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Mass outreach to build March 21 Demonstration--Saturday February 28,
March 7 and March 14:
San Francisco: 12noon, meet at 2489 Mission St. #24 at 21st St.
East Bay: 10am, meet at MacArthur BART main entrance, Oakland
NEXT MARCH 21 COALITION PLANNING MEETING:
SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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Winter Soldier: Testimony from US veterans on their experiences in Iraq, women's experiences, being a Muslim in the US military, war resisters and more.
Wed., March 11, 6 - 9 PM
150 Goldman School of Public Policy on UC Berkeley campus
Free.
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March against the war on March 21
Dear friends,
During his presidential campaign, Obama's popularity surged with the promise that he would bring the troops home from Iraq within 16 months. But his recently announced plan would continue the illegal occupation indefinitely. It would leave up to 50,000 troops in that war-torn country for who knows how many years. And it would delay the withdrawal of the first batch of troops to 19 months.
"When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, 'get out,' and everyone's gone. But that is not going to happen," said a senior military officer.
This plan doesn't "leave Iraq to its people and responsibly end this war", as Obama claimed during his Congressional address of Feb. 24. Instead it entrenches the U.S. in a brutal counter-insurgency war that helped to bankrupt our country and sends an endless stream of Americans to continue dying and killing.
The U.S. government, the American people, and the Iraqi people need to hear our voices of opposition on March 21.
Last week, Sec. of Defense Gates and President Obama announced their plan to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan - that's a 50 percent increase - despite the fact that the Department of Defense has no exit strategy. And the U.S. is expanding the covert war run by the CIA inside neighboring Pakistan.
We cannot afford another quagmire.
Please join us in Washington, SF, and LA on March 21.
Go to www.pentagonmarch.org for more information
Meanwhile the U.S.-funded occupation and blockade of Gaza continues after an assault in which 100's of civilians were killed and even a United Nations school was not spared from the onslaught of human rights crimes and violations of international law.
The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine are struggling to rid themselves of deadly, racist occupations. We need to unite in the realization that the movement in solidarity with the people of Palestine is the same as the movements in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us stand together with each other and with them, and say:
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, occupation is a crime!
The people of the world need to hear from Americans that we are against the racist U.S. wars of aggression and occupation. We have an historic responsibility to raise our voices and be heard, to march with our banners held high and be seen, demanding
Bring ALL the troops home NOW!
Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
End U.S. support for the occupation of Palestine!
No war on Iran or Pakistan!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations is joining with a broadening alliance of 100's of coalitions, organizations, and networks in a united MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION to mobilize people across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth year of the military invasion and occupation of the Iraq War: Saturday, March 21.
Demonstrations will also be held on that date in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the U.S.
For updated information about buses and the national March 21 coalition, which includes labor unions, peace and anti-war groups, veterans and community groups and more, see: www.pentagonmarch.org
These actions will remind the nation and the world that the U.S. antiwar movement - marching behind a banner demanding "Out Now!' - will intensify its struggle to stop the wars.
The actions are needed to assure the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and other countries threatened by Washington's expansionist policies that tens of millions of people in this country support their right to settle their own destinies without U.S. interventions, occupations and murderous wars. International law recognizes - and we demand - that the U.S. respect the right to self-determination. We reject any notion that the U.S. is the world's self-appointed cop.
The March 21 united mass actions are also needed at this time of economic meltdown to demand jobs for all; a moratorium on foreclosures; rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure; guaranteed, quality health care for all; an end to the ICE raids and deportations; and funding for sorely needed social programs. So long as trillions of dollars continue to be spent on wars, occupations, and bailouts to the banks and corporate elite, the domestic needs of the people of the U.S. can never be met.
For more information about the National Assembly please visit: www.natassembly.org
March 21, in D.C., will culminate in a dramatic direct action where hundreds of coffins-representing the multinational victims of militarism, Empire and corporate greed-will be carried and delivered to the headquarters of the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death.
From the Pentagon, we will march to the nearby giant corporate offices of Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Dynamics and KBR (the former subsidiary of Halliburton).
A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21
will be held in the grassy area just South of Market
Street in Justin Herman Plaza
Saturday, March 21
Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479
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Donate to Courage to Resist
A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,
Iraq War veteran and war resister
Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/
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Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
http://www.wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) After Losses, a Move to Reclaim Executives' Pay
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/22pay.html?hp
2) Following Bailout Money To Tax Havens
CBS Evening News: Bailed-Out Banks Are Getting Your Money - And Using Tax Havens To Avoid Coughing Up The Dough Themselves
by Sharyl Attkisson
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2009
[Check out the video of the news story at this sight.]
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/23/eveningnews/main4822689.shtml?tag=topStories;secondStory#
3) Terror Convictions Overturned in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
February 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/world/europe/25france.html?hp
4) From a Carrier, Another View of America's Air War in Afghanistan
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/world/asia/24carrier.html?ref=world
5) Pennsylvania: Boy Faces Adult Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/24brfs-BOYFACESADUL_BRF.html?ref=us
6) The 3 R's? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
By TARA PARKER-POPE
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/health/24well.html?ref=education
7) Falling Revenues Threaten Rebuilding in Iraq
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JAMES GLANZ
February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/world/middleeast/26reconstruct.html?ref=world
8) U.S. Plans Afghan Effort to Thwart Road Bombs
By THOM SHANKER
February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/washington/26military.html?ref=world
9) Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/science/earth/26charmin.html?ref=us
10) Reports Show More Signs of Downturn
By JACK HEALY
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/economy/27econ.html?ref=business
11) F.D.I.C.'s Bank Fund at Lowest Point in 25 Years
By ERIC LIPTON
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/economy/27bank.html?ref=business
12) Jobless Angry at Possibility of No Benefits
By MICHAEL LUO
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27govs.html?ref=us
13) Drought Adds to Hardships in California
By JESSE McKINLEY
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/us/22mendota.html
14) New Owners to Reopen Window Plant, Site of a Sit-In in Chicago
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27factory.html?ref=us
15) 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html?ref=us
16) As Livelihoods End, Bowed but Proud
By KEVIN COYNE
Jersey | Florence
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22colnj.html?ref=nyregion
17) Even Worse for Young Workers
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28herbert.html
18) A Clean Fight
By TIMOTHY HSIA
Op-Ed Contributor
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28hsia.html/
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1) After Losses, a Move to Reclaim Executives' Pay
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/22pay.html?hp
SHOULD executives get to keep lavish pay packages when the profits that generated their compensation go up in smoke?
As the financial crisis deepens, what might have been a philosophical question is now the topic of the day. With losses mounting at the nation's largest financial institutions, years of earnings have been erased, investors have lost billions, thousands of employees have been let go, and taxpayers have been tapped to rescue the financial system. But executives who helped set the problems in motion, or ignored them as they mounted, are still doing fine. Humbled, perhaps, but well paid for their anguish.
Executives at seven major financial institutions that have collapsed, were sold at distressed prices or are in deep to the taxpayer received $464 million in performance pay since 2005, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times. Almost half of that consisted of cash compensation.
Yet these firms have reported losses of $107 billion since 2007, a result of their own missteps and the ensuing economic downturn. And $740 billion in stock market value has been lost since these companies' shares peaked in 2007, just before the housing bubble burst.
Against that landscape, a growing chorus is demanding that executive compensation snared shortly before problems emerged be given back.
"There is a line that separates fair compensation from stealing from shareholders," said Frederick E. Rowe, a money manager in Dallas and a founder of Investors for Director Accountability, a nonprofit group. "When managements ignore that line or can't see it, then hell, yes, they should be required to give the money back."
Corporate boards that awarded lush executive pay packages almost always justified them by saying they encouraged superior performance and were directly tied to benchmarks like profitability.
But now, with a public backlash against excessive pay and taxpayer lifelines extended to crippled companies, the idea of recouping compensation, known as "clawback," is gaining traction.
Currently there is no legal mechanism for forcing the regurgitation of past pay, so such efforts would need to be bolstered by new legislation. Clawbacks also promise to be a hot-button issue at shareholder meetings in coming months.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has called for recovery of executive pay at companies that collapse. He posed this question to financial executives testifying before Congress last March: "When companies fail to perform, should they give millions of dollars to their senior executives?"
The seven troubled companies whose executives received almost $500 million in performance pay since 2005 are the American International Group, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual. Equilar, a compensation research firm, conducted the analysis of executive pay and earnings at these and other companies for The Times.
Analysts say that 2005 is a useful milestone because dubious lending started sweeping across the nation that year, and toxic assets began piling up at banks and other firms.
MANY of the chief executives who oversaw troubled financial institutions have exited the scene. And several of the companies that Equilar studied are no longer independent. Merrill, Countrywide, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual have been absorbed by competitors, while Lehman collapsed.
Trying to get out in front of the compensation backlash, some executives are refusing bonuses and limiting their salaries. Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup's C.E.O., recently said he would take a salary of $1 and would receive no bonuses until his troubled bank turned a profit. He has not received any performance pay since he took over the top job at Citigroup late in 2007.
The seven companies highlighted in the Equilar study are not the only financial firms that turned in woeful results recently. Even companies that have managed to generate profits - Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are three examples - have received taxpayer aid. Executives at these companies, too, face shareholders angered by battered stock prices.
Because the Equilar study uses only profitability as a basis for comparison among firms, it offers a relatively conservative look at how much pay might have been unfairly awarded.
For example, the analysis of the seven companies - among the most damaged on Wall Street - doesn't take into account the pay of executives who left the scene after overseeing corporate practices that eventually caused their companies to careen off the rails.
Sanford I. Weill, for example, Citigroup's chief architect, received $205 million in performance pay in the four years before he handed over the reins to Charles O. Prince in 2003.
Analysts contend that Mr. Weill's failure to effectively manage and knit together the financial behemoth he created in 1998 led directly to Citigroup's woes today. A spokesman for Mr. Weill said that Citigroup was profitable and financially healthy when he ran it. He noted that Mr. Weill has dropped a consulting arrangement with the bank, as well as use of its corporate aircraft, because of Citigroup's woes.
Matching compensation to actual, long-term profitability at other firms is revealing.
Consider Merrill, which Bank of America bought in a distress sale arranged last fall. Losses reported by Merrill as a result of the credit crisis totaled $35.8 billion in 2007 and 2008, enough to wipe out 11 years of earnings previously reported by the company. The losses dwarf those reported by any of the other companies that Equilar analyzed.
For the 11-year period from 1997 to 2008, Merrill's board gave its chief executives more than $240 million in performance-based compensation. The company had three chief executives during these years: David H. Komansky, who left in 2002, was followed by E. Stanley O'Neal. Mr. O'Neal was ousted in 2008 and replaced by John A. Thain, who was dismissed last month.
Mr. O'Neal's total pay for the six years he ran Merrill totaled $157.7 million. He declined to comment.
To be sure, executive compensation at the companies in the Equilar study was almost always a blend of stock and cash, and the downturn has hammered the wealth of executives who kept their shares. But analysts say that even if stock awards were removed from the mix, executives still received windfalls.
"This is really in our view a giant fraudulent conveyance, where money was paid out to executives at firms that were fatally undercapitalized," said Daniel Pedrotty, director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. office of investment. "We are arguing for a recovery of money that was used by people who treated these companies as a giant A.T.M. machine."
John D. Finnegan, the chief executive of the Chubb Corporation, has been the head of Merrill's compensation committee since 2007. Last March, when renewed outrage over pay packages for bankers emerged, he appeared before Congress. Lawmakers had questions about the $161 million that Merrill gave to Mr. O'Neal when he left the firm.
The essence of Mr. Finnegan's testimony was that Mr. O'Neal earned the money. "Over 80 percent of the amount consists of company stock he received as part of his annual bonuses for 2006 and prior years," Mr. Finnegan said. "Those bonuses were paid because of the company's and Mr. O'Neal's strong performance during those earlier periods."
Now that performance has turned to dust. Mr. Finnegan declined to comment.
Many investors say the whole pay-for-performance model is a mirage because consultants are too willing to make clients happy by making sure they are handsomely compensated - often regardless of performance.
John England, head of the financial services compensation practice at Towers Perrin, was the consultant on Merrill's pay practices. He or his firm also devised pay packages for Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief of Countrywide, and for Kerry K. Killinger, the former chief at Washington Mutual.
Mr. England declined to be interviewed. A spokesman for Towers Perrin said that it did not comment on specific clients but that the firm was confident about its practices and that its expertise had "resulted in the delivery of valuable, sound and objective executive compensation advice."
Yet Mr. England's white-collar clients also oversaw one of the greatest demolitions of financial value in history.
Countrywide generated losses of $3.9 billion in 2007 and early 2008, before it was absorbed by Bank of America last July. Those losses erased the company's entire earnings in 2006 and half of its profit for the previous year. But Mr. Mozilo received $82.4 million in performance pay between 2005 and 2008, roughly half in cash, according to Equilar.
Mr. Mozilo could not be reached for comment.
Washington Mutual, overseen by Mr. Killinger until federal authorities forced its sale last year to JPMorgan Chase, is another case. Its mortgage-related losses of $8 billion in 2007 and 2008 wipe out all of its earnings in 2006 and 2005 and three months' worth of profits generated in 2004.
Mr. Killinger received $38.2 million in performance pay between 2005 and 2008, Equilar said; of that amount, just $7.6 million was paid in cash, the rest in stock. A spokesman for Mr. Killinger said he would not comment.
Bear Stearns, which collapsed last March under the weight of soured mortgage holdings before it could record major losses, awarded its chief, James E. Cayne, $58.5 million in performance pay from 2005 through 2007. Some $30 million of that was cash, and the rest was stock. Mr. Cayne could not be reached for comment.
EVEN as shareholder ire over burgeoning pay packages has risen, recoveries of compensation are rare.
"I think you can count on two hands the number of voluntary or involuntary returns of compensation by executives," said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. "More companies are introducing clawback provisions, but instituting the provisions and actually clawing back the pay are two different things."
In the past, clawbacks were typically considered only in cases of fraud or accounting irregularities. Now shareholders want clawbacks if compensation ultimately encouraged dangerously risky behavior and was based on profits that later evaporated.
The initiative is directed almost exclusively at companies' most senior management, not at lower-level employees who earned relatively modest sums.
Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for one of the federal bailout efforts, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is examining compensation given to top managers at banks that received money under the program. And as the annual shareholder meeting season approaches, executive pay is expected to be an even more contentious issue, analysts say.
"Poorly structured pay packages encouraged the get-rich-quick mentality and overly risky behavior that helped bring financial markets to their knees and wiped out profits at so many companies," said Amy Borrus, deputy director at the Council of Institutional Investors. "And yet many of these C.E.O.'s have pocketed enormous compensation." Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant in White Plains, said clawbacks shouldn't be the only goal of irate shareholders. He said boards should also recover performance-based contributions to executives' pensions, because those payments were also tied to profits that may have proved fleeting.
"If these guys accumulated money during years when the earnings actually was not earned," he asked, "why shouldn't the pensions be clawed back as well?"
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Representative Henry A. Waxman's committee position. He heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, not the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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2) Following Bailout Money To Tax Havens
CBS Evening News: Bailed-Out Banks Are Getting Your Money - And Using Tax Havens To Avoid Coughing Up The Dough Themselves
by Sharyl Attkisson
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2009
[Check out the video of the news story at this sight.]
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/23/eveningnews/main4822689.shtml?tag=topStories;secondStory#
(CBS) They're exotic and faraway places known to tourists for coral reefs and sandy beaches.
But to the business world they're known as tax havens, with strict bank secrecy and privacy laws, where U.S. companies can pay fewer taxes and help wealthy customers avoid taxes, too. From the Caribbean and Europe - to Panama. CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.
And guess who's turned up in a new government report about tax havens?
Eleven giant recipients of your bailout tax dollars - American Express, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, General Motors, GMAC, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. Together they've collected more than $227 billion.
Even as they benefit from tax money, they operate hundreds of subsidiaries in places widely known for helping people evade taxes.
Although proponents say most business in tax havens is perfectly legal and legitimate, it's estimated that tax havens cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion a year in lost revenue.
The stakes are so high that one tax haven insider was put under witness protection after he exposed hundreds of tax dodgers, and testified to Congress about his job.
One favorite among the bailout companies is the Cayman Islands. There's no income tax, no corporate tax and no capital gains tax.
Goldman Sachs has 15 subsidiaries there. Bank of America: 59. Citigroup: 90.
But Morgan Stanley beats them all with at least 158 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands - seven times the number of hotels.
When asked about how hard it is for the U.S. government to "get at" what is going on in some of these tax havens, Dean Zerbe, a former congressional tax investigator, said "it's incredibly hard."
Zerbe believes the Treasury Department should demand that bailed-out banks cough up details of their offshore interests.
"Here we are sending taxpayers' monies to you. Tell us, banks, what you're doing to ensure that you are not helping folks avoid taxes coming the other way," Zerbe said.
None of the bailout companies we contacted would talk about their subsidiaries in tax havens, except insurance giant AIG which told us their operations do not "exist solely for tax benefit."
So the next time you're reminded the U.S. economy is in shambles, remember - there are places where business is still booming.
Places where some bailed out companies are getting your tax dollars, and may be helping others pay less.
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3) Terror Convictions Overturned in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
February 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/world/europe/25france.html?hp
PARIS - A French appeals court on Tuesday overturned terrorist conspiracy convictions for five former inmates of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp who had been tried and convicted in 2007, after they were returned to France.
The court ruled that information gathered by French intelligence officials in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay violated French rules for permissible evidence, and that there was no other proof of wrongdoing.
None of the men, who were originally captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, is currently in jail, having been given time off for time already served.
But the ruling is likely to be seen as a precedent for similar cases, as well as inject more uncertainty into the sensitive process of repatriating inmates being released from Guantánamo Bay, which President Obama has vowed to shut down. Various European countries have expressed willingness in principle to take some of the inmates, depending on their potential for dangerous behavior and whether the United States also accepts some. Some European countries prefer that the European Union come up with a unified position, so Washington cannot play one country against another while trying to negotiate placements.
The case is also interesting because it involves Mourad Benchellali, now 26, a member of a family with numerous other connections to jihadist violence. His older brother, Menad, was arrested in 2002 on suspicion of planning to bomb Russian targets, including the Russian embassy in Paris, as a response to the Chechen war. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Their father, Chellali Benchellali, a Muslim cleric from a suburb of Lyon, was arrested in connection with the plot to avenge Russia's crackdown in Muslim Chechnya. He had previously gone to Bosnia to help Muslims in the Bosnian civil war. He was given an 18-month suspended sentence; his wife, Hafsa, was given a two-year suspended sentence and another son, Hafed, was sentenced to four years in prison.
Mourad, who was at Guantánamo, wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times in June 2006, in which he said that in 2001, when he was 19, "I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan in what I though was a dream vacation." His brother's friends, he wrote, sent him to an Al Qaeda training camp. He spent two and a half years in Guantánamo as an "enemy combatant" and said he could not "describe in just a few lines the suffering and the torture."
He and other French detainees were returned to France in 2004 and 2005 following pressure from the French president then, Jacques Chirac, who promised that "justice will be done." They were immediately arrested; their trial produced the 2007 conviction - on charges of criminal association with a terrorist enterprise - that was overturned on Tuesday. During the trial, the men said that they had spent time in Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan but had never used their new combat skills.
In addition to Mr. Benchellali, the others cleared were Brahim Yadel, 37; Nizar Sassi, 27; Khaled Ben Mustapha, 35; and Redouane Khalid, 39. None of them was in court to hear the judges uphold their appeal.
The court found, according to lawyers for the men, that the French DST counterintelligence service could not serve both as an espionage agency and a judicial police service. Paul-Albert Iwens, the lawyer for Mr. Khalid, told Reuters news agency that the court refused "to let it be said that a police agency could question people detained on foreign territory in conditions that go against international conventions."
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4) From a Carrier, Another View of America's Air War in Afghanistan
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/world/asia/24carrier.html?ref=world
ABOARD U.S.S. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, on the Arabian Sea - Every day from the deck of this nuclear-powered aircraft carrier off the coast of Pakistan, two dozen combat planes are catapulted into the sky for the 500-mile trip to southern Afghanistan. There the pilots circle Taliban strongholds like an airborne 911 service and zoom in when American and British troops, spread thin and often panicked, call in airstrikes.
The Navy has been back in these waters providing more air power since August, in large part because the ground reinforcements that commanders have been pleading for have not yet come. From 15,000 feet up, the pilots protect supply lines under increasing attack, fly reconnaissance missions to find what they call "bad guys" over the next hill, and go "kinetic" with bombs that kill three, four or five Taliban fighters at a time. They can always tell when troops who call in airstrikes are under direct fire.
"They're trying to talk to you at the same time that they're running and being shot at, so obviously there's a lot of urgency in their voices," said Capt. Kevin J. Kovacich, the Roosevelt's air wing commander.
Captain Kovacich and many of his pilots last dropped bombs in Afghanistan in March 2002, when the American military seemed to have dealt a near fatal blow to the Taliban. Now the United States military is experiencing the limitations of air power in a seven-year war, in which an increasing American reliance on airstrikes against insurgents has kindled growing fury over the civilian casualties that have come with them.
"Those insurgents are wily," said Cmdr. Fredrick R. Luchtman, the commanding officer of a Roosevelt squadron of F/A-18C Hornets, who also flew missions over Afghanistan in early 2002. "They will meld themselves within the population. They will fire from areas that they know that if we put a bomb there, it's going to look bad."
The pilots do not need to be told that civilian deaths soared last year in Afghanistan, the majority from Taliban attacks, but others from airstrikes called in by American and British troops under fire. President Hamid Karzai has so angrily condemned the strikes that in December he was invited to visit the Roosevelt, so that officers could try to persuade him that they took care where they aimed their bombs.
As Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, the commander of United States naval forces in the region, put it: "We don't drop when we're unsure."
The visit, by the Navy's account at least, went well. Mr. Karzai watched jets take off from the flight deck and was briefed on how the pilots try to minimize "collateral damage." Afterward, he sent the ship one of his trademark karakul hats and a Christmas card. But for the pilots, tensions remain.
"If it was positively identified as hostile in Iraq, you took it out," said Commander Luchtman, who also flew missions over Baghdad in 2003. "Here, just because it's positively identified as hostile, you've still got to mitigate the other things around."
To support ground troops in Afghanistan, the United States flew more than 19,000 combat missions in the country in 2008 - more than ever before, surpassing even the number in Iraq over the same period. But over all, American pilots dropped slightly fewer bombs and other munitions, perhaps as a result of more restrictive rules imposed in September after an uproar about civilian casualties.
"To win the insurgency, we're not going to bomb our way out of this," said Col. Harry A. Foster, the chief of the strategy division of the Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Southwest Asia, the command headquarters for the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. To that end, pilots on the Roosevelt often engage in a "show of force" - flying as low as 1,000 feet and making a lot of noise to scare the Taliban - and say they drop bombs as a last resort.
The Navy says the pilots on the Roosevelt fly about 30 percent of combat missions over Afghanistan; the majority of the flights are handled by the Air Force from bases in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region. The Navy was called in last summer when attacks on American and NATO supply lines were on the rise and military commanders decided they needed to get the trucks off the roads and use more air transport.
The pilots fly many other missions for reconnaissance, using sensors to take pictures from the air of, for example, how many Taliban fighters are on the other side of a wall, or how many might be ahead of a NATO convoy. The pictures go directly to the laptops of troops on the ground. "So if there are three warm bodies in that compound, we will know that there are three warm bodies in that compound," Commander Luchtman said.
The Roosevelt arrived to relieve another carrier in mid-October and will remain in the region until late March. The carrier was last here in October 2001. Although Captain Kovacich and Commander Luchtman were here around the same time, they flew from different ships.
The Roosevelt pilots say they did not expect to be back, but they make no judgments, at least none they are willing to share, on the need for their return, or on whether what they do is making a difference in the overall conflict.
On Wednesday in Washington, Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said the war was "at best stalemated" in the very region in which the pilots operate. Most of the 17,000 additional American troops that President Obama ordered to Afghanistan last week will be used in the area.
What the pilots do say is that flying six-hour round-trip missions six days a week, they are doing what they have been asked: providing air support to troops in remote areas. "All I know," said Cmdr. Richard McGrath, a pilot and executive officer of one of the Roosevelt squadrons, "is that we dropped the bomb where it was supposed to go, when it was supposed to go."
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt this month and updated this article with information from Washington.
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5) Pennsylvania: Boy Faces Adult Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/24brfs-BOYFACESADUL_BRF.html?ref=us
A prosecutor said he had no choice but to file adult charges against an 11-year-old boy accused of killing his father's pregnant girlfriend, even though the child's age raises questions about where and how to jail him. District Attorney John Bongivengo of Lawrence County said state law prohibited him from filing criminal homicide charges against the boy in juvenile court. Therefore, Mr. Bongivengo said, he had to charge the boy with homicide as an adult or with a lesser charge. But he said he expected the boy's lawyer to ask a judge to move the case to juvenile court. Because the boy is charged as an adult, he must remain in the county jail, where he is separated from about 300 adult inmates. He is being kept out of a normal cellblock and in a 10-by-8-foot cell in the booking area.
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6) The 3 R's? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
By TARA PARKER-POPE
February 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/health/24well.html?ref=education
The best way to improve children's performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.
New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child's academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.
The lead researcher, Dr. Romina M. Barros, a pediatrician and an assistant clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the findings were important because many schools did not view recess as essential to education.
"Sometimes you need data published for people at the educational level to start believing it has an impact," she said. "We should understand that kids need that break because the brain needs that break."
And many children are not getting that break. In the Pediatrics study, 30 percent were found to have little or no daily recess. Another report, from a children's advocacy group, found that 40 percent of schools surveyed had cut back at least one daily recess period.
Also, teachers often punish children by taking away recess privileges. That strikes Dr. Barros as illogical. "Recess should be part of the curriculum," she said. "You don't punish a kid by having them miss math class, so kids shouldn't be punished by not getting recess."
Last month, Harvard researchers reported in The Journal of School Health that the more physical fitness tests children passed, the better they did on academic tests. The study, of 1,800 middle school students, suggests that children can benefit academically from physical activity during gym class and recess.
A small study of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder last year found that walks outdoors appeared to improve scores on tests of attention and concentration. Notably, children who took walks in natural settings did better than those who walked in urban areas, according to the report, published online in August in The Journal of Attention Disorders. The researchers found that a dose of nature worked as well as a dose of medication to improve concentration, or even better.
Andrea Faber Taylor, a child environment and behavior researcher at the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, says other research suggests that all children, not just those with attention problems, can benefit from spending time in nature during the school day. In another study of children who live in public housing, girls who had access to green courtyards scored better on concentration tests than those who did not.
The reason may be that the brain uses two forms of attention. "Directed" attention allows us to concentrate on work, reading and tests, while "involuntary" attention takes over when we're distracted by things like running water, crying babies, a beautiful view or a pet that crawls onto our lap.
Directed attention is a limited resource. Long hours in front of a computer or studying for a test can leave us feeling fatigued. But spending time in natural settings appears to activate involuntary attention, giving the brain's directed attention time to rest.
"It's pretty clear that all human beings experience attentional fatigue," Dr. Faber Taylor said. "Our attention has to be restored from that fatigue, and there is a growing body of research evidence that nature is one way that seems particularly effective at doing it."
Playtime and nature time are important not only for learning but also for health and development.
Young rats denied opportunities for rough-and-tumble play develop numerous social problems in adulthood. They fail to recognize social cues and the nuances of rat hierarchy; they aren't able to mate. By the same token, people who play as children "learn to handle life in a much more resilient and vital way," said Dr. Stuart Brown, the author of the new book "Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul" (Avery).
Dr. Brown, a psychiatrist in Carmel Valley, Calif., has collected more than 6,000 "play histories" from human subjects. The founder of the National Institute for Play, he works with educators and legislators to promote the importance of preserving playtime in schools. He calls play "a fundamental biological process." "From my viewpoint, it's a major public health issue," he said. "Teachers feel like they're under huge pressures to get academic excellence to the exclusion of having much fun in the classroom. But playful learning leads to better academic success than the skills-and-drills approach."
Join the discussion at nytimes.com/well.
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7) Falling Revenues Threaten Rebuilding in Iraq
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JAMES GLANZ
February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/world/middleeast/26reconstruct.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD - In few nations around the globe are the consequences of the financial crisis as potentially sobering as they are in Iraq. Both oil revenues and American financial support have plummeted just as the country has the chance to take advantage of its increasing stability to improve basic services and upgrade its ruined infrastructure.
Now, projects are being put off as Iraq struggles to pay for huge raises granted to government employees as well as the salaries and equipment for hundreds of thousands of new Iraqi security troops.
Last summer, with oil prices above $100 a barrel, Iraq was so flush with cash that many in the United States were arguing that a country so rich should be paying for its own reconstruction and possibly even reimbursing American taxpayers.
Six months later, the question is whether a decline in Iraqi government revenues, which depend almost entirely on oil, could threaten the relative security and stability won here at the cost of so much American treasure and life. Indeed, political pressure is rising here, as more Iraqis demand precisely the services, like better electricity, water and education, that could now come more slowly.
A stable Iraqi economy and an adequately prepared Iraqi military are crucial if American combat troops are to withdraw by August 2010, as aides to President Obama suggested this week. And illustrating just how closely the two countries are still intertwined, a faltering Iraq could also complicate Mr. Obama's plan to lower the American deficit with billions in savings that would come from such a withdrawal.
As the Iraqi Parliament debates a proposed $62.8 billion budget this week, senior American and Iraqi officials say that Iraq can prevent an immediate crisis by drawing on the very source that attracted such intense criticism in the United States: the billions of dollars in oil revenues that Iraq was unable to spend on its reconstruction projects.
That money, which Iraq's central bank and senior Obama administration officials say comes to roughly $35 billion, is sitting in various bank accounts, including one at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
To help plug the gap, Iraq is planning to withdraw about $20 billion in a single year. But that will not be enough, government officials say, to save reconstruction projects crucial to improving gravely inadequate services.
The provision of electricity is still far short of meeting demand, and the government is still struggling to provide clean water. Iraqi officials insist that Iraq could have revenue sources besides oil, like agriculture and industry, but developing them requires investments. Oil production itself has recently dropped in certain key fields, requiring a major injection of government money.
In the past, money for projects has been allocated but not spent. Now it is drying up altogether.
"It's a mathematical issue," Raed Fahemi, the minister of science and technology, said at a conference on Wednesday dedicated to finding alternatives to oil money. "We are staying up all night trying to ensure that there are required funds for projects currently under way. The issue comes with the future projects."
The reason capital projects are being put off is that the reserve funds in the banks were originally intended to be spent as part of the capital budget, not to meet shortfalls in Iraq's day-to-day operating costs, which now take up four-fifths of the proposed 2009 budget. And unless oil prices increase or Iraq finds new sources of revenue, its piggy bank at the Fed will last only so long.
"It's a disaster," said Ismail Shukir Haruty, a member of Parliament's financial committee. "What are we going to do in 2009, 2010, 2011?"
In many ways, the financial crisis, with the resulting drop in oil prices, could not have come at a worse time. The government gave its employees substantial raises last year. Wages now take up about 35 percent of the budget.
And in a critical move as the United States takes less and less responsibility for security, the number of soldiers, police officers and other security personnel has soared to 609,000, from 250,000 two years ago, when oil prices were on the rise, according to the Pentagon.
"There are some critical expenditures, like paying the military and the police and making sure that's being done very, very well," said Rick Barton, co-director of the post-conflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You can't afford any slippage at this time."
Still, a senior administration official said the United States was confident that the cumulative oil surpluses would allow it to weather the immediate storm. "The overall trend is still moving in a reasonable direction even if they're not able to do quite as much as anticipated," the official said.
Identifying the roots of the crisis here is much simpler than it is in many places in the world. In Iraq, there is not much of a credit market to dry up nor are there mortgages to default on. Oil accounts for roughly 90 percent of government revenue. When oil prices drop, as they have to below $40 a barrel from a high last summer of nearly $150, there are few other options for collecting revenue.
Finance and Oil Ministry officials in Iraq maintain that oil prices will rise again by the end of the year. After years of conservative budgeting, the proposed 2009 budget is based on an optimistic projection that oil will be selling at $50 a barrel, and that Iraq will be exporting two million barrels a day, about 100,000 barrels more than Iraq exported per day in January.
Critics of the budget say that the projections are unrealistically rosy and that the deficit will be even larger than the one planned.
The timing is particularly bad for the new leaders who emerged from January's provincial council elections. Many blamed incumbents for failing to deliver services and improvements, but they will have to make good on their promises with much less money.
"Reasonable people will understand, but the common people will not accept it," said Baqir al-Shaalan, who won in the southern Iraqi province of Diwaniya on promises of a refurbished irrigation system, new housing and government jobs for unemployed youths. "They will tell us: 'You've been justifying the lack of services with the security situation. Now the security situation has improved.' "
Then again, the provincial councils have such a dismal record of spending the money they have been allocated that, American officials say, they could actually spend more money this year even if their budgets are more austere.
There is a bright side: the crisis could finally force the Iraqi government to build up its agricultural and industrial sectors, and create a thriving private sector. Some Iraqi officials have been pushing for these moves for years.
"If the Iraqi government knew about the big depression, it would have done a lot of things differently," Mr. Haruty, the lawmaker, said. "Same as the American government, I think."
Campbell Robertson reported from Baghdad, and James Glanz from New York. Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting from Baghdad.
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8) U.S. Plans Afghan Effort to Thwart Road Bombs
By THOM SHANKER
February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/washington/26military.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - As part of its buildup in Afghanistan, the Pentagon plans to deploy billions of dollars in heavily armored vehicles, spy planes, jamming technology and even experimental ground-penetrating radar to defend troops from increasingly lethal roadside bombs.
More than 175 American and allied troops were killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan last year, more than twice as many as the year before, and American commanders say the 17,000 extra troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama last week will offer additional targets.
While improvised roadside bombs have been a greater threat in Iraq, the Taliban-led insurgency has begun to use them on a wider scale in Afghanistan. Four American soldiers died Tuesday in an attack involving an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., in southern Afghanistan, where most of the new American troops are headed. On Wednesday, three British soldiers patrolling in southern Afghanistan were killed by an explosive device.
Senior military officers say Afghanistan's topography and primitive infrastructure play to the insurgents' advantage. Unlike Iraq, where more of the streets are paved, Afghanistan has a network of undeveloped roads where it is far easier to lay traps.
"Dirt roads give you plenty of softer places to dig in, then for the weather to settle it, and then for dust to camouflage it," said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, director of the Pentagon's organization in charge of seeking ways to counter improvised explosives.
Even Afghanistan's most vital paved highway, the Ring Road, the primary route for commercial and military convoys between Kabul and other major cities, was built with thousands of culverts - any of which could conceal explosives.
The military plans to use satellites and portable Global Positioning System devices to show convoys the exact location of each culvert, and to install monitoring systems that can detect hidden bombs, General Metz said.
His unit, the Joint I.E.D. Defeat Organization, tallied 3,611 instances in which improvised explosives were used in Afghanistan in 2008, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. Besides coalition forces, even larger numbers of Afghan civilians were killed last year.
In Iraq, there were more than 9,000 I.E.D. attacks last year, but that is far below the number in 2006, when they peaked at 2,500 a month. Today, insurgents in Iraq are planting fewer I.E.D.'s, and only one in nine produces an American casualty. In Afghanistan, where as many as one in three bombs causes a casualty, American officers say they hope a combination of technology, intelligence, armor and training can help them drive down the casualty rate.
The improvised bombs - buried in roads, packed into cars or bicycles and hidden in trash cans or animal carcasses - are made from materials readily available in war zones, whether abandoned bombs, construction explosives or fertilizer. They are the weapon of choice for an insurgency: cheap and easy to build, but hard to detect and counter.
The Pentagon created the counter-I.E.D. organization in 2006, and its budget has ranged from $3.5 billion to $4.4 billion annually, but that does not include costs for armored vehicles and other systems. In part because new jamming technology has foiled some weapons triggered remotely by cellphones or garage-door openers, insurgents in Afghanistan are turning to more primitive methods, using wire or even rope as the trigger.
Other countermeasures being prepared include a ground-penetrating radar that only recently completed testing, as well as more jammers, wheeled robots, hardened troop transport vehicles and a laser that can detonate an I.E.D. from a safe distance. Armored vehicles will be deployed with heavy rollers extended in front to detonate bombs triggered by pressure plates.
Beyond that, the Pentagon is planning to buy 2,080 heavily armored vehicles that are more maneuverable than the 2,000 larger models in place. Each costs about $1 million. The more unwieldy version of the troop transport, known as a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, or M-RAP, has trouble negotiating Afghanistan's rough terrain.
The military's effort to counter I.E.D.'s in Afghanistan is managed by Task Force Paladin, with headquarters at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, and has focused mostly on eastern Afghanistan. Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the task force would expand its efforts in the south to support the additional troops.
Programs deemed successful in Iraq will be replicated in Afghanistan, including one that uses small passenger aircraft upgraded with advanced reconnaissance sensors to search for I.E.D.'s, and another that uses remotely piloted surveillance planes. Officials declined to provide numbers for the new surveillance aircraft or the additional intelligence teams, citing security concerns.
Over all, there are 38,000 American troops in Afghanistan today; half are in the NATO security and assistance force along with 32,000 allied troops, and half are under United States command, carrying out counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and training missions.
I.E.D.'s are intended to do more than kill troops on the battlefield, General Metz said. "The enemy knows this is a strategic weapon to influence public opinion back in the U.S., to influence positively his recruiting, and to show people that the central government in Kabul has less control," he said.
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9) Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/science/earth/26charmin.html?ref=us
Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed.
The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra - which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm.
But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.
Customers "demand soft and comfortable," said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. "Recycled fiber cannot do it."
The country's soft-tissue habit - call it the Charmin effect - has not escaped the notice of environmentalists, who are increasingly making toilet tissue manufacturers the targets of campaigns. Greenpeace on Monday for the first time issued a national guide for American consumers that rates toilet tissue brands on their environmental soundness. With the recession pushing the price for recycled paper down and Americans showing more willingness to repurpose everything from clothing to tires, environmental groups want more people to switch to recycled toilet tissue.
"No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper," said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council.
In the United States, which is the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands. Most manufacturers use a combination of trees to make their products. According to RISI, an independent market analysis firm in Bedford, Mass., the pulp from one eucalyptus tree, a commonly used tree, produces as many as 1,000 rolls of toilet tissue. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year.
Other countries are far less picky about toilet tissue. In many European nations, a rough sheet of paper is deemed sufficient. Other countries are also more willing to use toilet tissue made in part or exclusively from recycled paper.
In Europe and Latin America, products with recycled content make up about on average 20 percent of the at-home market, according to experts at the Kimberly Clark Corporation.
Environmental groups say that the percentage is even higher and that they want to nurture similar acceptance here. Through public events and guides to the recycled content of tissue brands, they are hoping that Americans will become as conscious of the environmental effects of their toilet tissue use as they are about light bulbs or other products.
Dr. Hershkowitz is pushing the high-profile groups he consults with, including Major League Baseball, to use only recycled toilet tissue. At the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, the gowns were designer originals but the toilet tissue at the Kodak Theater's restrooms was 100 percent recycled.
Environmentalists are focusing on tissue products for reasons besides the loss of trees. Turning a tree to paper requires more water than turning paper back into fiber, and many brands that use tree pulp use polluting chlorine-based bleach for greater whiteness. In addition, tissue made from recycled paper produces less waste tonnage - almost equaling its weight - that would otherwise go to a landfill.
Still, trees and tree quality remain a contentious issue. Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.
Greenpeace, the international conservation organization, contends that Kimberly Clark, the maker of two popular brands, Cottonelle and Scott, has gotten as much as 22 percent of its pulp from producers who cut trees in Canadian boreal forests where some trees are 200 years old.
But Dave Dickson, a spokesman for Kimberly Clark, said that only 14 percent of the wood pulp used by the company came from the boreal forest and that the company contracted only with suppliers who used "certified sustainable forestry practices."
Lisa Jester, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, the maker of Charmin, points out that the Forest Products Association of Canada says that no more than 0.5 percent of its forest is harvested annually. Still, even the manufacturers concede that the main reason they have not switched to recycled material is that those fibers tend to be shorter than fibers from standing trees. Long fibers can be laid out and fluffed to make softer tissue.
Jerry Baker, vice president of product and technology research for Kimberly Clark, said the company was not philosophically opposed to recycled products and used them for the "away from home" market, which includes restaurants, offices and schools.
But people who buy toilet tissue for their homes - even those who identify themselves as concerned about the environment - are resistant to toilet tissue made from recycled paper.
With a global recession, however, that may be changing. In the past few months, sales of premium toilet paper have plunged 7 percent nationally, said Ali Dibadj, a senior stock analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, a financial management firm, providing an opening for makers of recycled products.
Marcal, the oldest recycled-paper maker in the country, emerged from bankruptcy under new management last year with a plan to spend $30 million on what is says will be the first national campaign to advertise a toilet tissue's environmental friendliness. Marcal's new chief executive, Tim Spring, said the company had seen intense interest in the new product from chains like Walgreens. The company will introduce the new toilet tissue in April, around Earth Day
Mr. Spring said Marcal would be able to price the new tissue below most conventional brands, in part because of the lower cost of recycled material.
"Our idea is that you don't have to spend extra money to save the Earth," he said. "And people want to know what happens to the paper they recycle. This will give them closure."
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10) Reports Show More Signs of Downturn
By JACK HEALY
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/economy/27econ.html?ref=business
The faltering economy sent up more distress signals on Thursday, indications that the problems in manufacturing, housing and the labor markets were only multiplying.
Taken together, the economic reports reflected the stark pace of declines in a recession that began in December 2007. With unemployment rising as businesses cut costs and slash their payrolls, consumers are reducing their spending and putting off major purchases, including new homes, leading to reduced revenue for companies.
"What catches your eye is the uniformity of this breathtaking descent," the chief economist at ITG, Robert J. Barbera, said. "You've got incomprehensibly weak home sales, violent declines for businesses buying capital goods, and a new brutal jump for jobless claims."
The number of first-time unemployment claims rose 36,000, to a seasonally adjusted 667,000 last week, its highest point in 26 years. Continuing claims for jobless benefits topped five million for the first time ever, rising to 5.112 million for the week ended Feb. 14.
Economists said the spike in continuing jobless claims was a bad omen for February's unemployment numbers, which will be released on March 6. The unemployment rate for January was to 7.6 percent, and economists expect it will rise to 7.9 for February.
Orders for durable goods, products expected to last at least three years, fell $9 billion, or 5.2 percent, to $163.8 billion in January, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. It was the sixth month of declines.
Shipments of durable goods fell 3.7 percent while unfilled orders fell 1.9 percent as manufacturers cut orders for metal goods, machinery, computers, motor vehicles and other goods.
"January was a horrifically terrible, awful month for manufacturing, no matter how you slice it," said Daniel J. Meckstroth, chief economist for the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI.
Finally, the Commerce Department reported on Thursday that new-home sales fell 10.2 percent in January from December, to an annual pace of 309,000.
"For another month we had to shelve even any distant light at the end of the tunnel," said Michael Feroli, United States economist at JPMorgan Economics.
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11) F.D.I.C.'s Bank Fund at Lowest Point in 25 Years
By ERIC LIPTON
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/economy/27bank.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON - The federal government's bank insurance fund dropped by the end of last year to the lowest point in more than 25 years, and the number of banks at risk of failure nearly doubled, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairman reported Thursday.
"There is no question this is one of the most difficult periods we have encountered during the F.D.I.C.'s 75 years of operation," Sheila Bair, the agency's chairwoman, said at a Thursday news conference where she released a status report on the nation's 8,300 federally insured banks.
Overall, the nation's banks lost $26.2 billion in the fourth quarter, the biggest quarterly lost since the F.D.I.C. began collecting data on quarterly earnings. Almost one in three banks lost money, Ms. Bair reported.
Already this year, 14 banks have failed, compared with a total of 25 banks last year and 3 in 2007. Ms. Bair said that the agency had placed 252 institutions on its watch list - meaning they were at risk of failure-compared to 76 banks at the end of 2007.
With all of the bank failures, the F.D.I.C.'s insurance fund has dropped to $19 billion, the lowest it has been since 1993, at the end of the savings and loan crisis. The insurance fund had $52 billion at the end of 2007.
The F.D.I.C. - with the insurance fund now at such a low level - is required to increase it and it will move to do so on Friday by increasing the amount banks must pay in deposit insurance.
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12) Jobless Angry at Possibility of No Benefits
By MICHAEL LUO
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27govs.html?ref=us
As governors in nine states, mostly in the South, consider rejecting millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for increased unemployment insurance, there is growing anger among the ranks of the jobless in those states that they could be left out of a significant government benefit.
The stimulus bill recently passed by Congress includes incentives to states to expand benefits to many more jobless people, including part-time workers and those who have cycled in and out of the work force, who are not covered in many states.
The Republican governors of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, along with Alaska and Idaho, have raised protests, saying that expansion could eventually require them to raise taxes.
On Wednesday, Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee became the first Democratic governor to express reservations on the issue.
For people like Henry Kight, 59, of Austin, Tex., the possibility that the money might be turned down is a deeply personal issue.
Mr. Kight, who worked for more than three decades as an engineering technician, discovered in September that because of complex state rules, he was not eligible for unemployment insurance after losing a job at a major electronics manufacturer he had landed at the beginning of the year.
Unable to draw jobless benefits, he and his wife have taken on thousands of dollars in credit-card debt to help make ends meet.
It is precisely these kind of regulations, involving such matters as the length of a person's work history or reason for leaving a job, that the federal government is trying to get the states to change. Such a move could extend benefits to an estimated half-million more people, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal group in New York that supports the changes.
Mr. Kight and other unemployed workers said they were incensed to learn they were living in one of a handful of states - many of them among the poorest in the nation - that might not provide the expanded benefits.
"It just seems unreasonable," Mr. Kight said, "that when people probably need the help the most, that because of partisan activity, or partisan feelings, against the current new administration, that Perry is willing to sacrifice the lives of so many Texans that have been out of work in the last year."
He was referring to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who has said he may decline the extra money rather than change state policy.
"I remain opposed to using these funds to expand existing government programs, burdening the state with ongoing expenditures long after the funding has dried up," Mr. Perry wrote in a letter to Mr. Obama last week.
The governors contend that once the federal money ran out, they would have to continue providing the new benefits, which they say would force them to raise taxes on businesses. The federal money will end in two or three years in some states, or much later in others, depending on the size of the state allocation.
Proponents say that nothing would prevent states from changing the laws back at that time.
The anger at the governors' positions goes beyond just the unemployed workers who could directly benefit from the changes. Because eligibility rules for unemployment insurance are complicated and vary by state, many unemployed people do not even know whether they would be affected.
There is also confusion over what parts of the stimulus money are in danger. The governors have mostly said they do not object to the stimulus bill's $25 per week increase in unemployment benefits, or a new federal extension of benefits.
As a result, many laid-off workers across the South have been fretting over precisely what they might lose out on, even as they express astonishment that they might not receive the help that jobless people in other states will get.
"I don't understand the whole thing," said Kelley Joyce, 43, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., about indications from Gov. Mark Sanford that he may reject some of the stimulus financing in that state. "Apparently because he has money and he doesn't have to worry about everybody else who doesn't have money."
South Carolina, which has the nation's third-highest unemployment rate at 9.5 percent, ruled Ms. Joyce was ineligible for benefits for the same reason as Mr. Kight after she lost her job as a marketing assistant in November.
The first third of the $7 billion available to states to expand unemployment benefits is contingent on the states' changing eligibility rules in such a way that Mr. Kight and Ms. Joyce would receive benefits. It requires states to consider an "alternative base period" when determining someone's eligibility.
Currently, when considering a person's work history, most states do not include his wages in the current or preceding quarter. Instead, they look to see what the person earned in the four quarters before that, which can often hurt low-wage workers, women and others just entering or returning to the work force.
In Mr. Kight's case, he was unemployed for the second half of 2007, after losing an earlier job he had at a different electronics manufacturer in a downsizing. As a result, when he applied for unemployment benefits, he did not have enough immediate work history to qualify.
"I have worked for so many years, a total of probably 30 years, contributing to the support system that helps people when they get in a tough spot like I'm in," Mr. Kight said. "I haven't needed it too much in the past, but I sure could use it right now."
About 40 percent of applicants who are now disqualified from receiving benefits because they do not earn enough would qualify if states offered an alternative base period, according to the National Employment Law Project.
To be eligible for the other two-thirds of the money set aside for unemployment benefits, states would have to provide benefits to at least two of these four groups of unemployed people: those only available to work part-time; workers who left their jobs for a compelling family reason, like a spouse moving to take another job, to take care of a sick child, or in cases of domestic violence; workers with dependent children seeking additional benefits; and workers who need additional benefits to last them through re-training.
On Tuesday, Erica Greer, 32, and her mother, Candace Foss, 59, who lost her job as a data management specialist at Home Depot in late January, went to the State Capitol in downtown Atlanta from Kennesaw, Ga., a suburb where they live, to deliver a message to Gov. Sonny Perdue not to reject any of the stimulus money.
Mr. Perdue has said he fears the long-term consequences of accepting the money.
Ms. Foss got a severance package from Home Depot, so she has not yet applied for unemployment benefits. It appears she would be eligible for benefits, but she and her daughter said they wanted to stand up for unemployed Georgians and fight for their benefits. They wound up speaking to an aide to the governor for about 10 minutes and submitted a letter to Mr. Perdue.
"I don't think he truly understands the plight of his citizens," Ms. Foss said. "He's surrounded by people with good jobs, who make good salaries. He's not surrounded by people like me."
Robbie Brown contributed reporting.
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13) Drought Adds to Hardships in California
By JESSE McKINLEY
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/us/22mendota.html
MENDOTA, Calif. - The country's biggest agricultural engine, California's sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.
Across the valley, towns are already seeing some of the worst unemployment in the country, with rates three and four times the national average, as well as reported increases in all manner of social ills: drug use, excessive drinking and rises in hunger and domestic violence.
With fewer checks to cash, even check-cashing businesses have failed, as have thrift stores, ice cream parlors and hardware shops. The state has put the 2008 drought losses at more than $300 million, and economists predict that this year's losses could swell past $2 billion, with as many as 80,000 jobs lost.
"People are saying, 'Are you a third world country?' " said Robert Silva, the mayor of Mendota, which has a 35 percent unemployment rate, up from the more typical seasonal average of about 20 percent. "My community is dying on the vine."
Even as rains have washed across some of the state this month, greening some arid rangeland, agriculture officials say the lack of rain and the prospect of minimal state and federal water supplies have already led many farmers to fallow fields and retreat into survival mode with low-maintenance and low-labor crops.
Last year, during the second year of the drought, more than 100,000 acres of the 4.7 million in the valley were left unplanted, and experts predict that number could soar to nearly 850,000 acres this year.
All of which could mean shorter supplies and higher prices in produce aisles - California is the nation's biggest producer of tomatoes, almonds, avocados, grapes, artichokes, onions, lettuce, olives and dozens of other crops - and increased desperation for people like Agustin Martinez, a 20-year veteran of the fields who generally makes $8 an hour picking fruit and pruning.
"If I don't have work, I don't live," said Mr. Martinez, a 39-year-old father of three who was waiting in a food line in Selma, southeast of Fresno. "And all the work is gone."
In Mendota, the self-described cantaloupe center of the world, a walk through town reveals young men in cowboy hats loitering, awaiting the vans that take workers to the fields. None arrive.
The city's main drag has a few quiet businesses - a boxing gym, a liquor store - and tellingly, two busy pool halls. The owner of one hall, Joseph R. Riofrio, said that his family had also long owned a grocery and check-cashing business in town, but that he had just converted to renting movies, figuring that people would rather stay at home in hard times.
"We're not going to give up," Mr. Riofrio said. "But people are doing bad."
Just down the highway in Firebaugh, José A. Ramírez, the city manager, said a half-dozen businesses in its commercial core had closed, decimating the tax base and leaving him to "tell the Little League they'd have to paint their own lines" on the local diamond.
The situation is particularly acute in towns along the valley's western side, where farmers learned on Friday that federal officials anticipate a "zero allocation" of water from the Central Valley Project, the huge New Deal system of canals and reservoirs that irrigates three million acres of farmland. If the estimate holds and springtime remains dry, it would be first time ever that farmers faced a season-long cutoff from federal waters.
"Farmers are very resilient, we make things happen, but we've never had a zero allocation," said Stephen Patricio, president of Westside Produce, a melon handler and harvester. "And I might not be very good at math, but zero means zero."
While California has suffered severe dry spells before, including a three-year stint ending in 1977 and a five-year drought in the late '80s and early '90s, the ill effects now are compounded by the recession and other factors.
Federal, state and local officials paint a grim picture of a system taxed as it has never been before by a growing population, environmental concerns and a labyrinth of water supply contracts and agreements, some dating to the early 20th century. In addition to the federal water supplies, farmers can irrigate with water provided by the state authorities, drawn from wells and bought or transferred from other farmers. Such water may not always be the best quality, said Mark Borba, a fourth-generation farmer in Huron, Calif.
"But it's wet," he said.
Richard Howitt, the chairman of the agricultural and resource economics department at the University of California, Davis, estimates that 60,000 to 80,000 jobs could be lost - including in ancillary businesses - and that as much as $2.2 billion in crop and other losses could be caused by restrictions on water and the drought, which he called "hydrologically as bad as 1977 and economically as bad as 1991."
"You're talking about field workers, processing handlers, people packing melons, trucking hay, sprayers, people selling tractors, people selling lunches to people selling tractors," Mr. Howitt said. "And in some of these small west-side towns, it's going to hit the people who are least able to adapt to it."
One of the hardest hit areas is the farmland served by the Westlands Water District, which receives water exclusively from the Central Valley Project and distributes it to 600,000 acres in Fresno and Kings Counties. Sarah Woolf, a spokeswoman for the district, said that her 700 members expected to leave 300,000 to 400,000 acres fallow and that some might not come back to farm at all.
"Everyone's trying to go down fighting," Ms. Woolf said. "But there will be significant companies that will go out of business, as well as families that have been farming for generations, if it doesn't get better."
The outlook for things getting better quickly is dim, despite forecasts of rain this week. Last month, California officials estimated the snowpack in the Sierra, a primary source of water for the state when it melts in the spring, at 61 percent of normal. On Friday, the State Department of Water Resources said it would deliver just 15 percent of its promised contracts, a level it was able to maintain only because of the recent spate of rain. "It's pathetic," said Lester A. Snow, the department's director.
Lynette Wirth, a spokeswoman for the United States Bureau of Reclamation, said water levels in all federally managed reservoirs in California were well below normal, with "abysmal" carryover from the previous year.
"There's been no meaningful precipitation since last March," Ms. Wirth said.
Farmers, of course, are also dealing with issues unrelated to rain, including tight credit from banks and recent court decisions meant to protect fish that have limited the transfer of water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which feeds snowmelt to farmbound canals. Many farmers refer to a "man-made drought" caused by restrictions.
At the same time, environmental groups say they also fear a range of potential problems, including depletion of the valley aquifer from well pumping, possible dust-bowl conditions in areas of large patches of fallow ground and concern about salmon and other species. "It's a tough year for the environment, and people," said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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14) New Owners to Reopen Window Plant, Site of a Sit-In in Chicago
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27factory.html?ref=us
CHICAGO - The 250 workers who staged a December sit-in at a Chicago window factory to protest losing their jobs were celebrating Thursday, after another window manufacturer announced plans to reopen the plant and start hiring back the displaced workers within months.
The sale of what had been Republic Windows and Doors to a California company, Serious Materials, for $1.45 million, was completed in bankruptcy court this week, with company officials promising United Electrical Workers Local 1110 to rehire all the laid-off workers at their former rate of pay.
"We see this opportunity to expand our operations in direct relation to the stimulus package, which includes the greening of federal buildings and the weatherization assistance program," said Sandra Vaughan, the chief marketing officer for Serious Materials, which also manufactures energy-efficient windows and building products in Boulder, Colo., and Vandergrift, Pa.
Ms. Vaughan said it could take months to get the company's equipment up and running in Chicago, but to former Republic Windows workers like Armando Robles, a father of five who lost his health insurance in January, the prospect of the factory's reopening was "a dream come true."
"They are promising to hire all of us back sooner or later, but they will start with a small crew," said Mr. Robles, 39, who had been a maintenance technician. "Having another company reopen the factory was always our hope when we occupied the factory in December."
Serious Materials' acquisition of the 125,000-square-foot warehouse that housed Republic Windows comes just days after Republic Windows' former owner, Rich Gillman, ceased operations at his new window plant in Red Oak, Iowa. Mr. Gillman opened that factory late last year as a nonunion plant, after abruptly shuttering the one in Chicago.
"We are sad that the inability to make the company succeed represents a loss for more than 100 workers and their families, and investors who held great hope for this enterprise," Mr. Gillman said in a statement.
Melvin Maclin, 55, a former technician at Republic Windows, said his bitter emotions of the last few months turned to joy this week, after learning that he could soon be back at work, cutting designs into glass windows at the Chicago plant.
"When I got the phone call, I woke up my wife, and we did a little victory dance," Mr. Maclin said. "This is not only a victory for the Republic workers, but for laborers and unions everywhere."
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15) 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html?ref=us
More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers.
The suit contends that before resigning last year, the judges "used kids as commodities that could be traded for cash," placing an "indelible stain" on the juvenile justice system of Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania.
The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Scranton by the Juvenile Law Center, seeks to have all profits that the detention centers earned from the scheme placed in a fund that would compensate the youths for their emotional distress.
In an earlier filing, the law center, based in Philadelphia, asked the State Supreme Court to clear the records of all juveniles who appeared before the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.
The suit brought Thursday is the third filed on behalf of juvenile offenders. The two others, one of which also seeks class-action status, were filed by private lawyers.
Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income-tax fraud for having taken more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two privately operated centers, run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.
"Judge Ciavarella's placement of so many children in juvenile facilities without regard for their underlying charges suggests a Procrustean scheme that violated one of the core principles of the juvenile justice system - the right to individualized treatment and rehabilitation," Lourdes M. Rosado, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center, said in a statement.
Lawyers for the two former judges declined to comment on the suit.
As for the criminal investigation of court personnel, two additional people have already been charged, and federal officials say they may soon charge others involved in the scheme.
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16) As Livelihoods End, Bowed but Proud
By KEVIN COYNE
Jersey | Florence
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22colnj.html?ref=nyregion
Florence
ON his last day of work at the sprawling riverfront foundry here, Tom Darmo looked up from the stacks of pipes he was counting and decided that, after 22 years, the time had come for him to visit the one spot where he had never set foot before: the peak of the cupola, the five-story furnace where scrap metal was melted and transformed into something new.
The cupola is the highest point at Griffin Pipe, and on this last morning before the plant's closing it was probably the coldest, too. Winds were gusting near 50 miles an hour, whipping up whitecaps on the gray Delaware. Mr. Darmo, 42, tightened the band inside his hard hat and, with three colleagues from the quality control department, started climbing the narrow ladders toward the uppermost catwalk.
"It was like us going to Mount Everest," he said later, after he and roughly 200 other workers had left their old jobs for the last time. "I've looked at it from afar for many years, but I've never been up to the top. I will never forget that. It was a special time for us."
He could see everything from up on the cupola, more than 200 acres of a foundry whose roots were more than 200 years deep, a place most people around here presumed was too old and too big to ever close. "The First Company to Manufacture Cast Iron Pipe in the United States," the sign out front declares; before it was bought by Griffin Pipe in 1962, it was the R. D. Wood Company, which was founded in Millville in 1803 and took over an existing foundry here in 1867. If you live anywhere in the northeastern United States, you have almost certainly used water that has flowed through a pipe that was made here.
But those 200 years ended quietly on Lincoln's Birthday, while Congress was still debating an economic stimulus package that was arriving too late to save these jobs in this old river town just south of Trenton, where too many families already know what happens when a factory locks its gates.
"We were expecting a temporary layoff, maybe three months," said Mark Babula, 38, unit chairman of Local 2040B of the United Steelworkers, the union that represents 175 hourly employees at Griffin. But the economy was worse than anyone had ever imagined: Housing starts had plummeted, and so had the demand for water pipes. Just a year earlier, just three miles downriver in Burlington, another old foundry, U.S. Pipe, had closed.
The news arrived several weeks before Christmas: a complete shutdown of production. It was the same kind of hammer blow that hit Mr. Babula's father and grandfather in 1974, when the Roebling steel mill - the center of the meticulously planned industrial village just three miles north of Griffin, and the maker of the suspension cables that hold up most of the landmark American bridges of the 20th century - shut down, and tossed them out of work.
The final day at Griffin was marked by no ceremony. "Everybody just kind of drifted away," said Mr. Babula, whose father grew up in a house built by Roebling for its workers and who lives with his wife and their 2-year-old son in an R. D. Wood house, a seven-minute walk from the plant where he worked for 15 years. "But everybody went out proud."
Production had stopped almost a week earlier, so when paychecks were distributed at midmorning, most workers saw little point in sticking around till the end of the shift. One by one, they trickled out through the gate, carrying bags filled with dirty clothes from their lockers, some with several pairs of boots dangling like strings of bass.
By midafternoon a couple dozen of them had convened at a place called Wesley's up in Roebling, across the street from the mostly vacant parcel where the old mill had once stood. They traded stories about their lost world at the same long mahogany bar where the Roebling workers had once traded stories about their own.
There was some grumbling: about who got the few jobs that will remain as the plant becomes a distribution center for pipes made at Griffin's other locations, in Virginia and Iowa; about the recent ascendancy of managers unschooled in the ways of the old foundrymen; about what seemed a myopic strategy of shutting down, rather than riding through the rough times with a layoff; about the gyrations that R. D. Wood must be making in his grave.
But mostly there was sadness, and worry about the prospect of finding new jobs in an economy so bad that it killed a plant that had survived so many other downturns. "I went from making $48,000 a year to unemployment," said John Sheehan, who worked at the foundry for 22 years, and whose wife's father and grandfather had worked there before him. When his health coverage ends in four and half months, his insurance will become unaffordable: $1,000 a month, he said, half his unemployment check. "I have to start all over at 42 years old."
Hourly wages at Griffin ranged from $18 to $23, but in good years, when demand was high and overtime was plentiful, some workers made more than $60,000. "Everyone needs water and sewer lines," Mr. Sheehan said. "I never thought this would happen."
More workers arrived at Wesley's as the afternoon deepened, and they helped themselves to the spread of free food the owners had put out for them: pulled pork, Cajun wings, vodka rigatoni. A few had leads for new jobs, but more did not, and the chances of finding ones like the kind they had just left seemed to be growing dimmer each day.
"When you lose your manufacturing base, you're losing your backbone, you're losing your strength," Tom Darmo said. "Now we're enslaved to China and these underdeveloped countries where they treat the workers terribly and they don't have pollution controls."
Mr. Darmo had a new listener, and he was telling the story again of his ascent to the summit of the cupola, a perch from which he had seen not just the foundry that he was about to leave, but also all the way north to the memory of another plant from which an earlier generation of workers had once been expelled: the remnants of the Roebling mill just across the street.
"It was so windy it was scary," he said. He held on tight, though, braced against the wind that threatened to blow him away, but never quite managed to.
e-mail: jersey@nytimes.com
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17) Even Worse for Young Workers
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28herbert.html
The employment situation in the U.S. is, if anything, worse than most people realize. And huge numbers of young people, ages 16 to 30, are being beaten down in ways that could leave scars for a lifetime.
Much of the attention in this economic downturn has focused on the growing legions of men and women who are officially counted as unemployed. There are now more than 11 million of them.
But a better picture of the economic distress related to employment emerges when the number of jobless Americans is combined with two other categories of workers: the underemployed (those who are working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time work) and the so-called labor force reserve, workers who have abandoned their job searches but who would work if employment became available.
This total pool of underutilized labor has now risen above 24 million, according to researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That total will only grow in the coming months.
The Obama administration has more than enough on its plate at the moment, but before long it will likely have to consider a range of additional strategies, beyond the recently passed stimulus package, for putting jobless Americans to work.
A comparison of the number of people being thrown out of work in this recession with that of the severe recession of 1981-82 will indicate why. The peak unemployment rate was higher in that earlier recession than today’s 7.6 percent, largely because the last big wave of the baby-boom generation was entering the job market in the early ’80s. Those boomers who couldn’t find work were officially counted as unemployed.
What is different and more frightening about the current downturn is the number of people actually losing their jobs — being laid off or fired. That number is dramatically, dangerously higher.
The government uses two different surveys to gauge employment data. The household survey, based on telephone interviews, showed that job losses in the 13 months that followed the beginning of the 1981-82 recession reached 1.53 million. In the first 13 months of this recession, the number of jobs lost, according to the household survey, has been a staggering 4 million.
The payroll survey, which is based on employment records, showed job losses of 1.7 million in
the first 13 months of the earlier downturn compared with 3.5 million in the current recession.
Pick your poison. This is not the kind of downturn Americans are used to.
The ones who are being hit the hardest and will have the most difficult time recovering are America’s young workers. Nearly 2.2 million young people, ages 16 through 29, have already lost their jobs in this recession. This follows an already steep decline in employment opportunities for young workers over the past several years.
Good jobs were hard to find for most categories of workers during that period. One of the results has been that older men and women have been taking and holding onto jobs that in prior eras would have gone to young people.
“What we’ve seen over the past eight years, for young people under 30, is the largest age reversal with regard to jobs that we’ve ever had in our history,” said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies. “The younger you are, the more you got pushed out of this labor market.”
There were not enough jobs to go around before the recession took hold. So the young, the poor and the poorly educated were already suffering. Now that pool of suffering is rapidly expanding.
This has ominous long-term implications for the country. The economy cannot perform well with such a large cohort of young people condemned to marginal economic status.
Young men and women who remain unemployed for substantial periods of time find it very difficult to make up that ground. They lose the experience and training they would have gained by working. Even if they eventually find employment, they tend to lag behind their peers when it comes to wages, promotions and job security.
Moreover, as the economy worsens, even the college educated are feeling the crunch.
According to a report by researchers working with Mr. Sum: “While young college graduates have fared the best in maintaining some type of employment, a growing fraction of them are becoming mal-employed, holding jobs in occupations that do not require much schooling beyond high school, often displacing their less-educated peers.”
Employment problems have festered in the United States for decades. The economy will never be brought to a state of health until those problems are more thoughtfully and more directly engaged. This will become more and more clear with each passing month of this hideous recession.
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18) A Clean Fight
By TIMOTHY HSIA
Op-Ed Contributor
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28hsia.html/
BEFORE my Stryker squadron deployed to Iraq from Germany, the 500 of us cleaned up after ourselves. We spent a day removing every environmental trace of our training activities in the Bavarian heartland. Plastic and paper were sorted to comply with German recycling policies. Soil and plants contaminated by fuel leaks were dug up and placed in sealed bags. Depleted batteries were collected for proper disposal. We left our training grounds pristine.
This was America’s 21st-century military at work: soldiers are trained not only to battle insurgents but also to be good stewards of the environment. Sadly, during combat tours, we have forgotten the strict environmentally friendly procedures we practice in the United States or in host countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea.
On military bases in Iraq, plastic, paper, aerosol cans, Styrofoam plates, food waste, batteries, digital equipment and hygiene products fall under one category: waste. It is simply dumped at the edge of the base, then burned at night, irritating soldiers’ lungs. Untreated wastewater is also haphazardly disposed of and gradually finds its way into Iraq’s waterways, which can pose health risks for Americans on the base and Iraqis who live nearby.
It would be convenient to blame the chaos of a war zone for the military’s mismanagement of waste. But the issue is far more complex. Indeed, a major part of the problem is that the military has absolved itself of dealing with waste in Iraq and has contracted out the collection and disposal of it.
These companies — usually American firms that subcontract to foreign workers — operate free of regulation by either the Iraqi government or the United States military. Sometimes they simply remove waste to an abandoned field — out of sight, out of mind. Often, they use burn pits. Soldiers at a base in Balad have accused one contractor, KBR, of making them ill from burning toxic materials like aircraft fuel and arsenic, and medical waste, including amputated limbs. But in my experience Balad is not an isolated incident and waste mismanagement occurs on many bases.
All this trash has caught the eyes of enterprising Iraqis looking for scrap metal or reusable objects like discarded headphones and DVDs. When commodity prices increased, they resorted to picking up used ammunition brass as soon as soldiers left a practice firing range.
Although this inadvertent recycling might seem like a fine way to deal with trash, some of this material has gotten into the wrong hands and has been used to deadly effect against American and Iraqi soldiers. There have been accounts of insurgents dressing up in discarded uniforms and hiding explosive devices in abandoned equipment. Yet the Army’s counterinsurgency manual still gives sparse attention to the proper disposal of equipment and supplies, as well as other environmental concerns.
Waste is an overarching problem: our counterinsurgency policy of securing the populace and providing access to essential services can’t be separated from environmental considerations. It’s vital that the people we live among are getting clean water, that farmers are able to grow their crops, that communities aren’t buried under trash.
With President Obama’s planned drawdown of our military forces in Iraq by mid-2010, we need to ensure that our environmental legacy there is a positive one. But the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad contains hardly any details about protecting the environment. The United States is committed only to respecting Iraqi laws — a low bar because Iraq’s environmental agencies are still in their infancy. The United States military should take the lead by adopting — and requiring all contractors to adopt — American recycling practices.
In the last few years, the United States military has become a much more environmentally conscious organization. But these eco-friendly practices need to be applied every place where the military and civilian contractors operate, including Iraq. The military will not only protect the health and safety of American troops and local populations, but also leave behind a greener country.
Timothy Hsia is an Army infantry captain.
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