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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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PROTEST! When Obama Announces Afghanistan Escalation
The World Can't Wait
Stop the Crimes of Your Government
News from the San Francisco
Bay Area Chapter
Emergency Response Plan for the SF Bay Area:
World Can't Wait is joining with other anti-war forces including the local chapters of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, Code Pink and others [list in formation] to mobilize
On the SAME WEEKDAY** that Obama announces the escalation:
5:00 PM at Fifth & Market (Powell St. BART): San Francisco street protest including die-ins
In the East Bay, feeder rallies and a BART march:
3:30 PM Rally: Marines Recruiting Station, 64 Shattuck Square, Berkeley
4:00 PM Rally: downtown Berkeley BART station then march by BART to arrive 5:00 PM at Fifth & Market in SF
** NOTE: If the news breaks on a weekend, these protests will happen the following MONDAY
The day of the announcement, the World Can't Wait SF office [(415) 864-5153] will have a recorded message confirming the protest times and locations.
Send us info on other campus and community protests that we can also publicize.
PROTEST IN THE STREETS THE DAY AN ANNOUNCEMENT IS MADE TO SEND MORE TROOPS INTO AFGHANISTAN
STOP THE ESCALATION - OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW!
STOP THE CRIMES OF YOUR GOVERNMENT - THE WORLD CAN'T WAIT!
sf@worldcantwait.org
(415) 864-5153
sfbaycantwait.org
www.myspace.com/sfbaycantwait
World Can't Wait SF
2940-16th St., Rm. 200-6
San Francisco CA 94103
Bay Area United Against War endorses this emergency action.
bauaw.org
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STRIKE @ UC BERKELEY: NO BUSINESS AS USUAL!
NOVEMBER 18, 19 AND 20
At their November 17-19 meeting, the UC Regents will be voting on an additional 32% student fee increase. These proposed fees have already been pledged as collateral for $1.35 billion worth of new construction bonds despite an "extreme fiscal emergency." The Regents will also vote to lay off nearly 2,000 more workers, continue with furlough plans, and cut classes and critical student services. The executive administration wants to convince us that their hands are tied by Sacramento, but we know the real crisis is one of priorities. During these days The University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) will be striking, the Coalition of University Employees (CUE) will be striking and we will be converging on UCLA and at UC Berkeley to confront the Regents and fight their austerity measures.
WALKOUT on Wednesday, November 18
UPTE pickets beginning at 5am
Noon: Mass Rally on Sproul followed by a sendoff to those traveling to LA and
MARCH ending with a Strike Meeting: What's Next?
RECLAIM on Thursday, November 19
UPTE pickets beginning at 5am
Noon: Mass Rally at California Hall
4pm, Lower Sproul Second Strike Meeting: What's Next?
ESCALATE on Friday, November 20
If the Regents increase our fees, lay us off and cut our
pay, we will have no choice but to escalate our actions.
Noon: Gather at California Hall
*Tent City throughout the strike in solidarity with UCLA. Bring a pillow !*
**Schedule of Events forthcoming:Have your band play, play sports, put on a workshop, read your poetry, project a movie on the wall, do a fashion show, dj a set, whatever! **
Whose University? Our University!
Sign the call @ ucstrike.com. More info at ucsolidarity.org
The strike is endorsed and supported by UPTE Local 1, CUE Local #3, Solidarity Alliance , Graduate Student Organizing Committee, Graduate Assembly, CalSERVE, Bridges Multicultural, Student Worker Action Team (SWAT), Berkeley Law Organizing Committee, UC Berkeley General Assembly, & Oct 24th Statewide Mobilizing Conference.
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for immediate release:
Contact: Hendrik Voss
202-234-3440, media@soaw.org
Mass Mobilization to Shut Down the School of the Americas
November 20-22, 2009, Fort Benning, Georgia:
* The SOA graduate-led military coup in Honduras and the increasing U.S. military involvement in Colombia put a renewed focus on the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC) and the policies it represents.
* Thousands from across the Americas will converge on November 20-22 at Fort Benning, GA for a vigil and civil disobedience actions to speak out against the SOA/ WHINSEC and to demand a change in U.S. foreign policy.
* The vigil will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1989 SOA graduate-led Jesuit massacre in San Salvador, and the many other thousands of victims of SOA/ WHINSEC violence.
The military coup led by SOA graduates in Honduras has once again exposed the destabilizing and deadly effects that the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC) has on Latin America. Torture survivors and human rights activists from across the Americas, including Bertha Oliva, the founder of the Committee of the Family Members of the Disappeared (COFADEH) from Honduras and human rights defenders from Colombia will travel to Fort Benning, Georgia to participate in the mobilization.
The campaign to close the SOA/ WHINSEC is in a crucial phase right now. Despite promising comments from President Obama during his 2008 election campaign, the SOA/ WHINSEC is still in operation, the U.S. is poring millions into failing "military solutions" to combat the drug problems in Mexico and the Pentagon is moving forward with plans to use seven Colombian military bases in Colombia for offensive U.S. military operations.
"It is up to us to hold those responsible accountable and to push for to closing of the School of the Americas and a change in US foreign policy" said Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOA Watch. "Too many have died and continue to suffer at the hands of graduates of this notorious institute."
In the fall of 2009, opponents of the SOA/ WHINSEC achieved a victory when a joint House and Senate conference committee agreed to include language in the FY 2010 Defense Authorization bill that requires the Pentagon to release names of the graduates of the SOA/ WHINSEC to the public. The Pentagon had classified the names after the continued involvement of SOA/ WHINSEC attendees in human rights abuses became public.
For more information about the November vigil to close the SOA/ WHINSEC, lead-up actions and a complete schedule of events, visit www.SOAW.org
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"The End of Poverty"
Democracy Now Interview with Filmmaker Philippe Diaz
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/10/filmmaker_philippe_diaz_on_the_end
The film opens in San Francisco on December 4 at the 4-Star Theatre on Clement Street.
http://www.theendofpoverty.com/
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Four years ago activists around the world were mobilizing and organizing against the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams. We need to continue that fight today.
Fourth Annual Stanley Tookie Williams Legacy Summit
MOBILIZING THE MOVEMENT FOR JUSICE
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13TH, 3:00-6:00 P.M.
MERRITT COLLEGE
Huey P. Newton/Bobby Seale Student Lounge
12500 Campus Drive, Oakland
For directions go to www.merritt.edu
For more information: 510-235-9780
KEVIN COOPER, TROY DAVIS, MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: THREE INNOCENT MEN ON DEATH ROW
Featuring:
Angela Davis, author and activist.
Barbara Becnel, co-author and friend of Stanley Tookie Williams
Martina Correia, sister of Troy Davis
Release of report, "What's Really Happening on California's Death Row?"
Messages from "The Three Innocent Men"
Sneak Preview, "The Justice Chronicles," dramatic presentation of prison writings
Memorial Movie, for Oscar Grant III
Sponsors:
Stanley Tookie Williams Legacy Network; Campaign to End the Death Penalty; Kevin Cooper Defense Committee, African American Studies Department, Merritt College
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. (see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform ("the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits ("our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive ($1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington (preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright (ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Oakland's Judge Jacobson ruled at 4:00PM Friday, October 16 to move the trial of Johannes Mehserle, killer of unarmed Oscar Grant, OUT OF OAKLAND. The location of the trial venue has not been announced.
In the case of an innocent verdict, folks are encouraged to head to Oakland City Hall ASAP to express our outrage in a massive and peaceful way! Our power is in our numbers! Oscar Grant's family and friends need our support!
For more information:
Contact BAMN at 510-502-9072
letters@bamn.com
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The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA
The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4
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Courage to Resist Urgent Action Alert
Army sends infant to protective services, mom to Afghanistan this weekend
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/789/1/
Army has mom, Alexis Hutchinson, arrested and 11-month old son put into county foster care system. Alexis has now been ordered to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, November 15, where she will be court martialed.
Action Alert: Contact Congresswoman Barbara Lee to urge her to "Request that the Army not deploy Alexis Hutchinson to Afghanistan so that she can care for her son." From the 9th District (Oakland-Berkeley, CA) phone: 510-763-0370 (fax: 510-763-6538). Nationwide: 202- 225-2661 (fax: 202-225-9817).
Donate to Alexis' legal and family support fund (couragetoresist.org/alexis)
Alexis' attorney now available for media interviews.
By friends of Alexis and Courage to Resist. November 12, 2009
Specialist Alexis Hutchinson of Oakland, CA is the single mother of an 11-month old boy, Kamani. Currently she is confined to Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, where she has been posted since February 2008, and threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to be deployed to Afghanistan, even though she has not found anyone to take care of her child while she is away.
In anticipation of going overseas Specialist Hutchinson flew to California and left her son with her mother Angelique Hughes of Oakland, as per her Army family care plan. However, after a week of caring for the child Specialist Hutchinson's mother realized that she was unable to take care of Kamani on top of her other duties to her special-needs daughter, her ailing mother, and her ailing sister. In late October Angelique Hughes informed Hutchinson and her commander, Captain Gassant, that she was not able to care for her daughter's baby after all. The Army gave Specialist Hutchinson an extension of time to find someone else to care for her son, and in the meantime her mother brought Kamani back to Georgia. However just a few days before Specialist Hutchinson was scheduled to deploy she was told that she would not get the extended time after all and would have to deploy, even though there was no one to care for her child.
Faced with that choice Specialist Hutchinson did not show up for her plane. The military had her arrested and they put her child in the county foster care system. Currently, Specialist Hutchinson is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan for a special court martial on Sunday and is facing up to one year in jail. Her mother flew to Georgia and retrieved the baby but is overwhelmed, and does not feel able to provide long-term care for Kamani.
Specialist Hutchinson would like to have more time to find someone to care for her infant. However, she does not have a lot of family or friends who could do so. She says: "It is outrageous that they would deploy a single mother without a complete and current family care plan. I would like to find someone I trust who can take care of my son, but I cannot force my family to do this. They are dealing with their own health issues."
Also in the news:
Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan
by Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service. November 13, 2009
Online version with possible updates
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/789/1/
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HANDS OFF JUANITA YOUNG!
Statement from the NY October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality
http://www.petitiononline.com/JYoungNY/petition.html
Soon after 6:00am on October 27th, five cops raided the house of Juanita Young, the mother of Malcolm Ferguson who was gunned down by a plainclothes cop in 2000. They threatened to break down her door, tried to climb in through her bathroom window, put a gun in Juanita's face and took away her son, Buddy. The cops justified their outrageous and illegal behavior by citing a warrant, refusing to identify who or what the warrant was for. Later it was claimed that the warrant was for Buddy failing to appear in court for a Desk Appearance Ticket on October 13th, just two weeks earlier. This made it clear that it was both an unusually quick response and out of the ordinary violence for this offense.
This is not the first time cops have run roughshod over the rights of Juanita and her family. Juanita Young has been an outspoken opponent of police brutality, fighting for justice not only for her son Malcolm, but for all victims of police brutality. This has made her a target of persistent persecution by the police:
--June 2003: During an illegal eviction carried out by the NYPD, Juanita was arrested for trespassing in her own home. She was handcuffed and aggressively pushed out of her apartment and building, falling twice and injuring her arm. In October 2007, a Bronx civil jury determined that the arresting officer used excessive force in her arrest.
--November 2005: After voicing her disapproval of a brutal arrest at a demonstration, Juanita was arrested after a commanding officer said, "Get her, too." She was refused medical attention that she needed due to an asthma attack. Young was hospitalized for three days and faced criminal charges, but before the date of her arraignment, she received notice in the mail that the charges were dropped.
--November 2006: Juanita was arrested after more than 8 cops entered her apartment during an ambulance call for her daughter. The cops jumped her, punched and kicked her. She was taken to the hospital, where she was handcuffed to the bed and tortured by police for four days, only to be handed a ticket on the last day an hour after a press conference about her attack took place. In October 2008, a Bronx jury acquitted Young of all charges.
--August 2009: During a cookout in front of Juanita's building, over a dozen cops broke down the front door, slammed her oldest son up behind the door, and beat him on the head. The cops also arrested her daughters. This was another attempt to intimidate Juanita Young - through striking out at her loved ones - in hopes of silencing this powerful voice against police brutality.
All these attacks are outrageous, illegitimate and illegal. We say: HANDS OFF JUANITA YOUNG! The NYPD must stop this intimidation and harassment of Juanita and her family. Speaking out against police brutality is no crime. But targeting someone in retaliation for speaking out is illegal.
From Juanita Young's statement to supporters:
"Not only have my rights been violated in the most blatant ways, but I feel physically and psychologically terrorized. I fear for my safety, my very life, and the lives of my children and grandchildren." (October 29, 2009)
We refuse to allow Juanita Young, this fighter against police brutality and injustice, to stand alone against this onslaught.
We demand:
1: The NYPD stop its persecution of Juanita Young!
2: Bronx DA Robert Johnson investigate the role of the 43rd Precinct in this persecution.
3: An investigation of the Warrant Squad and how they were charged, and how they went about, in serving the warrant at Juanita Young's house on October 27th.
Sign Petition Here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/JYoungNY/petition.html
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Cleve Jones Speaks At Gay Rights Rally In Washington, DC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvC3hVXZpc4
Free the SF8: Drop the Charges!
by Bill Carpenter ( wcarpent [at] ccsf.edu )
Monday Oct 12th, 2009 11:20 AM
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/10/12/18625220.php
Sony Piece of crap (Hilarious!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-JByPDJm0
Sick For Profit
http://sickforprofit.com/videos/
Fault Lines: Despair & Revival in Detroit - 14 May 09 - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ7VL907Qb0&feature=related
VIDEO INTERVIEW: Dan Berger on Political Prisoners in the United States
By Angola 3 News
Angola 3 News
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/09/video-dan-berger-on-political-prisoners.html
Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
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JROTC MUST GO!
The San Francisco Board of Education has re-installed the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps in San Francisco schools -- including allowing it to count for Physical Education credits.
This is a complete reversal of the 2006 decision to end JROTC altogether in San Francisco public schools. Our children need a good physical education program, not a death education program!
With the economy in crisis; jobs and higher education for youth more unattainable; the lure, lies and false promises of military recruiters is driving more and more of our children into the military trap.
This is an economic draft and the San Francisco Board of Education is helping to snare our children to provide cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for over 700 U.S. military bases around the world!
We can't depend upon "friendly politicians" who, while they are campaigning for office claim they are against the wars but when they get elected vote in favor of military recruitment--the economic draft--in our schools. We can't depend upon them. That has been proven beyond doubt!
It is up to all of us to come together to stop this NOW!
GET JROTC AND ALL MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS NOW!
Write, call, pester and ORGANIZE against the re-institution of JROTC in our San Francisco public schools NOW!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
San Francisco Board of Education
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427, (415) 241-6493
cascoe@sfusd.edu
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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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Showdown In Chicago
The Showdown in Chicago is underway! Thousands of Americans are in the midst of a series of demonstrations against Wall Street banks and their lobbyists to call for financial reform. Check out the latest news:
http://www.showdowninchicago.org/
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EYE WITNESS REPORTS FROM GAZA Video Free Gaza News October 22,2009
http://www.youtube.com/gazafriends#p/a/1/nHa-CzNCF3c
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ANSWER Statement on Proposed SF Parking Meter Hours
The ANSWER Coalition-SF Bay Area strongly opposes the proposal to extend parking meter hours in San Francisco. The SFMTA, the Metropolitan Transit Agency, is proposing to have parking meters in most of SF run until midnight Monday-Saturday, and from 11 am-6 pm on Sundays!
This is another attempt by the politicians to solve the city's budget crisis by squeezing every last dollar they can out of working people. They have outrageously jacked up MUNI fares, other city fees and parking fines. At the same time they have let the big banks, developers and other wealthy corporate interests-the ones who have created the current economic and budget crisis-off the hook.
The DPT (Department of Parking and Traffic) has already begun a policy of "enhanced enforcement," super-aggressively ticketing vehicles from 9:01 am to 5:59 pm, Monday-Saturday. Every day in every working class neighborhood of SF you can see the booted cars and trucks. On top of the $53, $63 and higher parking tickets, it costs over $200 just to get a boot removed! If your car gets towed, you have to pay $400 or more to get it back. This is causing many low-income people to lose their vehicles.
City officials are trying to mislead people by falsely claiming that the reason for extending meter hours is to collect more quarters and "open up more parking spaces." What they really want is to hit us with thousands more high-priced tickets, and then collect the ransom for booted and towed cars.
This is a class issue. The rich and the well-to-do don't have to worry about where to park in this small and crowded city. They have garages or can afford to pay for parking. It is overwhelmingly working class people who are being hit and who will be hit much, much harder if the new policy goes into effect. Many residents in neighborhoods with meters have no choice but to park at meters after 6 pm and move their vehicles before 9 am the next morning. There just aren't enough spaces otherwise.
As Cristina Gutierrez of Barrio Unido, an immigrant rights group opposed to the plan, asked: "What are we supposed to do, run out of our homes every hour at night to feed the meter?"
But the MTA board and some misguided individuals are trying to pose the issue as MUNI riders vs. car drivers. Some have even ignorantly asserted that if you own a car, you can't possibly be poor. Really? Tell that to the growing number of people forced to LIVE in their cars due to the depression!
The reality is that many people in SF both ride MUNI and own cars (some ride bikes, too). For a lot of people getting to work, shopping, medical appointments, etc. requires a car. That's especially true for families and for people whose jobs are outside SF or not easily accessible by mass transit. Posing the issue as bus riders vs. car riders is false and reactionary.
Does MUNI need more funding? Of course. Should MUNI fares be cut and service increased? No question about it. The issue is: Who should pay?
While taxes, fees, fines, fares, etc., etc, have been constantly increased for us, the taxes on corporate profits have been going down. Many big banks and corporations have been able to avoid paying income tax altogether. While we're told that there's no money for people's needs, $500,000,000 is spent every day on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars have been handed over to the biggest banks in just the last year.
It's time to say: Enough is Enough! It's time for the politicians to stop trying to make working people pay for the economic crisis that the rich created. It's time to make those who can afford it-big business-pay for the services that the people of the city, state and country need.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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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) On the White House
Obama Purposely Taking Time on Troop Decision
By JEFF ZELENY
November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/politics/13zeleny.html?hp
2) Charges Prompt Iraqis to Look Into Blackwater
By JAMES RISEN
November 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/middleeast/12blackwater.html?ref=world
3) Who's Hurting the Most?
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
November 6, 2009, 5:41 pm
[Graphics can be viewed on site below...bw]
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/whos-hurting-the-most/
4) PLEASE SHARE WIDELY!
AFT 1021, part of United Teachers Los Angeles, representing over 10,000 teachers and professional education support personnel, passed the following motions at its meeting Thursday, 11/12/09.
AFT 1021 PASSES MOTIONS ON Afghanistan, Honduras, CA Statewide Day of Action for Public Education, Solidarity Day III March and Rally, and Community input on military academies
5) Man Jailed for '91 Murder Is Cleared by Judge
By JOHN ELIGON
November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13freed.html?ref=nyregion
6) Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
November 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11dowd.html?emc=eta1
7) Where Credit Isn't Due
By JOHN CARNEY
Op-Ed Contributor
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/opinion/13carney.html?hp
8) Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja
Iraqi former battle zone sees abnormal clusters of infant tumours and deformities
Martin Chulov in Falluja
guardian.co.uk
Friday 13 November 2009 19.24 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects
9) A Recovery for Some
By BOB HERBERT
"There are 25 unemployed construction workers for every job opening in their field, and more than a dozen for every opening in the durable goods industries, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston."
Op-Ed Columnist
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/opinion/14herbert.html?hp
10) Turtles Are Casualties of Warming [and tourist beaches...bw] in Costa Rica
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/science/earth/14turtles.html?ref=world
11) Kansas: F.B.I. Was Warned Before Doctor's Killing
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Plains
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/14brfs-FBIWASWARNED_BRF.html?ref=us
12) Job Losses Mount, Enduring and Deep
By FLOYD NORRIS
Off the Charts
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/business/economy/14charts.html?ref=business
13) Home Builders (You Heard That Right) Get a Gift
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/economy/15gret.html
14) Gates Bars Torture Photos' Release
By Nick Baumann
Fri November 13, 2009 9:17 PM PST
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/11/gates-bars-torture-photos-release
15) How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties
"Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed 'every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence' for 'lightning quick' strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him 'orgasms.'"
By Alfred W. McCoy
Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
November 15, 2009
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-w-mccoy/how-americas-wars-are-sys_b_355798.html
16) Reform and Medical Costs
NYT Editorial
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/opinion/15sun1.html
17) Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world/africa/15kenya.html?ref=world
18) Maine Town Is Riven by Housing Dispute
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Milbridge Journal
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/15milbridge.html?ref=us
19) They Have to Live Somewhere
By JOSH BARBANEL
Big Deal
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/realestate/15deal3.html?ref=business
20) Confronting Human Rights Abuses in U.S. Prisons
By Angola 3 News
November 15, 2009
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/11/confronting-human-rights-abuses-in-us_9321.html
21) Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan
By Dahr Jamail
Inter Press Service
Friday 13 November 2009
http://www.truthout.org/1114098
22) Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives
By MARC LACEY
November 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/americas/16mexico.html?ref=world
23) U.S. Readies New Facility for Afghan Detainees
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
November 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/asia/16bagram.html?ref=world
24) Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform
[And the banks are raising their interest rates befor the
"reforms" take effect. So what else is new?...bw]
By DUFF WILSON
November 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16drugprices.html?ref=us
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1) On the White House
Obama Purposely Taking Time on Troop Decision
By JEFF ZELENY
November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/politics/13zeleny.html?hp
WASHINGTON - President Obama has not made a decision about his new military strategy for Afghanistan. And the White House is happy to say so.
It's been 22 days since Mr. Obama was first accused by former Vice President Dick Cheney of "dithering" as he decides whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. An announcement is still likely at least two weeks away - perhaps more - and White House officials have purposefully made no apologies for the extended timetable.
"Contrary to published reports," an administration official said late Wednesday, "the president has not made a decision about the options presented."
As Mr. Obama convened his war council for 2 hours and 20 minutes on Wednesday, the final session before departing for a trip to Asia on Thursday, he suggested he was not satisfied with his options. It was the eighth Situation Room meeting in the last two months on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and officials said Mr. Obama pressed for clarifications on a series of questions.
Where are the off-ramps for the military? What is the exit strategy? When will Americans and their allies hand responsibility to the Afghanistan government? Can the Afghan government improve its credibility?
While much has been made of the four military options on the table - all of which revolve around how many troops to send and for how long - the president also made clear that he is not yet fully satisfied with these choices and will not approve an open-ended commitment. He has also asked, officials said, that some of the options be redrawn.
The White House has been eager to show that Mr. Obama is engaged in extensive deliberations before making one of the most controversial decisions of his presidency. Drawing consciously on studies of how decisions were made to escalate the war in Vietnam, Mr. Obama and his aides seem intent on showing the nation and the world that he is not being rushed by the military or making a judgment without considering the long-term implications.
In purely political terms, the relatively slow pace - administration officials had initially suggested that the review would be complete by early November - signals to both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill that he has given serious consideration to all the options. Given that liberals in his own party are generally opposed to further escalation in Afghanistan and could make trouble for the president should he need to ask for more money for the war, as he will almost certainly need to do, it can only help the White House to reassure the left about how rigorously he is examining the options.
As the weeks have passed by without a decision, the administration is airing its frustration that several news reports have suggested a decision has been made.
"I don't know that it's annoying as much as it is generally amusing to watch somebody or some group of people decide they know what only the president knows," said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.
Even as Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said last week he was disappointed and angry the president has delayed his Afghanistan decision, the White House has spent very little time reacting to the criticism. Administration officials said they believe Americans support the lengthy deliberations.
A poll released on Wednesday by CNN/Opinion Research Corporation showed that 49 percent of Americans surveyed said the president was taking too long to decide whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, while 50 percent did not.
As the White House makes plans for how the president will explain his decision to the nation - a leading option is delivering his first prime-time Oval Office address - Mr. Obama has spent considerable time with troops and families, filling out another part of his role as commander in chief.
He visited the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 26. He arrived at Dover Air Force Base in the small hours of Oct. 29. And he delivered a Veteran's Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. (A trip to Fort Hood, Tex., aides said, was the only hastily scheduled event, following the unforeseen shooting that killed 13 last week.)
A few hours before the meeting of his war council began Wednesday, Mr. Obama walked through the rain-soaked grass at Arlington National Cemetery. He stopped by Section 60, where 577 troops from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. He moved slowly among the granite headstones etched with names of today's wars, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
Mr. Obama stopped by the grave of Spec. Ross McGinnis, a Medal of Honor recipient who was killed nearly three years ago when a grenade was thrown into his vehicle in Iraq. The president visited family members of other troops, who were on hand when he passed by.
Before Mr. Obama reaches Asia - where his focus will be on a variety of other issues, from trade to North Korea - he has one more military stop on his schedule: He is set to meet Thursday with troops at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, as he makes his way to Tokyo.
The decision on Afghanistan won't come, aides said, until well after the president returns to American soil.
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2) Charges Prompt Iraqis to Look Into Blackwater
By JAMES RISEN
November 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/middleeast/12blackwater.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - A senior Iraqi official said Wednesday that he had ordered an investigation into whether top officials of Blackwater Worldwide approved of bribes to Iraqi government officials after shootings by Blackwater guards in 2007 left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
In an interview with CNN, Iraq's interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said that his ministry was beginning an investigation that was prompted by a report in The New York Times on Tuesday that top Blackwater officials approved cash payments intended to silence criticism and win support for the company after the shootings in Nisour Square in Baghdad.
The Times article reported that former Blackwater executives who learned of the plans said they did not know whether the money was, in fact, delivered to Iraqi officials.
Mr. Bolani said he had asked the appropriate commanders to prepare a report about the accusations and to follow up on the matter, CNN reported.
"My door is open to anyone with any complaints or information about this, and I hope they provide me with any information that may help with the investigation," Mr. Bolani told CNN.
The Times reported that a former Blackwater official said the planned payoffs were intended for officials in the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for approving operating licenses for private security companies working in Iraq. At the time of the Nisour Square shootings, Blackwater provided diplomatic security for the United States Embassy in Baghdad and would have needed the license to continue doing so.
Separately, Cofer Black, a former Blackwater official, issued a written statement on Wednesday saying that he was "unaware of any plot or guidance for Blackwater to bribe Iraqi officials," after the shootings, CNN and The Associated Press reported.
The Times article said that Mr. Black learned of the plan while in Baghdad in December 2007, discussing compensation to victims of the Nisour Square shootings with American Embassy officials. The Times reported that he later confronted the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, about the issue. Mr. Black left Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, in 2008.
In his statement, which CNN said it was provided by Xe Services, Mr. Black confirmed that he had met with embassy officials about payments to victims.
But he denied that he had "confronted Erik Prince or any other Blackwater official regarding any allegations of bribing Iraqi officials."
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3) Who's Hurting the Most?
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
November 6, 2009, 5:41 pm
[Graphics can be viewed on site below...bw]
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/whos-hurting-the-most/
The job market is bad for almost everyone. But it is especially bad for those who are young, less educated, male or black.
Below we have collected a breakdown of unemployment numbers by various demographic categories. You'll notice that many of the groups in the worst position today had relatively high unemployment rates even before the recession had begun. But in many cases, those who were relatively worse off before the recession have still been disproportionately hurt by the downturn.
(For example, even before the recession began, high school dropouts had higher jobless rates than college graduates. And during the recession, the jobless rate for dropouts has grown by 8 percentage points, to a total of 15.5 percent in October, while the rate for college graduates has grown by just 2.6 percentage points, to 4.7 percent in October.)
First let's take a look at jobless rates by age:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
While older workers may worry about their coming retirement, younger workers are actually having the most difficulty finding jobs. The unemployment rate for teenagers, which reached 27.6 percent in October, has set a record in each of the last three months.
On to education. As implied above, greater educational attainment is associated with a lower unemployment rate:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Men are also doing much worse than women in the labor market, largely because men are disproportionately employed in industries that are more sensitive to the business cycle:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
And finally, African-Americans are faring far worse than whites. (Seasonally adjusted data are not available for Asian-Americans.) The jobless rate for whites has risen 5.1 percentage points since the recession began in December 2007 to a total rate of 9.5 percent in October 2009. It has risen 6.8 percentage points for blacks, to 15.7 percent in October.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Update: Check out this neat interactive graphic to see how narrower slices of the labor force are doing.
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4) PLEASE SHARE WIDELY!
AFT 1021, part of United Teachers Los Angeles, representing over 10,000 teachers and professional education support personnel, passed the following motions at its meeting Thursday, 11/12/09.
AFT 1021 PASSES MOTIONS ON Afghanistan, Honduras, CA Statewide Day of Action for Public Education, Solidarity Day III March and Rally, and Community input on military academies
END THE AFGHANISTAN WAR AND SUPPORT DOMESTIC PROGRAMS
Whereas, polls show that a majority of the American people oppose continuation of the war in Afghanistan, 38% support immediate withdrawal, and only 25% favor any increase of troops to be sent there; and
Whereas, since 2001, US taxpayers have spent $ 230 billion on the war in Afghanistan, and
Whereas, military spending creates many fewer jobs than the same amount spent on infrastructure and other domestic needs (Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, "The Wages of Peace," The Nation, March 31, 2008), and
Whereas, the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan has escalated each year and 830 U.S. service members have been killed in Afghanistan so far as of 9/15/2009, and
Whereas, the $65 billion to be spent in Afghanistan this year, and the hundreds of billions of dollars required in coming years for counterinsurgency there, are desperately needed for urgent domestic social purposes, including health care for all, housing relief in the foreclosure crisis, full veterans benefits, and the creation of millions of jobs, therefore be it
Resolved, that AFT 1021 call for the U.S. government to end the war and occupation of Afghanistan and end its attacks on neighboring Pakistan; close all military bases in the region; and begin to withdraw all troops, mercenaries, contractors, and weapons immediately, and further
Resolved, that AFT 1021 call for the redirection of the military budget for Afghanistan to reparations for infrastructure and social programs for the Afghani people; and to expenditures to support returning US troops, and to meet urgent human needs domestically, such as education, healthcare, housing, jobs, and other social programs and public services, and further
Resolved, that AFT 1021 will undertake an educational campaign on these issues among its membership and seek to involve the members in the political tasks necessary to implement this resolution in public policy, and further
Resolved, that AFT 1021 endorse local, regional and national mobilizations this month and into the spring that support the goals of this resolution, and finally
Resolved, that AFT 1021 will communicate this resolution to its elected Congressional representatives and affiliates (CFT/AFT, LA County Federation of Labor, US Labor Against the War) with a request that they act accordingly.
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Emergency Resolution on the Current Crisis in Honduras
Whereas, following the June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, the AFL-CIO National Convention passed a resolution in September demanding immediate reinstatement of President Manuel Zelaya, restoration of all labor and democratic rights, and an immediate halt to all U.S. aid to the coup government; and
Whereas, a U.S.-brokered deal [the Tegucigalpa/San Jose Accords] to reinstate President Zelaya by November 5th -- in preparation for the Nov. 29th elections -- has unraveled, and the coup regime refused to restore Zelaya to the Presidency. As a result, President Zelaya, denouncing the "bad faith" of the U.S. government, said the Tegucigalpa/San Jose Accords were "a dead letter," and
Whereas, President Zelaya is still taking refuge in the Brazilian Embassy and the Honduran people led by the National Resistance Front Against the Coup (including many teachers in the leadership) continue to mount massive daily demonstrations against the coup regime; which responds with mass tear-gassing and beating of protesters by U.S.-trained army and police in an attempt to suppress the popular will and prevent the exercise of democratic rights; and
Whereas, there is a total lack of political space for opposition candidates to campaign and for the expression of any dissident political opinion, and under the current coup regime, conditions for free, fair and open elections are non-existent; and
Whereas, the National Resistance Front has denounced the Nov. 29th elections as a scheme by "the de facto regime that is repressing the people and violating the civil and human rights of its citizens, with the goal of validating the dictatorship of the oligarchy," and that participating in such an electoral exercise "would give legitimacy to the coup regime or its successor." The Front also stressed that "our stance in opposition to the electoral farce will remain firm even if President Zelaya is reinstated between now and Nov. 29th, since 20 days or less is too short a time to dismantle an electoral fraud many months in the making," and there is no time for opposition candidates to mount a campaign;
Therefore be it resolved, that AFT 1021 stand in solidarity with the heroic people of Honduras as they resist the savage repression of a military dictatorship, and fight to win real democracy and sovereignty for their country; and
Be it further resolved, that AFT 1021 send official letters to Congressional representatives, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and President Obama demanding that the U.S. government take strong measures against the repressive coup government in Honduras -- and whatever government may succeed it as a result of the "electoral farce" scheduled for Nov. 29th. These measures should include: 1) Immediately break off all political and economic ties with the coup government and its successor; 2) Recall the U.S. ambassador; 3) Establish an economic embargo on all trade and aid to Honduras; 4) Freeze the U.S. bank accounts of the coup plotters and deny them visas for U.S. travel; 5) Shut down U.S. military bases in Honduras; and
Be it further resolved, that AFT 1021 demand that the U.S. government denounce and refuse to recognize the results of Nov. 29th elections or any electoral process organized under the repressive coup regime; and
Be it further resolved, that AFT 1021 will submit this resolution as an emergency resolution at the Delegate Assembly of the County Federation of Labor on Monday, November 16, 2009 and further encourage its other affiliates, such as CFT and AFT to adopt similar resolutions; and
Finally be it resolved, that AFT 1021 make common cause with other labor and community organizations, to develop a reliable support network for the National Resistance Front against the Coup, and for the labor unions, especially the teachers union, that are at the center of the Resistance movement in Honduras.
_______
Call for Statewide Day of Action to Support Public Education
Whereas, California public education from pre-kindergarten through college and adult ed, is facing its most dangerous crisis in years; with funding cuts, tuition increases, reduction of college seats available, furlough days for educators and support staff, and layoffs of employees and outright closures of entire departments; and
Whereas, new registrations for anti-union referenda have been introduced in order to further damage education workers and their unions, and
Whereas, the official national, state and, in many cases, local agendas for public education will result in increased class size, increased testing, teacher accountability measures which do not take into account many factors, and the creation of tiered categories of employment based on such measures, and
Whereas, following successful statewide events at CSU, UC and community college campuses in September, 2009, a conference is being held on October 24 in San Francisco to explore the possibilities of statewide actions to "Save public education! No budget cuts, fee hikes, or layoffs! For state-wide student, worker, and faculty solidarity!"; therefore, let it be
Resolved, that AFT 1021 join the call for a statewide day of action to be held March 4, 2009, to include the demands of 1) restoring full funding of all public education, 2) assuring all of our students their right to a safe and free public education, 3) maintaining the rights of education employees to guaranteed pay, benefits and safe working conditions, and 4) ensuring adequate funding for the health, housing, jobs and safety of all working people; and further
Resolved, that AFT 1021 will organize within United Teachers Los Angeles (including bringing this resolution or a similar one to the House and Board of Directors of UTLA) its own internal education campaign, and mobilize support for an action locally, building coalitions with other education and affiliated unions, teachers, students, and community organizations to further the goals of this resolution, and finally
Resolved, that AFT 1021 will carry this resolution to CFT and to the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor for their concurrence and support.
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Support the Call for Solidarity DAy III March and Rally in Washington, DC next spring
Resolved, that AFT 1021 call on the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to organize a Solidarity Day III march on Washington D.C. in the spring of 2010 to demand jobs, housing, health care, full funding for public education and social services, and peace.
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Community Input on military academies and opposition to charters
Whereas, the forces of educational privatization and charter companies are making strong attempts to convert existing public school campuses throughout the country, and
Whereas, the forces of educational privatization and charter companies are seeking to convert new publicly-funded school construction projects to charters and other types of schools, and
Whereas, community, parent, faculty, labor, and youth voices are not part of the dialogue that allows for these charterizations and privatizations, and
Whereas, existing collective bargaining agreeements are being circumvented and ignored in this process, and
Whereas, many of these schools may be initiated or converted by private companies into military-style academies,
Therefore, let it be resolved, that the CFT insist that any new military and military-style academies in public school districts thaqt utilize school district resources conduct community forums where community stakeholders can provide input and vote on the militarization of the local school,
Be it further resolved, that the CFT discourage charterization and privatization of public schools in any form if community, labor, and parent voices are not included in the formation of these charter or private schools, receiving public dollars, or using publicly financed construction projects,
Be it finally resolved, that the CFT publicize this stand to all CFT locals and affiliates, and forward to the AFT for ratification at the 2010 AFT Convention.
Andy Griggs
lauslaw2@gmail.com
310-704-3217
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5) Man Jailed for '91 Murder Is Cleared by Judge
By JOHN ELIGON
November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13freed.html?ref=nyregion
A Manhattan judge ruled on Thursday that a man who had spent 18 years in prison for murder was innocent of the crime, sending a cathartic jolt through a courtroom packed with his friends and family members.
The prisoner, Fernando Bermudez, was not immediately released, however, as his lawyers must still sort out with federal authorities the status of a sentence on a drug distribution charge that he pleaded guilty to after he was arrested in the murder case. The time he served in state prison does not count toward his federal sentence of 27 months, but Barry J. Pollack, one of Mr. Bermudez's lawyers, said he would appeal for his client's release.
Mr. Bermudez, 40, broke down as Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court overturned his conviction. He whispered "thank you" to his lawyers, the judge and his supporters, who sobbed and applauded. He turned toward the gallery and whispered, "I love you," then hugged his lawyers before being taken away in handcuffs.
"I hope for you a much better future," Justice Cataldo told Mr. Bermudez.
Prosecutors continue to maintain that Mr. Bermudez is in fact guilty of the murder, in which Raymond Blount, 16, was gunned down on the street after a fight inside a Greenwich Village club in 1991. Mark Dwyer, the chief assistant Manhattan district attorney, said his office was deciding whether to appeal.
In his ruling, Justice Cataldo did more than overturn the conviction, dismissing the charges altogether. Short of a reversal by an appellate court, prosecutors cannot retry Mr. Bermudez for the crime, Mr. Pollack said.
A year after Mr. Bermudez's 1992 conviction, five witnesses who had identified him as the killer at trial recanted, saying in sworn affidavits that, they were coerced or manipulated by the police and prosecutors to identify Mr. Bermudez as the killer. Several of those witnesses reiterated their recantations in September at a hearing before Justice Cataldo.
This was the 11th attempt to overturn his conviction by Mr. Bermudez, whose case had received a lengthy examination by The New York Times in 2007.
Lawyers and advocates for the wrongfully convicted said the significance of Thursday's ruling was twofold. They said it was one of the rare instances in New York in which a judge had ruled that a defendant was innocent without the presence of exonerating DNA evidence. They also said that by ruling that Mr. Bermudez was innocent, Justice Cataldo had bolstered the prisoner's chance of collecting compensation from the state.
"This case, like the overwhelming number of wrongful convictions, does not have the advantage of DNA," said Scott Christianson, the author of "Innocent: Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases." "So for this judge to assess all the evidence in the case and come to this decision is quite unusual."
In his 79-page decision, Justice Cataldo wrote that Mr. Bermudez's rights were violated because the police had allowed prosecution witnesses to view Mr. Bermudez's mug shot as a group and to discuss his resemblance to the killer. Justice Cataldo also found that the prosecution should have known before sentencing that one of its cooperating witnesses, Efraim Lopez - a teenager whom Mr. Blount had punched at the club - had given false testimony.
"I find no credible evidence connects Fernando Bermudez to the homicide of Mr. Blount," Justice Cataldo wrote. "All of the people's trial evidence has been discredited: the false testimony of Efraim Lopez and the recanted identifications of strangers. I find, by clear and convincing evidence, that Fernando Bermudez has demonstrated he is innocent of this crime."
But prosecutors have contended that witnesses may have been pressured into changing their testimony.
"We don't think the defense has shown anything wrong with the verdict," Mr. Dwyer said.
Outside the courthouse, Mr. Bermudez's supporters beamed and waved shirts that read "Fernando Bermudez Is Innocent" for television cameras.
When Justice Cataldo declared Mr. Bermudez to be innocent, emotion flooded the tense courtroom.
"I couldn't even breathe," Christine Bermudez, Mr. Bermudez's sister, said. "My heart just stopped."
But Mr. Bermudez's father, Frank, who lives in Washington Heights, was so nervous he could not stick around to watch. He left before the start of the proceeding and returned to find his daughter weeping in the courthouse lobby. She told him that his son had been exonerated. "I was crying, too," Frank Bermudez said.
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6) Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
November 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11dowd.html?emc=eta1
WASHINGTON
The Great Vampire Squid has gotten religion.
In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are "mad and bent out of shape" at blood-sucking banks.
"I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer," Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.
But the little people who are boiling simply don't understand. And Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," doesn't understand.
Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.
"We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital," he said. "Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It's a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose."
When Arlidge asked whether it's possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was "doing God's work."
Whether he knows it, he's referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism - except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks' vicious - not virtuous - cycle of greed and concupiscence.
Blankfein's trickle-down catechism isn't working. Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.
Goldmine Sachs, as it's known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.
As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses - up 60 percent from last year.
The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it's whatever happens, the bankers win.
Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.
But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who got stock options instead of bonuses last year, at market lows, got a windfall - so it had nothing to do with bank employees' performance.
"The company gave its general counsel, for example, 104,868 stock options and 14,117 shares in December, when the bank's stock was around $78," Louise Story wrote for The Times. "Now the bank's shares have more than doubled in value, making that stock and option award worth nearly $12 million."
As one former Goldman banker told Arlidge, the culture there is "completely money-obsessed. ... There's always room - need - for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you're falling behind. It's an addiction."
It's an addiction that Washington has done little to quell. President Obama has not been strong on the issue, and Timothy Geithner coddles the wanton bankers whenever they freak out that they might not be able to put in their new pools next summer.
The bankers try to dismiss calls for regulation as populist ravings, but the insane inequity of it cannot be dismissed.
No sooner had the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd announced his plan to overhaul financial regulation Tuesday than compensation experts declared it toothless.
The banks and their lobbyists wheedled concession after concession out of Washington and knocked down proposed inhibition after inhibition. Now the banks are laughing all the way to the bank.
"Saturday Night Live" was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine - the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got - while so many at-risk Americans wait.
"Can you not read how mad people are at you?" demanded Amy Poehler. "When most people saw the headline 'Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine' they were superhappy until they saw the word 'vaccine.' "
Seth Meyers chimed in: "Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don't even touch their own car-door handles."
And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
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7) Where Credit Isn't Due
By JOHN CARNEY
Op-Ed Contributor
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/opinion/13carney.html?hp
SENATOR CHRISTOPHER DODD of Connecticut is trying to help consumers. Unfortunately, his plan is likely to backfire.
Despite the recent promising signs on economic growth, unemployment is rising and consumer spending is contracting. The slight rise in home prices we saw over the summer is already sputtering. Credit card rates have been shooting up - even though the Federal Reserve has extended generous interest rates to banks.
Mr. Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has proposed legislation that would immediately freeze credit card rates. "At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, jacked-up rates can quickly create crushing debt," he said in a statement. He also wants to extend and expand the tax credit for first-time home buyers, which was due to expire on Dec. 1.
At first glance, both proposals look like pragmatic attempts to relieve the tough economic problems faced by ordinary Americans. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences of the proposals may wind up creating even worse problems.
Let's start with the credit card rate freeze. The rising rates charged by issuing banks that inspired Mr. Dodd's legislation are themselves the unintended consequence of an earlier attempt to assist the consumer. Back in May, Congress passed a law requiring banks to give customers a 45-day notification before raising rates. To give banks time to adjust to the new rules, Congress decided not to put that provision into effect until February.
So what happened next? Banks rushed to raise rates before the law takes effect. Many customers who may not have had their rates raised until 2010 - or perhaps not at all, if the economy continues to improve - found themselves paying higher rates even though they had not missed any payments. How could Mr. Dodd and his fellow lawmakers not realize that banks would pre-emptively raise rates?
Mr. Dodd's new proposal may also wind up dealing a serious blow to consumers - and the economy. If banks find themselves unable to raise rates, many will limit their risk by severely restricting consumer credit. Many people will find their credit cards canceled, and new customers will be turned away. This will come on top of an already tight consumer credit market: banks sent out 2.1 billion direct-mail credit card solicitations in the third quarter of 2006, according to the research firm Mintel; this year in the same quarter, they sent out 391 million. A further contraction in consumer credit could devastate our nascent recovery.
The tax credit for new home buyers, now worth up to $8,000 per sale, can be credited with giving a boost to the housing market. Investment in housing rose almost 24 percent last quarter. Mr. Dodd would extend the program into next year, perhaps raising the $8,000 cap or allowing it to apply to those not purchasing homes for the first time.
But this program, too, has had an unintended consequence: large-scale fraud. According to the Treasury's inspector general for tax administration, at least 19,000 people who claimed the credit didn't actually purchase a home. Here's how: because the credit is "fully refundable," it is available to even those who don't pay any taxes or have any income at all. Thus people are buying homes under the names of their children - including at least one 4-year-old - to qualify as first-time homebuyers.
The tax credit is also interacting with other government programs to enable some of the worst mortgage practices of the recent past, including the notorious "no money down" mortgage. The Federal Housing Administration requires a down payment of at least 3.5 percent on mortgages it guarantees. But because homebuyers can recoup up to $8,000 from the tax credit and apply it to the down payment, they can buy a home worth up to $228,000 without spending a dime.
We don't know for certain how many such buyers will default on their loans. But borrowers who invest very little in their homes default at much higher rates than other homeowners. And because these loans are backed by the Federal Housing Administration, taxpayers pay the cost of those defaults. This sequence of events is eerily familiar from the subprime era.
Mr. Dodd's new proposals are guided by good intentions. But he and other lawmakers need to look to the future and see where that particular road may lead.
John Carney is a managing editor at BusinessInsider.com.
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8) Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja
Iraqi former battle zone sees abnormal clusters of infant tumours and deformities
Martin Chulov in Falluja
guardian.co.uk
Friday 13 November 2009 19.24 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects
Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.
The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja's over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.
Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects - which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems - are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.
A group of Iraqi and British officials, including the former Iraqi minister for women's affairs, Dr Nawal Majeed a-Sammarai, and the British doctors David Halpin and Chris Burns-Cox, have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war - including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
"We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies," said Falluja general hospital's director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais. "Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically."
The rise in frequency is stark - from two admissions a fortnight a year ago to two a day now. "Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs," he said. "There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years [old] with brain tumours. This is now a focus area of multiple tumours."
After several years of speculation and anecdotal evidence, a picture of a highly disturbing phenomenon in one of Iraq's most battered areas has now taken shape. Previously all miscarried babies, including those with birth defects or infants who were not given ongoing care, were not listed as abnormal cases.
The Guardian asked a paediatrician, Samira Abdul Ghani, to keep precise records over a three-week period. Her records reveal that 37 babies with anomalies, many of them neural tube defects, were born during that period at Falluja general hospital alone.
Dr Bassam Allah, the head of the hospital's children's ward, this week urged international experts to take soil samples across Falluja and for scientists to mount an investigation into the causes of so many ailments, most of which he said had been "acquired" by mothers before or during pregnancy.
Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf - areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.
Falluja's frontline doctors are reluctant to draw a direct link with the fighting. They instead cite multiple factors that could be contributors.
"These include air pollution, radiation, chemicals, drug use during pregnancy, malnutrition, or the psychological status of the mother," said Dr Qais. "We simply don't have the answers yet."
The anomalies are evident all through Falluja's newly opened general hospital and in centres for disabled people across the city. On 2 November alone, there were four cases of neuro-tube defects in the neo-natal ward and several more were in the intensive care ward and an outpatient clinic.
Falluja was the scene of the only two setpiece battles that followed the US-led invasion. Twice in 2004, US marines and infantry units were engaged in heavy fighting with Sunni militia groups who had aligned with former Ba'athists and Iraqi army elements.
The first battle was fought to find those responsible for the deaths of four Blackwater private security contractors working for the US. The city was bombarded heavily by American artillery and fighter jets. Controversial weaponry was used, including white phosphorus, which the US government admitted deploying.
Statistics on infant tumours are not considered as reliable as new data about nervous system anomalies, which are usually evident immediately after birth. Dr Abdul Wahid Salah, a neurosurgeon, said: "With neuro-tube defects, their heads are often larger than normal, they can have deficiencies in hearts and eyes and their lower limbs are often listless. There has been no orderly registration here in the period after the war and we have suffered from that. But [in relation to the rise in tumours] I can say with certainty that we have noticed a sharp rise in malignancy of the blood and this is not a congenital anomaly - it is an acquired disease."
Despite fully funding the construction of the new hospital, a well-equipped facility that opened in August, Iraq's health ministry remains largely disfunctional and unable to co-ordinate a response to the city's pressing needs.
The government's lack of capacity has led Falluja officials, who have historically been wary of foreign intervention, to ask for help from the international community. "Even in the scientific field, there has been a reluctance to reach out to the exterior countries," said Dr Salah. "But we have passed that point now. I am doing multiple surgeries every day. I have one assistant and I am obliged to do everything myself."
Additional reporting: Enas Ibrahim.
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9) A Recovery for Some
By BOB HERBERT
"There are 25 unemployed construction workers for every job opening in their field, and more than a dozen for every opening in the durable goods industries, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston."
Op-Ed Columnist
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/opinion/14herbert.html?hp
President Obama's strongest supporters during the presidential campaign were the young, the black and the poor - and they are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.
If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind - as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.
The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.
Now we're learning that unmarried women are among those being crushed by the epidemic of joblessness. As the Center for American Progress has noted, "The high unemployment rate of unmarried women, and particularly the 1.3 million unemployed female heads of household who are primary breadwinners for their families, is devastating to their financial circumstances and standard of living."
Mr. Obama announced this week that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month to explore ways of putting Americans back to work. It remains to be seen whether the summit will yield anything substantial. But it's fair to wonder why the president and his party have not been focused like fanatics on job creation from the first day he took office.
It was the financial elites who took the economy down, and it was ordinary working people, the longtime natural constituents of the Democratic Party, who were buried in the rubble. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have been unconscionably slow in riding to the rescue of those millions of Americans struggling with the curse of joblessness.
We've been hearing that there are six unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S., but even that terrible figure is deceptive. There are 25 unemployed construction workers for every job opening in their field, and more than a dozen for every opening in the durable goods industries, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
This was not a normal recession, and we are not on the cusp of anything like a normal recovery. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.7 percent. The underemployment rate for blacks in September (the latest month for which figures are available) was a gut-wrenching 23.8 percent and for Hispanics an even worse 25.1 percent. The poverty rate for black children is almost 35 percent.
Wall Street can boast about recovery all it wants, much of America remains trapped in economic hell.
It will take a monumental leadership effort by the administration and Congress to spark the kind of changes necessary to transform this wretched employment landscape. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute has written: "By itself, the private sector is unable to create jobs in the numbers the United States needs to obtain a robust, full economic recovery."
If that's true, and I have long believed it to be the case, then we need to rethink our entire approach to employment. Conventional efforts to kick-start economic growth are dwarfed by the vast scale of the problem. Bold new efforts - creative efforts - are needed.
A recent survey for the policy institute found that one in four families had been hit by a job loss during the past year and 44 percent had suffered either the loss of a job or a reduction in wages or hours worked. Economic insecurity has spread like a debilitating virus through scores of millions of American families.
What kind of recovery are we talking about if blue-collar workers, and men and women without college degrees, and large percentages of ethnic minorities and the young and the poor are not part of it? And how can any recovery be sustained if economic insecurity is a permanent feature of even middle-class life?
The financial elites have flourished in recent decades to a great extent because they have had government on their side, with the politicians working diligently to ensure that rules, regulations and tax policies established an environment in which the elites could thrive. For ordinary Americans, it has been a different story, with jobs shipped overseas by the millions and wages remaining stagnant, with labor unions under constant assault and labor standards weakened, with the safety net shredded and the message sent out to workers everywhere: You're on your own.
We'll get a chance to see at President Obama's employment summit whether anything much has changed.
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10) Turtles Are Casualties of Warming [and tourist beaches...bw] in Costa Rica
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/science/earth/14turtles.html?ref=world
PLAYA GRANDE, Costa Rica - This resort town was long known for Leatherback Sea Turtle National Park, nightly turtle beach tours and even a sea turtle museum. So Kaja Michelson, a Swedish tourist, arrived with high expectations. "Of course we're hoping to see turtles - that is part of the appeal," she said.
But haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population.
On a beach where dozens of turtles used to nest on a given night, scientists spied only 32 leatherbacks all of last year. With leatherbacks threatened with extinction, Playa Grande's expansive turtle museum was abandoned three years ago and now sits amid a sea of weeds. And the beachside ticket booth for turtle tours was washed away by a high tide in September.
"We do not promote this as a turtle tourism destination anymore because we realize there are far too few turtles to please," said Álvaro Fonseca, a park ranger.
Even before scientists found temperatures creeping upward over the past decade, sea turtles were threatened by beach development, drift net fishing and Costa Ricans' penchant for eating turtle eggs, considered a delicacy here. But climate change may deal the fatal blow to an animal that has dwelled in the Pacific for 150 million years.
Sea turtles are sensitive to numerous effects of warming. They feed on reefs, which are dying in hotter, more acidic seas. They lay eggs on beaches that are being inundated by rising seas and more violent storm surges.
More uniquely, their gender is determined not by genes but by the egg's temperature during development. Small rises in beach temperatures can result in all-female populations, obviously problematic for survival.
"The turtles are very good storytellers about the effect of climate change on coastal habitats," said Carlos Drews, the regional marine species coordinator for the conservation group W.W.F. "The climate is changing so much faster than before, and these animals depend on so much for temperature."
If the sand around the eggs hits 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), the gender balance shifts to females, Mr. Drews said, and at about 32 degrees (89.6 Fahrenheit) they are all female. Above 34 (93), "you get boiled eggs," he said.
On some nesting beaches, scientists are artificially cooling nests with shade or irrigation and trying to protect broader areas of coastal property from development to ensure that turtles have a place to nest as the seas rise.
In places like Playa Junquillal, an hour south of here, local youths are paid $2 a night to scoop up newly laid eggs and move them to a hatchery where they are shaded and irrigated to maintain a nest temperature of 29.7 degrees Celsius (85.4), which will yield both genders.
On a recent night, Dennis Gómez Jiménez, a 22-year-old in a red baseball cap and jeans, deftly excavated the nest of a three-foot-wide Olive Ridley, one of the smaller sea turtle species. The turtle had just finished the hourlong task of burying 100-plus eggs and then lumbered back into the water.
One by one, Mr. Jiménez placed what looked like table tennis balls into a plastic bag and transferred them to an ersatz nest he had dug in a shaded, fenced-off portion of sand that serves as a hatchery. Sandbags are positioned to protect against tides that could rip nests apart.
When the turtles hatch, in 40 to 60 days depending on the species, they are carried in wicker baskets to the ocean's edge and make a beeline for the water. Gabriel Francia, a biologist who oversees the youths, known locally as the "baula" or leatherback boys, likens their work to delivering an endangered infant by Caesarean section.
"In some ways we're playing God - this is a big experiment," he said. The long-term hope, he said, is to build a robust turtle population that will slowly adapt by shifting to cooler, more northern beaches or laying eggs at cooler times of the year.
Worldwide, there are seven sea turtle species, and all are considered threatened. (Turtle populations in the Atlantic have increased over the last 20 years because of measures like bans on trapping turtles and selling their parts.)
The leatherback is considered critically endangered on a global level. Populations are especially depleted in the Pacific, where only 2,000 to 3,000 are estimated to survive today, down from around 90,000 two decades ago. Cooler sands alone will not save them, given the scope of the threats they face. At Playa Junquillal, markers placed a decade ago to mark a point 55 yards above the high tide line are now frequently underwater.
"It's happened really fast - we have no rain, but water pouring in from the ocean," said Adriana Miranda, 30, the manager of a local hangout that serves beer and rice and beans.
Beachside tables have been removed because rising tides have destroyed the restaurant's concrete terrace and uprooted shading trees there. In different circumstances, the beaches could gradually extend backward as the sea level rose. But along much of Costa Rica's Pacific coast, the back of the beach is now filled with hotels, restaurants and planted trees, giving the sand no place to go. "The squeezing of the beaches where turtles nest is going to be a big problem," said Carl Safina, head of the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group.
In Playa Grande, the turtle issue has pitted environmentalists against developers and the national government. To ensure a future for the leatherbacks and the national park, biologists wanted a large section of land extending about 140 yards back from the current high-tide line protected from development. Beachfront property owners, many of them foreigners with vacation homes, demanded hefty compensation.
Arguing that the government cannot afford the payouts, President Óscar Arias has instead proposed protecting the first 55 yards, and allowing about 80 yards of somewhat regulated mixed-use development to the rear. But Costa Rica's leading scientists have protested that the new boundaries will lead to "certain extinction."
Turtles will not nest if there are lights behind the beach, Mr. Drews said, and those first 55 yards will be underwater by midcentury.
"Turtles will have to find their way between the tennis courts and swimming pools," he said dryly.
In a country where turtle eggs are traditionally slurped in bars from a shot glass, uncooked and mixed with salsa and lemon, biologists are also promoting cultural change.
"Of course 25 years ago, you went out with your friends or family and dug up the eggs," said Héctor García, 42, shopping at the Junquillal market. "It was a tradition. They are delicious, cooked or raw."
Today egg collecting is illegal in Costa Rica, but poaching is still common in many towns. It is frowned on at Playa Junquillal, where the five baula boys, with their piercings and baseball caps, patrol for poachers and are idolized by many younger children. Dr. Francia, the biologist, has also invited local families to watch the babies being released. "There were a lot of people who had eaten eggs but never seen a turtle," he said.
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11) Kansas: F.B.I. Was Warned Before Doctor's Killing
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Plains
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/14brfs-FBIWASWARNED_BRF.html?ref=us
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says that more than a month before the abortion provider Dr. George R. Tiller was shot and killed, it received an anonymous letter warning about the man now charged in the case. Bridget Patton, an F.B.I. spokeswoman, said the letter warned that the suspect, Scott Roeder, would physically harm Dr. Tiller or any other abortion provider. The letter turned out to have been written by a man who is in the midst of a custody battle with Mr. Roeder. Ms. Patton says the agency found no specific, credible threat in the letter.
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12) Job Losses Mount, Enduring and Deep
By FLOYD NORRIS
Off the Charts
November 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/business/economy/14charts.html?ref=business
THE rise in unemployment that has occurred in the current recession has been hardest on young workers, while having a smaller effect on older workers than previous downturns. Women have been more likely than men to hold on to their jobs.
The overall unemployment rate, which reached 10.2 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis last month, remains below the post-World War II peak of 10.8 percent, reached in late 1982. But the proportion of workers who have been out of work for a long time is higher now than it has ever been since the Great Depression.
The persistence of joblessness for so many people - 5.6 million Americans have now been out of work for more than half a year even though they have continued to seek employment - may provide the greatest challenge for the Obama administration if it decides to seek a new economic stimulus program.
The short-term unemployment rate - the proportion of the work force that has been jobless for less than 15 weeks - has begun to decline, however, and stood at 4.5 percent in October after peaking at 4.9 percent in May.
That decline is a signal that the recession, which officially began in December 2007, probably has ended. In past recessions since World War II, the National Bureau of Economic Research has always dated the end within two months of the peak in short-term joblessness.
Over the last three years - since October 2006 - the overall unemployment rate has risen by 5.8 percentage points. That is the largest such increase since the Great Depression, providing another indication of the rapidity and severity of the current downturn.
Before this cycle, the sharpest 36-month increase since World War II was a 4.9 percentage point rise in the period that ended November 1982.
The accompanying charts show the short- and long-term unemployment rates during the three cycles since World War II when the unemployment rate rose above 8 percent, and reflect how different groups of workers fared in each.
Each of the charts begins in the month when the broadest measure of employment - the proportion of people over age 16 with jobs - hit a cyclical peak. The first two end when that measure reached a cyclical low, several months after the recession was later deemed to have ended. The final chart runs through October, the latest month available.
With each chart are calculations on the proportion of jobs that were added or lost from the peak through the bottom for differing groups of workers.
This cycle has been the worst over all, with the government's household survey in October finding 7.7 million fewer jobs than in December 2006, when the employment-to-population ratio reached its high for the current cycle. The declines during the two earlier cycles, from November 1973 to June 1975 and from December 1979 to March 1983, were 0.8 percent and 2.0 percent, respectively.
Women have held on to jobs better than men have during this downturn, reflecting a pattern that prevailed during the previous cycles.
One major difference is how older workers have fared. The number of jobs held by men over 55 is up 5.6 percent since the cycle began, and the number of jobs held by women of that age has risen by 9.3 percent.
There are fewer jobs for workers age 54 to 64 than when the cycle began, but that group has done much better than younger workers.
By contrast, younger workers were more likely to hold on to their jobs in the two previous downturns.
It is not clear why that pattern has changed. It is against federal law to discriminate against older workers, but that law was passed in 1967, before either of the previous downturns. It could be that the plunge in real estate and stock prices in 2008 led fewer older workers to decide to retire.
The proportion of the work force out of work for more than 15 weeks reached 5.7 percent in October, well above the 4.2 percent figure reached in 1982. That had been the highest such figure since the government began calculating the number in 1948.
The proportion that has been out of work for at least 27 weeks - half a year - is now 3.6 percent, also a record.
Floyd Norris comments on finance and economics in his blog at norris.blogs.nytimes.com.
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13) Home Builders (You Heard That Right) Get a Gift
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/economy/15gret.html
ON Nov. 6, President Obama signed the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009 into law, extending unemployment benefits by 20 weeks and renewing the first-time homebuyer tax credit until next April.
But tucked inside the law was another prize: a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. The tax cuts will generate corporate refunds or relief worth about $33 billion, according to an administration estimate.
Before the bill became law, the so-called look-back on losses was limited to small businesses and could be used to counterbalance just two years of profits. Now the profit offset goes back five years, and the law allows big companies to take advantage of it, too. The only companies that can't participate are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and any institution that took money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Among the biggest beneficiaries are homebuilders, analysts say. Once again, at the front of the government assistance line, stand some of the very companies that contributed mightily to the credit crisis by building and financing too many homes.
This is getting to be a habit: companies that participated on the upside and are now reaping rewards from the taxpayers on the downside. The banks that underwrote so many dubious loans, for example, received government aid to get them lending again. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the result.
One can make an argument that throwing money at the banking system is necessary if we are to jump-start the economy. And banks need a bigger capital cushion to protect against future losses.
But dropping helicopter money on the homebuilders - the folks who massively overbuilt in community after community - seems decidedly less urgent (unless you are one of these companies, of course). Given that the supply of housing far outstrips demand, it is unlikely that these companies will use these tax breaks to hire workers (unless they go into a completely new line of business).
"I AM surprised that home builders are getting hundreds of millions of dollars given that many have very strong balance sheets," said Ivy Zelman, chief executive at Zelman & Associates, a research firm. "We question the public policy decision to gift home builders with capital that many will not use to create jobs, since they admit that job growth will be dependent not on capital, but on improving demand."
When Mr. Obama signed the law, his administration said the tax break would help "struggling businesses." But as Ms. Zelman pointed out, many large homebuilders are sitting atop mountains of cash. Pulte Homes, which will receive refunds exceeding $450 million under the new law, has $1.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet, according to its most recent financial statement.
Hovnanian Enterprises is another big beneficiary of the tax break. It anticipates a refund of $250 million to $275 million next year. It had $550 million in cash in its most recent quarter.
Smaller recipients include Standard Pacific, which is poised to reap cash refunds of $80 million under the new tax break. According to its most recent financial filing, Standard Pacific held $523 million in cash and cash equivalents.
Finally, Beazer Homes told investors that it expects to receive a refund of $50 million. The company reported cash and equivalents of $557 million at the end of September.
Some of the home builders poised to receive tax refunds have even more cash today than they did last year. D. R. Horton, for example, has $1.966 billion in cash, up 45 percent from September 2008 levels. And some are healthy enough to have retired significant amounts of debt from their balance sheets this year. Pulte has bought back $1.93 billion in debt in 2009.
So what do these companies plan to do with their refunds?
Ken Campbell, the chief executive of Standard Pacific, said the money would allow his company to continue buying land. "Will we build more houses or will there be more people employed in the first quarter? Probably not," he said. "Will employment accelerate when the market starts to grow? It will."
Caryn Klebba, a spokeswoman for Pulte Homes, said in a statement that the company planned to use the funds it receives "to support its current operations and, when market conditions improve, fund future growth and expansion."
In other words, job creation does not seem imminent, notwithstanding the claims of the administration or those in Congress who supported the giveaway.
Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, has conducted a lonely fight against the tax break all year.
"Some have said this is like a bridge loan to these companies," Mr. Doggett said in an interview. "Well if it's a loan, it is like a no-doc loan, because the recipients provide no indication that they will create jobs or do anything other than keep the money. I just feel it is a total windfall."
Unfortunately, this seems to be another example of an age-old phenomenon: Good Things Come to Those With Lobbying Power.
Securing this tax break was a top priority for homebuilders, lobbying records show. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that through Oct. 26 of this year, homebuilders paid $6 million to their lobbyists. Last year, the industry spent $8.2 million lobbying.
Much of this year's lobbying expenditures were focused on arguing for the tax loss carry-forward, documents show.
Among individual companies, Lennar spent $240,000 lobbying while companies affiliated with Hovnanian Enterprises spent $222,000. Pulte Homes spent $210,000 this year.
That's some return on investment. After spending its $210,000, Pulte will receive $450 million in refunds. And Hovnanian, after spending its $222,000, will get as much as $275 million.
Meanwhile, the bag that we taxpayers are left holding gets bigger and bigger.
THE problem here is that this public policy decision was made with little to no input from the public. Sure, tax rebates like these give a lifeline to companies that were about to sink beneath the waves, but would it be so terrible if some builders that lost their heads during the housing mania ceased to exist? It is not as if a housing shortage will result or that more jobs will be lost if these companies don't receive these tax breaks.
Pretending to promote job creation, the government is dispensing cash to companies that either do not need it or need it precisely because they didn't run their businesses prudently. Isn't there something wrong
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14) Gates Bars Torture Photos' Release
By Nick Baumann
Fri November 13, 2009 9:17 PM PST
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/11/gates-bars-torture-photos-release
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has used powers granted to him by a controversial new law to block the court-ordered release of numerous photos of detainee abuse, government lawyers revealed in a court filing [PDF] Friday evening.
Gates' new authority comes from a law, signed by President Barack Obama last month, that gives the Secretary of Defense the power to rule that photos of detainees are exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. Gates' action on Friday was the first use of the new FOIA exemption since it passed Congress last month. The photos in question are the subject of a years-long legal fight by the American Civil Liberties Union, which first filed a FOIA request for records pertaining to detainee treatment, rendition, and death in May of 2005. The case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
The administration first sought to change FOIA in June, shortly after deciding to contest a ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered the photos' release. The resulting bill, championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), was specifically designed to nullify the effect of the appeals court's ruling. Since the court had ruled that the photos couldn't be withheld under an existing FOIA exemption, the Obama administration simply asked Congress to carve out a new exemption. Despite objections from liberal members of the House, Congress obliged.
The new exemption's requirements are stunningly lax. In order to withhold the photos, Gates simply had to certify, as he did in the court filing, that "public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States." In other words, their release had to endanger someone, somewhere. And in the unlikely event that Gates had to stretch the truth to make that certification, it wouldn't matter, since there's no provision in the law that allows any court to review Gates' determination or rule on whether it was truthful.
This isn't just a few photos. Gates' block could apply to a far larger group of images than the 44 that are at issue in the ACLU's lawsuit. "The photographs include but are not limited to the 44 photographs" in the suit, Gates wrote in his certification. The extension of the ban beyond the 44 photos is the result of a flip-flop by the Obama administration. The Obama administration had originally planned to comply with the appeals court's order to release the photos. In April, Justice Department lawyers informed the ACLU in a letter [PDF] that the government planned to release the 44 photos and a "substantial number" of other images-over 2,000, according to some reports. But three weeks later, the administration changed course and decided to contest the appeals court's decision and pursue a legislative workaround. Now it appears that Gates has blocked the release of a large number-perhaps all-of the extant photos depicting abuse during the period from September 11th until the end of the Bush administration.
The administration undoubtedly has its reasons for withholding the photos. It's certainly possible that the release of more photos could help terrorist recruitment or further enrage anti-American sentiment abroad. But make no mistake. The new FOIA exemption that the Obama White House sought and obtained has one obvious result: shielding evidence of government lawbreaking, abuse, and torture under the Bush administration from public scrutiny. So much for Obama's claim that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency." There's a name for what the Obama administration did on Friday. It's called a coverup.
Nick Baumann covers national politics for Mother Jones' DC Bureau. For more of his stories, click here. He can also be found on twitter.
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15) How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties
"Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed 'every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence' for 'lightning quick' strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him 'orgasms.'"
By Alfred W. McCoy
Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
November 15, 2009
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-w-mccoy/how-americas-wars-are-sys_b_355798.html
In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.
Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you care to read on.
Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army's first protracted pacification campaign in a foreign land -- the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 -- were repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half century.
Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns, large and small -- in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines -- transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad hoc "counterterrorism" laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.
As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America's longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and the atmosphere they created domestically -- had on the quality of our democracy?
Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."
Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.
In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.
The Crucible of Counterinsurgency
For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury," a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.
The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.
Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of three things," explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"
A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.
Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets in the head -- and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American intelligence agencies launched a Special Action Program using "the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias."
Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence" for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him "orgasms." President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill or capture Al Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations forces.
Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted an early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").
In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops." By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets -- some so focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.
In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half of the Agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America's "weakest link."
Homeland Security
While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and -- with White House help -- several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.
"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it," said President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, however, forcing Justice to quietly bury the president's program.
Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to the NSA.
Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bush gave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through the nation's telephone companies and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.
After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely termed the systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA data base called "Pinwale," analysts routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.
Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... counterterrorism." Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers' licenses, and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to over a billion documents.
And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence issued a report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George W. Bush's claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific instances" of this, concluding such surveillance had "generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."
Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. She introduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing "star chamber," to "combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States." The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.
Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman's life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to information leaked to the Congressional Quarterly, in early 2005, an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said, "This conversation doesn't exist."
How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.
Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.
In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military cybercommand staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks -- with scant respect for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyberdomain." Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not -- I repeat -- will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the Pentagon's top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.
Sending the Future Home
While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.
Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with "civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals -- including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.
That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing: "[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."
At the outset of the global war on terror in 2001, memories of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.
In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.
In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life.
If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric data base akin to England's current National Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.
By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable -- or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security measures here at home.
Copyright 2009 Alfred W. McCoy
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16) Reform and Medical Costs
NYT Editorial
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/opinion/15sun1.html
Americans are deeply concerned about the relentless rise in health care costs and health insurance premiums. They need to know if reform will help solve the problem. The answer is that no one has an easy fix for rising medical costs. The fundamental fix - reshaping how care is delivered and how doctors are paid in a wasteful, dysfunctional system - is likely to be achieved only through trial and error and incremental gains.
The good news is that the bill just approved by the House and a bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee would implement or test many reforms that should help slow the rise in medical costs over the long term. As a report in The New England Journal of Medicine concluded, "Pretty much every proposed innovation found in the health policy literature these days is encapsulated in these measures."
Medical spending, which typically rises faster than wages and the overall economy, is propelled by two things: the high prices charged for medical services in this country and the volume of unnecessary care delivered by doctors and hospitals, which often perform a lot more tests and treatments than a patient really needs.
Here are some of the important proposals in the House and Senate bills to try to address those problems, and why it is hard to know how well they will work:
FORCED PRODUCTIVITY GAINS Both bills would reduce the rate of growth in annual Medicare payments to hospitals, nursing homes and other providers by amounts comparable to the productivity savings routinely made in other industries with the help of new technologies and new ways to organize work. This proposal could save Medicare more than $100 billion over the next decade. If private plans demanded similar productivity savings from providers, and refused to let providers shift additional costs to them, the savings could be much larger.
Critics say Congress will give in to lobbyists and let inefficient providers off the hook. That is far less likely to happen if Congress also adopts strong "pay-go" rules requiring that any increase in payments to providers be offset by new taxes or budget cuts.
CADILLAC COVERAGE The Senate Finance bill would impose an excise tax on health insurance plans that cost more than $8,000 for an individual or $21,000 for a family. It would most likely cause insurers to redesign plans to fall beneath the threshold. Enrollees would have to pay more money for many services out of their own pockets, and that would encourage them to think twice about whether an expensive or redundant test was worth it. Economists project that most employers would shift money from expensive health benefits into wages. The House bill has no similar tax. The final legislation should.
SIMPLIFIED FORMS Any doctor who has wrestled with multiple forms from different insurers, or patients who have tried to understand their own parade of statements, know that simplification ought to save money. When the health insurance industry was still cooperating in reform efforts, its trade group offered to provide standardized forms for automated processing. It estimated that step would save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. The bills would lock that pledge into law.
ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS The stimulus package provided money to convert the inefficient, paper-driven medical system to electronic records that can be easily viewed and transmitted. This requires upfront investments to help doctors convert. In time it should help restrain costs by eliminating redundant tests, preventing drug interactions, and helping doctors find the best treatments.
REFORM OF THE DELIVERY SYSTEM Virtually all experts agree that the fee-for-service system - doctors are rewarded for the quantity of care rather than its quality or effectiveness - is a primary reason that the cost of care is so high. Most agree that the solution is to push doctors to accept fixed payments to care for a particular illness or for a patient's needs over a year. No one knows how to make that happen quickly.
The bills in both houses would start pilot projects within Medicare. They include such measures as accountable care organizations to take charge of a patient's needs with an eye on both cost and quality, and chronic disease management to make sure the seriously ill, who are responsible for the bulk of all health care costs, are treated properly. For the most part, these experiments rely on incentive payments to get doctors to try them.
INDEPENDENT COMMISSION Testing innovations do no good unless the good experiments are identified and expanded and the bad ones are dropped. The Senate bill would create an independent commission to monitor the pilot programs and recommend changes in Medicare's payment policies to prod providers to adopt reforms that work. The changes would have to be approved or rejected as a whole by Congress, making it hard for narrow- interest lobbies to bend lawmakers to their will.
MANAGED COMPETITION The bills in both chambers would create health insurance exchanges on which small businesses and individuals could choose from an array of private plans and possibly a public option. All the plans would have to provide standard benefit packages that would be easy to compare. To get access to millions of new customers, insurers would have a strong incentive to sell on the exchange. And the head-to-head competition might give them a strong incentive to lower their prices, perhaps by accepting slimmer profit margins or demanding better deals from providers.
A PUBLIC PLAN The final legislation might throw a public plan into the competition, but thanks to the fierce opposition of the insurance industry and Republican critics, it might not save much money. The one in the House bill would have to negotiate rates with providers, rather than using Medicare rates, as many reformers wanted.
COMPARING TREATMENTS The president's stimulus package is pumping money into research to compare how well various treatments work. Is surgery, radiation or careful monitoring best for prostate cancer? Is the latest and most expensive cholesterol-lowering drug any better than its generic competitors? The pending bills would spend additional money to accelerate this effort.
[So the government in cooperation with the insurance companies are going to decide which treatments are worth it and which are not. Who's letting government interfere with healthcare treatment?]
Critics have charged that this sensible idea would lead to rationing of care. (That would be true only if you believed that patients should have an unbridled right to treatments proven to be inferior.) As a result, the bills do not require, as they should, that the results of these studies be used to set payment rates in Medicare.
Congress needs to find the courage to allow Medicare to pay preferentially for treatments proven to be superior. Sometimes the best treatment might be the most expensive. But over all, we suspect that spending would come down through elimination of a lot of unnecessary or even dangerous tests and treatments.
NEGOTIATING DRUG PRICES The House bill would authorize the secretary of health and human services to negotiate drug prices in Medicare and Medicaid. Some authoritative analysts doubt that the secretary would get better deals than private insurers already get. We believe negotiation could work. It does in other countries.
MALPRACTICE REFORM Missing from these bills is any serious attempt to rein in malpractice costs. (Trial lawyers, major supporters of the Democratic Party, have seen to that.) Malpractice awards do drive up insurance premiums for doctors in high-risk specialties, and there is some evidence that doctors engage in "defensive medicine" by performing tests and treatments primarily to prove they are not negligent should they get sued.
Patients who are injured because of a doctor's or a hospital's negligence must have recourse. We favor reforms that would try to compensate injured people fairly and promptly - perhaps through mediation or expert tribunals - but would not prevent them from filing suit as a last resort or cap the awards they could receive. Even then, the savings might be modest. Doctors mostly perform high-cost tests because they want to help their patients and get paid handsomely for doing so.
Republican critics say, correctly, that the health care bills would saddle the government with large new costs to cover the uninsured by expanding Medicaid and providing subsidies to help low- and middle-income people buy insurance. And they say, incorrectly, that the effort should not move ahead until a sure-fire way is found to rein in rising health care costs.
Their arguments overlook the fact that the government is already paying many of these costs, through special payments to hospitals, each time a person without insurance, and with no means to pay, goes to an expensive emergency room for treatment. It also overlooks the fact that both bills are designed to keep deficits from increasing over the next decade or two.
It would be unfair, and unnecessary, to leave tens of millions of people uninsured while we wait to figure out ways to hold down the rise in health care costs.
This editorial is a part of a continuing series by The Times that is providing a comprehensive examination of the policy challenges and politics behind the debate over health care reform.
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17) Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world/africa/15kenya.html?ref=world
MARASHONI, Kenya - With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya's honey hunters may soon be homeless.
Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya's traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as "dorobo," a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.
Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa's last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek's ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?
"Tell Obama and his men to help us," pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. "It's not that we're special, but this forest is our home."
No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is - or more accurately, used to be - a thick, staggeringly beautiful forest in western Kenya, capturing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feeding more than a dozen lakes and rivers across the region, even contributing to the flow of the Nile.
But in the past 15 years, because of ill-planned settlement schemes (the government essentially handed out chunks of forest to cronies), 25 percent of the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. The Ogiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswahili word "haribika," which means spoiled. Scientists say the environmental destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried up lakes.
The results were painfully obvious this summer when East Africa was hit by one of the worst droughts in years. In Nairobi, Kenya's capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hydropower, the water shortage meant blackouts, which many Kenyans believe contributed to the recent spike in crime and unemployment.
Suddenly, the Kenyan government seemed to spring into action, commissioning hefty environmental reports and insisting on ejecting all settlers from the Mau Forest so that the government could plant millions of trees and get the country's water sources churning again. But the sudden environmental altruism has bred suspicion as well. Many Ogiek wonder if Kenyan politicians, notorious as among the world's most corrupt, are driven by another kind of green.
"The government wants that forest for economic reasons, not conservation reasons," said Towett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. "The only people who are going to benefit are the saw-millers."
Almost as if to prove his point, beyond the bird chirps and cow bells tinkling across the smooth green hills was a different noise, a deeper, steadier noise, like a growl: bulldozers, many of them. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that timber companies are continuing to chew up large tracts of the Mau, knocking down giant trees and turning them into doors and plywood for export.
"I don't want to talk about that," said Julius Kavita, this area's district commissioner, when asked what was going on.
Mr. Kavita said it was "complicated" and left it at that. But Kenyan environmental groups contend that powerful politicians control the timber companies, just as they control the dairies, the tea farms and other engines of Kenya's economy.
To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into "native reserves" where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek's eyes, for little else.
The persecution continued after Kenya's independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away.
Mr. Kavita said the Ogiek, compared with the outside settlers who have chopped down trees to make cornfields, were "so kind to the forest." But he was noncommittal on whether the Ogiek would get a special exemption from the planned evictions.
Nowadays, many of the same people who used to derisively refer to Ogiek as dorobo are claiming to be Ogiek themselves, "Ogiek originals," in the hope they might get a break, too.
This could be a problem because the Ogiek are not great record keepers. Recent reports indicate that 8 of 10 Ogiek cannot read. Their total population is estimated at 5,000 to 20,000, many of them balancing their traditions with the trappings of modern life. It is not uncommon to see an Ogiek man with a quiver of eagle feather arrows in one fist and a cellphone in the other.
"I have one question," said an Ogiek boy in a village near Marashoni. "Will the government evict us or not?"
Another young man tramped off into the woods to check a honey trap at the top of a tall tree. He was carrying a smoking coconut - "to make the bees sleep," he explained - and wearing an antelope skin pouch and a pair of muddy sneakers. The last thing he did before shimmying up the bark and disappearing into the leaves was to kick off his shoes, a symbol of the world he was leaving behind, however fleetingly.
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18) Maine Town Is Riven by Housing Dispute
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Milbridge Journal
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/15milbridge.html?ref=us
MILBRIDGE, Me. - Down a rural road where wood smoke spirals from chimneys in the settling twilight, a five-acre lot thick with spruce trees is the unlikely site of a dream deferred.
This is the intended spot for a small apartment complex for farmworkers, a few hundred of whom are Hispanics living year-round in this remote corner of Down East Maine. They harvest blueberries, process seafood and assemble holiday wreaths, and most live in trailers near the fields and factories where they work.
A local nonprofit group won a $1 million federal grant last year to build the six-unit complex, a first step toward expanding housing options for the immigrant laborers, most of whom come from Mexico and Honduras.
But then ugly words were uttered, a petition was circulated, and voters in this town of 1,300 approved a moratorium on multifamily housing in June, blocking the project.
Now the group, Mano en Mano - Spanish for Hand in Hand - has filed a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination under the Fair Housing Act and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. And Milbridge, which once won acclaim for its efforts to welcome and integrate immigrants, is smarting from accusations of racism.
"We have always been very open and receptive and accommodating," said Lewis Pinkham, the town manager, police chief and code enforcement officer. "In my personal opinion, this got blown out of proportion."
According to the lawsuit and local newspaper accounts, some residents opposed the project on grounds that farmworkers' children overburdened the schools; others predicted it would be a drug haven. The petition, signed by 48 residents, said jobs should be saved for local lobstermen, whose industry is suffering, and not "given out to minorities that may move into these units."
Hispanics are a rare sight in Maine; more than 96 percent of the population is white, tying it with Vermont as the least diverse state. And while most immigrant groups here have clustered in cities - Somalis in Lewiston, for example, and Sudanese in Portland - Hispanics tend to scatter through smaller communities, making their ranks feel even thinner.
Not so in Milbridge, though, where Anais Tomezsko, director of Mano en Mano, said Hispanics made up perhaps 10 percent of the population or more. Washington County, which produces most of the nation's wild blueberries, draws thousands of them every summer to help with the harvest. And when a sea cucumber processing plant opened here in 1995, offering year-round jobs, some began to stay.
"It felt very isolated," said Edith Flores, 30, who came with her parents a decade ago to work at the sea cucumber plant. "But it was sort of like the town where I come from in Mexico, where everyone knows each other. It was calm, peaceful."
Beth Russet, a nurse practitioner and founding member of Mano en Mano, said their presence has shored up the town as the population of rural Maine has aged and dwindled.
"It's great that there are young families excited to stay here," she said.
But housing has been a constant challenge, Ms. Tomezsko said. The region's only subsidized apartment complex has a long waiting list, she said, and the few rental homes in Milbridge are usually too expensive for farmworkers - about $500 a month for a one-bedroom. "We have two or three people coming in every week asking about housing," she said, "and we're usually at a loss."
Ms. Russet said the town initially embraced year-round immigrants, even holding potluck suppers to help them fit in. Mano en Mano gave Spanish lessons - to bank employees who were struggling to communicate with Hispanic customers, among others - and the town won a grant to tutor immigrants.
But the constant drain of jobs has made native residents less receptive, others said, even though most shun the low-paying farm and factory work that immigrants do.
The county's unemployment rate is 10.4 percent, and 20 percent of its population lives in poverty. In a letter to a local newspaper, one resident pointed out that many native Mainers, not just immigrants, live in tumbledown trailers.
"When there is very little work," the letter said, "bringing more people in does not solve the problem."
In another letter, the resident, B. J. Seymour, wrote that multifamily housing complexes "are popular as halfway homes for recovering addicts, transients, sex offenders, seasonal workers, parolees and those with limited mental abilities."
The building moratorium was scheduled to expire last month, but at a town meeting in September, residents voted to extend it. They also voted down a proposal to exempt the Mano en Mano project from the moratorium and let it move forward.
Tenants at Mano en Mano's housing project - the first of its kind in Maine - would have to be American citizens or permanent residents who made a certain percentage of their income from agriculture or aquaculture under the terms of the federal grant, from the Department of Agriculture. They could be of any race.
But Mr. Pinkham said residents were more irked by the fact that Mano en Mano, as a nonprofit group, would be exempt from paying property taxes.
"Everybody feels that everybody should pay their own fair way," he said, estimating that the complex would pay $10,000 a year in property taxes if privately owned. "That's what I've heard the most complaints about."
As for the charges of racism, Mr. Pinkham said the town "can't gag people." "No matter where you go," he added, "you can have one or two people stand up in a crowd and say some comments that aren't the sentiment of the entire town."
Mr. Pinkham said the town imposed the building moratorium not to block Mano en Mano's project but to revise its land-use laws.
Residents will vote Monday on a zoning ordinance that would likely allow the project to move forward, he said.
Ms. Flores said that during a recent town meeting about the project, the hostility toward it - and toward Hispanics, she said - made her feel like "a cat surrounded by dogs."
"I'm brown, dark hair, and it doesn't matter if I'm a citizen of the U.S.," she said. "Just like everyone else in the Latino community, I'm looked at as a newcomer who's taking away jobs or asking for more than what we should have."
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19) They Have to Live Somewhere
By JOSH BARBANEL
Big Deal
November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/realestate/15deal3.html?ref=business
PERHAPS too much has been said about those tiresome kings of finance, macho bankers and hedge fund executives who have swooped in and picked up some of New York's most valuable real estate in good times - and less good times.
But they aren't the only business people stepping up to find a new home, despite the current uncertain market. Property records filed this month show that Anne M. Mulcahy, the chairwoman and until recently chief executive of Xerox, closed on a $7.4 million three-bedroom apartment on the 13th floor in the Superior Ink condominium on West Street and West 12th Street.
Ms. Mulcahy and her husband, Joseph, own a large house on the beach in Fairfield, Conn.
They also owned a three-bedroom condo in the Grand Beekman, on East 51st Street, but sold that last year when they were already in contract to buy at Superior Ink.
Ms. Mulcahy's closing happened a day after Lisa Carnoy, the global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, closed on a six-bedroom 4,300-square-foot apartment at the Harrison, a new condo development designed by Robert A. M. Stern at 205 West 76th Street, for $9.74 million.
Property records show that Ms. Carnoy and her husband, David, an editor at cnet.com, went into contract in January 2007, long before the Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch last year and paid $3.6 billion in disputed bonuses to key Merrill executives.
E-mail: bigdeal@nytimes.com
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20) Confronting Human Rights Abuses in U.S. Prisons
By Angola 3 News
November 15, 2009
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/11/confronting-human-rights-abuses-in-us_9321.html
An interview with Bret Grote of Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up!
Bret Grote is an investigator and organizer with Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up! (HRC/Fed Up!), a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Grote first became involved with the group after returning from the mobilization in Jena, Louisiana in Fall 2007. HRC sister chapters are in Philadelphia and Chester, PA. While covering a range of topics in this interview, Grote details how HRC/Fed Up! is documenting human rights abuses in Pennsylvania prisons, and using this documentation to fight back.
The website for the founding chapter of Human Rights Coalition in Philadelphia says that HRC "was founded in 2001 based on the radical notion that there was a vital segment of the population missing from the organizing work against prisons: the families and loved ones of the over two million prisoners in this country. Not just as spokespeople or tokens, but in decision-making positions, deciding what campaigns to do and what issues to address. Incarcerated brothers took this idea, and asked their family members as well as some supporters to take the lead in building such an organization, and the HRC was born...There are many fronts to fight the prison system on, so many issues to address, but the voices of those most affected: prisoners' families, ex-prisoners and the prisoners themselves, have to be at the forefront of any movement to change and, sometime in the future, to abolish the prison system entirely, because we are the ones who know the intimate pain this system causes."
Angola 3 News: Can you please explain the history of the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up! chapter?
Bret Grote: Our chapter of the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) was formed in late 2004-early 2005 and was originally known as Fed Up! The group began as collaboration between Etta, an anti-prison activist who lives in Pittsburgh, and Kevin Johnson, a prisoner confined in Red Onion State Prison, a Supermax facility situated in southwestern Virginia adjacent to the Tennessee border. The two were collaborating on an arts-based educational project.
Given the inherent brutality in Supermax facilities, the diametrically opposed racial demographics between prison personnel and prisoners, and the prevailing culture of violent dehumanization within the U.S. prison system at every level, it is no surprise that reports of severe human rights violations began emerging from Red Onion and its twin institution Wallens Ridge State Prison, which sits 30 miles down the road atop a decapitated mountain, immediately after each opened in 1998 and 1999 respectively.
Fed Up! was formed in an effort to expose conditions of confinement in Virginia's high-security prisons and mobilize prisoners' family members and support people against the racism, brutality, deprivation, medical neglect and abuse, and psychological torture that define these facilities.
Over the next couple of years Fed Up! built a contact list of hundreds of prisoners in Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, documented dozens of reports of human rights violations, informed various governmental representatives and agencies-including the governor of Virginia-of these conditions, and mobilized allies for letter and phone campaigns in an effort to penetrate the silence that enables the worst of the abuse, and thereby having a chilling effect on the most grievous brutality.
Sometime prior to or during 2007, Fed Up! became an official chapter of the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization whose founding chapter was and still remains active in Philadelphia. HRC was the brainchild of prisoners as well. Around the fall of 2007 and early 2008 HRC/Fed Up!-as we were then known-began to focus more exclusively on Pennsylvania (PA) prisons for reasons of capacity and strategy, because, obviously, we have more potential and actual power in this state since we are based here.
During these last two years we have documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations (to view a small portion visit our website) from over 20 prisons in the state system (PA has 27 state prisons). These reports have been collated from thousands upon thousands of pages of prisoner letters and reports, criminal complaints, affidavits and declarations, civil litigation documents, prison records, along with countless hours of interviews and dialogue with current and former prisoners and their family and support people.
What our investigations demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt is that the state of Pennsylvania is operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly baseless pretext of "security," wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions of solitary/control unit confinement each day.
Every single prison in the state has a control unit, and most of these consist of barren and often filthy cells that not only are the size of a bathroom, but are in fact bathrooms. Prisoners are confined for 23-24 hours per day in their cells. Reading materials are heavily restricted and censored. All incoming mail is subject to being read, except legal mail, although this policy is often violated while outgoing mail is subject to various forms of surveillance, tampering, and destruction. Restrictions on visitations are extreme and all visits with those in control units are conducted through thick glass with prisoners who are handcuffed throughout. Exercise "privileges" are granted 5-days per week when prisoners are taken to little cubicles of space enclosed by chain-link fencing and resembling dog kennels, presuming that the guards are willing to follow policy that day and that the prisoner in question feels secure being led from their cell to the "yard" by often flagrantly racist and sadistic guards.
While this capsule description of solitary confinement may appear inhumane and degrading enough to constitute torture-and it is-the concise litany of conditions above more or less corresponds to the aspects of solitary confinement that are mandated by policy, with the exception of some forms of mail tampering. The fact of the matter is that these control units are never operated in accordance with policy and instead serve as quite deliberate repositories for excessive and arbitrary violence, starvation and deprivation of water, psychological torment, etc.
Prisoners targeted most heavily by the regime of control unit torture are those who attempt to exercise constitutional rights to file grievances and lawsuits and expose conditions to the public. The other dominant filters that dictate an enhanced probability for placement in solitary confinement are race and mental health, as prisoners of color and those in need of psychological and psychiatric care constitute a higher concentration of prisoners in solitary than in the general prison population, which of course already has higher concentrations of both populations than the general population.
This focus on investigating, exposing, and fighting against state torture has emerged from a twinned set of obligations that need to accompany not only abolitionist movements, but struggles for social justice in general: the need to take immediate action in partnership and solidarity with those most heavily targeted by systems of oppression while simultaneously building a sustainable movement with a visionary, liberatory objective.
During the last year we have engaged in a number of other projects and community outreach and coalition-building efforts as well. Some of the more promising ones in terms of their necessity and importance for sustainable organizing are the recently launched project focusing on women's incarceration, our Innocence Division which aims to support the wrongfully convicted, and perhaps most crucial, the recent formation along with a number of other local groups of the Human Rights Alliance Pittsburgh, which works to generate an integrated, multi-front human rights movement by means of organizing local communities to struggle for their rights and build political power.
Angola 3 News: What role do prisoners and the families of prisoners have in HRC's Fed Up! today?
Bret Grote: Prisoners and their family members have provided the inspiration, dedication, strategy, and educational perspective from the beginning of HRC's work. Understanding the importance of documentation and securing affidavits, educating us on key aspects of the law and how to file criminal complaints, networking and bringing us into contact with other prisoners and activists: all of this has come from those on the inside.
Even more to the point, the resistance, humor, persistence, dignity, and unbreakable humanity of those subjected to conditions designed to humiliate, degrade, terrorize, break, and otherwise kill the human spirit is a constant wellspring of motivation that fortifies our collective commitment at HRC/Fed Up!
Family members' involvement is central, as our planning meetings and letter-writing nights frequently, though not always, feature the participation of those with loved ones inside. We routinely ask people to step up and respond to our action alerts in defense of those being starved, beaten, denied medical care or otherwise targeted, and it has been the responses of family members that have led to our ability to amplify our voices and have some degree of a chilling effect in certain situations.
Still, we need to make a more dedicated effort in my view to community organizing, since most people in Pittsburgh do not know we exist, and those who do are not always able to make meetings for a variety of reasons, which primarily has to do with attending to familial and work responsibilities. We need to broaden our avenues for participation and create a diverse and steady stream of public forums in which the voices of current and former prisoners and their loved ones will be central and guiding. We need to consciously step up our efforts to build more leadership within targeted communities.
Angola 3 News: Can you please tell us about HRC/Fed Up!'s ongoing investigations into State Correctional Institution (SCI), Dallas?
Bret Grote: In early June of this year we sent a letter to more than 20 current and former prisoners at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Dallas, PA, soliciting reports of human rights violations. Since then we have received thousands of pages in reports from dozens of prisoners detailing a wide range of gross and deliberate human rights violations.
The highest concentration of reports come from the Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), which is PA's own acronym for the solitary/control units, and these conform to the broad characteristics outlined above regarding solitary confinement, although certain depredations have been more prevalent at SCI Dallas. These include high incidence of sexual harassment by RHU staff and even reports of guards encouraging prisoners to sexually assault and rape other prisoners; frequent incitement to suicide, which was fatally successful in a case I'll discuss below; guards arriving to work drunk-we have had a shocking number of reports regarding this, particularly concerning Correctional Officer Jimmy Wilkes; no effective ventilation, which was exacerbated by the plastic "spit shields" placed on prisoners' doors in the RHU and a source of extreme misery in the stifling heat of summer; brown drinking and washing water from excessive amounts of iron, which was confirmed in a letter from the Department of Environmental Protection to a prisoner in the RHU that HRC/Fed Up! has obtained.
The assaults, racism, denial of adequate or even any medical care in solitary or general population, especially mental health treatment, denial of due process in internal grievance and misconduct procedures, obstruction of access to the courts via the destruction of legal documents and arbitrary restrictions on usage of the law library are commonplace at SCI Dallas as they are throughout the control units of PA with varying degrees of intensity.
During the course of our still ongoing investigation, on August 24, 2009, a prisoner in the RHU named Matthew Bullock committed suicide. The PA Department Of Corrections (DOC) issued a press release, as is their legal obligation, on August 25, 2009 announcing his death. Only two days later we received the first report that guards were involved in encouraging and enabling Mr. Bullock's death. Since then we have learned through more than half-a-dozen eyewitness reports, several of which were submitted as affidavits, that Mr. Bullock was extremely mentally ill and according to his family had attempted suicide on at least six separate occasions while confined in the PA DOC. Guards repeatedly kicked on the door of his cell and taunted him, telling him to kill himself, and calling him a child molester and rapist, despite his having no record of any such crimes. Mr. Bullock told guards he was going to kill himself on the morning of August 24. Guards encouraged him to do so and subsequently moved him from cell number 50, which was/is a psychiatric observation cell with a camera, to cell number 48, which had no camera. Guards on the afternoon shift then reportedly failed to make rounds. Mr. Bullock was found hanging in his cell at 6:15 P.M.
Because our investigations involve advocacy and are pursued with the explicit aim of abolishing control unit torture and other human rights violations in the prison system, we have earned the trust of many prisoners, and this is the reason that so many have come forward with reports of torture and human rights violations in SCI Dallas and elsewhere. As a result of their courage in speaking out we were able to break the story of the Bullock suicide in the local newspaper, the Wilkes Barre Times Leader. Mr. Bullock's trial lawyer read the story and contacted our office. We have provided a lot of documentation and witness statements to them, and they have recently opened an estate on Mr. Bullock's behalf, which is the first step in an eventual lawsuit.
Despite the negative publicity and small measure of exposure, conditions have not improved in the slightest, and acts of retaliation have in fact escalated recently. Reports of assault and instances of days long starvation continue to come into our offices multiple times each week.
HRC/Fed Up! has compiled the evidence we have accumulated and periodically notified those in positions of power with attendant requests for transparent investigations so as to ensure accountability and enforce the rule of law in the administration of the criminal legal system. In early July, over 70 state representatives and senators were put on notice of our preliminary findings, along with the PA DOC, the PA Attorney General and Governor Rendell (who it must be noted has a sordid history of criminal conspiracy and human rights violations himself, stemming from his role as the District Attorney of Philadelphia during the city's war against the MOVE organization and the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal). Further notices were sent in September, with even more copious documentation. To date no action has been taken by the PA DOC, the Attorney General of PA, or the Governor. Nor has the District Attorney of Luzerne County-notorious site of the kids-for-cash judicial scandal-taken any action regarding criminal complaints regarding the Bullock incident or the acts of assault and starvation and intimidation against Andre Jacobs, a brilliant 27 year-old jailhouse lawyer who was recently awarded $115,000 in a case against the PA DOC.
Our strategy has been to grant PA state authorities the opportunity to do the right thing while simultaneously preparing for the predictable reality that they will not. Our next steps are the filing of formal criminal complaints with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the issuing of a major human rights report detailing our findings regarding SCI Dallas. The basic idea is to methodically link state authorities at every jurisdictional level into a chain of notice and liability and to reflect the failure of the government to enforce the rule of law and uphold basic human rights onto the public consciousness in order to create the degree of exposure necessary for enabling mass movements and coherent, collective action against the injustices of the police-security state.
In the process we seek to bring methodically incremental increases in the forms and effects of pressure so as to provide improvements in immediate conditions. Or, in other words, we seek to win small battles as a method for building power and strength for the larger ones. Success often appears distant.
I just saw on the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader website that another prisoner died at SCI Dallas on Saturday morning. Autopsy results have not been determined and/or released, and the name has not been made public either. The article says the individual fell ill early Saturday morning and died at the hospital. My question is why is this one being reported? Deaths from "natural causes," i.e. medical conditions, are not required to be made public. Others have died at Dallas recently, or we've been informed, and the newspapers did not make mention of this. I've checked a half-dozen of our closer contacts and their names are still listed in the inmate locator. Nevertheless, I am concerned.
Angola 3 News: Does HRC see solitary confinement as a form of torture? Why do you think prison authorities use solitary confinement?
Bret Grote: What HRC or any members involve consider torture might be an interesting question, but it is of limited utility for effective political organizing. How do international law and the U.S. government define torture? The UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incident to lawful sanctions." Sounds clear enough.
How does U.S. statutory code define torture? Section 2340 of Title 18 of the federal criminal code defines torture as "an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control."
Do the conditions of control unit confinement meet this standard? There is not space here to go over the evidence, which could fill several hundred pages on the basis of our two-year investigations in prisons in PA alone, but those familiar with the subject have an unequivocal grasp of the reality that solitary confinement deliberately inflicts "severe pain and suffering," especially psychological, and cannot be justified on legitimate, i.e. "lawful," grounds. The reasons for these conclusions are several but I will simply touch on two matters here: the psychological impact of solitary confinement and its failure to meet stated policy objectives.
The scientific consensus deduced from copious research on the psychological impact of solitary confinement is that the experience generates considerable and sometimes permanent mental suffering. One of the foremost experts on the subject, Dr. Stuart Grassian, reveals that "even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium," and outlines the following seven symptoms as being characteristic of an "organic brain delirium" associated with solitary confinement: a) hyperresponsivity to external stimuli; b) perceptual distortions, illusions, hallucinations; c) panic attacks; d) difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; e) intrusive obsessional thoughts: emergence of primitive aggressive ruminations; f) overt paranoia; g) problems with impulse control.
Questionnaires submitted by HRC/Fed Up! to over 75 prisoners in SCI Dallas and throughout the state confirm the presence of these same symptomatic patterns amongst a disturbingly large number of the solitary confinement population. Incidents of self-harm, including suicide attempts, occur regularly and are certainly under-reported. At SCI Fayette, between the months of July and September, HRC received reports from Restricted Housing Unit (RHU) [RHU's are prisons within prisons] that two men set their cells on fire, one of those same men cut himself and swallowed a razor, another man tried to hang himself, and another two cut their wrists and arms. These examples can be multiplied throughout the PA DOC and the entire country.
As for the pretext that solitary confinement reduces violence in prisons and ensures secure facilities, this is supported by literally zero credible evidence to my knowledge. All available testimony and reports would seem to indicate that solitary units create a psychological condition of such absolute repression that instances of violence and brutality proliferate. Not to mention the obvious fact that a stay in the hole exacerbates mental illness, rage, frustration, and other characteristics of anti-social behavioral traits.
Countless prisoners report being forced to max out their sentences because of alleged disciplinary infractions that land them in solitary. The conditions of confinement in the PA DOC are a major contributing factor to recidivism rates that hover around 50 percent in the first three years after release, helping to feed a chronic crisis of overcrowding. This refutes the notion that the PA DOC has any legitimate security, penological, correctional or other rationale behind the program.
In other words, there is nothing lawful in the sanctioning of one to solitary confinement, as it clearly contributes to social destabilization by engendering even more criminality on the part of prison personnel and prisoners in an endless cycle that diverts funding from desperately needed social programs in order to disappear and warehouse members of the underclass. These conditions are a flagrant violation of article six of the U.S. Constitution as well, which affirms that treaty law (i.e. international law) is the "supreme law of the land." Thus, article 10 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that "The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation."
Angola 3 News: What role does solitary confinement have in the overall prison system? Since 1970, the prison population has increased from 300,000 to over 2.3 million today. The U.S. now has more total prisoners and the highest incarceration rate than any other country in the world. What do you attribute this increase to?
Bret Grote: I'll be concise here. Solitary confinement is the innermost core of the U.S.-led imperial architecture of terror. A succinct overview of this architecture can be formulated as follows:
1) The solitary confinement population is used to terrorize the prisoner population;
2) The prison population is used to terrorize poor communities in general and communities of color in particular;
3) Social and economic conditions in these communities are used to terrorize the middle classes;
4) The middle classes are used to carry out the social, economic, and political agenda of the ruling/owning class;
5) The ruling class uses this domestic base of power to organize empire abroad;
6) Empire generates a trajectory of apocalypse;
7) We have to stop this.
This sketch can be developed with varying degrees of nuance, focus, and elaboration, but seems durable enough for me.
In this respect the proliferation of solitary confinement/supermax conditions in the U.S. has corresponded closely with the rise of policies of mass incarceration and the global regime of neoliberal capitalism and its economic ideology of corporate supremacy, which I won't describe here except to say that the deindustrialization of U.S. society has generated an ever-escalating number of people who are useless to the accumulation of wealth. When these populations become fodder for the prison industry they obtain economic capital while the systematic removal of massive numbers of poor people, especially people of color, from anything but marginal or token participation in the economic, social, and political domains serves the political function of neutralizing potential bases for movements against the unjust status quo.
Angola 3 News: Concerning strategies of resistance, how do you think human rights and international law framework can be applied to prison conditions as a method/strategy/philosophy for investigations, exposure, and organizing? How does this relate to other struggles against the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and for human rights generally?
Bret Grote: Human rights, which are rooted in international law and designed to ensure the self-determination of peoples and thus a humane, sustainable, and legitimate social order, have a number of immediate advantages as framing instruments for the widest array of political struggle possible.
First of all, this frame turns reality right side up and exposes with grim clarity the criminality of the corporate-state. No matter the severity of crimes committed by those languishing anywhere in the U.S. prison system-and nobody disputes that some of those in prison are dangerous, violent, and pathologically anti-social-these crimes pale in comparison to wars of aggression, radical and ceaseless violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention against Torture, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Genocide Convention, etc. ad nauseam.
In fact, the systemic criminality of the political-economic order generates the oppressive power relations and attendant conditions of poverty, addiction, illicit economic activity, and normalized violence-especially against women and children-that fosters officially defined and punished crime. For those who are serious about ending violence and poverty in our collective communities it is imperative that a core objective of such a project is to mobilize a coherent mass movement from below to put constraints on and eventually eliminate altogether the ability of those in positions of power to engage in serial violations of the rights of others.
This framework has everything to do with accountability and necessitates that we work tirelessly to generate understanding and action around the reality that those who design and operate systems of power in this society are guilty of perpetrating crimes against humanity and must be stopped.
Specifically, in the context of day to day organizing around the prison system, it means that individuals and organizations concerned with the rights and lives of prisoners need to familiarize themselves with the basic principles of international human rights law as it pertains to the criminal legal system (I refuse to call it a justice system) and collect evidence regarding the state's failure to implement basic human rights and constitutional safeguards for prisoners. The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, the Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, amongst other human rights documents, are appropriate for orienting a host of campaigns toward dismantling the worst practices of the present system while simultaneously implementing alternative structures and practices.
Widespread dissemination of human rights documents and literature and the creation of community and movement curriculums toward this end are other means to build, and in part reconstruct, a rights-based culture of political dissent. Rights-based cultures naturally create movements that make demands and mobilize to enforce those demands, without asking for permission from repressive authorities or the ideal historical circumstances for organizing from below. A rights-based culture is a culture of struggle, cooperation, collective accountability, historical consciousness, and dedicated to creating a better world for those generations that will follow. Rights-based cultures are constituted by unbreakable bonds of solidarity, trust, and responsibility.
As anybody familiar with even a fraction of the history of popular struggles for social justice knows, these movements-while they rise and fall, wax and wane-never disappear so long as injustice exists; they are built to last. In fact, the human rights framework corresponds to the liberation movements of the 60 and 70s embodied in the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement amongst others.
Ultimately, human rights discourse and organizing revolves around the question of power: what forces in society hold power, how is it defined, who makes decisions and who suffers the consequences. For this end it is essential that we work to proliferate human rights alliances so as to build the necessary capacity and solidarity to confront the question of power. That is why the Human Rights Alliance of Pittsburgh, young as it is, strikes me as one of our most promising projects.
More practically, a method of documentation, intervention, and movement-building is effective for 1) tracking and exposing human rights violations in prisons, and other areas of society as well; 2) accumulating evidence to strengthen arguments in support of mass action for social reconstruction; 3) building trust with prisoners and their families by taking advocacy actions to the greatest degree possible; 4) building an organizational network with communication infrastructure that will serve to inform, foster dialogue, and mobilize increasing numbers of prisoners and their families and communities.
Angola 3 News: What link can we make between the work of HRC/Fed-Up! and the movement to free the Angola Three and all political prisoners?
Bret Grote: The relationship between the work of HRC/Fed Up! and the struggles of the Angola 3 are inseparable. Solitary confinement and the prison system as a whole have the primary function of silencing and/or liquidating precisely those radical movements embodied in the case and lives of Robert King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox [The Angola 3]1.
Solitary confinement is a mechanism to isolate and neutralize leadership elements, people with the ability to articulate a common vision, support their principles with action, and build trust, solidarity, self-empowerment, and unbreakable determination within oppressed populations inside the prison and out. As Angola's Warden Burl Cain clarified the matter, albeit while speaking against the release of Albert Woodfox, "He wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. ...A hunger strike is really, really bad, because you could see he admitted that he was organizing a peaceful demonstration. There is no such thing as a peaceful demonstration in prison." Any act of dissent or protest is unacceptable to the totalitarian mindset.
As Cain further stated about Woodfox, "I still know he has a propensity for violence...he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates." For those familiar with the actual program and ideology of the Black Panther Party, Cain's statement contains a key insight: the struggle for human rights amongst oppressed peoples is an unacceptable threat to a system built and sustained upon the denial of those rights.
Our task in this context is clear: to carry forward in our work with renewed intensity and dedication, honoring those who struggled before us, acting on our responsibilities toward those who will follow, and building the movements of today that will confront and ultimately defeat this unspeakably cruel and inhuman system.
Angola 3 News: How can readers best support HRC/Fed Up! with its work?
Bret Grote: We have no staff and even less money, so financial contributions are extremely helpful. We have a lot of printing and mailing needs, as we send dozens of letters to prisoners each month, not to mention criminal complaints, letters to state officials and legislators, and other operational costs, including transportation costs for a possible speaking tour and visits to prisons. Checks can be made to HRC/Fed Up! and sent to us at 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224.
Most importantly, however, get in contact with us so we can learn from each other's work and practice mutual aid and solidarity in whatever ways appropriate and possible.2
And finally, please do send an email and join our Emergency Response Network (ERN) to help us spread information and take collective action in urgent situations involving starvation, assaults, medical neglect, and other human rights violations in PA prisons. Set up your own ERN for your city, state, and/or region, and lets network to help shatter the silence that enables the torture to continue.
Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. Like this interview with Bret Grote, we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our online video series has now released interviews with Black Panther artist Emory Douglas titled "The Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Art," author J. Patrick O'Connor titled "Kevin Cooper: Will California Execute An Innocent Man," author Dan Berger titled "Political Prisoners in the United States," and Colonel Nyati Bolt titled "The Assassination of George Jackson."
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21) Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan
By Dahr Jamail
Inter Press Service
Friday 13 November 2009
http://www.truthout.org/1114098
Ventura, California - US Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas.
Hutchinson, of Oakland, California, is currently being confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, after being arrested. Her son was placed into a county foster care system.
Hutchinson has been threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov. 15. She has been attempting to find someone to take care of her child, Kamani, while she is deployed overseas, but to no avail.
According to the family care plan of the U.S. Army, Hutchinson was allowed to fly to California and leave her son with her mother, Angelique Hughes of Oakland.
However, after a week of caring for the child, Hughes realised she was unable to care for Kamani along with her other duties of caring for a daughter with special needs, her ailing mother, and an ailing sister.
In late October, Angelique Hughes told Hutchinson and her commander that she would be unable to care for Kamani after all. The Army then gave Hutchinson an extension of time to allow her to find someone else to care for Kamani. Meanwhile, Hughes brought Kamani back to Georgia to be with his mother.
However, only a few days before Hutchinson's original deployment date, she was told by the Army she would not get the time extension after all, and would have to deploy, despite not having found anyone to care for her child.
Faced with this choice, Hutchinson chose not to show up for her plane to Afghanistan. The military arrested her and placed her child in the county foster care system.
Currently, Hutchinson is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan on Sunday for a special court martial, where she then faces up to one year in jail.
Hutchinson's civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, told IPS, "The core issue is that they are asking her to make an inhumane choice. She did not have a complete family care plan, meaning she did not find someone to provide long-term care for her child. She's required to have a complete family care plan, and was told she'd have an extension, but then they changed it on her."
Asked why she believes the military revoked Hutchinson's extension, Sussman responded, "I think they didn't believe her that she was unable to find someone to care for her infant. They think she's just trying to get out of her deployment. But she's just trying to find someone she can trust to take care of her baby."
Hutchinson's mother has flown to Georgia to retrieve the baby, but is overwhelmed and does not feel able to provide long-term care for the child.
According to Sussman, the soldier needs more time to find someone to care for her infant, but does not as yet have friends or family able to do so.
Sussman says Hutchinson told her, "It is outrageous that they would deploy a single mother without a complete and current family care plan. I would like to find someone I trust who can take care of my son, but I cannot force my family to do this. They are dealing with their own health issues."
Sussman told IPS that the Army's JAG attorney, Captain Ed Whitford, "told me they thought her chain of command thought she was trying to get out of her deployment by using her child as an excuse." '
Major Gallagher, of Hutchinson's unit, also told Sussman that he did not believe it was a real family crisis, and that Hutchinson's "mother should have been able to take care of the baby".
In addition, according to Sussman, a First Sergeant Gephart "told me he thought she [Hutchinson] was pulling her family care plan stuff to get out of her deployment".
"To me it sounds completely bogus," Sussman told IPS, "I think what they are actually going to do is have her spend her year deployment in Afghanistan, then court martial her back here upon her return. This would do irreparable harm to her child. I think they are doing this to punish her, because they think she is lying."
Sussman explained that she believes the best possible outcome is for the Army to either give Hutchinson the extension they had said she would receive so that she can find someone to care for her infant, or barring this, to simply discharge her so she can take care of her child.
Nevertheless, Hutchinson is simply asking for the time extension to complete her family care plan, and not to be discharged.
"I'm outraged by this," Sussman told IPS, "I've never gone to the media with a military client, but this situation is just completely over the top."
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22) Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives
By MARC LACEY
November 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/americas/16mexico.html?ref=world
MIAHUATLÁN, Mexico - During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo's son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north.
Unemployment has hit migrant communities in the United States so hard that a startling new phenomenon has been detected: instead of receiving remittances from relatives in the richest country on earth, some down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to support their unemployed loved ones in the United States.
"We send something whenever we have a little extra, at least enough so he can eat," said Mr. Salcedo, who is from a small village here in the rural state of Oaxaca and works odd jobs to support his wife, his two younger sons and, now, his jobless eldest boy in California.
He is not alone. Leonardo Herrera, a rancher from outside Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the southern state of Chiapas, said he recently sold a cow to help raise $1,000 to send to his struggling nephew in northern California.
Also in Chiapas, a poor state that sends many migrants to the United States, María del Carmen Montufar has pooled money with her husband and other family members to wire financial assistance to her daughter Candelaria in North Carolina. In the last year, the family has sent money - small amounts ranging from $40 to $80 - eight times to help Candelaria and her husband, who are both without steady work and recently had a child.
"When she's working she sends money to us," the mother said. "But now, because there's no work, we send money to her."
Statistics measuring the extent of what experts are calling reverse remittances are hard to come by. But interviews in Mexico with government officials, money-transfer operators, immigration experts and relatives of out-of-work migrants show that a transaction that was rarely noticed before appears to be on the rise.
"It's something that's surprising, a symptom of the economic crisis," said Martín Zuvire Lucas, who heads a network of community banks that operate in poor communities in Oaxaca and other underserved Mexican states. "We haven't been able to measure it but we hear of more cases where money is going north."
At one small bank in Chiapas that used to see money flowing in from the United States, more money is going out than coming in.
"I'd say every month 50,000 pesos are sent from here to there," said Edith Ramírez Gonzalez, a sales executive at Banco Azteca in San Cristóbal de las Casas. "And from there, we'd receive about 30,000 pesos." Fifty thousand pesos is $3,840.
With nearly half its population living in poverty, Mexico is not well placed to prop up struggling citizens abroad. Mexico could lose as many as 735,000 jobs this year and its economy may decline 7.5 percent, government economists predict, making the country one of the worst affected by the global recession.
Still, poverty is a relative concept. It is easier to get by on little in Mexico, especially in rural areas, allowing the poor to help the even more precarious.
In Miahuatlán, Sirenia Avendano and her husband may be more down and out than their two sons, both in their 20s, who wait tables at a Mexican restaurant in central Florida and have seen their hours reduced and their tips drop precipitously. But they live in their own home, on land they use to grow corn and other crops.
"We're poor, but nobody can throw us out of this house," Ms. Avendano said, wiping away tears at her kitchen table as she spoke of her sons' economic travails. "They worry about that. What happens if they can't pay the rent?" To help make ends meet, she sells chiles rellenos, a popular delicacy, around the neighborhood.
"We have an obligation to help them," said her husband, Javier. "They're our sons. It doesn't matter if they are here or there."
In other cases, the migrants are returning home, as the many passengers who hop off the bus that runs regularly from northern California to a gas station in Miahuatlán make clear. "There's nothing up there," said a young man with an overflowing suitcase who returned one recent night.
Still, although a study by the Pew Hispanic Center from July showed a sharp decrease in the number of Mexicans heading north, there has been no sign of a mass exodus of migrants back to Mexico. Immigrants' families say it took great effort to scrape together the thousands of dollars needed to send relatives to the United States, a sum that includes the fees charged by the people who help them sneak in.
"It's expensive to cross, and it was a great sacrifice for us," said Mr. Salcedo, 43, who has sent about five wire transfers to his son Alfonso, 18, who this year lost his job as a cafeteria dishwasher.
As expected during an economic slowdown, the money sent home by immigrants has fallen. The Bank of Mexico reported recently that remittances during the first nine months of this year dropped to $16.4 billion, a 13.4 percent decline compared with the same period in 2008.
The flow of money out of Mexico is believed to be a tiny fraction of the remittances still arriving. "The evidence in this regard so far is anecdotal," said Juan Luis Ordaz, senior economist at the Spanish bank BBVA Bancomer, who has begun investigating the reverse money flow.
Families of migrants speak proudly of their successful relatives in the United States and use the remittances they receive to do anything from buying livestock to replacing dirt floors with concrete. The importance of such money, which is among Mexico's top sources of foreign currency, cannot be overstated. An estimated 5.9 percent of Mexican households, about 1.8 million families, receive economic support from abroad, studies show. For them, the money represents roughly 19 percent of total income for urban households and 27 percent for rural ones, according to government data analyzed by BBVA Bancomer.
For the Salcedos, the economic woes are intense on both sides of the border. The ones still here had moved to the outskirts of Mexico City seeking opportunity, but now they are on the verge of returning to Oaxaca because the owner of the land they are squatting on ordered them out.
For Alfonso, the situation has been just as difficult. He crossed into the United States in December with about $500 that his father gave him, supplemented with money he earned doing odd jobs in Tijuana. He found a job in San Diego paying enough for him to send home $170 the first month and $120 the next. The third month, he told his family he could afford to send only $40.
Then, like so many others, he lost the job and stopped sending anything.
Now his father has begun sending money the other way, usually about $60, less transfer fees. "We've decided to tighten our belt until we're all working again," Mr. Salcedo said.
Antonio Betancourt contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Dominique Jarry-Shore from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico.
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23) U.S. Readies New Facility for Afghan Detainees
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
November 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/asia/16bagram.html?ref=world
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan - The Obama administration's effort to remake the notorious American detention system in Afghanistan will take a critical step forward at the end of the month, when detainees move into a new facility on the edge of Bagram Air Base.
The complex, which eventually will be handed over to the Afghan government, is designed to accommodate new review boards, giving detainees a chance to challenge their internment and present evidence of their innocence. Reporters and Afghan and international human rights officials were allowed to tour it on Sunday - an unprecedented level of access since they were not allowed to enter the old prison, which has been in use since shortly after the American invasion in 2001.
The new complex is part of a broader effort to alter America's detention image, which has been badly tarnished by reports of abusive interrogation techniques, indefinite detentions without trial and inadequate conditions. The revamping is also expected to ease criticism of President Hamid Karzai for allowing the problems to persist.
Afghan and international human rights advocates are watching closely to see if the new review boards can remedy the current system's shortcomings.
"What is important to us is not the facility itself; our main focus is on the detainees themselves, how they are treated, and their rights," said Ahmad Nader Naderi, the deputy head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has responsibility under Afghan law to monitor detention throughout the country.
"We have asked for a transparent process that allows people like us to monitor the review boards; only then can we have confidence that detainees are able to challenge the evidence being used to hold them," he said.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, has also criticized the system for being an incubator for the insurgency because radical Taliban and other insurgents can mix with more moderate detainees and recruit them to their cause.
Under the revamped process, there will be more transparency and less risk of the facility being used to incubate radicals, said Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, a senior United States Army lawyer who led a study of the Afghan and American detention systems in Afghanistan earlier this year. "We're linking up detention practices with longer-term strategic objectives, so it's not just international law, it's not just human rights, it's strategy and counterinsurgency in the context of Afghanistan," he said.
To many Afghan and international human rights advocates, the central problem is that the Americans are detaining Afghan citizens but depriving them of the right to have their cases processed under Afghan law.
"The U.S. needs to establish a very clear legal basis for why they are holding Afghan citizens on Afghan soil, and right now there is no clear agreement between the two countries that gives the U.S. that right," said Sahr Muhammed Ally, a lawyer with Human Rights First, a New York-based group, who has studied detention arrangements in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
General Martins acknowledged that as soon as possible most detainees should go into the Afghan criminal justice system, where they would be charged and tried or released for lack of evidence, but he said that in a continuing armed conflict it is not always possible to try people.
"There is a category of cases," he said, "where you don't have evidence to convict someone in court, but you do have intelligence that if you brought into open court it could hurt you in the armed conflict. Those are the hard cases."
In the meantime, the goal is for the detainee review boards, which are made up of three American officers advised by a military lawyer, to improve the administrative review process for detainees. In the past, boards sometimes saw the detainees only once and renewed their detention repeatedly based on a paper record.
In Iraq, by comparison, when detainee review boards were put in place in 2007, release rates rose drastically, according to Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, who ran the detention system at the time.
The system at the new Afghan detention center has some elements that were not present in Iraq, including assigning each detainee a personal representative who will advocate on his behalf. The representatives are not lawyers - a point of contention for human rights groups - but they will explain the administrative review process to detainees and are supposed to help gather any "reasonably available" evidence that detainees wish to use to challenge their detention.
Several human rights advocates said they anticipated an array of practical problems with the system that could leave detainees with little more recourse than they have now.
"It will be these real on-the-ground issues, the nuts and bolts of how it works, that will make or break the policy," said Jonathan Horowitz, a human rights advocate working with the Open Society Institute.
If, for example, someone were detained mistakenly in a small village, would the detainee's personal representative have the time or ability to get a military unit to the village, find village elders and persuade them to testify on his behalf? In a largely illiterate community that has little trust of Americans, it could be difficult, human rights advocates said.
While the new complex is in part a recognition of the political problems facing Mr. Karzai, American officials have made clear they want the Afghan leader to be more accountable. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that the administration wants a tribunal to prosecute major corruption crimes and a new anticorruption commission.
"I have made it clear that we're not going to be providing any civilian aid to Afghanistan unless we have a certification that if it goes into the Afghan government in any form, that we're going to have ministries that we can hold accountable," Mrs. Clinton said.
At Bagram, the new facility includes classrooms, vocational-technical training areas and fully equipped medical facilities. The current detention population is about 600 men, of whom about 30 are non-Afghans, most of whom were captured, according to the American military, while they were aiding Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The center has room for 1,140 detainees, but the military said it did not foresee increasing the detention population. There are about 15,000 detainees in the Afghan system.
The new complex will be called "the detention facility in Parwan," the province where it is. The is within the perimeter of the Bagram base, but on the northeastern edge, so that when it is handed to the Afghan government it can be run independently even if Americans are still using the air base.
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24) Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform
[And the banks are raising their interest rates befor the
"reforms" take effect. So what else is new?...bw]
By DUFF WILSON
November 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16drugprices.html?ref=us
Even as drug makers promise to support Washington's health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation's drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.
In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation's drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.
The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.
Drug makers say they have valid business reasons for the price increases. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years.
"When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price increases," says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota. He has analyzed drug pricing for AARP, the advocacy group for seniors that supports the House health care legislation that the drug industry opposes.
A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years.
"They try to maximize their profits," Mr. Newhouse said.
But drug companies say they are having to raise prices to maintain the profits necessary to invest in research and development of new drugs as the patents on many of their most popular drugs are set to expire over the next few years.
"Price adjustments for our products have no connection to health care reform," said Ron Rogers, a spokesman for Merck, which raised its prices about 8.9 percent in the last year, according to a stock analyst's report.
This year's increases mean the average annual cost for a brand-name prescription drug that is taken daily would be more than $2,000 - $200 higher than last year, Professor Schondelmeyer said.
And this means that the cost of many popular drugs has risen even faster. Merck, for example, now sells daily 10-milligram pills of Singulair, the blockbuster asthma drug, at a wholesale price of $1,330 a year - $147 more than last year. Singulair is now selling at retail, on drugstore.com, for nearly $1,478 a year.
The drug companies "can charge what they want - it's not fair," Eric White, the 42-year-old owner of a small jewelry store in Queens, said as he left a pharmacy recently.
Despite having drug insurance, Mr. White says he now pays $110 a month out of pocket for two brand-name allergy medicines, even as he has cut prices in his jewelry store by at least 40 percent to keep customers coming through the door.
He shook his head. "What can I do?" he said. "I need my medicines."
The drug industry has actively opposed some of the cost-cutting provisions in the House legislation, which passed Nov. 7 and aims to cut drug spending by about $14 billion a year over a decade.
But the drug makers have been proudly citing the agreement they reached with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee chairman to trim $8 billion a year - $80 billion over 10 years - from the nation's drug bill by giving rebates to older Americans and the government. That provision is likely to be part of the legislation that will reach the Senate floor in coming weeks.
But this year's price increases would effectively cancel out the savings from at least the first year of the Senate Finance agreement. And some critics say the surge in drug prices could change the dynamics of the entire 10-year deal.
"It makes it much easier for the drug companies to pony up the $80 billion because they'll be making more money," said Steven D. Findlay, senior health care analyst with the advocacy group Consumers Union.
Name-brand prices have risen even as prices of widely used generic drugs have fallen by about 9 percent in the last year, Professor Schondelmeyer said. But name brands account for 78 percent of total prescription drug spending in this country. And as long as a name-brand drug still has patent protection it faces no price competition from generics.
Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the industry association - the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America - criticized the analysis Professor Schondelmeyer had conducted for AARP, saying it was politically motivated.
"In AARP's skewed view of the world, medicines are always looked at as a cost and never seen as a savings - even though medicines often reduce unnecessary hospitalization, help avoid costly medical procedures and increase productivity through better prevention and management of chronic diseases," he said.
But Professor Schondelmeyer's analysis - which found prices for the name-brand drugs most widely used by the Medicare population rising by 9.3 percent in the last year, the fastest rate since 1992 - is in line with the findings of a leading Wall Street analyst, too.
Catherine J. Arnold, a drug industry analyst at Credit Suisse, said her latest study of the nation's eight biggest pharmaceutical companies showed markedly similar results: list prices rising an average of 8.7 percent in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 - the highest rate of growth since at least 2004.
As does Professor Schondelmeyer, Ms. Arnold based her price calculations on reported wholesale prices and a formula that puts more emphasis on each company's best-selling drugs.
Ms. Arnold said the prospect of cost containment under health care reform, as well as the tougher business environment, entered into the decisions of manufacturers to raise prices this year.
The industry stands to gain about 30 million customers with drug insurance from the legislation pending in Congress. But the industry also faces the prospect of tougher negotiations from both public and private buyers as the government tries to squeeze savings out of the health system.
"If you're going to take price increases," Ms. Arnold said, "here and now might be the place to do that, because the next year and the year after that might be tough."
Mr. Johnson did not dispute the Credit Suisse study or deny Ms. Arnold's finding that American drug makers have raised prices at the fastest rate in five years.
He said both studies were incomplete by failing to include rebates that drug makers give distributors. But Ms. Arnold, Professor Schondelmeyer and a 2007 Congressional study of Medicare said the rebates often accrue to the middlemen, not consumers, and higher manufacturer prices lead to higher retail prices.
And the drug industry's own major consulting firm, IMS Health, has also reported a significant run-up in prices. Back in April, IMS predicted that United States drug sales might actually decline this year.
Billy Tauzin, president of the industry's trade association, highlighted the gloomy prediction in a June 1 letter to President Obama shortly before striking the deal to cut drug costs by $80 billion. In negotiating the deal, the drug makers argued that they could not afford to give up more than that.
But in October, IMS made an unusual change in the middle of its forecasting cycle, saying it now believed United States sales would grow at least 4.5 percent in 2009 - or $21 billion more than expected six months earlier.
A major reason, IMS said, was higher-than-expected price increases for drugs in the United States.
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