repeated violations of prisoners' rights in the Israeli prison system.
Sa'adat is serving a 30 year sentence in Israeli military prisons. He was sentenced on December 25, 2008 after a long and illegitimate military trial on political charges, which he boycotted. He was kidnapped by force in a military siege on the Palestinian Authority prison in Jericho, where he had been held since 2002 under U.S., British and PA guard.
Sa'adat is suffering from back injuries that require medical assistance and treatment. Instead of receiving the medical care he needs, the Israeli prison officials are refusing him access to specialists and engaging in medical neglect and maltreatment.
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat demands an end to this isolation and calls upon all to protest at local Israeli embassies and consulates (the list is available at: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/ About+the+Ministry/Diplomatic+mission/Web+Sites+of+Israeli+ Missions+Abroad.htm) and to write to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations to exercise their responsibilities and act swiftly to demand that the Israelis ensure that Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners receive needed medical care and that this punitive isolation be ended. Email the ICRC, whose humanitarian mission includes monitoring the conditions of prisoners, at jerusalem..jer@icrc.org, and inform them about the urgent situation of Ahmad Sa'adat!
Ahmad Sa'adat has been repeatedly moved in an attempt to punish him for his steadfastness and leadership and to undermine his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Of course, these tactics have done nothing of the sort. The Palestinian prisoners are daily on the front lines, confronting Israeli oppression and crimes. Today, it is urgent that we stand with Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners against these abuses, and for freedom for all Palestinian prisoners and for all of Palestine!
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org
info@freeahmadsaadat.org
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Where the Jobs Aren't
Editorial
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/opinion/05sat1.html
2) NATO Strike Magnifies Divide on Afghan War
By STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ref=world
3) Panel Rules Against Ashcroft in Detention Case
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/politics/05witness.html?ref=us
4) Young Adults Swelling Ranks of Uninsured
By ANDREA FULLER
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/health/policy/05uninsured.html?ref=us
5) Kentucky: Ex-Soldier Sentenced
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/05brfs-EXSOLDIERSEN_BRF.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1252174220-Yt2WthWDNaBTHzsAAKfxUg
6) In Unemployment Report, Signs of a Jobless Recovery
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05jobs.html?ref=business
7) Union Head Would Back Bill Without Card Check
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05labor.html?ref=business
8) For Your Health, Froot Loops
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html?ref=health
9) Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance
By JENNY ANDERSON
Back to Business
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06insurance.html?hp
10) Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?hp
11) U.S. Share of Worldwide Arms Market Grows
By THOM SHANKER
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/world/07weapons.html?hp
12) Text of flyer handed out at the San Francisco Labor Council’s Pre-Labor Day Breakfast honoring warmonger and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi on Friday, September 4; written and distributed by Ralph Schoenman, Mya Shone and Bradley Wiedmaier
[This was sent to me by the authors and I agree with it...Bonnie Weinstein]
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1) Where the Jobs Aren't
Editorial
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/opinion/05sat1.html
As is the case with so many economic indicators these days, the only good thing to say about the August jobs report is that it could have been worse. Employers shed another 216,000 jobs last month, a smaller loss than expected and the lowest monthly loss total in a year.
The losses would have been worse had it not been for federal stimulus spending - proof that the government is indeed helping to ease the downturn in its role as the spender of last resort.
Still, the damage to the work force caused by the recession is deep, wide and ongoing. The economy is now coming up short by 9.4 million jobs, including 6.9 million positions that employers have eliminated and 2.5 million jobs that were needed to absorb new workers but were never created.
And unemployment is on the rise, jumping from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August. For several demographic groups, the unemployment rate is already in double digits, including men (10.1 percent), Hispanics (13 percent), African-Americans (15.1 percent) and teenagers (25.5 percent). In all, 14.9 million workers are now jobless, of which fully one-third have been out of work for more than six months, the highest level of long-term unemployment by far in any post World War II recession. There are now nearly six workers available for every job opening, up from 1.7 workers per opening when the recession began in December 2007.
Worse, hiring is not expected to rebound anytime soon, even if overall economic growth resumes this year. Employers are likely to fill any additional workloads by adding hours to truncated workweeks and ending worker furloughs. Wage gains, which are always repressed when jobs are scarce and unemployment is high, will be an even longer time coming as employers restore pay cuts put in place during the recession before giving raises.
Without job growth and pay raises, consumer spending will not revive substantially because alternative sources of spending power - home equity and credit cards - are largely tapped out. And without an upsurge in spending, businesses will not add workers, and so on, in a decidedly unvirtuous cycle.
It has become commonplace to explain each dismal job report by saying that a resurgence in employment always lags general economic recovery. But with the job market severely wounded, and with consumer spending expected to be weak for a very long time, it could easily take until 2014 for employment to recover. It's safe to say that five years or more of subpar job growth is not what most people have in mind when they think of a "lag."
The question, then, is how bad does it have to get before the Obama administration and Congress make job creation a priority.
Will administration officials and lawmakers fight for new laws to make it easier to form unions, which are especially important in elevating and protecting the jobs of low-income workers? How will professed support for green jobs be translated into a manufacturing policy that promotes good jobs? Will efforts to improve the educational system also include serious efforts to train and retrain people for new jobs?
Help is wanted for out of work Americans.
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2) NATO Strike Magnifies Divide on Afghan War
By STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ref=world
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan - A NATO airstrike on Friday exploded two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban, setting off competing claims about how many among the scores of dead were civilians and raising questions about whether the strike violated tightened rules on the use of aerial bombardment.
Afghan officials said that up to 90 people were killed by the strike near Kunduz, a northern city where the trucks got stuck after militants tried to drive them across a river late Thursday night.
The strike came at a time of intense debate over the Afghan war in both the United States and Europe and after a heavily disputed election that has left Afghanistan tense and, at least temporarily, without credible leaders.
Though there seemed little doubt some of the dead were militants, it was unclear how many of the dead were civilians, and with anger at the foreign forces high here, NATO ordered an immediate investigation.
Recently, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander here, severely restricted the use of airstrikes, arguing that America risked losing the war if it did not reduce civilian casualties.
Underscoring his concern, on Friday he recorded a video message, translated into Dari and Pashto, to be released to Afghan news organizations.
The general began by greeting "the great people of Afghanistan, salaam aleikum."
"As commander of the International Security Assistance Force, nothing is more important than the safety and protection of the Afghan people," General McChrystal said in the brief message. "I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously."
General McChrystal said he had ordered the investigation "into the reasons and results of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people."
Two 14-year-old boys and one 10-year-old boy were admitted to the regional hospital here in Kunduz, along with a 16-year-old who later died. Mahboubullah Sayedi, a spokesman for the Kunduz provincial governor, said most of the estimated 90 dead were militants, judging by the number of charred pieces of Kalashnikov rifles found. But he said civilians were also killed.
In explaining the civilian deaths, military officials speculated that local people were conscripted by the Taliban to unload the fuel from the tankers, which were stuck near a river several miles from the nearest villages.
But some people wounded by the strike said that they had gone to the scene with jerrycans after other people had run through their villages saying that free fuel was available.
"They were just telling us, 'Come and get the fuel,' " Wazir Gul, a 23-year-old farmer, said at the hospital, where he was treated for serious burns on his back. He estimated that hundreds of people from surrounding villages went to siphon fuel from the trucks before the airstrike.
Mr. Gul said his older brother Amir was among the villagers incinerated in the blast. "When the tanker exploded and burned, I knew he was dead," Mr. Gul said.
The wounded 10-year-old, Shafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name, said he had defied his father's orders by climbing on the family donkey to join the throng of villagers heading to pick up fuel.
"When I arrived there, I was on the donkey," Shafiullah, wounded in his arms and legs, said from his hospital bed. "I was not very close. I had not gotten the fuel yet when the bomb landed and the shrapnel injured me."
German forces in northern Afghanistan under the NATO command called in the attack, and German military officials initially insisted that no civilians had been killed. But a Defense Ministry spokesman in Berlin later said the ministry believed that more than 50 fighters had been killed but could give no details about civilian casualties.
The public health officer for Kunduz Province, Dr. Azizullah Safar, said a medical team sent to the village reported that 80 people had been killed, and he said that "most of them were civilians and villagers."
But he said it was also clear that some of the dead were militants, noting that the site was scattered with remnants of ammunition vests and other gear carried by insurgents.
A statement issued by the office of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said that he was "deeply saddened" and that he had sent a delegation to investigate. "Targeting civilian men and women is not acceptable," the statement added.
Afghan officials said the attack struck a collection of hamlets known as Omar Kheil, near the border of the districts of Char Dara and Ali Abad. The district governor of Ali Abad, Hajji Habibullah, said the area was controlled by Taliban commanders.
The Kunduz area was once calm, but much of it has recently slipped under the control of insurgents at a time when the Obama administration has sent thousands of more troops to other parts of the country to combat an insurgency that continues to gain strength in many areas.
The region is patrolled mainly by NATO's 4,000-member German force, which is barred by German leaders from operating in combat zones farther south. The United States has 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, more than any other nation; other countries fighting under the NATO command have a combined total of about 40,000 troops here.
If a high number of civilian casualties is confirmed, it is likely to not only deepen antipathy toward NATO forces in Afghanistan, but also further diminish support for the war in Germany, where it is already unpopular. It could also become an issue in the coming German election as Chancellor Angela Merkel tries to win a second term.
A senior NATO official who had watched aerial surveillance video of the attack site said the Germans who ordered the strike "had every reason to believe what they were looking at was groups of insurgents offloading tankers," a process that went on for several hours.
The official said that the nearest villages were two miles away and that the authorities "don't know yet" whether the attack violated the rules governing the use of airstrikes tightened this summer by General McChrystal.
According to the new rules, airstrikes are, in most cases, allowed only to prevent American and other coalition troops from being overrun by enemy fighters. Even in the case of active firefights with Taliban forces, airstrikes are to be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas.
From initial accounts given by NATO and Afghan officials, it was not clear whether this strike met those conditions, regardless of whether the majority of the dead were insurgents or civilians.
On Friday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain called for a "prompt and urgent investigation."
"It is a vital time for NATO and Afghanistan's people to come together," he told Sky News.
Stephen Farrell reported from Kunduz, Afghanistan and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., from Kabul, Afghanistan. Reporting was contributed by Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul; Sultan M. Munadi from Kunduz; Judy Dempsey from Berlin; and Sharon Otterman from New York.
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3) Panel Rules Against Ashcroft in Detention Case
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/politics/05witness.html?ref=us
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft may face personal liability for the decisions that led to the detention of an American citizen as a material witness after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.
In the decision, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, was sharply critical of the Bush administration's practice of holding people it suspected of terrorism without charges, as material witnesses.
"We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution, and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history," said the opinion, written by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.
The lawsuit was brought in 2005 by Abdullah al-Kidd, who was born Lavoni T. Kidd in Kansas and converted to Islam in college. He was arrested in 2003 at Dulles Airport as he prepared to fly to Saudi Arabia for graduate work in Islamic studies, and was held for weeks under a law that allows the indefinite detention of material witnesses to a crime. After his detention, he was ordered to stay with his in-laws in Las Vegas; his travel was restricted over the next year.
Mr. Kidd, who was not called as a witness in the case in which he was detained and was never charged with a crime, sued Mr. Ashcroft and other officials in 2005, challenging his detention as unconstitutional and saying it cost him his marriage and his job. His lawyers argued that he was held as part of a secret Bush administration policy to use the material witness statute as a tool to detain and interrogate people when there was insufficient evidence to charge them with a crime.
Mr. Ashcroft, who was represented by the Justice Department, disputed Mr. Kidd's version of the facts and claimed his position granted him immunity.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who represented Mr. Kidd, called it "an enormous decision" that says "no official, including the attorney general of the United States, can be immune if he adopts and implements an unconstitutional policy."
Material witness laws, said Ronald L. Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia, have generally been used to hold witnesses briefly if they have crucial information but are thought to be likelier to flee than to testify. But during the Bush administration, the use of the law was expanded for use in terrorism investigations, and "the net swept pretty widely," Professor Carlson said.
Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said, "We're reviewing the court's ruling." Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft, would say only that Mr. Ashcroft was reviewing the decision as well.
A report in 2005 by Human Rights Watch and the A.C.L.U. said that 70 people were improperly detained under the material witness law after 9/11. Although the decision could conceivably apply to those people, few, if any, of them could now sue because of the statute of limitations, Mr. Gelernt said.
Judge Smith, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, was joined in the majority opinion by Judge David R. Thompson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. The third judge on the panel, Carlos T. Bea, filed an opinion that concurred in part and dissented in part. Judge Bea, who was also appointed by President Bush, argued that Mr. Ashcroft should have immunity in the case, and that the majority was wrong to allow Mr. Kidd "to seek redress from the wallet of a federal cabinet-level official."
Unless Mr. Ashcroft appeals the decision, the case will go back to federal district court for further hearings, which could involve extensive investigation of the former administration's antiterrorism policies.
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4) Young Adults Swelling Ranks of Uninsured
By ANDREA FULLER
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/health/policy/05uninsured.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Some of the difficult financial choices facing uninsured Americans - whether to go to a hospital or tough out an illness, whether to pay the rent or pay doctor bills - confront young people who not that long ago had to worry only about buying gasoline or paying a cellphone bill.
The age group of people 19 to 24 years old has the highest percentage of uninsured individuals, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Thirty percent of them did not have health insurance in 2007, a number almost certainly driven higher in an arid job market.
An additional 26 percent of people 25 to 34 years old were uninsured, Kaiser found. As a whole, polls have found that adults under 34 are more supportive than others of President Obama's drive to overhaul health care, though their views are hardly unanimous.
For now, some of them are without insurance by choice, gambling that their youth will keep them healthy. But others, already dealing with medical issues, say that affording medical care is a near impossibility because they either have no insurance or have inadequate coverage.
For a 23-year-old woman who graduated from Duke University in 2008, her efforts to break into the film industry mean a string of internships, none providing insurance. Nor can she afford insurance with her earnings from the jobs she has taken to support herself, including a position as a nanny and as a part-timer at a boutique.
But the woman, who asked not to be identified to keep her medical condition private, has HPV, a virus linked to cervical cancer. An annual pap smear and a colposcopy, a follow-up procedure to check for cancer, cost her hundreds of dollars.
"Do I keep checking that or do I save some money?" she said. "Do I do what I'm supposed to do and pay for the next procedure? Do I opt out of it because I can't afford it?"
For some, landing a steady job does not necessarily translate into insurance.
Kristy Weaver, 22, began working full-time as a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Crescent City, Fla., when she was 16. But Ms. Weaver said that the only insurance offered through her job "wasn't worth what you paid for it."
When Ms. Weaver was 11, doctors told her that she had ovarian cysts. Last year, a specialist told her the only way to eliminate the problem would be to remove her left ovary, an operation that she was told could cost $6,000 to $10,000. Unable to afford the surgery, she began taking heavy doses of birth control pills the doctor prescribed.
"All it did was make it worse," said Ms. Weaver, who is now a staffing coordinator at the nursing home. Ms. Weaver now has insurance through her employer, and said she has to wait 12 months before consulting a doctor about the cysts or else the insurer could designate the problem as a pre-existing condition that will not be covered. She has six months to go.
"It's a really throbbing pain," Ms. Weaver said. "The first time I had an attack, I thought I was losing a baby. I couldn't catch my breath. I was in bed for three or four days."
Now, she is about $5,000 in debt from her medical bills.
"I can't get a new car," she said. "I can't look at buying a house."
Instead of racking up medical bills, other young people decide to forgo treatment completely.
Spencer Krasch, 19, had surgery last year for Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a condition that causes his heart to beat rapidly, while covered on his father's insurance. Now out of high school and working in a deli, he is uninsured and has discontinued routine check-ups.
But recently, when Mr. Krasch, who lives in Temple City, Calif., was helping his girlfriend move into her dorm at Pomona College, he felt as if he was having a stroke, which he said doctors told him could be a complication of the surgery.
"All of a sudden the whole left side of my body went completely numb," he said. "My lips started twitching."
But he refused to let his girlfriend's parents call an ambulance.
"That would have been way too expensive for me to pay for," he said. Instead, Mr. Krasch waited until the symptoms subsided.
Even those who are in good health can quickly find themselves on the other side of the divide.
Josh Pavlacky, 23, knows that all too well. As a graduate of a top liberal arts college, Wesleyan University, with a bachelor's degree in studio art, he expected to find nonprofit work. Instead he is working as a dishwasher and running an art gallery out of his garage in Portland, Ore.
While in college, he was covered by the policy of his father, who works security at Costco. But now, he says, that coverage has ended and his family cannot afford to help him buy something else.
So when Mr. Pavlacky got hit by a car while biking in May, he decided that a hospital visit was out of the question. Instead of seeking treatment, he had friends bring him prescription painkillers they had left over from procedures like having their wisdom teeth removed.
"I was flipped over and fell on my back," he said. "I had a bruise all down my leg and couldn't walk for three days."
Mr. Pavlacky says he supports the president's health care overhaul, and wishes Mr. Obama had pushed a public plan forward himself instead of turning the negotiations over to Congress and "bringing everybody into the tent."
Young people are split on how the president is handling health care, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Aug. 5, though they are more supportive than other age groups. In the poll, 48 percent of those ages 18 to 34 said "disapprove" while 44 percent said they "approve."
Still, 53 percent of that group said the president would do a better job at handling health care policy than Congressional Republicans, while 35 percent sided with the Republican lawmakers.
Ms. Weaver, who voted for Senator John McCain for president, says she worried that a health care overhaul could make taxpayers finance a system that does not work.
But she said she feels that politicians do not seem to understand what young people are going through.
"It's the people who are trying to make a foundation for themselves," she said. "It's so difficult for younger people who are just now starting."
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5) Kentucky: Ex-Soldier Sentenced
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/us/05brfs-EXSOLDIERSEN_BRF.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1252174220-Yt2WthWDNaBTHzsAAKfxUg
In Paducah, a former soldier, Steven D. Green, received five consecutive life sentences for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members. Mr. Green, 24, of Midland, Tex., had been convicted by a civilian jury in May of rape, conspiracy and multiple counts of murder. He shot and killed the teenager's mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face. Her body was set on fire March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Barring a successful appeal or presidential pardon, Mr. Green will not be eligible for release from prison.
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6) In Unemployment Report, Signs of a Jobless Recovery
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05jobs.html?ref=business
The unemployment rate surged to 9.7 percent in August, signaling that joblessness and financial anxiety were likely to endure in millions of American homes for many months.
The Labor Department's latest employment report, released Friday, added weight to a growing belief that, at least technically, the economy had already escaped the grip of recession. Though 216,000 net jobs vanished in August, the losses continued to moderate from their worst numbers of the year.
Yet the report also lent credence to a deepening consensus that, even as the economy resumes expansion, the recovery was likely to be weak, prompting most companies to hold back from aggressive hiring.
"In the context of a full-blooded recovery, this report is disappointing," said Alan Ruskin, an economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford, Conn. "We're still clawing our way back."
Many experts envision a jobless recovery, in which the economy grows but job losses persist. That would reprise the end of the last recession in 2001, when payrolls continued to decline for nearly two years afterward.
Such an outcome would confront the Obama administration with a potentially nettlesome political problem heading into next year's midterm elections. After the government unleashed $787 billion to stimulate economic growth, and after it bailed out financial institutions and the auto industry, the unemployment rate exceeds worst-case projections envisioned by the administration early this year.
On Friday, Jared Bernstein, the top economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said the picture would look far worse were it not for the stimulus spending. He added that more help was on the way as the government distributed the remaining two-thirds of the package.
"Our interventions have contributed to significant cuts in the rate of job loss," Mr. Bernstein said. "We're headed in the right direction, but we're far from out of the woods. There are simply too many Americans seeking work."
If the jobless rate continues to climb, as is widely expected, that could generate pressure for another stimulus spending package. But given intensifying concern about the size of federal budget deficits - now projected to exceed $9 trillion within a decade - any new spending could be politically perilous.
The latest snapshot of the nation's labor situation testified to the drastic improvement since early this year, when nearly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing. Yet it also underscored the continued bleakness of the economic landscape.
"It's a good picture compared to where we were, which was just a free fall," said Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "But compared to anything else, this is just a horrible report. The rate of decline is slowing, but it's not going to stop. We're likely on a path toward more than 10 percent unemployment."
Most economists see recent improvements as the result of pulling away from the disaster of last fall - when the investment giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, spreading fear throughout the financial system - and not a sign of vigorous growth ahead.
After years of borrowing against soaring home values, tapping credit cards and harvesting stock market winnings to spend in excess of their incomes, millions of households are being forced to conserve. That limits consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the nation's economy. And that makes businesses that might otherwise hire and expand more inclined to hunker down.
"Household balance sheets are shot," Mr. Ruskin said. From here, spending "has to come from income, and income has to come from employment, and at this juncture it looks like employment will only improve very slowly."
The unemployment rate is up from 9.4 percent in July, when the economy lost 276,000 jobs.
The jobs report underscored the broad reach of the labor crisis, which has imposed austerity even on those still employed. In the last year, average weekly earnings have increased by only 0.8 percent - a decline, after factoring in the rising cost of goods. So many companies have trimmed working hours that paychecks have shrunk.
The so-called underemployment rate - which counts the jobless along with those working part time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find full-time jobs - reached 16.8 percent in August.
In recent months, the economy has benefited from a slowdown in the pace at which businesses have slashed inventories, prompting factories to expand production. Auto sales have been aided by the cash-for-clunkers program, which gave buyers incentives to trade in cars. Home sales have been stimulated by a tax credit for first-time homebuyers, an inducement that expires in November.
After those programs wear off, the nation may again confront a fundamentally weak economy.
"Everybody is looking around saying, 'Where is a robust recovery going to come from?' and not finding it," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "We're going to have elevated unemployment for four years to come."
In Williamsburg, Va., Ginny Hoover, 49, has remained unemployed since she lost her job at a pharmaceutical company in November 2007. She has maxed out her credit cards and borrowed money from friends. She broke her apartment lease and moved in with her boyfriend. But other than an offer to sell insurance door-to-door for commissions only, she has found no work.
"I thought maybe a month or two and I'd have another job," Ms. Hoover said. "I never would have guessed that it would be as brutal as it was out there."
Despite increased factory production, manufacturing shed 63,000 jobs in August. Construction lost 65,000 jobs. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding nearly 28,000 jobs.
"I don't think businesses will hire back anytime soon," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics. "Companies are rewarded by the stock markets for not hiring and keeping their costs down. We will see another jobless recovery."
In Delray Beach, Fla., Donna Angelillo lost her job as a property manager in May and quickly exhausted her savings. Her $1,000 monthly unemployment check does not cover her $1,030 monthly rent.
Jobs are scarce, she said. Past-due bills are abundant.
"I don't have September rent, but right now I'm more concerned about the electricity," she said. "Either today or tomorrow, they're going to shut it off. I'm getting desperate."
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7) Union Head Would Back Bill Without Card Check
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05labor.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON - The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president has signaled a significant shift to try to move a long-stalled pro-union bill, saying he would support a change that calls for speedy unionization elections, a provision that would replace the much-attacked card-check provision.
In an interview, John J. Sweeney, the federation's president, said he would accept a fast election campaign instead of card check because it would meet his goal of minimizing management interference during organizing drives.
Mr. Sweeney said he "could live with" fast or snap elections "as long as there is a fair process that protects workers against anti-union intimidation by employers and eliminates the threats to workers."
The move away from card check would be a victory for the business community. Randel Johnson, senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the United States Chamber of Commerce, nonetheless criticized the proposal for elections after a short campaign.
"That has the effect as a practical matter of eliminating the ability of the employer to educate its employees about the potential adverse effects of unionization," Mr. Johnson said. "It still begs the question, what is wrong with the existing secret ballot process?"
In recent months, several crucial Democratic senators have told organized labor that they could not round up the 60 votes needed to assure passage of any bill containing card check.
Despite such warnings, labor leaders continued to cling publicly to the idea; Mr. Sweeney's comments were a major departure from that position.
"If modifying that in some way or another is going to bring some more votes for the bill, I think that's worth it," Mr. Sweeney said.
Under Mr. Sweeney's idea, a secret ballot would be held probably within five or 10 days of a substantial number of workers petitioning for a union. Such a brief length of time would be far different from the current practice when campaigns often last two months, giving companies time to persuade workers to vote against a union.
Even before President Obama took office, labor made it clear that its No. 1 legislative goal was a law that would make organizing easier, including a so-called card-check provision that required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed cards favoring a union.
But card check faced huge opposition from Republicans and corporations, which complained that it would largely replace secret ballots. Under current law, companies that face organizing drives can insist on secret-ballot elections, which unions say they often lose because of management's lengthy and intense anti-union campaigns.
In an interview Thursday evening, Richard Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s secretary-treasurer, who will become the federation's president on Sept. 16, stopped short of endorsing fast elections.
He said the A.F.L.-C.I.O. wanted to make sure that any legislation contained three components: a process in which workers were free of intimidation; greater penalties against employers that break the law during organizing drives, for instance by firing outspoken union supporters; and binding arbitration to prevent employers from indefinitely dragging out negotiations without ever reaching a contract.
Business groups denounce the binding arbitration provision, saying it would be wrong to have federally appointed officials issuing rulings that determine a company's wages, hours, pensions and working conditions.
Echoing Mr. Trumka, Mr. Sweeney said he would accept snap elections only as part of a bill that also called for binding arbitration and stiffer penalties against management.
Mr. Sweeney said President Obama had assured labor that as soon as health care legislation was passed - if it was passed - he would work with labor and the Democrats to pass the pro-union legislation, known as the Employee Free Choice Act.
Mr. Sweeney voiced optimism that the bill would pass.
"It's going to be this year," he said.
Mr. Sweeney said that corporate lobbyists would find it harder to attack fast elections than card check because business could no longer contend that labor wanted to eliminate "sacrosanct secret-ballot elections." But some corporate lobbyists are already attacking snap elections as "ambush elections."
David Bonior, a former House Democratic Whip who heads a group, America Rights at Work, that has campaigned for the pro-union bill, said he still hoped card check could be salvaged.
"The first preference for everybody in labor is the original bill," he said. "And if we preserve the principles of the original bill and there are some changes - and if we can get 80 to 90 percent of what we started with - I think people would move forward on that."
Meanwhile, a Gallup Poll released on Thursday found that while 66 percent of Americans continued to believe unions were beneficial to their own members, fewer than half of Americans - 48 percent, a record low - approved of unions. That was down from 59 percent a year ago.
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8) For Your Health, Froot Loops
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html?ref=health
A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation's largest food manufacturers, is "designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices."
The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including - to the surprise of many nutritionists - sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.
"These are horrible choices," said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health.
He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices Program were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. "It's a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I'm afraid, not credible," Mr. Willett said.
The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture have also weighed in, sending the program's managers a letter on Aug. 19 saying they intended to monitor its effect on the food choices of consumers.
The letter said the agencies would be concerned if the Smart Choices label "had the effect of encouraging consumers to choose highly processed foods and refined grains instead of fruits, vegetables and whole grains."
The government is interested in improving nutrition labeling on packages in part because of the nation's obesity epidemic, which experts say is tied to a diet heavy in processed foods loaded with calories, fats and sugar.
The prominently displayed label debuts as many in the food industry and government are debating how to provide information on the front of packages that includes important elements from the familiar nutrition facts box that usually appears on the back of products.
Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program's criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.
She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.
"The checkmark means the food item is a 'better for you' product, as opposed to having an x on it saying 'Don't eat this,' " Dr. Kennedy said. "Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn't have the checkmark, by implication it's not a 'better for you' product. They want to have a choice. They don't want to be told 'You must do this.' "
Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.
"You're rushing around, you're trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal," Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. "So Froot Loops is a better choice."
Froot Loops qualifies for the label because it meets standards set by the Smart Choices Program for fiber and Vitamins A and C, and because it does not exceed limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains the maximum amount of sugar allowed under the program for cereals, 12 grams per serving, which in the case of Froot Loops is 41 percent of the product, measured by weight. That is more sugar than in many popular brands of cookies.
"Froot Loops is an excellent source of many essential vitamins and minerals and it is also a good source of fiber with only 12 grams of sugar," said Celeste A. Clark, senior vice president of global nutrition for Kellogg's, which makes Froot Loops. "You cannot judge the nutritional merits of a food product based on one ingredient."
Dr. Clark, who is a member of the Smart Choices board, said that the program's standard for sugar in cereals was consistent with federal dietary guidelines that say that "small amounts of sugar" added to nutrient-dense foods like breakfast cereals can make them taste better. That, in theory, will encourage people to eat more of them, which would increase the nutrients in their diet.
Ten companies have signed up for the Smart Choices program so far, including Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. Companies that participate pay up to $100,000 a year to the program, with the fee based on total sales of its products that bear the seal.
The Smart Choices checkmark is meant to take the place of similar nutritional labels that individual manufacturers began plastering on their packages several years ago, like PepsiCo's Smart Choices Made Easy and Sensible Solution from Kraft.
In joining Smart Choices, the companies agreed to discontinue their own labeling systems, Ms. Kennedy said.
Michael R. Taylor, a senior F.D.A. adviser, said the agency was concerned that sugar-laden cereals and high-fat foods would bear a label that tells consumers they were nutritionally superior.
"What we don't want to do is have front-of-package information that in any way is based on cherry-picking the good and not disclosing adequately the components of a product that may be less good," Mr. Taylor said.
He said the agency would consider the possibility of creating a standardized nutrition label for the front of packages.
"We're taking a hard look at these programs and we want to independently look at what would be the sound criteria and the best way to present this information," Mr. Taylor said.
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September. He said the panel was dominated by members of the food industry, which skewed its decisions.
"It was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we're doing, that was it, end of story," he said. Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Clark, who were both on the panel, said industry members had not controlled the results.
Mr. Jacobson objected to some of the panel's nutritional decisions. The criteria allow foods to carry the Smart Choices seal if they contain added nutrients, which he said could mask shortcomings in the food.
Despite federal guidelines favoring whole grains, the criteria allow breads made with no whole grains to get the seal if they have added nutrients.
"You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria," Mr. Jacobson said.
Nutritionists questioned other foods given the Smart Choices label. The program gives the seal to both regular and light mayonnaise, which could lead consumers to think they are both equally healthy. It also allows frozen meals and packaged sandwiches to have up to 600 milligrams of sodium, a quarter of the recommended daily maximum intake.
"The object of this is to make highly processed foods appear as healthful as unprocessed foods, which they are not," said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University.
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9) Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance
By JENNY ANDERSON
Back to Business
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06insurance.html?hp
After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash - $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return - though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated.
The idea is still in the planning stages. But already "our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries," says Kathleen Tillwitz, a senior vice president at DBRS, which gives risk ratings to investments and is reviewing nine proposals for life-insurance securitizations from private investors and financial firms, including Credit Suisse.
"We're hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering," said one investment banker not authorized to speak to the news media.
In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, exotic investments dreamed up by Wall Street got much of the blame. It was not just subprime mortgage securities but an array of products - credit-default swaps, structured investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations - that proved far riskier than anticipated.
The debacle gave financial wizardry a bad name generally, but not on Wall Street. Even as Washington debates increased financial regulation, bankers are scurrying to concoct new products.
In addition to securitizing life settlements, for example, some banks are repackaging their money-losing securities into higher-rated ones, called re-remics (re-securitization of real estate mortgage investment conduits). Morgan Stanley says at least $30 billion in residential re-remics have been done this year.
Financial innovation can be good, of course, by lowering the cost of borrowing for everyone, giving consumers more investment choices and, more broadly, by helping the economy to grow. And the proponents of securitizing life settlements say it would benefit people who want to cash out their policies while they are alive.
But some are dismayed by Wall Street's quick return to its old ways, chasing profits with complicated new products.
"It's bittersweet," said James D. Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University. "The sweet part is there are investors interested in exotic products created by underwriters who make large fees and rating agencies who then get paid to confer ratings. The bitter part is it's a return to the good old days."
Indeed, what is good for Wall Street could be bad for the insurance industry, and perhaps for customers, too. That is because policyholders often let their life insurance lapse before they die, for a variety of reasons - their children grow up and no longer need the financial protection, or the premiums become too expensive. When that happens, the insurer does not have to make a payout.
But if a policy is purchased and packaged into a security, investors will keep paying the premiums that might have been abandoned; as a result, more policies will stay in force, ensuring more payouts over time and less money for the insurance companies.
"When they set their premiums they were basing them on assumptions that were wrong," said Neil A. Doherty, a professor at Wharton who has studied life settlements.
Indeed, Mr. Doherty says that in reaction to widespread securitization, insurers most likely would have to raise the premiums on new life policies.
Critics of life settlements believe "this defeats the idea of what life insurance is supposed to be," said Steven Weisbart, senior vice president and chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. "It's not an investment product, a gambling product."
After Mortgages
Undeterred, Wall Street is racing ahead for a simple reason: With $26 trillion of life insurance policies in force in the United States, the market could be huge.
Not all policyholders would be interested in selling their policies, of course. And investors are not interested in healthy people's policies because they would have to pay those premiums for too long, reducing profits on the investment.
But even if a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion. That would help Wall Street offset the loss of revenue from the collapse of the United States residential mortgage securities market, to $169 billion so far this year from a peak of $941 billion in 2005, according to Dealogic, a firm that tracks financial data.
Some financial firms are moving to outpace their rivals. Credit Suisse, for example, is in effect building a financial assembly line to buy large numbers of life insurance policies, package and resell them - just as Wall Street firms did with subprime securities.
The bank bought a company that originates life settlements, and it has set up a group dedicated to structuring deals and one to sell the products.
Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable stock market indices that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of the market without buying stocks.
Spokesmen for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
If Wall Street succeeds in securitizing life insurance policies, it would take a controversial business - the buying and selling of policies - that has been around on a smaller scale for a couple of decades and potentially increase it drastically.
Defenders of life settlements argue that creating a market to allow the ill or elderly to sell their policies for cash is a public service. Insurance companies, they note, offer only a "cash surrender value," typically at a small fraction of the death benefit, when a policyholder wants to cash out, even after paying large premiums for many years.
Enter life settlement companies. Depending on various factors, they will pay 20 to 200 percent more than the surrender value an insurer would pay.
But the industry has been plagued by fraud complaints. State insurance regulators, hamstrung by a patchwork of laws and regulations, have criticized life settlement brokers for coercing the ill and elderly to take out policies with the sole purpose of selling them back to the brokers, called "stranger-owned life insurance."
In 2006, while he was New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer sued Coventry, one of the largest life settlement companies, accusing it of engaging in bid-rigging with rivals to keep down prices offered to people who wanted to sell their policies. The case is continuing.
"Predators in the life settlement market have the motive, means and, if left unchecked by legislators and regulators and by their own community, the opportunity to take advantage of seniors," Stephan Leimberg, co-author of a book on life settlements, testified at a Senate Special Committee on Aging last April.
Tricky Predictions
In addition to fraud, there is another potential risk for investors: that some people could live far longer than expected.
It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money.
It happened again last fall when companies that calculate life expectancy determined that people were living longer.
The challenge for Wall Street is to make securitized life insurance policies more predictable - and, ideally, safer - investments. And for any securitized bond to interest big investors, a seal of approval is needed from a credit rating agency that measures the level of risk.
In many ways, banks are seeking to replicate the model of subprime mortgage securities, which became popular after ratings agencies bestowed on them the comfort of a top-tier, triple-A rating. An individual mortgage to a home buyer with poor credit might have been considered risky, because of the possibility of default; but packaging lots of mortgages together limited risk, the theory went, because it was unlikely many would default at the same time.
While that idea was, in retrospect, badly flawed, Wall Street is convinced that it can solve the risk riddle with securitized life settlement policies.
That is why bankers from Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs have been visiting DBRS, a little known rating agency in lower Manhattan.
In early 2008, the firm published criteria for ways to securitize a life settlements portfolio so that the risks were minimized.
Interest poured in. Hedge funds that have acquired life settlements, for example, are keen to buy and sell policies more easily, so they can cash out both on investments that are losing money and on ones that are profitable. Wall Street banks, beaten down by the financial crisis, are looking to get their securitization machines humming again.
Ms. Tillwitz, an executive overseeing the project for DBRS, said the firm spent nine months getting comfortable with the myriad risks associated with rating a pool of life settlements.
Could a way be found to protect against possible fraud by agents buying insurance policies and reselling them - to avoid problems like those in the subprime mortgage market, where some brokers made fraudulent loans that ended up in packages of securities sold to investors? How could investors be assured that the policies were legitimately acquired, so that the payouts would not be disputed when the original policyholder died?
And how could they make sure that policies being bought were legally sellable, given that some states prohibit the sale of policies until they have been in force two to five years?
Spreading the Risk
To help understand how to manage these risks, Ms. Tillwitz and her colleague Jan Buckler - a mathematics whiz with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering - traveled the world visiting firms that handle life settlements. "We do not want to rate a deal that blows up," Ms. Tillwitz said.
The solution? A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases - leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.
As an added precaution, DBRS would run background checks on all issuers. Also, a range of quality of life insurers would have to be included.
To test how different mixes of policies would perform, Mr. Buckler has run computer simulations to show what would happen to returns if people lived significantly longer than expected.
But even with a math whiz calculating every possibility, some risks may not be apparent until after the fact. How can a computer accurately predict what would happen if health reform passed, for example, and better care for a large number of Americans meant that people generally started living longer? Or if a magic-bullet cure for all types of cancer was developed?
If the computer models were wrong, investors could lose a lot of money.
As unlikely as those assumptions may seem, that is effectively what happened with many securitized subprime loans that were given triple-A ratings.
Investment banks that sold these securities sought to lower the risks by, among other things, packaging mortgages from different regions and with differing credit levels of the borrowers. They thought that if house prices dropped in one region - say Florida, causing widespread defaults in that part of the portfolio - it was highly unlikely that they would fall at the same time in, say, California.
Indeed, economists noted that historically, housing prices had fallen regionally but never nationwide. When they did fall nationwide, investors lost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Both Standard & Poor's and Moody's, which gave out many triple-A ratings and were burned by that experience, are approaching life settlements with greater caution.
Standard & Poor's, which rated a similar deal called Dignity Partners in the 1990s, declined to comment on its plans. Moody's said it has been approached by financial firms interested in securitizing life settlements, but has not yet seen a portfolio of policies that meets its standards.
Investor Appetite
Despite the mortgage debacle, investors like Andrew Terrell are intrigued.
Mr. Terrell was the co-head of Bear Stearns's longevity and mortality desk - which traded unrated portfolios of life settlements - and later worked at Goldman Sachs's Institutional Life Companies, a venture that was introducing a trading platform for life settlements. He thinks securitized life policies have big potential, explaining that investors who want to spread their risks are constantly looking for new investments that do not move in tandem with their other investments.
"It's an interesting asset class because it's less correlated to the rest of the market than other asset classes," Mr. Terrell said.
Some academics who have studied life settlement securitization agree it is a good idea. One difference, they concur, is that death is not correlated to the rise and fall of stocks.
"These assets do not have risks that are difficult to estimate and they are not, for the most part, exposed to broader economic risks," said Joshua Coval, a professor of finance at the Harvard Business School. "By pooling and tranching, you are not amplifying systemic risks in the underlying assets."
The insurance industry is girding for a fight. "Just as all mortgage providers have been tarred by subprime mortgages, so too is the concern that all life insurance companies would be tarred with the brush of subprime life insurance settlements," said Michael Lovendusky, vice president and associate general counsel of the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group that represents life insurance companies.
And the industry may find allies in government. Among those expressing concern about life settlements at the Senate committee hearing in April were insurance regulators from Florida and Illinois, who argued that regulation was inadequate.
"The securitization of life settlements adds another element of possible risk to an industry that is already in need of enhanced regulations, more transparency and consumer safeguards," said Senator Herb Kohl, the Democrat from Wisconsin who is chairman of the Special Committee on Aging.
DBRS agrees on the need to be careful. "We want this market to flourish in a safe way," Ms. Tillwitz said.
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10) Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM
September 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?hp
ASHEVILLE, N.C. - In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C's she got last spring - a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends' houses and a motel.
Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities - and the federal mandate - to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.
The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.
Still, Charity said of her last semester, "I couldn't go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff," and she often nodded off in class.
Charity and her brother, Elijah Carrington, 6, were among 239 children from homeless families in her district as of last June, an increase of 80 percent over the year before, with indications this semester that as many or more will be enrolled in the months ahead.
While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.
There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.
With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.
"It's hard enough going to school and growing up, but these kids also have to worry where they'll be staying that night and whether they'll eat," said Bill Murdock, chief executive of Eblen-Kimmel Charities, a private group in Asheville that helps needy families with anything from food baskets and money for utility bills to toiletries and a prom dress.
"We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don't cry," Mr. Murdock said.
Since 2001, federal law has required every district to appoint a liaison to the homeless, charged with identifying and aiding families who meet a broad definition of homelessness - doubling up in the homes of relatives or friends or sleeping in motels or RV campgrounds as well as living in cars, shelters or on the streets. A small minority of districts, including Buncombe County, have used federal grants or local money to make the position full time.
The law lays out rights for homeless children, including immediate school placement without proof of residence and a right to stay in the same school as the family is displaced. Providing transportation to the original school is an expensive logistical challenge in a huge district like Buncombe County, covering 700 square miles.
While the law's goals are widely praised, school superintendents lament that Congress has provided little money, adding to the fiscal woes of districts. "The protections are important, but Congress has passed the cost to state and local taxpayers," said Bruce Hunter, associate director of the American Association of School Administrators.
Fairfax County, Va., where the number of homeless students climbed from 1,100 in June 2007 to 1,800 last spring, has three social workers dedicated to the homeless and is using a temporary stimulus grant to assign a full-time transportation coordinator to commandeer buses, issue gas cards and sometimes call taxis to get the children to their original schools.
Like Fairfax County, the Asheville area looks prosperous, drawing tourists and retirees, but manicured lawns, million-dollar homes and golf courses mask the struggles of many adults working at low-paying jobs in sales and food service.
Emily Walters, the liaison to the homeless for the Buncombe County schools, is busy as school begins, providing backpacks and other supplies and signing children up for free breakfasts and lunches. But her job continues through the school year as other families lose their footing and those who had concealed their status, because of the stigma or because they were not aware of the benefits, join the list.
Sometimes it includes driving families in crisis to look at prospective shelters - a temporary solution at best, Ms. Walters said. When the county receives a two-year stimulus grant next month, she said, she hopes there will be more money to help people avoid eviction or pay security deposits for new rentals.
The evening before school began, Ms. Walters drove 45 minutes to an RV campground to deliver a scientific calculator and other essential school supplies to Cody Curry, 14, who lives with his mother, Dawn, and his brother, Zack, 11, in a camper. Mrs. Curry had to downsize from a trailer, she said, when her work as a sales clerk was cut to two days a week.
The first day of school, Ms. Walters drove to a men's rescue shelter in the city to take Nate Fountain, 18, to high school. Nate said his parents kicked him out of the house last spring, during his senior year, because he was not doing his school work and was drinking and using drugs. With Ms. Walters's help, he said, he expects to finish high school this semester and study culinary arts at a community college.
"I spend a lot of time just making sure the kids stay in school," Ms. Walters said.
The busing service was especially valued by Leslie Laws, who was laid off from her job in customer service last year and lost her rental apartment.
Ms. Laws and her 12-year-old son are staying in a women's shelter in Asheville, far from his former school. He is deeply involved with activities like chorus. Now he must catch the bus at 6:05 a.m. and ride one and a half hours each way.
Educators and advocates for the homeless across the country said that in the current recession, the law had made a difference, minimizing destructive gaps in schooling and linking schools with social welfare agencies.
Charity Crowell, despite her vow to bring up her grades, may be in store for another rough semester. Her stepfather works long hours delivering food on commission, but business is poor. Her mother, Katrina, wants to look for a job, but that is difficult without a car.
Food stamps help, but by the second half of each month the family is mostly eating "Beanee Weenees and noodles," Ms. Crowell said. As school resumed in late August, the family was facing eviction from the $475-a-month trailer and uncertain about what to do next.
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11) U.S. Share of Worldwide Arms Market Grows
By THOM SHANKER
September 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/world/07weapons.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world's leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.
The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before.
Italy was a distant second, with $3.7 billion in worldwide weapons agreements in 2008, while Russia was third with $3.5 billion in arms sales last year - down considerably from the $10.8 billion in weapons deals signed by Moscow in 2007.
The growth in weapons sales by the United States last year was particularly noticeable against worldwide trends. The value of global arms sales in 2008 was $55.2 billion, a drop of 7.6 percent from 2007 and the lowest total for international weapons agreements since 2005.
The increase in American weapons sales around the world "was attributable not only to major new orders from clients in the Near East and in Asia, but also to the continuation of significant equipment and support services contracts with a broad-based number of U.S. clients globally," according to the study, titled "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations."
The annual report was produced by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. Regarded as the most detailed collection of unclassified global arms sales data available to the general public, it was delivered to the House and Senate on Friday in time for their return from the Labor Day recess.
The overall decline in weapons sales worldwide in 2008 can be explained by the reluctance of many nations to place new arms orders "in the face of the severe international recession," wrote Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service and author of the study.
Mr. Grimmett's report stated that the growth of weapons sales by the United States was "extraordinary" in a time of global recession, and was the result of new arms deals as well as the sustained cost of maintenance, upgrades, ammunition and spare parts to nations that purchased American weapons in the past.
In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations, which remain "the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by weapons suppliers," according to the study.
Weapons sales to developing nations reached $42.2 billion in 2008, only a nominal increase from the $41.1 billion in 2007.
The United States was the leader not only in arms sales worldwide, but also to the subset of nations in the developing world, signing $29.6 billion in weapons agreements with these nations, or 70.1 percent of all such deals.
The study found that the larger arms deals concluded by the United States with developing nations last year included a $6.5 billion air defense system for the United Arab Emirates, a $2.1 billion jet fighter deal with Morocco and a $2 billion attack helicopter agreement with Taiwan. Other large weapons agreements were reached between the United States and India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Korea and Brazil.
Russia was far behind in 2008 with $3.3 billion in weapons sales to the developing world, about 7.8 percent of all such agreements. The report notes that while Moscow continues to have China and India as its main weapons clients, Russia's new focus is on arms sales to Latin American, in particular to Venezuela.
France was third with $2.5 billion in arms sales to developing nations, or about 5.9 percent of weapons deals with these countries.
The top buyers in the developing world in 2008 were the United Arab Emirates, which signed $9.7 billion in arms deals, Saudi Arabia, which signed $8.7 billion in weapons agreements, and Morocco, with $5.4 billion in arms purchases.
The study uses figures in 2008 dollars, with amounts for previous years adjusted for inflation to give a constant financial measurement.
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12) Text of flyer handed out at the San Francisco Labor Council’s Pre-Labor Day Breakfast honoring warmonger and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi on Friday, September 4; written and distributed by Ralph Schoenman, Mya Shone and Bradley Wiedmaier
[This was sent to me by the authors and I agree with it...Bonnie Weinstein]
NANCY PELOSI'S APPEARANCE AT THE LABOR DAY BREAKFAST
The decision arbitrarily to reverse a vote to picket Nancy Pelosi's presence at the Labor Day breakfast, initiated by the leadership of the San Francisco Labor Council, is unwarranted.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, is a leading policy maker in the administration of Barack Obama and a point person for the imperialist, profoundly anti-democratic and exploitative policies of the Democratic Party - a principal instrument of rapacious class rule in the United States.
She represents the following:
Escalating the war of brutal aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond.
Sustaining the murder of Iraq indefinitely.
Expanding the use of torture, rendition and the implementation in the United States of the architecture of the fascist state.
She is a major figure in the handing over to the banksters, to date, of $23.7 trillion, as documented by Neil Barofsky in his testimony before Congress.
Nancy Pelosi, like the Party and administration she represents, is an enemy of working people - of their economic survival, their right to organize and their political independence.
It is matter of principle to protest her public appearances.
A picket protesting the anti-working class and anti-democratic policies that she represents is not an attack upon labor, let alone upon the San Francisco Labor Council as an organization.
It is disingenuous to equate protesting Ms. Pelosi's appearance at this breakfast with an attack upon the San Francisco Labor Council as an institution.
If the San Francisco Labor Council leadership is embarrassed by protests against Nancy Pelosi, all the more reason to hold this picket.
The leadership that would foist upon the Labor Council and upon working people the policies of the Democratic Party is a misleadership that disarms labor and renders working people unable to fight in their own name and in their class interests.
Those who have engaged in personal attacks upon Steve Zeltzer for proposing to picket Nancy Pelosi's appearance on Friday, September 4 - a proposal that was adopted unanimously - have used abusive language that covers an unprincipled accommodation.
Every defender of the rights of working people will reject this hysteria and recognize that it seeks to cover a bending of the knee to a labor misleadership that undermines the future of working people in the United States.
Ralph Schoenman
Mya Shone
Bradley Wiedmaier
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